Beyond the Pale: A Novel (28 page)

“Not too bad for a beginner,” the gluer girl opposite me said, when they blew a whistle for us to stop for lunch. “My name’s Sadie.”

“Chava,” I said, glad she was talking to me. She had on a sailor shirt, which seemed to be popular for girls, though it was a size too small for her.

“You got something to eat?” I shook my head. “For a penny you can get an apple. For another two, a piece of bread and a cup of milk from the pushcart outside, but you got to be quick—.” She gestured. Girls and boys were running through the entrance. By the time I reached the pushcart, there were only a few pieces of bread left. I handed the man my folded dollar.

“A whole dollar!” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing at me. “I guess I can let you have a piece of bread for that.”

“A piece of bread is one penny.”

“I was testing to see how green you were. Here’s your bread—and your change.” He put a big pile of nickels in my hand. It felt so heavy and important I left it stretched in front of me, staring at it. “All right, all right,” he said, “here’s the rest.” He put some bigger coins on top and I stuck the whole mass into my pocket. Had he cheated me anyway? The bread was almost stale. As I started to eat, the whistle blew again and I ran back in.

By the end of the day my eyes burned from the glue and my feet hurt from standing, though Sadie showed me how to dance up and down, standing in one spot, while keeping up my pace. When the quitting whistle blew, it was 6:00
P.M.
What does a penny a hundred mean? I tried to count what I made but the line went too fast, the packers taking the boxes away every ten, fifteen minutes. I asked Sadie.

“If you’re really fast, don’t make mistakes, work every day—$3 a week,” she said.

Three dollars a week. What a wonderful thing! The burning in my eyes stopped after a little while in the city air. Here I was, off the boat five days, and already I had a job. I could help with the rent and probably even save some. Mama, maybe even Papa, would have been proud of me.

Whether or not they would have been, Uncle Isadore certainly seemed pleased. “So that’s where you were today. Your Aunt Bina thought you did something like that. Good for you. Fourteen years old and making $3 a week, what a great country!” For him, the day hadn’t gone as well. Many watchmakers had come before us. Every street had a watch repair shop and no one needed help. They told him that uptown in the diamond district there were big jewelers and factories. Tomorrow he and Aaron would take the electric streetcar and see. Ephraim had been out on the street all weekend and today he somehow talked his way into a job in a tailoring shop, finishing men’s pants, even though he had never sewed before.

“What’s to it? The needle goes in, the needle goes out.” He laughed, pulling on his suspenders. He was almost seventeen, but he still acted like a boy.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Rose said.

Bina backed her up. “She’s right, Ephraim. If you want to still have your job tomorrow, you let Rose show you the stitches. Go on, Rose, take him into the other room. I’ve got to get dinner ready for my workers.”

“You pay attention to your sister, Ephraim,” Isadore added. “Tailoring is a good business here. I talked to some people, they told me—you can really get ahead if you have a talent for it. It’s about time we found out what talent you got in that nebish head of yours.”

“The needle goes in, the needle goes out,” Ephraim repeated over his shoulder as Rose turned up the gas jet in our room.

“So—it’s the American,” the boss said. “Here’s your pay.” My first pay envelope contained $1.90. My first wages. I bounced up and down on the balls of my feet and asked Sadie how she did.

“Only $2.95—Samuels took out a nickel for the learners.” I offered her a nickel from my envelope but she refused. “You weren’t the only learner we had this week and you were faster than the others.” She looked me over, cocking her head to the side. “I live over on Broome by Ludlow. You?”

“Essex near Grand, not far. Want to walk home together? I could buy you a seltzer.”

“Only a greenhorn would think she was rich with $1.90. I’ll buy my own, at least until you start getting full pay.”

I was a paid worker now and I knew someone else in the neighborhood, on my own. I ran all the way from the soda shop on Canal to Essex to give Aunt Bina the rest of my pay. Aunt Bina looked at it, looked at me.

“You worked hard for this, darling. You keep it.”

“I want to pay my share. For the food and rent. Next week it will be more.” Sometimes she treated me almost as if I was her own daughter. This hurt me in an entirely different part of my body than Rose’s kindness. Rose, after all, wanted things back from me. What did Aunt Bina want? To fulfill her duty. Her affections drew me in but she was affectionate to everyone. Not sloppy affectionate like some women—she was almost as smart as Mama. If I wasn’t there, though, I didn’t think she would ever miss me. I appreciated her fairness but paid my share.

“All right. But a working girl needs money for herself. You’ve got your own expenses now. You keep fifty cents this week and I’ll take the rest. Then we’ll see.”

Rose was jealous of my job, more so after I told her about having a soda with Sadie. She wanted to work too.

“I want you in school,” Aunt Bina said.

“Chava and I can go to night school together. I don’t like the day school. I’ll learn faster if Chava comes with me at night than I could ever learn going by myself in the day. I’m a hundred times better than Ephraim—I could sew him into one of Chava’s paper boxes. Let me try, please, Mama?”

“Rosele, what kind of life is that, to work all day and go to school at night? What’s wrong with the day school?” When she wrinkled her forehead, her freckles made a smudge across her brow.

“It’s all American-born and girls who already know English. They make fun of me and I can’t even understand what the joke is, Mama.”

Aunt Bina’s head swayed from side to side and we could tell she was going to give in. Anyway, what was Rose asking? A chance to bring home money, improve our fortunes, have enough to buy a cloak for the High Holidays, maybe a new dress. If you worked, you were doing something, you had something to show for yourself. Night school was the place for immigrants. We would make money during the day and still have our pride at night.

On our second Tuesday in New York, Uncle Isadore and Aaron finally got jobs uptown, at a watch manufacturer. Isadore walked around discouraged, hardly speaking. We all knew he had been expecting something better, having his skill rewarded, his success in Odessa counting for something here. Now he was just a hired hand like everyone on the Lower East Side. Worse, his new co-workers called him Izzy, which he hated, and he and Aaron had to get up a half hour before the rest of us to catch the streetcar. They were giving Isadore $11 a week to start, and Aaron $7 because he was an apprentice. Rose’s sewing lessons helped Ephraim hold on to his job. He was making $7 too and didn’t have to pay for the streetcar, he liked to remind Aaron.

“I’m not doing this for long,” Aaron said through gritted teeth. Uncle Isadore rattled the newspaper and grunted. We tiptoed around him for days.

Rose found a job in white goods—that’s what they called it when you made ladies’ underwear. White goods. As if saying the word “underwear” would invite demons to grab your soul. They started her tucking and hemming. She’d never used a machine before, but she took right to it the minute they gave her a chance. She could sew a straight line barely looking. Right around the time I had my fifteenth birthday, her forelady decided to teach Rose the fancy work. After five months in America she was making $5.10 a week; everyone said that was very good for a girl. In the paperbox factory, I worked faster and faster, thinking about Rose sewing with the machine, but the most I could make was $3.25. When I worked that hard, by Shabbes I collapsed.

On my way home from the East Broadway factory I sometimes stopped in Seward Park. There were benches where you could rest your feet and listen to people gossiping. Usually I could find a copy of the
Jewish Daily Forward
someone had left behind—the newspaper’s office building was right across the street. I liked to make up stories about the people who went in and out of their offices. Maybe the man in the long overcoat was a famous revolutionary in exile going for an interview, or the woman in the straw hat could be begging the editors to consider her latest poem.

From every corner of the park a constant stream of agitators interrupted my daydreams with their speeches. Anarchists, socialists, labor leaders exhorted us weary workers to stand up to our bosses. Almost daily I read about a strike in the paper and almost as often passed one by on the street. Striking in America seemed even more popular than in Russia. Now people wanted a ten-hour day, better conditions. Why not? I knew it was foolish to keep working at the box factory—it was just work for greenhorns. Now that Rose and I were going to English classes Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, I knew I could get a better paying job, but I didn’t like to think about looking for something new. If I closed my eyes for a minute in the park, I could imagine I was back in Kishinev, listening to Daniel. Then I’d open my eyes and see it was beginning to get dark in New York City and if I didn’t hurry I’d be late for school.

Rose saved out of her lunch money to get Aunt Bina a new cloak for shul. This was hard for Rose, I knew, because there were pushcarts on every corner with interesting, if not always fresh, things to eat: hot pretzels, ears of corn and roasted chestnuts. When I wasn’t very hungry at lunch, I saved what I bought for myself and gave it to her, so she could have more money for clothes and treats.

The stores were crammed with new styles, shirtwaists with fancy embroidery and skirts trimmed with lace. Back home we used to make almost everything ourselves but here we made only money, and there was never enough to buy what we needed in order to get better jobs so we could make more money. America wasn’t just new hats: all our clothes had to be new. Going out in winter with a shawl made you look green, even if our wool shawls were warmer than New York coats. But I liked how we all looked in shirtwaists. I’d seen some women in cafés wearing ties with them, almost like men, and they looked very crisp.

“Come to services with us, darling,” Aunt Bina said every Shabbes, yet I couldn’t make myself get ready in time. Maybe because I didn’t like the idea of having to look at an American rabbi, his beard—. Nobody pushed me. I knew I should be honoring my parents’ memory but I decided I had to honor them my own way, with my own thoughts. I could remember all the words of the service. I understood that going to shul wasn’t just knowing the words, it was belonging among the Jews—that was how Mama used to put it.

But how could you stop belonging to the Jews if you were one? Not every Jew went to shul in New York—or could. In the new world, we each had to carry around a little shul inside ourselves. Anyway, I was mad at God. I didn’t understand how someone who made the Garden of Eden would also make pogroms. I remembered Papa folding his hands under his beard and nodding while his students would argue about free will: how we have to have the choice to sin in order to not choose it, to choose God. Now I thought if this was God’s reason, he must be very vain to think it was more important to be worshipped than to let people live in peace. Thinking about God gave me an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. If I’d gone to shul with Bina and Rose, maybe I’d have gotten sick. It was better that I stayed home.

Besides, it was nice to have these hours on Saturday mornings. Most Saturdays, Isadore and Aaron had to work. Ephraim wouldn’t go to shul if he wasn’t working, instead he went somewhere men gathered to talk. Rose put on her fanciest waist—she had two for the week and one for Saturdays and holidays—and she and Aunt Bina would leave for shul. I only had two shirtwaists, but that wasn’t why I didn’t like to go. I could have had another if I wanted to, with more lace than Rose’s, even.

Lying on top of the bed after breakfast with my clothes on was such a luxury. Even though my shirtwaist didn’t have lace, I could follow the starched pleats down my chest. I pretended my fingers were revolutionaries going out for a walk in the hills at the north end of Kishinev. Over the hill, under the grass, the fold of cloth, my fingers walked, coming to the marker where the forbidden pamphlets were hidden. With my eyes closed I could remember how the wind rippled through wildflowers on a sunny afternoon. Stroking the cloth was making me dreamy, and I opened a button. My fingers curled beneath the edge of my undershirt and the green behind my eyes became dark, dark as the worn wood in the pews of shul. I touched my nipples. They wrinkled up into square knobs. “These are the handles to the ark of the covenant,” I heard myself murmuring. Then I worried if Mama would have thought I was being sacrilegious. Was it sacrilegious to touch yourself on Shabbes?

Sometimes after Rose fell asleep I would lie on my side, cupping my breast, trying to measure it with my palm. It was still growing, round and smooth, not as big as Rose’s, hardly, but my breast felt good. If you had bigger breasts, did they give you more pleasure? Maybe I could have asked Rose—or maybe not. I didn’t like how men stared at women’s chests. Mine were too small still to get much notice, thank God. Did having breasts make a woman so different from a man? If I didn’t have them, would it have made it easier to get a better job?

Rose told me I could make more money if I sewed. But I didn’t want to sew. She kept trying to show me anyway, just like Esther used to.

“No, I will not sew,” I told her fifty times.

“Everyone sews. Look at Ephraim—he’s already making $10 a week, tailoring. You think sewing is beneath you?”

“It’s not that.”

“What, then? It’s so good being a gluer, you get drunk from the smell all day long and it addles your brains, what?” Rose was getting good at arching one eyebrow, just like her mama. I practiced with my reflection in window panes when no one was looking, but I couldn’t get the hang of it.