my grandma told me when she tucked me into bed that night. I got to stay with my grandma while my mother and Henry went to Miami for their honeymoon. I was sleeping in Grandpa Lou’s bed. My grandparents had had single beds throughout their marriage. Grandpa Lou died three years ago. I was eight. The year before he died my mother brought me to Brooklyn for my Easter vacation to learn how to swim at the local YMCA. It was a special program that guaranteed that in just five days every child would learn how to swim. Faithfully every morning, Grandpa Lou and I walked what felt like miles to the Y. He waited in the lobby while I took my swimming lesson. The instructors called me Blue Eyes and told me I had the prettiest bathing suits. I wore a different one each day. But I hardly got them wet. I only sat on the ledge of the pool like a beauty queen or waded in the shallow end. I didn’t want to go in the water. It was cold. I was scared. After every lesson I would see Grandpa Lou and cry. He didn’t want me to go back. He and Grandma Rose had a big argument about it.
“Gants gut meshuggeh with the swimming lessons,” I heard him tell Grandma Rose in the kitchen. “She’s going to get pneumonia.”
“Sha! The kinder will hear.” Grandma Rose talked in a loud hushed voice. She talked in English and Yiddish. “Millie wants her to learn how to swim,” said my grandmother.
I didn’t want to stop going. I just wanted to stop being scared, and I didn’t know how to do that. So every day we went. Every day I cried. Every day they fought.
At the end of the week my grandmother came down with hives, and my mother came to the final class to see my progress. Every kid swam the length of the pool except me. With much coaxing I was able to do a ball float. I didn’t learn how to swim until Henry taught me.
I lay in Grandpa Lou’s bed and thought about how he would come in the locker room after each lesson. “Cover up,” he said, while he took off his coat and put it over my bathing suit. I could tell Grandma Rose was thinking about him, too, as she tucked me in.
“Are you in tight, mamala?” she asked. She brushed a few wisps of hair off my face and stuck them behind my ear. “You’ll see, Karrie, one day you’ll be a bride. You’ll marry a rich man. He’ll buy you a big diamond ring, and he’ll take care of you. And you’ll do it right the first time. Not like your mother. Okay. That’s finished. Henry’s a good man. A mensch. Not like your father, that clown.”
She wasn’t joking. My real father had run off to join the circus when I was four. At least that’s what I thought. For a few years we received postcards from around the country saying, “Hi, Cookie! What’s doin’ tips and all? The circus has come to town. Love, Mel.”
My mother said he wasn’t really at the circus, he just wrote that. And I wasn’t sure if writing to “Cookie” meant writing to me or my mom. But I always pictured him eating fire and jumping through hoops. Traveling across the country, and putting up circus tents. After a while the cards stopped, and I forgot about him.
Then about a year after the swimming lessons, my mom told me one night that Maggie McGraw from the apartment upstairs would be watching me because she had to pay a shiva call. She told me that Henry Eisenberg’s wife had died. I knew Henry Eisenberg from the neighborhood and he was always nice to me. He lived in the apartment building around the corner.
My mother went to his building that night and took the elevator to the sixth floor. When she got off the elevator she saw an open door. She looked at the name on the door and walked in. Millie said it was raining and she left her wet umbrella in the hall.
My mother went in the living room and sat down. A lit memorial candle burned on the end table. The only person there was an old man. He was sitting on a cardboard box that was supposed to look like a wood crate. That’s what people sat on when they had to sit shiva.
“Where is everybody?” Millie asked. “Where’s Henry?”
“Who’s Henry?” the old man asked. He had an Eastern European accent.
“Who are you?” asked Millie.
“I’m Bernard Aisenberg. I just lost my wife. Who are you?”
“I’m Millie Klein. I was looking for Henry Eisenberg. He just lost his wife.”
Bernard looked at my mother. Then he looked disappointed.
“Does this mean you’re not staying?”
My mother collected her wet umbrella and went across the hall to pay the right shiva call. Apparently her story won a piece of Henry’s heart. It happened slowly, but three years later they wed.
“You’re a whole family now. A mother. A father. You have a stepbrother, Lenny. He’s all grown up and away at college, but still…” said Grandma Rose as she slipped into the bed next to mine. “Better at that age he’s away. The long hair and who knows what else.”
She took out her teeth at night. It made her whole face sag, and her voice sound funny. Grandma Rose looked much, much older. I used to be scared when I was little, but now I was used to it.
“You have a brand-new apartment with your own bedroom,” she said, turning off the night-light. The room was quiet. I heard her breathing and rearranging her blankets. “You have a normal life now. It’s what I always wanted for your mother, and what I want for you.”
A light from the street shone in through the cracks of the venetian blinds. I heard the sound of a car driving by. Brooklyn seemed different to me than Queens. Older. They were both okay, but nothing like Manhattan.
Grandma Rose called Manhattan New York. My mother and I called it The City. I think that had something to do with being from Brooklyn or Queens, but I wasn’t sure. Grandma Rose said when my mother and Henry got married, she would take me to New York to see Radio City and the Rockettes.
“You’ll have to wear sunglasses,” she had told me, “because there are so many bright lights in Radio City it hurts your eyes. Chandeliers there. And colored lights on the stage. Everything glistens. And all the girls are dancing, and wearing sequins, and everybody applauds when they kick their legs in the air. It’s a whole line of girls, but when they kick it goes up like one leg.”
We would be going tomorrow. Tomorrow. I couldn’t wait. I would watch everything the girls did, because when I grew up I would be a Rockette and live in The City.
“A nice normal life for all my girls,” Grandma Rose repeated. I heard her reach for a tissue and blow her nose. “Wouldn’t you like that?”
I didn’t want to lie, and I didn’t want to tell her I was going to be a Rockette, so I didn’t say anything.
“Are you sleeping mamala? She must be asleep. Gai shlofn,” I heard her say, and in the half-lit dark saw her put the tissue under her pillow.
I felt private and secretive as I drifted off to sleep, thinking of everything but a normal life in Queens.
3
Nottingham Forest
Memorial Day Weekend
The Catskills, Upstate NY 1988
“I bought extra just for you,” said Henry, taking a slab of lox and tucking it into an onion-and-garlic bagel. “You know you can have another one. You’re thin. You can afford it.”
“I’m
