One Friday as I ran up to the butcher, I lost a nickel of the fifteen cents. I don’t know how that could have happened: there must have been a hole in my coat pocket. When I went to pay the butcher, I blanched. He knew us and liked my mother, and said he would give the meat to me and we could pay him later, but I feared incurring a debt, and said I’d have to ask my mother. I ran home, my heart thumping, terrified of her reaction. But why? She never never struck us children, never even raised her voice. Still, I dreaded telling her. I pushed open the back door to the kitchen and my story tumbled out.
Mommy just looked at me. She said nothing. I was babbling now, I told her that Mr. Schinkle was willing to let her pay another time, and I would go back if she wanted; I said over and again, “I’m sorry.” But she just stood there, and when she moved, she said calmly, softly, “It’s all right, Anastasia. I have some canned beans on the shelf. We can have that.”
I kept looking at her.
“It’s all right, Anastasia. I know you didn’t mean to lose it,” she said, and turned and quietly, tensely, began to heat the beans. I sat there silently, my body thrilled with pain. My mother was so good, so good, and because of me we would have a horrible dinner tonight.
We had the horrible dinner: to me, any dinner without meat, even if we had fish, was horrible. But Mommy never said anything and neither did Daddy. My sister, of course, was too young to consider what she was eating beyond whether she liked it or not. And we children liked everything. Even things we didn’t like, like turnips—what other people call rutabaga—we ate. We were hungry. Mommy never told Daddy about the lost nickel. He would have been angry, he would have gotten that look on his face that told me he wanted to hit me, but didn’t dare. But shame and guilt about it stayed with me clear into my adult years. Although our poverty was never mentioned, and indeed, we were relatively well off for our neighborhood—we didn’t have big bowls of potatoes for dinner, like other families—it permeated everything in our lives. The dread that comes with poverty is the awareness that one lives on the edge—that beyond it is starvation and homelessness. It doesn’t need to be spoken or threatened: it seeps, like polluted air into the houses near the mills. It doesn’t need even to be conscious. It is there, like the weather.
Years later, when I was thirteen and had finally found some girlfriends, my parents used to go out on Saturday nights, to my great pleasure. For years they had gone nowhere, but now things had eased up. The war was on and my father had a new job and earned forty dollars a week, double his earlier wages. So on Saturday nights, Daddy would go out and pull open the big fence that separated our yard from the one next door, and drive the old long 1925 Packard out backward through the Dentels’ driveway. We didn’t have a driveway, and Daddy had asked Mr. Dentel’s permission to use theirs. Since they didn’t have a car, and we rarely used ours (and didn’t always have one, either), they were agreeable. He would park the car in front of the driveway, and come all the way around to our back door and come back in and help Mommy with her coat and they would go out through the front door, always reminding me to lock it after them, and down the steps and then Daddy would help Mommy into the car, and they would drive to the movies or to Aunt Jean’s to play cards.
And then my girlfriends would come to my house. I never went to theirs: their parents would not have allowed them to have guests, but my mother was happy I had friends. And we would listen to WNEW, to Martin Block and the “Make Believe Ballroom,” and to other music programs, and dance, and eat pretzels and drink Coke and giggle and talk about hairstyles and boys and movie stars. And we were in love with this one disc jockey, who sounded young, and we fantasized about him, until one night I suggested we call him up and talk to him. The girls were thrilled and terrified: what will your parents say! I assured them, with complacent superiority (their parents regularly beat them), that my parents wouldn’t mind. So we called.
It was thrilling. The disc jockey got a kick out of us, and we talked for a long time; and the following Saturday, we called again.
Then, one afternoon when I came home from school, after I’d had my snack and finished practicing the piano, Mommy came to me and sat me down. She asked if I had made any telephone calls to Manhattan. I’d already forgotten about them: they were like forbidden joys that happen in the dark. Then I remembered, and told her what we’d done.
She said, “Anastasia, we got a bill today with twenty dollars’ worth of calls on it. You know that’s nearly half of Daddy’s salary.”
I turned white. I did know. But I hadn’t imagined telephone calls could cost so much. In fact, I hadn’t thought about them costing anything. We had been so long without a telephone, had got one only the year before, in fact, that I thought the expensive part was getting it, not using it.
I mumbled some apology, but it was my look, I’m sure, that conveyed my feelings. Mommy said, “It will take us a long time to pay off this bill. You won’t do it again, will you?”
I swore I wouldn’t, and the next time the girls came over and wanted to call Tommy, or whatever his name was, I said we couldn’t, that it had cost twenty dollars to call before, and that my mother wouldn’t let us call again.
They paled too. “Twenty dollars! Was she mad?”
“No.” I was uneasy. You couldn’t call what she was, mad.
“Did you get a whipping?”
“No!”
But they kept asking, and no matter how I denied it, they never believed me.
I never forgot that either—my mother’s understanding, my guilt, and their disbelief. It told me everything about their home-life. Or so I thought.
So I know something of what Bella felt in those years after her father died, when the consequences of utter poverty fell like the darkness on the little house in the alley. She continued her forays into Jewtown, which never became less frightening for her, although no untoward event ever occurred to her there. And she expanded her repertoire. She began with simple things—eggs and baloney, meatballs, or kielbasa with boiled potatoes and buttered scallions and beets. She would buy ten cents’ worth of meat and two cents’ worth of soup greens. As her courage grew, she felt able to ask Momma what cut of meat she should buy for lamb stew, for she was sure she remembered how to make it, or how to tell when to take the chicken out of the soup pot and put it in the oven to brown—as Momma used to do.
She made many mistakes. A few nights after her first success, she made meatballs again, and thriftily used the milk she had saved from the bowl. But after she had poured it in with the crumbled roll and meat, she noticed a funny smell. She put her nose close to the bowl. It smelled sour: the milk had soured! But what could she do? It was already half mixed in. So she went ahead, just as if the milk were fresh, and Momma never noticed a thing, although Bella had trouble eating her dinner that night. It tasted funny. She knew how fussy Momma used to be about food, and wondered why she didn’t spit it out and say ugh! the way she had in the past when the servant girl did something wrong.
She burned herself; she sometimes burned food; and her gravy and mashed potatoes—after she’d learned how to make them—often had lumps. But now she felt she could ask Momma questions, and on weekends she helped Momma and learned more. Life settled into a routine.
Frances had been hired to work on a sewing machine for five dollars a week, but she was so swift and accurate that the boss asked her if she could do fine handwork. Momma smiled charmingly, told him about her work in her husband’s tailoring establishment. She was promoted to do fine tailoring in the sweatshop and given a raise to six dollars a week. They also let her work only half a day on Saturday, so she was home by one-thirty, and she and Bella would eat their lunch of black bread and butter together. Then Momma would do the laundry. It was easier for her that way—now she could just do marketing on Sunday, and perhaps have time to cook up something special for the week.
First, she heated kettle after kettle of water on the wood stove, and poured it into one of the deep tubs where the white clo
thes were piled. After there was enough water, she scrubbed the clothes on a board with hard brown soap, and Bella filled the other tub with cold water. As she finished with each thing, Momma dropped it in the rinse water, and Bella, using both hands, would pull it up and down to get all the suds out of it. Then Bella would wring it and put it in an enameled basin. When Momma finished washing the sheets and underwear, Bella would put the kettle on the heat again, while Momma wrung out the clothes again: Bella’s hands were not yet strong enough to do it well. Then the two of them went outdoors, where a line was strung in the yard. Bella helped Momma pin the clothes on the line, flapping the big sheets hard so they would dry faster.
Momma would leave the small things for Bella, although she had trouble reaching the line, and go back in and pour hot water into the tub over the colored clothes, and start again. Bella returned to the house and repeated the same process with Momma. After Momma had washed, rinsed, and wrung the second load, she left it in the enameled basin until the first batch was dry. She would rest for a while drinking coffee, and when the sheets were dry, Bella would go with her and help her to take them down and fold them. Momma would take the sheets and pillowcases indoors while Bella felt the underwear. Usually, it was still damp, so she could hang up only some of the colored clothes. When she went back into the house, Momma had the ironing board out, and an old tablecloth on the floor, so the sheets would not get dirty as she ironed them. Bella sat watching Momma, and sometimes Momma would let her iron the easy things, like the pillowcases, while she sat at the table drinking coffee. Every half hour or so, one of them would run outside to test the clothes for dryness, bring in the dry, hanging up what remained. They did not have many clothes, so they finished in a few hours. Then Momma would return to the ironing. She pressed everything, the underwear, and even their cotton stockings.
On Sundays, they would walk together to Jewtown, and Momma would buy the makings for a pot of soup or stew, and their staples—bread, butter, bacon, eggs, flour, sugar, and coffee. Together, they lugged home the heavy bags, and Bella watched carefully now, and even helped Momma when, once in a while, she baked a cake.
Every night after dinner, Momma sewed. Sometimes she opened the machine and ran up seams, but often she sat at the table and did handwork by the kerosene lamp. Sometimes she would give Bella scraps and Bella would sew too. She made napkins for the dinner table, but Momma said they were too little, good for nothing. And sometimes, while she was sitting there sewing, she would put her hands to her face and sob, suddenly, startling Bella. Inconsolable, she would cry for a long time, while Bella watched her, listened to the cursing, the violence that was in her mother, terrified.
One Thursday night at the end of July, Momma was very late coming home and Bella worried about the fried peppers and bacon she had prepared. But when Momma came in, she was laden with bags, and she was smiling and her eyes were bright. This Sunday, she said, they would be able to go to the orphanage and see the children. And she ate quickly that night, so she could bake a cake; and the next night, she baked another. And on Saturday, after washing, she took Bella over to the Christian shops, and bought two plump chickens, and white bread, and onions and celery and cucumbers and dill, and potatoes, and butter and oil and sour cream. She was in such a hurry that they left before the sheets had dried and the second load was hung out, and she almost ran home, puffing with the weight of the shopping bag.
Momma made Bella take the clothes off the line all by herself, while she singed the chickens. It was hard to do, getting the big sheets off and folded without dragging them in the dirt of the yard, and Bella felt teary. Momma was excited because she was going to see the others, but here was Bella, doing all the work. After she had piled the wash in the basket, she wandered out through the long hall to the street. A little farther down, in the middle of the quiet Sabbath street, Margie Kowalski and the Hunrath girls were jumping rope. They were chanting a song, and laughing. They did not seem, to see her, and she moved forward a little, away from the edge of the building. None of the Jewish girls were playing, because it was the Sabbath. But they never played with the Polish girls anyway. Bella wondered why. The small Jewish children spoke only Yiddish, and the small Polish ones only Polish. But most of the older children could speak English, so they could play together. The Hunrath girls were German, and Margie was Polish, so they were talking together in English. But Bella still couldn’t speak English well. She moved forward a little more, and Gertrude Hunrath, taller and gawkier even than Bella, spotted her. She let the rope stop and called out. “Hey, Bella, wanta play?”
Bella’s heart leaped, and she ran toward them, taking one end of the rope from Gertrude, and chiming in on the chant, following their sounds—for she didn’t understand the words, or if she did, they seemed to make no sense. After a while, Margie tripped, and took her end, and Bella jumped. She did it heavily, and tripped several times, but they didn’t make her take an end, they said she could have another chance. Bella’s heart was pumping, her face was pink, her hair flew. It was wonderful!
Then, suddenly, there was Momma, standing at the entrance to the hall, grey-faced. “Bella! Bella!” Her voice was harsh and high. “Stop that! You’ll break your shoes!” And Bella paled, and looked down at her old boots, and understood there was no money for new ones, and reluctantly walked away from the girls, shyly turning to say (in English!), “I have to go in now,” and the girls watched her go, silently, understanding. Their lives, after all, were not so different.
Sullenly, Bella helped Momma chop the celery and the onions and simmer them in butter, and crumble the white bread. She wanted to beg a slice or two for herself: white bread was still a treat for her. But something stopped her, and she saw it all go into the bowl of stuffing, and watched Momma stuff the chickens and put them in the oven. Then Momma made her peel the hot boiled potatoes while she peeled the cucumbers and sliced them. It was easier to peel the potatoes hot, but they burned her fingers and she kept dropping them. She didn’t care, even though Momma looked up each time she heard one fall into the bowl. Momma salted the cucumbers and put them on the cupboard shelf with a plate over the bowl. Then she took the potatoes from Bella, and swiftly, without minding the heat at all, sliced them into a clean bowl and poured the celery she had chopped for the salad. Then she poured hot vinegar and oil over them, and salt and pepper, and mixed it well. Bella looked longingly at the salad, but Momma didn’t offer her any. Then Momma ran the cucumbers underwater and squeezed them, and poured vinegar and sugar and water on them, and put them aside again. Tomorrow morning she would immerse them in sour cream with dill sprinkled over it.
When this was finished, Momma sighed and wiped her hands on her apron, and poured a hot cup of coffee for herself. Bella knew Momma still had the ironing to do, and that she had been up since six, walked to work and back, and sewed for five hours that morning. She was ashamed of her sullenness. She looked shyly at Momma: “Are you tired, Momma?” “No, no,” Momma said, then looked at Bella and smiled. “Tonight I finish new dress for you, Bella.”
For them, Bella thought, then felt ungrateful and more ashamed. She went out to gather up the second load of wash, now dry, while Momma set up the ironing board. It occurred to her there was nothing for their dinner, and she ran inside, aghast.
“Momma! We forgot to get anything for our dinner!”
Her mother looked up wearily from the sheet she was ironing. “Oh, Bella, it doesn’t matter. We can just have some eggs. There are some boiled potatoes left over. Fry them in bacon fat.”
The next morning, Momma wakened her early and they dressed in their good clothes. Momma put on her old black straw hat. She wrapped the food in towels and laid it in a flat basket with two handles, and added plates and knives and forks and napkins. Bella crept up to examine them, and was relieved: there were five of each. Then they picked up the basket, each holding a handle, and walked to the trolley. They rode one trolley to the end of the line, got off and took another. Then they were in the m
iddle of the city, in front of a huge brown building that frightened Bella. Men in straw boaters were walking around, even though it was a hot August Sunday, and a woman in a great broad-brimmed hat with flowers on it was running toward the building, laughing with a man in a straw hat, while behind them stood a little Polaka carrying a great heavy bag. The woman turned. “Come on, Marija!” she called impatiently, and the girl ran as best she could, red-faced, tugging the heavy bag.
Momma and Bella went inside the building. The ceiling was high, and there were wooden benches in a great open room. It was cooler there. They walked to the wall where a man stood behind a cage, and Momma said something to him and gave him money, and he gave her two pieces of cardboard, and Momma turned swiftly and ran, and Bella ran after her, carrying the heavy basket alone now, until Momma realized, and stopped and took her end. They ran down some dark steps to a cavernous dark place with tracks running below a platform. Momma told her they were waiting for the train.
A train! Bella tried, but could not imagine what that could be, and when the thing came roaring toward them, she gasped and grabbed Momma and almost upset the basket, and Momma cried out, “Bella!” and shook her head at Bella’s stupidity. But the big light on the front, and the roar of noise terrified her and reminded her, as it plunged toward them, of the trolley that had almost killed Euga. They took seats and rode for a long time. Momma was fanning herself with her handkerchief, and breathing in quick little gasps. The city gave way to miles of green fields. Momma said they were potato farms.