Til the Real Thing Comes Along (23 page)

“Now that’s just the kind of selfishness I mean,” Miss Gallagher said, “which ultimately causes the downfall of civilizations.”

A groan went up from several of the kids. Rosie felt panicky. Miss Gallagher was talking about her. A finky drip, which was
what Rosie once heard Joanie Goldberg call a boy in tenth grade whom everyone hated. A Kuni Lemmel, who instead of laughing
and talking with the others, offered help to a teacher.
Oy,
please, don’t say it.

“So the person I am going to serve first, and she certainly deserves it is—”

“The Virgin Mary,” someone yelled.

“No, Stanley Goldman,” Miss Gallagher flared, “and we certainly don’t need your comments. The person is Rosie Jane Rabinowitz.”

Rosie felt heat in her feet that moved through her like lightning and directly into her face.

“Come up to the front of the line, Rosie Jane, please,” Miss Gallagher ordered. For a split second Rosie considered saying
“no, thanks,” but Miss Gallagher looked very upset and Rosie didn’t want to make it worse, so she walked to the front of the
line. The journey seemed endless. She knew they must all be snickering at the orangeish-red outfit, and when she finally stood
at the head of the line, and Miss Gallagher handed her a paper plate and asked her which part of the chicken she would like,
she had to swallow hard to keep the nausea down.

She looked at the platter. The charred black and brown and gold of the barbecued chicken was a blur, and she wasn’t the least
bit hungry, but she was standing there, and everyone was waiting for her to answer.

“Uh, lets see… I’ll have the, uh… I think I’ll take the uh… fleegle.”

Hysteria. Every one of the kids in the seventh was laughing. A big laugh. At Rosie. Like the kind of Jack Benny got when he
said something funny on his show. Miss Gallagher smiled, a tiny forced smile, but her face looked confused.

“The
what,
dear?”

There was something wrong. Something wrong about asking for the fleegle. Maybe there weren’t any fleegles on the platter.
But there had to be. Rosie had turned the fleegles over and over on the barbecue herself. And now when she looked down at
the pile of chicken, she could see at least six, maybe more of them. She sensed the restlessness behind her in the line, but
she didn’t know what to say next.

“Hooooongggry,” came the monster voice again, and all the kids laughed. When the laughter subsided, Miss Gallagher took a
deep breath and looked closely at Rosie.

“Which
part, dear?” she asked, through clenched teeth. The friendly look she’d had on her face for Rosie earlier in the evening
was now all gone. Not the fleegle, Rosie thought. There had been something wrong with asking for the fleegle. Something that
made the others laugh. That was a mistake she wouldn’t make again.

“Well,” she tried, “maybe instead I’ll have the poulke.”

The laugh from the group was twice as big as the last one. Even Rosie giggled a little giggle because she was so nervous.

“The poulke,” someone from the line shrieked out, and the laugh rose once more. Miss Gallagher’s face was starting to sweat
again, the way it had when she’d stood over the barbecue. Only now there was no hot barbecue. Now the sweat was angry sweat.

“Why don’t you point to those two parts, dear?” she asked. The word
dear
was dripping with anger.

Rosie had never been more confused in her life. She wanted to drop the paper plate and run out the door and home, but she
was afraid if she did she’d be known as the biggest Kuni Lemmel in the world forever. So instead, still not understanding
what the laughter was about, she pointed first to the chicken wing and said, “This is a fleegle,” and then to the chicken
thigh and said, “and this is a poulke.”

There was more laughter, this time dotted with applause.

“Have both,” Miss Gallagher said, putting one of each on Rosie’s plate. “Next!” Miss Gallagher said, in a voice so loud it
made Rosie jump. Rosie was so eager to get away from the others that she didn’t even stop for cole slaw or potato salad, but
simply took her knife fork, napkin, and plate of chicken to a table, sat down, and began to try to
eat, though her head was throbbing with the memory of the kids’ laughter and the anger on Miss Gallagher’s face.

Fleegle, poulke, what had she done wrong? It didn’t matter. She would have a few more bites of the chicken, and when everyone
was busy eating and laughing, she would catch the streetcar home. She wasn’t even sure now why she’d come to the stupid barbecue.
She didn’t like any one of these kids to begin with.

“Rosie yanked Gallagher’s chain,” she heard someone say. “And did you hear Gallagher? The downfall of civilizations.”

“Giving Gallagher her chicken order… in Yiddish.”

Yiddish.
Oy vey. Fleegle
and
poulke
were Yiddish. Not English. In her house, in her whole life, Rosie had never heard another word for those chicken parts. If
someone asked her now to say what the English was for them, she wouldn’t have known.
Fleegle
was… what? Yiddish. She had no idea. There were probably lots of words like that for her. For most of her life, except when
she was in school, she nearly always spoke Yiddish, probably because she was with Bubbe. And so many of the kids in her class
were Jewish that they knew the
vtoid fleegle
and the word
poulke
and knew what they were.…

Positive she couldn’t hold her tears inside for another second, Rosie walked out of the school yard still carrying her paper
plate with the fleegle and the poulke on it
Fleegle, poulke,
orangeish-red outfit, helping a teacher, I can’t, oh, God,
oy vey.
Why had she said that? When she got to Murray Avenue she could hear the streetcar bell clanging a block or two away, but
she decided to walk. She needed to walk, to feel the cool April air on her hot face.

She would get home and her mother would ask how the barbecue was, and she would have to pretend it had been okay, and then
she’d go to her room and Bubbe would be asleep so she couldn’t turn on the light in the bedroom. She’d have to undress in
the dark and slip under her covers, all the while listening to Bubbe snore, the way she had to every night, unless she happened
to fall asleep first. Bubbe. This was all her fault. If it wasn’t for her, Rosie could have her own room. Maybe even have
friends sleep over, if she ever made any friends after this. Bubbe. She was ninety-two years old. That was enough already.
Why did she have to stay around so long? Making ugly bumpy
clothes for Rosie and talking Yiddish. Maybe she would live until she was a hundred. Then Rosie would be twenty. Old enough
to get married, and she’d still be roommates with Bubbe. God forbid. Poo poo poo, as Bubbe would say. No. It was time for
Bubbe to die. Big tears rolled down Rosie’s cheeks as she quickened her pace, moving toward home, wishing—and hating herself
for it—that Bubbe would die. Die. Die. Bubbe, please die already. Rosie fell asleep that night thinking those words.

Usually on Pesach morning Bubbe woke up very early to make the gefilte fish for the seder that night. When she was still sleeping
at nine o’clock—which was very unusual, since the first strains of
“Oyfn Pripitchuk”
were usually heard at seven—Rosie’s mother came to see why. Rosie was still asleep, with the covers pulled over her head.
And Bubbe—Bubbe was dead.

After the funeral everyone came to sit shiva at Rifke and Louie’s house. Aunt Chana brought honey cake that was kosher for
Pesach. Aunt Malke brought macaroons. Rosie’s mother put out coffee and tea. Nobody wore shoes. When it looked as if everyone
had arrived who was going to, and people were talking and eating cookies and making jokes about how if it wasn’t Pesach they
could be eating corned beef sandwiches instead of Streit’s macaroons from a can, Rosie’s mother got a look on her face as
if she’d just remembered something, and she got up and left the room for a few minutes. When she came back she was carrying
an envelope, which she handed to Rosie.

“Bubbe gave me this for you a few months ago. But she said I should wait to give it to you until after she was gone. Until
you didn’t have her around to take care of you.”

In the envelope was a hundred dollars. It was the most money Rosie had ever seen all at once in her life. With it was a note.
The note was in Yiddish. Rosie could speak Yiddish but she couldn’t read it. She gave it to her mother, who read it and then
told her what it said.
Mayn kind.
My child.
kh loz dir iber di gelt zolst dir keyfen cleyder.
I left you this money so you can buy some clothes.
Ich hob dir zeyer lib.
I love you very much.
Dayn Bubbe,
Chaike. Rosie excused herself and went into the room she had
shared with Bubbe for her whole life. Then she lay down on Bubbe’s bed, where she could still smell the familiar smell of
her Bubbe, and hugged the pillow very close to her chest.

“I
’m forever blowink bobbles… Priddy bobbles in de air…”

For three weeks after Bubbe’s death, Rosie Jane stayed home from school. Every morning when she opened her eyes she looked
over at Bubbe’s empty bed, and loneliness ripped through her. Bubbe was gone forever. The only friend she’d ever had. Now
Rosie would have to go back to school and face the other students in the seventh grade who had heard her ask for the barbecued
chicken parts in Yiddish. Even as Rifke, in the childlike handwriting she had worked so hard to learn in night school, composed
Rosie’s excuse note (“Please forgive my Rosie for being absent due to our terrible tragedy and loss”), Rosie tried to think
of excuses to stay home for another week.

Her perception of the poulke-and-fleegle incident, as she was to call it years and years later, was that she had humiliated
herself so completely in front of everyone in her grade that she might as well not go back to school, because no one there
would speak to her anyway. But when she got there she discovered that the story had been interpreted by the kids as Rosie’s
irreverent way of teasing that dried-up battle-ax Miss Gallagher. Instead of being laughed at, she now found herself with
the reputation of being funny. Very funny. She was congratulated for her outrageousness so often that she started to forget
that the reputation was a fluke, and began cracking the jokes aloud that she would ordinarily have kept in her head. Some
of them actually were funny.

“Dey fly so high, nearly rich da sky…”

Her social life had begun at last. The girls befriended her, because everyone knows it’s beauty that threatens other girls,
and though Rosie was kind of cute, she was first and foremost funny. And the boys liked her, too, because funny was friendly.
It wasn’t forbidding or frightening like pretty.

The other immediate result of Bubbe’s death was that it brought Rosie closer to her parents. With Bubbe no longer waiting
for her after school, Rosie would find herself downstairs in Uncle Shulke’s store, putting the groceries in bags for people
and ringing the cash register. During the slow periods when no one came in, she and her mother would talk and laugh. Sometimes
on a Sunday she would go with her father to the Settlement House where he worked. He said he went in on Sundays, his official
day off, because that was the only day when he could get some paperwork done because nobody else was there and it was quiet.
When he said that, Rosie’s mother would wink at Rosie behind her father’s back, a wink that meant the real reason he had to
go to work on a Sunday was because being a group worker at the Gelman Community Settlement House was the most important thing
in Louie’s life.

So important that Mr. Katzman, his boss, had to insist—insist, mind you—that Louie take a week off and have a vacation. The
first one he’d taken that any of them could remember.

“Den like my drimz, dey fade and die…” Louie sang with the stub of his Marsh Wheeling cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth
as he drove along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The windows of the 1953 station wagon were rolled down, allowing the summer heat
to rush through the unwashed car. And other drivers, hearing Louie singing at the top of his voice, grinned as they passed
the Plymouth, which chugged along in the far-right lane. “Fortune’s alvays hidink…” Louie had come to America as a little
boy in 1907, and now it was 1957, but the traces of his Russian dialect still lingered.

“I’ve looked everyvere,” Rifke chimed in from the back seat. Whenever the family went anyplace in the car, Rifke sat in the
back seat. That was so her Rosele Jane could sit in the front seat, and not, God forbid, get carsick. “I’m forever blowink
bobbles…”

Now Rosie’s voice joined her parents’ and she added
the harmony for the last line: “Pretty bubbles innnnn theeee airrrr.” The three singers stopped to take a breath after the
last note rang through the car. After they cheered hooray for themselves, the way they always did, Louie, who had to sing
a little louder because a moving van was passing them, segued into “Ven you vore a tulip, a big yellow tulip, and I vore a
big red rose…”

They were all elated to be going on a family vacation. To go to Atlantic City and stay in a hotel. For free. Not that it was
such a big-deal hotel. It was only The Seaview, a hotel that was owned by Itzy Friedel, who, Louie explained to Rosie, was
his
landsman,
which meant that Itzy Friedel had come over to America from the same town in Russia as Louie. But big-deal hotel or not,
it
was
a hotel. And the only time Rifke and Louie had stayed in a hotel in their lives was on their honeymoon in Niagara Falls thirty-one
years before. And Rosie had never set foot in one.

Itzy Friedel let out a yelp when he saw the Plymouth parking on the other side of the street, and came bounding down the wooden
steps of The Seaview. “I vas doing a little shmoozing with the customers,” he said, grinning and looking to Rosie like Bert
Lahr as the Cowardly Lion. “Velcome, velcome,” he said, taking the suitcases from Louie and doing a happy little dance. Rosie
noticed that he had the same accent as her father. Rosie and her parents were tired and their clothes were wrinkled after
the long drive. They had eaten the corned beef sandwiches they’d brought from home as they drove, and made only a few of what
Louie called “pish stops” at occasional Howard Johnsons. Itzy hugged Rifke and Louie again and again and pinched Rosie’s cheek,
calling her a
“sheyne meydele”
—pretty girl—and a
“zise punim”
—pretty face. And then, beaming with pride, he insisted on taking them all on a tour of The Seaview.