by Joshua Braff
“ANYBODY OUT THERE?” says a voice from the sound booth above, a man my father calls Soundman Sal. “Welcome to the world famous Imperial Theatre. You’re in for quite a private treat this morning because our first dancer’s come all the way from San Francisco to get you hot, hot, hot. So let’s hear a nice round of applause for the sexy and sultry Tiki Nightly.”
Her music is “Susie Q” by Creedence and it’s cranked to an almost eardrum-piercing level. My father isn’t happy. He stands, signaling with his thumb for Sal to turn it down. On stage now is Tiki in a blue nightgown-like thing and a wig that reaches to her butt. She winks at me and is already on her knees and crawling toward us. With my father still motioning, the music lowers but only slightly. Ira pulls his chair closer to mine. “So you remember the monkey I got ya, right?”
I nod. “It’s in my garage.”
My father lights a cigarette. “Just found a ton of pictures in the garage,” my father tells him. “The Acapulco trip. Remember that? With the parrots, in that place?”
Ira nods and smiles. “What was it, ’56, ’57?”
“I was gonna say it was 1960 because Mickey was there.”
“Mick the quick,” Ira says, and my father glances at me, embarrassed.
Tiki leans over the end of the stage and points at Harvey. He laughs, reaching for his wallet. Four singles land at her feet and she pulls the nightgown over her head and hurls it. It lands on Harvey’s shoulder.
“Where are the pictures?” Ira yells as Tiki swings over us, gripping the gold pole.
“She’s wonderful!” says Harvey. He searches for more cash and this time finds a five. Tiki sits on the end of the stage, legs spread. Suddenly Brandi isn’t interested anymore. She dramatically turns her back to Tiki and her very open legs, wanting all of us to know she’s not impressed. The stripteaser versus the stripper. Brandi looks at my dad, who’s leaning to his right, trying to hear Ira.
“This girl’s a stupid whore,” Brandi says, reaching for her cigarettes. “Nine bucks on the stage and she’s showing off her cervix.”
Leo arrives with drinks and brings me a beer.
“David,” my father says. “Run upstairs to my office and grab the pictures of Ira in Acapulco. They’ve gotta be in one of the boxes.”
“I’ll go,” Brandi says.
“No, no, it’s okay,” I say, as Tiki goes down on all fours for Harvey, aiming her ass cheeks at the rafters. I head for the stairs, where the music is lower, and pass two other girls watching Tiki do her thing. In my father’s office, on the wall to the right of the door, are about fifty or more signed photographs of various burlesquers and some men too, like Lou Goldstein, the Simon Says King of Grossinger’s. Some are black and white and nearly all are posed shots, the women in frilly feathered garb, their heads back, shoulders exposed.
The boxes are in the closet, just where we left them. To find Ira in here might be impossible. I lift a pile and thumb through them: Debra with pail on beach, Debra in yellow bathing suit with kitten on the front. My mother asleep, someone at a pumpkin patch, my dad in high school, a woman I don’t know, more Deb on the beach. A woman in silhouette, another woman kneeling, lifting money from a stage—she’s in a headdress and the pieces, the feathers are lit at the tips with a distant blue light. The woman has my mother’s face, the profile too, and it’s in these seconds that it all becomes clear to me. The veins behind my knees start tingling as I lift the picture up to my face.
It’s her. It is. She’s got a thick, shiny layer of makeup on, cartoonish eyelashes. Her breasts look huge and her legs are way longer than they are. “It’s her,” I say, to no one in the room. “It’s you.” Of course. My first thought is to confront her. To find her and hand the Polaroid to her. I stuff the picture in the front of my pants and turn out of the office. The very moment I put my foot on the staircase, my ankle turns and I’m falling and rolling and trying to stop myself but can’t. Whew, when I finally settle, I have my back up against the wall and I’m not quite at the bottom. My mother was a stripper. Jesus Christ. The two girls from before are there and helping me stand.
“You okay?” one says as I make my way down to my father. Tiki is sitting on Harvey’s lap. On stage is a black woman in a Cleopatra outfit and the music is “Boogie Shoes.” Ira is whispering into Brandi’s ear and my father has his drink tipped to his mouth.
“I couldn’t find it,” I say, close to his ear.
“Not one of Ira?” he asks.
“I need to borrow your car.”
“What?”
“I need to go get my things from home, some clothes and my cameras. I don’t have anything.”
He nods and puts his hand on my cheek. “I’ll get you some clothes. You should probably stay away from Jersey for a while. Aside from school. I’ll take you to school in the morning.”
“I don’t need new clothes. I have clothes at home. Let me go get them.”
Cleopatra is walking down the steps of the stage, pointing at me. When I look up, Ira and Harry are laughing because I’m backpedaling away from her, away from being part of the shtick. She reaches me anyway and wraps a yellow, glittery rope around my torso. My shoulder aches from my fall.
“Hello, slave,” Cleopatra says into my ear, and I say, “I can’t now,” and she says, “Are you a bad slave?” and I say, “No,” and she puts her lips on my ear. Boner. She kisses me on the cheek and sort of taps me on the zipper of my pants. I jump back and hear Brandi yell, “Get back on stage!” My father reaches in his pocket and pulls out his car keys. “Be quick,” he says, throwing them to me. “Lickity split.”
I CAN SEE the two of them in my mind, meeting at the theater for the first time. She was eighteen years old when she auditioned and he liked her body, her face, her long and wavy brown hair. She didn’t talk to the other girls and it made them not like her. But the boss liked her and that made the others even more resentful. The boss would drive her home, buy her coffee before he dropped her off. One night he kissed her and they ended up going to his apartment. They made me that night but she didn’t know it was me until she was dancing a few weeks later, kneeling to lift the cash that had been tossed on the stage. She felt nauseous when she dipped her knees, felt sick and stupid because she knew what it meant, this feeling inside her, and she hated herself for letting this happen. Me, growing inside of her, waiting to come out and flip her life into something unwanted. My father took her picture as she knelt. She didn’t look at him. What now? A house in the ’burbs of Jersey, a wedding ring, promises of familial bliss and barbeques and neighbors with bowls of sugar. And when I was born, my father held me and kissed me and said, wow, he’s got my eyes before handing me back to my mother and leaving the house until 4 a.m. every night. The other moms at the playground said you need another, you have to have another, a girl would be perfect so this one can learn to share. So she asked the boss and he rolled his eyes and reminded her that the baby keeps you up all night. She said no, it’s you, you, the man who brought me here, the man who never comes home that keeps me up at night and they fought and called each other names and he said I’m not coming back and she said please, don’t say that, I’m lonely here in this big house and he said I’m sorry, but I have to work and she cried and cried and wished there was someone else to call, to talk to, a mother of her own. But she hates her mother, has never to this day mentioned her name or anything about her except the fact that she died alone in a nursing home which my uncle Don paid for. My father said, “I know, I got it.” She said she was lonely, right? He brought the party home. She dreaded the people. Always. But she went through the motions—the drinks, the fake laughs, the charade of friendship, all of it. Until she couldn’t anymore. She told him she wanted a divorce. He agreed and said he’d go. She became depressed. She called him frantically. So he moved back in. And then they had a girl.
As I drive, I look at the picture again. She looks cold. She’s got nothing on her legs.
I park in the street and stare at my hous
e. I’ll hand her the photo before I say hello. Or I’ll say hello, how are you, I found something I thought you’d like to have. I could laugh as I give it her, as if, hey, no big deal. Is that how you and Dad met? That’s crazy. You never mentioned you were a bottomless stripper, not ever, how weird. You said you met Dad at a party, remember, a party. There’s no car in the driveway. The house looks empty. My keys are inside the house so I try a few that are on my father’s keychain but none works. The window over the sink is locked. I try the garage door and it’s open. There’s the giant stuffed monkey that Ira bought me, sticking upside down in one of the soggier boxes. I pull it out by the foot, take it with me into the house, and up to Debra’s room. I prop George up on her bed and bend one of his knees before tying his arms in a knot. The Polaroid I place on his lap.
My sister will walk in and freeze when she sees it. “Who’s that?” she’ll call out to my mother. It’s George, my mother will say. No, I mean in the picture. Who’s that woman in the picture? That’s me, when I was younger, stripping, naked, in front of men.
You were a stripper? Yes. What if Becca finds out? Or Rachel or Miriam or Gilda or Chaya or any of the other ladies find out that you were a boom-boom girl? Won’t that hurt us? Won’t they tell the others? You’ve got to hide this. You’ve got to hide this forever.
All my clothes and cassettes and albums and two cameras and the Hustler and a tripod and Seth’s dime bag fit into my green army bag. The duffel ends up being too heavy to carry so I drag it out into the hallway, down the staircase, out the front door and across the lawn to the street.
“David?” It’s our neighbor Mrs. Litvak sweeping her driveway. When I was thirteen she saw me peeing on the Healey’s rhododendrons because Bruce Hallard dared me to do it. Mrs. Litvak told my mother and my mother made me walk over and apologize to Rona Healey. Rona Healey made me hose down her rhodies.
“You must be graduating soon,” she yells.
I nod.
“Congratulations. Where are you headed in the fall?”
“I don’t know,” I say, shrugging. “Maybe photography school.”
“My nephew just got into Yale,” she says, and waits for a reaction.
I have nothing to say. I’m thinking of the Polaroid on George’s lap, of my sister seeing it, walking toward it, lifting it to her face.
“Are you looking for your mother?” she says.
“Yes. Do you know where she is?”
She comes to the sidewalk, dragging the broom behind her. “They’re in Vincent today. She said it was some kind of brunch.”
The Danowitzes.
“Thanks,” I say, closing my dad’s car trunk. I look up at the windows of my sister’s room and start to feel wrong about leaving it up there. I head to the driveway, return to the house, and grab the picture. When I get to the car, Mrs. Litvak hasn’t moved an inch.
“Where did you say you were headed in the fall?” she asks.
“Uh, Harvard,” I say. “Harvard University.”
Her palm is placed over her mouth before she applauds right there. I watch the broom fall onto her fluffy grass. “Mazel tov,” she says. “Your mother must be going crazy!”
I smile at her as I get back in the car. “You have no idea.”
Kallah
MY FATHER CALLS THE TOWN of Vincent, New Jersey, “Heebville.” It has all the sects: the Satmars, the Lichtigers, the Sephardics, the Ashkanzis, and who knows how many more there are. The Danowitz house is like all the others on their block—an A-frame with beige aluminum siding and a yellowish front lawn the size of a picnic blanket. I’ve been to the Danowitzes three or four times but not since Mr. Danowitz, known to his daughter as Peter Rabbi, told me I was “killing my mother” by not embracing halakhah. Sarah, who is Peter Rabbi’s daughter and Debra’s closest Hasidic friend, told me that her father denies every aspect of his life before becoming a baal teshuva. Fifteen years ago he was “without God,” teaching world history at Fordham University, never having even gotten bar mitzvahed, which he did, finally, in his midthirties. It’s as if he’s humiliated by his own past, his own memory and that’s why Sarah calls him Peter Rabbi, to remind herself that he was once just a Peter before he became a Pinchus. My mother was a Mickey once. A bottomless Mickey on a stage in Times Square.
There are five cars in the Danowitz driveway, including my mother’s. It must be a holiday. I think there’s a Jewish celebration of some kind on every single day of the Jewish calendar. Aside from the weekly ceremonies, Shabbat and Havdalah, there’s Tisha be-Av and Lag ba-Omer and Asarah be-Tevet and Purim and of course the heavy hitters, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Each one commemorates a mass slaughter of some degree in which the Jews of the time became too prosperous or joyous and wound up very dead. Today must be one of those days. I park about three houses down and start to feel the nervousness of my intentions. Ring the bell, ask where Miriam is, see her, say hi, say sorry, hand her the photo?
As I ring the bell my stomach drops and burns. Becca Danowitz sees me through the glass and cannot fake her utter disappointment. I can’t tell if it’s her impenetrable mean streak or just the lack of respect she holds behind her eyes, but she will forever look at me as if I’ve let the entire religion down with my ignorance, youth, and raw stupidity. It’s there, even when she tries to smile, like she’s doing right now as she opens the door. I can see the bottom row of her teeth and the raised mole that invades her right eyebrow.
“Hello, David. We weren’t expecting you. I’ll get your mother.” Standing on the porch, I lean my head in and look for my sister. I see the mechitzah separating the men and women. This one’s made of a heavy wood and has triangular holes cut into it.
“What are you doing?” my mother says, and she’s there, at the door, with more shock on her face than pleasure.
“Hi, Mom.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.”
She looks back into the house where Debra stares at me.
“David?” Debra says, and moves to me. I hold her with my eyes closed, so close to me. My mother is watching, waiting.
“This isn’t a good time,” my mother says. “We’re having a celebration.”
“Oh.”
“Have you come to apologize?”
I tap the photo in my left pocket and know she’s right. It isn’t a good time. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Well, just as I’ve told Dena, you betrayed me. That’s how it feels. A betrayal of trust. Trust is earned. How are you going to earn it back?”
I see Peter Rabbi walking up behind her. He’s about my height and has a black and gray beard that’s wider than it is long. I feel some relief when a smile forms behind the hair on his face.
“Daveed!” he says, opening the door and taking me by the shoulder. Just like that, I’m in the house and on the male side of the screen. I look back for my mother and sister and see them heading into the kitchen. The room is small and dimly lit. It has a low ceiling and a velvety, mustard colored couch covered in plastic. A swirly gold-framed portrait of the Grand Rabbi hangs above the fireplace. His beard is black in this one and he’s young, a teenager maybe, grinning like a regular person you might know. Hundreds, maybe thousands of books are stacked on shelves and in milk crates pushed into the corners on the wood floor: In the Land of Prayer, A Maimonides Reader, Fundamentals of the Rambam. Two men in fedoras are on the couch. When they see me, they stand and one of them asks me if I’m Jewish. I nod and he asks me if I was bar mitzvahed. I shake my head and he asks if I lay tefillin?
“No,” I say, and he wants to know if I’d like to do it now. “No,” I say. “I’m just here to see my mother and sister.”
The two of them speak in Yiddish for a moment and one asks, “Are you Miriam’s son?”
“Yes.”
They both smile and offer their hands. The taller one is called Yussi and the guy with all the questions is Svi. They sit back down and continue their discussion so close to each other tha
t the brims of their hats overlap. They speak in both Yiddish and English. I think they’re talking about a farm animal or a plowing animal and what to do if your animal kills another man’s animal. Some Talmudic thing. Another man, older than Yussi and Svi, about thirty, with freckled skin and a red-haired version of the Hasidic beard, stands alone by the window. He grins at me and takes a sip from his glass.
“Shalom aleikhem, my name is Avram. Stolichnaya?” he says, holding up the bottle.
“No, thank you.” I can see my mother through the mechitzah. She’s talking to Becca and looking my way.
“Friend of Pinchus?” Avram says.
I shake my head. “Sorry. I don’t speak Yiddish.”
“No, no, Pinchus, Pinchus, the rabbi, Mr. Danowitz.”
“Oh, Peter,” I say, and Svi and Yussi both look up at me.
“We’ll start in two minutes,” Becca announces from the dining room.
I look for Debra through the wall but only see Sarah. She is taller and nicer and blonder and foxier than any baalai teshuva I’ve ever seen. When I wave to her, she waves back with a smile, a flirty smile. Svi and Yissi are standing now but still talking about the farm animal.
“Verse thirty-five,” Yussi says. “A man’s beast injures his neighbor’s beast and it dies, they shall sell the animal and divide its price. They shall also divide the dead animal. So the lesson here is that because the ox had never shown any tendency toward harming any other livestock, the owner is only obligated to pay half the damages.”
“Half?” says Svi. “No.”
“It was an accident, a onetime thing. If the ox had previously gorged another ox or any other animal and the owner didn’t slaughter it or, or, or, or . . . pen it up for doing so, then the owner bears full liability.”
“So just lie,” says Svi. “If your ox has gorged and gorges again, just say it’s never happened before.”
Avram laughs like this: hut, hut, hut. Like machine-gun fire. He holds his glass against his cheek.
“Give it a rest for a while, boys. Isn’t your life about to change, young Svi?”
