Prison?
“That’s how I know about the court system,” Emma said. “They railroaded my mom and sent her to prison for nine years.”
“What did she do?”
“I’ll show you.” Emma pulled an oversized book off the shelf, releasing a fine shower of dust. “You know Sasha, the Yiddish teacher? She cuts out newspaper articles and pictures about camp and campers and pastes them into albums. This book is 1968 to 1970.”
We perched on stools next to each other, carefully turning the stiff pages spread-eagled on the pine table. A musty smell rose from the paper. Emma read a headline aloud in a mock-pompous television news voice: “DA Considers Attempted Murder Charge in Anti-War Assault Case.”
“Assault?”
“That’s what my mom did,” Emma said. “There was this humongous anti-war demonstration about Vietnam. In Detroit. My mom went with her sister and Maggie. These mounted police were beating up protestors and Mom threw apples at them.”
“How can apples hurt anyone?”
“They were hard apples, little green ones. One hit a horse and it freaked and a cop fell off. That’s assault. He was paralyzed or something. Listen to this one: ‘Jewish Radical Cop-Attacker Comes From Union Family.’ See, they didn’t like her because of her background.”
“What happened to her?”
“There was a trial.” Emma leaned her face close to mine. “Mom tried to talk about the war being wrong, but the judge wouldn’t let her. So she went underground.”
“Huh?”
“Into hiding. A few months later, I was born and she hid me with her. But later someone recognized her and she was arrested again. In the second trial they framed her for a bombing she didn’t do and she went to prison.”
“If she didn’t do anything, why did the jury convict her?”
“The FBI lied. My dad said it was to scare other people, so they wouldn’t protest. They went after my mom because she was Jewish and socialist.”
Socialist? Socialists were frowning young men in black and white photos in my social studies book. They wore heavy dark clothes and wanted everyone to be poor.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“My dad took care of me. When I grow up I want to be a people’s lawyer, just like him.” Emma’s voice was soft, but I could hear the pride. “We visited my mom in prison almost every week. I spent summers here, with Maggie.” Emma smiled. “When I was little, I felt closest to my mom at camp. My parents came here as kids. They met here.”
“That’s so neat,” I said. “My parents met here too.”
“Cool.” Emma turned back to the album. “Look, here’s the very first story: ‘Sisters Arrested for Injury to Officer.’”
I studied the large black and white photograph under the headline. Two young women with pale oval faces and frizzy hair were caught with their arms flung out, fingers extended, as if they had just thrown something. Emma’s finger pointed to the woman on the left. “That’s my mom, Rosa.”
But I stared at the other woman, the one on the right whose eyes were closed. The air in the room went all stale and dead and so heavy my lungs couldn’t suck it in.
“What’s wrong?” Emma asked.
“I don’t understand.” I pointed. “That looks like my mother.”
Emma stared at me. “That’s impossible. That’s Esther Levin, my mom’s sister. She’s the person who finked on my mom and sent her to prison.”
“Esther Levin Green.” I pictured the gold letters on the diploma Jake framed when Esther graduated college. It hung on the wall over my mother’s desk in the alcove off the kitchen. A smoldering started deep inside my throat and spread like a fiery sunburn over my neck and face. Know-it-all Emma was dead wrong about this. There was no way that Esther could have a sister and never visit her or talk on the phone. That would be like me never seeing Oliver again. He was totally annoying now and I hated that he finished my sentences, but when he was little he loved to cuddle and twirl my curls around his finger as he sucked his thumb. He was my brother.
“My mother doesn’t have a sister,” I said. “I would know. She would’ve told me.”
Emma looked at me, then at the photograph, then back at me. Like she was trying to see if I resembled my mother. Or maybe if I was somehow responsible.
“What did you mean,” I asked, “that Esther finked on her sister?”
“Esther made a deal. She testified against my mom and sent her to prison.” Emma spoke like they were cuss words. “So she could avoid prison and could take care of her baby.” She jabbed her finger in my face. “That must be you.”
Right then, everything in the world divided in half, ripped right down the middle into two different universes, like Superman and Bizarro in the musty comics Jake lugged along on camping trips. In Emma’s half, people were socialists and anarchists. They attacked policemen and went to prison. In my world, people were regular and their kids hung out with their friends and had fun. How could we be in the same family?
A moth bumped its frantic dance against the window.
Emma wouldn’t stop talking. “My grandparents—well, I guess our grandparents—had to sell their Detroit shoe store to pay the fines.”
I covered my ears with my hands so I wouldn’t have to hear her lies. My grandmother lived in Detroit and collected porcelain cocker spaniels. We visited her every year at Passover. She had promised to leave me her china doggies in her will. Would she leave half to Emma? How come my grandmother never mentioned Emma, or Rosa?
“No.” I crossed my arms and frowned at Emma. “I don’t believe any of this.”
So Emma repeated the whole story again, about cops beating people and throwing apples and the horse rearing up and the cop falling down. Except this time she told it with two sisters, Rosa and Esther. This time it was worse because I knew what was coming, and her sentences punched holes in my lungs, up one side and down the other.
Finally, she finished and the room was quiet except for the dull lament of a lone cricket. I thought about how before chemo, Esther’s dark hair coiled down the back of her denim jumper, caught with a thick blue rubber band from the grocery store broccoli. I tried to picture my mother standing on a dusty city street throwing things at policemen.
“No way,” I whispered when I had breath again.
Emma touched the two faces on the photograph. First Rosa, then Esther. “They look so much alike. Except that you can’t tell how red Rosa’s hair is. Just like yours. Is Esther’s hair red?”
“Brown,” I said. “Like yours.”
“Your mom got off easy. She never spent a single day in prison.”
The Superman and Bizarro worlds came crashing together and that was just as impossible. I pushed off the stool and walked to the wall of photographs, turning away from Emma.
“I’m going back to the bunk. I don’t want to hear any more. I love my mom.”
“I know,” Emma said softly. “I love mine too.” She slid off her stool too and joined me at the wall. She pointed to the 1958 group photo, where four teenagers stood slightly apart from the crowd. The two boys leaned against the white oak tree at the edge of the field, their tanned arms around two frizzy-haired girls. “They’re all together here. Rosa and Allen. Jake and Esther.”
Jake and Esther. My parents. I turned away from the photo and looked down at the burning in my right fist. I rubbed at the row of curved marks my fingernails had gouged in the soft part of my palm. I squeezed my lips together thin and tight, and pointed at her face, like she did to me, before.
“I don’t believe a word of this,” I said. “You made this stuff up.”
CHAPTER 32
Molly
The next morning I pulled a stool close to the steel kitchen counter, daunted by the Mount Everest of creamy white garlic heads on the cutting board. Daunted and hungry and sad. At breakfast, Emma sat huddled with Poose and the Malcolm X boys. Their laughter mocked me across the dining room. Carrie invited me to join her and Wynona and Wil
low, the twins from Queens, but I told her I wasn’t hungry and sat alone.
The camp cook, Skinny Myrna, showed me how to press down firmly with both hands on the side of the heavy cleaver to crack the crisp skin of each garlic clove so it peeled off easily.
“You’re not one of those garlic press girlies, are you?” Myrna’s top lip curled up on the right side of her mouth, revealing one brown front tooth.
“Oh, no,” I said quickly. “My mother and I always chop by hand.”
“Good.” Myrna turned away to get the celery and onion choppers started. My head felt light and whirly and for a second I wished I were an onion chopper, so I would have an excuse for tears. But my fingers knew the work, and my mind flew home to the marsh hawk that lived in the fields behind my house. One day when I was little and walking in the field, I startled the bird and we stared at each other for a long moment until it flew off. I ran back to the house and looked through the New England field guide until I found the right picture. That weekend Jake pointed out the marsh hawks’ nest. I named them Sadie and Hawkins.
Sadie was my particular friend and I often spotted her perched in the big oak between our field and our neighbor’s. She let me borrow her wings and eyes when I wanted to fly. While my hands chopped garlic that morning at camp, my mind swooped and soared in spiraling circles, catching small breezes off Mount Tom. The field down the end of the road was our favorite flying place. It was much bigger than my family’s field, and the grasses moved like ocean swells in the wind. From the sky, my house looked small and secrets didn’t matter.
I brought my fingers to my nose, inhaling the pungent tang of the garlic, and rubbed the stickiness between my fingers. I reached for another head to break into cloves.
Then I was back in the air, swooping low over Rogers Drive where the poor white trash lived. Esther said it was disrespectful to call them that, but the kids at school did. All the Rogers lived along one road in misshapen family combinations amidst rusting cars without tires, and straggly sunflowers at odd spots instead of in neat gardens. I flew over the five Rogers boys riding the row of oversized metal mailboxes like cowboys on their rodeo horses, then circled back above the abandoned tobacco barn.
With the edge of the cleaver, I shaped the mound of minced garlic on the cutting board into the double hump shape of the mountain at home. The lines started to waver and float and my head felt light and spinning. The heavy knife slipped from my hand and clunked onto the table, the tip gouging into the mountainside.
Myrna glanced at me over her bony shoulder. “You look awful,” she said. “Go see the nurse.”
I didn’t feel well but I certainly didn’t need a nurse. So I wandered back to the empty bunk, stopping at the narrow mirror hanging between Sharon and Carrie’s cots. I tugged a corkscrew curl to twice its usual earlobe length, then let it spring back.
I didn’t belong at this camp. I didn’t know the people the buildings were named for, and anyway, I was scrawny for twelve and I needed braces. Esther joked that I was “dentally retarded” and the orthodontist said my teeth weren’t ready yet, even though most of the kids in my seventh grade class had braces by the time school ended in June. Chest bumps like Hershey’s kisses tented my T-shirt. When I rounded my shoulders, the tents disappeared in folds of cotton. Esther said I was a late bloomer and breasts would come, but I didn’t want them because cancer could grow there. The hurt in my throat expanded, sending aching down my chest and into my arms. The floaty feeling came back stronger and there were sparkles in the air, and I grabbed for the edge of Carrie’s cubby but I missed and fell.
I woke to a loud buzzing and thumping, the persistent drone of a June bug bumping against a screen. My head throbbed at the sides, near my eyes. I was in a bed, not my cot. Not at home and not in Harriet Tubman. There was a row of beds and the nurse was there. Sue. She sat on a folding chair next to my bed.
“What happened?” I asked her.
“You fainted. How do you feel now?”
“Okay.” Fainting didn’t sound as serious when the nurse wore a tank top.
“Has it ever happened before?”
I shook my head, but that made it hurt more. “No.”
“Any idea why?” Sue asked.
My eyes filled.
Sue’s voice was quiet. “Tell me about it?”
About what? About Esther having cancer? About people being sent to prison or even executed for crimes they didn’t do? About not knowing anymore who were the good guys and who were the bad guys and how to tell them apart? About Emma’s lies? Or maybe worse than lies? About Emma not wanting to be my friend? Sue probably wouldn’t understand any of that.
“I just want to go home.”
Sue nodded. “It’s hard to be away from home when you’re sick. Did you have breakfast today?”
I shook my head, just a little.
“Well, that’s probably why you fainted.” Sue stood up. “We’ll start with some crackers, then a little chicken soup.”
Sue sat with me while I ate.
“This is good,” I said.
“I’m going to keep you here in the infirmary overnight. Just to be sure you’re okay.”
“Can I call my parents?” Phone calls were discouraged. They said it made campers more homesick. But maybe they’d allow it because I fainted.
“Wait and see how you feel tomorrow.”
“I know how I feel. I don’t like it here. I want to call my mother.”
“Why don’t you like camp?”
“I don’t belong here. I’m too skinny and no one likes me and my family is all wrong and I don’t fit in.”
Sue rubbed my shoulder. “Did something happen today, besides not eating?”
“Do you know about Red Rosa? Emma’s mother?”
Sue nodded. “I’ve heard the story.”
Maybe I could talk to Sue. She seemed like an ordinary person, someone who wouldn’t hate a person for something her mother did when the person was just a baby. Something her mother maybe did.
“Rosa had a sister.”
Sue nodded. “I remember. They both came to this camp.”
Maybe I didn’t have to tell Sue everything. “Emma says the sister betrayed Rosa, sent her to prison.”
Sue hesitated. “That’s what people say. I don’t know what actually happened.”
“Emma said her mother hasn’t spoken to her sister in all these years. Rosa hates her sister. Just because Esther made a mistake.”
Sue wiped my cheeks with a napkin that smelled like chicken soup. “Maybe both sisters made mistakes.”
Sleepy, relieved, I let my eyes close.
When I woke up again the room was shadowy, as if the infirmary had been sketched in charcoal. Stripes of moonlight fell across the blanket. I scooted up in bed, propped my pillow against the pine wall. My finger traced the moon stripes as they crashed into the checks of my pajamas.
“Hey, sleepyhead.” Emma’s voice came from the next bed.
I turned to look at her. “Are you sick too?”
Even in the dim light, I could see Emma roll her eyes. “Duh. I’m here to visit you.” She slipped off her bed and onto mine. We sat cross-legged, kneecaps just touching. “I’m really sorry that I made you sad. And that your mother’s sick.”
“I don’t know if I believe you. What you said.”
That wasn’t totally true, I realized. I did believe it. Mostly. But I didn’t know what to feel about Emma’s story. I didn’t know what it meant about my family or what it meant about me.
“Anyway, it’s no fair that I never knew. How come you knew all about it and I didn’t?”
“It’s no secret in my family.” Her voice got that proud edge again, like she was making a speech even though she was whispering.
My throat went tight and achy all the way down to my chest. “I hate this place. I’m going to go home as soon as Jake can come pick me up.”
Emma shook her head. “Please don’t. Lots of kids are homesick, especially at first,
but you’ll like it here when you get used to it.”
“I hate it here.”
“Stay. We can do a skit together for visiting day.”
Visiting day? Esther and Jake and Oliver here, in the same place as Rosa?
Emma seemed to take the silence for yes. “We don’t have to talk about our mothers.”
But there wasn’t room in my brain for much else. I’d been thinking about our mothers constantly—what they did, what happened. How did they feel about each other now? How did Esther feel, being sick without her sister even knowing about it? And what did it have to do with their daughters? With us.
“Could you do something like that?” I asked Emma. “Throw things at policemen?”
“Maybe. If I felt strongly enough. Could you?”
I didn’t have an answer. I wondered about the horse. And the policeman. “Do you ever think about the cop?” I asked. “Like if he ever walked again. Or if he had little kids?”
Emma hesitated. “Rosa would say we should think about all the Vietnamese who were killed, and their kids.”
“I guess. That seems kind of far away.”
“Yeah.”
The sound of a door closing silenced us. “Probably just Sue going to the bathroom,” Emma whispered.
But I had more questions. “Weren’t you ashamed that your mother was in prison?”
Emma looked surprised. “Rosa’s a hero. I’m proud of her. Esther’s the person to be ashamed of, after what she said in court.”
I wasn’t sure what a hero was, except people in history like Joan of Arc or Madame Curie. And what could Esther have said at the trial that was so wrong? Did she tell the truth? Was she supposed to lie? I couldn’t bring myself to ask. “I just can’t believe my parents never told me,” I said. “I’m really pissed off about that. But then I think about Esther being so sick, and I can’t be angry with her. It’s so not fair that I never knew I had an aunt and uncle and everything.”
We stared at each other across the dark inches of nighttime. We both seemed to have the same thought at the same moment, but I said it first.
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