Jew Store (22 page)

My mother had told Miss Brookie all about the visit to the Rastows, especially—it was important to my mother to call attention to admirable things about Jewish people—how
modren
Gladys Rastow was. “She makes me feel like a sure enough greenie,” she had said to Miss Brookie.

Miss Brookie hadn't thought that
modren
was all that much. “When it boils down to the low gravy,” she had said to my mother, “it takes more than being
modren
to be a mensch.”

A woman could be or not be a mensch? My mother had been a bit flustered, having never before heard this term applied to a woman. Was it right? she had wondered out loud, and Miss Brookie had said, Foot, all it meant was a
person
, a person who could be counted on.

W
hat with Bronson's Low-Priced Store fast becoming a fixture in Concordia—and what with the Rastows having a house—all at once my father was agitating for a house of our own. He put it to my mother. “We ain't poor, so why should we live like we are?”

My mother sent up a wail. “Leave Miss Brookie?”

One thing my mother kept hold of: There was to be no
buying
, only
renting
. “It ain't as if we're here forever,” she said to my father.

Places to rent in Concordia were scarce. Houses in the “good” section of town were passed down through families, or, if not, were bought, not rented.

Carrie MacAllister took my mother to see a house that was on the rental market. It had been built six years earlier by two men who had come from Memphis to open an antiques shop. Before they moved into it, they had lived at Miss Brookie's. Miss Brookie had enjoyed them and admired their artistic bent. When the men gave up their shop and left Concordia after about two years, the house had stayed empty.

The house was more than unusual. It was one story (the
men had no doubt been caught up in that period's craze for bungalows) and had yellow stucco exterior walls. Over an open, concrete-floored porch were several brown wooden beams, one of which supported a chain-hung swing. In Mexico it would have fit right in, but not in Concordia.

Mrs. MacAllister was keen to share what she knew about the house. First of all, the men were not “interesting,” as Miss Brookie would have said, but “plain
peculiar
.” Though they were friendly to one and all, they never dated any of the local girls. Carrie summed them up as “the flat-out oddest people you'd ever meet.”

Like the Bronsons, my mother thought. Still, she agreed with my father that we should take the house.

When my father came home from the lease signing, I was sitting on the front porch swing, across from Miss Brookie. She wanted to know how it went.

“There wasn't nothing to it,” my father told us. “Herman Tucker directed his teeth at me, said ‘But, but' a few times, not too loud, and that was that.” He eased into the seat next to me and looked across at her. “Seems those teeth of his are chewing on butter and honey with me lately. Must think I'm making money.”

The late-afternoon sun was in Miss Brookie's eyes, and she shielded them with her hand to look at my father, exactly as she did in that snapshot of mine. “No doubt,” she said to him.

“So it's all set.”

Miss Brookie said, “I sure hate it that y'all are going. Still, I know you got to.”

“That's right, we do.”

Miss Brookie thought my mother needed to make some friends other than “an old maid and a Nigra servant and the
Daily Clarion
,” meaning Carrie MacAllister. “Anyway,” she said to my father, “y'all aren't going to Mars.”

I knew we weren't going to Mars, we were going two blocks
away. And Miriam would still be taking piano lessons. “But,” Miss Brookie wanted to know, “who's going to wake me up mornings with sounds of mortal combat with the harp?”

T
he house had
almost
enough room for us. My sister and I were still together in one bedroom, but my brother had his own—one that stuck out from ours like a wart on a finger.

What was supposed to be the dining room, behind French doors opening into the front room, became my parents' bedroom.

The furnishings my mother chose for the bedrooms were simple and utilitarian. She hung straight marquisette curtains at all the windows, though in the matter of color, Lizzie Maud had prevailed. “You got to get you some color on them,” she said to my mother. “These look like stuff you lays out the dead in.”

My mother, having spent long hours hemming the curtains by hand, went into full protest. “Enough's enough with the curtains,” she said, and hoped it was the last word.

In the end Lizzie Maud tea-dipped them, giving them a color that was “kindly red and kindly got some sun in it, too.” As she hung them back up, she said to my mother, “The thing is, if y'all got to leave us, we wants to be proud of y'all, don't you know.”

All the furniture in the minuscule front room was newly purchased. A gray mohair sofa and two matching easy chairs sat cheek by jowl in front of the red-brick fireplace. With their identical curving backs and rotund arms, they had the look of a well-fed family having a cozy chat. An iron floor lamp was behind the couch, and, at the side of each chair, a smoking stand.

In the space next to the fireplace sat a cabinet with a windup phonograph, which had been liberated from storage in Miss Brookie's basement. On the long wall were two windows facing the street, both curtained with lengths of white lace, with which Lizzie Maud had no quarrel.

Positioned squarely in the middle of the fireplace mantel, in a blackish-brown tortoiseshell frame, was the portrait of my mother's family—a studio photograph flanked by a vase of wax lilies of the valley and the nine-branched menorah for Hanukkah, which had come with the family all the way from New York.

There was one other chair in the front room: a way-too-big bentwood rocker Miss Brookie had brought down from her attic and sent around. There was only one remaining space—the doorway of the little square central hall, which housed the formidable presence that was the space heater—and a route had to be planned for going around it. But since Miss Brookie had sent the chair, we planned it.

Joey's room was very private, perhaps because of the way it related to the house or perhaps because of its modest dimensions, which allowed accommodations for only a narrow bed and a skinny chest of drawers. We had taken out the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Since, according to Carrie MacAllister, the men had gardened and put things up, we'd assumed the room had been used as a pantry. At any rate, its ceiling was so low that T, who was undergoing a growth spurt, could barely stand up. Still, Joey's erector and chess sets fit nicely under the bed, and the books sent by Uncle Philip were in reach on the slim shelf above.

With the dining room in service as my parents' bedroom, it fell to the breakfast nook—a table and benches tucked into a little alcove in the kitchen (a sure sign of modernity, according to my mother)—to serve for eating.

The kitchen was remarkable only because the sink had not a pump but a spigot. Otherwise, it was the usual: a dominating coal stove; two tables, both wooden—one on tall legs next to the sink and the other an all-purpose one in the middle of the room; and an icebox on the minute screened back porch.

My mother's most favored thing in the kitchen may have
been the coal scuttle, a black metal open-spouted pail for bringing in coal from the shed attached to the back of the house. It spoke to my mother of America's wonders. In Russia, coal, treasured like gemstones, had been brought in piece by piece, in hands. And here my mother had coal in great heaps, could fill the scuttle to overflowing, use it as extravagantly as she chose. Not that she ever
would
, but the choice was there.

T
he neighbors immediately came to call. They came in all manner of attire, some in gingham “wash dresses” with gardening sunbonnets still in place, some gotten up as if for church. Each came bearing a gift—a pie or baked apples or a few jars of home-put-up something from their gardens. (In Concordia things weren't “canned,” they were “put up.”) One, a young bride from across the street, placed into my mother's hands a slice of country ham wrapped in newspaper.

My mother thanked each one and tried to say more, knowing they all wanted to chat, but words stuck in her throat. The talk went quickly strained and soon trailed off. In just moments there were formal, self-conscious good-byes.

My mother put aside for Lizzie Maud not just the ham but the jars of vegetables as well. “
Seasoning meats
,” she said to Lizzie Maud. “These ladies never heard of vegetables without no
fatback
.”

To which Lizzie Maud said, “And you think that be worse than chopped-up livers with
chicken grease
?”

There came the day when the young bride—Miz Reeves— perhaps having learned of her folly in bringing us a housewarming gift of ham, dropped off a cutting of her “big inch” plant. This my mother accepted gladly. When the other neighbors brought cuttings, she accepted them gladly as well.

With the offering of plant cuttings, my mother found she could speak. She asked instructions, she listened, and as soon as the ladies left, she did as told.

It wasn't long before she stood before her own plants and snipped off cuttings for the neighbors. In short order there were visits where the conversation revolved not only around plants but around children, and school, and even cooking.

It was the neighbors who had urged my mother to take the step of planting a garden. They said it was easy, nothing to it. They recited a poem: “Just seed it and weed it, wet it and get it.”

So out from under the sycamores and elms, on land where the sun shone most of the morning, my mother made a plot for spring bulbs and one for summer flowers, the latter, in the fall, to become a patch for chrysanthemums. Another one was set aside for vegetables.

Almost every day she did something in the garden. She planted, she pulled out weeds, she dug the earth around the bulbs. And almost every afternoon Miss Brookie stopped in and offered encouragement. “Your four o'clocks are going to bloom fit to kill,” she'd say, and she often ended her visit with, “You do have a way with plants, Reba, indeed you do.” No matter how often my mother heard this, she never tired of it, never tired of any compliment from Miss Brookie. As my mother would say, “It was more music to my ears than music.”

My mother was so well acquainted with every square inch of her garden that when she came across a growth a couple of inches high that she had never seen before, she was truly surprised. How was it possible that it had gotten so big behind her back?

She asked herself if it was going to be
tsores
or
naches
. Trouble or joy.

At first she decided it didn't belong, that it was a weed to be pulled out. But when she looked more closely, she was unsure. It was dense with leaves—small, deep green, sturdy leaves, not weedlike in the slightest. She hesitated. She knew she had not planted it, but it clearly had more menschness, more substance,
than some errant growth. She withheld action until Miss Brookie had been consulted.

When Miss Brookie appeared, the two women strolled to the backyard and brought the little green shoot into their sights. On hands and knees, skirts trailing in the dirt, they peered from all angles at the tiny growth.

Miss Brookie finally rose back up, clapped her hands to dislodge the soil, and issued one of her “vows and declares.” After entering a disclaimer—“If I'm not a demented old lady”—she vowed and declared that in my mother's garden an azalea had volunteered.

It came to my mother that she had heard something about Tennessee being the Volunteer State. “You mean it only grows here in Tennessee?” she asked Miss Brookie.

Miss Brookie explained that no, a volunteer plant meant a plant that wasn't planted, wasn't invited, and appeared entirely of its own accord.

My mother's decision was made. It could stay in there with the bulbs. “It's been growing so hard, it would be a shame to do anything bad to it,” she said to Miss Brookie.

Miss Brookie took off her glasses, pulled her handkerchief from her pocket, and gave them a wipe. Message time. Volunteers, according to Miss Brookie, had ideas of their own: If they'd a mind to come up, up they'd come; but once they were up, they had to be well cared for. “Then they can be as pleasing as anything in your garden,” she said. She had a caution: Sometimes, for what would seem no reason at all, they would just “turn up their toes.” She said to my mother, “Volunteers are always a teensy bit different from cultivated plants. Or so it seems. Anyway, that's what makes them so fascinating, don't you know.”

My mother decided she'd just wait. “I can always pull it out later if I have to,” she said to Miss Brookie.