Jew Store (21 page)

“So why yes?” my mother asked him right back, making a quick stab for “tem-po-rary.” “We can't drive it back to New York.”

My father dropped on my mother one of his looks and said, “Did I say we could?”

The next day my father sat Joey down to write a letter to St. Louis, and inside of a week, a buggy was delivered.

In case Willy might require an explanation, my father and I brought him to the side yard, where the buggy sat under the trees, the old tarpaulin over it.

“Ain't you proud, old horse?” my father asked. “Now you can go high-stepping around in front of a buggy.”

Willy stared for a moment, moved his head in a dignified way, and made a stately return to the backyard, as if accustomed by now to my father's leaps into the new.

S
idalia was just across the border from Tennessee, a ride of some twenty-five miles. My mother made sure we all looked our best. She had no plan to notify the Rastows of our impending visit. She reasoned that since they were Jewish people they didn't expect other Jewish people to “stand up on ceremonies.”

We piled into the new buggy and, with Willy on the job, took the north road out of Concordia, out of Tennessee, into Kentucky. In about three hours we pulled up to a two-story brick house. It was a solemn house. No exuberant greenery here, just typically trimmed ornamentals.

The Rastows were Irving and Gladys and their two children —Delores, about Miriam's age, and Sheldon, a year or two older than I. There was also a bachelor older brother of Irving's, Manny, who, it turned out, was the real owner of their store.

Mrs. Rastow said they were “delighted,” as she opened the little front door to let us file into the front room. “We knew you were in Concordia—by the grapevine, you know. I'm so glad you didn't wait for an invitation,” she said, in a way that my father always said let us know we should have waited.

My mother chose not to notice. Nor to dwell on the meaning of “the grapevine.” How could she bother with such things when she had all at once been transported to a world she had thought lost, a world with Jewish people in it? She explained that we had heard about the Rastows from Sammy Levine.

“Yes, Sammy Levine,” Gladys Rastow said, as if she didn't know Sammy Levine all that well, probably because Sammy Levine carried a cheap line and, as we found out, if Rastow's carried cheap lines, and they did, Gladys Rastow wasn't keen on getting too friendly with the persons who sold them.

My mother said, “Anyways, that's how we knew.”

Mrs. Rastow said, “Delightful.”

My mother had been pleased to see there was a son. Now maybe she could have a serious discussion with
someone
about bar mitzvahs. My father was never any help. Even I had noticed that he didn't so much as discuss as go “hmm.”

After a moment, my mother found herself taken aback by Gladys Rastow. Gladys's hair, thick, dark, and wiry, was bobbed; Gladys was busy, involved,
modren
, as my mother pronounced it. She seemed to belong to every women's club in Sidalia, maybe in the county, maybe in the
country
. When Gladys said to my mother, “I must say the Sidalia ladies keep me on the move,” my mother always said she thought of herself at that moment as not only not on the move, but stuck tight, like a spindled bill.

Unnerved by Gladys or not, my mother let it all out. “Like a fire hydrant I was,” my mother said in later years, “and to this lady who acted like I was just off the boat.”

She had gone on about all the things that were lacking—a shul, a rabbi, a Hebrew school. She finally got to her main point: that since there was no shul in Sidalia either, what was Mrs. Rastow going to do about Sheldon's bar mitzvah?

Apparently Mrs. Rastow wasn't going to do anything. “Do? What's to do?” she said to my mother. If my mother cared so much, why not just send Joey to Nashville?

Nashville
? If the sofa had not been of mohair, which was very grabby, my mother would have slid right to the floor.
Send Joey to Nashville? Her Joey
? To who in Nashville? To Mrs. Moskowitz, who would have him make his own meals out of the little inch she would give him in her icebox? To the rabbi's wife,
who was so busy being the rabbi's wife, she would
maybe
have five minutes for Joey in between being the rabbi's wife?

My mother said no, she didn't think so. After which Mrs. Rastow suggested
commuting
. “You know,” Mrs. Rastow said, “go back and forth by train.”

Miriam has always said that if it had been about her, my mother would have given her two bananas—one for going, one for coming back—put her on the train and waved good-bye. But then Miriam has always thought Joey was my mother's favorite, and Joey, though he has always laughed at this, has also never denied it. In any case, my mother felt that
commuting
—or whatever it was Gladys had said—was no answer at all: It was a heavy foot planted right on her body. Her Joey so much on the train?

That was the end of the bar mitzvah discussion, such as it was, though my mother was not out of things to talk about. She wanted to know what Gladys thought of the food. “Like on the moon, no?” my mother asked her.

She surged on. She talked about the people, about how my father said they were not strange, as she herself thought, just different. She kept waiting for Gladys to “chime in.”

Mrs. Rastow did not “chime in.” And why? Because she had a different view of things. And it was different because Gladys Rastow had been born in America.

Yes, Gladys had been born in America. She was born in the Bronx, and grew up in Yonkers, in tony Westchester County, just over the northern border of the city, to which her family had moved when she was very young. Unlike my mother, she had not grown up in a big apartment house surrounded by Jews, but in a place that, when she lived there, was populated almost exclusively by Gentiles. In Yonkers her father operated a humble enterprise called a candy store. This was a slight misnomer in that this kind of store carried not only sweets but also tobacco products and newpapers and accommodated soda fountains
(which served up “two-cents plains”—a shot of seltzer that cost two cents and that at some point I understood to be New York's elixir of life, as Miss Brookie had said iced tea was the South's).

Gladys helped out in the store, before and after she finished high school. My mother would occasionally say, “What kind of job was that for a girl not only born in America, but a finisher in high school?” To my mother, if you had finished high school, you had at least a job in an office, like her younger sister, Hannah.

Gladys was hard for my mother, but my mother tried through the years to be charitable and attributed Gladys's personality difficulties to never having gotten sufficient respect for being born in America and being a high school graduate. Still, she would usually add, “Just because I'm taking up for Gladys don't mean I was crazy about her.”

At this first meeting the worst was to come. Mrs. Rastow had two suggestions for my mother: First, she should bob her hair, and second, she should call her by her first name. Braids and calling people by their last names were “out of the Dark Ages,” Gladys said, and it was clear that “out of the Dark Ages” was the last thing Gladys wanted to be. Born in America to a T, my mother thought.

I
n the dining room the men were having a good time. They were talking about business. My father's business was continuing to grow, Manny Rastow's showed promise, and, since Manny's store was the main thing in his life and my father's was second only to his family, the two had every reason to be cheerful. Irving, who was quiet (his wife had opinions for two, my father would say), mostly listened, but he was the sort who was happy to be in happy company. My father immediately liked Manny and Irving Rastow.

Manny had gone from New York to Alabama as a peddler's helper and after a year had gotten his own wagon. He had peddled
on his own in West Virginia and Kentucky, saved his money, and, after a few years, had had enough of the nomadic life. When a store came available in Sidalia, he'd bought it and sent for his brother and family to join him. He himself had no wife, something of which my mother took serious notice.

I
n the back of the house we heard Manny's call to come into the parlor, and when we gathered, Manny gave a speech of welcome. “What it is is a great occasion,” he said, as if he were giving a formal speech in a great hall, “and I want you should know how welcome you are in our house. If I didn't say
shalom aleichem
before, I say it now. I say welcome, and peace. You should know how good it is to have Jewish people here.”

He said that Irving had “a big surprise to pull, in honor” and that he would pull it in the kitchen. In the center of the kitchen table was a wooden barrel as squat and round as an oak tree stump.

Irving picked up a metal pry lying next to the barrel and proceeded to work off the lid, which responded with groans and squeaks. His reticence was gone. He was in full command. “Now!” he ordered. “Close eyes! Smell hard!”

Eyes closed. Noses inhaled, noisily.

My father cried, “Herring!” My mother cried, “Pastrami!”

Irving lifted items out one by one and gave each an honored place on the table: pink oiled-paper packets of corned beef and pastrami tied with string; ones of thin, thin slices of lox; tiny mustard-filled paper cornucopias; a whole tongue; a fat smoked whitefish; pickled onions, cucumbers, and tomatoes in white cardboard cartons with tiny metal handles astride; and, down in the bottom, rye bread, bagels, and nut-and-fruit pastries.

Miriam felt a tug. She turned and there was Delores, hissing at her. “See?” Delores said. “It's just Jew food!” So what that it was “Jew food”? All we knew was that Mr. Rastow had performed mouth-watering magic.

For Miriam, Delores was a “burden” (Concordia's word for anything calling for patience). To this day she will say, “Delores was the most
irritating
young 'un I've ever known.”

“Am I seeing what I'm seeing?” my mother was asking. She too called it magic.

Irving said indeed it was magic—magic sent from a St. Louis delicatessen, with which he had placed an order for a weekly barrel. Then every Sunday morning there was, as Irving said, “a magic at the front door, courtesy Railway Express.”

In her ecstasy at having “real” food, my mother told about a a recent encounter with some store-bought pickles. “Feh! So sweet they were, I should have given them for dessert. Whoever heard from sweet pickles?

“And the bread! Before you can chew it, it's gone—like some kind of trick! And no taste! When I'm eating a sandwich, if I didn't have something between, I wouldn't know I was eating nothing!” My mother speared a slice of rye bread with her fork and held it high. “Now, this is
bread
. It looks like something, it tastes like something!”

A
fter the Broomes, this was the second visit in a row that hadn't been a great success, but my mother took comfort in the fact that the Rastows were Jewish. As if asking for confirmation, she said to my father on the ride going home, “That's the important part.”

My father answered noncommittally. At this moment it seemed best to leave well enough alone.

My mother persisted. The
most
important thing, she said, was that Miriam and I would have Jewish friends.

This inspired a Miriam explosion. “For pity's sake, Mama!” she cried out from the buggy's back seat. “So what if Delores is Jewish? She's about as much fun as a dead cat!” Furthermore, she couldn't understand why my mother wanted us to be friends with somebody who was so clearly hostile to anything Jewish.
What about Delores saying “Jew” this and “Jew” that? “Just the way you hate it, Mama,” Miriam said.

“Did I hear anything like that?” my mother asked her invisible person. “No, I didn't hear nothing like that.”

“I know you didn't,” Miriam responded crossly. “It's
pathetic
the way you hear some things and not others.”

My mother waved a hand toward the back. “She's just a little girl talking. She don't know what she's saying.”

“Delores is a bent hairpin,” I contributed. “And Sheldon is a . . .” I was stuck.

My brother whispered something in my ear, and I said, “A snaggle-toothed comb.”

“Hush, Stella Ruth,” my mother said. “And, Joey, you quit telling her things to say. . . . Anyways, you'll make the best of it. They'll be your friends.”

Miriam argued that we had plenty of friends, plenty right in Concordia, so why did we need more?

My mother said we didn't have any
Jewish
friends, that was why. “I only wish Joey had some Jewish boys,” she said.

“You and your Jewish!” my sister said. “Honestly, Mama!”

My mother closed it out. “You're a Jewish girl, Miriam. Are you forgetting that?”

Was Miriam forgetting? As far as I could tell, it wasn't so much forgetting as never thinking about it. “It's just that it's so gol-derned silly!” Miriam yelled. Then she yelled, “Gol-derned silly” to the great outdoors until she got tired of saying it.

My mother already had other things on her mind, specifically that Manny Rastow was a nice man and a bachelor and that her sister Hannah was a lovely girl and likewise unmarried. Plans for my Aunt Hannah were beginning to percolate.

T
he very next day my father placed an order for the St. Louis magic. So eager was he, he made a long-distance call, the kind of telephoning usually reserved for wholesale
houses when an order, perhaps for superfrilly, superflouncy dresses needed for an Easter Sunday only two weeks away, had not yet arrived. But my father figured that my mother had been so joyful about the barrel, he should do whatever it took to keep her light shining.