Bertrand Court (6 page)

All those years of schlepping Irving around had given Sylvia a bad back, which now ached from walking four blocks with the bags holding her Rosh Hashanah feast: cabbage rolls, kishke, a brisket, an icebox cake, and a few raspberries from her backyard. She climbed the steps to Goldie's duplex, that old burn in her gut catching fire just from thinking about what had to be done. When she let herself into the kitchen, she was rattled to find a bag of Dunkin' Donuts and an old coffee cup on the counter. The potato bowl sat empty. Mama had taught Goldie and Sylvia to always keep a potato or two in the house to fill out a meal. The kitchen smelled clean, though — maybe too clean.

“In here, Heidi,” Goldie called out from the living room. “Did you pick up the chocolate chips?”

Heidi must be her help. Just like Goldie to order people to the grocery store. Sylvia smiled, relieved that her sister was up to her usual tricks, took a deep breath, and went into the living room, which smelled as her own had during Irving's last year, like fish and antiseptic.

Goldie looked as if her old chair — threadbare and faded to a mustard green — might swallow her up. Her arthritic hands sat folded on her lap, and as she shifted her weight, the plastic cover made a crinkling noise under her shrunken frame.

“Sylvia?” Goldie smiled like a child opening her first Hanukkah present, too surprised to show the practiced cold shoulder she'd been perfecting these past years.

“I brought you a few things.” Sylvia was still holding the shopping bags.

Goldie stared at her sister, grinning, adjusting her loose housedress, revealing her bony shoulders and freckled skin. “You know Viola Schnitz died. Dropped dead. Heart attack,” she said, as if she'd seen Sylvia just yesterday. She patted her chest.

Viola Schnitz had been dead for thirteen years, but maybe Goldie was just trying to make things easier. “Such a shame,” Sylvia said. Safer to talk about Viola than other things.

“She was as big as a house when she went. You never saw her that way, but I'm telling you, she must have been eating yeast.”

Goldie hadn't changed one bit. “She used to be movie-star gorgeous,” Sylvia said.

“Yeast, I tell you.” Goldie shook her head. “She used to be movie-star gorgeous.”

“I got you a present.” Sylvia set a bag of black licorice from the Pic 'n Save on the coffee table. Goldie and the help must drink a lot of coffee; rings from their mugs had ruined the table, the one that arrived right before Goldie hosted one of the last Rosh Hashanah lunches Sylvia attended. Goldie was so worried that this silly piece of furniture wouldn't come in time for her to show it off to the family.

Goldie grabbed the licorice bag and settled it on her lap.

“How are the kids?” Sylvia asked.

“Simon's getting married. Brenda. German Jew.” Goldie smiled with pride. “A bit of a snob.”

Simon and Brenda had been married for more than thirty years. Goldie's confusion ripped at Sylvia's heart. Sure, things hadn't always been easy with her sister, but Goldie had always been the rock, the bank, the fierce little girl who socked anyone who dared poke fun at Sylvia's lisp.

“You know, she looks just like you did back then, long and willowy,” Goldie announced.

“Your Hannah is much prettier than I was.” Sylvia could always follow her sister's thoughts, even now, when it seemed like someone had put them in a pot of soup and stirred them up good. Sylvia hadn't noticed how alike she and Hannah looked until she was rifling through old pictures last week, and she didn't much like the comparison. She wanted more naches out of life for her great-niece. It made her ache to know that Hannah was having trouble making babies too. Now, Amy, she was built like Goldie, peasant-like, short with a bosom, and mischievous and light, a real artist, but still a child that one.

“What else did you bring?” Goldie looked in the direction of the bags.

“Cabbage rolls, brisket, kishke, icebox cake, a few raspberries from the yard,” Sylvia answered; she wanted Goldie's Rosh Hashanah to be perfect. “Simon picked out the finest cut from the kosher butcher out by him and Brenda.”

Goldie's attention drifted; her eyes, once dark and bright, were grayish and watery. She patted the arm of the davenport that butted up against her chair. “Come, sit.”

Sylvia stepped around her bags and sat as close to Goldie as she could. Goldie's breath smelled like dirty flower water, and coarse, dark hairs sprouted from her chin.

“That's better,” Goldie said.

They sat together in silence for a few minutes. Sylvia took a deep breath, thinking Goldie wouldn't notice.

“Nu, what's on your mind, Sylvia, after all these years?” She was the old Goldie.

“I have something for you,” Sylvia said softly.

“I see, all that food. Simon will come with the kids, and we'll have a feast tomorrow.” She paused. “You'll be with us.” It was a statement, not a question.

“No, not the food.” As Sylvia was getting up to retrieve her handbag from the kitchen, she felt Goldie's fingers pressing into her arm through her thin sweater.

“Stay,” her sister commanded. “Hyman loves your icebox cake. He would wump up half of it if I didn't stop him.”

Hyman had been dead for ten years. “A good eater you married.”

“Twenty-five cents.”

Sylvia knew Goldie was talking about some kind of bargain from Saltzberg's, which had been replaced by a discount shoe store twenty years ago.

“Twelve ounces of chocolate for twenty-five cents at Saltzberg's. Dial up Zelda for me, dear. LOCUST-2424.”

“Mrs. Nosy Pants.”

“If I don't invite her, she'll mope around tomorrow and tell me that she fixed herself a ham sandwich and a warm glass of cola and listened to our family make such a racket that she couldn't take her nap.” Goldie frowned.

“That one.” Sylvia shook her head, almost convincing herself that Zelda was still utzing both of them, though she had died five years ago. Sylvia wished they could travel back to a time when Zelda was their biggest headache.

“I'll ask her to bring a potato kugel. She makes a decent kugel.” Goldie brightened with the germ of a new idea. “And maybe she'll pick up some chocolate chips for me at Saltzberg's. Twenty-five cents.”

The tarnished silver, Heidi the help's dreck on the counter, the nylon knee-highs falling down Goldie's bony white legs — it all reminded Sylvia of a darkened movie set after all the actors had returned to their regular lives, the props too worn to recycle.

“Otherwise, she's not so ai–yi–yi in the kitchen. Did I tell you that Viola Schnitz passed away?”

“A shame.”

“Heart attack. I've got new neighbors downstairs. Orientals. Big Packers fans, just like Hyman.”

Sylvia wanted the spoon in her hand so she could just give it to Goldie if she came back to the here and now. Sylvia wanted to take back all the years she'd been sore at her sister. What had made her so mad anyway? “Just a second, Goldie. I'm going to put the food in the Frigidaire.”

Goldie nodded toward the kitchen.

Goldie's fridge had never been so naked: a carton of yogurt, Velveeta cheese for the help, a few bruised apples, and some butterscotch pudding. Sylvia took the spoon out of her purse, slid it up her sleeve, and went back to the living room.

Goldie looked worn out as she gazed listlessly toward the park, at the Hmong grandmother sipping orange soda pop and the granddaughter skipping rope on Simon's old basketball court, her purple hair ribbon bobbing up and down in perfect time with her feet.

“Listen to me, Goldie.”

“You think I'm not listening?” She glanced at Sylvia, then back out the window.

Sylvia knew that glance, the glance toward the street that Sylvia stopped traveling when things got bad with Irving. “You've done good by me, Goldie.” She felt the spoon against her wrist. “You and Simon.”

“You're my Sylvia.” Goldie stated this as fact and stared straight ahead. “No matter what.”

Sylvia began pulling the spoon from her sleeve, and Goldie's head snapped toward her.

“For Hannah,” Goldie announced with finality, brushing her crooked thumb against Sylvia's sweater, grazing the hard metal.

“You give it to her,” Sylvia replied gently. She extended the spoon, and the shiny silver hung between them, charged with enough electricity to light up every lamp in the apartment.

Goldie touched the stem lightly, then pushed the spoon back toward Sylvia. “I could forget,” she said, her voice full with a joke, her eyes — smart, amused, bright — smiling at Sylvia. She winked, and then they giggled, softly at first, then loud and big, then deeper and deeper, from buried places: Mama's Rosh Hashanah table where Birdie Finkelstein bent a butter knife trying to slice her honey cake. Grandma Hannah's dresser stuffed with badly made wigs that they tugged over their braids. Cool spring nights when they crawled under the covers of the twin mattress they shared and gossiped about Hershel Klein's pickle breath. Hot Rosh Hashanah mornings when they sprang out of bed to dress Mama's icebox cake with whipped cream and maraschino cherries. Snowy February days when they woke up with frozen noses and breath that smoked. Huddled together for warmth, they'd listen for Mama's last noodge and then yank back the yellowed goose-down comforter from the old country and leap into the cruel winter morning.

A tear formed somewhere in the bottom of Sylvia's throat, but it never found her eyes. She poked around in her sweater sleeve for a tissue, just in case it did. Without looking at Sylvia, Goldie reached into her own sleeve and handed her sister a yellowed handkerchief.

Sylvia's heart filled up so full that she thought it might pop like a balloon. She felt Goldie watching as she spread the handkerchief on her lap and placed the spoon in the center. Before she folded the material around it, she paused to finger the faded pink embroidered roses and the inscription:
Always, Sylvia.

SKIN

Eric Solonsky, October 1995

O
n a warm Yom Kippur afternoon, Eric Solonsky stood on his front lawn, waiting for a delivery of Thai food and listening to the birds converse. A blade of overgrown grass brushed his ankle as he imagined his sisters, Hannah and Amy, and the rest of his family fasting and beating their breasts for a year's worth of sins in the main sanctuary of Hannah's synagogue.

He handed a twenty to a young man wearing an oversized Old Navy T-shirt and took a deep breath before returning to his in-laws and an exhausted Maggie, who was trying with a patient fervor to get their newborn to nurse. Eric felt useless in the pursuit, so he loitered for a few more minutes in the scraggly yard of 1935 East Bertrand Court, down payment compliments of his father. Maintaining a lawn, shopping at a store called Buy Buy Baby, ordering takeout on Yom Kippur, not to mention gathering thirty people, including his gentile in-laws, to watch his son's penis get whacked tomorrow at noon — it all seemed a little surreal.

He entered the house quietly through the back door and found Alec swaddled like a burrito, sleeping on top of Maggie's chest.

“He ate,” Maggie's mother mouthed. Maggie's parents had flown in from Milwaukee the day before Alec's birth.

Eric grinned at his wife, gave her a thumbs-up, and pointed to the brown paper bag of food in his hand. Without rousing Alec, Maggie managed to get up from the couch and lower him into the bassinet they'd set up in the family room. He'd left a spit-up stain the shape of Florida on her T-shirt, and one of her engorged breasts was nearly double the size of its partner. Loose flesh encased her middle, pimples covered her chin, and blue veins popped out of her calves. Eric had spent his senior year of high school, back in Milwaukee, fantasizing about Maggie Stramm's loveliness, and he still saw her as the cheerleader whose finely sculpted nostrils flared as she rooted for boys with athletic ability and smooth skin. Maggie hadn't remembered him ten years later when she saw him playing bass with a U2 cover band at an Earth Day fundraiser on Capitol Hill.

“Are you sure you don't want to stay?” Eric asked Maggie's mother, dutifully. “Looks like they gave us an extra order of pineapple fried rice.”

“Oh, gosh, I'm not an adventurous eater, although Will and I do go for chop suey now and then. What was the name of that Oriental family who went to your high school?”

Maggie bit. “Asian, Mom. They were Asian.”

“Oh, Maggie. Asian, African American, American Indian…Who can keep up? Eric, do you remember them?” Helene smiled at him.

“The Kimuras. They were Japanese, I think,” he answered.

No doubt, Helene said these things to rile Maggie, who worked for a diversity training company whose CEO regularly pinched her ass, but Eric guessed that Helene would have added Jews to the list if she were sipping her zinfandel at the club. In the heat of the wedding planning, Maggie had relayed Helene's comment that if she had to marry a Jew, she could at least have picked a lawyer or a doctor. He rationalized that Helene's comments were no worse than his mother's occasional remark about “those goyim and their cocktails.”

“Helene, let's let them get some rest,” Will urged, suitcase in hand.

Right about now, Eric's parents, also in town for the bris, were probably perspiring in their High Holiday wools and linens, chatting in the shadow of the enormous menorah outside the temple. They always took a break at one or one-thirty, right after Musaf.

Will kissed Maggie's cheek. “We're going to meander down to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial before we head over to Amy's.”

Amy was a saint for putting up Maggie's parents. “Call it a thank-you gift for that killer apartment, big brother,” she'd said of the apartment overlooking the zoo that Maggie and Eric had bequeathed to her.

Helene slid her purse up her arm, toned from hours on the tennis court, and snuck another peek at Alec. “I hate to run off when I could make another casserole or help you with the laundry.”

Helene had spent the past week knitting, whipping up concoctions involving Campbell's soup products, and telling nonstop anecdotes about Maggie's first days of life, while Will busied himself assembling baby gliders, swings, and strollers.

“Oh, no, Mom,” Maggie said. “Please, you've done enough. Go see the sights.”

After they said their goodbyes, Eric and Maggie took their Thai food into the kitchen and sat down at the Ikea table Eric had moved from apartment to apartment and finally this house.

“You okay?” he asked.

She rested her head on his shoulder. “Do you know what my mother told me? ‘I got back into my size four weeks after I had you, dear.'”

“Oh, babe.”

“And back then a size four was a real four!” Maggie looked in the direction of the den, where Alec was sleeping. “I promise never to count your calories, buddy,” she said, tearing into a carton of drunken noodles.

Eric registered the sounds of Maggie swallowing, Alec breathing through his stuffy little nose, the hum of the fluorescent kitchen lights — occupational hazard. He worked as an audio technician.

Maggie was eating so fast she was barely chewing. “You ordered these from Spices?” she asked through a mouthful of noodles.

“Only the best for the mother of my son.” They'd been doing a lot of this third- person kind of talk since the baby was born.

She gobbled up the rest of the order without speaking, spearing the last fat noodle with her fork. Then she said, “My parents don't get the bris thing.”

“Did you tell them that we're going to have him baptized too?” Eric asked.

She tossed the empty carton into the trash. “Of course. I tried to explain that a bris is a highly significant Jewish rite of passage rooted in a tradition thousands of years old, but achieving cultural competency isn't exactly their life's mission.” When Maggie was agitated, she peppered her speech with diversity-training jargon, nodding her head authoritatively at the end of every sentence.

“It will be over tomorrow.” He was eager to end the conversation.

“But I certainly wasn't going to tell them how hard it was to find a mole who would circumcise a baby with a Methodist mother,” she said, as if he hadn't spoken.

“Mole” was how she pronounced mohel, no matter how many times he'd said, “rhymes with boil, honey.” Whenever Maggie mentioned either the bris or the baptism, it was like having the barber part his hair on the wrong side of his head.

“Why don't you treat yourself to a nice hot shower while the baby's sleeping?” he suggested.

Maggie sighed, kissed him on the forehead, and trotted upstairs to the bathroom.

Eric tried to doze on the couch. While Helene and Will were taking in the new war memorial, his parents were probably enduring the hardest stretch of the fast, the two o'clock headache and grouchiness. For the first time since he married Maggie, he thought about the Yom Kippurs he'd spent as a kid, the mid-afternoon fights Amy picked with Hannah, and the sanctuary that reeked of the bad breath of hundreds of fasters who had gathered to hear the shofar, the signal that this day of torture was over. On the drive to Grandma Goldie's house, Eric and his sisters used to guzzle orange juice and wolf graham crackers, a warm-up for the table of bagels, lox spread, marble cake, and Aunt Sylvia's faithful pan of macaroni and cheese.

A wail interrupted the gentle ache creeping up on him, and Maggie rushed downstairs and swooped up Alec.

Eric stood over the glider, stroking Maggie's damp hair; Alec's jaw moved up and down furiously, and his tiny hand rested atop her breast. “Looks like he's getting the hang of it.”

Maggie nodded, gazing at Alec's profile. The phone rang, startling him, and he spit out a mouthful of milk and started to cry.

Eric grabbed the receiver.

“We're at Hannah's. What a ballabuste, as your grandma Goldie would have said,” Eric's mother announced. “She even made that god-awful icebox cake for the bris.”

Eric laughed, and his mother put his father on the line.

“You want to stop by?” Eric detected the urgency in Simon's voice. He knew that his father wanted nothing more than for the family to break the fast together.

Eric begged off, claiming the baby needed rest for his big day tomorrow, and stretched his arms out to Maggie, who handed over Alec.

“So did your parents give you a big guilt trip about not ‘breaking the fast' with them?” She made air quotes with her fingers.

He was expected to reply with some disparaging comment about Simon and Brenda, because this was how they spoke of each other's parents to one another —Maggie and Eric against the world — but he couldn't bring himself to do it today. “They understood.”

“Did you tell them how perfectly the fine chefs at Spices prepared your Yom Kippur shrimp?” She giggled meanly.

“I think our little guy has a present for us.” He felt the baby's wet warmth under his hand. “I'll take him upstairs and change him.”

Eric was relieved to have a moment alone with Alec. Maggie so rarely got on his nerves. He didn't mind the Christmas tree she plunked in the living room last December, or the ham and chocolate bunnies she served to a tableful of her friends last spring, but this bris talk felt different. Bad different. Uncomfortable different. He and Maggie had married quickly, out of passion, against their parents' wishes. They assured everyone that they'd figure out this interfaith stuff, that Maggie understood better than anyone how to merge two cultures.

When he came back downstairs, he saw that Maggie had leaked breast milk on the T-shirt she'd borrowed from him. He jumped at her request to run to the mall and pick up some nursing pads.

Eric felt insanely Jewish trolling through Montgomery Mall on Yom Kippur. He surveyed the array of shoppers, taking note of the varieties of blond: a highlighted soccer mom lugging a huge Crate and Barrel shopping bag, a dishwater twentysomething manning an electronics kiosk, a towheaded toddler wearing the remnants of a chocolate ice cream cone on her chin. Would Alec inherit Maggie's hair? Would he turn out dark-haired, pockmarked, and irreversibly chubby, like the Solonsky men?

A heavily perfumed saleswoman smiled at him when he walked into Mimi Maternity in search of breast pads. After discussing Maggie's cup size at excruciating length, they picked out their best estimate of the right-size pads.

He wandered down to Sears to look for a lawn mower. Why not? He'd tried to convince himself that his unkempt lawn hadn't embarrassed him when his dad pulled up to the house the day before. He wouldn't have felt as ashamed had he been able to cover the entire down payment. God, this was the first time he'd taken money from his father since high school. He'd sworn that he'd make a decent living without a college degree (dyslexia made school excruciatingly frustrating). He wasn't going to be an “Uncle Irving,” the guy who leeches off of everyone in the family. Until he'd met Maggie, he was content to live on what he earned as an audio technician. He could wire a dozen mics in half an hour and deliver audio so clean it whistled. Phil Scott, one of the best videographers in town, had anointed him his soundman. He would never make as much money as his dad or the lobbyists, lawyers, and businesspeople who peopled Bertrand Court, but he took pride in his work.

He bought Maggie warm chocolate chip cookies from Mrs. Fields, then meandered down to Sears and picked out a modest rear-bagging job for $279.98.

When Eric returned home, Maggie was covered in spit-up. “He hasn't stopped fussing since you left.”

Alec was arching his back and flailing his arms. Eric held the baby's little chest in his hand and patted him on the back, the way he'd seen his sister do once with his niece Goldie. The baby let out three enormous burps.

Maggie looked at him wide-eyed. “How did you know how to do that?”

“Hannah showed me.”

Her eyes started to well up. “Christ, Eric, you've got to take your cell phone with you. You have a kid,” she reprimanded him, but in a grateful, almost loving voice.

Eric handed her the nursing pads. “These are the most absorbent brand on the market.”

Maggie laughed.

“I brought you cookies.”

“So much for getting my figure back.”

She rested her head on Eric's shoulder. He felt better now, like they'd recovered a semblance of their old selves, the unlikely match whose love would conquer all. He turned on the TV and rubbed Maggie's neck while she fed the baby and they watched reruns of
I Love Lucy
, disregarding Hannah's advice to take turns sleeping.

Maggie sat in the backseat of the car with Alec during the three-mile drive to Hannah and Danny's enormous house with a wraparound porch that had been featured in
Washingtonian Magazine
. Realtor Danny had a gift for scouting out houses, or “killer screaming investment deals,” as he would say through his hundred-watt smile.

Hazy sunlight streamed through the trees that fortressed the living room windows, and Brenda had filled the house with bouquets of light-blue balloons inscribed with “Welcome to the world, Alec!” She'd covered rented tables with “It's a Boy!” cloths and garnished bakery platters with fake chocolate cigars with Alec's name penned in pale blue icing. (This was tame compared to Eric's Beatles-themed bar mitzvah, complete with Ringo, John, Paul, and George centerpieces.)

Hannah had purchased the items on the mohel's list: a tube of Neosporin, Vaseline, and gauze pads. Eric tried to listen as Rabbi Katzen explained how to care for Alec's penis, but a familiar electricity filled the air, the kind that would invade his gut if he showed up at a shoot that had imploded or a gig where his band sounded like ass.

After Rabbi Katzen finished, Eric stood still and listened to the din of voices in his sister's living room: his mom asking Maggie's parents how they'd enjoyed their night in Amy's apartment; Maggie cheerfully explaining the significance of the bris to her running partner; Phil predictably hitting on Amy, who leaned into him while opening the ceremonial bottle of Manischewitz. Amy's laugh, hyenaesque and normally infectious, was like an ice pick in his eardrum. Maggie's father's kippah slid down to cover half his boxy forehead.