Jew Store (14 page)

Mrs. MacAllister spoke over the head engaged at her nipple and expressed the wish that big Billy could be there for little Billy's baptizing. “Crawley's where we do our baptizings,” she said in my mother's direction. “They got a river over there lends itself real good for dipping.” She did an unsure grin, and after a moment, she said in a tone suddenly shy, “Do y'all . . . um . . . do y'all have any water in the Jewish faith?”

Jewish
faith!
Jewish
faith!
My mother always said the words tore through her box and ripped it to shreds. “Jewish faith” was not an expression she was unfamiliar with. Her coworkers had used it on those rare occasions when they'd determined for reasons unknown that politeness was required. It was as if calling it a “faith” somehow took the curse off. Well, she thought now, is that what everybody thinks? That the Jewish religion is a
curse
?

My mother was suddenly hearing another voice, and it was angry, no doubt about it, “Ain't ours a
religion
like everybody else's?” it was saying. She was amazed that this furious voice sounded so much like hers. And even more amazed when she realized it
was
hers. “You ain't going to get nothing from me to laugh at,” she exploded at the women. “You only want to know about our religion so you can call us
loony
or whatever word you use in your language.”

Mrs. MacAllister sat Billy up. Mother and child fastened china blue eyes on my mother.

My mother remembered it all, how she was not to be put off, how the more she thought about everything, the more she shouted. “Did you ever think how
loony
I might think it is that you dunk that little baby in a river?” Oh, she was screaming, no doubt about it, screaming loud. “Or that you cut off a girl's hair when she done wrong?” She paused for only a second. “No, you can't believe your
religion
could do anything
loony
.”

She now took all her courage in her hands and turned on Miss Brookie. “And you, you and your high-toned ways and how you talk and all what you know.” Though she knew her English wasn't coming out properly, with the words tumbling over each other, she couldn't make herself care. “So how come you don't look down your nose at this lady when she brings out her breast in front of a stranger? Ain't it because she's Christian?” She stomped on the shreds around her feet. “Well,” she went on, “I may be just a
Jew
, but that's one thing we don't know from. Only time I seen that is with the Russian peasants. For shame, for shame.”

When words began to slow, she knew it was time to quit. “I'm going in now,” she said more quietly, “and I'll leave you two to talk about me. You'll talk plenty, you're so good at saying things.”

She said later that she was shaking, shaking hard, and not from religious fervor but from having been so mad. Her legs were going wobbly, not holding her. When she got to the screen door, she put out her hands and clung to it. And all at once Lizzie Maud had hold of her. From out of nowhere she was at the door. “You best take it slow, Miz Reva,” she said. “You gwine be just fine. All it was was you was just full fit to bust. Don't we all know how that is?”

Just fine?
My mother would have taken any bet that so terrible was this thing she had done, so much trouble had she stirred up, she would never be “just fine” again. She let her body sag toward Lizzie Maud's. It would have been wonderful to remain in Lizzie Maud's embrace forever.

In her room she closed the door. She thought she would sink instantly onto the bed and quick, quick pull down her green shades. Instead she found herself in front of the mirror studying herself, looking hard at her forehead, as if to burrow through to the place where would arise the headaches she had just set into motion. “Fit to bust,” Lizzie Maud had said.

She stood there, looking, waiting. So where were they, those headaches, those squeezes like from a too-tight hat? Where were the moans and the groans, and the weeping that came not from memories but from misery? By now she should have been awash in tears, sinking in water like a leaky ship. Instead, there was, incredibly, a buoyancy, a sympathetic tug, and the feeling of being towed into a safe harbor.

What she also felt was
cleaner
. As if she had taken a ritual bath, a
mikveh
. Was a
mikveh
anything like a
baptizing
? With the question came a sound in her throat. It was a sound she had not heard from herself in a long time, a hint of a laugh.

Several minutes went by. She pulled the pins from the bun, and her hair plunged into a full fall. She brushed it and, after plaiting it into a braid, arranged it on top of her head.

She went back to the screen door and looked out onto the porch. Miss Brookie and Mrs. MacAllister were gazing anywhere but at each other. They were in a world of dead silence.

It took the reappearance of my mother to bring things back to life. As if she had been gone for days, the other women opened their eyes wide and flung greetings. Mrs. MacAllister grinned hugely, as if my mother's coming was only slightly less welcome than that other one yet to be.

M
iriam has always remembered that she had a wonderful time in St. Louis with my father. Although they stayed, and ate, in the home of one of the wholesale men, she and my father went to
two
restaurants. My father introduced her to the wholesale men as his “bookkeeper,” and, not knowing yet how to write, she nevertheless scribbled some things down. The men made a big fuss over her, and she came home with dresses so beguiling that they were perhaps what made her fashion-conscious for the rest of her life.

My father too had success in St. Louis. The men accepted Mr. Cohen's letter and treated him, if not like Diamond Jim Brady, then at least, as my father used to say, like a man with money to spend. This was the first of my father's annual buying trips to St. Louis, though he also ordered occasionally from the houses' traveling salesmen.

When my father and Miriam came back, nobody much mentioned my mother's collapse, and though my father was surprised to find her in such improved spirits, he didn't go on about it. The shoe factory was about to open, and there was little room for other than thoughts of business.

Miss Brookie had advised that the family go to the picnic to celebrate the opening. “Let them see that you share their species,” she said.

Despite that the thing on my mother's chest had lightened since what she called her
mikveh
day, and though the day of the picnic dawned sunny and clear, my mother herself was not very sunny and definitely not clear.

What she was not clear about was the food she should take. She could certainly not partake of Lizzie Maud's chicken, fried as it always was in bacon grease the volume of a small pond.

She had decided at last on hard-boiled eggs. That morning, however, when she had gone about boiling them, she had gotten the message from Lizzie Maud that eggs were too lowly for a picnic. Lizzie Maud had said you “dassent” go to a picnic without fried chicken, “no,
ma'am
.” As with my father's “God,” Lizzie Maud's “ma'am” was just a word. She didn't “ma'am” or “sir” every white person in sight, as if to honor them for just being white, though she did with older persons. Not that everybody in Concordia didn't “ma'am” and “sir” older people, but Lizzie Maud awarded the honorific to both older whites and older Negroes.

When my mother had said she didn't know how to make fried chicken, Lizzie Maud had said that first of all, my mother should understand that you didn't
make
fried chicken. “You don't make things you eat,” Lizzie Maud had said. “You fixes them.” In this case it didn't matter: Where she was from, my mother had told Lizzie Maud, they didn't even
eat
fried chicken.

“Then where you from don't know nothing,” Lizzie Maud had answered. There was, she had said, nothing to it, that even her “knee baby” knew how. She had muttered a “shoot-dog,” had herself gone to the icebox, taken out some pieces of chicken, contemplated the can of bacon drippings for a moment but, since she had already been informed of the rudiments of “kosher,” withdrew the Crisco.

She had run through the fundamentals, about the coating of the pieces in flour and the hot, hot grease and the pan lid being off and on and off again—to bring back its “ship-snap”—and “how you dassent leave no smidge of pink,” and had then said to my mother, “See can you do it.”

In the end the chicken was “fixed” by Lizzie Maud.

A
s my mother sat now in the buggy on the way to the ceremonies, clutched in her hand was a paper sack containing her fried chicken and a cucumber stand-in for the still suspect potato salad. For Miss Brookie and the rest of the family, along with the basket of Lizzie Maud's chicken and accoutrements, there were her lemon meringue pies for “sharing time,” when, Miss Brookie said, “everybody puts the word out on everybody else's cooking.”

It was one of those late summer mornings when the sun was everywhere and the air was like new. With my father holding the reins, Harold Lloyd clip-clopped briskly, as if happy to at last be on a mission worthy of his talents.

My father, with his own opening day nearing, was most decidedly, as my mother would say, “flying with the birdies.” Indeed so elevated was he, he had taken to declaiming. The day, for example, was “a day for princes, for kings!” He thought to compare it to a day in New York, and New York suffered in the comparison. In New York where was the sun? Hidden by the apartment houses, that's where; or, if it managed to squeeze between those brick fortresses, it fell on the streets in odd, sharpedged wedges like hunks of cheese. And trees?
Oy
, what a schlep to Central Park or to the north Bronx if you wanted trees. And here? Here was a countryside full of trees. And a smell from the pine needles and good earth like perfume. And the air? Nowhere so soft, so clean.

To show appreciation of air of such high quality, my father put on a show of deep breathing, holding the reins with one
hand and pounding his chest with the other. He gestured to Joey and Miriam to follow.

Miss Brookie told them to save the oxygen for my mother. “Since it's all kosher,” she said, “she can partake of it without guilt.”

Every time Miss Brookie said something like this, slipped in some Jewish something, my parents were surprised until they learned that Miss Brookie knew about “Jewish somethings” because she had known Jews. Specifically, she had known them in college, at the University of Chicago, where she had roomed with a Jewish girl—Dora Landau by name—and had spent a summer with Dora and her brother, Jack, and their parents. When she first told about that summer, she said that it had been nothing less than “momentous” and that it had changed her a lot. It was only much later that we learned just how “momentous” that visit had been.

German Jews
the Landaus were, my father thought at Miss Brookie's first telling of this story. Who but German Jews would send a
daughter
to college?

Therefore when Miss Brookie said, “They were German Jews,” my father said to himself, So was I wrong?

A
s they rode along in the carriage toward the picnic, my mother was aware that she had laughed with the others at Miss Brookie's joke about kosher oxygen. Since her
mikveh
day she had discovered that a laugh wasn't always for somebody else.

They arrived at the factory grounds at about eleven o'clock. A crowd had already gathered. Joey spotted T fooling around with some other children, and he ran over, Miriam chasing behind. Miss Brookie put her hand on a picnic table, thereby claiming it, and my father deposited the baskets.

My mother opened up one of the folding chairs and sat down.

Miss Brookie, after observing the scene for a moment, thought my father should do some “mixing.” She herself wanted a talk with Roscoe Pinder, the factory owner. She asked my mother if she wanted to come along. “It's a chance to meet the movers and shakers,” she told her.

By this time my mother had learned to separate the wheat from the chaff in whatever Miss Brookie said, or, as she put it, “the barley from the soup,” so she knew not to bother with “movers and shakers” and just answered, “Maybe later.”

After Miss Brookie and my father left to go “mixing,” my mother put on a pleasant expression and looked into the crowd.

Out on the picnic grounds everybody was all dressed up. The adults were in their Sunday best, the little girls in longish, densely smocked dresses, the boys in fedora hats and vested suits and celluoid collars from which stiff ties hung. The boys in the Bronx wore similar clothes to shul but these boys seemed to look different, like little imitation men. And their faces were small, too small, as if they had shriveled from the long summers of farmwork with the sun beating down every which way. Of course, as my mother sat thinking about little boys, and especially Bronx boys in shul, it made her think of her little boy
not
in shul, and here came a pang.

There were things to laugh at here, too, especially the tall, skinny older boys—long noodles, strands of
lockshen
, as my mother called them—with their bony hands and wrists sticking out from outgrown jackets like new shoots on a bean stalk, and she wished for my Uncle Philip, the one in the family she always laughed with.

The music at the picnic was a puzzlement. On the platform a band of musicians was jingle-jangling away on violins. Such a long warming up, she thought. Only when one of them stepped forward and delivered himself of some unintelligible words did she realize the performance was under way. And what strange music it was. She certainly hadn't expected Jewish tunes, but
why not songs that everybody knew, like “Valencia” or “Janine, I Dream of Lilac Time”?