The Appetites of Girls (3 page)

So I followed Mama’s voice, singing together with her. One phrase and another with Mama as my guide. Then finding my place once more, I mumbled and stuttered through the remainder of my Torah portion until I reached the final, shameful “Amen.”

•   •   •

A
ll of the family and friends who had come to watch me paraded back to our apartment when the service ended. In a steady stream, still huffing from their walk from the temple, they poured through our door, squeezing themselves onto the sofa and the wing chairs and around the scratched baby grand. In expectation of the celebration, Mama had laid the dining table with a feast of food. Earlier that week, she had bought beeswax candles for the silver candleholders and pink tulips for our Waterford vase. She had placed three small cakes of lily-of-the-valley-scented hand soap in the china dish in the bathroom and draped the best lacy hand towels over the rack beside the sink.
“Shayna Maideleh!”
Aunt Bernice and Aunt Helena embraced me, pinching my cheeks. Sarah and Valerie were passing trays of salmon and capers on toast, moving with small sideways steps to weave through the crowd, the white bows Mama had clipped in their hair that morning still perfectly placed. Sarah would not
become a bat mitzvah for another year, Valerie for another three, but from the way their lips pressed as they concentrated on the platters in their hands, I knew they were no longer looking forward to these occasions. When they reached me in the corner beyond the couch, the least conspicuous spot I could find, they both smiled and whispered “Congratulations.” But they attempted the word so halfheartedly, I could feel a flush spread along my neck.

Mama was offering around a platter of her chicken meatballs. That morning I had helped her stick them with toothpicks, dotting each with a leaf of parsley.

“Well, there you are, Ruthie. Mazel tov! Mazel tov!” Mrs. Rosenberg and Mrs. Kramer kissed me, then Mama. “This is a big day, yes? Very exciting!” The front of Mrs. Rosenberg’s dark hair puffed in a cresting wave, just as she had styled it the year before for her daughter Amanda’s thirteenth birthday. She accepted two meatballs and a cocktail napkin from Mama’s hands then blotted just the corners of her mouth, leaving her lipstick untouched. I had no doubt I would be the pitied subject of their conversation for the entire afternoon. So, slipping past forearms, chests, elbows, and plates of food, I escaped into the kitchen.

On the windowsill beside the cupboard stood the brightly colored bat mitzvah cards that had arrived in advance. When they had come in the mail, I had arranged them against the window, liking to reread their bold-lettered messages each time I entered the kitchen:
Congratulations, Bat Mitzvah!
We Celebrate You on This Day!
they announced. Mama, holding her now-empty platter, pushed open the kitchen’s swinging door. The small gold hoops with diamond studs, which had once belonged to Nana Leah, quivered in her ears as she began to spoon liver mousse into a pastry bag, piping it onto crackers, her jaw shifting to one side as she worked.

“Don’t you want to join your party, Ruthie?” Mama wiped her fingers on a dish towel. “Everyone is here for your sake.”

“No.” I shook my head, sinking into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, resting my heels on its metal rung.

“They’ll begin to wonder what happened to you, hmm? Are you going to hide in here all afternoon like a chipmunk in a hole?” Mama laughed as she placed a hand on my head, but I could tell she had been worrying. A smudge of plum lipstick stained the white of her front teeth, evidence, I knew, that she had been chewing her bottom lip over my morning failure.

“Please don’t make me go back out, Mama. I can’t, I can’t!”

Mama shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t gnaw, Ruthie.” She tugged my thumb from the corner of my mouth, lifting my hand for me to see the cuticle—shredded and raw once more despite the attention she had given my fingers the night before with warm water and lotion.

“Did you notice at Gregory’s bar mitzvah”—Mama opened the oven door, allowing a rush of hot air into the room, a quick change of subject to distract me from my misery—“Nadia hired caterers to make and serve
all
the food. She never had to lift so much as a pinkie.”

“Yes. The meatballs were dry and the liver canapés flavorless.” I knew this was what Mama wished to hear, affirmations that even professional caterers couldn’t top her dishes. She never said it, but now and then Mama hinted at what we all knew: that of the entire extended family, she was the finest cook. Neither of her two sisters nor any of the sisters-in-law could match her in the kitchen.

“I don’t think Nadia’s caterers actually used butter in their liver mousse. I added chopped walnuts this time. A definite improvement, I think. Did you try it?”

“No, Mama.” I cupped my chin in my fists. “I don’t think I can eat.”

“No? At your own bat mitzvah! Perhaps it’s better not to dwell on it, hmm, Pea? What’s done is done.” Drying her hands, Mama pulled a chair next to mine.

“But I don’t understand how I lost my place.” I began to pick at the thick sash wrapping my middle. “The others didn’t make mistakes. I was the only one!”

The hair at Mama’s temples had begun to dampen slightly from the
heat of the kitchen. “It was not so bad, Ruthie. You made it to the end, didn’t you? Really, it could have been worse.”

But from the way she frowned as she began to stroke my cheek, I thought she was trying to convince herself as much as me. “What’s the good in comparing yourself with someone else, hmm? We are all different. No two children are the same. When your sisters were babies, they plumped like dumplings. Just breathing seemed to make them fatten up. But you were small from the beginning. You always required a bit more care—”

“Yes, Mama.”

“So we are all unique from the start, each with our own special needs. And with a little help, a bit of attention, everything evens out.” As if to prove her point, the corners of her mouth curving into a half-smile, Mama patted the bulge of my stomach below my ribs.

“Try to eat something, Ruthie. It will make you feel better.”

Standing up, Mama reopened the oven, spearing with a knife three crispy potato pancakes and dropping them onto a dish. She scooped dollops of applesauce over them, then drew her chair closer until our knees bumped. It had been hours since breakfast, and I began to section off a chunk of the shredded potato with the side of my fork. One bite and then another and another. Until the warm pancake filled me, stuffing down the worries of the day.

The summer after my bat mitzvah was much like every summer. Always, in the months of July and August, many of the children in our neighborhood disappeared on extended vacations or to sleepaway camps. But long trips were a luxury our family couldn’t afford, and in Mama’s opinion, sleepaway camps were ill-supervised and of little benefit. So my sisters and I attended the morning summer school program at our temple, singing Hebrew songs, making dolls of papier-mâché, learning the stories of our people’s history. Then, in the afternoons, since this was the season
business slowed, Mama would leave Ruby, the college student she had recently hired, to manage Broadway Paperie, and she would devote the remainder of the day to all she had planned for us: a full schedule of activities that she believed would keep our minds active.
We
would not squander our time between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next, as so many of our friends did. From us she knew that Ellen Reid and her sister, when they were not at theater camp, spent day after day stretched on the roof deck of their apartment building for the sole purpose of deepening their tans. And that Jenny Frankel, until her family left for Lake George, was allowed to bring a TV into her bedroom and watch from morning till night. “Someone should tell them that by September their brains will turn to gelatin!” Mama liked to joke.

Once, when Mama and Poppy attended a funeral in Trenton for one of Poppy’s former coworkers, my sisters and I spent the entire day and evening with Jenny. When Mama came to get us after dark, we had fallen asleep on Jenny’s pink shag carpet, our unfinished glasses of 7UP, our shared plate of Doritos beside us. Later, walking home in the warm nighttime air to West 256th Street, the glow of the building lights and of the street lamps on the avenues seemed almost a continuation of the fantasy hours of
Charlie’s Angels
and
Gilligan’s Island
and
The Love Boat
we had just spent at Jenny’s house, a dream so complete and prolonged it had seemed it might last forever. Could we ever watch TV the way Jenny did? we pleaded, our feet tripping along the sidewalk in our buckled sandals. Not every day, but just sometimes? Once a week, maybe? Until summer ended? But Mama answered the way we supposed she would: Just because Jenny was permitted, did that make it a good idea? If Jenny leaped from the George Washington Bridge top, would we follow her in that foolishness, too?

Still, for weeks, before rolling from bed in the mornings, I would imagine I was Mary Ann or Ginger from
Gilligan’s Island
, lovely in my swimsuit with endless days in the tropics. Sometimes, with the pad and paper I kept on my night table, I would draw elaborate scenes of the grass
hut where Mary Ann lived or write poems about the sea or the groves of palm trees along the sand. But, as we expected, our TV restrictions were never altered—
Wild Kingdom
on Sunday evenings, because it was educational, and one hour of our choosing on Saturday mornings. And the next time Mama needed to be away for a day, she brought us to Aunt Bernice’s, where we played hangman and tic-tac-toe and dominoes with Aunt Bernice and Uncle Mickey until she returned.

•   •   •

H
ow much effort Mama gave to making sure our summer was not wasted, drawing up a calendar of projects she believed would put us at an advantage when school resumed in the fall. She bought a jigsaw puzzle of continental Europe, a second of the Americas. From the public library, she borrowed children’s history books on ancient Rome and the early explorers and on the Silk Road in China, listening as we read them aloud over bowls of her pea soup and plates of egg salad, correcting when we mispronounced a word. On Friday afternoons, she gave directions from recipes for the evening’s Shabbat—to fill tablespoons with flour, quarter cups with broth, and so on—so that we would learn our measurements. She invented a scavenger hunt math game, hiding clues around the apartment that could be found only by solving arithmetic problems. Though my sisters were younger, they made fewer errors than I. I knew my multiplication tables and fractions, of course, but sometimes my thoughts drifted to outdoor sounds—the squeals of the Pomerantz children down on the sidewalk, the thump-thump of their ball against the side of the building, the rattling wheels of the Italian-ice cart in the neighborhood—leaving my sisters to win the majority of the games. To make up for this, Mama insisted some days on helping me. “We’ll work as a team, Ruthie,” she would say, guiding me toward correct answers if I began to go astray, embarrassing me far more than did losing to my sisters. And as the summer days crawled by, I thought of Jenny Frankel,
now on Lake George, and of Ellen Reid and her sister off with their grandparents in the Berkshires until Labor Day.

But though I could never tell Mama, I did love one day of the week: Sunday. The day Mama shopped for our weekly groceries, then scrubbed the corners of the apartment that she complained Inez, our Wednesday morning cleaning woman, had overlooked. Sundays were the days Poppy would drive Sarah and Valerie and me to Long Beach for the afternoon. He would roll down the windows of our old Chevrolet wagon and fiddle with the radio dial until he found the station with the least static.

“You’re all going in today, right, girls?” he would say, checking us in the rearview mirror. “No chickens in this car!”

“No chickens, Poppy!” we would laugh. And once we’d made this promise, he reminded us, there’d be no turning back. No matter how the surf stung our feet with cold as we stood at the water’s edge or how our arms and legs bristled with goose bumps. The rule was we had to submerge ourselves shoulder deep. Then, if we were brave enough to stay in longer, he would teach us to swim—freestyle, breaststroke, even the backstroke. For the first few weeks, I had watched for half the afternoon, dry above my ankles, as my sisters splashed about with Poppy beyond the breakers, daring to plunge in with them only after much coaxing. But, eventually, I gained courage and allowed Poppy to show me how easily my body could float on the surface if I relaxed, how quickly I could propel myself by pulling at the water with long strokes and fluttering my feet.

“What a little tadpole you are, Ruthie! A natural swimmer!” Poppy would tug at my streaming wet hair. And then how reluctant I was to leave, staying in long after Sarah and Valerie, despite the numbness in my hands, feeling I could swim forever, past the umbrellas far, far down the shoreline.

On the way home, my hair still hanging in damp strands, leaning my head against the blue vinyl seat, I would dream of swimming all the way to the horizon and back, swift as the wriggling fish below, free as the clouds overhead. If traffic returning to the city was slow, Poppy would
stop with us at the Friendly’s off the highway for cheeseburgers and milkshakes, calling Mama from the restaurant pay phone to say we would be home later than planned. On these evenings, there was no time for Mama’s math games or reading. And I heard her at night, through my bedroom wall, protest that after so many hours at the seashore—and maybe it was also the junky food we had been eating—we were completely spent. Even the following day when she worked with us, she said, we were often unfocused, as if we’d been overbaked in the sun! Certainly there were other things Poppy could take us to do. How about a visit to the Metropolitan Museum or a walk through the gardens of Fort Tryon Park? Did it have to be the beach every time?