Stuffed (18 page)

The Lieban girls—Gertie, Polly, and Ruthie— in their black dresses and princess-length pearls

MEAT LOAF

The phone rings. It’s 6:30 a.m.

“Did I wake you?” my sister says.

I tell her the dream: “We went for a walk. A deer was lying on the sidewalk. Two dogs had eaten its innards and were licking their chops. The deer kept trying to stand up. It didn’t know it was dead. Its baby, a black goat, watched from across the street.”

“Wow!” my sister the therapist says. “That’s the worst dream I ever heard.”

I make a pot of coffee. My friend Brenda calls. “I need a jacket,” she says. “My jacket’s shot to hell.”

“Mine too.”

We meet after work and head up Madison. Two women pass us wearing The Jacket. The Jacket was designed for a purpose, so it defies trends. It’s a seventeenth-century alpine boar-hunting jacket. It comes with options, like a car.

“Oh, look!” I point to a store window. “They have The Jacket!”

We go into the store. The Jacket is $695 stripped, without the lining, without the hood.

“Jackie had three of them in mushroom.” The saleslady flips to one the color of dirt.

She holds up another jacket. It’s the color of phlegm.

“Moss would match your eyes,” she says.

“When does The Jacket go on sale?” I ask.

“Never,” the salesperson huffs. “It only goes up.”

At Fifty-ninth Street, standing in front of us, a woman is wearing The Jacket. Something about her looks familiar. It’s Aunt Harriet.

“Hi, Aunt Harriet,” I say.

She looks at me. “Who are you?” she says.

Aunt Harriet is Little Stuff, my father’s younger sister. His older sister, Aunt Helen, never recognizes me either.

“It’s Patty,” I say. “Your niece.”

“Patty! Well, for Pete’s sake! How’s your dad?”

We chat till the light changes. When Aunt Harriet is out of sight, Brenda cracks up. I have to explain that for reasons I’ve never understood, neither of my father’s sisters ever recognizes me. I grew up with them, we had Thanksgivings together, I look just like my father, but when I run into his sisters, I have to tell them who I am.

We give up on the jacket and say good-bye. It’s too late to start dinner. I pick up some Kentucky Fried Chicken. It costs $10.99 for a ten-piece bucket, even though the KFC commercial says it costs $8.99.

At dinner no one wants the chicken. I’ve reheated it in extremis so you can’t taste how greasy it is. There are some foods that are better over-hot, that get inedible as their temperature drops. Gummy soup. All fast food. Fried scungilli. Fried anything except bacon, which is good no matter how cold it gets. Stew.

A pizza will take forty minutes. The kids are not happy. That’s when I think of it: Aunt Gertie’s meat loaf. Whenever I make Aunt Gertie’s meat loaf, I make two. One for dinner, one for the freezer. It’s a form of security. This is what microwaves are for.

At five feet ten inches, Aunt Gertie was the tallest of the three sisters. She was also the firstborn, so she got to accompany her father on trips. Louis Lieban was a hat drummer. He went up and down the East Coast with his daughter selling hats. All the sisters had what was called a hat face. They looked good in hats, knew how to put them on. You can give a beautiful hat to a beautiful woman, but if she doesn’t know how to wear it—the right angle, the right attitude—it can look dopey or worse. Whereas a woman who might seem ordinary, in the right hat she becomes a siren, a vamp, a pixie, a coquette, a dependable human being, someone to be reckoned with, innocent or mysterious. A hat more than any other article of clothing creates an instant persona. A good hat has an idea. It’s a frame for your face. Too bad women don’t wear hats in America much anymore. They’re a shorthand for telling people who you think you are in the world, who you want to be. The taking off and putting on of a hat is a small piece of theater. Even when there is no audience, the act of putting on a hat is performed, it gets you into character. Think of the simple Basque beret, the many ways to wear it, what each way means and how each way makes you feel. Think how color options modify that.

Aunt Gertie preferred sophisticated hats with drama. She had perfect posture, and no matter what life flung at her, walked as if she were being coronated. She wore my mother’s old suits as if they’d been fitted by Balenciaga. She wore my grandmother’s cast-off furs draped loosely like Maximillian’s. My grandmother was shorter and bulkier than Gertie, but certain fur coats are sizeless: a sheared swing beaver, a single-breasted mink with revers, a Russian broadtail greatcoat with a shawl collar. Aunt Gertie didn’t get anything first. Even her money was secondhand. When my grandmother began getting Social Security, she signed the check over every month.

Aunt Gertie had one child, Wallace Shultz. During his birth, bacteria entered Aunt Gertie’s bloodstream. Antibiotics weren’t in use yet. She was dying of sepsis, and Wally, unnursed, was what the hospital called failing to thrive. Polly had given birth to my mother three months earlier, so on the pretext of visiting Gertie, she sneaked into the nursery and stole Wally. When she got home, she dialed the hospital. “Don’t look for him,” my grandmother said. “I got him.”

Polly breast-fed Wally along with my mother, fattening him up while her sister rallied. (Gertie never got over not being able to nurse her son. She poured heavy sweet cream on Wally’s cereal every morning of his life till the day he got married.) Wally grew into a dashing black-haired man, six feet three, tall like Gertie, with her delicate nose, leading-man handsome. But as an infant, there was a stunning anomaly. Wally was born with too much hair. It didn’t stop at his forehead. It went down to his eyebrows. The sides of his face to below his ears were napped like an ape’s. He was Wally the Wolfbaby.

My grandmother wasn’t worried. Newborn hair usually falls out. His forehead would grow. She went to work. She stitched up a drawstring cap that, when tightened, covered Wally’s brow and cheeks. Only his eyes, nose, and mouth showed. When Aunt Gertie was ready to leave the hospital, Nana wrapped Wally in a receiving blanket and pulled on the hat. Aunt Gertie had never seen her son. From the divan in Polly’s bedroom, she stretched out her arms.

“Bring me my son,” she said.

Nana carried the little bundle in. Aunt Gertie reached for him. She kissed him. “I can’t see his face,” she said. She untied the cap and pushed it back. She fainted.

Like everyone in the family (except Granny Ethel), Aunt Gertie met her husband on a blind date. Dike Shultz was a tall courtly gentleman from Greensboro, North Carolina, whose manners were widely admired. His family owned a department store but threw him out when he misappropriated some money. Dike Shultz turned out to be a compulsive gambler. My grandfather set him up in Herman’s Luncheonette at 284 Pearl Street near the courts, but Dike didn’t have the disposition for restaurant work. He couldn’t hurry.

“Nobody was fast like my father.” Mom laughs. “He had wheels.”

Dike reduced his family to poverty, moved to Washington, D.C., then died there of pneumonia. Dike Shultz, the gambler. I was certain, growing up, that he was really Dutch Schultz the racketeer, that he’d been upgraded to gambler for the sake of appearances.

Penniless, Aunt Gertie had to move out of apartment 2C in the family building, 845 West End Avenue. She moved around the corner to a small first-floor apartment on 101st Street and Riverside Drive. My grandfather offered her a restaurant to manage, but she wanted to be home for Wally. Then my grandmother got an idea. Gertie would take in “a line.” From her apartment she would represent a dress manufacturer and show his clothes. My grandmother called her brother Jerry in Norfolk, where he had the children’s department at Rice’s Department Store.

“Gert needs a line,” Polly told him. “See if you can get Gert a line.”

Gert got a line. But how do you lure customers to 101st Street to try on dresses in an apartment?

“Get these sizes,” my grandmother said, and handed her sister a slip of paper. On it Polly had written the sizes of all the women in the family. For a year the family only wore dresses from the line, but the customer base never increased. Aunt Gertie went under.

She had taste. She was refined. She got a job as a saleslady at Sachs Thirty-fourth and brought Wally up on her own.

“Gert, you’re so good,” the sisters would say. “Why don’t you work at Saks?”

“I like Sachs,” she’d answer. “I feel safe there. They know me.”

Nineteen years after Dike died, Aunt Gertie had her first date. By this time she was forty-seven. The next morning, she called my grandmother to report.

“He had a car,” she told Polly. “But a terrible overcoat.”

“He has a car?” Polly said. “He can take you places, and Herman will buy him a new overcoat.”

“He had hair in his ears.”

“He can go to Herman’s barber.”

“His hankie wasn’t pressed.”

“Look,” my grandmother said, “the rod in your guest closet is down. He could put it up, Gert.”

“For a dollar I can have the superintendent put it up.”

The few times people introduced Aunt Gertie to a man, she found something unforgivable. “He had bad breath, darling.” She would wrinkle her nose. “There was dirt under his fingernails.” In all, she had four dates. Her last date ever, I asked Aunt Gertie how she liked him.

“He used my
bathroom.
” She shuddered.

“What happened? Did he leave the seat up?”

“You don’t want to know, darling.”

“Yes, I do.”

“A
spatterer.
” She rolled her eyes.

Once, I asked Aunt Gertie if she missed being held by a man. “I never liked the he-she thing,” she said.

Aunt Gertie played the piano by ear. She had a nice singing voice. “She could always be fun,” according to my mother, “if the situation allowed it.”

“What does that mean, Ma?”

“She could sit at the piano and play.”

For family gatherings we’d drive downtown to the southern reaches of Stuyvesant Town, a postwar Howard Roark–pure complex that 25,000 New Yorkers in 8,755 apartments called home. Opened in 1947 for World War II veterans, it covered eighteen square blocks. Stuyvesant Town was another Robert Moses big dream, this one financed by Metropolitan Life. We’d pick Gertie up at her Fourteenth Street entrance and drive her to Mom’s. I’d get in the back with my children, and she’d sit rigid in the front, directing all comments to the windshield. When my daughter had trouble hearing her, she’d scream, “Look around, Ger-treeeeeee!” Then we’d laugh and start eating her glossy butter cookies.

“Darling, make sure you return the tin,” Aunt Gertie would say in her normal voice. On the phone she had another voice. Although Aunt Gertie never allowed pets, she spoke to me the way I spoke to mine. Aunt Gertie spoke cutesy-poo. She mimped.
Ooo dat?
for Who’s that?
Owsh my pwecious widdle dirl?
Yesh
for Yes. And her favorite:
In’t see koot?

At my grandmother’s Thursday-night dinners, after my sister and I had performed a duet like “A You’re Adorable, B You’re So Beautiful,” or put on the latest version of “Pat and Jo’s Showboat,” after the adults had been seated, it was customary to walk around the table and kiss each one hello. “Hello, Aunt Lil!” “Hello, Aunt Ruthie!” Some used their thumb and first finger to squeeze your cheeks together and say, “Could you eat her up?” Some patted. Aunt Gertie pinched. Fast as a lizard, she’d swing her right hand out of her lap and drive it up my dress, then under my underpants. She pinched my naked behind as if she were working hard clay. It never occurred to me to protest. I assumed I was supposed to like it. Aunt Gertie loved me. Why would she do it if it wasn’t right? I put pinching in the category of Things Done to Me I Don’t Like That Must Be Okay: Dr. Bronstein, the dentist, who rubbed my right breast with his forearm when he drilled, Cosmé McMoon, the piano teacher who slapped my hands, Miss Haas, the teacher from P.S. 9 who called me Volk instead of Patty. “Volk, get over here!” There comes a time when you know some things are wrong. Until then it’s open season on children. Dr. Smith, the allergist, who asked my mother to leave the room, then gave me a vaginal exam when I was eight. It’s like the Jean Rhys story, the one about the old sea captain who visits the windward islands and takes the pretty young girl for walks, and one day, as they’re chatting, he shoves his hand down her blouse and lays it on her breast, and she thinks, Surely, it was a mistake.

Widowed, broke, alone, Aunt Gertie raised Wally then followed him to Florida when he went to the University of Miami. She wanted to make sure he took his cereal with cream. When Wally married a local girl who didn’t like her, Gert moved back to New York to be with people who did. Wally and his wife became hairdressers, and when he came north to visit, he would do Gertie’s hair. It was white by that time, and he styled it beautifully, massing it up, making more of it.

Aunt Gertie had her appendix removed, her ovaries, her uterus, her large intestine, parts of her small or vice versa. She had as many ectomies as you can have and still live. When she had pain, some things were automatically ruled out because they weren’t there anymore. It can’t be a gallbladder attack if you don’t have a gallbladder. Eventually, something misfired in all seven of her vital organs, and she blamed whatever else happened on her diverticulitis.

I wish I had something that belonged to Aunt Gertie. When I got married, she gave me an electric blanket. But I was a newly-wed, my husband was heat enough. I returned the blanket for some towels. I do have a photo of her, tall and timeless in a black taffeta dress with black lace over an illusion insert, a dress I would be happy to wear now. She’s standing next to my grandmother Polly, who is standing next to Aunt Ruthie. The Lieban girls are smiling in their princess-length pearls. So I have that wonderful picture of the three sisters, and I have Aunt Gertie’s recipe for meat loaf. She told me her secret ingredient. It was ice water. She added half a cup per pound of beef. “It keeps the meat moist, darling,” she said, and it does.

Aunt Gertie shared her meat loaf secret, but she refused to share her friends. Polly would invite Gertie uptown to join her canasta game, but Gertie never invited Polly down to hers. It pained my grandmother. It puzzled her. She was so good to Gertie. My mother postulated that Gertie fabricated her game, that she didn’t really have one. She just wanted people to think she did. It’s what William James said, If you act a certain way long enough, it becomes you. Aunt Gertie acted the role of the popular woman with a regular game, a woman in demand. Maybe she did have a game and just wanted to keep it to herself. It was the one thing she didn’t depend on my grandmother for. Gertie used Nana’s old lamps, her old sideboard, her old rugs and linens, cast-off everything but shoes. (Gertie’s left was an eight, her right a nine, forcing her to always buy two pairs. In her sixties a doctor told her she’d once had a mild case of polio.) My grandmother was the sister with children right close by, the decorated apartment, clanking jewelry, the successful husband. Aunt Gertie depended on her largesse. People don’t always like people they need. Centers of families are resented for being essential by the people who make them essential. The only power Aunt Gertie had in my grandmother’s life was denying her the privilege of joining her weekly canasta game, if the game existed. And yet I could picture Aunt Gertie sitting in her tiny apartment, back ramrod-straight, staring out the window and not answering the phone on “game” days. She just said she had a game so everyone would think she had a life. It wouldn’t surprise me. Aunt Gertie believed how she thought she appeared to people was how she was.