One of These Things First

by Steven Gaines

  On other days in the box I’d make a tiny iris with a straight pin and sit quietly for hours, eavesdropping and observing the melodramas of the busy store. Unseen in my many boxes I listened to petty jealousies between the salesgirls—who made what sale, who was allowed to make change, who last went for an English at the Culver. I listened to them talk about their husbands and children, and gossip jealously about my grandparents, rich merchants who had no money trouble. I listened to women confide their most intimate marital problems to my grandmother, who dispensed homespun wisdom and sometimes a harmless off-color joke. I got to know all the punch lines. “Don’t stop, I’ll write you a check” or “Lady, I’m an old man, how about a cup of tea better?”

  I heard them talk about me. Not just the “come to no good” stuff, but how I was crazy, and that it was my parents’ fault for not getting me under control, and what I needed was a good spanking, but Rose and Harry spoiled me, and that my father was nuts too, what could you expect?

  I compiled the prosaic neighborhood gossip in my head as if it meant something. I knew that Lily Williams’s husband, Earl, who was a limousine driver, got a $100 Christmas gift from the man who was president of Whirlpool. I knew that Dodie Berkowitz wouldn’t let her daughter Ida get laughing gas at the dentist because she thought it made her stupid, and that her husband, Benny, a trainman on the New York-to-Baltimore U.S. mail run, once had a heart attack while they were having sex, and she had to bang on the wall behind the bed to summon a neighbor to help pull him off of her. I worried that Koret of California would not ship to us anymore because we were ninety days behind in paying their invoices. I knew the bra cup sizes we carried stopped at triple D, except on special order, and I knew that Smokey taupe/seamless/no heel pantyhose were on the top shelf. I knew that the glove salesman was the father of the actor Arnold Stang, and that the Jantzen bathing suit salesman wrote the lyrics to “Love Letters in the Sand,” but he didn’t make much money because he accepted a flat fee.

  I witnessed the clucking and preening of the hens when my grandfather was present, the only man in a world of perfumed women. I was confused by the curious world of women’s plumbing problems. Such secrets. Hysterectomies. Hot flashes. The changes. “She was dry down there.” Her time of the month. A period. A period is an end to a sentence, I thought, now it was an end to what? Then one day I was in a box watching through the fuzzy peephole I made with a needle when I got a demonstration. The assistant principal of the local grade school stopped into the store to buy stockings. A very proper and nice lady, she was standing near the cash register paying for her purchase and chatting, when I heard a plit plit plit plit sound. I could see drops of blood falling from between her legs under her skirt, dripping on the marble-patterned Kentile squares that covered the floor.

  The assistant principal murmured “Oh no,” and there was a terrible silence as Lily Williams helped her to the toilet in the back. When the humiliated woman emerged a few minutes later she kneeled and wiped up the trail of blood spots on the floor with toilet paper. The other women tried to console her, saying accidents happen, but I could see she was mortified beyond consolation. When she finished cleaning up as best she could, she apologized again and hurried out the door. I was bewildered, but when I climbed out of the box and asked the salesgirls what just happened, they yelled that I was hiding and spying on them, and I sulked with the lid closed the rest of the afternoon.

  The Goldberg Variations

  In a zany complication, when I was about twelve years old and couldn’t figure out who I was, my father changed our name from Goldberg to Gaines. He did it in part to spite his family—they were always feuding, those Goldbergs—and in part because he was swept away by the wave of assimilation of first-generation, American-born Jews anxious to disguise their Eastern European roots. The Holocaust may have blunted open anti-Semitism in America, but it hardly eliminated it, even in New York. The legendary Jewish banker Otto Kahn nailed it: “A kike is a Jewish gentleman who has just left the room.” After World War II the Jews were either defiantly proud of their heritage, or they wanted to disguise it. My grandfather Gog had long ago changed his last name, from Goshinsky to Goshin. Of course, for the Orthodox and hard core, changing your name was traitorous.

  The name Goldberg carried an unusual burden at the time because of the huge success of the 1950s TV series called The Goldbergs, a sitcom that took place in the Bronx and would indelibly stereotype New York Jews, just as Amos and Andy had branded blacks ten years before. Molly Goldberg, played by the actress Gertrude Berg, was a wise and loving mother, but she was also an immigrant with a singsong Jewish intonation who gossiped with the neighbors in her apartment building out of her window. The show’s trademark opening was a woman’s voice yodeling, “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!” It became irritating when, for the thousandth time, someone greeted us, “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!”

  My dad talked about changing our name for years, but what finally pushed him over was an incident at a laundry in Lake George, New York. We were on one of my dad’s aimless driving vacations, which we took every year at the end of August, coming from Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. On the long drive to Lake George my father filled me with dread, saying how anti-Semitic Lake George was and that we shouldn’t let anybody know that we were Jewish. “We shouldn’t even be going there,” he said, “except that I wouldn’t let them stop us from going there just because we’re Jewish.”

  I was even more alarmed when we checked into a lakeside cabin and he told the woman at the desk that our name was “Green.” We slept that night with a chair propped up against the doorknob of the cabin, I guess in case of a pogrom.

  The next day, when we dropped off our dirty laundry at a local laundromat, my father again gave the name Green. When we returned to pick up the clean laundry the following day, they handed it back to us unwashed, with an excuse about the washing machines being broken, although we could see clearly otherwise. My father was outraged. What had transpired, he divined when we got back to the car, was that the laundry owners were anti-Semites, and they could see in our faces that we were Jews, and they refused to do our Jewish laundry.

  Never would our dirty clothes be turned down again! he declared. We would change our name. We would still be Jewish, but not Jewish. The idea thrilled me. A clean start. A reinvention. Maybe with a less Jewish name my dad would be named assistant principal. On the ride home we spent hours nominating new surnames. The rule was that it had to start with a “G,” like Goldberg, although it wasn’t as if we had monogrammed towels we didn’t want to throw away. The name Green sounded too Jewish, we decided, as though it was shortened from Greenstein; and that’s why we didn’t want Gold, which sounded shortened from Goldberg. “Graham,” my mother’s choice, was too grand, and “Granit,” my favorite, sounded hard and made-up. At the end of a six-hour ride home, having run out of G names, we turned down Flatbush Avenue and drove past a car and tire dealership named Gaines Oldsmobile. We all liked that name, and we were tired. That’s where I got my name from, an Oldsmobile dealership.

  My father hired a lawyer, and a year or two later I became Steven Seith Gaines and received a new birth certificate with that name. My mother claimed my middle name was from a spelling in the Old Testament, but it doesn’t exist. I liked the sound of the word Seith, and because I wanted to be as far away from Steven Goldberg as I could get, I decided that I would be called Seith instead of Steven. For a few years I was known as Seith Gaines. My mother became Ruth Gaines, and my father went from Isidore Hyman Goldberg to I. Hal Gaines.

  Suddenly, people who knew us yesterday as Goldberg were expected to call us Gaines, me Seith, and my dad Hal. What made it even stranger was that my father made us pretend we were always named Gaines. How he expected this to succeed I don’t know. Even my mother had problems remembering to call my dad Hal, instead of Izzy. The name stuck in her throat every time she tried to say it. He had a habit of walking in front of her in the street, f
orgetting where she was, and she would call after him, “Iz … er … Hal!” He often didn’t turn around, forgetting what his new name was himself.

  My father was very sensitive about people mocking him for changing his name and he considered it an insult if anybody referred to him as Izzy Goldberg. He forbade my mother to go to the local grocer, who taunted him by calling him “Goldberg.” And of course his family never let him live it down. If they ran into him in the dry cleaners or passed him in the street, they’d scream, “Goldberg! Goldberg!” at him.

  As for Seith Gaines, after the initial thrill wore off, it was hugely disappointing. I dropped the Seith and went back to Steven, and I was quite disappointed when it turned out that Steven Gaines wasn’t any different from Steven Goldberg at all.

  The King’s English

  If things weren’t already wacky enough, sitting in a box one day when I was thirteen years old, I decided that I wanted to be a child actor because I was jealous of the Mouseketeers on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club show, which I watched on TV every afternoon. Also, I had a crush on Brandon deWilde, the blond child actor from Long Island who was only eleven years old when he was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in Shane, a movie I saw with my mother at the Culver Theater on a Friday night. When I told my parents about my aspirations to stage and screen, instead of rolling their eyes, they were excited that I had taken an interest in something outside of Rose’s Bras Girdles Sportswear, although my father was less keen than my mother was about my far-fetched new pursuit. However, to encourage any enthusiasm outside of my corrugated world, my mother suggested that I go for acting lessons on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, at the Henry Street Settlement House, which offered a variety of community services. On Saturdays there was an acting class for kids that cost only a few bucks.

  I was enrolled the following week, and after two classes the acting teacher, a young girl in black tights with some tenuous connection to the theater, told my parents that although I had tremendous acting potential my Brooklyn accent would hold me back from having a professional career. I was in urgent need of speech and phonetics classes, more than acting.

  So it was that every Saturday morning my dad sullenly drove me to the Henry Street Settlement and parked outside, smoking cigarettes and reading the Mirror while I spent hours repeating the phrase “Pul-eeze ahl-low fahr Ahhn to poss,” until my “e”s were rounded, and my “a”s softened. Eventually I sounded like Basil Rathbone. Having a faux English accent didn’t sit well with anyone on 18th Avenue. It embarrassed by father, made the salesgirls cluck their tongues, and when I came into the deli for a hot dog with sauerkraut, Mr. Silverstein would hoot “Cheerio!” at me. But I vowed not to revert to Brooklynese and hurt my career.

  During this period while I was studying to be a child actor my mother got a phone call from the guidance counselor at Montauk Junior High School. Even though I was intermittently on home instruction, there was an opportunity that might interest me. New York State had embarked on a massive experiment and installed televisions in every school in the city. They had leased the facilities of New York’s WPIX-TV, Channel 11, and were broadcasting educational shows from 9 to 3 daily in the tristate area. An educator named Jack Arenstein was going to be the teacher on a twice-weekly show called The King’s English, for junior high school students, and there was a citywide search for a student to be on the show with him. Would I be interested in auditioning?

  Overnight my rituals and counting became only background noise as I shifted from inside the box into a media personality. Haircut, shoes, sports jacket, and tie. Memorize “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service, in case I’m asked to perform. By the time I got to my audition a few days later I was full of spunk and desire. I was, indeed, asked to perform for Jack Arenstein and the producers. I gave an inspired and wry performance of Service’s poem in which a gold prospector cremates a friend to discover that a furnace is the only place in Alaska his pal can stay warm. I knew an adjective from an adverb too, which didn’t hurt, nor did my ersatz English accent. When I was told that I had been chosen to be the student in The King’s English, I spent a good long time on the living room floor, squealing with joy like a piglet, hugging myself, laughing hysterically and then crying, then hugging myself in the bathroom mirror. It was a miracle, unbelievable this was actually happening to me. From Rose’s Bras Girdles Sportswear to stardom. From the smell of sizing to the perfume of greasepaint. I would be the Brandon deWilde of educational TV.

  Early in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays my mother and I took the subway to New York City and walked along 42nd Street past the Chrysler Building to the New York Daily News building, where the WPIX studios were located. The director and crew were all jovial and high energy and the stage manager gave me some pointers about where to look, and warned me never to look directly at the camera. I sat in a chair in the makeup room while a schoolmarmish makeup woman put pancake makeup on my nose and combed my hair with a long part down the right side of my head, like an Archie comic book character. I learned the rule that we could wear any color except white, because of the TV cameras for some reason. The lights in the studio were brilliant and hot, and just before we went on the air people were tense, but I fed on the nervous energy.

  When the red light under the big bulky camera that was aimed at me lit up for the first time it was electrifying. Tens of thousands of people were watching me. I was either going to disassemble, or seize the moment and become the star I was meant to be. And a star I became, to everyone’s amazement, including my own. Over the next several weeks I played Jim Hawkins in a dramatization of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island with a passion unseen before on broadcast television, wearing a ruffled blouse from my grandmother’s store. I was composed and confident, I remembered my dialogue, and acting came to me naturally. Maybe it was the hundreds of movies I had seen. Another memorable segment involved me in a roller coaster in Coney Island, in which Mr. Arenstein and I taught the students how to tell an anecdote while I ate cotton candy.

  Without any doubt I was insufferable. Just to watch me order a bialy and chocolate milk in my English accent was enough to make any observer want to strangle me. I expected to bask in the adulation of my peers. Instead, I was taunted and mocked by eighth- and ninth-graders from all five boroughs who were forced to watch me twice a week. Since the show aired on live TV everywhere in the New York metropolitan area, even adults began to know who I was, and I became a target. The resentment was so potent that I was sucker-punched in the mouth at a Saturday matinee at the Culver Theater, and one day two tough girls took my Philco transistor radio from me and threw it down a sewer.

  But now that I was a TV star I was better able to manage and hide my rituals. Vanity and sheer adrenaline at first tamped down my obsessive behavior, but one day on the set of The King’s English I needed to touch a piece of chalk twice, and everybody noticed it. The next week I tried to take a pancake makeup sponge from the dressing room, and I was caught by the makeup lady, who made a fuss about it, as though I had stolen her wallet. She was the teaspoon of tar in the barrel of honey, the Lily Williams of the television station. With her watching over my shoulder, the compulsions started to punch through, and in only a few days of increasingly odd behavior it became clear that I had issues too debilitating for me to continue on the show.

  Mr. Arenstein called me at home and apologized. I sobbed and begged him to give me a second chance, but he said he was sorry. I learned later they had already found another boy for the show. My fragile, newfound self-worth was demolished in a single blow. It was soul crushing. I couldn’t show my face after that. I even stopped going to the Culver Theater. I retreated to a corrugated box behind the rack of dresses, where I sat in the dark counting and touching, furious with myself, thinking about suicide seriously for the first time.

  Tina

  In the late afternoons, when Tina’s kitchen filled with shadows and a pot of thick meat
sauce simmered on the stove, we sat at the kitchen table and talked while she did the rebus puzzle. Tina had multiple sclerosis, and she was going downhill fast. Only one year after she had been diagnosed, she walked like a spinning top about to totter over, and she had to hold on to furniture to make her way across the room. I went to her apartment almost every day around 3 p.m. and helped her straighten up and cook dinner. The multiple sclerosis made her left eye sag, and the medication dried her mouth, so she licked her lips all the time. She was my mother’s age, but when we chatted it wasn’t like talking to a mother, it was like having a friend. She thought I was funny and laughed at things I said. She asked me about my fears and why I counted and touched things, and I was able to explain it to her better than anybody else. She made no judgment.

  Tina told me about her own fears, about how afraid she was of dying of MS, but that she had faith in Jesus. Sometimes she felt steadier on her feet, and the doctor said there was a possibility of a remission and her MS might get better for a while, maybe forever, so she still had hope. She wished she were well enough to go to the church on 15th Avenue and light candles. She said there were statues of saints there that could help her, and that her patron saint was St. Jude, the saint of hopeless causes. I decided he would be my patron saint too.

  Tina and her husband, “Big Rich” Mastriano, were my parents’ best friends. They saw each other every Saturday night, usually at the Mastrianos’ apartment on Foster Avenue, where they sat around the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. Big Rich was a hairy-chested mook who worked as a mechanic replacing springs on trucks. He used Lava soap to remove the grease from his fingernails and knuckles when he came home from the garage on Coney Island Avenue.