by Carol Zoref
My father rewarded us with the Eddie Cantor Hour on Sunday nights. On Saturday afternoons we listened with him to the broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera when he came home from work. But never the Lone Ranger—not when my father was home—and never, ever Gus Hall. It was one thing to be a socialist, which my father was, but another thing altogether to be a communist. Especially a Stalinist. My father did not go for that whole “dictatorship of the masses” business which, to him, was just another form of fascism masquerading as fairness.
On Monday, Sofia and I pulled our chairs to either side of Miss Finn after school. Miss Finn told us how the author of the book she was holding was her sister, Dr. Finn.
We nodded, though I cannot imagine what we were agreeing to.
The title was Human Reproduction by Marion Finn, M.D.
Miss Finn propped the book up on a desk so we could see the pictures. We had both seen naked bodies before in Miss Finn’s books of paintings from the Renaissance and in old National Geographics. She had even taken some older students to the Brooklyn Museum on her day off, riding them over on a just-emptied scow on Saturday morning and sending them home on a newly-loaded one Saturday night.
Miss Finn read aloud:
Men have glands called testes that make sperm cells, whereas female glands make eggs. Testes make sperm all the time. Women go through a four-week cycle beginning in puberty, during which eggs develop. If the fully developed egg does not become fertilized at this time, it dies and is released from the body with menstrual blood. Sexual intercourse can introduce the sperm into an egg to start a new life. During intercourse, the man ejaculates sperm into the vagina.
She explained all about eggs and ovaries and ovulation, ejaculation, semen, insemination, gestation, birthing, and lactation. I already had the first few strands of underarm hair, which the book said was a sign. I was even certain, with a new nervousness, that my underarm perspiration smelled.
“Your mothers,” Miss Finn assured us, “are modern women. They want you to understand the reasons for your monthly periods.”
Our mothers? When Miss Finn offered, they were probably afraid to say no to her.
“This way you’ll be well prepared instead of being caught off guard alone in those outhouses looking for a rag.”
My mother had a bag of small rags that she kept in their bedroom. They were little mysteries that I now realized I never saw her wash or hang to dry. She must have done so when Noah and I were out of the house, and Helen, being so young still, would have no need to understand why.
The world is always full of people on missions: Miss Finn with her lessons on reproduction; Father Coughlin spewing venom; Franklin Delano Roosevelt preaching the virtues of personal strength and the welfare state all in one breath.
“Abstinence is the form of birth control you’ll practice until you marry,” Miss Finn explained. “Not knowing things gets young girls in trouble. You’re not living in some Garden of Eden over here.”
Garden of Eden. I remember her saying those exact words. Barren Shoal was such a cheap joke that even people with good intentions had trouble resisting.
“She’s telling the truth?” I asked Sofia after Miss Finn finished and set us free.
“It was in the book,” said Sofia.
“Plenty of things in books are make-believe. ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ‘Peter and the Wolf,’ ‘Cinderella.’”
An image of my mother and father together that way surfaced in my mind’s eye. Just as suddenly, they turned into Joey and Marie Dowd on the beach.
“You know what Yorgos calls it?” said Sofia. Yorgos, now sixteen, had taken to smacking Sofia around if she did not make him the sandwich he wanted, or took too long to clear the table after dinner, or did not make his bed before leaving for school. She did not even complain to anyone. He’s violent, I would tell her. He’s just a man, she would reply. He had decided to apply to City College, at Miss Finn’s urging, after which his parents became afraid of him too.
I did not want to know, but there was no stopping Sofia.
“Yorgos calls it ‘fucking,’” said Sofia, giggling.
“Fucker, fuckface, fuckhead,” I said, giggling as well, because, after all, it was the first time any of those words came out of my mouth, you should pardon me. “That’s what the men on the pier call each other. That means they fuck each other too?”
“That’s stupid,” said Sofia. “They’re just being disgusting.”
“If it’s so disgusting then why should we do it?” Was this disgusting thing inevitable? Or was it the other way around?
“You’re such a baby,” she said, needling me. “Remember that time when we saw Joey Pessara in the dunes with Marie Dowd?”
I nodded. We had not spoken of it since it happened.
“That’s what they were doing. On the beach. Fucking. All that noise? Because they were fucking.”
“Miss Finn didn’t mention noise,” I said.
“Well I heard Yorgos telling Joey that Marie is still a good fuck, so he must know.”
“What makes a good fuck not a bad fuck?” I asked. “And how can Yorgos tell?” I could feel something stirring inside me as we spoke, a feeling I tried to push away.
Not until I was in bed that night did I think about what I did in my room when I was sure Helen was sleeping, having graduated from my pillow to my fingers, you should pardon me. Except what I did never hurt; it always felt good, if you do not mind my saying so.
Miss Finn, we later found out from Marie Dowd, had this sit-down talk with every girl. The boys were supposed to learn all about it from their fathers. Noah, even later, confirmed this, though our father provided him with seriously limited information.
“What little I knew about girls I mostly learned from Yorgos and Joey,” he told me after the war, by which time we both knew plenty. “A lot of good that did me.”
“Can you imagine anything worse?” I said. “Me learning from that saint, you learning from a couple of slobs. No wonder it didn’t sound appealing.”
“We were kids, Marta, who fell for everything they told us.”
“Until we didn’t,” I reminded him.
“Right,” he said, and laughed. “Until we didn’t.”
CHAPTER 4
Sofia turned twelve a year later and her period came just like Miss Finn said it would, and the consequences of boys became different to her, like Miss Finn also promised. Sofia decided that the safest strategy was to bring her stained rags over to our house Sunday nights to dry in the little room upstairs in the eaves that I shared with Helen. Our room had a peaked ceiling, which held heat in the summer and cold in the winter. It is what nowadays they would call “rustic.” It is what I would call crummy. Those cabins were no good to begin with. The steps up were so steep that when my mother’s arthritis got the best of her she could not come to our room for days. Helen never noticed the rags; Noah barely acknowledged Helen or me, never mind come upstairs anyway.
My mother, though she had left all these matters for Miss Finn to explain, understood the private needs of girls. One evening she kept Helen with her after dinner when Sofia brought over her rags to hang. My father was at the gatehouse, the site of the nightly poker games that Mr. DeWitt had formerly hosted in his cabin. Cutters played on Monday nights, skinners played on Tuesday, and the stokers, all of them Negro men, played on Wednesdays. Friday night was Catholic night, Saturday night was Protestant night—all denominations welcomed—and Sunday night was for Jews. The men sat on empty coal oil drums, playing for cigarettes, smoking their reserve funds and profits.
Every man was welcomed to play on Thursdays, payday, the only night of the week that the men played for cash, even the ones without an extra dime to lose. The mothers would send the children to retrieve the men, even if the youngest girls had no business walking to the factory at night when it was so dark and damp. All it took to close out a game was one tough skinned, foul-mouthed man shamed into folding his hand by a sleepy-eyed little girl.
/> I do not know if my father lost more cigarettes than he won or what the outcome was of all those Thursdays. There must have been some consenting to these outings on the part of my mother, because she always waited a couple of hours before sending Helen and me to bring him home. Poker, my father insisted, was as American as playing baseball, and the players bet on that game too, didn’t they? Harmless, he insisted, not like the Black Sox throwing a World Series game. Or Pete Rose, that fool, who my father lived long enough to see get kicked out of baseball for betting on the game. My father, just into his nineties by then, was thrilled: Imagine that crook comparing himself to Joe DiMaggio, he said. Throwing a tantrum when he didn’t break DiMaggio’s hitting streak. What chutzpah.
The small window in our bedroom was wide open when Sofia found me struggling with arithmetic problems. The salt air was blowing off the ocean, a sweet and cooling breeze that, when the wind was coming from the south, did not stink. The only stench was coming from Joey, who was in the yard with Yorgos and Noah. Joey, like Mr. Boyle, used chain smoking as a deodorant. Sofia hung her wet things from a length of rope that we hung from stubby nails across a corner. She settled into replicating the drawings from Miss Doctor Finn’s Sex Manual, as we now called the hygiene book, by cutting out paper dolls. I was clipping newspaper articles on China for our Odyssey Project. China and Japan were having little outbursts here and there of warfare, which was why there were so many articles. Even so, we dreamed of seeing the Forbidden City and the Great Wall some day. Sofia’s dolls performed acts on one another that went far beyond the illustrations in Miss Doctor Finn’s book. At one point The Man’s face was between The Woman’s legs. I never asked Sofia where she got this idea, one that took me a very long time to appreciate, if you do not mind my saying so.
“How am I supposed to concentrate,” I asked her, “when Clark and Claudette are creating such a racket?” Sofia named her cutouts for celebrities. She knew plenty from listening to the radio and reading Walter Winchell’s column.
“It doesn’t bother them,” she answered, pointing Clark’s head in the direction of the back window. Her cutouts were blessed with the energy of newlyweds.
“I’m being serious here while you’re fooling around with paper dolls.”
Sofia lifted the cutouts high above her head and dropped them, letting them drift to the floor like parachute jumpers. She walked over to the window and leaned her elbows on the frame.
“Come here,” she said, waving me over.
“What?”
“Here,” she whispered emphatically.
I slipped in beside her. I could see the boys below, sitting at the edge of the garden. Beyond that, some moonlight was reflecting brightly on Barren Shoal as if the sand and water were as clear as the upper reaches of the sky and beyond, all the way to the newly discovered Pluto. Even Barren Shoal, at moments, was beautiful.
“No shit,” Joey was saying. His language, of course, not mine. “We don’t get hospital stuff. That goes into incinerators at the hospitals, whoosh, right down the chute into the fire. No fucking around.”
“That crap you eat is going to your fucking head,” said Yorgos. “Why you so sure the hospitals play by the stinking rules? They might slip a couple of bodies onto a barge here and there, maybe an amputated leg...”
Joey lit a cigarette off the one he had just finished. Embers rose off the butt, which he flicked live into the garden. My mother hated it when he did that. “Will you listen? It was a whole set of little foot bones: little thumb toe, little pinkie, little...”
“What are you?” asked Noah, “an anatomist?”
“I’m no antichrist. That would be you, Jew-boy.”
“Maybe it was baby back ribs you saw.”
“Maybe they’ve got some of those starving Ukrainians,” chimed in Yorgos, “direct from the famine. They’re eating people over there!” The Soviets kept the grain exports going out even as people starved, just like the Brits did in Ireland 100 years earlier. Am I repeating myself?
“Fuck you,” said Joey. “I told you they were a little person’s toe bones.”
“Just one foot? What’d it do, hop onto the barge?” Yorgos hopped around on one leg. “Please, sir, can you tell me the way to Barren Shoal?” he squeaked in a baby girl’s voice.
“I sure as hell didn’t go digging for the other one.”
“You missed a free meal!?”
I pulled Sofia from the window. I was going to say something, who knows what; I was disgusted, horrorstruck, mortified. She pressed a hand over my mouth and whispered, “Don’t say a word. Promise.”
I nodded, wanting nothing more than Joey’s discovery of those little toes to disappear. I gestured to the opposite side of the room. We crawled on our hands and knees.
“It’s not like they...” I said quietly.
She glared. I stopped speaking. “Sssshhhh!” Sofia repeated.
“Shouldn’t Joey tell someone?” I whispered into her ear.
“Don’t be so serious,” she whispered back. “He’s being disgusting on purpose.”
“Then why are we whispering?”
“Just never mind him, okay?”
I returned to my China clippings. Sofia retrieved the paper dolls off the floor, crumpled them into a ball, and tossed them out the open window. She ducked low so the boys could not see her.
“Hey, they’ll know we’re up here!”
She rested her hands on her hips. “Grow up already, please!”
“I’m going to Mr. Dewitt’s to get my father.”
“You’re going nowhere.”
“I want him to come home.”
Mr. Dowd opened the gatehouse door. My father sat at a table with Mr. DeWitt, Mr. Paradissis, and a couple of others. Sofia stood to the side of me, in the shadows, where her father could not see her. The new gatehouse, which was what everyone still called it, was barely large enough for a cot and the table, which was made from the old gatehouse door and two sawhorses. There was also a swivel chair that must have had a previous life when the sheen was worn off the curvatures for the buttocks and the wooden arms stained dark from hand oils. There was a small black stove against the wall opposite the door, and a small window on each of the other two walls. For light Mr. DeWitt used tallow candles made from the rendered animal fat from the factory. With the exception of Mrs. Weems, the Negro woman who did his laundry, no woman regularly went inside. Some said Mrs. Weems was a relation to one of the Scottsboro Boys, but I never heard that confirmed. The only thing I knew from the newspapers was that one of them was also named Weems.
All those years when he lived on the other side of the Paradissises, he paid another black woman, Mr. Morgan’s wife, to straighten up. He had more personal contact with blacks on Barren Shoal than anyone I can think of. I am not making excuses for how we did things. I am just describing how it was.
“What is it, honey?” asked my father.
“Time to come home,” I said.
“Your mother sent you so early.” The worry lines showed on his forehead.
I shook my head. “She’s busy with Helen.”
“What, then?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Go on now,” he said.
The boys were gone from the yard when we got back to the house. Sofia said she would come for her things after school on Monday, if that was okay. Helen was already sleeping when I went upstairs.
It was sometime around then that a letter came from my mother’s brother back in Zyrmuny. She read it quietly to herself—it was a couple of pages at least—while Helen played with shells she had collected on the beach and I ironed our dresses.
“What?” asked my father.
“It’s so hot today,” she said. “You girls should be outside. Marta, take Helen.”
“But my school dress,” I said.
“It can wait. Go.” She slipped the letter into the pocket of her apron.
“What about Noah?”
“Go.”
/>
“Come on,” I said, tugging Helen’s hand.
“I don’t want to,” she whined. Who wants to go somewhere with someone who does not want to go in the first place?
“And take water,” said my mother. She filled a mason jar and handed it to me so that we would not run back inside for drinks.
We walked in the direction of the bay. It was warm out, though not like my mother said it was. Helen was carrying the can in which she collected shells and rocks from the beach. Helen’s prized possessions were a sand dollar, which she had found perfectly intact, and two starfish. When she brought home a third, my mother told her enough with the starfish, which smelled rotten as they dried. As they died. Like that.
She walked along the shoreline, picking up shells and stones, examining them, and dropping most of them back onto the sand. I tried skipping stones the way Noah did, but they plunked into the surf. Helen found a piece of a horseshoe crab and I drew a picture around it in the sand to show her what it would look like had she found it whole. I had talent as a forensic sand comber.
“Let’s play,” said Helen.
Play? “We are playing.”
“Let’s build.” She dropped to her knees and scooped sand into piles. Then she started digging without a word about what she was digging for.
“How about a town?” I suggested.
I scooped out gullies between Helen’s piles of sand and circled them with a trench. “Look,” I said, pointing. “This is Barren Shoal; that’s Barren Island. Over here, that’s Brooklyn.” In my rendering, Barren Shoal was equal in size to Barren Island, which in truth it was not; Brooklyn was out of scale too, smaller and farther away. It did not matter. We made room for some extra little islands to represent the ones in Jamaica Bay that had no names. Helen shaped these by packing sand into a large clamshell. I dug the trenches deeper until I hit wet sand.
