Read Online Anna in the Afterlife by Merrill Joan Gerber - Free Book Online Page B

someone might steal it.” Anna had a flash of regret about her tightfistedness. Now it seemed it might not have been the best philosophy in the world. But she, too, had always counted on Janet’s having the samovar. (In secret she had done some research on the current prices of antique samovars. Gert’s was in the class of those valued at—at least—$20,000! What a nice bit of security it would be for Janet, whose husband, Danny, as good and reliable a son-in-law as he was, was still only a college teacher.)
    Even now, when Anna remembered Gert’s treachery, this act of revenge (on who? on her? retribution for giving away Bingo?), this betrayal of Janet, of Janet’s trust, she wanted to commit mayhem. The very manner in which Janet found out about the betrayal was a low and underhanded trick. She had gone, one day, with Danny and the children to visit Gert and Harry and discovered the samovar gone from its place. When she inquired about its absence, Gert said, with no apology, “I gave it to my step-grandson. I know his wife will polish it every week. I knew you wouldn’t.”
    The kiss of Judas. That’s what Gert gave Janet.
    Still—loyal and good niece that she was—Janet was standing knee-deep in the debris of Gert’s botched attempt to pass on to greener pastures.
    â€œGet rid of all the razor blades, all the scissors, any knives you find, throw them right into the trash,” Janet instructed her daughter and nephew. “She isn’t going to have one sharp item in that new place.”
    Carol was opening the china cabinet, beginning to wrap the knickknacks in newspaper. Such valuable things Gert had—all of them from Goldman’s Antiques, things she had finagled Abram into giving her. The silver candlesticks, the amphora, the bisque statue—if those were also going to be inherited one day soon by the step-grandson, Anna was going to whirl like a dervish among them and smash them to pieces right now.
    Handling a person’s private belongings was like committing a forbidden act. Anna could tell her girls were uneasy, sifting through Gert’s underpants, her bras (and her collection of foam rubber falsies), her letters, her checkbook stubs, her photographs. At one point Janet opened Gert’s wedding album (the first husband), and there Anna saw herself and Abram in the full bloom of youth. Over Janet’s shoulder, Anna studied her own face, her good bone structure (her sealed mouth—she never smiled after her teeth were pulled and dentures were installed). Her migraine headaches were supposed to have disappeared after her teeth were pulled, or so the dentist had said, but the headaches were even worse after that. Anna was hardly ever able to eat again without wanting to throw up after every meal.
    But Abram, who was holding the pole of the chuppa , looked magnificent, clear-eyed, wonderful. Six feet tall and strong as a mountain, but sweetness and goodness pouring out of him toward the world. (Too good, maybe; he had been a soft touch, and never knew how to be a good businessman.) Janet was in one of the wedding photos, too—about eleven years old, a skinny marink . Anna’s mother, stolid and simple Sophie, dressed in a dark blue dress, so proud to have her old-maid daughter find a husband.
    To think: the lives that people traveled through in a lifetime. Why was it everyone felt that life was too short when, looking back, it was vast, endless, comprised of dozens of little lives so that, by the end, everyone had lived a thousand times? Anna could pick a moment, any moment—her first day in public school, her first migraine headache, her first taste of chocolate—and write a book about each subject. She could talk about chocolate for a week, about her headaches for a year, what each did to her life, how she first felt about it, how she grew to feel about it, how she felt about it now. Her hands—whether she liked them