The Tell Read online

  Eva had a route. She’d walk down Schenck and up Livonia. Lights were coming on, and she would knock on doors to see who would want a challah, some bagels, or maybe some bialys. As she walked and as they bought, the load got lighter. When the basket was empty, she would go back to Heshy’s to fill it, and she’d go out again. Heshy paid her by the loaf, so Eva ran to make as much as she could in the time that she had. By seven, she was done. Heshy would fold the money, push it into her pocket, and give her a loaf to take home. She would hurry back to the children. Get them up, feed them breakfast, and get them off to school. Afterwards, when the house got quiet, she would wait and pray that Sol would get an order and send one of the girls over to tell her he needed her in the shop. In the meantime, she began to make aprons and housedresses and anything else she could think of to sell to the peddlers, to sell to the yentas.

  The days when one or the other of the children got sick, which in winter was every other day, Eva did what she had to do. She put her hand on the forehead or her ear to the chest and told them yes they could stay in bed, or no they should get up and go to school. If their head was hot, she told them to run the water, not too hot and not too cold, and take a bath. If the air rattled in their lungs, she ran quick and made a mustard plaster, put it on their chest, and told them to stay in bed, and if their nose was stuffed and they couldn’t breathe, she took them into the kitchen, put a towel over their heads, and told them to lean over the steaming kettle.

  The day that Tessie got sick and cried that her stomach hurt, Eva gave her some mineral oil and told her to get up and get dressed and go to school. Tessie wouldn’t budge. She said it hurt too much. Eva, having finally gotten a call from Sol, gave in to Tessie and told her to do whatever she wanted to do. She was eight years old, she wasn’t a baby, and if she wanted to stay home and lie around like a noodle, she should stay. Before Eva left to go to Sol’s, she yelled to Harry to keep an eye on their daughter.

  “Sure, sure,” he said, brushing her off, angry that she worried more for the kids than she did for him. Harry did what Harry did; he sat and waited for Eva to come home and make his lunch, and then he sat and waited for Eva to come home and make his dinner.

  Later that evening, Eva walked in the house and went in to check on Tessie. She was whimpering. Eva sat down on the bed and rubbed her belly and kissed her forehead and asked if maybe she would like a little soup.

  “I’ll heat up a little chicken soup. I’ll put in a little chicken, some carrots. It will be good. You should eat a little something.”

  Tessie refused. She turned away from Eva, pulled her legs up to her chest and lay like an infant in the corner of the bed. What was Eva going to do? She kissed her forehead and hoped that when she awoke tomorrow, the fever would be gone and Tessie would be better.

  The next day when Eva came home, Tessie was crying, and the next day when Eva came home, Tessie was screaming. Eva heard the screams even before she got to the steps. Rachel and Libby, the yentas next door, were standing at the stoop waiting for Eva.

  “Your daughter has been screaming all day. Where were you? Your daughter is sick. You should take her to the doctor.”

  Eva pushed past them in a rush to get to Tessie. She tried to hide her shame and appear impervious. Eva’s air was like oxygen to a fire, and the yentas shook their heads in disbelief. Eva heard Rachel tell Libby that if Eva’s neglect weren’t going to kill one child, it would kill another. Eva thought that this one’s husband was working and that one’s husband was working. They could go to a doctor, open their purse, and pay him his fee, but what was Eva going to pay a doctor—a challah, a chicken?

  When Eva opened the door, Harry was standing by the bedroom door, hands up, not knowing what to do. Eva leaned down beside her child.

  “Tessela? Tessela?” she whispered. She put her lips to Tessie’s forehead and it was as if she were kissing the oven.

  “Oy, my gut! Oy, my gut!” Eva pulled Tessie up and held her to her bosom and rocked her and held her, but Tessie was limp. Eva yelled to Harry, “Why didn’t you call me?” She threw up her hands. “Call now, Harry, call now!”

  “Call who, Eva? Who do you want me to call?”

  Eva shook her head at Harry and ran to the corner to the candy store and asked Francis if she could use the phone. She called an ambulance. “Please, please come. Mein dauchter is dying. Please,” she begged.

  “Please,” she cried. “Mein dauchter. Mein Tessie. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  The ambulance came. Tessie went to the hospital. Her appendix had burst and peritonitis set in. Her fever raged. The doctor told Eva to go home. He did what he could do. There was no point. She would live. She would die. It was God’s choice, not his. Eva was frightened that if she left Tessie now the way she’d left her before, God would punish her neglect by taking her daughter. She ran home only for an hour, made the supper, came back and sat. The next day, she ran home, made the supper, came back and sat. For eight days Eva ran home, made the supper, came back, and sat. On the ninth day, Tessie was released from the hospital, thin like a bone. Her little cheeks were gone, and her face was sunken. Her skin was sallow, but she was alive.

  Trauma, like hot heat, warps memory into strange shapes. The real and the unreal become apparitions of what was and what wasn’t. Like George when he lost his father, Tessie only remembers fragments of those days, moments stamped in memory like pictures taken with a flash. She remembers smells and sounds. She remembers the pain that twisted her body into a scream. As in a haze, she thinks she remembers her sister Ethel kneeling next to her bed and whispering, promising something if only she wouldn’t … but Tessie can’t remember what it was she shouldn’t … Was her brother Izzy there? She thinks she remembers Izzy telling her not to cry. Telling her that Mama was coming and not to cry. She remembers her tongue was dry like sand, but water made her wretch. She remembers being hot and cold and hot. She thinks she remembers being put on a stretcher and carried down the stairs and put in a truck. Is this a memory, or a fantasy that became a reality? She’s not sure. How can she know? She was very, very sick. She was only eight years old. She was alone, and it was dark. She would have asked her mother to tell her what happened, but she thinks she remembers that her mother wasn’t there.

  When the story was all out of her, finished, Tessie sighed and turned away from Gerry.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It feels funny hearing it out loud.”

  “Nah, don’t,” he said. “It’s an important story.”

  Gerry wondered if her story was better than his. He’d told her the truth, as it happened, but, because it hadn’t conveyed the impression he wanted to make, Gerry decided to make it better. He told Tessie how back when his father died, he sat by his mother all night, stroking her back. He told Tessie how grateful his mother was to have a loving son to take care of her.

  Tessie liked this story. The image of Gerry as a caretaker was the one she wanted to have. Gerry liked it too, and so he kept it, until the lie became the truth.

  When they were both finished talking, Gerry tried to turn her on again, but the moment was lost. It didn’t matter, because Tessie was determined to play hard to get. She wasn’t going to be like her sister Ethel and give it away for free.

  negative space

  Ethel was sitting at the vanity, applying the bright coral lipstick she’d bought especially to match her bright coral blouse. Tessie stood at the doorway, observing. She saw how Ethel’s ass hung over the back of the bench and how her large breasts pushed against the buttons of her blouse. Tessie thought, with satisfaction, that Ethel was about ten pounds past voluptuous.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” Tessie said.

  Ethel grimaced in the mirror.

  “What? What am I doing wrong?”

  “The lipstick. You’re trying to make a Clara Bow mouth. You don’t have a Clara Bow mouth. You have a Harry Stone mouth. Dad’s mouth. You have to work with what you’ve got.”
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  “Yeah? Says who?” asked Ethel.

  “If you don’t want my help, fine. If you want to look like a floozy, what do I care?”

  Ethel wished she could tell Tessie to take a hike, but she knew that Tessie knew what looked good. Tessie was thin. She had style. She wore wide-leg slacks and spectator shoes. Ethel swallowed her pride and asked Tessie to show her.

  “Look at me,” Tessie said, taking the lipstick. She carefully traced Ethel’s lips. “It’s like when you color, you try to stay in the lines.”

  When Tessie was done, and Ethel looked in the mirror, she saw what she didn’t want to see, her father’s face—small dark eyes, beaked nose, thin lips, and weak chin. Ethel knew she was no looker. She tried to make up in personality what she lacked in looks. She was what guys called fun-loving.

  Tessie looked at her sister. “Much better,” she said. “Izzy and Seymour are here. Go show your brothers; they’ll tell you, too.”

  Tessie and Izzy and Seymour were like a queen and two kings. They made it clear that Ethel didn’t belong in their royal court. They offered her no friendship and no solace, but Ethel knew she served a purpose. She was the negative space—without her they’d have trouble defining themselves. There was only one person in the family Ethel trusted, and that was their oldest brother, Hymie. Nobody else in the family liked Hymie either. Ethel and Hymie were like the peasants outside the palace—they shared what they had, and on cold nights, they kept each other warm.

  When Tessie left the bedroom, Ethel stood up from the vanity, shimmied her skirt down over her hips, licked her fingers, and straightened the seams of her stockings. She reached for the key hidden behind the mahogany bureau. On the bureau stood a small curio cabinet. Inside the cabinet were the twelve glass animals that Hymie had given her over the years—the first, the elephant, he gave her when she was five years old. She later found out he had filched it from a tourist shop on 42nd street. She didn’t care. It was special and just for her. The rest he said he’d bought with money he earned, but he never said how he earned the money.

  She was late. Her friend Chicky was waiting; there was no time to do what she liked to do—what she’d done since she was a child—run the glass animals up her arms and along her legs. On nights when Tessie was out, and she had the bedroom to herself, she would choose one animal to be special and put it between her legs until the heat of her body warmed the cool of the glass. Soothed, she would carefully return it to the cabinet, lock it, and hide the key, but tonight there was no time. She blew them kisses, grabbed a shrug from Tessie’s drawer, and ran out of the house.

  Ethel worked as a secretary at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was 1941. America was about to enter the war, and the yard was alive with anticipation and apprehension. It was a schlep from home, two trolleys, but Ethel didn’t mind. She was excited to be part of something important, and it didn’t hurt that there were guys everywhere.

  It was that night that she met Eddie—a double date with Chicky and Albert. Chicky said that Eddie was Albert’s best friend. She promised Ethel that he was a swell guy.

  “And what are you worried about?” she asked Ethel, “It’s not like you’ve been so particular lately.”

  Ethel laughed. Chicky had her number. They’d been friends since first grade.

  “Well you’re not exactly the Virgin Mary,” Ethel said.

  Chicky was right about Eddie; he was a swell guy. He was tall and well-built with dark hair. He had a sallow complexion like a faded suntan but nice warm eyes. He was a shaigitz, a Christian. Ethel didn’t care. What mattered to her was that he was 4F. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Chicky said not to mention the 4F, as Eddie was a little sensitive in that area. She said that he had a breathing problem—asthma, she thought.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not saying nothin’. Why would I embarrass the guy? Geez, Chicky. Do you think I’m an idiot?” Ethel asked.

  “Just sayin’,” said Chicky.

  In deference to Eddie, they decided not to go see Gary Cooper in Sergeant York, even though Chicky thought Gary Cooper was the cat’s meow. Instead they opted for Bogart and Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. It was the right choice because after, when they went out for a couple of drinks, Eddie couldn’t stop talking about Bogart’s Sam Spade, and Ethel couldn’t stop talking about Mary Astor’s dress.

  Ethel and Eddie hit it off well enough for a couple of months, but then Eddie got bored and moved on. For a while, Ethel called it quits and stayed at home with her glass animals. She really liked Eddie, but soon she started dating Marvin. Marvin was okay, but he was no Eddie, and when Ethel realized she was pregnant, she ignored Marvin and decided it must have been Eddie’s kid.

  Eddie said he’d come up with the lettuce so she could get rid of it. Ethel didn’t want an abortion; she wanted Eddie. She went to her father, confessed that she was pregnant, confessed that Eddie was a shagitz. She begged her father to have some rachmones, empathy for his youngest child, and give them money for a wedding.

  Harry was disgusted with Ethel.

  “Enough, already,” he shouted in Yiddish. “Gai avek, go away,” he cried. “A wedding—you want a wedding? And who’s going to marry you and a shagitz, a priest?”

  Ethel begged Tessie to talk to Harry on her behalf.

  “He’ll listen to you,” she said. “He always listens to you.”

  Tessie took pity on her sister. She also wanted the bedroom to herself. She went and spoke to their father.

  The next day Harry got off his chair, went to his brother Moishe and borrowed five thousand dollars. Moishe kissed the money goodbye. He knew he’d never see a dime from Harry but he did what brothers do, one for the other. When he came home, he went into the bedroom and found Ethel playing with her glass animals. He threw the animals on the floor and the money on the bed.

  “Gai avek. Go away, you’re a shandeh,” he yelled in Yiddish.

  Ethel, shaken, picked the slivers out of the hem of the pink chenille bedspread, where they’d attached themselves. The larger shards on the floor she placed back in the curio cabinet. Then, with bloodied fingers, she counted out the money her father had thrown—$5000. When she stuffed the money under the pillow and felt the intact body of the elephant, her tears broke and she sobbed.

  The next day she handed the money to Eddie and made a half-hearted joke that it was blood money—a week later they eloped. Three weeks later, Ethel miscarried. Although 4F, Eddie felt as if he had been given an honorable discharge. He asked Ethel to leave, so she packed her bag and went home.

  “Where’s the money?” Harry asked.

  Ethel said there was no money. “Eddie took the money.”

  Harry threw up his hands. “You’re no daughter of mine,” he said.

  Ethel sat at the vanity and looked in the mirror. Her face was swollen. Her eyes were bloodshot. She called Hymie, but he wasn’t home, so she soothed herself with the elephant—ran him up her arms, held him against her cheeks, and then, with slow, careful strokes, she took the coral lipstick and painted on a Clara Bow mouth.

  putting the pieces together

  It is September 1947, and we are moving to Redfield Village in Metuchen, New Jersey. Redfield Village is what you would call garden apartments: two-story, red brick buildings and large manicured lawns that angle around cul-de-sacs.

  My mother, in a very no-nonsense voice, tells my father and me that she doesn’t want to move. She says that she belongs in Brooklyn near her mother and her siblings and the gantseh meshpokha, the whole family. To move away is a slap in the face to all of them. She tells him the only reason she is going is because he hasn’t been coming home at night, and she knows it’s not just because the factory is a schlep, although she agrees that driving an hour and forty-five minutes from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, back to Brooklyn at the end of a long day is a pain in the ass. But the real reason she is moving is because she’ll be damned if she is going to sit around, waiting for him to come home while he is fooling around with Lillian the
secretary.

  “I’m not an idiot,” she tells him. “You think I don’t know what you’re up to?”

  Whenever my mother brings up Lillian the secretary, my father tells her she is crazy and doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

  My father manufactures ladies’ handbags. Inside a big, gray, cement building, ladies sit at sewing machines with extra big needles. The whole building smells of musky leather. There are rows and rows of wooden trays balanced on wooden sawhorses. Blue, red, and green handbags—some with snaps and some with wooden handles—stick up on the trays like crayons in my Crayola box. The name of the factory is Terose Leather: Fine Handbags for Fine Ladies. He tells my mother that the Te in Terose is for the first two letters of her name, Tessie, but he won’t tell her who the ro and se are for. He says he just made them up because it sounded good, but my mother doesn’t believe him. At least there is no li, so he didn’t name it after Lillian—or me, for that matter.

  My mother doesn’t believe a lot of things my father says, because he promises but he doesn’t deliver. When I get disappointed, she tells me that if I’d listened to her and waited for him to put his money where his mouth is, I wouldn’t always be disappointed. My father says that my mother has no faith.

  I’m thinking that my father is right, and maybe if my mother had faith, he would want to come home for dinner. So when he sits down on my bed to kiss me goodnight and tells me that he is super sorry but he was super busy and didn’t have time to get the circus tickets, and promises me that next year we will absolutely, definitely go to the Ringling—I believe him. I have faith in him. When he says that as soon as the factory takes off, he will buy us a real house like the one his sister, Aunt Laura, has in Franklin Square, my mother says, “Yeah. Well I’m from Missouri—show me.” But I believe him.

  After we move to Redfield, we go to Grandma’s house every Saturday and to Aunt Laura and Uncle Harry’s house every Sunday. Aunt Laura is always happy to see us and especially her brother. Aunt Laura is only eleven months older than my father, but when Grandpa Louie died and my grandma Pauline lost it, my aunt Laura had to take care of her little brother. So she always seems much older. She had to be like his mom.