She had one of the beautiful feathery white chickens by the throat. It was dead. She dipped the dead chicken into a pail of scalding water. Then she pulled at its feathers. They came out in her hands like the petals off of a flower. The scrawny chicken was left naked. Its skin looked like it had goose bumps.
On the way back to our car I wouldn’t look at the live chickens running around. I promised myself I’d never eat another chicken as long as I lived.
The next day Grandmama baked the chicken as usual. Every time Grandmama opened the oven to baste the chicken it gave off a heavenly smell. But I told myself I wouldn’t touch it. We were just going to sit down at the table when we heard a car in the driveway. It was my Aunt Fritzie and Uncle Tim.
Even if there isn’t any money for her clothes, Aunt Fritzie always wears something fashionable. She can cut up old clothes, or dishtowels, or slipcovers and turn them into a wonderful outfit. That day she wore something pale blue and gauzy that Grandmama recognized right away. “Fritzie, those are your living-room curtains!”
“It’s much more stylish these days to have bare windows,” Aunt Fritzie said. She put her arms around me, and I could smell the perfume she always wore. “Well, Elsa, don’t you look terrific. We went to see the movie Little Women last week, and I said to your Uncle Tim, ‘Amy looks just like Elsa.’” The thing about Aunt Fritzie is that she always makes you feel good, even if you know the nice things she says aren’t the truth.
She is artistic, too. She cuts out pictures of sleeping babies from magazines. She pastes them on tiny silk cushions and dresses them in handembroidered bonnets and little shawls trimmed with bits of lace. When the pictures are finished, she frames them and sells them.
Uncle Tim is Irish. He is handsome, with slick black hair and a black mustache. Before the Depression, they had money, and Aunt Fritzie loved to dress him up just like she dressed up the pictures of the babies. She bought him silk shirts and golf knickers and black-and-white shoes. One Christmas she gave him blue satin pajamas and matching blue satin sheets. But the satin sheets and pajamas were so slippery that each time Uncle Tim turned over he slid out of bed. Even now, when he had been out of work for months, he was wearing a straw hat and a white suit that looked new.
They acted surprised that we were just sitting down to dinner, but they ate an awful lot. There was plenty, though, because Grandmama always cooks extra. During dinner Uncle Tim did tricks, like pulling out a napkin from under a glass of water without spilling any water, which made Grandmama nervous.
After dinner Uncle Tim played records on the Victrola. He has a fine tenor voice, and he sang along and got us to sing, too, even Grandmama. Before they left, Aunt Fritzie asked me to show her all the things I had collected from the beach. She took a long time looking at them, and she said when she was my age she collected all the same things. As we came downstairs I heard Grandpapa say in an angry voice, “You spend money on a new suit, but you want to borrow money for groceries.”
Uncle Tim said, “If I want to get a job I have to look prosperous. No one will hire a salesman who looks like he’s down on his luck.”
Grandpapa sighed and took out his wallet. There wasn’t much in it. Grandmama got up and went into the pantry. In a few minutes she was back with more money. Aunt Fritzie threw her arms around Grandmama and Grandpapa and cried a little. But soon she was laughing and Uncle Tim was making jokes and they were in their car waving cheerfully to us as they drove away.
“Will they ever learn, Carl?” Grandmama said.
“They have a way of forgetting unhappy things,” Grandpapa said. “Maybe that’s not so bad.”
It was only then that I realized I had forgotten all about Mrs. Tolken. I had eaten the chicken. Two helpings!
Grandfather
He paints pictures
with blood-red roses,
their petals
thick as meat,
orange lilies,
open-mouthed
and yawning,
pink peonies
fat as pigs.
When he finishes
a painting,
he walks
around the garden,
grumbling
at how dull
real flowers are.
I like to watch Grandpapa paint. His painting clothes have little smears and dabs of paint on the pants and shirt. You can match the colors of the spots with the pictures he has painted.
On the porch he sets up his easel to hold his painting. He squeezes a little paint from nearly every tube onto his palette. When the colors are all arranged, he opens a book that has pictures of flowers in it. First he draws the flowers from the book, then he paints them. In the book the flowers never look real. They never look real in Grandpapa’s pictures either. The pink flowers are too pink and the blue flowers too blue. And everything is too large.
With the yard full of flowers, I don’t know why my grandpapa paints flowers out of a book. This morning I asked, “Grandpapa, why don’t you pick some of the flowers in the garden and paint them?”
“Ach,” he said, “they’re nothing special. I can’t do anything with them.”
Grandmama, who had been listening, laughed. “You mean you can’t make them do what you want them to do.”
“In Berlin,” Grandpapa said, “my teacher said you must learn to paint by studying the paintings of famous painters. I used to go into the Old Museum with my easel and paints to copy the pictures. That museum had twenty paintings by the great artist Rembrandt. Imagine!”
“Ah, but just down the street was the Cafe Bauer,” Grandmama said. “We would have cups of chocolate. From a table covered with silver trays we would pick out cookies shaped like swans. Hohlhippen, we called them. They were made with the beaten whites of eggs and were so light you didn’t know you held them in your hand. And all the while you sipped your chocolate a string quartet played waltzes.”
Grandpapa frowned. “Gussie,” he said, “how can you compare the beauty of a great painting by Rembrandt with a cookie?”
“You can live without pictures, Carl, but even an artist has to eat.” Grandmama went into the kitchen and brought back a big plate of sugar cookies.
“You win, Gussie,” Grandpapa said. We ate up all the cookies.
Later Grandpapa said to me, “Elsa, you mustn’t be like me when you write your poems. You mustn’t just copy what other people have done. Everyone has their own painting and their own poem inside them. Everyone has something they can say that no one else can say for them.”
When I went up to my room I looked through my diary. What my grandfather said is true. No one else could have written exactly what I wrote, and if I didn’t write it, it would never get said.
The Dummy
Because I kept
to myself,
reading
my books,
she made a dummy,
stuffing newspaper
into one of my dresses,
twisting paper
into arms and legs,
rolling it into a ball
painted with eyes
and a mouth.
Open on its lap
lay a book.
Hung around the neck
was my name.
I sit under the leafy branches of the apple tree and read my books. There is nothing to bother me but birds hunting the caterpillars that fold themselves up in leaves.
From time to time Grandmama comes to see what I am doing. “You’ll ruin your eyes,” she says, or “Heavens, girl, why don’t you do something?”
When I answer, “I am doing something, Grandmama. I’m reading,” she sends me out to pick strawberries or weed my garden. After a few minutes she is there to tell me, “You’re forgetting to look under the leaves. That’s where the biggest berries are.” Or, “Child, you’re pulling up your flower seedlings instead of weeds!” She sighs and tells me to go back to my books. Soon she will be there with another chore.
“I don’t think it?
??s healthy that you should read so much.” Grandmama picks up my book and leafs through it as if she were looking for some creepy-crawly thing inside.
One morning, on my way to the screen porch where we have our breakfasts, I saw it sitting in a rocking chair — a dummy made of newspapers stuffed into one of my dresses. There was a book on its lap. I started to cry. Grandpapa put his arm around me. “She only meant it as a joke,” he said.
“But why is she so against my reading?” I asked.
“In the old country your grandmama loved to read. But when she came to this country, she was too shy or too proud to go to school to learn to read English like I did. She misses her books just as you would. You must never tell her I told you that. She doesn’t like people to know.”
I tried to think what it would mean not to be able to read. It would be like walking into the library and taking down books from the shelves only to find that they were all glued shut.
Later that morning when I was sitting under the apple tree, Grandmama came to tell me to pick up the rugs on the porch and shake the sand out of them. “Wait a minute, Grandmama,” I said. “I’ve just come to a good part in my book. Let me finish it. I’ll read it out loud so you can hear it, too.”
She gave me a sharp look. “I’ve got better things to do with my time than to listen to books.” But she sat down.
I was reading Little Women, so I knew just where to turn. I read her the part where Beth dies. I read how Beth grew too weak to sew anymore. How Beth found the sad poem her sister, Jo, wrote about her. How Beth died in her mother’s arms with just a sigh.
“Well,” Grandmama said, wiping away a tear, “Beth is with the angels.”
Now two or three times a day Grandmama comes out to where I am reading and says, “Well, what is that wild girl, Jo, doing now?” She sits down under the tree with her long skirt arranged neatly and her legs in their thick white cotton stockings sticking straight out. I read to her. After a while she gets up and shakes the grass from her skirt. “I can’t sit here all day wasting time,” she says, but she always comes back. The dummy is gone.
The Card Game
In the orchard,
proper in suits
and Panama hats,
Willie Hoffman, Gustave
Ladamacher,
and my grandfather
are playing cards,
the smoke from their cigars
bothering butterflies,
their German insults
knocking apples
off the trees.
Every Saturday afternoon Mr. Ladamacher and another German gentleman come to play cards with Grandpapa. Every Saturday morning Grandmama makes strudel. Every week the German gentlemen act surprised, as if they had never seen strudel before. “Himmel!” they say. That means, “heaven.” “Gussie made strudel for us! So much work just for us!”
Grandmama always replies, “Ach, there’s nothing to it.”
But there is a lot to the making of strudel. I love to watch how it’s done. First Grandmama scoops out a big pile of flour and makes a hole in the center of it. Eggs and water and butter go into the hole. Using her hands, Grandmama squishes the mess together. Then it’s pounded and kneaded. That’s just the beginning. The dough sits for a while, “rests,” Grandmama calls it, as if the dough were snoozing. She spreads a clean cloth over the kitchen table and sprinkles flour over it. Next she rolls out the dough and begins to pull it with the backs of her hands. Little by little, the lump of dough stretches and grows. I get to help with the stretching. When we’re finished, the strudel dough, so thin you can see through it, covers the whole tabletop. By then Grandmama has flour all over her, even on the tip of her nose.
She spreads sliced apples and raisins and sugar and cinnamon over the strudel dough. She rolls it all up into a long bundle and bakes it. Nothing smells better than an oven full of strudel.
When the strudel is all finished, Grandmama puts it on her china platter with the roses painted all over it and lets me carry the strudel out into the orchard where the men are playing euchre. I’m not sure what kind of card game euchre is, but it seems like you can’t play it without a lot of shouting and yelling. Since the shouting all goes on in German, the only word I understand is dummkopf, which means “dumbbell.” I know that word. It is what my grandmama calls herself when a hole opens up in the strudel dough she is pulling and she has to patch it.
One day I climbed up into an apple tree near where the men were playing. After a while they must have forgotten I was there. They were full of strudel. Their Panama hats were tipped back from their foreheads, and their ties were loosened. Their jackets hung from the backs of their chairs, and their shirtsleeves were rolled up. Grandpapa was passing around a box of cigars. Grandpapa saves the rings around the cigars for me. He gives me the cigar boxes, too. I kept the baby mice in one of them. I don’t think the mice liked the smell of the cigars, though, because they ran away.
The men looked over their shoulders toward the cottage. Grandmama was inside washing dishes. I saw Grandpapa take out of his jacket pocket what looked like a small bottle, only it was metal not glass. He held it under the table and carefully unscrewed the top. The bottle was passed around, and everyone took a quick sip from it. Hurriedly Grandpapa put the bottle back in his pocket. I heard them say the word Schnaps.
Later I asked Grandmama what Schnaps meant. “Where did you hear that word?” she wanted to know.
“In the orchard. They were drinking it from a little bottle.”
“Ach! Sie haben Schnaps getrunken. Schnaps is whiskey. Your grandfather makes it himself.”
“But isn’t it against the law to make whiskey?” It was Prohibition, and no one was allowed to buy or sell whiskey.
“It’s just in case someone gets sick. Then we take a little for medicine. Maybe Mr. Ladamacher ate too much strudel and needed a little of the medicine.” She looked at me to see if I believed her. A minute later she was marching across the orchard toward the men. I could hear her scolding them in German all the way up to the cottage.
Quick Change
The city is an old woman
with nothing to dress up for,
the country, a young girl
trying on one thing and then another,
skirts of purple knotweed,
scarves of yellow mustard,
ribbons of red clover.
In the mornings after breakfast, Grandmama works in her garden pulling weeds. She ties up the leggy blue larkspur and waters the plants with a sprinkling can she fills from the rain barrel. The water in our faucets is pumped from the lake. “Too cold for the flowers,” Grandmama says.
While she works in her garden, I work in mine. All the vegetables are up, and there are little beans starting. The snapdragons are blooming, too. I picked some to go on the dining room table. Grandmama helped me cage my tomato plants. They are growing so large they can’t hold themselves up, so they go in these wire cages. First there were little yellow flowers all over the plants, and now there are tiny green tomatoes. “Why does it take so long for everything to grow?” I asked Grandmama.
She put her arm around me. It was warm from the sun, and she smelled of the tomato plants, which is a nice smell. “Ach, what is your hurry? Enjoy today. Tomorrow will come soon enough.”
I think she was talking about me and not the tomatoes.
In the fields something amazing is happening. One week the fields are orange with hawkweed, another week gold with mustard. Then they are white with daisies. I think of how hard I have to work to make my small garden grow. These fields, with their thousands and thousands of flowers, stretch as far as your eye can see.
There are flowers that know enough to open their blossoms in the morning and close them at night, as if they were keeping store. There are plants that have special friends: the milkweed flowers are cluttered with fluttering orange butterflies called monarchs. The tall yellow mullein plant has a yellow goldfinch perched on its tip.
I go by
the fields on my way into Greenbush to get the mail. No letter has come from the Roths. On the way home the fields are still crowded with flowers. Far away in Germany, too, there are fields of flowers, but if you were my grandparents’ friends the government might forbid you to paint the flowers. It would be like the flowers were taken away from you.
Each time I go into Greenbush I try to keep out of Tommy’s way. Most of the time Tommy’s on the fishing boat with his dad, but today he was sitting on the drugstore steps. When he’s with the other kids he doesn’t pay any attention to me. Today he was alone, so he said, “You want to see something?”
“What?” I wanted to know.
“In Mr. Hatton’s workshop.”
“I don’t care.” Just this morning Grandmama had mentioned a table she admired in Mr. Hatton’s store.
I guess I should have been warned by the sneaky way Tommy prowled around to the back of the furniture store.
“Why can’t we just go in the store?” I asked.
“Because what he’s working on is special, and he doesn’t want anyone to see it.” Tommy climbed up on a wooden crate that was pushed against the back wall of the store. He peered into a window and then motioned to me to climb up next to him.
By standing on my toes and stretching my neck up I could just see into the room. Scattered around the room were hammers and saws and all the stuff carpenters have. In the middle of the room was a sort of table. A man was lying on it. He was very still. “Why is that man sleeping on a table?” I asked Tommy.
“He isn’t sleeping. He’s dead as a doornail. It’s old Mr. Spire. He croaked last night, and Mr. Hatton’s building him his coffin.”
I practically fell off the crate. It was worse than Dracula. “You brought me here to show me a dead man!”
“What’s the matter with that?”