Lies About My Family: A Memoir

The Sylvia Plath of the Lower East Side: An Immigrant Tragedy

47 the sylvia plath of the lower east side an immigrant tragedy On his way home from the factory, my grandmother’s brother Meyer decides to go for a shave—this is in around 1935, let’s say late on a Friday afternoon. Sabbath is approaching, he’s just gotten paid, his wife is at home in the apartment, humming while a chicken roasts in the oven and his two little daughters play together, quietly for a change, in a corner of the room. The barber’s chair is soft, his towels hot, his razor sharp, and his conversation—baseball, politics—undemanding. Meyer feels a nick, but he waves away the man’s apology, tosses him an extra penny,leaves the shop rubbing his smooth cheek appreciatively. Sighing, he imagines being groomed like this every day, instead of scraping at his face over a basin of freezing water in the dark kitchen, while his wife rushes from one end of the room to the other, why, he doesn’t know, and his daughters pummel each other. The next day the little nick starts to throb, and by nightfall he is sweating and thrashing with fever. By morning he is raving —the infection has spread to his brain. Penicillin treatment doesn’t exist yet. The funeral is a few days later. In my mother’s photograph album, there is only one picture of this brother of my grandmother’s and none of his wife or younger daughter, whose names are forgotten, but there are lots of pictures of Little Pearl, the older girl, apparently a 48 lies about my family favorite among her cousins. My mother points her out again and again: a child in a white dress happily playing on a tireswing , sitting on a beach. “Now that’s a sad story,” my mother sighs. Here’s the rest of it: When Meyer’s young wife comes home from the funeral she is distraught. She stands in the kitchen in her black dress. How will they live, with no income and the rent coming due every month and the grocer’s bills? She’s been worrying the question ever since her husband stopped making sense, and she hasn’t found an answer yet, because there is none. She kneels and gathers Little Pearl and her sister into her arms. They whine and squirm and she shakes them hard and cries, “Shah!” in a high, clear voice nothing like her usual resigned mumble. Surprised into stillness, the girls let her hug them more tightly to her. She shifts them into one arm and stretches the other behind her to the oven, pulls down the door, flips on the gas. ...