Beyond the Pale: A Novel (30 page)

“Probably. The right book at the right time can change many minds—that’s why we have study groups. But you, what work are we going to find for you?”

She took me into her dark green eyes, measuring me. I stood up a little straighter. I’d been growing lately; everyone remarked on how tall I was going to be. “I want to work in a bindery, but they say you have to belong to the binders’ union to get in and I don’t know how to join.”

“A bindery. That’s not so easy but it can be done.” Lena considered. “Come back by the League headquarters tomorrow and I’ll see if I can find something for you. But don’t tell anyone else—we’re not an employment bureau!”

There was no bindery work but Lena got me a job stripping tobacco leaves for a cigar manufacturer, Polstein’s, on Grand. A block shorter walk and $5 a week to start. At least in cigars a girl could move up, maybe get to be a buncher or even a roller. The good rollers got $12 a week.

If We Were Really
Free to Choose

D
EAR
E
STHER AND
S
ARAH,

In the American papers we read about the Saint Petersburg massacre—now the Tsar kills Russians as well as Jews. I worry about you all this Pesach. I hope you are continuing safe and well. It took me so long to write because I know you’re waiting for me to tell what America is like but still I cannot say. Almost everyone in Kishinev would fit into Essex Street where we live, that’s how crowded. The dust of the world comes to New York on the feet of immigrants, so it’s a dirty place and no trees. I miss our yard, the water pump—what a funny thing to miss. Here the water is inside the house. We are on the fourth floor so it’s good not to have to pump. There are carriages that move without horses—the new automobile. When I saw one myself for the first time, I ran down the block following it. Then the driver saw me and started to go so fast I couldn’t keep up. Do you have them in Kishinev yet?

In New York so much is going on that every day the street is a carnival, like Purim. But I am always working and I don’t see much. First I was making boxes in a factory, but we had a strike. If you see Daniel, tell him I was one of the organizers. There are many strikes here—you could be just walking in your neighborhood and bump into one. Now I am stripping tobacco, which makes my hands brown but I get $5.50 a week. Don’t think this is so much. In America you pay for everything. I am saving to get Sarah a ticket, second class.

The Petrovskys are a fine family. We all contribute to send Aaron to school to be a lawyer maybe. Ephraim changed his name to Harry but only Rose and I call him that. Rose and I learn English at night. We are the best students. It is very tiring to work and study, not enough hours left for sleep.

Please let me know you’re staying safe in this troubled time. I send you many blessings.

Remember your sister across the water,

Chava

“Look at your hands,” Rose said as we hurried to class. Every school night I met her in front of Fine’s where she’d found a job sewing fancy undershirts after being laid off when white goods got slow. At Fine’s they would usually let girls under sixteen leave by 6:30 if they had night school. When they didn’t, the girls had to work until 10:00 or 11:00, in busy season, without extra pay—the older workers too.

We regularly ran up the stairs of Essex Street, washed our faces quickly and ate bread with boiled onions, kissed Aunt Bina, grabbed a piece of fruit and got to the high school by 7:30. Rose had been out of work from February until April and was ahead of me in her studies, but I was catching up.

“What’s wrong with my hands?” I held my left hand up under the faint glow of the gas globes over the pawn shop.

“They’re getting all stained and they stink from tobacco.”

“Can you say that in English?” I was trying to joke, but I stuck both hands in my skirt pockets, squeezing my reader under my arm. “Your hands aren’t so beautiful either anymore.” I sucked my cheeks in, ashamed at criticizing her.

“At least I manage to keep mine clean,” Rose came right back.

“Rose, how come we’re fighting? Something bad happen at work?” I stopped to look at her. The smudges of last evening light were beginning to blend into the smudges of the tenements. The smudges reflected the circles under her eyes. “Nu?”

“We’ll be late for class.” She hurried up the steps. Usually I had to drag her up after me. She always wanted to skip “just this once”—to get an eggcream from Mrs. Bergman or hang around the doors of the Yiddish theaters, watching the people go in. Now I had to run to follow her. I didn’t mind. English class revived me. Sometimes after pulling the stems out of the big tobacco leaves all day I just wanted to put a cold rag on my face and sleep, forget how my stomach hurt and my hands burned. But when we entered the high school I got a little thrill from the echoes of learning.

The girls who came in the day left their voices in the cool hallways, calling back and forth to each other, having their private jokes and important heartaches. I saw them the afternoon Lena took me to the League office, almost a year ago now. They wore clean new dresses, and you could tell they wore corsets to give them an American figure; maybe Rose had made their underwear.

“Just summer school,” Lena had said. Just! Now I wished I could go to school all day like them, even for a summer. Aaron failed the first entrance exam for City College, so Isadore told him he had to quit his job and study everything, not just English, in order to get in next term. I wouldn’t have failed. But I gave Aunt Bina all of my pay except a dollar I kept for my own expenses, and every week I saved twenty-five cents for Sarah’s ticket in a torn stocking stuffed in a hole in the mattress.

Rose managed to get a seat on the second row aisle. She turned and gave me her I’m-perfectly-happy-now smile and looked away before she could see that I was giving her my you’re-going-to-tell-me-what’s-going-on expression. I sat three seats away from her. The room was always full, sometimes there weren’t chairs for all of us. It was mostly Jewish girls in our class, a few Italians, two older women who always sat together up front. They owned a grocery store on Houston Street.

“Miss Meyer, would you spell ‘appointment,’ please?”

I wasn’t paying attention and the girl beside me giggled when I stared at the teacher. “What?”

Mrs. Kaufman half-closed her eyelids. You wouldn’t have thought a teacher could look as weary as somebody who worked in a factory. “Maybe next time you’ll be awake for class,” she said—sharp words from a patient voice. I hoped she remembered I usually paid good attention.

When class was out, Rose walked close beside me, quietly. It was dark and there were no gas lamps in the middle of the street, only at the intersections. We could usually pick our way easily from the lights in some shop windows, but tonight the shadows from the awnings and in the stairwells gave me a chill.

“Okay,” I said, one of my favorite American expressions. “But I’ve got to know what’s wrong by you.” I took her hand so she couldn’t run ahead. Of course, by nine o’clock we were too tired to run anywhere.

“The foreman called me into his office—,” she said.

“They don’t like your work?”

“Oh, he likes my work just fine. And my hair, he likes, he wants to make sure I have it tucked up good, it shouldn’t get caught in a machine.”

Even on the gray street I could see a bitterness in Rose I had never seen before. I looked at the dark, thick braids circling her head, like a nest you could lay your heart in. “Did he touch you?”

“He tried. I ran to the bathroom and locked the door. It’s a pit of filth in there, I can tell you. He’s outside yelling he’s going to dock me $1 for using the bathroom without authorization. We’ve got to pay for our needles and thread, now we’ve got to pay for his ‘authorization.’” She kicked a wad of paper into the gutter.

“He’s a bully and a lecher. You can’t go back.”

“I’m not losing almost a week’s wages.” Rose’s jaw clenched.

I took her arm and could feel the clench in her whole body. “You think he’s going to just forget about bothering you?”

“I don’t know. There’s lots of girls—maybe he’ll pick on someone else.”

“Oy, Rose, why wish that son of the devil on another girl?” She turned to look at me and I realized she was scared. Sorry for what she had just said, and scared. I was tall, my face was long, my breasts small, my hands smelled and I always had my guard up. But Rose—maybe this wasn’t the first time it had happened to her, just the first I noticed enough to make her tell.

“What can I do?” She said, pulling her arm loose from mine.

“Don’t go back. I’ll go by Fine’s in the morning and tell them you’re sick and if you don’t get better I’ll be by to pick up your wages on Saturday. Monday you’ll get another job. They say all the sewing shops are hiring now.”

“You’ll do that for me?”

“Of course, it’s nothing. You can’t let that bully treat you like a whore.”

“Maybe it’s my fault, I did something—”

“That sounds like Aaron’s talk, ‘A woman is the downfall of every man.’ If that were true, why would they say ‘fallen woman’ but not ‘fallen man’? You can see how the men are still on their feet, while it looks to me that it’s women and girls who get knocked down.”

Rose pulled one shoulder up to her ear and dropped it. “What will I tell Mama?”

“The truth.”

“But maybe she won’t let me work anymore.”

“She’ll let you. It’s busy season and you can make more in the factory than doing piecework at home. Besides, if you quit Fine’s, she’ll know you can stand up for yourself—she’ll trust you more.”

We shuffled up the four flights slowly, sighing at every cockroach that skittered out of our way. We had been going to move to one of the new buildings where they had hot water and toilets in every apartment, but Isadore was out of work after the Christian New Year, and then Rose. For awhile it was just my wages, Bina’s piecework and whatever Harry gave in. He said he couldn’t just hand over his whole pay envelope like a girl; he had expenses. So instead of moving we got a boarder, Leon. He slept on a cot across the kitchen from Aaron and Harry, snoring worse than anyone. It was a busy season in tailoring too, and often Leon wasn’t back until midnight.

Aunt Bina took her thimble off when we told her why Rose had to quit. She looked at her daughter. “You’re all right?”

“Yes, Mama, I didn’t let him touch me.” Her voice was so quiet I wondered that Bina could hear.

“Overnight, rent and girls grow,” she sighed. She looked at Rose and then me, then back at Rose, starting with her shoes and going up to her hair. “You promise me, Rosele, no matter what, if this happens anywhere, any time, you always quit. I should have both my arms cut off before I’ll see my daughter reduced to the level of the prostitutes on Allen Street. You promise?”

Rose looked towards the greasy pane of glass in the window and promised. Then Aunt Bina got up and made us both bowls of sour cream with a banana sliced in. She saw how we bolted dinner before school and didn’t want us to go to bed hungry. Or she wanted an excuse to keep us close to her, as if her night-time indulgence would protect us during the day. I felt too tired to eat and pushed the slices around in my bowl. Two years ago I’d never seen a banana. Rose knew it had become one of my favorite foods.

“Finish it,” she said. How she spoke gave me a flicker of warmth in my breast. I turned to show her how I was spooning the bananas into my mouth, but she was staring at the bottom of her dish.

Aunt Bina started up the treadle again. Rose had been lucky to get jobs in the bigger shops where they didn’t make you bring your own machine. Maybe in the smaller shops the bosses wouldn’t be so quick to make advances. Probably the size didn’t matter. If I thought Rose was pretty, so would men, and they could always find a reason to keep her late, alone.

The needle seemed to roar through Bina’s piecework. Harry had dipped into our savings to get her the sewing machine; before that she did hand finishing and fancy embroidery but there was more money in volume. Harry shleped her piecework up the stairs himself, acting as if he were the world’s most thoughtful son. Yet he never said exactly where he was working anymore. Rose and I thought he was trying to become a contractor, starting with his own mother.

“How much does Harry give you for those children’s trousers?” I asked, picking up Rose’s dish to wash it.

“What, you’re going to organize me in my own house?” Aunt Bina didn’t bother to look up.

“I just want to know.”

“Enough. I think of it as payment for the sewing machine and I want to help him out a little.”

I wasn’t sure how she managed to think that she—we—hadn’t already paid for the sewing machine. “Help him out? What kind of help could he need? He lives here, eats here—”

“He wants to rent a little shop on Delancey, see if he can start his own business.”

“He’s going to be a sweatshop boss?” Rose said, coming out of the far place she’d gone while eating.

“So he wants to get ahead. Is that a crime? If he does well, we’ll all do well.”

“But in the meantime he gets ahead on your shoulders,” Rose said. I translated this out of Yiddish in my mind and realized she had made an English joke. But it was too late to explain.

I dreamed I was outside our house in Kishinev. The street was empty. I walked inside. I could see every rock in the wall, every piece of furniture, the splinters in our long kitchen table, the stained sideboard that came from my Bobe Malka’s mother. I was looking down at the floor and then I heard my mama humming. She sat at the end of the table, braiding challah loaves. I ran to embrace her but she put out her hand to stop me. “Remember, you must make the offering.” When she opened the oven, smoke poured out. As I reached for her my hands disappeared into a cloud of smoke. No one was there.

“Mama!”

I was embarrassed to wake up like that. It was nothing that Rose did. If I roused her, she rolled towards me, her long braid flipping over her shoulder, and stroked my cheek. I thought of the challahs. The bed only had the sharp, familiar smells of our sweat and the kerosene we used to kill bugs. Nothing was burning.