Surviving the Seasons

by Fern Kupfer

Genres: Family Life; Sagas; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

“Funny, sad, and familiar, from the anguish and delight of early love to its wistful repetitions in old age. Surviving the Seasons is very moving, and absolutely true.”—Belva Plain

These are the golden years, under the Florida sun. Now, released from the pressures of working and problems of raising a family, down South they come, still with their quick New York ways and the baggage from the past, unpacked, displayed like treasures in their new homes. 
 
The marriages, good and bad, have survived the seasons. It is a time made more precious, coveted, because there is the awareness that this is the end of something. Not a gloomy thought, but a realistic one. This is it. When one of us dies . . .
 
But could you ever start again? Could you start now, with someone whose history you do not share? With someone who has not known the smooth-faced girl or boy you used to be? Even given the chance, would you ever want to?

Release date: July 29, 2009

Publisher: Laurel

Print pages: 336

Sample

Chapter One
 
WILLOW BRIDGE BY-LINE
 
Congratulations to this month’s anniversary celebrants: Joanne and Milton Brown (42 years), Shirley and Bob Demmis (41 years), and Sara and Jacob Pearlman (40 years). May all these happy couples share many more beautiful years together.
 
 
Latest Laff: Did you hear about the woman who said to her retired husband: “I married you for better or for worse, but not for lunch.”
 
*  *  *
 
The smell of roasting meat wafts across the swimming pool, a heady mix: suntan oil and beef with browned onions. With her eyes closed Sara can skip across half a century, back to a kitchen in The Bronx, her father, slump shouldered, reading the Jewish Daily Forward at the table, slowly sipping his tea. Always, he would leave the metal spoon in the glass so that it rested along the side of his cheek like a brace.
 
Here the spirit of her father hovers amid the palm trees. What would he think about this life? Her father, who had seen the czar in a passing parade in his Russian village, here in West Palm Beach? Sara has a flash of him standing by the pool in his long gray sweater, shrugging his narrow shoulders. He would say, “I don’t know from swimming pools. Chlorine, feh!”
 
Sara’s mother would be more appreciative. She had loved the beach. As a young woman, in this country not more than a year, she was “issued a citation” at Coney Island for taking off the black cotton stockings that at the beginning of the century were considered appropriate beachwear. She was afraid of the big blond policeman who wrote out the ticket (looking all the while at the stockings which lay across the blanket, the shape of her leg still outlined them, evidence of her lewdness); afraid she would go to jail, or worse—perhaps even be deported. Removing the hose had not been a political act. She just longed to feel the soft sand between her toes, the warmth on her bare skin. She would like it here, so near the beach.
 
This morning, the women around the pool are talking about their husbands, about what foods the men like and dislike, about what they simply cannot tolerate.
 
“Herbie won’t touch green vegetables. Carrots and squash okay, but won’t eat broccoli. Spinach? Never, …”
 
“I would make them a nice roast beef, but Joe likes it so well done, he’ll only eat the ends. …”
 
“So now he’s on a sodium-free diet. I’m careful, of course, what I make him, but he turns up his nose. …”
 
Babies! Sara thinks, hearing them go on. You’d think they were talking about babies. She is surprised at the annoyance she feels, out of proportion after all these years. Doesn’t she remember the same conversations thirty years ago on a park bench in The Bronx? What was it that she told the other women then—that she certainly had no complaints? First, Jake was not a fussy eater. For that, Sara was grateful enough. But he was also appreciative; he said thank you when she put down the plate in front of him; he said, “That was good, Sar,” before he pushed away from the table. He had a nice manner. Not like some of them. Not like Estelle’s husband, Lou, who sniffs suspiciously before the first bite, who gives orders: “More bread. … I need a spoon. … Where’s my drink?” And Estelle puts up with it.
 
Lately Sara has been angry with Jake. The togetherness in this retirement is more than she bargained for. Suddenly he is there, always underfoot, just when she is wanting to be by herself to read, to talk on the phone without him listening with half an ear from the other room.
 
But it is the meals that tie her down the most. In New York, when Jake caught the seven-eleven to the city, he grabbed a cup of coffee and a bagel at the station. For lunch he had sandwiches sent up—or when they weren’t busy, he and his partner went down the block for deli or Chinese. That was one of the ritual questions asked when he came home: “What did you have for lunch?” Sara always made wonderful suppers: cabbage soup, sweet and sour with chunks of tender meat; roasts and mushroom gravy; and always something baked fresh, the smell filling up the house. Ready every night at six.
 
Sara liked cooking. She started her meal in the late afternoon (though she thought of what to make every morning before her feet touched the floor, searching for slippers). The sun would filter through the west windows as Sara started chopping and rolling out her dough. Miriam and Sunny would be home from school, sometimes they’d have friends giggling with them in their rooms. Or they’d be at the kitchen table doing homework, till it was time to set the dishes out.
 
But in Florida it is different. First of all, kids or no, the New York meals, like the heavy upholstered furniture they sold before they moved down, don’t seem to “go” in Florida. Who could come in from a tennis game and want to eat roasts and hot soups with dumplings? Well, Jake apparently does. To Sara, Florida was orange juice and crispy salads, maybe a piece of broiled salmon. One time she gave Jake fruit cup and yogurt for supper. Refreshing, Sara thought, since they had just come from the beach.
 
“This is supper?” Jake said, staring at the single bowl in front of him.
 
“If you want something else, make yourself a sandwich,” Sara said quietly, spooning the creamy yogurt over her fruit. To Jake Pearl-man, who had never made himself a sandwich in his life, the statement foreshadowed revolution. Jake was smart enough to keep quiet and take a second helping of sliced bananas and peaches.
 
Sara’s real problem is about lunch. Three mornings a week Sara takes a course at the junior college: “Twentieth Century Women Writers,” a popular course taught by a retired college professor of Shakespeare. He gives dramatic readings from Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, to a rapt audience of older women who actually applaud at the conclusion of each class period. Then they circle the desk, hungry and admiring. The professor has never in his entire teaching career felt so revered. As the semester goes on, he grows his hair longer and his voice affects a deeper, more professorial resonance. After forty years in the classroom, now playing to a full house of academic groupies, he develops real flair. The women love him.
 
Today after class the discussion continues to be spirited. No, the poet Sylvia Plath would not have stuck her head in the oven (leaving two babies sleeping motherless in the next room) had she lived in today’s times, having the support of the women’s movement.
 
The professor offers to continue the argument down in the cafeteria; already students are waiting to get into the room for the next class.
 
Sara follows them out, but remembering that it is almost one o’clock, that Jake will be waiting for his lunch, leaves and heads out toward the parking lot.
 
Sara drives into the Willow Bridge Condominium, slowing to fifteen miles per hour, the required speed, following the road around a wooden pedestrian bridge, new but authentically rickety, which spans a narrow bit of lake. By the shore is the only true willow tree to be found at Willow Bridge. It is a rooted, gnarled old tree whose intricate tangle of branches droops into the shallow water. The tree always makes her think of Miriam’s hair.
 
“Let me put a comb through it,” Sara used to beg, when Miriam was a little girl. “You look like a wild woman.”
 
“No!” Miriam would say fiercely, putting a hand across her thick dark mane when she saw her mother coming toward her with the brush. “No, I’ll do it myself.”
 
Sara smiles, remembering her strong-willed daughter, always independent. Sunny, the second girl, was different. Easy to take suggestion. “My laughing girl,” Jake used to say. But sometimes Sunny listened with only one ear. Sara knew that. Oh, Sunny was a charmer.
 
Sunny … Miriam … her parents. Everywhere there are associations, this connecting with that; reminding her of another time and place so that the memories flash along in a steady stream like in those computer games that her grandchildren play.
 
The past and present flow along so smoothly that it is hard to separate who she was from who she has become. Yesterday, for example, she instinctively turned when a young child called out “Mommy” in the supermarket.
 
“How silly,” she thought when she saw the child’s mother, a girl herself, younger than both Sara’s daughters were now.
 
She pulls into her parking spot, with a sense of resolve, but her heart quickens when she sees Jake outside, watering the begonia and squatting down to examine the spiky leaves of the spider fern.