The next week, Mike and Mustang showed up on the Corner arm in arm, kissing and hugging.
“That’s why I don’t have no arguments with no woman,” Chicken Man said. “It don’t do nothing but fool you around.” But not long after, he did get into an argument with a woman. They argued in the morning and he went off and forgot about it, and later that day she came into the liquor store and stabbed him as he was waiting in line to buy a beer. He coughed a few times, then lay down on the floor and died.
15.
Graduation
After my abortion I wrote to Tateh and said I didn’t want to come back to Suffolk. I enrolled in Girls Commercial High School on Bergen Street in 1936. It was just down the street from Bubeh’s, but the schoolwork was hard and I struggled my entire junior year, sleeping on Bubeh’s couch and wrestling with algebra every night. Girls High was way ahead of Suffolk High and I never would’ve graduated on time, so after the school year ended I returned to Virginia to finish high school. When I came back to Suffolk, the first thing I said to Peter was, “We can’t see each other anymore. Don’t come by.”
He said, “I’ve been waiting for you. I still love you,” and I was swayed, because I still felt a deep love for him.
Not long after that, I was in the store behind the counter and two young black women came in. I overheard them talking about Peter, and one of them says, “Oh yeah, he’s getting married soon …” I almost fell over. Tateh was standing right next to me, so I grabbed a rag and started wiping the counter, edging close to them, eavesdropping. I was practically falling over the counter trying to hear them. “Oh yeah,” says the other. “He got such and such pregnant…” She named a black girl who lived behind us in the neighborhood.
I went right out and found him. The heck with who knew about us then. I was so mad I marched right down the road to his house in daylight and got him out. “Tell me the truth,” I said. He confessed it. “They’re making me marry her,” he said. “My folks are making me.”
“Did you get her pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
Oh, that messed me up. I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore and walked back through the black neighborhood, into the store, and went upstairs and cried my heart out, because I still loved him. I went through this entire ordeal and here he was getting busy with somebody else. The fact that he was black and the girl he was marrying was black—well, that hurt me even more. If the world were fair, I suppose I would have married him, but there was no way that could happen in Virginia. Not in 1937.
I made up my mind then that I was going to leave Suffolk for good. I was seventeen, in my last year of high school, and for the first time in my life I was starting to have opinions of my own. There was no life for me there. I was planning to leave for New York. But see, I had Mameh. I was her eyes and ears in America. She couldn’t speak English and I translated for her and looked out for her, because Tateh didn’t care for her at all. Her stomach was starting to bother her and she was starting to have these fainting spells, you know, she’d just black out in the middle of the day. Tateh couldn’t have cared less. He hired a black woman to look after Mameh and that woman cared for Mameh more than he did. She’d stay late and look after Mameh even if he didn’t pay her, and he paid her so little as it was. He thought money he spent to take care of his wife would do it, you know, substitute for the fact that he didn’t love her. But a wife wants love. She was a good Jewish wife to him, but their marriage was starting to crumble because he didn’t care about her. That’s why I knew I was leaving home. I wasn’t going to have an arranged marriage like my parents did. I’d rather die first, which I did do in a way, because I lost my mother and sister when I left home.
Well, the kids in my high school were excited and giggling about the prom and graduation and making plans, but I’d been to New York and seen the big time and didn’t plan on going to either. No one asked me to the prom anyway, but Frances kept saying, “Please go to graduation, Ruth. We’ll walk together on graduation day.” I never told Frances about any of that business I was going through. None of that stuff about Peter and my abortion in New York. She knew my home life wasn’t perfect, but Frances wasn’t the type to question you. She was just a giving, kind person. So I decided to go to the graduation ceremony for her, because Frances was my best friend and I would do anything for her.
Suffolk High had this graduation ceremony where the seniors lined up in their caps and gowns outside the high school and marched onto Main Street double file to the Protestant church for a ceremony. They called it a pre-graduation ceremony or baccalaureate or some such thing. I had to ask Tateh for money for the cap and gown, and the minute he heard about me marching into a Protestant church, he said, “No. Forget it. You’re not marching into any gentile church.” He was dead set against it. You know my parents were so old-fashioned European in their ways it wasn’t funny. Like if you took a social worker into my house and he talked to my parents, it would be like talking to that wall over there. They were stuck in their ways. There was no way they could change. He was still my father, and I was still a teenager living in his house, and he could still pull off his belt and beat the mess out of me when he wanted, so what could I do? He wasn’t worried about my graduation. What bothered him more was that I had no marriage prospects, and he began to take me on his business jaunts to Portsmouth and Norfolk, around to the stores and wholesale supply houses, and he’d introduce me to the merchants and their sons if they had any. It was like he was saying, “Here’s my daughter on display! What do you think?” Sometimes he’d send me on jaunts by myself, driving the car and pulling the trailer, me and Dee-Dee. We’d load up the trailer full of goods from the warehouses and drive though the Dismal Swamp around Portsmouth and Norfolk. Folks would tell us, “Watch out for the red-light district in Norfolk,” and we’d go around Norfolk avoiding red traffic lights.
Well, I was upset with Tateh about graduation and we weren’t speaking for a while, but he’d reached a point where he really needed me to help him run the store, because Sam was gone and Mameh wasn’t feeling well. Her stomach was starting to really bother her, to the point where she’d be doubled over in pain. We’d take her to the town doctor and he’d say this or that. He mentioned an operation of some sort, but he didn’t know. He was a nasty old man. I went to him once and he was as fresh as he could be, touching me in places that were not necessary and saying obscene things, so I never went back to him. Of course I couldn’t tell anybody about it. But he looked at Mameh and said he didn’t know what was wrong with her.
Well, Tateh and I argued about the cap and gown for a long time, and at one point I got so mad I revealed my plans to go to New York after graduation. “I’m going back to New York,” I told him. “I’m leaving.” He stalked out the room, cursing and swearing. A few minutes later, Mameh followed him out and spoke to him—they were rarely speaking by then—and the next day he came over and gave me the money for my cap and gown. “You can participate in the march,” he said, “but don’t go into that church. It’s forbidden.”
“I’m going to the ceremony,” I said.
“Respect your mother and me,” he said. “Don’t break the law of the Bible. Don’t go into that gentile church,” he said.
Well, my mind was made up.
On graduation day Dee-Dee and I opened up the store, set out the meats, stacked the fresh vegetables, and I worked behind the counter until it was time to go. Of course my parents wouldn’t go to that gentile graduation, so I put on my cap and gown and walked the six blocks to Suffolk High School alone and waited for Frances in the parking lot. Frances was late getting there, which gave the other students and their parents something to stare at, to watch me standing there by myself. I was ready to turn around and run home by the time she showed up. I told her, “Frances, I’m not sure I can go into that church.” She said, “I understand, Ruth. I’ll graduate by myself, then, because I don’t want to graduate next to anyone but you.” Well, I felt like I couldn’t
let that happen, so I said, “I can do it, let’s go.” We took a picture in our caps and gowns and got in line, double file, and marched together. The line marched out of Suffolk High’s schoolyard and onto Main Street and slowed as it bottled up at the church doorway. As we approached the church I started to shake and sweat, and just before we reached the church doorway, I stepped out of line. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t go inside that church. In my heart I was still a Jew. I had done some wrong things in my life, but I was still my parents’ child.
I turned away, but not before Frances saw my tears. She got out of line herself but I waved her away. “Frances, you go on in,” I said. “Don’t miss the ceremony because of me.” She went in. She had to wipe the tears from her own face, but she got back in line and marched through the ceremony alone, and she sat through the graduation ceremony next to my empty seat.
I walked home sobbing in my cap and gown and caught a Greyhound bus for New York the very next day.
16.
Driving
One Saturday morning in 1973, a few weeks after I got back from Louisville, and just a few months after my stepfather passed away, Mommy woke me up and said, “We’re going driving.” She thrust my two-year-old niece Z—that was her name, just plain Z—into my arms and we headed out to Daddy’s car.
My stepfather had kept his ‘68 Pontiac Catalina, gold-colored with blue interior, immaculate. Before that he’d had a ‘65 Chevy Impala that he paid good money for. The car, white with red interior, was a bomb. He called it “a cheese-box. I’ll never buy another Chevy again,” he fumed as the car, loaded with kids, sat in traffic, its engine steaming and sputtering. It seemed to break down every five minutes. When it did start, a key wasn’t necessary. You simply turned the ignition switch with your hand and it fired, and one evening a guy did just that as Daddy was standing by the kitchen window washing dishes. He watched in silence as the guy drove off in a cloud of blue smoke. “This must be my lucky day,” he said.
Mommy had never driven before as far as I knew. She was afraid to drive. She was a certified dyed-in-the-wool New York City transit passenger who could tell you what subway train went anywhere, which stop to get off at, and how far it was to the next one if you missed your stop and had to walk back. Depending on public transporation meant she was late for everything—for work, for open school nights, for picking us up whenever she had to. Every summer when I returned home from Fresh Air Fund camp, the yellow school buses would drop us off in Manhattan and I’d mournfully watch three hundred hugging, kissing, slobbering happy reunions between campers and parents while the counselors flipped coins to see who would wait with me, at which time Mommy would finally turn the corner at Forty-second Street—I could spot her bowed legs a mile away—and run up breathlessly, hugging me as the counselors looked on with looks that said, “I had no idea!”
But those days were gone. We needed a car. It was time for Mommy to drive. “I hate this,” she said, as we climbed in. “You have to tell me what to do.” I was almost sixteen then and though I had no license I knew how to drive, having spent a good deal of time driving Daddy’s car when Ma wasn’t around, not to mention other cars I wasn’t supposed to be driving. How she knew I knew how to drive she mercifully chose not to discuss, but by then I had begun to turn around. Deep inside I knew that my old friend Chicken Man back in Louisville was right. I wasn’t any smarter, or any wiser, or any bolder than the cats on the Corner, and if I chose that life I would end up on the Corner no matter what my brains or potential. I knew I wasn’t raised to drink every day, to work at a gas station, and to get killed fooling around with people like Herman and his gas station knuckleheads. That life wasn’t as wild and as carefree as it looked from the outside anyway. It was ragged and cruel and I didn’t want to end up that way, stabbed to death after an argument over a bottle of wine, or shot dead by some horny dude who was trying to take my manhood. “You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself,” my sister Jack told me several times. “Put yourself in God’s hands and you can’t go wrong.” I knew Jack was right, and when I got back to New York in the fall of 1973 for my junior year in high school I resolved to jump back into my studies and rebuild myself. Like my own mother did in times of stress, I turned to God. I lay in bed at night praying to Him to make me strong, to rid me of anger, to make me a man, and He listened, and I began to change.
I didn’t change right away. For one thing, I was still strung out on herb. I’d watch newscasters Roger Grimsby and a young Geraldo Rivera do grim-faced reports on Channel 7 Eyewitness News about the dangers of being “hooked” on marijuana and I’d laugh. “You can’t get hooked on reefer,” I told my friends. “I can stop anytime I want.” But deep inside, I knew I was hooked, and I was secretly jealous of those from my drug circle who got themselves together and pulled out. Day after day I found myself in some dude’s house getting blasted on weed and alcohol while he stuffed towels under the door to keep the smell in. I was also suffering occasional flashbacks from taking LSD, which I had done a lot the previous year. The flashbacks came out of nowhere: a joint or cigarette would set them off, or nothing at all—I’d be walking down the street and suddenly find myself blasted, tripping, that acid clairvoyancy high where people seem to be made of glass and the back of your hand becomes a purple star. I’d wander around the neighborhood paranoid, avoiding everyone I knew until the high wore off. Thank God crack wasn’t available then, because I would’ve certainly become a crack addict. As it was, every single day—on the way to school, during school, and on the way home—I felt I had to get high. If I ran out of pot I drank wine, and when I couldn’t get that my buddy Marvin and I drank NyQuil, which got you high and sleepy and slightly sick. I’d come home every night blasted, smelling like a pot house, promising myself as I put my key in the door that I wouldn’t get high the next day, only to open it and find Mommy standing behind it, screaming at me, “What’s the matter with you! Your eyes are all red and you smell funny!” I wanted to give up weed, but I couldn’t. Weed was my friend, weed kept me running from the truth. And the truth was my mother was falling apart.
Looking back, I see it took about ten years for Mommy to recover from my stepfather’s death. It wasn’t just that her husband was suddenly gone, it was the accumulation of a lifetime of silent suffering, some of which my siblings and I never knew about. Her past had always been a secret to us, and remained so even after my stepfather died, but what she had left behind was so big, so complete that she could never entirely leave it: the dissipation of her own Jewish family, the guilt over abandoning her mother, the separation from her sister, the sudden, tragic death of her first husband, whom she adored. While she never seemed on the verge of losing her mind, there were moments when she teetered close to the edge, lost in space. Even in my own self-absorbed funk, I was worried about her, because as my siblings and I slowly got to our emotional feet, Mommy staggered about in an emotional stupor for nearly a year. But while she wee-bled and wobbled and leaned, she did not fall. She responded with speed and motion. She would not stop moving. She rode her bicycle. She walked. She took long bus rides to faraway department stores and supermarkets where she’d window-shop for hours and spend fifty cents. She could not grasp exactly what to do next, but she kept moving as if her life depended on it, which in some ways it did. She ran, as she had done most of her life, but this time she was running for her own sanity.
She operated on automatic mode, rising each morning and chasing us off to school as if things were as they always were, but she could make no decisions. Even the simplest choice, like whether to have a Touch-Tone telephone or a rotary one, required enormous, painstaking deliberation. If the furnace broke down it stayed broken, not just because she didn’t have the money to fix it, but because…well…just because. She had always been incredibly disorganized, but now her disorganization reached new heights. I went to gym class, opened a paper bag from home in which I had stored my gym gear, and found her underw
ear inside. She’d disappear from the house for hours and come back with no explanation as to where she’d been. About a year after my stepfather died, her best friend, a wonderful black woman named Irene Johnson, passed away and Mommy teetered at the edge again, standing over the kitchen sink washing the same pot for hours, sniffling back her tears, and snapping, “Get away from me!” when we approached her. “You only have one or two good friends in life,” she used to preach at us, and for her, Irene was one of those. She and Irene went back to Harlem in the forties when Ma first came to New York. Irene understood how far she had come. Irene had helped her raise her older children and had been like a sister to her. Yet she refused to go to Irene’s memorial service. “I’m done with funerals,” she announced, yet you could see the pain on her face as she picked up the phone to dial Irene’s sister to ask her about the final details of her best friend’s life. “Please stay in touch,” Ma said, and Irene’s sister did, for years. Ma was utterly confused about all but one thing: Jesus. The young Jewish girl who at one time could not allow herself to walk into a gentile church now couldn’t do without it; her Orthodox Jewish ways had long since translated themselves into full-blown Christianity. Jesus gave Mommy hope. Jesus was Mommy’s salvation. Jesus pressed her forward. Each and every Sunday, no matter how tired, depressed, or broke, she got up early, dressed in her best, and headed for church. When we kids grew too old and big for her to force us to go, she went alone, riding the F train from Queens to Brooklyn to New Brown Memorial, the church she started with my father. Church revived her, filled her up, and each Sunday she returned a little more renewed, until that Saturday afternoon she announced she was going to drive my stepfather’s car.
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