A Short Story by Perle Besserman
It’s one of those minor Jewish holidays my principal uses an excuse to close the school in order to save on heating bills, and my uncle Harry is in town on furlough before shipping out to Vietnam, so here we are walking together through the fresh, winter-scarred streets of Brooklyn. I’m thrilled to be seen with my uncle in his military green jacket with its gold buttons and captain’s bars. Harry’s “an enlisted man,” and he loves parading this achievement in front of my father, who’s been rejected from serving in the military for having asthma.
Everyone in the family except for my father admires my uncle for enlisting. Even my mother goes out of her way to be nice to him, siding with him against my father, when they get into one of their heated dinner table debates. They start with silly stuff like who’s taller, which is really an excuse for them to argue about politics. If my mother didn’t interrupt these debates by bringing in food, they would go on for hours suspending dinner and making everyone at the table feel gloomy. Though my father will never admit it, Harry is taller, by maybe only a quarter of an inch, and muscular and blond, with laughing blue eyes that seem to invite you to mischief when you look straight into them.
Harry appeared at our house by surprise this morning, saying he wanted to take me out for my birthday even though my birthday is four months away. My uncle is famous for his surprises. He’s married to my mother’s youngest sister, Ida, the most glamorous in their family of three sisters and one brother. Ida has “done well for herself,” everyone says, because Harry is not only handsome, but owns his own business—the leather handbag factory where my father works as a cutter.
I don’t understand my uncle or his place in our family. For that matter, I don’t understand anyone in the family. Nobody seems to belong together; my mother and her sisters have all married strange sorts of men. Yet I can’t put my finger on what’s strange about them. Eva, the oldest, is married to a grocer who’s about twenty years older than she is, and I never see him at family get-togethers because he’s always “at the store.” That’s Uncle Alex. And my mother, Lillie, is married to the strangest one of all—my orthodox Jewish-Marxist father, Jacob. Her brother, also named Harry, is round and short, always joking and changing jobs. He’s married to Aunt Rita, a redhead who, two years before getting married to “Little Uncle Harry,” passed the first audition call for the front line of the Rockettes. Rita doesn’t dance anymore. But she paints pretty landscapes.
“Today’s the day I want to taste my first Chinese egg roll,” I say, determined that Harry be the one to introduce me to the forbidden pleasures of un-kosher food. My friend Nelly Polsky and I have been talking about eating at Tung Fat, the Chinese restaurant only three blocks from our school, but neither of us has had the courage to do it. It’s not because we’re afraid of being caught and reported to our observant Jewish parents, but because we’re both worried about eating pork and dying of trichinosis. Nelly tells me that her friend Roberta, who is also Jewish, eats at Tung Fat every Sunday and hasn’t gotten sick or died yet. As an afterthought she says that Roberta told her that egg rolls are stuffed with pork and shrimp. Though I once poked my head into the front door of the restaurant and it smelled delicious, I still never managed to work up an appetite for egg rolls until today.
Nelly says I’m always making a tragedy out of everything. She’s probably right. I suffer out of proportion to the realities of my life. But eating Chinese food is like everything else I’ve blown out of proportion, the specter of guilt for sins past, present, and future that follows me everywhere. I live in constant anticipation of a catastrophic punishment that never comes. And that in itself is a form of punishment. Thrashing around in my head are continuous bits and pieces of my serious talks with my father about not wasting my life on “hedonistic pleasures” but getting an education and devoting myself to “advancing social justice.” Though he only had one year of college, my dad’s organizing a union at my uncle’s factory, and he wants me to follow in his footsteps by becoming a labor lawyer. He talks like a mixture of Jeremiah and Jack London, so it isn’t always easy to follow his line of thinking. With Harry it’s different. He comes right to the point. “Sure, I know where we can get some terrific Chinese egg rolls,” he says, laughing.
The handbag factory, a red brick, four-storey building with gray doors, stands near a sprawling lumber yard on Rockaway Avenue. It makes me feel grownup just to be walking inside. From the street, beyond the open windows I can hear the steady thrum of machinery. With a slight grunt, Harry throws open the heavy iron door. A pale butterfly flaps its way in behind us. The first butterfly of spring. Harry makes as if to catch it. Amber wings beat desperately above our heads in the gloom.
Suddenly I’m panicked. “No, let it go,” I cry out.
The butterfly is so close I can see its ugly pop-out eyes and its spiny antennae. It reminds me of the fat black and yellow striped caterpillars that drop from the walls of the courtyard of our apartment house. Murray Rosenblum and Michael Toplitsky, my sometime-friends, like to stamp on them just for the fun of it, leaving flattened spots of greenish mush all over the yard in the hope of making us girls scream. But we don’t.
The butterfly circles the musty hallway and flutters out into the street.
“You’re a kindhearted girl,” Harry says, looking at me with those mischief-provoking eyes of his. Then he cups his hands around a Camel cigarette, which he’s removed from a pack in his pocket, lights it, and takes a deep draw. My uncle looks thinner than I remember him, and more serious even though he’s smiling at me over his cigarette. I’m savoring what he said about me, storing it away for when things get bad at school, where the girls all think I’m a snob because I’m the smartest in the class and no one finds me “kindhearted” at all.
I follow Harry into an open shaft elevator, my eyes still adjusting to the cocoon darkness.
“I’m going to be an actress . . . no, a dancer,” I say, as the elevator lurches and creaks up to the second floor.
“Great idea! What kind? Classical ballet or modern?”
I have no idea what Harry is talking about. All I know about dancers is what I’ve heard about my aunt Rita and the Rockettes.
“A Rockette,” I say.
“Are you taking dance lessons?”
“No. My father thinks it’ll distract from my schoolwork; he wants me to study hard and become a lawyer.”
Harry inhales deeply on his cigarette. “Don’t worry, Penny, once my tour of duty is over, I’ll see to it that you get dance lessons.”
“Really?”
“Sure.” Harry pinches my cheek, and it hurts a little.
The elevator lands with a thump, and he guides me over the gap between the floor and the shaft. Then he presses a button, and the elevator lurches its way back down to street level without us. I follow him into an enormous room with floor length windows on every side. Every inch of space is occupied by men and women stamping, stapling, cutting, framing, and labeling handbags in a beehive of block and steel-colored machinery. My father has gone off to the leather market, Harry tells me, and I’m relieved not to have to be in the same place at the same time with both of them. My father doesn’t say anything when I go out with Harry, but his silence “speaks volumes,” as my English teacher, Miss Lichtenstein, would say. The room is as noisy as a foundry. In one corner, three massive work tables heaped almost to the ceiling with thick, cylindrical bolts of leather and colored plastics form an altar, the workers moving about like high priests readying the sacrifice. Long rows of smaller tables line every wall; these are covered with cardboard boxes overflowing with silver pins, tortoiseshell frames, and brass clips. The floors, too, are cluttered with boxes, which Harry and I have to negotiate in order to get to his office. At the end of the box trail, we come upon a long conveyor belt moving the finished product—the kind of gaudy handbag my mother and aunts would never wear—toward a boxing chute. Batches of over-decorated, spangled beaded bags line our path, half of them stamped with the bashful faces of tiger-striped kittens and half with lazy turtles wearing sunglasses. Harry asks me if I’d like to take one home, and I say no, they’re not my type. More like Nelly Polsky, whose tastes verge on the common.
Harry snickers. “I should be insulted; they’re my personal design,” he says, and I’m instantly sorry for hurting his feelings. “Women like to wear cheerful bags during wartime,” he says as if he’s talking to a grownup.
I can’t think of an appropriately grownup reply, so I keep quiet and curl and uncurl my toes in my shoes, flattered to be talked to like an equal, even if he’s just teasing. But then, as we’re climbing over the cartons on the way to his office, he offers me a puff on his cigarette, and I see he’s not teasing. He really is treating me like a grownup.
I reach for the cigarette with trembling fingers. “Thank you, I’ve smoked before,” I lie, taking it from between his tobacco-stained forefinger and thumb, a secret communion between adults, my lips touching the half moon wet spot his mouth has made on the paper. I inhale, holding my breath somewhere between my palate and my front teeth, counting the seconds until I can’t hold it any longer and start spluttering. Harry doesn’t laugh at me or try to take the cigarette away. “Not bad for the first time,” he says. When the spluttering subsides, I manage to take a few more puffs without choking before handing it back to him. Funny thing is I don’t even mind that Harry’s caught me in a lie. What matters is that I’m standing with my uncle, smoking in full view of the three Puerto Rican women at the sewing machines even though they’ll probably tell my father about it later. And having “thrown all caution to the winds,” as Miss Lichtenstein would say, I don’t care.
Harry opens the dusty, bubble-glass door marked PRIVATE, and I have the feeling for the first time in my life that I’m entering the “real world.”
An enormous oak desk—bare except for a blotter with brown leather pockets at the corners, a color photograph of my Aunt Ida smiling wanly from beneath a huge black picture hat, a green marble ashtray, and a wire basket marked OUTGOING MAIL, containing two stamped envelopes destined for Crescent Center Hospital in New Jersey—is the only noteworthy piece of furniture in the room. The barred windows stream patterned sunshine onto the brown carpet, and an old-fashioned coat tree dangles a coatless hanger.
Harry sinks into the big copper-colored leather office chair on wheels behind the desk and rolls it around to the front. “It’s an exercise I’m practicing for when I grow old and need to sit in a wheelchair . . .” he says, smiling.
I don’t laugh at his joke because it’s awful to think of him in a wheelchair, growing old, maybe even drooling from the mouth. Besides, he sounds a little angry.
“You try it,” Harry gets up and offers me his chair.
“Won’t it spoil your carpet?” I ask.
“I’ll buy a new one. I don’t much like the color anyway. Ida chose it. I prefer blue myself.”
“My favorite color is blue, too,” I say, sinking into my uncle’s chair and rolling from one end of the office to the other.
“Ride em, cowgirl!” Harry yells.
I slap the leather chair arm in response and manage a feeble “Giddyap.”
Harry lights another cigarette and says, “Someday we’ll really go horseback riding, you and me.”
“I’ve never been on a horse outside of taking a picture on a pony on Sackman Street when I was five,” I say, out of breath from rolling around and trying to avoid hitting the coat tree.
“Wait till I get out of the army. I’ll teach you how to jump fences. We’ll go to a dude ranch in Wyoming . . . the big country.”
I leap out of the chair, kick off my loafers and start galloping around in my socks, letting my toes dig into the thick brown nap of the rug pretending it’s sand in a Wyoming corral. Then I start whirling around until I get dizzy and land in a giggling heap at Harry’s feet until I remember I’m not supposed to go barefoot because it means that someone in your family has died.
“I’d better put on my shoes,” I say.
“Why?”
“It’s a sin to go barefoot.”
“Who told you that?”
“My father.”
Harry snorts. “Going barefoot’s no sin.” Smelling of cigarettes and Old Spice aftershave, he leans over me, and I can see his face is red. “Never mind that. I’ve got something to show you.”
I stand up and slip into my loafers, watching him walk over to a closet I hadn’t noticed before. He opens the door and reaches inside. When he takes his hand out, he’s holding a gold statue of a sportsman with extended arms like a set of propellers, sitting on a horse. It has a wooden base with HARRY KAYE inscribed on it in flowing script.
“Like it?”
“Wow. Where did you get that?”
“I won it at a steeplechase competition in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. See what it says under my name: ‘First Place’?”
I study the trophy until Harry takes it away and puts it back into the closet on its hidden shelf, reaching in a second time as if he’s just remembered there’s an even better treasure back there. “I have a gun too,” he adds matter-of-factly.
I’m blinded by the sunlight streaming like thick hot paste into the room, now glinting off the barrel of the black revolver he’s got pointed at me. What with all the talk of horses and steeplechase riding and Wyoming, I wonder if I’m supposed to put up my hands and go along with the joke. But the cold muzzle of the gun on my chest prevents me from thinking of anything witty to say, and tears spring up in spite of the fact that I know Harry’s only kidding and has no intention of shooting me. Except for the muted thrum of machinery beyond the door, there isn’t a sound, and it’s as if we’ve both stopped breathing.
Seeing me go quiet, he says, “Don’t worry, Penny. “It’s not loaded.”
But my uncle’s face is set in an unfamiliar curious way and it suddenly dawns on me that he might be a little crazy.
“For Crissake, Harry, put the gun down. Can’t you see the kid’s scared shitless!” The voice coming from the door that has opened behind me is nasal and tired.
“See, I told you it’s not loaded.” Harry pulls the trigger of the empty gun with a click and drops back playfully, the familiar teasing look now back on his face.
I turn around and look at the man who’s interrupted Harry’s game. A coarse-featured person with tiny red lines crisscrossing his nostrils stands in the doorway dressed in a hounds tooth suit smelling of mildew. He’s chewing gum, and wearing a porkpie hat.
“Meet Detective Sergeant Flanagan,” Harry says.
The detective sticks out his hand and shakes mine, though I haven’t offered it to him. He smiles, revealing a set of sickly greenish front teeth, and his skin is moist to the touch. I’m tempted to wipe my hand on my skirt after he’s shaken it, but it’s not polite, so I just let it drop to my side.
“Whose tricky little number is this?”
“This is my niece, Miss Annie Oakley, the fastest shot in the West.”
The two men exchange smirks, and I can tell they don’t really like each other but are putting up a show for the “tricky little number.”
Harry excuses himself, and the two of them leave the office together “on business.” Since they don’t move much further than the doorway, I can see their moving shadows flat against the glass. Now it says PRIVATE across Harry’s back. I don’t bother straining to hear what they’re saying because I have an idea it’s about something shady and I don’t want Detective Sergeant Flanagan’s sudden appearance on the scene to spoil my uncle’s heroic image. Still, I can’t help overhearing the words “payment late” and “five-hundred,” and I decide that this “detective” is really a blackmailing gangster and that Harry has a dark secret that he will share with me when we’re riding horseback together out in Wyoming.
The detective leaves and my uncle returns to the office. I’m relieved to see that his smiling face looks normal and that he’s ready to return to the world of horses and open spaces. I swagger toward him and ask for another cigarette, and he hands me a Camel and lights it for me, and it’s like we’re both some kind of mean, sharp shooting hombres. Now when I smoke, the taste is sweet behind my tongue, bittersweet and familiar, like sin.
“Let’s go out and get that egg roll,” he says.
We walk toward the Rockaway Avenue El, where, Harry tells me, it’ll be easier to find a taxi. We’ve just stopped at the corner when a black man comes running toward us with his hands over his face. At first he looks like he’s crying, but then, as he gets closer, I see that what’s dripping down his face isn’t tears but blood. Harry pulls me back behind him trying not to let me see, but by now the man is close enough for me to look directly into his cut-up face. A woman is running down the street after him, screaming in what sounds like a foreign language. Her face is screwed up with rage, her eyes no more than little slits. She storms like the wind after the bloody man, and soon catches up with him. Strangely, she’s wearing a bath robe and has curlers in her hair, as if she’s just gotten up and hasn’t even brushed her teeth yet. As if she’s still dreaming and running around in her sleep.
“They’re drunk,” Harry says. “Don’t look . . . it’s ugly.”
But of course I can’t help looking as the couple comes together in a savage heap of curses, the woman lunging at the man like a tiger taking down a buffalo. “I’ll kill you, you muthafucka!” she screams, her right hand high in the air over her head. I’m so close to them that I can see the glistening straight-edged razor between her fingers. The man removes his hands from his face and bows down until he’s doubled over right there in front of her on the sidewalk. Red droplets form a trail from the distance he’s already covered to where he’s kneeling now, the woman still pummeling him with the fists of her free hand while threatening him with the razor held high in the other. It’s like she can’t get him to bow down deeply enough into the ground, she’s punching him so hard. Now there’s a long wailing police siren coming closer and closer, warning them to get out of there, but neither of them runs away.
Police cars appear from opposite directions, one of them going the wrong way up Livonia, which is a one-way street, pulling to a whining stop onto the curb of the sidewalk only a few feet from where Harry and I are standing. The doors of the cars spring open and six policemen rush over to where the man and woman are still locked in their death dance, wearily now, the man near faint with loss of blood, and the woman still screaming, “You muthafucka, I’ll kill you . . .” and swallowing gobs of air and spit between each word.
“There’s a cab,” Harry says, putting two fingers into his mouth and delivering a loud whistle. The driver sees us, and Harry pulls me along, trying to keep my face turned in the opposite direction from where the police and the fighting couple are struggling with each other. But I’m fascinated and keep turning around to look.
I tell Harry I’m not hungry anymore, but he doesn’t hear me. I wrench myself out of his grip and look back, but a newly gathered crowd is hiding the couple and the policemen from view. Harry tears open the door of the taxi that has just pulled up alongside us and almost tosses me inside, he’s so eager to get me out of there. Then he jumps in behind me and slams the door hard.
“What’s goin’ on?” the driver asks, looking at us through his rearview mirror.
“Just a fight,” Harry says.
The driver is bald and wears only a dirty grey undershirt. He shrugs and says, “Nice scene for a young girl, huh? I tell you this neighborhood stinks. You’re safer in the army than on these streets; right, soldier?”
“That’s love for you,” Harry says, pointing his thumb in the direction of the fighting couple. Then he lights a Camel.
The taxi driver slams the clutch into gear, turns down the meter flag, and pulls away from the curb with a violent lurch that makes me sick to my stomach. I want to tell my uncle that I really don’t want that egg roll now. But before I can say anything, I’m throwing up all over his starched army pants.
Who says there’s no punishment for sinners?
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Recipient of the Theodore Hoepfner Fiction Award and writer-in-residence at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim Artists’ Colony in Jerusalem, Perle Besserman’s work has been praised by I.B. Singer for its “clarity and feeling for mystic lore” and by Publisher’s Weekly for its “wisdom [that] points to a universal practice of the heart.” Her autobiographical novel Pilgrimage was published by Houghton Mifflin, and her short fiction has appeared in The Southern Humanities Review, AGNI, Transatlantic Review, Nebraska Review, Southerly, and Bamboo Ridge, among others. Her creative non-fiction has been recorded and released in both audio and book versions and translated into over ten languages. Her most recent book, combining memoir, storytelling, and women’s spiritual history, is A New Zen for Women (Palgrave Macmillan). She has lectured, toured, taught, and appeared on television, radio, and in two documentary films about her work in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, China, and the Middle East. Perle divides her time between Melbourne, Australia and Honolulu, Hawai’i.
