Part Two
Dev, 1917
Chapter 3

When I showed her the stain on my underpants, my mother slapped me hard across the cheek. “To make the blood flow,” she said, before hugging me and exclaiming, “Mazel tov!”

I was ready to mash her mush, or mush her mash. I’d have to ask my big brother Shmuel what the expression was. He didn’t use slang, but he corrected mine so I wouldn’t make a ninny of myself, which I did a lot. Or embarrass him in front of his loud-mouth friend Yaakov or Bernie, the quiet, cute one. It was wrong to think nasty thoughts about Mama, but I didn’t ask to get my period. I cringed when she and Tante Yetta whispered about their monthlies like it was some cabalistic mystery. Besides, her excuse for hitting me was applesauce, a minhag, a silly old Jewish custom. Mama knew better. She was a hip lady who marched for women’s suffrage.

I tried to look aggrieved so she’d feel bad about hitting me. Aggrieved was my newest adjective. Mrs. O’Brien, my English teacher, gave the ten smartest kids in our class a hard word to learn every week. I lapped them up like a well-behaved puppy gobbling treats. When Mama just ignored my sorrowful expression, however, I followed her to the laundry hamper by the back door leading down to the stinky, wet basement and out to the alleyway with the clotheslines we shared with our neighbours. Tante Yetta washed out cloth pads because she and Onkel Gershon had a private bathroom to hang them, but my mother kept a box of disposable Lister’s Towels at the bottom of the dirty clothes hamper, where my father and brother wouldn’t see them. She showed me how to tuck the towel inside my underpants and fold the used ones before dropping them down the incinerator. Now I understood why women put money in a special box on the counter at United’s. The druggist knew what the women wanted so neither he nor they were embarrassed by their asking aloud, and he gave them a parcel covered in plain brown paper, which they slipped into their shopping bags unobtrusively. That was another Mrs. O’Brien word.

If I were pale and slender, like Mama, I could be unobtrusive too. My brother took after her. Sometimes I snuck a peek at her red-blonde curls, which were chopped off after she married back in Lemberg, in accordance with Jewish tradition. There she’d wrapped them in a linen cloth and worn a simple brown wig. After they got to America though, she let her hair grow out again. It’s not as shiny as when she was younger, but the colour still makes you think of the country, not the shtetl. My father gently pulls her head onto his shoulder and strokes it when he thinks Shmuel and I aren’t watching. Wearing a wig is the only old-world practice he’s happy she gave up.

I did get my mother’s curls, but otherwise I’m dark and solid like Papa. Not fat and jiggly like my best friend Leah’s bubbe, but muscular. I can hit a baseball as good as any boy and I hide my broomstick bat behind the Pesach dishes in the basement storage bin. I’d be mortified if Papa found out. Mama wouldn’t mind, but I want the satisfaction of having my own secret.

Despite my mother’s thrill over my becoming a woman, the slap made me feel as if I’d done something bad. It nagged at me, like last year when I asked to help light the Shabbas candles and my father said it was a sacrilege for a little girl to play at such a holy task. I’d tried to sound sincere, but it was like he saw through me and knew I was trying to ingratiate myself with him instead of honouring God. Mama let me strike matches to light the stove, but I wanted the power to make the candles flare, drawing Papa’s eyes to my hands and his ears to my prayers.

I wondered if Onkel Gershon let my cousins bench licht. Zipporah was six years older than me, and Ruchel four, same as Shmuel. They’d been having periods a long time and could no longer visit the men’s side of the synagogue, a line I’d now be forbidden from crossing too. That wouldn’t be so bad, if it meant I could sit with Ruchel more often. I liked watching her roll her eyes when Reb Stern told women to leave services early and prepare their homes to receive the men. “You’re like Miriam,” the rabbi once said, “first to cross the Red Sea and preserver of the rituals that will continue to bind our people together.” To which Ruchel had muttered, “Miriam dies unmourned in the desert and Moses gets all the credit for leading us to the Promised Land.” Tante Yetta had whispered “Shah, Ruchel!” but Mama barely nudged me when I giggled.

The girls at school were expected to keep the boys in line too. None of them had begun to menstruate yet, even those with breasts. I wished I hadn’t started so I wouldn’t have to act like a grown up. Perhaps the true meaning behind Mama’s slap was a warning not to disgrace our family, like those skatey Catholic girls who got pregnant and had to get married. My cheek burned. Mama didn’t know me if she thought I’d commit such a shanda. Or maybe she did.

“Hurry and set the table,” my mother said, “we’re running late.” It was less than an hour before sundown, and my father and brother would soon be home from shul for Shabbas dinner. I spread out the linen cloth my mother had cross-stitched before her wedding, back in the old country. The cloth hid the ugly pine boards and made our table look as beautiful as the mahogany one in Tante Yetta’s dining room. I put Papa’s kiddush cup in front of his chair, at the head of the table. The silver goblet was the only orchid in our house. Orchid is the perfect slang word for something expensive.

Onkel Gershon and Tante Yetta’s apartment was full of orchids, because when my uncle arrived in America, he studied at night to become an accountant. He made enough money to sponsor my parents to come here too. Shmuel was just a baby then. My uncle is a big macher in the synagogue and even among the Jews who don’t belong to our congregation. People respect him and ask him for help, but I’m not sure they like him. He can be bossy. I don’t know if you have to be that kind of person to become a macher, or if having power makes you act that way. My father tries to order my mother around, but not as much as Onkel Gershon tells Tante Yetta and my cousins what to do. I wish I were rich like them, but I wouldn’t want to be in their family.

Actually there is one other orchid in our house, but I’m not supposed to know about it. It’s a pair of silver candlesticks in a velvet-lined box. I discovered them hidden beneath my mother’s braids when I was snooping in the bedroom closet. I wanted to ask about them but for once I kept my mouth shut. My mother didn’t mind my seeing her old hair, but my precocious woman’s intuition told me she wouldn’t want to reveal the story behind those candlesticks.

My mother’s seat at the table was opposite my father’s, close to the stove. I sat on my father’s left, near the sink, so I could clear the dishes while my mother served the next course. Shmuel’s chair was on Papa’s right, where he could put his hand on my brother’s head to give him the traditional Shabbas blessing before we began the meal. Leah’s father blessed all his children. My friend Leah deserved it because she was good, or maybe she was good because he blessed her. I wanted my father’s blessing too, but he saved the special Hebrew words for his son. I had to be satisfied with the English words Mrs. O’Brien gave me and nine other kids.

“Slice the mandelbrot before it cools down,” my mother said. She’d taken the dough out of the oven just before I showed her my underpants and it was already getting too hard to cut into the diagonal cookies we dipped in our tea. Mama didn’t mind baking her heavenly honey-nut cake, and she agreed with Papa that homemade babka tasted better than bakery bought, but I saw her annoyed scowl when he insisted she bake her own cookies too. There were perfectly good ones at the grocery store. She didn’t go against him, though. My father’s sole concession was allowing her to buy sandwich crèmes for Shmuel and me to pack in our lunch boxes. Of course, they had to be Hydrox, not Oreos, which were made with lard.

I ate an Oreo once, three years ago, in fourth grade, when I traded a Hydrox for Bridget Mahoney’s Oreo. The chocolate part was softer and it got quaggy if you dunked it in milk too long, but the filling was sweeter. I pronounced the Oreo too utterly too too.

“Gottenyu! You’re eating trayf!” Leah worried God would strike me down. She wanted to grab the forbidden cookie out of my hand, but she was too afraid to even touch it.

“I’m fine, Little Miss Goody Two Shoes.” I turned three pirouettes to prove it. Then I made a deal with Bridget to swap a cookie a day. A couple of hours later though, my stomach was queasy. I never knew if it was the lard or fear of God’s punishment that made me sick, but I cancelled the deal. Leah was too nice to give me an I-told-you-so look.

My curiosity about forbidden foods wasn’t dampened, however. Not long ago, Leah and I looked in a store window on Doyers Street, in Chinatown, filled with crabs and snakes and tiny birds on skewers with pearly eyes. When I told her, “Chinese people don’t die from eating those things,” she said, “They’re not Jewish.” I couldn’t dispute her reasoning, and I admitted they looked disgusting. Still, I thought it might be okay to taste one as long as I didn’t swallow it.

There are other American foods I would fully ingest in a heartbeat, like Jell-O. It’s even kosher, because the meat gets boiled out of the gelatin. Too bad Papa doesn’t trust it. Even Mama gags at anything that merely looks like it’s trayf. So, if I want permission to be adventurous, I have to do it in ways that don’t involve food. That’s why a year ago I began campaigning to bob my hair. I picked up the argument with my mother that night while I set the table. “Even you said my hair looks like a rat’s nest. If it was short, the curls wouldn’t get as tangled.”

“You forgot the knife for the challah.” Mama took the braided loaf out of the oven and set it beside my father’s kiddush cup.

“Ersatz.” I pointed at the knife’s pearl handle. Mama looked blank. “It’s not a real orchid.”

Her pale skin reddened and she slammed the knife on the table. “You have real, beautiful hair. Dark and thick like Papa’s mother’s, may she rest in peace.”

“Irene Castle wears her hair in a bob.”

“She’s one of us?” My mother, like other Jews, had to identify our people. It was partly to take pride if someone had done well, and partly to prepare for the backlash if they’d done wrong.

“She’s an actress and a dancer. She doesn’t want her hair in her face when she spins.”

“You’re going to be a biologist, not an entertainer. You’ll wind your hair in a neat bun when it’s time to look under a microscope.”

I was sorry I’d told Mama about my dream to be a scientist, and hoped she hadn’t spilled the beans to Papa. She was excited about my having a career, but all he wanted was for me to get married and have children. “For your information,” I announced, “Irene Castle was born in this country. May I remind you that I was too!”

“Nu?” Mama’s hands rested on her hips.

“You always tell Papa we should be more American. Yet whenever I try, you stop me.”

She sighed. “I went against tradition to grow my hair. Now you want to cut yours off. You can do what you want when you’re old enough, but until then you’ll listen to your parents.”

“I could cut it off right now with a pair of scissors. Or a knife with a fake handle.” I stopped, afraid I’d gone too far.

Instead of getting angry, Mama pointed to the clock and smiled. “Sorry, mamele. It’s past sundown and there’s no cutting allowed on Shabbas.”

“Then I’ll cut it on Sunday. And throw away the curls. I won’t save mine like you did.”

My mother ran a hand down her freshly washed hair. Leah’s bubbe said it was a mitzvah for husbands and wives to make love on Friday night. My mother turned off the stove, leaving a low flame under the cholent. The sweet potato and vegetable stew would bubble until sundown the next evening, giving us something hot to eat when Shabbas ended. “Your father and brother will be home any minute. Let’s have sholem bayess, peace in the house, on this day of rest.”