Stuffed (14 page)

I thanked Aunt Ruthie for the needlepoint pillow and the halvah. “Good-bye, Aunt Ruthie.” I bent to kiss her.

After visiting Aunt Ruthie, that night I dream I’m taking her to the Metropolitan Museum. “Leave your shopping cart at home,” I tell her. “We’ll slide.” We do the Great Hall like ice-skaters, gliding over the stone floors in flat shoes.

I wake up thinking about her applesauce and call my mother. “What’s the thing you push food through that gets out the pits when you make applesauce?” I ask.

“A Foley Food Mill,” Mom says.

So I dial the Bronx.

“Of course!” Aunt Ruthie gasps. “The letters are right there on the side! Darling, would you tell me something, please? I want to know. How on earth could I forget that?”

Ethel Edythe Shure Volk, the First National Bank of Princeton’s first calendar girl

STURGEON

With one or two notable exceptions every-one in our family was gorgeous. In a gorgeous family everybody looks like somebody else. That’s how you establish how gorgeous they are. My mother was a Lana Turner double. My father bore an uncanny resemblance to Stewart Granger
and
Prince Philip—people actually took sides. My mother’s mother was a Gloria Swanson look-alike. My sister was likened to two people: Elizabeth Taylor and Cyd Charisse. That left me.

“So who do you think she takes after?”

“I don’t know. Lily Pons?”

Lily Pons? Who was Lily Pons? How come everybody else looked like a brand name, and I looked like Lily Pons? Whoever Lily Pons was, she must have had gorgeous arms. One day, while my grandmother was playing canasta with her sisters, I stood in her kitchen making a ham sandwich.

“Look at that arm.” She glanced up from the card table.

“Did you ever in your life see such an arm?” Aunt Ruthie chimed in.

“As God is my witness,” Aunt Gertie swore, “never.”

NANA: “Look how it curves near the shoulder!”

RUTHIE: “Look how it moves!”

GERTIE: “Gorgeous!”

NANA: “Did you ever?”

GERTIE and RUTHIE: “Never!”

In a gorgeous family even
meat
can be gorgeous. As in, “That’s a gorgeous lamb chop.”

Objects too.

“Is that a gorgeous hat or what?”

“Did you ever?”

“May I be struck with lightning, never.”

My father set the standard for men. Tall, skinny, with a big nose and plummy lips, he was our male gorgeousness ideal. Naturally, my sister and I married tall, skinny men with big noses and plummy lips. Her husband looks like Montgomery Clift. Mine, like Gregory Peck.

In a gorgeous family, whatever you have, it’s gorgeous. If it’s on the small size, it’s “petite.” If it’s bigger than normal, it’s “generous.” Take our feet. Most of us had generous ones.

“What a shame.” Relatives would point out an otherwise nice-looking person. “Look how shrimpy her feet are.”

We were told large feet made us look more balanced. We were less likely to tip over. Big-foot support arrived via Jackie Kennedy. My sister, who by the time she was eleven was taller than our mother, had the biggest feet of all. How I longed for them. With nine and a halfs, I felt like a munchkin. I couldn’t wait to get pregnant and add half a size. If hair was kinky, it was naturally curly. If hair was limp, it was Garboesque.

In the beginning I hoped I was gorgeous too. If commenting on someone’s looks was the first thing people did when they ran into each other, gorgeousness had to be important. “Muh-wah! Muh-wah!” They’d air kiss. “You look gorgeous!” Every chance meeting started with a mention of looks. Every parting was followed by a looks postmortem. But all this time something nagged at me: What did
I
have to do with how I looked? Wasn’t being gorgeous a genetic fluke, like being able to roll your tongue or make your thumb touch your wrist? It wasn’t something you could take credit for like cleaning your plate.

When I was twelve, we moved to Kings Point, one of nine villages forming a town called Great Neck. It was a suburb where girls got their hair done every Saturday. On Saturdays I’d feel gorgeous too. Was I only as good as my do? I loathed how important it was to have the single solitary look that passed for beauty. I couldn’t bear having my looks be the barometer of my soul. The only time I ever heard my mother curse was when she broke a fingernail. I decided I would never have long nails. Watching her apply pancake makeup to her gorgeous face with a clammy beige sponge that smelled like an attic, I swore I’d never wear any of that stuff either. If artifice was the hallmark of beauty, how legitimate was beauty? My mother didn’t need makeup. She was more gorgeous without it. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She took this in her stride. If pressed, she would say Ingrid Bergman was the most beautiful woman in the world. Despite “a low hairline,” my grandmother voted for Kay Francis.

I decided not to let looks be important. And they weren’t until I had the occasion to doubt mine. One summer at camp a bunk bitch put together the perfect girl:

“Bonnie’s knees . . .” Harriet made a list. “Sue’s nose . . . Addie’s hair . . . Diane’s waist . . .” Nothing came from me.

“Of course you’re gorgeous,” my mother consoled me. “Anytime someone tries to hurt you, it’s because they’re jealous.”

It was self-preservation. I had to make gorgeous not matter. If I was gorgeous, fine. If I wasn’t, that was okay too. Gorgeous was too frivolous an arena to compete in. I began loathing compliments.

“Big deal,” I’d respond. “Cut to the chase.” Or “My skin is so smooth? What were you expecting? Pumice?”

I especially couldn’t stand the three questions my mother never failed to ask after a party: “How did you look? What did you wear? Were you the most gorgeous girl there?”

Most of all I detested the possibility that people were saying I was gorgeous to make me feel good. And the dark thing that meant was that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t gorgeous after all. That compliments were good manners, like “Let’s have lunch” or “Nice to meet you.” If I was so gorgeous, how come the most gorgeous boy in our high school never asked me out? How come nobody outside the family ever gasped and said, “Is she gorgeous or what?”

“Jewish girls don’t hit their stride till their thirties,” my mother consoled me. “Gentile girls peak before twenty.”

Always, the first day of school, I would check out all the other mothers. There was never any competition. Mine was the most gorgeous.

“Did anyone ever tell you you have one gorgeous mother?” was the refrain of my youth.

“Your mother? Go on. I thought she was your sister!”

“Do you know,” strangers would say as if I didn’t know, as if it was news, “your mother really is quite beautiful.”

“Thank you.” My mother’s eyes would widen as if she’d never heard it before.

Sundays, when the family sat down to breakfast together, my father would say, “Isn’t your mother the most gorgeous woman in the world?”

“Yes!” my sister and I would answer—glad she was, sorry we weren’t.

People looked at me with curiosity. “Tell me,” they’d ask. “What’s it like to have such a gorgeous mother?”

To support the idea that gorgeousness didn’t matter, I began to collect women I admired who, by the gorgeous family’s standards, weren’t gorgeous: Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, Alice Neel, Ella Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Simone de Beauvoir. Then a funny thing happened. They got gorgeous.

Loving them transformed them. In college there was an odd-looking boy in my drawing class. David had a potbelly. His acne raged. But he was funny and quirky and a brilliant renderer. After class I’d hang around his easel to see what he’d done. We began to take walks. I started thinking his skin wasn’t so bad and the fact that it fulminated was a sign of masculinity, a testosterone zetz. David became even more attractive because he didn’t seem to care if he was.

One afternoon, lying in the grass between classes, bodies almost touching, we stared at the sky. “David,” I leaned over him, “have you ever wanted to kiss me?”

“No,” he said.

Mostly though, I was attracted to gorgeous men. I couldn’t help myself. They didn’t have to be 100 percent gorgeous, but inky hair, rosy cheeks, a well-defined platysma popping out of a white T-shirt, bulging forearm veins, or the one that still takes my breath away—a concave spinal column, the kind of spine that goes in, a valley in the mountains of a man’s back. Any one of those and I was powerless. Yes, I loved how they looked. But I had a double standard. I resented that what may have drawn them to me had anything at all to do with how I looked.

I lived in a whirl of beauty. But even a gorgeous family has degrees. My mother was a true beauty. Her mother was a classic beauty. But it was my father’s mother, Ethel Edythe Shure Volk Wolf, who was considered a
great
beauty. Her thick chestnut hair was long enough to sit on. It had to be professionally combed. Her eyes were light blue and her nose was tiny. Granny Ethel was so gorgeous, she once received a letter addressed simply:

Post, postman
Do your duty
Deliver this letter
To the Princeton beauty

There was one unusual aspect to Granny’s gorgeousness. It had what some people might call a tragic flaw. No one else I knew with this flaw was considered gorgeous. But the rest of Granny’s beauty was of such magnitude, it overrode the problem. She was—there’s no other word for it—fat. Not plump. Not zaftig. Fat.

“She was made when meat was cheap,” Dad used to say when he saw a fat woman. “It must be jelly ’cause jam don’t shake like that!” or “Fat, fat, the water rat. Forty bullets in your hat.” But never about his mother.

“It was more than fat,” my sister says now. “She had no muscle tone.”

Exercise in my grandmother’s day meant walking two blocks on Sunday to pick up bagels. Granny’s upper arms hung. Six grandchildren used them as pillows. You could flick the upper part, and it would swing until somebody quieted their palms on either side to make it stop. Those arms held the secret of perpetual motion. We pressed our cheeks into their warm powdered softness. She laughed.

Granny Ethel was on an eternal diet. When we ate in restaurants, she’d work the breadbasket, starting with the Ry-Krisp because she was watching her weight. When those were gone, she’d dive into the saltines followed by the sesame breadsticks. Only then, if the appetizer still hadn’t arrived, if the waiter wasn’t in sight, if there was still downtime, would she go through the salt sticks and rolls: kaiser, Parker House, poppy seed, working her way up calorically to the hot cross buns.

When I was five, Granny took me to Schrafft’s to introduce me to the ice-cream soda. We sat at the polished mahogany counter, and she ordered me a white-and-black, a vanilla soda with chocolate ice cream. Then in her amused and patient way she taught me how to drink through a straw: “Pretend your mouth is an Electrolux.” It worked. That ice-cream soda was the best thing I’d tasted to date, cold and sweet to drink, cold and sweet to eat. And then there was the taste, the classic chocolate and vanilla, a combination that remains unparalleled. I dangled my legs from the stool hoping that soda never would end.

When Granny married her second husband, Charles Wolf, she left Manhattan and bought a house in Trenton. Then they bought a winter home in Miami, where they maintained a cabana at the Thunderbird. From the time I was eight, I would be sent to visit them at Christmas. Dad would wrap a sturgeon in waxed paper and two layers of gold foil, and I would sit on the plane with the sturgeon on my lap. The Flying Fish I called it. Planes to Florida took six hours then. Men wore suits, and women wore white gloves to fly. There were propellers out the window. I would sit on the plane for six hours holding the sturgeon. When the plane landed, I’d scan the crowd on the tarmac. Granny would be there making a visor out of her hand. Then she’d spot me and wave. I would see her eyes roam until they lit on the sturgeon. The relief, the joy, on her face. The question for me was, Who was she happiest to see?

Granny’s house wasn’t big. To get to the guest bathroom, I had to pass the kitchen. And there she’d be, night after night, standing at the counter, picking at the sturgeon. She’d be in an enormous belted robe, her hair in a loose thick braid down her back. She went through the fish in layers. First she’d eat it by the slice. Then she’d scavenge the debris. Finally she’d peck the skin. Toward the end of my week in Florida, the sturgeon remains were wrapped in newspaper and I’d go home. Only Granny ate the sturgeon. When friends stopped by, she put out mixed nuts and mosaics of dried fruit on wicker trays. These arrangements came packaged with an ivory-toned two-pronged plastic fork. But Granny preferred her own dried fruit instruments, an engraved silver nutcracker with a matching metal pick. Some of the things—the dried apricots and glazed maraschino cherries— were identifiable. But some were mysterious, beige with veins, black with stubble.

Jacob Volk had been Orthodox. Charles Wolf was merely kosher. Granny practiced no religion, but the problem, even though she kept a kosher home for Charles, was that she loved Chinese food. I always knew when she was going to take me for Chinese because she’d start the conversation with, “Don’t tell Grandpa Charles.” Then we’d slink to the kind of Chinese restaurant where it always looks like night. Granny would check the street to make sure no one she knew saw us going in. She’d order Chop Suey, Chow Mein, and Almond Char Sue Ding. When the New York branch of the family ate Chinese, we were more adventurous: Moo Goo Gai Pan and War Hoo Hip Har. What we ordered didn’t need gray cornstarch to hold it together. Still, Granny savored every bite. She ate with elegance and the kind of resolve that said, “This is hard work, this business of eating. I am, however, up to the task.” Afterward she would drink seltzer to “aid digestion.”

I liked Grandpa Charles. He was gentle, and even when children spoke, he listened as if he were interested. I was proud of him for inventing the toothless plastic zipper. He gave me handbags he manufactured under the name Park Lane and laughed when I tickled his feet. Once, he took me on a tour of his tannery in New Jersey. It was a sunny, Santa’s workshop sort of place, sunken tubs filled with hides and men in brown leather aprons working at tables with hammers and awls. I loved his accent. When he said, “So, Ettel, tell me vot. Vair you took da kinder fair loonch?” I’d let Granny answer. “Wolfie’s.” She’d lie. Or “Pickin’ Chicken, Charles.”

In Florida we ate out most nights. When Granny did cook, it was a broiled piece of meat and the salad she invented—a mound of shredded carrots moistened with V-8 juice. That salad had everything: the bright orange carrots, the lacquer of red juice. The sweet, the sour. The crunchy, the wet. I would sit alone by the window at her kitchen table and chew it, watching two great beams of light cross and part from each other in the black night sky. I didn’t ask her what the lights were for. I knew. They were to detect enemy planes so the army could shoot them down before they shot us. It never occurred to me the lights were from the airport and we weren’t at war. Anything was possible in Florida. To a New York girl of eight, Florida wasn’t really America. The buses, water fountains, and bathrooms were segregated.