Our neighbors bought their houses
with GI loans. The fathers had gone to college on
the GI Bill. Mothers stayed home, or worked as school
aides or secretaries while grandmas baked cookies
and marshmallow treats. My parents were in the war,
too, but not as soldiers. Now, they were American.
They were engineers. Their work was rocketry and war
planes; they knew top secrets and wouldn't tell, even
when I begged to know just one tiny confidence. Friends
they played poker with on Saturday nights had numbers
tattooed on their arms, and nobody, but nobody, knew
from marshmallow treats.
If the land of the Beach Boys and
eternal summer was not for me, I decided, I was not
for it either. In New York, my book promised, you
could be different-- dark, foreign. I realized I had
been born in the wrong place, a tragic error in my
parents' epic saga of war, survival, immigration and
resettlement. The phoenix had risen from the ashes,
yes, but had wound up on the wrong coast altogether.
I was a New Yorker meant to be. I was eight, and I
was moving East, as soon as I could manage it.
It snowed in New York, it said so
in my book. Great white blizzards of snow, banking
up on the streets, going gray with street grit, drifting
into the ravines of Central Park. It confettied down
the subway grates, and newsstand vendors had to bundle
against the cold, damp white. It said so in the book.
On Monday, I rode to the library
as usual, but diddt check out a new book. Instead,
I renewed "Cricket," and read it through
again, looking for a secret recipe for snow, hint,
any clue. At night, I punched my pillow up to make
bolster while I read. A tiny white down-feather pricked
my cheek through the cotton ticking. I pulled it out,
puffed it off my fingertip with an easy pah! of breath
and watched it drift and settle onto my lavender bedspread.
It lay there, balanced on a tuft of chenille, and
the thought exploded in my 8-year-old brain. I had
my plan.
The next morning, as usual, my father
rose before the sunrise, with ample time for his habitual
meticulous toilette-- shaving three times with a clean
razor blade, twice against the grain of his beard
and once, with it. Cleanliness was how he survived
the camps, he said. He respected himself more than
the others, and it showed. A fine appearance remained
a principal talisman for success in his new country,
where he could once again afford worsted wool suits
and leather shoes with laces. His rinsed-clean shaving
brush stood on the porcelain rim of the bathroom sink
as my mother began her own catechism, of cosmetics
and perfumes, that allowed her to present her professional
self to the world.
Max Factor pancake makeup and rosy
creme blush, light-blue powder eyeshadow, Maybelline
pencil eyeliner, then mascara. Bouffant beauty-parlor
hair tamed into a buoyant flip by a shower of Aqua
Net hairspray. A burst of Chanel No. 5-- my mother's
homage to her idol, Marie Curie-- and Revlon's Love
That Red lipstick finished her face. She bent across
me, perched on the back of the toilet tank, to tear
off a single square of toilet tissue. Carefully separating
the paper along the perforations, she folded it precisely
in half and blotted her lips. On school days, she
often tucked that square of tissue into my lunch sack,
a loving kiss from an absent mother. But now, in summmer,
she gave it to me. I tried to match my lips to hers,
on the paper, and carry some of the vivid color to
my own small mouth.
My father left for work in his sporty
white Monza. My mother, after her customary morning
repast of rye toast, smoked cod, coffee and unfiltered
Herbert Tareyton cigarettes, welcomed Mrs. Rollins,
then drove off in her big bronze Buick Skylark. In
my mother's absence, Mrs. Rollins' indifference to
me was unfettered by any concern for How It Looked.
She took care of me, saw to it that I was fed and
clean, but saved her love for Edie. Today, that was
good: I was aiming for late afternoon, when my sister
had her bath and when Mrs. Rollins, the mother of
two grown sons, filssed with Edie's curly hair with
the infinitely patient attention that mothers of men
lavish on little girls' coiffiires.
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