The Smartest Woman I Know (4 page)

Monte

Ettie was always trying to fatten me up. All I ever wanted was a grilled cheese sandwich and a cherry Coke at Liggett’s Drug Store on 65th and Madison, made by the boy behind the counter who looked like Montgomery Clift, if Montgomery Clift had acne.

ETTIE TRIED TO ADAPT to me and to modern times. She used paper plates.

“Thank you, God, for making such a miracle. Okay, so paper plates may not be as big a deal as penicillin, but can I use penicillin to put food on that’s not kosher? And for my grandchildren, I do things you wouldn’t do. My youngest granddaughter is too thin, so whatever she wants to eat, I’m very happy. And if she brings into my kitchen a baloney sandwich from someplace I don’t know, I put it on a paper plate. Should she want a little butter on a piece of pumpernickel, and if I should be so lucky, she also wants to taste my breaded veal cutlet, out come the paper plates. But I promise you, God, only for a grandchild who’s too thin, would I mix
milchig
and
fleishig
, and only on a paper plate.”

Once in a while, I’d make brownies from scratch following the recipe on the box of Baker’s unsweetened chocolate. But after melting, mixing, spilling, and licking, and after the brownies were baked, there’d only be enough for one brownie each for me, Tootsie, Ettie, and Mr. Goldberg.

ETTIE NEVER WROTE DOWN any recipes, so once for Mother’s Day I gave her a recipe box with index cards.

“Thank you very much but what am I supposed to do with this?” she asked.

“Ettie, you should write down how you make chicken soup, latkes, kugel, in case you get amnesia and can’t remember.”

“If I thought there were things I wouldn’t remember, I’d get amnesia in a hurry,” she said.

A few weeks later, I looked in the recipe box to see if she had written anything. Only one index card had writing. At the top of the card was written:
Make sure never to make Ida Bernstein’s mock kishke recipe again
.

Below that was the recipe for Ida Bernstein’s Mock Kishkes.

Whatever Ettie cooked, Mr. Goldberg ate as long as there was a bottle of Heinz ketchup on the table. He never worried about his big soup belly until one morning when Dr. Lewin, chief specialist of everything at Mount Sinai Hospital and a regular customer in the store, offered some free advice.

“Mr. Goldberg,” Dr. Lewin began, “it’s none of my business, but I think it would be wise for you to consider losing some weight.”

Dr. Lewin was a brave man. Nobody else ever told Mr. Goldberg what to do.

When Mr. Goldberg told Ettie what the doctor had said, she said, “So I’ll give you some free advice how to lose weight. Don’t eat so much. Don’t sit at the table and eat like it was your last meal. After a little of this and a little of that, say to yourself, ‘Thank you very much, but I’ve had enough.’ Also, have a little strawberry Jell-O or a little fruit cocktail for dessert instead of dessert. And it doesn’t hurt to take a walk once in a while.”

So Mr. Goldberg walked across the street to Duvanoy’s, bought a Linzer tart, and then went upstairs for his afternoon nap.

Not Ettie

E
TTIE WASN’T LIKE ANY of my friends’ grandmothers. She didn’t bake cookies with Tootsie and me. She didn’t knit us sweaters. She didn’t sing us lullabies or songs from Broadway shows. Her arms weren’t waiting for our hugs or to give us hugs. But Tootsie and I knew that she loved us.

Actually, I was sure that Ettie loved my sister best. Everybody loves the first child best. Even if the second child is adorable.

I wonder how different my life would have been if I had been the first child or first grandchild.

Tootsie had Veronica Lake wavy blonde hair with a dip over her left eye, eyes like light blue marbles, and long red fingernails that always matched her Revlon lipstick.

She had a voluptuous figure. Deliverymen whistled at her in the street and yelled out, “Hubba, hubba.”

But her nose had a teeny, tiny bump she obsessed over, so she never felt pretty. Ettie was always telling her, “Don’t worry about the size of your nose. The bigger it is, the better you can smell a flower.”

Everybody else in the world thought Tootsie was just gorgeous.

Besides the teeny, tiny bump in her nose, Tootsie had another problem. Me. Firstborn children seem to have that problem with the second child. “Why are you here?” they wonder. It never occurred to me at the time that being a first child came with its own set of problems. I had my own problems.

The five-year difference in our ages could have been a generation. Tootsie didn’t have to buy dresses with Peter Pan collars and puffed sleeves.

Tootsie got whatever she wanted from Ettie, even a black dress with a sweetheart neckline.

Tootsie could go to the movies with a friend and didn’t have to sit in the children’s section.

Tootsie knew things I wanted to know. She knew how to raise one eyebrow, and she had kissed a boy.

Tootsie was old enough to work in the store in the summer. I wasn’t. Ettie didn’t know what to do with me. One customer suggested a summer camp in Smithfield, Maine, where I could take horseback riding lessons. Only three hundred dollars a week.

Great idea, Ettie said, and sent me to Cejwin Camp in Port Jervis, New York. Cejwin stood for Central Jewish Institute. It was kosher and cost three hundred dollars
for the whole summer
. Ettie sent me there every summer. “Thank you, God,” she said, “for the big lake between the boys side and the girls side so I don’t have to worry.”

The first summer I was away, Ettie wrote me a letter I found many years later. It was stuck in the back of an old leather photo album.