The next time Grace came to the house, she and Jake and Ephraim all went out for a walk in the fresh evening. Zelzah was glad they didn’t ask her. She felt shy and ignorant around Grace. Soon, Grace began to drop in on her own, often when Ephraim wasn’t around. She and Jake argued furiously about books and politics. Then, for a while, she stopped coming to the house. And Jake stopped coming to Zelzah’s room at night.
Well, well, Zelzah said to herself several months later, it’s not surprising. No, not surprising. She seemed to be quite calm. She listened calmly as Aunt Hannah, weeping and hugging her, said that Grace was pregnant, that in fact Grace and Jake had been secretly married for some time.
They were in Zelzah’s little room behind the store, sitting on the iron cot with its neatly laid blanket. “Oh, what a disgrace, I’m so ashamed,” Aunt Hannah said, looking at Zelzah with reddened eyes. She seized Zelzah’s hands. “And I promised my sister—” Fresh tears threatened. She drew Zelzah’s hands to her heart. “Dear child! Do you want to stay on? You’re always welcome. But they are going to live here. Grace and Jake. Until the baby is born, at least. Oh, what will you do now?”
“I will think of something,” Zelzah said, in Yiddish. She felt a little cold and hunched her shoulders, drawing her mother’s shawl closer around herself.
It was now fall again, nearly a year since Zelzah had come to America. Uncle Morris and Aunt Hannah went with her to the train station. She carried her wicker case and a bag of fruit and sandwiches Aunt Hannah had made for her. “You can always come back,” Aunt Hannah said. “If you need us, we’re here, right here!”
Uncle Morris pressed a chunk of white chocolate, and then a five-dollar bill into her hands. Zelzah boarded the train, took a seat and put her wicker case at her feet. Her hands were sticky with chocolate. She put the chocolate down on the seat, tucked the money into the little leather purse Aunt Hannah had given her, and wiped her hands on her handkerchief. The train jerked and puffed. She looked out the cinder-specked window. Aunt Hannah and Uncle Morris were waving, moving alongside the train as it slowly left the station.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” Zelzah said. Her eyes were moist, but suddenly she wanted to laugh. A wind seemed to blow through her, and she recalled the blue Polish sky and goldfinches bobbing over the fields. She drew the handkerchief to her mouth so that Aunt Hannah and Uncle Morris wouldn’t see her laughing. The train picked up speed.
In New York City she found her way to a family whom Aunt Hannah had recommended. Here she was given a bed and meals for a small sum. She found work almost at once in a dress factory situated in a loft. All winter she sat at a sewing machine for nine hours a day, six days a week. She made $11 a week. She was nearly seventeen years old.
Work in the factory was hard; the loft was boiling in the summer, freezing in the winter. But Zelzah was strong. Two nights a week she went to school to learn to read and write English. Every month she sent money to her family; Shulamith was planning to come to America to join Zelzah.
In spring Zelzah heard from Aunt Hannah that Grace had died in childbirth. She remembered Grace saying, “I think Dickens is wonderful!” She sat up for many hours that night thinking about her life, thinking of Jake with his cold feet and bony legs. Now he had an infant girl, but no wife to care for the child or him. Zelzah had begun to see that there were things she might like to do in the world. She had left her village in Poland, traveled across Europe, then the Atlantic Ocean. She had gone from New York to Vermont, and back to New York. Now she knew there were other places to go, and she thought that she would no longer be afraid to go to them. Pennsylvania! Wisconsin! North Carolina! South Dakota! The names rang like bells in her head. She was reading the newspapers now, and sometimes a book. She had bought herself a few new clothes, a coat, shoes, a muff for her hands on bitter mornings.
She thought of all this, of the money she sent home, of the hope of Shulamith joining her. And then of her mother telling her the meaning of her name, the meaning of her life.
After this, she wrote a letter in English, being careful to spell each word properly. “My Dear Cousin Jake, I have heard recently of your Tragic News. I send you my Heartfelt Sympathy. There are tears in my Heart, for you. I want to say something in Plain Words. Would you need me now to be your wife? If that is the Truth, I will be happy to oblige.” (She crossed out “to oblige.”) “Kiss the dear little baby Girl for me. Zelzah.”
And Jake answered, “Zelzah, dear cousin, my heart is too full of grief to consider this matter now. My mother takes care of the child, and I am going to Michigan to see if I can obtain the college education I so deeply desire, and which my beloved wife (whom I will mourn forever) believed I ought to have. Your cousin, in friendship, Jake Neuborg.”
Reading Jake’s letter, again that impulse to laugh overcame Zelzah. Although there was no one to see her, she stuffed her fingers into her mouth, stifling the laughter. She didn’t understand herself. Was this a laughing matter!
Several years passed. At last Shulamith came to America. She wore high black boots and looked around her, scowling ferociously. “This noise, this noise!” She clapped her hands to her ears.
“You’ll get used to it,” Zelzah said, calmly. Passing through the throngs of people, gripping her sister firmly by the elbow, Zelzah caught sight of herself in a store window. She had changed. It was the first thing Shulamith had said. “Zelzah, is it you?” She had cut her hair; then, working and studying without much rest, eating less so she could send money home—these things had honed her down. She no longer had plump, bright-red cheeks. She was surprised, even a little alarmed to see herself; then she smiled.
Shulamith went to work in the same dress factory as Zelzah, but at once she hated it. She raged against it every day. “I’m getting out of here, I won’t go on for years like you, Zelzah. Don’t you ever get angry? Look at you, smiling, and you were jilted by our cousin. If a man ever did that to me!”
At night, she shoved Zelzah in the bed they shared. “Move! Move! You’re on my side.” Often, Zelzah got out of bed and read into the middle of the night, the fringed shawl over her shoulders.
In the morning, Shulamith was always up first. She prepared breakfast for the two of them. Sometimes she sang, but when the factory came into sight, she broke off, scowling, and raised her fist to the ugly building. She began night school also, but was not in the same class as Zelzah.
Zelzah was now hoping to get a high school diploma. She was studying mathematics, history, and geography. When she and Shulamith walked to school, they linked arms, and Shulamith spoke of their parents and sisters, answering Zelzah’s questions.
On warm Sundays, they often took the trolley to Brooklyn to walk in the woods, picking mushrooms or bunches of soft floppy little violets. One day, coming upon a farm, they sat on a bench and were given mugs of thick yellow milk.
“I used to milk cows,” Zelzah said.
“You!” The farm woman smiled disbelievingly. “You!”
Linking hands, suddenly, like two children, Zelzah and Shulamith danced around, shouting with laughter. And the farm woman laughed, too, seeing that she was right and Zelzah, the young lady from the city, had only been teasing.
On one of these Sunday expeditions, Shulamith met a “landsman,” a red-haired young man from a village near Premzl. The first time he came to visit them, Shulamith left the room, leaving Aaron and Zelzah together.
“Don’t do that again,” Zelzah said that night when she and Shulamith were alone, getting ready for bed. Shulamith, frowning, brushed her hair over her face.
“And why not? He can come to see you, as well as me!”
“Listen, my dear child,” Zelzah said, as if she were years older than Shulamith, rather than only ten months. “I have no interest in the young man.”
“But you’re older,” Shulamith said, brushing her hair furiously. “It’s only fair! I want you to be happy!”
“Peace, Shulamith, peace,” Zelzah said, just as their mother had do
ne so many years ago.
Aaron was a locksmith; a good trade. Shulamith’s rages left him undismayed; he had an even temperament and thought her quite wonderful. A year after they met, they were married. Shulamith insisted that the wedding pictures include Zelzah.
As the three of them stood outside Temple Beth Israel with their arms around each other, free hands holding down their hats against the warm gusts of May wind, Zelzah thought of the last letter she had received from her mother. “I long to see my dear Zelzah, my dear Shade-in-the-Heat. Send me good news soon! If I cannot see you, then the news of your happiness will satisfy me.” Anna had been married the previous spring; Sarah was engaged. Only Ruth, who still stared for hours with dreamy satisfaction at a stick of wood (or so Shulamith had told her), and Zelzah were still unmarried.
The next year when Shulamith had her first child, Zelzah received her high school diploma. She left the factory and went to work in an office. Not more money, but far less strenuous work. Her eyes had been going bad in the factory; now she had to wear glasses for reading and close work. “So?” Shulamith said, when Zelzah visited to give her the good news of her new job. “Will you settle down now?”
Zelzah started college classes at night. For eleven years she went to college. For eleven years, each time she had an exam, she found it impossible to sleep and sat up all night with the gray fringed shawl over her shoulders, feverishly muttering dates, names, places, and formulas to herself. Only once did she fail an exam, in physics; that was the year when two days before the exam Shulamith had her third child and nearly died.
After she received her bachelor’s degree, Zelzah was offered a job teaching third grade in a medium-sized city in upstate New York. There she rented a three-room apartment in a private home. The house was painted a fresh yellow on the outside, and had a large porch running around three sides. Zelzah had her own entrance, a tiny but efficient kitchen, and windows looking out on the back and side yards where the landlady, Mrs. Zimmerman, kept flowers and bushes blooming seven months of the year.
Every summer Zelzah visited Shulamith, Aaron, and their six children in the bungalow they rented in the Catskill Mountains. She stayed with them for a week or ten days, playing with the children, and talking to Shulamith for hours on end. She adored her nieces and nephews; she thought them all clever and beautiful, and she was always glad to leave the excitement and untidiness of their lives.
Thus, Zelzah’s life. Her cats, interesting creatures. Her windows full of plants. A month of travel in the summer. Shulamith, Aaron, and the children. (She kept all their letters and notes in a little square metal candy box with blue flowers painted all over it.) And her third-grade students; often they returned years later to visit her, to tell her what they were doing, and how well they were doing it. She remembered all their names.
The winter of her fortieth birthday, Zelzah received a letter from Shulamith. “You could still get married,” she wrote. “You are better-looking now than when you were younger. Come to visit us over the winter holidays, I want you to meet a friend. He was widowed six months ago. A lovely man! I want you to be happy!”
But Zelzah was involved with a pageant her third-grade children were writing and producing. There would be rehearsals over the vacation. The pageant was about the spirit of America and how the children’s parents had come from so many different lands. Really, the children had done a lovely job! She wrote Shulamith her regrets. “Perhaps another time, I’ll be able to come in the winter.”
A few months later, she woke up one morning and thought how strange life was. It was 6 A.M. She had never shaken the habit of rising early. Zelzah had been dreaming about her sisters. She seemed to hear Shulamith shouting, “Move! It isn’t fair!” She thought of the Polish farm, the dirty cows, herself a child dreaming with a bucket of warm milk in each hand. She thought of Jake pressing his cold body against hers. And of frost flowers on the window. Of the chocolates Uncle Morris had given her, and of drinking thick yellow milk in a farmyard. She thought of blue-covered examination books, the angry red faces of each one of Shulamith’s babies, and then of the pink dress she had bought herself for spring.
A cat jumped on her stomach and began cleaning her paws. Zelzah pushed the cat to one side and, with her hands behind her head, did twenty sit-ups. She got out of bed and put her mother’s shawl around her shoulders. She held the shawl to her face for a moment, then washed in cold water. Mother and father, both, were long dead. She made herself coffee, ate an orange and buttered toast. She thought of the day ahead of her, of the children she would teach. She set down her coffee cup and hastened to get dressed. She was humming under her breath, her mind was filled with details of the day ahead of her. Was she happy? Who could say? Zelzah, herself, never thought in such terms. What was happiness? Did anyone know?
About the Author
Norma Fox Mazer (1931–2009) was an acclaimed author best known for her children’s and young adult literature. She earned numerous awards, including the Newbery Honor for After the Rain, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Dear Bill, Remember Me?, and the Edgar Award for Taking Terri Mueller. Mazer was also honored with a National Book Award nomination for A Figure of Speech and inclusion in the notable-book lists of the American Library Association and the New York Times, among others.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1976 by Norma Fox Mazer
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5088-6
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Dear Bill, Remember Me? Page 15