Her Mother's Daughter (17 page)

Bella was silent, watching from her seat at the table, as Momma sat on the couch with the baby, rocking for a long time, kissing her forehead, holding her close. If she wondered if Momma would love her more if she'd gone to the orphanage, she did not let the question enter her mind. She just sat and watched.

But next day Momma told her that she had to take care of Euga all day while Momma worked. So Bella didn't go to school for a while. She took Euga with her everywhere she went, and Euga would clutch her sister's hand, and hang on to her so beggingly that Bella's heart was touched. Euga was quiet and obedient, and she never cried.

One day Frances told Bella she had to take Euga to be vaccinated. Vaccinations were required for entering schoolchildren. Bella paled.

“I don't know how,” she said tremulously.

“You take two trolleys, to the Board of Health,” Momma said impatiently. (How did she know? Did she take me? I don't remember.)

Bella just stared at her, and Momma grew more impatient. Bella was ten years old now, a big girl. She repeated the directions, and told Bella to ask someone if she was lost.

Bella set off the next morning, stiff with dread. Euga clutched her hand so tightly their hands got wet and slimy. But Euga would not let go, so every once in a while, they would change hands. They took the trolley, and got off at the end, then the second trolley. It was the same way they went to the orphanage, except you didn't take the train. Bella wandered around for a while among the big brown buildings, but finally saw a sign (she could read it!) that said Board of Health, and the two children climbed the steps and followed signs through the hall. They entered a large room that reminded Bella of the room with the lady who told Momma she could keep one. She began to tremble, and Euga trembled with her. Euga was a good kid. In a thin voice, Bella told the lady why they were there. The lady took a long sheet of paper with words and lines on it, and picked up a pen.

“What is the child's name?”

“Euga.”

“What is it?”

“Euga. Euga Brez.”

“OLGA? Speak up, child.”

Bella shook her head “No, Euga, Euga,” she pronounced it carefully.

The woman sighed. “How do you spell it?”

“I don't know.” Then, she had a moment of memory. “Eugenia!” she said, pronouncing it Aow-gay-nya, as Momma did.

The woman grimaced. “I'll put down Olga,” she said.

Bella protested, but the woman paid no attention. “Address? Date of birth?”

Euga remained Olga for three years; when she entered third grade, Momma went down to the school herself and cleared the matter up. But Bella felt humiliated again, again a failure. My mother tells me this story along with the one about almost causing Euga's death, with the streetcar. She is morose, more depressed than usual.

“So they called her Olga for three years?” I laugh.

She doesn't even smile. She is chewing on the inside of her lip, ruminating. The incident is one more black mark in the book of rage she is compiling against the gods she doesn't believe in.

A
FEW YEARS AGO, I
went to India to do a photographic essay on poor Indian women. The country provided me with spectacular material—the golden-skinned women in their brilliant saris, red, blue, yellow, against the sienna-colored sand, the pale green scrub trees, the sky that stretched unbroken blue for miles. I shot women carrying five shiny brass pots of water on their heads, walking barefoot along a dirt road; women at the communal pump, bending gracefully to fill their
matkas;
women so thin and brown they looked like stick figures made of ebony, but wearing inch-wide ankle bracelets of heavy silver; women sitting vacantly holding their children, their eyes wide and dark and sad and angry, unlike the loving madonnas on all the posters, embracing bright smiling youngsters. The women and children I saw all looked hungry and tired.

Of course I talked with these women as I shot them, or before; I always try to form some kind of relationship with people before I take their pictures—that way it seems less like rape and more like encounter. I had translators with me wherever I went, and the women and the translator and I would sit on the bare floor of one house or another, and I'd ask them about their lives. The lives of poor Indian women are unspeakable: they have all the responsibility and no power. They are expected—and expect—to fetch all the water, fodder, and fuel the family uses, to give birth regularly, from the time they are married—at fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen—and raise the children, to do all the cooking, a time-consuming task,
and
to care for all the animals and work in the fields for eight hours each day. They rise early and go to sleep late, and have no time during the day for anything but their work. And often, their wages are taken by their husbands, so they have nothing to say about how the money they earn is spent.

Whenever I asked them about how they felt about their lives, they shrugged: there was no alternative, they said. A woman's life is what it is. They were convinced that if they were reborn in the future, if they had been reborn before, they would always be women, had always been women, and would always be married to the same man. Since I have always thought that of all the punishments in Dante's hell, the worst was the one he believed to be lightest—an eternal whirling in the same condition—I found their vision intolerable. The American in me insisted on change, and I asked them about schooling children, a different future, literacy classes—something,
anything,
to change their condition. They would smile their sweet smiles at me and nod their heads. “Oh, we don't think about the future, about change,” one said, and the others would murmur in agreement and add, “It's better not to.”

And even though my life has been as different from theirs as one woman's life can be different from another's, I understood profoundly what they meant. There are times when it is essential
not
to think about your life, and certainly not to think about changing it, times when no change for the better seems possible, and disappointment of any sort would be the true last straw, the blow that finally makes you stagger, fall and die. When you have to walk for miles bent under a load of faggots in the hot sun, and you know you will have to do this again three days later, and you still have to walk miles carrying water later the same day…It is better not to think.

Bella spent years of her life not thinking. (So did I.)

By the time she reached fourth grade, Bella could read and write in English, and although she was still the tallest child in the class, she was no longer the oldest—other children too got left back—and she began to feel that perhaps she was not utterly stupid. Occasionally, when she read aloud, the teacher would praise her; and sometimes there was a note on her compositions complimenting her on how well she wrote. Then the teacher chose her for a good part in the school play, and the following term, she was given the lead.

She had a shoot growing in her—a fragile sense that she was a person like other people, that she perhaps had some worth. She began to make friends at school, not with the gay well-dressed girls who always wore bows in their hair that matched their dresses, the popular ones, who giggled and whispered together; but with the quiet girls whose underwear sleeves sometimes stuck out from under their puff-sleeved dresses, and whose hair was not done every day in long spaghetti curls and some days even looked uncombed. She still had to go to market most afternoons and cook every night; and now she had to take Euga with her everywhere she went. But Euga was sweet and appealing, and the older girls liked her, and she never caused trouble. And she never told Momma on the afternoons when she and Euga would go around the corner to jump rope with Margie Jasinski and her friends. Sometimes, if Bella had two cents, she and Euga would run to the corner two blocks down where the man sold hot sweet potatoes from his wheeled cart; or if Bella got out alone on a Saturday afternoon and had two cents, she would run to the bakery shop and buy herself a cupcake.

Momma was a little better, now that Euga was home. She was cheerful in the evenings, and after dinner, before she started to sew, she would take Euga on her lap and rock her and croon, “
Moja droga, moja biedna sierota,
My dear, my poor orphan,” over and over, and she would tuck Euga into their big bed every night. Bella would watch Momma hugging Euga and think, Well, I'm a big girl, now, I'm practically Euga's mother, and she would remember the girl she'd seen in Jewtown holding that huge baby on her lap, and try not to remember her eyes, try to blot them out.

But when Momma came out and saw Bella nearly invisible in the corner of the couch, sitting silently, she would speak sharply to her, say “What the hell is the matter with you? What the devil are you doing there?” And after she began to sew, sometimes she would cry out as if a sudden pain had struck her, and bend over her work and sob. She would start tearing her hair, cursing, sobbing, slapping herself. She cried in soft wrenching noises that would not wake Euga, her sewing neglected in her lap.

Frances never stopped this crying, not until the fall of 1916, when her sons were finally released. But she never did it in front of Euga, so none of the children except Bella ever knew the depths of rage and violence in their mother's heart.

The only time Momma ever got angry in front of Euga was when the two girls forgot, and slipped into English around the house. Euga had forgotten her Polish while she was at the orphanage, and although she picked it up again at home, English was now more natural to her, and the sisters spoke it at school and on the streets. But Momma, who had grown up in a country in which the Germans had forbidden the speaking of Polish even inside the home, went wild if they spoke English. She did not explain this; they only knew they were expected to speak Polish at home, and that Momma was unhappy when they did not. They were good girls, they tried to be obedient.

One day in the spring of 1916, when Bella was in sixth grade, the teacher made an announcement. She said that if the children wanted to learn a trade and get a good job after they finished school, they should sign up for PS. 162 in the fall.

“What a fool I was,” my mother says, sipping the water she now drinks alternately with scotch, so she won't be sick the next day. “I went running home and told Momma about it, and of course she trotted me right over there to sign up. Ugh. Those were the worst years of my life.”

I refrain from remarking that the worst years of her life are whatever years she is describing. I shun critical distance; yet at the same time I want it. If I were to be able to put my mother's life in perspective, maybe I'd be free of the burden of it; but if I do that, I will hurt her, I will in some way diminish what she has suffered. My stomach twists, but I remain silent.

So, in the fall of 1916, Bella went to P.S. 162 in Ridgewood. It was far from where they lived, so she had to get up very early in the morning. She would run out to the baker's for buns for breakfast; then walk in the windy fall days to the trolley stop. She had to take two trolleys to get to Ridgewood, to the dark soot-blackened brick school with its windows covered with mesh like the windows at the orphanage. There, from 8:30 until 11:45, she was taught history, geography, English, and arithmetic. But the teachers here were not as good as those in the old school, and she could not hear as well, and the work was too easy for her. One day she met a girl from her old school on the sidewalk, and they talked a little. The girl was excited, she was having trouble, she said, learning fractions. Bella could tell she was bragging even as she claimed stupidity; she thought it was very grown up to be studying fractions. They were not taught in Bella's school.

In the afternoons, after lunch, from 12:30 until 3:00, the children were supposed to be taught a trade. Bella was signed up to learn paper-box making. But the teacher almost never showed up. This was true, Bella discovered, of the teachers of dressmaking, millinery, and shop. The trade teachers rarely appeared, and the children would sit in the dreary cold rooms all afternoon until the bell released them. Four girls from Bella's school had transferred to P.S. 162 at the same time she did; within a few months, all of them had been removed from the school. Only Bella remained. She stayed for two years.

The dressmaking teacher came in more regularly in the second half of the eighth-grade term, and the girls all had to make a graduation dress for themselves. Bella made a beautiful middy, white, with ruffles, and Momma bought her a big white ribbon to wear with it in a bow in her hair. On graduation day, a teacher stopped Bella in the corridor.

“Oh, Isabelle, how lovely you look!”

Bella, who had no thought that she looked in any way attractive, who was in fact feeling bowed down and hopeless, tried to smile. Some passing girls overheard and clustered around her.

“Oh, Bella, how pretty! What are you going to do, Bella?”

She raised her head haughtily. “I'm going to high school,” she announced airily.

“Ooooh! You're lucky! Which one?”

Bella named the most prestigious high school she knew, and the girls were impressed.

But Bella felt even more bowed down. The space around her heart kept churning, and her heart felt as if something was hammering on it. She knew she had an enlarged heart and she thought perhaps she was about to die. She did not care. More than anything in the world she wanted to go to high school, but very few of the children did, and almost none of the girls. The Jewish boys were going, and a few Jewish girls. Bella remembered Yetta Ettinger playing the piano, and she wondered why Jewish people were kinder to their children than Christians.

The day after graduation in the June of 1918, when Bella was fourteen, Momma took her to Greenwich Village, to a loft on the third floor of an old dirty building, and Bella got a job working ten hours a day five days a week, and half a day Saturday, for twelve dollars a week. All day, every day, Bella made paper boxes.