The Cost of Lunch, Etc. (6 page)

“I’m so sorry. That you should be left scarred from trying to help people.”

“Everyone there had them. The worms were endemic. So while I was there, I didn’t mind the sores so much.”

“But now you do. You must regret that happened to you.”

“Mostly it was a good experience for me. I never knew how badly so many of my people lived. The scars remind me of what we were fighting to change.” She pulled her pant leg back down. “But they do embarrass me. I think if I were a better Communist, they wouldn’t.” She grimaced. “But I don’t like people to look at me with pity. I don’t like people to think I’m deformed. So I hide my scars.”

I thought to myself that maybe we all have scars we hide. I didn’t go around telling people how I had almost died from a self-induced abortion that had left me anemic, bone-thin and weak. And scared. I was as obsessive about birth control as she was about covering up her legs. My mother had concealed her age till her death, never admitting she was ten years older than my father. I knew, but he didn’t, that she had been married twice before him, not once.

“Can I tell my companions your story?”

“Just keep it to yourself. I don’t like to be pitied.”

“I don’t pity you. I admire you.” I lied. Both were true.

Circa 1943

I was what was then called a tomboy until halfway through my seventh year. I had always played with neighboring boys. I had little interest in school—being just average and paying little attention. Then I caught the German measles followed quickly by rheumatic fever. The doctor came, examined me, said I would die and asked for his ten dollars in cash.

My grandmother Hannah who lived with us half the year and half with my mother’s youngest sister Ruth came on the train from Cleveland. I have vague feverish memories. I felt like my mother and father were angry with me for being so sick. My
bobbelah
rushed into action. My Hebrew name was Miriam. The first thing Hannah did was conduct an impromptu naming ceremony as if I were a newborn. There was a guy present I remember dressed all in black with
peyeses
and speaking Hebrew, so it might have been a rabbi she pressed into service. She changed my name to Marah, bitter, so that
moloch ha moves,
the angel of death, would not know me, and would not want me and would pass over.

She hung on my neck a
hamsa,
that upraised hand with the eye in the palm, to ward off the demons that were attacking me. I have it to this day, although the string on which
she hung it has long ago fallen apart. She said it protected me against
ayin harah,
the evil eye, from which diseases and curses come.

Most of this occurred when my father was absent. He was not Jewish and resented any religious observation. He would go to the Presbyterian Church when we were visiting his relatives in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, in soft coal country, but he did not believe in a deity. He was stolidly materialist rooted in what science he knew and understood, believing passionately in mathematics and rationality—except when he lost his massive and fiery temper. He regarded any Jewish usage as superstitious, unclean, messy. My grandmother who had given me my religious education was Orthodox. When she was with us, we ate kosher. My mother managed to make it acceptable to him without telling him much of what was going on. He would insist on dairy with his meat, but the rest of us avoided it quietly. I grew up understanding that being Jewish was a secretive thing in Detroit, but not in Cleveland. When Hannah went back to Ruth, our level of observance dropped to zero. No more Shabbat candles, no prayers, no singing except of popular songs.

I was racked by fever, slipping in and out of consciousness. I remember waking and smelling something burning. I still don’t know what herbs my
bobbelah
set on fire in an ashtray, but again, she was driving out the demons. She surrounded my bed with a rim of kosher salt. My mother, being a superstitious woman herself, let Hannah do what she could but hung back, mostly I think from fear of what my father would say if he found out. He did not come into my sickroom—it had been my brother’s bedroom but he had gone off to the Marines to fight in the Pacific. Until he left home, I slept in my parents’ room.

The herbs were burned while my father was at work, fixing machinery for Westinghouse that frequently took him all over Michigan. He was gone for days at a time all through
my childhood, and with me sick and presumably dying, he was gone as much as possible. That made Hannah’s activities much easier to carry out. He never smelled the herbs, he never saw the salt, he didn’t notice the hand hung on a string around my neck. The rabbi came and went without his knowledge. Saving me was a secret between my grandmother and my mother. But Hannah was the one who did all the work.

I began to be conscious more and more. Whenever I woke, Hannah was praying over me in Yiddish. Although she was the daughter of a rabbi back in Lithuania near the border with Russia, part of the Pale of Settlement to which Jews were confined (except for prostitutes much in demand and boys taken for the Tsar’s army who seldom survived to return), Hannah did not know Hebrew. She knew Yiddish, of course, Russian, Lithuanian, some German and heavily accented English, but she regarded herself as almost illiterate because she was ignorant of Hebrew. Women often prayed in their own language while the men prayed in Hebrew. She often spoke to me in Yiddish but I answered in English. I have no idea why this was how it was. Somehow it was expected.

I can close my eyes and see her rocking back and forth davening in a singsong, almost musical voice, standing over my bed. She was a small woman in height, like my mother, like me—particularly as I age and shrink. Unlike other Orthodox women, she had long hair and not a wig because my grandfather, dead ten years by this time, had forbidden her to cut it. He said if any angels were tempted, they would have to come through him to get at her. Sometimes when I opened my eyes, I would see her with her hair braided round her head, occasionally covered with a kerchief. Sometimes when I woke, I would see her as she came to bed with me, her long chestnut hair streaked with white tumbling down, cascading around her shoulders. In her seventies, she had
lush hair like a waterfall and it smelled good, not perfume, something else. Once she had been entirely beautiful, but giving birth to eleven children in poverty and sometimes in danger had robbed her. Her face was puffy and wrinkled, her eyes glazed with cataracts that would eventually blind her from doing embroidery for money. She was stooped and round. But her face when she prayed almost glowed in the twilight of my room where the blinds were closed and the curtains drawn. She was talking to G-d, imploring him, demanding, begging, speaking to him as a wife might speak to a husband in those days. Reminding him of the good things, the
mitzvot,
she had done, giving
tzedakah
to the poor even when she too was poor, taking in an orphan when she already had so many children, lest the child be neglected. Now it was Ha Shem’s turn to do right by her granddaughter.

I began to be aware of the voices from the house next door, right across their driveway from us. I heard kids playing in the street, allye, allye-outsinfree. I heard the ice cream truck jingling its tune, the horse clopping past pulling the car of the fruit and vegetable man, the knife sharpener calling to housewives. I had been gone from the world into a hot dark place of nightmares, gone from life. Now I was slowly coming back to my bed, my sickroom, my Hannah, my tuxedo cat Buttons who was now allowed to visit me.

I remember the first day I could sit up in bed. My mother read me a story from a book I loved, about an adventurous goat. I remember eating raspberry-flavored rennet pudding. I remember my mother’s chicken soup, of which I could take a little. Usually I helped her make it. We would pluck the feathers together and burn off any remaining nubs. Sometimes we made dusters of the feathers, tying them together. My mother added the unborn eggs to the soup.

Everything felt new and precious, but when I tried to stand, I fell. I had lost half my body weight. Photos from
before show a slightly chubby kid with banged up knees and a big grin always doing something. Nobody in my family took any more photos of me till I was in high school, when girlfriends took them of each other. When I returned to school in the fall, I was pale blue, you could barely see me if I stood sideways, and I fainted a lot. I was as weak as a kid could be and survive. From a strong active tomboy, I turned into a bullied nerd who began to read a lot and excel in school. It was all I was good at now. I believed my
bobbelah
had saved me, but for what I wasn’t sure. My old pleasures were gone. My parents seemed to be ashamed of me, especially after I was diagnosed as nearsighted by the school nurse and sent with my mother to have my eyes tested and fitted with a cheap pair of glasses. Four eyes, I was now. I was regularly beaten up, especially by the Polish Catholic kids. Only my old alliance with the African American girls saved me sometimes. I escaped into books. I wrote stories about my heroic cat Buttons. The books I liked the best were animal stories because it didn’t matter if it was Lad or Lassie who was saving the drowning boy. Girl animals could have real adventures and be heroes. The other kind of books I liked were adventure stories supposed to be for boys. The girls teased me about the books I read during library periods. I didn’t care. The books for girls were insipid. The weaker I was, the more I dreamed of having superpowers, of great deeds, of harrowing adventures on the high seas or in space or in the jungle. I still loved going to Cleveland, when I could go to
shul
with Hannah and the other ladies would make a fuss over me. I liked being with women only. It felt safe and warm.

By the time I was twelve, I had regained my strength although not my good eyesight. That I would never get back. But I could walk ten miles, I could run faster than all but one Black long-legged girl in my school, I began to hold my own in fights. I had friends again.

When as an adult I was studying with Reb Zalman, he admired my golem novel
He, She and It.
One day he asked me my Hebrew name. I told him. He was displeased. He changed it to Ma’ora, bringer of light. I said I would hyphenate but I could not abandon the name my Hannah had given me when everyone said I was dying and had given up on me—except her. I honor her with the Hebrew name of bitterness that she gave me so the angel of death would pass on—and it did. And I lived and grew up to write about her and many others whose stories would otherwise be lost.

We were all in love with Mr. Danelli, every one of us girls on the high school newspaper, the
Signpost,
and more besides who’d had him for English and still dropped in to talk. His first name, we knew from Laura who was a study hall aide and peeked in his file, was Domenico, but the other faculty called him Dan. He was short, stocky, intense with dark brown hair combed over the reddening center of his scalp. His eyebrows were coarse and jaunty over his big grin. He would look you directly in the eyes, leaning forward, till you were sure no one could interest him more. Besides, he had the habit when talking of touching your hand or forearm or if you were standing, your shoulder. His hands were always warm.

I used to wonder why he endured us: lonely, over-imaginative girl nerds bringing him our writing, our drawings, our videos or merely our troubles to his corner desk in the
Signpost
office. “My mother won’t let me …” “My father took away my cellphone for a month just because …” “I need a car, really I do, and will they listen?” “Everybody lies all the time!” “School is a waste of time.” “Do you think I’m queer?” “Why does everybody bully me?” “I hate my brother!” “Do you believe in telepathy?” “… and he never called me back!” In the world we were rebelling against, jammed in aging tract
houses between the half-empty mall and the abandoned car parts factory, he stood torch high, our embodiment of the intelligent liberal.

When any new girl came into the
Signpost
office, he would call them over for an interview. He could spot the type of gauche eager nerd that interested him in five minutes. Don’t imagine he was scouting for sex; physical contact never went further than that touch on the hand or shoulder.

He had friends among the younger faculty, married men and unmarried women who sent students in to be mined. He liked to think of himself as better at departmental politics than he was; we knew that the principal, the chairman of the English Department and the other brass didn’t quite trust him. He was much too friendly with students. We felt protective. Almost we wished him to be in danger of being fired, so we could rush to his defense. But being one of the only faculty who taught a couple of courses at the community college gave him some kind of prestige. He was one of the few teachers with a PhD.

During our second intimate talk, he invited me to use him as a father confessor—his idea of his relationship with us. Well, we confessed everything but our collective passion. A few into drugs or drink dared tell him. Muffled rivalries clashed about him. Heather or Kelly would walk in while I was pouring out my father’s callousness and would search for something in the filing cabinet behind him until she got rid of me.

He did more than sympathize: he polished us—oh, roughly, but we were as spiny as sea urchins. He taught me to say Moht-zart, what I should admit liking to read, the location of the only good bookstore in our city, not to dress as if my body were two sizes larger. He determined our beliefs as thoroughly as any church: a highly partisan Democratic interest in politics and civil liberties, a craftsman pose that people were to be admired who did anything well, no matter
if it were cake- or poem-making, pitching or playing the violin, playing tennis or singing the blues.

Yet what did we love but the steadiness of his dark gaze that seemed to see us whole as we wanted to be seen and the warmth of his hands, his vulgar humor. His was the only real animal presence among the faculty. No one but me ever saw the poems Kelly wrote about him. I remember she used sun imagery.