“I’m Bernard Aisenberg. I just lost my wife. Who are you?”
“I’m Millie Klein. I was looking for Henry Eisenberg. He just lost his wife.”
Bernard looked at my mother. Then he looked disappointed.
“Does this mean you’re not staying?”
My mother collected her wet umbrella and went across the hall to pay the right shiva call. Apparently her story won a piece of Henry’s heart. It happened slowly, but three years later they wed.
“You’re a whole family now. A mother. A father. You have a stepbrother, Lenny. He’s all grown up and away at college, but still…” said Grandma Rose as she slipped into the bed next to mine. “Better at that age he’s away. The long hair and who knows what else.”
She took out her teeth at night. It made her whole face sag, and her voice sound funny. Grandma Rose looked much, much older. I used to be scared when I was little, but now I was used to it.
“You have a brand-new apartment with your own bedroom,” she said, turning off the night-light. The room was quiet. I heard her breathing and rearranging her blankets. “You have a normal life now. It’s what I always wanted for your mother, and what I want for you.”
A light from the street shone in through the cracks of the venetian blinds. I heard the sound of a car driving by. Brooklyn seemed different to me than Queens. Older. They were both okay, but nothing like Manhattan.
Grandma Rose called Manhattan New York. My mother and I called it The City. I think that had something to do with being from Brooklyn or Queens, but I wasn’t sure. Grandma Rose said when my mother and Henry got married, she would take me to New York to see Radio City and the Rockettes.
“You’ll have to wear sunglasses,” she had told me, “because there are so many bright lights in Radio City it hurts your eyes. Chandeliers there. And colored lights on the stage. Everything glistens. And all the girls are dancing, and wearing sequins, and everybody applauds when they kick their legs in the air. It’s a whole line of girls, but when they kick it goes up like one leg.”
We would be going tomorrow. Tomorrow. I couldn’t wait. I would watch everything the girls did, because when I grew up I would be a Rockette and live in The City.
“A nice normal life for all my girls,” Grandma Rose repeated. I heard her reach for a tissue and blow her nose. “Wouldn’t you like that?”
I didn’t want to lie, and I didn’t want to tell her I was going to be a Rockette, so I didn’t say anything.
“Are you sleeping mamala? She must be asleep. Gai shlofn,” I heard her say, and in the half-lit dark saw her put the tissue under her pillow.
I felt private and secretive as I drifted off to sleep, thinking of everything but a normal life in Queens.
3
Nottingham Forest
Memorial Day Weekend
The Catskills, Upstate NY 1988
“I bought extra just for you,” said Henry, taking a slab of lox and tucking it into an onion-and-garlic bagel. “You know you can have another one. You’re thin. You can afford it.”
“I’m really not that hungry,” I said, picking up the Sunday Daily News and fishing for the comics. The Parade section caught my eye and I started to read. “My husband and I are having a disagreement. I said that David Cassidy was the only son of Shirley Jones on The Partridge Family, but my husband insists that Shaun played the youngest Partridge. Life here hasn’t been the same since. Who is right? Conflicted in Connecticut.”
“I’m making eggs,” my mother yelled out from inside the house. I positioned myself near the screen door to be able to carry on a conversation with both of them. I watched my mother pour the yellow liquid into the frying pan. “This is the best part about being up here,” she said, stuffing the eggshells down the garbage disposal and flicking the switch. “I wish we had one of these in Queens.”
“The modern miracles of the Catskills,” I said, picking up the I Love My Grandparents mug Lenny’s wife Sharon had sent from Boston. It had pictures of their two-year-old twin girls on it. “Good coffee, Ma.”
“Henry made it.”
“I love it up here,” said Henry, setting up his bagel, cigar, paper, radio and fisherman’s cap on a plastic table, ready to embark on a day of sitting out on the deck and watching the resort community of Nottingham Forest walk by.
“Maybe when you retire you guys should live here all year,” I said.
“No, too cold,” said Henry.
“The winters are too cold,” yelled out my mother, who kept up her end of the conversation from the kitchen.
“Too much ice in the winter,” said Henry.
“You know how icy it gets up here in winter?” said Millie.
“We’ll stay in Queens, and when we retire we’ll go to Florida,” said Henry.
“We’re going to Florida. I want to be near my brother. We’ll live by Uncle Sy and Aunt Cookie,” said Millie.
“We want to be near family,” said Henry, from the deck. “In Florida it’s warm.”
“It’s warm,” said Millie, from the kitchen. “Why should I freeze?”
“We don’t need to be cold,” said Henry, getting up and sliding open the screen door in an attempt to hear.
“Shut it. The mosquitoes.” Millie turned to me. “Karrie, come in here and help me carry this platter.”
I nibbled at a piece of lox and stared down the whitefish with its bulging eyes before I went into the house.
“Have you called your machine since you’re here?” Millie asked, removing the eggs from the frying pan and putting them on a Lucite platter. She handed it to me, then lifted the arm of the faucet and drew some water into the pan to unfasten the pieces of egg that stuck to the nonstick Teflon.
“No. Not since Friday.” I brought the platter out to the deck and put it on the outside table.
“Maybe someone called. Maybe you have an audition,” she said, wiping her hand with a dish towel as she joined me at the table outside. “Henry. Eggs?”
Henry looked up from his beach chair and shook his head.
“You just want to know if that doctor guy from the park called.” I took a fork and started eating the eggs from the serving platter.
“Put it on a plate,” said Millie.
“I don’t want a lot.”
“I don’t care how much you want. But if you want some, put it on a plate. Don’t eat like that, Karen, it’s not nice.” My mom put some eggs on my plate. I knew she meant it because she called me Karen, and not Karrie. “It doesn’t matter if I care if the doctor called you or not. It matters if you care. It’s your life.” She took a bite of her eggs. “So, did he call?”
“Yes. He’s working this weekend. He called to say he’s on call. Don’t get so excited. We’ve only been out a few times.”
“Who’s excited? I’m not excited. It doesn’t matter to me.”
It mattered to her. And it mattered to me but I didn’t want to tell her. I had just turned thirty and I had met a Jewish doctor. I was a cliché. What’s more, I really liked him, but he seemed a little remote. I was trying to be cool, something I wasn’t very good at.
“I had a blind date last week,” I said, opening up a new can of worms, giving more information than necessary, illustrating just how cool I was not. I needed to take the attention off the doctor guy because I didn’t want to