Part Three

On a humid Saturday morning in July, I imagine my brother is lying on the sofa, thumbing through Collier’s magazine. My sister is in the bathroom, plucking her eyebrows with her new tweezers. Sitting on the floor in the bedroom, I am teaching a stuffed cotton doll to walk. My mother is at the sewing machine, the electric fan blowing on her legs. My father knots his tie in front of the mirror.

“You’re going out?” my mother asks him. “It’s too late for synagogue.”

“All I do is work, work, work. Can’t I go play cards?” In truth he is taking Trudy to the Brass Rail to celebrate her birthday, one day early.

“With a tie in this weather?” she says. “It’s ninety-five degrees. Maybe I should turn off the fan, nu?”

“So I’m wearing a tie. Are you looking for trouble?”

“Trouble, it finds me. Who has to look?” She thinks of my sister, who was caught shoplifting. “You’re not having lunch?”

“Put it away for me. I’ll have it tonight.”

“It’s the little one’s birthday,” she tells him. “You forgot already?”

“What do you want me to do?” he asks.

“Alevai, stay home, have lunch with your mishpokhe, sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ help blow out the three candles. Plus one for good luck.”

“You told me I don’t sing on key. So, blow the candles without me.”

My mother snaps off the light on her sewing machine and marches to the kitchen. She removes the lid from the big pot simmering on the stove and dumps the potato soup into the sink. She eases the blintzes from the frying pan into a casserole dish, covers it, and puts it in the Frigidaire. She stomps to the bathroom and knocks loudly. “Come out of there!” she yells.

My sister slips the tweezers into the front of her bra. She saunters into the living room, expecting to be interrogated over something she’s done.

“We’re eating out,” my mother announces. “At the Lucky Sun. Get dressed!”

Flanked by my mother and sister, my brother pushes my stroller along Dyckman Street. When we are nearly opposite the restaurant, my mother refuses to cross over. We go up to Broadway to cross, and we come back down the other side. With her eyes to the ground, my mother strides ahead of us.

“It’s Magic Shoes,” my sister whispers to my brother. “I bet she thinks it’s unlucky to pass right in front of it.”

“It’s a new store,” Sheldon says. “What’s it ever done to her?”

Mimi tells him how my mother threw a fit in the store in Brighton Beach. “Every time we’re on this block,” she says, “Mama takes off her glasses. Look, she’s not wearing them now.”

In the restaurant it turns out my mother left her glasses at home, so she can’t read the menu. My brother starts to read it to her but she clops her hand over it. “Order me something. The little one can eat from my plate.”

“Ma, you finally buy glasses, then you forget to wear them,” he says. “They look fine on you.” My sister concurs.

“Sha!” my mother yells. Shut up! The other people in the restaurant stare. My sister cringes.

Sheldon is dying to tell Mimi about the last time he was in the Sun Luck, but he doesn’t. He recalls how he walked away from my father and went back to his friends at the table, his insides churning. He couldn’t help telling his girlfriend. Lenore said, “What does your father see in her? She’s not nearly as attractive as your mom.” It surprises him that anyone would think his mother attractive. But then, Lenore has only seen her from a distance.”

From her combination plate, my mother makes me a little plate of my own, with vegetables cut into tiny pieces. When we’re done, she says, “No dessert, we have the birthday cake at home. How old are you?” she asks me.

“Three,” I answer.

“How old am I?” she asks.

“Ten!” I scream. It’s the biggest number I know.

“I’m telling you, she’s a genius,” my brother says.

“Don’t get carried away. She’s just a little precocious,” Mimi says.

“ ‘Genius.’ ‘Precocious.’ Don’t make her out to be a freak,” my mother says. “Alevai, she’s a normal kid.” My mother cannot tell them she is bowled over by the things that come out of my mouth from time to time.

After we leave the Sun Luck, my mother says, “Walk me to the corner. I want to have a look.” Mimi elbows Sheldon. We walk back up to Broadway. When we get there, Mimi says, “What did you want to see?”

“I forget,” my mother says. “Let’s cross.” We cross the street and walk back down on the other side.

“Ma,” Sheldon says, “what are you avoiding? Magic Shoes?”

“For Magic Shoes, a deigeh hob ich. I don’t give a hang. For what you ask?”

“The way you act when we get close.”

My mother taps her head as if to say he has it all wrong. With eyes like that, she thinks, he’ll never need glasses.

Later, my brother consults his girlfriend. “My ma acts as if the store is poison,” he tells her. “She’s such a character!”

“Maybe your dad’s girlfriend works there,” Lenore speculates.

“You think my ma knows what’s going on?” Sheldon says. “It would kill her if she knew. All hell would break loose.”

My brother isn’t with his girlfriend when she noses around Magic Shoes. The shoe clerks are all men, the cashier a mousy-looking woman around thirty. She’d be very pretty, Lenore thinks, if only she would fix herself up. This she reports to my brother as they lie on the big lawn in Fort Tryon Park.

“My ma’s weird,” he says. “All that old-country stuff. According to her, anything could be unlucky, even dropping a knife.” He tells Lenore about the Evil Eye. “She used to embarrass us every time she spit in the street.”

“Used to?”

“That was in Brooklyn. She’s different, ever since we moved. Mimi and I tried to figure it out.”

“Have you asked her?”

My brother turns on his side and chucks Lenore under the chin. “I love how you think.” Lenore is not sure how to take this. He puts his arms across her waist, leans down, and kisses the tip of her nose. “Grrr,” he says, but she gives him a warning look. She’s already told him she doesn’t like making out where other people can see. He goes on talking. “My ma’s the opposite of you. A lot goes on in her head that she’ll never tell you.”

“Have you asked her?” Lenore repeats.

“Mimi’s asked her about the garlic she used to keep in her pocket. We used to stink something awful when she made us go to school with it. Then we got smart enough to stash it under the milkbox.”

“So what did she say? About the garlic.”

“She said, and I quote, ‘If the Devil has it in for me, I must deserve it.’ ”

“Wow! She’s probably got a guilt complex.”

“You think so?”

Lenore turns on her side and searches my brother’s brown eyes. Even though he’s always working on cars or listening to ball games, he’s the only boy she knows who also talks about emotions. “What’s your mom so guilty about?”

“I don’t know, unless it’s not having enough money to give us things we want. Or the education to keep up with us. She flies off the handle, if you get on her nerves. Her family, they went through a lot in Russia, or maybe it was Poland. She’s not sure which. She’s got a really good heart, though.”

“I’d love to talk to her.” Lenore’s strawberry-colored lips pout.

My brother thinks she is so beautiful, lying there like that, hair the color of corn draping her cheek, her round breast pushing against the blouse. He cannot tell her he has the feeling my mother won’t like her.

Each time she sees Sheldon now, Lenore nudzhes him. “When do I meet your mom?”

“Tell you what,” he says one day. “I’ll take you to her favorite place, if you bring your swimsuit and pack us a lunch.”

“What should I pack?”

“Anything. Salami and pickles.” The heck with the lunch, he thinks. He’s dying to see what she looks like in a bathing suit.

They go on the sweltering subway to Brighton Beach. As soon as Lenore sees the million people lying towel to towel on the sand, she says, “You kidding me? She likes this better than Far Rockaway?”

My brother grins. “I swear to God. I told you she was weird.”

As Lenore removes her blouse and skirt, my brother is nervous with anticipation. He pretends to be busy folding his shirt and pants into a makeshift pillow, but he watches out of the corner of his eye. When she has stripped down to her bathing suit, my brother gives her a quick once-over. “Mamma mia!” he says, and whistles.

“I got it at Orbach’s,” she tells him, meaning the satiny black suit.

“Snazzy!” he says, although her hips could be bigger. He wishes he had brought the camera. She is so gorgeous he can hardly bear to look. “Race you,” he says, and sprints straight toward the ocean. Later he rubs suntan oil into her back. “Ooh,” she says, “you do that so nice.” They eat salami-and-pickle sandwiches and sunbathe for a while, till she complains she’s frying.

“French-fried Lenore. Can I have her with ketchup?”

“You silly.”

“There’s only one place that’s got shade,” he tells her, and takes her under the Boardwalk.

In the cool shade, as long as the Boardwalk itself, they lie on towels and French-kiss, again and again. Too late, my brother realizes he should have brought a blanket to cover them with. He shields her body with his own as he pulls down the straps from her bathing suit. The warmth of her breasts on his bare skin sends a hum through his body.

A line from a song he never appreciated before comes back to him: “When the moon hits your eye like a big piz-za pie, that’s a-more.” A-more. A-more. A big pizza pie.

My brother is in love.

I imagine my sister running her hand along the cotton tops hanging on the department store rack. Eenie, meenie, mineymo. Her pulse races as she plucks off three tops in her size, solid, polka dot, and striped. It’s true she needs clothes. Soon school will start again, and my father refuses to buy her anything new. “I’m still paying off your Uncle Yakob,” he says. “Moving to Manhattan costs a lot of money.” It isn’t the need for clothes that brings her back to Alexander’s, though. It’s the thrill.

In the dressing room she tries on the tops, slowly. The anticipation makes her shiver. She buttons each blouse completely, tucks it into her skirt, turns this way and that, as she gazes in the three-paneled mirror. Finally she decides on the black-and-white striped. She leaves it on, tucks the price tag into the sleeve, tucks the collar under, and buttons her blouse up over it. She studies herself from the front, from the side. She is building to that moment of tension, a fright like she’s only had on the Cyclone, as if her life could end right there, on a dime.

Her pulse pounding, she strolls leisurely onto the sales floor. She pretends to have an interest in the pedal pushers on a rack against the wall. She looks up. No one seems to be lurking around, waiting to catch her. She walks slowly, casually, to the escalator, steps onto it, and turns sideways to see who has followed her. Only a prim-looking woman with a tight, curly permanent.

On the main floor my sister takes a circuitous route, through handbags, through men’s shirts. Now is the moment. She steps into the revolving door. For a couple of long seconds she is captured within the glassed partition. Her adrenaline surges as the door moves, then opens onto the street. She blinks in the brilliant sunshine splayed over the Grand Concourse. Not breathing, she waits for the clop of an arm, for what feels like Death to come to get her, and when it doesn’t, she knows she has survived. Again.

At home she stuffs the tags from the striped blouse into the bottom of the garbage. She waits a week before wearing the top. Right away my mother asks, “From where you get the zebra?”

“My friend Suzanne,” Mimi says. “I’m just borrowing it.”

My mother pleads with her to stop stealing. “Number one, it’s a sin. Number two, if they catch you again, they send you to reform school.”

“I told you, I borrowed it,” Mimi says defiantly.

My mother feels she has no choice but to tell my father.

My father watches as my mother goes through my sister’s dresser drawers. She pulls out anything she doesn’t recognize. When my sister comes home, my father yanks her by the sleeve to the bedroom. There he points to the pile on the bed. “Never did I ever think,” he says. “Tell me, am I looking at stolen goods? Admit it!”

My sister shoots my mother a look as if to say, You betrayed me. My mother feels terrible, but she cannot let her daughter steal.

“Tell me!” My father shakes Mimi by the shoulders and keeps smacking her face till she admits she’s been shoplifting. Then he gives her one more smack, backhanded, for good measure. He tells her, “For one month you’re staying home. Period. No going out with friends. No allowance.”

My mother thinks this is a good idea until my father says, “If you have to stay here with her, you make sure she don’t go nowhere.”

Later she says to my father, “For what should I be cooped up? I have shopping to do, I have to take the little one for fresh air.”

My father gets angry. “Which is more important? We have to teach Mimi a lesson.” When my mother doesn’t agree right away, he says, “Of course you can go out, but not all day.”

At night, she tosses and turns in her bed. Less time for the Cloisters, my mother thinks. Why does this have to happen? She feels resentful, panicky even. The Cloisters is her one happiness. Then she remembers the woman whose boy took the stroller. I hope your daughter doesn’t grow up to be a thief. From where does her daughter get the idea to steal? my mother wonders, but the answer comes to her the following week, when my father announces he is suing the Transit Authority.

The wicker seat in a subway car tore a hole in his pants, he says. This time my mother says something back. “Those pants, they were so thin already, I think they tore themselves.”

“What do you know about it?” he answers. “You have a Ph.D. in textiles?”

My mother still takes me to the Cloisters every day, except when it’s closed, but she feels too guilty to enjoy herself. We don’t stay as long as before. Then one day she says to my brother, “Do me a favor.” He agrees to baby-sit me the following Saturday and gives her subway directions to Brighton Beach. Then she informs my sister that they are going. “You do me this favor, I’ll talk to Papa to let you out of the house sooner.”

My sister doesn’t mind. She is going stir-crazy. She’s read all the library books twice. My mother, who’s never used a library, doesn’t know how to pick out new books to bring home. Rereading all the magazines, my sister has become an expert on Hollywood gossip. She experiments with my mother’s makeup. She teaches me new words. Powder pu f is my favorite.

“Powder puff,” I say, watching my mother pat her nose. “Where we going?” I ask.

“Not you. You’re staying with your brother.”

“Why?” I follow her to the kitchen, where she packs a lunch. “Because why?”

“Me and your sister, we have to go to Coney Island.”

“What’s Coney Island?”

With her finger my mother pushes the egg salad off the knife and into my mouth. “Where you were born,” she says.

“Can I go? I want to go.”

“Another time. Don’t chew with your mouth open. I wonder what your brother will learn you today. Maybe something too hard for you.”

“No!”

“We’ll see,” she singsongs. “We’ll see.”

At the subway station my mother suddenly recalls the crazy man from the change booth. She doesn’t want to know if he’s in there now. She throws a dollar at my sister. “You get,” she says, and waits by the turnstiles, the shopping bag between her legs. On the platform she looks all around.

“What’re you so suspicious of?” Mimi says, trying to hide her annoyance.

My mother tells her how the man from the booth followed her and the baby in Coney Island. She doesn’t mention the bankbook, or Harry either.

“What were you doing there?” Mimi asks.

“Oy, how I miss the salt air!”

“Does Papa know what happened?”

“Crazy your mother isn’t. Kholilleh, he’d kill this man and go to jail.”

“Why are we going to Coney now?” Mimi expects my mother to say something like, Maybe the salt air will cure your sickness. Something cuckoo.

“You wouldn’t believe me. Anyhow, is hard to explain.” Unlike my mother, my sister finds the long ride boring. Still, she’s glad to be out of the apartment. She reads and rereads the placards overhead. I’D WALK A MILE FOR A CAMEL. She wonders what it’s like to be Miss Subways. She would never say it, but she is also glad it’s just the two of them together.

As soon as she sees the crowded beach—sand hardly visible in between all the bodies, a million bodies it looks like—my sister says, “We should have brought our bathing suits.”

“I have right here.” My mother rattles her shopping bag.

“So what did you want to show me?”

“First we go change,” my mother says. “Then we’ll see.” One at a time they go into the bracing ocean while the other one watches their belongings. They eat egg salad sandwiches and drink milk from the thermos. While they lie on towels under the hot sun, my mother says, “I did a foolish thing once. More than once, but it’s once I want to tell you.”

My sister thinks my mother is going to confess that she stole something. She closes her eyes. She hears seagulls honk above the din of voices. The heat from the sun feels like the blast from an open oven. Her body tingles.

“Remember I was expecting with your sister, I went to the doctor’s?”

“Yeah.” Mimi yanks the straps off her shoulders.

“I was very depressed at that time. And then your papa and me, we got into an argument. He gave me such a smack—”

My sister’s stomach tightens. Maybe she doesn’t want to hear this.

“After I cried my eyes out, you know what I did? I went there, to the Boardwalk.” She points behind them, but my sister’s eyes are still closed. “I walked and I walked. I was thinking, ‘Should I, shouldn’t I?’ ”

“Should you what?” Mimi asks.

“Should I kill myself.”

My sister opens her eyes. “You thought about killing yourself ?”

“More than thinking. Sit up.”

Mimi clutches the top of her bathing suit and sits up.

“See?” My mother points to a crowded area near the water. “There, I collapse after. At that time, deserted. The sun, so pale and cold. Got shikt di kelt noch di klaider. God sends the weather you need. I think I’m laying down to die alone, nu? but from nowhere this nice man comes, he asks me if I’m all right.”

My sister is squinting from the horror. “You tried to kill yourself? But—but what would have happened to us?”

It’s the question my mother was hoping for. “That’s it,” she says. “Why I didn’t kill myself. At the moment I go in the ocean, all I’m thinking is me me me.”

“That’s so selfish,” Mimi says.

“That’s it,” my mother says again. She waits a decent interval before saying, “When you help yourself to clothes they don’t belong to you, all you think about is you. You don’t think about your family. How it hurts me and Papa. And your brother and your sister. Your shame is our shame, nu?”

My mother speaks matter-of-factly, without reproach. “I tell you so you should know what this pain is, deep inside me.” Her hand over her breast, she says, “Azoy! Now, we get ourself some geshmak French fries by Nathan’s.”

On the long subway ride home, my sister falls asleep. She dreams she is floating on water, content under a warm sun, until she overhears someone say she is going to get burnt to a crisp. She tries to go back for her blouse to put on over the swimsuit, but the tide pulls her in the opposite direction. “Help!” she calls out to the other swimmers. They smile and cheerfully wave her on. In the distance a woman in a white filmy dress appears over the water. She has dark hair to her knees and a glittering tiara. She tiptoes from wave to wave, coming toward my sister. Up close, my sister realizes the woman is as tall as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “Use the breaststroke, dear,” the giantess counsels, but what she demonstrates is the backstroke, and soon she recedes toward the horizon. My sister thinks she says “Use the best stroke.” Circling her arms wildly through the water, she flutter kicks like crazy, no longer afraid to be swimming toward the ocean. But when she lifts her head, she sees the beach coming closer and closer.

My mother makes them get out at 190th Street, to avoid the man at Dyckman. Just the thought of him gives her the creeps.

In the tunnel they pass the elevator operator who is in uniform but taking a break. “How are you folks today?” he asks.

“My older daughter,” my mother says.

“Hello, miss. You been to the Cloisters again, ma’am?” he says.

“We were on the subway. From Coney Island,” my mother answers.

“See you soon.” He tips his brown cap.

My sister gives my mother an inquisitive look. “Sometimes I take the little one there.” She shrugs, as if it’s nothing. “You ever see this place, inside?”

“Our art teacher took us once. All those crucifixes and statues. Jesus and the Virgin Mary. It’s all hooey.”

My mother says, “People need something to believe in, nu? What’s mysterious can be like a magnet.”

My sister ignores this. “If you like art, there’s lots more at the Met.” My mother looks blank. “The Metropolitan Museum, in Central Park. Downtown.”

“Is that so?” My mother gets the idea that museums are only in parks.

“It’s incredible what they have,” Mimi says. “I like the Egyptian part and the Impressionists. There are Rembrandts, too. And metal armor the knights wore for fighting. Everything. Whole floors of paintings. A cafeteria. It’s fifty times, a hundred times bigger than the Cloisters.”

“So big?”

“I swear, Mama. I’ve been there ten times, and I haven’t seen half of it.”

“Imagine! This I didn’t know.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” my sister says.

“We must be close to home,” my mother says. She means it ironically. “So, please, tell me. I’m all ears.”

The receptionist for the factory flings open the door of my father’s office. She aims her pencil at the phone. “I think it’s your wife.”

“Thank you,” my father says stiffly. He’s never given my mother the number, because Mr. Gershenfeld has warned them about personal calls. He picks up the receiver now, warily. He’s hoping it isn’t the baby.

Hearing Trudy’s voice, my father lets out a big breath. “You nearly gave me a heart attack, telephoning here.”

“The worst thing happened,” Trudy says.

My father thinks Barney has found out about them. His mind reels. Is Barney on his way to the factory? Is he divorcing Trudy?

“My nephew,” Trudy says, “the one I told you who was overseas—”

“Something happened to him?”

“And his wife.” Trudy starts to cry. “They were killed in a car crash.”

“My condolences. That’s a terrible thing.” He takes another big breath.

“They left their little girl with the baby-sitter. G-d in heaven, now she’s an orphan.”

“The poor kid. She’s going to an orphanage?”

“Not if I can help it,” Trudy says. “Right now the baby is with my niece, but she’s only a schoolgirl. In college.”

“What can you do?” My father sees his boss walking down the aisle between the seamstresses.

“I’m taking the train. To Philly. It may be a few days. Okay?”

“You’re asking me? You have to go to the funeral, no?”

“Not just the funeral. I have to see about the kid.”

My father wants to tell her not to mix in, but he knows he has to get off the phone. “Call me when you come back. A safe trip.”

“Thank you. I love you.”

“Likewise,” he says as Mr. Gershenfeld steps through his office door.

Sometimes when my mother and I leave the house, I remind her to take her glasses. At first she thinks it’s very cute. She takes the eyeglasses in a case. Or puts the glasses on, but if we go to Dyckman Street, she takes them off. She thinks that if Harry should happen to come out from the Magic Shoes store, if he’s just visiting there, say, it would be better not to see him.

One afternoon when she tells me we’re going shopping, I say, “Glasses, Mama.” Her eyebrows lift up. She looks like Olive Oyl in my sister’s comic book. “Stop tchepping me!” she says. “Three years old, already you’re a nag.”

This is the first time I’ve ever heard her angry at me.

At the kosher butcher’s, she parks the stroller and I go inside with her. “Don’t play on the floor,” she says. When she turns her back, I put my hand down on the sawdust. I like how it clings to my palm. The butcher gets aggravated when she asks him to read her the prices on the board behind the counter. Twice. “Missus,” he tells her, “you broke your glasses? Get them fixed. I’m not the Lighthouse for the Blind.”

At the bakery, she points to me. “You,” she says. “Not a word from your mouth since we left. Talk your head off, but don’t tell me about my glasses, nu?” She takes a number, and we wait with the other customers. Overhead [1] [8] becomes [1] [9]. I want to ask what makes it change, but I don’t.

“Oy,” my mother says, “you break my heart with those eyes.” I go to the case where the fancy cookies are and peer in, my hands on the glass. She’s told me before that sweets are not good for me. Today she says, “Half a cookie you can have. This one time.”

“A whole cookie!” I say. “I want a whole cookie.”

“She knows from halves?” a customer says.

“A whole, a half, that’s not much to know.” The number changes to [2] [2]. “Right here!” my mother yells. After she orders a pumpernickel, sliced, my mother asks the lady with the organdy apron and hat, “Can I get one little cookie, if you please?”

“A quarter-pound minimum,” the lady says brusquely, before she sees my hopeful stare. “For her?” she asks.

“She just turned three,” my mother says.

“Here.” The lady hands my mother a cookie on a piece of waxed paper. It has a cherry in the center. “How much?” my mother asks, but the lady waves her hand dismissively.

Outside the store, my mother breaks the tiny cookie in half. She keeps the part with the cherry. “Don’t get a cavity from this,” she says, giving me what’s left. I know my mother is saying she’s sorry for getting angry, but I don’t ever ask her again about her glasses.

"Mr. Arnow, you’re getting so popular.” The receptionist tilts her head toward the phone and backs out the door.

Now what? my father thinks as he picks up the receiver. “Mr. Arnow speaking. How can I help you?”

“I have some ideas,” Trudy says.

“Trudy! For God’s sake, don’t call me here. The boss don’t like it.”

“You could at least say, Welcome back.”

“Yeah, what is it?” He fans himself with the order book.

Her voice bubbles as she says, “Can you see me tonight?”

The heat wave is still on, and my father has decided to take my mother and me to the movies, where it’s air-conditioned. Now he wavers. Trudy sounds so eager, she must have missed him. Since he hasn’t mentioned the movie to my mother, he tells Trudy, “Okay, we’ll take in that James Cagney picture.” Just then Mr. Gershenfeld comes up the aisle. “I have to go,” my father says, and puts down the receiver.

For once Mr. Gershenfeld comes into the cubicle without his jacket. When it’s a hundred twenty degrees in the factory, my father thinks, hell freezes over. He mops his forehead, waiting for his boss to read him the riot act on personal calls. Mr. Gershenfeld only explains about the new wonder fabric they’re going to try. Polyester.

The receptionist pokes her head in the door. “Telephone, Mr. Arnow. It’s the same lady.”

“Would you tell her I’ll call her later?”

Mr. Gershenfeld puts his hand up. “Take the call. It must be something urgent for her to interrupt you at work, right?”

“I’m very sorry,” my father says. “I’ll ask her not to call me again.”

Mr. Gershenfeld nods. He can tell my father has gotten the message.

Alone in his office now, my father picks up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Don’t be angry,” Trudy says. “I just had to tell you.”

“Didn’t I say, Don’t call me?”

“Yes, but—”

“My boss was just in here,” my father says, his voice rising. “Do you want me to lose my job?”

“No, I only—”

“Trudy!” he screams. “Never, ever call me here again, understand?” He looks to see if anyone outside the booth heard him, but the girls are working away, even Flora, her long hair falling on the fabric near the needle. He’ll have to tell her to comb her hair back before there’s an accident.

“You don’t have to get apoplectic. I only wanted to let you know I can’t go tonight to the movies. I have my nephew’s daughter here.”

“For how long?”

“Ha!” Trudy says. “That’s a good one. Let’s see, I would say, uh, fifteen years. Barney and I are adopting her.”

On the factory floor my father feels at sixes and sevens. What is Trudy talking about? What has gotten into her? If she wants company, she should get a dog, he thinks. What does she need with a kid?

When he arrives at Trudy’s place, three-year-old Hannah is running in circles around the living room. She bangs together two wooden horses.

“Isn’t she cute!” Trudy says. “I’m taking her to a doctor next week for her eyes. They go in different directions.”

“Can’t you tell her to be quiet?” he says.

“She’ll calm down. She just got here. Sometimes she asks for her mother. It breaks my heart.”

The last thing my father wants to see at Trudy’s is a baby. For that he already has a home, but what can he say? “Why should you be the one to adopt her?” he says. “You could be her grandmother.”

“Hannah,” Trudy says. “This is your grandpapa. Say hello.” Hannah stops running for a minute and stares. Then she squats under a chair. From there she clops the horses together, over and over, as if they’re at war.

"We could go to 181st, is better for the variety,” my mother says.

“I told you, what I want is in the Magic Shoes window,” my sister says.

My mother is pretty sure Harry is still in Brooklyn, but why take the chance? “In that case,” she says, and hands my sister the money.

“You’re trusting me to buy shoes?” Mimi says. “Chicken Little, the sky is falling.”

“Make sure they fit, or I’ll give you a loch in kop.” A hole in the head.

While Mimi is gone, my mother waits. Zitsen ahf shpilkes, she thinks. On pins and needles. Finally my sister comes home with a plain pair of pumps. “Put them on,” my mother orders. “Walk back and forth.” She pinches the toes to check if there is room. “We’ll see how long they’re good for. Tell me, you see someone in there we know?”

“The shoe store?”

“No, the dairy farm. To whom am I talking, please?”

“I didn’t see anyone, why?”

“It’s nice in there?”

Mimi shrugs. “Like the one in Brighton Beach but smaller.”

“The salesman was nice to you?”

“Why shouldn’t he be? I didn’t yell at him. I didn’t insult him.”

“All right, all right,” my mother says. She figures if my sister saw him, she would remember him from the other store and say something. My mother feels calmer but not altogether easy. She wishes the store wasn’t there. She can never go now on the main shopping street without thinking of Harry.

I imagine my mother is surprised when my father agrees to go with her on Friday nights to Temple. In Brooklyn they went regularly, but in the city she goes only on the High Holy Days. Lately she feels the need for some uplift.

At first they argue over which synagogue to attend. Though my father prefers the Orthodox or Conservative, my mother refuses to sit with the women in the balcony like some outcast. My brother and sister don’t want to go at all, which aggravates my father, so he makes them take turns baby-sitting me.

The Reform Temple is a makeshift building next to a garage, but my mother feels it’s haimish. Homey. The rabbi clasps her hand in both of his. “Mrs. Arnow, how good to see you again!” He reminds her a little of her late father. She reminds him of his mother.

At the services my mother sees some of our neighbors and others from around the area. The Hebrew is foreign but familiar, and the English cadences move her. Thou createst day and night; thou rollest away the light from before the darkness, and the darkness from before the light; thou makest the day to pass and the night to approach, and dividest the day from the night . . . Like the ocean, she thinks, meeting the shore. Dark against light.

One evening she says to my father, “A book like this at home for the little one, her brother could read to her.”

“You’ll make a fairy out of him,” my father says. “The kid’s too small.”

“Look, that one isn’t too small.” My father looks and sees Trudy and Barney Fleisch with Hannah sitting between them, asleep.

After services, though my father doesn’t want to stay for the social hour, the Fleisches troop up to them and my father has to make the introductions. “Join us for a nosh,” Barney says, and my mother says, “Why not?”

In the other wing, which is the Community Center, they drink punch and eat rugelach. My father is on edge, but the danger excites Trudy. She sizes up my mother, surprised she is so tiny, and at the same time, full-figured.

“From where do you know each other?” my mother asks Barney.

“My old handball adversary,” he says. “Brighton Beach, off the Boardwalk.” He pinches my father’s cheek. “I see him at the Jewish Club sometimes, playing hearts.”

Trudy recalls to herself how she and he met there that time, an instant attraction. One moment they were introduced. Moments later, she kissed him by the water fountain. She thinks he’s hilarious now, looking bored, as if he wants to escape. She knows he is afraid.

“Since when did you start coming here?” Trudy asks my mother. She really wants to ask what kind of night cream she uses on her face. Not a wrinkle anywhere.

“A few weeks. I didn’t see you before.”

“We used to come all the time, before we got our little Hannah. We’re adopting her.” Trudy tells my mother the story.

My mother cringes to hear her use words such as died and orphan in Hannah’s presence. “Some mitzvah,” she says, “to take her in.” Too bad, she thinks, about the kid’s eyes. Such thick lenses.

Hannah points to my father. “Grandpapa.”

“No, that’s not Grandpa,” Barney says.

“Grandpapa,” Hannah insists. She looks to Trudy for confirmation. Trudy smiles feebly. My father scowls.

“Cute,” my mother says. She has to stop herself from saying, Kineahora.

It’s a whole different situation now, my father tells himself. Whenever he visits Trudy, they can’t just fall into each other’s arms or go to bed. He watches television until Trudy tucks the kid into her crib at seven o’clock. Even then they wait until the kid is actually asleep before they make love—if Trudy isn’t too tired by then. Afterwards, all she talks about is Hannah this and Hannah that. He’s given up going there on Saturday afternoons because the kid is awake the whole time.

Discontent runs through my father’s head as he sorts the orders at his desk in the factory. When he sees Flora and Ida gabbing once again, he storms down to their stations. “Both of you,” he yells, “if I have to tell you one more time—” He runs his index finger across his throat. He thinks he’d hate to fire Flora, she’s such a beauty. Her unpainted lips are the color of red grapes.

As he walks back up the aisle, the sewing machines come to a sudden stop, and he hears barking sounds behind him. He whirls around, but he doesn’t see who’s doing it. The machines are running again. He starts walking. Urh urh. Urh. The barking follows him, but he keeps going.

Returning from his break, he finds a piece of paper taped to his office door: MISTER BOWWOW. He can feel the eyes of the girls on his back. He forces a laugh. “Ha! That’s a good one.” He turns around and, sure enough, two dozen pairs of eyes are on him. “That’s me,” he says jovially, “Mr. BowWow.” Then he screams at the top of his lungs: “NOW GET TO WORK!”

After Mr. Gershenfeld leaves for an appointment, my father calls Trudy. “I can’t see you tonight. I have to work overtime.”

“It’s for the best. Hannah has a bad cold and an earache. She’s all cranky, aren’t you, Hannah? Poor Hannah,” Trudy coos.

“Can’t you talk about anything else?” my father says.

“I never liked kids before, but now that my own are grown, I get such a kick out of her.” Trudy squeals, a new laugh since the kid arrived. “You should have heard her when we had the T.V. on—”

“See you Thursday,” he says, and puts down the receiver.

He flips a page of his desk calendar to get ready for the next day, surprised by his sudden sense of loss. Where did the time go? It was just yesterday when he was in an undershirt and shorts after a handball game, and a girl—what was her name?—waited for him outside the courts. That night was his very first time, with her under the Boardwalk. So quick he didn’t know why everyone made such a big deal about sex. But the more he did it with her, the more he wanted to. Still, she was just a girl. She didn’t know what Trudy knows. Why does Trudy have to slip away from him? he asks himself. Before his eyes she is becoming a grandma.

Through the glass now, he watches Ermelinda bent over her machine. The way her skirt is bunched under her, he can see her leg to the knee. A pretty caramel color.

My mother and I are sitting on a low wall around a courtyard in the Cloisters, near the wavy columns. In the garden is a fountain no taller than I am. My mother won’t let me poke my finger in the water that bubbles from the center. “Here, look,” she says, writing with her fingernail on the little magic slate. She brings the slate now on all our outings, ever since my brother taught me the alphabet. “What is this?” she asks.

“I know,” I say.

“Tell me.”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t think you kno-ow,” she says in singsong.

“I do too. Mama,” I say.

“Mama. That’s right.” She lifts the cellophane that makes the letters disappear. “Now you.”

With the little stick I write LOVE. The letters are very crooked because there are no lines, like on the loose-leaf pages my brother gives me.

“Love,” my mother says. “Very good.”

“What a smart little girl!” I hear someone say. A man is standing behind my mother. Her eyes get very strange. Frightened, I think. Slowly she turns her head. “You,” she says.

“Chenia,” the man says. He has dark eyes and a green hat with a tiny yellow feather. “Hello, hello,” he says to me. “You’ve grown so much I hardly recognized you. How old are you now?” I look at my mother.

“It’s okay, you can talk to him,” she says. “He’s somebody I know from Brooklyn.” She’s told me many times not to talk to men.

“Three!” I tell him.

“Just three?” He looks at my mother. “She’s reading and writing?”

“A bissel.”

He leans over her shoulder to draw a figure on the slate. “What’s that?” he asks me.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You know,” my mother prods. “A heart. A valentine.”

“Valentines are red,” I tell him. “We have a valentine box.” My mother flushes, almost the color of the box. It’s the one he gave her, with all the candy, only now it holds her necklaces. Sometimes she lets me play with them.

“So, Chenia, how have you been?”

“A sach tsu reden, vainik tsu heren.”

“You know my Yiddish is wanting,” he says.

“A lot to tell, but too little to hear,” she translates.

“Write me,” I say.

She writes PAPA with her fingernail.

“That’s too easy,” I say.

She lifts up the page to make PAPA disappear.

“Write my name,” I say.

“What’s the first letter?” she asks me.

“D.”

“That’s right.” She prints DEVORAH. “Such a hard name for a little girl to spell.” Handing me the slate, she says, “You can copy it.”

“So,” she says to Harry, “here we are.” She sounds calm, but inside, she is in great turmoil. He looks to her smoother than before. Maybe it’s the silky gray suit. She remembered him taller.

“I thought you would be by the river,” he says.

“That?” she say. “Big enough only to spit in. We see the whole megillah from outside there, then we come in here, where I like it. Oy, the little one will think she’s a Catholic.” My mother makes the sign of the cross.

He laughs. “Fascinating, huh?” She looks to him a little different. Standoffish, maybe. He liked her hair longer. In the net. “Have you seen the Nine Heroes Tapestries?” he asks.

“The tapestries I saw. Such skinny thread. You could go blind.”

“You know there are Jewish heroes among them?”

“Really?” She thinks to herself, How can this man know so much? Does he make it up? She wants to tell him to go away, before she falls back in love with him. With his mind.

“Come,” he says. “I’ll show you.” We follow him until he stops at a doorway. “Fifteenth century. Limestone.” He takes off his hat before we enter the room. “Here are the Greek heroes,” he says.

He points at a huge tapestry on one wall. “There’s Julius Caesar, the great Roman conqueror. Those men are famous Christians. And on this wall, the Hebrews’ tapestry. Voilà! There’s King David—see his harp? There’s Joshua with a dragon on his shield. And Judas Maccabeus. These tapestries are from the fourteenth century, more than six hundred years old.”

My mother is standing with her mouth hanging open. I am climbing on the big chair under the funny window that doesn’t look out on anything. Harry comes to lift me off the chair. He plops his hat on me. I laugh. “I have to get back to work,” he says. “It’s a long walk from here to there. Like from one end of the Boardwalk to the other. You know I’m on Dyckman Street now? I asked for the transfer.” He doesn’t tell her why.

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” she says. “What should I know? No one ever rang my telephone to tell me.”

“I did call you once. I think your daughter answered. I hung up.”

“Your finger broke? You could dial again.”

“Chenia!” he jollies her. “Your fingers, they don’t look broken to me.”

Harry’s hat falls off me as I run around the table in the middle of the room. “You!” my mother says to me, but I know not to touch the plates or the pitcher on it.

“You must have seen our store. Did you bother to come in?” Harry says.

“Why would I? The way you acted last time.”

“Chenia, my mother was ill. By the time I returned, she was on the floor, crawling on her belly to get to the phone. I’ve been more than punished for the few moments I spent with you.” He stoops to pick up his hat.

“This I’m sorry to hear.” She pauses, thinking, Is it true?, then she says, “But you acted like we never knew each other. Hello, how are you, good-bye.”

“Let’s hash this out, Chenia. That there should be no misunderstanding. When and where can I meet you? This is too far from work.”

My mother’s chin juts toward me. “Big ears grow bigger every day.”

“I realize. I’ll think of something, I promise. Bickford’s on Dyckman?”

“When?” She looks very sad. She’s thinking, Maybe it’s better not to start again.

“Tomorrow. Two o’clock. I’ll take a late lunch.”

“Who’s that?” I ask, after he goes.

“A man from the shoe store in Brooklyn.”

“What’s his name?”

“Bubbeleh,” she says, “I have such a headache. Let’s go outside. Do you want an ice cream?”

Outside the Cloisters my mother buys me a Dixie cup, half chocolate, half vanilla, from the man with the wagon. It’s so frozen she has to help me dig in with the wooden spoon, until the ice cream starts to soften. When I can’t eat any more, I say, “What’s his name?”

“Peter,” she says. “Peter the Wolf. Did I ever tell you that story? Your sister has the book someplace.” We sit on our bench and she tells me about how Peter almost ate Red Riding Hood. “If Red Riding Hood didn’t go to school,” she says, “she wouldn’t know about wolves and how dangerous they are. But she went to school and she was a smart little cookie. She knew how to spell her name, and it was a much longer name than yours.”

My mother writes on the slate board RED RIDING HOOD. “She had red hair like you,” my mother says. “And red shoes.”

“My shoes are red.” I point to my hair. “This isn’t red.”

“There’s different kinds of red,” my mother says. “You’re right. Life is, oy, so complicated.”

Ever since she went with my mother to Brighton Beach, my sister has resisted the temptation to shoplift. Now school has started, and every day she resents having to wear Cousin Rhonda’s castoffs. The other girls wear plaid skirts and sweaters with dolman sleeves, all the latest fashions. In spite of her resolve, one afternoon my sister boards the trolley to the Grand Concourse.

A few stops later, an old woman on the sidewalk is yelling “Hey! Hey!” Her shopping cart, loaded with a tall cardboard box, is too heavy for her to boost up the high step. The conductor is gruff. “C’mon, lady, this ain’t the pony express. I’m already running late.”

My sister rushes to the rescue, taking the handle of the cart and yanking it into the car. The woman climbs on and says something to her in a foreign language. Thank you, maybe. Her face is brownish, the color of old makeup, with deep pockets in the flesh. It reminds Mimi of a sponge.

“Are you going far?” she asks the woman.

“By Alexander’s.” She taps the box in the cart. “This kind of cabinet you can’t get there.” Her arms are so thin, her wrist bone looks like a tumor.

When my sister pulls the cord, the woman says, “I get out, too.”

“I’ll help you,” Mimi says. She carries the cart down to the sidewalk. “I hope you live in an elevator building.”

“You couldn’t get me in an elevator—” the woman says.

“Maybe I should walk you home,” Mimi suggests.

“It’s not necessary,” the woman says. “But if you want . . .” Slowly they walk two blocks off the Concourse, my sister pulling the cart. The building doesn’t have an elevator. My sister lugs the cart up the three flights.

“There you go,” she says.

The woman opens her purse and says, “Wait, I give you.”

“You don’t have to tip me. I just wanted to help,” Mimi says.

“Then you come in, have a cup of tea.”

My sister is curious. As far back as she can remember, my mother has warned her against strangers—all the more reason to say yes now.

The dark apartment smells like an apple core left out too long, but it’s not exactly repulsive. The foyer is full of dark furniture and glass and china knickknacks. In the kitchen, she and the woman manage to slide the cabinet out of the carton and stand it up by the sink, next to several bags of garbage.

Mimi loads the garbage into the empty carton. “I’ll take it down for you.”

“It’s not necessary. But if you want . . . Then I’ll have your tea ready.”

The basement is darker than my sister expected. When a large man steps out of the darkness, she shrieks. “What the hell?” he yells. He’s unshaven, with overalls that are too tight. He yanks the carton from her and plops it down by the garbage cans. “Visiting someone here?” he asks.

The way he looks at her—too happy to see her—gives Mimi the creeps. To be polite, she answers him. “Yes.”

“You come here often?”

“This is my first time.” Maybe she misjudged him, she thinks, then she sees him looking over his shoulder as if to check whether they’re alone. She goes back as fast as she can, taking the steps two at a time.

The table is already set. Yellowish tea—like pish, Mimi thinks—sits in two glass cups. “How we have it at home,” the woman says. Mimi doesn’t have the heart to tell her she doesn’t drink tea. On a chipped plate are ginger cookies covered with powdered sugar. My sister fills her mouth each time with a big piece of cookie before she sips.

The old woman asks her about school, about where she lives. She asks the old woman if she has a family, where she came from. An hour goes by. “Have some more tea,” the woman says. “I have to go now,” Mimi says. The woman looks very sad. Maybe she is missing her son who died at Pearl Harbor, Mimi thinks. She has only a brother who lives in Queens.

At the door the woman slips a rolled-up bill into my sister’s hand. Mimi tries to refuse but the woman says, “Please, you can come visit me, anytime. I tell you my name.” She points above the doorbell. “Sofie Vrebolovich.”

“I’ll never remember it.”

The old woman gives her a used envelope with her name and address. Slowly she prints her phone number. It seems to take forever. “You come anytime for lunch.”

On the landing below, my sister opens her hand. In her palm is a twenty-dollar bill. For some reason, she thinks of the woman in her dream, the giant with the tiara. She feels there’s some connection with the old woman, but she doesn’t know what.

At Alexander’s my sister buys herself two outfits, a blouse, a sweater, and a felt skirt. She has money left over, which she will put toward shoes. When she gets home, she leaves everything in the bags and waits for my mother. “Mama,” she says, “the most amazing thing happened today.” She shows her the receipts and the envelope from the old woman. She tells my mother about helping her with the cabinet, about the tea and the money. She doesn’t mention the man. “I’m happy for you,” my mother says, “but tell me this, what were you doing on that trolley to begin with?”

While Mr. and Mrs. Gershenfeld and their five children vacation in the Poconos, my father calls Ermelinda into his office. “I want to compliment you. You’re our best worker. Did you know that?”

She gives him a shy smile. My father isn’t sure if she understands. Her English is only so-so. “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?” he asks. When she looks a little puzzled, he pretends he’s spooning something into his mouth, then points to her and himself. “Tonight,” he repeats.

Ermelinda says something, maybe in English, but he can’t make it out. He thinks he hears the word baby, which sounds like “behbee.”

“Baby?” He makes his arms into a cradle and swings them back and forth. She nods. “¿Casado?” he asks. Married?

She reaches inside her blouse and takes out her gold wedding ring, which is on a chain around her neck. Most of the girls wear their rings around their neck so they don’t get caught in the machines.

Through the glass, he sees the girls who sit by Ermelinda watching them. Ida says something. Flora gathers the hair at her neck and laughs.

“That’s all,” my father says. “You can go back to work.”

“Know you’re very nice boss,” Ermelinda tells him. “Gracias.”

Although he pretends to read a production schedule, my father sees the girls question Ermelinda when she is back at her station. The three of them eye him and make faces at each other, their eyes rolling and bugging out.

The next night my father leaves work as usual. As he rounds the corner to go to the subway, someone comes up behind him and jabs something in his back. “Over here,” the man says, prodding him toward the alley.

My father swings his fist behind him, like a mallet, catching the man in the solar plexus. Then my father runs. In the subway station he feels for his wallet, which is still in his back pocket. Not so bad for an old man, he thinks, his heart racing.

At home he tells us about the attempted robbery.

When Ermelinda doesn’t show up the next morning for work and doesn’t call, my father puts two and two together. That night, he walks the long way around to the subway.

Ermelinda doesn’t come back to work. After a week, my father cautiously resumes his normal route to the IND. Three days later, two men grab him by the arms and force him into the alley. They take his wallet, his watch, and land a few punches before he breaks free.

“Oh, my poor Ruben!” Trudy says when he gets to her place. “What happened?” She puts ice cubes in one of Barney’s socks and gives it to my father to hold over his swollen cheek and bruised eye.

At breakfast the next morning my mother learns what happened. “Oy,” she says, “I thought we moved to the city because it was safer.”

My father takes it as a criticism. “A mugging can happen anywhere,” he yells. I start to cry. “Don’t cry,” he says. “There’s nothing to cry about.”

“Papa, hurt,” I say.

He carries me into the other room and sets me down. From his pocket he fishes out a small handful of change. “Here, you pick two.” I pick the biggest coins, a half dollar and quarter.

“Good girl!” He lowers his voice. “Don’t get high-strung like your mother. There’s nothing to be nervous over.”

“Noy-vus?” I say, which is how my mother says it.

“Nervous, not noy-vus. Okay?” he says.

“Okay,” I say, but I wonder who is right.

By November, Harry has everything worked out. He rents a furnished room on Broadway. He locates a former schoolteacher who now teaches French to little ones at home. My mother and Harry arrange their meetings to coincide with the lessons.

The first time they take me to Madame LePage, I scream when my mother tries to leave. Madame gives my mother permission to stay. My mother sits on the sofa and worries about the dust on the rug where the rest of us sit, six children and Madame, whose slender legs fold easily under a gathered skirt. Madame teaches us a song in French while she plays her xylophone. Enthralled, my mother forgets the dust.

That night my mother sings, “ ‘Frè-re Jac-ques, Frè-re Jac-ques.’ ” Soon I am singing with her. “Where’d you learn that?” my brother asks. My mother tells him about the class. He tells my sister. Mimi gets very jealous. “You never gave me any classes,” she says to my mother.

“If we had the money, I would’ve given you,” my mother says. “I would have given myself.” She wishes she could take the French classes with me.

Each time she picks me up from Madame’s, she asks what I learned. At three years old, I am teaching my mother French. Numbers, colors.

When my father asks how this came about, my mother is glib. “A woman in the park. Her kid goes, too. Only twentyfive cents,” she lies.

“Maybe it’s not good to put so much into a child’s brain. I don’t want her to get sick. She can’t wipe her tokhes, and she’s learning a foreign language?”

“Don’t be old-fashioned,” my mother says. “It’s the new thing, to start when they’re so little.”

The first few times alone with Harry, my mother is uneasy. “This ain’t the Half-Moon Hotel,” she jokes. Their rented room in a retired man’s apartment is dusty, with a blue chenille bedspread on the single bed, and no curtain on the window, just a yellowed shade. The light from the uncovered fixture overhead is harsh. My mother won’t let Harry turn it on, so he buys a little lamp with a muslin shade from the Five and Ten. The retired man always hovers by the door to the apartment, whether they come in or go out.

And then she worries about me.

“Madame has the phone number here,” Harry says. “Don’t worry.”

Finally Harry gets the idea to bring a bottle of schnapps. He says he can’t drink because he has to go back to work and they’ll smell it on his breath. “Take a sip,” he tells her. “It’ll do you good.”

“Honik-lekech,” she says ironically. Honey cake. Still, she has to admit, the liquor helps. Once she stops her worrying, she finds making love with Harry is ganaiden, Paradise. What was good before is now even better.

In between their meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, my mother drives herself crazy with guilt. How can you do this? she asks herself in the mirror above the vanity. What kind of person are you? A bummerkeh, she answers. Lowest of the low. She resolves never to see Harry again. An hour before she brings me to Madame LePage, she swears to break it off with him. She has no idea what the classes cost, but she will scrub floors to pay for them.

Then she sees him again, and her knees weaken. After they make love and they lie squished together on the narrow bed, she thinks, Whatever God is going to do to me, it was worth it.

For New Year’s Eve, my parents go to a party given by the Vogels, friends my father knows from Brighton Beach. The Vogels live now in Manhattan, in a co-op on the East Side. “Arthur hit it big with the horses,” my father tells my mother. “A few bets, and he’s rich. Is that fair?”

“He suffered plenty,” my mother reminds him. “They lost everything, nu, after he was beaten up by the bookies.”

Snow is falling as my parents cross Lexington Avenue. The Christmas lights are still strung up high across the street, with five-pointed stars, as far as the eye can see. Windows in the grand buildings are lit golden and orange, some with stars or menorahs. Tiny bulbs in all different colors wink around the frames. Oy, to live in such a place! my mother thinks.

Stationed in the middle of the circular driveway, a doorman in a long maroon coat tips his cap and asks my parents their name. “Chenia Arnow,” my mother says and the doorman checks his list. “I don’t see it,” he says, looking under the Ch’s. “I’ll have to call upstairs.”

My father scans the list from upside down. “Here,” he says. “Arnow.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the doorman says. “I misunderstood you.”

In the elevator, my father says, “He did it on purpose.”

“Shhh.” My mother hitches her shoulder toward the elevator operator.

“The doorman should go to hell,” my father says.

“You’d think he’d recognize you, so often you come to play cards.”

The elevator operator casts a glance at my father, who does not look at all familiar.

“Paigeren zol er,” my father says. He should drop dead.

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” my mother says. “A leben ahf deir.” You should live and be well.

The Vogels’ foyer has green-and-gold-striped wallpaper. Fancy, my mother thinks, but she doesn’t know if she likes it. Vera Vogel presses her cheek against my mother’s and takes her Persian lamb coat, which smells of mothballs, and my father’s checked coat. Arthur Vogel shakes my father’s hand, slaps him on the forearm, and asks what he’d like to drink. “Nothing,” my father says, but my mother says, “Me, I’d like a little something.”

“That’s the spirit.” Arthur takes her arm and leads her to the bar, past two couples, clinking their tall glasses.

While my father talks with Vera, another guest arrives in a full-length mink. Vera introduces them. “Ruben, this is Bertha Landau. Her husband passed last year, God rest. Did you know him? Myron Landau was a first-rate poker player. Bertha, this is Ruben. Fifty girls he has under him—at work. You better watch out.”

Bertha smiles. “I didn’t catch your last name.”

My father says, “Arnow,” but he hardly notices Bertha, except for her buckteeth. He wonders if Trudy will come to the party. She wasn’t sure Barney would get the night off. “I don’t want to be alone on New Year’s Eve,” Trudy said, “when everyone has someone.”

“Are you a teacher, Mr. Arnow?” Bertha asks. “A gym instructor?” she banters. She likes his mustache, neatly trimmed. He looks like the writer Robert Benchley, but with lighter coloring.

“He manages a factory,” Vera tells her, and goes to deposit Bertha’s mink on the bed in the guest room, away from the Persian lamb.

“I’m just the floor boss,” my father says. “We make ties for all the big stores. LVG Fabrics.”

“What a coincidence! The building you’re in, it’s one of ours.”

“Excuse me,” he says, “maybe I didn’t hear right. You own the building?”

“Technically, Myron Landau Estate owns the building.”

Now my father takes a good look at her. With the buckteeth, she reminds him of Eleanor Roosevelt. Even the hair, short and a little curly, looks like her. He wonders if the jewels around her neck and all over her fingers are real. “Too bad the elevator needs repair,” he says.

“You’re telling me!” Bertha smiles as if unaware of her buckteeth.

My mother is back now with a glass of punch. “Something strong,” she says. There are introductions, and then the doorbell rings.

“I’m here,” Trudy Fleisch announces as she steps in, her beaver coat over her arm. She is wearing a silky green dress my father has never seen and green high heels to match. She stares right at him as she hands her coat to Vera. “Sorry Barney couldn’t make it,” Trudy says. “And it was so hard to get a baby-sitter, until the last minute. My neighbor took the baby—”

“Come in, come in,” Arthur says. “Who needs Barney when you look like a million dollars?”

“Tell us your secret,” Vera says.

“It ain’t from bicycling,” Trudy jokes. She elbows Arthur.

For the moment my father has forgotten Bertha Landau. He tries to remember now how Arthur knows Trudy. Finally it comes to him that Arthur used to work with Trudy’s husband at the newspaper, before the bookies chased him out of town. They still play poker together, he thinks.

“We should try the canapés,” my mother says, “after all the trouble Vera made.” My father nods, but he doesn’t move. The vodka punch makes her feel better at first, but after she drinks some more, my mother gets melancholy. She strikes up a conversation with Mrs. Landau. She doesn’t have to ask a lot of questions. Mrs. Landau is only too happy to let her know that she owns several apartment buildings and all they give her is grief. “It’s a shame, this city is not geared for business. All the regulations! And the expenses are enormous, you can’t imagine.”

“Is that so?” my mother says. She doesn’t recognize anyone in the room, except Trudy from Temple, who’s talking non-stop, with Arthur hanging on every word. Trudy’s pointy chin and big eyes remind my mother of a goat.

Finally she can’t stand it. My mother goes to the sideboard and helps herself to the canapés, two each of half a dozen different kinds, and five gefilte fish balls with toothpicks. When she returns, Mrs. Landau is saying, “Our sojourn on the Queen Mary—” She stops to peer at my mother’s plate. My mother thinks it’s because she’s hungry.

Watching Mrs. Landau and Trudy go to the sideboard, my mother says, “It’s good, two women alone to stick together.” My father doesn’t answer. He helps himself to the herring off her plate. Not long after, they follow the women to the buffet. My mother heaps her plate again, wondering why Mrs. Landau has only one tiny sandwich on her paper plate, the size of a half dollar.

“You’re fasting, Mrs. Landau?” my father jokes.

“I’m sure they won’t run out of food,” she says. “Please, call me Bertha.”

“So, Bertha,” my mother says, “you get your exercise going back and forth.”

Trudy laughs. A big horse laugh. Her belly shakes. My mother wonders why Trudy isn’t wearing a girdle under the silk dress, even if she has no tokhes. She herself is tightly corseted. Her soft, rounded flesh is in one piece, firm as a marble statue at the Cloisters, even while she does the samba with Arthur Vogel to a phonograph record.

“You’re some dancer!” he tells her. Is he flirting with her? Anyhow he’s too eager, not reserved like Harry. She wonders now if Harry’s good manners come from growing up rich. She knows so little about him.

Back from dancing, she finds Trudy and Bertha have my father cornered by the grandfather clock. She edges in and puts her arm through his, as the Vogels announce the rules of the first game, Short Straw. A man is blindfolded and spun around, then he’s supposed to use his mouth to get the short straw into the mouth of his wife. Other women try to confuse him by grabbing onto the straw with their own lips.

Is she imagining things? my mother wonders, when it’s my father’s turn. Bertha and Trudy are elbowing each other out of the way to line their lips up in his direction. A second later, Trudy yelps and points to her foot. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” Bertha says, her voice dripping like honey. My mother doesn’t hear what Trudy says back, but Bertha looks shocked. There are more words. People stare. Arthur steps between them. “Come with me, you beautiful creatures.” My father takes off his blindfold and asks what’s going on.

“Me-ow!” a woman tells him. “Two women fighting over you.” She gestures toward their backs as Arthur spirits them to another room.

My father glances at my mother. “One of them I never met before in my life.”

The woman baits him. “And the other one?”

“My mistress,” my father says. There’s a howl and then a larger one after my mother says, “You wish.” In fact, my mother cannot conceive of my father’s being attracted to Trudy Fleisch, not just because she looks like a goat and laughs like a horse. A very aggressive type, my mother thinks. Trudy would scare my father to death.

Just before midnight, champagne glasses clink together. My mother yearns to call Harry, to hear his voice. When she suggested it to him, he told her his mother goes to bed early, even on New Year’s Eve. She realizes now she doesn’t even have his number. She’s not even sure where he lives exactly.

While the ball drops in Times Square, my mother’s eyes are closed as she kisses my father. She is thinking, Alevai, the goat should run off with him.

My father’s eyes are open. He and Trudy are staring at each other. “I love you,” she mouths. From across the way, Bertha catches Trudy’s eye. She mimics her, mouthing, “I love you.” Trudy flushes. She doesn’t care if Bertha knows, so long as Barney doesn’t find out.

After the kissing, a conga line forms. The dancers use one hand to maintain contact with the person in front of them. The free hand twirls a noisemaker. In the street, horns are honking. The dancers snake around the room, through the French doors of the dining room, into the kitchen, and back again. Someone shakes a cowbell. The dance gets faster and faster. One two three kick. People drop out. My father drops out when Trudy does. Bertha keeps on. Onetwothreekick. So does my mother. They are the last two dancers. My mother kicks off her shoes. Finally Bertha drops out, panting. My mother is declared the winner. A man she doesn’t know hands her a glass of champagne. “I should pour it into your slipper,” he jokes. My mother is about to ask his name when my father steps between.

She sips the champagne, thinking, Another year. Let it be healthy and happy for the kids. Then she thinks, Harry, Harry, Harry. She gives the glass to my father to finish. “So, I beat the lady who owns half the buildings in New York,” she says.

With Bertha a safe distance away he tells my mother she also owns the building he works in. “Do you think those are real diamonds she’s wearing?”

My mother glances over her shoulder. At Bertha’s gray silk shoes, at her gray silk purse, at her gray silk dress with just a little extra fabric draped over the breast, at her short fingernails shiny with colorless polish. “I don’t know,” my mother says, “but only a very rich lady would look so plain.”

A few days after the party, Bertha Landau troops into my father’s office at the factory, with Mr. Gershenfeld behind her. “This is our landlord,” the boss says. “She wants to look around.”

My father stands up.

“Good to see you again,” she says. “Please, sit.”

My father doesn’t see Mr. Gershenfeld narrow his eyes. In her mink coat, Bertha makes a show of examining the ceiling and the walls. “You can leave me here to putter around,” she tells Mr. Gershenfeld. Once he’s gone, she says to my father, “We’re thinking of selling this building. I want to be sure it’s in top condition.” Her perfume makes him want to open the door.

“Of course, if there’s anything I can do to help . . .” he says.

“Tell me, is there a nice place around here for lunch?”

He tries to think where Mr. Gershenfeld might go, then recalls his boss goes only to the kosher deli down the street. “Schrafft’s is on the next block.”

“What a good idea! Now, how would you like to join me?”

My father is too embarrassed to tell her he brings his lunch and doesn’t have enough money with him. He decides to go with her anyhow. Later he’ll act as if he forgot the money at home.

The restaurant is too dark for my father. He starts to apologize for his mistake, but Bertha says, “Au contraire! I’m fond of dark wood and subtle lighting.” My father looks at the little brass lamp on the table, which gives practically no light. Beyond it, Bertha is practically all in shadow. Suddenly my father understands her preference.

She orders a club sandwich and tea. My father has the least expensive item, a grilled cheese, nothing to drink. They talk about the party, the predicted snowstorm. Bertha asks if he grew up in the city, surprised when he says he was a boy when his family emigrated from Berlin.

“That’s why you have no accent,” she says.

“I enjoyed learning English. My parents—may they rest in peace—they didn’t know what my brother and I were saying. You have no accent either.”

She tells him how she learned English in Austria, and when her family fled to England, she improved her accent. She tells him stories about their life in Vienna, where her father was a confectioner, then orders a layer cake, with two forks. When the waiter leaves, my father says, “They don’t mind?”

“I’m the customer. It’s their job to please me, not the other way around.”

My father laughs nervously. He thinks, She must be rich, all right. When the cake arrives, he digs in only on his side, but Bertha guides his hand to where she’s been eating the jelly between the layers. He thinks she wouldn’t even mind if they had only one fork. “Don’t be shy,” she says.

That’s what money does for you, my father thinks. It gives you Hoden. He excuses himself to go to the rest room. When he returns, she says she is ready to go. “We didn’t get the bill yet,” he says.

“I took care of it.”

“How much?” my father says. He makes a show of digging into his pocket, but she puts up her gloved hand.

“Please, don’t embarrass me,” she says. “It’s nothing. Allow me to treat. Another time you can buy me a cup of coffee.”

The day before Valentine’s Day Trudy gives my father a blue tie dotted with large red hearts. “Say you got it at the factory. I cut out the label.”

“You’re so clever,” he says. He thinks Bertha would never go for such a loud tie. He’ll keep it at work and wear it once or twice to Trudy’s before throwing it out. He gives Trudy a two-pound box of Barricini’s candy in a pink heart-shaped box. She offers the first candy to Hannah.

For Valentine’s Day my brother and Lenore have dinner in an Italian restaurant on Fordham Road and go to the Loew’s Paradise to see Trapeze with Burt Lancaster and Gina Lollobrigida. They sneak into the loge and make out so heavily, they see very little of the second movie. Sheldon takes Lenore home, and on the marble floor under the stairwell, she loses her virginity.

For Valentine’s Day my sister makes Sofie Vrebolovich a pink paper heart, which she delivers along with a rose. She climbs up on a chair to change a lightbulb for Sofie and sorts through her mail. Sofie feeds her a bowl of borscht, the kind my sister never had before, with meat in it instead of just beets. Before Mimi leaves, Sofie insists on giving her an old rolltop jewelry box filled with costume jewelry. “I’m cleaning out,” she says. “To make less work for whoever finds my body.”

My sister is horrified. “But you’re not sick.”

“I’m old. Eighty-one. I could go any minute.”

At home, my sister paws through the garish earrings and necklaces and finds a hundred dollars in tens, rolled together. She calls up Sofie to tell her. “That’s for you,” Sofie says, “my little angel.” My sister cries.

For Valentine’s Day my mother gives Harry an umbrella with a wood handle. “So you think of me when it rains,” she jokes. Harry gives my mother a little gold heart on a chain. He fastens it around her neck before they have sex in the narrow bed. My mother wears it home, not the least concerned that my father will notice it. On the way she picks me up from Madame LePage’s.

Right away I notice the heart. I point. “Coeur,” I tell her, and poke my finger at the middle, which is missing.

“Coeur?”

“That’s right, Mama.” I show her the valentines I made, one for her, one for Papa, one for Sheldon, one for Mimi. On each one I’ve printed JE T’AIME. “Je t’aime is ‘I love you,’ ” I say. “Je t’aime, Maman.”

“Je t’aime, Mama,” my mother says.

“Je t’aime, Devorah,” I correct. “You’re Maman.”

“Excusez-moi,” my mother says.

For Valentine’s Day my father gives my mother a large, store-bought card inscribed TO MY DEAR WIFE. Inside is a fiftydollar bill. For Valentine’s Day my mother gives my father an argyle sweater vest and a medium-sized, store-bought card inscribed FOR MY HUSBAND.

A few days after Valentine’s Day, my father gives Bertha a fivepound box of Barricini’s candy in a red heart-shaped box. Although they’ve only had a few lunches together, I imagine my father considers it an investment. His hopes are buoyed when Bertha gives him gold cuff links. One is a baseball, and one is a bat. “I had them made for you. I wish I could have them engraved.” He only wishes she had ordered a pair that matches.

At the Rainbow Room, he insists on picking up the check, and is shocked by the tab. Short on money, he stints on the tip. As they walk back to her place, Bertha thinks she will have to teach him about taxis, but later. All night my father has been planning their first kiss, so when they arrive at her building, he is crestfallen to see the doorman right there, holding the door open. Seconds later, when Bertha invites him up for coffee, he feels on top of the world.

The living room is like a hotel lobby, with its baby grand and two sofas, each with two facing armchairs. Too nervous to make the first move, my father stands by the window for a while. Is he really looking at Central Park? He wants to pinch himself for his good fortune, meeting Bertha Landau. Whatever happens, he thinks that this could do a lot for his future.

Soon, he sits primly on the tapestried-brocade sofa, the china cup and saucer on his lap. He is conscious of not knowing how to behave.

“I gave the boy the night off,” Bertha says.

“The boy?”

“He cooks my dinner, makes the fire. It’s good to have a man around the house.”

“I don’t cook,” my father jokes. “I’ve never made a fire, either.”

“Then we’ll have to find some other use for you,” she says.

“I’m at your service,” he jokes back.

From the other end of the sofa, she holds out her hand. As my father takes hers, his cup and saucer tip over onto the carpet. The coffee splashes on the pleated skirt of the sofa. My father is mortified, but Bertha says, “Good! I needed an excuse to redo the room.”

Love is such a funny thing, my mother thinks. Once upon a time she thought she loved my father. Now she only wishes him away. Whatever she is doing, darning his socks, washing the clothes, ironing them, she tries to imagine what Harry is doing. Once as she lies in his arms, she asks Harry to tell her what he does after work. “I want to know, minute by minute.”

“Oh, I read. Listen to the radio. Then I have dinner—”

“Who makes it? Your mother is sick, nu?”

“Since when is a Jewish mother too sick to cook for her son?” Harry says.

“But she had two strokes—”

“Her speech is a little affected, but she gets around okay.”

“She’s a good cook?” My mother doesn’t wait for the answer. “I would love to cook you something. My kugel. My potato pancakes. I would bring you some, but warmed up is not the same as fresh.”

Each time they’re together now, the minutes go like nothing. She thinks someone is turning the hands of the clock ahead faster and faster. One afternoon, when it’s time to leave, she says, “A year from September the little one will be in school. Then I can see you more.” When he doesn’t say anything, she says, “I know, you have work.” He nods.

“But on your day off—”

“I do the shopping, the laundry.”

“Such a good son! But maybe you could help on some other day?”

For a long time Harry has expected the balance to tip, for Chenia to become dissatisfied with the status quo. He only wishes the moment weren’t upon him just yet.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

“How grateful I am for these few moments of perfection! It’s dangerous, Chenia, to ask for too much. Let’s not be too greedy, all right?”

My mother is quiet. The way he acts, she thinks it must mean he doesn’t love her as much as she loves him.

The next time my mother is supposed to meet Harry, she drops me off at Madame LePage’s, but she doesn’t go to the rented room. She walks up Broadway in the opposite direction, until she reaches the George Washington Bridge. She gazes at the steel towers, which remind her of the Parachute Jump. Just for an instant she thinks of going off the bridge. She doesn’t really want to die, only to escape.

Digging her hands into the pockets of her suede jacket, she walks back, chewing on why Harry hasn’t brought her home. His mother wouldn’t have to know she’s married. She chews on how she and Harry should be going places together, doing things, something besides making love in that skinny bed.

Outside Madame LePage’s, he is leaning against the arch that leads to the courtyard. His head tipped back, he looks for a moment like Robert Taylor, full of the devil, but also tired. He turns slowly toward her. “I thought something happened to you,” he says, his eyes full of self-pity.

“We don’t have a future,” she says. “Not like this.”

“Chenia!” He takes her hand, but she pulls it away. “Chenia, when your daughter’s in school, I promise, I’ll rearrange my life. These past two hours were the worst I’ve had since— since you disappeared on me, in Coney Island.”

“A day here, a day there, there’s no future,” she repeats.

“I can’t bear the present without you, Chenia. Don’t you love me?”

Love. It’s the word she’s been yearning to hear. But she can’t give in so easily. “What am I to you?” she says.

“What are you to me? My beautiful Chenia! Let me count the ways—”

Now the children and mothers spill past them, from across the courtyard. My mother edges away from Harry, looking around for me, my reddish hair.

“Thursday,” he says. “Please come. We’ll talk.”

She averts her eyes. When she looks back, she concentrates on his ears, which are a little long, his protruding Adam’s apple. It’s over, she thinks. Es iz ois! Finished. Done.

The first time my father has sex with Bertha Landau, I imagine he has no trouble with his erection, getting or maintaining. The bedroom is dark, and anyhow, the novelty propels him. Bertha is only his fourth woman, not counting the two with whom he petted heavily before he was married.

The second time, Bertha leaves on a little night-light. Even without his glasses, he can see her face. He gropes under the sheet covering their bodies. Even without seeing, he can feel that in the parts where Trudy is firm, Bertha is flab. As his erection withers he feigns a sneeze. “Ah-ah-choo! Too much perfume,” he mutters. “I should have told you. I’m allergic.”

“Oh, my dear Ruben,” she says. She doesn’t say that her husband also used to complain.

What saves him is Bertha’s expertise. Deftly she takes hold of his soft member and tugs on it, knowledgeably, as if she possessed one of her own. He responds. Though she isn’t wet, like Trudy, he enters her easily enough, but then he struggles to maintain. “Bertha, sweet Bertha,” he mutters in her ear, surprised when her hips counter his bucking with their own. The mechanics propel him to a climax.

During the fifth or sixth time, when Bertha switches on a lamp, saying, “I want to see your handsome face, Ruben,” he is in trouble. He pushes and pushes inside her, but he doesn’t feel excited. He slips right out. She caresses him until he can reenter her, and he thrusts violently till she tells him to take it easy. He thinks of Trudy or even of Ermelinda to keep himself going, but it’s too complicated. Finally he thinks of Millie, the Negress. How dark, how soft, how she embraces him, clasping his head between her breasts . . . He comes.

Not seeing Harry, my mother suffers. She misses glimpsing a world larger than her own. She misses making love. It’s crazy how she can hardly bear not to see him, but to see him would be too painful. What made her think he ever loved her?

At night, after my father falls asleep, she touches her knepl. What she calls her love button. She needs the comfort of sex, even a poor substitute. To quell the fire. It takes no time at all now for her to have a climax. Still, she feels cranky all the time. Unfulfilled.

More and more my father gets on her nerves. As he leaves for work one morning, she says, “Tonight you can’t have dinner with your mishpokhe?”

“It’s Tuesday. What do I always do on Tuesday?”

“This card playing, is it a krenk with you?” A sickness. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday afternoon, now Sunday afternoons.”

“There’s a big game tonight. Special odds.”

“Where are you playing?”

“Where else? At Arthur’s,” he says. “If you think I’m lying, call him.”

“I’m only asking. Vera don’t mind the company? Cooking and cleaning?”

“They have a maid. Anyway, it’s not her business.”

“Listen,” she says. “This cannot go like this. I want you home. The little one, she never sees you.”

“Tomorrow,” he says right away. He knows Bertha is going to the opera with her lady friends. He was planning to see Trudy instead.

“One day from seven,” my mother says. “Yes, Friday night we go to Temple. Two from seven. Tu mir nit kein toyves.” Don’t do me any favors.

“Saturday,” he says. “We’ll go someplace.”

Now my mother wonders why he’s giving in so easily.

Sex with Bertha is all right, my father tells himself, but the more he thinks about his conquest, the better it becomes in retrospect. Though he seldom has sex anymore with my mother, he finds ways to keep her from thinking his attentions are elsewhere. He offers to paint the bathroom ceiling, which is peeling. “You want I should faint?” she says. He suggests new linoleum for the kitchen floor. My mother and I spend days in the linoleum place, deciding on a pattern, squares within squares. Yellow, red, and green. Then, wonder of wonders, my father orders a television set from the appliance store on Dyckman Street.

“I can’t believe it,” Mimi says.

Now my mother’s sure my father is making up for something. Or that he’s won a big lawsuit. Even so, she thinks it’s the best thing, to have the family around the T.V., but soon everyone starts arguing over what to watch.

“Stop it!” she screams one night. “You make me crazy with the fighting!” When Sheldon and Mimi start again, she hurls a vase across the room.

Even before it shatters, I run behind the sofa.

“You scared the wits out of Devorah!” my father says, pleased to have something against my mother. Something tangible. “Devorah, come here,” he cajoles. “Your papa loves you. Come here. No one will hurt you.”

But I stay put. Finally I let my brother coax me out. I sit on his lap for a few minutes and stare at the screen. I don’t know why he is laughing. I go to get my book of ABCs. I read it for at least the hundredth time.

On the first day of spring we’re at the top of Fort Tryon Park, but my mother doesn’t take me into the Cloisters. “I change my mind,” she says, and wheels me around. She feels she’s losing her mind, thinking of Harry. Maybe if she changed her routine . . . Down we go, all the way to the bottom of the park. “Wheee,” she says, as she pushes and runs.

“What did you forget, Mama?” I ask.

“My head. I don’t even know my name. Tell me.”

“Chenia,” I say.

“What’s Papa’s name?”

“Papa.”

“Papa and what else?”

“Troublemaker.”

She leans over to see me better. “What did you say?”

“Troublemaker.”

She makes a sound I’ve never heard before, kind of a short shriek. Then she laughs. “You’re a one-person act, like in vaudeville.”

“Poison?” I say, because that’s how she says person . She’s told me not to touch the poison in the kitchen cabinet, which is for the roaches.

“Oy,” she says. “Person, not poison.”

“Poyson,” I say.

“That’s it. Person. All by yourself you could be on the stage. I’ll take you to the Roxy when you’re older.”

Often, when they see each other, Bertha gives my father a gift. The gifts are expensive: a mahogany clock, a silver razor, a silver-backed brush, a silver mustache comb. My father scolds her, but she says, “I like to spoil you.” Each time he rings her bell now, he wonders what she will have for him. If he could wish for anything, besides a million dollars, he would wish her smile didn’t remind him so much of Howdy Doody.

One afternoon, my mother parks my stroller outside Magic Shoes. “Holler if anyone touches the carriage, hear?”

Inside the store she asks for Mr. Taubman. The cashier’s bangs flounce as she says he’s not available. “Can someone else help you?”

“No. Is he here?”

The girl tilts her head. “Can I tell him what it’s concerning?”

“So he’s here?”

When the girl doesn’t say anything, my mother says irritably, “What’s with the big mystery? He’s here or he ain’t here.”

“He’s tied up,” the girl says.

“Can you go untie him?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. Can I give him a message?”

“I don’t think you’d like it.” My mother slams the door behind her.

Outside the store she releases the brake of my stroller, sees the funfeh, the double-talker, smirking. My mother has an urge to slap her. What is this new crankiness in herself? she wonders. Is she getting her period? Now she wonders how long it’s been. If she’s pregnant . . . She doesn’t finish the thought.

She asks me where I’d like to go, and I tell her, “On the swings!”

In the playground she lifts me into a little metal seat with a bar across, like my old high chair. She pushes me, but I know how to pump my legs. “Not too high,” she yells. “High!” I yell. “Higher!”

“Well, lookee who!” a woman says. Trudy Fleisch plops Hannah into the swing next to mine. She pushes Hannah’s swing as she looks my mother over. She likes the suede jacket, the suede gloves. She wonders why my mother wears shoes with thick heels. “You come here often?” she asks. Push push.

“Not anymore,” my mother says. “How’s about you?”

“Every afternoon.” She forgets to push, and Hannah starts to wail.

“Push her,” I say.

“Okay, okay,” my mother says. “Don’t tell Trudy what to do.”

“Trudy?” I say.

“Mrs. Fleisch, to you,” my mother says.

Later my mother and Trudy sit on a bench while Hannah and I play nearby. “How old is your kid?” my mother asks.

“Four. At my age I’m ready for grandchildren, then my nephew had the accident . . . And you? You wanted another child?” Trudy says.

My mother glances at me. “This one, she understands too much for her own good.”

“Mrs. Fleisch,” I call out. “Spell your name. Please?” I say it to show off. Anyway, it’s hard to play with Hannah. She doesn’t talk. She just wants to hold her teddy bear.

“Why don’t you go chase pigeons?” my mother says.

“I want to listen,” I say.

“I want you to go chase pigeons. Show Hannah.”

“C’mon, Hannah,” I say. “I’ll learn you to chase the pigeons.”

“I’ll teach you to chase the pigeons,” Trudy says to me.

“I know how,” I say. My mother can hardly keep a straight face.

Trudy doesn’t seem to notice. She opens a compact and powders her nose. “Your husband, he’s okay?” she asks.

“How should he be?” my mother answers. “The same. How’s by yours?”

“Barney’s always working overtime.” Trudy snaps the compact shut.

“Extra money, it couldn’t hurt. Ruben, he never gets a day of overtime.”

“Is that so? Never?” Trudy wonders if my mother is trying to worry her. Overtime is the excuse Ruben gives for only seeing her once a week now.

“Six kids his boss has,” my mother says. “Orthodox. He don’t believe in overtime. Why? You like your husband not to work so much?” With her sad blue eyes, Trudy looks more like a goat than ever, my mother thinks.

“I never see him,” Trudy says. “We lead two separate lives.”

“Who sees a husband? With Ruben it’s cards, cards, cards. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday . . .”

Trudy stands up. “I have to run some errands.”

“Maybe we could meet here again sometime?” my mother says.

“Oh sure,” Trudy says, but then she hurries off. My mother tries to figure out what she did to drive her away. Maybe she’s jealous of the little one after all. Next to Hannah, even a blind person could get the picture.

“Now what do you want to do?” my mother asks me.

“I want to go to the library.”

“Let your sister take you.”

“You take me.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

My mother sighs. “Why? Why? Why? I don’t know where it is.”

“You could ask.”

“It’s too far. I’m tired,” she fibs. Actually she feels like running. She is so restless.

When we get to our building, my mother races me up the stairs. For once she doesn’t let me win. With so much energy, she thinks, she couldn’t possibly be pregnant. Taking off her hat in the apartment, she catches sight of herself in the mirror. Her skin seems dry, lined all of a sudden. Now it dawns on her, why her monthly is late. She is beginning her menopause.

slumped over a newspaper he has spread across the "What’s?” my mother asks my brother again. He is kitchen table.

“Nothing. I told you.”

“Nothing, you didn’t tell me,” she says. “You look like the sky is falling.”

“It is.”

“You’re in trouble at school?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “I need money. A lot of money.”

“For what?”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Is so terrible?”

“Pretty bad, Ma. I’m sorry.” His eyes are sunken into his long face. She wonders if he’s losing weight.

“Your mameh, she’s heard many things in her life. You can tell me.” She sits down next to him and puts her hand on his wrist.

“I have to have the money.”

“You broke something? What? A friend lent you his car and you smashed it up?”

“That would be a lot simpler, Ma.”

Now she starts to worry. “Gevalt, you got a girl in trouble?”

His eyes flash. “My friend Donny knows someone who will take care of it, if we could just get the money.”

“Take care of the baby?”

“Take care of it,” he says. “You know—”

Get rid of it, my mother thinks. She feels suddenly queasy. “This individual, he’s a doctor?”

“No. It’s illegal, Ma. You can’t go to the doctor.”

“How much?” she says.

“A hundred fifty.”

“Dollars?” My mother sits down next to him. “Her mother knows?”

“Of course not. She’d kill Lenore.”

“Lenore? Have I met her?”

“No.”

“What kind of girl is she? You love her, or you were just taking advantage?”

Sheldon flashes her an angry look. “She’s a nice girl. Her father’s a chemist.”

“If she has brains, she should have used them,” my mother says. “She must be pretty.”

“She’s no dummy. She was planning to go to college.”

“Oh yeah? She don’t want to get married so young?”

“If her parents find out, they’ll make her.” He puts his hands over his gaunt face. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” my mother says. “Let me think.”

My mother aches to talk it over with Harry. He would know what to do, she tells herself. He wouldn’t get angry, because it doesn’t involve his own son. That afternoon she leaves me with my brother and goes back to Magic Shoes. The same cashier is there and recognizes her.

“I’d like to see Mr. Taubman,” my mother says.

The cashier flashes a quick, phony smile. “He’s in a meeting.”

“You worked here so long you have X-ray eyes from the machine?” my mother jokes. “Listen, darling, tell Mr. Taubman there’s someone to see him.”

“I can’t.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jilly.”

“Jilly, go get Mr. Taubman. Now. Go!” My mother smiles to herself. She can hear how she sounds like a boss.

Jilly stares for a second, then picks up the phone. “A woman here to see you. I told her you’re in a meeting.” Jilly hangs up. “He’s coming.”

“Mrs. Arnow!” Harry strides up to her with his hand extended. They shake hands. “What can I do you for?”

“There’s a little matter I need to talk over,” she says.

“Jilly, I’ll be back in a half hour.” He winks at her.

As they walk up Dyckman, my mother says, “You were in a meeting?”

“That Jilly, she’s always trying to protect me.”

“From what?”

“Customers. They get angry. They buy shoes that don’t fit, then they blame us.” He takes her arm and squeezes it. “Chenia! I’ve missed you. God, how I’ve missed you!”

His breath is warm, familiar. She aches to draw him close to her.

In Bickford’s they spend ten minutes staring into each other’s eyes before my mother remembers why she’s there. “Harry, can I ask you something?”

Harry tenses the muscles in his solar plexus. “You can ask.”

She tells him about my brother and the girl. He asks how old he is. “Seventeen,” my mother says. “The girl I don’t know.”

“I hope she’s of legal age,” Harry says. “Her parents could put him in jail.”

“Jail? Gottenyu!” Her eyes get wild, she comes up out of the seat, but Harry tells her he was just thinking out loud.

“What do you think is best for him, Chenia?”

“All I know, my son, he wants her to get fixed.”

“An abortion? Very dangerous,” Harry pronounces. “Sometimes the girl bleeds to death or gets an infection, a bad one. After that she might not be able to bear children.”

My mother sips the cold coffee.

“How many weeks along is she?” Harry asks.

“Not so many, I think.”

“That’s good news. It’s not a baby yet, just a lot of cells, like a tadpole.”

“What is this, tadpole?” she asks.

On the napkin he makes a little sketch. “That’s how big it is. In the Torah, the zygote is considered to be only water for the first forty days after conception. The fetus isn’t a human being until it can exist independently.”

“So small?” she says. She can’t get over it. The torture she went through . . .

“But tell her not to wait, Chenia. It’s a sad situation nonetheless. I’m sorry. Is that why you came to see me?”

“Just part.”

“You missed me?”

“A taigel,” my mother jokes. “Half a taigel.”

My mother dreams that she is lying on the operating table. Her belly is huge, and encased in limestone. It looks like an igloo. The doctor uses a hammer and chisel on it until it cracks open. He lifts me out. I am wearing a gingham dress, red-and-white-checked, with a matching bonnet, and papery white shoes, the kind dolls wear. “It’s either you or her,” the doctor says. “You have to decide!” My mother feels herself shriveling. Her belly collapses, and her body is folding up, into itself. She knows she will have to live the rest of her life as a dwarf.

She wakes up sweating and moaning.

All the time now my mother daydreams different ways to get my brother out of his difficulty. Maybe he should go in the Army. Maybe she should meet the girl’s mother. In the daydream my mother puts on a housecoat and a kerchief. She puts garlic all over herself and carries two shopping bags. She talks only in Yiddish. The girl’s mother decides she doesn’t want her daughter to marry into a family of foreigners.

In another daydream my mother tries to borrow money from her sister, but in reality she’s too ashamed to tell her what my brother did.

One day, as she imagines asking my Uncle Yakob for the money, the phone rings. I pick it up. “Hello,” I say.

“Let me talk to your mother,” the voice says.

“Mama, a man.”

My mother takes the phone. “Hello?”

“Chenia? It’s Harry. I’ve missed you.”

Her stomach flutters. “Me, too.”

“When can I see you?”

“Let me take care of this business with my son,” she says, “and then my mind will be free again.”

“I understand, but I miss you so much. I want to hold you, to kiss you.”

“Me, too,” she says. “The little one is right here.”

“I understand. Give her a kiss for me.”

My mother announces to my brother that she wants to meet Lenore.

“Why?”

“Why? Because something has to be done. You could go to jail for what you did.”

“Lenore would never let her parents do that to me.”

“Yold!” Simpleton. “Lenore cannot stop them.”

My brother is instructed to stay away while my mother has Lenore to the house after school. My mother sizes her up, a nice girl, with a good figure, but a brain she isn’t. My mother takes heart. She serves us milk and bananas, then the three of us go to the playground. She asks Lenore to wheel the stroller. Thinking it’s my mother’s way of inviting her into the family, Lenore relaxes.

They sit on a bench near the fountain. My mother doesn’t say much.

“Do you miss Brooklyn?” Lenore asks.

“Sure,” my mother says. “Why not?”

“You come from Poland or Russia?” Lenore asks.

“That’s so.”

Sheldon was right, Lenore thinks. His mother is very mysterious. Lenore stops asking questions for a while, but then she gets impatient. “What did you want to talk to me about?” she says.

“Don’t be in such a hurry. Sit. This is what you’ll be doing for the next ten years, sitting on this bench, watching your children.” Lenore gives her a look. “What?” my mother says. “You think I make this up? Look around you.” On all the benches are girls just a few years older than Lenore, with carriages and strollers.

No! Lenore thinks. I’m not going to. I can’t. I can’t. God help me.

They sit some more. Then my mother says, “Darling, is this a future for you? You’re so young, so pretty, my son tells me you get good marks. You could go to college.”

“That’s what I want,” Lenore says.

“So tell your parents. If they think better you should get married, my son is willing, but kids having a kid, it couldn’t be much of a life.”

“I don’t know whether to have the baby anyway,” Lenore says.

“You could have it,” my mother says. “But if it’s adopted, you’ll only break your heart.”

Lenore starts to cry. “I love him.”

“What is love? You want him with you. That’s one kind of love. A childish love. Grown-up love, you want him to finish high school. You give him a chance to make a decent living. Then you can get married, right? He’s not going nowhere.”

“My parents will kill me.”

“I don’t think so. You’re a nice girl, I bet you have nice parents. You want me to talk to them?”

“No, I’ll do it,” Lenore says.

“Let me at least walk you home,” my mother says. “You have to talk to them right away, before the seed starts to grow into a baby. Now is nothing. Did you know that?” Lenore looks doubtful. “ Emes,” my mother says. True.

On the way to her place, Lenore asks my mother, “Don’t you go crazy, sitting in the park like that?”

“At your age, yes. Now, I don’t mind so much. The little one keeps me company. Today she’s all ears, but when we’re alone together, she has plenty to say. Right, you?”

“Lenore,” I say. “L-A-N-O-R.”

“Almost,” Lenore says, and spells it for me. I spell it for her, correctly. “My golly, Sheldon told me she was a genius.”

“What’s genius?” I ask.

“It’s another word for bubbeleh,” my mother says.

On a bench in front of Central Park, Trudy waits. People walk their dogs. Limousines pull up to the awning-covered entrance of the building across the street. Taxi horns blare. She was here the evening before, but my father didn’t show up. When she finally asked the doorman for Mrs. Landau, he said she was out. Now Trudy scans the windows, wondering which apartment is Bertha’s.

Just as she gets discouraged, a crosstown bus stops across the street. My father gets off the bus. Although Trudy has planned only to spy on him, she darts across Fifth Avenue and catches up with him under the awning.

My father opens his arms. “Surprise! What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for a friend. And you?”

“I’m going to see Bertha Landau. She isn’t feeling well.”

For a moment Trudy is so thrown by his clever answer she believes him, then she decides to call his bluff. “Maybe I better go with you.”

“Too many visitors,” he says. “Better call her and come another time.”

“Baloney! You’ve been having an affair with her all along, haven’t you!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Either you come with me now, or it’s over between us,” she says.

“Trudy, don’t be foolish!”

“Can I help you?” the doorman asks.

“No!” Trudy and my father say in unison.

“I mean it,” she says. “Are you coming with me?”

“I have an appointment. I can’t stand her up.”

“You can call her and make an excuse.”

My father contemplates. “Okay, where would you like us to go?”

Late at night my mother wakes. Another hot flash. She wipes the sweat from her forehead. She wonders if my brother is asleep. He didn’t eat his dinner. He tried to call Lenore after the abortion, but she hung up on him. Now my mother thinks she hears someone walking through the living room. She gets up.

The kitchen light is on. Funny sounds, like squeaks or hiccoughs, are coming from that direction. As she nears the kitchen she realizes it’s the sound of sobbing. My brother’s face is buried in his arm, resting on the table. His shoulder wings bob as he cries.

My mother goes back to get her bathrobe. He is still crying when she returns. She walks up to him and puts her hand on his back. “Darling, you did the best thing for all concerned.”

He wipes his nose on his pajama sleeve and looks up at her. “We killed a baby.”

“It wasn’t a baby. Just cells. A tadpole,” she says. “This big.” She shows him with her fingers.

“Really? You’re not just saying it?”

“Darling, one of the smartest men I ever knew told me this.”

“Who?”

“I forget his name. How is Lenore?”

“She won’t talk to me.”

“Eh, she’s upset, that’s all.”

“She says she hates me.” Sheldon starts again to sob. My mother puts her hand on his hand, smoothes his pajama collar. “Listen,” she says. “Right now you want to make it up to her, and she won’t let you. Both of you, you make such a tsimmes from so little.” My mother can hardly believe she’s saying this, but she would say anything to stop her son from hurting. “Are you listening to me?”

He wipes his nose again. “Yeah.”

“A few cells, they came out of her body, like she had her monthly. That’s all it is. You have to tell her. She’s built it up in her mind. Farshtaist?”

My brother nods. And suddenly a sob comes out of him, from way inside. He sobs and sobs. My mother stands there with her arms around him, tears streaming down her own cheeks.

Even before Harry says anything on the phone, my mother can tell he’s excited. “My mom, she’s visiting her sister for a week. I want you to come over.”

“All right.” My mother is very curious what kind of place he lives in, how he lives altogether.

“Can’t you get away for an evening, for a week of evenings? I want to take you out to dinner, the whole shmear.”

“I have to figure,” she says.

“Figure fast,” Harry says. “She’s leaving tomorrow.”

My mother has me wait on the landing below as she rings Lenore’s bell. Lenore looks very surprised to see her. “Sheldon sent you, didn’t he!”

“I thought between you and him is over,” my mother says.

“That’s right.”

“I want you to baby-sit my little one. Tomorrow night.”

“Me? Why?”

“She’s good company. Right now your mood, is sour. You need an uplift.”

Mrs. Arnow’s so strange, Lenore thinks. Her face is serene, like those on cameos, but she’s a little bundle of nervous energy. Lenore wonders whether Sheldon takes more after his father, quiet and reserved. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea,” she tells my mother. “I want to forget everything to do with babies.”

“Listen,” my mother says. “Someone falls off a bicycle. They have to get right back on. Someday, alevai, you’ll have little ones, when you’re ready.”

Lenore doesn’t know what it is, the way Mrs. Arnow looks at her, the way she talks, piercing right through her. Even with her accent she sounds so smart. “What time? Can you bring her here? I’m sorry, I don’t want to see your son.”

My mother leaves me with Lenore and meets Harry at Bickford’s after he gets off work. They take a cab to a restaurant way up Broadway, a place with blue-and-white-checkered tablecloths and candles in wine bottles with wax dripping down. My mother finds it very interesting, but the food is a little spicy. It’s the first Italian restaurant she’s ever been in. By the time the spumoni comes, she feels tipsy from the Chianti. She reaches across the table to touch Harry’s cheek. “I love you so much. You have no idea.”

They take a cab to his apartment, near the river, it turns out, on a tree-lined street that curves around. The building has a sofa in the lobby and an elevator. The apartment is on the fifth floor and smells of pine.

There are two bedrooms and a dining room, two bathrooms, and three steps down to the living room, with a fireplace that Harry says is real. Her eyes take everything in hungrily, but it’s all so plain, beige upholstery, beige carpet. Boring, she thinks, before pushing the word out of her mind. On the mantel, there’s a framed picture of his mother. She can see he gets from her the dark eyes, but her hair looks white now. They sit on the beige sofa and drink a little sherry.

“We’re always in such a hurry,” he says. “Tonight we have time. Tell me about you, where you grew up.”

She loves how he hasn’t touched her, how he leans forward now, his elbows on his thighs, his hands clasped, to listen. She tells him about her father who was a carpenter, how he never spoke anything but Yiddish. She tells him about her mother who always wore a wig because she was Orthodox. She tells him about her sister who got into trouble for loving a Russian soldier.

“Ruchel?” he says.

“No, the other one. She passed. Oleho hasholem.” May she rest in peace.

When my mother stops talking, it is ten o’clock. “Gevalt! I have to go home. If Ruben comes there first—” Then she remembers, the little one is with Lenore. “You devil,” she says to Harry. “You can make me forget everything.”

He insists on seeing her to Lenore’s place, and waits outside. My mother is amazed I’m still up, but she doesn’t scold. Lenore refuses money from my mother and gives me her Look magazine. Harry puts us in a taxi, where I fall sound asleep. My mother has trouble rousing me when we get home.

Upstairs, while I dream of Lenore pushing me on the swings, my mother stays awake. Tonight was one of the best nights in her whole life, she thinks. She can’t get over it, how strange this is, because she and Harry didn’t even make love.

Over dinner at Longchamps my father tells Bertha that Trudy showed up outside her building. Bertha says, “I doubt it was accidental on her part. Wasn’t she your girlfriend?”

“Yes,” he admits. He is counting on his frankness to disarm her.

“But you’re not seeing her now, is that right?”

“That’s right. But she’s very jealous.”

“That I can believe.” Bertha looks approvingly as my father tears a piece off his roll to eat, instead of cutting it in half. He is making progress under her tutelage. Next she will get him to stop using his fingers to shove the peas onto the fork.

Why can’t he find one woman who has everything? my father wonders. After their big fight over Bertha, Trudy went back to Philadelphia to sign the adoption papers, but now she is all lovey-dovey. As soon as he steps through the door, she throws her arms around him and starts to tear off his clothes. He knows to arrive later these days, when Hannah is already asleep.

Tonight Trudy pulls him down on the floor. “Always the bed,” she says to him when he resists. “Let’s do it here.”

The floor is hard on his knees, but he goes along. When his head bends down to kiss Trudy’s ear, he feels as if he is inhaling dust from the rug. Even so, he’s glad to be with her, to be inside her. Their bodies mingle like vanilla and chocolate pudding swirl. He lets his mind wander to help him last longer. To keep from climaxing too soon, he thinks of his future with Bertha Landau.

Lenore has such a good time baby-sitting me, she calls my mother the next day and offers to do it again. “Tonight?” my mother asks. Lenore says okay. My mother calls the store and talks to Harry.

“I was just going to call you,” he says. “A cousin of mine drove in without telling me. I’m so sorry, Chenia. How about tomorrow night?”

“I’ll try.” She calls Lenore back to ask, but Lenore says she has to go a party. “How’s Friday?”

My mother calls Harry back.

“Friday is fine,” he says. As soon as she gets off the phone, my mother remembers that Friday night she and my father attend services. She is heartsick. The whole week with Harry is going, and there’s nothing she can do.

She feels out my brother, but Sheldon says he’s promised to fix a girl’s car. She doesn’t have the heart to ask him to change his plans. He is starting to act normal again. She asks my sister, but Mimi says she has to study with her friend Suzanne for a test. My mother gets the idea to look for Trudy Fleisch in the playground, but when she doesn’t find her, she calls her at home.

Hearing my mother’s voice, Trudy is shocked. She believes that she and Ruben have finally been found out.

“You know, how one hand washes the other?” my mother says.

“What are you getting at?” Trudy wonders how she can persuade my mother not to tell Barney.

“I have to go shopping at Alexander’s, but is too much with the little one. Maybe you could mind her tomorrow night when they stay late. Some other night, you need a baby-sitter, you call me, nu?” When Trudy doesn’t answer right away, my mother says, “You’re there?”

“I’m here, can you hold a moment? I have to see about Hannah.” In truth, Trudy needs time to decide. She wonders if my mother is testing her. Thursday is her regular night with Ruben. She’s afraid to say no to my mother. At the same time, she’s afraid that if she makes an excuse with Ruben, he’ll go see Bertha.

Trudy picks up the phone. “Okay, what time?”

My mother and Harry go for dinner to a steak house. When they first enter the place, all she can smell is beer. “They couldn’t save more on the electric,” she says. “So dark in here. Are you trying to hide me?”

“Chenia! This is one of my watering holes.” He explains watering holes.

Her eyes adjust soon to the dim light. The men at the bar seem to her coarse, with red noses and large pores on their faces. After the food arrives, she hears a woman singing, “ ‘Gon-na take a sent-i-men-tal journey . . .’ ” She is across the way, on one of the bar stools. She has a feather in her hat, and her white blouse is unbuttoned down to her brassiere.

Harry sees my mother looking. “A regular,” he says.

“To me is like a tavern here.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a snob. Isn’t the steak good?”

“Very good. You come in here often?”

“Twice a week.” He gestures with his hands. “For the company, I guess.”

Just then she sees a man coming toward them. He is limping. She puts her hand along the side of her face and bends her head down.

“Mrs. Arnow?”

She looks up.

“Oh, Mr. Mangiameli! How are you?” she says warmly. Inside she is cringing. To think what Ruben did . . . For months she couldn’t get over it. It made her so sick. “This is my cousin, Peter,” she says to him.

Harry gets up, and they shake hands. Her heart sinks when Harry says, “Would you like to join us?” but Mr. Mangiameli declines. He tells Harry to please sit down.

“You’re looking very good,” Mr. Mangiameli tells her. “How’s your little daughter?”

“Getting big. You, too. You gained weight. You look good.”

Mr. Mangiameli gives Harry a once-over, then he pats her upper arm. “Be happy,” he says knowingly. “You deserve it.”

Her eyes brim with tears. After he limps off, she tells Harry he used to be their boarder. She can’t bring herself to tell him what happened.

“Why are you all teary-eyed?” Harry asks. “Was he your boyfriend?”

“What?” she says indignantly. “You are my first, my last. What do you take me for?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“He’s a good man. Italian. I feel very sorry for him.”

“Ah, Chenia, you have such empathy.” Harry explains how empathy is different from sympathy.

For a few minutes they are quiet. She chews on what he told her earlier and says, “So, you come in here every week?”

“I have a beer, let off some steam, and then I go home.”

“Your mother, she makes you nervous?”

“She’s not the easiest person to be around.”

“What about me?” my mother says. “Am I so easy?”

“You?” Harry slaps his head. “If you were, I wouldn’t be so crazy about you.”

“Since when are you crazy about me?” she asks.

“Since I saw you on the Boardwalk. You had that new-mother glow.”

“The glow from the ocean wind, that’s all.”

“You were so beautiful. I didn’t want to go back to work that day. Your hair’s growing now,” he says. “I like it longer.”

“Then I let it grow.”

As he traces her fingers with his index finger, they are both quiet. With his thumb he massages the back of her hand. She feels hypnotized, so completely in his power. What scares her also makes it thrilling.

The bedspread is gray plaid, a rough material. He pulls it down. Harry’s bed, she thinks. They sit on the side and kiss for a long time, then slowly he undresses her. This time she starts to undress him. A first. “Go on,” he encourages. Then they lie under the sheet, and soon he is inside her. Right away he has a climax. “Oh Chenia, I’m so sorry, I was so excited. In a few minutes we’ll try again.”

For my mother it doesn’t matter. Just to lie there, in Harry’s arms, to feel his naked body against hers, the hairs of his belly against her belly, is pleasure enough. He kisses her all over. When he tries to kiss her down there, she pushes his head. “What are you doing, Mister?”

“Relax.”

“You make me nervous. How can I relax?” He kisses her hip instead, her breasts, her neck. Then he is inside her again. For a while she thinks nothing is going to happen, but when he takes her face in his hands and they look at each other, that sweet feeling floods through her. She loves hearing him moan with pleasure as he spills into her.

She has never felt so close with my father. Not in all their twenty-two years. “I love you, Mister,” she says to Harry.

“My Chenia,” Harry says. “My dear, dear Chenia.”

“The bus, it never came,” my mother tells Trudy. It’s eleven o’clock, and the store closes at nine-thirty or ten, my mother can’t remember which.

“What did you buy?” Trudy asks.

From her pocketbook my mother takes out a paper bag, an old one, from Alexander’s. She has put an unused linen hankie in it, with a tiny gold sticker on it still, which she shows to Trudy. “Bedspreads I couldn’t find. Thank you a million for watching the little one.”

“Did you try on some clothes? Your zipper is halfway open.” Trudy zips up my mother’s dress.

“Nothing fit,” my mother says.

Trudy has a fleeting thought that my mother is lying.

“The little one didn’t give you trouble?” my mother asks.

“She followed me everywhere. Questions, questions. She wouldn’t look at the television with Hannah. Your husband’s out tonight? He must be, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Playing cards. If he wins, he comes home in a good mood.”

“How often does that happen?”

“I should know,” my mother says, meaning she doesn’t know. “Last night, midnight, he came home singing to himself.”

“Is that so!” Trudy says. Just wait, she thinks. There’s going to be hell to pay.

The next afternoon, as my mother gets me ready to leave the house, Vera Vogel calls. “I know this is short notice, but I’m practically in your neighborhood, and I need to talk to someone.”

“Talk.”

“Can you meet me at 181st Street? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

“I have the little one with me, is okay?”

“This is the best news I’ve heard in a week.”

My mother puts on her felt hat, which she only wears when she’s visiting. As she wheels me up the hill she says, “We meet my friend Mrs. Vogel. She wants to talk, so you have to be quiet and read your library books.”

In the coffee shop, which smells of chocolate, Vera pinches my cheek and hugs my mother. “I’m so glad to see you.” Before they even look at the menu, Vera says, “Arthur’s in the hospital. Presbyterian.”

“Gevalt! How come?”

Vera sighs. “The loan shark from Brooklyn, he found him. I told Arthur, ‘Pay up!’ but does Arthur listen? Arthur, he’s such a damn fool, he says, ‘A hundred percent interest, are you kidding?’ ”

Before I can ask, my mother says, “Vera’s husband is sick. Mrs. Vogel to you.” The waiter takes the order: coffee and apple strudel for them, milk for me. My mother gives me pieces of apple from her plate. I try to read my book, but the conversation is too interesting, even if I don’t understand very much.

“So what happened to him?” my mother asks Vera.

Vera clucks. “His nose, his ear, several ribs, and they cracked his knee.”

My mother puts her hand over her face. “Gottenyu! I’m so sorry.”

“What can I do? I begged him not to get involved with those gangsters.”

My mother is thinking it’s a lesson to her, not to envy people with fancy apartments. “When did this happen?”

“Four days ago, he’s walking down the street. Boom! From nowhere. When he doesn’t show up for dinner, I get an inkling. By the time the phone rings, I’m out of my mind.”

“He’s been in the hospital since Monday?” my mother says. Vera nods. The wheels in my mother’s brain start to turn.

“So how’s Ruben?” Vera asks. “Everything all right between you? I haven’t seen either of you since you were over for New Year’s, except—”

A strange chill goes down my mother’s spine. “Your husband, he don’t play cards anymore?” she says.

“Thursday night poker, that’s it. I put my foot down. Isn’t this strudel delicious!”

“Delicious,” I say.

“Chenia, maybe it doesn’t mean a thing—” Vera begins.

“What?”

Vera swallows. She looks away as she speaks. “Arthur and I, we were in Longchamps Saturday night. On my way to the powder room, I saw Ruben. He was with Bertha, having a fancy dinner.”

“Bertha?”

“You remember Bertha Landau. The widow who was at the party, bragging about her real estate.”

“I remember,” my mother says. “In Longchamps? Where the movie stars go?”

“Saturday night.” Vera grabs my mother’s hand. “I wasn’t going to tell you—”

“Thank you. I could die of shame, but you do me a favor.”

We finish drinking and eating, and then my mother hugs Vera. Vera hugs me. She takes something out of her pocketbook. It’s a gold locket on a chain. “For you,” she tells me. She tells my mother she bought it in the jewelry store next door while she was waiting for us to get there.

“Coeur,” I say. “Like yours, Mama, but bigger.”

“What?” Vera asks.

“That’s heart in French,” my mother says, and makes a face that I know means, Be quiet. “Besides, this one opens.” She shows me how, then asks, “How do you say thank you? In French.”

“Merci. Merci beaucoup.”

Vera claps her hands. “It would be wonderful if she could go to private school. Maybe she could get a scholarship?”

My mother nods, but she’s too distracted to hear. Her head is full with news she has to digest.

Fancy dinner. Vera’s words tchep at her. My mother waits up that night for my father. She drinks a glass of milk at the kitchen table, studying a sheet that Madame LePage gave us, with drawings labeled in French. LA MAISON. LE PARAPLUIE. LA FLEUR. Her heart thumps when she hears the key in the door.

“Can’t sleep?” my father says.

“I worry how much money you’re losing, all the cards you’re playing. Did you lose tonight?”

“Just a little.”

“Who won?” she asks.

“Arthur. He’s so lucky.”

“Takeh? You played cards at his place?”

“What’re you giving me the third degree for?”

“We never get to talk,” she says. “I was just wondering.”

“Yeah, we played at his place.”

“What a coincidence! I saw Vera today.”

My father changes his story. “Actually I didn’t play cards tonight. I was at the factory. We’re having problems. Serious problems. I didn’t want to worry you.”

“How can you have money problems when you’re seeing such a rich woman? Don’t look so stupid at me. You know who I mean. This Bertha Landau, she must be some cardplayer!” My mother hurls the milk at him. The milk doesn’t reach him but plops on the table and runs off the edges.

“What are you talking about?”

My mother holds up her hand. “Vemen narst du?” Whom are you kidding? “Go, go to your Bertha Landau. For my part, I want a divorce!”

“Don’t be crazy,” he says. “You don’t know what you’re talking.”

“Liar, snake! You think I’m so stupid? You think you can fool me? Playing cards five days a week! With a man who’s in the hospital. That’s right. Your friend Arthur, he’s in the hospital. I want a divorce. Now gai avek!”

My father looks at her, not quite understanding.

“Out, get out of this apartment! You have no right—no right to be here!” she screams.

Awakened by my mother’s voice, my sister comes to the doorway. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, go back to bed,” my mother says. “Go!” Mimi leaves the kitchen but lingers in the hallway where she can listen.

“If I leave, I won’t come back,” my father says.

“Es vert mir finster in di oygen.” I am fainting.

“All right!” he says. “I’m going.”

My sister retreats to the bedroom. As soon as my father steps outside the door, he hears my mother put the chain on. He should have taken a toothbrush with him, he realizes, but then Bertha probably has an extra.

In the morning my mother calls her sister to ask how to get a divorce. She tells her my father is seeing this rich woman, Bertha Landau.

“Are you sure?” my Aunt Ruchel says.

“All this time I think he is playing cards, but he is out with her, with all her money, in fancy restaurants. Imagine.”

“I mean, are you sure you want to get a divorce?”

“Mechuleh! It’s finished!” my mother says. “With all her money, er hot nit kein zorg.” He hasn’t got a worry. “Now I’m free to marry Harry.”

My mother stops by Magic Shoes. She leaves me outside. “I want to go in,” I say.

“I’ll just be a minute. Wait on this spot.”

Inside she says to the girl, “Would you tell Mr. Taubman I’m here?”

“What’s your name again?” Jilly looks annoyed for some reason.

“Mrs. Arnow.”

“Mrs. Arnow, he’s very busy. Really. We’re doing month-end inventory.”

“Tell him anyhow.” My mother expects her to pick up the phone like last time. Instead, Jilly stomps across the floor. Then she stomps back to the register. Soon Harry comes out.

“Mrs. Arnow, what can I do you for?” he says cordially, extending his hand.

“I have to talk to you.”

He looks at his watch. “Two o’clock okay?” Jilly is glaring.

“All right,” my mother says. The door opens, and as a customer walks in, I run in beside her. “Are you buying shoes?” I ask my mother. “I want to see.”

“You! I’m just talking to someone,” she says.

“Who?” I ask. Harry hears us and turns around. “Peter the Wolf!” I say.

“That’s right,” my mother says. As she opens the door for us, she sticks her tongue out at the cashier.

For the big occasion my mother buys me a glass of apple juice and a black-and-white cookie. She sips her coffee and keeps looking at the big clock on the wall of Bickford’s. She doesn’t talk to me. I play with the locket around my neck. I wish I could see the tiny pictures my sister put in it, of Mama and Papa.

At ten after two, Harry comes in, handsome in his light blue suit, the dark blue tie. He doesn’t order anything but sits right down, opposite my mother. “Hello, hello,” he says to me. Then he says, “Chenia—” He is going to ask her not to come to the store anymore, but he doesn’t get the chance.

“I have news,” she says. “Ruben is having a A-F-F-A-I-R. I’m getting a D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

“Really?” Harry says. “It’s all decided?”

My mother gazes at him expectantly. “Such a surprise for me, too. What I wanted all along. Now—now we can be together. Now you don’t have to be shamed to bring me to your mother. I feel like I know her already.”

Harry’s dark eyebrows are knit together. “Chenia! What are you thinking?”

“What’s to think? We’re free now. Nothing goes in our way. Thanks God, we can be married.” She can see by his expression, so perplexed, that something is not right.

Waiting for the big moment to arrive, my mother has imagined Harry embracing her. She has imagined he would lift her right off the floor the way he did that time on Surf Avenue. But all he does now is frown.

“What?” she asks. “What?”

“But Chenia,” he says, “I have a wife.”

“A wife? What are you talking? You told me you were divorced.”

“From my first wife.”

The way he looks at her, my mother feels very strange all of a sudden, as if she is in a fun house where everything is moyshe kapoyr, all upside down.

He raises his hand, a helpless gesture. “I’m married, Chenia. I’ve been married for eight years.” Before she can ask, he says, “I can’t leave her. It’s too complicated to explain now . . .”

Inside she feels something moving, crashing against her insides, like the waves of the ocean. “Married? You never told me this.”

“I’m sure I did, Chenia. Anyway, you had to know. You know I can never see you in the evenings.”

“Your mother, you said.”

“Shhh.”

“Don’t shhh me,” my mother screams. “You!” she yells at him. “You! A finsternish on you!” A plague on you! “So I was your tsatskeh!” Your plaything.

She lifts the bottle of sugar high over her head and tries to bang it on his shoulder. He wrests it away from her and sets it back on the table.

I jump off the chair and pull at her skirt. “Mama, don’t!”

My mother is screaming. “A ruach in dein taten’s tateh!” You can go to the devil! Harry is saying, “Stop it! Stop it!” He tries to hold her in his arms, but she breaks away. She picks up my glass and smashes it against his chest. The glass flies everywhere. A shard cuts my cheek. I touch it and see blood on my fingers. Blood drips on my dress. I start to wail.

“Genaivesheh shtiklech!” she yells at him. You and your tricky doings. “A brokh tsu dir!” A curse on you! She catches sight of me, the cut, the blood, and she collapses to the floor. I am so shocked I stop crying and only stare.

When my mother comes to, one policeman is holding smelling salts to her nose, the other one holds napkins against my face. Oy Got, such a fool, she thinks about herself. Yekl! Greenhorn. Sucker.

Very calmly, Harry tells the cops that Mrs. Arnow got a little upset. He whispers in the policeman’s ear that my mother caught him with another woman. The policeman says, “I gotcha.” Harry gives him his business card and home address and says he’ll pay for all the damage. The cops take my mother and me to the hospital in a police car. The stroller goes in the trunk.

As we wait in the Emergency Room, my mother looks strange to me, vacant. She looks as if she’s gone blind. She doesn’t say a word. When they give me an injection so I won’t feel the stitches, she keels over again. I scream so loud they have to give me another injection to calm me down. I don’t even yell when the second needle goes in.

“What happened?” the neighbors ask when they see us coming up the stoop, me with a big bandage over half my face.

“An accident,” my mother says. “Ten stitches!” She gives me a look.

“Poor kid!” someone says.

“You’re telling me,” my mother says.

We go inside the building, but we don’t go up right away. My mother plops down on the marble steps. “You!” she says to me. “A glik hot dich getrofen,” she says in her ironic tone. A piece of luck happened to you. “Today your mother went crazy,” she tells me. “When you’re older, I’ll explain you everything. Now I want you to listen to me something.”

“What, Mama?” I’m so glad to hear her speaking to me like normal, nothing else matters, not even the awful throbbing in my cheek, like iodine poured into a cut.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you. That your mother could do such a terrible thing, I can hardly believe it. You hear me?”

“Yes, Mama. Why did you get so angry?”

She sighs. “You’re almost four years old,” she says, “but to understand, you have to be twenty-five.”

“So old?”

Her head bobs. “To think that I hurt you—” She puts one hand on her chest, the other over her face.

“Don’t cry, Mama. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

“No more. Your mother will never hurt you again. Never again. Not today, not tomorrow.” She takes my hand and kisses it, over and over. I lose count. “I’m not fit to be your mother,” she says. I don’t ask her what she means.

In the bathroom my mother stares into the mirror. Devil, she thinks. That devil! She knew when she first saw him. And still she was tempted. And now her child will be scarred forever. Why? she thinks. Why? It was her sin. She let herself be used. Like a kurveh. A whore.

When I tell my brother how Mama tried to hurt Peter the Wolf, he keeps asking, “Who’s Peter the Wolf?” Then he asks my mother how I got the cut.

“For what you keep asking?” she says. “An accident! Is all! All I can do now is kill myself.”

“Ma!” Sheldon says. “You’re talking crazy.”

My sister guesses there is a man in the picture, especially after she picks up the phone twice when it rings, and there’s no answer.

Sheldon says, “That’s ridiculous. Whatever’s going on, it has to do with Papa. Since he left that night he hasn’t been back. Maybe he’s the one calling.”

“Papa would never do such a thing,” Mimi says.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about Papa,” my brother answers. He wishes he could talk things over with Lenore. He tries not to think about her because it makes him ache.

After my stitches come out, my mother asks her sister to take me for a week. “The little one had an accident, ten stitches in her face,” she says, but doesn’t go into detail. “One tsore after another. I need a rest.”

“Of course,” my Aunt Ruchel says. She is glad my mother mentions nothing about a divorce. Maybe she’s come to her senses, she thinks. She tells my mother she will send Millie with the car to get me.

Millie rings our bell. She is wearing a straw hat and a green dress with little white cherries all over. My mother invites her in and gives her juice to drink. “Hot enough for you?” Millie asks. My mother nods. She hasn’t noticed the temperature.

Millie takes my suitcase. I don’t want to go with her. I cry. I beg my mother to let me stay. “I’ll be good, Mama. I’ll be good. I won’t talk about it nomore.”

My mother comes down the stoop with us, her backless slippers clopping with each step. She blows me a kiss through the car window.

“Mama!” I scream. “Mama!”

As soon as Millie drives off with me, my mother puts her bathing suit on, a dress over it, and goes to the subway. She takes the train to Coney Island. You fool, you fool, you fool. The words chug to the rhythm of the train. When she gets out at Stillwell Avenue, she wonders if she should have left a note. She doesn’t know what she would write, anyhow. She thinks of the bankbook. She wishes she had given it to my brother first. Now it’s too late.

On the beach she removes her shoes and kicks them under the Boardwalk. Then she walks in her bare feet on the hot sand, a crooked path between a hundred blankets and towels, until she is at the water’s edge. She takes off her dress and leaves it in a heap. She walks into the water. She keeps walking until the water is over her head.