Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (20 page)

It was Mr. Horton, who worked for the Company. He was pulling a black girl into the woods, and one of his hands was over her mouth. They could see the pistol tucked into his pants, the way all the boss’s men carried their pistols. Mr. Horton yelled at the girl, “Shut up,” he told her. He was pulling at her clothes, and pulling at her.

She cried and slapped the air. She was a big girl, older than Angelina, and when she turned just so they saw who it was:
Lecie Titus, Birdie’s cousin. Birdie rose up on her knees, as if she would stand up and go help her. But instead she put her hand on Isola’s arm, and Isola looked at her, and there was nothing they could do.

Mr. Horton pulled his pistol out of his pants. He tossed his hat and pistol on the grass and the gun shone there, silver. And then he pushed Lecie onto the ground and climbed on top of her. When she cried out he slapped her face, and then he kept his hand on her neck.

Isola stared, horrified. She knew what was happening, though no one had ever told her about such things. She felt Birdie’s fingers pressing into her arm. All she could think was if she had stayed home and done what her mother had told her maybe this wouldn’t be happening to Lecie. She thought of sewing, how she hated it, but how she would learn to love it, and would help her mother take in sewing and they would make a lot of money and save it all and then go back to Italy like her father said.

Mr. Horton stood up and wiped his hand across his face. He picked up his hat and the pistol and pushed the pistol back into his pants. “Get to work,” he told Lecie, “before your whole family catches hell.” Lecie stood up, whimpering. She moved away from him, and then she turned and ran, the back of her ragged dress wet and covered with mud. Horton bent over and brushed at his knees. He put the hat back on his head and walked out of the woods.

Birdie and Isola stayed crouched behind the bushes, hardly daring to breathe. Finally they looked at each other. Birdie’s eyes were bright with tears that hadn’t fallen. The girls stood slowly, keeping their eyes on the spot where it had happened. The woods were so quiet. The birds sang, the woods smelled rich and muddy and green, and everything was so peaceful. The pond lay still and peaceful and white under the green branches. Everything was rich and beautiful. But as they
moved closer to the pond, they saw the matted spot on the ground where Lecie had lain with Horton on top of her. And then near the pond there was the little levee they had built, with the silver fish still in it, but most of the water was gone. The fish’s mouth moved slowly, with long rests in between.

Isola picked up the fish. It felt dry, and pieces of grass and twigs stuck to it. She threw it back into the pond and it floated. They ran out of the woods as fast as they could.

There was no one on the road or in the field across from the trees. The sun burned down on them, and the air was heavy with the humidity that seemed to rise right up out of the damp earth.

They headed back toward the Titus land, where people were working. They saw Lecie out there, her head just showing above the tall green cotton. She was leaning against a
zoppa
, standing still, not chopping the weeds. Others worked around her, nipping off broken branches, chopping at weeds, humming, calling to each other. But Lecie stood off by herself, looking at the ground.

Birdie broke away from Isola and ran down the road.

“Birdie Hall, ain’t you got home yet?” old Lud Titus called to her. Isola tried to follow Birdie, but then stopped. She knew she had to get home herself or she would be in big trouble. “Wait, Birdie,” she called.

Birdie turned and looked back at Isola. “Stupid,” she called over her shoulder. “Stupid Dago.” Then she ran home.

LIZ ROSENBERG

When I was a child, Christmas was a borrowed holiday. It wasn’t for Jews. We couldn’t live with it, and yet we couldn’t seem to live without it. We drove in slow, loopy circles on December evenings to admire our Christian neighbors’ lights. The green Buick dipped and swayed along the streets, like a boat skimming waves, while my father sang “Sweet Molly Malone,” and “Mack the Knife” in his pleasant, fading monotone.

I sat in the back seat, my breath fogging the car window, and clung to a baggy pouch of green leather upholstery that had torn loose from the back of the seat, but which I believed had been placed there by some genius who understood about children and automobiles.

Each year we would undertake the pilgrimage to Oyster Bay, to visit the yard of the Christmas Man. His house and shrubbery were loaded down with blinking, flashing lights, as if he were signaling some catastrophe to the rest of the Milky Way. It was said he lived alone. A mannequin Santa, oversized and lit from within, leaned drunkenly against an upstairs window. Christmas carols blared through loud-speakers attached to the porch, and a battery-operated Santa waved from the middle of the front lawn. His red sled was filled to the brim with sourballs—there must have been thousands of them—each one wrapped separately in cellophane. A clumsily hand-lettered sign invited each child to take one. I’d choose a red candy, shout “Thank you!” toward the loud-
speakers, and skid away on the soles of my galoshes to the safety of the warm car, where I would join in my father’s refrain as we nosed toward home: “Alive, alive o-oh! Alive, alive-o-oh! Crying cockles and mussels, alive, alive-oh!”

On other, less thrilling evenings, riding home from my grandparents’ apartment in Brooklyn, I would count all the lit houses we passed, like stars in a valley; windows framed in blue and red and green, each shrub with a spiral of lights; or, more rarely, a menorah with three or four of its orange electric candles lit, glowing behind a living room drape.

On Christmas Eve I was loaned out to help decorate the Piscatellis’ tree. Marie Piscatelli was my best friend. She lived three houses down and four around the corner. Two hemlocks, encircled in greenish-blue lights, guarded either side of her front porch, where I would stand shifting my weight and stamping my feet like a small, embarrassed horse.

These were confusing evenings—irresistible, because the Christmas decorations were so delicate and baroque, so unlike anything at home. There were clear glass baubles with snowy religious scenes inside; gilt decorations as pointed as needles at both ends; silver ornaments dusted with white frosting like the sugared dates set out for us on the Christmas china. It was somehow humiliating, too, because none of these things were mine. I had to be careful around them.

This need for caution made me exquisitely clumsy. On Christmas Eve some devil in me emerged; I would fall into the fine-needled tree and knock things loose, my arms swinging like windmills. I remember one hand-blown ornament I dropped on the rug; it slipped down between my fingers, then exploded like falling snow.

Marie’s mother tried to console me. She liked me because I was polite, and a good eater. I dismantled the stuffed artichokes she served before dinner, tasted the veal and peppers, lasagna, antipasti, hard cheeses, button mushrooms, and
roasted chestnuts. I sipped wine like an adult and, when pressed, took seconds of the pastries she bought at the Italian bakery in Hempstead. Marie’s father had ulcers. No magic for him. He lived on cottage cheese and canned pears, and spent his weekends cleaning the garage, whereas Marie picked at her food and swallowed her green peas whole, like bitter pills.

By the time my parents came for me I would be stretched out on the living room sofa with a cup of cocoa cooling in front of me, half asleep; stupefied by the bright, blinking Christmas lights indoors, the pyramid of gifts beneath the tree, the heavy dinner. In fact, I was a little tipsy.

My mother would tighten her hand around mine as we walked home, and we came as close as we ever did to a theological discussion.

“Remember, this is not our holiday,” she would remind me.

“What’s our holiday?”

“Hanukkah.”

But Hanukkah was already a dim memory, a faint sweet odor of melting candle wax. “Why can’t we have Christmas, too? Everybody else does.”

“Christmas is for Christians. It’s to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Do you believe in Jesus Christ?”

“No,” I said, “but neither does Mr. Piscatelli. And you don’t even believe in God.”

There was a heavy silence. We walked a little faster. “We celebrate people’s birthdays all the time,” I told her. “What’s so bad about this one?”

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” my mother said.

But Christmas was a child’s holiday. That fact was inescapable. Adults gave things in such abundance it made you dizzy and sick for a month, like falling under a spell. If it was a holiday for children, wasn’t it mine as well, by right? I tried
to unravel these mysteries while I staggered down the block, swept along by my mother’s strong hand, but always I was too sleepy to figure it out, asleep before I’d even had my bath.

Christmas morning, early—before my parents had had their first cup of coffee—Marie would call me up. It was time for the Listing of the Presents. Mine was a short list and I went first. After I had finished I waited in a long silence while Marie enumerated her gifts in lavish and scientific detail: pink coral earrings from her parents, and a glow-in-the-dark radio; from her aunt and uncle an angora sweater set; a silk petticoat from one grandmother and from the other a gilt-edged catechism; French chocolates sent by distant cousins; two stuffed bears; a chintz bedspread for her canopy bed; slippers made of rabbit’s fur, and brand-new Barbie doll outfits, which she would elaborate down to each gold hem or tiny shoulder pad.

Most of these gifts were from Santa Claus, who was no acquaintance of mine; a sort of rich cousin to Jesus Christ. My parents divided things equally between the two holidays—eight tiny presents for Hanukkah, and one big, practical one for Christmas, despite my mother’s reservations—a new winter coat or, one year, a bookshelf for my room. We weren’t an extravagant family, and I was content with little luxuries and the few big necessities.

Then one year I fell in love with a red sled. This had for me the symptoms of a genuine infatuation. I had seen it gleaming, languishing against the brick face of the hardware store downtown, and had admired it from a distance, and studied it up close from every angle, like a chandelier. It was expensive. My father’s pharmacy was going through hard times; he’d recently had to lay off two part-time employees. Still, the vehemence of my longing made the sled both realer than life and slightly unreal to me—like the shapes in the fireplace that leaped up green and blue when my father
sprinkled on a special powder made of sulfur and hydrochloride. If I stared into the fire for a long time—till the top of my forehead grew hot to the touch—I would begin to see things in the flames, as I did in summertime, watching cloud formations swim overhead. When I nagged my mother about the sled she just looked grim and said, “We’ll see” and “We’ll see” till at last one day, riding by the store, I saw that it was gone for good.

Eight nights in a row the Hanukkah candles burned down to blackish nubs, nothing like the sanctified oil in the Bible. I nibbled at the burned edges of the potato latkes. No one was surprised when, a few days later, I dragged myself home from school with a sore throat and high fever.

I would have to miss Christmas Eve at the Piscatellis’ that year. I overheard my mother talking with Marie’s mother on the phone. In compensation came a platter of Mrs. Piscatelli’s sugar-dusted dates and walnut-stuffed figs, which sat at the foot of my bed like disembodied things. My mother wheeled the TV set into my room and brought me tiny paper cups of ginger ale and a stack of comics on loan from my father’s store. She even offered to play Go Fish with me—an invitation which stunned me so that I forgot my sickness for an hour or two, as I hid beneath the covers reading the new comic books. My mother was not a playful woman; we’d never played games together, and I wouldn’t have known how to start, even if I had wanted to.

On Christmas Eve my fever climbed higher, and anxious phone calls went back and forth between my house and the doctor’s office. I soon lost track of time. It seemed to me that I had lain in bed for weeks and was now better. I kept pleading to go to the Piscatellis’, begging my parents to walk down the street with me. But even the tears were scalding on my face, and hurt me. The wallpaper by my bed was patterned all over with teakettles which began to issue clouds of steam
and then to shriek. My mother kept coming to me in the gloomy half-light with aspirins and damp washcloths. She and my father would walk me, wobbly legged, to my small white vanity, on which the vaporizer percolated like a coffeepot. I sat drenched in sweat and Vicks VapoRub, surrounded by billowing clouds from the vaporizer, under the thick towel my mother held over my head, commanding me to breathe, breathe deeper.

I must have finally slept, for I woke suddenly with the collar of my plaid wool robe scratching my face and a sense of someone standing very near my bed. There were two of them. It was my mother and father, and they gazed at me tenderly, standing shoulder to shoulder. I noticed they looked shorter and squatter than normal, and insubstantial, like the reflections in a funhouse mirror. They stared at me and I stared back at them for a long time, as if each of us was looking at the other down a long dark tunnel. Then I knew that they were ghosts, not my parents at all. I was not afraid, but my mouth was dry. I hoped they had come to my bedside to bring me a glass of cool water. “I want—” I began. “I want—” I stopped talking.

They looked interested, but I had a sense that because they weren’t alive they couldn’t speak, or act. It made them seem pitiable and helpless. I noticed that their feet did not quite touch my rug, as sometimes my own feet did not touch the floor when I sat in a chair. After a few long, slow seconds—just when I had grown accustomed to the oddity of their being there at all—they grew wavier and wavier, like bad reception on a TV set, and vanished.

I woke in the cold, damp grayish light an hour or two before dawn. It was too early to be awake on Christmas morning—I had the guilty sense of having stolen something in advance, stolen time. The vaporizer hissed quietly now. It gurgled and sighed to itself in a corner of the room. I could
see the puffs of steam it sent up, like clouds of breath on a cold day. And just there, leaning against the bed, against my wooden footboard, substantial in the cool bluish-gray light, so beautiful and radiant that it brought a pang to my heart, was the red sled.