We Love Anderson Cooper

by R. L. Maizes

  “You’re hungry?” My aunt continued to write.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Have an apple.”

  “How come she gets it?”

  Leah’s head snapped up. “Don’t call your cousin she. It’s not polite.”

  “How come Rivkah gets it?”

  “You had enough to eat today. Leave us alone.”

  “Di tokhter iz fet.” The daughter is fat, she said to me when Bruriah was gone, and we both laughed.

  Naturally, everything changed the instant Yankel came into the kitchen. He was above noticing me.

  “Tateleh, what can I get you?” she asked. “Rivkah, pour him some tea. You want a slice of pie? Rivkah, not the old pie, the fresh one.” I handed her the pie tin, and she placed it on the blue booklet, staining the paper with grease.

  He sat down next to her, and she caressed his ruddy cheeks with her fingertips. I purposely forgot the sugar, but she jumped up to get it and dropped three lumps in the glass, one at a time, making sure the water didn’t splatter. She stirred it for him and rested the spoon on a plate.

  I watched from a corner as they whispered to each other. No one invited me to sit down, so I went home.

  Entering my house, I slammed the door behind me. My mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner. “What is it?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “You want a snack?” A worn terry-cloth apron was tied around her waist.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I’m making minute steaks for dinner.” With the back of her hand, she pushed a loose strand of hair from her eyes, her fingers still holding the garlic she had been rubbing into the meat.

  “I said I wasn’t hungry.”

  “Wait till you see them.” She was eternally optimistic, and since I loved to eat, she wasn’t disappointed. That night, as my parents talked over the day’s business, trading words like orders and shipments, returns and remainders, I sliced through the steak, imagining I was cutting Yankel’s hand away from a sweetened glass of tea.

  My father was as handsome as his sister Leah was delicate, with reddish hair and high cheekbones. He wore three-piece suits even on the weekends. His only concession to leisure was to leave the vest unbuttoned. When he wasn’t working, he was in his study, a somber room crowded with ancient texts that lined the walls and sat in piles on his desk. He spent hours in his high-backed chair, hovering over tall volumes of Torah and Talmud.

  I had asked him to teach me the sacred wisdom, but he said it was forbidden for girls to pronounce the holy words. “If I had a son it would be different.” He shook his head and went back to his studies, ignoring me although I lingered alongside his desk.

  When my father was at work, I sometimes took the books down, their cracked leather bindings crumbling in my hands. I stared at the long pages, groups of words arranged around central texts, their meanings hidden from me. I didn’t dare sit in my father’s seat and instead settled cross-legged on the floor, inhaling the smell of disintegrating glue. Once, I took a fountain pen from my father’s desk and blotted out the name of God.

  “There is only mourning when a girl enters the world,” I had overheard my father say, commiserating with a neighbor whose wife had just given birth. For years, I wondered why a girl should be deprived of afternoon or evening, but from my father’s tone I knew he was describing a tragedy, like the dropping of a holy scroll or the accidental ingestion of pork.

  My mother was constantly pregnant, but a dybbuk inhabited her womb, and she was unable to carry another child to term. She prayed endlessly to relieve her condition, bowing and beating her breast in the synagogue, while I stood next to her, bored and counting the pages to the conclusion of the service. In the end, my parents were left with only me.

  I cut my hair short and wore boy’s clothes. I peed standing up, using a plastic funnel I found in the kitchen to direct the yellow stream. One day my mother brought me a gift, a bomber jacket from the Army Navy store, a strip of tape advertising the size—boy’s medium—stuck prominently on the chest. I put it on and ran into my father’s study. Did I hope to deceive him, as Jacob had deceived Isaac? I should have known his eyesight was too good for that.

  “It’s forbidden!” he shouted, wagging his finger at my mother, who was standing in the doorway. “The girl mustn’t masquerade as a boy!” He flew from his seat and grabbed the jacket by the collar. With an upward motion he yanked it off, twisting my arms and lifting me to my toes. He shook it in my face. The polyester fibers gave off melancholy vibrations as the sleeves rubbed against the body of the jacket. He took it out to his car, and I never saw it again.

  Leah continued with our lessons, reciting vocabulary while I peeled potatoes for the cholent, the beef and bean stew she served for Sabbath lunch. “Meydl, girl, eyfele, baby, yingl, boy, like my Yankel, oy, what a boy, a mother couldn’t ask for more. Such a smart boy, such a good boy, such respect he shows his mother. You’ll be lucky to have such a boy. Look at your poor mother what she goes through.”

  In the middle of this speech, I cut myself with the peeler. I let the blood flow over the potatoes and dropped them into the pot.

  * * *

  Over the next few years, my father’s factory prospered, but wealth failed to bring him happiness. Yankel graduated from high school and went off to rabbinical school in Baltimore. While my classmates helped their mothers, pushing younger siblings in strollers and learning to bake challah, my aunt and I chatted away in Yiddish. Bruriah had refused to speak since she turned twelve, so there was no one to interrupt us. Once, sitting across the kitchen table from me, Leah grabbed my hand and brought it to her chest, and I knew I was the daughter she had always wanted.

  Yankel returned home one weekend each month. Days before his arrival, my aunt began preparing. By Thursday afternoon, she was elbow deep in kugel, stirring the glutinous mass of noodles, eggs, raisins, and sugar. She fried batches of kichelkies, sprinkling the puffed-up cookies with confectioner’s sugar after they cooled. She scoured the house, wiping dust from the tops of door moldings and airing out coverlets on the clothesline in the backyard. She inventoried the refrigerator and tossed aging food to the neighborhood cat. Even as I helped her stuff veal roasts and wax floors, I prayed for a great train wreck on Amtrak’s Baltimore–New York line.

  One Sabbath my uncle began discussing marriage possibilities for Yankel. Sitting at our dining-room table, he asked my father about this family and that one. I hoped Yankel would find a foreign girl, one from London or at least New Jersey. When she heard the word marriage, my aunt choked on a lump of gefilte fish, her eyes watering. She was sitting next to Yankel and when her airways finally cleared, she clutched the sleeve of his suit jacket and wouldn’t let go.

  “What about Malkah Bina, the butcher’s daughter?” my cousin Bruriah rasped. “They could have flanken every night.”

  “No one asked you,” my aunt said, and with that, Bruriah retired her vocal cords for another half dozen years, until she finally escaped to live a bohemian life in Prague.

  “A rabbi can always make a good match,” my father said, twisting a fine lace napkin that had come from his factory. He looked at me. A girl of fifteen, I no longer fit into boy’s clothes. Overnight, my body had become a swollen curve, my face a mass of angry red hormones. The lace ripped. My father laid the torn napkin on his lap and sighed. “You’re a lucky man.”

  “What is luck?” my uncle said, leaning back in his chair and raising his hands to the heavens, “but a blessing from the Almighty.”

  Yankel pried his mother’s fingers from his jacket. “God said in Genesis, ‘It is not good for a man to be alone. I will make a helper for him.’”

  “You’re too young for a helper,” Leah said.

  “But I’m not, Mama.” He scratched his scalp, pulled on his earlobes, and smoothed his pants, only to begin again, scratch, pull, smooth. His face glimmered with sweat.

  At first it was just talk, but eventually parents brought their daughter
s to meet Yankel. I was not invited to these meetings, but I heard about the girls from my aunt.

  “Her teeth were like planks. The family must be poor or they would have fixed them—sawed them down, moved them back, something. And when she sipped her tea, what a noise. Loud as a lawn mower. Someone played hooky from charm school.” And about another: “I grant you, this one was pretty. But what kind of a name is Janice? Her skirt was so short, I caught a glimpse of you-know-what. She’s studying accounting. Just what my Yankel needs, a girl smarter than he is. I can hear it already, ‘No, Yankel, this way. Not that way, Yankel. How hard is it to understand, Yankel?’ Better a stupid girl who won’t make him feel small.”

  She began to discourage Yankel from coming home. I heard her on the phone. “Are you sure you don’t need to study? It’s such a long train ride. Stay for the weekend. Eat dinner at the rabbi’s. They’d be happy to have you. The rabbi’s wife assured me, she said, ‘Any time Yankel wants to stay, he’s welcome at our house for Shabbos.’ You don’t want to insult them.”

  He stayed at school until my uncle became suspicious. “Where’s Yankel?” he demanded one Friday afternoon when it became apparent Leah wasn’t setting off for the train station. “I’ve got three girls for him to meet, and he’s never home. Doesn’t he want to see his parents? Leah!”

  “I’ll tell him you want to see him.”

  My uncle pulled at the hairs on his chin. I held my breath, afraid he would tear out a chunk of flesh. “Just tell him to come home!” he said.

  The parade of girls resumed, and I noticed a change in my aunt. Her wig, which had once sat so perfectly, tilted to one side, revealing strands of her silver-gray hair. A snag appeared in her stockings, a mere pull at first, the nylon thread hanging like a bride’s train. Over time, the snag blossomed into a run and then a tear, revealing yellow flesh and purple veins.

  I tried everything to get her attention. I ridiculed her daughter Bruriah’s isolation and her husband’s ripe odor. My aunt gave me a weak smile, but it smacked of pity and only served to infuriate me. I translated famous speeches—the “Gettysburg Address” and “I Have a Dream”—into Yiddish and performed them for her in her kitchen, but I couldn’t tell if she heard. She stopped cleaning. Mildew coated the bathroom walls. Dust settled onto the surface of the matzo-ball soup, which remained on the stove for days. When I offered to clean, she ignored me.

  Yankel got engaged. The girl’s name was Tamar, and she was finely proportioned, with hair the color of almond shells and large green eyes. Her lips were always lightly parted and moved easily into a smile. She never spoke of herself. Unable to find fault with her, my aunt became mute, her mouth shrinking like a raisin. Tamar’s father was a successful diamond cutter with workshops in New York and Jerusalem.

  Yankel came home every weekend to see her. He trimmed his beard and changed his shirt morning and evening. He began carrying breath freshener and a comb. I never saw him pass a mirror without stopping to inspect himself, to remove the food particles migrating through his beard, and to curl the side locks that hung to his shoulders. He was deaf to all but Tamar’s voice and let the tea his mother poured grow cold.

  Leah didn’t give up. She prepared his favorite foods and sprinkled lavender oil on his bedsheets. She purchased herbs from the Levite witch, whose potions were said to win back straying lovers. She mixed them in with the cholent and served him an extra large portion. Bloated and farting, Yankel stayed by Tamar’s side.

  The marriage was celebrated for seven nights. Each night the caterer served seven courses, never repeating a dish. A klezmer band played, the fiddle drawing guests onto the dance floor where they squatted and kicked out their legs in a vigorous kezatzke and hoisted the bride and groom in their seats. Yankel’s eyes lingered on his bride’s face. He spoke softly to her, not as his father spoke to his mother, but as his mother spoke to him, asking after her every need, though it wasn’t the custom for men to wait on their wives.

  After the wedding, the couple moved into an apartment in Baltimore, so Yankel could complete his studies. When they visited Crown Heights, they stayed with Tamar’s parents, whose house was spacious and cleaned by servants.

  “Is the meat more tender there? The fruit sweeter?” Leah asked no one in particular. She banged a ladle on the counter, splattering hot liquid across the room.

  One day, she took out a fresh blue book and began to write. She composed a poem about the angel of death. I memorized the verses and recited it back to her the next day. “You’re my only friend,” she said, resting her head on the table.

  I brought her roses I cut from a neighbor’s bush. Deprived of water, they wilted. When she served me pie, I cut away the mold and made grateful noises as I ate the rest. What did I care if she wrapped her hair in an old kerchief and allowed her stockings to bunch around her ankles? She said barely a word when we were together. Her body limp, her eyes closed, I worried she might fall from her chair. I talked enough for both of us, content to be in the same room with her.

  * * *

  One year after the wedding, Tamar gave birth to a baby boy. So perfect was the child in his parents’ eyes, they were convinced his birth was a miracle, and they hung five-fingered hamsas in every corner of their apartment to ward off evil spirits. Tamar’s father invited half of Brooklyn to the bris. Buffet tables spilled over with delicacies, herring swimming in cream sauce, entire schools of smoked whitefish, black eyes staring out of oily faces. Fat bagels were trucked in from Manhattan by the gross. New Jersey tomato farms were denuded for the occasion.

  My father wore his best wool suit, the one he wore to synagogue on the High Holy Days. When Yankel passed him the baby, my father cradled the boy to his chest and kissed his hair. I snuck my hand under the child’s blanket and pinched his eight-day-old thigh hard enough to bruise it. His face screwed up with pain. “He must have gas,” I said. The ceremony was about to start, but my father wouldn’t give up the child. It took three men to pry him from my father’s arms.

  A few weeks after the bris, Leah straightened her wig and went to stay with the new parents in Baltimore. She was gone for a week. When she returned, all she talked about was the baby. “I was changing his diaper and all of a sudden, he made such a fountain. I laughed so hard tears ran down my cheeks. And when he saw me laughing, he started laughing, too. Did you ever hear of such a thing? Such a smart baby!”

  I recited the Pledge of Allegiance in my head as she talked. “My class is going on a trip to Washington. We’re touring the White House and the Senate.”

  “Why Tamar has to use cloth diapers, I don’t know. What’s wrong with plastic? The cloth ones give him rashes. I tried to tell her, but she looks at me like I’m some old lady.”

  I hummed “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Then I said, “We’re seeing the Smithsonian and the Air and Space Museum.”

  “He looks just like my Yankel looked. Oy. I could hold him all day. He smells like blintzes.”

  Of thee I sing.

  * * *

  Yankel finished rabbinical school, and the couple moved back to Crown Heights. I hardly saw my aunt anymore. When I knocked on her door, no one was home. She was always visiting the happy family.

  One Sabbath, I got lucky. I found Leah in her bedroom. She was lying on her bed, tickling the child, who had grown into a small boy. The scent of lilac entered through an open window. Next to the windowsill stood a step stool. “Look at these dimples,” she said. “Did you ever see such dimples? Feel his hair, how soft.” I patted his head. She went on about what a clever boy he was, climbing out of his high chair, calling her bubbe. She didn’t even offer me a cup of tea. I didn’t want to spoil the surprise I had for her, so I swallowed my anger. I had collected all the blue booklets and paid to have the lessons typed and the manuscript bound in leather. Yiddish Lessons by Leah Masterson was printed on the cover. I handed it to her.

  I had given it to her a dozen times in my imagination. Sometimes she dropped the baby as her eyes widened a
nd filled with tears of gratitude. Other times she took me into her arms, pressing my head to her chest.

  She glanced through the pages. “Such silliness.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Really, Rivkah. Why waste money on such things? It’s not like I made up the words.”

  I was about to retrieve the gift when the child stretched his hand toward the manuscript. “Look who wants to read!” Leah said. She placed the book next to him and opened it. He grabbed a page, the paper crinkling in his fist. “Such strong hands. At least someone has a use for it.” Leah stood up and straightened her skirt. “Mameleh, watch the baby for a minute.” She ducked into the bathroom.

  “Good baby,” I said, as he rolled onto his belly and slipped over the edge of the bed, sliding down the cotton bedspread to the floor. He tottered toward the window.

  “Up?” he asked, resting his small, plump hand on the step stool.

  “Up,” I said. Collecting the manuscript, I dropped it into the wastebasket on my way out.

  Ghost Dogs

  Thwap. Thwap. The sound of the dog door as Petal and Tanner come and go distracts Paula as she drafts a contract on her laptop. Dozens of laser-printed photos of the dogs spill across her desk. She picks one up and examines it, brushes her fingers against an image of fur. Putting the photo down, she tries again to focus on her work. It’s Sunday, but Paula is desperate to catch up. Clients send angry e-mails, demanding to know why they haven’t heard from her. She could reply, but that would only put her further behind. Thwap. Thwap.

  She used to hit Save, reflexively, at the end of every sentence, but no more. It is a fallacy to think one can keep calamity at bay. Roger programmed an automatic backup that runs weekly and will have to do in case of crashes.

  Order once governed her home office. Her desktop was immaculate except for a single photo of Roger and the dogs, and the laptop. Now generic tea bags perch on soggy napkins. Mugs hold three-day-old tea scum, catch crumpled tissues and contorted paper clips—an entire box unwound. The floor is an obstacle course of dog beds, squeaky toys, sterilized bones, leashes, collars, and plastic bags for picking up poop. Though it is fall, the Humane Society wall calendar is stuck on May.