Anna in Chains Read Free Page A

said, a little weakly. “Really rad.”
    â€œAnd we got another Heavenly Hash ice cream.”
    â€œCould we please have some over here before it’s all gone?” Anna asked immediately. “With whipped cream if possible.”
    â€œYour wish is my command,” Abram said. He danced around under the kitchen light like a boxer in his new shoes.
    â€œBut don’t bring it to us yet. You help your mother unpack first,” Anna said.
    â€œAnd then we have something to tell you,” David added. “It’ll blow your mind.”

THE LEAF LADY
    The Leaf Lady was swirling her broom around on the cracked cement; no matter when Anna came up Granger Street, pulling her despised cart behind her, she saw the same angry woman, dressed in a blue bathrobe, jerking her yellow broom from side to side and daring the universe to dirty her sidewalk. Anna had no doubt that she was a landlady, probably as bad as her own.
    A leaf came down. The Leaf Lady pounced, attacked it with a flurry of broomstraws, shunted it into her dustpan, delivered it triumphantly into her silver trash bag. Then she planted her feet apart, looked up, and waited for another to come down from the stunted, anemic tree.
    Old ladies like this one gave a bad name to all old ladies. If Anna could be bumping along the street shaped like a beachchair or a candlestick or a rye bread, she would definitely prefer it to looking like this white-haired object in whose form she was housed. She glanced in the window of a car and winced at her reflection. Typical. The rounded shoulders, the delicate jowls, the fallen, sunken, loose skin of the face, the watery eyes. Even the ears on old people got huge, stretched out, as if to remind the world to speak up—more was needed, more of everything, if the old were to receive even a tiny bit of what used to be their due.
    There was no point in trying to hide her age like some of the women at the Center did, with their platinum hairdos and their red-white-and-blue makeup. Besides, little things gave them away. In one second their stooped backs and their wire carts on wheels told the whole predictable story: osteoporosis and a dead husband. An army of women like Anna walked the streets. Who needed names or histories? You could guess a hundred life-stories and be right ninety-nine times: the one-room apartment, enough money in the bank to make up what Social Security didn’t pay for, the big-shot children (at the Center, where Anna ate lunch every day, “movie producer” was the favorite; doctors, lawyers—they weren’t so impressive any more).
    Anna sighed with regret. In that department she was sorely lacking—her youngest daughter, Carol, was the widow of a lunatic who had killed himself (thank God, at least, for that) and her oldest, Janet, was married to a professor. Neither of her children was ever going to provide Anna with the key to a fancy condominium with soundproof walls. This was her heart’s desire: to live in a place with no Armenians, no Russians, no gays, no babies, no aspiring musicians, no noises, no smells. And no landladies.
    She dragged her cart down the curb and was nearly run down by a Mexican speeding by in an ancient red truck. And no Mexicans, she added. A warning flag flashed in her mind. These conveniences she wished for she would find soon enough in a hole in the ground. And for much cheaper than in a condominium. She shouldn’t wish for something she wasn’t ready for. Bernie, at the Center, warned everyone he met: “Don’t have fancy wishes—God might make them come true.”
    God was a subject she wasn’t going to get into now. She had to remember her shopping list. Although she wasn’t superstitious—she didn’t go hopping right now over to some tree to knock on wood that she had a good heart; she didn’t spit to ward off the Evil Eye—she said aloud for the record, “For a hole in the ground I