Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions (5 page)

That tear-stained face under his. Her
stillness.

“I felt guilty for leading you on,” she says
in the boyfriend dead of cancer voice. “And afterwards I felt
crummy. You weren’t worth the risk.”

You knew I was fragile, he wants to say, but
words stick in his throat. There are no safe houses left in this
hard new city; no earth angels. The fundamentals no longer
apply.

“I want you out of here,” she says, a simple
order.

“Woke up this morning

and went back to sleep…”

Epstein-Barre Blues byMemphis Earlene Gray

.

You have an inalienable right to sing the blues if
you were born under a bad sign. Capricorn is a bad sign to be born
under. Jesus was one. So was Nixon.

The right to sing the blues may be earned if you:

a. suffer

b. lose

c. pay some dues

It’s not the blues when your loss is tax
deductible.

Some examples of dues:

a. working for the man

b. hating your day job

c. losing your man.

Some forms of suffering that will never be blues
worthy:

a. anorexia nervosa

b. low LSATs

It’s the blues if you:

a. wish you never been born

b. feel like a motherless child

If your mother is dead and you miss her it’s
Country.

.

Good times to have the blues are:

a. Christmas

b. Mother’s Day

c. every night when the sun goes down

You can’t sing the blues in Chinese.

.

Mouth full of toothache

Head full of network news

Gonna go downtown

Buy some alligator shoes

Silverpoint Blues,
Attributed to Blind Drunk Johnson

.

Blues women never sing Send in the Clowns.

Blues women pack heat and eat meat.

Just because you shot that two timing man doesn’t
automatically make you a blues woman, but it’s a good start.

So is buying him an Armani suit, or paying his child-
support.

.

Blues sports are:

a. drinking

b. gambling

c. running around

Blues men are not team players.

You can’t sing the blues in Gore-Tex

The following drugs don’t belong in the blues:

a. Ecstasy

b. Speed

c. Multi-vitamins

Blues women don’t wear Chanel. Other fashion
no-nos:

a. running shoes

b. lace

c. botox

.

Blues men don’t get born again.

There is no word in French for hellhound.

You can’t sing the blues in French, not even if
you’re blind.

“A virtuous woman; her price is beyond
rubies,” says the Rabbi, but I can’t get my mind off that pale
yellow stain on her living room rug, which is a lousy way to
remember Aunt Shirley, who raised three sons and kept a kosher
household full of polished mahogany furniture. A bright woman
married to a dull man. Priced beyond rubies. Uncle Joe was lucky to
marry Shirl, my mother always said, which meant too bad she
couldn’t have married someone bright and tall, like she was,
instead of just tall.

Uncle Joe was not much of a catch, but Aunt
Shirley turned him into a good provider. She wore mink in the
winter and none of her jewelry was fake. Maybe she shouldn’t have
corrected his grammar in public, but without her nudging, he would
have been somebody’s loyal employee and a buyer of second hand
Buicks, not a prosperous businessman with a new Cadillac every
other year.

She was my mother’s big sister; the one who
came first and set standards none of us could live up to. Everyone
in Aunt Shirley’s family could read Hebrew. Passover Seders at Aunt
Shirley’s, you read the entire Haggadah, from beginning to end,
first the Hebrew and then the English translation, so it took all
night. She was strict with her boys, her three dark-eyed, musical
sons, but you could sense sweetness in her; the heavy sweetness of
fruit stewed in Sabbath wine. She wore steel blue sheath dresses
with matching jackets that looked like armour to Synagogue and the
Symphony, but she had a weakness for small, silly velvet hats
trimmed in feathers or rhinestones like the headpieces of circus
elephants and chorus girls. She was a large woman with a broad
forehead and a commanding nose. In her presence, my mother became
baby sister, the little sparrow, not quite up to the mark but
always forgiven.

.

Marriage had exiled my mother from the
familial warmth of Philadelphia to New York, the price of marrying
for love, and condemned her to permanent homesickness. In New York,
according to my mother, even the nicest people (she meant other
Jews in general and her in-laws in particular) were hard and lacked
proper family feeling. Her in-laws were too visibly ambitious, too
conscious of price tags. They exchanged Christmas gifts as though
they were Protestants.

A“real” Jewish family, by which she meant the
one she grew up in and Aunt Shirley preserved, celebrated Hanukah
and all major Jewish holidays together. It was a cosy place, a
haven. You didn’t need best friends because you had plenty of
cousins to play with, and no place was better than home. We always
went to Aunt Shirley’s for the holidays.

.

The three yellow squares in the southeast
corner of the Monopoly Board, Atlantic Avenue, Ventnor Avenue, and
Marvin Gardens, are in Margate, New Jersey. Aunt Shirley had a
house in Marvin Gardens,

a real one, a white Dutch colonial with a sun
porch. It was bigger than ours back in New York, but the back yard
was smaller and it didn’t have a basement. No one had much back
yard in Marvin Gardens nor real basements either. Margate was a
sedate beach town full of carnival attractions. The Boardwalk began
at the Margate/Ventnor border.

Ten blocks away from Aunt Shirley’s house was
the Margate Elephant, four stories tall and hollow inside, made of
some substance that looked like industrial strength paper mache.
It, or rather she, was almost as famous as Monopoly. The radio
comedian Jean Shepherd called her The Sphinx of Margate (“How she
got here? Nobody knows. Why she came here? Nobody says. What she
does here? Nobody cares.’’) There had once been a sister elephant
in Florida, that was levelled by a hurricane and another at Coney
Island that was destroyed by fire.

We never went to Coney Island, even though it
was close to home. It was not a suitable place for families,
according to my mother, as though the Atlantic Ocean itself became
more refined once you reached the Philadelphia part of the Jersey
Shore.

.

There was always a bowl of fruit on Aunt
Shirley’s dining room table. In her kitchen, the women spoke
Yiddish, language of secrets and nuanced disparagement. Such heavy
brown food, garnished with cooked carrots and schmaltz, which is
Yiddish for chicken fat but connotes sentimental excess.

Didn’t she ever get sick of doing all that
cooking?

Uncle Joe and the three boys listened to the
ball game on the sun porch, (Phillies fans, all of them, didn’t
they get tired of rooting for a team that always lost?), and played
pinochle, a mysterious card game with its own special deck;
forty-eight cards and nothing lower than a nine. Cousin Danny said
girls weren’t allowed to play pinochle.

Girl card games were go fish, concentration,
and spit, which I played with my sisters. When Danny played cards
with me, we played gin rummy or war. Sometimes we played war using
the pinochle deck, which made for a faster game, more fights for
bigger stakes. More fun but not kosher.

Keeping kosher meant you weren’t allowed to
mix things that God told Jewish people to keep separate, and it got
complicated. You needed one set of china for dairy dishes and
another set for meat. A milk plate used for meat had to be buried
in the back yard for twenty-four hours before it could be used
again. Following all the rules was like saying “step on a crack
break your mother’s back”, but crossing your fingers. As if God
would get you for eating a cheeseburger. Kosher was a lot of extra
work for mother. Back home, in New York, my sisters and I grew up
drinking milk with our baloney sandwhiches.

.

Aunt Shirley’s studious eldest, Jeffrey,
flunked out of Penn State his freshman year, his first time away
from home, but later redeemed himself when he started over at
Temple. He lived at home until he passed his CPA exam and married a
rabbi’s daughter from Pittsburgh. Stewie, the good looking one, got
married a Catholic girl. He’d always had lots of girfriends. He
flirted with fat great aunts, and little gril cousins and
waitresses in family restaurants and flashy Boardwalk babes, but
his girlfriends were always artistic. Stewie’s wife Joanne, was a
dancer.

Aunt Shirley took it surprisingly well, which
is sad when you think about how everything ended.

Cousin Stewie with his degree in psychology
talking about Empty Nest Syndrome, and the rest of them; were they
as stupid and vindictive as my mother thinks, or was it just that
they’d stopped listening to her long ago?

There’s a bad dream I get sometimes, the one
that begins with a splitting headache and the sensation of burning
urine trickling down the insides of my legs.

Everyone says I’m the one who looks most like
her.

.

Last summer Aunt Shirley let her hair down,
and confessed that she really liked the Catholic dancer better than
the Rabbi’s daughter.

“She’s got some life in her. The other one is
such a stick,” she said to my mother; the daughters-in-law barely
out of earshot.

Aunt Shirley spoke English, which meant I was
included, that I’d been promoted from the children’s table, if only
for a day. I had just turned 15, and she gave me perfume, My Sin
Eau de Toilette, instead of the usual Israel bond. That day on the
beach we were three grown women; gossiping, mildly indiscreet,
basking in the sun with Noxema on our noses. Aunt Shirley wore her
old straw farmer’s hat but she had new sunglasses with rhinestones.
Usually she was hard to amuse, but that day she laughed her head
off till the tears came.

.

“Weren’t we something!” she kept saying to my
mother, and they laughed like clowns in back of the midway after
the crowd has gone home.

The first signs of trouble, but who knew
then?

We thought she was finally happy.

.

Thanksgiving dinner that year the air was
full of Aunt Shirley’s rage. Her dining room furniture looked
dusted in a haphazard way, like she’d run out of steam and Lemon
Pledge. Thumb prints smudged the wine glasses. She only came out of
the kitchen to serve food, which was cold and under cooked. She
wouldn’t sit with us. She wouldn’t let the Rabbi’s daughter or
Joanne help her, only my mother. Uncle Joe and the boys tried to
act like there was nothing wrong, tried to smooth over everything
with Scotch, but without Aunt Shirley there was no conversation at
the dinner table beyond please pass the salt. No laughter, no
jokes.

The women talked Yiddish in the kitchen.

The stain on the living room wall to wall
carpet reminded me of the ones we had, from when our collie got
old.

“She’s stopped talking to us. I don’t know
why,” Uncle Joe said. “You know how stubborn she can be. She won’t
even eat.”

“She’s sick,” my mother said.

“I know she’s a sick woman, but what am I
supposed to do, force feed her? We’re doing everything we can.
Stewie got her into a support group for empty nesters, but she
won’t go.”

My mother screamed at him. “What’s the matter
with you? She needs to see a real doctor, not group therapy.”

My mother turned out to be right, but by the
time they discovered the tumor, it was too late to operate.

.

The human brain is another version of the
Monopoly Board. The multiplication tables are filed next to Spanish
verbs. The habits of love live next door to the memory of toilet
training. A tumor the size of a golf ball was discovered at the
location of conscience and emotion in Aunt Shirley’s brain. In
effect, she had undergone a pre-frontal lobotomy, an operation that
used to be recommended in the Forties for mental patients who
worried too much.

It made them happy, but irresponsible, made
them incontinent; turned them into tractable zombies.

We’d thought she’d finally figured out she
could relax a little and all the time it was creeping
pathology.

The second opinion doctor, a relative
youngster as neurosurgeons go, told us Aunt Shirley had three to
six months left, but that she would feel no pain.

“It will be harder on you guys, not her. In a
way she’s already gone.”

.

At the funeral Uncle Joe and the boys sit on
one side with the two daughters in law, and Uncle Joe’s sister and
brother-in-law. With Aunt Shirley gone they are no longer part of
our family. Everyone else sits with us; all the rest of the
relatives, as well as the ladies from Hadassah, the music
appreciation class Aunt Shirley taught at the Jewish Senior Center,
the dentist she used to work for before she got married, and some
of her friends from Overbrook High. It seems to be the general
consensus that Uncle Joe and the boys let her die, that it was all
their fault she didn’t get medical attention until it was too
late.

“They killed my sister,” is what my mother
says.

Even the Rabbi seems to think so. When he
talks about Aunt Shirley’s devotion to her family and how devoted
they were to her; he doesn’t mention Uncle Joe or the boys, but
makes a big deal about how her nieces came all the way from New
York to visit her when she was sick. I look for some way to convey
to Danny how embarrassed I am by this undeserved praise. I should
stand up for him, my favorite of the cousins, who turned me on to
Jean Shepherd and Mad Magazine, and made it fun to sit at the
children’s table.