That Said Read online

  Glued to the bottom,

  translucent with oil, the pale green bill

  a maze of Chinese characters.

  Between the sealed lips of each fortune cookie,

  a white scrap of tongue poked out.

  Tonight, the waiter brings Happy Family

  steaming under a metal dome

  and three small igloos of rice.

  Mounded on the white oval plate, the unlikely

  marriage of meat and fish, crab and chicken.

  Not all Happy Families are alike.

  The chef’s tossed in wilted greens

  and water chestnuts, silk against crunch;

  he’s added fresh ginger to baby corn,

  carrots, bamboo shoots, scallions, celery,

  broccoli, pea pods, bok choy.

  My daughter impales a chunk of beef

  on her chopstick and contentedly

  sucks on it, like a popsicle.

  Eating Happy Family, we all begin to smile.

  I prod the only thing left on the plate,

  a large garnish

  carved in the shape of an open rose.

  Is it a turnip? An Asian pear?

  The edges of the delicate petals

  tinged with pink dye, the flesh

  white and cool as a peeled apple’s.

  My daughter reaches for it—

  “No good to eat!” The waiter rushes over—

  “Rutabaga! Not cooked! Poison!”—

  and hands us a plate with the bill

  buried under three fortune cookies—

  our teeth already tearing

  at the cellophane, our fingers prying open

  our three fates.

  Crazy Joey

  Crazy Joey was famous,

  more famous than the mayor.

  Though he was as old as my father,

  and tall and clean-shaven,

  he wore his navy blue stocking cap

  pulled way down over his ears,

  dressed for winter even in June.

  What was he doing

  hanging around the schoolyard,

  slowly pedaling his dented Schwinn

  just as school was letting out?

  He’d pick a kid. Boy or girl.

  He’d wait until you turned the corner.

  Then he’d follow you home on his bike,

  an empty red milk crate strapped

  to its back fender.

  There were rumors

  that he lived with his mother in a basement.

  Rumors that he was born wrong-end first.

  Rumors that his father beat him senseless.

  Rumors that some boys lured him

  into an alley and made him

  pull down his pants and pee.

  And that Crazy Joey did it, cheerfully.

  When, in the seventh grade, my turn came,

  I pretended to ignore him,

  clutching my homework, my empty lunchbox,

  never once turning my head.

  Crazy Joey trailed me

  past the used-car lot and the deli,

  through the neighborhood

  neither of us lived in,

  grid of locked garages, neat shoebox lawns,

  house after house after house

  like televisions all tuned to the same station.

  It wasn’t my fault

  I studied piano and ballet.

  It wasn’t my fault

  both my parents were alive.

  It wasn’t my fault

  I was normal, even though

  I lived in an apartment over our store,

  and not in a real house, either.

  So I didn’t take the shortcut,

  or try to hide, or run crying to my father

  rolling up the awning of our store,

  but watched my every careful step

  the day Crazy Joey chose me.

  Mrs. Hitler

  When my mother got into a bad mood,

  brooding for days,

  clamping her jaws shut, refusing to talk,

  brushing past me, angry,

  on her way to the kitchen,

  I’d call her “Mrs. Hitler” under my breath.

  I knew it was wrong, very wrong.

  But when her back was turned,

  I’d stick out my tongue

  at Mrs. Hitler in her blue nylon nightgown

  and pink foam hair rollers,

  glaring at the dishes in the sink.

  Sometimes I’d give her the finger,

  though I knew it was wrong, very wrong.

  Hitler killed Anne Frank,

  whose diary was required reading

  in my junior high.

  My father fought Hitler during the War.

  But the first time I heard Hitler’s name

  I was eavesdropping on my aunts

  sitting around our dinner table,

  whispering about “the Jewish camps.”

  When I burst into the room,

  they switched from talking English

  to Yiddish, to me pure gibberish,

  my ear a funnel for their gravelly words.

  Were they planning to send me back

  to Camp Bell, the Jewish day camp

  where, homesick, I lost my appetite

  and five pounds, refusing to eat?

  If they made me go next summer,

  I’d go on another hunger strike.

  I’d seen the Life magazine

  hidden in my parents’ bedroom—

  seen the photographs of Jews,

  all skin and bones,

  and a picture of Hitler

  and his little black push-broom mustache.

  I’d seen an old newsreel on TV:

  German soldiers dressed

  in gray uniforms, blocks of them marching,

  taking giant steps in unison

  as if they were playing

  Follow the Leader with their friends.

  I made up a game.

  While my mother cooked dinner,

  I’d sit on the kitchen floor,

  with a plate and a knife

  and a big chunk of Muenster cheese,

  and pretend I was a Jew starving to death

  like the Jews I saw in Life.

  The cheese supply allotted me—

  like my father’s Marine rations—

  was to last exactly thirty days:

  I divided my cheese into a grid

  cut into thirty pieces,

  I popped a tiny cube into my mouth

  as if taking my daily vitamin,

  and gobbled it down, then whispered,

  so my mother wouldn’t hear,

  “I was very hungry, thank you.”

  A moment later, I’d gruffly reply,

  “You’re welcome,” pretending

  to be my jailer, a Nazi guard;

  taking on both roles, both voices,

  at once—one high, one low—

  just like when I played with dolls.

  Day Two dawned a minute later.

  My breakfast, lunch, and dinner

  melted in my mouth.

  “Thank You.” “You’re welcome.”

  Day Three followed, and so on,

  as I played my game, Concentration Camp.

  And I fed myself

  the way a mother feeds her baby.

  And I ate and I ate and I ate

  until all the food on my plate was gone.

  The Uncanny

  Saturday afternoons, they like

  having me over, having

  had no children together

  of their own.

  Late afternoon, the venetian blinds

  stripe gold prison bars

  on their white satin bedspread:

  both of them dressed

  in casual slacks and pastel golf shirts;

  they played eighteen holes

  earlier today.

  Door ajar, I burst in,

  about to ask them a
question.

  He sits on his side

  of the bed, facing the blinds,

  his back to me,

  his head tilting up to hers

  leaning down, as if to kiss him.

  He turns and, for an instant,

  I see it—see her tenderly

  swabbing the empty socket

  of his missing right eye, her Q-Tip

  poised over the flat planes of his face

  as if she’s about to dot an i.

  Losing so precious an organ

  is my uncle’s punishment—

  a married man with two children—

  for having had a long affair

  with my aunt.

  She has to clean it every single day,

  and every single day

  she changes the patch.

  I didn’t used to think it odd

  that he lived in a house with Tess

  and his kids, and also

  in an apartment with my aunt.

  For twenty-six years

  they acted like an old married couple.

  Then they made it legal.

  When he wears his formal black eye patch,

  Al looks like Moshe Dayan.

  He couldn’t get a glass eye

  to replace it, one like Sammy Davis Jr.’s.

  He had a little tear on his bottom lid

  they couldn’t sew up.

  Before I was born,

  driving between Flossie and Tess,

  he fell asleep at the wheel.

  My mother says Al is lucky

  that all he lost that night

  was an eye.

  I catch a glimpse, just as

  Flossie is about to cover it

  with a folded square of gauze.

  Gently, she pulls adhesive tape from a roll,

  cuts the sticky white strip

  into two equal lengths,

  makes a big sticky X

  to lay across the gaping socket

  to hold the gauze in place.

  She is the one who sees me first.

  Surprised. When he faces me,

  flashing me his one good eye,

  my aunt quickly covers

  his nakedness. But it’s too

  late, I’ve already seen—

  where his other eye should be—

  the wrinkled pocket of skin

  I’ve always been so curious about.

  The Best-Dressed Girl in School

  “I could make you the best-dressed girl in school,”

  my mother used to say. “But I won’t.

  Better that you’re famous for something else,

  like getting good grades

  or having the best manners in your class.”

  My mother was famous.

  She owned the best dress shop in town.

  At thirteen, I could almost fit

  into the size 3 petites

  that hung in our store downstairs,

  directly under my bedsprings.

  So what if a dress hung loose on me.

  Why was my mother so stingy?

  The first week of school,

  she drove to Little Marcie’s Discount Clothes.

  She beamed as she dumped the bag out

  on my bed, my new fall wardrobe

  piled high as a pasha’s pillows:

  pajamas and panties and argyle socks,

  white cotton blouse with Peter Pan collar,

  red tattersall jumper, dungarees,

  and a blue plaid woolen skirt.

  Inside every collar and waistband,

  the fraying outline where the label

  had been razored out.

  “Don’t turn up your nose,” my mother said.

  “What gives you the right to be a snob?”

  Unfolding the blue plaid skirt,

  she made me stand on a kitchen chair

  while she chalked the endless circle of pleats.

  Pins scratching my knees, she put up my hem.

  The next day, I

  and five other girls in Mrs. Cooper’s class

  wore the same Little Marcie’s blue plaid skirt,

  just like a parochial school uniform.

  But not Stacie,

  the best-dressed girl in my school,

  who bought her clothes at Lord & Taylor.

  I wanted what Stacie had—

  her Pendleton skirt and Lanz nightgown,

  her London Fog raincoat and Bass Weejun loafers—

  and Stacie’s mother, instead of mine.

  Stacie’s mother spoiled her, my mother said,

  because Stacie was plain,

  and her grades just average.

  “She doesn’t have anything else going for her,”

  my mother said, “other than clothes.”

  Hypocrite! My mother’s whole life

  was about clothes!

  Buying, selling, wearing, breathing, eating,

  sleeping, talking clothes!

  Like a musician with perfect pitch,

  my mother had a natural talent for clothes.

  She grew up during the Depression.

  She’d had to work and work

  to get to where she was today—

  the owner of the best dress shop in town—

  but she was sick of clothes.

  Sundays, summers, Christmas Eves,

  she could never take a vacation

  away from clothes.

  Her customers waited for her

  behind dark green corduroy curtains,

  in separate dressing rooms,

  waited barefoot, in their bras and slips,

  waited for her

  to run to the racks and bring them back

  the perfect garment to try on.

  And I waited, too,

  apprenticed to my mother’s exquisite taste.

  Sweeping the floor

  or stacking flat hosiery boxes