The Silents

19

CHAPTER WH E N I was about eleven, I heard one of the neighbors say to Mrs. Goldberg, "You can't have two women in the same household. They're sure to kill each other." I pulled three four o'clocks out ofthe flower bed that day, sat on the front stoop, and listened with great interest as Mrs. Goldberg debated her position with the neighbors. The three of them were sitting on a bench, crossing and uncrossing their legs, then spreading them apart to let the breeze flow up their dresses. "Especially if one of them is the mother-in-law. Oy, what a mistake that is," the middle neighbor declared. Then they unwrapped their white handkerchiefs from their necks and wiped their brows. Nobody paid attention to me because I was just a kid, sitting on my front stoop, picking four o'clocks, and crushing the petals between my fingers. They uttered a couple ofswear words in Yiddish and went back to wiping their brows. The reason for this discussion was Mrs. Mandleman's heartless behavior with old Mrs. Mandleman, a tiny lady with a face like the wrinkled leather of a worn-out shoe. She was even older than Zadie, I had determined. She wore old-fashioned dresses down to her ankles, a shawl over her shoulders, and what appeared to be a wig-one of many, apparently, because their shades of brown seemed to change every couple ofdays. I would see her shuffling along with her cane to Laykin's grocery and come back with only a small bag because she couldn't carry anything larger. One strong breeze offLake Michigan could have blown her over. 162 What had happened the previous day, according to Mrs. Goldberg, was that young Mrs. Mandleman threw old Mrs. Mandleman out, left her on the street, crying and wailing in Yiddish. When nobody came to rescue her, Mrs. Goldberg called the police, who had a heart-to-heart talk with the younger Mrs. M. Somewhat later, the older Mrs. M. shuffled back upstairs, and peace settled in again at 1309. Mrs. Goldberg's intervention came as no surprise; she was always rescuing somebody. But what astonished me was the fact that one ofthe neighbors attacked Mrs. Goldberg for butting in. How could anybody fault Mrs. Goldberg? I tossed the crushed four o'clock petals behind the bushes and went upstairs to tell my mother. "I'm not surprised," she commented, swirling chocolate frosting in a bowl. "Mrs. Goldberg is a saint. The others wouldn't help a dying man into his bed. And Mrs. Mandleman, well, Mrs. Mandleman is a horse's arse." "A horse's what?" "Arse. Arse. A-S-S," she spelled. She looked at me, giggled, filled a spoon with the frosting, and gave it to me. "Don't tell Papa I swore." "Which Mrs. Mandleman is a horse's arse?" "Well, now that I think about it," she mused, swirling the frosting again, "they're both horses' arses." When the movers placed the last piece offurniture in our new living room, Mama and I sat down on the sofa. We were determined not to be horses' arses. We didn't have a big discussion about it. We just held hands, her two icy ones firmly grasped by mme. THE "NEW" house was not new. Built in the early thirties, it boasted high ceilings and old-fashioned wainscoting, unlike the modern trilevels sprouting in the suburbs. There were three small bedrooms, a kitchen large enough to accommodate the five of us, and an antiquated bathroom with black and white hexagonal tiles halfWay up the walls. Mama inspected the kitchen cupboards one by one, poking her fingers in them-dishes here, cans there, pots and pans under the sink. These were her markers. Instead of a back porch, she now had access to a large backyard with grapevines dangling over an arbor. She could negotiate the back steps without trouble, guide herself to the lawn chair under the arbor, and poke her face up to the sun that filtered through. When we stood at the counter at the new drugstore to pick up Papa's potion of alcohol and witch hazel, the sights and smells were familiar: the soda fountain along the middle ofthe wall, the sweet sickening odor ofdishwater lingering on the cloths used to wipe up ice cream spills, the strong aroma of cough...