The Tell

by Linda I. Meyers

  Aunt Laura treats my father like a king. She makes him his favorite—eggplant. Uncle Harry sits in his chair, smokes his pipe, and doesn’t even look up when we come in. He says Aunt Laura bends over backwards for her brother. He says that she doesn’t bend over any which way for him, and then he laughs. I don’t see what’s so funny about bending over, backwards or forwards. “He hates us,” my mother says to my father. “Your brother-in-law can’t stand us. He treats us like we’re shmattehs, and still you want to go there every week.”

  “She’s my sister,” is all my father answers. The way he says it makes me wish I had a sister to feel that way about, but my mother only had one child. “Believe me, you were enough!” she tells me, over and over.

  But I do have my cousin Louise, who says that her father is angry because we come over all the time, and because her mother always sticks up for her brother, even if he is a jerk.

  “My father is not a jerk,” I protest.

  “My father says he is.”

  “Well maybe a little, sometimes,” I say.

  I tell my mother after we leave that she’s prettier than Aunt Laura—particularly when she smiles—and this is true. In her wedding picture, she is beautiful.

  Aunt Laura collects little shoes made out of colored glass and white porcelain. She keeps them in a glass cabinet so they are protected from dust and also from my cousin Alan, a bratty little kid who roughhouses in the living room. At Aunt Laura’s house, we eat in the dining room on a tablecloth with silver candlesticks. Uncle Harry hands his plate to Aunt Laura and she fills it first because he is the boss of the house. My father says that my mother should take a few lessons from his sister. My mother says, “Over my dead body.”

  Aunt Laura is happy and smiles a lot. My mother says she has lots to smile about; she has a real house with furniture and a backyard and a barbecue and a piano, and a husband who comes home at night.

  My cousin Louise is six months younger than I am. We are close like sisters, but we do not look alike. I’m a skinny minny. I have thick, brown, wavy hair that my mother puts in pigtails. When we are going to Aunt Laura’s, she adds ribbons to hide the rubber bands. I have long legs and bony knees with red scabs, because I am learning to ride a two-wheeler. Louise has light brown, frizzy hair that she hates. She is a little on the fat side. Once we heard our mothers say that I’m the pretty one and Louise is the smart one. I don’t think that’s fair. Sometimes I’m smart, and sometimes Louise is pretty. You don’t have to be everything all the time. But when our mothers take us shopping together and we have to take Louise to Bonwit Tellers, because that’s the store that has the chubby shop, I am secretly glad. Louise hates going there. She makes Aunt Laura wait out in the store and won’t let her into the fitting room. In the stores where we’re shopping for me, I parade everything I try on. By the time we go to lunch, she’s so angry, she ends up eating everything: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, extra gravy, macaroni and cheese, bread and butter. My mother gives me the elbow. I tell Louise not to feel bad, that I would rather go to the chubby shop if I could have my own room like she does with a four-poster bed and a frilly canopy. Louise says that doesn’t make any sense and she’s not going shopping anymore. Period.

  Louise takes piano lessons. She can play “Malagena”—it’s Spanish. Whenever we come over, Aunt Laura makes her play it, and Louise gets nervous and hits a lot of wrong notes. Louise taught me how to read music, and I’m teaching myself to play “Fur Elise.” So far, I’ve got the right hand okay, but the left hand isn’t so good. My father says that when we buy the house, we will also buy a piano, and then I can take lessons. My mother looks at me and rolls her eyes.

  “What are you making promises to the kid for?”

  “Why don’t you mind your own business, Tessie? I’m talking to my daughter.”

  I’m sorry I ever asked for a piano.

  I like sleeping under the canopy with Louise. Once I had a dream that I was a princess and my parents were the king and queen of the land. I told Louise about it the next morning, and she said she has that dream every night. I don’t believe her. I think she just said that because it was a special dream, and she wanted it for herself. Besides, I don’t think people have the same dream, any dream, every single night. Louise lies when it’s convenient.

  Louise is like Uncle Harry; she likes to be the boss of everything. She says it’s her house so she should be in charge. I don’t think that’s fair, because she never stays over at my house, so I never get my turn to be in charge. She says that if I won’t play what she wants, she’s going to tell her father that I’m not being nice to her, and that will be the end of staying over. I don’t think Uncle Harry would do that, but I’m not going to take any chances, so I pretty much say okay to whatever it is she wants to do.

  “Let’s play writing books,” she says. She picks the subject, and we each go to separate corners of her room and write what we want to be when we grow up. She wrote that she wants to be a teacher, and I said I wanted to be a head doctor.

  “What’s that?” she asks. “Is that cannibals or something?”

  “No. It’s what my father says my mother needs.”

  “Why?”

  “So she would be happy and leave him alone,” I say.

  She looks at me funny.

  I want to change the subject, so I tell her I think she would be a good teacher given how she likes to tell kids what to do. As we get closer and closer to moving, my mother is getting more and more far-tshadikt, confused. She stands in the living room holding one tchotchke after another, not knowing what to do with them. I try to stay out of her way, so I’m sitting in the kitchen looking at comic books and eating Mallomars. She yells to me to come out of the kitchen, because she wants to tell me something.

  “Never,” she says, pointing her finger at me for emphasis, “never leave your mother. Promise me that you’ll never move away from me. You know,” she says under her breath, “your grandmother could die anytime and where will I be? I’ll be in achinvey, New Jersey.”

  I am looking forward to going to all-day school. I wonder if that counts as leaving, but I am afraid of the answer so I don’t ask. “I promise,” I say, afraid not to mean it.

  Then I think about Uncle Izzy.

  “Uncle Izzy moved to Beacon, and Grandma didn’t die,” I say. From what I could tell, Uncle Izzy wasn’t worried about Grandma. He is happy in Beacon, riding his don’t-you-dare-tell-Grandma motorcycle. As if Grandma doesn’t know. I don’t know why they always think they can hide things from Grandma. If I fall on my face, which I do a lot, I’m not to tell Grandma.

  “But won’t she see the scab?” I ask.

  “So what? Just tell her someone at nursery school hit you,” my mother says.

  I don’t understand why getting punched in the face is okay, but falling on your face isn’t.

  “Why can’t I tell Grandma? She knows I have two left feet. Remember when I tripped on the stoop and got a black eye, and Grandma took me to the butcher and bought a steak and put it on my eye? She knows I’m a klutz. I thought you said I was never to keep secrets, so why can’t I tell Grandma?”

  “Because Y is a crooked letter,” she says. I have no answer to that, so I shut up, which is the point.

  I am upset, thinking that something could happen to Grandma after we move. I tell myself this is just my mother being crazy, because my grandma is very strong. She can lift a big turkey out of the oven all by herself. She can pound a mound of dough until it is soft enough for me to shape into cookies. She can also kill a chicken with one swing by the neck—which is a big yuck as far as I’m concerned, but Grandma says that was when she lived in the shtetl, and in Brooklyn you don’t have to kill your own chickens. I think my grandma is very pretty. She has the softest skin in the world, because she rubs mineral oil all over. Her hair is brown and white. She wears a girdle with bones under her dress, so she will always be straight as an arrow.

  My mother says that Grandma works like a dog.
Everybody, all my aunts and uncles and cousins, except for Uncle Izzy, squeezes around the kitchen table, and Grandma serves the chicken soup and the pot roast. My mother and Uncle Seymour yell at her to sit down and eat, but no one lifts a finger to help, so I don’t know how they think the food is going to get served if she sits down to eat. Grandma says she is always happy when the family comes over and eats her food, and she looks happy on Saturday. I decide that there is nothing wrong with Grandma, and that my mother is just having a conniption.

  I am worried that once we move to Redfield, I won’t do any more sleepovers at Grandma’s. I stayed over at Grandma’s a lot. Whenever my mother “couldn’t take it anymore because she had had it up to here,” she would drop me off at Grandma’s. Sometimes she wouldn’t come get me for a week, which was fine with me.

  Grandma and I slept in the same bed. Grandpa slept in a different bed, so he didn’t mind. I always had the best dreams when I slept at Grandma’s, because we’d have heart-to-hearts before I closed my eyes. I would tell her everything that was bothering me, like that I wasn’t picked to be Queen Esther in the Chanukah play at school, or that my friend Becca got a Tiny Tears doll but my mother said I can’t get one until I’m good.

  I asked Grandma how to be good and she says that I am the goodest little girl she knows, and we laugh because goodest isn’t even a word. At Grandma’s, I go to sleep happy.

  My mother says that when we move to Redfield, I will have my own room with a bed and a dresser and that there will even be room for a big dollhouse.

  “How about a Raggedy Andy doll instead of a dollhouse?” I ask.

  Actually, I want both, but I don’t want to be a chazzer, a little pig like her sister Ethel who grabbed everything.

  “Ask your father,” she says. “It’s time he bought you something.”

  Which is the same thing as telling me to go buy it myself. In other words, forget it.

  If you want to know the truth, I am more excited about getting out of the crib and having a real bed than I am about getting the dollhouse or a Raggedy Andy.

  My mother also says that after we move, we will still go to Grandma’s at least once on the weekend and that I will still get to see all my cousins.

  “Right, Gerry?” she yells to my father, as a reminder that he has promised to take us every week.

  And he does take us without too much complaining. I think he is happier going to Grandma’s, because sitting at home with us on the weekend gives him shpilkes, restlessness. While everybody is in the kitchen talking over each other, my father sits in the green, flowered wing chair in Grandma’s living room. My mother goes in and yells at him to put the paper down and be sociable! He gives her a look and goes back to the paper. The whole ride back to New Jersey she yells how it was all right when her brothers lent him money, but now that he doesn’t need them anymore, he doesn’t give them the time of day.

  “Where’s your gratitude?” she asks my father.

  At first my father looks like a puppy that pooped on the rug, but then he gets snarly. One time he swerves the car and almost gets us into a big accident. My mother says it’s his fault, that he nearly got us killed. My father says it’s my mother’s fault for driving him crazy. Sometimes I put in my two cents and say whose fault I think it is—usually agreeing with my father—just to distract them so my father won’t drive off the road again. My mother says “little pishers have big ears” and I should just mind my own beeswax.

  “Lay down on the back seat and take a nap,” she orders.

  Redfield turns out to be pretty nice. We are on the second floor. The apartment has a front door and a back door. We never go in through the front door, because we might track dirt on the rug. Instead, we climb the outside stairs to the landing and go in the back door, onto the kitchen linoleum. The kitchen is big enough for a Formica table and two chairs. The table is where I eat my breakfast—quietly so I don’t wake my mother. I make myself Mallomars and milk, and, sometimes, if I have time before I have to leave for school, I make Raisin Bran. Mostly I just have Mallomars. There is a phone on the wall just over the kitchen table where my mother likes to sit, smoke cigarettes, and talk to Grandma or to her new best friend, Rachel.

  Rachel has a little girl who becomes my best friend, Roberta, but everybody calls her Bobby. I think Bobby is a weirdo name for a girl, but she likes it, so I call her Bobby, too.

  My mother is very excited that I am friends with Bobby, because this means that she and Rachel can send us outside to play at the same time and then they will have privacy, which is something my mother can’t get enough of, mainly because I watch and listen to everything so I will know when to take cover—like when my mother is on the phone with Rachel, and she starts twirling her wedding band faster and faster and talking lower and lower, I know it’s a good time to hightail it outside.

  I hear my mother on the phone telling Rachel that my father is always working late. “What the hell was the point of moving to New Jersey to be near his factory if he never comes home anyway? And,” she adds “I have serious doubts as to whether he is working at all or just fooling around.”

  I know about the working late, because I hear my mother crying in her bed, but it takes me awhile to understand that fooling around doesn’t mean acting silly—until I hear her tell Rachel something about Lillian the secretary. Then I remember that day my father, finally—because I kept nagging him—took me to the factory to pick out one of the Junior Miss handbags. Lillian was there and I saw him give her a kiss that didn’t look like a friendly hello. He said that they were just fooling around and that I shouldn’t tell my mother. My mother said that I was supposed to tell her everything, so now I was going to have to keep a secret about keeping a secret. I was very upset, but that had to be a secret, too.

  I skip kindergarten and go right to first grade. My mother convinces the principal in Metuchen that I am a very smart kid, and, besides, I’ve already gone to nursery school, which is just like kindergarten, and there’s no point in me repeating it. Also, first grade is all day, and she needs her afternoons to herself. I’m excited to go to first grade, anyway. I am smart. I already started to read and write on my own, but I need some help, so it will be good to go the whole day.

  “I thought Cousin Louise was the smart one?” I ask when we leave the principal’s office.

  “What difference does it make who’s smarter?”

  “I don’t know, but I heard you and Aunt Laura saying that I’m the pretty one and Louise is the smart one.”

  “You know, you are a little pischer. You’re pretty and you’re smart. Now don’t go letting that go to your head.”

  “Does that mean that Louise isn’t smart?”

  “You know, Linda, you’re driving me crazy. Enough already, with the smart and the pretty. You’re going to first grade. That’s all that matters.”

  I get Mrs. Frankenheimer for first grade. I like her a lot. Maybe even better than Miss Katz, my nursery school teacher. Mrs. Frankenheimer decides that I don’t have such big ears. She notices that she has to keep repeating herself to me. At first, she thinks I’m just not listening, but then she has another idea. She gets my parents to sign a paper allowing me to get a hearing test at school. They figure out that I have a super good right ear but a super bad left ear.

  My mother has trouble figuring it out.

  She says, “You hear everything you want to hear.” She gets on the phone with Rachel.

  “I don’t know about that test. The kid hears everything she wants to hear, but they want me to take her to the doctor, so I’ll take her.”

  After the doctor, Mrs. Frankenheimer moves me to the front of the class, so I can hear her instructions. I can also read her lips, which I have learned how to do without even knowing I was doing it. The front row also gets me away from William, who spends the whole day making pig noises at me.

  The doctor also tells my mother that I must have had a bad ear infection that burst the drum, and now I have scar tissue, and t
hat’s why I can’t hear out of that ear. He says that I should have had penicillin, because then my drum wouldn’t have burst.

  I remember the earache. It hurt all night. I was at Grandma’s house, but I don’t tell my mother this, because I don’t want Grandma to get in trouble.

  Bobby lives two cul-de-sacs over. We meet up in the middle and then go exploring. We discover a big white house up in the woods behind the village. Bobby’s mother tells us that this had been the manor house that once owned all the land, and that the manor people sold the land to the Redfield Village guys who built our apartments. She says she thinks the old lady of the manor still lives in the house.

  Bobby and I want to see her. We’re curious. We creep up to the house, peek in the windows, and try to get a look at the lady. We decide she might be a wicked witch and if she catches us, she might throw us in the oven like Hansel and Gretel. The house is white clapboard that hasn’t been painted in a hundred years. The shutters hang off the hinges. It has a big, black, wrought iron fence and a gate that squeaks whenever we sneak in. The branches from the big walnut trees brush the roof and make moaning sounds in the wind. The house has floor-to-ceiling windows. The drapes are always open a crack and you can see in if you get right up close and put your nose to the glass. We take turns peering through, and, one time, Bobby is sure she sees someone moving around inside. We are determined to see the lady! I start having nightmares about the white house and I don’t want to go peeking in those windows anymore, but I don’t want Bobby to call me a sissy, so I don’t tell about my dreams, and I keep on going.

  Bobby and I have different games for different seasons. The fall is skating season. We strap on roller skates and tighten the grips with a key that hangs on a ribbon around our necks. The cul-de-sacs are perfect for skating, because there are only a few cars. When the walnut trees drop their fruit, we scrape out the soft centers, make a hole on the side, stick a straw in and call it a pipe, or we string them together into giant necklaces. In the winter, we play Monopoly at Bobby’s house, but it’s my set, and I am very particular about keeping all the money lined up and making sure when we’re done that the red hotels and green houses and the cards go back in the box, in the exact right place that was meant for them. Bobby says I’m a little nuts having to keep everything just right, but I don’t care. I like to be sure that I haven’t lost any pieces, and that is that.