Jew Store (20 page)

I
n the immediate years after I was born, my mother and I were together during the week, but come Saturday she was off to the store, taking my brother and sister with her. At the store, as I have understood it, Joey did his usual stock chores, and Miriam wrote things down in the big black-and-white-splattered ledger. Unlike the first visit to St. Louis, she may at this point have been doing actual bookkeeping, so simple was it. All that was required was to put down the figures as my father gave them to her—daily “paid outs” on the left page and “receipts” on the right.

My father was full of compliments for Joey and Miriam: Joey was “Johnny-on-the-spot,” Miriam's work was “aces.” My father said she must be “taking in good” the arithmetic they were teaching her in school.

Joey, wanting as always to keep the record straight, said then—and he hasn't changed his mind since—that she was good at arithmetic from playing so much casino with him on Sundays.

Miriam and Joey played cards on Sunday because Miriam had nothing else to do. Her friends were all in church or having their Sunday dinners afterward; and though Joey could have found other diversions, to Miriam a day without friends was no day at all. She would go around the house yelling, “I
hate
Sundays! There's not a bless-ed thing to do!” until Joey would agree to play casino with her.

Casino was a favorite card game in the Bronx, along with pinochle, and my brother and sister had learned it from my parents. It was the only card game my mother ever played, because
it was the only one she knew how to play. My father preferred pinochle, but though my mother had seen pinochle played all her life (a game was in progress virtually around the clock at my grandparents' apartment on the weekends), it remained to her a man's game and a mystery.

O
n Saturdays, with the whole family off at the store, I was left home with Lizzie Maud. I made no protest, I've been told, probably because Lizzie Maud always had something for us to do. Right after she had put the greens or the snap beans to simmer (without fatback) on the back of the stove, we were out of the house, if only to go strolling past the uptown stores or around the courthouse park.

Miss Brookie sometimes strolled with us, and according to how Miss Brookie later described these strolls to me, Lizzie Maud would smile hugely at passersby, to encourage them to ask whose baby she was minding. As the questions came, she would pick me up and say, “This here my Jew baby,” then turn me slowly around to display my head. “See, ain't no horns on this child. Ain't no way to tell she Jerrish”—her way of pronouncing “Jewish”—“unless you knows the family.”

My father needed my mother on Saturdays. Mrs. MacAllister, pregnant now, was in semiretirement, and Vedra Broome was the only one working full-time.

Vedra Broome's husband, Gaither, always came to pick her up after work. As a man from strictly farming people, Gaither was proud of his wife for being a store clerk and of himself for being a worker in a factory; and he liked to talk things over with my father when he came to get his wife. When my father wasn't busy, he was glad to listen, especially when the talk was about the factory. It was true that Gaither actually knew very little, being only a worker behind a machine, but his chatter allowed my father to make some educated guesses.

All this listening my father was doing perhaps made Gaither
feel close and comradely, because one day—possibly, as my father always said, before he knew what he was saying—he had invited us out to his parents' place for Sunday afternoon lemonade and cake.

W
hen we went out on this visit to the Broomes, I was coming up on three years old, old enough to begin having my own memories.

Though we had often gone out into the country, to buy farm produce and such, this would be my first visit out there to somebody's house. I have a recollection of my mother trying to resist going and wanting my father to take us and leave her home, protesting that she wouldn't have anything to say to them, “no more than a stick.”

My father paid no attention, borrowed Miss Simmons's buggy, and out we went, my mother too. We were in our best clothes. As befitting my post-toddler status, I was in a lawn dress on whose dropped waist my mother had added tiny ribbon rosebuds, thus carrying out her own dictum that if there was a place for a flower, you put one there. She herself was in a new dress with ruching around the collar. She said she was all dressed up to get hanged. Hoping for the best was not an option; she only expected the worst.

The house we were going to was shared by Vedra and Gaither and his parents. My mother's apprehension was not eased by the long ride out to it nor by the sight of it. It was a narrow, tall, white frame two-story, attenuated by an assortment of lightning rods on the roof.

The Broome parents greeted us from the front porch, rising from their rockers like the handles of butter churns. Their smiles were wintry, though whether from age or disapproval, as my father would always say, who could tell? Rising also were Gaither and Vedra, and Vedra's twin sister, Vyvid.

With gaits stiff and slow, the elder Broomes led us through
the front door and into the parlor, where they took their places on the horsehair sofa and sat gazing, as if their part in the afternoon had been concluded according to plan.

My parents sat on horsehair chairs and Joey and Miriam on small ladderback ones, in front of the mahogany secretary whose writing surface displayed some porcelain ladies and gentlemen dancing around a gold-rimmed clock while a tiny lady in a vast quilted skirt looked on.

I plopped down on the floor, on the braided rug near my mother's legs.

Vedra and Vyvid half-sat on the sills of the two tall windows, from which hung stiff, dark cretonne draperies. Between the windows was a tall three-branched plant stand holding spiky sansevierias and a trailing pothos, probably the only species able to survive in this sunless room.

Any signs of life from the parent Broomes came from two sources: heads turning in tandem to seek out whoever was speaking and Mrs. Broome spitting tobacco juice into her glass. They neither asked a question nor answered one, only sat as if ready for the show—perhaps a ritual Jewish jig—to get under way.

After a few moments Vedra and Vyvid left the room and returned carrying a tray of glasses of lemonade with red cherries floating and plates of thick slices of chocolate-iced dark, dark chocolate cake, along with tiny napkins edged with tatting.

Certain of the presence of fat in the cake, my mother pushed her slice around until she had a chance to shove it into her handbag. Then, to cover her deed, she asked for the recipe, and whereupon she learned that in Concordia “spec-i-al-i-ty” recipes were not to be shared. At my mother's question everyone just went on eating. “Like what I said went in one ear and right out the door,” my mother used to say, in one of her famously mixed metaphors.

I finished my cake, plunged my fingers into the lemonade,
brought out the cherry, and chewed on it. The cherry being truly nasty, I spit it into the tiny napkin edged with tatting.

This was the most excitement for a while. The conversation spluttered. It died altogether. The clock ticked loudly. Conversation was revived now and then by Vedra offering more cake or lemonade. Everyone said, “No, no, thank you.”

Gaither told things that had happened at the factory. Everyone had heard it all before. My father's anecdotes about the store did not bring smiles.

I contemplated Vyvid, focusing on her speech patterns, which featured synchronization. When Vedra started to speak, as when she said, “Can I fetch you some more lemonade, Mizriz Bronson?”, Vyvid's lips would tremble, and she would come into sync with Vedra on the last syllables. I waited for it, for the sisters to say as one, “-ade, Mizriz Bronson?”

When the novelty of this wore off, I sought attractions elsewhere. I eyed the little lady with the big skirt on the secretary, at her skirt stuck through with pearl-headed pins. I fixed a look on Miz Broome. Her orangey-brown spit had just about filled up the glass. Miriam was now sitting with her legs curled around her chair, as if in this way to keep from collapsing in a heap on the floor; Joey had revived slightly and was counting cracks in the ceiling.

I got up and went outside. I ran into the clean-swept yard and dashed over to the old rubber tire that hung from the large elm in the front yard. I climbed into it and tried to swing by pushing with my feet. This being harder than it looked, I jumped off and ran for the fields in the back.

Behind the house, I chased aimlessly through some corn stalks before I made for the fields beyond. I skirted the tomato plants and plunged through the squash rows, making an attempt to avoid the squashes and noticing in passing that since they hadn't been picked when Lizzie Maud would have said they
should have been, they were now as big as watermelons. I dashed on, trying not to step on anything important, heading for some trees in the distance. And then suddenly I found myself not on dirt, not on tilled soil, but on a small expanse of wooden planks. Now
this
was something.

I looked down and tried to figure out what I had happened on. Whatever it was, it was lying flat on the ground and had a handle with a rope attached.

By tugging on the rope with all my might, I finally managed to pull the thing open. I had opened a door to a flight of stairs going into the earth. Down below was a roomful of home-canned things.

I wandered, I touched. I stood for a long moment in front of the toe-dancing pigs' feet. Only when the light grew dim did I think of going out.

I picked my way up the stairs. At the opening I drew back: While I had been playing underground, thunder and lightning had overtaken the outdoors. I was all at once unable to take another step. The only thing I could do was to go back down the stairs. But when I looked into the darkness, it was no longer friendly.

It was a long moment before I heard a voice. “Come on, Stella Ruth,” it said. “Come with me.” Joey. Come to save me.

I said nothing, just took his hand.

He walked me back through the dying rain. An occasional disapproving drop, cold as lake water, fell on my skin. We trudged on through the fields, the earth muddy and clinging to our shoes, until the house at last came into view.

My voice came back when we were in the buggy and my head was in my mother's lap. I dug my face into her skirt, into the still-present mustiness of the Broomes' parlor furniture. “It was scary,” I said into it.

My mother thought a big hole in the ground was “ridikalus.”

My father tried to explain that it was a storm cellar, a place to go for safety during big storms. “In case of tornadoes,” he said.

My mother had no wish to have things explained. “Talk about storms! It's like God is punishing! I never seen such storms!”

My father said yes, she
had
seen such storms, in Kiev
and
the Bronx, but my mother wasn't listening. She was saying “My poor Stella Ruth” over and over, smoothing my hair impatiently, and mad that we had visited the Broomes in the first place. “What were we doing out there anyways?” she asked my father. Why had we been all dressed up? After all, it was
their
Sunday and
they
were the ones who had just come from church.

Did we have anything in the world to talk to them about? No. Had we sat there like bumps on a log? Yes.
Oy
, my mother said, what she wouldn't give to see some Jewish people.

It was obvious even to my father that the Broomes wouldn't do, and although he wasn't sure that only Jewish people
would
, he agreed with my mother that they needed friends. It was a thing that needed working on. Seeking help, he sent out a rush call for his good luck.

H
is luck showed up some months later, this time to provide us with a visiting opportunity more to my mother's liking. On one of his sporadic visits to Concordia, Sammy Levine, the young traveling salesman who carried my father's underwear line, brought with him the news of a Jewish family named Rastow who had opened a store in Sidalia, a town in Kentucky not too far away.

My mother fell on this news as if a sudden shower had coursed over her after many days in the desert. “Sammy says there's
Yehudim?
And not too far?” she asked my father.

Excited as my mother was, she had to first understand how it was that Sammy Levine had been in Concordia and had not come for a visit as he always did.

My father explained that Sammy was in a hurry and had no time. My mother was puzzled. No time to come to us and speak
the old language, as Sammy loved to do? And then the deeper puzzlement. “No time to eat my pot roast?”

My father, knowing, as he always said, that his explanation “would sit with Mama like a bad piece of fish,” told her that Sammy was taking a girl out.

A Jewish boy taking out a Concordia girl? My father was right: My mother had tasted the fish and it was truly bad. She wanted to know who—“So who on earth?”—he was taking out.

It was Laverne Bascombe, and when my mother heard this, she said it wasn't right that he should be taking out “a little shiksa.” “A Jewish boy and a shiksa,” she said to my father. “You can't make me believe that it's right.”

My father protested that Sammy Levine was lonely, that it was a hard life being a traveling salesman. “So what do you want him to do?” he asked my mother.

To which my mother answered, “Not that. I sure don't want him to do that.”

So
nu
, so anyway, she said, she wanted to talk about something better, their trip to Sidalia.

Fine, my father said, delighted to be off the subject of Sammy Levine and his shiksa girlfriend. He now had another surprise: We would go in our own buggy. Business was thriving; indeed Bronson's was attracting customers countywide. So why not a buggy of our own? It would be light and comfortable, with two seats and a hood, a change from the wagon, which we still used whenever my father thought we had been borrowing Miss Brookie's buggy too often. “We can afford it, so why not?” my father asked my mother.