Part Four

“I want to show you something,” Sofie Vrebolovich says to my sister. My sister follows the old woman into the bedroom, which smells like stale sheets. She thinks maybe Sofie is going to show her more old photographs. I imagine Mimi never tires of looking at them. I imagine she can’t get over how beautiful Sofie was as a young girl. She had a long neck then and regal bearing. Now she has practically no neck, and everything droops: her eyelids, her nose, her spongy skin.

The old woman points to a marble-topped chest, jammed in the corner behind a sewing machine. Mimi helps pull the machine aside to get a good look at the chest. There are red flowers and green leaves painted on the inlaid wood. Maybe cherry wood. Each of the three drawers has a large, brass keyhole. Mimi runs her hand along the edge of the cool marble. “Oh, that’s so pretty!”

Sofie nods. “I was hoping,” she says, pleased my sister likes it. She reaches inside her blouse and pulls out a large brass key on a string. She yanks the string over her head and puts it around my sister’s neck. “You keep this for me.”

“But if this is locked, how will you open it?”

“I have another key,” Sofie says. “You hold this in case I lose it, yes? I get more and more forgetful.”

“All right.” Mimi glances at the top of the sewing machine, which seems to be covered with a light gray felt. “Do you have any rags? I’d like to dust this for you.”

“It’s not necessary,” Sofie says. “But if you want . . .”

Diligently my sister dusts the furniture in the bedroom and living room. She wants to dust the knickknacks in the curio cabinet, but Sofie insists it’s time for tea. Hot tea in the middle of summer! My sister can’t get over it.

“The best thing to cool off,” the old woman says, wiping her deeply furrowed brow with the cuff of her long sleeve.

When my sister is about to leave, Sofie says, “God forbid, anything happens to me, I want you to take that chest.”

“You shouldn’t think about dying so much.”

“It’s a very good chest. Then, they knew how to make furniture. More than fifty years ago, when I was married. Promise me you take it.”

“It’s not necessary,” my sister says. “But if you want . . .” She says it with a straight face, but Sofie gets the joke. She howls.

Close to six o’clock, when my sister arrives home, the apartment is deserted. She tries to remember if my mother was going someplace. She recalls that Millie was supposed to get me. She wonders if my mother went along for the ride.

At seven my brother comes home. “Ma’s not here?”

“She’s hiding under the bed,” Mimi says.

“Where is she? She didn’t leave us dinner?”

“She ran off with Burt Lancaster.”

“What’s with you?” Sheldon says.

“Some people can’t take a joke,” she answers. “What do you want for dinner? I know how to make French toast.”

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s put ice cream on it.”

Just as they finish watching Ed Sullivan on Toast of the Town, my sister hears the key in the lock. “Thank God!” she says. She steps into the hall as the door opens. But it isn’t my mother. “It’s Papa!” Mimi calls out. Sheldon doesn’t move from the sofa.

“I came to get some clothes,” my father says. “Devorah’s asleep?”

“She’s staying in Jersey, with Aunt Ruchel,” Mimi tells him. He wouldn’t ask about her in a thousand years, she thinks. “Mama’s not home yet.”

“It’s after nine o’clock. Where is she?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she went to Jersey, too.” Mimi notices his short haircut, parted on one side instead of in the middle. The ends of his mustache are longer.

My father strides through the living room. He and my brother glance at each other, but neither says a word. My father peers into the room where I usually sleep, as if Mimi was mistaken. From his wardrobe he takes out his summer suit and lays it on the bed. He makes a pile of short-sleeved shirts, underwear, and socks.

He should be happy to be moving in with Bertha, he thinks. To be living in the lap of luxury. Who would have predicted it! Still, he cannot help feeling angry. What right does Chenia have to throw him out? He gets a suitcase from the closet and packs.

My sister doesn’t want to wait for my mother to come home to tell her my father showed up. In the hallway, she dials the Operator for long distance.

As Aunt Ruchel answers the phone, she hears me crying in her guest bedroom but says to my sister, “Devorah’s fine. Tell your mother.”

“She’s not here. I thought she went with Devorah.”

“Isaac!” my aunt calls out. “Come here! Hold on, darling,” she says to Mimi, and confers with my uncle. Back on the phone she says, “Is your brother there? Let me talk to him.”

“You can talk to me,” Mimi says.

“Darling, please, I need your cooperation. Put your brother on.”

My aunt doesn’t tell Sheldon what she really thinks. She says, “Your mother, God bless her, she was very tired. Probably she went away for a rest.”

“Without telling us?”

“When you’re so exhausted—” my aunt starts. “Never before has your mother asked me to take the children. I know, darling, it’s hard to comprehend. Do you and Mimi want to come here? You’re welcome.” She looks at my uncle as she says, “You can stay with us so long as you like.” He nods.

“I don’t know. Can we talk it over and call you back?”

“Please, darling. I’ll wait up to hear.”

My father hasn’t heard the conversation, but as he walks through the living room with his suitcase, he gets an uneasy feeling. “Mama’s on her way?”

Sheldon starts to say yes, but after what he told her, Mimi is too upset to remain silent. “Aunt Ruchel thinks she went somewhere for a rest.”

“What?” my father says. “She went away? Where?” Mimi shrugs. He puts the suitcase down. “She leaves you here, just like that? Is she out of her mind?” His eyes go in all directions, trying to account for Chenia’s absence. She’s always been so responsible. “She left you money?” he asks.

“Nothing,” Mimi says. Although she’s always regarded my mother as somewhat peculiar, for the first time she considers the possibility that she might also be romantic. To walk off and leave everything behind . . .

My father breathes noisily through his nose. “I better stay. This is unbelievable. Unbelievable! She must be insane!”

“Don’t!” Mimi says.

“You walk off and leave your kids. What, is that sane to you?”

“You left, didn’t you?” Sheldon says.

“Don’t get smart!” my father says. “Your mother, she threw me out.”

My brother is about to say something, something provocative, but my sister saves him. “Maybe she went shopping and she’s just not back yet,” Mimi says. She doesn’t say, Maybe she got kidnapped. Mimi is starting to feel afraid.

Even as my father works himself into a fit of anger, part of him thinks, This will help with the divorce, though he’s not sure how. He doesn’t want custody of the children. What would he do with them, the little one especially? He’ll think about it later, he tells himself. Right now he has to call Bertha to let her know. He wonders if Bertha will believe him.

It doesn’t take my Aunt Ruchel long to figure out that cookies are my weakness. “Eat your dinner and you’ll get a cookie,” she might say. Or she says, “If you go to bed right now, you can have a cookie tomorrow.” If I refuse to brush my teeth, she says, “Uh oh. The Sugar Monster will make holes in your teeth, and without teeth you can’t eat any more cookies.”

When she’s not going to riding lessons or the Young Zionists’ Club, my Cousin Sandy reads stories to me, over and over, as many times as I want. They’re all about a girl named Nancy Drew. She teaches me to play croquet. She puts me on her old tricycle, even though I can’t reach the pedals. My Aunt Ruchel has a fit. “You want her to have another scar?”

I don’t see my Cousin Rhonda very much. Mostly at dinner. Or in the mirror over her vanity. She asks me questions but in a way I’m not used to. “What’s up, kid? Having fun, kid?” She doesn’t always wait for my answers. She walks quickly through the house, usually with a tennis racket over her shoulder.

My Uncle Isaac likes to chuck me under the chin. His big hand hovers delicately near the puffy skin. I get the idea he wants to touch my scar. He doesn’t seem to know how to talk to me, as if we come from different countries.

Millie is the only one who carries on a conversation with me, usually in the kitchen. I help her husk corn and hull strawberries. She shows me how to squirt little flowers out of the pastry bag. She doesn’t mind if I make a mess. “You’s a good helper,” she says. “Soon we’ll have you baking pies for Mr. Pies.” For some reason she thinks that’s very funny. She teaches me how to use the flour sifter. “That day I drug you here, you was white as that flour,” she says.

“White like you,” I say. I laugh for the first time since I got there. She drops her jaw in mock anger, and then she laughs also.

She tells me how she used to cook in this big house she calls a mansion. “One whole room they’s got for a Frigidaire, and one’s for groceries. Ain’t that something!” She says a lot of things different from what I’m used to. She says “right nice” a lot, which for a long time I think is “write nice.” I find it very interesting. Just before she hangs up the phone, she says, “God keep you.”

“What’s that mean?” I ask her.

She starts to explain about the Lord, but my aunt interrupts. “Millie is a Baptist. We’re Jewish. We believe different things.”

Later Millie asks me, “What kind of name’s Devorah? Is that Hebrew?”

“I don’t know. What’s Hebrew?”

She takes a salami out of the Frigidaire and shows me the Hebrew letters. “Hebrew is Jewish.”

“What kind of name is Millie?” I ask her. “Is it Baptist?”

She shrieks. “That’s a good one, girl.” Sometimes she reminds me of Mama.

In the morning, when Aunt Ruchel watches Millie dress me, I ask her if we’re going to see Mama.

Today she says, “I told you. She’s where sick people go until they’re better. Do you know what a hospital is?”

“Where I got my stitches?”

“That’s right, a place like that.”

“There’s lots of them hospitals,” Millie says.

“Did Mama cut herself?”

“No, she’s sick,” Aunt Ruchel says. She thinks, It could be true. My sister, God willing, could be alive . . . She looks at my scar and forces herself not to think.

“Does she have an earache?” I ask.

I imagine Aunt Ruchel trying to decide what to tell me. Which sickness. “Her ears are fine,” she says.

“Does she have a cold?”

“Yes, a very bad cold,” she says today. “You don’t want to catch it.”

When my brother goes with my father to file a missing-persons report, the police say they’ll check the morgue. When no one turns up resembling the description of my mother, the police are nonchalant. “Thousands of people run away every year,” they say.

“Why would she run away?” my father says.

I imagine the police zero in on certain facts. The outside door was locked. There was no sign of forcible entry. And my mother left her pocketbook at home, but her keys are gone. They ask if she ever leaves home without her purse.

“To do the laundry,” Sheldon says, “but she doesn’t lock the door.” It turns out that the hamper is full of laundry, and anyway, her slippers are by the bed. Whenever she does laundry, she is always in her slippers.

“Anything unusual happen, before she disappeared?” the police ask. My father and brother silently recall my mother asking my father to leave. “No,” they say. “Was she under pressure?” the police ask. “Did she owe money?” “Does she have a history of mental problems?” “No,” they answer. “No.”

I imagine my brother reports the conversation to my sister. She says, “What about Devorah’s accident?”

“Silly, what does that have to do with anything?” Sheldon says.

“I don’t know. I think it affected her,” Mimi says. “A lot.”

My sister likes her new freedom. Without my mother around, she can come and go as she likes, even in the evenings if she tells my father she has to study with her friend Suzanne. It surprises her, though, when fits of weeping suddenly come over her. “How could she leave us?” Mimi rails at Sheldon. She alternates between feeling angry and feeling scared. What if something terrible did happen to Mama? Maybe on the roof. Or in the cellar. What if she turns up dead, God forbid!

In the first week after my mother is gone, my sister rushes to the phone whenever it rings. As time passes without any word, she becomes pessimistic. Today she lets the phone ring and ring. She has the feeling that it’s bad news.

When the ringing stops, she goes to the doorway of the bedroom. She kisses her hand and places it on the mezuzah, which is nailed to the doorjamb. “Please, God,” she says out loud, “let her be all right. Even if she doesn’t come back to us.”

Kneeling before the shelves, my brother lines up the cans of peas—neatly, as the boss has told him. He stews over my mother’s disappearance. If anything bad has happened to her, he will make my father pay, one way or another. He fumes over my father’s demand for money to cover room and board. My brother has been saving up to buy a used car. He will have to cut down now on what he spends, going out with his new girlfriend, Joyce. That S.O.B., my brother thinks, as he moves on to the canned spinach.

At Aunt Ruchel’s, the phones ring a lot, especially after dinner. They have two phones upstairs and two downstairs. Millie talks a lot on the yellow phone in the kitchen, when my Aunt Ruchel is out playing mah-jongg. Cousin Sandy shows me how to dial their number, which makes a busy signal. She lets me dial when she calls her friends. Sometimes she lets me say something. Her friends ask me what grade I’m in, which I learn has to do with school. Cousin Sandy tells them I’m too young for school. “I’m not!” I say, but I know she doesn’t believe me.

I try to make telephone calls by myself, but I forget which letters and numbers to dial. I make up new ones, but they don’t work. Finally I notice my aunt and uncle using the phone book before they dial. Later I open the book and study it. Soon I am talking to a lot of people in New Jersey. They always tell me to put the phone down, or they ask if they can talk to my mother.

On the front lawn, Millie peels potatoes while Cousin Sandy and I play croquet. I ask her, “Why can’t we telephone Mama?” Millie shakes her head. She sings, “ ‘Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky—’ ”

“She doesn’t have a phone,” Cousin Sandy says. Her mallet hits the wooden ball so hard it rebounds off the wicket and rolls down to the street.

“That’s right,” Millie says. “There’s no phones for the patients.”

I think she is saying my mother doesn’t have a phone because she isn’t patient. “Where is she?” I ask.

A man walking by picks up the ball and lobs it on the lawn, near me.

“Say, ‘Thank you,’ ” Cousin Sandy coaches.

I don’t tell her I’m not supposed to talk to strange men because they take you away and you never see anyone you know, ever again. “Thank you,” I say.

“Devorah, you knows the answer to that one,” Millie says. “You gonna tell me now? Tell me where’s your mama.”

“In the hospital,” I say, because it’s what she wants to hear. I have a new theory, though. I think Mama talked to some strange man. That’s when he took her away. Now he won’t let her see me anymore.

“Your turn,” my cousin says. “Go on.”

I look very hard at the wicket, and then I aim the little mallet. THWOCK! The ball goes right through.

At night when I’m supposed to go to sleep, I climb over the chair by the side of my bed and sneak to the door of my aunt and uncle’s bedroom. They talk about people I don’t know. They also talk about Millie. I don’t always understand what they’re saying.

Aunt Ruchel says, “You tell her. She’s twenty-eight. Old enough to know.” Uncle Isaac says, “Me? You tell her.” My aunt gets very angry. I wonder if she’s going to try to hurt my uncle.

Sometimes they talk about Mama. One night I hear Aunt Ruchel say, “They haven’t found her yet. How could Chenia disappear into thin air?”

Now I wonder why Mama is hiding.

I go to the vanity in my room. I turn on the tiny white lamp and look in the mirror. I open the locket around my neck that Mrs. Vogel gave me. I touch the pictures of Mama and Papa. “I promise I’ll be good,” I tell them. Then I poke the scar on my face until it hurts.

My mother chafes under the regimen of the hospital. The room is never completely dark, so she cannot sleep very well. She puts a pillow over her head, but soon it falls off and the lights from the corridor shine right in. Anyway, who can rest with so much noise? All the voices from the radio on one side of her. And music from the radio on the other side of her. Across the way there is talk and more talk. There is moaning from the bed in the corner. And coughing all around. Sometimes it sounds as though someone is choking on phlegm.

Trays and carts rumble down the hall. Bells ring. All the time they are looking for Dr. Levinson. “Doctor Levinson, Doctor Levinson, please call the operator.” My mother thinks, Maybe he is lost, like her.

Day and night people are coming and going. Nurses. Doctors. Orderlies. They bring things, they take things away. They pull open the curtain around her, they pull it closed. They roll her on her side, they roll her on her back. They stick things in her arm, they stick things under her tongue, they jab her tokhes with needles. They ask her to swallow this pill and that. They slap a rubber mask over her nose and mouth and ask her to inhale. They stick her head under a little tent where the steam comes up. They talk in singsong.

Sometimes a whole group of young men come, wearing white coats, with stethoscopes outlining their collarbones. They push the cold metal disk up against the bottom of her breast. They ask her to breathe in, to breathe out. Strange words fly from their thin lips: roentgen evidence, intramuscular paraldehyde, sodium phenobarbital. The older doctor who is with them speaks slowly and simply to her as if she is a child. “How do you feel today?” he asks.

The social worker comes to the ward. She hovers by the bed. Her blue eyes look concerned. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” she says. The fourth or fifth time she says it, my mother snaps, “Don’t feel sorry for me!” It’s the first sentence my mother volunteers.

“We all deserve compassion,” the social worker says.

“How can you be so sure?” my mother answers.

Finally her fever is down. Soon she is out of bed and shuffling to the bathroom. Soon she is aware of the visitors who come twice a day, but never to see her. In the corridors they pace and light cigarettes. They ask questions in a cheerful voice. Are you feeling better? How’s the food? They bring candy or flowers, they bring greeting cards, they bring things people forgot at home, toothbrushes and toothpaste, bathrobes and slippers. Once a priest comes. The nuns visit in twos and threes, draped in black from head to toe. Once she sees a man with bandages piled high on his head. She thinks he is not long for this world, but the social worker tells her he’s wearing a turban. “A hat for a corpse,” my mother says. Before, she never thought about how many people there are, dead people, walking around.

Sometimes the visitors stick their head in the door and ask for people who are somewhere else. No one knows where she is. She has a new name. Barbara Hayward. From her two favorite actresses, Barbara Stanwyck and Susan Hayward. She’s told the lady who comes with the clipboard she has no relatives. “But what about this wedding band?” the social worker says, pointing to her finger. “You must live somewhere.”

“You call this living?” my mother jokes. “Where I used to live, was all in my mind. There I was happy beyond belief, but for that I have no address.”

The social worker doesn’t want to call in a psychiatrist. She knows that if they take her to an asylum, it’ll be the end for her. She likes my mother’s sharp tongue. The residents who trail the important doctor on his rounds my mother calls nuchshleppers, hangers-on. The social worker can’t get over it. She tells everyone in the office. Among the hospital staff my mother becomes famous.

She wonders why they come talk to her on their break, on their lunch, after work. They ask for her opinions. “You are really something!” they say. What do they want with a lady who doesn’t care if she gets well? In a way, she is already dead, she thinks. She wonders if anyone is sitting shiva for her. Mourning her death.

Where can she rest? she wonders. In the hospital is too busy. She can only sleep while drugged. In the ocean is too cold. It wouldn’t let her rest. From the cold she got pneumonia, and now she is in a place where you can’t tell night from day. To rest, you have to know which is which. And anyhow, she cannot rest when she is so tired. She hardly has the strength to cough.

For the first time in twenty years my father sleeps alone. The first night, when he finds my mother is gone, he is not comfortable in the double bed by himself. He sleeps on the side he’s used to. In the ten days he stayed at Bertha’s, their only argument was over which side of the bed he should sleep on. Bertha prefers the side near the door, like him. He had room enough in her bed, which is queen-sized, but he wasn’t comfortable sleeping on the side by the windows. Now he can sleep wherever he wants. Gradually he moves to the center of the bed. Soon he is stretching his arms in both directions. Most nights he falls into a very deep sleep. He thinks for the first time in his life he is really getting a good rest.

On my birthday, my sister and brother come to Aunt Ruchel’s. At first I don’t talk to them because I’m angry. But then my brother picks me up in his arms and swings me around. “Oy gevalt,” he jokes, “she’s so heavy I’m getting a hernia.” He tells me what a hernia is. It makes me giggle.

They bring me some coloring books and crayons, and a watercolor paint set in a tin box. Mimi says, “You look adorable, like Shirley Temple.” The night before, Cousin Sandy wound hunks of my hair with rags, and now my head is all in curls. I tell them what I got from my aunt and uncle: a pink pinafore, a pink pocketbook, and a bracelet of pink hearts. And what I got from my cousins: a big book of fairy tales with color pictures.

“Any news?” Aunt Ruchel asks. They shake their heads. They say my father wants me home. “He could have come with you,” my aunt says.

“He has more important things to do,” Sheldon says. My aunt and uncle give each other a look.

“Darling,” my aunt says to Mimi, “you look fabulous.”

“How much weight did you lose?” Cousin Rhonda asks.

“Ten pounds,” Mimi says. “I just haven’t felt like eating.”

The pot roast Millie makes is so good, my sister cleans her plate. When Millie brings in the chocolate cake, they sing me “Happy Birthday.” Millie sings the loudest. I blow out all the candles. I make a wish for Mama and Papa to stop being so angry at me. After we eat the cake, Cousin Rhonda goes upstairs. Uncle Isaac goes into the den. Millie goes in the kitchen. The rest of us go out on the back porch. My brother and I swing on the bench, and he croons, “ ‘Some-where there’s mu-sic, How high the moon . . .’ ” Then my brother says they have to go home.

“I want to go with you,” I say.

“I wish you could,” Sheldon says, “but there’s no one to mind you. I’m working in a store all day.”

“You could mind me,” I say to Mimi.

“Not every day.”

“Why?”

“I have to go visit this old lady.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she says. “Just because.”

I scream when they leave. I lie down on the carpet and bang my feet. I start to bang my head, but Millie scoops me up and holds me in her arms. I bang with my fists on her back and I try to kick her, but she holds me tight. “You’re too big to be behaving like a two-year-old,” she says. “How old are you, girl? I thought you was four years old today.”

“I want my mama!” I cry.

Millie carries me up the stairs. She sets me down on the bed, and then she kneels on the floor beside me. She puts her hands together and bends her head. “O Mighty Lord,” she says, “hear our prayer. Bring Devorah’s mama home to her, safe and sound.” Millie teaches me to say, “Amen.”

While my sister and brother ride the bus back to Manhattan, my father tries to find Trudy. He keeps calling her home, but there’s no answer. He walks around the neighborhood. He looks in the playground where he knows she takes Hannah; she isn’t there. Finally he reaches her on the phone.

“Oh, it’s you,” she says coldly, but she doesn’t hang up. After their big fight, she lashed out at him. “You were at Bertha’s every night, weren’t you! That ugly beast! Get your glasses fixed!”

“I’ve missed you,” he tells Trudy now.

“That and a nickel will get you on the Staten Island Ferry.”

“You’re right. But I have big news for you.”

“You’re getting a divorce,” she says sarcastically.

“You heard?”

“Don’t pull my leg, Ruben.”

“Who’s pulling your leg?”

“Really, a legal divorce?” Trudy thinks, If he’s just saying that to make up to me, I’ll kill him. I’ll go to Chenia and wreck his home.

“Chenia threw me out,” he says. “She got suspicious.”

“Of me or Bertha?” Trudy asks.

“Not Bertha. I was doing her some favors, that’s all. I told you.”

“I heard a joke on Jack Benny,” Trudy says. “A husband arrives home late and says to his wife, ‘Can’t you guess where I’ve been?’ The wife says, ‘I can, but go on with your story.’ ”

“Trudy, this is no story, but it could be. Chenia throws me out and what do you think? She goes and disappears. No one knows where she is.”

“Wait a minute,” Trudy says. “Give it to me slow.”

My father wants to pinch himself. Here he is, back with Trudy, in her bedroom once more. She is kissing him all over. It takes just a few seconds when he is inside her until he spurts. “I’ll be better,” he promises. “I got so excited, being with you again. You smell so good, you feel so good—”

He has never been that expressive, Trudy thinks. “I love it when you talk to me like that,” she says. She kisses his chest around the nipples. She slides her head down to his belly, and then she takes his member in her mouth. Right away he gets hard again. This time when he is inside her, he thinks of Mr. Gershenfeld, threatening to dock him for all the time the girls talk. He thinks how ironic it is, to be with one woman where he has trouble finishing and another where he finishes too fast. Then he wonders where my mother is.

“Ruben? Where are you?” Trudy asks.

“With you,” he says. “You smell so good, you feel so good—” Although he pushes inside her, he knows he is having trouble. He cannot believe it. Why now? He tries to inhale Trudy’s scent, like spring flowers. He concentrates on her nipples, but they feel wrinkled, shriveled like his member. He doesn’t want to, but in desperation he falls back on his sure thing: He thinks of Millie, her big breasts in his face, his hands on her big tokhes.

“Oh Ruben,” he hears. “I love it when you’re so passionate.” It’s Trudy, he realizes, having a climax.

My father comes.

The day after my birthday, the city is sweltering. Even with the fan, the apartment feels like a furnace. My sister recalls Sofie’s cool basement and the strange super. She gets goose bumps.

On the stoop she waits for her friend Suzanne. They are going to buy shoes. She hopes Suzanne invites her over for dinner. Her mother makes the best mashed potatoes. Mimi misses having real dinners. Mama! my sister says to herself. Where are you?

A neighbor rocks her baby carriage close to where my sister is sitting. “How’s Devorah? I never see her anymore, or your mom. Are they still living upstairs?” Mrs. Kleeberg probes.

“They’re in the country. On vacation.”

“Tell me, how did your sister get her face cut up?”

“She fell over a bike,” my sister says. “Why?”

“Just wondered.” Mrs. Kleeberg forgets to rock. Her baby starts to wail.

“What? You think my mother did that to her?”

“No, of course not,” Mrs. Kleeberg lies. “I didn’t know your sister had a bike.” The baby screeches.

“It was a little boy’s bike, okay?” Mimi says. “On Dyckman Street.”

“Sure, okay. You don’t have to get so upset,” Mrs. Kleeberg says. “Especially if there’s nothing to hide.”

In Magic Shoes, Harry is at the cash register when two teenage girls walk in, one lanky and awkward, the other small, with graceful arms. The little one reminds him of Chenia, with the tiny face, the intense eyes and pointy chin. Could it be? he wonders, moving toward her. He sees now her eyes are not as dark as Chenia’s. “Have a seat,” he says. “Someone will be right with you.”

My sister does a double take. She recognizes him from the store in Brooklyn. The broad forehead, the deep pores in his cheeks.

“Coney Island,” Harry says, and smiles. “You came in with your mother, as I recall. There was a, uh, little problem . . .”

“That’s right,” my sister says. She is dying of embarrassment. “My mother, she, uh, couldn’t come today.” She ignores Suzanne’s quizzical look.

“Is she all right?” he asks.

“Fine,” Mimi says. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

“Give her my regards,” he says. “I’m the manager here.”

My sister feels a chill spreading through her. She waits until he is out of hearing range, then says to Suzanne, “Don’t think I’m nuts. I just know there’s a connection. Between him and my mom.”

“Oh my God!” Suzanne says. “You don’t think he kidnapped her? He doesn’t look the type. Doesn’t he resemble Perry Como?”

“A little,” Mimi says. “You can’t really tell what people are like.” My sister studies Harry while he is at the register. He reminds her of my father, the medium build, how neatly he dresses, but the manager is more of a shmoozer, the way he handles the customers. “It can’t be just a coincidence that he works here now,” she says to Suzanne.

Suzanne whispers. “You don’t think your mom was, you know, involved with him? He looks younger than her.”

“She’s the last person I’d ever—” my sister says, before the salesman asks what he can do for her today.

At six in the evening, Bertha dials my father’s home number. When my sister answers, Bertha disguises her voice to ask, “Is your mother home?”

“She’s indisposed,” Mimi says. “Who’s this?”

“I’ll call back later,” Bertha says. The next time she calls, she speaks in a high-pitched voice. She asks the same question. She gets the very same answer.

Humming to herself now, Bertha puts on the blue dress that Ruben says is his favorite.

In the entryway of Schrafft’s, Bertha bumps her cheek against my father’s. “Ruben! You’ve shaved off your mustache! You look—less mysterious.” She resists telling him that she’s missed him, that a week has never felt so long.

“I don’t like this business,” he says. “Devorah is still at my sister-in-law’s. Mimi is no cook. What she doesn’t burn, she leaves raw. Last night the chicken—”

Bertha cuts him off. “Perhaps if they know we’re waiting—”

Once they’re seated at a table, Bertha recognizes an acquaintance nearby. She, too, is with a gentleman. Bertha glances at my father’s hand, at the wide, gold band on his fourth finger. She can’t see the hand of the gentleman across the way. She wonders if Ruben will ever notice she’s taken off her own wedding ring.

After studying the menu, my father resumes where he left off. “The chicken last night was so raw—”

“Your usual?” the waiter says, and Bertha nods, not waiting for my father. Her acquaintance is leaning forward, forearms on the table. A romantic interest, definitely, Bertha thinks. Or maybe financial.

Bertha waits for the food to arrive before she brings up what’s on her mind, but even then she doesn’t rush into it. “Mmm, the prime rib, it’s roasted to perfection,” she says, and then, “Have the police made any progress?”

“Nothing,” he answers, slathering more sour cream on the baked potato. “The neighbors, they saw her go downstairs with Devorah and the Negro maid, she works for my sister-in-law. After that, no one remembers.”

“Maybe you should hire a detective.”

“What does something like that cost?” he asks.

“What does cost matter? If she doesn’t turn up, you won’t be able to divorce for—I think it’s seven years. That’s too long to wait, isn’t it?”

“It’s unfortunate I can’t see you,” my father says. Bertha only nods because she is chewing. “Have you sold the building?” he asks.

Bertha swallows. “Not yet. They’re claiming demand is down. The market is depressed.” She splays her ringless hand over her chin. “How old is Mimi again?”

“Fourteen. Fifteen, maybe. I think fifteen.”

“Certainly old enough for her to be home alone in the evening, Ruben.”

“You’re right. The worry, it’s affected my thinking. At work the girls laugh at me. I can’t make them listen.” He slurps the seltzer through the straw.

“Please!” she says. “You’re doing it again. Order another if you want.”

His eyes flash, then he says, “Sorry.”

What’s wrong with her? Bertha wonders. It has to be more than the fact he looks so different now. “I miss your mustache,” she tells him.

He shaved it off after Trudy said it tickled too much when he kissed her. Now he tells Bertha, “When it’s cooler I’ll grow it back. Just for you.”

Finished with his seltzer, he starts to push the glass away till he sees Bertha’s eyebrows go up. He removes his hand and balls it into a fist, resting it on the linen. “I have to go to the dentist,” he says. “I’m having trouble with my partial. If he don’t fix it right, I may get a lawyer.”

Is he always so boring? Bertha wonders. “Ruben, tell me something new.”

“The orders are coming in,” he says. “We have to hire more girls.”

She perks up. “You think the economy is doing better, then?”

Now that my mother is almost ready to be discharged, the social worker is determined to get more information from her. All the file says is that the patient was brought into Emergency with a high fever, blue lips, pains in her side. She’s made a remarkable recovery, Mrs. Markham thinks, as she apologizes for the partitioned space that is her office.

“A broom closet is more interesting,” my mother says. “The beige, it makes me yawn.”

“Well, maybe you’d rather visit in the lounge.”

“Visit who?” my mother asks.

“Each other,” the social worker says. “All right?”

It doesn’t matter, really, my mother thinks, but she nods. It’s an effort to lift one foot up, then the other, as they walk, slowly, to the end of the hall. The seersucker robe flaps against her bare legs.

In the crowded lounge, they find two seats beneath the large clock. Everywhere people are talking, but my mother thinks no one is listening. “Here there is nothing to do,” she says, “except wait for the news. Good or bad.”

“What do you consider good news, Mrs. Hayward?”

“Good news? Maybe that boy, the lifeguard, didn’t pull me out after all, and now I am dreaming only. ‘Leave me,’ I told him. ‘Leave me.’ ‘Not if my life depends on it,’ he says. Such a funny thing, maybe I dreamt it.”

Mrs. Markham doesn’t always understand what my mother means. Is she referring to a suicide attempt? “Mrs. Hayward, or whatever your real name is—” She winks. “Do you ever hear voices talking to you?”

“Inside my head, you mean?” My mother’s head bobs slightly.

Mrs. Markham tenses, until my mother says, “Only my conscience. What makes me so tired. Why I wanted the water to keep me under.”

Wanted, past tense, Mrs. Markham notes. “Why? What happened to make you want to stop living? It was either a man or a child. Am I right?”

With those large blue eyes and the wide, smiling mouth, the social worker seems to her a simple woman, but she’s smarter than she looks, my mother decides. It’s just that nothing terrible ever happened to her. And nothing so wonderful either that she would kill herself for losing it.

“So which is it?” Mrs. Markham asks. “A man or a child?”

“Both,” my mother says. “It’s a long story.”

“I have time.”

My mother tells her because she doesn’t care. She tells her about Harry, whom she calls This Man. As she talks, she becomes oblivious to everyone in the waiting room, those talking too loud with relatives they haven’t seen for a while, those sitting like stone, those wishing they could be somewhere else. She doesn’t notice the clouds of cigarette smoke, the doctors in green coming fresh from surgery, masks hanging around their necks.

Two hours later, when my mother says, “Nu, that’s it,” the social worker says, “You know, happiness isn’t a permanent state. Neither is unhappiness. There’s a flow, back and forth. It sounds as if your daughter makes you happy. She must be a real kick. I’d love to see her.”

“She has a big scar,” my mother says. “Ten stitches on her face.”

“That’s not the end of the world.” Mrs. Markham raises her own skirt up over the knee. Through the nylon stocking my mother can see a whitish, ridged scar. Like a short, fat worm.

“My father pushed me so hard I fell over a big flowerpot,” Mrs. Markham says. “He had a violent temper, yet I knew he loved me.” The social worker realizes she has my mother’s rapt attention. “I needed at least ten stitches,” she continues, “but see how the scar has faded?” She lets the skirt drop. “All kids have accidents—of one kind or another. That’s life, isn’t it?”

My mother’s face scrunches up. She cannot believe it, how she feels. The fact that she feels anything at all. A pain worse even than missing him.

On the first day of August, when my Aunt Ruchel sees the return address on an envelope postmarked Brooklyn, I imagine her heart practically stops. At the top of the typed letter, she reads, “In re: Discharge of Chenia Arnow.” My aunt thinks it’s a notice of her sister’s death. “Go outside,” she tells me, and then she sits down to read.

It’s the first time she’s told me to go anywhere without her. Outside, I spank my teddy bear. “Bad boy!” I say, and stick him in the corner of the porch.

Inside, my aunt reads the letter twice to make sure she understands. It says the patient will be discharged on August 2. The hospital prefers that she be accompanied by a responsible party.

My aunt presses the letter to her breast. It’s so hard to grasp . . . She has already been thinking of Chenia in the past tense. My sister had such a sense of humor . . . My sister was such a good mother . . . Now she has to alter her world again. She knows she ought to call Sheldon, but first she calls my uncle, and reads the letter to him.

“They’re stingy with information,” he says. “Shall I get in touch with them?”

“I was hoping you would offer.”

“You don’t have to wait for an offer. You can ask.”

When my aunt tries to call me in from the backyard, I am not there. “Devorah? Devorah!” she calls. She looks for me. She goes out to the front and looks up and down the street. If it isn’t one thing . . .

By now I am two streets down Elm, skipping on the narrow sidewalk. I don’t like it when dogs bark. For a while I stop to play with two little girls. They pull me around the corner in their wagon. Then their mother tells them they have to come inside. I try to retrace my steps, but nothing looks familiar. I know I’m lost. I’m scared. I want to scare Aunt Ruchel for making me go outside. I wasn’t being bad. Why did she tell me I couldn’t stay with her?

I walk and walk. I start to cry. A mailman sees me. “Why are you crying?” he asks. “Where’s your mommy?”

“I don’t know.” I cry even louder. I’m not supposed to talk to him.

“Where do you live?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“Devorah Arnow.”

The lady in front of her house says he can use her phone. We go inside and he looks up Arnow in the phone book. He dials someone, but it isn’t the right person. “I have to finish my route,” he tells the lady. “Can you take her to the station?”

As soon as I see the police I think something terrible happened to my aunt. But after the lady tells them I’m lost, they take me to the office inside and give me ice cream and a clown doll. They give me sheets of paper and pencils in different colors. I copy words I see on a legal pad: CASE ROB 1. SUSPECT. TRACE.

Outside it gets dark. There are different policemen at the desk now. I ask why they don’t wear uniforms. I ask them to spell detective. One is blond and has a tiny nose, like my doll at home. “Stop your squirming,” he says. “You have to pee?” I move to the bench against the wall.

The other detective is puffed out like my teddy bear at Aunt Ruchel’s. He has red hair like me. He picks up the phone when it rings. He winks at me as he says, “Describe her.” He puts his hand over the receiver and asks me if I know my aunt’s name.

“Aunt Ruchel,” I say.

“Bingo!” he says. “You’re not lost anymore.”

When Aunt Ruchel gets to the police station with Millie, the blond detective asks her where my mother is.

“In the hospital,” I answer.

“That’s right,” my aunt says. She’s wearing a necklace of white hearts and a lacy blouse with a square neck. I want to tell her she looks pretty.

“Well, we have a little problem here. I can’t release her to you, being as you’re not her immediate family. What’s your name?”

“Mrs. Isaac Peisner.”

“And what’s the mother’s name?”

“Mrs. Ruben Arnow.”

“Peisner. Arnow. What kind of names are those?”

My aunt stiffens. She knows exactly what he’s asking, but she says, “What do you mean?”

“Are they, uh, Italian?”

“No.”

“Maybe they’re Chinese. No? Well, they must be Hebrew. Are you Hebrew?”

“We’re Jewish,” my aunt says. “We came from Poland, but now we’re American citizens.”

“Yids, did you say? Imagine that! So where’s the Yid’s, uh, kid’s father?”

“He can’t be bothered,” she says. By the way they look at her, she knows it’s the wrong answer. “He’s working,” she adds, “in a factory in Manhattan. My sister asked me to care for her child, temporarily. Come, Devorah, let’s go.”

“Not yet,” the blond detective says. He turns on the little fan that sits on his desk. The papers fly all over. “Goddamnit!” he says, and shuffles them together. “What took you so long to report her missing?” he asks.

“I called immediately,” she says indignantly. “They gave me the other precinct. Our street is on the line between.” My aunt’s voice gets louder. Millie clears her throat. My aunt lowers her voice. “What if I show you the letter from the hospital?”

“That depends,” the other detective says. He loosens his tie.

Aunt Ruchel sends Millie home to get the letter. “Tell Mr. Peisner I’m here.” She hesitates to call my father—why make things more complicated than they already are? “So warm,” she says and wipes the perspiration off my brow.

“How did she get this?” The blond one points to my scar. “It looks new.”

“An accident,” Aunt Ruchel says.

Soon I am in a room alone with a lady cop. She talks to me about different things, then asks me how I got the scar, which she calls “a big sore.”

At first I don’t want to answer, but she keeps asking.

“From the glass,” I say.

“What glass?”

“Mama threw the glass.”

“Your mother threw the glass at you?”

“At Peter the Wolf.”

“Who’s Peter the Wolf?” she asks.

“A man,” I say.

“What man?”

“He works in the shoe store.”

The questions go on and on. I tell her everything I can remember. She asks me to wait while she goes back to the other room. I get the idea they know where my Mama really is.

In the other room they ask my aunt how I got the scar. “I don’t know,” she says. The blond one looks up at the ceiling. He starts to hum.

After a while they let me back in the first room, a lot noisier now, with two fans going and more people. I don’t see the clown doll where I left it, on the bench. Soon Millie arrives with the letter. They pass it around. One reads it, then another. In between they answer the phones.

Fanning herself with an envelope, Millie tells my aunt that Mr. Peisner isn’t home yet. There are wet blotches under her arms.

Finally the blond detective says, “Come back in the morning. If everything checks out, we’ll release her into your custody.”

Aunt Ruchel grabs my hand and yanks it over my head. “What do I tell her mother? That I don’t have her kid anymore?”

“We’ll take good care of her,” he says. “Go on, there’s nothing you can do here.” My aunt doesn’t move. When the policewoman tries to take me out of the room, I get hysterical.

“Please,” Millie says to them. “Her mama’s sick. Don’t be torturing this child any further.”

“Are you accusing us of torturing her?” the blond policeman says. The way he says it, I stop whimpering.

My aunt picks up a phone to call my uncle. She puts it down. Chenia wouldn’t stand for this, she thinks. Softly she says, “You don’t think I kidnapped her? Here, here’s my identification.” She hands him her wallet. “Twenty years I’ve lived in the same house, ten minutes from here. I’m not moving away overnight. My husband, he’s a respected businessman. We have two daughters of our own . . .”

“Ma’am, there are procedures we follow.” He flips the wallet in the air. It lands on the floor. He looks up at the ceiling. Millie stoops to pick it up.

“If you think I’m a criminal, please, lock me up right now.” My aunt wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. “I have to pick up my sister in the morning. Look at the letter.”

Aunt Ruchel glances at me to see if I understand. I do in a way, but I think it’s what my mama calls a bobbe-myseh. A fairy tale. I think my aunt is trying to fool them so they’ll let us go.

They look at the letter again. They mop their brows with large white handkerchiefs. They confer among themselves. The redheaded one who winked at me says, “It’s more trouble than it’s worth.” The policewoman says, “But it’s probable abuse.”

Probable, I say to myself. I wonder what it means.

My aunt mutters that this is crazy. Millie tries to calm her down. My aunt can’t stand it. She yells out, “If you knew the mother, you’d know she’d take her own life rather than hurt her kid. What kid doesn’t have an accident?”

The policewoman points to me. “She’s the one who told us. Her mother threw the glass. Didn’t you say that, Deborah?”

I’m starting to understand what I’ve done. I shake my head no.

“You told me that, Deborah,” the policewoman says.

“No! My name is Devorah.”

“How did your face get cut?”

“It was an accident,” I say.

“She’s been coached,” the policewoman says.

After the redheaded detective answers the phone, he says, “There’s a guy on the water tower, threatening to shoot himself.” He glances at us. “Let it go,” he says to the others.

Millie takes the cue. She shepherds me out the door. Outside in the cool night air, she says, “Forgive me, Lord. There be murder raging in my sinful heart.”

“Amen,” I say.

My aunt’s eyes nearly pop out. Millie shrugs. My aunt hugs her with one arm and me with the other.

I am feeling so happy all of a sudden, but when I look at Millie, I can see something is wrong. She pulls out of my aunt’s embrace. “Better be getting back. Don’t want Mr. Peisner be thinking we is lost.”

In the car going home, Aunt Ruchel says, “Darling, I have to ask. I want you to tell me the truth. Did your mother throw the glass at you?” When I don’t answer, she asks Millie to ask me.

“At Peter the Wolf,” I say. Before she can ask, Who’s Peter the Wolf? I say, “He works in a shoe store.”

“Veys mir,” Aunt Ruchel says. “No wonder she ran away!”

I think she is talking about me, but of course she is talking about my mother.

As soon as we step out of the hospital elevator—Aunt Ruchel, Millie, and I—we see a tiny, frail-looking woman in a wheelchair by the nurse’s station. “Thank you, Jesus!” Millie says, and then I realize it’s my mother. Her hair is all pushed back on the sides with hairpins. She has white socks on, like a girl’s, and sandals I’ve never seen. Up close, she seems smaller than I remember.

She makes an effort to smile. To see her daughter after all this time . . . and her sister . . . It’s too much. My mother steels herself. She doesn’t want to feel a thing.

My aunt bends over to kiss her on the cheek, but delicately. She thinks that hugging her sister might cause her bones to break.

My mother keeps her eyes on me the whole time. I know she is looking at the scar on my face. “You’ve been picking at it?” she says, her first words to me.

“All the time,” Millie answers.

“You’re so big,” my mother says to me. “How tall are you?”

I don’t answer.

My aunt starts to scold me. My mother says, “Nu, she’s angry. She has a right. You!” she says to me. “If you think I forgot about you, think again.”

“when we get to New Jersey. “I never saw traffic that "Do you want to rest?” my Aunt Ruchel says to my mother, terrible.”

“Resting makes me so tired,” my mother says. “You have iced tea?”

I watch her change into one of Aunt Ruchel’s housedresses. She seems familiar to me, but not completely.

Out on the back lawn, we sit on metal chairs that have bent tubes instead of legs. The petals of the pink flowers shiver in the slight breeze. Just as a bird flies into a big green bush, another one flies out. They’re different from the purple and gray pigeons in the park. They’re bluer than the sky. I look at them awhile and quickly back at my mother. I keep expecting her not to be there.

My aunt riffles through her mail. My mother presses the glass of iced tea against her cheek. “So much better than paper cups,” she says. “Real glass. What?” she says to me. “What’s the matter?”

“G-L-A-S-S,” my Aunt Ruchel spells. “A-C-C-I-D-E-N-T.”

“You have something to do inside?” my mother hints. I think she means I should go away. But then my aunt blows us a kiss and goes in the house.

“So quiet here,” my mother says. “A bee buzzes, it sounds so loud. Tell me, what you find to do here?”

I tell her about going to the grocery store with Millie. “She lets me push the basket.”

“You play with kids your own age?”

I tell her about the two girls with the wagon. I don’t tell her how I met them.

“Comment-allez vous?” she asks. When I don’t answer she says, “Listen to me. Your mother had to go away. I was sick. Too sick to take care of you.”

“Why?”

“Why? Who knows how sickness comes? Nor Got vaist. Only God knows. Some say the devil brings it. This man I knew once, he believed the germs make us sick. Sometimes we make ourself sick.”

“Why?”

“That’s a good question. Why do you pick at your face?”

I shrug.

“We all do foolish things,” she says. “Things that hurt us. That hurt other people.” She sighs. “What do you want to do when we go home?”

“Can I go to school?” I ask.

“By Madame LePage?”

“Regular school.”

“At four years old?”

“Cousin Sandy told me I can go when I’m bigger, but I want to go now.”

“This is an idea,” my mother says, “but how do we get them to take you? Oh, I know. A big girl doesn’t pick at her face.”

“I won’t anymore. Can I go to school? I won’t pick at my face.”

“Only one month till September, when school starts. Now is August. That’s thirty days.”

“ ‘Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,’ ” I rattle off. “ ‘All the rest have thirty-one.’ August has thirty-one.”

“I’m plotzing,” my mother says. “Who learned you?”

“Isaac. “She hasn’t called Sheldon or Mimi yet. It’s been, "Don’t you think it’s strange?” Aunt Ruchel says to Uncle what? five or six hours since we got home. Should I call them?”

“You can call them. Would she talk to them?”

“I’m sure. But it’s so strange. Maybe she’s—”

“Not right in the head?” my uncle says. My aunt nods. “If you ask me, the whole episode is strange. She disappears, God knows where. A week later they find her under the Boardwalk. How did she get pneumonia?”

My aunt has been thinking about this very question. She tells him, “According to Millie, that day she picked up Devorah, Chenia already looked peaked. Like she hadn’t slept for a while. I think she was exhausted, frankly.”

“From what? And where did she go? She had no purse, nothing, when she came into Emergency.”

“Isaac, let’s talk of something else. This is killing me.” My aunt suspects my mother ran off with the man from the shoe store and then he dropped her. She imagines my mother was too ashamed to return home. But where did she go? She can’t stand to think of her sister living in the street, like some bum on the Bowery.

There is lots of hugging the next morning when my sister and brother arrive at Aunt Ruchel’s. We go downstairs to the rec room, where the big television is, but they don’t turn it on. Cousin Sandy gives us all seltzers from the wet bar, and there is lots of talking, but no one talks to me.

Mimi says, “I can’t get over it.” She says it over and over.

Sheldon says, “You okay, Ma?” My mother nods. “Are you sure?”

Aunt Ruchel has warned them not to ask my mother questions. My mother does a lot of asking. Only in that way does she seem like her old self. Her hair is the way she used to wear it, with the pompadours on the sides, but she is different somehow. Not so peppy. She is surprised that Sheldon has a job. “Tell me,” she says, “what you do all day.”

While my brother talks about stocking shelves and fixing loose wheels on the carts, my mother appraises him as though he is a stranger. He’s not bad looking, she thinks. A kind face. His ears are still too big, his nose a little long. She hopes he finds a nice girl, with alleh meiles, all the virtues. Then my mother notices my sister pouting.

“My toothpick!” my mother says, because my sister is no longer pudgy. “Your nails are fixed up nice.”

“You’re giving me a compliment?” Mimi says. “I should faint.” My sister tells her she got the manicure at the beauty school in our neighborhood.

“How much this costs?”

“The old lady gave me some more money,” Mimi says. “I put most of it in the bank account I got through school. I have a passbook and everything.” Mimi doesn’t say she had to forge my mother’s signature.

“What old lady?” my mother asks.

“Mama! The one in the Bronx I helped with the cart.”

My mother smiles weakly. And then it comes to her. “With the long name, nu?” Everyone looks relieved—my sister, my brother, my aunt.

We go upstairs for cold tomato soup and hot biscuits, which Millie serves. Everyone agrees the lunch is delicious. My mother looks surprised when my sister brags that she makes dinner every night. “We have salami and eggs a lot,” Sheldon says. “I do the vacuuming, by the way. And I’m learning to iron.”

“You’ll make someone a good husband,” my aunt says.

“Pop, of course, does nothing,” Sheldon says. “Not even his wash.”

“Papa . . .” my mother says vaguely.

My sister and brother look at each other. “He’s back,” Mimi says. “He doesn’t trust us to be alone.”

“Back where?” my mother says.

Now my aunt is getting worried. “Back home,” she says.

“Did he go away?” my mother asks.

“Ma!” Sheldon says. “Don’t you remember? You threw him out.”

“I did?” She looks at her sister. “You’re kidding me, no?” There is a long pause. She shrugs. “I forgot. So where is he today?”

“At work, Ma! It’s Monday. I asked my boss for time off.”

“Monday,” she says vaguely. “In the hospital, you couldn’t tell one day from the next. Except Sunday. On Sunday a lot of flowers came . . .”

Right away Aunt Ruchel changes the subject. “Congress might pass a big bill on civil rights.”

“You can’t force people to accept everyone as equals,” Uncle Isaac says.

“I don’t think segregation is right,” my sister says.

“Why would someone want to go to a school where no one wants them?” Cousin Rhonda says.

“What if it’s the best school in the city?” my brother says.

Back and forth they argue. No one even notices me. Finally I interrupt to ask Sheldon, “What time are you going home?”

He laughs. “We haven’t had dessert. Why, you want to get rid of me?”

“You’re not turning into a little brat, I hope,” Mimi says.

“Brat!” I say. It’s a word I don’t know. I point to my sister. “What time are you going home? I’m staying here,” I tell them. “With Mama.”

My father divides his evenings between Trudy and Bertha. The nights he doesn’t see Trudy he tells her he spends in New Jersey with me. He tells Bertha the same thing. When Bertha asks my father how much the round-trip costs, he says, “Are you testing me? Why don’t you have a detective follow me around?”

While we stay at Aunt Ruchel’s, my mother doesn’t say much. “You’re restless?” my aunt asks. “Go for a walk.”

“Such a little sidewalk,” my mother says. “And all you see are trees.”

“Do you want to go home?”

“Not yet.” My mother thinks she has to make a decision first: whether to keep living like a zombie or whether to end it all, the whole megillah.

“How can we entertain you?” my aunt says. “Shall we see Blue Gardenia? I know you like Anne Baxter.”

Cousin Sandy is supposed to baby-sit me, but I tell my mother I want to go with them. “You have to sit quiet a long time,” she says, “no matter what.”

It isn’t hard to sit still. The movie is very fascinating. When the woman picks up the poker and hits the man with it, my mother sucks in her breath so noisily the whole theater can hear. After it’s over my aunt says, “That rat! He got what he deserved. Isn’t Richard Conte a doll?”

“Feh,” my mother says. “He needs oomph.”

“What’s oomph?” I ask. My mother smiles, the first real smile I’ve seen since she came from the hospital.

Before the second movie they take me to the bathroom. Then Aunt Ruchel buys me candy. “You spoil her,” my mother says.

“Chenia, after what she’s been through—”

“Don’t make me feel any more guilty than I am!” my mother says.

Right after the second movie begins, I fall asleep. In the morning I wake up with a sore throat, but I don’t tell my mother. I know she’ll blame it on my staying up late. My throat hurts more and more each day, but still I don’t say anything.

On Saturday Cousin Rhonda leaves with a little train case for a pajama party. Cousin Sandy gets my aunt to take us shopping for clothes for school.

“I want to go to school,” I say. My mother looks helplessly at her sister.

“She’s so bright,” my aunt says. “Maybe a private school would give a scholarship. Talk to Isaac when we come home.”

After ten minutes in the car my mother realizes I have a temperature. She asks my aunt to take us back. “You go on, go shopping. You must be sick to death of me anyhow.”

Aunt Ruchel makes a dismissive sound. “My sister is welcome to stay as long as she likes.”

Cousin Sandy blows my mother a kiss. “We like having you,” she says. “You too,” she says to me, “you little squirt.”

I ask her, but she can’t explain squirt to me.

My aunt drops us off at the house. “I’ll buy a something for Devorah anyhow.” She winks at me through the open car window.

My mother and I walk into the house, which is open. We don’t see anyone downstairs. As we go up the stairs, I hear a funny noise. Then my mother hears it, like a dog crying.

I see them first. The bedroom door is open. My Uncle Isaac is lying on top of Millie. Below his shirt his heinie is bare. Millie has nothing on her legs. Her skirt is bunched up around her waist. My mother sucks in her breath and clops her hand over my mouth. We go back down the stairs.

“Lay down on the couch,” she says softly. “I’ll get something.” She returns with half an aspirin and a glass of water. “Swallow, then I want you should listen,” she says. She looks very serious. I think she is going to tell me she’s going away again. I don’t take enough water with the aspirin. I can taste how bitter it is but I don’t care.

“Uncle Isaac and Millie are being very naughty,” my mother says, practically in a whisper. “They’re playing a game they’re not supposed to play. Farshtaist?”

“Which game?”

My mother cannot think so fast. “They’re trying to make a baby. Uncle Isaac is only supposed to make babies with your Aunt Ruchel. If Aunt Ruchel knew, oy, would she be upset! It would hurt her feelings. So you forget the whole thing. Hear? Forget we went upstairs.”

“How do you make babies?” I think she’s making the whole thing up.

My mother decides she’s gone so far, there’s no turning back. “The man’s pee pee goes in the woman’s and plants a seed which grows. That’s why when a woman is expecting a baby, the belly gets so big.” My mother shows with her hands how big. “You remember Mrs. Kleeberg from downstairs?” I shake my head no.

“That’s okay. Just promise me you keep your lips zipped.” She pretends she’s pulling a zipper over her mouth. She strokes my hair, damp with sweat. She is wondering what to do. Should she mention something to her brother-in-law? To Millie? Should she tell her sister? Always there are problems. Accidents, the social worker said.

As I turn fitfully on the cushions, my mother hums the song from the movie we saw. “Nat King Cole,” she says, “the way he sings, se tsegait zich in moyl.” It melts in your mouth.

Millie comes downstairs first, adjusting the belt on her shirtwaist. She looks shocked to see us.

“We didn’t want to go upstairs,” my mother says pointedly.

“I’m sorry,” Millie says. She looks at her bare feet.

“Can I bring her up to bed?” my mother says. “The kid is not feeling so hot. You have a thermometer?”

Millie carries me up the stairs. My mother follows. We meet Uncle Isaac at the top of the stairs. He has pants on, but his shirt is outside. My mother was going to snub him, even though she knows that would make her a hypocrite. For her sister’s sake, she thinks. But at the last second she remembers she’s supposed to talk to him about private school. “The little one is sick,” my mother says. “We came home early.”

“Please—” he starts to say.

“Don’t worry. What goes on, is none of my business.”

My father gets upset when he learns that my mother and I are not coming home right away. My Uncle Isaac delivers the news to him by telephone. “We thought, a week in a bungalow—just the two of them. Chenia’s still weak.”

“From what?” my father says.

“The pneumonia.” Incredible! my uncle thinks. Ruben’s just now getting around to asking questions about his wife?

“How did she get this?” my father asks, wondering if he can sue.

“No one knows,” Uncle Isaac says. “A cold goes into the lungs . . . She needs time. What’s one week, anyhow?”

“Devorah’s my daughter, not yours,” my father says. He worries that I’ll catch something serious from my mother.

“Look,” my uncle says, “if you want to take care of your daughter, we’ll send Chenia by herself.” He doesn’t tell my father he’s also arranging for me to attend a private school in Manhattan.

“Where are they going?”

“To Atlantic City. The seashore will do them both some good.”

The only thing I actually remember about Atlantic City is being with my mother in a Chinese restaurant. She orders chicken chop suey and lobster Cantonese.

When the food arrives, she slaps her own hand. “An aveyreh,” she says. “A sin. Jewish people aren’t supposed to eat lobster.”

“Why?”

“It’s not clean. Not healthy. But for me is out of this world.” She spears a chunk of lobster and reaches across the table.

I open my mouth. My teeth scrape the morsel off the fork. I chew it once, and then spit it out on my plate. “It’s like an eraser.”

“An eraser!” She looks at the ceiling. “What she doesn’t think of. Listen, it’s a grown-up taste, like cigarettes and liquor.”

“You like it. Why? Why do you like it?”

“Human nature,” she says. “Being attracted to what isn’t so good for you.”

I imagine we walk a lot on the boardwalk and watch the waves roll in. When we get tired, we take the covered choo-choo, as my mother calls the tram, all the way down to the end, then back again. My uncle is paying for everything. To have so much spending money makes my mother giddy. She buys cotton candy and fudge. She buys caramel apples and caramel corn. She buys taffy, but I can’t have any. She pays for us to get into the Steel Pier.

Our koch-alein is a block away, a tiny bungalow with two tiny bedrooms and a kitchen.

On our second day, the owner comes to see if everything is all right. He has burgundy hair. “Dyed,” my mother tells me after. There are palm trees on his shirt, which he leaves unbuttoned over his rust-colored pants.

“When’s hubby gonna join you?” he asks.

“I’m not sure,” she says.

The owner is picking weeds out of the grass when we come out of the house the following morning. “Beautiful day!” he says. My mother tries to smile. “Your hubby coming today?” he asks.

“I think so,” she says.

On the boardwalk, she refers to the man as a tsutcheppenish, a pest.

“Why?” I say.

“I can tell he likes me.” She thinks, An old lady with a kid, what does he want with her, except to take advantage?

“Aunt Ruchel likes you. Is she a pest?”

“He’s not supposed to like me. Because I’m married. He’s probably married too.”

“Married people aren’t supposed to like each other?” I ask.

“If one’s a man and one’s a woman.”

I think about this for a few minutes. “You don’t like Uncle Isaac?”

“He’s my shvoger. Brother-in-law. We’re related. Relatives are supposed to like each other. There’s like and there’s like. One is too much.”

I think some more. “I know. Like Uncle Isaac and Millie!”

“That’s it,” my mother says. “There’s a difference between friends and more-than-friends. That pest over there, he wants to be more than friends with your mother. Come, let’s go to where your Aunt Ruchel recommends us.”

From high up at the Steel Pier, we watch a lady get shot out of a cannon and land in a net. We watch swimmers and divers, girls in ruffled costumes riding horses—real horses. We watch seals and chimpanzees. We even see a movie there. In between we eat fried fish and French fries. We drink milk shakes.

When we get back to the bungalow in the early evening, the man is there. “I know a good seafood place. I’d like to invite you and your kid.”

“Thank you very much, but my husband, he’s due any minute.”

We eat corn flakes and bananas for dinner. “I should cook you a real something,” my mother says, “but, nu, I’m too tired.”

The rest of the week we eat Chinese. During the day we never go on the beach. “I want to go in the water,” I say. “Another time,” my mother tells me. “Now is not a good idea. And don’t ask me why.”

She goes to bed when I go to bed. She turns on the radio and falls asleep. I make up stories until I fall asleep too. I wake up first. I read my big book of fairy tales. Every day my mother gets up later and later. First seven, then eight, then nine o’clock. “I could sleep all day,” she says. “Oy, the more I sleep, the tireder I feel. I have two months of catching up. Too bad for you, your mother isn’t so much fun. You should have someone to play with.”

“Can Millie come here?” I ask.

My mother is too weary to tell me that Negroes aren’t welcome by the shore. “No, Millie has to work.”

“Where does she work?”

“You know. She works for your Aunt Ruchel. What she does for them, the cooking, the cleaning, the driving. They pay her for her time.”

“For her watch?”

“For her time, bubbeleh. They pay her by the hour. The more hours she works, the more money she gets.”

Sitting on the boardwalk, my mother teaches me addition, using Millie’s hypothetical wages of a dollar an hour. She says Millie has to work because her husband is a no-goodnik. “He drinks and he don’t work. If Millie didn’t work, she and her children wouldn’t have any place to live,” my mother says.

“They could live here,” I say, pointing to the beach.

“Got zol ophiten!” she says sharply, flinging up her hands. I guess she sees how she frightens me because she says gently, “To be a bum on the beach, is not such fun. At night—” My mother gets choked up. “At night, for a woman alone, is very dangerous.” She points to a mound of sand showing only a girl’s head sticking out. “There, like the coffins in the Cloisters, nu?”

We spend another whole day at the Steel Pier. This time we stay till after dark to see the show. There is a chorus line and singers, and then the comedians come onstage. I don’t understand what they talk about, but I like it when they spray each other with water or honk horns that are hidden in their clothes. I’ve never heard so many people laugh at one time. My seat shakes.

Mostly, though, my mother and I walk. “I figured it out,” she says one morning. “The difference. See all the couples holding hands? They’re honeymooners. They just got married. No one goes to Brighton Beach on their honeymoon. People come for the day, then they go home. Here is supposed to be a vacation.”

I know she wants to talk, so I don’t say anything. She goes on and on about the honeymooners. “This couple looks happy. That couple, something’s wrong—he’s walking ahead of her. Over there, he can’t keep his hands off her. I suppose he thinks he owns her. Look at them two, how they smile at each other . . .”

I see her wiping tears from her eyes. “Why are you crying, Mama?”

“The wind, it got in my eye.”

Sometimes we walk off the boardwalk. Once we find ourselves in a Negro neighborhood. “Like Harlem,” my mother says, “but not so interesting.” I find it fascinating. Lots of little girls are playing on the porches of houses or on scrubby grass. Some are playing with tires. “How did they get brown?” I ask.

“They’re born Negro,” my mother says. “The Chinese people in the restaurant, their skin is in between. Auburn hair you got, your sister more like me. Ver vaist? Who knows?”

We browse in different souvenir shops. She buys a bell for my sister and a glass car for my brother. GREETINGS FROM ATLANTIC CITY, they say. For herself she buys a salt and pepper shaker set. For my father she buys a box of taffy. I look at some dolls in a glass case, and when I turn back, I don’t see my mother. “Mama!” I yell. “Mama!” Everyone turns to look at me. Then my mother comes running up to me. “With lungs like that you could be an opera singer.” Before I can ask what an opera singer is, she says, “They’re big, fat women, and they sing very loud.”

“Like Millie,” I say. “She’s big fat and sings very loud. I’m not big fat.”

“My skinny opera singer,” she says. “Please, do me a little something. Don’t let go my hand.”

On our last night there, we go to a different Chinese restaurant, not the dumpy one we’re used to. This one has rose-colored tablecloths and black-lacquered chairs. Fresh flowers in shiny black vases. Soon after we’re seated, the waiter comes over and says a man wants to buy my mother a drink. He tips his head toward the bar. The owner of the bungalow is in a pink jacket and a flowery tie. He raises his glass as if toasting us. “That tsutcheppenish, I think he followed us,” my mother says. “Tell him no thank you,” she says to the waiter.

Soon the waiter brings drinks with purple parasols and cherries stuck on toothpicks. “This one’s a virgin,” the waiter says about mine. “No liquor,” he explains. My mother thinks he’s being vulgar. Before she lets me drink, she takes a sip, just to be sure. Her own drink sits on the table. She eats the maraschino cherry and gives me the parasol. “Wait here,” she says.

She goes to the bar where the man is. She’s thinking she doesn’t want to make him angry because he has the key and he could come into the bungalow whenever he wants. “Thank you, Mister,” she says. “You’re very kind.”

“Don’t mention it. There’s lots more where that came from.”

“I just got out of the hospital,” she says. “I’m not so well. For a month I didn’t see my daughter, so you please excuse me if I don’t have time to talk to you. She needs me.”

“She stays up all night?” He waves to me. I don’t wave back.

“I go to bed when she goes to bed.” She smiles ingratiatingly. “You look like a nice man,” she fibs. “You can find yourself a nice, unmarried woman.”

He grabs her wrist and whispers in her ear. “You know you can’t be without a man for so long . . .”

She pulls away. “If you touch me again I call the cops.”

After the almond cookies come, we sit there a long time. The man sits there too. My mother is afraid to go back to the bungalow. It has no telephone. Finally she decides what to do. We go to the phone booth in the restaurant. I squeeze in, against the brown, lumpy wall. She dials the Operator. It takes a while for the Operator to understand she wants to call her sister, collect.

My uncle tells my mother to go to the Claridge Hotel. “It’s right on the boardwalk. Stay there for another week, so long as you want,” he says, but my mother says one more day is enough.

At the entrance to the Claridge, we stop while my mother looks up at the sky. “Some coincidence,” she says. “A half-moon.” The second time in her whole life she is staying in a hotel, she thinks, and the moon has to be the same.

“How does the moon get different?” I ask.

“Moving around the world.” She walks around me. “Now you see me. All of me. Now you see a little bit. Now you don’t.” At least from him she learned a little something to tell her daughter, she thinks. “ ‘It’s a matter of perspective,’ ” she says, just the way he told her.

The clerk at the desk gives my mother a strange look when she says she has no luggage. The elevator operator says, “Something smells good,” about the carton of chop suey my mother is holding. Once we’re settled in the room, my mother turns out the lights and opens the window. We sit by the window for a long time, listening to the roar of the surf.

In the morning my mother is still by the window when I open my eyes. Her bed is still made up. Uncle Isaac and Aunt Ruchel come to get us. First we go to the bungalow for our things. The owner shows up just as we’re ready to leave. He’s wearing a maroon undershirt and shorts with palm trees. “Hope you enjoyed your stay,” he says to my mother.

“Some parts more than the others,” my mother says. “Last night, not at all. I think you owe us money since we didn’t sleep here.”

The owner starts to object, then he glances at my uncle. He takes out a ten-dollar bill from his pocket to give her. “That’s all I got.”

My mother takes it and gives it to my uncle. Quickly we all get in the car. Uncle Isaac drives us to Manhattan.

“Such a good rest I got!” my mother tells them. “How can I thank you?”

“You enjoyed Atlantic City?” my uncle asks.

“The ocean, it’s very nice.” To herself, she says, It ain’t Coney Island. Not by a long shot.

To my mother the city looks familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It looks grayer than she remembers, maybe because the sky is overcast. She can’t believe that she misses being in the hospital. There she was free. No one knew who she was or where she came from. There she had no worries.

As soon as we get home my mother spends all her time putting the apartment in order. Then comes the day she’s been dreading. She has to take me downtown to the Belevair School. My brother gives her directions. The subway part is easy, but we get lost on the Upper West Side. Finally a nice lady walks us there. Then we have trouble finding the subway back.

At the school, my mother doesn’t know how to fill out the papers, so she brings them home. My brother writes in all the answers he can. “How much does Pop make?” he asks. My mother shrugs. “We have to tell them,” Sheldon says. “Or she won’t get financial aid.”

My mother can hardly bear to think of it. “All I can do is ask your papa. If he says, ‘None of your business,’ we’ll make something up.”

She shows my father the form. “It’s a very good school.”

“How would you know?” he says.

“Isaac says. He’s no moyshe kapoyr.” A person who does everything wrong. “Besides, the little one wants to go.”

My father looks over the application. “It’s none of their business how much I make.”

“Okay, you tell her she’s not going.”

“I don’t like it when you boss me around. You throw me out of the house and now—”

“I was sick then,” my mother says. “I didn’t know what I was talking. Can you believe me?”

My father doesn’t know what to say. It’s easier if she throws him out. Otherwise he’ll have to prove adultery on her to get a divorce. He makes huffing sounds, sounds of aggravation.

“I have an idea,” my mother says. “You fill this out. We put it in an envelope, we seal it, and I swear to you on the little one’s head I won’t open it.”

My father nods grudgingly. The amount he writes in is what he made when Gershenfeld first hired him. He looks over the form to see if it’s complete. “Why did you sign it?” he says. “I’m the head of the household.”

“Please,” she says. “Go ahead and sign over me.”

The second time we go to the Belevair School, we bring the papers back and make an appointment for me. The third time, they ask my mother to wait while they give me the tests. My mother whispers in my ear, “Do whatever they tell you. They want to see if you’re smart enough to go to school.”

The tests make me forget I’m scared. I have to put blocks of wood into puzzles, which is easy. I have to count until the lady tells me to stop. I get to forty-two. Now I notice the big watch on her desk that has no strap. Sometimes she pushes down the little button on top, sometimes she pulls it up. Then she says, “I’m going to read some words to you. I want you to repeat them after me.”

“What’s repeat?” I ask. She smiles.

“When I say something, I want you to say the same thing. If I say ‘chocolate,’ what do you say?”

“Chocolate?”

“That’s right.” The lady gives me small sentences to repeat, and strings of numbers. The sentences and the strings get longer and longer. After I repeat them, she says, “Very good,” and then I say, “Very good,” and then she smiles. She shows me drawings of boxes stacked on top of each other and asks me questions about them. Sometimes I don’t know the answer. “Tell me,” I say. Now the lady laughs. A man with a red bow tie comes in, and she shows him the paper she’s been writing on.

“Do you know what a school is?” he says to me.

“Where they learn you things,” I say.

“Why do you want to go school?” he asks.

“To be a smart cookie,” I say.

Now the man is laughing with the woman.

When we are not going back and forth on the subway, my mother is cleaning up. “Such a mess!” she says. Everywhere she looks, she sees dirt. Under, over, behind, in front of. Where does all the dirt come from? she wonders. She spends her days with the Frigidaire or the oven or the radiators. She spends her days on her knees, on the stepladder, on windowsills washing the windows outside and in. She spends her days with sponges and brushes and rags, with a broom, a mop, a vacuum hose, with Ajax and borax and Clorox, looking for dirt as if panning for gold.

We don’t go anymore to the park. We don’t go anymore to the Cloisters. She sends the nexdooreker, the boy who’s our next-door neighbor, for whatever she needs from Dyckman Street.

For a few nights my father comes straight home from work. He teaches me to play checkers. He lets me win every game. On Saturday, while my mother washes the windows, he takes me to the playground in Fort Tryon Park. Mrs. Fleisch is there with Hannah. “Go play in the sandbox,” he orders.

The sandbox is very boring. I get Hannah to sit down, and then I throw sand on her legs until you can’t see them anymore. Soon the sand is up to her waist. I can see my father and Mrs. Fleisch from the sandbox. It looks like they’re having a fight. I tell Hannah I’ll be back. Anyway, she can’t move. I run up to my father. “Don’t fight!” I say.

“Where’s Hannah?” Mrs. Fleisch asks.

“In the sandbox. I buried her.”

Mrs. Fleisch gets hysterical. “What’ve you done?” she screams at me. She runs to the sandbox.

My father helps her dig Hannah out from the sand. “What’s the matter with you,” he yells at me, “putting all that sand on her?”

“I saw them on the beach. Mama and I saw them.”

“Atlantic City,” my father mutters. When Trudy’s eyes pop, he realizes his mistake.

“You were in Atlantic City?” Mrs. Fleisch asks me. She is looking daggers at my father.

“With Mama,” I say. “We stayed in a koch-alein, until the man gave us the drinks.”

“What?” my father says. “There was a man there?”

mother. "Who were you with in Atlantic City?” my father asks my

“No one,” she says.

“The one who bought you the drinks, that’s the man you went away with, isn’t it!”

“What are you talking? I was with the little one.”

“Not Atlantic City. When you left here, when you didn’t tell nobody where you were going.”

“Believe what you want,” she says, “I was by myself only.”

I answer the phone when it rings. The woman’s voice says, “Is your father home?”

“Papa!” I call out.

He takes the phone. “Hello?” He glances at the back of my mother’s head. She is wiping the mirror over the credenza.

“Ruben!” Bertha says. “When are you returning?”

“Give me a little time. My daughter, she needs me.”

“I need you too. I’m booking Labor Day weekend in the Catskills for us.”

“Sure, sure! By then, everything will be straightened out.” He fingers the cord and sees me staring at him. “I’m busy right now.”

“I’ll see you Tuesday, then? Shall I let Joe have the night off?”

My father hesitates. “All right,” he says, and hangs up. “Who’s that?” my mother asks.

“Gershenfeld.”

“And you told him you’re busy?”

“The accountant from Gershenfeld,” my father says. “A nudnik.”

My mother wipes the ceramic pitchers with the rag. So expensive and useless, she thinks. “Remember these?” she says. “From Yakob.”

“They look just like—”

“What?”

He was going to say, What Bertha has on her buffet. “Like what they have in this store downtown. The Going Out of Business store.”

My mother is still chewing on his conversation. Was he talking with Trudy Fleisch? “So, you had a fight with Trudy Fleisch,” she says.

My father makes a who-me? face.

“The little one told me. In the park, nu?”

“It’s all in her imagination.”

“Listen,” she says. “Ignorant I may be, but I know what I know. The kid has an eye like a camera.”

“She don’t always understand what she sees,” my father says. “We’re making jokes, she thinks we’re having a fight.”

“She’s certainly one for laughing,” my mother says. “That Trudy Fleisch.”

In bed that night my father reaches for my mother. All he wants is some comfort. He feels more and more like the taffy she brought back from Atlantic City, pulled and pulled, stretched into bits and pieces.

You’re his wife, my mother tells herself. She closes her eyes. You’re his wife. She tries to empty her mind. She wants to push him away. She imagines pushing so hard, he falls out of bed. She wants to scream.

After he climbs on top of her, she puts her arms around him and raises her knees.

“Can I take Devorah to Sofie’s place?” my sister asks.

“That’s an idea,” my mother says. “I can wash the kitchen walls.”

“What are we going to do there?” I say.

“She’s heard a lot about you. She wants to meet you,” Mimi says.

“I want to stay home with Mama.”

“Remember what I told you about trolleys? You can pull the cord to make the bell ring,” Mimi says.

“Okay,” I say.

On the trolley I make the bell ring. Then I want to stay on the trolley to do it again, but my sister won’t let me. “On the way back,” she says.

When a man answers Sofie’s door, my sister thinks something’s happened to the old woman. “Is she okay?” she blurts out.

“Oh yes,” the man says. He looks to her about thirty-five, too young and too thin to be wearing suspenders. Because of his short-sleeved dress shirt and his tie, she is sure he works in an office. “Benjamin Farber,” he says, extending his bony hand. “Call me Ben. You must be Mimi.” They shake hands, and he says, “And this one?”

“Devorah,” I say. “How do you spell Benjamin?”

We walk into the kitchen, and he spells his name for me. He asks me how to spell Devorah.

“Capital D,” I begin. I spell my first name and my last name.

The old woman at the far end of the table claps. She points to her sunken chest. “Sofie Vrebolovich,” she says to me. “Your sister can give you the spelling lesson later.”

“Devorah got a scholarship to the Belevair School,” Mimi says.

“Impressive,” Ben says. He speaks fussy, as if he’s English, my sister thinks. She wonders if he’s a relative Sofie hasn’t mentioned.

“If you’re wondering who I am,” Ben says, “I’m her attorney. Don’t be alarmed. Mrs. Vrebolovich wants to be sure her papers are in order, that’s all.”

“I told him to give you the chest,” Sofie says. “If anything should happen.” She pours from a teapot and gives each of us a glass of tea. “Careful,” she tells me. “It’s very hot, the way I like it.”

“You’re not sick, are you?” Mimi says to her.

“No, but I’ve lived long enough. My brother is in hospital now.”

“A serious heart attack,” Ben says. “We saw him yesterday.”

Sofie looks depressed, Mimi thinks. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I wish there was something I could do.”

“Give Benny your address,” she says.

My sister glances at me. This is different from what she had in mind. But I find it fascinating.

“You’re about to start high school?” Ben asks Mimi. “Planning to go to college?”

She shrugs. “I don’t think my father would give me the money.”

“If your grades are good, you can go to City College. It’s free.”

“Really? I wonder if you can study art there.”

“Benny,” the old woman says. “You’ll take care of it?”

“Absolutely, Mrs. Vrebolovich.”

My sister gives her an inquisitive look. The old woman waves her hand, as if to say, Don’t mind me.

“Vrebolovich,” I say. “Vrebolovich.”

“You’re pretty good with words,” Ben says. “Maybe you’ll be an attorney.”

“What’s that?”

“When people have arguments, I have to help them figure things out.”

“Everyone has arguments,” Mimi says.

“I don’t like it when people fight,” I say.

Looks pass between Ben and the old woman. “You’re right,” he says to me. “Other people get hurt.”

“That’s the truth!” Sofie says.

“Ain’t that the truth!” I say.

“Who taught you to say that?” Mimi asks.

“Millie. She learned me lots of things.” I try to blot out the image of her, with her dress all the way up, and Uncle Isaac’s heinie between her legs.

As Labor Day weekend approaches, my mother fastens on the thought that my father will want us to go to Coney Island for the fireworks. First she thinks she won’t go, she’ll just refuse. Then she thinks she’ll go, and if she sees him, she’ll give him a snub. Then she decides it’s impossible, she’ll have to pretend she’s sick.

The Wednesday before Labor Day, in the middle of dinner, my father says, “I have to go to Philadelphia, Friday, on business. I’ll be back Monday night.”

“Who’s doing business on a holiday weekend?” Sheldon asks.

“If you stay this fresh when you’re out of high school, you can go look for somewhere else to live,” my father says. “Next summer.”

“One minute please,” my mother says. “Now is this year. You’re going to Philadelphia?”

“Gershenfeld asked me to go for him. On account of the Sabbath. To see about our orders,” he adds awkwardly.

My mother is sure my father is making it up. Still, she doesn’t want to say anything. Not until after the weekend.

“I want to go with Papa,” I say.

“Devorah, your papa has to work,” he says to me. “I’ll bring you back a surprise, though. What?” he says to my mother. “You don’t believe me?”

“If you’re telling me the truth, I believe you,” she says. “A sof, a sof.” Let’s end the discussion.

I imagine that Trudy Fleisch misses my father, even knowing he is two-timing her with another woman. What does he see in that cow but her money? Trudy thinks. Big Bessie, she calls Bertha, in her mind.

At night she lies awake till the wee hours, till her husband comes home from the printing plant. Lately she’s been reaching out to him, to reassure herself she’s still desirable. “What has you so hot?” Barney says in her ear.

Not hearing from my father, Trudy dials Bertha at all hours. The phone just rings and rings. How can she find out what’s going on? Trudy wonders. She tries to see Mrs. Landau at home, but the doorman won’t let her in. She tries to find my mother in the park, but my mother doesn’t go there anymore.

Desperate, Trudy gives her a call. “Chenia, Hannah is throwing up and I can’t reach the doctor. Can you recommend someone?”

My mother asks about Hannah’s symptoms. Then she says, “Take her to the Jewish Memorial. Right away.”

“All right. I hope you and Ruben are having a nice weekend.”

The remark strikes my mother as peculiar. “Ruben’s in Philadelphia, on business,” she says.

“Oh, is that right? For how long?”

“Till Monday night. But why are we yakking when your kid needs a doctor?” No one is that meshugge, my mother says to herself.

“You’re right,” Trudy says. “Thanks much.”

My mother hangs up the phone. I look at her expectantly. “If Trudy’s kid is sick,” she says, “your papa is in China.”

The resort is far grander and larger than anything my father has imagined. There are tennis courts and handball courts, outdoor and indoor swimming pools, an archery range, a riding range, a lake for canoeing or even water-skiing. He has a room of his own because Bertha says they have to keep up appearances. The room is next door to hers.

The dining hall is immense. For appearance’s sake, they sit with six strangers, rather than at a table for two. Dinner is a six-course affair. On the first night, when Bertha doesn’t like the entrees on the menu, she asks the waiter to ask the chef to poach some fish. My father is astounded when the waiter says, “Certainly, madam.” After dinner they watch the entertainment in a hall with at least five hundred people. My father is amazed to see Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, live, right before his eyes.

Coming out of the show, Bertha waves to someone. “A business acquaintance,” she says. My father keeps his left hand in his pocket. He has tried to remove his wedding band, but his finger is too swollen.

Later, when no one is in the hallway, my father slips into Bertha’s room and spends the night. The next morning, Bertha insists on having breakfast in bed, which embarrasses him. “What do you care what the help thinks?” she says. She is thinking, Oh Ruben, I have so much to teach you . . .

The weather is brisk for autumn, so during the day they swim in the huge indoor pool, which is heated. Bertha puts on her rubber bathing cap and dives right in. She swims several laps before tiring. My father cannot keep up with her. “We’ll have to get you some Geritol,” she teases. Annoyed, my father wants to tell her that in a bathing suit she looks less like a woman and more like a German tank. After swimming, Bertha suggests they get a rubdown. It’s my father’s first. He has a new definition of heaven on earth.

All weekend Bertha says nothing about my father leaving my mother. But in the taxi from the Port Authority back to her place, she says, “When do you think the arrangements will be final?”

“Arrangements?”

“The divorce.”

“I don’t know. I have to see a lawyer.”

“If you don’t have a lawyer, I’ll ask mine for a referral.” My father hates it when she nudzhes him. To change the subject, he asks, “Why are we going up Eighth Avenue?”

“It’s faster. So you’ve discussed it with Chenia, then?”

“Not yet,” my father says.

“Ruben! What are you waiting for?”

He doesn’t know, really. He says, “This week the children go back to school. I’ll talk to her.”

“Very good.” She takes his hand between both of hers.

“Your hands are so warm,” he says. “Do you have a fever?”

“For you,” she says. “I’m glad you let your mustache grow in.”

At the entrance to her building, Bertha tells my father the doorman will see her up. She kisses him on the cheek. “Night night,” she says. As soon as my father departs, the doorman says, “Mrs. Landau, a woman was here to see you at seven. She came back at eight. She didn’t leave her name.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes, Mrs. Landau. She asked if I knew when you would be back. I told her I wasn’t at liberty to discuss anyone’s plans.”

“Thank you, Patrick. What did she look like?”

“A little taller than you, slender, brownish hair, I think. Shoulder-length.”

“A long face?” Bertha asks.

“Yes, a very long face.”

As they ride up in the elevator she reaches into her alligator bag and hands him five dollars. “I appreciate it,” she says.

Going up the stairs with his suitcase, my father revels in the memory of his luxurious weekend. He wonders how much money Bertha actually has. She never worries about what things cost. The tips she leaves! He decides he’ll wait awhile before he tells her not to overdo it.

As soon as he opens the apartment door he sees the kitchen light is on. He wishes my mother were already in bed. He wants to keep basking in the glow. “You’re still up?” he says. “It’s after eleven.”

“Tomorrow is the kid’s first day of school. I couldn’t sleep.” He looks farmatert, she thinks. Weary. “So tell me, how was Philadelphia?”

“What should I know? We stayed in the hotel for meetings.”

“On Labor Day too?”

“Listen, I’ve had enough of the third degree—” Just then the telephone rings. My mother puts her hand over her breast. Bad news, she thinks, as my father goes to the hallway.

“Ruben, dear,” Bertha says. “I just had to hear your voice.”

After she hangs up, he says into the receiver, “You have the wrong number,” and puts the phone down. Go on, he thinks. Tell her. As he walks into the kitchen, my mother turns out the light. “Time for bed,” she says.

In bed my mother turns on one side and then the other. My father lies still, but he isn’t snoring. “What’s keeping you awake?” she says. “Your weekend was too exciting, nu?”

“Chenia, I want a divorce.”

“No,” she says.

“What, no?”

“I’m not giving you a divorce.”

“I don’t love you anymore,” he tells her.

“I know. But you have a family to support.”

“I’ll support you. But I want a divorce.”

“No.”

“I can make it worth your while—if you make it easy for me.”

“Forget it,” she says.

“Chenia—”

“Forget it.”

My mother falls asleep first. My father is awake till dawn, stewing.

At first I find school very boring. We’re supposed to play a lot. Or stick Tinkertoys into each other. I’d rather read. We’re also supposed to nap. I find it very hard to lie still and pretend to be asleep. And I get scolded when the teacher is teaching the alphabet, because I’m doodling. “I already know it,” I tell her. “Well, in that case,” she says, “maybe you’d like to recite it.” After I recite the alphabet, she says, “Maybe there’s something you don’t know, so you better listen.”

When she isn’t teaching letters and numbers, I learn the names of different shapes: triangle, rectangle, square. Or different instruments. Flute is my favorite. I learn how flowers grow from seeds and how butterflies come from caterpillars. One day when the headmaster is in the room, I forget he’s there and I look out the window instead of at the teacher. So much is happening on the street, with people and dogs and bicycles. Soon I am taken to the headmaster’s office. He talks to me about why I don’t pay attention.

“I can read already,” I tell him.

“Is that so?” he says. He takes a book from the shelf. It’s the one Cousin Sandy gave me, with all the fairy tales. “Read something from this page,” he says.

It’s not one of the hard pages. I read, “A long time ago there were a King and Queen who said every day: Ah, if only we had a child!”

“Indeed!” the headmaster says. “We’ll have to see about a more advanced class for you.” He asks a woman to take me back to my class.

“What’s ‘more advanced’ mean?” I ask her.

On the day after Labor Day, while Barney is still asleep, Trudy reaches Bertha by phone. Softly, she says, “I want to tell you something I think will interest you very much.”

“About Ruben?” Bertha guesses. “It’s a little late. Ruben is divorcing Chenia to marry me. Got it?”

“To marry you? Hah!” Trudy says with all the aplomb she can muster. Brazen bitch, she thinks.

“It’s a fait accompli. You shouldn’t trouble yourself anymore.”

“It’s no trouble when your, uh, fiancé comes here to sleep with me,” Trudy says. “He’ll be over tonight, as usual. At eight. In half an hour, we’re usually in bed.” Trudy thinks she hears Bertha suck in her breath.

“Some ploy! I don’t believe it for a minute,” Bertha says.

“Well, if you get yourself up here tonight at eight-thirty, I can prove it. I’ll leave the door open for you. Just walk right in.”

There is a long silence before Bertha hangs up.

At seven that night, Trudy finishes feeding Hannah a huge bowl of oatmeal. In the oatmeal is a tiny bit of a sleeping pill, crushed to powder. Just after Trudy gets her into bed, my father arrives with cartons of Chinese takeout. “Aren’t you going to lock the door?” he asks.

“Of course.” She locks the door, waits for him to step out of the hallway, and quietly unlocks it. As soon as they’re done eating, she’s all over him. “I’ve missed you. Did you miss me?”

“You have no idea how much.” His hands squeeze her slender waist.

At eight twenty-five they are lying naked on her bed. “Let me do you,” she says to him. She strains to hear if there is someone at the door.

At eight-thirty, a casually dressed man emerges from the elevator, down the hall from Trudy’s apartment. Hanging from a leather strap over his shoulder is a flash camera. Slowly he walks down the hall, looking at the apartment numbers. When he finds the Fleisches’, he puts his head against the door to listen. Hearing nothing, he turns the doorknob. Carefully. The door opens.

My father receives a telegram at work: ALL MEETINGS OFF STOP DONT TRY TO CONTACT ME STOP THIS IS THE END STOP BERTHA LANDAU.

Telegram in hand, my father storms down to Mr. Gershenfeld’s office. “I have an emergency,” he says. “May I leave early?”

“Of course,” Mr. Gershenfeld says. “Something happened?”

“My brother. A heart attack.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Gershenfeld says, before he remembers. “I thought your brother lived in the city.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m curious. Why would he send you a telegram here?”

“They were in the Catskills,” my father says. “You’ll excuse me, I have to hurry.”

Outside, my father thinks of taking a taxi to Bertha’s but decides it costs too much. Two buses and an hour later, he is asking the doorman if Mrs. Landau is in. “Do you have an appointment?” the doorman asks.

“Yes,” my father lies.

“And your name?”

“Ruben Arnow.”

The doorman consults his list. “I’m sorry, Mr. Arnow, your name is not down here.”

“She forgot. Would you ring her?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

“Bastard!” my father says.

In a fury, he storms down Fifth Avenue. How could it happen, his whole future, gone! Like that! In the wink of an eye! There is no doubt in his mind that my mother is responsible. Walking so fast, he doesn’t see the truck that almost runs into him.

What did Chenia tell Bertha? he wants to know. That she won’t give him a divorce? He could kill her, he thinks. Just strangle her.

He storms all the way down to Grand Central Station. Then he remembers the Western Union office there. At the counter he practices writing out his message to Bertha and finally decides on: I LOVE YOU STOP WHATS WRONG STOP PLEASE CALL ME STOP I WANT TO SEE YOU STOP RUBEN.

The Western Union clerk counts the words. “Eight over,” he says. “That’ll cost you—”

“Wait,” my father says. He pens an abbreviated version: I LOVE YOU STOP WHATS WRONG STOP PLEASE CALL STOP RUBEN. Then he takes two subways home.

screams at my mother. She is on her knees, relining the "How dare you! How dare you interfere!” my father shelf of a kitchen cabinet. He leans over her. It’s all he can do not to strike her.

“What are you talking about?” my mother says, moving sideways, out from under his angry face.

“You told her you wouldn’t give me a divorce, didn’t you! Didn’t you!”

“Who?” she says. “I didn’t talk to no one.”

Ever since she returned from New Jersey, my mother has managed to stay busy. I imagine being busy has kept her from thinking too much. Being busy has kept her alive. After taking me to school, my mother feels desolate. There is no reason to go on living, she believes, when you’re so alone.

After my mother leaves me off, she stays downtown because there isn’t time enough to go home and back again. She walks and walks to make the hours go by, and then she returns to the school to pick me up.

The kids spill out of the door, down the steps. Waiting with her are lots of Negro women in black uniforms, maids of rich people who can afford to send their children to private school without scholarships. The children wear beautiful clothes. Plaid wool skirts with matching hats. Corduroy jumpers. The boys have caps.

Today, when she sees me, my mother doesn’t rush toward me. She watches. My blouse is half out of my skirt. My hair is wild; I’ve lost a barrette. I don’t see her. I stand at the top of the stairs and look around, unsure of where to go.

One more year, my mother says to herself. If things aren’t better by then, she’ll kill herself. This time, she’ll jump off a roof. And if she can’t jump off a roof, she’ll eat poison.

For the first two weeks of school, the sky is very blue. It’s sunny, not cold. Hardly any wind. My mother walks and walks. Everyone seems to be in a hurry. Rushing to work. Rushing to shop. So useless, she thinks. What does it all matter? She passes a blind man selling pencils. She puts a coin in his pewter cup. She passes a Chinese laundry which is just below the sidewalk. She can see a slender little man pressing the shirts. How hard he works! And for what? For such a hard life. She thinks of her sister, the one who died long ago. How lucky she was! To get out of the whole thing.

Then the weather turns wet and cold. The hours drag. One night she consults my sister. “Where can I go to pass the time?” she asks. She doesn’t really expect an answer.

“The museum,” Mimi says. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s just on the other side of the park. You can take a crosstown.”

The first time my mother sees the outside of the Metropolitan Museum, she thinks it’s large, all right, but not so interesting as the Cloisters. Skeptically she goes through the revolving door and into the Great Hall. She is a little ruffled by all the people. Such a busy place! But the Hall is grand! In the middle of the marble floor, she tilts her head back and gapes at the domes and circular skylights way up high.

Slowly she moves through some of the first-floor galleries. She falls in love with one Greek sculpture after another. She reads the placards but has no idea what many of the words mean. What is Dancing Maenad or Sleeping Eros? She has so many questions. For a fleeting instant she wishes she could ask Harry.

The two hours go like a minute. As she passes the circular desk in the Great Hall, she sees people taking brochures without paying. Shyly, she collects a few. On the crosstown bus, she looks them over. And then the size of the place begins to dawn. Even though she has never read a map in her whole life, she figures out that what she saw was the tiniest little corner.

She arrives at the school with twenty minutes to spare. Now she notices a couple of cars with chauffeurs who are also waiting. A gray-haired woman leaning against the wrought-iron railing strikes up a conversation with her. “You have a grandchild here, too?” she says.

“A daughter,” my mother answers.

“Sometimes the late ones are not so gifted,” the woman says. “You were lucky.”

“Kineahora,” my mother answers. It just falls out. “ ‘No Evil Eye!’ is just a superstition, like ‘Knock on wood,’ ” she tries to explain, but it’s too complicated.

“How quaint!” the woman says. After that, she is quiet.

Now my mother is kicking herself. It doesn’t matter what the woman thinks of her, but she shouldn’t get the wrong impression of her daughter. Like that movie Stella Dallas, so long ago, before she was engaged, even. That Barbara Stanwyck, how she could break your heart! My mother feels sick in her stomach, but as soon as she sees me coming down the steps, my reddish-brown hair flying, my jacket buttoned crooked, the white collar of my dress bunched up against my neck, her heart lifts.

Cut off from Bertha, my father turns to Trudy, but ever since Barney changed his schedule at work, Trudy hasn’t been able to see him. When she suggests they meet by the river one Sunday morning, my father gets excited. Then she says she’s bringing Hannah and he should bring his kid along, too. He feels too defeated to argue.

There’s nothing really there, by the river, but I find it an interesting place. First of all, there’s the Hudson River, where Henry Hudson sailed in his ship called the Half Moon. My brother says they think he landed at Spuyten Duyvil, which is the tip of Manhattan. My sister calls it Spite the Devil. In school they tell us about the Indians and how they traded twenty-four dollars of wampum beads for all of Manhattan. Then the Dutch people came to live here. My teacher doesn’t know where the Dutch people went, though. Or the Indians. I get a little aggravated because no one ever tells you the whole story.

Waiting for Trudy, my father takes me for a walk between the road and the river, beside a rocky bank where men and boys fish. Today there’s a girl fishing, too. My father peers at her over the top of his glasses and calls her a tomboy. He can’t explain what the tom part means. “It’s just a word,” he says. “Better you should learn to tell time.” He shows me his wrist-watch.

“Nine to ten,” I say.

“It’s a quarter to, or you can say, it’s fifteen to ten.”

“How can a quarter be fifteen?” I ask.

“It just is,” he says.

I think there’s also a torture called drawn and quarter. In the torture, quarter means “four.” All the time now I get more and more confused.

On the other side of the grass, where the wildflowers grow, a train comes by, tooting its horn. There are so many cars we get tired of counting. We wave and wave. Walking by the river, we hold hands. His is warm, and he squeezes mine from time to time, but never so that it hurts.

Soon we see Mrs. Fleisch with Hannah. Mrs. Fleisch has her big smile on. I think it’s too big because she wants us to like her. “Go play,” she says to Hannah right away. I would rather hang around there, but my father becomes a copycat and says, “Go play.”

Hannah and I run around the grass. I tell her I’m the cow-girl, like Dale Evans, and she’s the squaw. I don’t think she understands. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I let her shoot me dead with an arrow.

Then I blow the gray fuzzy stuff off the dandelions. Taking their clothes off makes me feel peculiar, but I like doing it. Each time I blow, I make a wish.

My father and Trudy sit on a bench facing the river and the Palisades of New Jersey. “What a long face!” I imagine Trudy says to him. “Problems with all your women?” She wants to tell him how, lying on top of him, she could hardly believe her eyes when she looked up. There was the man pointing the camera at them. Covering my father’s forehead with noisy kisses, she used one hand to shield his eyes from the flash. She reached down for him with the other. That he never knew what was happening is some miracle. At the least, a credit to her powers.

Seeing Trudy’s knowing smile now, my father realizes that she is to blame for his change of fortune. “What did you tell Bertha?” he demands. “Tell me, damn you!”

“Oh, look at you,” Trudy says. “That’s why I wanted to meet here. Here you wouldn’t dare hurt me. I told that cow you could marry her for all I care, but I won’t give you up.”

My father stares, incredulous. A million dollars he’s probably lost. He looks away. Little boats are bobbing on the dark blue waves. He feels as if a load of cement is pulling him down under the water.

“What is it? You’re thinking about all the money you lost?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” A million dollars. He feels sick. He wants to push her over the rocks and into the river—a fleeting thought that shocks him.

“Ruben, don’t be angry. I did it because I love you.”

She cajoles and flatters him until he gets the sense that she really cares. He tries to resign himself. At least he still has Trudy. And he won’t give up on Bertha Landau. Not yet.

Just as we’re getting ready to go home, Trudy says, “Don’t look now! There’s Barney.” A man with a crew cut is walking pretty fast toward us.

My father steels himself. He is ready to punch Barney out if he has to, but Barney says “Howdy” and pats my father where his big arm muscle is. He asks Hannah, “What did you do this morning?”

“We played cowboys,” she says.

“Cowgirls and Indians,” I say.

Barney walks along with us, between my father and Trudy.

“You came all the way to the river to see us?” Trudy asks him.

“I missed you.” Then Barney grabs her, leans her way back, and kisses her. Trudy starts to sputter, then she gives in to it. Let Ruben see, she thinks. The competition will do him good.

My sister meets my mother and me at the door when we come from downtown. Her eyes are red, and her face is swollen.

“What?” my mother says, all alarmed. Her thoughts fly in all directions.

“Sofie. She had a stroke last night and died in her bed.” My sister shakes with sobs. After my mother pours her a glass of milk she calms down.

“The best way,” my mother says. “To go like that.”

“Like what?” I say. “Where’s she going?”

“Shut up!” my sister says.

“To die quickly,” my mother says. “Without pain.”

I think about the rabbit in our class. I wonder if they gave Sofie an injection.

“But she was all alone,” Mimi says. “I wish I could have been there. To say good-bye, at least.”

“She was an old woman, nu? I know you helped her a lot.” I imagine my mother can’t help feeling a twinge of envy. “Drink your milk.”

My sister gets angry. “I hardly did anything. I wish I’d done a whole lot more.” She runs into the bedroom and slams the door. She stays in there and doesn’t come out for dinner. My mother finishes the glass of milk.

Later I eavesdrop as my sister talks to her friend Suzanne. “She was so alone. I didn’t know her brother died. If I knew, I would’ve gone to see her right away. I could kick myself.”

When it’s time for me to go to bed, I open the door. She sits up on her bed. Her eyes bulge like a frog’s. “I was so selfish,” she says. She pulls at her hair. “I hate myself,” she says. She keeps pulling her hair.

“Stop it!” I say. “Stop hurting yourself.”

“school tells my mother. “On a trial basis. If it doesn’t "The first four-year-old in first grade!” the head of the work out, she can go to kindergarten and still be a year ahead. Is that all right with you, Mrs. Arnow?”

“The older kids, they won’t take advantage?” my mother says.

“We’ll keep close tabs on the situation,” he assures her. He explains about uniforms and where she can go to buy them.

“Write it down for me,” she says.

“It’s very simple,” he tells her, but when she insists, he gives in. Maybe the father has the brains, he thinks.

The uniforms cost twice as much as my mother expects. More than dresses she buys for herself. She hates to do it, but she calls up her sister to ask for a loan. “Darling,” my Aunt Ruchel says, “I’m thrilled to pieces at the news.”

My mother feels guilty about all the money she spends on carfare and the cups of coffee she drinks while waiting for me. She cuts down on groceries. She hardly ever buys meat anymore. Her daughter needs clothes. Her son needs shoes. Although they’ve hardly spoken since that day my father came home early, accusing her of something, who knows what? she decides she has to talk to him about what it costs to send me to school.

“Why does Devorah have to go downtown?” my father asks.

“I’m surprised you say such a thing.”

“All schools are the same. Reading, writing, arithmetic.”

“You talked lately to your daughter?” my mother says. “What she’s learning, she wouldn’t get in just any school. What’s the matter with you? You think for an ordinary kid I would shlep her back and forth? I’m worn out.”

“No one’s forcing you.”

She shakes her head. “Why, because you didn’t have much education, you want to keep her so little?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Already she knows more than we knew at ten years old, even twelve,” my mother says passionately. “Farshtaist?”

“How much school does she need? She’ll grow up, she’ll get married, she’ll have babies . . .”

“Zei nit kein vyzosah!” Don’t be such a damn fool! “To wash and iron clothes like me, she don’t need brains. Ask Gershenfeld, Should the kid go to private school? If he says no, it’s no.” My mother is only bluffing. She has decided that no matter what, if she has to take the clothes off everyone’s back, I’m going to be educated. She wants me to be at least as smart as, smarter even than, Harry.

My father sulks. He slams doors and drawers.

She gets an idea. Every night now, she serves noodles for dinner. On the third night, my father blows up. “Noodles again?”

“Noodles from now on,” she answers. “Tsu gezunt!” To your health!

A few days later she finds more money in her household allowance. After that, things are much easier. She can walk around the museum without a head full of worry.

Though my days are much longer now, my mother doesn’t mind. She has the routine down. After she drops me off, she takes the crosstown bus. On Madison Avenue, she sits at the counter in a coffee shop until the museum opens.

She starts to attack the museum systematically, room by room. She keeps a little notebook, and after she gets tired of walking, she sits on a bench in one of the halls and writes down what she liked especially. She brings along a sandwich for lunch and eats it in the cafeteria with a glass of water. Then she takes the crosstown bus back to the school to pick me up.

She doesn’t know how it happens, but one morning she wakes up and thinks only about what she is going to see at the museum that day. Gone are the questions: Why should she get up? Why should she go on? Gone are the thoughts of killing herself, and how to do it. Rain is beating on the windows, but she doesn’t care. She hurries to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

By the entrance to the river, my father buys me peanuts in the shell from a little refreshment stand built into the cliff below Inwood Hill Park. I enjoy crunching the shells with my teeth and popping out the peanuts. My father says it’s too much work.

We’re there at ten, but by ten-thirty Mrs. Fleisch hasn’t shown up. I tell my father what I learned about Henry Hudson looking for a way to get to the Orient, but my father isn’t very interested. He’s left his glasses at home, so he squints at his watch and keeps asking if I see Mrs. Fleisch.

The sixth time he asks me, I say, “Over there.”

He gets all excited, happy-excited, until I say, “There’s Mr. Fleisch.”

“What? Are you sure?”

I point across the street. Mr. Fleisch is coming through the shadow of the arch that covers the whole street. The top of his head looks like a clothes brush. My father grabs my hand so hard, I feel the ring on his finger pressing into me. We go up into the park, which is like a forest. I want to ask why he’s running away from Mr. Fleisch. Something tells me not to.

On the way home we stop at the Five and Ten. My father asks if I want to get a game. “Like what?” I ask, because games can cost a little money or a lot of money. He says, “Pick out whichever one you want.” I really want the doctor’s kit that my sister’s friend Suzanne told me about, but that’s not exactly a game. Finally I decide on Clue.

My father doesn’t ask me to keep anything a secret. But somehow I know he doesn’t want me to tell my mother about Mr. Fleisch showing up instead of Mrs. Fleisch. I don’t know how I know.

At first my mother doesn’t say anything about my new game. But after my father goes out, she says, “I didn’t know it was Hanukkah already.” I shrug. I’ve never fibbed to my mother. She says, “Okay, enjoy your secret.” It’s like a curse, the way she says it. All day I hear her voice in my head. Okay, enjoy your secret. I put Clue at the bottom of the bookcase, and I don’t open it. I give it to Laura, my new friend from school, for her birthday. Then finally I get to play the game.

My mother, brother, sister, and I are all home when the men come with Sofie’s marble-topped chest. “It goes very nice there,” my mother says, after my brother takes away the wrought-iron stand in the hallway. “Such a fancy place for a telephone.” She pulls at the handles of one of the drawers. “It’s locked?”

“I have the key,” Mimi says. “I’ll go get it.” I trail after her and back.

“She locked away her important papers?” my mother says.

“I don’t know. She never told me what was in it.” Mimi turns the large brass key in the lock. She slides the drawer open. There are piles of used envelopes with canceled stamps. My sister thinks it’ll make interesting reading. Idly she takes one envelope out. The flap opens. “Good God!” she says.

“There’s money in there,” Sheldon says.

“No kidding!” Mimi answers.

Soon we are all digging into the drawer and taking out envelopes. Each one is crammed full of bills. An inch thick. It’s the same with the second drawer. In the third drawer there is also a box of old coins, but the rest is crammed with envelopes full of fifty- or hundred-dollar bills.

My brother starts to calculate. “Ma,” he says. “I think we’re rich.”

“The money, it belongs to your sister,” my mother says.

“I think Sofie wanted all of us to have it,” Mimi says.

My mother stares for a moment, her eyes clouding. “A leben ahf dein kop!” she says to her. “A blessing on your head. What I did to deserve such a daughter, I haven’t the faintest idea!”

At midnight my mother sits at the kitchen table. She sips a cup of cocoa and remembers the lifeguard who pulled her out of the water. Such a young kid! She can still see the freckles on his face. She wishes she had his name and address so she could thank him. She has to push away the thoughts of that terrible time . . . She starts writing a note to the social worker. She will ask my brother to help her with the English.

She hears my father on the stairs. He unlocks the door and walks in. He’s dapper in a brown suit and rust-colored tie. There’s only the tiniest patch of gray hair on one side of his head. My mother realizes she hasn’t noticed for a long time how handsome he is.

“You’re up?” he says. “Can’t sleep?”

“I waited up,” she says. “I have such good news for you. I want a divorce.”