Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  “Don’t forget, you’ve also got your chocolate log, your halva log, your schmoo torte, your Ark of the Covenant slab cake, your assortment of dainties, and your fancy fruit platter,” he reminded Shirley.

  How much sugar can you people possibly consume? he did not say and perhaps did not even think. As for the proposed new distribution of the luncheon hall, with the dessert table up front and the buffet table crowded in back — well, that was an accident waiting to happen.

  “Nobody will know where to go,” he told Marilyn Rubin. “Not the regulars, not the guests.”

  “What, so they’ll all wander around with empty plates in their hands?” snapped Marilyn.

  Chef Hubert gazed off into the middle distance, silently but gently, until Marilyn was forced to follow the trajectory of his gaze into an apocalyptic vision of, yes, her guests stumbling hither and yon, confused by desserts where there ought to be warming trays of tuna lasagna and cherry kugel, their plates in their hands.

  It was fruitless to quibble with Chef Hubert. He had seen everything and was impressed by nothing.

  On the matter of garnishes, however, he conceded a point, a small one, making a staunch ally of Sally Segal forever after. Of course he would never have considered foregoing parsley altogether. What else could enliven a side plate of olives and pickled cucumbers or a dish of chilled butter balls? And what but dried parsley could be sprinkled over his bowls of mounded egg salad and heaped platters of party sandwiches? Parsley was the necessary complement to any celebration meal, an honoured guest, even. Indeed on the subject of parsley — its dried and its fresh incarnations — Chef Hubert grew uncharacteristically loquacious. If garlic was the predominant note of French cooking and basil its Italian equivalent, then parsley, that humble but honest herb, that survivor of countless culinary purges, evoked the essence of Jewish cuisine, he told Sally, who reported this insight to us. We were impressed but bemused.

  Who knew that the picked-over blandishments of Menu A and Menu B, the flavours that were almost as familiar to us as our children’s faces but that nevertheless refreshed us after our three-hour services (longer, if the rabbi had a bone to pick with one of the enemies of Israel), who knew that they constituted what Chef Hubert called “a cuisine”? In his French accent, no less.

  “Francophone,” Shirley Rubin reminded us. “Not French.”

  Yet the fact remained that Chef Hubert had conceded in the matter of radish roses and carrot curls, orange spirals and cucumber fans, and from then on we felt that our synagogue was justly celebrated for the perfection of our garnishes.

  But for all that we obsessed over our luncheon menus or exhorted Debbie at Bouquet Boutique to design ever more unique yet affordable floral creations — or consulted with Linda of Linda’s Linens over our table settings, and ordered gift baskets from Not Only Cheese to be delivered to the hotel rooms of our out-of-town guests — however we distracted ourselves with shopping for clothes, matching shoes to purses, and making sure that our husbands had purchased new suits in time for them to be altered, we could not conceal our real anxiety. All the sound and fury, the mountains poking through our molehills, and the storms blowing themselves out in our teacups, in short the endless niggle of our preparations, could not silence the still, small voice that came in the night before we closed our novels and tumbled into sleep or again in the early morning as we took our first sips of coffee.

  “The children,” whispered the voice. “The children, the children, the children.”

  Again and again we recalled our rabbi’s favourite joke.

  “Four women sit down to play mahjong. ‘Oy!’ sighs the first. ‘Gevalt!’ groans the second. ‘Vey ist mir!’ wails the third.”

  We always began laughing at this point, often so hard that we couldn’t find breath for the punchline. But behind our laughter, a persistent worry ticked over, like the second hand on our kitchen clocks. Maybe, maybe, maybe, went the worry tick.

  Was it possible that our children would grow up over the course of one eventful weekend? We simply couldn’t believe it. Such nonsense!

  No, we knew that the weekend would pass, and on Monday morning we would wake our children for school, as we had for the last ten years. We would throw open the blinds and tousle the tops of their sleep-tufted heads and say, “Rise and shine, darling!” The odour of slightly sour laundry and unwashed shin pads and hormone-buzzing teenage bodies would reassure us that all was as it should be. On that morning we would feel particularly tender toward our children, patiently coaxing them awake, pouring milk into their cereal bowls, and reminding them to eat slowly. Don’t wolf it down, honey. Do you want to get sick? We would ignore their scowls and yawns, the implication that we were treating them like children. Didn’t we realize they’d been eating breakfast for years?

  Of course we did. We knew that they were no longer children. But they were still our children.

  Yet even if we succeeded in keeping them close for a little while longer, our children grew up in the end. It was inevitable, like proving a loaf of challah dough overnight. In the morning we would lift up the damp dishtowels and find palpable evidence of the way time passes as we sleep. Look how the dough has doubled! Tripled! But a child, unlike a loaf of bread, cannot be punched back down or beaten into shape. Heaven help us, and why would we beat our children? The truth was nobody made their own challah anymore. Not since the kosher bakery in the North End began distributing their bread to local supermarkets.

  So our children grew up — slowly or swiftly, awkwardly or gracefully, with grateful hearts or serpents’ teeth — but in the end they all grew up. And we, too, grew older, although we seldom heard the whir of time’s machinery as clearly as we did when we gathered at our book clubs or Sisterhood meetings or when we got together to play mahjong. Then news of our children would flash across the synapses of the room like nerve impulses: this one was finally getting married, that one was suddenly getting divorced or having twins or — God forbid — going in for a biopsy. It was like those movies we’d all seen: when the epilogue describes what happens to the characters as they grow up.

  Where was the moral? we wondered. What was the lesson of the epilogue? That nothing grows while you watch, that a surprise ending is better than a good beginning, that the future lies in the hands of a Hollywood scriptwriter? Perhaps if we knew the future we would never get out of bed in the morning. Poor Minnie Binder, what happened to her Maxele should never happen to another mother. What mother wants to outlive her child? No, better not to know the end of the movie.

  Meanwhile, between the end of the last frame and the slow fade to the credits, our children leapt into the billion scintillating points of light that was the future. Rose Epstein turned the family schmatte business around and eventually went into fashion design. You might even know her label — Is a Rose — which Bev Epstein explained was actually a poem. Harry Naiman became the dermatologist in charge of not letting women age. You can see his face on benches and billboards all over the city with a caption that reads: “Only a Shar-Pei needs to live with wrinkles!” Of course there is also a picture of this dog, this Shar-Pei, with its draped face staring out. Leah Silverstein is also on benches but with her it’s a matter of real estate. Between the two of them — Leah and Harry — they have almost the whole South End covered, bus bench–wise.

  None of our children grew up to run delis, although the Segal brothers started up the famous Dough Nuts franchise, specializing in fresh cookies which is maybe confusing given the name (no nuts, no donuts), but as Sally Segal pointed out, you don’t want to fool around with names when the business is doing so well. If it ain’t broke, she would have said, if she wasn’t such a well-spoken gal. And, of course, none of our children became soccer stars or movie actresses or famous pop singers either. Molly Leibowitz didn’t get to play her piano at the Albert Hall (she’s a music teacher, three lovely children), and Leo Friedlander never did learn to drive an
ice cream truck or operate an earthmover (he’s an orthodontist, bless his heart, and he drives a Saab). Nevertheless, Michael Shayowitz surprised us all by becoming a world-class entertainment promoter. Not one musical production or reunion band arrived in town that he didn’t personally oversee. A finger in every pie, an iron in every fire!

  “A finger? The whole hand!” Bella Shayowitz would boast, and how could we begrudge her the pride she took in her only son’s success? Michael Shayowitz was not himself musical, as we all recalled, but it seemed he possessed the magic formula that transforms dross into gold. The Midas touch, a pocketful of pixie dust, the secret name of his first-born son. (Actually, his first-born son is now called Chloe and is currently living on the west coast with Michael’s ex-wife and her new husband, but that’s a story for another time.) Whatever talent Michael possessed, only see what glamour it produced! And despite what people said, the trouble he got into later had nothing at all to do with music and entertainment promotion.

  “Everything will come out all right in the end,” as Harvey Silverstein always used to say. “Perhaps we just haven’t come to the end yet.”

  Ah, but all this was in the future (Molly’s breast lump, Max Binder’s terrible accident), and in our late-night kitchens the dough was still proving. In short, they remained our obstinate or pliable, messy, rebellious, muddle-headed darlings, and we were so relieved that they hadn’t grown up overnight that we forgot the cunning ways in which time could slow down or accelerate, could switchback or even change tracks entirely. Dear Minnie had once wondered if time travelled along two separate tracks but now we realized that time itself was what drove the train. Time was the wily signalman, the flip switcher.

  The problem, of course, was Genesis and the dinosaurs.

  We had all been through Genesis and the dinosaurs, and we’d tried to prevail with humour and imagination, with patience and even delight. For we remembered our own childish bewilderment at the story of the creation: the animals on the fifth day, Adam and Eve on the sixth. On the seventh day the Almighty took a nap and, hey presto: the World! It was Mrs. Silverstein who broke the news; she related how Leah had come home from second grade with the age-old question burning on her lips. Leah was the first, as always, but soon mother after mother began reporting that the great debate was upon us. Where, our children wanted to know, did the dinosaurs fit in?

  Some of us said natural selection and some of us said God. Some of us said survival of the fittest and some of us said ask your teacher. Some of us said a day was longer in those days, about a million years! Some of us tried to explain how Darwin and his monkeys swung through the branches of Genesis while the Almighty created the world in six short sleeps and one long one. Some of us said you can’t do it, you have to choose.

  Some of us went out on a limb and talked about “interpretation” rather than “truth.” Some of us even went so far as to say imagine the Bible is a story, imagine the story is neither true nor false, not in that way. Do you know what a metaphor is?

  Some of us said well who created the dinosaurs then? Some of us rolled our eyes and shrugged our shoulders. How were we supposed to know? Some of us said forty days and forty nights, some of us said gone in a flash. Some of us said think of it this way, what would have happened to all the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and the beasts of the field? Some of us said if a dinosaur and a whale got into a fight, who do you think would win? Some of us said there are certain things we can never know. Some of us said okay then, where did they go?

  But those of us who, like Minnie Binder, were often exhausted after standing for eight hours in the shoe store, said God is God. Have you ever seen a dinosaur?

  Have you ever seen God? her Maxele immediately replied. He was just curious, she realized later, always such a curious, eager boy, although at the time it had seemed like cheek and was punished accordingly. In fact, she’d slapped him. There, she’d said it. A swift cuff, nothing serious, no lasting scars. Except to the one who had slapped, to the mother who could never now forgive herself.

  Oh, Minnie, cut yourself some slack, we told her in the months after the accident, when all the poor woman could remember were the very few times that she had been harsh to her son. How that slap reverberated through the years, how it stung. Not for Max, of course, who had probably forgotten all about it five minutes after it happened (Wasn’t that always the way with children?), but for his mother whose hand still trembled when she remembered.

  Oh, Minnie, we chorused, you were a wonderful mother! And we would sit with her and try to console her: Eat something, drink something. How are you sleeping? Have you thought about volunteering? They need people at the Inspirational Living Centre. Have you thought of joining a support group? Crying is good, anger is good, grief is good. Here’s a cup of tea for you, here’s an old camp photograph I found, here’s a joke our rabbi liked to tell.

  “Four ladies sit down to play mahjong. ‘Oy!’ sighs the first. ‘Gevalt!’ groans the second. ‘Vay ist mir!’ wails the third. ‘All right already,’ says the fourth, ‘are we here to play cards or talk about our children?’”

  In truth the joke was so old that it was popular when Tyrannosaurus rex walked the earth. Well, why not? Dinosaurs had children too.

  Ah, why bring it all up again, those extinct years when our children turned to us with starry eyes and earnest, questing hearts? This was the first spiritual crisis of their young lives; they still believed us — they still believed in us. Now, all these years later, they accepted nothing that we said. They rolled their eyes and slammed their bedroom doors on our good counsel. They were laggardly about learning their Torah portions and grumpy at the thought of a weekend full of visiting relatives they hardly knew. Some floundered about in their recently acquired, ill-fitting, nearly adult bodies; others drove us crazy with shopping for fashionable clothes. Suits for the boys, real ties not clip-on. For the girls, modest yet stylish outfits and high heels to tip them forward on the axis of their new femininity, their swelling breasts and rounding hips.

  Most of us were happy to purchase the new clothes that our children desired. We were adept at shopping, at flicking our fingers through clattering rails of trousers or shirts, at holding up gowns to our daughters’ shoulders to judge for length. We narrowed our eyes and estimated drape and cut, deftly plucking a skirt or a blouse from a row of swinging garments. “Go and try it on, darling,” we’d coax. Then we’d wait patiently outside the fitting room although it was always a challenge to keep the younger kids from running amok, pulling merchandise off the shelves or tagging each other with price guns.

  “Anyone in there?” we’d eventually call through the change room door. “Let me see how you look, sweetheart.” Did we imagine magical transformations as we stood waiting expectantly: our girls in their ball gowns, our boys in their suits?

  But they were not those kinds of change rooms. Beneath the new dress shirts and the shiny fabric our children remained themselves, only paler and slightly jaundiced-looking in the lurid department-store light. What were clothes but the disguise beneath which our children’s bodies changed, subtly or suddenly, into an idea of the future in its still-wet, waiting chrysalis? The truth was, we did not want to think of those changes — the swellings, roundings, protrudings, the encroaching hair, the hardening muscles. Most of us did not like to dwell too closely upon those growing bodies. Instead, we preferred to focus on the clothes our children were growing out of and the childish games they’d outgrown. But Bella Shayowitz, as always, was shameless.

  “I walked into his room one day,” she told Shirley Rubin. “Obviously he didn’t hear me knock.”

  “She didn’t bother to knock,” interpreted Shirley.

  “And what do you think I saw?” Bella asked.

  We could imagine, although none of us would have dreamed of barging into our son’s rooms.

  “She saw a forest,” Shirley confided to her sister-in
-law.

  “A forest!” exclaimed Bella, gesturing with one hand at her crotch, the other hand clutched to her heart.

  Years later, when Michael Shayowitz was first taken into custody and before his childhood friend, Danny Rubin, even then a big shot in the courts, got him out on bail, we comforted ourselves with the thought that at least his mother had passed on. Little Michael Shayowitz who had once grown a forest was now growing an empire. How could he know that all of a sudden the promotion of boxing matches was not considered kosher business?

  “Bare-knuckle fighting, Mom,” Leah told her mother. “It’s never been legal.”

  “Michael Shayowitz has been fighting without his gloves?” exclaimed Mrs. Silverstein, as if the boy had forgotten to wear mittens in the middle of winter, which, in her opinion, was just as dangerous.

  Not fighting but promoting, is what we heard. In one of the shady hotels near the airport. Michael Shay — for this was his fancy promoter’s name — not only organized bare-knuckle cage fights, he had even bankrolled an Israeli (ex-Mossad, it was rumoured) to star in one of his fist-fight productions.

  “Alleged, Ma,” Danny Rubin reminded his mother. “Alleged promotion, alleged fraudulent immigration practices, alleged illegal gambling.”

  “Ari the Jew,” Shirley Rubin mused. “You say he’s good at his fist fighting?”

  “The best, Ma,” Danny assured her.

  It was true: the papers reported that Ari the Jew, a six-foot-four colossus with whirring muscles, was the undisputed champion of the bare-knuckle circuit and had yet to be defeated. Despite our horror, we were impressed: that a Jew should be so powerful, so fearless, so talented in the fist-fighting department, went a little way toward allaying the shame we felt on behalf of Bella Shayowitz who, if she were alive, would have been brokenhearted at her son’s imprisonment, although understandably proud of his enterprise. On her behalf — dear Bella! — we too were proud, we too were heartbroken. And, remember, she had only one son, Minnie Binder reminded us. No do-overs!