Jew Store (31 page)

I was on the verge of blubbering when my mother came back. “What's the matter with you?” she asked me. “Miriam's already in the car with Papa. Seth's waiting for us, and in the middle of everything, you decide to just sit. What's wrong? Don't you want to see your brother? Stand up and button your blouse.” She went out the door.

I hung my head, and the tears popped out. Through the fat globs I tried to make out the buttons. Those rocks, those huge, craggy rocks, could they possibly be buttons? I made a grab for them and tried to shove them into their slots. They wouldn't go.
They were the stubbornest things I had ever seen. I finally cried out, as loud as I could, “They won't go, they won't go!”

No one answered my cries, and pretty soon I gave up expecting anybody. I picked up the sweater and dragged it along as I went out of the house. The car door was open and I crawled through it. I was a stupid worm shoving my own self into a bait can.

At the depot everybody was talking and laughing. Seth had moved to the waiting-room wall and under the overhang was talking to a friend. Each time he laughed, I took it as a cue to jump with both feet on a crack.

In what seemed a very short while, here came the roar, and I covered my ears with my hands. Not yet! Not yet! I cried out to myself, though even if I had yelled it out loud, no one would have heard me.

The train whooshed to a stop, the bells clanged, and the porters in their shiny black coats and brimmed caps jumped off and, lightning-fast, put the little steps under the train doors.

My father walked quickly up to the train, my mother and sister half-running behind him. I hung back with Seth and kept my eyes on him.

Seth was looking toward the train. I saw a smile overtake his face, and I shifted my gaze. What I saw was a tall boy with black curly hair and a freckly face. He was holding a paper sack and was at this minute hugging my parents and my sister.

That's Joey, I said to myself, your brother. I grabbed at Seth. But Seth had no time for me. “Mr. Joey, Mr. Joey,” he yelled, and ran to the boy.

They laughed with each other for a moment. I saw Joey look around and heard him ask, “Where's Stella Ruth?”

I didn't move. My mother turned toward me and motioned “come” with her head. Still I hung back.

My mother came over. “What's the matter with you?” she said, and shoved me forward.

Joey knelt down in front of me. “Hello, you silly girl. Don't you remember me?” He put down the sack to hold me by the shoulders. “How'd you get so big anyway?”

I stared at him.

“I know something to make you talk.” Joey reached into the sack, drew out a plump doll, and put it in my hands. A second thrust into the sack produced a lollipop as big as the moon. He held it in front of me. “Don't you remember what I promised? ‘A sweet to eat and . . .'” He stopped, waiting for me to finish the jingle.

I said nothing.

“Don't tell me you've forgotten?”

Without looking I turned the doll over in my hand. I felt the hair. It was straw-stiff, sticky like the excelsior stuff in the store boxes. The dress was just as scratchy. I went on fingering. The lace down the front was hard and scabby, like a two-day-old knee scrape.

Everybody was smiling at me, waiting. They didn't know I wasn't going to speak. They didn't know that what I was going to do was run. I told myself what a fast runner I was and that if I wanted to, I could outrun them all.

I snatched the lollipop out of Joey's hand. Lollipop in one hand, doll in the other, I darted down the platform.

I was running toward the train engine, running with all my might, faster than I had ever run before. As I ran, the doll dangled upside down. “I hate you! I hate you!” I cried, and with all my strength hurled the doll to the side of the engine. Its head fell off; body and head bounced to the platform. I picked the body up and flung it once more. I threw down the lollipop and trampled it into sugary clumps.

Then I was running again and shrieking, “No, no, no!” When I was finally out of breath and not sure of what else to do, I sat down, dug my face into my knees, and let the crying come.

I
n the first weeks, when my brother was around, I stayed pretty quiet. There was this stranger called “Joey,” and I was at first strongly disinclined to admit him as part of the family. It was a feeling that wore off, to be replaced by shyness, which in turn yielded to curiosity, and soon I was asking questions and Joey was answering. When he described the big whale at the American Museum of Natural History or told about climbing into the arm of the Statue of Liberty, it seemed I was hearing of a dreamworld.

But Joey never talked for very long, not to me, not to anybody. He always said he had to get back to his book. When my mother went to his room to try to get him to come out, he would say “later” and then read on until she came again.

T came over, but after he and Joey got out the erector set, they did no projects with it. They played some checkers and chess, but there was no longer any joshing and pretend accusations of cheating. Joey occasionally took the car out, but he went alone. When he was asked where he had gone, he headed for his room, saying, “Out in the country somewhere.”

My mother at last realized that he was lonesome. She said to my father, and was surprised by what she was saying, “He's lonesome for New York.”

My father agreed. “Sure he is. He's been doing New York things, and he's missing them.”

My mother wanted to know what he was missing. Standing at Joey's door one Saturday morning, she spoke to him as he lay on his bed. “So what did you do in New York you can't do here? What's so different?”

Joey shrugged. “It's fine here, Mama. Don't worry.”

“I can't help but worry. You ain't the same. Missing something a little bit I can understand, but to be homesick in your own home I never heard of.” Maybe he wanted to go to the Saturday serial?

He had seen it in New York, and he was going to the store later.

“Papa don't need you that bad. Go see the picture anyway.”

“I've seen that already, too.”

“So see it again, like always. Or go call T and go somewheres with him. And for a cherry Coke afterwards. Or maybe a cherry
smash
like you once had. Wouldn't that be nice?”

Joey just looked at her.

My mother was trying to understand. “You went to lots of places Saturday mornings in New York?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“To museums and operas and things? With Uncle Philip? You like that kind of thing?”

“Sure.” Lest my mother get the idea that he just went in for the higher things, Joey also mentioned the New York baseball teams, especially the Yankees, since the Yankees played in the Bronx. We had a cousin who lived in an apartment building that overlooked Yankee Stadium, and sometimes, Joey said, they'd watch a game from the rooftop. “Best seats in the house,” he said.

Baseball was nothing my mother was prepared to discuss. “When school starts, you'll find more to do what you like,” she said to Joey.

When school started, the principal called my mother on the telephone. “Joseph” was too advanced for his class, and she wanted my parents' permission to skip him to the next one.

“Yes, fine,” my mother told her. “Joseph will be glad.”

Well, Joey wasn't quite as glad as my mother had thought. Concordia classes ran in years, not in half years as in New York, so Joey was skipped a whole year. At the end of the first week, he came home with another problem: The class thought he was too young for them. T was in the class, but, Joey explained, T had other friends, and you couldn't expect T to be just with him.

My mother wrung her hands. “Now
this
is wrong! Something's always wrong!” She kept trying. “So you'll make friends later. Right now you'll learn.”

This didn't work either. “That's just it,” Joey protested. “I'll be wasting my time. If I was in New York, I'd be learning a lot more a lot faster.”

My parents went together into Joey's room to talk it over with him. Since it was definitely a family matter, Miriam and I pushed in with them.

My father thought it was the Rapid Advance thing that was bothering Joey. Rapid Advance was a New York City program to which Joey had been assigned, one designed to move motivated pupils ahead more quickly. My father said to nobody in particular, “He feels like he's being cheated since he was supposed to go.” He looked at Joey. “Ain't that right, my boychick?”

Joey's face was bright for the first time since the day of his return. He talked about the school he would have gone to, one with a library and laboratories. And every day an art and music lesson. Uncle Philip had gone with him to look it over, and, Joey said, “Boy, were we impressed!”

Miriam thought maybe Joey also had a sweetheart he was missing. Miriam wanted to talk not about educational programs but about courtship customs. She pursued the subject, doing serious research. “What on earth do y'all do when y'all have sweethearts? Are there football games?”

Joey shook his head.

“Do y'all have
dates
?”

Joey finally obliged her. “We don't call it a ‘date.' We call it ‘taking a girl out.'” When he took a girl out, he said, they went to the pictures, to a theater downtown, or to the Paradise on the Grand Concourse. Afterward they got an egg cream—which, as I found out, mysteriously contained no egg and no cream—on the way home from the subway. Joey said “THEE-a-ter,” not “thee-AY-ter,” the way we did.

My mother took Miriam's subject to heart. As she saw it, there was nobody in Concordia for Joey to take out, meaning, of course, no Jewish girls.

Pretty soon the old discussion began, only this time both my parents, if not delighted that Joey would have to leave, were accepting.

Joey went back to New York, to my grandparents' apartment, before the year was out. Afterward, we saw him in summers when he came home for vacation. While he was with us, he played a little chess with T and guessed, with the rest of us, at the number of beans in the jar in the U-Tote-'Em window—an enduring summer contest in which a boy might win a baseball and a girl a box of bath powder—but the truth was we all treated him as a visitor and a guest.

M
iriam's social life was exceedingly active. Besides the piano lessons and chats at Miss Brookie's, there were football games, Saturday afternoon bridge parties, after-school gatherings at Tippett's Drug Store and Ice Cream Parlor. But the social week marked time until the Saturday Night Party.

The Saturday Night Party was a tradition in Concordia, and Miriam's crowd had arrived at the age when the mantle had fallen to them. The party was held at the home of one or other of the girls, and when Miriam said it was her turn, my mother did not demur. As with anything, she felt a responsibility to pay back. She only wanted to know who to invite and how many.

The gang, Miriam said, so about twenty in all.

And with the parents?

Parents?
“What parents?” Miriam asked my mother.

“You can't give a party without inviting the mothers and fathers!” my mother cried. “I never heard from such a thing.” She started, “In New York—”

Miriam wouldn't let her finish. “Oh, New York!” she said, as usual dismissing New York and its “tacky” ways. “We don't need
chaperones
,” she said. “After all, we're not
children
.” And not only that, none of the other parents were ever there.

My mother was truly shocked. She looked, according to how Miriam has told it, as if she had ventured into “a nest of wicked old fire ants.”

My mother was adamant: There would be no party without her being there.

Miriam gave my mother an accusing look. “You don't trust us. Just go on and admit it.”

My mother tried to give Miriam an honest answer. “I don't know what I do. I hear the way you girls don't talk about nothing but boys. I see the way you dress for them. I ain't afraid to say I don't know what to expect from nobody. What do I know from these people?”

In the end Miriam said, “All right, be there if you want to. But I completely
despair
of you.”

T
he party was on. Twenty-two teenagers were invited. My mother was surprised that T was one of them. T didn't go to parties, and he was older than Miriam. “Even if he does act younger,” my mother said.

“Act younger?” It was Miriam's turn to be shocked. “You haven't noticed him lately if you think that.”

My mother probably
hadn't
noticed that T had grown very tall, and had acquired a way about him that all the girls found “dead attractive.” He seemed to be everybody's crush, though, the girls wailed, he paid them “no mind atall.” Miriam said she had to practically
order
him to come to the party.