M
INNA had not received a letter since she was nine or ten, when her aunts wrote to send their regrets, they would not be coming to make Pesach that year. But that letter was not intended for her. She’d opened it though she knew it would make her father angry, then tried and failed to seal it back up, then, when he came home and saw, she’d said without thinking,
but I read better than you
—which was true but not good, or good but only if one didn’t speak of it, or good if spoken about but only if they pretended she was her little brother, which was growing more difficult all the time. Just as Max had brought his sons to a place where they would grow strong, then mistrusted their strength, her father had sent her to the boys’ school, then regretted it. When she said
I read better than you
, he slapped her. Then he asked her forgiveness but she was already pouring his coffee, so he punished himself by not drinking it. Though that last part, she might have wrong. It might have been that he drank his coffee, and punished himself by asking Minna to read the letter aloud.
R
UTH’S letter was in Yiddish, thankfully. Minna would have expected her to write it in English, just to prove something, to taunt.
Tayere
Minna,
I wish to express my condolences to you and your little family. Your recent misfortune is certainly undeserved. I understand that you will have a new house built, sturdier and of course more hygienic, and I hope that you soon come to feel misfortune turning into opportunity. Then you may truly call yourself American.
I also wish to send my regrets that we will not be able to join your little family for Rosh Hashanah. Preparations for winter must be made, and the girls and I have begun our canning.
And you? Do you expect a child?
I hope you do not think me impolite for asking. On the plains, one mustn’t hide anything. It only leads to trouble.
But on to my real purpose (for does not a True Friend have a better purpose than to
plaplen
?): Along with a new stove (a gift from Leo—the latest model from Sioux Falls) and an excellent tool with which to beat eggs, I have obtained a book (borrowed, I admit, but I intend to keep it all winter)
CHOCK-FULL
of the latest housekeeping advice. As often as I can, I will send you
TIDBITS,
those I think you will find most useful given your unique situation.
(I’ve translated all, of course, and hope I have done the author justice.)
Therefore, I will not continue to delay:
1.
“In the city, I believe, it is better to exchange ashes and grease for soap; but in the country, I am certain, it is good economy to make one’s own soap. The great difficulty in making soap ‘come’ originates in want of judgment about the strength of the lye. One rule may be safely trusted—if your lye will bear up an egg, or a potato, so that you can see a piece of the surface as big as a ninepence, it is just strong enough.”
2.
“Count towels, sheets, spoons, &c. occasionally; that those who use them may not become careless.”
3.
Sore Nipples—Put twenty grains of sugar of lead into a vial with one gill of rose water; shake it up thoroughly; wet a piece of soft linen with this preparation, and put it on; renew this as often as the linen becomes dry. Before nursing, wash this off with something soothing; rose water is very good; but the best thing is quince seed warmed in a little cold tea until the liquid becomes quite gelatinous. This application is alike healing and pleasant.”
4.
“Wash the eyes thoroughly in cold water each morning.”
5.
“When green peas have become old and yellow, they may be made tender and green by sprinkling in a pinch or two of pearlash, while they are boiling.”
6.
“Squashes should never be kept down cellar when it is possible to prevent it. Dampness injures them.”
7.
“Eggs will keep almost any length of time in limewater properly prepared. One pint of coarse salt, and one pint of unslacked lime, to a pailful of water. If there be too much lime, it will eat the shells from the eggs; and if there be a single egg cracked, it will spoil the whole. They should be covered with limewater and kept in a cold place. The yolk becomes slightly red; but I have seen eggs, thus kept, perfectly sweet and fresh at the end of three years.”
8.
“Keep a coarse broom for the cellar stairs, woodshed, yard, &c. No good housekeeper allows her carpet broom to be used for such things.”
9.
“Let those who love to be invalids drink strong green tea, eat pickles, preserves, and rich pastry. As far as possible, eat and sleep at regular hours.”
You may be left with questions,
mamele
. I recall from our whitewash lesson that you are shy to admit your ignorance, but one must never, ever, be afraid to ask questions. Please consider me a fountain of knowledge wishing to shower you with experience. Particularly when your wee one arrives.
Regards to your boys,
Ruth
Minna’s response was brief, her excuse for its brevity a lie:
I have only this small square of brown paper on which to write, for I was careless and squandered the wrappings from my wedding gifts, which just goes to show how truly lacking I am in any instinct for housekeeping.
And because her excuse took up half the square of paper, she only had to fill a tiny space with her note:
Not expecting—yet—any wee one. Thank you for the housekeeping tips, I will try my best to apply them to my “unique” situation, though I am, as you say, quite ignorant. Regards to your big family, Minna
W
HAT Minna did not tell Ruth:
She was grateful for Ruth’s instructions. She’d been grateful for almost all her advice—even her suggestion that Minna try to love Max. She was sorry that she couldn’t bring herself to say this.
And there would be, she was fairly certain, no wee one. Minna still hadn’t bled, even once, nor did she feel any different. A bit heavier, perhaps, but that was likely the food the boys brought back. There were walnuts and cherries and apples and beets and turnips and yams; there was yeast, and a cornmeal fine as flour. She baked bread every morning, served a full meal at midday, made the evening soup thick.
She did not tell Ruth this either, for Minna understood her own indulgence; it was clear from the way her heart leaped as she chose yet another yam, and from the way Samuel watched her hands as they chopped and mashed and kneaded. He did not approve, but wouldn’t say so. Since his return, they’d had no formal greeting, no “how-dee-do,” as Jacob called it, just a slide again into weather and time and meals and tools. She hadn’t asked the questions that kept riding through her mind: Had they slept in a house? In tents? Had there been a woman to cook for them, and if so, what had she looked like? Nor did Samuel ask after the work Minna had done or not done. But one day she overheard him, in the yard, saying to Jacob: “A cellar? You believe they were intending a cellar with that hole? They had weeks, and accomplished nothing! And my magazines—what was she doing with them that they’re torn apart and stuck to the sod?”
“Papering the walls?” Jacob suggested. “As far as I can tell.”
“But why?”
“Why not?”
“She did it to anger me.”
“Why would she do that?”
Minna peeked around the house now—but she was too late to catch whatever silent response Samuel gave, whatever shrug or shift in stance.
“Minna!” called Jacob gaily.
She smiled, mouth closed, and waved a hand. “Hello, Jacob.”
“We were just talking about you.”
“Really.”
“Really!”
Samuel looked at her, but she refused to meet his eye. “You know,” she said to Jacob. “If he’d asked me himself, I would have told him.”
“I’ll let him know that.”
“Please do.”
She turned, and went back into the house to cook dinner. If Samuel hadn’t called her “she,” she thought, she might have told him still. About the
mikvah
and the whitewashing and the general waywardness with which she and Max had behaved. Some part of her wanted to tell him, and force him to anger. But another part knew that he knew, so she went on ignoring the silent rebukes of his frugality. On Rosh Hashanah, when she opened a jar of honey, and he muttered, “That’s from Iowa,” his meaning was clear; she might have closed it up again and appeased him. But she was looking at how the word
Iowa
had left his mouth, open more than usual, so that she saw his top row of teeth and, behind them, the blood-pink roof of his mouth. “Iowa,” she said, “How interesting,” and spooned the honey out onto a thick slice of challah. Max called it a threat to his prayers and wouldn’t eat it until afterward, and Samuel tried only a bite, but Minna and Jacob finished the rest quickly, then cut another slice and finished that, too, and then they stood next to Samuel, fortified and a bit loopy, as Max led them through the service. It was as repetitive as Minna remembered
shul
to be, but worse because there were no songs and no one in front of you to look at or gossip about or feel pity for. They could have gone west to the colony, where “za great von Baron de von Vintovich,” as Jacob called him, would have sent a true rabbi and enough
yarmulkes
to cover every man’s head, where there might be a synagogue as tall as in Cincinnati, with a separate place for the women to sit, where everyone could start the year with a new pair of shoes. Shoes, not boots—Jacob was emphatic on this point. And who knew, he said, za Baron might even be there himself. They might kiss his feet, or dance around him, like Indians. Max said—or Samuel said and Max repeated—that he didn’t want to waste the time traveling, with the unfinished house and the short days and what have you. But Minna suspected the real reason Max didn’t want to go to the colony—apart from his fear that she and the boys would want to stay—was some idea he had that the journey back and forth might upset Minna’s chance of conceiving. Max had become more fixated on having a child now, as if to go into winter without Minna pregnant would be to admit that he’d never bring anything forth in this new world.
“Our child,” he said when he woke, and after he prayed, and in the middle of the night. “Our child,” he whispered, after he slid out of her, smoothed her nightgown, and—a new gesture—gave her stomach a pat. “Child of an angel.”
And what would Ruth say to that? What did Minna even have to say? Nothing—it was too charitable. It made her feel every edge of her body, every place skin met air, the pulses in her neck, her wrists, the receding pulse between her legs, how utterly unlike an angel she was. It made her feel the parts of her that didn’t know if they wanted a child at all—and those that wanted one, but not his. If she had Max’s child, she supposed, there would be a kind of relief in it. A purpose. A knot. She might think less of other lives. Then again, she might not. She might be driven, like her mother, to go live the other lives.
She whispered back, “Good night.”
But even a whisper gained force against the new wood frame, and floor. If the cave had absorbed noises, the house spat them back. When the second room was built, she and Max would sleep in there, but for now the beds lined one wall, foot to foot. She tried covering his mouth with her hand but then her palm collected his breath and Max just held her closer, as though her shushing excited him. She listened for the other bed, and sometimes she heard breaths, but sometimes she didn’t. She listened until her skull shook with the effort, then counted and tried to forget, or at least not to care, for the time it took to fall asleep.
But in the morning as she served breakfast, her face turned red, and her hands were clumsy, even though Jacob would be making jokes or playing spoons and Samuel rarely looked at her anymore anyway. He could go a whole day without meeting her eye, which meant that Minna barely had to try not to meet his. And yet she couldn’t help trying, and hard, so that she wound up looking at him all the time, everywhere but his eyes. His general irritation was closer to the surface now, you could see it in the way he never sat entirely still, a knee or fist always jouncing, the way his jaw went rocklike at the slightest provocation. The questions they hadn’t asked of each other were irretrievable now: on top of them had piled the question of the clouds, which were difficult to read suddenly, and of the cold, which you could feel in your fingernails. How long should they wait, how cold should it have to be, before they started burning coal? Minna’s old grass braids were fine for cooking, but not heating, and they would run out soon anyway. And would the
shochet
ever arrive with the meat? Minna and Samuel and Max turned over every possibility, every choice, they took up sides and angles, and sometimes it seemed to her they switched just to keep debating. And what to do about the chickens? More had stopped laying; they sat haughtily upon their nests. The eggs would keep in salt, Samuel suggested, but Max said he’d never heard of such a thing.
This was on a clear, cold day, which seemed to have given everyone a headache. Jacob was out gathering the last potatoes. Max was convinced they’d been sold bad chickens, and when Samuel reminded him that they’d bought the chickens from a Jew, Max said the Jew must have been sold bad chicks. When the
shochet
showed, he said, they should have him kill the birds for meat. If the
shochet
showed, said Samuel. If, if. And the chickens weren’t “bad,” he added. They were cold. They would start laying again, come spring.
Minna said yes, of course, they always start again. Poor chickens. She paused. She wasn’t certain if she meant poor for not laying, or poor for the fact that they would have to lay again. She explained Ruth’s limewater solution to the men and offered to put the eggs up to store that way.