Mrs. Everything Read Free

it all around until all the margarine was yellow-colored. She’d watch Mommy’s hands as she’d crack an egg on the side of the pan and drop it neatly into the hole in the bread. The egg would cook, the bread circle would get toasty-brown, and Sarah would shout for Jo to make her bed and wash her face and come to the table, she was already late. When Jo finally took her seat, the eggs and bread would go onto the plates, and the browned bread circle would sit on top of the egg. That was an egg with a top hat.
    When breakfast was finished, and dishes and juice glasses had been washed and put in the drainer to dry, Mommy would make a lunch for Jo to take to school, and Bethie would change out of her flannel nightgown, folding it under her pillow for thecoming night. She’d make her bed and get dressed, and her mommy would zip her dress and do her hair. Bethie would hold perfectly still while Sarah combed, parting her hair down the center and dividing it into pigtails, tying them with ribbons to match Bethie’s dress. She would watch her mother pull the curlers from her own hair, until rows of shiny brown ringlets hung on each side of her face, before she combed the curls into waves and sprayed them stiff. Mommy would put on a dress and clip nylon stockings to her garters. She would puff perfume out of an atomizer and step through the mist, explaining, “You never put perfume right on your skin, you just mist and step through.” Sometimes, when Sarah wasn’t watching, Bethie would run through the leftover mist of Soir de Paris, hoping to smell as good as her mommy.
    At ten o’clock in the morning, Mae would come. Mae was old, probably forty, but her mother called Mae “the Girl.” Mae called her mother “ma’am.” Mae had dark skin, a golden brown that was dotted with darker brown moles, and her eyebrows were plucked to skinny arches that she darkened with black pencil. Her hair was shiny and black and lay in gleaming waves against her head and cheeks. Mae would tune the radio to WJLB 1400 and listen to songs like “Blue Shadows,” “Fool, Fool, Fool,” and “Please Send Me Someone to Love.” She’d sing along with the radio while she ironed the Kaufmans’ clothes. When the ironing was done, she’d cover her hair with a brightly colored scarf before vacuuming the carpets and mopping and waxing the floors.
    Sometimes Mae would bring her own little girl with her. Mae’s daughter’s name was Frieda. Frieda was skinny as a string bean, with knobby, scabbed knees and the same golden-brown skin as her mother, and she wore her hair in two braided pigtails that stuck out from the sides of her head. Frieda was the same age as Jo, and she was wild. She and Jo would go racing around the backyard, climbing the cherry tree, playing Cowboys and Indians, coming back all sweaty and out of breath, with grass stains on their clothes. Bethie preferred to stay inside and play with her paper dolls, but Jo adored Frieda, and she’d stay in the kitchenwith Mae even when Frieda wasn’t there, handing Mae things to iron and singing to the radio.
    The Kaufmans had two cars, the New Car and the Old Car. The New Car, which lived in the garage, was that year’s new-model Ford, purchased with a discount, because Bethie’s daddy worked in the accounting office of the Ford plant. The Old Car, parked in the driveway, was the previous model, handed down to Sarah. When Bethie was five, the Old Car was a Ford Tudor sedan, with four doors and a pistachio-green body and a darker-green hardtop roof. On Fridays, Mommy would climb into the driver’s seat and lean forward with her hands tight on the wheel as she would drive them carefully from their new home to the old neighborhood, a mile away, where they used to live and where Sarah’s parents, Bethie’s bubbe and zayde , still lived, in a three-bedroom apartment on the corner of Rochester and Linwood, where the white-painted walls were stained brown from Zayde’s cigars, and the air