Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  “Mira!” he called as soon as he entered. “Mira!”

  “Yes, yes, I’m here.” She rushed out of the drawing room. “Shh, Preeti’s not well. The flu, I think. I’ve given her an aspirin and put her to bed. She’s sleeping.”

  “Why she refuses to have that vaccine every year, I don’t know. Surely it’s better than coming down with it so often. Anyway, how are you?” He gave Mira a surprised look. She was wearing fresh lipstick and had put her hair up. He kissed her, then started toward the staircase.

  “Let me unpack this right away. I’m sure the suit’s crushed anyway, but I’ll take it out now.”

  Mira followed him up the stairs.

  “You don’t have to come. Why don’t you relax downstairs. I’ll be down soon.”

  “No, I’ll sit with you while you unpack.”

  It was good to have him back, Mira thought. She wasn’t alone. Sudhir would help her through this. She watched his strong back as he hung up his clothes.

  “How was the conference?” Mira asked.

  “All right. The usual stuff. It was good to see some of those guys I went to school with. Brennan was there—remember him, when we lived in Ohio?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Lipset. He sent his regards. Lost his wife last year.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry for him. She was young.”

  “Yes, poor chap. How have things been over here?”

  “Okay. Asha Gupta called. She wants us to come early tomorrow—she’s making bhajjias and tea. Then we’ll hear the singers and then have dinner.”

  “Sounds too long for me. I want to plant some bulbs. Haven’t done any gardening for months and it’s already July.”

  “You can come later. But I’ll have to go earlier, I think. You know how the women are supposed to help with everything. And I want to see how she makes those bhajjias. That woman is really terrible. She takes our recipes, yet when we ask her for hers, she leaves out some really important steps, I think. Mine never turn out like hers, and I don’t know why.”

  “Mira, this is the fifth time in the past week I’ve heard about those damn bhajjias. Even on the phone from L.A. Look, I don’t care if you never make another bhajjia in your life. I just don’t want to hear another word about them. I’m more concerned about Preeti. How’s she been, besides the flu? Any problems?”

  “No,” Mira said.

  Sudhir wasn’t convinced. Mira was usually much more reassuring. “Come on, let’s go downstairs and have a drink.”

  On her way down, Mira remembered the brandy bottle. Had she replaced the cork properly? She couldn’t recollect.

  “Mira, this is strange,” Sudhir was saying. “I bought a new bottle of brandy last week just before I left. It was unopened. Now it’s only half full. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, that.” Mira laughed nervously. “Shirin Mehta gave me her recipe for her brandy cake. You remember how delicious it was—we had it at her house last Christmas. You must remember; you really liked it.”

  “Yes,” Sudhir was staring at her. “But how much brandy would a cake need? Half a bottle?”

  “I tried three times, Sudhir. You know I can’t bake cakes. It just kept coming out badly. So I made it again and again till it came out right.”

  “I hope you saved me a piece.”

  “No. Some of the ladies came for tea the other evening, and it was finished. Don’t worry; now that I know how to do it, I’ll make it again soon.”

  Sudhir poured himself a brandy. “What do you want to drink?”

  “Nothing.”

  He stretched himself out on the sofa next to her. “Sorry for shouting about the brandy, but you know with a teenager around the house, one just has to be very careful.”

  “Come on, Sudhir, Preeti isn’t alcoholic at least.”

  “No, not yet, but you never know.” He yawned. “It’s good to be back home. We should eat soon. I’m getting hungry.”

  “Yes. I’ll get the dinner.”

  “No, not just yet. Let’s talk for a little while first.”

  “Sudhir,” Mira said, “Preeti told me such a sad story today. I really don’t know how these parents can treat their children as though they belonged to someone else and were not of their own flesh and blood.”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, you know her friend Janet? She got pregnant last month and her father just threw her out of the house.”

  “Well, she was stupid to get pregnant. I can’t believe these teenagers. They have counselors and everything at their schools, which is a lot more than you and I had. They’re constantly being warned against these things. In our time, do you remember anyone talking to you about anything like this? People didn’t talk about it, so it was easier to get into trouble. You didn’t know what the consequences would be. Now they know everything, and if they’re still so stupid, then they deserve it.”

  “Sudhir, I’m surprised at you. Being a father yourself and from a culture like ours, where your children are your life … I don’t know how you can be so heartless.”

  “Mira, I didn’t mean us. I was looking at their culture and their feelings about their children. I was seeing it in context.”

  “But what if it were us? I mean, it’s not so impossible, with the way teenagers are these days—”

  “But it isn’t us, is it, so why should we worry about it? I don’t have the time to sit around hypothesizing about problems that don’t really exist. Come on, let’s get dinner on the table.”

  It was after dinner. Sudhir was about to turn on the television, when Mira stopped him, saying, “Forget the news for one day. I want to talk to you.”

  Sudhir looked irritated. “All right, what is it?”

  “You know that girl Janet?”

  “Oh God, this bloody Janet again. Mira, I don’t have the patience for this.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you what the matter is, and I hope you’re going to be helpful and not start raving, as you usually do when there’s a problem with your daughter. Preeti is pregnant.”

  His expression changed from incredulity to horror as he took in her words.

  “I know you’re not joking. You wouldn’t joke about something like this. How could this happen, Mira? How, under your wonderful, caring supervision of your child?”

  Mira kept silent, knowing now that the anger would come, just as she had feared it would.

  “I see it now—the half empty bottle of brandy, the useless talk about bhajjias and brandy cake. You have been lying to me, lying to save your child—who should be thrown out of this house, just like that whoring Janet. Does she even know who the father of this bastard is? The bloody tart—what was she trying to do with her heavily made-up face and her skintight clothes, if not to get laid and make monkeys of her parents. You only have yourself to blame.” He raged at Mira. “‘Sudhir, please increase her curfew.’ ‘Sudhir, please let her go out for one evening. What can happen in one evening?’” he mimicked her. “Now you know what can happen in one evening, and I hope you’re happy.”

  He ignored Mira’s silent tears and marched up the stairs. “All right, Preeti,” he called. “Come on out here and show your face. You must be so proud of what you have done. Shaming your parents just to get your own bloody back on us for trying to protect you.” He walked into Preeti’s room, saw her looking at him with naked fear in her eyes, and yanked her off the bed. “Come on downstairs. Flu, hahn? We’ll see what kind of flu this is.”

  He dragged her down the stairs and brought her into the living room. She stood there shivering in her nightie. A little girl was what Mira saw. A frightened little girl.

  “Leave her alone,” Mira shouted at Sudhir. “Get out of here and leave her alone.”

  Sudhir laughed mirthlessly. “Me—get out? You”—he took hold of Preeti’s hair and walked her toward the door—“you, you shameless tart, you get out,” he snarled at her.

  Mira walked up to Preeti and put her arms around her. “Be very careful of what you say
at this moment, Sudhir,” she articulated slowly and clearly. “You may live to regret it. Preeti needs me more than you do right now. If Preeti goes, I go with her. So choose your words carefully.”

  Sudhir looked at the two of them, then turned abruptly and walked out of the room. Mira could hear him noisily beating around the wooden hangers in the coat closet in the hall as he looked for an umbrella. In a few moments, he had left the house, banging the door behind him.

  Preeti began crying, silently at first, then heaving great sobs, weeping from the pit of her stomach.

  “It’s all right now, Preeti,” Mira said. “He knows now. It’ll be much easier. Trust me.”

  Preeti finally let herself be taken up to bed. She fell asleep almost immediately, with Mira by her side. Soon Mira went to her bedroom. She tossed sleeplessly as she wondered what tomorrow might bring.

  It was about three in the morning when Mira was wakened by the sound of deep sobbing. She put her dressing gown on and crept down the stairs. About halfway down, she bent her head to look into the kitchen. Sudhir was sitting at the dining table, the bottle of brandy in front of him. It was almost empty, Mira could see from where she was. His head was in his hands. Mira could not confront him; it would make tomorrow all that harder to deal with. So she walked back up to her room and tried to sleep through the wrenching cries that broke the night silence of her house.

  Drowning Kittens

  ENID DAME

  Let me take you with me on a visit to Indiana, a place I’ve never seen. It is 1924, a muddy spring day on the edge of a small town. The sun is weak, lemony. The house needs a paint job. That angry man, my grandfather, is angry once more: this time at Dinah, the family cat. Three weeks ago, while he was away at a Gentlemen’s Apparel Buyers Convention in Chicago, Dinah gave birth to four nondescript kittens on the floor of the spare-room closet. My grandfather has just discovered them this morning. He is furious. He had not even realized Dinah was pregnant.

  My grandfather had other plans for this cat, a real Persian, a placid aristocrat with large feet, tufts of hair in her ears, and guileless blue eyes. He’d gotten her by a fluke, when a customer defaulted on a payment. Unlike his wife and children, my grandfather hates cats, which he associates with fleas and mice. But Dinah was a special case, a matter of business. He’d intended to mate her, when she came of age, with another Persian, owned by another customer. He’d sell the kittens and make, maybe, a fortune.

  Everything was arranged. Dinah went into her first heat; the male cat, Sultan, arrived in splendor, in a special carrier. He was tremendous, twice as large as Dinah, with one green eye, one blue eye, and an aggrieved expression on his pushed-in face. My grandmother had disliked him instantly. She was pleased when Dinah rejected his advances, giving him a sharp rap just below his hairy right ear. She drew blood, and Sultan sulked in a corner. My grandfather felt himself disgraced. He kicked the sofa leg. “Don’t be silly, Jake,” my grandmother said. Her long braid had fallen down again; she tossed it back, airily. “Maybe he isn’t her type.”

  She was right. Two days later, Sultan dismissed, Dinah ran outside and got herself pregnant by a striped, marauding tom with one ear missing. Right now, she is suckling his disgraceful kittens in a carboard box. My grandfather is beside himself. Once again, nothing has worked out. “That putz!” he curses in his mother’s language. “That nafka!” He decides he will drown the bastard litter. That will be his project for this Saturday. He announces his intention loudly, kicks the back door for emphasis, and storms down to the garage.

  During this uproar, my grandmother lies low in her kitchen, busying herself with saucepans and stove lids. She is adept at becoming invisible when necessary. This is a talent, like making dresses without patterns or cakes that never fall. It’s a skill I often wish I’d inherited along with her name. She was Renée; I’m Rita (and in Yiddish, we’re both Riyka). In some sense—according to Jewish myth if not Jewish law—I am my grandmother; carrying her name, I’m her representative in my own place and time. This mythic commission sometimes awes me: How can I be a person I’ve never met? Occasionally I wonder: If the choice had been up to me, would I have chosen her name?

  My mother, if she were living, would say, “What’s the fuss? A name’s a name.” My mother Annie—that seething little girl in a sailor dress. On this Saturday, she is furious at her furious father. She follows him at a careful distance as he kicks and mutters the length of the lawn. His temper is famous: it rips phones out of walls, smashes platefuls of noodles, beats children. Her anger is inside. It rocks and wallops there like a hidden ocean, or soup on a too-high flame. It is a powerful fuel; it scares Annie at times. She doesn’t dare let it out. It might blow up the house, the town, the state of Indiana. It might hurl them all, shattered and bleeding, into outer space.

  Annie is especially enraged at that elusive lady, her mother. Why doesn’t Mama try to stop her husband from committing a crime? How can she be an accomplice to murder? Besides, Mama loves cats, feeds strays at the back steps. That’s how the unsavory tom got there in the first place. You might say it’s really Mama’s fault. Furthermore (Annie piles up each point in her legalistic, ten-year-old mind), a mother should stand up for another mother, no matter what. Annie has very decided ideas about what people should and should not do. In this, she resembles her father. Like him, she is always being disappointed.

  The other children, David and Ruth, sit on the back steps, in tears. Ruth, at seven, can’t imagine that force, her father’s anger, changing direction or being stopped. She accepts it as she accepts the house they live in, or the weather. David is three. He does not really understand what is happening. He cries because Ruth, his favorite person, is upset; it is an act of companionship rather than grief. Unfortunately, it catches his father’s attention. “Stop that racket, David Rabinowitz, or I’ll give you something to cry about!” Jake hurls the threat offhandedly over his shoulder.

  Reaching the garage, Jake pauses. He has threatened to drown the kittens. As a threat, it had sounded masterful. But now he must work out the details. He has heard of people drowning unwanted kittens, but has never done so himself. It is an activity he classifies as “country,” like knowing how to milk a cow or read the sky. He has always regarded such knowledge—his neighbors’ knowledge—with a mixture of admiration and contempt.

  My grandfather is not a native Indianan. He is not even, literally, an American by birth. He pushed himself out of his mother’s body unexpectedly one heaving night as her ship shoved its way across the water on the most difficult lap of her journey from Lithuania to Pittsburgh. A traveling midwife, luckily, was there to cut the cord.

  His anger may have begun there, on the overheated ship, and taken root more firmly later in the tangled, Yiddish-speaking Pittsburg slums. My mother always claimed it was a gift from his mother, who as a girl in Vilna was nicknamed “Vildeh Chaya”—wild animal. No one in the family questioned it; it was simply there, a given, one knot in the fabric of family legend. It lives on, years after his death, in my mother’s stories (now my stories), in my dislike of people with loud voices.

  To my grandmother, Renée Lowenthal, Jake’s Pittsburgh must have seemed far away as Lithuania. After all, her father William owned a dry goods store in Indianapolis. Mama told me many anecdotes about him and his large family. They were, of course, “assimilated” Jews. Yet, in my mother’s recollections, they come off as exotic, out of place in the sedate Middle West. Even their attempts to be ordinary turn into excesses. Great-grandmother’s best set of dishes, for instance, was pink crystal with a rose-colored cream pitcher and sugar bowl. Birthdays were extravaganzas, with fireworks on the lawn and gifts of precious jewels. Josephine, Renée’s oldest sister, was the beauty and musician of the family. She played the violin in a long gown while Dickie, her pet canary, perched on the bow. (For years, this vision charmed me. Then I wondered if Dickie’s singing interfered with Aunt Josie’s playing. Mama laughed and said she hoped so, she could never stand viol
in music anyway. “Screech, screech, too sappy for me.”)

  In 1913, Mama said, the family store was very successful. That’s why Great-grandpapa asked Renée to help out on Saturdays. Renée was seventeen, bored, engaged to a distant cousin, a lawyer. She was marking time, waiting for school to be over. She hated her public high school: the girls shrieked and giggled and the boys told dirty jokes. The year before, she had attended a Catholic girls’ school, which she’d liked better. The nuns excused her from Religion.

  Of course, Renée was working at the store when she met Jake. I’ve often tried to picture that meeting. What would a dry goods store look like in Indiana in 1913? Would it be large and pompous like a department store, or small and intimate, like a five-and-ten? Would Renée sit behind a counter on a high stool, her braid coiled tightly in a businesslike knot? That’s how I imagine her, my teenaged grandmother, a trifle self-conscious, self-important, aware of looking good in this new role. Secretly, of course, she hopes no customer will intrude upon her thoughts.

  At her back rise roller after roller of soft cloths, langorously waiting for the tape measure, the shears. It’s a bazaar, a picnic of colors, textures, possibilities. Even their names give pleasure at this distance: calico, cambric, polished cotton, watered silk, satin, sateen, velvet, velveteen, lawn. Not that Renée would find them particularly wonderful. She would prefer the novel she surreptitiously pulls from her pocket. As she begins to read, she plays dreamily with the hairs working loose from her braid.

  And now Jake Rabinowitz enters her department with his samples of shoelaces and socks. (He is in the wrong place; men’s furnishings are downstairs.) He is handsome; my mother insists he was handsome then. He had a dark, confident moustache, he was twenty-five, a salesman, a man of the world. He had no trouble persuading Renée to marry him. They eloped that night, after the store closed.