Niagara Falls All Over Again Read Free Page B

but what could she do? Besides, she’d heard Jews broke glasses at weddings. Why not pie plates at funerals? We trampled all the food. In houses around us, north, south, across the back lot, neighbors pulled back curtains and wondered whether this is what Jews did, when their mothers died.
    The older girls watched us from the kitchen windows. Such waste, they thought. Such ingratitude. Fannie and Ida and Sadie wanted to stop us, but Annie, the oldest, rocked the baby and kept them from the door.
    â€œLet them alone,” she said. “There’s time enough for crying.”
    The other girls agreed. Soon enough we’d miss our mother. Soon enough we’d weep. They’d be ready for us then. They had examined their own grief and decided they couldn’t use it, not when the littler kids suffered, so they folded it up, and ironed and scented it, and tried to make it look like something else entirely, offered it to us as though it was plain, brand-new, original concern. Hattie, savvy, recognized sympathy for what it is, hand-me-down love.
    Get that away from us, she thought.
    Oh, the older girls wanted to mother us. They tried to wrestle us onto their laps; they tried to order us around, but it was too late: I belonged to Hattie, and she belonged to me.
    Some days I forgot my mother was dead and went looking for her. Was she in her bedroom? The pantry? No. I’d hide on the back staircase then, exhausted. Hattie would find me. “There you are,” she’d say as though I was the one who’d been misplaced, and she’d thrust her arms under mine and bear-hug me to my feet and pull me, my toes bumping each step, through the kitchen and out the door. She must have missed Mama too, I realize now. But she kept me busy so we could both forget. Like Annie, she knew there was all the time in the world for crying, and so it was best never to start.
    She tried to teach me things: I made a fine audience but a miserable student. I applauded lessons. When I refused to learn to tree-climb, Hattie tossed me into the arms of the elm in front of our house. I bounced once, then sat down to see what she’d do next. I was a composer of songs as a child, though often I merely sang opera—
    Potato! Potato, Potato!

Potato. Potato. Potato?

Potato potato potato potato.
    â€”and Hattie could join in on the harmony, even if I was making up the lyrics right then.
Harmony
was what we called her inability to carry a tune.
    All of Valley Junction knew us, the little Jewish kids, two of Old Man Sharp’s brood: the tall redheaded girl and her short black-haired swarthy brother. We didn’t look like each other, but we didn’t look like anybody else in town either. Together we wandered everywhere in Vee Jay, fearless. Our sister Annie, who was afraid of everything—smallpox, the nearby river, the slightest cough, birds, fire—thought this was a sign of muddleheadedness. She told us so.
    â€œKeep on that way,” she warned, “and you’ll come to grief.”
    My Father’s First Stand
    My father’s store, Sharp’s Gents’ Furnishings, was a long narrow store that differed from the other long narrow stores on Fifth Street only in what it stocked. The floors were composed of wide unfinished boards that had been seasoned with dirt that sweeping couldn’t budge and mopping turned to a stubborn paste. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of stock made accessible by sliding wrought-iron ladders stood against each wall—denim coveralls so stiff you could spread butter with them, union suits in bright red and speckled cream.
    That was where my father went, after he was widowed. He’d buried six children by the time his wife died, and would live with that sorrow for the rest of his life, but he did not believe in mourning, which to him was a kind of idleness that could kill you. Like my sisters, he believed that grief was a fact. You put it in your pocket where you felt it at