Chains Around the Grass (10 page)

“Enough!” Morris warned. “Silence! A little respect!” He picked up the plate of matzot, removing the satin cover.

Haw lachmaw anya di achloo avahatana be’ar’a dimitzraim. Kol dichphin yasay ve’yachool, kol ditrich yasay ve’yifsach. Hashatah hacha lashana haba’ah b’ar’ah d’Yisrael.

Hashatah avday, lashanah haba’ah b’nai chorin.

“I think we should say it again in English. For the kids,” Dave said apologetically.

Morris frowned, then shrugged. “So you do it.”

Dave looked around him, uncertain but pleased. “This,” he pointed to the matzot, “is the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate in Egypt. All who are in want, sit and eat with us. All who are in need, stay and be satisfied. This year we are here, next year may we be in Israel. This year we are slaves. Next year may we be free men.”

“Now one of the kids has to ask The Four Questions! Jesse?” Jesse looked down, shaking his head.

“Nu. It’ll be good practice for the Bar Mitzvah…”

“He started late, Morris. His Hebrew’s not so good,” Ruth interceded, seeing Jesse’s face cloud dangerously.

“A Bar Mitzvah boy who can’t read Hebrew? So how will you read the haftorah?”

“A shandah,” Harriet clucked.

“I’ll know it!” Jesse replied, too loudly.

“Don’t get excited, be a nice boy,” Harriet warned. “I told you. He’s getting shikker.”

“I’ll read the questions,” Ruth said shyly. “Just like when I was a little girl in my father’s house. Remember Morris? Ma nishtanah halaylah hazeh, micol halalos, micol halalos….” The room grew quiet as she read the words with uncharacteristic confidence and pleasure.

Then, finally, after they had burned their lips and the inside of their cheeks and tongues with freshly grated horseradish that made their eyes smart, and ingested unconscionable quantities of colonclogging matzos, the food came: hot chicken soup with matzah balls, boiled chicken, sweet carrots, potato kugel. They ate and ate, feeling the torture was over, the fun about to begin. Morris, in his own home, feeling magnanimous and hospitable, leaned back comfortably.

“So Dave, how’s business?” “Couldn’t be better, Morris.”

“It’s risky. You should get a good job, move back to Brooklyn. The commuting out to Rockaway is terrible. Even the subway is double fare it’s so far out.”

Dave shrugged. “I couldn’t do what you do, Morris, live in Brooklyn, work in the same job for twenty years. See the same people every day until they bury me.”

“When I retire, I get a union pension on top of Social Security. You got some kind of insurance?” Morris bristled.

“I don’t believe in it. They’re all crooks, those insurance guys. You pay in and pay in but then, to get them to shell out, that’s another story. A man has to make his own insurance,” he tapped his chest, “have his own business. You can never make it on a weekly paycheck.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a worker,” Morris’ piqued voice rose. “Save a little, watch it, put some away for the kids…”

“It depends on what you want…” Dave said squirming, trying to end the conversation peacefully.

“And what you want is to live with the shvartzes out there in the slums?!” Morris challenged, the wine finally hitting the jackpot.

Dave shrugged off Ruth’s restraining hand, the blood boiling up into his face. “I’d rather have that temporary,” he said, beginning softly, but growing louder and more insistent with every word, “than some stinking, roach-infested, rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn permanent!”

The dishes suddenly stopped in mid-clatter, and voices lowered, making his seem even louder. “And some gold-plated watch from a fat-ass boss like your Weinstein when I’ve got one foot in the grave! You never had a good idea in your life, Morris. That’s why you’re just a worker and will never be a boss. To be a worker you didn’t have to come to America!”

“Dave, please!” Ruth begged, laying her hand over his. He looked up, suddenly aware of the shocked, disapproving stares. He swallowed, managing a faint, apologetic smile.

“Look…it’s not important. It doesn’t mean anything. You might even be right, Morris. Who knows?”

Morris didn’t seemed to hear him at all, standing motionless as if struck by a sudden illness that made his body shiver, his skin transparent. He avoided Dave’s eyes, staring at the rug until Harriet touched his arm and whispered: “Sha, sha. It’s Seder night. Family. Go. Finish.” He sat down heavily. “In my own house!? To be insulted at my own Seder table…!?”

“He didn’t mean it, Morris! It’s nothing! Don’t make a tzimmes.

Go, go finish!” A chorus of voices urged him.

“Yeah, Morris. Sorry. You know, I don’t mean anything by it,” Dave began, already regretting opening his mouth.

“Aach, please. It’s family! Forgotten already,” another relative chimed in.

“The afikomen,” Ruth said quietly. “Morris. The children.”

A friendly moan went around the table. The older cousins smirked and Sara suddenly remembered the game. One piece of matzah was hidden and until it was found, the Seder could not continue. She should have searched for it earlier and then any toy she wanted would have been hers as ransom. But now it was too late.

“It’s mine!” Jesse announced, holding the prize high above his head. Shouts of adult laughter and childish disappointment went up. “I want a…” he surveyed the faces around him, calculating, “a fishing rod…and a record player…”

“Oh, you hear that? A real businessman!” a cousin mocked. Jesse reddened, then smiled. “You want to finish this thing,”

he waved it tantalizingly, “and go to sleep?”

“Yeah. Better give him what he wants,” Aunt Harriet agreed. “It’s late already.”

Morris nodded. “All right. A fishing rod. After yonti?. ” “I’ll take care of it, Morris,” Dave offered.

Morris pointedly ignored him.

“Time for Elijah,” someone said, and an older cousin went to open the door. Everyone stood up silently staring at the large silver goblet in the middle of the table. A slight breeze made the candles flicker.

“There’s less,” Aunt Harriet whispered. “Look, it’s been tasted!” “Yes,” Ruth agreed. “A drop less.”

“Who drank?” Sara tugged at her mother’s skirt.

“Elijah the Prophet. He comes Seder night in a flaming chariot to announce that finally the Messiah will come. Next year we will all meet in Jerusalem.”

A chorus of “God Willing” and “Amen” rang out, along with laughter.

Were they making fun of her? Was it like Santa Claus who never came? Sara wondered. She saw the wine glisten in the cup and reached out to drink from the same place where the angel’s flaming lips had rested. It was cold, and a little damp. But the wine went down her throat like fire.

Chapter eight

Dad?” Jesse whispered loudly, hoping his father was already awake, but not at all guilty about getting him out of bed if he wasn’t. A promise—even if no one remembered it but himself—was still a promise. He listened for the soft shuffle of feet or a low moan and blankets rustling, but heard only his parents’ syncopated breathing ?owing without interruption from behind the closed bedroom door.

Damn! Now what?

He hesitated, his hand fidgeting with the doorknob, but pulled away. They would be lying there together. It had never bothered him before, but lately he had developed a squeamish delicacy about his parents’ bodies, lowering his eyes if his mother’s loose bathrobe accidentally parted, feeling queasy and unnatural coming upon his father after a shower. Only recently had he realized his mother was actually a woman with breasts and… (No! That was as far as it went). He fought equally hard against the vision of his father’s bulge straining against his pajamas, frightened and ashamed of these strange new visions, this unwanted knowledge.

So, he stood there, unmoving, paralyzed by the unseen vision of what lay on the other side of his parents’ bedroom door, not knowing what to do next, until the solution suddenly dawned on him.

“Sara! Get up!” He shook her rudely, until she swam up from the depths of sleep, her eyelids fluttering, struggling to dive back under. “Come on! For once in your life, do me a favor!”

“What?” she whimpered.

He shoved his hand quickly over her mouth. “Shhh. Just be quiet, will you? Nobody is doing nothing to you, OK?”

She pried the bony lock from her lips. Recognizing it was only

Jesse, her terror transformed into fury.

“Lemme alone!!” Her eyes were hot slits.

Go ask a face like that for a favor. His heart sank. “Listen,” he began hopelessly, his voice measured and cajoling, “can you just go into Daddy’s room and tell him that it’s time to get up if we’re going fishing, okay?

“Fishing?” She sat up.

“Come on! I’ll do you something good. I swear. I’ll…I’ll,” his imagination faltered. She was a strange little creature to him. A girl. “I’ll let you watch Queen for a Day and Mighty Mouse—that is, if the Dodgers aren’t playing…” Watching the spark of interest in her eyes fade, he rushed on recklessly. “You can come too!”

“Fishing?”

“That is, if you want,” he hedged, filled with immediate regret. That was all he needed. Sara tagging along! Then something else occurred to him, and he smiled. “Sure you can. Just do like I tell you, all right? Go in and wake up Daddy.” He laughed silently, watching her throw off the covers and rush past him into the hall straight into his parents’ bedroom. He heard muffled groans, and soon his father showed up, sleepy and disheveled.

“You didn’t forget, Dad, did you?” “What?”

“Fishing. Remember what you said last Sunday?” Jesse read the answer in the twinge of startled recognition that widened his father’s eyes.

“What do you think I am, huh?! Forgot? Who forgot! A promise is a promise is a promise, right?”

Jesse followed his father’s reluctant gaze toward the darkened windows. Outside, trees bent in a harsh wind.

“Looks pretty cold,” Dave began doubtfully. “I thought for sure, after Passover, it would be nice weather already…”

“But it ain’t raining. Remember you said cold is nothing. You said the fish bite better in the cold when the bay is empty…”

“Awright, awright,” he said, holding up his palms in surrender. “I said, so I said. Eat a good breakfast and then let’s get this show on the road.”

Jesse struggled into his warm woolen socks. They were too small, he realized with pride. Way too small. He could feel his father’s happiness each time he grew an inch, his young shoulders inching up past his dad’s. It had been so long since they’d been on their own somewhere. There was always somebody else hanging around: his mother, Sara, the baby, the cab. There were so many things he wanted to talk about man to man. Things he didn’t want his mother or sister to hear. He wasn’t sure he’d have the guts to ask straight out. But he thought that, maybe, if they were alone his father might ask the right questions, like he used to, years ago.

Behind the counter in the candy store, in those years before Sara had come along and put the knot between them, slackening their bond, he and his father had been like two ends of a seesaw, balanced, reciprocal parts of one whole, sensitive to the other’s slightest mood change.

Sometimes he felt his father pulling hard, trying to make things come tight and smooth again between them. But so often Sara was always there, in the middle, making it impossible.

“What, in this weather?” he heard his mother say. There was the usual rise and fall of voices: his father’s deep, sincere bass, his mother’s hesitant soprano that soon faltered and fell silent, allowing his father’s voice to go on alone with convincing assurance.

He was too excited to eat, but his father’s uncompromising gaze beat him back into his chair, and he understood that this was the one thing his father had conceded to his mother. The stuff was awful! Sticky and scorched and tasteless like everything else his mother cooked. So he stirred it around with the spoon, trying to reduce the amount by getting some of it to stick to the sides of the bowl, so as not to hurt her feelings. Out of the corner of his eye, he studied his father: the face rugged with stubble, the happy, expectant eyes, the red flannel shirt.

He loved that shirt. It was his father’s “work” shirt, which meant that he put it on for hammering, oiling and fixing—everything except going to work. It was the shirt that meant he was home with them. But the thing he loved most were his father’s boots: heavy rubber with fifteen manly metal clasps, disaster-ready, wading-intodanger boots. He even forgave his father the embarrassingly baggy woolen pants because of the boots. He longed for a pair just like them instead of the flimsy kiddy galoshes he struggled to pull over his own shoes. Sometimes, secretly, he’d try on his father’s boots. But as tall as he was, they were still way, way too big.

But this morning, even that didn’t bother him. It was all OK. They were going fishing. Him and his dad. He was happy. He found the pails and the new rod, bought by Uncle Morris (who had tried to talk him out of it and into an American Savings Bond). Jesse held it reverently.

“Ready?” his father said, standing by the door. Jesse nodded, brushing past him out the door, a feeling of strange unease making him quicken his movements.

“Daddy!!” Sara suddenly wailed.

“Dad, come on! The elevator’s here already!” he said urgently. Dave hesitated, picking up the child who was by now in tears.

“Let it go, Jess. Just a minute, okay?”

Jesse watched the door drop back into place and the machine slide down, lost to him.

“Jess, you wanna come here a second?”

He saw his sister sitting on his father’s lap, her hands possessively around his neck.

“Did you tell her she could come?” his mother accused. “I said…that is…we had this deal…about television…” “Fibber!”

“You want to come, Saraleh,” Jesse heard his father say caressingly. His heart sank.

Sara nodded solemnly.

“Everything,” Ruth’s voice rang out with great conviction, “everything I give in to. But not this time. Not in this weather.”

Jesse’s heart rose. It was what he’d counted on! His mother to the rescue, like those times long ago when she had swooped down on his tormentors in Brooklyn alleyways.