The Cost of Lunch, Etc. (17 page)

Circa 1947

I was ten years old and visiting my grandma Hannah in the mixed poor Jewish and African American ghetto where she lived upstairs in a wooden tenement. Part of every year,
bobbelah
stayed with us in our little asbestos bungalow in Detroit and we shared a bed. But several times a year, we went to Cleveland, where most of my mama’s family lived. I loved Cleveland. In Detroit I was a secret Jew, since religious observance annoyed my father. In Cleveland, I went to
shul
with Hannah. In Cleveland it was all right to speak Yiddish. In Cleveland my aunts and uncles hugged me and fussed over me. In Cleveland Hannah made a Pesach Seder. In Cleveland all my uncles told outrageous jokes at the table. Everybody laughed with their whole bodies. We had plenty to eat in Cleveland. Good food and houses with books and music, even when the apartments were small and crowded. I was absolutely sure my grandma loved me; I was only as sure about my cat Buttons. I was doubtful about my father, who did not think much of me, and my mother and I were often at each other in kitchen skirmishes.

The big war of my childhood had finished the summer before. A great crowd filled the Campus Martius in downtown Detroit and everybody was yelling, shooting off fire-crackers,
kissing, dancing. I thought it was great. In our neighborhood, we kids had a parade with our bikes round and round the block waving a couple of flags and some balloons, banging on drums and shaking noisemakers left over from some New Year’s Eve.

Grandma was my only grandparent. Both my father’s parents were dead and my maternal grandfather’s head had been bashed in by the Pinkertons when he was organizing the bakery workers in Cleveland. I had nearly a dozen and a half aunts and uncles and gaggles of cousins, but only Hannah to tell me stories from the
shtetl
where she had grown up till her marriage, stories of wonderworking rabbis, of the golem and Lilith and
dybbuks
and Cossacks. She had been hungry often, she had often been afraid, but she had belonged, the daughter of a rabbi, and she had many girlfriends with whom she bathed and washed clothes at the river and gossiped and shared her dreams. I knew that since the war ended, she had been trying to get in touch with relatives and old friends back there in Lithuania.

Grandma’s apartment was tiny and mostly we sat in the kitchen with her cat Blackie and sometimes one of her neighbors who went to the same
shul,
where she would take me and we would sit behind the
mechitza.
At that age, I did not mind the segregation because I was petted and made much of by the old ladies who had the same thick accent as my
bobbelah.
They told me how smart I was and what pretty black hair I had, worn in two braids down my back.

Hannah was short and stout with chestnut hair streaked with white. She wore it in a bun, but at night when we shared a bed she would let it down like Rapunzel. At
shul,
she hid it under a tight kerchief, for my grandfather had forbidden her to cut it off when they married. I wished I had long hair like hers, but my mother cut it every two months. My mother’s hair was as black as mine but kept very short. She curled it from time to time. Mine was straight and there
was a lot of it. My mother would complain when she washed it with tar soap (she didn’t trust me to wash my own hair) and then rinsed it in cider vinegar that I had enough hair for a whole family of girls.

Hannah wore thick glasses. She had made money doing embroidery but now she had cataracts and she said, “My eyesight, it’s going too fast. Soon I’ll be blind like a stone.”

In Hannah’s kitchen, neighbors came and went while her cat supervised from a high shelf. Most were Jewish and some were Black. That did not surprise me, as we lived in a Detroit neighborhood Black or white by blocks. My parents were openly prejudiced, but I had never lived in an all-white world. My first boyfriend was Black. That lasted until my parents found out and I was beaten hard by the wooden yardstick they used on me.

My parents had driven off to see one of my father’s younger brothers in Youngstown, Ohio, leaving me overnight with Hannah. That made me happy, as I was the oldest and, she insisted, the smartest of her grandchildren, instead of a disappointment to my father for being born a girl. Also the woman married to my father’s brother was just anti-Semitic enough to make sly hints and drop little phrases like, “That woman at my yard sale, she was trying to Jew me down on the price of the crib.” Her son would pick on me when we were out of sight of the grown-ups. No, I was delighted to stay in Cleveland.

We had bagels and lox for breakfast with thick slices of onion and cream cheese that didn’t come in a Philadelphia package as it did at home. I had brought my best doll. Hannah was making a dress for her out of an old tablecloth that had disintegrated. She could no longer do fine embroidery, but she could still sew by hand or on her old treadle machine. Late in the morning she sent me down to get the mail from her box. Proudly I brandished the key. Our mail at home was generally left on the front steps. Unlocking a
metal box felt special. At home, I had just gotten my own house key that I was expected to wear on a string around my neck when my mother needed to be out when I was due home from school. Keys were very adult, I felt. I was old enough to be left alone. Kids were more independent in those days. At twelve, I would be babysitting until two in the morning.

An electric bill, a postcard with palm trees from my uncle Danny in the merchant marine, a circular for a new drycleaners and a thick official-looking letter from a Jewish organization. I carried them all carefully upstairs, proud of my errand and myself for doing it so well. I hadn’t dropped anything and my hands were clean. I even brought up the circulars.

Hannah was laying out plates for lunch, the plates with roses around the edges that I loved. To this day, when I am a so-called adult and in fact a senior citizen, as they say—
bobbelah
would just say, old lady—I am fussy about my dishes, my mug for coffee, which sheets I put on the bed. My husband thinks this is crazy. I say it’s because I’m female. Or maybe I’m just fussy.

She had soup boiling on the old gas stove that always stank a bit. “It leaks a little—like me,” she would say if I mentioned the smell. (I won’t give you her accent; that would turn her into a caricature and I had no trouble understanding her, including the Yiddish.)

She had a little radio sitting on the shelf that Blackie preferred, and often it would be turned to classical music or else the news. But whenever I came into the kitchen, she would turn it off. “Who wouldn’t rather listen to you than some stranger?” she’d say. “What a nice voice you got.”

“At school the music teacher won’t let me sing. She taps me on the head to shut up.”

“What does she know? A nice low speaking voice is nice for a woman.”

Everything about me could use improvement according to my mother, and was just perfect by Hannah.

I put the mail on the table. She riffled through it and pounced on the official-looking letter, tearing it open and squinting at it.
“Ketselah,
read it to me.”

“Dear Mrs. Adler,” I read. That was her name from her second marriage. “In regard to your query about the following persons,” and there was a list of perhaps twelve names I sounded out slowly.

“Yes, yes,” she said,
“Mach schnell, ketselah.
Who lives?”

“We regret to inform you that all the inhabitants of …” I could not pronounce the name as there were too many consonants and almost no vowels.

She spoke the name and stared at me.

“All the inhabitants were killed. There are no survivors we have been able to trace.”

She made a noise like I had never before heard, a shriek that went on and on as she beat her chest and shook back and forth.
“Alles
…
alles
…”

I read on. They had been shot, the entire village, and left in a mass grave. Relatives were trying to raise money for a stone monument. I did not know what to do except to rise and hold her by the shoulders, standing behind her chair. I was afraid. I felt too young to deal with her grief. I felt helpless and shaken myself. I tried to imagine what it would be like if everybody I knew died, how I would feel.

When she stopped shaking she said, “Because they were Jews. That’s all. Little babies, my niece Rivka, my neighbors who had only one cow and two hens, the
Rebbi
my father taught, what did they ever do to anybody? Just because they were Jews, made to dig a big grave and then shot and piled in.”

When she was cried out, she just sat in her chair, shoulders stooped and grey in the face. Her grief scared me. I had cried when my previous cat Whiskers had died. I cried over
a baby robin I tried to save. I cried when I got beaten up at school. But never had I seen anybody weep like Hannah. The soup had boiled over on the stove and I shut off the burner. The scorched smell filled the kitchen but she did not seem to notice.

Finally she said, “Soon they will be no more Yids. They will wipe us from the face of the earth. We will be done. Four thousand years, and no more.”

I tried to think what I might say. “Grandma, I will always be a Jew. No matter what, I will remain a Jew so long as I live.”

She looked up into my eyes. “Promise. Your mother has forgotten everything. She doesn’t know who she is any longer. Your father has no religion.”

“But I do. I promise.”

“As long as you breathe.”

“So long as I have breath in my body.”

She nodded. “I need
Yahrzeit
candles. I got to find out the day of their death so I can light candles for them and say
Kaddish
.”

“I can write a letter for you.”

“Do it. There’s paper in the drawer of the little table.” She pointed. I fetched paper and pen and wrote the letter she wanted and addressed an envelope. She sealed it and kissed the envelope. “This is all I can do.”

“Should I go mail it?”

“Go ask my nextdoorsikah if she got a stamp.”

I knocked, got a stamp and came back. “Okay.” She nodded wearily. “Go mail … Do you mean what you promise me?”

I did. And I have kept the promise ever since.

I don’t wonder you had trouble finding the house. This tract is laid out in narrowing circles like Dante’s hell. But why should Helena send me an ambassador? Remember her? You might say I have a few souvenirs of that summer. Here, somewhere in the desk, unless the children … This snapshot. Oh, it’s one of those bridges over the Seine. It’s a poor picture of her. The sun was too bright. That was Barry in the middle and me, in my Left Bank costume—I was such a fool! Yes, that was me, I swear.

She told you I was her best friend? Dear God. Like a country mouse she turned up in my apartment in Chicago fifteen years ago. I was in my second year subbing in the public schools, hoping for something better. She was in her junior year at Roosevelt College downtown. Not that she was country. We came from the same West Side neighborhood of square frame houses with a tray of grass in front, old enough for the houses to be sagging, near enough to the factories to hear their whine in the quiet of the morning. But I had left there when my parents broke up.

The evening she came to my apartment, it was raining. She looked like a wet leaf, her blond hair dripping as she sneezed. She had failed some test. She shivered, plucking at her skirt. “What a mean, stupid system! Science is
unfeminine!” I thought she was going to cry, but she turned her anger on a mural my boyfriend Zak had painted, and after she had insulted it, she relaxed and we had supper. Her insults never bothered me. For all my troubles, I had then a placid confidence that attracted and annoyed her, for she could not know any better than I how flimsy it was.

In high school her mother had dressed her in prissy jumpers and drab skirts and buttoned cardigans, as if time had stopped in that house a decade or more in the past. Sometimes in the high school library, we had met in brief passionate exchange of books and music. Then from my three years’ height I’d begin to condescend, and she’d batter at me in fury.

That fall, I was trying to cry on Walt’s shoulder about my relationship with Zak without getting involved with Walt. Try to understand why I didn’t stop to look at this kid who cadged meals, jewelry, five dollars, old lecture notes, and finally men. I suppose I should have been alerted when she turned up Helena: she was Elsie on the West Side. When I gave a party, I told her to come and meet some people.

Halfway through the evening, when I looked around for Zak to make sure he was not starting a fight, I saw him on the floor beside her chair. She got up and walked off. Then turned just as abruptly and intersected him as he was starting towards me. Zak: let me say he was big-boned, with a hank of black hair falling in his eyes, powerful hands and body he used with conscious arrogance. He maintained a violent past and painted in bouts. For almost eighteen months I had been his trampoline, running to my friend Walt for comfort and advice in between bouts.

So I looked hard at Helena. Her hair was that blond with seascape tones of green algae and sand. Her eyes were blue and perhaps looked so dark because the lashes were daubed a sooty black that blurred, as if they cast a shadow. She believed her sharp chin spoiled her face and told me she
had grown her hair to soften it. But that sharpness brought out a questing, plaintive childishness. Did the sirens too cry, save me! take me with you! make me happy!

A week later I tried to deliver a warning, for I knew how Zak gobbled little girls with big eyes for breakfast.

“You have a compulsion to patronize me!” She perched on my couch with her knees drawn up, as if warming herself in her long hair. “Your life is shoddy, so you think others are shoddy too. Cow!”

She flung down counters of words like rolls of dice—words used to mean whatever she chose: “kind” applied from clothes to mountains; “nice,” a hard, almost spiteful moral judgment hurled down and if not instantly accepted, hugged back into a silence now large-eyed and accusing; judgments gratuitous, sharp as broken glass: “shoddy,” “gross,” “ratty.”