Streets of Gold (43 page)

“I learned a trick,” the old man says, and chuckles with the memory, “
such
a trick, Rivke, it fooled those
farshtinkener
Cossacks. There was a man in the ghetto, he knew already about army raids from the Crimean War, when they used to come, the Cossacks, and take away the young men to get killed by the French. So he showed me a thing to do with my leg, do you want to see, Rivke, I can still do it. I paid him plenty; it cost me, don’t worry. But when they came the next time, the Cossacks, I did the trick, this is the trick,
bubeleh
, see?” he says, and he rises from his rocker and before Rebecca’s astonished eyes he pulls his left leg up into the socket where leg joins hip and makes the leg a full two inches shorter than it normally is. Still chuckling, he grasps the leg between both hands again, and manipulates it, freeing it from the socket. “They thought I was a cripple, those
paskudnyaks
,” he says, laughing. “I never went in their army; for what reason should I go?”

Every Wednesday night, when she is old enough, her grandfather Itzik takes her to the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue. She watches with her green eyes wide, catching only some of the dialogue, listening to her grandfather as he patiently explains what is happening on the stage and the people in the rows in front of them and behind hiss
“Shah! Shah!”
When she is eight years old and she catches the whooping cough, it is her grandfather who takes her out to Coney Island every day in the dead of winter, and stands on the boardwalk with her and tells her to breathe deeply of the fresh ocean air, this is the way to get rid of the racking cough. “Breathe,
bubeleh
, in, out, in, out, good, darling, good.” Her sister is a beautiful child, with green eyes like Rebecca’s, but with blond hair and a pert
shiksa
nose. “She looks like a regular Shirley Temple,” everyone says, and Rebecca knows this is because her mother rolls Davina’s hair into those long blond curls. One night, when her grandfather comes home from work — he works with her
other
grandfather, who owns a business in the garment center, and whom she does not like — he finds her sitting in the middle of her room with her Shirley Temple doll on the floor, her hand wrapped around its leg, the head caved in. He asks her why she did that. “Why did you
do
that, Rebecca? The doll cost me fourteen
dollars!
” She tells him the doll slipped out of her hands.

She loves her father, but she hardly ever sees him. He comes home late more often than not — her mother explains that he goes to his card games — and then he marches directly into Davina’s room and Rebecca can hear him laughing with her, and tickling her; he tickles her under the chin all the time, he never tickles Rebecca. He is a big man, her father, six feet four inches tall and weighing 220 pounds. Everyone is always mistaking him for a detective. He is very tough, her father. She can remember when she was six years old and a black man came in the store, her grandfather’s dry-goods store, and tried to steal a bolt of cloth, good cloth, too, not a second or anything. Itzik had his eye on the black man from the minute he walked in the store, he wasn’t going to let no
shvartzer
take from him. But the man was fast, he snatched up the bolt and ran for the doorway, and Rebecca’s father was just coming in to tell Itzik not to forget supper was six o’clock tonight because Sophie had to go to Screeno. He saw the black man running off with the bolt of cloth, and he picked up a broom that was near the doorway, and chased the man all the way over to Third Avenue. When he caught him, the man pulled a knife from his pocket — “You always have to watch those niggers for knives,” her father said later, “they all carry knives” — but he took the knife away from the man and beat him up and told him if he ever came anywhere
near
the store again, he would be one dead nigger.

Sometimes, her father takes her for a walk on Saturday, and these are the times she likes best, when she is alone with him, and he lets her stop outside the open door of the delicatessen, and allows her to sniff the aromas pouring out onto the sidewalk — the sour pickles in the barrels, the corned beef and the pastrami, the knishes, the fresh rye bread, the kosher hot dogs. For the longest time, she thinks delicatessens are only for sniffing. She later learns that whenever her father takes
Davina
for a walk, he buys her a knish, or a piece derma, or a nickel-a-shtickel, or some shoe leather, which is dried apricot and delicious. Her father owns a Studebaker with a rumble seat. When they go for a ride in the country, her father, her mother, and her sister sit up front. Rebecca sits in the rumble seat. She does not mind this because she makes up stories about the clouds, sitting with her head back against the leather cushion and watching the sky as the car heads up toward the Catskills — and besides, Davina is just a baby. They keep telling her Davina is just a baby. In the mountains, they stop for lunch at her Aunt Raizel’s
kochalayn
, which is a bungalow she rents near one of the big hotels. It is only three rooms and a kitchen with a big stove. Her Aunt Raizel has a daughter named Hannah. Hannah has black hair and brown eyes, but Aunt Raizel does her daughter’s hair in the same long Shirley Temple curls. Once, on the way back from the mountains, it begins to rain, and Rebecca pulls the rumble seat closed above her, and then cannot open it again, and is afraid she will not be able to breathe. Her father does not discover that the seat is closed until they stop for gas. He opens it, looks in at her, and says, “Why did you do that, Rebecca? You could have suffocated.” Her face is streaked with tears, her nose is dripping snot. She answers in a very small voice, “It was raining, Daddy.” The only time Davina sits in the rumble seat with her is once coming back from the mountains, when her father stops to help a priest who has a flat tire and no spare. Her mother and Davina get in the rumble seat with Rebecca, and the priest sits up front with her father and the tire. Her father lets the priest out at a filling station near the Washington Bridge. That night, when they are eating supper at home, her father says, “He was an interesting man, the
gaylach
.”

She is an enormously bright child; her teachers have told her mother that her IQ is 154. She has skipped from 1A to 2A, and again from 4B to 5B, and at the age of ten, she is the youngest child in the sixth grade. But her sister has moved out of kindergarten into the first grade, and some of the teachers Rebecca once had are now beginning to notice Davina, and stopping Rebecca in the hallways to comment on how beautiful her younger sister is. Sometimes, she tries to look at her sister objectively. She studies the green eyes, so like her own, and the blond hair — well, her own hair had been blond when she was a baby, it did not become red and ugly till she was three; perhaps Davina’s hair will change, too. She supposes it is the nose. She stands before the mirror and lifts the end of her nose with her middle finger. Her hand hides her mouth, which she considers her best feature, so she raises her arm above her head, and reaches down for the tip of her nose with her hand upside down. When she exerts the tiniest upward pressure, her nose becomes very much Davina’s nose. She asks her grandfather one day whether she should have her nose cut off.

“Your
what
?” Itzik says.

“My nose, Grandpa. Should I get a nose job?”

“What is
that
, a nose job?”

“They fix your nose,” she says.

“There’s nothing wrong with your nose. That’s your grandmother Rivke’s nose. That’s a beautiful nose.”

“Mm,” Rebecca says, but she does not believe him. If it is such a beautiful nose, why is it that none of the movie stars have it? Or none of the models in the magazines? If it is such a beautiful nose, why does everyone tell Davina she’s a regular Shirley Temple? She is getting very tired of Davina and Shirley Temple. Her mother has encouraged Davina to learn the words to “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” and whenever there is company, Davina sings the song and tap-dances around the living room, and everyone exclaims how beautiful and talented she is, and Rebecca wants to go into the bathroom to throw up. Whenever no one is watching, she hits Davina, who runs screaming into the kitchen. Rebecca is invariably punished for the attack, but she doesn’t care because she would rather be in her own bedroom with her treasured books than in the living room with Davina tap-dancing all over the place. In a book called
Ivanhoe
, she discovers a woman named Rebecca. Rebecca is the heroine. She reads the description of the fictitious Rebecca over and over again, until she has memorized it:

She does not finish the book, it is much too difficult for her, but she has gathered from it precious ammunition to use against her sister.

“I’m in a book,” she tells her.

“So am I,” Davina says.

“You
are
not!” Rebecca says.

“I am
so
.”

“Where? What book?”

“In a book Mommy has in her room. It’s Davina’s Baby Book, and it tells all about me. How much I weighed and things I said when I was little, and everything about me.”

Rebecca does not have a baby book. She takes
Ivanhoe
back to the library and tells the librarian it was lousy. In 1939, when she is eleven years old and enters junior high school, she is jubilant because it means she can escape little Shirley Temple for at least the length of the school day. In the seventh grade, there is a big fat girl named Rosalie, who becomes fast friends with Rebecca — perhaps because Rebecca is the only one in the class who doesn’t call her Fat Stuff, after one of the cartoon characters in
Smilin’ Jack
. One day, when Rebecca is telling Rosalie about what a pain her little sister is, Rosalie says, “Why don’t you just kill her?”

“Always singing and tap-dancing,” Rebecca says.

“Yeah, kill her,” Rosalie says. “Drown her in the bathtub.”

“You could go to jail for that,” Rebecca says.

“No, they don’t send little girls to jail,” Rosalie assures her.

Rebecca considers the idea. She and Rosalie talk about it often and seriously, concocting new methods of murder each time, some of them quite bizarre. Sitting on the front stoop of their tenement, picking their noses, they talk about hanging little Davina, or poisoning her (Yeah, but where would we get the poison? The man in the drugstore would remember us), or throwing her off the roof, or — and this causes both of them to burst into hysterical laughter — holding her head in the toilet bowl. Sophie Baumgarten heartily disapproves of the relationship with Rosalie, even though she knows nothing of these dire plans for murdering her regular Shirley Temple. She disapproves of Rosalie only because she is fat.

“Fat,” she says, “disgusting,” she says, and spits on the extended forefinger and middle finger of her right hand.
“Ptoo, ptoo!”

“What’s wrong with fat?” Rebecca says. “And anyway, she isn’t fat.”

“She’s fat as a horse,” Sophie says.

“Well,” Rebecca says, “she’s my friend.”

“Some friend.”

“She’s my
best
friend.”

“Better you should find yourself a Goodyear blimp,” Sophie says.

In school, whenever the friends are together, the other kids begin to chant, “Fat and Skinny had a race/All around the pillowcase/Fat fell down and broke his face/Skinny won the race.”

“Yaaaaaah,” Rebecca says, and sticks out her tongue.

In the fall, when her father buys the Oldsmobile agency, they move to the Bronx. She misses Rosalie dreadfully, and at her new school she is very wary of making friends. Around the house, she is quiet and unresponsive. She reads now more than she did in Manhattan. Sometimes she memorizes long passages from the encyclopedia. Her mother tells her she must take piano lessons. She begins these when she is thirteen. She hates the piano, and she plays badly. Once, in the kitchen of their apartment, her father’s friend Seymour asks, “How old is she now, Abe?” and her father looks at her as though discovering her for the first time, and is silent for a moment, and then says, “Gee, I don’t know. How old
are
you, Becky? Eleven? Twelve?” He knows
exactly
how old Davina is. Davina is nine years, two months, and seven days old. She was born on July 12, 1932. Her father knows the date by heart. “Sunshine was born that day,” he says, smiling. “My little sunshine. Sing ‘My Little Sunshine’ for me, baby.” Davina no longer sings “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” thank God. Nor, at the age of nine, does she any longer sport those Shirley Temple curls Rebecca once found so distasteful. Instead, she combs her hair the way Veronica Lake does, hanging over one eye. Rebecca thinks her sister is too young to be imitating a sex-pot movie star, and she tells this to her mother. Her mother says, “Look who’s talking.”