Miss Wolfe abandoned me as quickly as she could. I stared down at my dress to see if maybe I still looked too much like a greenhorn.
“Don’t worry,” Reva said, “she’s like that with almost everyone. She softens up if you’re good at your job.”
“I will be.”
Reva laughed. “I’m sure you will. It’s easy. Here, I’ll show you.”
By my seventeenth birthday I was making $7.50 a week. I had almost enough saved for a second-class ticket, though every time I went by the steamship company, they’d raised the price. Some American with his hair plastered down over his forehead and smelling of cheap whiskey would laugh and say, “Supply and demand, sweetheart.”
“I’m not your sweetheart.”
“You’ll never be anyone’s with that attitude.”
I didn’t pay any attention. In a year maybe I’d have enough saved. I knew Esther. If I sent the ticket, she wouldn’t say no, because Sarah’s leaving would relieve her and Nathan from making a dowry. Sarah was almost fourteen but I didn’t want her to go right to work like I had. She should go to school and learn something besides factory work. Typewriting was good work for women, I’d heard, or maybe she’d like to be a teacher. If she went to school, what I brought in would have to be enough for both of us. The ticket would take up everything I had in the bank, so it was foolish to think of getting my own place now, when everyone said the economy was bad.
What made a bad economy? Something spoiled that capitalism had eaten, that gave it a sour stomach? New York was full of Russians who came after the failed revolution—they had to eat, sleep, work somehow. Wasn’t that the way an economy worked? But maybe it was just the same as the Pale: not enough work to go around so everyone had to eat each other’s fleas.
Good or bad, it was time to talk with Aunt Bina about having Sarah live with us. We’d have to get a cot for her to sleep on in the room with Rose and me. But that wouldn’t be so great, would it? What had I been thinking? Rose would be furious. How could it be all these months I had two people on separate sides of my mind—Sarah and Rose—and never put them together? Maybe I would wait until Rose and I got a place of our own, if the Petrovskys would ever let us. But would that be fair to Sarah? And Rose, would it be fair to Rose? And maybe Rose wouldn’t want to leave her mama … Oy!
“Hello, dear.” Aunt Bina looked up for a second when I came in. “Did you get that fish for dinner?”
“Right here. But it looks like you were out already today.” I motioned to the wall where a new portrait was hanging: Lincoln, in a thin wooden frame.
“I was just out for a few minutes. I can’t sit all day like I used to, my legs fall asleep. And I have to get out now and then, find out what’s new. Besides, Chava, you always pick out a good fish from Yankovich’s. What they sell by Hester Street is only fit for cats.”
“Mama, you’re the best cook on Essex Street. Don’t pretend you’re not!” Rose came in from the bathroom, went to the sink to wash. Her shirtsleeves were rolled up and I watched a dribble of water flow down the outline of her arm, catch at her elbow, make a spot on the fabric. She looked at me over the drying towel and winked.
“You think you’re paying me a compliment? All I should want in life is to be your cook?”
“Okay, so I’ll cook tonight,” Rose said. Rose was turning out to be a better cook than Bina.
“No you won’t. You worked all day, you need a few minutes to relax. You don’t go to class tonight?”
“It’s Monday, Mama. I thought after dinner Chava and I would go to the baths. We could use a good shvits, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t cook. You’re the one working all day.”
“Didn’t I just say I was out in the afternoon? Only slice some onions and garlic, all right, dear?”
Rose and I were chopping and flicking our onion tears at each other when Uncle Isadore arrived.
“So what’s this?” Isadore asked. He didn’t even bother to greet us. Rose shook her head. Bad news.
“It’s a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, who freed the African slaves. I got it in the Hester Street market for forty cents.” Bina didn’t look away from her needle.
“I know who it is. You think I haven’t learned anything about this country? But you didn’t ask me if you can buy a picture.”
“Did I ask you about the curtains? Since when do you boss the walls around here?” She sighed and looked up. “You got laid off again?”
He shrugged, hung up his hat. I noticed a lot of stains around the brim. We would have to get him a new one if he had to look for a job.
“Slow season again, even by watches.” Isadore picked up the
Forward
and rustled the pages, end of conversation.
“You know,” I said slowly, not used to having so much room to form my thoughts, and hoping to change the mood, “just because Abraham Lincoln made the, the emancipation—”
“Very nice, very nice English words,” Isadore mumbled from behind the paper.
“—doesn’t mean he would have been interested in freedom for the workers.”
“What are you talking about?” Rose asked, making a little pile of our choppings as she heated up the frying pan.
“I mean, the President, any president, is still like the Tsar.”
“You’re calling Abraham Lincoln the Tsar? God in heaven!” Bina said, working a little faster now that she knew Isadore wasn’t. When she shifted the pile of piecework, the dust made me sneeze.
“Remember we learned how the Tsar freed the serfs?” I asked.
“It’s not the same,” Rose stopped cooking and looked at me. “I learned in English class, like you. Abraham Lincoln was a great man who wanted to see freedom.” I liked the way she stood with one hand on her hip. Still, I didn’t want to be distracted.
“But I was listening to the anarchists talk in Washington Square—”
“Oy, the anarchists again, I might have known,” Bina said.
Isadore snorted. “Anarchists, syndicalists, socialists—in the park you can listen to a hundred opinions, but opinions aren’t onions. You try to take those Chaim Yankls seriously, you’ll starve.”
“But don’t you think the state is just a big company, run to profit the rich?” I asked. “And the President is like the boss of that company?”
“I suppose a president is like a boss, but a president is elected by the people, the boss elects himself,” Rose said.
“That’s good, Rose, that’s good thinking.” Isadore glanced at her for a second, then raised the paper again.
“Still, the President is looking out for all the bosses,” I persisted, annoyed with Rose for taking her papa’s side.
“And for all the workers too,” Isadore said without looking up again.
“I think the President only cares about the workers enough so we don’t revolt. So it looks like he cares. You know the government forces us—”
Now Isadore put down his paper. “Forces us to do what? Who’s forcing you to do anything? You want to work for the unions, fine. I can see that working men, and ladies, have to band together sometimes, the bosses shouldn’t take advantage of us.” He stopped and grimaced, pulled out his pocket watch, made a show of opening and closing it. “You think we could do that in Russia without facing a band of Cossacks? You forgot already?”
“Isadore—.” Bina tried to shush him. I stared at his face.
“All right, that I shouldn’t say to you. But we came here for freedom and freedom we got. We were always working people. Sometimes we had good times, sometimes not so good, like now. But I don’t want any more of this anarchist talk in my house. Bina, I’m glad you bought that picture of Mr. Lincoln. It looks nice where you hung it—now I don’t have to try to fix that hole. You, Chava, you,” he shook his finger at me, at the same time turning his face away. “You’re like Saul, always looking for trouble.”
“I don’t have to look,” I said almost in a whisper.
“When I was a boy we talked respectful to our elders. Just because you get a paycheck doesn’t mean you can treat me with disrespect.”
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Uncle. I just am trying to figure things out for myself.” I noticed now that Isadore got laid off so often he wasn’t quite the freethinker he had been in Odessa.
“For yourself !” Isadore’s head bobbed up and down. “If you would take the trouble to learn from your teachers and your aunt and me, you would have a lot less problems in life, isn’t that right, Bina?”
“Hmm,” Bina replied. She had a mouthful of pins.
“You too are going to contradict me? I’m the only one who will stand up for America in this house?”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t for America, Isadore, really.” For a second Bina looked longingly at her pins after she spit them into her hand. “The girls have to figure it out themselves. Chava can’t know why the anarchists are wrong if she doesn’t know what they’re saying.”
“She can take my word for it! I’ve had enough of this,” he said. “I’m going out to talk to men, not to children. Just save some supper cold for me.”
I looked over my shoulder at Rose, who gestured what-did-you-expect, and turned back to the frying pan.
“Goodnight, girls,” he said, pushing the wobbly chair back, a little more cheerful now that we’d given him an excuse to go to his landslayt club. “Goodnight, Bina. Don’t wear your eyes out doing that!” She gave him a look he couldn’t see. As he went out the door Isadore looked at the wall. “And goodnight to you too, Mr. Lincoln.”
While the fish was cooking I went down the hall to the toilet. I could see that Rose had cleaned it before I came home. It was almost never this bearable unless she did. The janitor was supposed to make sure it was sanitary, but that would have meant keeping a twenty-four hour guard on every floor. The tiny room was the only private place in the building, providing someone wasn’t banging to get in or you didn’t find a rat keeping you company. It was the same size as a coffin and almost as dark. Sometimes I thought we’d be stuck on Essex Street forever.
“So, Mama, maybe we shouldn’t go by the baths tonight, since Papa got laid off.” Rose was setting the table when I returned. Neither of them seemed upset about the fight with Uncle Isadore. Leon had come home and Aaron was back from City College, reading his books. When all the men were home our kitchen was as crowded as a sweatshop, but just two of them wasn’t too bad.
“Don’t talk foolishness. We aren’t so desperate that you can’t keep clean.”
I looked at Rose. She gave me a smile no one else noticed. Maybe she just said that to keep everyone from knowing how much we wanted to go to the baths. But then, it was coming on slow season and Rose might get laid off too. And Leon. And me, only binderies didn’t have the same slow season, something to be grateful for.
Aaron looked up from his studying. “You know Mama, we heard this week a man from the police department give a talk—”
“They’re going to teach college students how to beat up workers too?” I was trying to keep the mood light, only teasing him.
He scowled. “Everything by you is politics and you don’t even know from politics.” Aaron turned back to Bina. “As I was saying, he told us that after two years of college we could take the police exam and be hired right away.”
Everybody looked at him in amazement. Leon, who liked to stay out of our family discussions, found his voice first. “The police? The police? My God, Aaron!” he could barely croak.
“Look, Leon, the whole Lower East Side’s controlled by the Irish,” Aaron said. “Why should they get paid to walk around our neighborhoods? I’d do a better a job.”
“Think, Aaron, what kind of job they’ll ask you to do,” Leon implored.
“I know sometimes it will be hard.”
“Hard?” Rose said, looking perplexed.
“Hard. But better me than some Irish man with a grudge against Jews in the first place.”
“You’re going to have to work with those Irish every day,” I said.
He threw up his hands as if we were flies bothering him. “I knew I should have talked to Ma alone.”
“What about finishing college? Your father was hoping you’d want to be a lawyer,” Bina raised her eyebrows at him. It was the first time that night I’d seen her turn away from her sewing completely.
“College takes a long time,” Aaron said, “and we all know Papa isn’t doing so well here. You know what a beginning policeman makes?”
“Enemies,” I said. He pretended he hadn’t heard.
“Thirty dollars a week! On that a man could afford even to get married.”
Bina stood up and stared at him. “You’re planning to get married?
A guilty look crossed Aaron like a cold wind. “I’m just saying, Mama. Think of what a help $30 a week would be.”
She shook her head. “Come and eat. I don’t want to hear any more of this.”
“But—”
“I said no more. I know you’ll do what you want to do, the same as your brother did, but you don’t have to spoil our evening. Speaking of brothers, where’s Ephraim?”
“I saw him on Second Avenue, by the theater, missus,” Leon said. “I’m sorry, I forgot. He said not to wait for him for dinner.”
On Monday nights the Turkish baths were crowded. We sat together on the wooden bench, sweating, taking in deep breaths. I passed my chunk of ice to Rose and she licked it, knowing I was watching.
“Look,” I said, holding up my hands, pressing my thigh close to hers, “almost all the yellow is gone already.”
Rose retucked her towel and reached for my right hand. She turned it over, inspecting it in the steam. I closed my eyes. Every touch was loaded with double meanings. In the bathhouse women scrubbed each other’s backs, slapped their friends’ rears, pinched cheeks and whatever fat they could get between their fingers, admiring, commenting. Women groaned and sighed taking off their corsets, running their fingers along the indentations left by the tight lacings, mumbling about what they went through for men.
“Men,” someone said. “You just want to look stylish for the other girls in the workroom. You don’t have a boyfriend.”
“But I’m looking.”
“Always looking,” another voice registered, “is better than having babies and cooking.”
“Look who’s talking, Miss-Dances-With-Strangers.”
“So I like to have a good time. With a hundred dance halls in my neighborhood, I should deprive myself? What Papa doesn’t know doesn’t start an argument.”