THE NAME OF OUR NEW Missus was Fanny Diamond. That first evening, without teeth in her mouth, her nose and chin almost meeting, she looked to me like a scarier twin sister of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. (Her teeth, as I later discovered, always sat in a glass of water near her bed when it wasn’t mealtime.) While she showed the dining room with a cot where My Rae would sleep and the bedroom where my mother and I would sleep, I lagged behind because I wanted to examine a row of glass jars I’d spied on a living room shelf. They held floating objects that looked from a distance like marbles: Now I could see that they were blue or brown or green at their centers, and they had big borders that were wrinkled and yellowish or milky blue and smooth. The smooth ones looked as though they’d just been plucked from a person’s head. Yes. There was no mistaking what they were. Eyeballs! My stomach contracted. I ran at a gallop to find my mother, who was following Fanny to the kitchen now.
“It’s all right. My Marty is a eye doctor,” Fanny cackled.
“Can we go now?” I begged, grabbing at my mother’s arm, but she didn’t hear me because she was listening to Fanny tell her how to turn on the old gas stove.
I tugged at the sleeve of My Rae’s blouse to make her bend down. “I don’t like it here,” I whispered in her ear.
She stage-whispered back, “When we get some money for furniture, we’ll take an apartment. For now we have to live with a Missus.”
There were twin beds in our room, but that first night I lay in my mother’s bed, clutching her arm until she said, “I have to turn over now, Lilly.” I glued my body to her back and wouldn’t let go of her because I couldn’t get the floating eyeballs out of my mind.
When I awoke in the early morning, it was to an awful odor that I remembered from long before, in New York, when I’d burned my pinkie finger on an iron that my aunt kept hot so that she could press her piecework. Fanny’s house was on a corner, next door to a kosher chicken market, and when the wind was wrong, the smell of singed feathers and skin was powerful. That first Friday on Dundas Street, I went to the market with my mother and My Rae to select a chicken. I breathed through my mouth, trying vainly to block the smell. Live chickens, hundreds of them, were packed tightly into cages, to be freed only when a housewife pointed and said to the chicken man, “Gimme this one.” Then he extricated the chosen one by its legs while the other chickens squawked an uproar, and he handed it over to a shochet, a kosher slaughterer, who tied its legs to a noose that hung from the ceiling.
I watched it all, unable to look away after My Rae had selected our chicken. Its mournful little head and beak pointed downward, and with one deft stroke of his razor, the shochet sliced its throat. The blood dripped and puddled onto the sawdust floor until the chicken was cut down and ran in little circles, its almost-severed head flopping grotesquely, ribboning blood, its still-undead wings beating frantically. When it finally collapsed on the sawdust floor, another man, wearing a big leather apron, singed its feathers off, wrapped the naked bird in a newspaper tied with string, and gave it to me.
I carried home the warm bundle, a dead baby placed eerily in my arms by the big jolly executioner. Then my aunt unwrapped it, spread it on the drainboard, sawed it into pieces with a big knife, and sprinkled the dissected parts with the coarse salt that she poured into her hand from a yellow box bearing the word KOSHER in English and Yiddish. I ran out of the kitchen. But when I had to go back for a drink of water, I couldn’t help looking again at the nude, hacked-up thing that had been a white-feathered, squawking creature only a short while before. A couple of hours later, the pale yellow pieces were bobbing and dodging bits of carrots and onions in a big pot of water that sat over a flame on the gas stove.
At supper I gagged with my first bite. I could still smell the singed feathers and skin, and I ran from the table out to the rickety front porch, my aunt running after me with a drumstick in her hand. I clamped my lips tight and shook my head violently until she retreated.
“No appetite,” I heard her mutter as the screen door creaked shut behind her. “Wrists skinny like a chicken bone.”
“Ooh, look, the witch’s daughter,” two passing boys about my age hooted at me as I stood on the porch. “Witch, witch, come out on your broomstick,” they shouted at the house through cupped hands.
But the three of us were together again. On Saturdays my mother and My Rae and I took a bus to Hollenbeck Park and walked in the sunshine amid the lush California greenery, or we pressed close, I in the middle, on a silvered wooden swing the size of a loveseat that overlooked a dark pond alive with quacking ducks. “Lift your legs and I’ll swing you,” I ordered them, standing on my tiptoes to push us off. My mother had a dreamy look in her eyes and a faint smile on her lips.
“Look at who’s Samson,” My Rae said.
“Me!” I chortled, making our collective three hundred pounds swing back and forth.
They left the house together every morning and took three buses to get to their shops in the downtown neighborhood of tall buildings where the garment manufacturers were. In the late afternoon they came back together, and when I heard their voices on the porch I rushed to throw myself at them, first my mother and then My Rae. I shadowed my mother through the house, happy that the long day at a strange school (where the funny way I said waata and singk had already been noted) was over and we were together again.
But even before she put her purse down, she went to find Fanny. “Did I get any letters?” she asked.
“Not a single thing.” Fanny’s answer was always the same.
In the beginning my mother nodded and smiled. As the weeks and months went by she stopped smiling. “Nothing?” she’d ask again.
“Listen, the only thing the letter carrier ever brings is big bills for me.”
“Watch me do Eddie Cantor,” I’d beg my mother, pulling at her skirt, arresting her there in Fanny’s dark and dusty hallway. I made my big eyes bigger and rolled them round and round. “Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll,” I sang, and I gestured grandly, first to my heart and then to her person, with open-fingered hands.
“I’m so proud of my little girl,” my mother said. But I knew her thoughts were elsewhere.
“Watch me do Jack Benny now,” I demanded, following her in a soft-shoe dance, playing my air violin and humming a screechy tune that I ad-libbed. “Mommy, wait, look.” She flopped on her bed and stared up at the ceiling.
“Can I read to you?” I asked, positioning myself at the side of the bed with one of the books I’d gotten from the Malabar Public Library. She moved over to make room for me, but she didn’t take her eyes from the ceiling. “Are you listening?” How could I pull her back from where she was in her head? I put all the expression I could muster into the words. “The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day,” I orated. “The score stood four to two with one inning left to play . . .”
But she didn’t look interested in what Casey could do at the bat. I switched books. “Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream!” I didn’t understand all the words, and I knew that she understood even less than I did, but I put plenty of voice music into it, making solemn low sounds and then, for contrast, high happy sounds. I held the book with one hand and waved the other in the air. I declaimed to the end of the poem and then read her another and yet another. “Did you like it?” I asked anxiously.
“I’m so proud of my little girl,” she said again, and she held me in her arms when I lay down next to her, but her face was like pale stone, and I knew I hadn’t taken away her sadness.
More and more, as the months wore on, when My Rae came to say supper was ready, my mother told her, “I can’t eat” or “Who wants food now?”
“Well, the baby needs to eat,” My Rae said the first time my mother shooed her away. She took me by the hand and pulled me toward the torn oilcloth-covered kitchen table.
“I’m not a baby anymore. Haven’t you noticed?” I sassed her and bucked free and scurried back to my mother, to put my arms around her, pat her soft dark curls, make her feel better. When would she stop missing him?
My mother stopped putting lipstick on her beautiful lips. I never saw her burning a match anymore to make herself eye shadow. The blouse she wore to work had half-moons of yellowish stain under the arms, and the hem drooped and dangled threads from the bottom of her skirt, but she wore them that way week after week.
“Fix yourself,” my aunt said gruffly, “for the sake of the baby. Forget about vus iz gevehn, what was. It’s over. Moishe, Europe, over and done with.”
My mother bared her teeth at My Rae like a mad dog, like she used to do in New York. “I don’t need you to tell me nothing,” she growled.
Something bad was happening to her, but how could I stop it? What if she drove My Rae away again? We’d be alone, in a strange house and a strange room in a strange city. I wanted the old times back, when the three of us pressed together on the wooden swing and my aunt called me Samson. But I couldn’t be with both of them at the same time, and it was my mother who needed me most, so it was in our bedroom, reading on her bed while she stared up at the ceiling, that I spent the evenings. Sometimes, though, when my mother was asleep or in her trance, I slipped out to find My Rae in the dining room. I’d throw my arms around her furtively and bury my head in her big, sheltering bosom, as I knew I mustn’t do in my mother’s presence. “I know, Lilly, I know,” My Rae said, and pressed her lips to my forehead before I broke away and ran back to my mother.
At the end of the summer, my aunt bought some forest green worsted and paid a dollar to the cutter at Bartleman’s, her shop, to snip out the pattern for two dresses. For weeks she stayed late at work. “Who needs her to ride home with me on the bus,” my mother grumbled.
On the first morning of the High Holidays, before it was time to go to the synagogue, My Rae called me into the dining room. She was wearing a beautiful new dress, with gold disks running all the way down the front, and she held up its miniature, an exact copy, and buttoned me into it with nimble fingers. “For Rosh Hashanah.” She turned me round and round to examine her handiwork. “Oy vee shayn, how beautiful!” she exclaimed. “Who’s the love of Rae’s life?” she sang as she puffed my sleeves and fiddled with my collar.
I looked down at myself. I adored the Robin Hood color, the big gold buttons that were just a little smaller than hers, the way we matched. “Who’s the love of Lilly’s life?” I sang back, making sure to keep my voice low so my mother wouldn’t hear.
The next week, I sat again with my mother and aunt in the cramped upstairs hall of the Breed Street Synagogue while the men downstairs droned their Yom Kippur pleas to Yahweh, and the women above who could read Hebrew bent over their prayer books and chorused along with them. When it was time to say yizkor, the memorial prayer for the dead, we kids were superstitiously ushered out. “Hurry, go,” the mothers said, shooing us, because only those whose loved ones had died said yizkor or even remained in a room where it was being said. I hurried off, as superstitious as the grownups. I sat on the concrete steps, watching some girls play a quarreling game of hopscotch in front of the synagogue, until, twenty minutes or so later, a big kid came out and called to his little brothers down the street, “Hey, get back here, I think they’re finished.”
“Why did you say yizkor for them?” I could hear my mother even as I was walking back through the upstairs doors. Her eyes blinked out of control. “You louse,” she hissed at my aunt’s face. “Hirschel’s not dead! You want to kill him by making believe he’s dead?”
There was spit on my aunt’s cheek. She swiped at her face with the sleeve of her dress. “Mary, control yourself in the shul,” she whispered hoarsely.
The people in the rows around us who’d been fanning themselves against the heat with prayer books or pledge envelopes stopped and stared. The loud davening of the men downstairs could not drown out the whispers of my mother and My Rae.
“They’re not dead! None of them! How do you know they’re dead?” My mother forgot now to try to whisper.
“Shaddup for the baby at least,” My Rae moaned.
“You lousy bitch!”
My Rae jumped up and sidled out, knocking against the legs of the women in our row.
“What’s going on here?” a large angry woman in a black cloche demanded.
“Mishugenehs, crazy people,” a lady in a polka-dot blouse yelled. Her eyes were red from yizkor weeping.
Now my mother jumped up, following My Rae, shoving aside the same legs.
“Tsk! Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!” I heard all around, and a buck-toothed girl sitting down the row bent over to stare at me as though I were a bug.
“Excuse me,” I begged, passing the legs. “Excuse me. Excuse us,” and I fled down the synagogue stairs after my mother and my aunt.
The week before Thanksgiving, the teacher passed out big new boxes of Crayolas and white stenciled sheets, and I lost myself in the lavish variety of the wax sticks. Tongue between my teeth, I gripped the Crayolas and colored Indian faces Carmine Red (because we’d been told they were red men) and pilgrim dress Midnight Black and Earth Brown. I solved the problem of their “white” English skin by leaving their faces and hands uncolored. Chartreuse and magenta and teal were the colors of the heaps of food they shared with the red men. I yearned for a peace in our house like the peace between the pilgrims and the Indians. Those idyllic afternoons at Hollenbeck Park were already a far memory. They fought all the time now.
“Forget the past!” My Rae always yelled at my mother. “Forget Moishe, he should grow a cancer in his heart! Forget Europe.”
But my mother couldn’t. “Moishe would have married me, but you had to take us away.”
“He wanted you to go again for another abortion,” my aunt once hollered in her own defense. “He told you to give her up for adoption,” she shouted another time.
Both times my mother pulled me to her, protecting me again from annihilation (and letting my aunt know to whom I belonged). “I would die first,” she vowed ferociously each time, as though the threats against me were imminent still.
That Thanksgiving morning I jumped out of bed and raced. I’d heard my mother’s voice screaming from the dining room, “You choleryeh, you cholera-infected one! You brought me and the baby to this dump, and now you’re going to leave us alone?” She stood in her thin nylon nightgown, its straps fallen to her arms, looming over my shriveled aunt. My Rae looked as paper-pale as the pilgrims in my crayoned pictures. She was dressed, a brown coat buttoned up to her chin, a little navy hat perched on her head. She gripped a bulging cardboard valise.
“What are we supposed to do now? Answer me!” My mother’s breasts flopped as she moved, and my breath caught at the glint in her eyes that was like those of the crazy women I’d seen in a movie, The Snake Pit. And we were alone, the three of us, because Fanny had left the night before to spend Thanksgiving at the eye doctor’s house.
“Lilly!” my aunt cried when she saw me. “If I go I can help you.” She straightened and ran to draw me to her, but I squirmed to get away. She knew she mustn’t do that in my mother’s presence! She pulled me back, and my nose shoved against her bosom, choking me. “Shepseleh, meineh.” She kept her fingers on my head. “I can’t do anything for you if I stay here.”
I broke free and ran to my mother’s side. What was happening here? What did my mother mean, “leave us alone”?
“With Mr. Bergman I can make a home and help you.”
What was she talking about?
“Do you know what that bloodsucker is doing?” my mother bellowed.
My aunt moved toward the door, my mother at her heels. I held on to the table, my head thrumming, the floor tilting. Then I forced my knees to unbuckle, and I bolted after them.
“Do you know what she’s doing?” my mother shrieked again.
Now, through the glass panes on the door I saw a little man in a brown hat walk up the porch steps. He opened the screen door and rang the bell formally, though he must have spied the three of us peering at him from the other side. We froze for an instant, all four of us, like characters in a funny papers cartoon. Then my aunt unfroze, opened the door, and shut it behind her.
“My Rae! No!” I cried.
“Don’t go after that louse!” My mother’s arm held me back.
I broke away and threw myself at the door, but my hand remained stuck to the doorknob, as though under a spell. They stood on the porch. I could see my aunt’s shoulders heaving. Mr. Bergman, who’d taken his hat off in her presence, held it in one hand and patted her back with the other. He moved his lips, saying words I couldn’t hear. She turned to look back at us, and I opened my mouth to cry “Come back,” but nothing came out. He was old, much older than my aunt, with a bald head and a kind, round face, and he wore an immaculate beige suit and polished brown shoes. He put his arm around her, led her to a black car that was parked in front of the house, settled her in, and drove off with her.
“Do you know what that choleryeh is doing?” my mother yelled. “She’s getting married!”
My mother and I live in the front bedroom of Fanny Diamond’s house. Though my mother often says we’re going back to where we came from, the black metal trunk that we brought with us from New York stands unpacked. It makes up part of the furniture in our room. Through the years, my dresses and blouses and skirts that can’t fit on the hook behind the door I pile on top of the trunk, my only closet. In my mother’s small closet are stuffed all the dresses she used to wear when she went to see her lover.
If the window shades were up, there might be sunshine in our room, but they’re always down, hiding us because we’re separated from the pavement outside by only a two-foot swath of grass. But the shades have serious rips on their sides, and if a peeping tom or kids egging each other on want to, they can peek in and see my mother running naked up and down our narrow room, bumping into the twin beds, the dresser, our metal trunk, tearing her hair until it stands straight up. “Hirschel,” she cries to her crippled brother. “I didn’t kill you! Don’t you know how I love you?” I close the door so that Fanny won’t hear her, but I can’t do anything about the people who walk by on Dundas Street and can see and hear it all.
I run back and forth in the room, following my mother, keeping up with her pace, two chickens cut down from the noose. “He’s okay, Mommy. He’s not dead.”
“Zay hargenen yidden, they’re killing Jews!” Her eyes are shut tight, and she screams as though under her lids she can see it. “Gevalt! Help! I did a terrible thing!” she shrieks with her mouth open wide. When she drops onto her bed, I cradle her head; I smooth her wet forehead; I place the tenderest kisses on her ash-colored face. I know I am all she has in the world.
When I’m home alone, I watch myself in the mottled dresser mirror as I practice my routines. I recite “To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” in my six-year-old-boy voice, but with dramatic flourishes and great urgency. How will I get a job as an actress? What can I do to get discovered? If my mother didn’t have to go to the shop every day, she could rest and get well. ” When my baby smiles at me, ”I belt out my sing-say. I throw my head back, hand on hip, shoulder forward. I lift my skirt to my thigh and pose my leg. Would I look more like Betty Grable if I could dye my hair blond?
One Saturday I was startled from sleep by my mother, hair spiked, a wild woman, banging on her head with her fists. “I killed him! Oh, my God, help me!”
I jumped up and took my place behind her in the chicken dance. “It’s okay, Mommy. He’s okay. Everything’s okay.” Where was My Rae? Who else could help me with my poor sick mother? Come back, I need you, I can’t do this alone! But I didn’t even know where to phone her.
It was afternoon before my mother stopped, like a wound-down clock. She flopped onto her bed, stared at the ceiling like someone hypnotized, then sank finally into sleep. I sat on the edge of the bed, watching over her, a mother with a sick child. The world was silent except for her soft snores. What would become of us? Through the ripped window shade, I looked out at a slice of empty street.
When a black car stopped in front of the house, I leaped to my feet and pulled up the shade. She was here. But for how long? Had she changed her mind? I watched as they both got out. My aunt was wearing a shiny dress that came down to her ankles, and a gardenia corsage was pinned at her heart. Mr. Bergman was decked out too, in a powder blue suit, smiling amiably. My aunt’s eyes were red and puffy, and she carried a big cooking pot in her hands.
My head buzzed and bumbled. She was here. Finally. But not to stay. I raced to the front door, but Fanny had already opened it, and I lagged behind her, suddenly shy before that stranger with a pot.
“Look what I brought for your supper,” my aunt cried when she saw me.
I hadn’t eaten all day, and I could smell the gedempfte flaysch even through the screen door. At the rich odor my stomach rose, but I ignored it. It had been weeks since I’d laid eyes on My Rae. I loved her more than anything in the world, except for my mother. How could she have abandoned me? “Go away!” I shouted from behind Fanny and saw Mr. Bergman’s expression change from amiability to shock and then sternness. I wanted to scream at her, You said that when I was a baby you held me to your heart and I crawled right in forever, and now you’ve left us alone to get married! But all I yelled before I ran back to my sleeping mother was, “I don’t want your gedempfte flaysch.”
Fanny Diamond was not a witch, she was a schnorrer. That’s what my mother and My Rae called a stingy person who acts like a beggar. She owned the kosher chicken market on the corner, and she also owned the dark little grocery store next door to the chickens, where you could buy sour pickles from briny barrels. But every afternoon Fanny donned her dead husband’s woolen overcoat and wing-tipped shoes in order to preserve the raggedy dresses and down-at-the-heels shoes that were her daily costume, and, almost disappearing in the clothes of someone who’d been a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier, she watered the tiny patch of manicured lawn in front of our house’s tattered screens and chipped stucco. “You live there?” my schoolmates said, fascinated and repelled when they found out that I shared the dilapidated, spooky house on Dundas Street with the witch lady.
Fanny must have heard my mother’s wailing, but if she knew what went on behind our closed door, she never let on. Maybe she figured that since my mother went to work every morning, as though she were perfectly well, and paid the forty dollars’ rent on the first of every month without fail, nothing very bad could be happening behind the door.
Or maybe she figured that she would help where she could and not interfere where she couldn’t. From her daughter Ruthie’s home in Beverly Hills she brought me barely worn, maid-starched, and maid-ironed dresses—a peach organdy with puffed sleeves and an orange-ribboned belt, a yellow dotted swiss with a Peter Pan collar, a dress-up buttons-and-bows green velvet. Sally and Becky, her granddaughters, had outgrown them, and Fanny’s daughter wanted to give them away to somebody who needed them. Of course the dresses didn’t stay in mint condition for long, but at least now I had a lot of different clothes to wear. “Little momzer,” Fanny called me affectionately when we were alone together. I didn’t learn until I was an adult and she was long dead that momzer means “bastard.”
Not only did Fanny give me her granddaughters’ dresses, she gave me her wisdom too. “So, what do you want to be?” she asked one afternoon as I sat at the kitchen table reading a comic book and she stood at the sink eating sardines out of a can.
“I dunno,” I answered, a little embarrassed. “Maybe an actress.” I’d wanted success always for the sake of my mother, but that ambition had become a part of who I was, and now I wanted it for myself too. Yet I was almost ten years old, and I’d made no progress toward realizing my glorious dream. I still didn’t know how to begin.
“Don’t be a silly girl,” Fanny said, confirming my fears. “Everybody wants to be an actress, but how many actresses do you see in the world?”
In fact, I’d just recently been thinking of a backup plan. Unlike child stardom, which would allow me to rescue my mother right away, with this new plan she’d have to wait for years, but still, it was better than nothing. I remembered seeing Myrna Loy play a judge in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and I had just seen Katharine Hepburn play an attorney in Adam’s Rib. They wore gorgeous dresses and had beautiful hairdos and lived in big fancy houses. “Maybe I’ll be a lawyer, then,” I told Fanny with a shrug.
She cackled. “Narreleh, little fool, poor girls don’t become lawyers. You better pay good attention in school and you can be a secretary. Like that you can help out your poor mother.”
I felt a hot sting in my eyes. She couldn’t be right. Mrs. Patrick, my teacher, had told us about Abraham Lincoln, who was poor, and he became the president. “In America anyone can become anything,” she’d said. Why shouldn’t I believe it? Mrs. Patrick knew more than Fanny.
Every night as I’m trying to fall asleep I comfort myself with happy fantasies. Lights! Camera! Action! and I, dressed in star-spangled leotards and a star-spangled top hat, break into my whirling, twirling, high-kicking, splits-in-the-air tap dancing routine. Fred Astaire and Danny Kaye dance beside me, beaming broadly at their little co-star’s brilliance.
But those child star images give way after a while to images from my comic books. Sometimes I’m clad in red tights, like Mary Marvel, sometimes in blue tights, like Supergirl. Lilly the Kid, that’s who I am. Always I fly through the air with a muscled mighty man on one side of me and a muscled mighty boy on the other. I name our missions, and they follow. We grab up into the air the evil men with big lips and Homburg hats, and we deposit them behind jail bars before they can do more harm to women and children. We rescue emaciated and terrified victims, like those I’ve seen in the movie newsreels, who are only seconds away from their death in concentration camp ovens.
My mother doesn’t know for a long time that I am Lilly the Kid, the real brain behind these great deeds that fill the movie newsreels and the Yiddish papers. And then I tell her. Mighty Man and Mighty Boy stand at my side and confirm what I say.
“I’m so proud of my big girl,” she tells me every night in my fantasy before I drop off to sleep.
A half-dozen kids from my fourth-grade class stood in a knot on the playground, entranced by the story that Melvin Kaplan and his little sister were telling: “She was walking down the street all naked. Her titties and everything was showing.” A couple of them tittered, the rest opened wide eyes. “Our dad saw her. It was like six o’clock in the morning.” Melvin and his sister raced each other to tell it. “And then somebody calls an ambulance and says, ‘There’s a naked lady walking on the street,’ and they came to take her away. My dad says they put her in a place for crazy people.”
Now they all giggled, and I could hear my heart pounding as though some animal were trying to break out of it.
“And you know what else?” the sister shrieked. “She was sucking on her own titties when the ambulance came. On her own titties!” she yelled, outdoing her brother, relishing the detail.
The girls from my class let out sounds of disgust; a boy whooped.
It was Arthur Grossman’s mother they were talking about. Arthur, a boy with curly black hair and large black eyes who looked so much like me that he could have been my brother. He wasn’t in school the rest of that week, and when he returned the following Monday, he had a sheepish look, as though he’d done something wrong. On the playground he wandered around by himself, pretending to examine ant trails or little pebbles. I watched him. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know what words to use.
The other kids didn’t leave him alone for long. “Hey, Arthur, how’s your mom?” Sandra Schulman asked with a high-watt smile when we filed out for lunch. He ducked his head and moved off.
In class I couldn’t stop watching him. I knew that if he’d been there with his mother that morning, he would have thrown a coat over her and led her by the hand back to their house and closed the door and hidden her from the eyes of the neighbors who told their kids about her shame. But he must have been sleeping the morning it happened. Probably he didn’t even know she’d left the house. Probably the ambulance sirens woke him up.
A few weeks later he was absent again, and he never came back to school. Melvin Kaplan and his little sister said that Arthur’s father couldn’t take care of him, so he had to go live at the Vista Del Mar Home, which was for kids who didn’t have any parents. Would I be sent to the Vista Del Mar Home someday?
But sometimes my mother seemed all right. She’d be with me and talk to me as though nothing terrible had ever been wrong, and I’d almost forget how sick she’d been. Sometimes she’d even talk about her family in Europe. We’d be in a restaurant maybe; I’d fiddle with my milkshake straw or try to act casual in some other way, but I’d hold my breath to listen. I yearned to know something—anything—about where I came from, though I never dared ask lest my questions trigger another bad episode.
“When I was ten years old,” she reminisced on my own tenth birthday in 1950, when she took me to the Famous Restaurant on Brooklyn Avenue, “I already worked in seven different jobs.” She enumerated them on her fingers. First, she helped out in her mameh’s tiny grocery store; then she sold onions and cabbages in the shtetl market; then she was a maid for a rich family in Prael; then she took care of children for a family in Dvinsk, the city fifty miles away; then she untangled balls of wool in a Dvinsk shop where they wove cloth; then she was a milliner’s apprentice; then she was a tailor’s apprentice.
“All those different jobs I had by the time I was ten years old. Then when I knew what I needed to know, I went to work by a tailor as a regular seamstress.” She held her teacup with delicacy, her pinkie finger raised like some fine lady’s in the movies, and sipped. “So that’s what I did in my life until I was eighteen and came to America,” she sighed.
“But why did your parents let you go away to work when you weren’t even ten?” I knew she’d never ever let me go away from her.
“We had no food. If I lived somewhere else, the people there had to feed me. If I lived at home, my tateh and mameh had to feed me, and they had plenty other mouths to feed without me,” my mother said without rancor. “At home, most of the time we got only black bread and potatoes to eat, and maybe a few carrots or cauliflower. Maybe, if we were lucky, on Friday night everybody got a little piece of fish or some meat in a tablespoon.”
It had never occurred to me that anyone could be that poor. Though we lived in an ugly furnished room, I always had food, and here we were in the Famous Restaurant and I’d just filled my belly almost to bursting with lamb chops and potato latkes and chocolate cake.
One evening in a Brooklyn Avenue delicatessen she’d ordered a plate of chopped herring for herself. That was when she talked about Hirschel, whose name I’d heard before only through her shrieks. “I was maybe nine years old,” my mother said now, “so that means Hirschel was a year old, and my mameh gave me a few kopeks and told me go to the market and buy a herring.” Enchanted now, I saw my mother as a little girl, a nine-year-old with big dark eyes and curly black hair. “I always carried Hirschel around with me in my hands when I was at home because he was the baby, and my mameh was busy with everything else she had to do and couldn’t watch him all the time. He was so darling, with his round little head and his little hands with dimples on them.” We laughed together at this sweet vision, as though he, a baby still, were happily cooing before our eyes, and I adored them both, my mother, who was a child, and my uncle, the baby, whom I would never see at any age. “We loved each other like I was the one who was the mameh,” my mother said.
“So I go to the market and I’m carrying Hirschel, and I buy a herring just like my mameh told me, and the lady wraps it in a little piece of paper. I carry Hirschel, but I’m so hungry that I can’t stand it no more. With my teeth I unwrap the piece of paper, and I just lick at the herring. It’s so good, just to have at least a little bit of the salty taste. I lick and lick—and Hirschel falls out of my hands. Right away I got worried, because he was crying till his little face was red like fire. When I get home with him and the herring, he’s still crying, and I’m crying too. We’re both crying our heads off, and it’s black in front of my eyes. I have to tell my mameh what happened, but she didn’t say much because it didn’t look like he was hurt bad, only a few scratches. Except that when he started walking, he had a big limp. And my mameh said it was because of me, that I dropped him because I was busy licking the herring and I was the one who made him a cripple.” I leaned my head against her bare arm and stroked her fingers that rested on the table. So that was why it was always his name that she cried. If I’d been her mameh, I’d never have said those things to hurt her.
When my mother wasn’t sick, it was sometimes hard to believe that there would be crazy times again. She bought a little radio, a brown plastic box, and on Friday nights we cuddled on her bed, my leg draped over hers, and we listened together to Dorothy Collins or Snooky Lanson or Gisele MacKenzie sing the romantic songs she loved on “The Lucky Strike Hit Parade.” Later I rose on my knees in the bed and sang them again for her, or sometimes I hopped down and did a tapless tap dance or a wildly acrobatic ballet to accompany my singing. “Again” was her favorite. I was pretty sure she was thinking of my father when she heard it, but it didn’t really matter because she was looking at me and listening to me and he was thousands of miles away. I pirouetted around as I sang, and my mother moved her lips along with me, bobbing her head in agreement at the important phrases. “Again, this couldn’t happen again,” we sang. “This is that once in a lifetime. This is that thrill dee-vine.”
“I’m not a good mother to you,” I heard her say one night after she turned the lights out and I lay in my own bed, waiting for sleep, the words of songs still going through my head.
“Don’t say that!” I scolded in the dark. “You’re the best mommy in the world.”
“I don’t know why I get so crazy sometimes,” she sighed. “I can’t help it.”
For a while, Rae and Mr. Bergman would come to take us for a Sunday drive to Ocean Park Beach, but he didn’t like it when my mother said my aunt was a choleryeh, and finally he wagged his finger at her and told her that in the future she’d have to ride the streetcar if she wanted to go to the beach. But he was really a kind man, and when it came right down to it, he’d do anything my aunt wanted. He’d drive her across town to East L.A. so she could bring us some dish she’d made, and no matter how mad he was at my mother, he’d always slip her five dollars and instruct her, “Buy something nice for Lilileh,” little Lilly, as he called me. “She’s a good girl. Good as gold,” he said.
“Good as gold.” My aunt bobbed her head, defending me now and against all future incidents and slipping a dollar bill into my own pocket before she left. “What else do I still work for?” she said when I once tried to give it back because I was afraid my mother wouldn’t like it.
But most weeks Rae was a ghostly memory. She lived far away, on the other side of town, and I was alone with a sick mother. I could tell by looking at my mother’s face when a bad time was coming: there would be a deep flush on her cheeks and neck and chest, and her mouth would change. She’d keep swallowing her lips, or she’d spit out an imaginary speck that would not be gone from her tongue. Her eyes would change too. Someone else looked out from them, a person who barely saw me, not even when I stood in her line of sight to distract her attention from the terrors in her head.
“I did a bad thing!” she howled, and I knew—I had figured it out now—that it wasn’t just because she’d dropped her baby brother. It was also because she’d been busy with Moishe when she should have been finding a way to rescue her family. “God punishes me,” she wept. She beat her head, her chest.
“Mommy, stop it, stop it, you’ll hurt yourself!” I groped for her banging hands. “You have to be all right—what will I do if they take you away?” I cried, hunting for the words that would make her stop.
Something always triggered the spells; often it was a May Company bag. The women at Schneiderman’s, her shop, brought their work dresses with them and changed from their street clothes. One woman, a Hungarian whose three brothers had been killed by the Nazis, carried her work dress in an old May Company bag, and that created an excruciating dilemma for my mother. If she carried her own work dress in a May Company bag it would mean that, like the Hungarian woman, she didn’t have a brother anymore. But maybe her own brother hadn’t been killed. Nobody knew for sure that he had. No one knew anything except that the Jews who were in Prael the summer of 1941 were all murdered. But maybe Hirschel wasn’t in Prael that summer, or maybe he escaped and hid somewhere. Maybe he was a displaced person now and would show up in America soon.
But if she carried her work dress in the May Company bag, she was “making” him be dead. It didn’t mean that! It did mean that! She forced herself to shop at the May Company, fighting her superstitions. The bags sat in a folded pastel green heap on the dresser and she eyed them, tormented. She put her work dress in a May Company bag with trembling hands, she took it out, she put it in again, she took it out again.
Through the whole ordeal, no matter how long the spell lasted or how bad it was, she got up at six-thirty and was out the door by seven. She almost never missed a day of work. How she controlled herself, how she steadied her hands enough to drape dresses on a mannequin so that she could support us, I can’t imagine.
From the Malabar Public Library I borrowed “adult section” books. “They’re for my mother,” I swore to the blue-haired librarian who wanted to foist The Secret Garden and the Nancy Drew books on me when I brought up to her desk for a check-out stamp Personality Maladjustment and Mental Hygiene, You and Psychiatry, Keeping a Sound Mind.
I didn’t understand most of what I read, but, sitting on my bed or on the milk crate that Fanny kept as a chair on the front porch, I kept reading as though it were a matter of life and death. On the next page might be the simple answer, and I’d learn what to say or do to help my mother. Someone had to do something. Who else was there but me?
I grew up in the shadow of my mother’s tragedy.
And, for a while, I caught her sickness. It didn’t take the same form; it wasn’t full-blown, but the germs were there.
“Good night, Mommy,” I said every night from my bed to hers.
“Good night, Lilly.”
“Sleep tight, Mommy,” I said.
“You too. Sleep tight.”
“See you in the morning, Mommy.”
“Okay. See you in the morning.”
“Good night, Mommy.” I waited for her response to the trinity again. “Sleep tight, Mommy.” “See you in the morning, Mommy.” And then a third time, “Good night, Mommy . . .” She had to chorus back each statement. If she didn’t, she would be dead before the night was over. I was certain of it. She must have understood the unspoken rules because she always answered me.
I had another ritual for the mornings, before she left for work. “Watch the way you cross the street, Mommy,” I said. “Look both ways, Mommy.” “Don’t come home late, Mommy.” She had to acknowledge each warning, and I had to repeat this trinity three times as well. If we didn’t do it right, I knew that something terrible would happen to her that day and I’d never see her again.
Even if we did do it right, most days I was afraid I’d never see her again. At four-thirty every weekday afternoon, I waited at the bus stop across from the Evergreen Cemetery until she came. I never let my toes point directly toward the cemetery because that would mean her death. The second the bus slowed, I peered through the windows, trying to decipher her form in the rush-hour crowd, feeling my face flush hot and hotter. I placed myself squarely in front of the door the instant the bus stopped, and the people who descended before she did had to walk around me or trip over me. When I saw her I was swept by a torrent of cooling relief, and I threw myself at her as though she’d been gone for a month.
If she wasn’t on the four-thirty bus, I forced myself to pretend calm and wait for the four forty-five bus. If she wasn’t on that one, waiting for the five o’clock bus was like being under a sentence of death and watching without hope for a reprieve. I paced up and down the sidewalk, running to the corner every couple of minutes to look at the big street clock whose hands dragged in diabolically slow motion. I was almost certain she wouldn’t be on the five o’clock bus, and that could mean only one thing.
I learned the meaning of the expression “to be beside oneself” at that bus stop: when she wasn’t on the five o’clock bus, my mind took leave of my body, which ran up and down the street, frenzied, possessed, the decapitated chicken cut loose from the noose, crying scalding tears that I was aware of only because I couldn’t breathe through my nose, and my face smarted as though coals had pelted it. She’d been killed, I was certain of it. I would be sent to the Vista Del Mar Home now. I had nobody in the world anymore because Rae had left me to get married and my mother was dead.