He heard their voices at the same time I did, and he jumped up and settled two feet away from me on the bench. My mother and Shmuel were walking down the path toward us. I wanted to run to her, but what about Shmuel? I sat glued to the bench. Didn’t she see what Falix had been doing? Why didn’t she yell at him like My Rae had yelled at Chuck?
“You had a nice tree to sit under,” Shmuel said cordially.
“Yes,” my mother said. “It’s nice and shady here.”
If there was a Mrs. Lieber I never saw her, and I never saw little Shayna after that first time at the bazaar. When Shmuel came to court my mother now, Falix was almost always with him. Didn’t my mother understand what he was up to?
Falix talked to me as though I were an adult. He spared me nothing. “I have a good friend”—he was gleeful one Sunday—“who just married a beautiful lady with a beautiful daughter, fifteen.” He stretched the vowels out as though he were tasting delectable little bites of knish—“bee-ooo-tii-ful,” he said with feeling, and his eyes shone. “In the night he has the mother and in the day he has the daughter.” His hand cupped my knee, moved to my thigh.
“When my Shayna is twelve years old,” he said dreamily, a hint of melancholy in his voice, “I’ll find her a geliebte, a lover. A girl shouldn’t go longer than twelve without a man to love her.”
He crooned at me always, whether I was fighting him off or tired of fighting him off. He sought me in the kitchen, on Fanny’s crumbling back porch, in the bedroom as I sat on the floor doing my homework. Sometimes I let him touch me where he wanted, pretending more struggle than I felt. Then I hated myself for it.
But when I lay in bed, my mother asleep in the bed next to mine, and I remembered where and how he touched me, I was also overwhelmed by physical sensations in deep places where I’d never had them before. They weren’t like the sweet throbbings I’d had at night when I thought of Irene. They came in great scary waves and were out of my control. When I thought about Falix Lieber in the daylight my face flamed. Could people tell about that dark thing by looking at me?
It went on for a couple of months, and then Falix disappeared, along with Shmuel, just as Jake Mann had. I was relieved never to have to see Falix again and Shmuel, who brought him and must surely have guessed what was going on. But even years later, Falix Lieber sometimes sneaked up on me to scare me, to lull me, in fantasies that popped out of nowhere, crooning, “Maydeleh, what’s so bad here?”
I think my mother was really upset to be dropped by Shmuel. I know she’d felt a special link to him—they’d both suffered because of the Nazis, they’d both had terrible losses, and now they might help each other forget a little bit and snatch some happiness from life. But not even that had worked out. “I can’t no more,” my mother cried. “They don’t like me. I’m old. Who would want me now anyway?” She flopped on her bed and threw her eyes heavenward once again, and I stood at the door feeling more helpless than ever. I had no idea what we could do next.
But Yehuda Cohen had another one: Albert Gordin, “a nice, honest man,” the matchmaker said, collecting our three dollars and folding them into his moth-eaten wallet. “Has a steady job. A bachelor.” Mr. Cohen enumerated the new man’s virtues.
Albert arrived on a Sunday afternoon with a little bouquet of pink carnations wrapped in newspaper. He was seven or eight years younger than my mother. (She’d lied about her age to Mr. Cohen, and never—in twenty-five years—did Albert learn the truth.) He wore a new-looking plaid jacket that was too big across the shoulders and too long in the sleeves and a yellow-and-blue-striped tie that also looked new. He removed his hat from time to time—only to wipe his brow in the L.A. heat. When he lifted it, I could see two deep indentations on the top of his head, which was bald as a baby’s.
He didn’t offer to take my mother out anywhere. He got to the point, sitting on Fanny’s couch. “I’m looking to get married. Mr. Cohen says you’re looking for the same thing.”
“Yes, I wouldn’t mind getting married,” my mother said. Her voice sounded to me as shaky as a little old lady’s.
“Mr. Cohen told me you’re a good, honest person,” he said.
“Yes,” my mother said guilelessly.
“I make a good living. Not too much, but enough for a wife.”
“I wouldn’t have to work?” my mother asked, getting to the point herself. She’d had too many painful months to be coy now.
“Not you and not your daughter.”
“So I could stop my job right away if we got married?”
I held my breath.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “My mother says to me a couple months ago, ‘Albert, I’m going, and now you have to settle down with a nice lady.’ And then she passes away. She was almost eighty-four years.” He swiped at a tear in the corner of his eye, but I don’t think my mother saw it because she was studying the floor as though the faded flowers of Fanny’s carpet were tea leaves that could foretell her future. “So if we like each other, we’ll get married right away and you don’t have to work no more, okay?” Albert asked.
The next day he came in the evening, right after my mother got home from work. He wasn’t going to waste any time. On this visit he was more relaxed and a lot more voluble. Whenever he was about to launch into a monologue he abruptly stood up. “Those doctors I work with at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, they’re so smart,” he proclaimed, “they know everything—everything. You can ask them a question, any question you want, and they can tell you the answer. That’s how they got where they are.” He plopped down again on Fanny’s couch.
My mother nodded her head after each sentence, but her eyes looked glazed.
“Dr. Friedman, my big boss,” Albert said, standing up again, “he’s sooo rich that he’s not a millionaire—he’s a mul-ti-million-aire.” He punctuated every syllable with a pointed finger.
“Would you like some coffee?” I squeezed in between his monologues.
Albert shook his head no. “He writes a book and ev-er-y med-i-cal student in the whooole country has to buy it. It costs them one hundred dollars for a book by Dr. Friedman.”
After he left, I followed my mother to our room, and for a minute I thought we were going to do the chicken dance again, but she stopped her pacing after one turn and plopped down on her bed. I plopped with her. I could smell the sickly sweet dead-flower-and-sweat odor that her skin always had when she was really upset. We both stared up at the ceiling now, with eyes open like two corpses.
“Lilly, what should I do?” This after a long time.
“I don’t know!” I tried to think it out, but I couldn’t. Here was the person who might finally rescue her from the shop. But he was weird. Yet if he was a nice, honest man with a steady job, like Mr. Cohen said … But how could she live with him?
The next time we heard Albert’s steps on the porch and his banging at the front door, my mother pulled frantically at my arm, even though I was doing my math homework. “You come too and sit with us,” she implored.
“Why? You’re fine,” I whispered, and extricated myself from her clutch. He didn’t require much conversation from her—she didn’t need my help in that area. But I could see in her eyes that she wasn’t fine. I wasn’t either. She went, head down, as if to her death. I sat on my bed, chewing my nails. I couldn’t even add five plus five now. I jumped up to join her.
“Without me,” Albert, on his feet, was saying, “the doctors can’t do nothing. I’m the one who knows where everything is,” and down he plopped again.
“I’m the one who keeps the knives sharpened for them,” he rambled the next time he came. “‘Albert,’ they tell me, ‘without a sharp knife I’m lost.’ I’m in the pathology labatory almost all the time.”
I didn’t know what a pathology laboratory was. He cleaned, he straightened things up, I figured out. He kept doctors’ instruments in order. It took me a while to understand that it was autopsies he was cleaning up after, and that one of his main jobs was to be sure that th
e scalpels and saws were sharp. My guts twisted at the insight, but I never told my mother. Why upset her needlessly?
A few weeks later, Albert arrived holding more carnations wrapped in newspaper, a bouquet identical to the first one. In his other hand he carried a small box. As soon as I opened the door I knew something was different.
“Lee-lee,” he pronounced my name. “Hullo.” His nervousness was palpable. “I have news for your mother. Where is she?”
My mother came out, as scared as he. I retreated to the bedroom.
“Look what I bought for you,” I heard through the walls less than a minute later.
“Oh, my God!” my mother exclaimed.
“So, you want to get married now?” Albert asked seconds after that.
I covered my eyes with my hands. I covered my ears, my mouth. Oh, God! Oh, my God! I did the chicken dance by myself up and down our room. Then I forced myself to stop. He doesn’t try to put dirty paws on me. I sat on my bed, repeating his good points like a mantra: he has a job, he’ll let my mother quit the shop.
As soon as the screen door closed behind him, my mother rushed to our room. On her face was animal panic. On her left hand was a gold ring with a tiny diamond. “Lilly, what should I do? Tell me!”
I flew to her, held her tight, as in a death grip. “I don’t know,” I cried. Then, into her shoulder, “Marry him, Mommy.” My voice sounded in my ear as if it came from underwater.
I felt her nod her head, again and again, as though she was agreeing, convincing herself.
The next evening Albert showed up with two immaculately tailored men in their fifties, both bald, one tall and big-bellied, his forehead showing blue veins, and the other inches shorter, with a round, fat face. A new pastel blue Cadillac convertible, which I’d seen before only in billboard ads, was parked in front of the house. “This … this is my older brother Jerry, and this is my … other older brother Marvin.” Albert’s expression was sheepish, like a kid’s whose parents have come to school on account of his bad behavior. They sat down on Fanny’s couch, Albert hemmed in between his brothers.
“Albert says he wants to marry you,” Jerry, the shorter one, said to my mother.
“Did he tell you he was in a mental institution for three years?” Marvin asked, a businessman with no words to waste.
Their family had emigrated from Russia to Mexico at the start of the 1930s because they couldn’t get into the United States. Jerry told the story while Albert looked down at his shoes. Marvin and Jerry became jewelers—big successes, I gathered. Albert, still in his teens, wandered off to work with a traveling peddler, and in the heat of Vera Cruz, “a hundred and fifteen degrees,” Jerry emphasized, he had to be hospitalized. “He had a nervous breakdown.”
“Do you understand?” Marvin asked my mother, staring at her with cruel, ironic eyes. “He went crazy. They even had to do an operation and open his head.”
“To save his life,” Jerry added quickly.
Marvin ignored him. “You still want to marry Albert?” His mean mouth smirked.
Now Albert looked up and rose to his feet. “I’m not crazy no more,” he uttered with a quiet dignity that I hadn’t seen in him before.
“Yes, he’s all right now. He’s not stupid, you understand,” Jerry said, as though Albert, who stood near my mother now, weren’t in the room. “He holds down a job and he can speak five languages—Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Spanish, English,” he enumerated. “And he reads Hebrew better than a lot of rabbis.” Jerry sounded almost proud of his poor younger brother.
“He’s all right now,” Marvin agreed, “but we thought you needed to know about it. Now we wash our hands, and what you do is your business.” He got up to leave at once, holding the screen door open peremptorily for both his brothers. Albert gave my mother a shame-faced, pleading, backward glance.
From the window I watched them usher Albert down the steps and into the back seat of the Cadillac. I felt sorry for him, how he’d sat hemmed in between the fat-cat brothers, disgraced like a culprit. Yet how could my mother marry him? I ran to her. “Mommy, what should we do?” I cried.
My mother was bent over the couch, patting smooth the yellowed sheet where the brothers had sat. Then she straightened, shrugged her shoulders high, and let them fall. “They told me he’s not stupid, he keeps a job.” She sighed. “I’ll marry him. What else can I do?”
5. SHEDDING
I LOST HER. I made myself an orphan by giving my mother up to a crazy man with holes in his head. They got married, and he moved in and slept in my bed; I suppose he slept in her bed too, where we used to snuggle and listen to “Your Hit Parade.” I was cast out of my shabby paradise and had to go sleep on the old army cot in the dining room, where Rae used to sleep before she left to marry Mr. Bergman. The first nights I stuck my knuckles in my mouth so my mother wouldn’t hear me sobbing, slobbering, because it was Albert and not I who’d rescued her from the shop.
Yet it had all gone just the way I’d planned. She’d quit her job the very day they went downtown to City Hall and became man and wife, and now she was safe and I’d be free. So why did I feel that she’d betrayed me, that I had to break away from her, just as she’d broken away from me?
I stare into the full-length mirror in the dressing room of the girls’ gym. A tough girl with a furious face stares back at me. I’ve shaved off the thin end of each eyebrow and replaced it with a penciled black line that aims straight up, two rapiers poised above my scowling eyes. My blood-red lipstick is drawn high on my upper lip to make it look socked-in-the-mouth full. My head is crowned by a huge pompadour. I might be hiding a knife in there, so you better watch out. My blouse is see-through nylon, and my skirt is pachuca-tight and pachuca-short.
“Is that the way you dress?” my aunt says with a voice that slides all the way up from her deep foghorn the first time she sees my transformation.
“Yeah, that’s the way I dress,“I tell her. What does she know about surviving at Hollenbeck Junior High? She’s never even been to school. She doesn’t know anything except how to take care of Mr. Bergman.
“Oy vey iz mir, oh, woe is me,” she says, slapping her cheek.
I’ve bought a silver metal belt at the 5&10, and I clasp it breath-quench-ingly tight around my waist. Why should I hide what I’ve got? I’ve measured myself with an old cloth tape measure that Rae left behind. I’m 36-22-36. The world can like it or lump it.
Most of the Jewish kids have moved west, to a nicer part of town, the Beverly-Fairfax area, away from the Mexican kids and the Negro kids and the Japanese kids who spent their first years of life in relocation camps. Only a handful of Jewish kids are left behind to graduate from Hollenbeck Junior High School. Who cares? What good did the Jewish kids ever do me anyway? I was always an outcast, an odd girl, with my crazy mother, no father, Fanny’s furnished room. With them or without them, I’m alone.
The Jewish kids that remain titter at the way I dress, and I don’t give a damn. I always liked the Mexican kids better anyway because they’re poor too, so why would they look down on me? Though I have no gang, I dress like the pachuca gang girls who look so tough, just the way I want to be.
Carlos used the current expression of admiration to introduce himself. “You built like a brick shithouse, baby.” His dimples and strong white teeth looked beautiful against his dark skin, and I liked the rolling shuffle of his walk, a tough guy bop. “Hey, ese, how you doin’ man?” I’d hear him say to other pachucos. I loved its lilt. I’d practice saying it too when I was alone. “Hey, ese…” How cool it sounded.
“I gotta rumble with them pinche cabrones alla time ‘cause they call me a black Mexican,” he said with a sneer about the light-skinned Mexican boys who watched us with narrowed eyes as we walked past them holding hands. “Tu madre,” he muttered in their direction, but under his breath, and he raised a middle finger at them, though they were already behind us, so only I could see it. He seemed to be a loner, just like me, and that made me like him ev
en more. I loved that he risked being seen with me though I wasn’t a real pachuca, not even a Mexican. I loved his clothes, the sharp-creased pachuco khaki pants, the dark, long-sleeve shirt with the collar raised in back. I loved his shiny black hair, a duck’s ass, slicked on the sides with Vaseline, and sex curls—that’s what the girls called them—dangling on his forehead.
“Hey, baby, I made this for you in shop.” He didn’t look at me as we walked, but he handed me a red and green plastic heart, like those I’d envied on other girls. When you wore a heart like that, everyone knew you had a boyfriend. “I don’t have no chain, but you get yourself one and wear this round your neck,” Carlos said in his pachuco rhythm. He grasped my waist as we bopped down the street together. “You don’t got to go home right now. Let’s go talk in the park,” he said.
“We can sit on my porch and talk,” I offered. It didn’t matter if I took him to Fanny’s ugly house because he probably lived in a bad place too; and I really didn’t want to go back to Hollenbeck Park. I had such a long history there already, swinging with my mother and My Rae, fighting Falix off. Did my mother see what Falix was doing? Did she?
“No, it’s better in the park,” Carlos said, and led me with his firm grip on my waist. I let myself be led because I wanted to keep being his girlfriend. Near the familiar pond we lay side by side under a low willow tree, a droopy umbrella hiding us from the world. I willed myself to cast my mother and aunt from my memory and feel only how warm his breath was on me and how soft his lips were. His mouth lowered to my neck, and his teeth made gentle little bites and sucks on my exposed skin. Then his tongue found its way in and out of my ear, and he shifted to lie on top of me. A bird sang its heart out on the branches above us, and I was paralyzed by languor under his fifteen-year-old’s expertise. When I closed my eyes, I still saw the bright dizzy green, and the leaves were tangled with birdsong. “Hey, baby, let’s go in that boathouse. Don’t nobody come in there during the week.” Carlos looked down on me, a young boy’s look that surprised me with its sly hopefulness. Through all the layers of our clothes I felt him harden.
Naked in the Promised Land Page 10