The Old Brown Suitcase (10 page)

“Now let’s go into one of the stalls,” she suggested.

“Can we come, too?” asked several of the other girls.

“No, my dears, please control your nosey selves for just another moment,” said Miriam, shooing them away. She took me by the hand and led me into one of the stalls.

“Take this off,” she commanded, pointing at my blouse. Then she took a bra out of the tissue. I took off my blouse and put on the bra, with Miriam officiating at the clasps. This was far beyond anything I could have imagined for a first day at school.

“How does it feel?” queried Miriam, while the girls who crowded around our stall were peeping from below, and chorusing, “Hurry up.”

The bra was a little too big.

“I thought so. Since it was too small for me, I was going to return it to the store for a size larger, but if it fits you, you can have it. Or would your mother prefer you to have one that really fits?”

“You don’t know my parents,” I replied. “They would have a fit if they saw me like this.”

“Jailers eh? Don’t worry, mine are like that too. We’ll break out.” Miriam stuffed the cups of my bra with toilet paper.

When we came out of the stall, I looked in the mirror. Although my blouse was looser than a sweater, I could see two small bulges emerging from behind the pockets. Breasts at last! I exalted, feeling the toilet paper rub against my skin. The other girls gathered around. “You look so much more sophisticated now,” said one girl.

I looked at myself not knowing how I really felt about this sudden change. After Rockville I didn’t trust girl classmates very much. The word “sophisticated” brought Ina to mind again. I didn’t want to be like her. How could I be sure that Miriam was really trying to help me, and not make a fool of me?

I ventured to ask her something that I would never have dared to ask before Rockville.

“Are you Jewish?” After all, Poles were also sent to concentration camps.

“She wants to know if I am Jewish! Girls, am I Jewish? Is a Rabbi Jewish? Elizabeth, I want you to meet your classmates, Reva Krantz, Maria Stern, Esther Goldberg, and me, Yenta Miriam Silverman.”

With a name like Silverman, she had to be Jewish. “But what’s Yenta?” I asked.

They laughed. “It’s Yiddish for someone who talks all the time,” they explained.

“Now tell us, pretty young blond maiden,” said Miriam, “Are you Jewish? You don’t look it.”

“Of course I am,” I answered with a certain amount of pride.

“This school is ninety-five percent Jewish. Didn’t you know that?” asked the girl called Reva. How amazing that it seemed to be an almost all-Jewish school.

On the way home, Miriam informed me about the school dances and other social events. The sooner I entered the contemporary ways of fashion and hair style, she said, the sooner my immigrant image will fade.

“Don’t worry,” she grinned, “we’ll have you looking and talking like a Canadian in no time.”

As I neared home, I saw Father standing in the window. He saw me and must have gone to open the door as I climbed the stairs. A look of surprise came over his face.

“What on earth have you done to yourself!” he exclaimed.

I remembered that I had gobs of lipstick on, eyebrow pencil, and a hairdo that made me look five years older.

“Papa, I am fifteen years old already. The girls in my class thought I was twelve …” Tears began to fill my eyes.

He pulled out a handkerchief and pressed it to my lips. “Look at this!” he said angrily, showing me the red outline of my lips on the white handkerchief. “Is this your claim to maturity?”

“The next thing you’ll do is sneak out with boys, and that will lead to God-knows-what.”

Now I felt angry. Didn’t he trust me? I brushed the tears from my eyes with the handkerchief I still held in my hand.

“Why does my wearing lipstick make you say things like that? Girls here are already going on dates. This isn’t Poland!” I said.

“Girls here are spoiled and begin doing grown-up things much too early,” he snapped. “Can’t you see? They dress and paint their faces to make boys notice them and make passes at them.”

“So what’s wrong with that? A girl of fifteen starts thinking about boys. In Poland they do it as well, I bet. Only I am sure that they keep it a secret from their parents.”

“I don’t care what they do in Poland or in Canada, no daughter of mine is going to become a hussy.” Father stomped out of the room.

I went into the kitchen, and Mother looked at me with horror. “What have you done to your hair and your mouth!”

All this fuss about a little lipstick, I thought. Mother found a brush and parted my hair in the middle again. I didn’t want my hair parted in the middle. Pushing her hand away, I stomped off to my room, and quickly removed Miriam’s bra and all the toilet paper fell out. I looked at myself in the mirror. What a mess! I fell on the couch and wept bitterly. That evening I refused to eat dinner; I decided that I disliked my parents.

Later that evening, after I had gone to bed, Mother came in and said that I mustn’t worry.

“Soon you’ll be older and will do as you please. But in the meantime, watch out for boys. They only want one thing. I’ve heard that in the high school basements of Montreal, young girls are getting pregnant by the minute.”

The next day I returned the bra to Miriam. I didn’t feel that it made all that much difference to my looks. And anyway, the elastic band felt uncomfortable.

Right after school Miriam and I went to Woolworth’s to buy a lipstick. I chose a pale red. Each day, I would put on the lipstick on the way to school and take it off on the way back, so my parents wouldn’t know. They suspected something, however, because I heard Father tell Mother in the kitchen that my lips were always pink, that I was on the road to evil. But he said nothing to me.

In order to brighten my dull wardrobe, I bought two brightly coloured scarves and wore them each in a different way. Miriam said that I was original, but Esther Goldman said I was a show-off. A week later she came to school wearing a bigger and brighter scarf, telling everyone that hers was a “Chanel.”

Then one day my world changed again. Father opened a delicatessen. Uncle Urek had been finding it difficult to continue supporting us, so Father had looked around for a business.

I had always been proud of my father. He was a professional in Poland, a well-respected man. Suddenly I saw him selling salami and rye bread. My emotions were mixed. I loved him very much, but I thought he looked pathetically out of place, serving clients over the counter at a deli instead of defending them in court.

Father was hopelessly inept at some things. He wanted each package he wrapped to be perfect. The impatient customer would sigh and pace up and down, waiting for his parcel of herring to be wrapped like a birthday gift. And

Father could not cope with the customer type who didn’t know what she wanted, or the rude executive who felt he should be the first in line, while everyone waited.

So I came to his rescue. My afternoons after school consisted of piling bagels and buns in the window, and wrapping parcels of food. When it grew busy, and the language became mostly Yiddish, which Father didn’t understand, he would put his hands to his head and run into the back of the store, and I would have to take over. Even without knowing Yiddish I could understand what the customers wanted. Since business was good, I persuaded Father to hire Miriam, who was delighted to earn some money after school.

Miriam’s parents were very strict, too, and didn’t let boys come near her at home. Some afternoons after school, Miriam’s boyfriend, Mark, would come to visit her at the deli. I could see that Father didn’t approve, but he said nothing.

They always left as soon as her shift was over. Once I followed them and saw them disappear around the corner, kissing passionately. They didn’t even see me watching them. After that, I went back to the store and ate a large sticky bun. The bun was delicious, but I’d rather have had a kiss — not from Mark, of course.

Winter passed and spring was on its way. The dirty snow melted slowly, and the ice was replaced by puddles. The Jewish quarter moved onto the streets again, and I was surrounded by it once more — lively and colourful.

One day, Miriam brought a letter to school, which she gave me at recess. “A letter from a secret lover, eh Polachka?” she teased.

I couldn’t believe it. The letter was from Joshua. He wrote:

I wrote to Joshua immediately, and he wrote back. The third letter he ended with, “Love, Joshua,” instead of “Affectionately.”

I read the letters to Miriam who shared my excitement. Each day I watched for the mail with such anxiety that my parents decided to interfere again. They wanted me to show them Joshua’s letters. I refused, took the letters to Miriam, and asked her to keep them for me. I also asked Joshua to write me care of Miriam.

A kind of cold war broke out between me and my parents, and it soon became worse when my spring report card showed that I had failed everything except French and Latin. My English mark was hovering between a pass and fail. My parents told me that if my marks did not improve quickly I would be grounded each night and on weekends so that I could I study harder.

The next morning I shared my problem with Miriam. Then I talked about Joshua for a whole ten minutes. I had never before said so much in one breath, and all in English. I was like a cloud that had been darkening and swelling to the bursting point. In the middle of it, the look on Miriam’s face stopped me. Her blue eyes were moist.

“I have to tell someone or I’ll die,” she said. “I missed my period this month, and I don’t know what to do.”

The bell rang, the washroom emptied and became terribly silent. I didn’t know what to say.

“What exactly does that mean, Miriam?”

“Naive little Polachka,” she exclaimed, shaking her head from side to side. “Don’t you know what it means? It means that I might be pregnant!”

If someone had hit me over the head I couldn’t have been more shocked. Miriam was still a kid like me. To be pregnant at our age was simply unthinkable, unless … “Miriam, did you and Mark play a married couple?”

“Finally you got it,” she said, smiling weakly. “Your parents did an even better job on you than mine did on me. You have been pretty sheltered.”

The next day we played hooky from school. I tried to cheer her up as best I could. She thought she was craving pickles, as her mother had when she was pregnant with Miriam’s brother, so I bought her four pickles. These upset her stomach. She cried a lot, too. I had not seen Miriam in this state before. She was always so strong.

At the deli I asked Father if Miriam could come to our house for dinner. He thought that Mother wouldn’t mind one more person, and he was right. Mother and Miriam got on right away. After dinner in the privacy of my room, we made a plan. Miriam was going to call Mark. After all, he was half responsible for this mess. She called him from my house and told him to meet her at the deli tomorrow after school.

The next day school was torture for both of us as we could hardly wait to go to the deli. Mark had made himself invisible. Even if he wasn’t in Miriam’s class, we thought that he might have come over at recess or at lunch. Miriam was beginning to despair.

When we arrived at the deli that afternoon, there was no Mark. “Maybe he’s late,” said Miriam hopefully, fishing a pickled egg out of a jar. But Mark never showed up. Miriam was beside herself.

Saturday and Sunday I made her go for a walk, and bought her lunch. She called Mark again but found that he’d gone out of town for a basketball tournament.

On Monday I went to school dreading the state Miriam would be in. When I met her in the hall she was all smiles.

“Guess what?” she whispered.

“You got it!”

“Shhhhh, Polachka. I got it!”

Because of Miriam’s close call, my mother’s words were beginning to make sense. Fearful for the fate of all womankind, I wrote Joshua a letter asking him if he went out on dates.

He promptly replied, “With whom?”

Around that time, Father decided to get out of the deli business. Although he felt completely unfitted for the job, it had been a good source of income. He would have continued, but his illness was growing worse, and that made him decide to sell the deli.

It took Father only two weeks to find a buyer. A Mr. Yankelman came to look at the deli accompanied by a rabbi. After spending some time examining the books, Mr. Yankelman closed the deal with a sizeable deposit.

On the last day at the deli, I was working as usual when I heard a groan in the back room. I ran back and saw Father bending over the table, holding onto one side. His face was twisted with pain.

I called Mother and she made an appointment with the doctor for that afternoon.

After Father left for his appointment, Miriam and I worked very hard cleaning the place for the new owner. When Mr. Yankelman came and looked around, he seemed pleased. “You girls have done a good job. Would you want to continue to work here?” he asked.

Miriam and I looked at one another and simultaneously nodded our heads.

“Thank you, Mr. Yankelman,” I said, handing him over the keys. That was great news, but my gladness didn’t last long.