The Lost Girl

The truth?

The family was different, especially the mother.  The neighbors knew nothing about her—as she offered nothing to them.   They did not know that her mother-in-law by sheer force of will had arranged the marriage and pushed for it over two continents, through a stream of correspondence and overseas calls.  In addition, they had no way of knowing the mother and her husband were cousins and that she brought with her into the marriage not a small amount of money.  They were oblivious to the fact that the husband had left days after her most recent conception as if he had a premonition.  What they could see was that she wore her hair long, uncovered and loose. A mane of dark brown, it would always catch the slightest breeze and cause her to toss her head back and with one hand sweep the hair away from her face.  Other married women wore their hair under wigs or covered by a scarf.  The closest she came to looking Jewish was bible sandals with bare legs.

Their house: a remnant that the adjoining neighbors hoped would be torn down—moss green, slanted at the roof, it leaned against underbrush and overgrown trees, an inlet of neglect, twice removed from the newer mirror image split-levels that flanked it on either side.  The orchard that had sustained generations of land owning, hard-working Gentiles reduced to an apple tree in every other front yard.  To everyone else’s eye the old stone front seemed to have less of new American potential than the rest of the neighborhood, certainly fewer new appliances, less wallpaper. To the mother it seemed perfectly American, the America she admired, culled from literature, handpicked fruit—Nineteenth Century and Yankee Emily Dickinson, later—Twentieth Century, waspy, Cheeveresque, ice clinking in a martini glass.

Rumor had it that the house was bought for cash because the mother said to the realtor she did not like paperwork or men in dark blue bank suits.  Inside, thumb-tacked and taped to the walls were posters from distant farmers’ markets, Frank Stella exhibitions, and quaint products, elixirs not sold for half a century, if ever.  Throughout the house stacks of books created an obstacle course, so moving from room to room had to be done with care. The furniture was mismatched and quirky; at the tables, chairs were unpredictable, some were whole, others were not, like lame animals allowed to remain out of kindness.

Doing her best to distance herself from the immediate surroundings, the mother insisted that she was educated and cultured and, as if one thing followed from the other, showed little interest in the price of eggs or the latest trends in child rearing.  She told this to the girl often.  And in this tight family-centered community she did not deign to interact with the neighbors and had turned down invitations so often until they stopped coming.

In contrast, the other mothers watched children play in tight yards. They understood the inherent dangers, bones snapping like twigs, skulls cracking, eyes taken out, the infinite possibilities of hurt the world had to offer.  They concealed this knowledge from their children with talk of recipes and feigned anguish at every toy dropped inquisitively down the toilet.  They exchanged smiles and shared the bonds of friendship.  Yet nothing humbled her, not the initial warmth at the door, not the meals sent over when they first moved in, not the offers to share in car pool.   Aliza Ahronson Berg would not go and join them. She had not lowered herself to that. She would not even give them a second glance when she backed the car down the driveway, getting out to get the mail dressed in a fringed brown leather jacket and peasant skirt with mauve ribbons tied in little bows and stitched around the hem line.

In this self-imposed brilliant creative isolation they sat inside through long afternoons. The mother read poetry and advised the girl to have a critical mind.  Long drags on a cigarette, she repeated lines from poems—“Do I dare to eat a peach” or “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”  Wisps of wordy smoke puffed into the girl’s face.  After, she looked up and directly at the girl, waiting for some mysterious response, as if it were her highest priority to convey that a trivial life was worse than anything else possible.  Gaze fixed.  Her eyes implored the girl—say something, say something, you dimwit.

“Mrs. Failkoff said today that there was a giant hanging on Noach’s ark,” the girl offered because it was what she was thinking about, since it had just started to rain.

“And they pay her a salary for this?” the mother said.

Stung, the girl would then look away toward the drained multi-colored antique maps of the world hung on the walls, feeling a hot blister of hurt rising in her throat.  She was told they are in the world.  Lands conquered and claimed.  Independence fought for and won, revolutions in the street. The mother had placed the maps to show that the world has changed, and will change again.  Tacked to the fridge was a picture of the President under which it said, “Would you buy a used car from this man?”  Alongside it were pictures of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein.  The girl thought them both very ugly.

In every area, Aliza Ahronson Berg dabbled in domestic trickery; laundry went undone, dishes piled up, produce that had been left out bred swarms of tiny flies that rose up whenever anyone walked past.  By her own confession it amused her to have things in the fridge become covered over by a fuzzy green and black skin.  Meals were a whole other kettle of fish, sometimes a complete dinner of artichokes or chocolate sandwiches.  With an emotion stronger than any ordinary envy the girl wanted, longed for what she had seen others have on their plates for meals.  She would ask for mixed canned or frozen vegetables, confetti of color, or even meat with a sauce, or a soft white bread sandwich.  In fact what the girl felt was hunger, and she would learn to savor that, too.  Once, at the ShopRite, the mother agreed and placed in the wire cart a white plastic bag of vegetables that the girl hoarded in the back of the freezer.

The girl attended a school with some of the other girls on the street.  A small, worn-to-the-bone school with dingy ceiling tiles that hung slack overhead.  She was often late or not there at all.  When she was there, most of the teachers overlooked her.  She kept to herself, and during the times that they all stood, siddurs opened, she always kept her place during the concentric rings of prayer.  She watched the other girls the way she might have watched fish sliding behind glass in an aquarium.  They were neither unkind nor generous. They treated her with a practiced indifference.  The mother did not ask her about school and did not look up when she pushed the mimeograph worksheets under her nose, did not react as she repeated something the teacher said.

Most days she walked home from school, as it eliminated the seat on the bus dilemma. The bus was a complex social situation, based on family, older siblings, cousins and a father’s occupation.  She would just as well walk herself over the railroad tracks and past the store with takeout chickens turning on a spit in the window.  Even the newest stores, still with Grand Opening Sale hung in the window, already looked shabby.  Along the way the sides of buildings and phone poles were hung with posters.   Whole collages plastered with the faces of the leading rabbis of the community, announcing lectures telling people not to mingle with the Gentiles, not to dress immodestly, or to give money to help a certain widow with twelve orphans.  Likewise the weekly local newspaper often ran the names of people called to the Beit Din, the court that presided over all matters, cat calls to guard your eyes, guard your mouth and guard your children.

When the long driveway snaked at the pine tree the girl would quicken her pace and cut across the yard to the back kitchen door next to the bay window.  Always through the ice lace on the pane she could decipher the mood she was about to enter. Dirty dishes on the table meant nothing, a book open and out signaled the mother had gotten out of bed and moved through the house.

It was March; there were still some patches of snow on the ground and the lawn was pitted with small pools of melted brown broth.  Through the window she saw them both standing in front of the white refrigerator. She recognized Mrs. Leiber from the library, her very white skin, brown eyes and pursed mouth—she always looked as if she was about to say something but never did.  Her only awkward feature was her nose, which came to a near perfect point at the end.  Her skin glowed like a cameo.  She saw her mother’s hand around Mrs. Leiber’s upper arm and the other plunged splayed fingers into her hair, their lips touching and Mrs. Leiber’s head tilted back as if she was looking up but her eyes were closed. Her sheitel, not just a wig but stylized stiff blond with outward turned curls on either side, was not on her head and she had short-cropped, very black hair and looked a bit like Joan of Arc.  She was dressed in the mother’s blue and white striped robe and stood barefoot.

When she opened the door from the entranceway she heard them—a Morse code of sighs.  The sounds so unfamiliar she could only intuit a meaning; a noise like a knife cutting air.   She would not get the sound out of her head for a long time. “I’m so wet,” Mrs. Leiber said.

“Oh,” Mrs. Leiber said when she noticed the girl standing in the kitchen. She then gave an automatic reflex of a smile, as if she had just opened her door to unexpected and unwanted guests. The mother spun around on her heels to face the girl.

“Don’t you knock? Didn’t I teach you to knock?”  her mother said.

“Knock? It is the kitchen, no door,” the girl said.

“Aliza,” Mrs. Leiber started, trying to soothe what she uncomfortably noticed as the mother’s anger rising.  At that moment, Mrs. Leiber looked sweetly into the girl’s face and at once noticed that just like the mother she had one blue and one green eye.

“Aliza, she has mamish, exactly your eyes.  I have never seen it before and now I have seen it twice in one day.” She said it in a gusty and tender voice, as if a peacock had just displayed its plumage for her.  She put her cameo white hand on the girl’s shoulder.

“I have eight children and they all have the same color eyes,” she said as if they had been cheated out of something.  Mrs. Leiber continued to take in the girl.  She noted that she had on shoes at least three sizes too big, and the shoulders of the sweater were nearer the elbows.

“Such a day,” she said looking at the mother. And then, realizing she was just wearing a robe, Mrs. Leiber fled the kitchen and then reemerged fully dressed and politely excused herself out the back door.

“She’ll be back,” the mother said as she closed the screen door and placed Mrs. Leiber’s forgotten sunglasses on the counter.

She was the oldest, the other two were babies—one could walk with a tipsy gait, the other did not even sit up and only took a bottle.  They all looked somewhat alike with fair skin and light eyes.  The girl had wheat colored hair that she braided herself each morning, using the chrome trim on the side of the oven as a mirror and old rubber bands saved from newspapers. The babies mostly slept dressed only in undershirts and diapers.  They never went out and there was neither stroller nor carriage.  They both always smelled funny, like rusty nails.

The mother wanted to go to protest the war. She said that they would write a lawyer’s number on their arm with a ballpoint in case the cops arrested them. The mother put combs in the girl’s hair like a Spanish dancer and said, pointing to a map, “The world is changing and we will be part of it.” She did a little dance around the dining room adjusting the volume to Joan Baez on the record player: “you got to walk that lonesome valley, you got to walk it by yourself, ain’t nobody here can walk it for you, you got to walk by yourself…” each chord loosening the knots in the coarse ropes of conventionality.

As the weather warmed Mrs. Leiber visited.  Often the girl would get home from school to find both women outside sitting on a blanket under a tree drinking tea from glasses.  When she would leave to return to her own house, Mrs. Leiber always headed down Viola Road, past the twisted rows of apple trees on either side, crossing over Route 306 to the intersection, the invisible boundary into the area where the women wore small pillbox hats over their sheitels, where English was only spoken by outsiders.

Even making her way on the gravel side of the road Mrs. Leiber never looked disheveled in the smart European suits favored by the wealthy Chasidic women, crisp lapels on the jacket, a mid-calf skirt of the same material and her wig frozen into style.  She returned to her younger children, to the maid, to the cooked foods in the kitchen. Mrs. Leiber spoke German with her mother, sometimes French.  They both spoke many languages and had lived in other countries.  Mrs. Leiber’s husband traveled for business, every week to a different place—Antwerp, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, London.  Money poured in as if from an open spigot.  Her children were all over the world, schools in England, Switzerland, Jerusalem.  Despite this she did not seem worldly or sophisticated. She had a house full of beautiful things, Persian carpets, a French Armoire, gilt edges; but these neither reminded her of what she had lost, nor symbolized what she would have.  A silver pitcher was a silver pitcher.  It sat on a table.

The commonality between the two women was what the grandmother would later call “wanting the wrong things in life” and having “an upside-down head.”  She said this flatly without judgment as if she was commenting on the color of the sky.  What they shared was an impression of the world before and away from this place.  They both expected bread to have a hard outer crust, for a seamstress to arrive at the house when they needed an outfit, and that everyone played either piano or violin.  The particular America around them, with its subdivisions and long vistas, did not hold their attention.

To hear the mother tell it, the world separated as neatly as a sheet torn from the top of a tablet.  There were good people and bad people.  Nixon/bad equals Vietnam/bad.  Martin Luther King/good equals he was shot.  A few complications: the Russians had Hitler alive and hidden.  The FBI read people’s mail, and had lists. The mother was sure she was listed and her mail was read.  Whenever a piece of mail had the slightest crease the mother held it to the light, convinced it had been opened, read, resealed by an entire team of government gnomes hunched over an expansive dark wood conference table.  The people in this small community were bad; they were, she did not even hate to say it, little petty Jews.  They are not on a list.  Even as the mother explained, it laid on Mrs. Leiber’s brain as a thick fog.

“Come on Viv, don’t you read the newspaper? Can’t you see what’s going on?” the mother asked putting her hand on Mrs. Leiber’s shoulder.

The mother came from a big city, and had studied at the Sorbonne. She spoke languages, European languages. Not Yiddish—that is not a language, more of a vulgarity.  Even though nothing in the house matched or was a set, such that the neighbors at first asked when the furniture would be arriving, she had silver flatware and trays and a sterling tea set and candlesticks to prove her lineage. These were the artifacts of class.  She was elegant but that was not important—she merely held it out like a religious relic of where she came from—an ulna bone, skull plate, a shard of wood.  Her people (that she would never see again) had been well known, celebrated, cosmopolitan.  Chasidic stock, yes, but versed in the arts and sciences, physicians, musicians, and even an astronomer. European émigrés who had swept into every tearoom of the world’s grandest hotels.  They walked in the paved streets, not in wagon ruts or muddied cow paths. Ghosts now, billowing, translucent, hovering near the tiers of a wedding cake chandelier. The mother has no mother or father and no brothers or sisters. Only a mother-in-law that she called my soon to be former mother-in law.  She was waiting for an attorney to recalibrate her life and at the same time waited for people’s minds to open.  She felt it all was right at hand; she felt change like a warm breath on the back of her neck.  Then she will assume her rightful place wearing the crimson mantle, standing at the podium ministering to a congregation of fledgling radicals.  She circled rentals in the Village Voice.

Stonewall was amazing. “A kick line down the street,” the mother yelled into the phone to Mrs. Leiber. “You know, like show girls, moving toward the police—the New York City police.”  She was trying to explain this in three languages to Mrs. Leiber, who did not understand.

“Women? Dancing in the street?” Mrs. Leiber asked.

“No, Viv, men, dressed like women,” the mother went on.

“Why, dance in the street, and what, in a skirt?  I don’t know what you are talking about.  I don’t understand—kick line.” Mrs. Leiber turned the new words over in her mouth.

The days lengthened and night announced itself with the distant twinkle of fireflies. By July there were gatherings of the exiles at the moss green house—friends came, they drove up from the city and held poetry readings in the playroom. Someone read “Howl” and all of Walt Whitman’s “I Sing The Body Electric.” Sometimes they brought food, strange gooey concoctions from Chinatown, bits of red floating in a brown sauce eaten with black lacquered chopsticks.  The guests sat on the counters in the kitchen with legs dangling or Indian style on the floor using teacups for ashtrays. They blasted music and opened windows.  Like a memorized dialogue, the girl heard about Jacques Brel and Lotta Lenya and living in Greenwich Village.  Sometimes they nodded at the girl as she worked at her pink yarn and knitting needles or made a potholder at a small red loom.

It took some convincing because the first week of July was usually when the Leibers took their family vacation in the mountains.  Mrs. Leiber agreed to just stop in. She had made some potato pirogues that she would bring.

“Do you see what I have going on here?” the mother would say to her friends. “You drove in, did you see them? It is like an ant hill, and they don’t even speak English. It is a nightmare.” And with that the mother would flop into a chair and pick at the stuffing leaking from a tear in the upholstery.

It was a new atmosphere, especially for Mrs. Leiber, seeing Aliza with other people, and people like these—friends. From the embrace of the over-stuffed chair the mother was holding court.  Men were gliding through the rooms bare-chested while off in a back room the babies were frantic and screaming.  A cloud of smoke engulfed the room.  The girl watched Mrs. Leiber’s face tense as she stood holding her plate of pirogues.  The music was rebellious and lewd, a man belting out oh baby, oh baby, something something, I’m on fire.

“Oh, Viv,” the mother called out, patting the arm of the chair. Mrs. Leiber did not move and looked transfixed on an invisible thread.  She did not smile at the girl or at anyone.  Her head turned to follow one person and then to look at another. Some had torn and patched clothing, and bare feet with filthy heels.  Somehow they seemed sinister and menacing, like she had walked into a bad neighborhood.  The girl could see she felt terribly uncomfortable and terribly sad all at once.

Mrs. Leiber was relieved and confused when she pulled the door shut behind her unnoticed.  She was grateful to be going to a bungalow in the mountains with her family.  Quite suddenly she longed for her husband, the sound of his quiet voice, almost inaudible, longed to talk about their children, in that moment her life seemed as simple and unexpected as an instant Polaroid, glossy but real and important and hers.

What sent it all careening out of control and over the cliff was the day at the dress store a few weeks after the party.  Mrs. Leiber returned from the mountains but now kept a distance.  Nearly frantic, the mother went in and bought Mrs. Leiber crinolines and petticoats. In fact, after looking through the racks, she took the whole new Fall line, piled them on the counter and told the lady at the cash register to have them delivered to Mrs. Leiber, as a gift. She then asked for a card to enclose. The lady at the counter looked over the huge pile at the mother with an expression of confusion.

“These aren’t your size,” the woman said.  The girl recognized her as the mother of a classmate.

A comet streaking past, the mother flashed her a fierce and haughty look. “I told you to pack them and deliver them, and if you must know, they are a gift of love, for my lover.  So nosey, why are you so nosey?”  She hissed like the start of a teakettle.  It was this look and that voice that caused the woman at the counter to recoil.  To turn instantly away from the gray cash register and to reach for the phone the moment the door closed behind the mother.  The woman at the counter called the rabbi of the shul off Route 45; she called the principal of the school, who was the brother of the rabbi of the shul off Route 45. She called her own husband to come and pick her up—right away.

In the car the mother slapped the girl across the face, even though the girl had said nothing.  She must have realized what she had done. She pounded the steering wheel over and over with her hands and bit her lip.  The mother drove the girl home and left her at the end of the driveway and then turned the car around in a wide sweep.  The girl watched as the car snaked back down Viola Road.

The men were out walking with the boys, the street began to fill.  Inside houses meals were being prepared, tables set.  The girl ran into the moss green house.  There was no mother, no father.  The babies were flushed from screaming, their hair matted to their heads with sweat and dirt.  The girl took a bag of frozen peas and sprinkled it into the cribs for the babies to pick up and eat.  By this point they were greedy and smelled. She remembered that baby Freeda needed a bottle and she propped up for her by wedging it between the crib slats—like a water bottle in a gerbil cage.  They pulled and strained against being lifted. The mother, a rogue pigeon escaped from the cote, did not return. The girl ate raw meat because she had been warned never to go near the stove with her long hair.  The first few days the girl imagined that they were like a land-locked Robinson Crusoe, on an adventure. She felt safe in the house during the day, at night each tap of a branch against a window sent ribbons of fear through her.  After a few days, the days got bad too.

By the time the grandmother arrived the house was strewn with trash.  They had eaten uncooked rice from a box and raw pasta.  They drank maple syrup.  The grandmother screamed the mother’s name through the house—“Aliza!” she yelled up the stairs and down into the basement.

* * *

The grandmother walked through the house like she was stepping over corpses. Then the grandmother scrubbed floors, walls, tiles.  She took big pruning shears and cut back branches.  She went out in calf-length dresses and big black rubber boots, pulling stalks of blue chickweeds and lamb’s-quarters, hacking at a half-dead hedge of privet shrubs.  Wearing a flowered kerchief over her head that Eastern Europeans never seem to notice, that screamed, “I am from the old country.” Mindel Berg stood in the middle of the street smoothing her dress and studied other front yards.  Then with a shovel bought at a hardware store and four bushes, two blue mop-head hydrangeas and two rhododendrons from a nursery, she made the front entrance approximate the neighbors’.

This was not the first scandal to hit the Town of Ramapo.  There had been the fallout about some suspect kosher chicken, another one about meat. There were scandals that unraveled from Forty-seventh Street all the way up the Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway.  Any number of businesses with irregularities on the books.  But this was different and there was no re-landscaping it.

The grandmother tried to position herself, just like getting the right leverage on the shovel. On the day the grandmother went to meet the principal, she aimed to be prepared.  She wore a sky blue dress with a belt that matched a hat with bright red plastic cherries and a blue band.  As support, her girlhood friend Rebbitzin Gruner accompanied her. She supplied school clothes and shoes, had some weight in the community, and also had, if needed, a checkbook and her husband’s word that tuition would be paid.   The grandmother came fully made-up, her mouth highlighted with a slash of red lipstick, her cheeks hit by high streaks of rouge.  She carried a wicker handbag with a bent bamboo handle and dressed not to plead and not to offer an explanation, because she had none, but rather to attempt to assure the girl a place.

At the school she had to pass through two anterooms, the walls lined with massive leather-bound gold embossed volumes of Talmud and various tractates.   Once seated in the inner office the first thing the principal said to the grandmother, from behind a past storm of loose paper, was that he knew for a fact Mrs. Leiber was in Canada under the care of professionals, resting and making a fine progress, and he had no reason not to expect her to return to her family soon. This was not merely a piece of information passed from one to another in casual conversation; it was an opportunity, a chance, a pole held out into the rushing waters that in fact she had no chance of grasping onto.  The grandmother understood this and felt forgiveness was a wave that hit the shore and quickly went back out to sea.  Finally, with no tone of regret, not the slightest hint of consolation, he said the truth was many people knew the story and he had other children to protect and donors to consider.  He then opened a folder lying on his desk, looked down and did not raise his eyes again.

The mother would call sometimes and demand things—her books, a silver sugar bowl, a worn carpet. “Aliza,” the grandmother would yell into the phone, “I can’t hear you; we have a bad connection, call back. No.  I don’t know, I have not seen it.”

“It is a chutzpah,” the grandmother said after she returned the white phone to the cradle on the wall. “She should be angry at us? What did we do?”

“Did she want to talk to me, is she going to call back?” the girl asked.  She was working on an intricate picture with a house and a rainbow and a horse and a girl.

The grandmother cleaned the house and parsed through the children.  The boy was sent to other relatives with money who could raise and educate a boy, and the girl and baby stayed with her.  They moved out of the house into a small apartment closer to stores and a new school that would become one of many.

The grandmother made friends with the neighbors in the new neighborhood. She graciously accepted their cooked dishes the week they moved in, the invitations that followed and even the shared duties of watching children play. Her willingness to converse in Yiddish and to hem a dress here and pants there were well appreciated. The women admired the grandmother’s eye for decorating, for adding small details to a room, a vase, a golden and blue throw pillow.  They admired her upright stance, the fact that each step was measured. The truth was they still eyed the girl at a distance, unsure what she knew, what she had seen, how much she understood.  And they, after all, had their own children to protect.  A girl laden with god knows what happened in that house, times ten. They had to protect their children.

Once the grandmother took the girl to visit the mother in a house on a lake and there was a small rowboat turned upside down next to a small dock.  They walked from the road where the taxi had left them off up a gravel and dirt path, the whole time the grandmother saying, “How to find such a place? Who could find such a place? It’s like a forest for Partisans and wolves.”

The girl sat on a lumpy torn couch with her feet dangling across from the mother in a black captain’s chair that she recognized.  She had dressed especially carefully with knee socks that matched her skirt.  The mother did not offer anything to eat or drink and did not ask her about school.  The mother just sat and gave the girl a long hard look.  She eyed the purple hair bows that the grandmother had put in as if they offended her. There was another woman there named Bobbie, older than the mother.  At first she stood behind the mother’s chair. Bobbie then moved through the room with a military swagger, a general inspecting the troops; her biceps straining under her tight T-shirt.  The girl thought it rude and mean but it was obvious that this was Bobbie’s territory. The grandmother stood with her back to them staring out a large window that looked onto the lake—she said something about the view.

When they left, the grandmother turned for just an instant outside the door and was about to say, “Please, Aliza, please.” But before she could speak the mother looked at her and said, “Don’t start,” and closed the door.

Invariably the daily demands of life eclipsed the real reason they were together. They settled into a routine—a poorly mended rag doll family, flopping awkwardly through town.  The grandmother would not be cowed, not by the greengrocer putting withered greens into the bag, not by the butcher with a thumb on the scale. “How many fingers of his did I pay for today?”

Those times when the girl offered that she had not been invited to yet another one of her classmates’ parties, and had been crossed off every possible list, real and imagined, and not counted in the tight social tally, the grandmother would nod.  In reality the girl was on a list—a blacklist, the mother’s word.  The Grandmother never offered comfort or compensation by way of an alternative treat, never said they would do something themselves that would be just as fun.   Except once the grandmother drew a long breath, a medical exam breath.  Just then the girl wanted to say she hated this town, these people, having to be alone, but she knew if she said that it would sound like her mother, whom they never mentioned by name.

“Her temper and her mouth,” the grandmother offered, even though no question had been posed.  “Here, in this place,” she said pointing to the floor—although the girl understood it to mean a larger expanse. “No anger, no temper.”

By this point she had seen enough to understand the pairings required in this life.  She could see the line of demarcation drawn, that outer distance, the tree line half way up the mountain, an off-limits boundary where nothing could grow, where her mother stood, both hands blowing mock kisses.

Nobody could see the whole, some are reactions expected, predictable, a constant; others a variable.  How far the tale traveled and how distorted it may have become and how crudely it may have been interpreted and internalized were random.  By the time the world had not changed the grandmother bought her a new outfit for the Yomim Tovim. They went to three stores, trying things on—walk, turn, walk, turn, walk, turn, the grandmother working three fingers into the top of the waist of skirts, looking for growth room, Mrs. Gruner standing off to the side and nodding with approval. Finally, it was a white skirt with orange and brown stripes and a matching brown button-down shirt with a collar.  The shoes were black patent leather, with a bow on the top and a slight heel.

The entire neighborhood smelled of ply-board, and all the sukkahs, wooden framed, branch-roofed dwellings, were decorated with plastic grapes and construction paper chains.  As always, the yeshiva across the street had the largest sukkah in town set up in the parking lot.

The girl never crossed the street to the school side except this once when two boys signaled to her and shouted in Yiddish,  “Vee koift men fish?”

An odd question.  In fact she knew where the fish market was and she crossed the street to point them in that direction.  The parking lot was empty, the school out for the holiday.  It seemed strange that boys would be sent to buy fish so late in the afternoon and in the middle of the vacation week.  This thought just skimmed across the surface of her mind.  She let it slide under because it struck her that this was the first time ever that anybody had spoken to her outside her home, the first time she was asked a question.  They both wore the identical uniform of black pants and white button shirts, with stiff black shoes. One had his shirttails out and bright red hair with loosening corkscrew side-locks.   When she came closer she saw that one was undoing his belt, and had his hand inside his white underwear and was pulling.  At first the girl thought he was like one of those very slow boys who trailed off behind all others in the family and got lost in parks.  She was about to tell him kindly but firmly that he can’t undress in public and to go home.  Before she could speak they pulled her behind the school.

What he was holding had a slightly different complexion than the boy’s very pale freckled face, a shade darker, closer to the shade of his lips.  One of them circled around her and somehow maneuvered her up against a heavy metal door. She could feel the bar of the door pressing painfully into her back.  The ground was dirty with cans and leaves and the kinds of things that collect in isolated unused doorways.  When they pushed on her shoulders she slumped to the pavement, with her head against the door.  The redheaded boy’s pants were around his ankles; he squatted at her feet completely exposed and then landed on top of her and pushed her new sweater up to clear a space on her stomach.

“Nisht tzvishen de bainer—not between the legs,” the other boy ordered. He spoke in imperatives, rapid speech words she never heard, except to know that he was firing off commands in a patois that caused her to wince and grab at the air.

The taller boy stood lookout a few feet away.  She watched him in his nervous furtive sway, not unlike the movements of prayer.  The redheaded one held her arms, pinning them to the ground.  He was on top of her, looking directly at her, his face less than an inch away from her own.  He never deflected his gaze.  Then he lunged back and forth again and again against her exposed stomach until she heard a faint grunt and a sigh.  Even though her mouth was open, no sound came out. Wedges of glass sparkled on the black top. On her stomach he left something of himself wet and milky and she imagined it was puss from a wound, a terrible disease, a sickness that was killing him and now her. Instinctively she covered her face with the back of her hand and with her other she reached out defensively. There in the secret hiss of boys, nobody screams when it happens or when it happens again.  There was a kind of silence, a white noise of leaves crushed underfoot, except for a slight grunt, like an old dog being pulled too hard on its leash, or the weakest kid on the field trying for an airborne ball, familiar sounds.

After he had his turn, the prayer boy stood up, looked straight at her, and said in perfect English, “Tell your mother.”

There were scratches on her back, and some blood.  She had been cut by shards of glass on the ground and had not even felt it. There was no hurry.  The new clothes were torn and worthless. All around her she could hear families begin to gather in their sukkahs.  In the twilight she saw a constellation of blue twinkle lights strung festively around the booths.

She would say nothing.  At that moment she was still miles and many boys away from the lives she would have, all the thin dresses that would tear away like tissue. What she learned was that even long after the boys grew into men they still wanted her—with their fingers digging deep into the wells of her clavicles.

By then, she knew to do what they wanted.   That’s what she would have told her mother, how she formed her lips into a perfect O each time.  A magician, she pulled bright silk handkerchiefs from her mouth, each time she moaned to the boy on top of her.

For another story by B.A. Newmark, from the POV of one character in this story 30 years later, check out “The Last Lion,” in The Montreal Review.