“Oy, Zimmerman.” She would smile patronizingly when Mrs. Zimmerman, beside herself over some slight, real or imagined, came to tell her of the perfidy of one or another of our neighbors. “Such foolishness.” Or, “That’s ridiculous,” she would rap out sharply when a tale she considered base or ignorant was repeated to her. She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one interpretation of an event. She knew that, compared with the women around her, she was “developed”—a person of higher thought and feeling—so what was there to think
about? “Developed” was one of her favorite words. If Mrs. Zimmerman spoke loudly in the hall on a Saturday morning, we, sitting in the kitchen just behind our apartment door, would stare at each other and, inevitably, my mother would shake her head and pronounce, “An undeveloped woman.” If someone made a crack about the schvartzes , my mother would carefully explain to me that such sentiments were “undeveloped.” If there was a dispute in the grocery store over price or weight, again I would hear the word “undeveloped.” My father smiled at her when she said “undeveloped,” whether out of indulgence or pride I never did know. My brother, on his guard from the age of ten, stared without expression. But I, I absorbed the feel of her words, soaked up every accompanying gesture and expression, every complicated bit of impulse and intent. Mama thinking everyone around was undeveloped, and most of what they said was ridiculous, became imprinted on me like dye on the most receptive of materials.
The apartment was a five-room flat, with all the rooms opening onto each other. It was a tenement flat not a railroad flat: not one window looked into an airshaft. The apartment door opened into a tiny foyer that gave directly onto the kitchen. To the right of the kitchen, in the foyer, stood the refrigerator, propped against a wall at right angles to the bathroom: a tiny rectangle with a painted wooden door whose upper half was frosted glass. Beyond the foyer stood two rooms of equal size separated by a pair of curtained glass doors. The second of these rooms faced the street and was flooded with afternoon sunlight. Off this
front room, at either end, were two tiny bedrooms, one of which also faced the street, the other the back of the building.
Because the front room and one of the bedrooms faced the street, ours was considered a desirable apartment, an apartment “to the front.” A few years ago a man who had also grown up on my block said to me, “I always thought you were richer than us because you lived to the front.” Although living to the front usually did mean that the husbands made more money than did the husbands of those living tief, teier in draird (deeply, dearly in hell) to the back, we lived to the front because part of my mother’s claim to a superior grasp of life’s necessities rested on her insistence that, unless we stood nose to nose with welfare, an apartment to the back was not within the range of domestic consideration. Nevertheless, it was “to the back” that we—that is, she and I—actually lived.
The kitchen window faced the alley in the back of the building, as did the kitchen windows of the building next to ours, and those of two other buildings whose entrances were on the opposite side of the square block these apartment houses shared. There were no trees or bushes or grasses of any kind in the alley—only concrete, wire fencing, and wooden poles. Yet I remember the alley as a place of clear light and sweet air, suffused, somehow, with a perpetual smell of summery green.
The alley caught the morning sun (our kitchen was radiant before noon), and it was a shared ritual among the women that laundry was done early on a washboard in the sink and hung out to dry in the sun. Crisscrossing the alley, from first floor to fifth, were perhaps fifty
clotheslines strung out on