By 1948 Sal Luccino had been smoking cigars for the dozen years that he’d been a Good Humor man. A Milford native who’d been trained by his father in the art of plumbing, Sal had split from the family business, Giuseppe Luccino & Sons, in 1936, when he was forty and had socked away enough money for the down payment, seventeen hundred dollars, for his own Good Humor franchise and a truck. The first cigar, smoked the day he signed the papers for the franchise, was a means of celebrating his independence, as was the second, smoked at ten in the evening when he finally parked his truck in front of his home after his first day of making rounds. He’d begun the day promptly at nine that morning. Independence, he discovered right away, came with a price—those daunting hours—but he was determined to make a go of it, and after that first day the cigars were smoked because they made him feel less alone inside his cab, like his father and brothers were right there beside him, just as they were when they fixed the pipes of the buildings in downtown Milford. Quickly, then, the cigars became a habit, and soon enough, for old times’ sake, he even called them “pipes.” “Not fixing the pipes anymore,” he told his wife, Marie, and all five of their children on a Sunday morning in July of 1936, one month after he’d begun his new work. In four weeks he’d cleared eighty-seven dollars, more than he’d ever made before. He held his cigar proudly for them to see. It being Sunday, he’d gone to mass then taken the rest of the morning off. “No, not fixing pipes. Just smoking ’em now,” he’d said. The work of the ice cream franchise ran from late April through mid-September, and in fact he returned to fixing pipes during the other months, when the families remaining off-season in the shoreline boroughs of Milford didn’t want to rush outdoors for something even colder than the weather. But once he’d adjusted to being a Good Humor man—driving and maintaining his truck, meticulously dressing each morning in pressed whites, ringing those luring bells, and chatting it up with his customers, the world’s children—his months as Sal Baby, as he’d come to be called, were by far the better part of the year.
He’d been the one who’d first offered himself to others as Sal Baby. August of 1937, a second summer of the new franchise almost gone, and a group of six kids—all from the Monroe family of Morningside—had begged him to “whistle it more, please,” as the youngest, a child of four, had put it. At the time Sal hadn’t even realized he was whistling. But that’s how whistling was for him—like breathing, he simply found himself at it. He’d even learned the hard way, through the cries and complaints of his own children to keep it down at night or he’d keep them up. But here in the streets of the Milford shoreline, the ocean gleaming in the distance, the open sky above, he’d belted it out for all six sandy-haired Monroes to hear. While he did, the children’s faces were transfixed, so much so that three out of the six didn’t even notice the melted chocolate dripping onto their hands. Even when he finished his song the children’s expressions of joyful wonderment didn’t change. “Sal Baby thanks you,” he told them with a wink. They repeated the phrase, “Sal Baby,” and while doing so each had laughed. So he tried out another phrase. “Bye-bye, apple pie,” he said, and without a moment’s hesitation they repeated that too.
Something settled over Sal that day, a sense of well-being, of knowing that this idea of his, the small business of selling treats, was the work he didn’t even know he was made for. The realization hit him first as he watched Mrs. Monroe, concerned that her children hadn’t returned home yet, come fetch them and urge them off, which did nothing to dissipate the cloud of sweetness surrounding them. The next January, 1938, while frantically fixing the pipes of a downtown apartment building after an unusually deep freeze had caused a riot of bursting, Sal, once again of Giuseppe Luccino & Sons, sat back on his heels, the bones of his arms and shoulders aching, his throat dry, his breathing shallow from bending at the waist as he worked. An image came to mind of the youngest Monroe child, Tommy, the one who’d said, “Whistle it more, please,” who, later, his mother clasping one of his messy hands, had strained to keep his head turned toward Sal long after his mother pulled him away. For a moment Sal was there, on the shoreline street, the sun blazing above, the child so impressed Sal could have told him he was the one to have invented ice cream and the kid would have believed him.
He put his wrench down. He looked around at the dim cave of the basement where he’d spent the better part of the morning. The place was unheated. On his hands were woolen gloves, clipped so his fingers were free. Three more months, he told himself, and then he’d be back at it. Outside. Breathing deeply. Whistling whenever the spirit moved him to. And, when it did, letting it rip.
That Friday of our family’s first week in Woodmont Sal was doing just that, letting it rip, as he drove to New Haven to restock, and that’s when he passed Davy, waiting for the mail, wearing shorts, a puppet, and a pajama shirt that in his sleepiness he didn’t realize was inside out. And, as if I were Sal that day, I can see Davy, all these years later, so very clearly. I can even hear him call “Sal Baby!”—his voice still the chirp of a child, his words a little rushed. And there we—the family members—were those early days of summer, swirling around him, each of us bathed in a light of innocence we didn’t even know was there. Davy’s innocence, the fact of his still being a child, wasn’t the light’s source. I talk of a grander innocence. Unlike my grandfather Maks during his days in Russia, in America we’d been lucky so far. Even the recent war, in all its anguish, hadn’t broken our spirit, and in fact that summer, 1948, we were particularly hopeful, given Israel and all. “I’m free!” Davy cried while jumping on his bed, the words nearly his first upon our arrival at Woodmont that summer. And as I sit here now, once again at Bec’s desk, staring for a second day in a row at that fraught note she wrote so long ago, after that innocence faded, here’s what I sense: that at the summer’s start Davy’s words were true for each of us, though not for the same reason, and that all of this—the different ways we found and grabbed at our freedom—had so much to do, ultimately, with this boy’s death.
But when the going is good, when the day is light and sunny, how can you not grab at freedom?
Take my mother, for example, who, in ways not so different from her nemesis-to-come, Sal Luccino, didn’t even know she had.
“This is where I feel I can breathe,” my mother always said of Woodmont—always showed as well—and it was there, in the cottage with her sisters each summer, that I would watch the usual knot of her brow unwind, the taut vein lines in her neck slacken, the apron strings, inevitably wound round her waist in our Middletown kitchen, fall by the wayside. Wearing her daily housedress, one of her many shapeless cotton shifts, her mass of hair pinned haphazardly behind her head, and her beloved wedge sandals, oddly stylish given the rest, she could look almost comic. Yet she was content, even happy. For in Woodmont she gained a kind of autonomy over her life, something she lacked in Middletown. For one thing, as co-inheritor of the cottage, she was on her own turf. And she loved that ownership, loved taking stock of the place at the beginning of each summer, scouring the building—as my father did in our Middletown home—for any needed repairs, any further upgrades. She even loved the smaller acts of day-to-day maintenance such as sweeping the cottage’s ever-sandy front porch. On many a morning I would find her there, humming. When she finished, she’d lean the broom against a wall, sit herself down on one of the porch’s chairs, and hum—as she never did while doing housework in Middletown—even louder.
Then again, at Woodmont the daily work of cooking, cleaning, shopping, and watching over us was shared. That was another feature of summer so different from life in Middletown. Our cottage was a kind of commune, and if my mother ever had any ambitions outside the home, the live-in help she had at Woodmont in the form of her sisters could have allowed her the time for it. She could have taken up painting watercolors, for example, or studied shorebirds. Like Nina, she could have read an extremely long book. But Ada had no such ambitions. Years ago, when she’d used her keenest wiles to steal my father from Vivie, she realized all the ambition she’d ever had. She’d got her man. Her life, she knew then, despite the eighteen years of it already lived, was about to begin.
Odd, then, how during those childhood summers the five weekdays when the men weren’t there were the most relaxed of her adult life. I remember the sound of her waking each morning, early, not long after daybreak, along with Vivie and Bec. That Friday morning of our first week was no different. I was still snuggled under the cotton blanket on the sofa bed I shared with Nina, my eyes heavy with sleep, when I heard the creaking upstairs begin. Even before there was any movement in the boys’ room it was clear that at the front of the house Ada had risen. At the other end of the upstairs hall Vivie had too. In the sunporch beyond the living room Bec was rising, and the glass doors separating her room from Nina’s and mine squeaked as she opened them to make her way to the toilet near the back door. Soon she returned, and in what I imagined as perfect synchrony the three sisters then stepped into their identical bathing suits, black one-piece suits with skirts that covered the tops of their thighs. These were their morning suits, to be replaced later by lighter-colored ones, or even floral-printed ones, suits that they would wear in lieu of underwear under their inevitable housedresses. But the black suits were what they stepped into each morning for what they referred to as their daily dunk.
For all their years at the beach their parents had dunked, first thing in the morning, walking hand in hand from the cottage porch, around the Isaacsons’ cottage in front of them, to the sands of Bagel Beach, and finally to the water’s edge. When Maks and Risel died, they bequeathed to their daughters not just the cottage and its contents but also so many years of Woodmont-only traditions: the cottage cheese and fresh fruit salads Risel favored for lunch, the Saturday evening rounds of rummy, the early-morning dunk.
The stairs, creaky as the cottage’s floors, squeaked as my mother and Vivie descended, towels and bathing caps in hand. My eyes still heavy, I didn’t have to actually see them to know what was under way. At the base of the stairs Vivie and Ada stopped, leaning over the banister to check on Nina and me. At the same time, Bec, also carrying a towel and cap, emerged once again from her porch. The sisters paused briefly in the dining room to greet each other, whispering a hushed but audible “morning” before they scurried out the back door and began making their way, their legs and arms, chests and backs exposed, as they strutted forth in their bathing suits, which, at this time of day and this time of day only, went uncovered. If you were to stare out a window you could see that they were nearly the same height, though Bec was a little taller than the others, and that Vivie had noticeably wider hips, and that my mother’s waist was the trimmest, despite her having borne the most children. You would see each of them holding her head high, her posture straight, her near-black mane still braided from the night before and falling past her bare shoulders onto the skin of her upper back. You would see they were lovely, the three of them, as they walked silently through the misty grayness of the early morning air.
But at six thirty a.m. who was up to see? Thus the exposed swimwear and skin, the goose bumps rising on their arms, the determined pace. For this was business, this dunking, this daily reminder of Maks and Risel, this morning prayer—a form of Kaddish, really, except the practice, silent, was wholly physical—and a moment later the sisters dropped their towels, tipped their heads, and began the synchronized stuffing of those thick manes of hair inside their snug rubber caps.
But that synchronicity—a kind of peace—wasn’t always the case. My mother was seventeen when she betrayed Vivie, who then didn’t speak to her for the next five years. The undoing began when Vivie, who was twenty at the time, was laid low with the flu. This was during the winter of 1926, and Vivie was incapacitated for a good three weeks. Bec, too, was sick. But my mother had a hardiness to her and never took ill. Instead, she acted as house nurse, a role she enjoyed, carrying pitchers of juice and water to her sisters’ bedside tables, taking their temperature, buttering their slices of toast, rushing to answer their throaty calls.
Her mother, Risel, couldn’t have been more grateful for this invincible girl, her darling Ada, the middle child who happened to also have the most charming face and a lively, headstrong personality. During those long weeks Risel’s thankful adoration was a kind of pampering, as steady as the pampering Ada offered her sisters. The approval bolstered what was already in Ada, due to those striking looks and that outgoing disposition: a healthy dose of self-confidence. And so my mother was grander than usual, as well as more purposeful than usual in her role as nurse. High school, which she’d been missing those weeks while her sisters needed her, already seemed a thing of the past, despite the four months of it still looming. But with the business at home Ada began to see beyond her school days, when she’d be expected to take a job, a caring job, much like the house nurse position she’d stumbled into, and then, soon enough, find a husband and start a family—which, as everyone knew, was any woman’s real job, her future permanent position. Vivie, who upon graduating from high school had taken a part-time post at Leibritsky’s, in downtown Middletown, was certainly on the same path, just a bit ahead of Ada. And every other young woman Ada knew, or knew of, also trekked that very path. It was at Leibritsky’s that Vivie had met Mort, the owner’s eldest son, who worked there with his father. For the last three months, on Saturday nights following Shabbos, Mort had come by to court Vivie. Twice they’d sat completely alone, just the two of them, in the Syrkin living room, quietly conversing. Once they’d gone out to see a picture show.
In three days, Vivie told Ada one evening, it would be Mort’s birthday. He would be twenty-four. She’d hoped to bake him a cake, to surprise him with it. They were to have a little party there at the store, Vivie, Mort, and the old man, Mr. Leibritsky.
“I had it all planned,” Vivie complained. She pulled her blankets over her face, despairing, and then pushed them down again, waist high. She was still flushed with fever and sweating. Ada urged her to drink more water, which she’d iced to help battle the fever.
Vivie sipped while Ada held the glass. Sated for the moment, Vivie dropped her head back onto her pillows. “It was going to be a yellow cake with chocolate frosting,” she said, her voice almost a whimper.
Ada nodded. Everyone loved a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. The choice was sensible enough, but maybe a little predictable, a little bland.
“Oh, Lord, Ada. Do you think this will ever end?” Vivie asked. Upon seeing her sister swipe her brow, Ada offered Vivie a hanky to mop up the moisture. Ada wasn’t sure if Vivie was speaking of her fever or of the courtship with Mort. “I think I need to sleep,” Vivie added, her voice falling. In the next minute she dropped off.
Ada brought Mort the cake. She baked it, on Vivie’s behalf, Risel encouraging Ada when she thought to make a chocolate cake with butter cream frosting rather than Vivie’s yellow cake. “Yes, yes. Bring him a good cake, at least,” Risel said. And good, Ada knew, was Risel’s best word for marvelous.
A good cake—the batter light, the frosting thick—is exactly what my mother brought him, on a platter, covered with wax paper. She donned her boots, coat, gloves, and scarf, and as she carried the cake to Leibritsky’s on Main Street, a mile-long walk, she trod carefully to avoid slipping on patches of winter ice.
“It’s for you,” she announced upon her arrival at the store, the tinkling bells as she walked through the doorway startling her. Mort stood before her, thin and not particularly tall, a dimple in his chin, waves of hair crossing his forehead, a warm smile marking his face. In his own way he was handsome, she thought, more so in the store than on those evenings in their home when she caught glimpses of him as she passed by the living room where he and Vivie sat. There he was stiff, in both posture and facial expression, but here he was so much more himself: smiling, self-assured, welcoming. She said, “Vivie couldn’t deliver it herself; she’s still so sick. But I know she wanted you to have this.”
“How is she?” he asked, taking the cake from Ada then pointing to a chair.
“Coming along.”
Mort insisted that Ada sit. “This is an awful lot of trouble,” he told her. He eyed the cake as he brought her a cup of coffee.
“It really is,” she answered.
When he widened his eyes in response, she laughed, a quick hoot.
She spun around to take in the store before seating herself in one of the leather armchairs that were more or less at the store’s center. She’d been there before, many times over the years, but never by herself. The place looked different, somehow, from the vantage point of her first journey there alone. More interesting. The green-rimmed dishes to her left were rather pretty, she thought. On a shelf across from them the men’s ties were as colorful as a rainbow. Just as always, there seemed to be no plan to the inventory at Leibritsky’s, but for the first time the disarray was less confusing than appealing.
“Can I interest you in anything?” Mort asked. A moment ago she’d heard him ask the same thing of a customer, an older man, who was now talking to Mort’s father.
“Cake?” she answered, smiling.
Soon they all had some: Ada, Mort, old man Leibritsky, and the customer. She amused them with talk of another cake she almost baked but didn’t. “Not quite enough,” she said of Vivie’s yellow cake. “But you have to understand. My sister’s sick with fever and not thinking at her best. When she comes back just tell her how you loved her cake, how the chocolate frosting was irresistible.” She lifted a forkful of the butter cream icing to her mouth and winked.
And that was the last Vivie was spoken of that afternoon.
“You’re a live one,” Mr. Leibritsky remarked with a laugh.
There was talk then of cakes: a favorite coconut cake that the customer, a man introduced as Thomas Tucelli, described with nearly obsessive detail. Mr. Leibritsky’s favorite was his mother’s babka, from the old country, baked with cinnamon, raisins, and nuts.
“Good God, child,” he told her, warming to her as he ate, and soon enough taking a second helping. “But do you know how good that cake is?” She wasn’t sure if he meant her cake or the babka of his youth. Still, she nodded. She began to feel an increasing comfort there at the center of the three men.
During this time Mort said little about cakes or anything else, but he never took his eyes off Ada. She knew it and liked it. Wriggling back into her coat, readying to leave, she realized that between the verbal attentions of the father and the nonverbal attentions of the son she’d had one of the most pleasant afternoons of her life.
Would she think of coming back soon? the elder Leibritsky asked as she stood in the doorway to leave. Mort was still staring at her, glancing over his father’s shoulder to do so. Even the customer Thomas Tucelli seemed to want her to return.
She directed her gaze at Mort and nodded. When she opened the door to leave, the tinkling of the bells caught her by surprise again.
“Did he like the cake?” Vivie asked. She struggled to rise from the bed. She sat on its edge, her bare feet dangling. Ada told Vivie they’d both liked the cake, Mort and his father.
“Mr. Leibritsky too?”
“Yes, Mr. Leibritsky too. He was very dear. Very animated.”
“Mr. Leibritsky? You sure?”
“Yes. The old man himself. He told me to come back soon.”
“He didn’t!”
“Sure he did. Why so surprised?”
“He never really talks to me, is all,” Vivie said.
“That’s because you’re too nice, Vivie. Too bland. He likes a little spit in his face. You’ve got to give it to him. That’s what wakes him up.”
“Lord, Ada. I’m sure you gave it to him. I’m sure you did.” Vivie shook her head. “So, tell me about Mort,” she continued. “What did he say?”
But before Ada could answer—a bunch of lies she’d practiced on the way home—Vivie had dropped back into sleep.
The next time Ada visited the store, three days later, she brought a jar of herring. Perhaps the men would want some with crackers for lunch, she figured. Upon her arrival, the old man threw his hands in the air. “What’s that? Babka?” he asked, smiling. His delight didn’t decrease when he saw she’d in fact brought fish.
Mort was with a customer, but when he finished, the three took to the seats at the store’s center as they had the last visit. The men enjoyed the herring and ate it, as she suggested, with crackers. When they’d finished, Mr. Leibritsky mentioned a new shipment of women’s shoes. “Special,” he said. “Ladies’ dress shoes. From New York.” He winked as he pronounced New York slowly, as if it were as exotic as Buenos Aires or Hong Kong.
They walked to a wall lined with shoe boxes. The pair Mort pulled out to show her, made of shiny black leather, had a bit of a heel and an ankle buckle. “Oh,” Ada whispered, surprised to see such quality.
“Try them,” Mr. Leibritsky urged. “Come on, what the hell.” He gave Mort a look, then shook his head. “Help the girl,” he finally directed.
A couple then entered the store. Mort rose but his father told him he’d handle them.
While Mr. Leibritsky shambled away, obviously tired, Ada returned to her chair and sighed. She felt a little tired too, or perhaps a little impatient. Mort remained standing as he pulled one of the shoes from the box, and then he knelt before Ada, shoe in hand. When she offered him her right foot, pointing her toe as she held the foot aloft in front of him, she noticed he was blushing. Her face, she had to admit, felt warm, was perhaps flushed as well. Suddenly she no longer felt tired or impatient. As he reached for her left foot she held her breath.
“Pretty,” Mort said once the shoe was on. He was staring at her foot, not at her, and still blushing.
She nodded, and soon he’d placed her right foot in the other shoe. She waited contentedly while Mort managed the ankle buckles on both shoes. As she rose from the chair Mort offered her his hand. She was glad to grab it and held on a moment past the point of rising. Her face once again felt warm. His was an even deeper shade of red.
When they glanced at each other she wondered if she looked as shocked as he did.
“Go for a spin,” Mr. Leibritsky called from across the floor. He pointed to the store’s entranceway, and as she walked she sensed the rapt attention of the two men on her, along with the customers’, an attention that made her feel even more important than she did at home, despite the recent elevation of her status there. In the next moment she grasped in a way that was more certain than ever before the meaning of her beauty, its power. As she moved forward she stopped blushing like a child, instead held her head high. She turned at the entranceway, tugged at her sweater and skirt, and then proceeded, proudly. Reaching Mort, she stopped, stood before him, turned in a quick circle, then dropped into the chair.
“That’s a good-looking shoe,” Mr. Leibritsky called. “A very nice shoe, hey, Mort?”
Mort nodded. She stared at him until she caught his eye, then she smiled.
She reached to unbuckle the shoes. In an instant Mort dropped to his knees, lifting a shoe from each foot, holding her ankles as he did. “There’s no way you’re going to get me to buy a pair of shoes,” she said. “Who’s got money these days? But that was sure fun.”
“That’s just it,” Mr. Leibritsky said as he neared them. He was looking at Mort when he added, his voice almost grave, “Everyone needs a little fun.”
“Did he say anything?” Vivie asked.
“Who?”
“What do you mean, who? Mort. Did he ask about me, Ada?”
“He asked. Sure he asked. ‘How’s Vivie,’ he said. ‘Is she well?’ ”
“And? What did you tell him?”
“I told him you were sick. I told him you were weak as a limp pickle.”
“But I’m walking now. I walked yesterday and today. I’m no limp pickle, Ada, please.”
“Vivie, you are. You’re not well. Now lie down and take a load off.” She fluffed her sister’s pillows and wiped her still sweating brow. “A limp pickle,” she added, “is exactly what you are.”
Just a week later, Vivie, by then well enough to amble about the house, caught them holding hands outside the front door. Mort had accompanied Ada home after another visit to the store. She’d nearly slipped on ice and he’d taken her arm, to steady her, and then held her hand. They’d walked that way, hand in hand, without talking, the last half mile. Just as Vivie opened the door to take in the mail, the lovers-to-be were standing, facing each other, hands still entwined.
“Oh!” said Vivie. She was wearing her bathrobe and slippers. Her hair was ready for nighttime, braided and down.
Ada stepped inside. Mort tried to speak but Vivie dismissed him with an unusually forceful “Go.” Then she slammed the door. In the front hallway, the two sisters faced each other. Ada began to unbutton her coat when her sister’s words, a rain of Yiddish, struck her. “Vaksn zolstu vi a tsibele, mitn kop in dr’erd!” You should grow like an onion, with your head in the ground!
I first heard these words some twenty-one years later, January of 1947, when Nina and I, aged fourteen and eleven respectively, were talking one late afternoon, a Friday, in the kitchen of my home. Nina had come over for a rare winter sleepover. We were helping my mother prepare the Shabbos dinner, and I was elated by Nina’s company.
My mother had asked me to chop an onion, and Nina another one, and the saying, just as we’d commenced peeling the onions, flew from Nina’s mouth.
“You should grow like an onion, with your head in the ground!”
She meant it only as light humor, and indeed, the oddness of the expression had me and Nina instantly laughing.
But my mother froze. A moment before she’d been crouched before the oven, checking the baking challah loaves. But hearing Nina’s words, she shot up.
For what seemed a whole minute she didn’t speak or move. During this time she might have been thinking, I knew, about us, her children, about whether we were bathed on schedule, or had finished our homework, or, the night before, had gone to bed on time, or, more generally, whether we were on the right track, as she often called it. Then again, she might have been thinking of my father, of whether she’d sufficiently cleaned and ironed his clothes, or had sent him off that morning with a decent enough breakfast and a happy enough wave, or whether she could muster the energy to sufficiently welcome him home that night. Tradition advises, my father once explained, that on Shabbos a husband make love to his wife, and this desire, too, was something to consider. In the totality of Friday she had to dust, sweep, and otherwise tidy the house; get us children washed; knead, braid, and bake the loaves of challah bread; set the table, prepare the meat, peel the potatoes, and rinse and chop the vegetables; wash herself, present the dinner, clear the table, put the food away, and wash the dishes. She had to do all this, and then she had to go upstairs to make ready for, as she once put it to me, the you know what. She didn’t think this custom was sanctioned by God, but rather was godforsaken, clearly man-made. So many Shabbos nights, trudging up the stairs to her bedroom, my mother was certain of it. There was all this—which on a yearly basis included the extra cleaning and cooking for the Jewish calendar, not only the weekly Shabbos meal but also the feasts for the New Year and Passover, and so many other holidays too, even minor festivals like Purim and Chanukah—and somewhere along the way this prize she’d felt propelled to rush toward and claim, marrying Mort Leibritsky and having his children, had become something to both love and hate. Confused, tired, my mother might have, in her pausing, been thinking about that.
Finally she said to Nina, “That’s an awful expression. A curse. Don’t let me ever hear you say that to anyone.” Her expression stricken, she looked Nina in the eyes and then me. We hadn’t yet had a chance to ask her what she meant when she reached in front of us, grabbed one of the still uncut onions, and, as if it had spontaneously rotted, threw it away.
“Can’t you tell?” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Molly. Nina. I’m cursed.”
But the curse lifted during those cherished weeks at Woodmont, where, despite the trajectories of their adult lives, my mother was convinced there were no longer any differences of significance between her and Vivie, no one was luckier, better married, prettier, more vivacious, and all she’d ever done to Vivie, however badly she’d broken her sister’s heart (the shock, the crying, the anger, the nearly five years of silent treatment that followed), however hard were those next years of uncertainty (Would Vivie ever marry? Was it time to take up nursing yet?), it no longer mattered, and they were who they were before—before what? For my mother there were no words for what had driven her in a blind walk toward what had nearly destroyed them.
That first Friday morning at the beach, once Ada, Vivie, and Bec had stuffed their long manes into their caps, the three sisters strolled, more gingerly than before, toward the water. Arriving at its edge, Bec was the one to plunge right in, no hesitation, then to come up from under with a yelp and a smile. Ada and Vivie watched, ankle deep. They glanced at each other. If you go, I’ll go, Ada thought. They were only little more than knee deep but they held their arms out as if the water already rose to their waists. They laughed. They whooped. Vivie bent down and splashed water onto her belly and shoulders. Ada watched, then followed her older sister’s actions in a way that was as automatic as when she was a child. Oh, how she’d loved being a child! They had never fought then, in those days of early innocence, when Vivie, older, doing everything Ada wanted to do but doing it better, more easily, was only to be imitated, worshiped, chased, revered. Here at the beach, each morning when they dunked, all that goodness they were born into, all that they had ever been to each other, was restored. The salty air, cool with breezes, an air wholly other than that in Middletown, had to be responsible, she reasoned. How else could you explain this transformation in their relationship? If you go, I’ll go, her eyes told her sister once again. And at that Vivie raised her arms over her head, hands together, and dove forward, and Ada raised her arms over her head, hands together, and followed her sister into the cool waters of the Long Island Sound.
The three floated on their backs, kicking occasionally, their arms sculling beside them to keep them afloat. This was happiness, my mother knew, this early-morning chill they so willingly endured. She raised her head briefly, enough to look shoreward, in the direction of their cottage and of Hillside Avenue running behind it. Later in the day they’d confront a whole body of men: the peddlers driving past—the iceman, the fish man, the milkman, the produce man, the ice cream man—and, later still, their husbands would return for a Shabbos meal they had yet to even think about making. But for now she was here, buoyant on her back in the waters of her childhood, her sisters by her side, and not a single one of those many men had the power to change that fact. They were here, doing just what they wanted. She took a deep breath. How glorious, she thought, simply to breathe.