My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why are thou so far from helping me,
And from the words of my roaring?
Chapter 11
DORA: SCORCHED EGGS, MEMORIES, AND SHATTERED GLASS
1990
Huddled behind a threadbare chair, Disha, a dark curly-haired child, shivers with fear as the sound of soldiers’ booted strides comes closer. She hears the truncheons striking doors or whatever unfortunate object finds itself in their path. The pained yelp of a dog trumpets one of their victims. And then: “Yid, yid, Christ-killers! Kill the dirty Jews!”
“Mama,” she screams as the door explodes with thunderous force, toppling the mound of furniture stacked against it to keep the assailants out; they snap like delicate, miniature tables and chairs that populate a child’s dollhouse.
Eighty-two years later, Dora awakens to her own smothered scream and to the shouts of garbage men clearing the detritus of her neighbors’ lives as they make their weekly rounds.
“Vey iz mir! I must have fallen asleep.”
The acrid odor of burning food invades her nostrils. She wonders where she is but slowly, slowly recovers her whereabouts as she looks around the familiar living room overflowing with cherished possessions that joggle her memory.
“The eggs!” she whispers, placing her hand to her cheek, and staggers to the kitchen and sees the remains of the scorched pan and charred eggs sitting on the still-glowing stove burner, with its shattered shards of eggshells precariously hanging from the surrounding walls and ceiling. “I could have burned the house down with me in it . . . So, it would be so bad if I went? How long can a person live? Saul gone; my brothers and sisters dead. Eighty-six years, almost blind. And dangerous. And here I am talking to myself. What a mess! What a mess!”
She sets the small, rutted aluminum pot in the sink filled with hot, soapy water, wipes the egg fragments from the stove and wall, looks at the ceiling, shrugs, and returns to the living room and collapses in her rocker, struggling to eradicate the memory of the nightmare image of carnage and the ever-present reminder of death.
“So many years ago and still that same dream. A nightmare. Odessa. Only in my dreams do I remember that place. But why should I remember? It was nothing but misery. Roberta asks why I don’t speak Russian. Why would I want to? She shows me pictures a friend took when she was there and asks if I know where it is. ‘It’s Odessa, Mother,’ she says, like I should know. How would I know? Sometimes she can be a nudnik with her questions about the past. She thinks she’s in court. Always questions and more questions.”
With great effort, she shuffles her slippered feet back to the kitchen table and sits down to an improvised lunch of canned vegetable soup and a hunk of challah, the bread she bought for the evening’s Shabbos meal. Taking but a few swallows of the soup, she pushes aside the bowl and opens the oven door to make certain that the vegetable tzimmes hasn’t burnt as well. At least, she thinks, my dinner shouldn’t taste like ashes.
“I can’t eat. That dream takes appetite away,” she says, talking to herself, “but I’ll be hungry later.” She returns to the comfort of her wooden rocking chair, well worn, like an old sock, from years of sitting, depressed in just the right places.
A Whistler-like portrait in gray and black, Dora rhythmically rocks back and forth in the chair she has known intimately for what seems like an eternity. This small, still strikingly handsome white-haired woman stares into the space of time past as she absentmindedly strokes the worn armrest of the rocker. She smiles as she recalls the home she lived in for more than forty years with Saul and their daughters. Such a long time ago.
“So different, like night and day they were, those kids. One afraid of her shadow; the other afraid of nothing. Hannah serious, with her face in a book, and Roberta, getting into mischief. Always doing splits and headstands and cutting school. Who would have thought she’d become a lawyer? The troublemaker, a lawyer; the serious one, an artist. Well, maybe that’s not so strange after all. The troublemaker understands how it feels for another troublemaker, and the serious one expresses her deep thoughts in works of art. Huh! I sound like Bessie. I’ve got to call her.”
Dora thinks of the ways Saul encouraged Roberta to be a tomboy. She pictures the trapeze he hung in the doorjamb when she was barely two and how he let her swing by her arms until she cried out “uncle” and how, eventually, she learned to pull her body into an upside-down arrow, feet up, head down, smiling and looking to him for approval. Like a sloth, she would hang in that position for five minutes or more, until Saul took her down as Hannah stood wistfully, looking at her baby sister’s achievement with admiration and awe. And just a little envy. Roberta, even at that young age, knew what she had to do to enchant Saul. And to make up for having been born a girl.
Dora reflects on the time when Roberta was three and Saul threw her into the swimming pool at Paramus on one of their Sunday excursions and how she came up sputtering but determined to laugh through her fear. She refused to cry “uncle,” the signal she knew would stop him, when Saul squeezed her knuckles. She knew he liked her spunk, and she so needed his approval and love.
It wasn’t right, she thinks, how he ignored me after Roberta’s birth and how he told me that I never gave him anything he wanted. And then she smiles, recollecting how the nurse told him off as they were leaving.
“Listen, Dad, take a look at this beautiful little girl. You should be ashamed of yourself, acting like a spoiled child. If I were your wife, I’d throw you outta here. So she’s not a boy, but she’s got all her fingers and toes and can see and hear.”
It didn’t help, she thinks. He was so stubborn. He was always to feel the deprivation.
She glances at the silver-framed image of two young girls, residing on the table beside her rocker—the older of the two with thick jet-black curls framing her sweetheart-shaped face, with saucer-like brown eyes; the little one’s hair the color of butter and eyes like the sky at twilight and skin as pale as moonshine.
“Eh, those were the days,” she says to the photograph. The image, one that Saul captured of the girls with his new Brownie camera, is now somewhat faded with age and brown spots, like her hands. Hannah stares solemnly into the camera; Roberta smiles and looks adoringly at her big sister. They had stopped for a break at a drive-in restaurant on their way to Miami, where they were meeting Lenny and his family, in their newly purchased but used 1941 black-and-gray two-toned Buick coupe. He wasn’t a bad father, she thinks. It’s just that he wanted a son. He liked it that we named Hannah after his mother, but he wanted a son to carry on the Sussman name. He even told Roberta that she was the biggest disappointment of his life. Imagine. We had moved to Hawaii, and they were visiting. She looks again at the photo from their first family vacation.
Hannah read the road signs aloud as they entered the city.
“NO COLORED OR JEWS.”
She remembers her shock and fear and Saul’s fury after first being welcomed at the motel, the one with the flashing red vacancy sign, then given the clerk’s disclaimer that there was, in fact, no vacancy after Saul wrote his name on the reservation form. She wanted to go home, but Saul wouldn’t hear of it. That was the first time Dora experienced an inexplicable feeling of imminent death, what the doctors later labeled a nervous breakdown. Her heart beat as though it would explode out of her chest; her lungs felt near collapse; her palms sweated profusely. “I must lie down,” she said to Saul, who was in the middle of a very rowdy quarrel with the clerk. Dora climbed into the back seat of the car to restore her equilibrium.
The Golden Land, she thinks. Hannah must have been, let’s see—it was 1940, so I must have been thirty-six, so Hannah was eleven or twelve and Roberta, five or six Ah, who can remember? My mind is a muddle. The best times of my life, she reflects, when they were little. They were so sweet. I would look at them as they slept in their beds and think they looked like cherubs. But could I enjoy it? Always worried about fitting in. Always feeli
ng like an outsider. I still do, even though there aren’t many left to fit into. I guess that never goes away. Always looking to see how everyone else was doing something or not doing something. Not Saul. Born here, so why would he worry? He was always standing up to someone. I was always shrinking. She remembers the car accident. The girls were in the back seat, and some man cut Saul off on Degraw Avenue and clipped the left fender. Saul got out of the car and before you know it, the man was calling Saul a dirty kike. Well, no one did that to Saul, she thinks and smiles with pride, recalling the image of the man sprawled on the ground and her pleading for Saul to calm down. Saul calmed down when he got the man’s apology.
“He never knew what hit him,” she says, laughing as she addresses the photograph.
“You had some father. He always taught you girls to hit first and ask later what they meant. That’s my husband—your father—may he rest in peace . . . The girls insisted we should cremate him because that’s what he wanted. I stood my ground, for a change. But, ah, what’s the difference; when you’re dead, you’re dead.”
Dora begins to stroke the arm of the rocking chair and thinks of the day she made the decisive purchase. It was Adeline, her next-door neighbor—Addie, she called herself—who instructed her in the ways of her new, new world in the suburbs.
“We all buy our furniture there,” she said. Dora understood what Addie meant by “we all.” It refered to folks born in America, not foreigners—especially Jews—like her. She recalls how Addie’s mother spoke with an accent. But it was Scotch. Being a Scotch immigrant, not Russian and certainly not a Jew, made all the difference to Addie.
Oh, Saul! You had to move us to New Jersey with its pigs and smells and swamps—Secaucus, Weehawken, Hoboken, what names!—away from Mama and Papa. So what we had near Mama wouldn’t be a two-story brick house with shutters—what good are shutters anyway?—and a backyard with peach and apple trees and a fenced-in pen for a dog. Who needed a dog, with his hair all over the place? Just more work for me. In Brighton Beach, at least I could walk to Mama’s every day. And there were kosher butchers and a shul across the street and people like me. I heard Yiddish in the streets. And no one called me a dirty kike or a greenhorn. We were all greenhorns then.
Still, she yearned to be like “them,” like Addie or Addie’s sister, Elsie, who lived across the street—to speak the way they spoke, without an accent; to wear their kind of clothes; to drink Manhattans with cherries or rye and ginger ale after their husbands returned from work; to make the food they made—pineapple upside-down cake—not traif though; and to buy furniture like they had in their parlors.
One day, while waiting for the clerk to bag her groceries at the A&P supermarket on Queen Anne Road, she turned the pages of a magazine near the checkout counter with dreams of transforming her home. Making it like theirs. Once, she even bought a Woman’s Day when she happened upon a picture of a forest green-walled living room. So beautiful, like a velvet jungle.
Maybe Saul can paint it, she thought. That man can do anything with his golden hands. Turns the basement into a playroom, with its orange and blue square cardboard ceiling and walls that look like real wood. Builds a white fence in the backyard. Plants a Victory garden. What can’t that man do?
Willing herself to act like the other women in line who would casually make such a purchase, Dora, with a small flourish, dropped the magazine in her shopping cart along with her groceries, fervently wishing the other women were looking.
Several weeks later, Dora approached Ye Olde Furniture Shoppe on a typical humid summer day in Jersey. She paused to ponder the lettering of the wrought-iron sign hanging over the entrance as she wiped her brow.
“S-H-O-P-P-E? Huh? I could have sworn it was S-H-O-P,” she whispered, looking around for reassurance that no one had heard her talking to herself. She did this frequently, mostly to rehearse what she was about to say. She searched her green felt pocketbook and took out a piece from the corner of a brown paper bag, which she carried with her for just such occasions, and a knife-sharpened pencil to scribble in her artless penmanship: S H O P P E.
“I’ll ask Addie. No, Saul. He would know.” She felt smugly satisfied when she thought that she was married to a real American, and smart.
The brass bell on the glass-framed door tinkled as she tentatively entered the claustrophobic store. She patted down her beige linen dress with its stand-up collar to erase the wrinkles from the bus ride from Bergenwood to Hackensack. A dank odor sent a shudder throughout her body. It reminded her of something. But what? The agitation was familiar. She knew it belonged to another time, another place. She hoped she wasn’t about to get another one of those attacks. Her new doctor, Dr. Fechner, called them anxiety attacks. He was a nice man—a German refugee. Called what she had in Florida a nervous breakdown and gave her iodine to put in her milk each morning. She breathed deeply.
Tables, chairs, lamps, hassocks, and loveseats strewn about like pick-up sticks, a game her children love to play by the hour, left a narrow pathway for Dora to maneuver. Stricken with queasiness and the fear that she might have another collapse, she turned to leave.
“Good afternoon. May I help you?”
Too late. She regretted coming alone, but she couldn’t turn and run now. Once again she thought of Addie and tried to emulate her stately bearing. She would hold her head high and breeze through the door with a condescending gesture, waving the man aside, as if she owned the place. Just like a queen, Dora imagined.
Addie represented everything Dora was not. A tall, handsome woman who appeared to Dora to be strong and invincible. She did everything Dora feared to do or even to think of doing: She drove a car—a baby-blue convertible Chevrolet—steering with her right hand while smoking a Lucky Strike in her left. She painted the shutters that bracketed the windows of her cottage while perched on a stepladder, her auburn hair piled high on her head, the ever-present cigarette suspended loosely from her plum-painted lips—with fingernails to match. She baked pineapple upside-down cakes and blueberry pies and told shady jokes about a man’s body “down there,” followed by hearty peals of laughter. When the war came, she got a job spot welding in an assembly plant. Dora never learned exactly what that meant, just that it was what Addie did and that it must be grand. The factory even used her as the model for a “Rosie the Riveter” poster that Addie hung prominently in her living room, framed. Saul had made the frame. That man, what can’t he do? thought Dora, somewhat jealous, and imagined herself as the woman in the frame.
Addie even divorced her husband, Arthur, an Errol Flynn lookalike who, despite working as an elevator operator in one of New York’s high rises, wore a neatly pressed charcoal-striped suit each morning as he set off for work, attaché case in tow. He also cheated on his wife.
She was the talk of the neighborhood when a strange man was seen frequenting her bungalow and then leaving in the early morning hours, before the neighborhood awakened. For two years they carried on this charade, and then she married him. And then Larry disappeared from the premises as mysteriously as he appeared. He vanished shortly after Addie was seen with one of her eyes blackened and her arm in a sling. He was no longer “lovey.” She now called him “a sonova bitch.”
Years later, Dora’s conflicted adulation of Addie would end abruptly when Addie refused to accompany her as a witness when she applied for citizenship. “We have enough foreigners here. And Jews. Find one of your own, honey. I’m kinda busy now that I have a job.”
The insistent voice of the shopkeeper interrupted Dora’s tentative maneuvers between the aisles filled with dusty furnishings.
“Excuse me, how may I help you?” he repeated.
“Oh, my! Uhh, my friend Mrs. Taylor—perhaps you know her—tells me that you have really nice used furniture. She says I can trust you, so I thought I’d look around. I don’t know if I’m going to buy right now. I’m just looking.”
“Madam, we sell antiques here. If you’re looking for ‘used furniture,’ I could give
you the name of a store down the street for that,” he remarked, trying to hide his disdain. “I do believe I remember your friend. A very attractive woman.”
“Thank you, so I’ll look around. A little crowded in here, isn’t it? My husband just bought us a house in Bergenwood. Have you heard of it? Used to be a baseball field. We moved from Fort Lee.”
Dora turned away and placed her hankie over her nose to quell the growing squeamishness. She passed tables laden with dishes—some chipped, others rimmed with gold—and chairs perched precariously on top of other chairs and tables. Her eyes spied silverware, pewter mugs, vases, and crocheted antimacassars.
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