That first winter in day care I was taken with the other children to a holiday pageant, where a play was performed about an infant and a stable and wise men. “Jesus is God,” the little actors shouted at the finale.
I’d been bored, but now I was troubled. My mother or aunt told me about words such as “Jesus” and “Christ” and “gentile,” and I knew they meant some ancient horror, Cossacks galloping on fiery horses, running swords through women and children and setting fire to the shtetl at Eastertime after the village priest enraged them against the Jews. Whenever we passed two nuns on the street, my aunt said it meant bad luck and you were supposed to say “Tsu, tsu, tsu,” like spitting something out. One nun could mean good luck, but it was safest not to pass any.
I was so shaken to hear the dangerous words in an auditorium that I must have been oblivious when my schoolmates were ordered to form a line and walk to the yellow bus on which we’d come. Soon I found myself surrounded by strange children in maroon uniforms.
I stood there, stunned, at the end of the row where I’d been sitting with my schoolmates. A harried woman wearing glasses that slid down her nose appeared out of nowhere and barked at me, “Underprivileged or Catholic?” I’d never heard either of those words, and I stared at her with an open mouth. “Underprivileged or Catholic?” she repeated.
One of the teachers who was herding a group of children out overheard her and peered at me. “She looks like a little Eye-talian or Porto Rican.”
My inquisitor took my hand and rushed me toward a bus packed with more children in maroon uniforms. “Up you go,” she said.
I obeyed her and squeezed into a seat near the front, next to a red-faced fat boy who stuck his tongue out at me and yelled, “Oooh, cooties.”
I looked around, thinking I’d move to more hospitable ground, and there, in the middle of the bus, shooing children into seats, were two nuns in black, their gigantic crucifixes gleaming on their breasts. I burst into exasperated, horrified tears, which caught the attention of one of them.
“She’s not Catholic Elementary,” she said, and gruffly taking me by the hand led me out of her bus and finally settled me in the right one, with my underprivileged schoolmates.
I’d learned two new words.
Though I’d looked forward to going to school, I wasn’t happy there. One day I cut my finger on the jagged edge of something in the playground, and the other children gathered around me to see the ooze of blood.
“Ooh, look how bright it is,” one little girl observed. “Her blood looks so clean, and she’s so dirty.”
I must have been dirty. In the hot months, my mother came back from the shop sticky and dripping. She ran a cool bath for herself in the little bathroom we were allowed to use, pulled her clothes off, threw them in a pile on the floor. Then she sank into the tub while I sat on the edge.
Sometimes I cooled myself by placing my lips on the delicious wetness of her back. “Onekiss, twokiss, threekiss, fourkiss.” I could count up to a hundred and aimed to give at least a hundred kisses, though always she said, “Enough, Lilly, enough,” before I could get out of the twenties.
But I don’t remember ever being in the bathtub myself. Baths were to get cool in. Probably her mother had never cleaned her in a bath when she was a child either. They probably had had no baths in the shtetl.
The children at school must also have noticed my hair. It was a long time before I realized that a comb was supposed to go through one’s hair with ease, that knots were not inevitable if you combed your hair every day, that most people in America washed their hair. My black head was a tangled mass of unruly curls. The hair seemed to grow out in a great bush rather than down. In the morning, when she got me ready for school, my mother sometimes passed a comb over my head, but if she combed deep enough to hit the knots, the pain was awful. “Stop, stop,” I screamed at her, and she did, leaving my head to announce to the world the story of her hopeless parenting.
One day my first-grade class went to the Bronx Zoo on a field trip, and Victor, an immaculate blond boy who wore a clean, starched white shirt every day and a little gold ring on his pinkie finger, ended up next to me on the bus. “I’m not going to sit there,” he proclaimed after one look at me and popped up, then cried when the driver yelled back at him to sit down and shut up.
I squeezed myself toward the window, trying to give him as wide a berth as possible so there would be no further protests, and I clamped my lips together so I wouldn’t cry too.
It didn’t matter, I tried to tell myself. Because what did matter to me, passionately, was Miss Huntington, my teacher—a blond goya, my mother would have called her. She was a woman in her forties, not beautiful the way the movie actresses were beautiful, I knew, but to me totally captivating. Her eyes were blue, as I remembered My Rae’s had been, and she was tall like my mother. But in no other way was she like them. She was an American. Her voice was low and cool. She had no accent when she spoke, and she could read English. She smiled a lot and laughed at things. Someone like that didn’t carry heavy burdens on her heart, dark sorrows that made her whimper in the night. Though I felt a little guilty toward my mother and maybe even toward the memory of My Rae, I was madly in love with Miss Huntington.
Would I have been so attentive to learning otherwise? I hung on her every word. I watched her lips form the letters she had written on the board and I copied her accent; I modulated my voice to imitate her tones. Ay, Bee, Cee—it was easy for me. Many of the letters looked like they sounded, S like a snake, K like a crash, L like a leap, O like an oooh. I memorized them right away, hearing her voice in my ears.
“Who can say the whole alphabet?” she asked, and my arm shot up.
“Me, Miss Huntington. I can.” I ripped the letters off at great speed while some of the children tittered at my intensity.
One day she explained silent letters to us, and cases when letters made unusual sounds: “‘G-h’ sometimes has a fff sound,” she told us. Then she wrote letters on the board. “Who knows what this word is?” The class was silent.
“E-n…” I struggled with the code. I knew it! “Enough!’” I shouted, floating through the air on diaphanous wings. The secret of reading was mine. The class murmured, awed by my miracle. “Wonderful, Lillian,” she said, beaming at me, pronouncing my name in American, making it sound as wonderful as she was.
One morning we lined up in the schoolyard, waiting for Miss Huntington to come and take us in to class as she always did. Instead the vice principal, Miss O’Reilly, came, a no-nonsense woman of great girth and steely gray hair. “Miss Huntington is sick,” she announced, “and I will be with you today.”
But Miss O’Reilly had important administrative papers to tend to, so she had no time to stand in front of the class and deliver lessons. “You must be very good boys and girls, very quiet,” she told us, passing out the picture books that were reserved for reward days.
She sat at Miss Huntington’s desk, absorbed in writing and figuring, ignoring the din until it couldn’t be ignored any longer, then rapped on the desk with a ruler. “Silence. Do I have to give out demerits?” The roar died down briefly, then rose on a wave again.
“All right,” she announced. “We’re going to have a contest. Whoever can be the quietest for the longest will get a very valuable present, a toy that you’ll love.” The class tittered, but she had struck a chord. There was silence for a while, then only occasional whispering. From time to time she looked up. “It’s something everyone would love to have,” she reminded us.
The boy in the row next to me was sitting with his hands folded, eyes straight ahead, lips sealed. “Look at Shlomo,” she said. “Are you going to let Shlomo be the one to get the valuable present?” Some imitated his posture for a few minutes, then tired of the game.
Shlomo’s shoes had low tops and were made of the smooth, rich, dark brown leather such as I had lusted after, not like my cheap-looking, scuffed high-tops. He carried his lunch and his homework to school in a le
ather satchel with a picture of Pinocchio on it. I had seen him one day walking with his father and a happy-looking mother and sisters. He had everything. It was I who needed the valuable present.
I folded my hands and extended them in front of me, much farther than Shlomo’s. I peered into the distance with glazed eyes. I pressed my lips together tightly, as though I never cared to open them again. I became as rigid as a soldier, a corpse. A fly buzzed around me and I did not acknowledge it. Only once in a while did I dare to glance over at Shlomo to see if he were still in the running. I mustn’t let him beat me—he couldn’t beat me.
It felt like hours later when Miss O’Reilly announced that it was time for our nutrition break. “I have finished my work,” she said. “And now I will keep my promise.” She left as the monitor passed out milk and graham crackers, and she returned with a large paper bag. “Class, which student do you think should get the present?”
My heart sank. She was leaving it up to them. They would never choose me. I had no friend who would speak out for me.
“Barbara Ann,” one girl said, naming the prettiest girl in class.
“Barbara Ann is a chatterbox,” Miss O’Reilly said abruptly. “Lillian, come up here.”
She had noticed. There was justice in America! My blood beat a joyful tattoo.
“Shlomo, you come up here, too.” For him she pulled a big box out of the bag. “Shlomo, do you know who Albert Einstein is? This is a chemistry set. You work hard with this chemistry set and someday you, Shlomo Schwartz, will be another Albert Einstein.” There was a bored pattering of applause as Shlomo returned to his seat.
To me she said, “Now, Lillian, you have a choice. Would you like a toy or a useful present?”
She looked at me expectantly. I knew the answer I was supposed to give. But maybe she had a doll with blond hair and blue eyes that opened and closed in that bag. I had never had a doll before. Maybe it was a pair of skates, or a bow and arrow, or something else more wonderful than I could even imagine. My classmates held their collective breath along with me. They would have chosen the toy, I knew. And the toy, the lovely, frivolous luxury of it, was what I wanted.
“Come on, Lillian,” she prompted. My name had never sounded so heavy, so adult before. I hated the way she pronounced it, impoverishing me even more by cutting a whole syllable out of it: Lil-yun. I could not open my mouth to say what I knew she wanted me to say, what a little girl who was so serious that she would sit for hours as still as a corpse in order to win a valuable present should say.
“I would like the toy, please,” I blurted out.
“What?” she asked in disbelief, or perhaps to bully me into reconsideration.
“I would like the toy,” I said again.
“Shame on you,” she came back. “I know how hard your mother has to work to support you, a girl without a father. Don’t you want to help her out? Don’t you want something serious that will help her out?”
I expected my classmates to giggle at the news of my fatherless state, but they were silent, as solemn in the battle now as I was.
“I would like the toy, please,” I repeated.
A half dozen of them clapped their hands; one cheered, “Yeaa.”
“Quiet,” Miss O’Reilly admonished them. “All right, Lillian. I’m surprised at you. That was not a good choice, but you may have it.” She took out of the sack a book with a worn gray cover. “The Last of the Mohicans,” she informed me. I sucked in my breath in disappointment, and it seemed to me that I heard the class echo my sound.
“And because your mother needs all the help she can get, I’m going to give you the serious present too.” Now she handed me a little bag. I opened it just enough to see that it contained beige cotton stockings. “But in the future, I want you to remember to make a wiser choice,” she said, dismissing me back to my seat.
They applauded for me again, and this time all of them joined in. I couldn’t decide if it was in commiseration over the way I’d been tricked or preached to or if I’d really won their admiration by standing firm for my desire.
When we went out to the playground at noon, I was alone again, as though their tribute had never happened. But I felt somehow that I’d tasted a victory over forces that weren’t sympathetic to me. I’d learned that I could win, I could earn applause, but, even better, I could be strong enough to demand my desire. I might not get it, but I would get the satisfaction of knowing I couldn’t be daunted.
Those Saturday evenings when my mother dressed up and left me I knew where she was going, though she never told me. I knew she would never be finished with him, that man she thought looked like Charles Boyer. The more I became aware of how overwhelmingly I loved her, the more I despised him.
“You have me, Mommy,” I said one Saturday evening when she didn’t make up her face to go out and I found her crying in our room.
“It’s not the same thing.” She made a sad little smile. And I knew for sure that she was crying now not about the lost relatives but about Moishe and how much she missed him when she wasn’t with him. “To who can I let out my bitter heart?” she sighed to the air.
Moishe, that hated name. I wanted her not to need anyone else. I wanted to be everything to her.
But her life was so hard, so full of losses, her work so exhausting. She had to stand on her feet the whole day, she told me, because it was her job to drape the dresses on the tall, stuffed mannequins. “No sitting,” the forelady barked at any draper who might be weakened for a minute by her period or her troubles and tried to pull up a stool from the finishers’ station. In the steaming New York summers it was especially bad: My mother’s mannequin was next to the pressers, and she’d be bathed and scalded by vapors from their hot machines. And there was no escape: She had to support us. “My whole body is breaking from tiredness,” she’d sigh as we walked the block and a half together from my nursery school, and I could feel the tremor of her tiredness in the fingers I clutched. Once in our room, she threw off her clothes and stretched naked and immobile on our bed, where I, sitting on a corner of it, watched over her as she stared up at the ceiling until she could drag herself to cool off in the bathtub. “Rateveh mich, save me. Save me from the shop, Lilly,” she said once, gazing at the ceiling with a little smile on her lips that confused me. My mother didn’t joke. Was she joking now? “Save me from the shop,” she said again and sighed.
“How, Mommy? What should I do?” I asked, primed to do anything in her service.
“You can’t,” she admitted. “How could you?” Then, “Become a movie star.”
Did she mean it? Could I become a movie star? I would do it, I promised myself. That’s what I would become! She needed my help, and I would not fail her!
One evening, when my mother and I returned home after our long day, a squat little person was waiting in our room, wearing a small brown hat and veil, balancing an enormous black patent leather purse on her lap, sitting stiffly on the edge of the room’s only chair.
“She’s back. My Malech Hamovas is back,” my mother said to the air. “Angel of Death, now you come back, after you left us for so long alone!” she turned to the veil and yelled.
My Rae lifted her veil, gathered me into her arms, wet my cheeks with her tears. “Shepseleh meine, my little lamb.”
“My Rae!” I threw myself at her, then pulled away. My mother wouldn’t like it.
“The mameh ohn a boich vaytik is back, the mama without a bellyache,” my mother translated bitterly for my benefit, though I didn’t need the translation.
“Why you didn’t answer my letters?” My aunt wept to my mother in English. “Why you disappear and my letters come back to me? Thank God the old super heard where you moved and took pity on me. You want to kill me? You almost killed me,” she shrilled.
“You’re the murderer, you!” My mother outdid her, resuming the litany I hadn’t heard in a while. “You cockroach, you. You bigmouth, you.”
But after my mother emptied herself and my aunt s
hed all her renewed tears, after both women yelled themselves to hoarseness, My Rae suddenly declared, as though they hadn’t been screaming about death and destruction for the last hour, “The baby needs eats.”
We went to the Automat. Neither woman spoke to the other, but both piled my plate high. They had no family except each other, no children in the next generation except me, and they were signaling a kind of truce, one we would live with for a while.
“Look how pale and skinny she is.” My aunt felt my ribs.
“I need you to tell me how to take care of my kind? Where were you when I needed you? Now we don’t need you. Go back to California.” My mother tossed her hand and grumbled, yet, it seemed to my ear, less vehemently than before.
My aunt did go back to California, but not alone.
I’ll never know what got into my mother a few weeks later. I’d been watching her in the mirror, just as I had on so many Saturdays, while she put on her makeup. This time, though, I wasn’t sad because My Rae had said she would take me to the Automat. She stayed with us now, sleeping on the Missus’s couch in the living room. It hadn’t taken me any time at all to remember how much I’d loved her.
“When you were a little tiny puttzeh-ruttzehleh,” she reminded me to my giggly glee, “I took you into my arms and I held you next to my heart. And you know what you did, little gonif, little thief? You crawled right in, and you never crawled out again.”
Though I’d lost the image of her over the last couple of years, she had crawled deep into my heart too, I realized. I’d never stopped loving her. How I loved her now! But different from the way I loved my mother. My mother I would have to take care of. My aunt would take care of me. I needed them both, desperately.
“Can I have lemon meringue pie? And then can we go see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall?” I’d asked for the biggest treats I could think of, and I knew as sure as I knew the sun would rise the next day that she would give them to me.
Naked in the Promised Land Page 2