Replacement Child (15 page)

1960

I
WANTED TO BE
Queen Esther.

She was the real hero in the Purim play each year at Temple. Purim is the Feast of Lots, commemorating the Jews being saved once again from extinction. Always a good thing. There were never enough parts for girls, and I was cast as Esther’s uncle, Mordechai. I wore a black mustache and cape, which almost made up for not being the queen.

When I complained to my father, he said, “There are no small parts, Juicy, only small actors. Oh wait, you are kind of small!”

I instinctively loved Queen Esther, whose name is derived from the Hebrew
saiter,
meaning concealment. The story goes that she saw through to her hidden role to save her people. Her other name—Hadassah—references the clarity of her eyes to see beyond surface realities to inner beauty.

Esther belonged to no one. Her father died before her birth, her mother in childbirth. Loneliness nurtured her, preparing her for her purpose and making her a master at breaking through the illusory trappings of the physical world.

The Purim carnival after the play featured homemade games for the kids. Knocking over milk bottles, bursting balloons with darts, throwing ping-pong balls into fishbowls to win a goldfish.

My mother and father were always the “Pic-a-Pocket Lady” and “Pic-a-Pocket Man” at the carnival. My mother sewed the costumes on her brown Singer sewing machine. Sliding material under the needle, she turned the fabric around and around while she worked the foot pedal. She pulled out the straight pins as she sewed, holding them between her lips. Every year she added new colors and pockets and fixed the torn ones.

Her outfit had a swingy pink and blue flowered skirt covered with pockets. Strings of bright colored beads draped her neck. A poofy yellow silk flower in her blouse “just for fun.” Big gold hoop earrings to “fill my gypsy spirit.”

My father wore a straw hat from New Year's Eve. His vest and pants had about fifty pockets sewn on them. He wore a tray over his shoulders “like a cigarette girl” with extra prizes to refill the pockets.

A trail of kids always swarmed them at the fair, paying a nickel to reach into a pocket to get a prize—a little puzzle, a ball or a hard candy—with the money going to charity.

Linda and I could always pick a pocket any time we wanted. Celebrity status.

“Stay with your big sister,” my mother told me before the carnival started. “Come get me if you need me.”

I didn’t have to ask what she meant.

Later, she saw us both sitting in a corner and came to check on us. The toys in her pockets clacked as she sat down.

“The kids pushed me away from that bowling game. They said they are afraid they’ll catch whatever made me look like this,” Linda told her. She was eleven, and I was six.

I nodded yes when my mother looked over at me. She got up and walked away, coming back in a few minutes and telling us to go back to the game. Linda and I looked at each other, agreeing silently to trust our mother and try again. Sure enough, all those kids had changed their attitude. I learned later that my mother had gone over and explained that Linda was not contagious, and she elicited the support of the woman running the game.

Queen Esther could see beyond the facade of reality and make others see it, too.

1964

L
UCY AND
E
THEL
were working at the candy factory, the candy conveyor belt moving at a moderate speed while they wrapped each candy in tissue paper. Then it sped up, and Lucy started popping candies into her mouth and stuffing them in her hat and down the front of her dress. The supervisor came in, and Lucy’s candy-filled hat flopped over her eyes and Ethel’s mouth overflowed with chocolate. As we watched our favorite TV show,
I Love Lucy
, Linda and I doubled up laughing. I was ten, she was fifteen, and this was one of those timeless shows we could still laugh at together.

We didn’t notice my mother standing behind the couch.

“Can you girls come up to the kitchen? Dad and I have something we need to talk to you about.”

Linda and I exchanged confused looks and followed her upstairs. My father sat at the kitchen table, and we took our usual dinnertime seats—Linda in the corner by the wall, me on the side by the refrigerator. My mother stood behind my father’s chair, the window of the built-in oven reflecting a halo around her.

“Girls,” my father started, “I don’t want you to worry, things will be fine, but I wanted to let you know that I’m closing up the store.

“It’s just not making enough money, and I owe quite a bit. But that’s not for you to concern yourselves. We’ll get through this and be better than ever.”

My mother put her hands lightly on his shoulders. “That’s right, things are going to be fine. It will just take a little while.”

I could tell that my mother had orchestrated this conversation.

I didn’t know then that the extra costs of Linda’s surgeries had put a big strain on the family finances. It was my mother who saw the store was a losing proposition and convinced my father to stop putting good money after bad and to move on.

“Nothing is going to change really. We’ll just have to tighten our belts for a little while. Then I’ll get another job, and we’ll be back to normal, okay, Juicy?” my father said with a wink at me.

I wondered how making my belt tighter would help. But I was convinced. My parents were all-powerful.

Linda said nothing and folded her hands in front of her on top of the table. She may have been thinking about how they would afford college, which was around the corner for her.

It seemed to me that my father
was
Goldblatt Jewelers. He had owned it for nearly fifteen years, and before that, he worked for Mrs. Goldblatt. I couldn’t imagine him apart from the store. His world revolved around the place where he built up clientele and friendships. He was there six days a week, with blue laws giving him one day of rest on Sundays.

Sundays, when I was little, I would follow him around like a puppy. Looking back, it was my mother who deposited me firmly under his jurisdiction on that day of the week. If he went bowling with his league, I would tag along. Or, if he was going to the hardware store to pick something up, my mother would tell him to bring me, too.

When my father closed his store, the “Everything Must Go” sale turned into a reunion for all his customers. It was just like the Christmas rush when the whole family helped out in the store. Those are some of my happiest memories. I was the quarterback of the team and could wrap a package in a minute flat or clean a tray of rings in no time. We arranged and rearranged the displays as things were sold. At this last sale, my father said good-bye to lifelong friends, with everyone swearing to keep in touch.

In a photo of my father in front of his store on Broad Street, he wore a diamond tie bar just visible above his jacket buttons— “Easier to sell them when I’m wearing one.” He posed proudly in front of his display window with the silver giftware polished by my mother, arranged by him.

After closing Goldblatt’s, my father got a job as a manager with a large jewelry chain. And he was very successful there, winning awards and trips. It was the first time my parents had a chance to travel—to the Caribbean; to the company headquarters in Texas; to meetings in L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco. These were the good times they talked about for years and remembered fondly in their eighties.

With the new job, calls from creditors stopped, and my mother started answering the phone again. She was calmer, and
my father cracked more jokes. We had barbecues and holiday dinners with aunts, uncles, and cousins again.

After my father died, I found a letter from the top executive of that jewelry chain in the strongbox under his bed:
Al is an exceptional manager. His knowledge and experience in the jewelry business are invaluable as our top salesman.

The letter was folded twice over and yellowed with age. It was the only document, other than his wishes for cremation—“like his little girl”—held in the steel box.

2006

T
HE AUDITORIUM IS
packed with people, and I’m straining to find my son among all the blue gowns. The music has started, and the class is marching in from two doors on opposite sides of the room. I don’t know where to look. It’s also a little hard to see anything through the blur of water that has collected in my eyes. I didn’t expect the rush of emotion today at his graduation. Part of it, I know, is wishing my parents could be here to see their grandson graduating with honors, tall and strong and handsome, with his warm smile and a kindness of spirit that is rare in teenagers. My mother saw it though; she could feel it in his hugs, she said. Another part is that I am so very proud of this boy, and still another is that I realize the biggest part of my mothering job is behind me. I’m not at all sure I always did the best for him. I’m haunted by something someone said to me when I was pregnant, that the best thing I could do for my baby was to stay together with his father. That was the one thing I couldn’t do.

When I met Bob, Justin’s dad, I was sure I had found my soul mate. He was sensitive and kind. We cried at movies together.
He was caring when I was sick. I thought he was responsible and that I could trust him, since he was a bank manager when we met. In the beginning, he was attentive and affectionate, though that faded pretty quickly after we married. We also had a common bond of being married twice before, which was sometimes a stigma with other men I met.

When we first dated, Bob took me to expensive restaurants nearly every night of the week and wowed me with gifts for birthdays and holidays. It wasn’t until much later that I found out he cleaned out his savings and investments to finance that courtship.

When I brought him to Florida to meet my parents, we all got together with his father and stepmother who lived close by. The families hit it off. But when we got home, Bob almost immediately got a call from his father, who warned him that if Bob didn’t tell me the truth, he would tell me himself. The truth that I didn’t know was that Bob was still married. Now that his father had met my parents, he said, he couldn’t let Bob lie to me any longer. That led to a long process of obtaining the actual divorce and proving to me and his father that it had been done by producing the final papers. Still later, I learned that he had a daughter that he was not allowed to have any contact with. Yet I ignored all the signs.