Fanny laughed every prohibition away, and drank beer, too! Those things were bad enough, according to Mary, but worse than all of that, Bubbe Fanny wore pants! Also a seamstress, she sewed them herself, using Butterick patterns, which Bubbe Mary found “Goyische.” The wearing of pants was on par with the eating of pork by-products—outrageously scandalous to her. “What kind of a Jewish woman wears pants to show off her tochas? Francis has no class at all!” she would say, shaking her head. “No class at all!” And Bubbe Fanny’s summation of Bubbe Mary: “She is just stuck up and doesn’t know how to have any fun in life.”
Fanny stood on the opposite side of tradition, was resourceful, had huge dimples when she laughed, and didn’t have a self-righteous bone in her big, honest, round body. Once, a few old biddies were talking some prissy diet talk, while daintily picking around some snacks and talking about how they couldn’t eat this or that because it would put weight on them, and you just knew they were aiming their remarks in her direction. “Not me,” said Fanny, grabbing one of these and one of those. “I never seem to gain a pound!” It was true! She managed to keep herself right around a nice, healthy, two hundred and thirty pounds her entire adult life, which she lived deep into her seventies, enjoying every bite of it! She was a role model for me and was the perfect antidote for all the uptight, repressed, tradition-bound women I saw almost everywhere I looked in the Utah of the 1950s and ’60s.
Bubbe Mary voted Republican in every election from school board to president, and would make Bill Kristol look liberal. She loved Nixon! She did not accept evolution as a reality in the least, and she was quite vocal about the duties of the Jewish woman to run the entire world, as required by Jehovah. I’m not sure where that’s written, exactly, but I’m down with that (as the kids say), so who cares? Her politics never grabbed me, coming of age in the ’60s as I did, BUT (and it’s a big BUT—hey, no big-butt jokes!) I think it was her unshakable belief in the power of women and her confidence that it was up to them to straighten out this crazy world that instilled a lot of that same gutsy confidence in me. Bubbe Mary was a damn force of nature!
Even though Bubbe Mary was a rogue capitalist, she dropped every spare dime and quarter into a blue and white tin charity box that she kept in her pantry, right next to the jars of gefilte fish and red beet horseradish. She once explained to me that being a Jew meant being someone who gives charity. I asked if we give charity to those who are not Jews, and she said, “We give to our own first.” I remember asking her, “If there is any left over, do we then give that to non-Jews?” Her answer: “There is never anything left over.” That was that.
Next to the charity tin sat the cans of Campbell’s soup, green beans, stewed tomatoes, and corned beef. Then the rows and rows of Ritz crackers, matzoh, kosher salt, flour, sugar, matzoh meal, cornmeal, and instant mashed potato boxes. The entire right side of the pantry was stacked with kosher candles for the Sabbath and memorial candles for the dead. Next to the shelves were the dozen or so barrels of pickles she made herself, out of the cucumbers she grew in her garden, which had an arbor over it, where the grapes that she crushed for her homemade closet winery grew.
Bubbe Fanny had grown up in the Midwest and was the Queen of the Casserole, and she also made pickles. Where Bubbe Mary made the very garlicky kosher pickle, Bubbe Fanny made the bread-and-butter pickle, which Bubbe Mary used to say was completely “Goyische,” as was the casserole, and everything that Bubbe Fanny did or said. Things were to be cooked in a pot, not a Pyrex oven dish!
Bubbe Fanny said that Bubbe Mary was “old-fashioned” and a “religious fanatic,” and that her pickles were too “heavy” and caused diarrhea. Our favorite food at Bubbe Fanny’s house was a frozen Salisbury steak in a plastic pouch that we took out of the freezer, dropped into a boiling pot for eight minutes, and then cut open with scissors and placed atop a lovely white slice of sandwich bread, washed down with a fabulous cream soda, bread-and-butter pickles, and potato chips. This was so modern, which was what we called everything that wasn’t Bubbe Mary–like.
Bubbe Fanny also infuriated and upset Bubbe Mary by joining a bowling league with other women who wore pants and were not Jews, and most of all by becoming involved with a man named Roy, whom she had met downtown, where she worked as a sales-clerk. Roy “enjoyed a cocktail” and was from New Orleans, Louisiana. Wearing pants, working as a clerk, eating nonkosher foods, and bowling all receded into the background as colossal social errors next to this seditious turn.
Both of my grandmothers, however, were in complete agreement with each other in the worship of the homemade noodle, which was an important thing to know how to make in our very fat extended family. Now that I am menopausal, I have gotten into making the world’s best noodles. I use my grandmothers’ recipes, but I roll the dough out very, very thick—it takes the noodles at least six hours to dry out. My noodles are like plump, beige knapsacks; two of them are an entire meal, I swear.
For no extra charge, I gladly include the recipe here in this book as a special bonus to you, my dear readers! (You are so very welcome!) Just call me Bubbe Roseanne! Ot azoj kocht men di lokshn! (How to cook noodles.)
Lokshn (Noodles)
1½ cups flour
½ cup water
1 egg
1 tablespoon sunflower oil
Place flour in a mixing bowl. Make a well in the center, and add water, egg, and oil. Mix with clean hands, kneading into a smooth dough. Roll dough into a rectangle. When dough dries, sprinkle with flour, roll out flat, and cut into strips. Cook in boiling salted water and drain. Can be used for soups, kugels, or as a side dish.
After my father presented Bubbe Fanny with the choice between giving up living with the man she loved or seeing her own grandchildren, she chose to elope to Wendover, Nevada, with Roy and become Mrs. Fanny Charbenau. This way, she explained, they were no longer living in sin (sleeping together). Daddy was feeling outsmarted and quite abandoned by his mother and her choices. Instead of giving up the goy, she had married him. He was screaming at the top of his chain-smoking lungs about how Bubbe had tricked him. My mother said, “Well, you told her the issue was living in sin, so she made it legal. You should have said the issue was that she shouldn’t have sex with a goy! But you didn’t; you said, ‘You cannot live in sin and be a good grandmother,’ so . . . you got what you wanted!”
Buoyed by Mama’s explanation of his triumph over his mother’s sinfulness, Daddy started to go over to her house for breakfast every day on his way to work, and grew closer to Roy. We kids hardly ever got to go over to Fanny’s house, because Fanny worked and bowled and made crafty things out of old beer cans and then sold those things at craft fairs to raise enough money to go on fishing trips with Roy. Bubbe Fanny had totally transcended the entire scope of Judaica in everyone’s mind on the more fundamentalist side of our family by baiting a hook and catching, gutting, and cooking a rainbow trout out in the woods in a silver bullet camper pulled by a goy named Roy in a big truck. He was enjoying showing our Bubbe how the other half lives, inducting her into the secret and exotic world of the cowgoy.
He adored her and would say, “Here come those big dimples and that smile that Roy loves to see!” She laughed easily, and told off-color jokes now and then, too, that made him laugh. His sister told my sister that his first wife had died of cancer after years of fighting it, and he had nursed her through it all until the end. Bubbe Fanny made him laugh, and that gave him a reason to live. Bubbe told Sis that Roy was different from all other goys—he was nice and sweet and there was none of “that Jesus crap.” He reminded her of her primitive ancestors, and the way they lived in harmony with their conflicts, joyfully roasting a “kid” in its “own mother’s milk” as the carefree goys still do to this day.
Like Bubbe Fanny, I found the cowgoys a loving bunch, flirting with women in open adoration, and not in the lecherous way typical of our own menfolk. Listening to the way Jewish guys talk, I could never believe that their lecherous ways would work s
o well on the shiksas. I was incredulous—until I left home and saw for myself that Jewish guys act differently with shiksas than they do with Jewish girls. Most of the Jewish guys I met when I left home thought I was a shiksa, so I was privy to the truth about how much nicer they are to “chicksas” than to Jewish women. They don’t really like us Jewish chicks because we are stronger than they are, and they like to act like the Big Man and not the Little Boy. We like taking care of the Little Boy, though, for the most part.
The Big Man thing is, of course, all an act, as every Jewish woman knows. Mostly, we do not like our own men that much, either, and find them to be whiners and blamers and big, hairy, suckling, and arrogant babies who give next to nothing back. These things are true, of course, but when they get with a shiksa, they fall all over themselves to keep her. She is the one they drop us for, their true and secret ideal of womanhood. They do not realize that no woman really likes them all that much once she gets to know what a bunch of whiners they are, and so, once they get dumped for a smarter, richer Jewish guy, they keep trying to get with newer, thinner, dumber shiksas, and that takes some money when you look like a Dustin Hoffman. It’s quite complicated.
Though I sleep with goys, marry and divorce them, work with them, and have borne their children, make no mistake: I am a Jew and will always be a Jew because I cannot NOT be a Jew. It is an inescapable matrix. Feminist Jews argue against patriarchy while honoring it. Liberal Jews argue against elitism yet practice separatism. Progressive Jews take the words of old men wandering around in the desert six thousand years ago as good modern advice. There is no way out for any of us.
I want to be whatever it is that everybody else is not, like every other Jewish woman. I am part rebel and part joker, like my bubbe Fanny was, and part student of the Torah, like my bubbe Mary. I am an enigma; I contain multitudes.
Sleeping with someone is the most important thing in the world to many, many women, who find great joy in being awakened by a snoring, sweating bed hog whose toenails are too long and whose base urges are aimed in their general vicinity or particular direction. I prefer to fart alone in comfort and in style. But women had to marry a man in order to sleep with him in those olden days. You had to pay for your physical pleasures, meager as they were, with fertility and pain. One had to force oneself to become uncomfortably familiar with terms like “pistons,” “cylinders,” and “tight ends,” and the other endless little inconsequential subjects of the male—the mutant species with whom we have nothing whatsoever in common. The rogue element. The Y chromo. The Damned.
When Bubbe told Sis (and Sis later told me) that she “never enjoyed sex so much before, in my entire marriage to Sam Barr,” it made me hurl hot spittle and vomit across a gorgeous lace-covered tabletop. I said, “Why are you telling me this when I will no doubt be attempting to overeat later?” The thought of Bubbe on top of Roy or vice versa was a horrid vision, one that would be followed by an entire mental slide show of grotesque horrors, catalogued by my “Morbid Thought Disorder,” which began at age three, after viewing Holocaust films and photographs on Bubbe Mary’s TV.
The goyim with their bright smiles and high hopes were gods to me. I loved being around them because they never talked about the real world, ever, and were always baking and eating cookies. Eating cookies that you bake with your grandmother is one of the greatest social steps one must experience in order to grow up into a decent world citizen, in my opinion. Bubbe Mary may have shown her love for us by making fantastic cheesecakes and sponge cakes and angel food cakes and killer apple strudels with hand-rolled homemade phyllo dough, as well as the Holy Chocolate Bar of Mosaic Law, but her cookies were abysmal. Those awful hamantaschen with the figgy prune inside are not pleasing to the palate until one is well into her diabetic sixties, just for the record!
Those cookie-baking Mormon mothers who surrounded us might not have had a conscious thought in their heads that wasn’t tranquilized away by the largely Mormon-owned pharmaceutical companies, but they did possess the good sense and the incredible awareness to add a bittersweet chocolate chip or two, and crushed pecans, and some peanut butter to the basic vanilla cookie batter. They were so very modern, and unsaddled with the burden of six thousand generations of suffering grandparents hauntingly stuck to them like glue, like we Jewgaboos were. Mormons seemed carefree, with only about one hundred years’ worth of suffering, marching, and freezing ancestors to leave survivor’s guilt behind. I knew that I would rather marry their cousins than mine because I was not tribal at all by the age of three, despite the witches and warlocks who tried to program and indoctrinate me into the Jewish cabal of sado-spirituality and carbo-slavery to Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat Jehovah.
Bubbe Fanny was so incredibly, modernly Jewish to me, what with the boily-bag dinners, and the high-heeled sandals, and the cool furniture, lamps, and art brought back from Korea by her soldier son, my father’s brother Larimore. (Bubbe Mary, on the other hand, would remark, “Jewish people do not join the army. They are doctors, lawyers, and accountants.”) After Larimore’s return from Korea, many lovely Korean people became Bubbe Fanny’s new west-side neighbors, and like all of the people who lived in Bubbe Fanny’s vicinity, they loved her, because she made people feel welcome, with casseroles, or crocheted hot pads, or a plate of some of her homemade cookies, which were the “Ding Dong Daddy Hot Dog Diggity Bestest in the Westest” little round mouthfuls of heaven from the loving hand of “The Hostess with the Mostest,” Fanny Barr Charbenau! She was the first to add butterscotch bits, pecans, milk chocolate, and semisweet chocolate chips into a lovely little vanilla cookie. And it was she who made the pineapple upside-down cake with the newfangled coconut crisp on top and underneath. So back off, back up, and step off, bitches!
Even though the Koreans loved her, they did hold handkerchiefs over their noses when they visited her home. We thought their homes stunk, too, and were incensed that they thought the same thing of us. Apparently, we smelled worse to them than they did to us, or else they were just less polite or less dissociative than we were, because at least we would not tip our hand by placing perfumed handkerchiefs under our noses when we visited them. Instead, we would put the perfume directly on our upper lip, and everyone thought we had colds when we repeatedly sniffled during our warm and welcome cross-cultural visits. After a time, we all started to smell alike, as that is what assimilation is all about, I think.
Nobody really liked Bubbe Mary. It was not just the smell of garlic, fried onions, and dill that turned people off. She had hardly any friends, aside from Dora Gallenstein, with whom she would monitor the comings and goings of other Jewish women of our community, judging whether or not they were conducting themselves as ladies should. Mostly, she had no friends because she was mad all the time, at the injustice of the injustices against small business owners in America. At one point, she had to build a bathroom for each of the apartments she rented out to tenants instead of forcing them to all co-op just one bathroom among three apartments, and that stuck in her craw. Barry Goldwater, Bubbe’s favorite candidate of all time, would see to it, if elected America’s first Jewish president, that the principles of Ayn Rand, Bubbe’s psychic mentor, would become law someday, in a proper world where might makes right and the weak are silently grateful for the crumbs they are allowed.
I once witnessed her slap a six-foot-three policeman across the face, right in front of me, my sister, and my pregnant mother, who almost fainted. My mother said, “Mama, the cops will hurt you.”
“They don’t hurt a lady in America!” Bubbe insisted.
Mom said, “If you assault them they will!”
Bubbe Mary, who had pulled the boots off a dead German soldier in order to have shoes when she was only nine years old, was in need of having her files updated. Learning to respect police authority ran counter to her ideas about being an American citizen. She believed that in America being a business owner meant the police were your personal servants. It took Mama screaming in her face about being nicer to p
eople or she would get smashed down one day soon by forces stronger than she, who saw old women as marks and as easy pickings, whom they could get away with hitting over the head and robbing, especially those old, fat Jewish ladies who had money sewed in their coats and mattresses, to get through to her.
Mama would also remind Bubbe that it was the pharmacist in her hometown of Aborniki, Lithuania, who Bubbe’s mother, Rifka (whom I was named for), trusted, who poisoned Bubbe’s twelve-year-old twin brothers, who both died in agony as a result, in one of many pograms. (Sometimes, for no reason at all, fortunes change and the wind blows through the world, scattering us here and there, battered and dazed.) We need to fit in better and get along with our neighbors, Mama said. Mama had a way with threatening words. Bubbe subsequently attempted to make a more genteel change in her outward behaviors from that day forward. She stopped cheating people out of the return of their damage deposits when they moved out of her rental apartments—although she kept cheating me at gin rummy.
One fine day, boys and girls, a man named Anderson the Handyman (who later became Anderson the Fugitive) rented a room from Bubbe Mary in “Mary’s Manor” and befriended her, offering his tasteful services in the grooming of the rosebushes, about which he knew everything. He told Bubbe Mary that he had a lot of rosebushes himself back in Florida, where he used to live before he decided to leave his life of golf and roses and leisure to come to Salt Lake City and write his book about how he left Florida for Utah to live among the drunk and the poor there. He was quite tan and elegant in his golf shirts and penny loafers and sunglasses. Nobody we knew wore sunglasses; everybody around us wore big hats and squinted instead.
Roseannearchy Page 7