Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

by Bess Kalb

  On the invoice it said, “Black footprints going up and down the aisle.”

  VOICE MAIL, 2012

  Bessie, if you try on a dress and you don’t immediately want to parade outside the dressing room and show it off to everyone in the store, take it off and forget it ever existed.

  YOUR GRANDFATHER

  I left Brooklyn when I was eighteen and I made it all the way to Manhattan.

  I got into Hunter College, which in those days was all women. Georgie was so proud he took a taxicab to come visit after my first day. It must have cost him ten dollars, which in those days was a small fortune. He was leaning on the car outside the main building when I got out of class. He was dressed up: a three-piece suit and a hat. “My baby sister, the college student. I had to see it with my own eyes.” Then he kissed me on the cheek, hit the hood, and got back in. A character.

  Two years in, I met your grandfather.

  It was on a city bus of all places. I had homework on my lap—math. And out of the corner of my eye, this young man in a fraternity sweater and old shoes was inching closer and closer to me, which at first I assumed was a come-on. But he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking over my shoulder at the homework, the equations. He was peering. The bus was crowded, but I felt his eyes on my paper like darts. So what did I do? I started to intentionally mix up the numbers, flubbing the answers. In reality I was a whiz at math—my brothers made sure of it—but with this man hovering over me, breathing down my neck, I’d add a zero or start to write down the correct answer and cross it out and put the wrong one in. And I did it in big, bold penmanship. To this day—hand to God—he doesn’t have any idea.

  So of course, your grandfather gets on his high horse and he sings out, “Wrong!” Can you believe it? Seventy years and it started with “Wrong!” So I turned my head and really laid it on thick: “Excuse me. I don’t appreciate strange men criticizing me on the bus.” And he laughed and said, “I ain’t criticizing. I’m simply stating a fact.” He really said “ain’t.” A Jewish kid, talking like a country bumpkin. And in that split second, I don’t know what it was about his round face with that smirk in his eye—the bluest eye I’d ever seen—but I made a decision. I moved over two seats and slammed my notebook on the empty seat and handed him the pencil. “You want to do someone else’s homework so badly, be my guest.”

  He stuck out his hand. “Hank Bell. City College. Engineering.”

  I shook it once. “Bobby Otis. Hunter College. Math.”

  Three years later, we were eating cherries jubilee at our wedding dinner.

  * * *

  · · ·

  So I met your grandfather on the bus and we were going together by the next day. He pulled up to my parents’ house on West Street in an old jalopy—a station wagon he borrowed from a friend. It was to be our first date. So he got out of the car, introduced himself to my mother (she didn’t say a word), and I left the house with him. I wore my fake pearls Georgie had gotten me when I was admitted to college. I felt very important getting into a car: your grandfather walked with his chest all puffed out, and he opened the door for me and held my hand when I got in.

  He sat down in the driver’s seat, proud as can be, but when he turned the key, there was a terrible, low rumbling sound and then a pop. He tried it again and the engine revved up, but then there was nothing. A dead engine. We sat there in silence and the color went out of his face. Before a second could go by, I threw my head back and I laughed until I cried. He was very sore about it at first and kept turning the key, until he gave up and he laughed, too. And when he laughed his whole face turned into a great, big smile and I could feel my heart in my throat over the sight of him. I knew I’d do anything for that smile—the way his eyes disappeared, swallowed by his cheeks, and his shoulders shook and his breath caught in his chest. If I could see one thing for the rest of eternity, it would be your grandfather laughing.

  But we were in the dead car and I was hungry. And enough was enough. So I marched him right back into the house and shouted up the stairs, and my brother Leo drove us to our first date. We went to a Jewish deli and we both ate liver sandwiches as big as your head, and for dessert I had an egg cream. That car must have sat outside my house for a week until someone carted it away.

  I know I’ve told you a thousand times that after I graduated from college he proposed with a dinky ring from Woolworth’s. There was a notch carved into it to look like a diamond in the light. He had tears in his eyes and so did I. You’ve never heard anyone say yes louder.

  But my father wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t like the kid with the broken-down car and no prospects. He was a socialist until it came to the possibility of his daughter growing old under his roof. I desperately wanted to be married to your grandfather, and one morning, I looked at him and said, “I want to be your wife today,” so we went down to the marriage bureau and I bought three pennies’ worth of baby’s breath from a corner store near the courthouse and we eloped. We didn’t tell a soul. But every night, your grandfather would tell me, “Good night, Mrs. Bell. And if I don’t see you again, good morning, Mrs. Bell.”

  A couple years later we had our big wedding with all our family there. I wore the white dress, and as I walked down the aisle I winked at him under my veil. He winked back. He toasted me with sparkling cider at the reception in the temple: “To the love of my life. May she always get what she wants, whether I like it or not.”

  PHONE CALL, 2011

  GRANDMOTHER: Bessie, everything you wear is black.

  GRANDDAUGHTER: That’s not true! That’s not even remotely true!

  You wore black to Rachel’s wedding.

  So?

  So you looked like you were in mourning. It was a summer wedding.

  I like that dress.

  Never mind what you like—would it kill you to wear some color every once in a while? Blue? Pink? Even a very pale pink. That would be a start. What they’re wearing lately is neons.

  What who’s wearing?

  All the girls.

  All the girls?

  Why yes. And in the style section. Neon handbags, neon belts, neon cardigans. You name it!

  Well, I don’t really like the sound of that.

  Why don’t you take down my credit card number and go to Bloomingdale’s and buy yourself some nice things that aren’t morose.

  Ha. Why don’t you tell me what you really think?

  [NO PAUSE. NOT EVEN A BREATH.]

  You should be engaged by this time next year.

  VOICE MAIL, APRIL 3, 2011

  Bessie, if you ever finally find a lipstick that actually, certifiably looks good on you, buy twenty of them. If it gets discontinued—and it always does—you’ll never forgive yourself. Ever. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. [BEAT] Do they have a Bloomingdale’s in San Francisco? Is it very small?

  THE CHAIR THAT WOBBLED

  Did I ever tell you how your grandfather made his money? The only reason I didn’t die penniless is one day in 1950 a chair wobbled on a sidewalk.

  I swear on your life every word of this is true.

  When your grandfather and I got married, we moved into the apartment upstairs in my parents’ house in Greenpoint. “Apartment” is a generous word for what it was: An attic. A space under the eaves. There were two rooms separated by a wall that didn’t reach the ceiling—one with a stove, one with a bed. The only running water in the building was on the ground floor, and so if God forbid I had to take a shower, I’d have to walk up two flights of stairs in a towel past all my relatives.

  Up in the attic your grandfather would chase mice around with a broomstick, and when it rained we’d leave a tin pot on the floor and all night we’d hear plunk plunk plunk.

  We’d both graduated from college and your grandfather was taking jobs as an accountant and making a
lmost no money, and there was very little I could do to change our situation drastically.

  In those days, I had three options: I could be a secretary or a teacher or a nurse—you put on a skirt and looked after other people’s problems while yours stayed the same. No thank you. I refused to be at the beck and call of a man I didn’t know, so I couldn’t be a secretary. I didn’t want to be a teacher because I couldn’t bear the thought of wiping snot off noses all day. And I saw what nurses had to contend with once and that was enough. So I was out of options.

  But your grandfather had something: He wasn’t stupid. And he was a born salesman. Some people—sometimes even you, Bessie—would call him a shyster. I call him resourceful.

  He’d been doing it since he was in britches. When he was growing up in Brooklyn, his father owned a penny candy store on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was a ritzy area, right near the Museum of Natural History, and when he was a little boy he’d leave school an hour early and ride the bus all the way uptown and plant himself outside his father’s store with a big, swirly lollipop. And when the rich kids from Collegiate School and Trinity and Dwight and all the rest would walk past with their uniforms, knapsacks, and au pairs, he’d start the performance of a lifetime, taking big licks of the thing while crying out, “My oh my, this is de-licious!” and “Gee, I’m glad I spent a nickel here!”

  The store did fine until his father dropped dead of a heart attack at forty-five.

  But now it was 1950 and your grandfather was making forty dollars a week as an accountant for a builder, which was barely enough to survive. And I was pregnant. And I was tired of chasing mice with broomsticks and wearing his dungarees to the store in the winter because all my stockings had ripped. I’d had enough. And there was one thing I could do about it: nudge. Remember, you can always nudge.

  One night when we were huddled around our kitchen table in the attic and the wind was hammering the walls and rattling the windows, one of the glass panes shattered in its frame—it just exploded. I didn’t know if we were being shot at or bombed or what. There was glass on the floor, and now the wind was whipping into the room, and I stood up and I threw my hands in the air and I said, “Hank! You know how to make money for other people. It’s time you make it for us. You need to go into business on your own.” And he said, “I’d need to get an office and find a bookkeeper.” And I said, “You’re standing in your office and you’re looking at your bookkeeper.” And that was that.

  He spent about a month reading through tax codes and real estate listings for tracts of land until he had an idea. He found something very interesting in the GI Bill: develop land and build houses exclusively for veterans, and you’d get an enormous tax abatement if you structured the bank loan correctly. Bessie, when I first explained this to you, you called it a loophole. Your grandfather called it an exciting opportunity. He was too young to fight in the war—he was all set to use his engineering degree to build fighter planes, but by the time he graduated from college, it had been over for years. So this was his way of helping. The returning soldiers needed good-quality, affordable housing, and he needed to get his pregnant wife out of the attic.

  So he called up his friend Buzzy, who was a construction supervisor in the firm, and he said, “You know the job from the outside, I know the job from the inside—what do you say we sell houses on our own?” Buzzy agreed on the spot. And they pooled everything they had and they took out an ad in The New York Times: “Two Honest Young Jewish Builders Looking for Capital.” Ha. They weren’t builders at all. They were a kid with a hard hat and a kid with an adding machine. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. Call it sleight of hand.

  In any event, in two weeks they’d raised enough start-up investment, and your grandfather went to the bank and got a loan and he was off to become the honest young builder he advertised.

  He found some cheap, low-lying land out on the Long Island Expressway. It wasn’t exactly a swamp—he’ll swear up and down it wasn’t a swamp—but it was soggy here and there. It was wet. It can be argued that there was a stream running under it. But it was cheap, and there was a lot of it. It passed inspection by the Veterans Administration and your grandfather and Buzzy broke ground.

  In those days, suburban developments were cropping up all over Westchester and Long Island, and your grandfather needed to find a way to make his stand out. By the time construction was finished it was the middle of June. And it was hotter than hell. There were headlines in the paper every other day about the record-breaking heat. “Ten Dead in Boynton Beach,” like that.

  And that gave your grandfather an idea. On July 4, he went into debt buying a second ad in The New York Times. There was a schematic of one of the houses and the location on a map and in huge lettering: WE! HAVE! AIR-CONDITIONING!

  Only one of the units—the all-furnished staged unit—actually had an air conditioner. He had Buzzy install it by hand; there wasn’t a company that was doing that at the time. When people got to the development, they were told they could buy an air-conditioned unit for a $700 surcharge or the base model with a free fan. Your grandfather sold out in forty-eight hours. The only unit that didn’t sell was the one with the air-conditioning. Not one person wanted it in the end. But it got them in their cars.

  What? Oh, please. Like you wouldn’t have done the same.

  When your grandfather came home from the final closing, he walked into my parents’ living room with a leather briefcase.

  “Bobby, get down here! Rose! Sam! Zayde! Everyone!”

  His eyes were wild, crackling with electricity, and his cheeks were flushed.

  We all gathered around him, and he put the briefcase on the cedar trunk we used as a coffee table and he started to giggle like a little kid.

  “Have any of you ever heard of snow in July?”

  He opened the briefcase and took out two big stacks of cash and threw them up in the air. And he walked through the falling paper bills and scooped me up in his arms and gave me a kiss on the mouth so hard my zayde waved his jug and cheered. That really happened. It sounds like a story, but it’s absolutely true. He threw the money in the air and my zayde danced.

  As the bills were falling all around us, my mother looked right at me and then rolled her eyes melodramatically. Rose Otis. The Buster Keaton of Belarus.

  The summer went by and the houses were all sold and your grandfather was already looking to develop his next plot of land, when one morning at the end of August the whole house was awoken at dawn by a phone call.

  It was a woman in one of the houses. She was in hysterics. Your grandfather had handed all the homeowners a business card with my parents’ phone number on it, and he told them if there was ever any trouble with anything, he would personally come and fix it. Nobody called—they were all too proud, or maybe they knew enough not to trust your grandfather with a wrench.

  But this woman was furious. She was screaming. She said she woke up to let her little dog out and there were geysers in the middle of her lawn. Two fountains shooting up from the grass. “My house is sinking!” She screamed so loud I could hear it coming out of the receiver from across the room. “You sold me a sinking house! I’m calling the newspaper!”

  “Calm down, calm down, it’ll be all right. It’s just been a rainy month.” Your grandfather was snapping his fingers for his pants and shoes. I ran them to him, and he got dressed still on the phone with the woman. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  And your grandfather got into his station wagon, and I handed the baby to my zayde and ran out of the house and got in the car next to him.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Do you really want to handle a screaming woman on your own?”

  “This doesn’t concern you, Bob.”

  “Like hell it doesn’t.”

  He said nothing, and we drove in the ea
rly gray light all the way to Long Island. He was gripping the steering wheel so hard I thought it would break off.

  By the time we arrived at the house, there was a photographer and a reporter outside.

  “Harold Bell? Are you Harold Bell?”

  “That’s me!”

  “Will you refund Mr. and Mrs. Lipowitz for their sinking house?”

  I grabbed your grandfather’s arm and said, “There aren’t any sinking houses and there won’t be any refunds.”

  Your grandfather went in the house and the Lipowitzes were standing there around a chair in the living room, fuming. Your grandfather—I could kill him—opened with a joke:

  “For a sinking house, you people look awfully dry.”

  Mrs. Lipowitz wasn’t having any of it. She looked like she was about to knock him flat on his back. I chimed right in.

  “I’m Hank’s wife, Bobby Bell.”

  She softened a little. “Suzanne.”

  “I had a sorority sister called Suzanne. Wonderful girl. A brunette just like you.”

  “You look familiar. Did you go to Bryn Mawr?”

  “No, Hunter. I just have one of those Jewish faces.”

  “Don’t we all!”

  There was a moment of silence, and then we were just two gals laughing.

  But her husband was still irate. He pointed at the chair in the middle of the floor. “This chair wobbles.”

  Your grandfather crossed his arms. “Excuse me?”

  “Go ahead. Sit in the chair. The whole house is uneven.”

  I didn’t say a word, but I gave your grandfather a look that said, “If you sit in that chair your whole life will be over.”