Anna in the Afterlife by Merrill Joan Gerber Page A

doing it.”
    â€œDoing what, Gert?”
    â€œWhatever he was doing with us.”
    â€œ What was he doing, Gert? What are you saying?”
    â€œOne morning Mama got very angry. She was changing the sheets on my bed. Maybe she saw something.”
    â€œSaw what?”
    â€œA stain, something funny. She took me aside and said ‘Did Sam touch you during the night?’ And I told her, ‘Maybe he did. I thought it was his thumb.’ “
    â€œHis thumb!”
    â€œIt wasn’t his thumb, Anna. So what did I know? He probably couldn’t help it, being so close in bed with a girl.”
    â€œWith his sister!”
    â€œHalf sister,” Gert corrected her. “So it’s only half as bad as you think it is.”
    â€œYou think he did something sexual to you…and it doesn’t bother you?”
    â€œI’ve had two husbands,” Gert said. “Men can’t help themselves. They’re all animals. They get more enjoyment from it than we do.”
    â€œHow often did Mama let Sam sleep with me?” Anna demanded.
    â€œWater under the bridge,” Gert said. “Forget about it, Anna. He drowned at sea. Let him rest in peace.”
    â€œHe didn’t drown at sea, not the way you think,” Anna said. “When I visited Ava in Miami Beach she told me something that was kept a secret from you and from Mama. Our brother Sam was no angel the night he died. And no fisherman, either. He was a common criminal, if you want to know the truth. He was running rum up the coast, he was shot down that night by the Coast Guard. They were trying to stop the boat.”
    â€œThat’s ridiculous, Anna. It was Yom Kippur. He was fishing with his friends. It was a stormy night. A wave capsized the boat. Everyone knows the story.”
    â€œWhat you know is a fairy tale, Gert. Bullets from the Coast Guard sank the boat.”
    â€œBullets!”
    â€œSo now we’re even, aren’t we Gert? You gave me Sam’s thumb and I gave you Sam’s bullets.”
    For once Gert had nothing to say. For once Anna didn’t either. The sisters looked at one another till something settled in their minds, took its ugly place with the other miseries of their lives. When it was registered, recognized, stamped in memory, Gert said to Anna, “I’ll make us a cup of tea now. Yes?”

The Desert of the Mysteries
    THE MAIN PROBLEM with marriage, Anna thought, was that it put an end to looking further. When Abram took her to see the musical The Desert Song , she listened to the tenor’s honeyed voice croon, “The desert is waiting, come dear with me, I’m longing to teach you love’s sweet mysteries…” and decided then and there she might as well let Abram be the one to show them to her. Something notable had to have inspired all those movies and the love poems Gert was always clipping from the newspapers. The tragic arias of every opera depended on love’s mysteries, and Chopin’s heart had to have been in this desert when he wrote his nocturnes. Though Anna had no patience for sentimental nonsense and scorned Gert’s habit of pressing flowers in her “Thought for the Day Album,” she knew at one time or another she’d have to choose some man and go with him to those vaunted places.
    The lawyers in the offices where she worked were always after her—they smelled of starched shirts and the ink that oozed from their signatures onto their desk blotters. She imagined that life with a lawyer would be one long contract with many stipulations. She didn’t want to marry anyone smarter than she (or who thought he was) or with more education. The man she finally chose—when he turned up on the front porch of the Brooklyn house, brought along as Gert’s blind date for the party she and her friends were giving—seemed shy, pliable, agreeable, unthreatening, and had a sweet, winsome smile. He looked, in