Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (29 page)

His expression changed from incredulity to horror as he took in her words.

“I know you’re not joking. You wouldn’t joke about something like this. How could this happen, Mira? How, under your wonderful, caring supervision of your child?”

Mira kept silent, knowing now that the anger would come, just as she had feared it would.

“I see it now—the half empty bottle of brandy, the useless talk about bhajjias and brandy cake. You have been lying to me, lying to save your child—who should be thrown out of this house, just like that whoring Janet. Does she even know who the father of this bastard is? The bloody tart—what was she trying to do with her heavily made-up face and her skintight clothes, if not to get laid and make monkeys of her parents. You only have yourself to blame.” He raged at Mira. “‘Sudhir, please increase her curfew.’ ‘Sudhir, please let her go out for one evening. What can happen in one evening?’” he mimicked her. “Now you know what can happen in one evening, and I hope you’re happy.”

He ignored Mira’s silent tears and marched up the stairs. “All right, Preeti,” he called. “Come on out here and show your face. You must be so proud of what you have done. Shaming your parents just to get your own bloody back on us for trying to protect you.” He walked into Preeti’s room, saw her looking at him with naked fear in her eyes, and yanked her off the bed. “Come on downstairs. Flu, hahn? We’ll see what kind of flu this is.”

He dragged her down the stairs and brought her into the living room. She stood there shivering in her nightie. A little girl was what Mira saw. A frightened little girl.

“Leave her alone,” Mira shouted at Sudhir. “Get out of here and leave her alone.”

Sudhir laughed mirthlessly. “Me—get out? You”—he took hold of Preeti’s hair and walked her toward the door—“you, you shameless tart, you get out,” he snarled at her.

Mira walked up to Preeti and put her arms around her. “Be very careful of what you say at this moment, Sudhir,” she articulated slowly and clearly. “You may live to regret it. Preeti needs me more than you do right now. If Preeti goes, I go with her. So choose your words carefully.”

Sudhir looked at the two of them, then turned abruptly and walked out of the room. Mira could hear him noisily beating around the wooden hangers in the coat closet in the hall as he looked for an umbrella. In a few moments, he had left the house, banging the door behind him.

Preeti began crying, silently at first, then heaving great sobs, weeping from the pit of her stomach.

“It’s all right now, Preeti,” Mira said. “He knows now. It’ll be much easier. Trust me.”

Preeti finally let herself be taken up to bed. She fell asleep almost immediately, with Mira by her side. Soon Mira went to her bedroom. She tossed sleeplessly as she wondered what tomorrow might bring.

It was about three in the morning when Mira was wakened by the sound of deep sobbing. She put her dressing gown on and crept down the stairs. About halfway down, she bent her head to look into the kitchen. Sudhir was sitting at the dining table, the bottle of brandy in front of him. It was almost empty, Mira could see from where she was. His head was in his hands. Mira could not confront him; it would make tomorrow all that harder to deal with. So she walked back up to her room and tried to sleep through the wrenching cries that broke the night silence of her house.

ENID DAME

Let me take you with me on a visit to Indiana, a place I’ve never seen. It is 1924, a muddy spring day on the edge of a small town. The sun is weak, lemony. The house needs a paint job. That angry man, my grandfather, is angry once more: this time at Dinah, the family cat. Three weeks ago, while he was away at a Gentlemen’s Apparel Buyers Convention in Chicago, Dinah gave birth to four nondescript kittens on the floor of the spare-room closet. My grandfather has just discovered them this morning. He is furious. He had not even realized Dinah was pregnant.

My grandfather had other plans for this cat, a real Persian, a placid aristocrat with large feet, tufts of hair in her ears, and guileless blue eyes. He’d gotten her by a fluke, when a customer defaulted on a payment. Unlike his wife and children, my grandfather hates cats, which he associates with fleas and mice. But Dinah was a special case, a matter of business. He’d intended to mate her, when she came of age, with another Persian, owned by another customer. He’d sell the kittens and make, maybe, a fortune.

Everything was arranged. Dinah went into her first heat; the male cat, Sultan, arrived in splendor, in a special carrier. He was tremendous, twice as large as Dinah, with one green eye, one blue eye, and an aggrieved expression on his pushed-in face. My grandmother had disliked him instantly. She was pleased when Dinah rejected his advances, giving him a sharp rap just below his hairy right ear. She drew blood, and
Sultan sulked in a corner. My grandfather felt himself disgraced. He kicked the sofa leg. “Don’t be silly, Jake,” my grandmother said. Her long braid had fallen down again; she tossed it back, airily. “Maybe he isn’t her type.”

She was right. Two days later, Sultan dismissed, Dinah ran outside and got herself pregnant by a striped, marauding tom with one ear missing. Right now, she is suckling his disgraceful kittens in a carboard box. My grandfather is beside himself. Once again, nothing has worked out. “That
putz!
” he curses in his mother’s language. “That
nafka!
” He decides he will drown the bastard litter. That will be his project for this Saturday. He announces his intention loudly, kicks the back door for emphasis, and storms down to the garage.

During this uproar, my grandmother lies low in her kitchen, busying herself with saucepans and stove lids. She is adept at becoming invisible when necessary. This is a talent, like making dresses without patterns or cakes that never fall. It’s a skill I often wish I’d inherited along with her name. She was Renée; I’m Rita (and in Yiddish, we’re both Riyka). In some sense—according to Jewish myth if not Jewish law—I
am
my grandmother; carrying her name, I’m her representative in my own place and time. This mythic commission sometimes awes me: How can I be a person I’ve never met? Occasionally I wonder: If the choice had been up to me, would I have chosen her name?

My mother, if she were living, would say, “What’s the fuss? A name’s a name.” My mother Annie—that seething little girl in a sailor dress. On this Saturday, she is furious at her furious father. She follows him at a careful distance as he kicks and mutters the length of the lawn. His temper is famous: it rips phones out of walls, smashes platefuls of noodles, beats children. Her anger is inside. It rocks and wallops there like a hidden ocean, or soup on a too-high flame. It is a powerful fuel; it scares Annie at times. She doesn’t dare let it
out. It might blow up the house, the town, the state of Indiana. It might hurl them all, shattered and bleeding, into outer space.

Annie is especially enraged at that elusive lady, her mother. Why doesn’t Mama try to stop her husband from committing a crime? How can she be an accomplice to murder? Besides, Mama loves cats, feeds strays at the back steps. That’s how the unsavory tom got there in the first place. You might say it’s really Mama’s fault. Furthermore (Annie piles up each point in her legalistic, ten-year-old mind), a
mother
should stand up for another mother, no matter what. Annie has very decided ideas about what people should and should not do. In this, she resembles her father. Like him, she is always being disappointed.

The other children, David and Ruth, sit on the back steps, in tears. Ruth, at seven, can’t imagine that force, her father’s anger, changing direction or being stopped. She accepts it as she accepts the house they live in, or the weather. David is three. He does not really understand what is happening. He cries because Ruth, his favorite person, is upset; it is an act of companionship rather than grief. Unfortunately, it catches his father’s attention. “Stop that racket, David Rabinowitz, or I’ll
give
you something to cry about!” Jake hurls the threat offhandedly over his shoulder.

Reaching the garage, Jake pauses. He has threatened to drown the kittens. As a threat, it had sounded masterful. But now he must work out the details. He has heard of people drowning unwanted kittens, but has never done so himself. It is an activity he classifies as “country,” like knowing how to milk a cow or read the sky. He has always regarded such knowledge—his neighbors’ knowledge—with a mixture of admiration and contempt.

My grandfather is not a native Indianan. He is not even, literally, an American by birth. He pushed himself out of his
mother’s body unexpectedly one heaving night as her ship shoved its way across the water on the most difficult lap of her journey from Lithuania to Pittsburgh. A traveling midwife, luckily, was there to cut the cord.

His anger may have begun there, on the overheated ship, and taken root more firmly later in the tangled, Yiddish-speaking Pittsburg slums. My mother always claimed it was a gift from
his
mother, who as a girl in Vilna was nicknamed “Vildeh Chaya”—wild animal. No one in the family questioned it; it was simply
there
, a given, one knot in the fabric of family legend. It lives on, years after his death, in my mother’s stories (now my stories), in my dislike of people with loud voices.

To my grandmother, Renée Lowenthal, Jake’s Pittsburgh must have seemed far away as Lithuania. After all, her father William owned a dry goods store in Indianapolis. Mama told me many anecdotes about him and his large family. They were, of course, “assimilated” Jews. Yet, in my mother’s recollections, they come off as exotic, out of place in the sedate Middle West. Even their attempts to be ordinary turn into excesses. Great-grandmother’s best set of dishes, for instance, was
pink
crystal with a rose-colored cream pitcher and sugar bowl. Birthdays were extravaganzas, with fireworks on the lawn and gifts of precious jewels. Josephine, Renée’s oldest sister, was the beauty and musician of the family. She played the violin in a long gown while Dickie, her pet canary, perched on the bow. (For years, this vision charmed me. Then I wondered if Dickie’s singing interfered with Aunt Josie’s playing. Mama laughed and said she hoped so, she could never stand violin music anyway. “Screech, screech, too sappy for me.”)

In 1913, Mama said, the family store was very successful. That’s why Great-grandpapa asked Renée to help out on Saturdays. Renée was seventeen, bored, engaged to a distant
cousin, a lawyer. She was marking time, waiting for school to be over. She hated her public high school: the girls shrieked and giggled and the boys told dirty jokes. The year before, she had attended a Catholic girls’ school, which she’d liked better. The nuns excused her from Religion.

Of course, Renée was working at the store when she met Jake. I’ve often tried to picture that meeting. What would a dry goods store look like in Indiana in 1913? Would it be large and pompous like a department store, or small and intimate, like a five-and-ten? Would Renée sit behind a counter on a high stool, her braid coiled tightly in a businesslike knot? That’s how I imagine her, my teenaged grandmother, a trifle self-conscious, self-important, aware of looking good in this new role. Secretly, of course, she hopes no customer will intrude upon her thoughts.

At her back rise roller after roller of soft cloths, langorously waiting for the tape measure, the shears. It’s a bazaar, a picnic of colors, textures, possibilities. Even their names give pleasure at this distance: calico, cambric, polished cotton, watered silk, satin, sateen, velvet, velveteen, lawn. Not that Renée would find them particularly wonderful. She would prefer the novel she surreptitiously pulls from her pocket. As she begins to read, she plays dreamily with the hairs working loose from her braid.

And now Jake Rabinowitz enters her department with his samples of shoelaces and socks. (He is in the wrong place; men’s furnishings are downstairs.) He is handsome; my mother insists he was handsome then. He had a dark, confident moustache, he was twenty-five, a salesman, a man of the world. He had no trouble persuading Renée to marry him. They eloped that night, after the store closed.

“What did he say to her, Mama?” I often wondered.

“I don’t know. What does a man say? He probably told her she was pretty, or something like that.”

But she wasn’t pretty. I’ve seen many pictures of her. At seventeen, at twenty-eight, at thirty-five, she looks much the same: a pleasant, vague-faced woman with light hair caught in a thick, frizzy braid. Later, she turned tired, sour, sick. She died at forty, of cancer.

Married, she had to discover Jake’s anger, his bafflement, his habit of chasing fire trucks. He liked to watch things burn. No one in his family thought this odd. They nicknamed him “Klingele”—fire bell. In one Indiana town, he served on the Volunteer Fire Brigade. Usually, though, he was a free-lance fire buff.

One night, my mother remembered, Jake took her with him to watch a grocery store burn to the ground. His hand gripping hers was hot, sweating, heavy. As the flames grew large and the walls caved in, he squeezed her fingers. Her hand hurt, but she could not protest. His air of quiet, crushing reverence alarmed her more than his usual outbreaks of temper. Later, he said. “That was a good one.” When Annie told her mother the next morning, Renée smiled her vague smile and flipped back her braid. “Papa can be silly sometimes,” she said.

Was she sorry she married him? On that day of Jake’s discovery, was she regretting her impulse—her decision? What
was
she thinking of? If she’s at all like me, her namesake, her thoughts are probably wispy, scattered, ungraspable. I can see her staring out her kitchen window, fumbling for something in her apron pocket. She has forgotten exactly what she is looking for. In any case, the pocket is empty.

At some point, she decides she can’t remain invisible much longer. After all, she hears her husband bellowing in the garage, she sees two of her children incoherent with tears and the third judging her severely. Upstairs, her cat is passionately nursing a disreputable brood. Perhaps Renée thinks: Who are all these creatures, and what is their relationship to
me? Perhaps she is appalled by all these forces she somehow, at seventeen, set in motion.