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This was the age when my Mom sang “Twas on the Isle of Capri” at bedtime. I closed my eyes and clutched my toy pig with a music box inside its belly. It was a fuzzy, yellow pig with stains and vibrant-colored flowers sprouting from its body. My mom, who met my father while singing in a choir at Temple Ohev Tzedek, sang everything from Barbara Streisand’s “Funny Girl” to the top 40 hits of Judaism. Her voice was a warm caramel blanket pouring over us. Tender and innocent as it seemed as a child, “Twas on the Isle of Capri” is about love’s disappointment. A man in love with a woman finds a golden ring already placed on her finger by another. The last line was a killer, “Twas goodbye on the isle of Capri.” Goodbye love. It was a fitting precursor for the years to come.
At age six, my sister Evie and I had two pet mice named Felix and Arnold. We’d let them run through doors and windows of our Fisher Price miniature village in a race to see which would poop first. At bedtime when mom finished singing, the squeaking of their exercise wheel in the “habitrail” cage lulled me to sleep. Then one day, we found Felix and Arnold lying on their backs motionless in the habitrail tower. They were gone. A suicide pact of two brothers? Two lovers? A poisoned pellet of food? It was an unsolved mystery. I cried for days. I held tightly onto my remaining pets, border collie Annie, her scraggly son George, and goldfishies Fanny and Danny.
At seven years old, my older sister Valerie tried to burn my Barbie doll’s shoes in the Hanukkah candles. We were enjoying the soft glow of candles after an early sunset in December My big brother Bobby rushed to my defense. He tackled Valerie and pushed her through the door to the bathroom breaking the hinge. She tried to escape his grip, wrestling over the bathroom sink. We went from a peaceful picture, like a Jewish Norman Rockwell painting, to a scene from the World Wrestling Federation. I stepped aside and tried to fit the tiny melted shoes on the doll’s perfect little feet.
My brother wasn’t home much, he was in college at Ohio State studying Zoology, but whenever he had the chance, he defended me. He seemed so untouchable at times. During vacations, he worked on his cars like “Waldo I”, a beat up teal Dodge convertible with the words “Waldo I” painted on the front. Waldo wore a dejected expression on its grill, like it had given up hope to be anything but scrap metal. And after a long day working at Fisher Foods meat packing when he’d take off his blood smudged apron, my brother would retreat to his room in the basement with cinderblock walls painted black. Above the musty smelling bed hung a towel with the print of a sexy woman whose body was marked in sections: rump roast, quarter pounder. My sister Evie and I snuck into his cave when he was away hoping to find a hidden treasure. We found bb gun accessories, a few scattered playboy magazines and mould. Intriguing artifacts but not much fun for two little girls.
At age seven and a half, my second grade teacher, Ms. Teawanger, cut off the top of her index finger in a paper cutter. The class was captivated by her story. And what seven year old doesn’t love a gory tale about severed appendages? Ms. Teawanger showed her bandage, and we were riveted. But we really wanted to see the finger...the greenish, waxy sewn up finger. To this day, whenever I use a paper cutter, I think of Ms. Teawanger and her finger just lying there on the table feeling so cut off from the rest of the body and the world.
At age eight, just after my birthday party at Barnhill’s Ice Cream Parlor in February, my dad found a squealing mutt-puppy in the backyard. We called him “Jay Jay '' and Dad called him “Sport”. But as Jay Jay frolicked, ripped up toilet paper and nipped my sister Val’s socks as she practiced dance routines, we noticed that Jay Jay didn’t have a penis. Jay Jay became Gee Gee. Typical children always beg typical parents to keep abandoned pets, but when the answer was “no”, we didn’t fight back. We silently compiled and made a catchy poster, “puppy needs a home” and taped it on the bulletin board at Ben Franklin Plaza. Hanging the poster was ceremonial, a finality, a done deal. We walked away and back to the car, heads hung low, but I lagged behind. Something was in my shoe. When no one was looking, I snagged that poster, tore it down and never told a soul. Gee Gee would stay. My dad, who never wanted the dogs anywhere near the red shag carpet in the living room, or in the house all together, would grow to love Gee Gee with all her slobbering, ripping up paper, leaving the occasional fecal surprise and spinning around like a furry top.
At age eight, about the time of Gee Gee’s acceptance into the family, my Dad died. Onset of illness to passing away was only a month. It was only two weeks after his 49th birthday. It was a dark veil, it was a sunny, breezy day in April, it was seeing dogwoods in bloom that day. It was sparkles in the sidewalk leading to the hospital’s entrance. It was seeing him walking around the hospital corridor in his navy blue robe for the last time. It was all of these images compounded into one. It was everything that an eight-year-old doesn’t understand.
***
The ride to the cemetery was in a shiny black limo. A little violet flag on the front of the limo with the word “funeral” waved to the passing traffic. One minute I was hopping around, climbing the bunk bed ladder, playing the games with my sister while guests sat in the living room whispering and nibbling on tuna salad, ambrosia and chopped liver. The next moment, I was shutting myself up in the bathroom wiping tears on my polyester pants that mom handmade.
Why were the mirrors covered with sheets? Uncle Leonard said that it was for the spirit to not get confused once it has departed the body. Why would the spirit be confused? It is Dad’s spirit and his house. He knows where to go, where to get a snack, where he keeps his cigars, where he does his glassblowing in the basement. To think of Dad now as a “spirit”, a remote ghost who was lost and displaced was too much.
My sister Valerie said, “Don’t look in the mirror. You’re not supposed to care about your face.” She was biting her now stubby nails and picking at a pimple on her cheek. She barely went to synagogue, and now she was the expert on Judaic traditions? I glanced at those mirrors draped in sterile white sheets, like the ones from a hospital bed, I could see faces, contorted and surreal. This was supposed to be comforting and calming, but it was more like fixtures in the haunted mansion at Disney World.
Strange that mom had to wear a torn black ribbon on her coat, and that we washed our hands in a tub of water on the front porch before entering the house. The world suddenly was topsy-turvy, like something from a bygone era, shades of metallic gray, out of whack. This was the turning point. The Barbie house was demolished. There was no going back to that little mop-top with a crooked front tooth and jelly stains on her t-shirt.
On the eve that dad died, my sister Evie and I were staying overnight at
Linda’s house on a little ranch in Hartville, Ohio. Linda was the biggest eleven-year-old horse-freak that I’d ever met. She drew pictures of horses, smelled like hay with a sour hint of manure and showed us how to feed her favorite horse, Trixie, bruised apples. I worried that Trixie’s giant teeth like sharp wooden pegs would chomp off my hand along with the apple. Big-boned Linda allowed us, the skinny sisters, to ride her. We’d nudge her “giddyup” and Linda would trot around the shag carpeting. After “horsing” around, we staged our own production of Wizard of Oz and collected hay from Trixie’s barn to stuff into our shirts for the scarecrow. We hopped and frolicked around Linda’s homestead like carefree bunnies, yet completely unaware that Dad was already gone.
Linda's parents knew, but said nothing.
The next day was our performance. It happened to be Easter Sunday; as the token Jewish kids in the neighborhood this meant no chocolate eggs or cellophane-wrapped bunnies with creepy candy eyes. Just a typical Sunday.
Linda’s mom drove us up the narrow tar-black driveway to our ranch house hidden by shrubbery. Peering out a corner window of the house was the ghostly, emotionless face of Alice, my first cousin from Maryland. She was my Uncle Bill’s only daughter. Uncle Bill, my dad’s younger brother, was divorced, a psychiatrist and drove a long, emerald green Cadillac with white leather seats and 8 track tapes of Barry White and Prokofiev.
“Hey, what’s Alice doing here?” I said, shocked to see her. I fidgeted in my seat, crinkling the bag of straw and hay. Something wasn’t right.
“A surprise visit?” said Linda’s mom, trying to disguise the truth.
“Whatever it is,” said my sister, “Get ready for gifts from the Pennsylvania turnpike.”
Whenever the two visited, Uncle Bill always brought souvenirs from Washington, Maryland or the turnpike like the toy dachshund with “Washington DC” printed along its torso or peanut brittle from Barbara Fritchie’s diner at a reststop Frederick, Maryland.
We burst into the living room with its blood-red carpet and love-seats ready for the souvenirs, hugs and laughing, but what we got looked like a room full of lobotomy recipients. No one spoke. A few relatives sat scattered around like cracked porcelain dolls. Their faces were a blur and I only could see my mom’s. It was unusually pale and her cheeks were damp. She wore a polyester button-down shirt with a tessellated design of womens’ heads in pink, black and white. Just heads and blank stares. “It’s your dad,” she said softly. Then she broke down and cried.
****
A year later, after the abrupt turn-around, the world settled down again. The way a nine-year old wants it to be. My dad had died, mom was single again. Mornings, we’d scrape the frost off the windshield and pile into the red Ford Maverick with my rat-terrier dog, Gee Gee, in mom’s lap at the steering wheel. She’d drop us off at our school with the lackluster name, Plain Center.
Shiny hallways smelling of disinfectant, dark corners and see-saws with splinters at the far end of the playground. This was a public school where kids got whacked with wooden paddles willy-nilly and girls had to wear dresses. I solved the latter problem–I wore mom’s homemade dresses over polyester pants. Plain Center school must have had a secret society of sadists. Take Mrs. Miller, I was never in her class, but I was forewarned by the older fifth graders, like my sister Evie. Mrs. Miller dressed like it was Victorian era, long skirts, ruffled blouses, wrinkled forehead, and slicked back black hair in a bun. She’s “paddle happy” they’d say. She even checked for dirt under your fingernails. Mrs. Nagy, my first grade teacher, sent me to stand in a dark corner outside the classroom because I cried after losing my lunch money.
I was now in third grade. I missed my second grade teacher Ms. Teawanger, the one who chopped off her index finger in a paper cutter. She understood why I hid myself in the bathroom stall and cried while everyone else was playing tag at recess.
Tag, you’re it. You’re the odd one out.
She understood my excessive absences while Dad was hospitalized. She had a kind, soft rubbery face, like those troll dolls. She had all the kids in the class write “Get well” notes to dad, even scribbles in crayon on torn pieces of construction paper meant something.
About a year before he died, Dad had given me a black pocket knife. It was the one memento I carried with me outside the house. I was safe with it sleeping in my pocket. Then one day while smacking a tether ball on the playground, it fell out of my coat. Suddenly, I was transformed from the obedient, smart, artistic third grader into “Johnny Switchblade,” sans leather jacket. Rumors floated around, was I a gangster-wannabe? What kind of Jewish kid from Ohio, a girl, sports a pocket knife? What’s next, holding up first graders for milk money? A star of David tattoo with an intertwined evil serpent from Genesis?
They dragged me to the principal’s office, made calls home. “My dad gave it to me.” I pleaded with the administration to go easy on me. “My dad gave it to me,” I told the teachers and attendants in the boxy office with cinder blocks for walls. “I never use it!”
“My dad gave it to me!” I repeated. “Don’t you understand, my dad died.”
But they didn’t understand. They took it from me, locked it in a steel desk drawer. I never saw it again.
***
We lounged on the family room couch watching the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Outside the window, bare branches swayed in a frigid wind. Inside, the sun lit up a patch of red carpeting. The fish tank filter gurgled, my dog Gee-gee snorted in her midday nap, and all was as it had been before. But something was changing. It couldn’t stay like this forever.
----to be continued....
The Rosh
My grandma, Baubie, came visiting without fail, from Canton, Ohio to Potomac, Maryland every year for Rosh Hashana. She flew on defunct Piedmont airlines equipped with shoe boxes lined with wax paper holding mandel bread. Never “bread” but more “cookie”, we grandkids would dig into each box on a hunt for the mandel bread with the most apricot or raspberry filling. Sometimes brawls over the last crumbs followed. These treats, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, were like what the gentile kids experienced with Christmas cookies. We never knew sliding down the shiny wooden banister on Christmas morning for treats decorated in shades of green with silvery sprinkles, but we could always count on Baubie’s shoeboxes of mandel bread on “the Rosh.”
Baubie, known otherwise as Dorothy, curly reddish brown hair, pearl earrings wore comfortable wallaby shoes in shades of brown. She was the only grandparent that I ever knew and she was golden. She could be hundreds of miles away from home, but still carried the Dorothy essence –Palmolive soap, tuna salad with egg, chopped liver and jello with mysterious bits of chicken in suspended animation.
We were destined to attend our synagogue, Har Shalom, “Mountain of Peace,”services in our high school auditorium–there were too many Yids to fit into our mid-sized temple. This was the one time of year when non-practicing Jews had to go to religious services. They knew that apparently they were judged by God, and even if they didn’t believe, they couldn’t handle the guilt.
My parents and sisters Alice and Evie sang in the choir, led by Jerry, a Harvard graduate and lawyer who wrote political musicals. We were a musical family, but I didn’t want to be seen with these collective music nerds in public. Ironically, I was one of the biggest nerds of any variety–musicals, Woody Allen movies, Monty Python reruns. I had no right to judge the choir members.
“I’m just too busy practicing my Scott Joplin piano pieces,” I’d tell them when asked why I didn’t join in. Then, I’d lounge on the couch watching Brady Bunch reruns eating instant mashed potatoes.
“Get up, it’s time for services. It’s Rosh Hashanah,” my sister Evie scolded me.
I gave her a contemptuous look (contemptuous was my Uncle Bill’s favorite word to describe pre-teen brazen behavior). “You’re a bad Jew,” she’d say as she gathered her choir music and fixed her platform sandals. Little did she know that many years from that moment I’d be the only sibling out of six to study with rabbis, go to Israel three times and celebrate the holidays that few even knew about–like Shavuot–when we eat cheesecake, cheese blintzes and go to lectures all night.
So I went. I was going through the motions. I sat in my cushy folding seat and counted the pages in the prayer book until the end of the service. I looked at the cumbersome Hebrew letters and tried to sound out words. Then I was frustrated and opted for English. I watched Sabrina Rosenbaum who sported the nickname “Prune” and her dork-ridden siblings walk up and down the aisles looking for trouble.
The choir sang beautifully. It was pure and simple, and made me think for a brief moment of something holy. Then, the rabbi’s son blew the shofar–it sounded like a sick buffalo, stumbling and about to collapse. He said the Hebrew, “Tequeea”...which meant a long, drawn out sound, but I always thought he was saying “Tequila” Let’s drink to the new year.
Blue eyes, that’s what I wanted at six years old. My mother used to call me her “black-eyed Susan”, though my name wasn’t Susan and I didn’t have black eyes, but deep brown.
This was the age when my Mom sang “Twas on the Isle of Capri” at bedtime. I closed my eyes and clutched my toy pig with a music box inside its belly. It was a fuzzy, yellow pig with stains and vibrant-colored flowers sprouting from its body. My mom, who met my father while singing in a choir at Temple Ohev Tzedek, sang everything from Barbara Streisand’s “Funny Girl” to the top 40 hits of Judaism. Her voice was a warm caramel blanket pouring over us. Tender and innocent as it seemed as a child, “Twas on the Isle of Capri” is about love’s disappointment. A man in love with a woman finds a golden ring already placed on her finger by another. The last line was a killer, “Twas goodbye on the isle of Capri.” Goodbye love. It was a fitting precursor for the years to come.
At age six, my sister Evie and I had two pet mice named Felix and Arnold. We’d let them run through doors and windows of our Fisher Price miniature village in a race to see which would poop first. At bedtime when mom finished singing, the squeaking of their exercise wheel in the “habitrail” cage lulled me to sleep. Then one day, we found Felix and Arnold lying on their backs motionless in the habitrail tower. They were gone. A suicide pact of two brothers? Two lovers? A poisoned pellet of food? It was an unsolved mystery. I cried for days. I held tightly onto my remaining pets, border collie Annie, her scraggly son George, and goldfishies Fanny and Danny.
At seven years old, my older sister Valerie tried to burn my Barbie doll’s shoes in the Hanukkah candles. We were enjoying the soft glow of candles after an early sunset in December My big brother Bobby rushed to my defense. He tackled Valerie and pushed her through the door to the bathroom breaking the hinge. She tried to escape his grip, wrestling over the bathroom sink. We went from a peaceful picture, like a Jewish Norman Rockwell painting, to a scene from the World Wrestling Federation. I stepped aside and tried to fit the tiny melted shoes on the doll’s perfect little feet.
My brother wasn’t home much, he was in college at Ohio State studying Zoology, but whenever he had the chance, he defended me. He seemed so untouchable at times. During vacations, he worked on his cars like “Waldo I”, a beat up teal Dodge convertible with the words “Waldo I” painted on the front. Waldo wore a dejected expression on its grill, like it had given up hope to be anything but scrap metal. And after a long day working at Fisher Foods meat packing when he’d take off his blood smudged apron, my brother would retreat to his room in the basement with cinderblock walls painted black. Above the musty smelling bed hung a towel with the print of a sexy woman whose body was marked in sections: rump roast, quarter pounder. My sister Evie and I snuck into his cave when he was away hoping to find a hidden treasure. We found bb gun accessories, a few scattered playboy magazines and mould. Intriguing artifacts but not much fun for two little girls.
At age seven and a half, my second grade teacher, Ms. Teawanger, cut off the top of her index finger in a paper cutter. The class was captivated by her story. And what seven year old doesn’t love a gory tale about severed appendages? Ms. Teawanger showed her bandage, and we were riveted. But we really wanted to see the finger...the greenish, waxy sewn up finger. To this day, whenever I use a paper cutter, I think of Ms. Teawanger and her finger just lying there on the table feeling so “cut off” from the rest of the world.
At age eight, just after my birthday party at Barnhill’s Ice Cream Parlor in February, my dad found a squealing mutt-puppy in the backyard. We called him “Jay Jay '' and Dad called him “Sport”. But as Jay Jay frolicked, ripped up toilet paper and nipped my sister Val’s socks as she practiced dance routines, we noticed that Jay Jay didn’t have a penis. Jay Jay became Gee Gee. Typical children always beg typical parents to keep abandoned pets, but when the answer was “no”, we didn’t fight back. We silently compiled and made a catchy poster, “puppy needs a home” and taped it on the bulletin board at Ben Franklin Plaza. Hanging the poster was ceremonial, a finality, a done deal. We walked away and back to the car, heads hung low, but I lagged behind. Something was in my shoe. When no one was looking, I snagged that poster, tore it down and never told a soul. Gee Gee would stay. My dad, who never wanted the dogs anywhere near the red shag carpet in the living room, or in the house all together, would grow to love Gee Gee with all her slobbering, ripping up paper, leaving the occasional fecal surprise and spinning around like a furry top.
At age eight, about the time of Gee Gee’s acceptance into the family, my Dad died. Onset of illness to passing away was only a month. It was only two weeks after his 49th birthday. It was a dark veil, it was a sunny, breezy day in April, it was seeing dogwoods in bloom that day. It was sparkles in the sidewalk in front of the hospital. It was seeing him walking around the hospital corridor in his navy blue robe for the last time. It was all of these images compounded into one. It was everything that an eight-year-old doesn’t understand.
***
The ride to the cemetery was in a shiny black limo. So fancy. A little violet flag on the front of the limo with the word “funeral” waved to the passing traffic. My emotions were doing flips and somersaults. One minute I was hopping around, climbing the bunk bed ladder, playing the games with my sister while guests sat in the living room whispering and nibbling on tuna salad, ambrosia and chopped liver. The next moment, I was shutting myself up in the bathroom wiping tears on my polyester pants that mom handmade.
And why were the mirrors covered with sheets? Uncle Leonard said that it was for the spirit to not get confused once it has departed the body. Why would the spirit be confused? It is Dad’s spirit and his house. He knows where to go, where to get a snack, where he keeps his cigars, where he does his glassblowing in the basement. To think of Dad now as a “spirit”, a remote ghost who was lost and displaced. It was too much.
My sister Valerie said, “Don’t look in the mirror. You’re not supposed to care about your face.” She was biting her now stubby nails and picking at a zit on her cheek. She barely went to synagogue , was she now the expert on Judaic traditions? I glanced at those mirrors draped in sterile white sheets, like the ones from a hospital bed, I could see faces, contorted and surreal. This was supposed to be comforting and calming, but it was more like fixtures in the haunted mansion at Disney World.
It was strange that my mom had to wear a torn black ribbon on her coat, and that we washed our hands in a tub of water on the front porch before entering the house. The world suddenly was topsy turvy, like something from a bygone era, shades of grey, out of whack.
I wanted to ask questions, to comprehend the mystery, get a straight answer, but I held it tightly inside.
This was the turning point. From this moment on there was a shift in the path; the Barbie house was demolished. There was a metamorphosis, it sounds drastic but it happens, even for an eight year old. There was no going back to that little mop-top with a crooked front tooth and jelly stains around her mouth. My sister Evie and I were staying overnight at Linda’s house on a little ranch in Hartville, Ohio. We hopped around Linda’s homestead completely unaware that Dad had passed on that night. Linda's parents knew. We were kept in the dark.
Linda was the biggest horse-freak (like many tween girls) that I’d ever met. She drew pictures of horses, smelled like hay with a sour hint of manure and showed us how to feed her favorite horse, Trixie, bruised apples from a nearby tree. I worried that Trixie’s giant teeth like wood pegs would chomp off my hand along with the apple. Big-boned Linda allowed us, the skinny sisters, to ride her. We’d nudge her “giddyup” and Linda would trot around the blood-red shag carpet in our house. We collected hay from Trixie’s barn stall to use for the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.
