When we split, my husband, in his desire to make an imposing statement by leaving a large space, took the desk. That was fine with me. I moved the Chinese commode into the vacancy he left. I oiled the teakwood table, and that was it for the furniture. I went to the lumberyard and picked up pine planks, a saw, and a hammer. I made my own bookcases, because in my quest to find my own lucky direction, I had started college and needed a place to put my books. I stained the shelves Jacobean brown. The kids and I distressed them with hammers. I placed the planks on bricks, stacked the books in alphabetical order, looked around, and felt instant, strong and ego-filled qi. Lastly, I went into the bedroom, pulled the curtains off the windows, and let the room fill with air and light.
My friend Elsa was taking a course with one of those feng shui experts and was deeply immersed in chakras and baguas. She insisted that I hadn’t done enough, and that there would be no harmony in my house without the proper application of all the feng shui principles. I told her that the harmony had arrived when my husband left.
“Yes, but what about your inner turmoil? What about the space within?” I told her that I was working on my inner turmoil in therapy. I was sifting through my unconscious, sorting through my history, looking desperately for any evidence of ancestral harmony. I was currently focused on the shtetl.
According to my grandmother, hers was a small house outside of Berditchever. It had two rooms, a dirt floor, six kids, and a sewing machine. My grandmother, the oldest daughter, worked the sewing machine. She cut off and mangled the tip of her pointer finger making white shirts for the Cossacks. They liked the shirts but raided the shtetl anyway. I’m sure there was no feng shui in the shtetl. When you are running from the Cossacks, you’re not worried about how the furniture is arranged. Grandma escaped to the forest where she lived until she got a ticket for the boat. America was her lucky direction. Grandma was in steerage. By the third day, everybody was seasick, and whatever good qi had come on board had been thrown up and out the portholes. I think the good qi came back when they stood on deck and saw the Statue of Liberty. Grandma said she was so happy, she cried. When I was a kid, I’d make her tell this story over and over, particularly the parts about the Statue of Liberty and her mangled finger. There is harmony in stories of survival.
Let’s face it, all the immigrants coming to America were looking for better qi. Grandma hoped to find it when she climbed the four flights to her aunt Rifka’s apartment on Avenue A. Instead she found three rooms, eight people and one bathroom down the hall. Each night the furniture was re-arranged, not for feng shui, but for sleeping. The kitchen became a bedroom. Grandma was fourteen years old. They figured she still had a good back, so she slept on a board that was laid across two sawhorses. If she hadn’t been the last relative to arrive, she might have gotten the table, but her uncle who worked all day as a presser in a shop got the table. Grandma didn’t speak English, but she knew how to sew. She landed a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. I can tell you that there was definitely no feng shui at that factory.
Grandma told me she only worked at the Triangle for one month. She said that when her mother, back in Russia, found out that her daughter had to work on Shabbes, the Sabbath, she asked the rabbi in the shtetl to write a letter to America and tell her daughter that there is no harmony in Hell. Grandma listened to her mother and quit the factory. Two weeks later, the factory burned down. Grandma said that the moral of the story is to always observe Shabbes. My mother said that the moral of the story was to always listen to your mother.
After a couple of years, Rifka and her daughters decided a plank in the kitchen added nothing to the décor, and to de-clutter the apartment, someone had to go. They decided that it was fitting that the last one in should be the first one out. Everyone but Grandma agreed, and they chipped in and hired a matchmaker to find a husband for Grandma. They must have hired the cheapest matchmaker they could find, because she picked Harry.
Harry was no bargain. They married and moved to Brooklyn. They had five children—Hymie, Izzy, Tessie (my mother), Seymour, and Ethel—and an apartment at the back. Apartments at the back have no chance of feng shui. They face walls and alleys. They have no light, no air. They come with envy for everyone who lives in the front. Envy is bad qi.
Grandma said that when her children were young, her apartment was like little boxes, tiny rooms with rails on the windows. The windows looked out on brick walls. The apartment was on the sixth floor of a walkup. If you have ever carried groceries for five children and a husband up six floors, you know that there was no good qi in that apartment. But Grandma had an eye for color, and she knew how to sew. At Passover, flowered, linen slipcovers appeared on the furniture. The rug with pockmarks from Harry’s cigarette ashes was rolled up and the wood floors polished. The rose-colored dishes we ate off all year were exchanged for the pure white plates that had sat in the back of the cupboard through the winter. When all was done, Grandma would take a minute, sit down, and look at all her hard work with a big, happy, feng shui smile.
For the first five years of my life, I spent most of my time at Grandma’s. Trust me when I tell you this was a good thing. My parents were too busy and too angry to deal with a little kid. There was bad qi and no harmony in my house. Staying at Grandma’s was fine with me. By the time I was born, all but one of Grandma’s children had been launched and were out trying to find their own lucky directions, except Aunt Ethel who had left and was back again.
When I was a kid, my mother said I was a “little pisher with big ears.” That meant to bug off and stop listening to grownup conversation. But I liked grownup conversation, particularly when they whispered or spoke in Yiddish. I had to be a pisher with big ears because no one would tell me anything except that I was too young to know about “such things.” I knew enough to know that I wanted to know more. Sometimes I’d pick up a little, listening to the yelling at the weekly poker game. If I got out of bed and peeked in from the bedroom, I’d see them sitting around the table: a cigarette dangling from Grandpa Harry’s lips, handsome Malconson smiling up at Grandma, and Sam Kushner reluctant as always to ante up. Mrs. Malconson, the Webers, and Gussie Kushner just kept their heads down and played their cards. They’d been friends forever. They had all come over from the same part of Russia, and they were all members of the Berditchever cemetery club.
I don’t know what to tell you about the poker game except that everybody’s luck seemed to go in cross directions. It wasn’t about winning, but more about who passed which card, and why that card and not the other card, and why they pulled for an inside straight when they didn’t stand a chance and kept the person who should have gotten the card from getting the full house they deserved. They argued in Yiddish. They argued in English. It didn’t matter. I got it, that you can have love without harmony, that good qi and bad qi can go together, and that a lot depended on the cards you were dealt. I can tell you, though, that if you wanted pure, uncorrupted, unconflicted harmony and good qi, you had to have been there when Grandma and I were alone.
We had our routine. The day started with me sitting on the toilet with the lid down, helping Grandma dress. It was there that I first learned that there was feng shui dressing, and that clothes, properly arranged, could be art. It was my job to hand Grandma each garment in exactly the right order. It began with a salmon-colored undershirt and cotton bloomers to match. The undershirt, she told me, was to keep the corset and the bra from getting smelly. Next, I handed her the corset. The corset was my favorite. It had bones and crisscrossed laces that wrapped on hooks from the bottom to the top. It was like cats-in-the-cradle, a game with fingers and string that Grandma played in the shtetl. Grandma told me that if I wanted to be straight as an arrow, I should always wear a corset and sit on a hard chair. By the time I hit adolescence, the corset had been replaced by the girdle, equally restrictive, and also guaranteed to keep you from ever taking a deep breath. After Grandma laced the corset, she put on the bra, and after the bra, the slip. Finally
, at the end, came the dress. After that, we left the house and said hello to the yentas sitting on the stoop. We went to see Sam at the vegetable stand, to get the greens for the soup, and to Herbie the butcher for a nice brisket.
The butcher shop had sawdust on the floor, a finger on the scale, and Esther, the chicken plucker, in the corner. Esther wore a black dress and a bloodstained apron. She sat, legs spread, on a wooden stool with a dead chicken on her lap. If you replicated Sam’s stand and Herbie’s shop for, say, a movie set or a play, it would have a historical feng shui—a perfect reflection of life in Brooklyn in the 1940s.
I did not come of age in the sixties—if you ask me, that was the feng shui generation. I missed that boat by just a few years, and forever after I was out of my element. When I was in high school in Brooklyn, girls were getting pinned when they were sophomores and engagement rings by graduation. I managed to hold off and not walk down the aisle till I was nineteen, but I still missed the whole getting high, Janis Joplin, free love thing. I can tell you right now that had I not been a they-won’t-respect-you-in-the-morning good girl—had I had sex before I got married, there would have been no divorce because there would have been no marriage. There was no harmony or good qi in sex with Howard.
When the festival was happening, I wanted to strap my baby on my back and head up to Woodstock. Howard said I was crazy. I argued that all the good qi was on the New York State Thruway, heading in what should have been our lucky direction. He turned on the television and showed me how it was raining, and how they were all stuck in traffic. Nothing was moving. I watched the news all day. I told him they looked like they were moving and shaking to me, sliding in the mud, happy as clams. He said, “Yeah. That’s because they are high on weed and LSD.”
I said, “Yeah, so?”
In my fantasy, had I gone directly to college, there still might have been time for me to crash that party, but there was no money for tuition, and we had to move again—not because we couldn’t find our lucky direction but because my father couldn’t find a way to pay the rent. The only thing that was permanent was the storage unit—the receptacle for all the clutter we accumulated from one move to another that wouldn’t fit into wherever it was that we were moving to this time. So here it was: the year I was graduating from high school, and, once again, we were up and out. We moved into Grandma’s apartment, which marked the end of Grandma’s harmony. All her kids were out of the house, even Ethel, and Grandpa Harry was dead. Grandma celebrated her newfound freedom by getting herself an apartment in the front. She had air. She had light. She had a view of the street where she could sit and sew by the window. And now, in mitn derinnen, in the middle of everything, she had us. It was like she was back at Rifka’s.
Meanwhile, my father, believing the only thing worse than being broke was looking broke, went out and bought a new Chrysler New Yorker convertible. When we saw him drive up to the house with the top down and a big grin, Grandma went into the kitchen and hacked a chicken, my mother went nuts and started to scream, and I, realizing that my father had no representation, stood up on a pulpit and, with a combination of insight and audacity, preached the importance of the welfare Cadillac. My mother said, “Fine, then you get yourself a job and make the car payments, because he doesn’t have two cents.” My father for once applauded my mother. I joined Grandma and the chicken in the kitchen. My father turned the car around and drove off in his new lucky direction.
Where feng shui used heaven and earth to help improve life, my father relied on money and charm; the charm was his, the money generally wasn’t. The money belonged to the business, his partner, the bank, or the mafia. Like a shell game, he moved it around from one to the other, as dictated by the necessity of the moment and his desire to stay out of jail—or worse yet, a ditch. His personal element must have been water, given the way money ran through his fingers. Picture my father, and you’ll see he’s wearing a well-tailored suit and a white shirt with French cuffs. He wears the star sapphire ring on his right hand, and no wedding band on his left. He looks taller than he is. Some women said he was Errol Flynn, others said he was Clark Gable without the ears. My mother said he was an empty promise.
The pictures of my mother from the late ’30s and early ’40s, before she married my father, show that she had a definite feng shui style and some pretty sexy qi. She had Swedish features: blonde hair, perky nose, and pale white skin. In one picture, she is wearing Kate Hepburn trousers, a jacket fitted at the waist with shoulder pads, and a blouse with a jabot. In just a head shot, the kind you got from a booth with a curtain, she is wearing my father’s Stetson hat tipped to the side. My father’s chin is resting on her shoulder. He is looking at the camera; she is looking at him. My mother will brag and tell you that people said she looked like Tina Louise, the sexy actress with sultry lips. I did not know this version of my mother. The mother I knew wore a beehive hairdo and butterfly glasses. Her feng shui must have gone into storage during one of my father’s situations.
I shouldn’t point a finger at my mother, because I was certainly not a feng shui kid, which caused my mother a lot of anxious qi. There’s a picture of me at eleven: long, skinny legs like a pony and a Buster Brown haircut with bangs cut too short. I have scabs and bruises from popping wheelies on my bicycle. I’m an ace at dodgeball, and the only girl allowed on the boys’ baseball team. My mother had a very clear picture of what a daughter should be like, and I wasn’t it. In an effort to edge me towards a more feminine feng shui, she taught me how to rumba. That wasn’t enough, so my mother began to make mother-daughter outfits the way my grandma made slipcovers. I particularly remember the yellow calico dresses with the puritan collars, edged in red rickrack. We tried them on and stood in front of the mirror. Think Diane Arbus, and you’ll get the picture. To have some harmony, I agreed to wear it, but only if I could cut school and we could go to the movies. I figured it was dark at the movie. We put on our dresses and went to see The Moon is Blue—a racy, no kids allowed, 1953 romantic comedy about two men, William Holden and David Niven, who go after a woman, Maggie McNamara, who is determined to keep her virginity. I leaned over and whispered to my mother that if Maggie wore one of these dresses she’d have had nothing to worry about. This was the beginning of bad adolescent qi.
After we moved in and my father bought the car, there was no harmony left in Grandma’s house. Grandma kept feeding Candy the collie Jewish food—kreplach and flanken. Her colitis was getting worse, and I was tired of cleaning up after her. If I was going to make the car payments, I needed to get a job. My father, knowing the garment center, told me my lucky direction was 1407 Broadway. He said to knock on the door of every showroom until someone said “yes.” He told me, so I wouldn’t be scared, to picture the guys who interviewed me as sitting on the toilet. Aside from Don’t listen to your mother, it was the only good advice he ever gave me. Correction: he also advised me not to marry Howard. He was right on all three accounts.
The guy sitting on the toilet turned out to be my new boss at Century of Boston. He really was an ass. He had the pompous attitude of many short men, who tried to make up in arrogance what they lacked in height. He thought he was passing for tall because he stood on his father’s shoulders. His name was Alan, insisting that the emphasis be on the second syllable. If it weren’t for Oscar, Alan’s father, Alan would have just been another little pisher. He strutted around the office sucking air through his teeth, obsessively checking the Teletype machine like a newspaper reporter expecting big news. Oscar knew that Alan was an ass, but he had to do something with his youngest son, so he stuck him in the New York showroom. There was no good qi between Oscar and Alan. It was so bad that when Oscar was in town, there was no harmony in the showroom at all. Alan hid in our office till Oscar left, bossing us around like a tyrant.
It turned out that Howard was a tyrant too. It didn’t take long after our feng shui wedding to realize that this was going to be a very bad marriage, but, following Grandma’s lead, I tried to hang in
there. After twelve miserable years, I accepted that Grandma’s mistake didn’t have to be mine, and that no matter how much you pray, there can be no feng shui if there is no harmony.
I learned feng shui wasn’t just about wind and water, but about comfort with order, like the steps and stages of my grandmother putting on her garments—one thing leads to another. Bad marriages can end, unlucky directions can be reversed, and harmony with oneself precedes harmony with another.
sharks and other perils
This was my day, not every day, but often enough. I’d get up in the morning, get my three kids ready and off to school, do my homework until 3:00, and if I was lucky enough not to have to go food shopping or do other intrusive errands, pick them up at school, pile into my old Oldsmobile 88, rush directly into the City for auditions, run around town to various ad agencies where most of the time they had to say inane things like, “If it isn’t Heinz, it isn’t ketchup,” drive home and hope to beat the rush hour traffic, feed them dinner, say hello to the babysitter and goodbye to the kids, with a reminder that bedtime was 9:00, and I’m not kidding, then head to school for a 7:30 class. At 11:00 I was settled in bed and at 11:01 I was asleep.
This marathon began in 1974, about a year and a half after Howard and I split, when he phoned with an unusual invitation. He had shown a picture of our boys, aged four, seven, and nine, to a business associate who was dating Delores Reed, a talent manager.
“Delores was excited when she saw the picture,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because they’re cute.”
“Lots of kids are cute.”
“Yeah, but not all kids have red hair. Red hair is the draw. Redheaded kids look good on color TV,” he said. “She’s just starting her talent management business. We’d be getting in on the ground floor.”
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