Stuffed (13 page)

“Poppy’s nicer to you since the hitting,” my sister said, punching me on the thigh.

“You could learn a lot from him, you know,” I said, grabbing her wrist with my fingernails.

Naturally I swore I’d never hit my kids. I’d make mistakes, just not that one. How could I do anything to them I hated done to me? I would never say, “None of your business.” Or “Because I said so.” I would never hit. Until I did.

It was almost midnight. First Polly needed water. Then she forgot to feed the fish. Then she forgot to turn the closet light off. Then she thought she saw a roach. Then she needed the closet light on. Then she forgot to pack her book bag. Then she remembered she’d forgotten to tighten her dental appliance. Then she couldn’t find her library book. Then she wanted more water. Then I hit her. I didn’t know I did it till I’d done it. I hit my child. I lost control. Would she be afraid of me? Would she think of me as the Hand Out of Nowhere? What if she thought she
deserved
being hit?

“I will never forget this moment as long as I live!” she said, pulling the covers up to her chin.

“Oh God, Pussycat. I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so exhausted! It’s almost one o’clock! You’re wearing me out! I want to live to be an old lady!”

“And I want to live to be ten,” she said.

We started to laugh. It seemed less bad.

“I love you more than every pine needle on every pine tree there ever was,” I said.

“I love you more than every hair on every head,” she said.

“Well, I love you more than every pea in every pod.”

I tucked her in, stuck my nose in her hair, then kissed her good night.

“I may have laughed,” she whispered in my ear, “but I’m never going to forget you hit me.”

“I know that,” I said.

My grandfather did not go to shul. He observed being Jewish two ways: On Yom Kippur he fasted all day and broke it by tossing back a jigger of slivovitz at sundown. And every night he prayed. I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t slept over. My grandmother would set up a cot between their twin beds. She made a tight bed with starched white sheets and a dense camel-colored Austrian blanket trimmed in velvet, said to cure arthritis. The bed was so pretty I hated to disturb it. I would tip myself up at the head, then tunnel in without rumpling the covers. “Herman,” my grandmother would say, “she’s like a worm! Did you ever?”

“Never!” he would say.

Before they turned out the lights, my grandfather would reappear in a sleeveless ribbed undershirt, boxer shorts, a gray homburg, and dark socks held up by garters. He’d pace back and forth at the foot of the beds, head bent, lips moving, an Amen blurted here and there. Then he would peel off his socks, place his hat on the dresser, and turn out the light.

“Colgate-Palmolive?” he would call from his bed.

“Up a quarter, darling.”

“Standard Oil of New Jersey?”

“Down an eighth.”

“Georgia Pacific?”

“Up three quarters.”

“Texaco?”

“Up a half.”

So this, I thought, is what married people do.

When my grandfather tripped and broke a rib in the store, he didn’t complain. “There’s nothing you can do for a broken rib, darling,” he explained. But he winced when he laughed, and he groaned when he coughed. Then he began to cough more. Finally, the doctor told us. He had cancer of the pleura, the tissue that surrounds the lungs.

I would visit him in Polyclinic in the West Fifties, the hospital I was born in. He would submit to needle aspirations with no anesthesia, the insertion of various drains and punch biopsies. He couldn’t wait to get back to the store. He didn’t know he never would.

No one told him he had cancer. It was my mother’s decision. He would live longer not knowing he was dying. He would be happier. He would live “not giving up.” He would die optimistic.

“What’s wrong with me, darling?” he would persist.

“It’s an infection,” we’d say. Or “You’re congested.”

Then he stopped asking.

During the last month of his life a doctor told me every breath he took was like trying to breathe with an elephant standing on his chest. By then he’d moved into my sister’s room. My grandmother was stuck in New York Hospital with her failed hip operation, and sick people often moved into our house. My mother knew how to make them comfortable. She knew what people needed and liked giving it to them. My bedroom shared a wall with two nervous breakdowns, one radical mastectomy, a divorce, my grandmother’s hip, and my grandfather’s lungs.

In November, when it wasn’t too cold out, we’d sit on the patio. He’d turn his face to the sun, and I would take dictation. There were Morgen’s recipes only he knew: Sauce Mousseline for the Brook Trout Stuffed with Fruits de Mer; Apple Fritters that accompanied the Jumbo Jersey Center-Cut Boneless Pork Chops. The secret in the Mashed Peas that went with the Extra-Thick Beef Tongue and Creamed Spinach. A high priority was Chopped Liver.

“The most important thing, darling, is you have to take the livers off the flame before they finish cooking. They have to still be pink inside. Off the flame, they continue cooking from their own heat. If you let them cook through in the skillet, they dry out. Take them off the flame when they’re pink, and they’ll stay moist. They won’t overcook.

“ ‘Take off flame while still pink. . . .’

“Then let them cool for fifteen minutes before adding the egg.”

I check my recipe files. I can’t find Morgen’s Chopped Liver. I call my father.

“Dad? Do you remember Poppy’s recipe for Chopped Liver?”

“How come every time a Jewish man gets a cold, a chicken has to die?” Dad says.

“Seriously, Dad.”

“All right, Petroushka. Got a pencil? Take one chicken. Kill it. . . .”

Do you have any regrets?” I asked my grandfather a week before he went to the hospital for the last time. He was thoughtful. Then he answered, “I didn’t buy the Carlyle during the Depression when I could have had it for a song. I let my accountant talk me out of buying 1450 Broadway when I could have had it for fifty thousand dollars. I didn’t invest in Chock Full O’Nuts, because I was sure Americans would never put up with that kind of service. And I didn’t buy Luchow’s when they were giving it away.”

He died ten days before I got married. I went to pick up what the hospital called his effects. A clerk handed me a clear plastic bag. In it were his long-sleeved yellow sweater, gray slacks, his Masonic ring, his wallet, and his bridge. In the wallet was his Social Security card, his Blue Cross/Blue Shield card, a twenty-four-year-old invitation to an elite New York bridge club my grandmother refused to let him join because other women would be there, a few singles, and one photograph. It was me, my high school graduation picture, a three-quarter view with a close-mouthed smile. I am gazing into nowhere. The white photographer’s drape exposes my shoulders and crosses my breasts. I am wearing Cleopatra eyeliner, and my clavicles are sticking out. It was the fashion in my high school for seniors to have dozens of their graduation pictures printed. You’d autograph them for your friends to put in their wallets. Your popularity was measured by the fatness of your wallet and the length of the elastic you had to sew on the tab to get it to close. I don’t for a minute think my grandfather carried the picture because I was special to him. Most likely I was the only person who ever thought to offer him a photo for his wallet. When I gave him the picture, he stared at it long and hard. Then he took the cigar out of his mouth and told me I was so thin and bony, I looked like a herring. The Herring Picture he called it. This I took as a compliment.

Aunt Ruthie makes the front page after hostage negotiators exchange her for two cigarettes. (She never kept kosher.)

BUTTER COOKIES

Your Uncle Albert and I had a whirlpool romance,” Aunt Ruthie tells me. Then she pauses. “Is that the word I mean?”

We’re having lunch to celebrate her eighty-ninth birthday. She dabs a little applesauce on her blintzes.

“I make the best applesauce,” she says. “You want to know the secret? I put in the pits.”

“You leave them
in
?”

“There’s taste in the pits,” she explains. “You quarter the apples, cook them in water, then you put them through a . . . through a . . .” The word is gone.

There are 159,260 women in New York City over eighty. You see them taking tai chi at the Y. You see them at Fairway elbowing toward the Florida grapefruits or examining the string beans one by one. They’re on the bus after ten and before three. In winter they wear woollies. You used to see them at the Women’s Exchange and Mary Elizabeth’s. You used to see them at Schrafft’s having tuna on toasted cheese bread and hot fudge sundaes with coffee ice cream. New York’s oldest women have outlived their hangouts. Most have outlived their husbands. One of them ran the marathon last year. Few are as lucky as Brooke Astor and Kitty Carlisle Hart and my mother’s friend’s mother Lola, who, at ninety-seven, stands on her dining-room table twice a year to clean the chandelier. What’s a little old lady anymore anyway? Grace Paley? Matilda Krim? Aunt Ruthie?

“If I live to be a hundred, I won’t finish these blintzes,” Aunt Ruthie says. “Take one, darling.”

“You really leave the pits in?”

“And the skin.”

Maybe you’ve heard of my Aunt Ruthie. She’s the woman who was taken hostage in her Bronx apartment by an ex-paratrooper on August 4, 1990. It was a hot night. She left her bathroom window open. José Cruz climbed in and held Aunt Ruthie at gunpoint for seven hours. BRAVE, the
Daily News
ran under her photo on page 1. YIDDISH CHARM NAILS SUSPECT, said the
New York Post.
He ate all her plums, a wedge of Jarlsberg, and three nectarines before the police exchanged her for two cigarettes.

“When you go to prison,” Aunt Ruthie counseled him, “take out some books. Learn a different profession. It’s important in life to get hold of yourself.”

Aunt Ruthie got hold of herself young. After graduating Morris High, she got a clerical job at the Pathé Exchange on West Forty-fifth Street. Aunt Ruthie couldn’t help noticing that the office supervisor, a Miss Maloubier, was taking lunch from twelve to four. Six months later Aunt Ruthie had Miss Maloubier’s job. “I was so fast and thorough, they advanced me.” She made fifty dollars a week, which she gave to her mother, who gave her an allowance. “That’s the way it was then, darling. I didn’t think anything else.”

A woman who looks like George Burns sits down at the table next to us. She knows Aunt Ruthie from the building and starts complaining about the super, how he mops the lobby using the same bucket of water he uses to mop the basement, how she’s been keeping an eye on him and she knows. When we finally disengage, Aunt Ruthie blinks at me in an exaggerated way. First one eye, then the other, then both, then one eye again. I think she is sending me a code that she doesn’t like the woman, so I nod to show I get it. Then Aunt Ruthie tells me she can’t see out of her left eye.

“You accept these things.” She shrugs. “No pain, thank goodness.”

Aunt Ruthie can remember the taste of her mother’s egg sandwiches and recite “All the world’s a stage.” But she’s puzzled she’s “lost” Latin. In 1930, when she married Uncle Albert—“I was attracted to him. He was the Beau Brummel type”—her mother-in-law insisted she retire.

“But you’d worked there five years. You loved that job. Didn’t you mind?”

“I ran sixteen girls in that office, but she was against it.
So
against it. At that time there weren’t many married women working.”

Aunt Ruthie’s not tough, but she’s resilient. She’s what you’d call old New York genteel. I worry that when she dies, her syntax will disappear from the universe. There should be a place that preserves the way women spoke, the way the Yivo Institute preserves Yiddish. For instance, when you agree with Aunt Ruthie, she prolongs the agreement with “Am I right?” as in:

AUNT RUTHIE: So help me, that woman looks just like George Burns.

ME: You’re right. She looks just like George Burns.

AUNT RUTHIE: Am I right?

“I’ll be jiggered,” she likes to say. “Out of this world.” “Isn’t it something?” “May I be struck with lightning.” “Honest to God.” “As I live and breathe.” “She’s not my cup of tea.” “Mixed vegetables.” “You should only never know.” “I could eat her up.” “Always the lady.” “I won’t hear of it.” “Vichy.” “Certainly.” “Frigidaire” and “Down below” or “
There.
”

Like the song says, she calls everybody “darling.”

“Darling, do you think you could find this for me in a fourteen?”

“I’ll have the toasted pimento cheese and a cup of coffee, darling, if you don’t mind.”

“Darling, if you have a seat on the aisle, I’d be so appreciative.”

And to me on the phone: “I had my hair done, darling. I wish you could see it.”

I ask her about a word my grandmother used to use.

“
Umbashrign?
It’s like God bless you. On that order, darling.”

Aunt Ruthie lives by herself. She’s not half of the New York Odd Couple, a widow and her live-in companion. You see these women on sunny days, walking with care or getting pushed. Aunt Ruthie does just fine, even though she was hit by a stolen van in front of Key Foods two years ago. She wound up with a broken hip and shoulder, and now, when she leaves the apartment, Aunt Ruthie uses a shopping cart for balance. She weights it with the Bronx Yellow Pages.

“I make out I’m going shopping.” She laughs. In her black tight skirt, black sweater, and black heels with patent toe caps, Aunt Ruthie looks stylish even with the cart.

A friend stops by our table and admires her red jacket.

“Trying to get noticed, Ruth?”

“Well, what do you think?” Aunt Ruthie jokes back.

Then she whispers, “The
Blair Catalog.
Thirty-nine dollars,” to me.

The three sisters—my grandmother Polly, Aunt Gertie, and Aunt Ruthie—all wound up having trouble walking. But it’s especially sad to see Aunt Ruthie with a limp. She and Uncle Albert were the family dancers. At every fancy function they took over the dance floor, chin-flicking to the tango, kicking out to the cha-cha, fox-trotting so it actually looked like a trot, spinning in smiling synch, clearing the floor, everyone watching as Aunt Ruthie’s fingers rested like the tip of a wing on Uncle Albert’s palm, our very own Fred and Ginger.

Every week Aunt Ruthie gets together with the girls. These are new girls. The old girls, her four best friends, are dead. And every week Aunt Ruthie gets her pageboy done. It’s still got a lot of black.

“Is that your real hair color?”

“I swear to you as my name is Ruth. But people don’t believe me, so I tell them I use shoe polish.”

Back at the apartment, Aunt Ruthie asks if I could use her mahjong set. When I admire a needlepoint pillow, she says, “Take it home.” I follow her into the kitchen. There’s Aunt Ruthie’s twenty-four-inch white enamel gas stove, the one that’s seen forty-three years of Chicken à la Thousand Island Dressing, Meat Loaf with Dole Pineapple Rings and Stuffed Cabbage with Ocean Spray Whole Cranberry Sauce, the vintage oven she uses for her butter cookies. The three sisters all made thumbprint butter cookies. They all used their mother’s recipe, but the cookies came out different. Nana’s were the roundest, Aunt Gertie’s were the flattest, and Aunt Ruthie’s were free-form. Nana’s were the butteriest, Aunt Gertie’s were the flakiest, and Aunt Ruthie’s used the most sugar. Nana’s were pale, Aunt Ruthie’s were brown, and Aunt Gertie’s shined because she alone painted the tops with egg white. The three sisters filled the thumbprint with jam or a chocolate morsel except for Aunt Gertie. In addition to jam and chocolate, Aunt Gertie improvised with walnut crumbs, although she was the only one who liked walnut crumbs. Sometimes Aunt Ruthie put a whole Hershey’s Kiss in the thumbprint, creating a cookie of high promise. But the sorry fact is, her cookies were inedible. Each time Aunt Ruthie gave me a tin, I’d try one, hoping this batch would be different, that I’d be able to taste the butter and vanilla, that this time they’d be good. I’d take a bite, raise my eyebrows, and go “Ummm . . . UMMMMM!” because that’s what Aunt Ruthie was waiting for. I’d smile and shake my head with faux wonder. Then I’d say, “They’re so good. Can I save them for later?” How could I tell her they had freezer burn and left an oil slick on the roof of your mouth? Once I learned to cook, I knew what was wrong. Aunt Ruthie didn’t use butter in her butter cookies. The Crisco must have been to save money.

Aunt Ruthie takes her carving knife out of a drawer. She unwraps a slice of marbled halvah from the birthday basket Mom sent from Zabar’s. With decisiveness she cuts a piece. Then, wrapping it in waxed paper, “This is for your
husband,
” she warns in a different voice. “
You
don’t need it.”

I never anticipate the zinger. When I’m with Aunt Ruthie, I’m having such a good time I forget she does that. Even though I may not have spoken to Aunt Ruthie for two months because of a past zinger, all is forgotten when I am swept back into the culture of my youth, when I am called “darling,” “light of my life,” or her favorite, “my love.” I am adored, adored. But then there it is—the Aunt Ruthie zinger. My heart and upper arms feel fizzy. It’s an adrenaline surge, the kind you get crossing the street when a car almost clips you.

This is for your husband. You don’t need it.

Zing! Does she think I’m fat? Zing! Zing! Was I going to scarf the slice on the Mosholu Parkway, allowing my husband to think I visited Aunt Ruthie without bringing something for him? That Aunt Ruthie provided no gift for the man of the house? Zing. Zing went the strings of my heart. What’s the matter with me? Can’t I have some halvah too?

It’s a shocker, the Aunt Ruthie zinger. She loves you to death, she loves you so incredibly much you forget she zings. Then she zings. Sometimes I take a little vacation. I don’t call. Then Aunt Ruthie phones, her voice wobbly, and says, “Why haven’t I heard from you, my love?” and I’m overcome with missing her. Why does every encounter come with one poison dart? Is it the power to hurt that proves you still mean something to somebody? Is it a tic? Is this why the daughter-in-law I never met won’t see her? Why the granddaughters don’t call? Why has she never seen and held her great-grandchildren? How does Aunt Ruthie survive the hole in her heart where family should be?

“For the life of me”—Aunt Ruthie dabs her eyes with a hankie —“I don’t know what I did. As God is my witness, you tell me, darling. What on the face of this earth did I do?”

This is the theme, the central gnawing conundrum of Aunt Ruthie’s every waking day. How can people hate an old lady so much they won’t let her see her own flesh and blood?

Some zings are breathtaking.

To a child having trouble in school: “Your brother gets nothing but straight A’s. What a pity you’re having such difficulties, darling.”

To an aunt with a weight problem: “Would you like a safety pin for that seam, my love? Fat people are so hard on clothes.”

To my mother whose hand-me-downs Aunt Ruthie depends on: “It cost me eleven fifty to fix the shoulders on the pink suit. Can you imagine, light of my life? Eleven dollars and fifty cents! It was that out of fashion.”

To me as she points to one of my children: “Now
that
child is extraordinary.”

What about the other one?

If you say, “Aunt Ruthie, it hurts my feelings you only inquire about one of my kids,” her jaw drops open like a nutcracker. “Darling, you misunderstood me,” she says.

Does she do it on purpose? Does she not know she does it? What’s in it for her? Why does she keep doing the thing that makes what she wants most in life impossible? Only once, when my mother refused to retreat, did Aunt Ruthie back down. “I know.” Aunt Ruthie wept. “I can’t help myself. Forgive me, Audrey darling. I don’t know why I do that.”

I cherish Aunt Ruthie for loving my grandmother Polly as much as she did. “There’s no words,” Aunt Ruthie says. “I don’t know how to describe her. She made up for everything heavy in my heart.” And for remembering details like how my grandmother wore her braids on her wedding day and how a woman could fake having a hymen on her wedding night with chicken blood. Aunt Ruthie is the last survivor of the generation that spawned my mother. She never complains about money. She’s never had any. She makes me think of my beloved godmother, whose financial security can’t do a thing for her Alzheimer’s. It’s advanced to the stage where my dearest Dorothy doesn’t know she’s Dorothy. The last time I took her to lunch, she couldn’t remember our names. We sat in a luncheonette on West Seventy-second Street, and she kept asking, ever polite because patterns of civility are the last thing to go, “Now, you are . . . ?” and “Who, may I ask, exactly are you?” The first few times I told her, “I’m Patty.” Then I’d say, “I’m Patty. Cecil and Audrey’s daughter, Jo Ann’s sister, Peter and Polly’s mother.” Then I took a paper napkin out of the dispenser and began writing it down. Each time she asked me who I was, I’d write Patty on a napkin and hold it up for her to read. Then she’d work the clasp of her bag, stuff the napkin in, and say, “Ahhhh. And how do I get in touch with you . . . uh . . . Patty?” So I’d take the napkin back and write my phone number on it too. When we used up all the napkins in our dispenser, I took a dispenser from an empty table. Each time I wrote my name and number down, Dorothy looked relieved.

We walked back to her apartment at the Majestic, her handbag crammed with napkins. Then I left the city for the weekend. When I returned Sunday night, there were nineteen messages on my answering machine: “Hello. . . . Who are you?” “Hello. . . . Where are you?” “Hello. . . . Who is this?” “Hello. . . . Who is Patty?” “Hello, this is Patty. Call me.” That was three years ago, when she was still able to speak. Aunt Ruthie is a reminder it doesn’t have to be like that, not with our gene pool.