I go home and try to nap. Nothing doing, so I pull on an old pair of shorts from my Bucky Badger days and walk two blocks up M Street to a coffeehouse that doesn’t sell anything beginning with the letters “frap.” Danny wants to move to Bethesda, but the thought of living in the suburbs without children thoroughly depresses me.
A cell-phone-blabbing mother spills her latte on me; the hot liquid burns my thigh. “Watch where you’re going,” she says, and her brusque words crack me open like a walnut. Instead of crying, I find a table and rub my iced tea against my leg.
A man with kind eyes and a thumb ring sits down next to me and asks to borrow a pen. I reach into my purse, and the baggie falls to the table. We both examine it.
“Must have been a hell of a sandwich.” He laughs nervously.
“Keep it.” I slide a pen at him with more force than I intend and snatch the baggie from the table. These days, I go nowhere without my spoon and baggie; they make me feel close to my Sylvias. Strange, I know, but they comfort me when nobody else can. One miscarriage and you get “Seventy-five percent of women miscarry during their first pregnancy.” With the second, it’s “My sister/cousin/hairdresser had two; you’ll be fine.” Three begets “I know of a fertility clinic out in Gaithersburg.” I’m on number four.
I return to our apartment and go straight to the guest room I’ve been avoiding since I lost Sylvia. A stack of pink, blue, and yellow hand-me-downs from Robin provides the only color against the oatmeal carpet and white futon.
Danny’s shoved the teak wooden cradle into the corner. We bought it at the Georgetown Flea Market last summer, a few days before our first miscarriage. I remove the spoon and the baggie from my purse and lay them in the cradle. With the edge of my thumb I rock the bassinet back and forth so gently that the spoon and the baggie barely move.
The day folds into itself. At five, I’m massaging a chicken breast with olive oil when Danny calls. “I have to show a house tonight, sweetie. Can I pick up some Ben and Jerry’s on the way home?” He sounds both anxious and relieved to take a night off from our grief. I don’t blame him. I call my mom in Milwaukee. Just because.
“Whatcha doin’?” I try to sound like that plucky girl who beat the entire sixth grade class in an arm-wrestling tournament, who trotted off to Mali to run an AIDS program, and not the hormonal casualty I am.
“Thinking about you, honey.”
“No need.”
“We spent today at Aunt Sylvia’s house, sorting her things.”
My cheeks flush, and I feel like I did when I was eight and my father caught me stealing a piece of Bazooka bubble gum from Winkie’s. “Did you find the spoon?”
“The one from your great-grandma Hannah from Minsk?” My mother sounds amused; she’s a fourth-generation German Jew and often disparages her mother-in-law’s Eastern European ways.
“Yeah,” I mumble.
“No sign of it. Right before your grandma Goldie passed, when her dementia got really bad, she went on and on about that spoon and some handkerchief that I’ve still never seen.”
My heart quickens as my mother tells me about a feud between my grandmother and my aunt over this spoon. She’s fuzzy about the details, but my grandmother was mad as hell that barren Sylvia kept their mother’s baby spoon for herself instead of letting her have it.
I sleep fitfully. I dream that a pregnant Aunt Sylvia eats Neapolitan ice cream with the baby spoon while Grandma Goldie sits in her favorite chair and watches a toddler with braids stand alone on a grassy knoll playing Captain, May I? Raspberries stain the girl’s white overalls, and her eyes bulge slightly. The images crash into each other like scenes in an MTV music video.
The next morning, I’m shampooing my hair when I retrieve a memory of the spoon. I was five and a half when my parents let Eric, Amy, and me stay with Aunt Sylvia while they went to the Cayman Islands. She ran us bubble baths and wrapped us in towels that she’d warmed in the dryer. Cocooned in our bathrobes, we curled up on the sofa bed and ate Jiffy Pop. She packed Hostess Ding Dongs in our lunch boxes, and I watched her polish her silver until it sparkled. Only after she finished the candlesticks and kiddush cups did she shine the baby spoon.
On the last day of our stay, I asked her if I could feed my doll with the spoon, which, even as a child, I knew she didn’t want me to touch. I also knew that she couldn’t say no to me. She nodded toward the spoon, and I grabbed it greedily.
“Here, my little Melanie.” I placed the spoon gingerly against the doll’s plastic mouth. “My little baby, my baby.” I rocked Melanie back and forth. I could feel my aunt watching me, so I hammed it up. “Mommy loves you, Mommy loves you so much.” On some level, I knew I was making Aunt Sylvia feel like I did when my brother waved his extended bedtime or gum-chewing privileges in my face. My aunt never polished her silver in front of me again. A year later, I tortured my grandma Goldie with questions about the spoon, but she told me nothing.
To rinse this memory away, I stand under the shower until the water turns cold. I leave a message for my boss telling him that I’m taking off a few more days. I pop my wedding video into the VCR. Danny breaks the glass, and then we kiss as we’d practiced: affectionate but not too much tongue. I fast-forward to Aunt Sylvia, who is fingering a stray rose petal when the camera zooms in on her. She fumbles with the microphone and holds it to her lips, recently touched up with a fresh coat of lipstick. Pink Velvet. Revlon. Funny the things you remember. Her large eyes dart around the room, and she clears her throat several times. “Like someone pulled them off the top of a cake, this bride and groom.” She giggles nervously and continues. “My wish for my Hannah is that she know every kind of naches life has to offer.” Her laughter fades.
I replay the clip over and over. My aunt is smiling, but her eyes are slightly watery. How could I have missed this? Maybe she suspected that I wasn’t going to be able to have children. Maybe she was mourning Uncle Irving. No, he was an asshole; this has to be about me. What possessed me to swipe a fertility totem from a barren woman? How could I have stolen my aunt’s birthright?
Tears are forming somewhere in my skull. To stave off another tidal wave of grief, I drive around the Beltway thinking about my aunt.
“Call me Aunt Sylvia. All the kids do,” she told Danny seven years ago when I presented him to her in a dry run for the later round of family introductions. She motioned to a wall of framed photos of my grandmother’s progeny while I poked around in her fridge for a Pepsi. She loved to brag about me: “My bat mitzvah…voice like an angel…captain of the volleyball team.”
I joined my aunt and Danny in the dining room, where they were laughing at one of his corny jokes. And when I recited the blessings over the candles later that night, I surprised myself with my silent prayer that my walls be filled with photos of my own children and grandchildren.
Ten days post-miscarriage, I pack toiletries, two shirts, and a peasant skirt into a duffel bag; my jeans don’t fit because I’m still sporting a sanitary napkin the size of a diaper. I fly Midwest Express to Milwaukee because the seats are roomy and they serve warm chocolate chip cookies and meals with real linen napkins.
A blond woman in her sixties offers me one of her cookies. “I’m Lois. You got family in Milwaukee?”
“I’m visiting a relative.”
“You got kids?” She adjusts her Coke-bottle glasses. “Those career women forget to have kids until it’s too late and then that’s that.”
“I have a baby girl.” I entertain a confrontation fantasy with Lois on my way to the bathroom: Lois, I’ve lost a baby. I named her Sylvia, and I’m carrying a replica of the fetus made out of raspberry jam and capers in my purse. Would you like to hold her? The tiny lavatory smells like asparagus pee and jet fuel. I pull the baggie and the spoon out and examine them. Neither one ever truly belonged to me.
I rent a Ford Taurus and drive to Aunt Sylvia’s empty colonial house with a For Sale sign planted on the front lawn. I sneak into the backyard and sit cross-legge
d on her overgrown grass. A ladybug crawls up my big toe. Four raspberries cling to an anemic- looking bush, and I pick them. I open my baggie, which smells vinegary and sweet, and drop in the fruit.
The grass cools my feet as I walk back to the car. While I concentrate on finding my way to the cemetery, I excavate a piece of licorice from the bottom of my purse and run it back and forth between my teeth until it turns into a skinny thread.
Seven white tulips mark Aunt Sylvia’s grave. Sylvia Savitz Seigel. What a dreadful name for a woman with a lisp. The thought makes me smile.
I remove my sandals and let my soles sink into the velvety soil. The dirt next to my aunt’s grave yields easily as I dig a hole with my fingers. I take the baggie from my purse and place it in the hole. I scoop small chunks of dirt over the plastic with my aunt’s spoon, and then I raise its warm handle to my lips and kiss the Hebrew letter hey. I drop the heirloom into the earth. A warm breeze tickles me, and I hear a whisper, my whisper.
Yisgadal ve yiskadash shema rabah. Amen.
WHAT HANNAH NEVER KNEW
Goldie Solonsky and Sylvia Seigel, September 1970, 1935, 1937, and 1990
September 1970
Goldie
Of course Goldie Solonsky said yes when her son asked if Hannah, Eric, and baby Amy could spend the night with her. What bubbe would turn away her grandchildren? “I can still make Rosh Hashanah and take care of the kids,” she assured Simon. “What do you think I did when you and your sister were children?” She told him that she knew from losing a mother and that his wife needed a little peace and quiet.
This morning her husband, Hyman, had taken Eric, Simon’s eldest, to the office to show him off. Eric took after Hyman, gentle, plump, and not so good with the books, but blessed with a knack for listening to people and enough street smarts to find his way, she often reassured Simon, who worried about the boy too much. Hannah, on the other hand, for that one everything came to her on the first try, and Amy, well, she was still a baby so it was too early to tell.
Goldie put Amy down for a nap and began peeling potatoes for her kugel. Hannah sat at the kitchen table sorting her rubber bands by color until she grew bored and asked for a job. “Can I cut the onions, Bubbe?”
“Let’s wait until you are seven for that. You’ll need all of your fingers to play jacks.”
“Can I grate the chocolate for the icebox cake?”
“Your aunt Sylvia will be here soon, cookie. She’ll take you across the street and run you around but good.”
Hannah pulled a doll from the Milwaukee Sports Club gym bag her father had loaned her for her sleepover. Fancy. The club had just started officially accepting Jews, and her Simon, famous for fixing noses and bosoms, was one of the first to join. Hyman wouldn’t have cared about the club even if they’d accepted him. He’d never wanted to shower with the goyim; too many times he’d gotten it for having a different shmeckl.
Hannah fed her doll with a fake bottle. Goldie thought her granddaughter was a bit old for dolls, but what did she know about little girls? Her daughter, Marlene, had run off to San Francisco ten years ago and barely picked up the phone to say hello. Miss Broken Finger.
“Your baby hungry?” Goldie glanced up from a heap of peeled potatoes.
“Yes, Melanie wants Cream of Wheat.”
Hannah held her doll to her shoulder with tenderness. This was a child who knew from love. Goldie felt proud of Simon for being such a good father, and proud that he’d picked such a loving wife. So she was bossy, which had only gotten worse when she started burying her nose in those Gloria Steinberg books.
“You’re a good mommy, Hannahle.”
Hannah’s eyes brightened. “Do you have a special spoon too?”
Goldie reached into her top drawer and handed her granddaughter a teaspoon.
“No, Bubbe, a baby spoon.” Hannah grabbed the end of one of her pigtails — her hair was black and curly like her father’s — split it in two, and tugged.
“My baby is thirty-five years old.” Goldie chuckled.
Hannah put her hands on her hips. “Well, Aunt Sylvia doesn’t even have kids, and she has a baby spoon.”
A chill ran up and down Goldie’s back. “What baby spoon?”
“It was small and shiny and silver, and it had a little Hebrew letter on it.”
Goldie could tell Hannah was feeling like a real big shot with this piece of grown-up information. “A hey,” she murmured. Her limbs felt heavy. She wanted to pour herself a glass of ice water and sit down for a second. She had specifically asked Sylvia at Mama’s funeral if she’d seen Grandma Hannah’s baby spoon, and Sylvia just shook her head in her sweet Sylvia way and said not a word, so Goldie assumed that it had been misplaced. The funeral was more than thirty years ago, but she remembered it as if it were yesterday.
“Are you okay, Bubbe?”
“Of course I’m okay.” Goldie’s tone was harsher than she meant it to be. “Bring me that tin. We’ll split a pecan bar.”
Hannah’s eyes, brownish black like Goldie’s, grew round. Goldie never interrupted her cooking and baking for anything.
The cookie felt like chalk on Goldie’s tongue, but she tried to pretend that a treat was just what the doctor ordered. After everything she’d done, all those envelopes of money, all the fights with Hyman when he insisted that she should just let Sylvia fend for herself, all the times she turned her head the other way when Sylvia’s good-for-nothing husband, Irving, showed up in his fine wool suits, all the nights Sylvia spent on Goldie’s sofa, all the Shabbat dinners and seders and Rosh Hashanah lunches and the care packages that followed. Not to mention the fact that Sylvia had never so much as invited her over for a grilled cheese sandwich. Why wouldn’t Sylvia have wanted Goldie’s children and grandchildren — whom she practically pretended were hers sometimes — to take their first bites from the spoon that had touched the mouths of generations of their family’s babies? Goldie couldn’t even think to peel a potato she was so hot. This one she couldn’t blame on Irving.
Hannah examined her bubbe, in that way that made Goldie uneasy, as though her granddaughter were twenty years old already, as though she could see right into Goldie’s heart. “Let’s go watch for Aunt Sylvia, Bubbe,” she suggested in her sweetest voice.
Goldie always felt better when her hands were busy. She led the little girl to her newly reupholstered chair, forest green with gold stripes. “Go get me your hairbrush,” she ordered. Hannah returned with the brush and a glass of ice water. “That’s a new coffee table. Use a coaster, dear.” Hannah placed the glass on a coaster and sat on her knees in front of Goldie, who brushed the tangles out of her hair just as she and Sylvia had done for each other when they shared a bedroom back in Mama’s four-room apartment on Burleigh Street.
“There she is, Bubbe!” Hannah pointed out the window to her aunt, still slender and a looker. Hannah had inherited Sylvia’s figure, thank God, and not her mother’s schmaltz or her father’s pear shape that hours of schvitzing in the gym couldn’t change. “She’s here, she’s here! Do you think she brought raspberries?” As Hannah turned around to face her grandmother, Goldie knew what she would read in the little girl’s expression. Hannah had never once looked as excited to see her own bubbe as she was to see this woman whom Goldie had thought she knew better than anyone, including Hyman.
Chic in her pantsuit from Gimbel’s and her fresh set from Minsky’s, Sylvia waved up at Hannah. Goldie’s neighbor, Zelda, recovering from her corn surgery, limped to her mailbox and nodded at Sylvia, who kissed her cheek and made a beeline for Goldie’s steps.
Goldie hauled herself out of the chair and rushed to her bedroom, where she listened to Hannah’s breathless chatter, something about a Barbie doll that talked or some such mishegas. “I’ll be out in a second, Sylvia,” she called, trying to make her voice sound normal.
Business had been good for Hyman that year. Goldie took her knippel, a fat brown envelope filled with bills she’d been socking away, into the bathr
oom and sat on the toilet to give herself another minute, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking bad things about her sister. She’d been too generous, and not only with the money. “Simon, have you called your aunt this week?” “Simon, go shovel your aunt’s front step.” “Simon, take the kids to see Sylvia; they need to know their aunt.” “Sylvia, you play with the kids. I’ll fiddle around in the kitchen.”
Goldie was sobbing now, and the tears were going to give her away. Once she started, though, she just couldn’t stop. She would frighten Hannah, who, like Sylvia, missed nothing. She buried her face in a bath towel until her shoulders stopped shaking. Cold water helped, but she would need a miracle to hide her puffy face.
Sylvia knocked on the door. “Goldie, you okay in there?”
“Just a little indigestion. Take Hannah to the park.”
“You sure? You don’t sound so good.”
“Go.”
When Goldie heard the door close, she came out of the bathroom and began chopping potatoes again. Halfway through the second potato, Sylvia and Hannah returned for Hannah’s doll. Goldie just wanted to keep chopping, but for the sake of her Hannah, she had to force a smile. Sylvia looked worried, and Hannah looked scared. Goldie’s eyes were so swollen that they felt like buttonholes in her head.
“Come on, my little monkey. Come and show me your trick on the bars.” Sylvia stroked one of Hannah’s plaits and guided her out the door.
The envelope felt heavy in the pocket of Goldie’s slacks. Part of her wanted to look her sister square in the eye and hand her the money, instead of her usual pretending that it just appeared like magic in Sylvia’s pocketbook. Part of her wanted to keep the money and splurge on a trip to Florida with Hyman next winter. Most of her wanted to turn back the clock, to tell Mama that Sylvia was the older one and she should take care of herself, or maybe even Goldie, once in a while.
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