The Ninth Wife by Amy Stolls Page A

secret.
    “What’s with the face?” he said. “We Steinblooms are normal law-abiding people. Well, except for Uncle Abe, this is true.”
    “See, there he goes.”
    “Uncle Abe, boy. He used to play fiddle down at the movie houses. I was too young to go into those places, but I could hear him from the street. He drank too much, but he was a good musician, and you know what? They asked him to be part of this new orchestra they were putting together back then, and you know what I’m talking about, Bessie? It was the National Symphony Orchestra!”
    Bess noticed when it came to talking about the past, Millie and Irv liked to expose each other’s faults and failures in a competition of superiority. She liked to tell about the time he hired the wrong man to run his shop in Baltimore— He was a nice boy, what are you talking about?— who took to wearing the flapper dresses he was supposed to be selling— I said there was a dress code, so he took me literally —and because Irv hardly ever visited the store like a good manager should— It was so far away —this man in a dress scared women out of the store telling them things like if only they weren’t so fat they’d look as good in the dress as he did —Well, someone should tell it like it is. It’s stories like that, said Millie, that show you just how soon he’d have been out of business had she not been there to knock some sense into him.
    Oh yeah, he’d say. He’d say he’d like to see where she’d be if it weren’t for him— With Melvin Finkelstein, that doctor from Harvard, that’s where I’d be, I should have married Melvin when I had the chance . Yeah, he’d say, the poor Russian Jewish girl who didn’t even have a penny in her pocket— I had everything I needed thank you very much —who walked into his shop and rang his bell in her torn pedal pushers— Torn, my tuchas —whom he took pity on and hired as a salesgirl— I was your best salesgirl —who all day long punched clack-clack-clack-ka ching at the heavy black cash register— I always paid you back whatever I borrowed— and holy mackerel if someone could just have told him what he was getting into, boy oh boy.
    Sometimes it’s in fun, their bantering. But often it turns to bickering that turns to vicious verbal attacks. “Nobody cares, Irving,” she’d say, or “Shut your mouth,” he’d say, as if the anger inside them—an anger so deep that it is before Bess’s time and beyond her comprehension—has no choice but to bubble to the surface in small explosions of hostility. The tension, like smoke, makes anyone else in the room cough and leave. Bess has tried to tease out the roots of their anger to no avail. She thinks maybe it stems from their inability to have children of their own, genetically speaking, for it is one topic they won’t talk about. But then it could be anything, for what does Bess know about keeping a marriage afloat for sixty-five years? What does she know about marriage, period? She would like to believe that her grandparents loved each other once, deeply and passionately, to know they were happy in their lives as a whole, but then what does that say about marriage, that the descent into misery is directly related to the number of years a couple spends together, the accumulated anger and grief winning out in the end? Where is the yin and yang in old age? It’s as if Millie and Irv’s imbalanced inner state manifests itself on the outside, the way they walk slowly and diagonally, bumping into things and losing their footing.
    And still, despite all their fighting, Bess feels lucky to have them in her life. They shower her with all the love they withhold from each other, it seems. How important it is to have family nearby, thinks Bess, as she turns onto their street. She loves the moment when they open the door, smiling and aching to hug her, saying, Come, come, dear as she walks into their embrace.
    “How’s my birthday girl!” Irv yells out, beaming,