Saturday's Child Read Free Page B

discuss. It would take me decades finally to see Sally for the poignant figure she was. In her youth, she’d apparently had a glorious voice (all three of them actually agreed on this), and had longed to be an opera singer. But for awoman in that era and in the conservative European Jewish culture of her family, a life on the wicked stage was regarded as one lewd flounce away from prostitution. So her music was denied her. Then, so the story went, she fell in love with a Christian who cared enough to convert to Judaism in order to marry her. Rose, horrified at her daughter’s defilement of the family by such a marriage, decided conversion was insufficient; she demanded that her new son-in-law be circumcised, a barbarous enough ritual when inflicted on a newborn and a particularly savage procedure when carried out on an adult. Still, Sally and her husband were, briefly, happy. Then she gave birth to stillborn twin sons, and, soon after, their father died in a car accident. My grandmother celebrated both tragedies as punishments from Yahweh, her jealous god’s revenge on Sally for having loved a “goy.” Sally, left a childless widow, shifted her grieving attentions to her youngest sister—and eventually to her youngest sister’s child.
    I now realize that Sally suspected I only pretended to love her, while most of the time I detested her. She was the hands-on operator of my childhood career as first a model and then an actor, so she functioned in my mind as the blameworthy stage mother. I’ve often suspected that the idea of putting the baby me to work as a professional model in the first place originated with Sally’s seeing in my infant prettiness and toddler precocity her own second chance, albeit vicarious, at a stage career. To make matters worse, she’d adopted her mother’s dictatorial style. My mother, on the other hand, had a wider repertoire, choosing confrontation only when manipulation failed (except in certain circumstances against which you could never prepare yourself for the shock of her full frontal attack). Poor Sally. In style and substance, she came to represent in my mind everything crude.
    When I think of her, what comes to mind are the cast-and-crew jokes about her thick body’s profile blocking everyone’s view of the set monitor, and her sycophantic apologies before sidling up to it again. In one of those so unfairly preserved moments of perfect recollection, etched deep by the acid of embarrassment, I will never forget one particular Saturday. We were at home, in the little third-floor walk-up apartment she, Mommie, and I shared, when my teacher dropped in unexpectedly. Mommie was out, but Aunt Sally didn’t tell me to entertain Miss Wetter while she made herself presentable. No, whether in a state of innocence, indifference, ordefiance, she received the visitor just as she was, without flinching. Her hair stood in peaks stiff with peroxide bleach foam, reeking of ammonia that dripped onto the frayed towel around her shoulders. She sat large-bodied at the kitchen table in brazen undress: the heavily boned bra, pendant from the weight of her large breasts, hung from soiled straps that cut dark pink grooves deep into her shoulders; the batwing flesh rippled and hung from her bare arms; the huge underpants showed their outline under her faded pink half-slip. And all the while, she continued busily squashing the bright orange “Flavor Dot” into a brick of white oleomargarine—oleo for short—and kneading it with her bare hands through the oily blob until the whole pound marbled into one pale yellow. Miss Wetter managed to carry the moment off, but soon recalled another appointment and rushed away. I wanted to die. I swore silently with the intensity of a nine-year-old to will myself into forgetting the moment ever happened—which is doubtless why it remains so crystalline almost half a century later. Time may have lent me some