TREYF (12 page)

She says, “Try. Just try. For me.”

My passions are Karen whose last name I'll never know, and Suzi, and Camp Towanda.
He is in our acts of kindness; he is in our joys
, I whisper to myself every Friday night after dinner during the winter, reciting the bits of Sabbath services that I can recall while I fall asleep to strains of
Dark Side of the Moon
coming through the wall I share with Shaina Garbfeld.

•   •   •

T
he doorbell rings on a late Friday afternoon; I open it and there is Shaina, looking like Marie Osmond in her
Paper Roses
days, with cascading waves of thick, dark brown hair that roll down her back, almost to her waist.

I sometimes see her getting on the elevator in the morning to meet the private bus that drives her to the yeshiva she attends in Douglaston, half an hour away. Dressed in a navy blue melton coat, prim white blouse, and dark serge skirt that falls well below her knee, Shaina stands out the way I do amidst the green snorkel parkas and orange burnished Frye boots that everyone is wearing. She neither talks to me nor smiles.

“She's
frum
—Orthodox—” my father tells me one night over dinner. We're eating a sausage pie from the pizzeria downstairs; I've been complaining that most of my friends have left the area. Maybe, I think, Shaina wants to be friends.

“She's only interested in God,” he says, taking a long drag off his cigarette, “like your grandfather. Save yourself the trouble.” His words come out through a haze of smoke.

I chew on a pizza end and pout.

“She has nothing to
say
to you, Lissie—” my mother adds, her voice clipped with exasperation. “Make friends with the kids at your school. And
stop already
with the crust—” She reaches over, takes the end of the pizza out of my hand, and drops it on the floor for the dog.

On the afternoon that finds us facing each other in the hallway, Shaina introduces herself to me through a thick, wet lisp; heavy metal braces are clamped to her teeth like bear traps, top and bottom, connected with small rubber bands. Home from yeshiva for the day, she is barefoot, dressed in old Levi's bell-bottoms that have tattered to soft blue strings around her painted toenails. A Bonne Bell cola-flavored Lip Smacker hangs off a black cord around her neck. She pushes up the red sleeves of her baseball shirt to reveal the same braided sailor's bracelet that I wore all summer in camp until it blackened, rotted, and fell off on the bus ride home.

“I
really
like your guitar,” she says, her hands on her hips. “You play great—”

“How do
you
know?” I ask, my arms folded protectively, looking at her feet.

“I can hear you through the wall, silly—” she laughs, tossing her hair off her face. “I can hear
everything
!” She winks and cracks her gum so loud that the dog barks.

“Jewish girls don't chew gum like cows,” I remember Gaga saying to me once.
Well
, I think,
this one does.

Shaina can hear me—my music, my laughter, my angry sobs after my father's rages, my youthful groans—the way I can hear Moishe beseeching God every morning.

I spend every day after school in Shaina's apartment, until my
parents come home from work. Judith sits in the kitchen reading
People
, while we disappear into Shaina's bedroom, its pineapple yellow–painted walls covered in earth-toned macramé hangings that she and Judith brought with them when they moved here from Israel after the war in 1973. The minute she walks through the door, Shaina sheds her yeshiva outfit like a snake sheds its skin, replacing it with snug elephant bell-bottoms and tight black concert T-shirts emblazoned with
Kiss
and
Tommy
and
Emerson, Lake, and Palmer
. She piles up a stack of records and arranges them on her stereo pin and Judith barges into her bedroom without knocking and sets down a platter of toasted pita bread torn into small pieces and drizzled with olive oil and sesame and sumac, which makes the sides of my tongue hurt.

“You'll stay for dinner,” Judith tells me, unsmiling as she walks out of the room.

I sit at the Garbfelds' heavily carved dining room table creaking under the weight of alien foods I've never seen or eaten before: stuffed grape leaves, roasted eggplant dip, tabbouleh, and round, deep-fried balls that, until I bite into them—they're my first taste of falafel—I believe are meat. My mouth, unaccustomed to the bitterness of the garlic and crushed fava beans and eggplant and chickpeas mashed to a thick paste, aches. Moishe and Shaina and Judith eat in silence; she killed her first Nazi at seven, and now, she's feeding me dinner. I wonder if kindness can flow from the same fount as brutality, if the two are somehow mutually exclusive. There is no talk of boyfriends or fashion or what Shaina will or won't do to get into a good college; there is no talk at all.

There is just food, and eating, and sustenance.

“Sit,” Judith says to me that night. She points at the table.

“Eat.”

•   •   •

I
n a corner of her bedroom, at the spot on the wall between us where it meets the floor, Shaina, who loves to draw, has begun freehand painting with the acrylic paints that she keeps in an old Tretorn sneaker box under her bed. Her mother knows about it, Shaina says; Moishe sees it every morning while he davens. In quiet moments after school while I lie on her floor, playing my guitar, Shaina paints a little bit every day: it starts with a small brown primordial soup that seems to emerge out of the brown shag carpet itself. A week later, emerald green lily pads sprout from its depths, balancing on narrow stalks like scrolls; eventually, tiny frogs will crawl up and out of the soup with outsized, Lewis Carroll eyes, and long, unfurling, flicking tongues that wrap themselves around the daisies that Shaina has painted growing on the shore. In a month, there will be a bright red toadstool flecked with yellow spots perched upon a thick, penile stem, and everywhere, flat green cannabis plants with pointed leaves in threes, fives, and sevens.

It's an early Friday night when Shaina feigns illness and begs off services; with Judith and Moishe in shul and my parents at a movie, she decides that her masterpiece is complete and insists we celebrate.

“Let's have a cocktail!” she lisps, her hooded brown eyes brimming with pleasure. My heart races in my chest so hard and fast that my gingham cowboy shirt, untucked from my jeans, flitters
against my skin. Before I can say no—
do I even want to say no?
—Shaina leaves me sitting on her bed and returns with two azure blue goblets in one hand and a can of Coca-Cola in the other. Wedged under her armpit is a half-empty bottle of Manischewitz Heavy Malaga procured from the depths of a living room cabinet. She struggles to unscrew it—sugar has congealed around the screw-top cap, sealing it like cement; it's thick and syrupy and gives off a familiar warm cloud that smells like Grandpa Henry's apartment in Coney Island. She pours it expertly into the glasses from on high, like a bartender, and tops it off with fizzing splashes of soda, and hands me a glass.

Shaina the devout; Shaina the
frum
.

Shaina, who, I will learn over the next three years, rolls the tightest joints, acquires the best hash, buys the strongest quaaludes, drinks the darkest rum, and fucks the most yeshiva boys, takes me by the hand and pulls me down onto the shag carpet in front of the toadstool and the mucky pond and the perfectly rendered cannabis.

This Shabbos night, we lie on our backs and slur along to Cher's
Half-Breed
on the turntable. We have one glass and then two and then three; we get drunk on the profane swirled together with the wine of ritual, and for the first time, the world around me seems warmer and kinder. Shaina and The Marseilles and Cher spin around me as I put my hand on the wall that separates our lives—it lands someplace between the mushroom and the sludge, between beauty and filth—and I throw my head back, close my eyes, and belt it loud, like my mother:
Both sides were against me since the day I was
born.

PART II

How far back must you go to discover the beginning of trouble?

—Philip Roth,
“Epstein”

H
e had been so handsome—a catch, everyone said: blond and blue-eyed with a soft, sad brow, a kind mouth, and a pouty, winsome face. It broke his heart to leave his mother in Novyy Yarchev, he told me when I was a little girl. Even back then, as a child, I couldn't fathom it: how does a twelve-year-old boy pack himself up and run away, across a continent, across an ocean, by himself?

“What did you take with you?” I wanted to know. “What did you carry?” I sat on his lap one afternoon at Aunt Sylvia's house, mystified by his story. He smiled and pointed to the ceiling. I looked up at the crown molding.

“Hashem,” he said, closing his eyes in a reverie and letting his hand drop to his chest, over his heart.

Hashem, he believed, would protect him wherever he went
and whatever he did. Hashem would guide him and direct him; Hashem would provide his moral compass and be his anchor.

Once he got settled, after he landed his first job setting hot lead type for the Yiddish newspaper
The Day
, my grandfather devoted himself entirely to pleasing Hashem, who, he knew in his heart, had looked after him on his journey to America. He studied the Talmud daily, learned English, found love, and became, as he liked to say,
a regular Yankee Doodle boy
.

By early autumn of 1944, Grandpa Henry looked like the American he longed to become: he is dressed like an Edward Hopper character, in a conservative herringbone tweed overcoat and his favorite dark wool fedora from the JJ Hat Center on Fifth Avenue. Years after he dies, I find this picture of him long forgotten in a torn Klein's of New York shopping bag buried deep in his hallway closet, tucked in among ancient, dog-eared photographs and old, gilt-edged Hebrew yahrzeit calendars sent over from the old country before the war; my grandfather gazes away from the camera at something unseeable, perhaps into a hopeful future, or a past filled with regret. This pose will become a trademark of virtually every family photograph; each one of us, without exception and regardless of age, glances away from the camera, as though we'll surely turn into pillars of salt like Lot's wife if we make direct eye contact with time.

On the day my father comes home on leave from the Navy, my grandfather stands solemn and pensive, I imagine, waiting for his youngest child outside the civilian pickup gate at Floyd Bennett Field, a crumbling Yonah Schimmel potato knish in one pocket and a rolled-up copy of
The Day
in the other. He had left
work early that afternoon and headed out east to pick up his son, the aviator, who was flying himself home after receiving his wings in Corpus Christi. As a twenty-one-year-old night fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy, my father still didn't know how to drive a car and, like a teenager, needed a lift home.

My grandfather munched on the remnants of his beloved knish—until the day he died, his regular treat after filing his social page stories—pointed his chin to the sky, and waited for the sound that my father told him to listen for: a low, dull thunder, a steady roar that would grow louder and stronger with his son's approach.

I can feel the aching, sudden homesickness that overtakes him—it happens when he least expects it; it runs in the family and wraps itself around me like a shawl, and like him, I find myself yearning for a past that was sometimes violent—and lodges in my grandfather's throat like a wad of guilt. It had been so long. He himself had forgotten where home was, what it looked and smelled like, and what his mother's kitchen tasted like: the Friday night cholent cooked for hours so that it would be ready in time for Shabbos dinner. The autumn borscht, and the stray ropes of sinewy flanken peeled in long strands off the week's boiled, disintegrating bones and folded into misshapen purses formed from hard winter flour and water and whatever broth his mother could afford to use. He could smell it as he stood there waiting for my father in the Brooklyn seaside chill, running cold knish crumbs through his dry fingers and shaking his head, his eyes suddenly filling with tears.

Ach,
he sighs from someplace primal, like an animal.

The little news he got about the Ukraine wasn't good: the last
time he had heard from his mother was in 1938. A postcard. She said that she was staying put in their little town because, she wrote in Yiddish,
what would anyone want with a little old lady in the middle of nowhere? I'm insignificant. Small beans. Bupkus.

My grandfather paces back and forth, thinking of his mother and the autumn borscht of Shabbos dinner. Standing at the airstrip, he remembers the last thing she told him before he ran away: “No matter where you go, Hirsch, remember Shabbos, and keep kosher.” If only she could see him and his family now; if only she could see. If only she had left Novyy Yarchev when she had the chance, before the Nazis came.

It will be seven years before he learns of his mother's fate: he will find a distant cousin from his shtetl, resettled in a Boston suburb. My father drives him there and hears the story: the Nazis didn't want to waste diesel fuel on such vermin, and executed every resident in the forest outside the town. The cousin himself was shot in the back and left for dead; he will live for the rest of his life with a hump. At the telling of the story, my grandfather leaps to his feet in this tidy suburban living room not far from Walden Pond and beats his long-lost cousin bloody, so profound is his grief; they never see each other again.

On this day at the airfield, I imagine my grandfather staring down at the nice wingtips he's begun wearing since he's been doing a little better at the paper; he takes off his hat and runs his index finger down the top crease. He sets it back on his head and waits for his son to blast through the sky like Superman, the radio hero who always saves the day against the most impossible odds.

•   •   •

M
y father takes off from the Naval Air Station on Cape Cod, traveling south along the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut before reaching New York, where he heads west, out over Boerum Hill. He banks hard to the right and then loops back, swooping down over the synagogue roofs and the kosher butchers and my grandmother's favorite fishmonger, who has sold her three pounds of fresh carp for the gefilte fish she's made for my father's arrival home. He turns his plane east, out over Ocean Parkway, grazing the treetops and the low-rise apartment buildings, lining up 602 Avenue T in his cross hairs like a beloved target. Lightly, tender as a caress, he squeezes the locked trigger on the gunsight.

Boom,
he whispers.

In Brooklyn, he is still known among the neighbors as Henry and Bertha's little Seymour—my grandmother will call him Shmuel, pronouncing it
Schmeel
, to the day she dies, which drives him crazy—who'd rather play stickball and listen to Gene Autry on the radio than say his prayers. He's the little Seymour with the funny sense of humor, who loves to make people laugh, who loves the special foods that his mother makes just for him; he's the little Seymour who will hide from his father's violence beneath the carved legs of his mother's Knabe baby grand, the lilting Chopin
Études
she practices each afternoon punctuated with the sounds of rage. Music, perhaps, is a form of genetic memory, a heavy cloak of protection against a family anguish so ancient and
deep that it has seeped into my grandfather's, my grandmother's, my father's, my own corpuscles. Through the generations and over the arc of a century, we listen to Chopin's Opus 10, no. 3—
Tristesse
; sadness—on the radio, or at a young cousin's first piano recital, and separated by time and circumstance, it binds us together like the color of eyes. Every member of my family weeps when we hear it; none of us knows why.

Aunt Sylvia's husband, Uncle Lee, is stationed in France with the Army Corps of Engineers, chasing the Germans east after the Allied landings; Sylvia and her new baby, my cousin Maya, are living with my grandparents until the war is over. My father has told them precisely what time he's going to fly over the building, and they race up the echoing hallway stairs from the fifth floor to the sixth, throwing the roof door open just as he's passing over. My grandmother waves a schmaltz-caked flowered kitchen towel and my father spots them, small as ants, and salutes them by dramatically tipping his wings, before heading off to the airfield.

My father strafes Ocean Parkway every time he comes home for leave, right up to the end of the war in 1945. The Navy offers to bring him back to New York on a troop plane, but as long as he has wings and is in uniform, he wants to fly himself to the airfield, less than five miles from where he grew up.

•   •   •

A
s a cadet in 1943, my father gets the same three meals a day, every day: farina for breakfast, chipped beef on toast—SOS, or shit-on-a-shingle—for lunch, and an unidentifiable meat
with a canned green vegetable and a boiled potato for dinner. There are endless cups of watery coffee. “Saltpeter,” his friends tell him, “is in everything from the ice cream to the hamburgers, so don't even try.” No one asks him if he has any dietary restrictions he must abide by lest the God of his Fathers rain down hell upon his head. For the first time in his life, he can eat what he wants, when he wants, however he wants. Everything is a temptation; he trembles with guilty, thrilling delight at the thought of breaking the rules everywhere from the mess hall to the whorehouses that his squadron frequents if they have even a few hours' leave.

On August 1, 1943, he writes to my grandparents from preflight school in Del Monte, California:

. . . I have a deep feeling in the job that must be done. For the crusade against evil to be successful, every fighting man must feel the spiritual support of his loved ones behind him. To you, I am still the blond boy, naughty at school, with all the faults. But you must think of me as an individual whose job is to train to kill your enemies and then return, without having lost the teachings of his parents, home, and religion in the process. . . .

Tucked into that letter is a newspaper clipping entitled “A Mother's Prayer,” by syndicated columnist George Matthew Adams, which is reprinted in America's newspapers during the holidays:

God, Father of Freedom, look after that boy of mine, where he may be. Walk in upon him. Talk with him during the
silent watches of the night, and spur him to bravery when he faces the cruel foe. Transfer my prayer to his heart.

Keep my boy inspired by the never-dying faith in his God. Throughout all the long days of a hopeful Victory, wherever his duty takes him, keep his spirits high and his purpose unwavering. Make him a loyal friend. Nourish him with the love that I gave to him at birth, and satisfy the hunger of his soul with the knowledge of my daily prayer.

He is my choicest treasure. Take care of him, God. Keep him in health and sustain him under every possible circumstances. I once warmed him under my heart. You warm him anew in his shelter under the stars. Touch him with my smile of cheer and comfort and my full confidence in his every brave pursuit.

Fail him not—and may he not fail You, his country, nor the mother who bore him.

“Vuss es duss?”
I imagine my grandfather mumbling as he reads the prayer. Devout Jews don't ever print or write the word
God
on anything that is considered impermanent or that can be thrown away; instead, they write
G-d
, with a dash. He hands it to my grandmother, who reads it again: she never prays for her son in this stilted, inauthentic manner with its unique form of sanitized, movie-script American zeal and its unfamiliar Christian phrases. Still, she tucks the clipping into the pocket of her flowered apron and reads it over and over, pleading with God—somebody's God—to hear her and return her Schmeel to safety. She folds the prayer back into my father's letter and slides it into
the depths of a drawer in the hallway table, where it will remain untouched and forgotten until I discover it one Sunday morning in 1991, the year after my grandmother's death.

•   •   •

M
y father became an aviator—Ensign Altman, Lieutenant Junior Grade—on a blisteringly hot day in August at the Naval Air Training Center in Corpus Christi, Texas. The next day, August 3, 1944, he wrote to his parents in stiff, shaking cursive:

Right now, I'm living in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters and boy, is it snazzy. This being an officer is really hot stuff. Everybody salutes. I've got to be immaculate (shave twice a day). Meals are all very formal. Waiters in white mess jackets, heavy silverware, beautiful service and linens, and I've got to constantly remind myself not to SCHVITZ.

I can see my grandmother standing in the kitchen, the windows facing the fire escape thrown open to the Coney Island breezes, reading the letter aloud to Grandpa Henry, who is slurping a bowl of cold emerald green schav for dinner and laughing at the description of the silver and the service and the meals.