Saturday's Child Read Free Page A

Yvonne who was “wildly popular at the court of the tsar”—and sometimes I didn’t; sometimes the family had a branch of “great scholars among the Sephardic Jews back to the Middle Ages”—and sometimes it didn’t. Consequently, I learned two lessons the hard way but early: that understatement was ineffective for making oneself heard at home, and that reality was decidedly relative. I grew up witnessing truth as the tennis ball in a match between Dionysus and Lao Tzu.
    But however ectoplasmic facts may have been to these women, emotion was real—utterly, suffocatingly real. All three of them Drama Queens of Ashkenazic Family Theater, my mother and aunts performed their lives in operatic fashion and at decibels aimed for the fifth balcony’s back rows. Each preferred arias, but they often went at it in duets, and their periodic trios were memorable.
    The middle sister, Sophie, led the closest to what in those days was considered a “normal” life: she married (a distant cousin with the same surname, Teitlebaum), bore a son and a daughter, and seemed content to become an obsessive housekeeper and a wonderful cook. I can still remember the pungency of her cooking smells, their promise beckoning from far down the hall outside her apartment door: comforting chicken soups bobbing with kreplach , crisp noodle kügles , pot roasts with garlicky dumplings—and the heavenly, moist, almond-flour cakes she would bake in special molds the shape of lambs, then decorate with vanilla frosting and shaved-coconut curls, raisin eyes, and a maraschino-cherry mouth.Unfortunately, I also remember the yelling, tearful fights she waged with my cousins, her son Jerry and daughter Dorothy, both already teenagers when I hadn’t yet started school. Jerry fled to enlist in the navy and was based at Pensacola, Florida (to my child’s ear and logic, this became Pepsi Cola, Florida, named after a product as was Hershey, Pennsylvania, which I knew about since I had once appeared there in a fashion show). Dorothy’s revolt took the form of as many boyfriends as could be crammed into a given day—a tendency that had persisted, until I lost track of her, through three marriages and three more live-in relationships.
    Still, Aunt Sophie cossetted me, let me help with cutting out cookies and decorating the “lambie cakes,” told me stories, and, unlike Aunt Sally, seemed to care more about my schoolwork than about my fan clubs. Her husband, Uncle Harry, a retired semi-invalid with a colostomy, made me nervous: he rarely said anything while shuffling through their apartment en route from bedroom to bathroom and back. Sophie could also unnerve me on occasion, as when she enjoyed removing her false teeth and snapping them in my face or chasing me around with her vacuum cleaner, an upright with a roaring motor and a single light glaring from its forehead like a robotic cyclops. Scaring young children is considered by many adults to be an act of good-natured fun, but it’s always struck me as a sadistic display of grown-up power thinly disguised as “teasing.” The small-bodied people—children—get the message on all levels, and learn to respond with manic laughter signaling not so much humor as submission.
    Aunt Sally was very different from Aunt Sophie. For one thing, she lived with Mommie and me. For another, her approach to cooking was to boil all vegetables a uniform grey color the consistency of mush and fry chops until they were so well-done they bounced on your plate when you tried to cut them. If in my childhood archetypes Mommie was cast as the Good Mother, Sally was the Evil Aunt.
    The oldest of what in my adolescence I would come to name the Weird Sisters, Sally had been born in the Old Country—Russia? Poland? it depended on who was telling the story—and claimed to remember the boat trip to the New World, a journey she nonetheless refused to