The Appetites of Girls (2 page)

(My Story)

•
1983
•

O
n the third Saturday of May, exactly one month after my thirteenth birthday, I was to become a bat mitzvah. Already seated in the temple, waiting for me to recite my Torah portion, were my eight aunts and uncles and my eleven cousins. The Kramers had come all the way from Farmingdale, the Martins from Staten Island. Neighbors from our building had shown up as well—the Schafers, the Rosenbergs, the Kleins from across the hall. Mama, Poppy, Sarah, and Valerie had spread across the first pew, Mama in the center in her new navy Anne Klein suit and her best patent leather purse with the gold horseshoe-shaped clasp.

Though the temple was only a six-block walk from where we lived in Riverdale, north of Manhattan, we had, at Mama’s insistence, been dressed and squeezed into our building’s narrow elevator two hours before the service began. “I want to be sure of securing the front row, the
one closest to the bima,” Mama had informed us. She’d been standing before the bathroom mirror, spraying her hair—which had been styled just the day before at the salon—filling the apartment with the sweet scent I associated with Saturday mornings and all significant occasions. Even for weekly services, Mama made certain we were fifteen minutes early so she could turn and wave to friends as they arrived. But this day, of course, was of far greater importance. “It’s only once you become a bat mitzvah, hmm, Ruthie?” Mama licked her thumb to flatten a strand of hair that had loosened from my rhinestone barrette. “Poppy and I want to be just an arm’s length away when you stand to read.”

During the service, Jessica Neier and Harold Green would also be called to the Torah, and, of the three of us, I would read last. As Harold recited his passage, I gazed at my new chocolate-brown shoes with their almost-grown-up heels, which Mama had bought at Saks Fifth Avenue especially for this occasion. Most items for my wardrobe, and those for my younger sisters, she purchased at a bargain basement in Brooklyn, scrutinizing labels and buttons and seams until she was satisfied that, despite the discounted prices, she had found top-quality clothes. But at the beginning of the month, Mama had taken Sarah and Valerie and me by bus to midtown Manhattan, to the girls’ department at Saks. At the back of the store, a carpeted elevator chimed softly when we reached our floor. And there, on orderly racks, hung dresses and gowns like those I had seen in the fashion magazines Mama bought now and then. Gowns overlaid with lace, silk ones with sashes and pleats or with shoulder straps as fine as shining strings. Dresses like those my sisters and I noticed on girls our age during our occasional trips to the Upper East Side, their hair tied back with ruffled ribbons, on their way to parties, we guessed, or expensive restaurants. In my bedroom closet at home, between my plaid wraparound skirt and my gray flannel one, hung the outfit I had always assumed I would wear: a charcoal suit, wool with four black buttons down the front of the jacket and a slight scallop
along the skirt’s hem—a purchase from the last High Holy Days that still fit and seemed appropriately solemn. But the Saks dress Mama chose was a deep rose taffeta with a velvet collar and a large bow, and she paid more for it and for the blue crêpe dresses for Sarah and Valerie than I could remember her spending on any previous shopping excursion.

I proudly ran my hands over my lap, feeling the smooth taffeta, prettier than the beige wool of Jessica Neier’s. As she was called to read, I repeated again and again in my mind the trickiest phrases from my portion.

Every Wednesday for months, in one of the third-floor classrooms of the temple, I had studied with Cantor Rothman the Hebrew syllables, the pronunciation and meaning of each word, as well as the musical symbols indicating pitch.

“She’s making fine progress, Mrs. Leiser,” the cantor had said to Mama when she arrived on her way home from work to fetch me. “She seems to have an ear for the Hebrew language.” And he had winked at me, folding his thick arms over the mound of his stomach.

“Thank you, Cantor.” Mama had shaken his hand. “That’s reassuring.” But she had sniffed in a way I knew meant she was not yet convinced. Cantor Rothman had a reputation for praising even the least capable students. Mama had heard this from mothers of older children in our neighborhood when I had first begun attending Hebrew school some years before. And she had been privy to what the cantor had not, had listened as I’d practiced at home, had heard how the words sometimes stuck in my throat even with Poppy’s occasional help and with the practice tapes Cantor Rothman had given me.

How many, many sounds there were to memorize, how much for my ear and tongue to learn. So Mama had begun to study the tapes as well, until she knew every line better than I, believing that she, too, could be of assistance. When she was young, not many years after arriving in this
country, Mama had planned to be a school principal, or even a professor at a university. A goal she certainly could have achieved, she liked to tell us, having maintained for years in a row her position at the top of her class, even though most others had been here since birth.

I had heard snippets of what her life had been from the late-night chitchat of Mama and my aunts, after my sisters and cousins and I had been excused from Friday Shabbat dinners. After the reciting of the Kiddush and the completion of the meal, after our plates had been carried out to the kitchen and when our parents thought our ears were buzzing only with our own child-games. Talk of when Mama’s and Poppy’s families had made their way to America from Poland. Poppy’s family coming first, years before Poppy was even born, Mama’s coming later while Mama, Aunt Helena, Aunt Bernice, and Uncle Jacob were children. Of how turns of fortune had saved Mama’s family from the fate that had blotted out so many of our people, turns that, in the end, had allowed them to make the voyage here: of their escape to Vilna, of a Japanese diplomat there who had issued them visas, of the safe haven they had eventually been granted in the Jewish ghetto of Shanghai for the duration of the Second World War. And then talk of how both Mama’s and Poppy’s families had eventually settled in Washington Heights, and then, some years later, here in Riverdale, just north of hustling, bustling Manhattan, where the streets had more trees and the apartments were a bit roomier. Of how the families had hoped for what others already enjoyed—wages that increased, prospects that widened. How grateful they all were to be here. Still, now and then, I heard Mama and my aunts allow that if only Papa Marvin had started a business of his own as some others had . . . For those with the foresight to follow certain paths, opportunities never seemed to run out.

“Always, always we should remember our blessings,” Mama would say. But she never explained why she’d changed her mind about becoming a professor or heading a school, why she had opened her shop,
Broadway Paperie, where she sold gift cards and personalized stationery and all styles of writing implements, instead. I’d gathered it had something to do with the printing plant where Papa Marvin worked closing down while Mama was in college, with his taking up woodcarving and oil painting to pass the time “because no one was hiring middle-aged men who operated the old presses” (as I remembered him recounting), and with Mama leaving college and returning home to take a secretarial job. “Just a matter of circumstances,” was all she would ever reply if we asked, as if to mean, “It all worked out in the end.” But I saw how carefully she read through any mailings from Barnard, the college she had attended for just two years, scrutinizing the alumnae notes, the descriptions of added courses and publications by faculty, making me wonder if there were things she regretted. And if these were the same regrets that made her complain about the hours Poppy dedicated to his journals—the anecdotes of our family that he wrote with pencil in green cardboard-bound notebooks, even typing up a few and submitting them to
Riverbank Press
, a small literary magazine he’d heard about through a coworker. Recently, now that I was older, he would allow me to read over his stories as he worked, explaining why he’d chosen this word and not that, how he’d elaborated for the sake of humor and artistic merit, even asking if I had suggestions. Poppy had bought ten copies each of the issues that included his pieces. “See that, girls! Your Poppy is famous!” he’d joked, showing off his name—Aaron A. Leiser—in black print, listed between Kyle Jessup and Alice Novak on the back cover.

“How many people even read the magazine?” Mama had wanted to know.

“Not many. But that doesn’t lessen the glory, does it?” Poppy had laughed.

“Our family’s private affairs for the amusement of a few strangers?” she’d asked. (Poppy’s second entry was about our trip to Philadelphia the previous summer when we had lost Sarah in the crowd on line to see the Liberty Bell.) But I could tell it was not embarrassment that made her
press two knuckles beneath her chin and look at Poppy as if there were things she wished she could change.

•   •   •

I
hope you girls know how important it is to use time wisely,” Mama taught us. “If we’re not careful, it pulls away from us like so much thread unwinding from a spool.” She started a new routine. At the dining table each evening, after the supper crumbs had been wiped from the floral tablecloth, she directed me to close the sketch pad I now liked to draw in every night, illustrations meant to accompany Poppy’s stories. There were other things we needed to attend to, she said.

“I may not be fluent in Hebrew, Ruthie, but I’d like to think I have something of value to offer anyway.” And so she rehearsed my Torah passage with me, prompting me each time I hesitated over a word, whispering the correct Hebrew enunciation until I was able to read from beginning to end with near perfection.

That winter, we had received a printed invitation to my cousin Gregory’s bar mitzvah. For the past three years, Poppy’s older brother, Uncle Leonid, and Aunt Nadia, Gregory, Isaac, and Jack had lived in Scarsdale in a two-story house with four bedrooms. I remembered how Mama’s eyes had widened just slightly the first time Aunt Nadia had shown us their backyard with more than ample space for the swimming pool she mentioned they were considering. Mama’s sisters lived in apartments the size of ours, and ones we could walk to, and Poppy’s younger brother, Uncle Josef, and Aunt Malina were also nearby, on the bottom floor of a two-family town house on Delafield Avenue. But after Leonid and Nadia’s move to Westchester—following short on the heels of Leonid’s promotion to supervisor of the Rockland Textile Company—we rarely saw them for Friday Shabbat dinners or casual Sunday afternoon visits. And they and my cousins seemed different now. Gregory and Isaac and Jack wore leather shoes instead of sneakers, even to play outside. And our old routine of
Blind Man’s Bluff and Chutes and Ladders seemed to bore them compared with the games they could now play on the brand-new Atari computer in their family room.

Aunt Nadia had begun to dress in frilly skirts made of some stretchy material, strutting proudly in them, though I thought they made the cheeks of her bottom look like two flat couch pillows. She ordered garments from a catalog Mama had browsed through once. “You could buy plane tickets to Europe for the cost of one of those! Or even a small auto!” Poppy had joked, glancing over Mama’s shoulder at the featured outfits. “I know. Ridiculous, aren’t they?” Mama said, but I’d seen how she turned through the pages a second and then a third time, pausing to study a photo of a black sequined dress like the one Aunt Nadia had worn for Uncle Leonid’s recent birthday celebration. But what surprised Mama more than Nadia’s new shopping habits was the full-time housekeeper she had hired to cook and clean five days a week—a woman who now practically
lived
with them. Though we did not keep kosher as Nana Leah and Papa Marvin had, or Nana Esther and Papa Elias, Mama still prepared the foods of our people’s heritage, traditions Nadia’s Jamaican housekeeper, Adelaide, surely was not following. “You’d think Adelaide was family, for God’s sake,” I’d heard Mama mutter once to Poppy after we learned that, on evenings when Adelaide worked late, she was offered the spare bedroom to sleep in. A bedroom that, in the opinion of Mama and her sisters, should have been set aside for Nadia’s father to live in rather than the home for the aged two towns away. I knew in the old country—though it was before Mama was born—her grandparents had lived always in the house with Nana Leah and Papa Marvin, and with Uncle Jacob and Aunt Bernice and Aunt Helena when they were very young. And though I’d complained to Poppy and Mama about having to relinquish my room—sleeping on a cot between Sarah and Valerie’s beds for those months before Nana Leah passed away—I knew none of us would have considered any alternative.

•   •   •

A
s we had driven up the Hutchinson River Parkway to the temple in Scarsdale where Gregory’s ceremony would take place, Mama had folded down the car’s visor and checked her reflection in its rectangular mirror. She’d adjusted the pearl choker at her neck so that the largest pearls were centered. The last time we had visited, Aunt Nadia had worn a double strand of pearls, hanging nearly to her navel.

“Do you think Gregory feels nervous?” Sarah asked.

“I suppose he might,” Mama replied, though I knew Aunt Nadia had employed a high-priced Hebrew tutor to coach Gregory for his reading. And in the temple, with his prayer shawl draping his shoulders and his gold-embroidered yarmulke, as ornate as Poppy’s or Uncle Leonid’s, Gregory looked almost a man. Then as he chanted words from the Torah, his voice rocked—high-low, high-low—like the rabbi’s. Only once did he stumble over the difficult phrases. When he finished, I looked up at Mama seated beside me to see if she was impressed. But she gave only a small nod, then, bending her head to mine, tucking my hair behind my ear, whispered, “You will be even better.” And for the remainder of the service, I sat still as the stone walls of the temple, silent with wonder for what Mama thought I would do.

•   •   •

W
hen my turn finally came and Rabbi Levi called me to the podium, I smiled at him as my new heels thumped against the wooden floor. I recited the first several lines, using my finger to trace each symbol as Cantor Rothman had taught me. And I raised my voice, remembering his direction to speak so that those in the pews at the back of the temple could hear. But midway through, something caught in my throat, a feathery tickle. And by the time I coughed it away, my finger had
slipped from its place. Suddenly, the Hebrew figures—which had, just a moment before, stretched across the page in clear, logical rows—scattered into a haphazard jumble of dashes and squiggles, making the soles of my feet go damp in my stockings. When I looked out across the congregation, I saw Harold Green’s mother and Jessica Neier’s and a hundred other waiting faces. Two women in silk neck scarves, seated in the pew behind my family, murmured to each other behind their programs. In panic, I fixed my eyes on Mama. There were creases of worry between her eyes, hollows above her jaw I had never seen before, making the thudding in my chest quicken. Then, to my relief, she leaned forward, closer to me still, and began to chant, so softly that only I could hear.