On the porch my mother blinked some more. It was her turn to say something, she knew that; but what could she contribute about “heavenly music” and “dead attractive” men in “balled shirts”? Maybe she could start a new something, maybe about how nice that Miriam was learning to play the piano. She opened her mouth. No words came. Her mouth was as dry as an ancient riverbed.
She pawed at her throat, pinching the flesh between her thumb and forefinger. Miss Brookie was staring at her, waiting. My mother knew that if she didn’t speak when she was supposed to, Miss Brookie would rush to rescue the silence, in the way that she did, with that profusion of words, “like the ceiling was falling down on my head,” as my mother described it.
My mother didn’t want the silence to be rescued. And she didn’t want Miss Brookie thinking she needed to be cooed over, as if she was one of her “precious lambs.” No, she didn’t want that at all.
So she got up and went into the house and into bed and didn’t get out of it for three days. When Miss Brookie came in to see her, my mother couldn’t say what was wrong, nor was she surprised that she couldn’t. It was the old saying of her mother’s come to life: The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue it has.
Miss Brookie and Lizzie Maud saw to Joey, and Lizzie Maud brought soft-boiled eggs, which my mother didn’t eat, having no appetite whatsoever. The two of them acted as if my mother had the flu, but my mother knew that it wasn’t anything like that. What it was was what my father had predicted: She had made herself sick, so sick that she couldn’t get out of bed.
Lying there, she tried hard to think of nothing. She had a little trick to help her do this: She pretended to have green shades over her eyeballs, and when an unwelcome thought hove into view, bang! down went the shades, blocking it out.
There were a few images she permitted. These had to do with her Bronx family and were for tears. She had discovered that after she cried, she could sleep.
With the High Holidays—Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement, the day of fasting)—approaching, on the third day she lay in bed fashioning reveries about the holiday dinner that would be taking place in her parents’ apartment. She saw her family at the massive dining-room table, the place for all social occasions, for there was always a sure serving of tea and honeycake, or, at the very least, a piece of fruit.
But on this day, in my mother’s fantasy the table was in use for the post–Yom Kippur feast, after the long hours in shul, but she soon realized she had blundered: She had allowed herself to think of her family being together without her. The thought made her not sad and sentimental but anxious. It had reminded her of how her life had changed. If she waited for tears, she waited in vain. She could expect no wet cheeks, no drifting off to sleep; she had remembered that there would be no mother and father, no Sadie, no Meyer, no Hannah, no Philip, and no shul in this place. There was only one thing to do: She lowered her green shades.
At the end of this day Miss Brookie came into the room and stood at the foot of the bed. She clearly thought enough was enough. She told my mother to get out of bed.
My mother didn’t move.
Miss Brookie said everybody knew about being homesick (though perhaps not everybody, as most Concordians had not gone much further than Pottsboro, fifty or so miles down the road). She said, “Rise up, Reba. Rise up and make contact with the world again.” Where this contact would be made was on the porch.
At the mercy of a truly commanding voice that wasn’t going to go away, my mother could resist no longer. She got up, put on the first skirt and blouse her hand touched, and walked stiffly out onto the porch. There was, however, an added complication: She had gotten it into her head that if she was walking oddly, it was because she was encased in a wooden box. There was a hole in the box, to see out of. Through the hole, she observed an unknown woman sitting with Miss Brookie.
Miss Brookie introduced her as her around-the-corner neighbor, Mrs. MacAllister. In Concordia, along with “Mizriz,” “Mrs.” was also pronounced “Miz,” and this was the way Miss Brookie pronounced it.
Some words or another—she didn’t know what—fell out of my mother’s mouth.
She looked at the woman through her hole: pale skin, and black hair so densely marcelled it had taken on the corrugated look of a clay road washed over by many rains.
When the woman spoke, it was in a hearty voice that my mother’s box muffled only slightly. “I like to have a fit to meet you,” my mother heard. The woman smiled broadly, and oversized teeth were put on view. “It sure is nice to meet Joey and Miriam’s mama.”
This new talker pressed on. She was glad there was going to be a Jew store, glad they no longer had to depend on a Jew peddler coming to town just every once in a while. “If you can believe it,” she said to my mother, “the last Jew peddler we had, well, him and Agnes Kimball …”
Miss Brookie sprang into action. “Lord, Carrie,” she said, “I doubt Miz Bronson has the slightest interest in Agnes Kimball.”
Mrs. MacAllister changed the subject. She was now “tickled” that we didn’t rent Tom Dillon’s store, because Tom Dillon was “such a mess,” there was no telling how much trouble he’d cause. And why was he “such a mess”? According to Mrs. MacAllister, it was because his wife, Martha, stayed “poorly” so much. “Now don’t stop me, Brookie,” she said. “You know good as I do that Martha don’t do nothing but stay in bed, and it’s gotten so that …”
Carrie MacAllister was full of stories. Miss Brookie said that if the Sentinel was our weekly paper, Carrie was our daily one. Harsh description though it was, Carrie MacAllister herself laughed at it, knowing it was true.
At this moment, Miss Brookie refused to accommodate Carrie MacAllister’s need to divulge. Though she knew, and the whole town knew, that Martha Dillon was always in bed—and what the whole town also knew was that she was in bed with a jar of white lightning—Miss Brookie no doubt feared that Carrie was going to frighten my mother right back into bed. She said that if Carrie was determined to tell my mother something, she should tell her about her baby, Billy.
Mrs. MacAllister tilted her head toward the end of the porch, and my mother looked through her hole at a fat, open-faced, blond-haired boy of about a year—Billy Sunday Mac Allister —sitting squarely on his bottom, chirping and trilling at a toy on wheels. He was, his mother said, going to be as good a talker as the man he was named after. And why was the baby named for Billy Sunday? “Because,” Carrie MacAllister said, “that man was sent straight from the Lord to help us poor sinners.” She closed her eyes, and her body trembled and shook.
My mother was truly frightened. What was this, this shivering, this quivering? Oy, this was something beyond the usual Gentile strangeness. At this moment it looked to her like craziness, though in later years my father tried to get her to see it in a more evenhanded, more realistic way. “So you never seen Jewish people rocking back and forth when they pray?” he would ask her, and she would think about it for a moment and say, “Maybe it’s the same.” It was the best she could do.
At any rate, in another moment Carrie MacAllister’s eyelids flew open. She had another story my mother needed to hear. It was from a couple of years earlier, when Billy Sunday had come to town, at a time when Mayor Bailey’s daughter had gotten into trouble and Mayor Bailey had cut off her hair. My mother told this story often, and as faithfully as she could: “Lord,” she would say, trying to imitate Carrie MacAllister, “here come Miss Floy Inez Bailey into the tent, and she’s near bald as a egg.”
Miss Brookie had then interrupted to say, “Looks like we’re in for talking some trash.”
Carrie, not having been told definitely by Miss Brookie to stop, simply went on with her story. She was now reporting Floy’s hair as “plumb gone.” It was gone, apparently, because Floy’s father had got Floy from where she was staying with the traveling salesman and cut it off.
When Floy had announced she wanted to declare, “Law,” Carrie said, �
��the fight was on. For the soul of Miss Floy Inez Bailey, don’t you know.” It was a night, Carrie was pleased to say, when Billy Sunday “took to preaching only hellfire and damnation,” to the point that the whole tent got down with Floy. “Chalk one up for God,” Carrie said.
Perhaps sensing that Miss Brookie was about to call her to a halt, she leaped up and, all bones and sinew, marched down the porch and grabbed up her child. Settled back in the rocker, she flung open the buttons of her dress, grabbed a breast, and pushed it at the baby in her lap. He sucked hard, and a fist pounded the air. Then his eyeballs rolled up, and he considered the ceiling.
Mrs. MacAllister spoke over the head engaged at her nipple and expressed the wish that big Billy could be there for little Billy’s baptizing. “Crawley’s where we do our baptizings,” she said in my mother’s direction. “They got a river over there lends itself real good for dipping.” She did an unsure grin, and after a moment, she said in a tone suddenly shy, “Do y’all … um … do y’all have any water in the Jewish faith?”
Jewish faith! Jewish faith! My mother always said the words tore through her box and ripped it to shreds. “Jewish faith” was not an expression she was unfamiliar with. Her coworkers had used it on those rare occasions when they’d determined for reasons unknown that politeness was required. It was as if calling it a “faith” somehow took the curse off. Well, she thought now, is that what everybody thinks? That the Jewish religion is a curse?
My mother was suddenly hearing another voice, and it was angry, no doubt about it, “Ain’t ours a religion like everybody else’s?” it was saying. She was amazed that this furious voice sounded so much like hers. And even more amazed when she realized it was hers. “You ain’t going to get nothing from me to laugh at,” she exploded at the women. “You only want to know about our religion so you can call us loony or whatever word you use in your language.”
Mrs. MacAllister sat Billy up. Mother and child fastened china blue eyes on my mother.
My mother remembered it all, how she was not to be put off, how the more she thought about everything, the more she shouted. “Did you ever think how loony I might think it is that you dunk that little baby in a river?” Oh, she was screaming, no doubt about it, screaming loud. “Or that you cut off a girl’s hair when she done wrong?” She paused for only a second. “No, you can’t believe your religion could do anything loony.”
She now took all her courage in her hands and turned on Miss Brookie. “And you, you and your high-toned ways and how you talk and all what you know.” Though she knew her English wasn’t coming out properly, with the words tumbling over each other, she couldn’t make herself care. “So how come you don’t look down your nose at this lady when she brings out her breast in front of a stranger? Ain’t it because she’s Christian?” She stomped on the shreds around her feet. “Well,” she went on, “I may be just a Jew, but that’s one thing we don’t know from. Only time I seen that is with the Russian peasants. For shame, for shame.”
When words began to slow, she knew it was time to quit. “I’m going in now,” she said more quietly, “and I’ll leave you two to talk about me. You’ll talk plenty, you’re so good at saying things.”
She said later that she was shaking, shaking hard, and not from religious fervor but from having been so mad. Her legs were going wobbly, not holding her. When she got to the screen door, she put out her hands and clung to it. And all at once Lizzie Maud had hold of her. From out of nowhere she was at the door. “You best take it slow, Miz Reva,” she said. “You gwine be just fine. All it was was you was just full fit to bust. Don’t we all know how that is?”
Just fine? My mother would have taken any bet that so terrible was this thing she had done, so much trouble had she stirred up, she would never be “just fine” again. She let her body sag toward Lizzie Maud’s. It would have been wonderful to remain in Lizzie Maud’s embrace forever.
In her room she closed the door. She thought she would sink instantly onto the bed and quick, quick pull down her green shades. Instead she found herself in front of the mirror studying herself, looking hard at her forehead, as if to burrow through to the place where would arise the headaches she had just set into motion. “Fit to bust,” Lizzie Maud had said.
She stood there, looking, waiting. So where were they, those headaches, those squeezes like from a too-tight hat? Where were the moans and the groans, and the weeping that came not from memories but from misery? By now she should have been awash in tears, sinking in water like a leaky ship. Instead, there was, incredibly, a buoyancy, a sympathetic tug, and the feeling of being towed into a safe harbor.
What she also felt was cleaner. As if she had taken a ritual bath, a mikveh. Was a mikveh anything like a baptizing? With the question came a sound in her throat. It was a sound she had not heard from herself in a long time, a hint of a laugh.
Several minutes went by. She pulled the pins from the bun, and her hair plunged into a full fall. She brushed it and, after plaiting it into a braid, arranged it on top of her head.
She went back to the screen door and looked out onto the porch. Miss Brookie and Mrs. MacAllister were gazing anywhere but at each other. They were in a world of dead silence.
It took the reappearance of my mother to bring things back to life. As if she had been gone for days, the other women opened their eyes wide and flung greetings. Mrs. MacAllister grinned hugely, as if my mother’s coming was only slightly less welcome than that other one yet to be.
CHAPTER 11
NO PICNIC
Miriam has always remembered that she had a wonderful time in St. Louis with my father. Although they stayed, and ate, in the home of one of the wholesale men, she and my father went to two restaurants. My father introduced her to the wholesale men as his “bookkeeper,” and, not knowing yet how to write, she nevertheless scribbled some things down. The men made a big fuss over her, and she came home with dresses so beguiling that they were perhaps what made her fashion-conscious for the rest of her life.
My father too had success in St. Louis. The men accepted Mr. Cohen’s letter and treated him, if not like Diamond Jim Brady, then at least, as my father used to say, like a man with money to spend. This was the first of my father’s annual buying trips to St. Louis, though he also ordered occasionally from the houses’ traveling salesmen.
When my father and Miriam came back, nobody much mentioned my mother’s collapse, and though my father was surprised to find her in such improved spirits, he didn’t go on about it. The shoe factory was about to open, and there was little room for other than thoughts of business.
Miss Brookie had advised that the family go to the picnic to celebrate the opening. “Let them see that you share their species,” she said.
Despite that the thing on my mother’s chest had lightened since what she called her mikveh day, and though the day of the picnic dawned sunny and clear, my mother herself was not very sunny and definitely not clear.
What she was not clear about was the food she should take. She could certainly not partake of Lizzie Maud’s chicken, fried as it always was in bacon grease the volume of a small pond.
She had decided at last on hard-boiled eggs. That morning, however, when she had gone about boiling them, she had gotten the message from Lizzie Maud that eggs were too lowly for a picnic. Lizzie Maud had said you “dassent” go to a picnic without fried chicken, “no, ma’am.” As with my father’s “God,” Lizzie Maud’s “ma’am” was just a word. She didn’t “ma’am” or “sir” every white person in sight, as if to honor them for just being white, though she did with older persons. Not that everybody in Concordia didn’t “ma’am” and “sir” older people, but Lizzie Maud awarded the honorific to both older whites and older Negroes.
When my mother had said she didn’t know how to make fried chicken, Lizzie Maud had said that first of all, my mother should understand that you didn’t make fried chicken. “You don’t make things you eat,” Lizzie Maud had said. “You fixes them.” In
this case it didn’t matter: Where she was from, my mother had told Lizzie Maud, they didn’t even eat fried chicken.
“Then where you from don’t know nothing,” Lizzie Maud had answered. There was, she had said, nothing to it, that even her “knee baby” knew how. She had muttered a “shoot-dog,” had herself gone to the icebox, taken out some pieces of chicken, contemplated the can of bacon drippings for a moment but, since she had already been informed of the rudiments of “kosher,” withdrew the Crisco.
She had run through the fundamentals, about the coating of the pieces in flour and the hot, hot grease and the pan lid being off and on and off again—to bring back its “ship-snap”—and “how you dassent leave no smidge of pink,” and had then said to my mother, “See can you do it.”
In the end the chicken was “fixed” by Lizzie Maud.
As my mother sat now in the buggy on the way to the ceremonies, clutched in her hand was a paper sack containing her fried chicken and a cucumber standin for the still suspect potato salad. For Miss Brookie and the rest of the family, along with the basket of Lizzie Maud’s chicken and accoutrements, there were her lemon meringue pies for “sharing time,” when, Miss Brookie said, “everybody puts the word out on everybody else’s cooking.”
It was one of those late summer mornings when the sun was everywhere and the air was like new. With my father holding the reins, Harold Lloyd clip-clopped briskly, as if happy to at last be on a mission worthy of his talents.
My father, with his own opening day nearing, was most decidedly, as my mother would say, “flying with the birdies.” Indeed so elevated was he, he had taken to declaiming. The day, for example, was “a day for princes, for kings!” He thought to compare it to a day in New York, and New York suffered in the comparison. In New York where was the sun? Hidden by the apartment houses, that’s where; or, if it managed to squeeze between those brick fortresses, it fell on the streets in odd, sharpedged wedges like hunks of cheese. And trees? Oy, what a schlep to Central Park or to the north Bronx if you wanted trees. And here? Here was a countryside full of trees. And a smell from the pine needles and good earth like perfume. And the air? Nowhere so soft, so clean.
Jew Store Page 10