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This is for my mother, Frances Frumin Weiner
“There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.”
—GRACE PALEY
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”
—MEXICAN PROVERB
2015
Jo
Her cell phone rang as they were on their way out of the movies. Jo let the crowd sweep her along, out of the dark theater and into the brighter lobby, smelling popcorn and the winter air on people’s coats, blinking in the late-afternoon sunshine. She pulled the phone out of her pocket. “Hello?”
“Jo?” Just from the sound of the doctor’s voice, just in that one word, Jo could hear her future. The Magic 8 Ball’s truth-telling triangle had flipped from REPLY HAZY or ASK AGAIN LATER to OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD or MY SOURCES SAY NO. Her chest tightened, and her mouth felt dry. Her wife looked up at her, eyebrows raised in a question. Jo tried to keep her face expressionless as she held up one finger and turned away.
The first time, nine years ago, she’d found the lump while in the shower, a pebble-like hardness underneath her olive-hued skin, once drum-taut, now age-spotted and soft. This time, they’d caught it on one of the mammograms she endured every six months on the breast that remained. See? the radiologist had said, tapping the tip of a pen against a shadow on the image. Jo had nodded. Yes. I see. It was a tiny concentration of white in the cloudy gray dimness, barely bigger than the head of a pin, but Jo knew, in her bones, the truth of what she was seeing; she understood that she was looking at her doom.
“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. Jo caught a glimpse of herself in the movie theater’s windows, her face slack, her expression stunned. Mom’s spacing out again! she imagined Lila cackling. Leave Mom alone, her oldest daughter, Kim, would say, and Missy, the even-tempered middle child, would ignore them both and pull a book out of her bag.
The doctor was still talking, her voice sympathetic in Jo’s ear. “You should come in so that we can discuss your options,” she was saying, but Jo knew that there weren’t any options left, at least, not any good ones. The first time around, she’d done the surgeries, the radiation, the chemotherapy. She’d lost her hair, lost her appetite and her energy, lost her left breast and six months of her life. After five years cancer-free, she was allowed to say that she was cured—a survivor, in the pink-tinted parlance of the time, as if cancer were an invading army and she’d managed to beat back the hordes. But Jo had never felt like a true survivor. She never believed that the cancer was really gone. She’d always thought it was in temporary retreat, those bad cells huddled deep inside her bones, lurking and plotting and biding their time, and every minute she’d lived, every minute since her fingers had come upon that lump under her wet skin, was borrowed. For nine years she had lived with the sound of a clock in her ears, ticking, louder and louder, its sound underlining everything she did. Now the ticking had given way to the ringing of alarm bells. Hurry up please, it’s time.
Jo shivered, even though she was wrapped in the puffy purple winter coat all three of her daughters made fun of. Underneath, she wore one of her loose cotton tops and a pair of elastic-waisted jeans that had to be at least fifteen years old and sneakers on her feet (“I guess those are her dressy sneakers,” Jo had overheard Lila say at the big seventieth birthday party Kim had thrown a few years before). Her hair was short, the way she’d always worn it, pale gray, because she’d stopped coloring it years ago, and she never wore makeup, or much jewelry, except for her wedding ring. She wondered what would happen if she let the phone thump to the blue-and-red carpet, what would happen if she started to scream, and found herself remembering the one actual scene she’d made, years ago, in a Blockbuster Video store, when such places had still existed. All those years later, and she could still remember the exact sound she’d made, how her laughter had turned shrieky and wild, the smell of the teenage clerk’s spearmint gum, and the feel of the girl’s hand on her shoulder as the girl had said, “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” She remembered how Lila’s shoulders had hunched up high beside the pale, skinny stalk of her neck, and how Melissa’s voice had wobbled as she’d said, “We’re going, okay? We’re going right now.”
Time, she thought, as she gripped the phone in one numb hand. She needed time, as much as they could give her. Time to make sure that she’d done everything she could to make things right with her sister. Time to make Kim believe that she was a good mother. Time to convince Melissa that doing the right thing belatedly was better than never having done it at all. And Lila . . . well, eternity might not be long enough to solve Lila’s problems. But couldn’t God at least give Jo long enough to make a start?
She wanted to groan, she wanted to cry, she wanted to throw the phone at the colorful cardboard display of some superhero movie, and the teenagers posing in front of it, snapping selfies, laughing and making faces for the camera, as if they were all going to live forever. She felt her wife slip her small hand into Jo’s and squeeze. Jo blinked back tears and thought, Please, God, or whoever’s up there, please just give me enough time to make it right.
PART
one
1950
Jo
The four Kaufmans stood at the curb in front of the new house on Alhambra Street, as if they were afraid to set foot on the lawn, even though Jo knew they could. The lawn belonged to them now, along with the house, with its red bricks and the white aluminum awning. Every part of it, the front door and the steps, the mailbox at the curb, the cherry tree in the backyard and the maple tree by the driveway, the carport and the basement and the attic you could reach by a flight of stairs that you pulled down from the ceiling, all of it belonged to the Kaufmans. They were moving out of the bad part of Detroit, which Jo’s parents said was crowded and unhealthy, full of bad germs and diseases and filling up with people who weren’t like them; they were moving up in the world, to this new neighborhood, to a house that would be all their own.
“Oh, Ken,” said Jo’s mother, as she squeezed his arm with her gloved hand. Her mother’s name was Sarah, and she was just over five feet tall, with white skin that always looked a little suntanned, shiny brown hair that fell in curls to her shoulders, and a pursed, painted red mouth beneath a generous nose. Her round chin jutted forward, giving her a determined look, and there were grooves running from the corners of her nose to the edges of her lips, but that morning, her mouth was turned up at the corners, not scrunched up in a frown. She was happy, and as close to beautiful as Jo had ever seen.
Jo wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist, feeling the stiffness underneath the starch of Sarah’s best red dress, the one with a full skirt flaring out from her narrow waist and three big white buttons on either side of the bodice. A smart red hat with a black ribbon band sat on top of Sarah’s curls. Her mother put her arm around Jo’s shoulders and squeezed, and Jo felt like someone had pulled a blanket up to her chin, or like she was swimming in Lake Erie, where they went in the summertime, and had just paddled into a patch of warm water.
“So, girls? What do you think?” asked Jo’s daddy.
“It’s like a castle!” said Bethie, her little sister. Bethie was five years old, chubby and cute, with pale white skin, naturally curly hair, and blue-g
reen eyes, and she always said exactly the right thing. Jo was six, almost seven, tall and gangly, and almost everything she did was wrong.
Jo smiled, dizzy with pleasure as her dad scooped her up in his arms. Ken Kaufman had thick dark hair that he wore combed straight back from his forehead. His nose, Jo thought, gave him a hawklike aspect. His eyes were blue underneath dark brows, and he smelled like the bay rum cologne he patted on his cheeks every morning after he shaved. He was only a few inches taller than his wife, but he was broad-shouldered and solid. Standing in front of the house he’d bought, he looked as tall as Superman from the comic books. He wore his good gray suit, a white shirt, a red tie to match Sarah’s dress, and black shoes that Jo had helped him shine that morning, setting the shoes onto yesterday’s Free Press, working the polish into the leather with a tortoiseshell-handled brush. Jo and Bethie wore matching pink gingham dresses that their mother had sewn, with puffy sleeves, and patent-leather Mary Janes. Bethie could hardly wait to try on the new dress. When Jo had asked to wear her dungarees, her mother had frowned. “Why would you want to wear pants? Today’s a special day. Don’t you want to look pretty?”
Jo couldn’t explain. She didn’t have the words to say how she felt about pretty, how the lacy socks itched and the fancy shoes pinched and the elastic insides of the sleeves left red dents in her upper arms. When she was dressed up, Jo just felt wrong, like it was hard to breathe, like her skin no longer fit, like she’d been forced into a costume or a disguise, and her mother was always shushing her, even when she wasn’t especially loud. She didn’t care about looking pretty, and she didn’t like dresses. Her mother, she knew, would never understand.
“It’s our house,” Jo’s mother was saying, her voice rich with satisfaction.
“The American Dream,” said Jo’s dad. To Jo, the house didn’t seem like much of a dream. It wasn’t a castle with a moat, no matter what Bethie had said, or even a mansion, like the ones in Grosse Pointe that Jo had seen when the family had driven there for a picnic. It was just a regular house, square-shaped and boring red, with a triangle-shaped roof plopped on top, like the one in her “Dick and Jane” readers, on a street of houses that looked just the same. In their old neighborhood, they’d lived in an apartment. You could walk up the stairs and smell what everyone was cooking for dinner. The sidewalks had bustled with people, kids, and old men and women, people with light skin and dark skin. They’d sit on their stoops on warm summer nights, speaking English or Yiddish, or Polish or Italian. Here, the streets were quiet. The air just smelled like air, not food, the sidewalks were empty, and the people she’d seen so far all had white skin like they did. But maybe, in this new place, she could make a fresh start. Maybe here, she could be a good girl.
Except now she had a problem. Her dad had borrowed a camera, a boxy, rectangular Kodak Duaflex with a stand and a timer. The plan was for them all to pose on the steps in front of the house for a picture, but Sarah had made her wear tights under their new dresses, and the tights had caused Jo’s underpants to crawl up the crack of her tushie, where they’d gotten stuck. Jo knew if she pulled them out her mother would see, and she’d get angry. “Stop fidgeting!” she would hiss, or “A lady doesn’t touch her private parts in public,” except everything itched her so awfully that Jo didn’t think she could stand it.
Things like this never happened to Bethie. If Jo hadn’t seen it herself, she wouldn’t have believed that her sister even had a tushie crack. The way Bethie behaved, you’d expect her to be completely smooth down there, like one of the baby dolls Bethie loved. Jo had dolls, too, but she got bored with them once she’d chopped off their hair or twisted off their heads. Jo shifted her weight from side to side, hoping it would dislodge her underwear. It didn’t.
Her father pulled the keys out of his pocket, flipped them in the air, and caught them neatly in his hand. “Let’s go, ladies!” His voice was loud and cheerful. Bethie and Sarah climbed the stairs and stood in front of the door. Sarah peered across the lawn, shadowing her eyes with her hand, frowning.
“Come on, Jo!”
Jo took one step, feeling her underwear ride up higher. Another step. Then another. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she reached behind her, grabbed a handful of pink gingham, hooked her thumb underneath the underpants’ elastic, and yanked. All she’d meant to do was pull her panties back into place, but she tugged so vigorously that she tore the skirt away from its bodice. The sound of the ripping cloth was the loudest sound in the world.
“Josette Kaufman!” Sarah’s face was turning red. Her father look startled, and Bethie’s face was horrified.
“I’m sorry!” Jo felt her chest start getting tight.
“What’s the matter with you?” Sarah snapped. “Why can’t you be good for once?”
“Sarah.” Ken’s voice was quiet, but angry.
“Oh, sure!” said Sarah, and tossed her head. “You always take up for her!” She stopped talking, which was good, except then she started crying, which was bad. Jo stood on the lawn, dress torn, tights askew, watching tears cut tracks through her mother’s makeup, hearing her father’s low, angry voice, wondering if there was something wrong with her, why things like this were always happening, why she couldn’t be good, and why her mom couldn’t have just let her wear pants, the way she’d wanted.
Bethie
Her address was 37771 Alhambra Street, and her phone number was UNiversity 2-9291 and her parents’ names were Sarah and Ken Kaufman and her sister was Josette and her name was Elizabeth Kaufman, but everyone called her Bethie.
Her sister went to school in the morning and came home for lunch, and ate her sandwich and watched Kukla, Fran and Ollie in the living room until it was time to go back, but Bethie had a late birthday and wouldn’t start school until next September, so she spent her days at home, with her mother. Tuesdays were wash days. Bethie’s job was to help separate the white clothes from the colored ones, down in the basement, and hand her mother clothespins from the Maxwell House coffee can when her mother hung the wet wash on the rotating aluminum hanger in their backyard. On Wednesdays, Mommy would iron, and Bethie would hold the bottles of water and starch, and would sometimes be allowed to spritz the clothes. Mommy would lick the tip of her finger and touch it lightly to the iron, listening for the hiss to see if it was hot enough, but Bethie wasn’t allowed to touch the iron, not ever. The radio played in the kitchen all day long, usually big-band music and also the news on WJBK, “the sound of radio in Detroit, fifteen hundred on your dial.” Thursdays were marketing. Mommy would push a wheeled metal cart two blocks up to Rochester Avenue, where they would get a chicken or steak or chops at the kosher butchers and dish soap at the five-and-dime. Bethie would follow along, one hand on the side of the cart, watching her mommy squeeze tomatoes and sniff cantaloupes and lift up a plucked chicken’s wing to peer underneath, always with a suspicious look on her face, like the foods were trying to trick her. Everyone smiled at Bethie, and pinched her cheeks, and said what a pretty, well-behaved girl she was. Bethie would smile, and Mommy would sigh, probably thinking about Jo, who was a Trial.
Fridays were Bethie’s favorite, because Fridays were Shabbat. For breakfast on Fridays, Bethie’s mother would use a juice glass to cut out a hole in the middle of a slice of bread. “Wonder Bread builds strong bodies eight ways,” Buffalo Bob would say to the kids on The Howdy Doody Show. He’d tell them to make sure that their kitchen had the bread with the red, yellow, and blue balloons, but at Bethie’s house they ate the bread that Zayde gave them, bread that he’d baked at the bakery where he worked. Mommy would spread margarine on both sides of the slice, then put it into the frying pan, where it would sizzle. On the best days, there’d be a new package of margarine, and Bethie would be allowed to break the capsule of yellow dye and squish it all around until all the margarine was yellow-colored. She’d watch Mommy’s hands as she’d crack an egg on the side of the pan and drop it neatly into the hole in the bread. The egg would cook, the bread circle woul
d get toasty-brown, and Sarah would shout for Jo to make her bed and wash her face and come to the table, she was already late. When Jo finally took her seat, the eggs and bread would go onto the plates, and the browned bread circle would sit on top of the egg. That was an egg with a top hat.
When breakfast was finished, and dishes and juice glasses had been washed and put in the drainer to dry, Mommy would make a lunch for Jo to take to school, and Bethie would change out of her flannel nightgown, folding it under her pillow for the coming night. She’d make her bed and get dressed, and her mommy would zip her dress and do her hair. Bethie would hold perfectly still while Sarah combed, parting her hair down the center and dividing it into pigtails, tying them with ribbons to match Bethie’s dress. She would watch her mother pull the curlers from her own hair, until rows of shiny brown ringlets hung on each side of her face, before she combed the curls into waves and sprayed them stiff. Mommy would put on a dress and clip nylon stockings to her garters. She would puff perfume out of an atomizer and step through the mist, explaining, “You never put perfume right on your skin, you just mist and step through.” Sometimes, when Sarah wasn’t watching, Bethie would run through the leftover mist of Soir de Paris, hoping to smell as good as her mommy.
At ten o’clock in the morning, Mae would come. Mae was old, probably forty, but her mother called Mae “the Girl.” Mae called her mother “ma’am.” Mae had dark skin, a golden brown that was dotted with darker brown moles, and her eyebrows were plucked to skinny arches that she darkened with black pencil. Her hair was shiny and black and lay in gleaming waves against her head and cheeks. Mae would tune the radio to WJLB 1400 and listen to songs like “Blue Shadows,” “Fool, Fool, Fool,” and “Please Send Me Someone to Love.” She’d sing along with the radio while she ironed the Kaufmans’ clothes. When the ironing was done, she’d cover her hair with a brightly colored scarf before vacuuming the carpets and mopping and waxing the floors.
Mrs. Everything Page 1