Modern Girls (6 page)

“Ma,” Dottie said. She seemed to be weighing her words carefully. “Yes, I’m not married now, but two years is a long time. What happens when I do get married? How do I have a husband and go to school?”

“Why not? Two years is not so long. And Abe? Abe, he moves like a snail, that man. In two years you will be lucky to be married. And even if—from my lips to God’s ears—you do marry sooner, until you have a baby, you can go to school. So you wait a little to have a baby.”

Dottie’s head shot up. “Wait to have a baby? Isn’t that in God’s hands?”

I chuckled and leaned in yet closer. “There are things in women’s hands, too, my
bubelah
. When you are married, you shall learn.” Ruefully, though, I thought,
Have I learned? No, of course I have. I’m too old.

A voice bellowed in the small apartment. “Hello?”

“Hello, hello,” I called back. I took Dottie’s hands in my own again. “You will be a brilliant accountant. You will start this fall. Now, go. Your prince awaits. We can talk more about this later.”

Giving me a feeble smile, Dottie stood, then leaned down to peck my cheek before going out to greet Abe. But before she
opened the bedroom door, she turned back. “Thank you, Ma.” I couldn’t read her expression. Was it joy? Or sadness? I didn’t understand. She surprised me by returning and giving me a hug. “Thank you.”

“Shoo, you.” I smiled as I released her and she walked out, and I sat on the bed another moment, before putting the money back in the tin. I listened to Ben, Heshie, and Abe chatting in the next room, Alfie and Eugene resuming their airplane battles, Izzy futzing with the radio. Returning the money to the tin, I couldn’t help but think,
We’ve done good. Ben and I, we’ve done just fine.
I put my hand on my stomach.
Whether this is old age or a new beginning, we’ll make it through this as well.

AS I walked into the next room, my head flooded with confusion. College! And that Ma would do this for me. How she must have scrimped for years to save so much. For me. My heart beat with excitement at the possibility, even as I knew it would never become a reality.

Tateh
, Uncle Heshie, and Abe were in a heated discussion, but I couldn’t concentrate. Abe stood when I entered.

“I hear congratulations are in order,” he said. I could tell he wanted to give me a kiss, but of course he wouldn’t dare touch me in front of my parents. He looked around awkwardly, then sat back down in what looked like an uncomfortable perch on the edge of the couch.

I shot
Tateh
an annoyed look. “You gave away my news?”

“News like that I should keep? It’s too good not to share.”

I could never be truly mad at
Tateh
.

Abe returned to the conversation as if there had been no interruption. “It’s nonsense, I tell you. War is an impossibility. That’s what we fought for in ’eighteen.”

“I wish you were right, Abe,” Uncle Heshie said. “Hitler has begun a compulsory draft. Why build an army if you don’t plan on using it?”

“Why are we
letting
him build an army?”
Tateh
said.

Abe and
Tateh
were both about the same height, but that was
where any resemblance ended.
Tateh
spent his days in the garage, so his skin was pale, his build lean, and his hair a black-streaked gray. Abe, who spent his days unloading crates, stacking goods, carrying groceries for customers at the store, had firm muscles and burnished skin that I loved to run my fingers along. His brown hair flopped ever so slightly into his face, giving me a frequent excuse to brush it to the side.
Tateh
and Abe, side by side, made me feel less unsettled.
Tateh
and Abe would never let anything bad happen to me.

“All this talk of war, and on
Shabbes
. You two are no better than Alfie and Eugene,” Ma called from the bedroom, but I knew she didn’t mean it. Ma never minded the political talk when she was involved; she just disapproved when she wasn’t in the room.

“Dottala, what do you think?” Uncle Heshie asked.

“I think if I start telling you what I think, we’ll miss our show.” I gave Abe a pointed look, to signal the conversation needed to end so we could be going. The talk of Nazis and Mussolini and war and Jews stuck in Europe was slightly terrifying and definitely depressing, and my mood wasn’t the best to begin with. Besides, right then, I had so much else to think about, more important things. College. A promotion. The math that was forcing itself into my head, taunting me with its tallies. May 24. A Friday. Twelve weeks ago. Exactly.

“Our government is letting him build an army because they fear the Communists in Russia,” Ma said from the bedroom. Her voice boomed as if she were standing next to us. I could hear her closing her drawer, knowing she was returning the tin. The tin that held my future. Perhaps. Unable to resist the lure of talk, Ma came to the doorway between the rooms. Ma had no compunction about jumping into the fray. Like a freight train coming in from the distance, she would start calmly and quietly, building up steam, until the full roar of her thoughts accelerated, bearing down on you, threatening to run you over with their iron strength and speed.

Calculating forward, I toyed with the numbers again. Nine months. February. The numbers were not reassuring. Sweat pooled at my neck. August in the apartment was oppressive. It felt like the walls were closing in and the droning of everyone’s talk was as irritating as the heat. I needed to be outside right away. “We should go, Abe,” I said.

But before we could leave, Ma said, “I hear talk that Hitler is going to assume the position of von Schuschnigg. I read—”

I cut Ma short. The political talk would continue all night if I let it. Abe was always more than willing to be drawn into a debate with my parents.

“Ma!” The impatience oozed from me, but I checked myself. An argument would only delay us further. With a saccharine tone, I said to Ma, “We won’t make curtain if we don’t leave now.”

“Of course, of course,” Ma said. She made shooing motions with her hands. “Go. See your— What is it you’re going to see?”

“The Children’s Hour,”
Abe said.

“Ah, yes. Well, go. Enjoy.”

I set my hat on my head and carefully pinned it into place as Abe opened the front door and we headed out.

I hurried down the stairs before anyone else could stop us and Abe rushed to catch up.

“Where’s the fire?” he asked as he took my arm.

“Trying to escape the flames of my mother’s convictions,” I said. I gave him a playful nod with my chin. “Why do you encourage her so?”

“Encourage her? I enjoy the conversation.” His smile created tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, a look that made me want to grab him and hold him. But we needed to make our way toward the train.

“Conversation? Is that what you call those battles with my parents?”

Abe chuckled. I pulled his arm closer. I loved when I could make him laugh. The sound was low and rumbling, and it touched
me in all the right places. “We’d better hurry. It’s at the Maxine Elliott Theatre. If we miss the next train, we’ll miss the first act.”

Abe and I had known each other since, it seemed, the beginning of time. From grammar school, from the block, from the market. But he hadn’t paid attention to me as anything more than a neighborhood fixture in those days. Three years older, Abe had little time for the pip-squeak I was then. While I’d had my eye on him, he had his eye on Sadie Kraus. But just before I turned sixteen, my body began to change, and I found plenty of excuses to stop by Abe’s store. A little laugh here, a light touch there, and soon his attentions meandered my way. A few months later, he made his intentions known, and we’d been an item ever since. But Abe was frightfully slow, and after three years, I was becoming impatient. Now I was downright desperate.

As we made our way to the theater, Abe kept me entertained with the gossip from the store. He chatted about who complained the scales were heavy, who tried to pay on credit when credit ran out, what he overheard women telling his ma, and while he spoke, I plotted. Abe was determined we not marry until we could afford our own apartment. Many of our friends moved in with the bride’s or groom’s parents after the wedding; Abe refused to allow that. He’d saved quite a bit, but it was not yet enough, he insisted.

I pulled him closer, longing to feel his arm around me. When we arrived at the theater, we took our seats just as the curtain rose. But I couldn’t follow the story, as preoccupied as I was. My mind tuned in and out like a staticky radio. Yet as words floated past me, a line settled in, nestling into my brain:
Martha and I have been lovers.
They had been lovers. Lovers. Of course.

I didn’t need to marry Abe. I just needed to seduce him. How silly of me not to realize that.

But how? It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried, but before, it had been fun and games. Now it was serious business. Abe was an innocent in so many ways. His parents’ store protected him from the
harsher aspects of the lower East Side with which Izzy and I were all too well acquainted.

Every day as a child, Abe ran home after
heder
to help his parents. From a young age, he was carting sacks, filling barrels, helping customers, whereas Izzy constantly fell into scrapes with his gang. With
Tateh
at the garage and Ma sewing in the shop down the street, no one kept an eye on us. The neighborhood was territorial, and the street needed to be guarded from gangs from other blocks, and Izzy was into fisticuffs, it seemed, more often than not. Ma did the best she could until Alfie and Joey fell sick; then it was up to me to steer Izzy toward proper behavior, bandaging his wounds, keeping him from the prostitutes who offered their wares on the street corners.

But the truth is, I was not quite immune to the temptations of the street and, out of boredom and curiosity, found myself, once or twice—or a dozen times; who can remember?—in a compromising position with one of the boys in the gang. My virtue remained—more or less—intact, although in empty cellars and on lonely rooftops I certainly pushed the boundaries of decency from time to time. For a while, Lefty Iskowitz and I met in the basement of my building, but it didn’t take long for us to tire of each other.

But Abe. Abe was pure and untouched by any hands other than mine. At least that’s what he professed. But then again, so did I, so how was I to be sure? Who knows what went on with Sadie Kraus in the back of the store when he was left alone to mind it?

Onstage, the bang of a gun jolted me back to the moment, and I caught the final few minutes. When the lights went on in the theater, I snuggled into Abe’s arms and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “That was lovely. Thank you.”

“I’m not sure ‘lovely’ is the right word for a play with such a tragic ending, but the production was wonderful, wasn’t it?” Abe said, his eyebrows bopping up and down as they did when he was excited. “Florence McGee was terrific as Mary. Why did we wait so long to see this?”

I took Abe’s arm as we stood to walk out of our row. “Because you wanted to catch
La bohème
while it was still playing at the Hippodrome and we
had
to see the Whistler Centenary at the Metropolitan before it closed, and we
couldn’t
pass up Leslie Howard in
The Petrified Forest
and . . .” We made our way up the aisle to exit the theater. “Shall I go on?”

With a laugh, Abe said, “Well, I’m glad we finally made it. Such complex characters. I do believe Miss McGee stole the show. Her character was pure deviousness.”

As we exited the theater, Abe asked, “Shall we get an ice cream before we head home?”

“Of course,” I said, though I worried about my ability to keep it down.

As we walked, Abe returned to the topic of the play. “Isn’t it interesting how the story exemplified
lashon hara
?”

“And it always comes back to Torah,” I said, trying to keep my tone light.

“The prohibition against gossip is such an important commandment to observe. And it’s fascinating to see the relevancy of Torah around us. Even in the
goyishe
world.”

Abe still held dear the
mitzvot
of the Torah, spending time studying Talmud even after becoming a bar mitzvah. Unlike other boys who immediately distanced themselves from synagogue—attending only on holidays and the occasional
Shabbes
when their mothers insisted—Abe appreciated the traditions. Even in my own home, the rules were strictly obeyed only because Ma said so.
Tateh
said socialism had no room for religion, but all it took was one fierce glare from Ma, and
Tateh
would be scurrying off to
shul
. “The workers should own the means of production,” Ma frequently said, “but there’s no reason God can’t keep an eye on us while we do it.” I once spied
Tateh
eating a sandwich with his pals on Yom Kippur, when they were supposedly praying. That night he came home, and pretending he’d fasted the entire day, he forced himself to eat the lavish spread Ma had prepared for him. How
difficult it was to keep from erupting with laughter, as I watched Ma eye
Tateh
with such a suspicious look. “Yom Kippur made you too ill to eat? Here, have some more
.
”

Abe, however, kept the traditions because he found beauty in them. He went to
shul
twice a day to pray. Every morning he placed on his arm and forehead the prayer boxes, the
tefillin
. Yet, he assimilated in many of the same ways as
Tateh
: he kept a clean-shaven face; he no longer observed
Shabbes
; he would sit alone with me.

For the next few blocks, I let Abe pontificate about the play, trying to proffer a tidbit here and there, even though I hadn’t paid enough attention to say anything meaningful.

When we reached the ice cream stand, Abe paid for two cones and we found a bench to sit on.

“Oh, I should have bought those with my new raise,” I said, scooting close to him.

“It’s good you got a raise,” he said, “but I will always treat.”

Trying to appear coquettish, I licked my ice cream in long, languorous strokes. But apparently it was more comical than provocative, as Abe chuckled.

“With this extra money, we don’t have to wait to get married.”

Abe nodded. “Yes, it will help. In a year we should have saved enough.”

A year. That would never work. But happily, the ice cream agreed with me, and that, coupled with the gorgeous night and the comfort of Abe and my plot to seduce him, made me truly feel like everything was going to turn out fine.

We chitchatted about where we would go on our next date, about our friends, about our families. When the ice cream was down to the cone, I walked over to throw it into the garbage. On returning, I sat on Abe’s lap.

“Well, hello,” he said.

“Well, hello,” I said back.

He popped the rest of his cone in his mouth and snaked his now free arm around my back.