Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (9 page)

It was almost 4 a.m. as we approached the sprawling labyrinth of the Bronx Terminal, then the largest wholesale food market in the world, occupying thirty-two acres, stretching from 149th Street to 152nd Street and called a “terminal” market because it was the end of the line for runs from farms to the city. Although it was still pitchblack when we pulled up to the long brick warehouses, there were so many people gathered around the illuminated counters that it seemed like midday. Fruits, lettuce, celery, and broccoli were displayed in wood-and-wire slotted crates, which were discarded as they emptied. Kids would come at day’s end, lug off the discarded crates, and, with old roller skates, fashion homemade scooters. Firmly clasping Max’s hand, I walked with him for nearly an hour as he picked out what he wanted, and then stood beside him as he loaded it into the back of the truck. Soon we were back on the road, heading east toward home, just in time to see my first sunrise.

For me, each store was a treasure house of lore about the varied lives of the people of my community. I marveled that for Carl and Edna Probst, the husband-and-wife team who ran the delicatessen, unlike my own parents, there was no separation of the workplace and the living place, no division which forced the woman to stay home with the children and the man to spend his working day in the city, away from his family, his leisure time away from his place of work. I imagined that when I grew up I would enjoy a similar marriage—my husband and I would work side by
side, day after day, waiting on people, making potato salad, and slicing cold cuts.

Whenever I entered the delicatessen I was greeted by the blended odors of good cheese, cold cuts, and pickles. In contrast to the neon lights and wide corridors of modern supermarkets, the delicatessen was small and narrow, with dark wooden shelves that resembled library stacks, packed from floor to ceiling with colorful cans instead of books. Because the shelves were so high, long-handled clippers were needed to reach the hard-to-get items. When the store was not crowded, Edna and Carl let me manipulate the clippers myself, positioning the arms around a box of cereal or a can of Campbell’s soup, squeezing the grip to tighten the clippers, and then lowering the container to a point where it could drop into my arms.

One Thanksgiving when my mother was in the hospital, Edna and Carl invited our family to join them for dinner. Since they had decided to stay open in case any of their customers needed something at the last minute, they celebrated in the back of the store, setting out dinner at the big table where each morning they made the tuna and potato salads. When I walked through the decorated cloth curtain which separated the front of the store from the back, I was excited to find this back room as warm and personal as a home; a large wood stove and a small maple table made it cozy, as a kitchen should be on a cold Thanksgiving day.

The owners of the soda shop next door were not quite as friendly. We were convinced that Mr. and Mrs. Brand hated us. Mrs. Brand was short and fat, with bleached-blond hair and beady eyes. If we took too long in the comics section without buying anything, Mr. Brand, with hair like Brillo, took delight in kicking us out of the store. Their attitude brought out the worst in us. Over and over,
we would call the store and ask in disguised voices if they had “Prince Albert in the can.” When they confirmed it, we would start laughing and say, “‘Well, please let him out. He deserves to be free!” For maximum satisfaction one of us would be stationed in the store during the calls to watch Mrs. Brand screw up her prune-like face in anger at the third Prince Albert inquiry and retort, “No, we won’t let him out, but if we catch you, we’ll put
you
in the can!”

Nevertheless, the Brands made the best sodas in town, boasting more flavors than Howard Johnson’s, and their booths were large and comfortable. They had a son, Eddie, who also worked in the store. He always wore a bow tie, and we sensed that he wanted to be nice to us but was afraid to let his guard down when his parents were there.

I
WAS ONLY
two years old when the end of World War II signaled the often involuntary return of women to the homes they had left for the factories and shipyards of wartime America. The re-entry of millions of men into the work force, together with pervasive fear of a return to large-scale unemployment, was fertile ground for the growth of an ideology which sought to persuade women that work and education would destroy their chances for marriage and a happy home life. The media and pundits of the day instructed women that their only true fulfillment could be found as wives and mothers, that sexist discrimination was actually good for them, that the denial of opportunity was, in reality, the manifestation of the highest possible goals of womanhood. The president of Mills College argued that higher education could actually be harmful for women, since the total irrelevance of their studies to their destined roles as wives and mothers would only increase their frustration. If Rosie the Riveter, women pilots,
and Women’s Army Corps members had been portrayed as the heroines of the forties, the heroines in the fifties were women who were wise enough to realize that work and marriage were incompatible and had renounced careers to raise a family. This reassertion of dying values worked, at least for a while. Women valedictorians who left the commencement stage to become suburban housewives were praised as paragons of femininity. A renowned concert pianist, Liz Eck, became a media darling, a credit to her gender, for her decision to leave the stage in order to tend her husband and mother her child. Grace Kelly gave up her dazzling Hollywood career to become a wife and mother, albeit with a principality thrown into the bargain. In
Life
magazine in the mid-fifties, Robert Couglan railed against “the disease of working women,” who insisted on ruining their children and their family life.

If my mother felt a conflict of desire between her own ambitions and her family, she never showed it to me. On the contrary, she took great pride in being a housewife and seemed to enjoy her inviolable routine. On Mondays and Wednesdays, Frank, the Dugan’s Bakery man, came with fresh bread, coffee cake, and cupcakes; on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the milkman, whose name was Ray, arrived at the back door with glass bottles of Evans’ milk, which came with a layer of cream on the top that had to be scooped out with a special spoon. On Fridays, the chime of a bell signaled the arrival of the iceman, with large rectangular chunks of ice held between sharp metal tongs; a second bell heralded the man who sharpened knives and scissors, the sparks flying from the grindstone against which he held the blade. We had a Monitor refrigerator in our pantry, a Bendix washer in the basement, and a pentagonal clothesline in the backyard where our clothes were hung out to dry. My mother presided over the myriad
details of life, deftly orchestrating the well-being of our household to the rhythm of the seasons: storm windows went up and down, slipcovers were put on and taken off, winter clothes were stored with mothballs, summer rugs replaced winter rugs, and the awnings were put up and removed.

Because she was such a methodical housekeeper, my mother had plenty of time to read her beloved books, walk to the corner stores, or visit with neighbors. I never sensed that she was bored or lonely. She always took special pains to put on fresh lipstick and to comb her hair when she knew that my father was on his way home. As soon as she saw him coming down the street, she began preparing the Manhattan cocktails which they shared every single night of their married life as they sat together on our porch and talked about their day. She seemed to grow more vibrant as they talked, asking him questions about work, and listening with unwavering interest and sympathetic understanding. He in turn asked her what she had done, whom she had talked with, and what she had read. When, occasionally, I listened to them talk, I could sense their love for one another, which made me happy, though I felt jealously excluded from their conversation. Indeed, so special was their ritual cocktail hour that my father never drank another Manhattan after my mother’s death.

These repetitive days seemed fulfilling for my mother. But I could never be sure. I was unable to share her interior life as she shared mine, a barrier strengthened, I suspect, by her illness. She must have known that her heart was growing weaker each year and worried about how much longer she would live. Not wanting me to know her fears, she rarely talked about her illness, never revealing to me what must have been a continual preoccupation. Yet, despite the weakness and fragility of her body, my mother
stamped her personality in every alcove and corner of every room.

For as far back as I can remember, she was the overseer of some project in our house: a change of wallpaper in the bedroom, new paint in the kitchen, a new slipcover for the couch in the living room. My father was the work force for all these projects: painting the walls, hanging the wallpaper, and building the rock garden that my mother planted. After working with figures all week long, he relaxed on the weekends by working with his hands, and took pride in the tools he had assembled over the years. We used to tease our parents that when they both got to heaven we could expect that the sky would be a different color each day, with Mother giving orders and Dad doing the painting.

For the most part, I was little more than an eager witness and cheerleader for these activities. One summer, however, when I was about six, my father rented a steamer to take the old wallpaper off the dining-room wall. Intrigued by this strange machine, I volunteered my services, and then, when my suggestion met little enthusiasm, I pleaded for a chance to try it. Reluctantly, my father gave me the steamer, and with a little yelp of enthusiasm, I proceeded to strip off the thermostat, to the stunned merriment of my father. The only housework I ever enjoyed was on the nights my father designated me the person to put away the dishes he had dried. While I stood by the cabinets, he threw the plates and the silverware across the room to my waiting hands. Though we lost a few dishes along the way, my father had managed to transform an otherwise tedious chore into a great adventure.

Every year, my parents had more money to spend, a prosperity shared by almost everyone in the neighborhood. Excitement infected the entire block when someone got a new refrigerator with a built-in freezer, an automatic washing
machine, or a television set with a bigger screen. Critics have railed against the acquisitiveness of the fifties generation, but for our parents, who had lived through the Depression, the ever-expanding economy seemed like a miraculous cornucopia; they took nothing for granted, and approached each major purchase with a sense of awe.

T
HE SOLITARY EXCEPTION
to the genteel circumstances of middle-class life in our neighborhood was the old woman who lived in the run-down wooden shack with peeling paint on the corner of our street, known to us only as Old Mary. She was dressed always in black, and she had only one leg. The tapping of her wooden stump as she hobbled down the street, muttering, her body hunched, her eyelids half closed, terrified the children of the block and sent us scurrying for cover. A look of anger invariably darkened her creased face, and her hands seemed to make vague menacing gestures.

Old Mary was the “bad witch” of our neighborhood, something straight out of the fairy tales we read. As we rounded her corner, we would retreat to the safety of the opposite curb and spy on her, trying to decipher her movements while we watched her dig threatening holes in the ground behind her shack. Our vision obscured by the tangle of weeds, raspberry canes, and briar that surrounded her property, we imagined that she was making those holes to dispose of children she had kidnapped and killed. Through one of her windows we thought we spied the outline of a skull, which we believed she had placed there as a warning.

We fed on our own fear, daring one another to dash into her yard and peer directly into her windows. A glimpse of the inside of her house would, we believed, provide evidence of her witchcraft. For each of these escapades
we concocted military-style stratagems. One or two lookouts would back up the brave person who volunteered to make the run, ready to sound a warning at the first sight of Old Mary. No one was eager to do the job, but one summer day Eddie Rust finally volunteered. After swiftly crossing the street, he darted through the jungle of canes and weeds and had just reached the window of her shack when Old Mary suddenly appeared. She caught Eddie by the back of his belt, her face twisted in anger, her screams chilling even at our distance of twenty feet. For several very long seconds, we stood frozen on the sidewalk, before Eddie struggled free and we raced off down the street. She began chasing us with what seemed supernatural endurance for an old lady. Though our houses promised sanctuary, we were afraid to have her know where we lived, so we ran in the opposite direction. Every time we glanced back, she was there, the staccato thump of her wooden leg on the sidewalk amplified in our frightened brains. Long after we eluded her, we couldn’t stop shaking.

A few days later, I bounded down our front steps to find my mother standing on the sidewalk talking to Old Mary herself. I turned immediately to escape back into the house, but my mother’s voice aborted my flight. Beckoning me over with a smile, she presented me to Old Mary and waited expectantly for me to say hello. Eyes cast downward, my voice muffled, I managed a pathetic semblance of a greeting. My mother’s solicitous expression and friendly voice betrayed a disquieting familiarity as I listened to her inquire after Mary’s health. Mary asked my mother a question about her flowers, and in response my mother led her through our driveway to show her something in the rock garden at the back of our house. As I stood there transfixed, watching them walk alongside the house, I imagined that my mother pointed to my bedroom
window. Now that Old Mary knew where I slept, there was nothing to prevent her from flying through my window during the night and spiriting me away.

While I was getting ready for bed, my mother came up to my room, and in a tone devoid of sympathy said, “I don’t understand what you’re so afraid of.” I felt trapped between the fearsome realities of Old Mary and my mother’s accusing tone. I did my best to relate how she had yelled at us and then chased us down the road. “And what provoked her to do this?” my mother asked. “I have no idea,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Is it possible that you were on her property and trampled her flowers?” “I never did,” I replied, stressing the “I” so that my response was not completely untrue.