by Carol Zoref
“You saw him speak?” Noah’s voice cracked, as if his teen-age boy vocal cords were dried dune grass.
“Thomas is a communist,” said Yorgos.
Joey gave him a shove and Yorgos punched him dead on in the shoulder without even looking to take his aim. All this pushing around used to frighten me; now it annoyed me. It looked so stupid. They looked stupid. At least Joey was stupid. The others had no excuse.
“Shut up, you guys,” said Noah.
My father told them about the crowd at the union hall, and the noise of everyone translating Thomas’ native-speaker English into Italian, Yiddish, Russian, and Polish. He also mentioned his own “debate” with Uncle David. Heaven forbid he should have called it a fight. “Uncle David and the garment workers’ local are demanding new schedules so Jewish men can work Sundays, not Saturdays.”
“Some of those factory owners are Jews,” said Noah.
“What do you want from me, Mr. Know-It-All? They’re so busy becoming American they’ve become Christians.
“I’m going to find your mother.” He walked away.
“That shut you up but good,” said Yorgos.
“He’s missing the point,” said Noah, “which is why we get nowhere.”
“Which is what?” said Yorgos.
“That you shouldn’t be forced to work on your Sabbath, no matter who you are. Even if you’re not religious. The furnaces on Barren Shoal keep burning anyway, the barges are backed up in the harbor Monday mornings, so what difference does it make if the men work Saturday or Sunday.”
“There’s no managers here Sundays,” said Joey. Only someone that dumb could be counted on for the facts.
“The Sunday men could supervise themselves. What are they gonna do, steal a dead horse?”
“People want one day when the air doesn’t stink,” said Yorgos.
“It stinks every day. Why is it better to stink on Saturday than on Sunday?”
“Because you’re a stinking Yid,” said Joey. “So joke’s on you! Ha!”
“Shut up, you stinking moron,” said my brother. He pulled a green tomato off the vine and threw it hard at Joey’s chest. Joey turned his body so the tomato hit his shoulder blade. He pulled a zucchini and heaved it at Noah like a spear. Nothing ever changed between those guys. How long would it take before they were covered in broken vegetables and the garden was destroyed? Not even my mother, now calling from the doorway for me to come in, had the power to stop them. You would think it was a big deal that she was speaking. Not to me. What was to say that she would not just as suddenly stop?
In the kitchen was a basket of potatoes that needed peeling. I want to say this again: our mothers were forever working in those kitchens. Forget about the debate about the men working Saturdays versus Sundays. Our mothers never had a day off. Not ever.
“Come here,” she said.
Her eyes were red around the rims and her nose was red too; it was obvious she had been crying.
“Closer,” she said. She was still going at the potatoes.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked. She was making me uneasy.
She leaned forward and, out of nowhere, kissed my forehead. This simple, unexpected display of affection was so strange. She handed me a knife. “Here,” she said. “Peel.”
“Maybe the union will do something about child labor,” I said. If she could be affectionate now, she could take a joke, yes?
My mother laid down her potato and her paring knife, wiped her hands on the kitchen towel draped over her shoulder.
“What did you say?” she asked. Her face was so serious. I had miscalculated. So what else was new?
“Nothing.”
“About the law: what did you say?”
“I was just joking.”
“You know nothing, nothing, about the lives of most children. Your father came with a can of sardines in his pocket. You have all this. And you have us. You better be sorry.”
“I am. Sorry.”
It was a moment when I wished that she were still not speaking. We were so damned precious to them, Noah and I. There was so little room for making mistakes.
We worked in silence.
“What do you think about all this union talk?” I finally asked, removing myself from the center of things.
“Do I think the men should earn a living wage?” she considered. “Of course they should. And work in safe conditions? Yes I do. Yes. And should work shorter days and see a doctor when they are sick and have real time off to be with the family? Yes, again. And that someone should speak on their behalf when there’s trouble with a boss? And they shouldn’t lose their jobs or be thrown out of their houses when they get sick or too old to work?
“But should they demand this and that and everything else and risk being shipped back to where-ever? Where they’re lucky if someone lets them live, never mind lets them work? You want fair, Marta, you go play your games with Sofia. After that, there’s no fair.”
What kind of games? Sofia and I had not played games for years. But I was probably no older to my mother than I was when Helen died.
She picked up the paring knife, returning her attention to her potato. “Better to know the truth,” she said. “The world is a rotten place, like it or not.”
I started peeling again, too. Did she see the world this way before Helen died? Yes. And she was right.
After dinner that night I went next door and found Mrs. Paradissis sewing, Grandma Paradissis sewing, and Mr. Paradissis listening to FDR deliver a fireside chat on the radio. The president was going on at length about the National Recovery Act.
“Where’s Sofia?” I asked. There were not a lot of places to hide in that house, what with Sofia and Grandma sleeping in the living room and Yorgos hoarding the attic for himself.
Neither woman looked up from her sewing. Mr. Paradissis muttered something about how girls should not be out at night, not even in their own backyards.
“Did you eat?” asked Mrs. Paradissis.
“We just finished.”
“Then go home,” she said, with a long, tired sigh.
“Is she here?” I asked again.
“Go!” she shouted, shooing me off.
Noah and Yorgos were out back as usual, talking about organizing weekly meetings on Barren Shoal to build momentum for the union. Sofia and Joey were there too. Yorgos was saying he was tired of waiting for Uncle David’s local to come through; it was time to make some other contacts. He knew of another group, he said, that he heard about from one of the barge captains. The captain would make the introduction.
Sofia and Joey were sitting off to the side sharing a cigarette. She took a drag and then asked, “How was Brooklyn?” The word “Brooklyn” floated on a current of exhaled smoke. What she was saying, I understood later on, was, Look: this is how I am now. Sharing a cigarette with Joey.
Sure, I was surprised. I was also disgusted. Not by the cigarettes, mind you, but by Sofia letting something that touched Joey’s lips touch hers.
“Want some?” she asked, offering me the cigarette.
“Want one of your own?” volunteered Joey.
“Our parents will kill her if they catch her smoking,” said Noah.
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“You two don’t have to do anything for your parents except not die,” said Yorgos.
“Don’t you ever get tired of listening to yourself speak?” I asked. I had heard someone on the radio ask this question. I thought it sounded clever.
“Stanley Morrow is gonna drop us if he comes out here and the men aren’t ready,” said Noah. “And if you don’t mind, girls, take off so we can talk.”
“Who put you in charge?” said Sofia. She reached again for Joey’s cigarette.
“Now you’re a union organizer, too?” I asked her. I did not say in addition to being different, older, sexy, hanging out with Joey. Not that I minded Sofia knocking Noah down a notch. It was just that I was feeling so bothered by this whole thing with her and J
oey that I needed to bother her too. None of it was any good.
“You got a problem with that?” she said.
“Go on, get outta here,” said Joey. It made no sense that he would talk nasty to her when this whole thing was starting up between them, but there it was, one disgusting thing on top of the next.
Sofia tossed the half-smoked cigarette into a pile of crushed clamshells. She walked angrily in the direction of the beach, her shoes pounding the shells, the sand, the dune grasses, and anything else that got in her way. She did not talk back like she usually did when Joey was acting especially dumb or being insulting. This was Joey, after all, the boy so stupid that he could not even find Italy on Miss Finn’s old globe, never mind Greece or Poland or Galicia.
“Why did you do that?” I said when I caught up with her. “Why’d you listen to him?”
“Stay out of it,” she barked.
“I’m out,” I said. “Watch how out I can be.”
I did not wait for her to call after me so she could apologize; I did not wait for her to come after me and change the subject; I did not go back and tell her what an idiot she was being. I can talk a lot, but I know how to be silent too, until my silence is the impenetrable. I am, after all, my mother’s daughter.
Sofia and I did not speak more than a few words on our walk to school the next morning, and not much more on the walk home. The week passed, me sequestered in my room after school, Sofia who-knows-where. I never asked. She never asked me either. When I was not in my room I was out walking, mostly to the far side of the island. Solitude can always be found in the face of loneliness, even on a place as small as Barren Shoal where there were not many places to be alone. The marshy side of the island, the side opposite the docks and the factory and furthest from the school house and our own houses, the side where Sofia and I had seen Joey and Marie Dowd all those years ago, had an emptiness that we could claim for ourselves when we wanted to, needed to, when we had no other place to go.
I felt grief when Helen died, but that was different, straightforward, automatic. I now understood that people were fragile, lives were fragile, and our connections to one another were the most fragile things of all. When I walked out of the backyard, when I walked away from Sofia, I felt a kind of loneliness I had never known before. The loneliness that happens when the living walk away from the living. Not that I doubted that I would see Sofia the next day or at school or whenever we crossed paths, which was often and inevitable. Sofia and I could live as neighbors for the rest of our lives, I now realized, and never speak as intimates again. Things like that happened all the time in the books Miss Finn brought us from the Brooklyn Library, usually the result of something large and awful. In real life it could also be something quiet, something unnamed or unknowable that pulled people into separate parts, separate pieces, separate places.
I poked around at the water’s edge, ripples of the cool tide rising over my toes. The brown-green water turned yellow, then grey, and then clear as it rolled onto shore. It washed around some horseshoe crabs that had not been there the day before. The shells were up-ended on their backs, their innards already picked clean by smaller crabs and seagulls. I found a sliver of driftwood branch, splintered and weather beaten, and used it to turn the horseshoe crabs over so that their helmets were on top again.
I inched my way down the beach, inspecting starfish and clamshells and bits of beach glass, dried seaweed and the footprints of cats and plovers and gulls. If Helen had been there, she would have loved adding the beach glass to her coffee can. I spotted in the dune grass another piece of drift wood, shorter but smoother and less splintered than the one I held. That would work even better. I touched it with my fingers and the branch reeled and coiled, twisting itself around my wrist. I tried shaking it off, but it pulled even tighter.
I ran towards the houses screaming, waving my arm, the snake still coiled around my wrist, not knowing whose name I should call, not knowing who I was running to. I could feel the loneliness of this in my leg muscles as they carried me in the direction of everything and nothing. It is a terrible thing to not know a name to call out to. I am not afraid of snakes anymore, but I do fear that memory of loneliness.
The snake, no doubt as scared as I was in its soundless way, suddenly uncoiled itself, plunking into a dense puddle of shallow water. I kept running, crying now instead of screaming.
“Where are your shoes?” asked my mother when I blew through the door. I could smell chicken simmering in a broth of carrots and dill. The table was already set for dinner and the kitchen was clean and calm. I remembered reading how a snake could expand its torso and swallow a chicken whole, taking days to break it down in its digestive tract.
I noticed my bare feet with a kind of shame that came from not having an answer. I must have kicked them off as I was running. There were bits of seaweed stuck to the tops of my feet; there was sand between my toes. There was a carelessness my mother would have observed in this, a kind of carelessness about which she was unforgiving. Inattentiveness to those kinds of things, she believed, invited troubles. As if knowing was a way of preventing them.
“There were these horseshoe crabs and the snake and then ...” I was rubbing my arms, trying to wipe off the imaginary, invisible oil left by the snake.
She interrupted me. “Your shoes,” she said.
“I’ll find them,” I replied. I gave up. What else could I say?
“And come right back,” my mother called after me.
The next day, instead of stopping for Sofia, I left home early and settled myself in the schoolroom before anyone else, including Miss Finn. Yes, it was a terrible feeling to walk past Sofia’s house. Yes, I was compounding my own loneliness. Yes, I could have knocked on her door and acted as if nothing was wrong. But I could not.
The schoolroom was especially still, as if pulsing with a hollow, empty excitement in anticipation of everyone’s arrival. Miss Finn showed up earlier on Mondays than on other days, having just returned from spending her weekend at home in Brooklyn. Soon enough there would be something other than me not knowing what to do with myself.
Soon enough, through the window, I could see Miss Finn walking from the dock. Helping her with her bags and piles of newspapers and all the other packages that filled the small cart was, of all people, the girl in the brown dress. It was hard to believe but, yes, it was that same girl.
“Oh, Marta!” Miss Finn gasped, startled to see me sitting alone there in the grey light of that new morning. She set a bag down on the table and looked around, prepared for another surprise. There was none. She was still loaded down with a carpetbag and some smaller burlap bags, two of which hung from her shoulders by looped rope. “For heaven’s sake: you look like you slept here.”
In my rush, I had neither brushed my hair nor checked myself in the mirror to straighten my dress. More than that, I was missing the clear eye with which Sofia gave me the once-over every morning, the gaze that took care of anything that was amiss.
“I thought it was later than it is,” I said. I smoothed my dress, which even I could see needed ironing.
“It always is,” she said gravely. For a woman as smart as Miss Finn was, she spoke with so many clichés. At least to us she did. “Say hello to Katrine,” she continued. Now the girl in the brown dress had a name. We exchanged hellos.
Miss Finn straightened the collar of my wrinkled dress.
“These need to go upstairs,” she announced. Miss Finn’s bags for the week were still sitting on the schoolroom floor.
I thought she meant that I was supposed to help her, so I reached for the bag closest to me. Next to it was a second carpetbag and the burlap sacks.
“No, I meant Katrine,” she explained.
I felt foolish standing there holding a bag in mid-air.
“Never mind. Come, Marta. Katrine: you wait here.”
I followed Miss Finn to the top of the stairs, where she had her private room. It was the room that in our identical house would be my
room.
“Set those bags down here,” she said, “and go back down and wait for me in the classroom. I’ll be only a few minutes.”
It seemed silly that she had asked me to help her only to send me away, but I was relieved that Miss Finn did not want me to stay. I was relieved, as well, that when I got back downstairs Katrine was gone.
CHAPTER 12
Our estrangement lasted for weeks, not that anyone noticed. I suppose that people were as indifferent to Sofia and me being at odds as they were to our being joined at the hip. Not that I expected them to care, but it surprised me that our friendship mattered so little. But how much do any of us matter anyway, you should pardon me for asking?
Our falling out ran its course because it had to. Who else did we have? Little by little Sofia and I returned to our usual custom of walking to and from school together, of crushing clamshells around the houses in the never-ending effort to keep the sand down. We never discussed what pulled us apart anymore than we talked about what pulled us back together. We worked hours in the garden, dead-heading flowers and weeding and tilling around the vegetables. A year passed, then another, and I was the reluctant third wheel to the now teenaged Sofia and Joey. Noah and Yorgos were making ever more complicated plans for the work-slowdown or sit-down strike, none of which had happened. Talk is cheap. Another cliché, also true.
Joey was now taking dinner two nights, sometimes three, with the Paradissis family. The thought of him at the kitchen table was disgusting. According to Sofia, these meals were in return for Joey’s work in the vegetable garden. Sofia, Yorgos, Noah, Joey and I had tripled the garden’s output in those two years and now there was more than enough for both families, plus some. Our parents were pleased with us; we were pretty pleased with ourselves, too. Who would not be pleased? Yet not even Noah, self-declared friend of the workingman, was ready to invite Joey to our family table. At some point my mother took to sending along extra sandwiches for Joey’s lunch, though it did not stop him from scavenging. Even so, it was good to see my mother taking charge of something again, to see her acting as if there was something worth worrying over other than us. And anyway, she was doing more for him than Mr. Morrow’s union, an idea that still took center stage in the boys’ heads, or in the backyard, or in some conversation in Brooklyn from which Sofia and I were excluded.
