Jew Store (13 page)

In Dalrymple's windows he found on display only a pair of shoes with a beaded vamp and spike heels. A tchotchke, a lady's pretty. Well,
his
windows would be jammed full of shoes to show the entire range—tough ones for the fields, fancies for church. If, as was printed on the scalloped awning in front, Dalrymple's had
EVERYTHING FOR THE DISCRIMINATING,
my father joked that his would say,
EVERYTHING FOR EVERYBODY, EVEN IF YOU'RE NOBODY.

It was finally time to let the family in on it. In front of the furniture store, he pointed, and a meaningful point it must have been. “Okay,” he said to the family, “everybody take a look at our store.”

He even had the name and how it would be displayed: gold lettering, and, very important, on both windows. And the name?

BRONSON'S LOW-PRICED STORE

W
ith a store safely his—“
my
store” or “
our
store,” my father called it from the moment the lease was in his hands—he made up his mind to go to market right away. With Mr. Cohen's letter of credit in his pocket and Miriam at his side, who had begged to go, he set off for St. Louis.

My mother thought Miriam at five was too young to go but decided not to argue. It seemed to her that every time she opened her mouth lately, she spit out stones. “Be a warm stone in your husband's pocket,” her mother had said, and by no stretch of the imagination had she meant these hard, hurtful little things. No, she had meant a nice smooth stone heated up by two warm hands, something to comfort a man who might need comforting but was maybe not showing it.

As my mother and my brother waved the travelers goodbye, my mother felt a kinship with the shtetl women who stood at their doors watching the men set off for the city to find work. Still, in the old country when the men were gone, the women had one another. And who did she have? A lady who talked an incomprehensible language and a Negro she didn't quite trust.

They had walked to the depot, and now there was the walk back. It suddenly seemed to my mother that Miss Brookie's house was a very long way off.

On the front porch she sank onto the swing. How could she be always so tired, so
lazy
, when she had almost nothing to do? A few meals, two beds to make, a flick here and there with the dust rag, and she was finished. That wasn't housework, that was
noodling
. She didn't even have washing and ironing: A Negro woman came around every Friday, picked up the week's laundry, and brought it back on Tuesday, the clothes so starched they could not only stand up but maybe even walk around, and everything ironed. Miss Brookie had recommended it. “The best thirty cents you'll ever spend,” she had said. My mother was too embarrassed to say she would rather do the laundry herself and put the thirty cents toward the family's debts.

She felt herself slipping into the role of “poor soul.” All her life she had heard about “poor souls,” those upon whom life had inflicted crushing sorrows. How often had she heard “Molka, poor soul, since her Peretz passed away (
olov hasholem
—may he rest in peace), she don't have nobody”? Or “Fageh, poor soul, she don't have two pennies to rub together”? Wasn't there some sort of measure by which she would qualify as a poor soul?

At this moment she had to get Joey something to eat, but she could not summon the will to do it. Her body was heavy, suffused with a kind of lethargy. And her eyes kept wanting to close.

Miss Brookie appeared behind the screen door. Then she had pushed the door with her hip and was bearing down on my mother with two glasses of iced tea. “All sugared and lemoned,” Miss Brookie announced as she handed one over. She sat down on one of the wooden rocking chairs, held her own glass up to the light, and said to the air, “In the South this is truly the elixir of life. . . . Though up in the hills they set store by more intriguing refreshment.” She laughed.

Always with the talking and the laughing, my mother thought.
She glanced down at the glass in her hand.
Oy
. No mistake. Ice again. Whoever heard. In a glass of tea. She put the glass down on the little table beside her.

“Did the travelers get off all right?” Miss Brookie sipped and smiled at my mother.

My mother didn't sip or smile; she blinked.

Miss Brookie seemed undeterred and began, as my mother always said, talking a blue streak. My mother could not “do” Miss Brookie talking a blue streak and would turn it over to Miriam, who could. As Miriam told it, what Miss Brookie was saying to my mother out there on the porch was “You know, Reba—and by the way, it occurs to me that I'm old enough to be your mama and therefore ought to have the privilege of callin' you by your first name . . . unless, of course, you plan to have a fit on the floor over it—in the old days I used to go to St. Louis right much. . . . Oh, Lord, here I go plungin' headfirst into nostalgia. . . . Well, the fact is Mama and Daddy and I used to go to the opera there. And mercy, that heavenly music and those beautiful ladies in those glorious gowns. And the men in their boiled shirts. Just dead attractive.”

On the porch my mother blinked some more. It was her turn to say something, she knew that; but what could she contribute about “heavenly music” and “dead attractive” men in “
balled
shirts”? Maybe she could start a new something, maybe about how nice that Miriam was learning to play the piano. She opened her mouth. No words came. Her mouth was as dry as an ancient riverbed.

She pawed at her throat, pinching the flesh between her thumb and forefinger. Miss Brookie was staring at her, waiting. My mother knew that if she didn't speak when she was supposed to, Miss Brookie would rush to rescue the silence, in the way that she did, with that profusion of words, “like the ceiling was falling down on my head,” as my mother described it.

My mother didn't want the silence to be rescued. And she
didn't want Miss Brookie thinking she needed to be cooed over, as if she was one of her “precious lambs.” No, she didn't want that at all.

So she got up and went into the house and into bed and didn't get out of it for three days. When Miss Brookie came in to see her, my mother couldn't say what was wrong, nor was she surprised that she couldn't. It was the old saying of her mother's come to life: The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue it has.

Miss Brookie and Lizzie Maud saw to Joey, and Lizzie Maud brought soft-boiled eggs, which my mother didn't eat, having no appetite whatsoever. The two of them acted as if my mother had the flu, but my mother knew that it wasn't anything like that. What it was was what my father had predicted: She had made herself sick, so sick that she couldn't get out of bed.

Lying there, she tried hard to think of nothing. She had a little trick to help her do this: She pretended to have green shades over her eyeballs, and when an unwelcome thought hove into view, bang! down went the shades, blocking it out.

There were a few images she permitted. These had to do with her Bronx family and were for tears. She had discovered that after she cried, she could sleep.

With the High Holidays—Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement, the day of fasting)—approaching, on the third day she lay in bed fashioning reveries about the holiday dinner that would be taking place in her parents' apartment. She saw her family at the massive dining-room table, the place for all social occasions, for there was always a sure serving of tea and honeycake, or, at the very least, a piece of fruit.

But on this day, in my mother's fantasy the table was in use for the post–Yom Kippur feast, after the long hours in shul, but she soon realized she had blundered: She had allowed herself to think of her family being together without her. The thought made her not sad and sentimental but anxious. It had reminded
her of how her life had changed. If she waited for tears, she waited in vain. She could expect no wet cheeks, no drifting off to sleep; she had remembered that there would be no mother and father, no Sadie, no Meyer, no Hannah, no Philip, and no shul in this place. There was only one thing to do: She lowered her green shades.

At the end of this day Miss Brookie came into the room and stood at the foot of the bed. She clearly thought enough was enough. She told my mother to get out of bed.

My mother didn't move.

Miss Brookie said everybody knew about being homesick (though perhaps not
everybody
, as most Concordians had not gone much further than Pottsboro, fifty or so miles down the road). She said, “Rise up, Reba. Rise up and make contact with the world again.” Where this contact would be made was on the porch.

At the mercy of a truly commanding voice that wasn't going to go away, my mother could resist no longer. She got up, put on the first skirt and blouse her hand touched, and walked stiffly out onto the porch. There was, however, an added complication: She had gotten it into her head that if she was walking oddly, it was because she was encased in a wooden box. There was a hole in the box, to see out of. Through the hole, she observed an unknown woman sitting with Miss Brookie.

Miss Brookie introduced her as her around-the-corner neighbor, Mrs. MacAllister. In Concordia, along with “Mizriz,” “Mrs.” was also pronounced “Miz,” and this was the way Miss Brookie pronounced it.

Some words or another—she didn't know what—fell out of my mother's mouth.

She looked at the woman through her hole: pale skin, and black hair so densely marcelled it had taken on the corrugated look of a clay road washed over by many rains.

When the woman spoke, it was in a hearty voice that my
mother's box muffled only slightly. “I like to have a fit to meet you,” my mother heard. The woman smiled broadly, and oversized teeth were put on view. “It sure is nice to meet Joey and Miriam's mama.”

This new talker pressed on. She was glad there was going to be a Jew store, glad they no longer had to depend on a Jew peddler coming to town just every once in a while. “If you can believe it,” she said to my mother, “the last Jew peddler we had, well, him and Agnes Kimball . . .”

Miss Brookie sprang into action. “Lord, Carrie,” she said, “I doubt Miz Bronson has the slightest interest in Agnes Kimball.”

Mrs. MacAllister changed the subject. She was now “tickled” that we didn't rent Tom Dillon's store, because Tom Dillon was “such a mess,” there was no telling how much trouble he'd cause. And why was he “such a mess”? According to Mrs. MacAllister, it was because his wife, Martha, stayed “poorly” so much. “Now don't stop me, Brookie,” she said. “You know good as I do that Martha don't do nothing but stay in bed, and it's gotten so that . . .”

Carrie MacAllister was full of stories. Miss Brookie said that if the
Sentinel
was our weekly paper, Carrie was our daily one. Harsh description though it was, Carrie MacAllister herself laughed at it, knowing it was true.

At this moment, Miss Brookie refused to accommodate Carrie MacAllister's need to divulge. Though she knew, and the whole town knew, that Martha Dillon was always in bed—and what the whole town also knew was that she was in bed with a jar of white lightning—Miss Brookie no doubt feared that Carrie was going to frighten my mother right back into bed. She said that if Carrie was determined to tell my mother something, she should tell her about her baby, Billy.

Mrs. MacAllister tilted her head toward the end of the porch, and my mother looked through her hole at a fat, open-faced, blond-haired boy of about a year—Billy Sunday Mac Allister
—sitting squarely on his bottom, chirping and trilling at a toy on wheels. He was, his mother said, going to be as good a talker as the man he was named after. And why was the baby named for Billy Sunday? “Because,” Carrie MacAllister said, “that man was sent straight from the Lord to help us poor sinners.” She closed her eyes, and her body trembled and shook.

My mother was truly frightened. What
was
this, this shivering, this quivering?
Oy
, this was something beyond the usual Gentile strangeness. At this moment it looked to her like craziness, though in later years my father tried to get her to see it in a more evenhanded, more realistic way. “So you never seen Jewish people rocking back and forth when they pray?” he would ask her, and she would think about it for a moment and say, “
Maybe
it's the same.” It was the best she could do.

At any rate, in another moment Carrie MacAllister's eyelids flew open. She had another story my mother needed to hear. It was from a couple of years earlier, when Billy Sunday had come to town, at a time when Mayor Bailey's daughter had gotten into trouble and Mayor Bailey had cut off her hair. My mother told this story often, and as faithfully as she could: “Lord,” she would say, trying to imitate Carrie MacAllister, “here come Miss Floy Inez Bailey into the tent, and she's near bald as a egg.”

Miss Brookie had then interrupted to say, “Looks like we're in for talking some trash.”

Carrie, not having been told definitely by Miss Brookie to
stop
, simply went on with her story. She was now reporting Floy's hair as “
plumb gone
.” It was gone, apparently, because Floy's father had got Floy from where she was staying with the traveling salesman and cut it off.

When Floy had announced she wanted to declare, “Law,” Carrie said, “the fight was on. For the soul of Miss Floy Inez Bailey, don't you know.” It was a night, Carrie was pleased to say, when Billy Sunday “took to preaching only hellfire and damnation,”
to the point that the whole tent got down with Floy. “Chalk one up for God,” Carrie said.

Perhaps sensing that Miss Brookie was about to call her to a halt, she leaped up and, all bones and sinew, marched down the porch and grabbed up her child. Settled back in the rocker, she flung open the buttons of her dress, grabbed a breast, and pushed it at the baby in her lap. He sucked hard, and a fist pounded the air. Then his eyeballs rolled up, and he considered the ceiling.