Introducing Shirley Braverman

by Hilma Wolitzer

  I remembered the terrible darkness in the closet and Mitzi’s ghost voice floating toward me, and I really didn’t mind the night light myself.

  Six

  Miss Cohen’s Announcement

  WALKING TO SCHOOL WITH Theodore the next day, I promised myself that I’d never talk to Mitzi Bloom again. It was all her fault that I got into so much trouble the night before. It was all her fault that Theodore had an egg-shaped blue and yellow lump on his forehead that morning.

  When she smiled at me on the sixth-grade line, I just turned my head away and looked across the schoolyard, where the kindergarten babies were lined up, holding hands. I had gone to kindergarten in the same school. Had I ever been that little? It didn’t seem possible. Yet I remembered the big kindergarten room with its doll corner, a place where I was the mother of some naked and raggedy doll. I remembered rest time, lying in a little patch of sunlight on my yellow blanket and thinking dream thoughts, even though I was still awake.

  Mitzi kept hissing at me and saying “Shir-ley,” but I pretended I couldn’t hear her at all. She wasn’t going to get me into trouble ever again.

  Finally the bell rang and we all walked into the building and went to our classrooms. Miss Cohen was waiting at her desk. Just before the pledge to the flag, Mitzi leaned over and said, “Are you mad at me or something?” As if she didn’t know. Then it was time to stand and I didn’t answer her.

  After the pledge, Morty Levine, the boy sitting at the next desk, passed a folded piece of paper to me. I looked at him, raising my eyebrows, but he shrugged his shoulders and pointed to Mitzi.

  I opened the note. It said, “Roses are red, violets are blue, if you won’t be glad, I’ll go live in the zoo!” There was a tiny drawing of a monkey wearing a dress just like Mitzi’s. Of course I had to smile. I couldn’t help it. The monkey looked so funny and cute. How could I be mad at Mitzi for very long? I turned around and smiled at her and she smiled back, and then she made a monkey face at me and I laughed out loud.

  Miss Cohen tapped on her desk with a ruler. “If you’re ready, young ladies,” she said, and I turned around to face her. “Now,” Miss Cohen continued, “I have an announcement to make. There is going to be an interborough competition in spelling.” A few of the boys groaned and Miss Cohen tapped the ruler again.

  I sat up very straight in my seat to listen, forgetting about Mitzi and the monkey note. A spelling competition!

  “For those of you who are interested,” Miss Cohen said, “there will be a preliminary spelling bee in Dr. Vanderbilt’s office in a few weeks. It will be held at three o’clock, just after school ends for the day. The winner will go on to compete with winners from other schools in our district. The district winner will compete to determine the best speller in Brooklyn. Finally there will be a bee to name the best speller in all the public elementary schools in the City of New York. The grand winner will receive a gold medal and a special citation from the mayor.”

  The best speller in New York City! I began to think of all the big words I could spell. Institution, I thought. Representation. Receive, committee, hospitality, government. The best speller in all of New York City. Would it end there? Who knows? I began to think about it. The best speller in New York State. The best speller in the United States of America. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Shirley Braverman, the greatest little speller in the world!

  “...and you may pick up your application blanks at my desk on your way home this afternoon,” Miss Cohen was saying. “Remember, you must have your parents’ permission to enter the spelling competition, so be sure one of them signs in the right place.”

  I came back to the classroom again, a little ashamed of my daydreaming. After all, I didn’t know that I was the best speller, did I? Then I thought of all my test papers, marked A+, 100, Excellent. I hadn’t missed a word all year, even the ones that Miss Cohen called “challenging.” At home, Velma, and even Mother, would ask me how to spell something once in a while.

  I took a piece of paper from my notebook and wrote, “Roses are red, violets are blue. Confidentially speaking, I’m not mad at you.” I asked Morty to pass the note to Mitzi. Confidentially. That was another hard word. I wondered how the gold medal would look on my blue winter coat.

  Seven

  Before and After

  “THE TROUBLE WITH THEODORE,” Mitzi said, “is that he doesn’t have big muscles. You never see anyone picking on Popeye the way they pick on Theodore, do you?”

  We were on our way home from school, with Theodore walking a few feet behind us. He kept turning around every few minutes to see if we were being followed. There was a much older boy who had been picking on Theodore and scaring him half to death. Mitzi and I looked for him in the schoolyard. If we found him we were going to tell him to stop being such a big bully, but he was nowhere in sight.

  “My mother and father don’t want Theodore to fight,” I said.

  “He doesn’t have to,” Mitzi explained. “If he looks tough, if he has big muscles, nobody will ever start up with him in the first place. That bully only picks on him because he’s such a puny little kid.”

  I turned around and looked at Theodore and I had to admit that Mitzi was right. He looked very little walking all by himself, and he was pretty skinny and pale besides.

  “The thing is,” Mitzi said, “we have to help him build up his muscles. I’ll come over later and show you something.”

  We parted at the next corner and I waited for Theodore to catch up. “What did that boy say to you again?” I asked him.

  “H-he said he was going to g-give me an Indian burn, and he said he was going to get me into trouble, i-if I didn’t give h-him my baseball cards and my m-marbles.”

  “That big bully! I bet he wouldn’t pick on someone his own size! Don’t worry, Theodore. I won’t let him hurt you.”

  But Theodore looked worried anyway. He was still watching for that bully over his shoulder when we entered the lobby of our apartment house.

  When Mitzi came over later, she had a big stack of her favorite comic books with her. She handed a pile of them to each of us. “Here. Look through these. We want to find the ads for body-building.”

  “What?” Theodore said.

  “Theodore, don’t worry,” Mitzi said. “Leave it to us. Just look for an ad with a picture of a man with great big bulging muscles.”

  Theodore started turning the pages and in a few minutes he forgot all about the ad because he was so busy looking at the comics.

  But Mitzi and I looked very carefully. We read the ads for little machines that pull blackheads right out of your skin, and the ones for marvelous magic tricks that could “fool your friends and amaze your relatives!” There was one ad for a special brassiere that was supposed to help girls with small busts look glamorous. The ads were really much more interesting than the comics.

  Finally Mitzi said, “Here it is! This is the one we want. Listen to this, Shirley. ‘We can build you a better body in just thirty days or your money back! King Sandor was once like you, afraid to stand up for his rights, afraid of threatening bullies who tried to take his girl and his job away. King Sandor was once a skinny helpless weakling! When you look at his picture, this will be hard for you to believe, but through his special, scientifically devised, secret muscle-building plan, King Sandor became the he-man he is today. Send for our free instruction booklet that will come to you in a plain brown envelope, without cost or obligation. Don’t delay and we will include a beautiful free portrait of King Sandor, suitable for framing.’”

  Mitzi turned the book around so that I could look at King Sandor’s pictures, Before and After. In the Before picture, King Sandor looked even skinnier than Theodore. He was wearing loose-fitting swim trunks and he was standing on the beach with very poor posture and a sad expression on his face.

  But in the After picture, which almost filled the rest of the page, King Sandor had muscles as big as watermelons. He was wearing tight leopard-skin trunks and leather
wristbands and a great big smile. He didn’t look anything like the King Sandor in the Before picture. “Wow!” I said. It was hard to believe. I read the ad myself. It said, “Without cost or obligation” in plain English. “Okay,” I told Mitzi. “Let’s do it!”

  We decided to send for the instruction booklet under the name of S. Braverman at my address. I was the only S. Braverman in the family and King Sandor had no way of knowing that I was a girl. Even while we were filling out the coupon, Theodore just sat there looking at Superman and Blondie and Nancy and Sluggo, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Mitzi licked the envelope and sealed it shut. “Make a muscle, Theodore,” she said.

  He turned the page of the comic book and held his arm out without looking up. It looked as straight and skinny as a pencil.

  Mitzi squeezed it. “Mush!” she said. “But we’ll take care of that!”

  We shook hands on it over Theodore’s head.

  Eight

  Style 482

  ON SATURDAY MY FATHER took me to the dress factory with him. There had been a big shipment of fabric on Friday and he had to go in on the weekend to help his boss, Mr. Hamberger, get it ready. He took me along for company. My father and I rode the subway to the factory. I brought my book Words That Stump the Experts along so I could study my spelling during the train ride. Daddy wiped his eyeglasses clean and he opened the book on his lap as the train left the station. “Okay, Shirley-girl,” he said. “How about ‘exaggerate’?”

  I spelled it for him, loving the way his eyes opened wide when I did it correctly.

  He patted my head. “With a good brain and a good education,” he said, “you can do anything you want in this life.”

  I knew it was his dream to send all three of us to college, even though he and Mother never had a chance to go themselves. “Give me another word,” I said, feeling very proud.

  “‘Fascination,’” he said, and the train rumbled on, taking us to Avenue U, where the dress factory was.

  Mr. Hamberger was a fat man, but he never looked jolly. He always seemed aggravated. He pinched my cheek, but he really wasn’t paying any attention to me. Then he started complaining. “Morris,” he said, “it’s a good thing you’re here. Yesterday that truckman was late. Today I see a whole bundle is ruined with water stains.” Mr. Hamberger kept pulling on the few hairs left on his head.

  The factory wasn’t as busy on Saturday as it was during the week, but there were still some people working overtime. Three operators, their sewing machines singing, their feet pumping the pedals, waved to me and blew kisses. The presser, Dominick, smiled through the steam of his pressing board at me. His shirt was open at the neck and his sleeves were rolled up.

  My father patted Mr. Hamberger on the back. “Don’t worry,” he said, but Mr. Hamberger kept complaining. “Today, Operator No. 3 has a bellyache. Operator No. 4 has a kid with the measles. Why didn’t I go into the printing business with my brother Lou?”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. H.,” my father said again. “Stop worrying. Everything will be all right.”

  My father put his apron on and went to the big cutting table, where a large sheet of paper was laid out. He placed the pattern pieces on the paper and traced their outlines with black chalk. Then he put the patterns aside and took the paper off the table as well. He unrolled a huge bolt of material in many layers across the table and put the paper with the black outlines on top. Each shape on the paper represented a different part of a dress: a sleeve, a collar, a skirt. After laying heavy weights across the paper, he began to cut the pieces out with an electric cutting machine.

  One of the operators gave me a bunch of yellow tickets that said Style 482, Size 14, and she showed me how to thread the tickets through the belt loops on the dresses. It was fun. I pretended that I was all grown and that this was my real job. I named myself Finisher No. 23. In my imagination, Mr. Hamberger told my father that if it wasn’t for Finisher No. 23, he’d have to close his shop. “Look at those tickets,” Mr. H. said, inside my head. “Perfect! What a job!”

  Behind me, the operators tried to sing louder than their machines, the presser whistled like a bird, and my father’s electric cutter knifed through the fabric.

  Just when I began to get tired, when the color yellow seemed like the worst color in the world, Operator No. 16 came back and gave me a new rack of dresses and a new bunch of tickets, green ones this time, marked Style 482, Size 12. She smiled at me and went back to her sewing machine.

  I did all the green tickets and then all the blue ones marked Size 10 and then I realized that something strange had happened. All the noises in the shop had died down, almost at once. The machines were quiet, the presser’s steam had stopped hissing. My father was rerolling a bolt of cloth and then stacking it in a bin with other bolts.

  I rubbed my eyes and wriggled my fingers. They felt stiff and tired.

  “Well, Shirley-girl,” my father said. “Did you have a long enough working day? Are you ready to go home?”

  Before I could answer, Mr. Hamberger came over to the cutting table. He polished a silver dollar against the side of his trousers and then he handed it to me. “You’re a nice little girl,” he said. “But don’t marry anyone in the dress business. It’s nothing but headaches.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. H.,” my father said one more time, but Mr. Hamberger only shook his head sadly from side to side.

  Just as we were leaving the factory, Operator No. 16, an old lady with gray hair pinned into a bun on top of her head, ran after us. “Wait, wait!” she called. “Morris, little girl, wait!”

  I turned around and she handed a package to me. “It’s a present,” she said, and when I hesitated, “Go ahead. Take it, it’s for you. I made it for you.”

  I opened the loosely wrapped package and found a tiny, perfect dress inside. Exactly like Style 482, only very, very small. I looked at it carefully and found a tiny hem and little buttonholes, just big enough for my smallest fingernail to pass through.

  “Tell your dolly she should wear it in good health,” said Operator No. 16. “And I hope it’s a good fit!”

  “Thank you,” I said. “It’s so—so perfect!” I didn’t want to tell her that I had stopped playing with dolls almost a year ago. She looked so pleased that I couldn’t hurt her feelings, and besides, I really did like the little dress for itself. I thought that when I got home I would make a tiny tag for it that said Style 482, Size 1.

  Later, all alone in the bedroom, I took the dress out again and ran my finger over the miniature collar and cuffs. Just for the fun of it, I decided to look for my old dolls and see if it would fit one of them. In the doll box on the floor of the closet, I came across a little grownup doll, one with beautiful blond hair and high-heeled shoes. I remembered when I got her as a birthday present from Aunt Lena and Uncle Max. She came in a cardboard box that looked like a camp trunk, and she had a wedding gown and a pair of pajamas and an apron. Now she was naked, except for her shoes.

  Mitzi and I played with her for hours almost every day. We called her Alice for a long time and then we renamed her Sonja, after Sonja Henie, the blond ice skater who was a movie actress as well.

  Poor Sonja looked terrible now. She had been at the bottom of the doll box, under the heavy rubber baby doll and a very old one of Velma’s with elbows and knees you could bend. “Poor little Sonja,” I said, smoothing her hair and brushing some lint out of her blue eyes. “Don’t worry. I have a beautiful new dress for you.”

  The dress was easy to put on because it had buttons all the way down the front, right to the hem. When the last one was closed, I saw that it was a perfect fit! It was as if Operator No. 16 had made the dress just for Sonja.

  “Don’t you look wonderful!” I said aloud. “Aren’t you beautiful? This is Style 482, madam, our most popular number. Please look at the beautiful work, all these lovely stitches and everything. It fits like a dream, madam, and the color is very good for you.” I held Sonja up to the dresser mi
rror and turned her around slowly, as if she were a model in a fashion show. “Do you see? This dress was made by our finest operator. Our best cutter cut out this material for you, and Finisher No. 23 did the finishing.”

  I looked in the mirror again and I saw Velma standing in the doorway staring at me. “What are you doing?” she said. “Are you playing with dolls?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I don’t play with stupid dolls any more. Somebody just gave me this stupid dress and I wanted to see if it fit, that’s all.”

  Velma’s eyes got very narrow. “Well, then who were you talking to?”

  “Me? I wasn’t talking to anybody.” I threw Sonja behind me without even looking to see if she landed on the bed or not. There was a little thud and I guessed she’d fallen behind the bed. I wouldn’t look, not when Velma was there, anyway. “I wasn’t talking,” I said. “I was singing.” Then, just to prove it, I began to sing at the top of my lungs. I never did have a very good voice. It always sort of cracked and squeaked when I tried a high note.

  Pretty soon Velma went back to her own room.

  As soon as she was gone, I knelt beside the bed and looked under it for Sonja. There she was, lying on her face next to one of my blue bedroom slippers. “Sorry, madam,” I whispered, so that no one else could hear me. I smoothed her hair again and I fussed over her new dress. Then I put her back in the doll box and closed the closet door.

  Nine

  “Hello Ma?”

  THEODORE DIDN’T IMPROVE MUCH, in spite of my vows to help him. He wasn’t on the Honor Roll for the first grade yet and people kept on calling him a sissy, and that big bully still picked on him. He fell down a whole flight of stairs in school one day and now he had another bump on the same side of his head. Poor Theodore.

  I did feel a little guilty. I hadn’t paid much attention to him lately. Ever since Miss Cohen had announced the spelling competition, I hardly thought of anything else. Even during blackouts, I’d just sit in the dark and spell out big words inside my head. I think I wanted to win that competition more than anything else in the world.