On Rosh Hashanah morning, a crisp fall day, colorful leaves gather at the feet of the Projects’ trees, and Leo, unseasonably dressed in a mid-thigh bathing suit and flip flops, is in a wondrously jolly and magnanimous mood, due partially to the weather, and partially to the memory of his embrace with Cookie Coke, replete with its ecstasy and guilt. Cookie hasn’t been back to the store since, nor has he run into her in the Projects, and, despite a strong desire to see her, he’s relieved. Better to remove the temptation than to give in to desire. He assumes she’s come to the same decision. Anyone can make a mistake, can slip up once.
His flip flops slap the floor noisily as he pads along the narrow foyer towards his daughters’ bedroom, and opens their door without knocking. In the doorway, voice singsong, he calls out, “Up and at ’em, both of you. We’re going to the beach. Put your suits on.”
Leo pats his slight paunch, imagining himself an atheist Santa Claus spreading cheer on the Jewish holiday, an image he relishes for its absurdity, going so far as to cry, “Ho Ho Ho! Comrades, it’s off to the beach we go!” Thoughts of the beach never fail to bring out this boyish, irreverent side in him—his best childhood memories revolve around sun and sand. Arnold and Myrtle Rosen, both strong, serious swimmers, took Leo and his sisters to Coney Island every weekend, all summer long, into the early fall. Just the sight of the ocean calmed his mother and father, who spoke in sensible, soothing voices rather than their usual manic, raw shouts. “Come here, Leo-kin,” his mother called gently, using her rarely offered pet name for him, holding out her jiggling, loose arms, standing at the water’s edge in her dark-skirted bathing suit. His forbidding, bald-domed father, typically sour and resentful of the demands of family life, playfully splashed water at him, smiling and laughing good-naturedly when Leo splashed back.
Emma, sitting up in bed in her striped pajamas, rubs her crusty eyes, pleased by her father’s upbeat mood, but surprised that he wants to go to the beach today. She knows enough about the Jewish High Holy Days to know that this is definitely not a day for beachgoing. This will mean more trouble for the Rosens, if God is spying on them from Heaven, but of course there is no-God, so there’s nothing to worry about.
If only she could return to the Virgin Mary, to ask her opinion about the options available to good Jews … beach-going or not … but she cannot return. She sighs with the enormity of the knowledge that Mary is forever off limits to her, mutters oy vey under her breath, and is startled by how much she sounds like Grandma Thelma. Although these days it’s not Grandma’s Thelma’s Yiddishisms Emma remembers most vividly, but her terrible hands, each missing two fingers, with crooked stumps where fingers once were. Grandma Thelma had an illness that, according to Annette, had forced the doctors “back in the old country,” to cut off four of Grandma Thelma’s fingers. “So you see,” her mother says, “Grandma is an example of the curse our family carries, far and near, the Baums and Rosens, both.”
“Cursed by whom?” Emma once asked her mother. “We don’t believe in God, right? So who can curse us?”
Annette had sighed, looked into the distance and said, “Who do you think?” Which explained absolutely nothing.
Now, in the doorway, Leo taps his foot loudly, his good mood clearly evaporating, and this concerns Emma, who’s still in bed, blanket up to her chin, unable to stop thinking about Grandma Thelma, worrying about the curse. If Thelma had been right, if there is a God, then Grandma Thelma herself must have done something so horrible that God had punished her by giving her that dreadful disease. Had she been, despite her synagogue-attendance and candle lighting, a bad Jew? Will Emma’s fingers one day be chopped off and replaced by gnarled stumps? Will she spend the rest of her life paying for the sin of not believing in Him, the sin passed down to her by her parents?
Or maybe, Emma thinks, Grandma Thelma was punished by God because He disapproves of Socialists, which is what Grandma Thelma once was, before she became so deeply and devoutly religious. If that’s true, then won’t her mother, who still votes Socialist, also be punished in some terrible way? And what about her father, who was once a proud member of a young Communist group, like the ones that supposedly meet in the Coops, whom she’d been so eager to see on the day of her ill-fated walk with Shelley? What will God do to her father? Surely, God disapproves of Leo’s commitment to the idea that even violence is “justified as the means to an end.” Leo’s hands and feet might be chopped off in their entirety.
“Get a move on,” Leo says, hovering impatiently over her bed in his cotton bathing suit. She stares at his hairy, strong chest, and feels overwhelmed, nauseated by his power over her. Not fair, she wants to scream into his face.
Leo is beginning to glower, and now there’s no mirth, no musical playfulness, in his voice. Why aren’t his daughters grateful for the pleasure he’s offering them? They should be squealing with almost kittenish joy, the way he and his sisters did on beach-going days.
He leaves, slamming the door emphatically behind him, and Emma notices that May, on the other side of the room, is out of bed and stepping into a pink bikini the exact shade of Pepto Bismol.
Finally Emma rises from her own bed and rummages in her crammed bureau for the dowdy green tank suit that some second cousin of her mother’s, whom they’ve never met and who lives way out in the suburbs, sent as a birthday gift. Emma quickly pulls her hair into a ponytail. In her rush, she pulls so tightly, her forehead stings.
When she and May are washed and dressed, they join Leo at the front door. He’s scowling and holding the door open in his impatience to leave. Emma assumes that their mother is coming with them. But Annette, who’s wearing one of the flowered housedresses that May, behind her back, calls a schmata, shakes her head no. “I’m as opposed to organized religion as you,” she tells Leo, her voice strained. She hands him the large blue plastic picnic bag she’s packed with sandwiches. “But you don’t have to rub everyone’s faces in your beliefs.”
Annette tries to catch Leo’s eye, hoping that he’ll change his mind and stay home today, reading, or watching TV with the girls. But it’s useless, he always does exactly what he wants, while she ends up sounding like an ineffectual nag, a yenta, a whiney kvetch, the kind of woman no one, including herself, likes. Annette hates what she has become, and would understand if Leo is drawn elsewhere, to other women, like the seductive Cookie Coke, although she would not ever truly understand, not in her heart. She would never forgive Leo if she were to find out he’d been with someone else.
“Oh yes, I do have to rub their faces in it,” Leo insists, happily, meeting her eyes. Mischievous music has returned to his voice, the scowl transforming, like a miracle, into a crooked but wide grin. “I have to show these so-called good Jews a thing or two!”
Emma, witnessing the drama between her parents, wonders at her mother’s stony face. She has heard her father use this phrase before—these so-called good Jews—and she wonders what makes these particular Jews only “so-called.” What would it take for them to be the real thing? Why is there so much attention paid to this Good Jew-Bad Jew stuff? Was Grandma Thelma, who went from not believing in God to passionately and fervently believing in Him, a good Jew or a “so-called?”
Are there so-called Good Catholics? Is Rosemary Mammano, with her prejudiced comments against blacks and Jews, a good one or a so-called one?
And what about so-called good Protestants? Not that there are a lot of them in the Projects. Some of the black kids are, but they don’t talk about their religion nearly as much or with the same intensity as the Catholic kids. Protestantism seems sober and unextravagant, without the passion and mystery of Catholicism. Only one white Protestant family lives in the Projects, the blond, blue eyed Crowells, who say “Oh gosh,” and who come from Sioux City, Iowa, a place that Emma has heard them describe as “flat, green, and Godly.”
Emma tags behind May, who like her, has thrown a light cardigan sweater over her bathing suit. The elevator, as if to appease impatient Leo, moves swiftly and is urine-free, and as they walk to their car through the Projects, Leo hums one of his old labor songs. His voice is so flat and off-key Emma can’t figure out which one, but she vaguely recognizes it, and guesses it’s the one about the union maid who’s not afraid of “goons and ginks and company finks.”
The Projects are deserted at this early hour, other than for a young Puerto Rican mother, whose root beer-colored hair is pinned up in fist-sized rollers. She’s wheeling a baby carriage and, like Leo, humming to herself. Her voice is beautiful and Emma instantly recognizes the song as one her mother often sings: Catch a falling star …
Emma and May follow their father into the secondhand black Oldsmobile scarred by bullet holes in two of the windows, a great source of pride for him. “I got this baby for a song,” he likes to say, “from a guy who hangs around the store.” The way he says, a guy who hangs around the store, seems like a code for someone criminal and unsavory, and Emma knows that this is why Annette hates this car.
Today, Emma is allowed to sit in the front seat beside her father because that way she’s less likely to get carsick. May narrows her eyes, but Emma decides not to care, since she’s the one who’s always vomiting her guts out into the large plastic “puke bucket” that her mother and father insist she keep balanced between her knees whenever they take a car trip, no matter how short. Luckily, it’s only a twenty-minute drive to the beach, and this time, Emma doesn’t get sick, which pleases her immensely, and she wonders if this is God’s gift to her on Rosh-Hashanah, her reward for keeping her promise not to visit the Virgin Mary again.
On this October day the sky is slate blue, the air is nippy, and the beach desolate, but Emma has to admit that the fine white sand is cleaner and more lovely than in the summer when the beach is crowded with people and cluttered with blankets and umbrellas and cans of soda and beer. Nevertheless, it’s during the summer, not now, that she loves the beach. She loves the way the hot sun makes her sleepy and lazy, and the way the wave-crested water cools her off.
In their cardigans, she and May sit silently together on the thin woolen blanket Leo spreads out for them. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he grins and starts the long walk to the water’s edge, leaving them alone.
Emma regards May closely, marveling at how little they have to say to each other, despite sharing the same blood and having both been on the receiving end of so many of their mother’s Doom and Gloom predictions and their father’s violent outbursts. Emma usually thinks that May is pretty, despite her cruelty, with her dirty-blonde hair and her cats’-eye eyeglasses, but right now she’s scrunching her face up as though she’s the one who’s going to vomit. For a moment, Emma worries that May is really sick—and if this were the case, she worries what her own response would be. It might not be sorrow. It might, in fact, be happiness, and this realization simultaneously saddens and pleases her. In any case, May is fine. She’s deliberately making an ugly face, in order to frighten Emma. But Emma’s not about to fall for a stupid trick like that.
Tired of May’s petty cruelties, she turns her attention to her father, studying him as he walks slowly down to the edge of the dark, choppy water, a lone figure against the landscape of sea and sky, never looking back at his daughters. She doesn’t ease her concentration as he begins to swim, his movements through the water strong and fierce, his head turning smoothly and rapidly from side to side as he takes in air.
Only when she loses sight of him, does she feel she can relax enough to turn her concentration back to herself. She wraps her suddenly chilled body in a large, brightly colored beach towel. Curling herself up as tightly as she can, she begins composing a poem in her head about water and sand, using the words “aqua” and “ivory,” words she loves because they sound as beautiful as the colors they represent. The aqua water is like sky, she thinks. The ivory sand is bright and fair. Good lines, she thinks, and she repeats them silently twice more. As soon as she gets home, she’ll write them down so she won’t forget.
Waiting for Leo to finish his long, solitary swim, she grows hungry. She reaches into the large plastic picnic bag, removing one of the two sticky peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches that her mother had packed.
May, who’s been lying face down on her stomach, sits up, and for a long minute watches Emma as she begins to eat. Self-consciously, Emma chews carefully with her mouth closed. She licks crumbs delicately from her lips, unable to shake the oppressive feeling that May is judging her, finding her even more lacking than usual in grace and elegance, the two things May is always saying that she, herself, “like Kim Novak,” possesses. Despite her self-consciousness, Emma consumes the sandwich in record time, and is struck by her own large appetite, so much like her father’s, and so different from her sister’s.
Like a weapon, May’s silence is aimed directly at Emma. May reaches into the bag and pulls out the second sandwich, but not before removing a paper napkin and placing it daintily on her knees. With a disgusted expression, pursing her lips, she shakes her head at Emma.
Emma is reminded of awful Mrs. O’Reilly who pursed her lips in class and called Emma “This Girl.” You don’t rule over me, Emma thinks, you petty tyrant.
May eats very slowly, making a deliberate and big show of constantly dabbing her mouth with her napkin, not with her tongue, obviously to distinguish herself from Emma, whom she has called, in the past, “boorish and vulgar.” Yet, after all that, May doesn’t finish her sandwich, carefully re-wrapping the untouched half. Of course, Emma thinks—truly feminine girls who exude what May calls “class,” would never reveal too hearty an appetite.
A gull flying overhead swoops surprisingly close to them, then soars far away. A new poem begins to take shape in Emma’s mind. The gull, as narrator, revealing his urgent need to flee. But the poem remains vague and intangible, and soon the words are as far away as the gull itself, which has disappeared in the sky, in the same way Leo seems to have disappeared into the ocean.
Finally, after what seems like forever, so long that Emma is truly beginning to worry that Leo has been sucked down into a wicked dervish of a whirlpool, she spots him on the sand, walking toward them. In the distance, he looks so small and harmless. Emma wishes this moment could be frozen, rendering him that way forever.
A moment later, Leo, full-sized once more, rejoins the girls on the blanket, breathing deeply and drying off his dripping body with two oversized beach towels. “Up and at ‘em,” he says again, his voice happy once more. “Time to go home.”
As Emma fumbles with the buttons on her cardigan, Leo says, “Come on, come on, get a move on.” Emma can tell that he’s serious, not fooling around. This time he will not be kept waiting. There will be hell to pay—a beating, perhaps more than one—if he doesn’t get his way. May, too, is obediently readying herself, quietly buttoning her own cardigan.
Dripping water, Leo is now in such a hurry to get home that he keeps his wet bathing suit on, not even slipping on his zippered windbreaker to warm himself. He rushes them to the parking lot where once again May sullenly slithers into the back seat, and Emma climbs quickly, monkey-style, into the front.
Leo accelerates so fast that both girls gasp, and he crosses lanes, cutting off the Number 12 bus, which in the summer is packed sardine can-tight with beachgoers but today is nearly empty. With a wild screech, he steers across the busy intersection of Pelham Parkway and White Plains Road. Trying to quell her lurching stomach, Emma looks out the bullet-scarred car window, and sees a Jewish family, a father and three sons, all dressed up in dark suits, crossing the street. She knows they’re Jewish because they’re wearing yarmulkes, although she doesn’t understand the significance of the skullcaps, another sign of her bad-Jewishness. No point in asking her father; he’d just say, “Pure superstition. No more.”
Intently, Emma watches as the fair-skinned, chubby family walks together almost dreamily, as if in slow motion. Are they truly good Jews, or just so-called? They must be on their way home from synagogue, where they’ve celebrated Rosh-Hashanah, however it’s done. With music and prayer, she guesses, and special foods. She’s heard of davening, has witnessed her father’s comic renditions of it, in which he lurches back and forth and wails as if he has to urgently go to the bathroom.
Is she the only Jew in the world who’s never set foot in a Jewish temple? Even May attended the bar mitzvah of George Zimmerman, Bethie Zimmerman’s older brother, during the brief period that Bethie was May’s best friend, before May dumped her, as she eventually dumps anyone close to her.
Leo parks the car on the far side of the Projects, and Emma immediately understands that he has done this deliberately, so that they’ll have to walk past all five of the other buildings, in order to reach their own. This has been the real reason for the entire excursion, this parading around in their bathing suits on Rosh Hashanah. By now, the Project benches will have filled up with Jews, home from synagogue, chatting and sharing news of God, or whatever it is that religious Jews discuss on the High Holy Days. This must be what her mother meant when she’d said to Emma’s father, “You don’t have to rub everyone’s faces in your beliefs.”
Like two little ducklings, May and Emma trail behind their father, the three of them in their bathing suits. Their rubber flips flops slap the sidewalk in drum-like rhythm. Emma’s toes and fingers are freezing, and, beside her, May also shivers, although she won’t meet Emma’s eye to commiserate.
Of course, Leo doesn’t appear to be cold at all, and it’s crystal-clear to Emma how proud he is of the figure he cuts as he walks through the Projects, his back straight, head high, a strong man who can withstand cold water and cold weather, a muscular man with his two obedient and unquestioning daughters in tow.
It’s also clear to Emma how much her father relishes the shocked and disapproving stares from the Jews, who, as Emma predicted, are now sitting in clusters of three and four, on the slatted wooden benches outside their buildings. They wear their nicest wool coats, the men wear yarmulkes, and the women wear cloche hats and lots of gold jewelry, which may or may not be real. All she knows for sure is that the few gold pieces her mother has, and which she rarely wears, are all fake, something her mother seems proud of. “We Rosens don’t care for material things,” she insists. “Fakes are good enough for us. Fakes are not really fake at all,” she adds, enigmatically.
As the Rosens pass, the Jews on the benches shake their heads, whisper, frown, roll their eyes and click their tongues, reminding Emma of Looney Tunes’ cartoon characters.
Leo, grinning ear to ear, stage whispers, “We’re stronger than they are. That’s Truth with a capital T.”
Emma hopes that Mr. and Mrs. Freedman, sitting on the bench closest to them, haven’t heard him. The Freedmans have a black-haired daughter named Rachel whom Emma and Shelley sometimes spend time with, and whom Emma likes a great deal, because Rachel writes poetry, and has, a few times, shared her poems with Emma. Emma remembers the beginning of one of Rachel’s poems: Horses inhabit my dreams … . It had surprised Emma, because there were no horses in the Projects, and, as far as she knew, Rachel had never ridden one.
Emma also hopes that Mrs. Zelig, sitting next to the Freedmans, hasn’t heard Leo. Mrs. Zelig and her branded arm, with her kind, inclusive smile—even if her teeth are grey and chipped, who says oy vey just like Grandma Thelma used to.
But next to her, filling out the bench, is the rheumy-eyed, bearded widower Mr. Roshansky, wrinkled head bobbing. Emma hates him because he likes to touch the breasts of young girls—hers, Shelley’s, Rachel Freedman’s, even May’s—under the pretense of being nice and friendly, slipping his bony, hairy hand beneath their undershirts. “Everyone’s Jewish Uncle,” he calls himself. His touch makes Emma cringe, makes her want to vomit all over him, and all over herself, as well, wherever his hands have landed. Sometimes he tries to go even lower than their breasts, below the waistbands of their pants, and even lower still, all the way down to their privates, what she and Shelley like to call their vajakas because it’s their own special word, more musical, more esoteric, than the basic, clumsy, vaginas.
Once, back when Emma was nine, she found herself alone in the lobby with Mr. Roshansky waiting for the elevator. She stood all the way over by the mailboxes, trying to keep out of his sight. Fearful of his roving, spidery, hands, she felt tiny and breakable. When the elevator arrived, he got in first and held the door open for her. “Little Emma Rosen,” he called softly, “I’m waiting for you.”
Trying not to show fear, she pressed the button for her floor and as the door closed, she backed into the corner and held her hands over her breasts, unable, alone with him in such a small, closed space, to pretend any longer that she wasn’t fearful.
He amazed her by remaining in his corner, not making a move toward her. Instead, he spoke even more softly, as if sensing her fear and wanting to reassure her. “I’ve been watching your sister,” he half-whispered. “She’s got the inner devil. She’s not right in the head.” He touched his own head with his thin, old man’s finger. “She’s teched. So don’t worry, Emma Rosen. I know the truth.”
Emma had held her breath before allowing herself to nod, letting her hands fall to her sides. “Yes,” she said, in amazement, as softly as he.
The elevator stopped on his floor, and he got off. “Remember,” he whispered, “we both know.” The doors closed.
Emma hasn’t known what to think since then: Is he right? Is May teched? Sometimes she thinks so, and it gives her comfort. Just the other day she wrote in her diary, May is teched and evil, a flesh-and-blood version of the cackling, cruel Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. I am Glinda, the Good. If there is a God, he loves me.
Still, it’s difficult to fully believe what Mr. Roshansky says, considering the fact that he’s so clearly teched in the head himself, a lecherous alter kocker. Even May calls him “Mr. Dirty Old Man.” But none of the girls ever tell their parents about the way Mr. Roshansky touches them, not Emma or Shelley or Rachel, not even May. It’s an unspoken agreement among them to protect him because of what Hitler did to him, because of that rigid line of pale blue numbers lining his arm.
In a book of her father’s about Adolph Eichmann, Emma had seen photographs of concentration camp survivors on the day they were freed, barely-alive wraiths, with hollow eyes and shaved skulls. Mr. Roshansky had been among them, had looked like them. She doesn’t ever want to add to Mr. Roshansky’s suffering. Maybe, she tells herself, Mr. Roshansky wasn’t like this before Hitler came to power. Maybe he was once a gentle man who played nice games with little girls, who never thought about touching their breasts.
And now, on Rosh Hashanah, as she walks past him, she’s more confused than ever. Is Mr. Roshansky, whose yarmulke sits atop his head at an almost rakish, hoodlum’s angle, a good Jew, or a so-called? Mr. Roshansky, with his branded arm, thick, ragged beard, and phony, flat smile, has suffered in ways that Emma knows she can’t even begin to understand, and now he dresses up in his suit and tie and goes to synagogue and prays. But as soon as he can, he’ll be sidling up to Emma, putting his bony arm around her, trying to stroke her nipples, beneath her blouse. Just because Emma hasn’t set foot in a synagogue, hasn’t suffered at Hitler’s hands, isn’t even sure of God’s existence, does that make her a worse Jew than he?
Hannah Zelig suffered just as much as he did during the war, and she behaves kindly toward all the children in the Projects. Nothing excuses what he does, and as Emma trails along behind her father, she meets the full-bearded Mr. Roshansky’s bespectacled, watery eyes, and she shivers again. Then she feels glad that she’s wearing a bathing suit and walking beside her father and sister on Rosh Hashanah instead of sitting beside Mr. Roshansky on the bench. Try to touch me now, she thinks, you dirty old man, you so-called Good Jew.
May, however, isn’t at all glad, since Marvin’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Ludwig, are among the religious Jews sitting outside. And the zaftig, double-chinned Mrs. Ludwig, whose wrinkled, soiled brassieres and panties May had glimpsed the day Marvin kissed her in the laundry room, is glaring directly at her.
And there’s no mirth at all in the eyes of the fair-skinned Mr. Ludwig, a salesman of lighting fixtures in a small store on the Lower East Side, who loves to perform magic tricks for the kids in the Projects. On a few occasions, May and her friends have joined Marvin and some others, and watched Mr. Ludwig make coins disappear and appear, and playing card numbers recur at his will.
But now, as he stares at the Rosens walking past in their provocative and shameful bathing suits, his yarmulke sits stiffly and rigidly atop his head, his eyes are grim, and there’s no magic in the air around him.
Even if she threw herself to the ground and begged her father to apologize to everyone on the bench, even if she told him that he’s ruining her life and destroying her chance for happiness and a golden future, May knows that he wouldn’t care. And she’s right. Because at that moment, not only do his needs come first, but Leo believes that his needs are his daughters’ needs. He recognizes no separation between their flesh and thoughts and feelings and his own. Leo runs the Rosen family; thus, he is the Rosen family.
Nor does he perceive the Jews sitting on the benches as distinct individuals, as ghostly, long-suffering widow Mrs. Zelig, for instance, or Hyman and Bella Freedman whose daughter Rachel has dined at his table, or loudmouthed Aaron Ludwig, who clumsily performs magic tricks that any six-year-old boy can do better, and his smug wife, Judith, and her floppy, unappealing bosoms, the size of a small country.
Right now, all Leo sees is a huddled group of nameless, faceless men and women who, frightened of pain, death, and sorrow—as are we all—foolishly and desperately turn to the supernatural, wrong-headedly calling their fears “faith,” despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, too weak to acknowledge their own frailties.
It suddenly occurs to Leo, however, that Cookie might see him too, parading around in his bathing suit, but he has a feeling that his mischievous ways will titillate her more than disappoint her. He admits to himself that he likes the idea of her seeing him in his bathing suit, and he allows himself a fantasy of the two of them, side by side on a beach on her island, Cookie in a white bathing suit that sets off her nutmeg skin, the sky overhead violet and magenta, the water a swirling turquoise mist. What if he ran away with her to a tropical paradise and lived a life of pure freedom, no loans to pay off, no whining children, no kvetching wife? Once, a month or so ago, while visiting the store, she had smiled at him and said, “Leo, you are boy and man together, and what’s not appealing to a woman about that?” But now isn’t the time to think about Cookie and to want things he’ll never be able to have—now is the time to delight in the present, in the here and now, on this High Holy Day when he will show the world what he thinks of the very concept of holiness.
May, sensing her father’s feelings, tries to affect an impassive expression that shows her lack of agreement with him. She pulls down her too-short cardigan in order to hide her pink bikini, but the gesture seems obscene, and she feels vulgar and trampy. At least, she thinks, Marvin isn’t on the bench with his parents to witness her sacrilege and shame. But even so, she wants never to have to show her face again in public, she wants to die. She wants all records of Leo Rosen’s firstborn wiped from the books. After today, Mr. and Mrs. Ludwig will order Marvin to keep as far away as possible from the daughter of the meshuge Leo Rosen, and how can she blame them? In their place, she would do the same.
A gust of wind knifes through her, but May resists shivering. She keeps her head down, not wanting to see for another second the icy disapproval in the Ludwigs’ eyes. As she follows her father into the building, she feels that pain again, first in her forehead and then behind her eye. Much worse than it’s been. Quick. Stabbing. A message of some sort. Like Morse Code. Rat a tat tat. Roger and out.
Two overhead lights in the lobby are out, and the semi-darkness mirrors May’s dark mood. Leo, grinning from ear to ear, like a crazed circus clown, rings for the elevator. Emma, in her ugly, vomit-green bathing suit, grins back at him. Sickened by their mutual-admiration society, May forces her features to remain calm.
The elevator arrives, and out spills the Williams family, who are black. Her father greets them far more warmly than he ever greets any of the Jewish families. May is sure that he likes blacks and Puerto Ricans better than he likes anyone else. He never says “so-called blacks,” or “so-called Puerto Ricans,” as if there’s no way someone could be black or Puerto Rican and not be authentic. This, despite the fact that most blacks and Puerto Ricans, from what she can tell, attend Church regularly and believe fiercely in God. She’s not sure why he’s so tolerant of the same “weaknesses” he’s so repelled by in Jews, but she imagines it’s somehow connected to his own “meshuge” parents, and his Communist youth, of which he’s so proud, because it proves his solidarity with “the little man.”
Around Cookie Coke, who smells of vanilla and lavender, he’s positively gaga, and she’s amazed her mother lets him get away with it, if her mother even allows herself to acknowledge what is so obvious. Not that her mother, who can be so pathetic at times, ever stands up to him about anything. May promises herself that she will be strong on her future children’s behalf, although, because Marvin will never do anything to make her jealous, sad, or angry, she’ll never be tested.
Leo affectionately pats the heads of the Williams twins, two small boys with enormous eyes and close-cropped hair who grin up at him with admiration and awe, neither of which May, at the moment, feels toward him.
Mrs. Williams says, “Hello there. Have you all been for a swim in this weather?” Her smile reveals one dazzling gold front tooth. May wonders what Mrs. Williams really thinks of the three of them. The Williams are Protestants, and May has seen Mrs. Williams all dolled up in her Sunday church-going clothes, wide-brimmed hats, stiff dresses, and white stretchy gloves. Does she, like the Jews on the benches, perceive the Rosens as absolutely crazy and disgraceful?
Mr. Williams slaps her father on the back as though they’re old friends, and as though seeing a family in their bathing suits on a cool October day is nothing unusual. “Leo Rosen,” he smiles, “How goes it?”
Leo nods, says, “Can’t complain. Can’t complain.”
Mr. Williams holds the elevator open with an almost formal, gentlemanly bow. Leo and Emma step inside. Emma bats her eyelashes at Mr. Williams and says, “Why, thank you very much,” probably imitating some trashy movie actress like Jayne Mansfield, nobody as classy as Kim Novak. Emma will grow up to be a slut, May is certain, the kind of desperate female out to please men at all costs, choosing her men foolishly, going for the ones who cheat and drink and gamble. No golden future for Emma. But, after today, perhaps May won’t have a golden future, either.
Wishing she were invisible, May glumly follows Leo and Emma into the elevator. Losing her balance, she briefly stumbles. But nobody seems to notice, and she figures she’s just so distracted over seeing Marvin’s parents that she’s not her usual, graceful self. At least the pain behind her eye has completely subsided, and she rests her back against the elevator wall, narrowly missing leaning against a wad of chewing gum that might very well have been Emma’s, since Emma chews a lot of Juicy Fruit, which Leo brings home for her from the store five, six packages at a time. Yes, the E-Bomb is definitely inconsiderate and piggish enough to discard her gum in such a disgusting, childish way.
Emma, meanwhile, is reciting a new poem to Leo, some hooey about sand and sky. Pretentious, May thinks, proud to use a word that Bonita often uses. “Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke is pretentious,” Bonita says, or, “Beatniks are pretentious.” Pretentious, for May, has come to mean everything that she and Marvin Ludwig, as real and authentic as two human beings can be, are not, and will never be, everything that Emma embodies.
Just then May’s stomach turns over, and everything around her goes black. For a second time, the world is suddenly devoid of light, and she hears her father’s disembodied, boisterous voice saying, “Emma, kiddo, you’re gonna win a Pulitzer!” and Emma, in response, giggling like the moron she is.
May stands still. Her back against the wall is frozen and rigid. She must reveal nothing; if they suspect, they’ll tell her mother. And then her mother will send her to a doctor. Inevitably an operation will follow, and she will never be the same. Her life will be as good as over.
An explosion bursts inside her head, and she can see again: Emma’s goofy, proud smile; Leo’s equally proud, nauseating grin. The elevator stops at the eleventh floor. May steps out first, keeping her back to them. In the grey-wallpapered hallway, she walks quickly to their corner apartment, fearful that she might lose her balance and stumble again. Her flesh feels moist behind her knees, her mouth is sour, and she grits her teeth, thinking: careful, careful, one foot in front of the other, give nothing away.
She rings the doorbell even before her father has his key out, and then completely ignores her mother who comes to the door to greet them.
“So, Leo,” Annette says, tensely, a vein on her temple visibly throbbing, stepping aside to let them in, running her hand through her embarrassingly premature white streak of hair, “now are you satisfied? Are you proud of yourself?”
May, pushing past her mother, heads quickly to the bathroom, not waiting to hear her father’s reply, not even giving him first dibs on the toilet, the way she usually does, since, according to her mother, he sometimes has “bathroom problems.”
She closes, then locks, the bathroom door, and stares at herself in the mirror above the sink, blaming Emma for the ugly smears of toothpaste on the glass. Piggish Emma, who stole their parents’ love, who defaces and destroys everything and everyone she touches.
In the mirror, May’s dirty blonde hair looks messy, her skin unnaturally pale. Her rebellious lazy eye is acting up, shifting inward. She doesn’t look real to herself: a shadow girl whose sight comes and goes.
Closing the toilet lid, she sits down heavily, her head in her hands. She feels her shoulders rising and falling as though she’s sobbing, but there are no tears in her eyes. The pains she’s having aren’t just headaches; she’s certain of that. They’re nothing, for instance, like Annette’s migraines, which come on every couple of weeks, sending her into the bathroom where, like Emma during car trips, she loudly pukes and pukes, sometimes for hours on end, while May grows angry and queasy just listening to her. Afterward, her eyes rimmed by dark circles and her skin like chalk, Annette returns to the land of the living, wearily announcing to May and Emma, “I inherited Grandma Thelma’s migraines, and one day, wait and see, you’ll get them, too.”
Despite Annette’s prediction, May knows that what’s happening to her has nothing to do with migraines. Or with the headaches shown on TV commercials in which an aspirin or two solves all problems. What she has is unreal, alien, too intense for this planet, like something from The Twilight Zone.
No, that’s not it either, she thinks, I am not otherworldly. I’m just a sick girl, plain and simple. Something is seriously wrong, deep inside her bones, her marrow. She splashes cold water on her face, feeling at last the full-blown panic she hadn’t allowed herself to feel in front of her father and Emma.
Why me, she whispers, squeezing some peppermint toothpaste onto her toothbrush. Why not Emma? Up and down, side-to-side, she vigorously moves her toothbrush as she was taught by the crisp and efficient nurse from Montefiore Hospital who’d visited her first grade class. “Be sure to brush your back teeth,” the nurse had said, as May admired her form-fitting, pristine uniform and glossy smile. If Kim Novak ever played a nurse, this would be the one. She was a Hollywood fantasy come to life.
Now, May carefully follows her tooth-cleansing regimen, with more ferocity even than usual. If she cleanses her mouth, maybe she’ll be able to rid her body of all germs and contaminants. But it’s no use: God has chosen her, and she must accept it. It is He who’s sending the nausea, the clumsiness, the blindness, the strange clarity that follows. The fact that she has a lazy eye, a toxic sister, a chronically sad mother, and a madman for a father, clearly isn’t enough to satisfy Him. He wants her to endure yet another trial in order to prove that she’s worthy of Marvin’s love. It’s not a punishment, it’s a test.
She will not question His plan. Nor will she tell anyone about it. She rinses her mouth, spits, wipes her face, re-folds the towel before hanging it on the rack, and opens the bathroom door to a scowling, red-faced Leo, who was just about to begin pounding on the door, yelling “Get the hell out!” which is what he does to her and Emma and even to their mother, when he really, really needs to go.