by Carol Zoref
Mr. Singer’s whole being turned solemn, too.
Their faces said that certainty, which could hold out the promise of security, could also hold out tragedy.
Miss Rosen interrupted for Uncle David and Mr. Singer to come help, something was wrong with her sewing machine. “Why do they make me work the machine that always jams?” she complained.
My uncle and Mr. Singer laughed; the natural color returned to their cheeks. “Some people,” said my uncle, tilting his head toward Miss Rosen. “Always rotten luck no matter what machine they get. This one’s got troubles like flies to honey.”
“You mean bees to honey,” said Mr. Singer.
“Bees make honey. Why would they look for it? It’s those flies you’ve got to watch out for.”
What is there to say about my mother’s response to the news from Mr. Schwartzbart? Her despairing was predictable by now, though no easier to live with.
“What did you expect?” she asked my father, as if he was at fault for thinking the situation might turn out better. “You think the world’s a decent place? Maybe that’s why you like living on Barren Shoal, where you got plenty of sand to stick your head in. Pull your head out! Did you think you could save the whole family? Even one? The world is rotten; people are rotten. You just think it gets better with your American Revolution, or your French Revolution, or your Russian Revolution. Ideas change, but not people. People stay rotten.”
After making this declaration, she shut herself away in their bedroom for two days. She only emerged in the middle of the night, when I could hear her moving around in the kitchen. Cabinets opened and closed, utensils clanked in the sink. The bucket she used for mopping scraped against the floorboards as she dragged it along.
Where did my mother think this put her in the scheme of things, if every time she grieved she abandoned us? She would likely say this made her a rotten person, but that is too easy. My poor mother. We knew she loved us. She was afraid of how much she loved us, as if that makes it any better. I could not curse my mother so I cursed Noah, wherever he was, chopping trees or shoveling landslides or doing whatever he was doing that day in California instead of being home in this new, rotten mess. And I cursed Ray Whitmore, who would not let me love him. And I decided to return to the warehouse, if they would have me. Forget waiting around on Barren Shoal for something to rescue me, I thought. No one and nothing was coming.
Miss Finn delivered a letter for me and Dolores replied saying that of course they would welcome me back.
Ray was not at the warehouse when I arrived, the first time I made the entire trip by myself. For days I had steeled myself for seeing him. Dolores did not volunteer his whereabouts nor did I ask. I was too proud. Nor did Dolores ask why I stayed away or why I returned. I pulled up a stool and resumed sewing as if I was never gone.
Uncle David had his first heart attack a month later, not bad enough to kill him but bad enough to retire him for good. He was 45 years old plus or minus a couple of years depending on who was saying, my uncle or my aunt, who did not want anyone to know that she was a year older than him. What a silly thing to be ashamed of.
Uncle David’s brother Sam had one in his forties too. Men in those days had heart attacks, not midlife crises. Who had time for a crisis when there was a Depression at home and fascists in Europe? And before that the Cossacks. And before that the Tsars. And Torquemada. And the Romans and Haman and Pharaoh. I bet that no Cambodians had midlife crises in the Pol Pot years.
Today, Uncle David would get an angioplasty like Noah did last year at age 83, in and out of St. Vincent’s Hospital in twenty-four hours along with a whole gang of WWII veterans who spent the evening playing bridge at a card table near the nurses’ station. Some crazy life.
My mother blamed Uncle David’s heart attack not on diet or genes—as if the blame for anything can be assigned to just one cause—but on the working conditions at the shoe factory, even if they were decent by the standards of the day.
“What do you expect?” I overheard her saying to my father, “a man his age on his feet all day, stooping over a table.”
My mother, of all people, went to Brooklyn to watch over Flat Sammy while Aunt Sara traveled back and forth to Coney Island Hospital. Uncle David’s brother Sam was still too weak from his own heart attack to come up from Philadelphia. Cousin Ruthie, I suppose, was too busy with her married life with Sidney. I have no idea what the real reason was, though I would prefer whatever kind of certainty that comes from knowing. My mother slept on the living room couch—Flat Sammy on the floor beside her—knowing that Aunt Sara would take all the help she could get when Uncle David came home.
My mother did the marketing, the cooking, the laundry, and the cleaning. She kept Flat Sammy in the kitchen with her where he went on playing with paper cutouts, even though he was old enough now to shave. Without Uncle David there to shave him, my mother did that too. She baked intricate, colorful cookies, and cleaned chickens and did things she had barely done since Helen died. I know because my aunt told me.
It took two young men from the building to carry Uncle David upstairs when he was released from the hospital. According to Aunt Sara, Uncle David arrived soaked with sweat from the effort of holding on. Flat Sammy threw himself into his father’s arms, almost knocking him off his feet before the men got Uncle David settled into a chair.
The already cramped apartment became a hospital ward. Windows were shut tight to keep the heat in and the soot out; no one was allowed to visit if they had a cold. They could not even come if they had a cold sore. It is a wonder that no one died by suffocation; it is no wonder that my mother went up to the roof after dinner every night for air.
I would like to know what Mr. Aryeh said to her one night and what she answered on all the nights that followed when they must have sat on the parapet wall, the pigeons cooing themselves to sleep after Mr. Aryeh swept out their coop and refilled their food and water troughs. I asked my aunt if she knew what my mother was doing up there but she said no. She even asked my mother if she had taken up smoking, but my mother said no. Who knows if this was true. I would not blame my aunt for protecting my mother. Or for protecting us from the path that brought my mother back to us. Was there a romance between my mother and Mr. Aryeh? Was there something else that came from two people talking? Whatever passed between them accomplished all that falling in love can do.
The photographs Mr. Aryeh made of her during that period changed her. I saw only two of them, but those were enough. One shows her in all her despair, chin and brow cast downward and hollow eyes wide open. She is staring away from the camera as if she is looking away not only from the lens, but from the past and the future as well. In the second photo, her eyes are addressing the camera and her expression is firm and elegant and fragile. Her mouth is poised in the silent quivering that takes place between speaking and having just spoken.
These two photographs are in their original cherry wood frames that my mother kept on her dresser for years and that now sit on mine. These photographs are everything I need to know about whatever passed between my mother and Mr. Aryeh. For a time—not right then, but after—I assumed that this had everything to do with the physical aspect of their intimacy. My mother reemerged in the weeks to come as if her absence had been a mere episode, even though I knew it and remember it as epic. This was before my own life had taken enough turns and I learned a different way of looking at those pictures, when I saw the subject and the photographer and the mysterious place that they shared. If this is not about intimacy then nothing is.
My mother, having already been in Brooklyn for two weeks, got a message to my father that she would be staying on a few days longer. Our household routine on Barren Shoal was as close to normal as we could manage. My father prepared breakfast while I packed sandwiches for lunch. I was also in charge of dinner. Mrs. Paradissis provided loaves of fresh bread; Sofia helped me snip beans and peel potatoes. The period of our estrangement faded away. I did the laundry on Saturday
morning when my father was at work so that he never saw the washtub, as if I was now in charge of Helen’s memory. My father washed his own underwear, I washed mine, and we each hung them to dry in the privacy of our rooms. I ironed on Saturday afternoons when the clothing was still damp, listening to the opera with my father, who put his own things away when he came home from work. I missed my mother and I dreaded her return.
On Sunday I returned again to the warehouse where there was still no sign of Ray. Another fellow was there ripping muslin bandages. Dolores introduced us, but I did not catch his name. I saw him many times after that but never asked and never cared. We would say hello and go about our business.
It was a relief to be with people and not care. Neither of them mattered to me in a personal way. Being with them was a vacation, not that I had ever taken one. Now I know that people do crazy things on vacations: they go swimming in the dark; they jump into lakes with their clothing on; they jump in totally naked.
As for me, I stole. That was me jumping into the water. I took a little money here and a little money there. Every time I worked at the warehouse, I took a little more except every so often when I skipped a week. If you think I am ashamed, think again.
It was easy.
Dolores slid ten $20 bills into every jacket that we stitched. $200! Who had that kind of money? I returned the first twenty I took just to see if I could. That was harder, the bill all crumpled from the trip to Barren Shoal and back. After that I kept what I took.
I pinched a bill here and a bill there. Some weeks I took nothing, just in case. Back on Barren Shoal I slipped the money between the pages of the old Odyssey Project that nobody touched anymore. It would have been faster to take one whole packet, but that would have left some poor soldier high and dry—maybe even Ray—not to mention maybe getting caught.
I no longer had Ray, but I was getting rich.
My mother again sent word that she was spending another night in Brooklyn, and then another and so on until a month had passed. My father went to the factory, I went to school, and on most Sundays I stole $20 bills because I knew how. I would steal enough to buy passage for ten people from Zyrmuny to someplace else. Not America, I understood, but somewhere.
“I’m taking you this weekend to see your mother,” my father finally announced. Who knows what went into this decision? So many decisions are made about which we know so little. Including why one day is a better day for stealing or why we decide to steal at all. It is no wonder people are frantic to come up with an explanation for everything.
“Sammy slept in Uncle David’s pajamas while he was gone,” were my mother’s first words when she saw me. How crazy was that after not seeing me for four weeks? She was up on the roof, sitting next to Flat Sammy on the parapet wall, where they were cutting paper dolls from a newspaper. Sammy’s scissors were tethered to his pants by a string. My mother was wearing a pink housedress that belonged to my aunt. My mother never wore pink after one time when Mrs. Dowd told her it made her look sallow. It was green, according to Mrs. Dowd, which brought out my mother’s eyes, forget that the one good dress that she owned, the one she wore to Helen’s funeral, was navy blue and beautiful.
It was useless to guess what she wanted me to say in return. That I had slept in her nightgown? I had not. That I missed her? I had not. That my single, humiliated appeal to Ray—and his kind and condescending rejection—hurt me in ways I was unprepared for? That I had longed for a mother’s reassurance? Why bother. My mother, having quarantined herself since Helen’s death, made it impossible to recognize the ways that I needed her. Impossible for her. Impossible for me.
My mother and Flat Sammy went on trimming paper dolls until Mr. Aryeh emerged from the pigeon coop, where he had been checking the tags on his birds.
“This is my Marta,” my mother said by way of introduction.
“Of course I know Marta,” he replied, smoothing the feathers of the pigeon in his hands. When he said that he knew me, it was not just that he had seen me before. He knew about me. Not about the thief I had become, but a girl seen through her mother’s eyes.
“You like pigeons?” asked Mr. Aryeh. He stepped back into the coop, set down the bird he was holding, and returned to the assembly line inspection of the others, adjusting the tags with a pinch of his needle-nose pliers.
My mother and Mr. Aryeh had pulled a shroud of exclusivity over whatever was passing between them, but they were the elephant in the room that my father and uncle never spoke of. Now they were the elephant on the roof.
“There aren’t many pigeons on Barren Shoal,” I replied. “Mostly seagulls.”
“Which don’t compare to pigeons.”
“They’re not afraid of people either.”
Mr. Aryeh smiled. “A good point. But you can’t train them to deliver messages, can you?”
“The only thing a seagull delivers is....”
My mother cleared her throat. She finally noticed me enough to slap me on the wrist. Flat Sammy cleared his throat too in pure imitation.
Mr. Aryeh laughed. “I get your point. Pigeons, though, they’re pretty smart. Even so, it happens every once in a while that a pigeon gets lost and another pigeoneer returns it. Sometimes someone holds it hostage, shakes you down for a ransom, or returns it with a mutilated wing or a knife cut in the beak. People do pigeons how they do each other. I can’t explain it.
“You want to see a guy go crazy, you watch a pigeon man get back a cut bird. What did the bird do? Nothing. Pigeons are very sociable. It’s a bird; it sees other birds, it flies to them. But some guys don’t want their pigeons mixing with another guy’s pigeons, so a bird’ll come back with a marker, maybe something not so nice, something so you know where it landed. Then you got to decide what to do: do you wait until one of his birds strays so you can take a piece of its wing? Do you keep the guy’s pigeon and switch tags with a bird you wanna get rid of? Do you let it go so it doesn’t dishonor your flock by association?”
Mr. Aryeh raised the wings of a homer; the bird shifted its weight from one pink foot to the other. “The stakes are high when your heart’s in it. A couple of months ago a guy from Greenpoint called to say he had one of my birds. Way the heck the other side of Brooklyn. Nice fella, immaculate coop, open sky to Manhattan. Italian guy. His wife set out cookies and coffee. She said stay for dinner, they were ready to sit down, noodles with green sauce, pesto from basil she grows in boxes beside the coop. Who knew? All along I thought Italian sauce was red. We end up trading a couple of birds. I don’t see this guy ever, us living at opposite ends of Brooklyn, but now he’s a friend. We send messages via the birds. We got plans to trade again. It’s good to bring new blood into the flock, mix things up with a well-cared-for bird. Makes the birds stronger. Good for everyone all around.”
My father finally appeared on the roof and the men shook hands through the open door of the coop. He tousled Sammy’s hair and gave my mother a peck on the cheek.
Mr. Aryeh went on, with a wrapping-things-up rise in his voice. “A bird gets lost, and now, maybe, you’re in the middle of a tragedy. Or maybe you’re about to make a friend. This is what everything boils down to: you never know. The old proverb is true: about nothing you never know nothing. You can’t predict; you can’t plan. But you just go on planning anyway, because that’s how people do.”
My father took a seat next to my mother. She moved closer, finally leaning into him. Flat Sammy looked up from his cutouts, blew some air kisses at my father, and returned to his rough scissoring. My mother gently kissed my father’s cheek.
“I’m going to stay a few days longer,” she said.
Down on the street a wagon was passing, bottles clinking as its wheels passed over the ruts. I remembered the milk wagon from the night of Helen’s funeral; how I was a girl on the street in her pajamas; how I was throwing away a confession to a crime my mother never committed.
“I know you’re staying,” answered my father.
“Then I’ll be home,”
she said. She brushed a pigeon feather off his pants.
“That’ll be good,” he said.
“Come on, kids,” Mr. Aryeh to Flat Sammy and me. “Let’s get the camera and make some pictures.”
My parents, to my astonishment, were still sitting on the parapet wall when we returned with Mr. Aryeh and the camera gear. How often did I see my parents sitting, just sitting, instead of making something, fixing something, reading something, planning something? How about never.
“Can you stay in one place if I tell you?” Mr. Aryeh asked Sammy.
Sammy nodded, though who knew what he was agreeing to. Mr. Aryeh gave Sammy a box of rejected photographs and a pair of scissors, telling Sammy to cut the people out from the pictures. Sammy was essential to the process, intently cutting out figures while Mr. Aryeh used him as a model.
Mr. Aryeh was a patient teacher. After setting up the tripod, he folded it down so I could open it again and lock it myself. He laughed when I splayed its legs and the thing toppled onto Sammy, who thankfully laughed too. To my further delight, Mr. Aryeh handed me the big 8x10 view camera, talking me through each step of mounting it on the tripod. A welcome peacefulness settled on Sammy while the technical problems were being solved around him. Then Mr. Aryeh took the light meter hanging from his neck and draped it around my own. He showed me how to take meter readings from Sammy’s left cheek, his right cheek, and directly in front of his face, the sun always behind me where it belonged.
I exposed two images that day. The first was of my parents. The second was a self-portrait made using a shutter release cable, the trigger hidden from view in my hand. I have kept them both, rare souvenirs. Of course I wanted someone beside me; of course I imagined Ray. Or Ray and me rolling into a pile of $20 bills like a big old bed of leaves. I have witnessed enough to believe this happens to most everyone: we become stuck on someone not because they are perfect or we are perfect together, but because the feeling is. It was not the idea of Ray that I fell in love with, the way he said on that humiliating day at the Brooklyn Museum. It was the sensation of loving him, which had changed everything. I confused it with the creation of the universe, as if nothing existed unless I did. A girlish thought, but not dumb. It will not exist when I die, this universe as I know it. Do not worry about me. I am okay. I would be running out of time if all that mattered were the future, but it is not.
