September 1990
Sylvia
It was the third Rosh Hashanah after Irving died before Sylvia found herself back on Goldie’s street, now treeless thanks to that Dutch elm business. Irving’s stroke was as good a reason as any for Sylvia to drift from Goldie’s life; she had spent fifteen years feeding him applesauce and toileting him. Like a baby.
Broken glass and greasy McDonald’s bags littered the playground where she’d once watched Simon play kick-the-can and Hannah and Amy swing across the bars like monkeys. A Hmong woman wearing a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt nodded to her as she checked what Sylvia would always regard as Zelda Greenberg’s mailbox. A little girl, probably the woman’s granddaughter, played cat’s cradle with an old shoelace on the steps.
Sylvia never thought she’d miss Zelda, just as she didn’t realize how much she’d missed Goldie until Simon called last week to tell her that his mother was getting confused, that the fire department had come twice to her duplex after she’d gone to bed with a kugel in the oven, that he’d hired a nurse to make sure that she ate and bathed, that there might not be too many good conversations with Goldie left.
She was glad Simon had called. Both Simon and his son Eric had inherited Hyman’s bad skin and good heart. For the past fifteen years, the first of the month had always brought that thin envelope addressed to “Aunt Sylvia Savitz” in Simon’s doctor’s scrawl. Sylvia could never repay Goldie, or Simon for that matter, for all the money they’d given her over the years, but she had another idea. Her pocketbook dangled from her forearm, slapping her hip as she walked. Zipped safely in the side pocket, wrapped in one of Mama’s old handkerchiefs, was the freshly polished baby spoon, her peace offering to Goldie. She would give it to her right away.
All those years of schlepping Irving around had given Sylvia a bad back, which now ached from walking four blocks with the bags holding her Rosh Hashanah feast: cabbage rolls, kishke, a brisket, an icebox cake, and a few raspberries from her backyard. She climbed the steps to Goldie’s duplex, that old burn in her gut catching fire just from thinking about what had to be done. When she let herself into the kitchen, she was rattled to find a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts and an old coffee cup on the counter. The potato bowl sat empty. Mama had taught Goldie and Sylvia to always keep a potato or two in the house to fill out a meal. The kitchen smelled clean, though — maybe too clean.
“In here, Heidi,” Goldie called out from the living room. “Did you pick up the chocolate chips?”
Heidi must be her help. Just like Goldie to order people to the grocery store. Sylvia smiled, relieved that her sister was up to her usual tricks, took a deep breath, and went into the living room, which smelled as her own had during Irving’s last year, like fish and antiseptic.
Goldie looked as if her old chair — threadbare and faded to a mustard green — might swallow her up. Her arthritic hands sat folded on her lap, and as she shifted her weight, the plastic cover made a crinkling noise under her shrunken frame.
“Sylvia?” Goldie smiled like a child opening her first Hanukkah present, too surprised to show the practiced cold shoulder she’d been perfecting these past years.
“I brought you a few things.” Sylvia was still holding the shopping bags.
Goldie stared at her sister, grinning, adjusting her loose housedress, revealing her bony shoulders and freckled skin. “You know Viola Schnitz died. Dropped dead. Heart attack,” she said, as if she’d seen Sylvia just yesterday. She patted her chest.
Viola Schnitz had been dead for thirteen years, but maybe Goldie was just trying to make things easier. “Such a shame,” Sylvia said. Safer to talk about Viola than other things.
“She was as big as a house when she went. You never saw her that way, but I’m telling you, she must have been eating yeast.”
Goldie hadn’t changed one bit. “She used to be movie-star gorgeous,” Sylvia said.
“Yeast, I tell you.” Goldie shook her head. “She used to be movie-star gorgeous.”
“I got you a present.” Sylvia set a bag of black licorice from the Pic ’n Save on the coffee table. Goldie and the help must drink a lot of coffee; rings from their mugs had ruined the table, the one that arrived right before Goldie hosted one of the last Rosh Hashanah lunches Sylvia attended. Goldie was so worried that this silly piece of furniture wouldn’t come in time for her to show it off to the family.
Goldie grabbed the licorice bag and settled it on her lap.
“How are the kids?” Sylvia asked.
“Simon’s getting married. Brenda. German Jew.” Goldie smiled with pride. “A bit of a snob.”
Simon and Brenda had been married for more than thirty years. Goldie’s confusion ripped at Sylvia’s heart. Sure, things hadn’t always been easy with her sister, but Goldie had always been the rock, the bank, the fierce little girl who socked anyone who dared poke fun at Sylvia’s lisp.
“You know, she looks just like you did back then, long and willowy,” Goldie announced.
“Your Hannah is much prettier than I was.” Sylvia could always follow her sister’s thoughts, even now, when it seemed like someone had put them in a pot of soup and stirred them up good. Sylvia hadn’t noticed how alike she and Hannah looked until she was rifling through old pictures last week, and she didn’t much like the comparison. She wanted more naches out of life for her great-niece. It made her ache to know that Hannah was having trouble making babies too. Now, Amy, she was built like Goldie, peasant-like, short with a bosom, and mischievous and light, a real artist, but still a child that one.
“What else did you bring?” Goldie looked in the direction of the bags.
“Cabbage rolls, brisket, kishke, icebox cake, a few raspberries from the yard,” Sylvia answered; she wanted Goldie’s Rosh Hashanah to be perfect. “Simon picked out the finest cut from the kosher butcher out by him and Brenda.”
Goldie’s attention drifted; her eyes, once dark and bright, were grayish and watery. She patted the arm of the davenport that butted up against her chair. “Come, sit.”
Sylvia stepped around her bags and sat as close to Goldie as she could. Goldie’s breath smelled like dirty flower water, and coarse, dark hairs sprouted from her chin.
“That’s better,” Goldie said.
They sat together in silence for a few minutes. Sylvia took a deep breath, thinking Goldie wouldn’t notice.
“Nu, what’s on your mind, Sylvia, after all these years?” She was the old Goldie.
“I have something for you,” Sylvia said softly.
“I see, all that food. Simon will come with the kids, and we’ll have a feast tomorrow.” She paused. “You’ll be with us.” It was a statement, not a question.
“No, not the food.” As Sylvia was getting up to retrieve her handbag from the kitchen, she felt Goldie’s fingers pressing into her arm through her thin sweater.
“Stay,” her sister commanded. “Hyman loves your icebox cake. He would wump up half of it if I didn’t stop him.”
Hyman had been dead for ten years. “A good eater you married.”
“Twenty-five cents.”
Sylvia knew Goldie was talking about some kind of bargain from Saltzberg’s, which had been replaced by a discount shoe store twenty years ago.
“Twelve ounces of chocolate for twenty-five cents at Saltzberg’s. Dial up Zelda for me, dear. LOCUST-2424.”
“Mrs. Nosy Pants.”
“If I don’t invite her, she’ll mope around tomorrow and tell me that she fixed herself a ham sandwich and a warm glass of cola and listened to our family make such a racket that she couldn’t take her nap.” Goldie frowned.
“That one.” Sylvia shook her head, almost convincing herself that Zelda was still utzing both of them, though she had died five years ago. Sylvia wished they could travel back to a time when Zelda was their biggest headache.
“I’ll ask her to bring a potato kugel. She makes a decent kugel.” Goldie brightened with the germ of a new idea. “And maybe she’ll pick up some ch
ocolate chips for me at Saltzberg’s. Twenty-five cents.”
The tarnished silver, Heidi the help’s dreck on the counter, the nylon knee-highs falling down Goldie’s bony white legs — it all reminded Sylvia of a darkened movie set after all the actors had returned to their regular lives, the props too worn to recycle.
“Otherwise, she’s not so ai–yi–yi in the kitchen. Did I tell you that Viola Schnitz passed away?”
“A shame.”
“Heart attack. I’ve got new neighbors downstairs. Orientals. Big Packers fans, just like Hyman.”
Sylvia wanted the spoon in her hand so she could just give it to Goldie if she came back to the here and now. Sylvia wanted to take back all the years she’d been sore at her sister. What had made her so mad anyway? “Just a second, Goldie. I’m going to put the food in the Frigidaire.”
Goldie nodded toward the kitchen.
Goldie’s fridge had never been so naked: a carton of yogurt, Velveeta cheese for the help, a few bruised apples, and some butterscotch pudding. Sylvia took the spoon out of her purse, slid it up her sleeve, and went back to the living room.
Goldie looked worn out as she gazed listlessly toward the park, at the Hmong grandmother sipping orange soda pop and the granddaughter skipping rope on Simon’s old basketball court, her purple hair ribbon bobbing up and down in perfect time with her feet.
“Listen to me, Goldie.”
“You think I’m not listening?” She glanced at Sylvia, then back out the window.
Sylvia knew that glance, the glance toward the street that Sylvia stopped traveling when things got bad with Irving. “You’ve done good by me, Goldie.” She felt the spoon against her wrist. “You and Simon.”
“You’re my Sylvia.” Goldie stated this as fact and stared straight ahead. “No matter what.”
Sylvia began pulling the spoon from her sleeve, and Goldie’s head snapped toward her.
“For Hannah,” Goldie announced with finality, brushing her crooked thumb against Sylvia’s sweater, grazing the hard metal.
“You give it to her,” Sylvia replied gently. She extended the spoon, and the shiny silver hung between them, charged with enough electricity to light up every lamp in the apartment.
Goldie touched the stem lightly, then pushed the spoon back toward Sylvia. “I could forget,” she said, her voice full with a joke, her eyes — smart, amused, bright — smiling at Sylvia. She winked, and then they giggled, softly at first, then loud and big, then deeper and deeper, from buried places: Mama’s Rosh Hashanah table where Birdie Finkelstein bent a butter knife trying to slice her honey cake. Grandma Hannah’s dresser stuffed with badly made wigs that they tugged over their braids. Cool spring nights when they crawled under the covers of the twin mattress they shared and gossiped about Hershel Klein’s pickle breath. Hot Rosh Hashanah mornings when they sprang out of bed to dress Mama’s icebox cake with whipped cream and maraschino cherries. Snowy February days when they woke up with frozen noses and breath that smoked. Huddled together for warmth, they’d listen for Mama’s last noodge and then yank back the yellowed goose-down comforter from the old country and leap into the cruel winter morning.
A tear formed somewhere in the bottom of Sylvia’s throat, but it never found her eyes. She poked around in her sweater sleeve for a tissue, just in case it did. Without looking at Sylvia, Goldie reached into her own sleeve and handed her sister a yellowed handkerchief.
Sylvia’s heart filled up so full that she thought it might pop like a balloon. She felt Goldie watching as she spread the handkerchief on her lap and placed the spoon in the center. Before she folded the material around it, she paused to finger the faded pink embroidered roses and the inscription: Always, Sylvia.
SKIN
Eric Solonsky, October 1995
On a warm Yom Kippur afternoon, Eric Solonsky stood on his front lawn, waiting for a delivery of Thai food and listening to the birds converse. A blade of overgrown grass brushed his ankle as he imagined his sisters, Hannah and Amy, and the rest of his family fasting and beating their breasts for a year’s worth of sins in the main sanctuary of Hannah’s synagogue.
He handed a twenty to a young man wearing an oversized Old Navy T-shirt and took a deep breath before returning to his in-laws and an exhausted Maggie, who was trying with a patient fervor to get their newborn to nurse. Eric felt useless in the pursuit, so he loitered for a few more minutes in the scraggly yard of 1935 East Bertrand Court, down payment compliments of his father. Maintaining a lawn, shopping at a store called Buy Buy Baby, ordering takeout on Yom Kippur, not to mention gathering thirty people, including his gentile in-laws, to watch his son’s penis get whacked tomorrow at noon — it all seemed a little surreal.
He entered the house quietly through the back door and found Alec swaddled like a burrito, sleeping on top of Maggie’s chest.
“He ate,” Maggie’s mother mouthed. Maggie’s parents had flown in from Milwaukee the day before Alec’s birth.
Eric grinned at his wife, gave her a thumbs-up, and pointed to the brown paper bag of food in his hand. Without rousing Alec, Maggie managed to get up from the couch and lower him into the bassinet they’d set up in the family room. He’d left a spit-up stain the shape of Florida on her T-shirt, and one of her engorged breasts was nearly double the size of its partner. Loose flesh encased her middle, pimples covered her chin, and blue veins popped out of her calves. Eric had spent his senior year of high school, back in Milwaukee, fantasizing about Maggie Stramm’s loveliness, and he still saw her as the cheerleader whose finely sculpted nostrils flared as she rooted for boys with athletic ability and smooth skin. Maggie hadn’t remembered him ten years later when she saw him playing bass with a U2 cover band at an Earth Day fundraiser on Capitol Hill.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay?” Eric asked Maggie’s mother, dutifully. “Looks like they gave us an extra order of pineapple fried rice.”
“Oh, gosh, I’m not an adventurous eater, although Will and I do go for chop suey now and then. What was the name of that Oriental family who went to your high school?”
Maggie bit. “Asian, Mom. They were Asian.”
“Oh, Maggie. Asian, African American, American Indian…Who can keep up? Eric, do you remember them?” Helene smiled at him.
“The Kimuras. They were Japanese, I think,” he answered.
No doubt, Helene said these things to rile Maggie, who worked for a diversity training company whose CEO regularly pinched her ass, but Eric guessed that Helene would have added Jews to the list if she were sipping her zinfandel at the club. In the heat of the wedding planning, Maggie had relayed Helene’s comment that if she had to marry a Jew, she could at least have picked a lawyer or a doctor. He rationalized that Helene’s comments were no worse than his mother’s occasional remark about “those goyim and their cocktails.”
“Helene, let’s let them get some rest,” Will urged, suitcase in hand.
Right about now, Eric’s parents, also in town for the bris, were probably perspiring in their High Holiday wools and linens, chatting in the shadow of the enormous menorah outside the temple. They always took a break at one or one-thirty, right after Musaf.
Will kissed Maggie’s cheek. “We’re going to meander down to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial before we head over to Amy’s.”
Amy was a saint for putting up Maggie’s parents. “Call it a thank-you gift for that killer apartment, big brother,” she’d said of the apartment overlooking the zoo that Maggie and Eric had bequeathed to her.
Helene slid her purse up her arm, toned from hours on the tennis court, and snuck another peek at Alec. “I hate to run off when I could make another casserole or help you with the laundry.”
Helene had spent the past week knitting, whipping up concoctions involving Campbell’s soup products, and telling nonstop anecdotes about Maggie’s first days of life, while Will busied himself assembling baby gliders, swings, and strollers.
“Oh, no, Mom,” Maggie said. “Please, you’ve d
one enough. Go see the sights.”
After they said their goodbyes, Eric and Maggie took their Thai food into the kitchen and sat down at the Ikea table Eric had moved from apartment to apartment and finally this house.
“You okay?” he asked.
She rested her head on his shoulder. “Do you know what my mother told me? ‘I got back into my size four weeks after I had you, dear.’”
“Oh, babe.”
“And back then a size four was a real four!” Maggie looked in the direction of the den, where Alec was sleeping. “I promise never to count your calories, buddy,” she said, tearing into a carton of drunken noodles.
Eric registered the sounds of Maggie swallowing, Alec breathing through his stuffy little nose, the hum of the fluorescent kitchen lights — occupational hazard. He worked as an audio technician.
Maggie was eating so fast she was barely chewing. “You ordered these from Spices?” she asked through a mouthful of noodles.
“Only the best for the mother of my son.” They’d been doing a lot of this third- person kind of talk since the baby was born.
She gobbled up the rest of the order without speaking, spearing the last fat noodle with her fork. Then she said, “My parents don’t get the bris thing.”
“Did you tell them that we’re going to have him baptized too?” Eric asked.
She tossed the empty carton into the trash. “Of course. I tried to explain that a bris is a highly significant Jewish rite of passage rooted in a tradition thousands of years old, but achieving cultural competency isn’t exactly their life’s mission.” When Maggie was agitated, she peppered her speech with diversity-training jargon, nodding her head authoritatively at the end of every sentence.
“It will be over tomorrow.” He was eager to end the conversation.
“But I certainly wasn’t going to tell them how hard it was to find a mole who would circumcise a baby with a Methodist mother,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken.
“Mole” was how she pronounced mohel, no matter how many times he’d said, “rhymes with boil, honey.” Whenever Maggie mentioned either the bris or the baptism, it was like having the barber part his hair on the wrong side of his head.
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