by Elise Levine
Late again. Our poor girl! We feel for her. We do. She’ll be late for her own funeral. Little Miss Dirty Little Can’t Hack It Go-er Alonger, whatcmerensaythat. Locked in her bedroom at this sorry excuse for her own home, she attempts to drown out Ranting Mom with vintage Bang a Gong. There’s also her AP English paper, due nine sharp tomorrow morning. Get it on. Paradise Lost, she keystrokes at the top of page one.
Middle of the night, sick of the racket—and needing a break from spiriting into existence another A—our girl climbs through her first-floor bedroom window. She’s off to the Queen’s. Where else can she go? Leaves sharpen on the wind and she bucks across the frost field craving bacon, toast while dim satellites swarm among even fainter stars. She has in her knapsack two decent pages of her essay on Miltonic inversions to light her path. She has, deep in her cortex, what she thinks of as her magic pen.
She lets herself in with her spare key and camps out in the kitchen. Come dawn the paper’s done. Enter the Dowager. She stands in her nightie, grey bangs mopped to one side of her crumpled-looking head.
Oh, it’s you, Little One!
C’est moi!
A chuck from the Dowager beneath the chin—positively golden. Then exit the Dowager to prepare for another eleven-hour shift stickering and shelving goods.
Enter the Queen. Who two weeks ago—and unknown to the Dowager—quit tenth grade. The Queen scrabbles through the back of the freezer. Voilà vodka, which she dresses with o.j. from concentrate. Then she refills the bottle with tap water.
Exit the Dowager through the front door, quick-quick.
In the basement the Queen bends once more to her task. Quick-quick the Queen’s Little Queen’s head smokes again. More prayer—for making it to third-period French. For Tale of Toking Up With Alan and Soledad—remember them, our girl’s less fucked-up friends?—Behind the Portables Before Lunch. Tale of Je ne me reviens pas au revoir.
Suddenly the Queen withdraws her hand with a jerk. What have we here? she says. What’s the meaning of this?
Meaning? Confused, the Queen’s Little Queen thinks of her paper—Tale of Tiny God of Little Gods, Tale of Work Abandoned—with its delicious hair-splittings laid out cold upstairs on the kitchen table.
Answer, the Queen demands, and the Queen’s Little Queen lifts her head and twitches her legs. She muddles a hand between her thighs. Oh that.
Tale of the Late Bloomer, Commencer Finally of Her First Menses, Tale of —
Nothing, she murmurs in response to the Queen’s outrage.
Another tale comes to mind. Étant donnés. Given States. Recently learned about in art class. An assemblage wrought in secret for twenty years. It now resides in a museum, on display for all. Viewers sidle up to a wooden door and peer through a peephole. In the foreground, a life-sized simulacrum of a dead naked woman lies spread-eagle on a bed of dead twigs and leaves. She holds a gas lamp in her left hand and the light shines toward a pleasant wooded landscape.
Rien, the Queen’s Little Queen silently, ferociously vows. For it is here that she feels for us. Our Girl! Tale of Nothing She Will Not Go On To Do.
Empress. Tale of s’il vous plait nous parler. Talk to Us. Light Our Way.
Death and the Maidens
He is seven or six or twelve. The sack he carries bulges and shrinks. He is Isidore, not yet Edwin. The sack squawks and pummels his leg.
I’ll give you twenty cents for those chickens, a woman calls across the narrow street.
She shades her eyes with a wrinkled hand. Her hair sticks out in stiff grey wires. She is not his grandmother who looks after him. She is not his mother who does not.
A peck on his leg near his rear end reminds him—walk. Eight more blocks but the butcher pays better. Upon Isidore’s return, his grandfather will count each nickel and cent, telling the sum in his palm with a finger. When he is done, he will tally again.
The woman pats beside her on the stoop. She rocks from side to side. Little boy, she croons.
No, Isidore thinks, continuing on, kicking stones and stamping the cracked sidewalk with his tight shoes. His grandmother might buy him only one new-used pair a year, before school starts, but he knows right from wrong. It’s like a sum he can do in his head.
Jew boy, the woman cackles behind him.
Another journey. On this one, he is not near-wronged but dead wrong.
No, he says anyway, and stamps his foot. To his surprise, it is bare. The boat rocks and water sloshes in. Reeds rustle, oars dip though no rower is visible. A tall green bird lifts overhead. Its thin legs dangle. In a blink the sky blacks and stars course the complicated channels above, below. He rattles the wooden locket tied around his neck with string. As if that will help. His wife, daughter, son hole up inside. No! He wants to go back. Why can’t he go back?
He snaps hands to hips and fumes until the breath whistles through his nose. Ida and Bernice and Abraham and Samuel and Meyer. Isidore, until Uncle Abe—one-seventh part-owner of a racehorse, one-third co-owner of a three-taxi fleet, bootlegger, donor to the sole shul of Saint John, New Brunswick—rolls up his sleeves. The transformation occurs in a shabby room at city hall. Edwin. No more schoolyard taunts until he dizzies like a girl. No more nightmares or his grandfather’s failed attempts at exorcising them, swinging aloft a chicken by its legs and praying once in Hebrew, three times in Yiddish before chopping off the head with an axe. Worked for the man nearly hit by a falling piano on moving day. Worked for the girl who watched her sister drown in the Saint John River one sunny afternoon. Isidore-now-Edwin’s grandfather charges fifty cents apiece, extortionate rates, but so long fear of the murdered who got left behind in the old country, fear of income tax in the new. The old man hears it all and swings the bird and the fright flies out—good riddance—then he counts and recounts the sums, standing by the kitchen’s wood stove. He also peddles pots and pans, driving his horse-drawn cart alongside Saint John’s increasing numbers of cars and buses and trucks. He stands arms folded next to his friend Morris in the back of the synagogue every Shabbas eve and loudly takes issue with the Rabbi’s discussion of the Torah portion.
The old ways.
Eddie-once-Edwin-once-Isidore will abandon them of course. For a high school dance with blonde Julie Ross. Nine months at business college and an office job among skinflint Scotch Presbyterians. Tommy Dorsey on the car radio. Montreal when the employer opens an office there and Oscar Peterson in tiny clubs after work and—so open-minded is Eddie—all manner of prostitutes. Until Eddie marries a chesty brunette he meets at the High Anglican wedding of a pal back home down east.
She converts. No easy feat in Saint John in those days. But as luck would have it, a young and progressive Rabbi visiting for the winter from New Jersey permits her to study with him. Not that she has a religious bone in her body—neither does Eddie. She converts for his remote, orthodox father’s not-quite acceptance. For her ticket out of fearsome Saint John, where she grew up in a house with no indoor plumbing, sharing a single outhouse through vicious Maritime winters with seven older brothers and one older sister and one gut-twitchy ghost of a dead eldest sister, passed at age twelve from acute appendicitis and a thirty-mile drive in the middle of the night from the family’s outskirts home to the nearest hospital, only to arrive too late. Goodbye, Eddie’s bride bids her alcoholic communist Canadian Railway union-organizer father. Farewell, recent memories of her diabetic mother who stopped taking care of herself since the death of her first-born girl and who herself dies a year before her youngest daughter’s Jewish wedding. Jew-ish, is how the Scotch-English brothers and sister and father pronounce the word. So long to all that small mindedness.
And so to Montreal where the couple roosts. And soon thereafter another transfer, to Toronto, where the baby girl is born. Sinatra on the radio. Frequent business trips to New York and all manner of kicky hookers sporting coral-coloured lipstick, Eddie’s favourite. Which he tries
to talk his wife into wearing each time he returns home.
High hopes for his girl though. Supreme Court judge, heart surgeon. He loves her so much. Each workday morning he straightens his tie in the kitchen while the toddler perches in her high chair at the newly bought dinette set and molests a soft-boiled egg. Who’s your handsome papa? he asks and his wife tsks. You! he trains the kid to gurgle. Smart like papa.
When she turns four—pretty as a princess—he takes her to visit her handsome papa’s office.
It is Saturday morning. His wife is home, miserably pregnant again. Eddie plants shorty in his desk chair where she can study the desk calendar featuring naked ladies while he telexes Denmark, Greece, Hong Kong. He takes her to lunch and flirts with the waitresses who tease him about his miniature girlfriend. He orders her strawberry shortcake and after her first two mouthfuls tells her she better watch her figure. He likes his ladies slim.
Sometimes as the girl grows bigger he juts hands to hips and cuts her off in the hallway or a corner of the living room. Or he lies in wait for her outside the bathroom door. Who’s your handsome papa? he demands as if posing a math question or quizzing her on her Prime Ministers.
John Wayne. Ol’ Blue Eyes and Dean. Ain’t that a kick in the pants? How the girl grows. And the mouth on her. What did you say, smart-mouth? Does someone need a good swift one? Don’t make me take my belt off.
Christ’s sake. The boat again. Nearly forgot. Where is he? Where was he? His wife. Not of his family’s faith but she converted—and boy did she cost him. Not cheap the hair and make-up and smart plaid pedal pushers and Jesus the hats. Starting with all the debt she’d acquired before the marriage, but he bailed her out. And then the newlywed needs—maple-veneer dresser set, navy Samsonite-luggage set. The loan with interest, never repaid, to her second-youngest brother the fired bank manager. Birthdays and Mother’s Day mother-of-pearl earrings and twelve-karat bracelet charms—Sears’ semi-best. Her biannual threats of divorce, venomous enough to scare the daylights out of Eddie. Did she ever cost him. On the eighth anniversary of her death, he tells his daughter this, wanting to believe they’re still close. Wanting her forgiveness, wanting her to understand him.
He can see from her face she’s angry or worse.
What did he do? Just tell him.
Already this is years ago. But he stamps his foot in the boat just thinking about it and another foot of water crests in. How’s that for a kick in the pants? After all he has done. The sacrifices. Scrimping to save for this brat’s education—and she refused science, turned up her nose at law. How can he understand? His daughter with her fierce loyalty to her bitter mother. That unhappy woman. Would it have hurt her to smile more? Like his own mother, who could not afford to raise him—unexpected youngest of five—and who entrusted his upbringing instead to his paternal grandparents. Okay, he can try to understand that. But how comprehend this? In the early days of Eddie’s marriage, when his own mother lay dying in a Saint John hospital bed—when he’d driven through the night from Montreal to see her and entered the hospital room—she lifted her worn head with its white hair like wires from the pillow to say, What are you doing here?
What is he doing here?
Where was he?
Eddie, Edwin, Isidore. Aunt Mary, wife or sister to Abe—the truth forever lost to the silence that enshrouds new-immigrant make-do—spoils the boy rotten. A new leather belt with a shiny belt buckle. A pair of creased seersucker shorts. Who’s the handsome little man? Who is never invited to the birthday parties of the rich Jews across the river, the ones who hold birthday parties. Boy who one afternoon returns from school to his grandfather’s house to find the police dismantling the backyard still. They arrest this enterprising Talmudic expert and small-time peddler. Born to a Lithuanian village once renowned for its Rabbinic scholars and a store of customs including exorcism—a village in which there now exists no record of Jews ever having lived, let alone thrived. Dirty bootlegging Jew. Most likely the police release Eddie’s formidable grandfather soon after the arrest. But of this Eddie has no memory except that of shame stuffing him like river mud until he is choked full and shut tight around it like a green-tinged clam.
Not that he has never unburdened.
Soon after he marries, he comes clean to his wife despite his abundant strayings—as if proud of them, he tells her everything, every dirty thing he does with whoever he finds close at hand. What else are women for but for Eddie to pour himself and all his longings into? Excepting his own mother. That one. And what can his wife do about any of what he tells her? Hightail it with her lousy grade-eight education back to her lout brothers and alky father and boozing surviving sister to unforgiving shithole Saint John? Eddie continues to tell his better half of his fucks and affairs, the still and arrest and the story of his original name, and forbids her to ever tell. Not the daughter. Not the son who arrives later.
But the years of infidelity and screaming, the wedding gown shredded by her own hand and tossed to the garbage, wear on Eddie’s wife. She does tell. Does she ever. Every dirty thing, every thing Eddie finds shameful about his past. Stoked with one pill after another—years of medications to ease the burdens—Eddie’s wife beckons the teenaged daughter to her one day. The daughter she and the husband, united in this at least, insist on calling Daughter.
Your father, the sickened woman rages. And suddenly her long-denied and frightful past—with Eddie and long before him, another story entirely, for another time and place—flies back inside her. She battles and hurts. Your goddamned Jew father, she lashes out. Think he’s so great?
When Eddie’s wife dies, she dies alone. Death from heart disease, not helped by the fact she is skeletal from years of under-eating. Which for years Eddie has encouraged. Alone from years of pushing away her children with her silences and angry, scattershot paroxysms and over sharing.
The night before she passes, the hospital calls to say she is fading fast. Eddie is confused, terrified. His wife, leave him? For real? Not possible. No!
The hospital calls early the next morning. Hurry, some woman, some nurse is saying—no, a lady doctor. There’s not much time, she tells him. She tells him, We’re holding your wife for now, but hurry.
Instead of a taxi, Eddie calls his son who lives two hours away. Eddie’s daughter lives in another country, already in her own story, one Eddie at eighty-one years of age cannot for the life of him read so he refrains from calling her. When he finally arrives at the hospital with his son, his wife is gone, may her memory be a blessing. Eddie and his son—a mother’s boy, as is often the way, though not in Eddie’s own case—weep in each other’s arms.
Years of guilt and shame follow. Eddie could have been nicer. Could have been there. Could’ve-should’ve, he thinks, weeping at three in the mornings, four. Cocooned in a grief monumental like no other’s. Oblivious that his daughter drifts in her own shit-stew—another long story—and his son drifts, but less so. There is also a grandson, an innocent, beloved by Eddie’s dead wife. By Eddie once as well but whose very existence is also eclipsed by Eddie’s mourning. Then suddenly remembered—the grandson screamed at days before his wedding to a biology teacher of Korean descent. Berated for the disrespect of not ordering a special dinner of salmon instead of chicken for Eddie and his new wife—Eddie having quickly remarried after his first wife’s death, to help manage his guilt and shame. This new wife is of all things old-ways orthodox and yet arm-twisted by Eddie into breaking the Sabbath so she can accompany him to the Catholic wedding service on a Saturday afternoon—he refuses to attend without her and the thought of him not attending breaks her good heart though she is helpless to prevent his railing. Anyway. Any idiot knows salmon is classier than chicken. Any idiot who doesn’t know—grandson or not—can kiss Eddie’s ass.
The wedding, dear Lord. Koreans on one side of the reception hall, whites on the other. Eddie sputters over the remains of his fish when an old friend of
his first wife pads over to pay a compliment to Eddie’s daughter—Eddie angry that his daughter, in town for the wedding, keeps her back to him. The spitting image of her mother? Eddie snorts. But my first wife was beautiful, Eddie yells, so loud that couples skirting the dance floor startle. What? he yells a moment later. Just kibitzing. What, can’t take a joke?
Did I ever tell you about our honeymoon? First one! First is always best. Hey, a joke, okay? Anyway we’re in New Hampshire and—
There is only one photograph, which he takes. His first wife sticks out her full breasts like he tells her to. Her belly high and round. Curvy you bet. You bet she likes to eat. And skinny him—she will carry her husband over the threshold of their first apartment that first day in their new life together in Montreal.
Years later she will starve nearly to death like he tells her to. What, eating again? Stop with it already!
And then she does starve to death.
Another way of saying congestive heart failure. Another way of saying starved heart. No salmon. Certainly no chicken.
This wife dies and dies alone for nearly nine years after her death. Then her boat drifts from this story.
Somewhere in all this, Eddie’s brother. Once upon a time, a Second World War hero. Ace figure skater who entertained the troops by skating in drag during war-time extravaganzas. Post-war he owns a children’s shoe store, for which Eddie disparages him, this hero who once saved a torpedoed cruiser by hurtling into the engine room and fixing—something. Eddie can never remember what. Though he does experience pride when his brother is featured late in life in newspaper articles about miraculously active seniors. Get a load of this. Figure skating at age eighty-five on the rink at Toronto City Hall’s Nathan Philips Square. Swimming at the Cassie Campbell Community Centre pool in Brampton at age ninety-one. Will you look at that, Eddie allows when his new wife shows him the pictures. Isn’t that something?