by Pamela Moses
“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.
• • •
As 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.
• • •
When 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.
So I followed Mama’s voice, singing together with her. One phrase and another with Mama as my guide. Then finding my place once more, I mumbled and stuttered through the remainder of my Torah portion until I reached the final, shameful “Amen.”
• • •
All of the family and friends who had come to watch me paraded back to our apartment when the service ended. In a steady stream, still huffing from their walk from the temple, they poured through our door, squeezing themselves onto the sofa and the wing chairs and around the scratched baby grand. In expectation of the celebration, Mama had laid the dining table with a feast of food. Earlier that week, she had bought beeswax candles for the silver candleholders and pink tulips for our Waterford vase. She had placed three small cakes of lily-of-the-valley-scented hand soap in the china dish in the bathroom and draped the best lacy hand towels over the rack beside the sink. “Shayna Maideleh!” Aunt Bernice and Aunt Helena embraced me, pinching my cheeks. Sarah and Valerie were passing trays of salmon and capers on toast, moving with small sideways steps to weave through the crowd, the white bows Mama had clipped in their hair that morning still perfectly placed. Sarah would not become a bat mitzvah for another year, Valerie for another three, but from the way their lips pressed as they concentrated on the platters in their hands, I knew they were no longer looking forward to these occasions. When they reached me in the corner beyond the couch, the least conspicuou
s spot I could find, they both smiled and whispered “Congratulations.” But they attempted the word so halfheartedly, I could feel a flush spread along my neck.
Mama was offering around a platter of her chicken meatballs. That morning I had helped her stick them with toothpicks, dotting each with a leaf of parsley.
“Well, there you are, Ruthie. Mazel tov! Mazel tov!” Mrs. Rosenberg and Mrs. Kramer kissed me, then Mama. “This is a big day, yes? Very exciting!” The front of Mrs. Rosenberg’s dark hair puffed in a cresting wave, just as she had styled it the year before for her daughter Amanda’s thirteenth birthday. She accepted two meatballs and a cocktail napkin from Mama’s hands then blotted just the corners of her mouth, leaving her lipstick untouched. I had no doubt I would be the pitied subject of their conversation for the entire afternoon. So, slipping past forearms, chests, elbows, and plates of food, I escaped into the kitchen.
On the windowsill beside the cupboard stood the brightly colored bat mitzvah cards that had arrived in advance. When they had come in the mail, I had arranged them against the window, liking to reread their bold-lettered messages each time I entered the kitchen: Congratulations, Bat Mitzvah! We Celebrate You on This Day! they announced. Mama, holding her now-empty platter, pushed open the kitchen’s swinging door. The small gold hoops with diamond studs, which had once belonged to Nana Leah, quivered in her ears as she began to spoon liver mousse into a pastry bag, piping it onto crackers, her jaw shifting to one side as she worked.
“Don’t you want to join your party, Ruthie?” Mama wiped her fingers on a dish towel. “Everyone is here for your sake.”
“No.” I shook my head, sinking into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, resting my heels on its metal rung.
“They’ll begin to wonder what happened to you, hmm? Are you going to hide in here all afternoon like a chipmunk in a hole?” Mama laughed as she placed a hand on my head, but I could tell she had been worrying. A smudge of plum lipstick stained the white of her front teeth, evidence, I knew, that she had been chewing her bottom lip over my morning failure.
“Please don’t make me go back out, Mama. I can’t, I can’t!”
Mama shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t gnaw, Ruthie.” She tugged my thumb from the corner of my mouth, lifting my hand for me to see the cuticle—shredded and raw once more despite the attention she had given my fingers the night before with warm water and lotion.
“Did you notice at Gregory’s bar mitzvah”—Mama opened the oven door, allowing a rush of hot air into the room, a quick change of subject to distract me from my misery—“Nadia hired caterers to make and serve all the food. She never had to lift so much as a pinkie.”
“Yes. The meatballs were dry and the liver canapés flavorless.” I knew this was what Mama wished to hear, affirmations that even professional caterers couldn’t top her dishes. She never said it, but now and then Mama hinted at what we all knew: that of the entire extended family, she was the finest cook. Neither of her two sisters nor any of the sisters-in-law could match her in the kitchen.
“I don’t think Nadia’s caterers actually used butter in their liver mousse. I added chopped walnuts this time. A definite improvement, I think. Did you try it?”
“No, Mama.” I cupped my chin in my fists. “I don’t think I can eat.”
“No? At your own bat mitzvah! Perhaps it’s better not to dwell on it, hmm, Pea? What’s done is done.” Drying her hands, Mama pulled a chair next to mine.
“But I don’t understand how I lost my place.” I began to pick at the thick sash wrapping my middle. “The others didn’t make mistakes. I was the only one!”
The hair at Mama’s temples had begun to dampen slightly from the heat of the kitchen. “It was not so bad, Ruthie. You made it to the end, didn’t you? Really, it could have been worse.”
But from the way she frowned as she began to stroke my cheek, I thought she was trying to convince herself as much as me. “What’s the good in comparing yourself with someone else, hmm? We are all different. No two children are the same. When your sisters were babies, they plumped like dumplings. Just breathing seemed to make them fatten up. But you were small from the beginning. You always required a bit more care—”
“Yes, Mama.”
“So we are all unique from the start, each with our own special needs. And with a little help, a bit of attention, everything evens out.” As if to prove her point, the corners of her mouth curving into a half-smile, Mama patted the bulge of my stomach below my ribs.
“Try to eat something, Ruthie. It will make you feel better.”
Standing up, Mama reopened the oven, spearing with a knife three crispy potato pancakes and dropping them onto a dish. She scooped dollops of applesauce over them, then drew her chair closer until our knees bumped. It had been hours since breakfast, and I began to section off a chunk of the shredded potato with the side of my fork. One bite and then another and another. Until the warm pancake filled me, stuffing down the worries of the day.
The summer after my bat mitzvah was much like every summer. Always, in the months of July and August, many of the children in our neighborhood disappeared on extended vacations or to sleepaway camps. But long trips were a luxury our family couldn’t afford, and in Mama’s opinion, sleepaway camps were ill-supervised and of little benefit. So my sisters and I attended the morning summer school program at our temple, singing Hebrew songs, making dolls of papier-mâché, learning the stories of our people’s history. Then, in the afternoons, since this was the season business slowed, Mama would leave Ruby, the college student she had recently hired, to manage Broadway Paperie, and she would devote the remainder of the day to all she had planned for us: a full schedule of activities that she believed would keep our minds active. We would not squander our time between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next, as so many of our friends did. From us she knew that Ellen Reid and her sister, when they were not at theater camp, spent day after day stretched on the roof deck of their apartment building for the sole purpose of deepening their tans. And that Jenny Frankel, until her family left for Lake George, was allowed to bring a TV into her bedroom and watch from morning till night. “Someone should tell them that by September their brains will turn to gelatin!” Mama liked to joke.
Once, when Mama and Poppy attended a funeral in Trenton for one of Poppy’s former coworkers, my sisters and I spent the entire day and evening with Jenny. When Mama came to get us after dark, we had fallen asleep on Jenny’s pink shag carpet, our unfinished glasses of 7UP, our shared plate of Doritos beside us. Later, walking home in the warm nighttime air to West 256th Street, the glow of the building lights and of the street lamps on the avenues seemed almost a continuation of the fantasy hours of Charlie’s Angels and Gilligan’s Island and The Love Boat we had just spent at Jenny’s house, a dream so complete and prolonged it had seemed it might last forever. Could we ever watch TV the way Jenny did? we pleaded, our feet tripping along the sidewalk in our buckled sandals. Not every day, but just sometimes? Once a week, maybe? Until summer ended? But Mama answered the way we supposed she would: Just because Jenny was permitted, did that make it a good idea? If Jenny leaped from the George Washington Bridge top, would we follow her in that foolishness, too?
Still, for weeks, before rolling from bed in the mornings, I would imagine I was Mary Ann or Ginger from Gilligan’s Island, lovely in my swimsuit with endless days in the tropics. Sometimes, with the pad and paper I kept on my night table, I would draw elaborate scenes of the grass hut where Mary Ann lived or write poems about the sea or the groves of palm trees along the sand. But, as we expected, our TV restrictions were never altered—Wild Kingdom on Sunday evenings, because it was educational, and one hour of our choosing on Saturday mornings. And the next time Mama needed to be away for a day, she brought us to Aunt Bernice’s, where we played hangman and tic-tac-toe and dominoes with Aunt Bernice and Uncle Mickey until she returned.
• • •
How much effort Mama gave
to making sure our summer was not wasted, drawing up a calendar of projects she believed would put us at an advantage when school resumed in the fall. She bought a jigsaw puzzle of continental Europe, a second of the Americas. From the public library, she borrowed children’s history books on ancient Rome and the early explorers and on the Silk Road in China, listening as we read them aloud over bowls of her pea soup and plates of egg salad, correcting when we mispronounced a word. On Friday afternoons, she gave directions from recipes for the evening’s Shabbat—to fill tablespoons with flour, quarter cups with broth, and so on—so that we would learn our measurements. She invented a scavenger hunt math game, hiding clues around the apartment that could be found only by solving arithmetic problems. Though my sisters were younger, they made fewer errors than I. I knew my multiplication tables and fractions, of course, but sometimes my thoughts drifted to outdoor sounds—the squeals of the Pomerantz children down on the sidewalk, the thump-thump of their ball against the side of the building, the rattling wheels of the Italian-ice cart in the neighborhood—leaving my sisters to win the majority of the games. To make up for this, Mama insisted some days on helping me. “We’ll work as a team, Ruthie,” she would say, guiding me toward correct answers if I began to go astray, embarrassing me far more than did losing to my sisters. And as the summer days crawled by, I thought of Jenny Frankel, now on Lake George, and of Ellen Reid and her sister off with their grandparents in the Berkshires until Labor Day.
