Too Many Men (22 page)

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L I L Y B R E T T

were riveted by her stories. The school Ruth attended was in an inner-suburban area populated with migrants and refugees. Most of the children had no trouble imagining Ruth’s poverty. The stories became more elaborate as Ruth got older. They became more complex, with a better sense of structure and better timing.

Ruth lied as an adult, too. Stupid, harmless lies. As though no reality was worthy of repetition. Everything had to be expanded and enhanced.

She couldn’t help it. She was often shocked herself at her lies. Surprised and bewildered at the words which she knew not to be true that came out of her mouth. The shock didn’t last long.

Ruth’s elaborations and embroideries were intricate and authentic, to her. No sooner had she uttered them than she began to believe that what she was saying was the truth. A good liar had to be efficient and organized, Ruth discovered. Lies were too difficult to keep track of otherwise. And a good memory was essential. Good liars had to be able to retain the facts of their own existence and the facts of their lies. It wasn’t easy.

Ruth rarely let herself spin off into meticulously constructed lies or fantasies anymore. She had paid a lot of money to several analysts in order to give up this trait. She was happy she was no longer a big liar. The lies had entangled and snared and confused Ruth as well as their recipients.

As a child Ruth’s lies had been intricate enough. She had made up relatives. Aunts, uncles, cousins. She made up cousins she loved and cousins she disliked. She had made up favorite aunties, and favorite grandparents.

She had invented eight grandparents. She knew nothing about grandparents. She had eliminated four of the grandparents when she was old enough to know that people rarely possessed more than four. She had explained the extraneous grandparents as adoptions. Then she had whisked them, briskly, out of the picture. She had known, even then, that credibility was a crucial component of storytelling.

Attention to detail was also critical. Ruth knew the physical characteristics and personality quirks of all of the fabricated aunts and uncles and cousins. She had populated her world with so many made-up people. She had best friends and second-best friends and casual boyfriends and serious boyfriends she had invented. She had never been lonely.

Sometimes when she thought of the past, she couldn’t remember which friends she had really had and which friends she had imagined. At least T O O M A N Y M E N

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now she had a better use for her imagination. She made up letters all day.

Six days a week. From 8:30 A.M. to 7 P.M. By the end of each day, she had had her fill of invention and fabrication.

The subject of relatives, her relatives, still occupied her from time to time. When she visited museums or Holocaust memorials, she saw herself in many of the photographs on display. Ruth knew, of course, that it wasn’t her in the photographs, but it seemed reasonable to think that she might be looking at relatives. She looked at photographs of Jews in the streets of the ghettos. Photographs of Jews being liberated from concentration camps. Photographs of Jewish families before the war. She saw herself in all of them.

She had asked an official in the Wiesenthal Center, in Los Angeles, if he had known the identity of a young woman in a photograph taken in the Lódz ghetto. Anyone who knew Ruth could have identified her right there in the center of that photograph. The official didn’t know who the young woman was. Ruth had given the official a list of people she was related to.

The Buchbinders, the Spindlers, the Knobels, and the Brajtsztajns were all related to the Rothwaxes. They were all from Lódz. And they were all dead.

Ruth had asked the man if it was possible to see if any of those names appeared in any of the photographs they had on display in the center. He had explained that it was an impossible task.

Edek had stopped running. He was walking beside Ruth. They walked past a young woman and her child. The mother looked about thirty. She was hitting the child. Smacking the small boy hard. Ruth flinched at the sound of the slaps. What had the child done? she wondered. Something that bothered his mother. The mother was red-faced and grim. She kept on hitting him. He screamed and screamed. Why did people like this have children?

Was beating a child one of the pleasures of parenthood? Enough parents beat their children.

“We did never smack you,” Edek said. “Never.”

“Jews on the whole don’t use physical violence,” Ruth said. She immediately worried that Edek may have interpreted her reply as offensive. As though she had insinuated that Jews were prone to emotional violence. She looked at Edek. He didn’t look disturbed.

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L I L Y B R E T T

The boy continued to scream. The mother noticed Edek and Ruth. She motioned for the boy to be quiet. He kept crying.

“You did never want a child,” Edek said to Ruth. “Even when you was a teenager.”

“I still don’t,” Ruth said. “All of my nightmares are about children. My children. I lose them. I leave them on trains and buses and other public places. I forget to feed them. I forget I have them. In my dreams, I have a baby who is born damaged and he disappears, right after the birth.” Edek stopped walking.

“What is wrong with the baby?” he said.

“What baby?” she said.

“The baby in your dream, of course,” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s never clear. In the last dream someone took the baby away from me.” Edek stared at her. “What’s wrong?” she said to him. “Nothing,” he said.

Something she had said had disturbed Edek. But what? Ruth had no idea what it was. She had no idea what much of her communications with her mother and father had meant. Things were said to her in short ambigu-ous sentences and semi-indecipherable phrases. Brief bursts of almost-comprehensible advice and guidance, warnings and orders. Nothing was explained at length. Everything was in quick, oblique English. Edek and Rooshka were always stumbling and floundering in English, a language that was foreign to both of them.

“Why didn’t you speak Yiddish to me? Or Polish? Or German?” Ruth said to Edek. “Why did you and Mum only speak English to me, instead of one of the languages you were really comfortable in?”

“Mum was very comfortable in English and I am very comfortable in English,” said Edek.

“You weren’t when you had me,” Ruth said. “You were almost forty, and you weren’t in a position to go to English classes.”

“That is true. I was working in factories and so was Mum,” Edek said.

“So why didn’t you speak to me in a language that was easy for you?”

said Ruth.

“Mum wanted for you to learn English,” Edek said.

“I couldn’t have avoided learning English. We were living in Australia,”

Ruth said.

T O O M A N Y M E N

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“It is not so important what language you speak to a child,” Edek said.

“Of course it is,” Ruth said. “How can you speak intimately to a child when your words are limited?”

“As a matter of fact,” Edek said, “It was Mum’s idea. I was not so keen on it myself. Mum said, ‘We will speak English to this child.’ ”

“To this child?” said Ruth. “The other two didn’t last long enough to catch on to language, did they?” Why had she phrased that so harshly? She hadn’t meant to. “I guess Yiddish could have reminded Mum of the babies she lost, or the past, in general,” she said quickly.

“Mum said she did not want the baby to learn a language of the past,”

Edek said. “She did mean Yiddish. And she did not want the baby to learn the language of the Polish people. She said this baby is not Polish. And she is not German. I did not want to speak to a baby in German, in any case.

What Jew would speak to a baby in German?”

“But Mum insisted I learn German at school,” Ruth said.

“That was different,” Edek said. “She did not speak German with you.

German was not spoken in our house.”

“Yes it was,” Ruth said. “I was always reciting lines from Goethe. I had to memorize them for my German classes. Remember I won a prize for reciting Goethe? Mum was thrilled.”

“I remember,” said Edek.

“Mum thought that if the Nazis arrived in Australia, I would at least be able to communicate with them,” she said.

“That is not so funny,” Edek said. “That is what Mum did feel.”

“I didn’t say it was funny,” she said.

The mother and child were walking behind Edek and Ruth. The child was still crying, but it was a quiet cry now, a whimper. “I want to say something to that mother,” Ruth said. “How do you say ‘bully’ in Polish?” “Are you crazy?” said Edek. He scurried ahead of Ruth. Ruth turned around and glared at the mother. The mother looked startled. She smiled at Ruth.

Ruth shook her head in what she hoped was a gesture of admonition. Why did most mothers become mothers? Ruth thought. They looked so unhappy in the job.

Occasionally Ruth liked a burst of mothering. Mothering other people’s adult children in very small bursts. Sometimes you could experience an exchange of intimacy and understanding with a stranger’s child. This was a

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mothering of sorts. A transferring of wisdom, however menial the subject matter. Ruth had been buying a petticoat in Kmart on Cooper Union Square, when a young woman, a girl really, she looked about nineteen, had asked her advice about a black dress that she was trying on. “Does it look okay on me?” the girl had said. “It looks gorgeous,” Ruth had said. And it did. Kmart contained some surprising merchandise. “Is it suitable for a formal dinner?” the girl had asked Ruth. “Or is it too formal?”

“It’s just the right degree of formal to be formally formal or formally casual,” Ruth had replied. She had helped the girl choose a pair of shoes, as well. They had both left the encounter, glowing. “Thanks so much for all your help,” the girl had said. Ruth had almost leaned over to kiss the young girl good-bye. Instead, she blew her a kiss. “Have a wonderful evening,”

she said to her.

Ruth loved Kmart. It was open until 10 P.M. every night, and she often went there to unwind. Kmart kept her grounded. It showed her how real people lived. At Kmart you could buy mops and buckets and plastic fly swatters. Kmart had detergent in huge containers, and racks and racks of rubber gloves. You could buy car jacks and screwdrivers and brooms and brushes and irons and ironing boards.

Kmart stocked irons and ironing boards in the middle of a city where very few people, Ruth was sure, ever ironed their clothes. Ruth’s neighbor, an advertising executive, bought a fresh pack of white sports socks every week. “It’s not worth washing them,” he said to Ruth. “They only cost five dollars a pack.” Clothes were disposable or dry-cleanable. There were dry cleaners on every block in New York. Early in the morning and early in the evening, in the streets of New York City, men and women walked purposefully, holding dry-cleaned clothes aloft, in the air. Nobody ever said that they had to leave a meeting, or a meal, because they had to do their ironing.

Americans did seem obsessed with dry cleaning, to Ruth. Americans living abroad who feared the local Parisian or Italian or Turkish dry cleaners could airmail their clothes via Federal Express to Maurice Dry Cleaners in New York City. Maurice cleaned the clothes and Federal Expressed them right back to the customer. It cost $150 to clean and ship a suede jacket.

Maurice had customers in other parts of America and other parts of the world.

But then, Americans were strange. You could buy Mint Balls in Amer-T O O M A N Y M E N

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ica. “No More Doggie Breath,” it said on the packet. The manufacturer was not referring to human breath. These Mint Balls were breath freshen-ers for dogs. Two Mint Balls cost $3.99. On the front of the packet of Mint Balls was a drawing of a brown dog with a large green Mint Ball in his mouth. Ruth thought the idea must be to fool your dog into thinking this was a game of catch. The Mint Balls were not available in Kmart.

Ruth loved the cafeteria in Kmart, too. The cafeteria had the most wonderful view of the city. From its enormous arched windows you could see all the way along Lafayette Street and across to the East Village. The food in the cafeteria was not bad at all.

The world of Kmart was a world so removed from her own daily life of composing letters for other people. Composing congratulations-on-your-promotion letters for someone she didn’t know, to send to someone else she didn’t know. Composing letters for people who no longer knew what to say to each other. No wonder she needed to be soothed by the car jacks and the racks of rubber gloves in Kmart.

She had been thinking, recently, about opening a branch of Rothwax Correspondence in Los Angeles. She already had clients in California. She had quite a few clients in L.A. In L.A., they appeared even more in need of her services. Most of their brainpower seemed to be expended on their appearance. This applied equally to men and to women. “I can recommend a great plastic surgeon,” one of her clients had said to her. Ruth had flown to L.A. to check out office space, and she was having lunch with the client.

She liked this client. He was a thirty-three-year-old scriptwriter. When he had first phoned Rothwax Correspondence she had said to him she was sure he could write his own letters. “I can’t,” he had said. “I can write two-and-a-half-minute cop scenes. I do those really well. I can write cops in cars, cops on the street, cops taking calls, cops speeding, and cops in the office. I don’t do cops at home or cops under suspicion.” Ruth had written several personal letters for him.

“I can recommend a great plastic surgeon,” he had said to her again, at the end of the lunch. Ruth thought she must have looked very tired.

“You look great,” the scriptwriter had said, “but we can all use some help. I’ve just had lipo on my chin.”

“You’ve had what?” Ruth said.

“Lipo on my chin,” he said. “Liposuction.”

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