When Bella stands at the window looking out, she does not always see the street before her. Sometimes she is on another street, sitting on stone steps under the tips of the branches of a tree, wearing a pink dress. Her hours pass in vacancy, the vacancy of unselfconsciousness. She is unaware of much around her. But some things she knows.
She knows she has a momma and a poppa who are always gone. Momma is already in the kitchen making oatmeal when Bella rises from her tousled bed and trots, silently and barefoot, into the dining room, and climbs onto the couch and curls up in its corner. She can see Momma in the kitchen they share with the next-door neighbors. She is holding the round fragrant loaf of Jewish rye bread in her arm, slicing it toward her breast. She cuts three slices for Poppa and one each for herself and the children. She spreads them thickly with creamy white butter and puts them on a plate. She carries the plate into the dining room and lays it on the table, but she is rushing, always rushing, and she does not see Bella curled up in the couch. Bella jumps up and runs to the table and snatches her bread and butter, then runs back to the couch, snuggles in its deep cushions, and eats. Eddie comes roaring in, pretending to be something that makes noise, and grabs his slice and jumps up on the couch next to Bella; and Wally follows, crawling. He reaches the table and whimpers. He can’t reach the plate: he can’t stand up yet. Eddie jumps up and gets Wally his slice of bread, then lifts him onto the couch. Eddie is strong. Wally tries to put the whole slice in his mouth at once, and smears butter all over his face.
Eddie takes the bread away from him, and Wally begins to wail. “Bites, stupid, take bites. Like this.” Eddie holds the edge of the bread to the infant, and Wally grabs it and bites down. “That’s right,” Eddie says. He has finished his bread, and sits in the center of the couch, his legs dangling, swinging back and forth. Bella doesn’t notice him, doesn’t notice any of this. She has finished her bread and butter and is watching Momma scramble Poppa’s eggs. She wishes they were for her. Momma puts Poppa’s plate on the table just as Poppa comes into the dining room. He is wearing his shirt and tie, but not his vest. He sits down at the head of the table, removes his heavy linen napkin from its ring, and tucks it into his belt. He does not begin to eat until Momma comes in with the coffeepot and pours a steaming cup of rich-smelling dark brew for him. Her shoulders are a little hunched in his presence, but she is smiling at him. Momma is small and nimble and amiable. She always laughs or smiles or nods when Poppa says something. Poppa begins to eat his eggs and his three slices of bread and butter. Momma has eaten her bread standing up in the kitchen.
Momma leaves first in the morning, running the three blocks to the tailor shop, which she opens up, so that when Poppa arrives, everything is in order. She gets her coat and tells the children to be good. She runs out the door. When Poppa is finished eating, he goes back to the bedroom. Then the servant girl clears the table and slams down the children’s bowls of oatmeal. Bella slides down from the couch and darts into the hall. She flattens herself against the wall and watches Poppa, who is standing before the mahogany-framed cheval glass adjusting his gold watch and chain across the front of his beautiful striped-satin white vest. He brushes the shoulders of his dark jacket with a fine soft brush with a tortoiseshell handle. Bella does not know the words for these objects, but she perceives their quality. Then Poppa pulls out each side of his mustache, sets his hat just so over his brow. He straightens up in the mirror. He is very fine. As he starts to turn to leave the room, Bella scurries back to the dining room and climbs up on a chair at the table.
Her oatmeal is lumpy now. She eats around the lumps, pouring heavy cream over them until she has a kind of soup—cream with lumps—and the servant girl comes in and sees her and slaps her hand and scolds her. “Stupid Bella!” She slides down from the chair and runs away. She goes to the front room, which is rarely used and is off-limits to the children. She knows this, but she also knows that if she slips behind the lace curtain and stands very still, the servant girl will not look for her until nearly midday, when Momma will come running back home to make lunch for Poppa. Bella can see Momma running when she is a block away, and she can slip out and go to the children’s bedroom and put on her dress and shoes. The servant girl has to button them, and will slap her for dressing so late, but she is used to these slaps now.
Momma was fat and stayed home and one night she screamed and then she got thin but she still stayed home. Bella wanted to sit on her lap, but the ladies shooed her away. They had a funeral. They were crying. A funeral was a party where ladies cried. Then Momma went away again, back to the tailor shop.
Bella is only vaguely aware of her brothers. She does not know what Wally is doing. There are no toys in this house, no books, no paper or pencil or crayon or paints. The children’s room holds the one big bed they all sleep in and a trunk for their clothes. Sometimes when she goes in to get dressed, Wally is lying on the floor with his thumb in his mouth. He is a baby. Eddie has gone out. He goes out every day to play ball with his friends. They throw a ball at the brick side of the stationery store on the corner until the owner chases them away. Every day he chases them away, and the boys call him names as they run. Then he goes inside and gets a broom which he brandishes like a bat as he chases them. But they are small and quick and dart behind wagons and into doorways. The boys cry out, “Old man Meinie has pimples on his heinie,” and giggle hysterically. Mr. Meineke gets red in the face and the red lines on his nose look as if they will burst.
Bella cannot understand why Eddie is willing to incur such a terrible punishment—as the scene with its noise and violence seems to her—for such a foolish pastime. She followed him out one morning and stood beside him while he threw his ball, but the act seemed pointless to her and she could not understand why he wanted to do it. Eddie just laughs, he says he isn’t afraid of old man Meineke. But Bella doesn’t really believe him, even though Eddie is big. He is five. He had a birthday and Poppa made a speech. He pulled Eddie up onto his lap at the dinner table and he held up his glass and everyone else at the table held up theirs and he talked about his five-year-old son, and cried out “Na zdrowie!” and everyone else called it out too and they drank. And Momma gave candy to Bella who had been allowed to stay up and was sitting quietly on the couch.
Bella hears a sharp screech and knows the servant girl has done the wash in the two deep tubs in the kitchen, and is hanging it on the line that stretches outside the kitchen window to a pole at the end of the yard. The pulley is rusty and screeches with each tug. Bella goes to the kitchen to watch, silently. She peers down from the window into the yard below, which is cluttered with refuse from the Chinaman’s rice-cake shop that borders the plot of vegetables planted by the Chinaman’s silent wife. She is tending them, moving slowly, hunched over the plants; she never looks around her. At night Bella could smell vegetables cooking in the evil-smelling oil they used, the same oil in which the Chinaman cooked his rice cakes. When she went out, Bella would stand on the street watching him make his rice cakes in the window of his shop. Despite the oil, they smelled delicious, and he made them just like Momma made pancakes on Sundays when the tailor shop was closed. Bella would gaze enviously at the people who stood on line to buy the rice cakes. But she never dared to ask for one because every time Poppa saw him he would boom out laughing: “Oh, that Chinaman! Don’t you ever eat those rice cakes of his! You know what he makes them from? He makes them from rats’ tails and chopped-up mice and spiders.”
He spoke in Polish, of course, so the Chinaman did not realize what he was saying. Everyone spoke Polish in Bella’s world, although she recognized that when the boys called out to Mr. Meineke, they were speaking in a different language. She did not know that language, but understood what they cried to the storekeeper. Bella was embarrassed by her father’s insults to the Chinaman, and was grateful that the rice-cake man did not understand. She would watch his face sometimes as he cooked, and she felt something strange, as if they were alike, as if they were tied together. He
never looked directly at anyone, and his expression never changed. He looked down at his rice cakes, at the money he changed. His eyes had no light in them. His wife never appeared in the front of his shop. If Bella had not seen her in the garden, she would not have known the woman existed.
Bella never tasted a rice cake. They are one of the only two things she can remember wanting, many years later, in her seventies, sitting with me smoking in the darkened porch. Rice cakes and white bread. She discovered white bread when she was four and in the hospital.
She vaguely recalls being sick, lying in semidelirium, people hovering around her bed. Once she woke, and heard her mother whispering to a neighbor, “The boy next door had the same thing and he died.” She wondered if dying was different from living. She recalls hearing shouting, too, from far away, and soon after that she was moved someplace.
When she was grown up, Momma told her what happened. Poppa did not believe in giving good money to doctors or insurance companies and he would not let Momma call the doctor for her. But Mamie came, and saw Bella, and she screamed at Poppa that Bella’s death would be on his head, so he let Momma call the doctor, who transferred her to the hospital. She had a mastoid infection that left her deaf in one ear. (Poppa listened to Mamie, but he told Momma she was not permitted to enter his house again. But she did! Bella knew she did! She wasn’t as stupid as Momma thought.)
One day she woke up in a strange bed with high sides. A woman in a white dress was putting breakfast on a tray in front of her. There was a glass of orange juice, an egg, and something she had never seen before—white bread and butter with salt in it. Isabella picked up the bread and tasted it: saliva gushed into her mouth and she had to restrain herself from gobbling it all up fast. Slowly, lovingly, she bit tiny pieces of it.
The little girl in the next bed dawdled over her food. She was playing with her egg, her bread pushed to one side. Bella’s hand suddenly darted out and snatched up the little girl’s bread. She stuffed the whole slice in her mouth at once as a piercing scream rose. People ran into the room, all kinds of people, some in white dresses, some in blue-and-white ones, some in suits with white jackets over them and odd things hanging from them that looked as if they could do horrible things to you if you were bad. Isabella’s heart beat so hard she thought her ear would burst, and she leaned rigidly against her pillow, her face ashen.
The little girl was only crying now, pointing to Isabella. A woman in a white dress and a funny hat said something calmly, and the little girl’s sobbing abated. Everyone left the room, and after a while, a woman in blue and white came into the room with a plate and another piece of bread and butter and gave it to the little girl. Isabella stared straight ahead of her. But she wished she knew how the girl had managed to get another slice, for she wanted one herself.
2
THE SCENE WITH THE white bread was Bella’s first conscious experience of terror. She had another, not too long afterward. She was home, and she had a friend, a little girl her age who lived down the street over the vegetable market, Olga. One day, before she went out to find her friend, she saw the servant girl frying chruściki on the wood stove. She ran down and began to jump rope with Olga, but after a while she remembered the chruściki. She ran back upstairs, and while the servant girl was in the toilet, she snatched up two of the cookies and ran down and shared them with Olga. This made both of them extremely happy. But she felt prickles on the back of her head, and turned, and looked up. There in the window of the front room stood the servant girl, glowering at her, waggling her finger. That day Bella stayed out as long as she could. She did not want to go home at all. Nor did she enjoy jumping rope anymore. Her body was cold and prickly and her head felt thick. But if there were consequences to the theft of the chruściki, she does not remember them.
Food, food: it is mostly what she remembers: Momma making doughnuts, laying them out to dry on thick brown paper, spread across all the surfaces in the kitchen and dining room; and babka; and mushroom soup made from dried brown flaky bits, and thickened with barley; and gołągbki, stuffed cabbage. There were potato pancakes with apple sauce; and sometimes, on Sunday, a roast of pork with crackly skin. Isabella did not care about the meat, she wanted only the skin, which crunched and made delicious juices in her mouth. And chicken broth with tiny soft noodles made of egg and flour that Momma dropped in patiently, from the tip of a teaspoon. Food. Bella loved food.
Olga’s family moved and Bella lost her friend, and moved back into her silence. Momma was very fat again and stayed home some days, and when she was home, she had visitors. Momma had many friends, everyone liked Momma, Bella could tell that by the way they smiled and bobbed their heads at her and Momma did the same. Momma would set the table and put out babka and almond cakes and glasses of tea, and the ladies would sit around the table with their hats on, talking. Sometimes Bella listened. Momma did not shoo her away in the daytime when Poppa was not there. She would curl on the couch in silence. Sometimes she would fall asleep.
One day she heard a great cry, and raised her head. Momma had tears in her eyes and was embracing Mamie. They were whispering together, and Momma’s eyes darted to her, to Bella. Then Momma turned back to Mamie and said, “Ah, she won’t say anything to him, and if she did—she’s stupid, he wouldn’t believe it.” And Mamie swept into the room, drawing another woman behind her. Mamie and the other woman wore beautiful broad-brimmed hats with flowers on them. They sat at the table and Momma bustled about just like she did for Poppa except her shoulders weren’t hunched, and she was laughing and talking and every once in a while she wiped a tear from her cheek, and Mamie reached out a graceful arm and patted Momma’s belly, and the women laughed, and Mamie caressed Momma’s cheek. And when Momma had everything on the table, she sat down and the ladies drank tea and ate cake, and Momma held out a piece to Bella, and she ran to get it, then returned to her spot on the couch. The cake woke her up, and she listened.
Mamie was asking Momma for a favor. She wanted Momma to write a letter for her friend. Mamie could not write English; her friend could not write at all. The letter had to go to Immigration. Momma found some paper and a pen, and sat at the table, writing as they told her what they needed to say. Bella began to drift off. After Momma finished the letter, the women continued to talk. Mamie’s friend—Pani Sliwowska—had a rich sister whose husband sold fur coats to very rich women. This sister lived in a brownstone (Bella wondered if that was what the little girl’s house was called) with ten rooms and three toilets. Imagine! And she had a daughter named Anastasia, who had embroidered sheets on her bed and a set of underwear for each day in the week. Imagine! Ah-nah-stah-zya. Bella heard the name over and over. That was the little girl’s name. It was Anastasia she had seen on the steps of the quiet benign house. Bella wondered if she had a dress for each day also. Maybe each day had a different color: pink, blue, white, yellow, green: what else was there? Black. No. Red. She would have a red dress for Sundays. Bella had never seen a red dress.
Anastasia. Anastasia knew only beautiful things. She knew the turning of the leaves when the rain was coming, and the colors of the sky. In summers her parents took her to places where the sun went down. Bella knew about this because, once, in the summer, Momma and Poppa had taken the children to the country, to Uncle August’s house in Rockaway. She did not remember Uncle Gus’s house, or Aunt Sophie, or anything except standing on the beach watching the sun over the water. The sun was big and red and it hung just a few feet above the sea and Bella watched it with her mouth hanging open. And they had to catch the trolley and Poppa had scolded Momma because Bella would not come away from the beach. And Momma, who never scolded, had spoken to her almost sharply, but she would not, she could not, come away. At the end, she had to be lifted up and carried away. And she wept, because she had not seen it, and now she would never see it. “Just another minute, Momma, please!” she cried, but Momma held her tight, and Momma had lines in her forehead as she ran to where Poppa stood with the boys. And even now s
he wanted to weep thinking about it because she would never know: what happened when the sun sank into the sea? Did the sea boil? Did it turn red like the sun? Did the sun make a big lump in the ocean? Did the ocean put out the sun, the way water put out the candles?
Thinking about this, she felt sleepy again, and laid her head against the sofa arm. Anastasia saw the sun go down every day in the summer, and knew what happened. And someday she, Bella, would know too. Someday she would see it. Her arm fell limply against the chair back as she drifted into an Anastasia sleep. She sensed her aunt Mamie kissing her temple, and smelled her perfume. Then she slept deeply.
Sometimes, Momma took Bella to Poppa’s shop with her. Bella loved to go there, although she had to be very quiet and stay out of the way. Poppa’s shop was large and bright, with great crystal chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling. The floors were polished golden wood, and everyone in the shop wore beautiful clothes like Poppa. Momma didn’t, of course, but she stayed in the back. Momma told her Poppa’s shop was very fine, and that the mayor of New York City came to Poppa to have his suits made. Many people came from all over the world to Poppa’s shop, Momma said, and Poppa could speak to them because he spoke seven languages. So Bella had to be very quiet here. And she was. She stayed in the back, only peeping out sometimes through the brocade curtain that separated the front from the back. Usually, she curled up in a corner with bits of silk Momma gave her, scraps from linings and from shirts, and tried to make herself a little pocketbook like one she had once seen, but she didn’t know where. She had made seven of them, but they were no good because the string did not close them. She did not know how to make them work.