Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

by Bess Kalb

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Bess Kalb

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kalb, Bess, [date] author.

  Title: Nobody will tell you this but me : a true (as told to me) story / Bess Kalb.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. | “This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019026101 (print) | LCCN 2019026102 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525654711 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525654728 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Kalb, Bess, [date] | Grandmothers—Anecdotes. | Grandparent and child—Anecdotes.

  Classification: LCC HQ759.9.K36 2020 (print) | LCC HQ759.9 (ebook) | DDC 306.874/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019026101

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019026102

  Ebook ISBN 9780525654728

  Cover photograph by Mark Weiss / Getty Images

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  v5.4

  ep

  Thank you, Grandma.

  And for my son.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  MY MOTHER

  YOUR MOTHER

  OUR LIFE TOGETHER

  AFTER ME

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  List of Illustrations

  A Note About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  I COULD TELL THIS GIRL she’d marry the love of her life in a year. She’d leave the tenement in Brooklyn and see Cairo and Tuscany and China and Switzerland and Greece and Gaza and Paris—Paris more times than she could count. She’d visit her mother’s village in Belarus (then part of Russia), the village her mother fled when she was thirteen years old, and that night she’d order a Kir Royale at the hotel bar. She’d have two worshipful sons and one daughter.

  * * *

  · · ·

  Her daughter would be her spitting image, as if she were reborn. She’d teach her daughter to study harder than her sons. To speak louder. To make ’em laugh to make ’em relax. She’d read her daughter Emily Brontë at night. Her daughter would be in the first class of women admitted to Brown. Her daughter would graduate by twenty. Her daughter would say, “I want to be a doctor,” and she’d tell her, “Go be a doctor.” Her daughter had never taken science.

  * * *

  · · ·

  Her daughter became a doctor. Her daughter would have a daughter, me.

  * * *

  · · ·

  She and I would fall in love. We’d speak in songs: “My angel, my angel, you saved my life.” We’d have secrets and hiding places and code words. We’d talk about our hair until we fell asleep. We’d watch old movies and read new books. We’d cry for no reason. We’d cry for every reason all at once. We’d said everything that ever occurred to us to each other, even if it was nothing, or mean, or so mean it was crazy. We’d eat the same foods at exactly the same rates in exactly the same ways. We never said goodbye, always “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Three times. Never enough. “If you ever have a daughter,” she’d tell me, “I declare her a force.”

  MY FUNERAL

  It’s a terrible thing to be dead. Oh, how boring. How maddening. Nothing to do. Nothing to read. No one to talk to. And everyone’s a mess. Thank God for that, at least. The rabbi at the service didn’t know me from Adam. I didn’t pay attention. I was watching your grandfather. I always hated Hebrew—Bessie, there was too much of it!—but when everyone started the chants he finally stopped crying. Fine. Good for Hebrew. I will say this: I’m more upset than any of you.

  The worst part was the dirt.

  I never understood why they make the family shovel dirt onto you. What an awful thing. I appreciate you refused, Bessie. What’s next? They make the kids push the embalming fluid into my veins? Honestly, the whole thing was degrading. I’d kill your uncles for how much dirt they shoveled. Your grandfather seemed calmed by the ritual of it. And I believed him when he told me, as he poured it onto the coffin, “I wish it was me, Bob. I wish it was me.”

  My zayde, my father’s father, died at ninety-six. Older than me. He was drunk as a skunk! He went to temple that morning, drank his weight in the wine they had there—probably brought his own potato vodka, too. It could dissolve paint. Then he crossed the street and a bus hit him. Bam. Dead. What a way to go. When they crowded around his body, he was smiling. The bus driver says he smiled at him. Or at least that was my brother Georgie’s story. The funeral was a party at the temple. Everyone got drunk and walked home and lived to tell the tale.

  My coffin was perfect. Absolutely perfect! Although I could have done without the Jewish star. What am I? A Zionist? All of a sudden everyone becomes very religious on behalf of the deceased.

  I never understood why your mother went to that kibbutz. She had just been accepted to Columbia School of Architecture, and she had a bad feeling about the whole thing and decided to travel to Europe. So she flew to Paris and stayed with her friend Claire, who was an au pair for a wealthy family, and she got bored almost immediately and she met a few Jewish kids who said they were going to Israel to live in a commune and pick strawberries and smoke drugs. Heaven. So she bought a ticket to Tel Aviv the next day. She stayed in some terrible international hostel and asked around and ended up getting on a bus to a banana farm in the north along the Sea of Galilee.

  It wasn’t the type of kibbutz where they all danced around in peasant blouses and banged the tambourine and sang songs. It was a tough camp where the kids worked outside all day and drank arrak all night until they passed out in the fields and woke up with frost in their hair. Your mother arrived, and the old man in the front office had blue numbers down his arm and he gave her a job peeling potatoes in the mess hall. Every morning she’d wake up at dawn and put on rubber boots and stand in a cold vat full of potatoes and water, peeling them one by one and tossing them into another vat. Plunk. And in the afternoons she rode a tractor up and down the banana fields and picked the bunches in the sun, and her hands grew calloused and turned so brown people at the markets would speak to her in Arabic.

  To her, it was paradise. She didn’t have to think about architecture school. She didn’t have to plan. She didn’t have to worry about the boyfriend at Brown who’d asked her to get married. She didn’t have to do anything but peel potatoes and ride a tractor. It was the same every day, every night, for two months.

  * * *

  · · ·

  She sliced her hand open one morning and ended up in the medical tent, and the woman who patched her up was kind and funny and smart, and by the time she finished stitching her wound your mother had decided to become a doctor. Just like that.

  I knew she’d be flying back to New York by way of Paris, and in one of her letters she said she’d call on Labor Day when she got back to Claire’s apartment. Labor Day came and I didn’t hear from her. No call, no telex, nothing. I woke your
grandfather up at four the next morning and I said, “Something is the matter with Robin.” He told me not to worry. Ha! That’s the last time he ever did that.

  On a whim, I called the American Hospital of Paris. That’s the family rule: if anything happens to you when you go abroad, you go straight to the American Hospital. Whatever it costs. So I called and I said, “Robin Bell’s room please,” and I’ll never forget what I heard next: “Just a moment.” The longest moment of my life. And the nurse picked up and brought your mother the phone, and she said, “Mom…” I hung up and hit your grandfather on the head.

  Then I got my handbag.

  I got in the car and drove it to Kennedy Airport. I left the car at the curb and walked up to the ticket counter and said, “One way to Charles de Gaulle,” and they said, “Today’s flight is completely full, but you can go tomorrow,” and I said, “I need to go now.” I took out my wallet and started counting out bills. I paid double, all in cash, and sat in the jump seat next to the stewardesses in the galley. I don’t think I blinked the whole flight. I was by your mother’s side in eight hours. She had viral encephalitis. It was in her spine. They said she might never walk. I looked at her and I said, “Robin, you get up right now and you walk.”

  So she did.

  * * *

  · · ·

  Do you know what my zayde used to say? He would look at me and say, “Bubbalah, when the earth is cracking behind your feet, you go forward. One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other.”

  { part one }

  MY MOTHER

  THE FRUIT OF THE VINE

  MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME EXACTLY ONE THING and it’s how to make brisket.

  It doesn’t take a genius.

  The key is you just leave it alone. You put the side of beef in a large pot, pour in whatever—red wine, tomatoes from a can, some carrots cut up, a half an onion, a fistful of kosher salt, a potato for your grandfather—and let it sit on a very low flame. I’d pour in some water if it got too dry, but otherwise, it required very little effort. You could forget about it for the entire day and there it would be. Don’t say I never taught you anything.

  How you loved my brisket. You didn’t care if it was tough. You loved the taste of the gristle on the edges and the char from the bottom of the pot. Before you came over to the house in Ardsley for Passover or break the fast or what have you, you knew there would be brisket. You’d talk about it like a fiend. “Is it time for brisket yet?” “Grandma, is there going to be enough brisket?” Always with the appetite. Your parents never made beef because of your father’s cholesterol, so you were probably very anemic. You needed the blood running through you.

  It’s my mother’s recipe, more or less. She wasn’t religious, but she felt it was very important to have everyone over to the house in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn on Friday nights for Shabbat dinner. There wouldn’t always be beef, but there’d be liver or sweetbreads or tongue. If you stew it long enough, what’s the difference?

  My brothers were all grown up and out of the house, and every week she’d invite them with their wives and their children to her dining room table—the same table where we were all born. She’d preside over the whole thing. She’d stand up, bang her fist on the table, take one of my father’s matchbooks from her apron pocket, and strike a match. You could hear a pin drop. She’d lean her enormous breasts over the table and light two long candles in their brass holders she brought from Russia and shake out the match.

  Then she’d put a kitchen cloth over her head. Like a looming ghost, she’d very slowly lift her hands up in front of her eyes and chant with her head bowed, her hands lilting back and forth with the incantations.

  “Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvo-sav”—which was incorrect, it’s b’mitzvo-tav with a t not -sav with an s, but that’s how it was in the Yiddish pronunciation—“vitzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbos.”

  Then still under the cloth she’d say to my brother, “Georgie-zun, vayne!”

  Georgie would wink at me and foist up a cup of wine, his chest all puffed out. He’d mouth along dramatically like an opera singer, and I’d try not to laugh as she continued on in her trance.

  “Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, boreh p’ri hagafen.”

  Blessed are you, Adonai, for giving us the fruit of the vine.

  Imagine calling a jug of my zayde’s forty-cent kosher wine “the fruit of the vine.” Hardly.

  Then she’d take the cloth off her head and fold it back up on the table, just as her mother had done before her, and hers before her, and hers before her, and so on. And there she’d stand, solemn as a statue, beholding all her creation.

  * * *

  · · ·

  So decades later I’d have the family over for Seder and we’d all be at my house in Ardsley in our nice clothes under the crystal chandelier. I’d stand at the head of the table and everyone would shut up. I’d light the candles in the same brass holders and I’d blow out the match and put my cloth napkin over my head. I didn’t say the prayers—I never really learned the words. But I hummed softly to myself and rocked back and forth under the veil. You asked me what I was saying. “Rose, Rose, Rose.” My mother’s name.

  Bessie, you are the only daughter of an only daughter of an only daughter. The fruit of the vine.

  MY MOTHER

  My mother was always at the movies.

  She was an enormous Russian immigrant in a falling-down house right by the shipyard in Greenpoint and her English wasn’t great, but she’d find a nickel and go to the theater and sit in the dark all day.

  In the summers she’d go for the air-conditioning. She’d watch the same movie over and over until the sun went down and you could breathe the air again. Then she’d come home and make dinner, humming the musical score. She’d sway from side to side in front of the stove—she wasn’t graceful—but she would transport herself. I always knew when she’d been at the movies that day, because she’d be in an elevated mood, everything heightened. She’d embrace my father when he walked in the door all covered in sweat and dirt from the picket line, swept up in the romance. “A gut ovnt, Samuel!” Good evening, Samuel. He didn’t know what hit him.

  She adored Buster Keaton. She insisted he was Jewish. She read the sections in the paper about the movie stars, the glamour. The women in their silk gowns and ermine boas. She’d impersonate the way they talked, and she was a large, imposing woman—she gave birth to five children on the dining room table because she didn’t want to ruin the bed linens—but she carried herself with a certain air.

  She’d tell me, “If you’re having a rotten day, go buy yourself an ice cream soda and a new hat.”

  And that’s what I would do.

  So my mother was at the movies and my father was always on the picket line. Do you know why they call it Union Square? It’s where the Socialist union organizers would go and stand on their soapboxes—real soapboxes—and scream about workers’ rights. These were the days when you could die in a fire at your factory job in the United States and no one would bat an eye. My father didn’t work, though. When we were desperate and out of money, he’d paint houses. That’s what was listed on the census as his official profession: “House painter.” Ha. He was a professional complainer. A protester. And he petitioned. He’d take the bus into Manhattan and sleep on the steps of City Hall until someone would talk to him and look at his petition or hear his rallying cry or read his list of demands on behalf of other men. We always had people staying in our house, sleeping on the floor. My mother could barely feed us kids, and my father would come with four, five union men and they’d say, “What’s for dinner, Mrs. Otis?” She’d always say, “You tell me!” But somehow there would always be food. There would be blankets. There’d be conversation that lasted all night. We got by.

  It�
��s no wonder my mother needed to get out of the house. She thought she was done with babies when she had me. She was forty years old. Can you believe it?

  She didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant with me until the very end, because she wasn’t entirely sure I’d be alive. I was very quiet in the womb. My brothers were so loud I was just in there listening, already enamored with them.

  When I was born, the twins Georgie and Leo washed me off in the sink. I was their pet.

  * * *

  · · ·

  I almost died once before.

  I was a very little girl, ten years old. And I was in the hospital with meningitis. In those days, there wasn’t much anyone could do. We waited it out. And all four of my brothers never left my side. They were all grown up. David and Jesse had children of their own, but they slept in the hallway and on the floor of the hospital in shifts. They were certain I’d die. My hearing had gone in my right ear, so they read to me on my left side. One day, Leo leaned over and he said, “Bobby, if you die, I’ll kill you.” And I laughed so hard I coughed up bile. But I heard him loud and clear. I went home a week later, on Purim. Every. Flat. Surface. Of. My. Bedroom. Was covered in hamantaschen. There must have been two hundred cookies. Apricot, poppy seed, fig—all the best flavors. I cried and they cried, and we invited the neighborhood over and we ate.

  Did you know my name wasn’t supposed to be Barbara?

  It should have been Gloria. The afternoon I was born, my mother said, “Georgie, go down to the Social Security office and register the baby. Gloria Otis.” And Georgie didn’t like that name—too Jewish. So he and Leo and Jesse and David talked, and they all went down to the grand building on Fulton Street and registered my birth: Barbara Dorothy Otis.