Imaginary Men (3 page)

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Authors: Enid Shomer

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BOOK: Imaginary Men
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Page 12
their neighbors while their parents often never set foot in their houses. I had seen Mr. and Mrs. Levandowski in their pajamas on Sunday morning. I knew that Mrs. Levandowski wore a thick layer of Noxzema cream on her face at home, even if Asher brought company. I had seen her watch TV in the living room in the evening, white-faced, smelling like a Vick's cough drop, dead to shame about her appearance. I had even heard her burp once at the kitchen table. She had excused herself, but she wasn't embarrassed.
Mrs. Levandowski arrived at 2 P.M. She was dressed in a navy print dress with a large white collar that spread out from her cleavage like wings and flapped into her face when she leaned forward. Her accent was Polish, her speech, even in English, filled with the gentle clicking and mewing of that tongue. The blood red lipstick she wore made her face look extremely pale. Barry and I said hello, then sat down on the loveseat opposite the sofa where the two women sat, each turned slightly on one haunch toward the other. Mrs. Levandowski withdrew a huge deadly hatpin from her hat, removed the hat, and patted her hair. "In Europe we had cafés where to talk," she said.
"Oh? You mean sidewalk cafés?"
"Sidewalk, yes. On the street. In Warsaw we had many. We walked there."
"I see," Mother said.
"We didn't drive. Who needed a car in Warsaw?"
"I hate to drive," Mother said. This wasn't exactly true. We used to have a blue stick-shift Ford that Mother was unable to master. But once we got the Chrysler with the automatic transmission, she was jumping into it every chance she got.
"My husband, Zaichik, he drives."
"Yes," Mother said.
The kettle was whistling. Mother got up to fix the tea and told us to keep Asher's mother company. The three of us sat silently until she returned. Mrs. Levandowski looked around at everything in the room, not furtively, but as if she were searching for something familiar. She picked up the plate of cookies my mother had set out, chose two, and put them in her lap. Her hands were meaty and slow-moving. They were as big as a man's.
Mother returned with the tea service on a tray. "I have sugar cubes, if you like," she said, offering her the good crystal sugar bowl.
 
Page 13
My grandparents from Russia drank tea with sugar cubes in their mouths. Mrs. Levandowski took her tea unsweetened.
Suddenly, the two of them were speaking the secret language, Yiddish. Mrs. Levandowski spoke much faster than she had in English. Mother stumbled a bit, groping for words. They talked for a long time, until their voices were a drone in the room. I looked at Barry fidgeting and was happy to see he couldn't understand them either. Then, all of a sudden, dead silence. Mother lit a cigarette and blew a plume of smoke to one side.
"The world," Mrs. Levandowski said, addressing me and Barry, "is not a happy place. Once maybe, but never again . . ." Her voice trailed off.
"Dos iz nisht Warsaw, Sadie. Dos iz America," Mother said.
Mrs. Levandowski glowered at her and spoke some more in Yiddish. I could pick out the words "matzoh" and "Pesach." She pointed to Barry and counted off four fingers on one hand, each accompanied by a name.
Mother continued to smoke, but with her free hand she was pressing her thumbnail along her jaw, a nervous habit I'd seen before. Then, her voice quaking and high-pitched, she said something long and pleading in Yiddish to Mrs. Levandowski.
"Nein." Mrs. Levandowski shook her head. Her teacup rattled in the saucer as she set it down. She pushed up her left sleeve until small blue numbers appeared on her forearm. "Don't be fooled," she said. She reached across the sofa, took Mother's arm and gently turned it over to expose the wrist, with its tracery of veins and smooth, finely textured skin. "Your arm is the accident," she said, ''not mine."
Mrs. Levandowski stood up to leave. "Asher understands," she said. She picked up her hat and walked to the door. Mother thanked her for coming. They shook hands, something I had never seen two women do before. They looked like heads of state. "Goodbye to you," Mrs. Levandowski said.
Mother watched through the living room window as Mrs. Levandowski trudged down the pavement. Then she burst into tears and went upstairs to her bedroom. "I knew you wouldn't be able to change her mind," Barry shouted up at her, a note of righteousness in his voice, as if Mrs. Levandowski had not disappointed him.
For some time after that, Barry and Asher continued to be friends,
 
Page 14
though only on the street. Barry was not allowed in Asher's house, and Asher avoided our house, not because his mother had forbidden him to enter it, but because, I think, it held too much for him to reconcile. Eventually, of course, he had to choose. Perhaps if he had been a few years older, he'd have chosen Barry. But he was young then. So young that the choice must have felt to him simply like a gradual turning in the direction of his mother's pale insistent face and dark lips, a slight inclination of his head so that her lament came clearer to his ears and became, finally, his lament.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
When Barry saw that new neighborhoods and shopping centers were sprouting near his subdivision on land formerly given to tobacco and horse pasture, he thought about moving farther out. But of his three children, only one lives at home now, and she'll be going away to college in the fall. Instead, he and his wife bought a large cabin-cruiser where they spend every weekend in good weather. He says the sea is the last open road.
I was surprised to see the old Deaf CAUTION Child sign relocated to the side of the newly widened road to his house. I like to imagine that the road workers preserved it out of reverence, for surely they could have guessed from its battered condition that the deaf child was long since gone. But perhaps they were simply daunted by the prospect of discovering whether, in all those houses, there was still someone who lived in a markedly different world, one which could not be changed and needed protecting.
Barry says he barely remembers Asher, and he does not know what became of him or his parents. This is nothing unusual or sad for a human being. The memories of children do not so much record the past as bury it.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The full story about Mother's Great Uncle Beryl is this: when he overturned the Cossack wagon into the ditch he wasn't just showing off. He was in quite desperate circumstances. He was a drayman and made his living hauling thingsbarrels of salt herring, household
 
Page 15
goods, sacks of flour and barley. His buckboard was full that day. He couldn't have moved it out of the way if he had wanted to. The road was narrow and steep, with deep culverts on either side. Mother said he must have reached the breaking point, sitting up high on his rig, looking into that dark ditch where the Cossacks expected him to tumble without a fight. It was perhaps the tenth or the hundredth time he had been called a Jew-dog. That was a common insult in his world of shtetls and pogroms. What matterswhat aroused such ferocityis what he saw from his rig: the dark ditch waiting for him.
After he overturned the Cossacks, it was said that their horses were so frightened by the sight of a wheel that they had to be sold for meat and glue. In the countryside, word of his bravery spread, exciting admiration among gentiles and Jews alike. The family celebrated and toasted him that night with wine, even his aged mother, for whom I am named, and who, I am told, tossed off her shoes and danced.
 
Page 16
Tropical Aunts
Aunt Debs and Aunt Ava. They were my father's sisters. Dramatic, glamorous women who, my mother said, had ''been around." I saw them every July when we traded the humidity of Washington, D.C., for the even more oppressive heat of Miami, where my father's people lived amid piña coladas, guava jelly, and floral print clothing. I still have a picture of them mounted in one of those plastic telescopes that were popular key chain trinkets in the 1950s. They look tan and healthy and non-Jewish standing arm-in-arm in front of the cardboard palm trees.
Debs was the older, a stormy, rich blond who had been widowed. She lived a reclusive life in a houseboat on the Miami River. Without a phone, she could only be contacted through her attorney, like a
 
Page 17
movie star. Ava was a redhead with a reputation for borrowing money. Everyone knew she'd had to get married to her first husband. This was the biggest scandal so far in our family. After she had the baby, she got divorced, lost custody, and married an osteopath who worked nights as a stand-up comic in the hotels of Miami Beach.
My Florida aunts came north to visit us only twice. The first time was for my sister Fran's wedding. They drove up together in a big white Chrysler sedan. "My teeth started to chatter as soon as we hit North Carolina," Aunt Debs said, hugging herself as she closed the car door. She regarded our snow-covered lawn as if it were the surface of the moon. Then she picked her way slowly up the front walk. Ava followed, relatively surefooted in doeskin loafers and thick white socks. She leaned down to touch the snow shoveled into a heap alongside the front stoop and put a drop of it on her tongue. "Sometimes we put Hershey's syrup on it and make snowcones," I told her. I knew they'd be exclaiming and complaining about the weather but that the cold fascinated them. Also, when I saw my aunt Ava eating snow, just like that, I understood how she could have gotten pregnant.
As soon as they had hung up their clothes, they unveiled the presents: chocolate-covered coconut patties (my favorite candy), sea-grape jelly, and fresh papayas. For my mother, a white lace bathing suit cover-up, for my father, a book called
Fish of the Southern Waters
. My gift was a pearly pink comb-and-brush set with tiny shells and seahorses embedded in the handles. For Fran they'd chosen salmon-colored lingerie that made my father blush as my sister eagerly held it up for us to admire. "Baby-dolls," Aunt Ava explained to Fran. "I hope your Herb will like them."
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The night before the Florida aunts arrived my mother had given my sister and me a briefing. "Don't mention Uncle Teddy," she cautioned. Teddy was Aunt Debs's dead husband.
My father, within earshot in his lounger, pitched in. "Did you put away the liquor?" Fran and I looked at each other. The only time my parents drank was at Passover, when they sipped reluctantly at four glasses of Manischewitz Concord wine. Beer had never crossed our threshold. Once at a restaurant I had seen my mother drink a Brandy
 
Page 18
Alexander, but afterward someone told her mixed drinks were fattening and she never had another one.
"All I have is the bottle of schnapps," my mother said. I knew exactly which bottle she was talking about. It belonged to my grandfather, Velvel. My mother kept it on hand for him the way you'd keep medicine for an emergency asthma attack.
"Are we supposed to pretend Uncle Teddy never existed or what?" Fran asked.
"She took his death so hard," my mother said. "Just avoid the subject if you can."
I remembered when Great Uncle Benny had died. The whole family mourned for a week at my aunt Florence's house where the gilt mirrors were covered with black cloth and the satin loveseats crowded out by low, uncomfortable, wooden folding chairs.
"Aunt Debs must have really been in love," I said, looking at my sister and remembering an old movie about a girl whose fiancé was killed on the way to the wedding. Would Fran turn to drink if Herb were tragically killed after the final head count had been given to the caterer?
"Teddy was a real charmer," my mother said. "Could charm the birds out of the trees."
My father lit a Lucky Strike. "That girl really suffered when he went. I even had to hide the scissors. No hospital could have handled it."
This explained, at last, my father's prolonged visit to Florida the autumn before. My parents had flown down for the funeral, but my father had stayed an extra three weeks. At the time he had said he was helping Aunt Debs settle Uncle Teddy's estate. Now my imagination ran wild with passionate scenes in which my aunt Debs, her large blue eyes reddened by grief and alcohol, was saved from self-destruction by
my father
, who in my experience had not been up to dealing with bloody knees or temper tantrums.
Later that evening I persuaded Fran to let me into her room. She was setting her hair. I eyed the birch bedroom set and pink clock-radio, the wallpaper with its soothing dusky primroses being visited by small yellow birds. As soon as Fran was married I'd be moving in. I smeared some of her Dippity-Do on my hair.
"Your bangs will look like sheet metal if you use that much," she said through a mouthful of bobby pins.
"Who do you like best, Aunt Ava, Aunt Debs, or Aunt Florence?"

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