My Sister Is Sewing Either My Mom’s Grown Nor My Dad’s Sarong

[Andrew Schiavo]

THEGOLD RING on the carousels was made of brass. Even as kids in Coney Island we didn't believe it was the real thing. By the time we'd grown old enough to ride the outside horses and lunge out sideways to grasp the metal rings that swung toward us for the final few rotations, the carousel was no longer enchanting and we had no deep desire for the free ride that the last, lucky gold one awarded. By then we had nickels enough to go around again if we wanted to, but we tended to spend them on attractions that were higher and faster, more spectacular--roller coasters--and, for fun, the electric bump-cars.

We were luckier with the staying power of our craving for things like pretzels, potato chips, jelly doughnuts, and chocolate bars. Mark Twain is said to have remarked that by the time we're tall enough to reach the jar of jam on the high shelf of the cupboard, we find that we've lost our taste for jam. No such rueful fate struck me or my friends or any in the small family of four of which I was the youngest, not with edibles like halvah or salted peanuts, ice cream, kosher corned beef and hot dogs, or even salami sandwiches. When we found ourselves with enough cash to obtain as much of these delicacies as we wanted, we still had a hearty appetite for them, and we tended to indulge ourselves, and still do, by eating as much as, sometimes more, much more, than we truly did, and do, want.

Of late, my best defense against corpulence has been to keep out of the house supplies of things to eat that reason cautions I shouldn't be stuffing into myself. Pistachio nuts, for instance, whether in petite jars or five-pound bags, have a feeble chance of extended survival once I discover them close at hand. If there's ice cream in the freezer, I feel a commanding moral responsibility to move it out of the house as quickly as I'm able to swallow as much as is there. Lately, I've discovered that salty pretzels go very well with just about any dessert I am likely to have at home. They're also good by themselves. If, before going to bed, I happen to remember we have sliced turkey breast in the refrigerator, the odds are heavy that I'll put some in my mouth as I find my way into the bathroom to brush my teeth--on a couple of crackers, of course, or half a flat of pita bread, with salt and mustard.

But it's ice cream that still tastes most wonderful and is richest in evocative associations extending backward in time almost to the formation of memory itself, to brands and items long extinct--to Dixie cups, for example, with their prized photographs of cowboy movie stars on the inside of the lid under a transparent waxed-paper seal. Like the evocations of the cookie to Proust, a meditation on ice cream soon takes me back to the age of eight or nine and into a family setting in which a small container is shared with bliss by the four of us, a mother, a sister, a brother, and me. (I was by many years the youngest.) In summer, ice cream was everywhere. In autumn, though, after the change back from daylight saving time, and even in winter on a black night after dinner and before bedtime, the idea of ice cream might be voiced, taking on a sacramental meaning to our small family in our small apartment--four rooms, looking out on West 31st Street near Surf Avenue in Coney Island. My mother--finally relaxing in front of the radio with the rest of us, after shopping for dinner, preparing dinner, serving dinner, and cleaning up in the kitchen after dinner--might say with her Jewish intonations that she would certainly very much welcome the taste of a little ice cream. We had no refrigerator then, no freezer--no family living in our apartment building did--and there would be no ice cream in the house. At that late hour only the soda fountain in a drugstore two blocks away was open. I was the one who would volunteer to go. I would be given a dime to bring back a container. The flavor of our unanimous choice in those years was called Golden Glow. It's hard today to believe that just half a pint of bulk ice cream could have been so satisfying to the four of us, but that's all, as I recall, that a dime paid for. More than a dime for ice cream they couldn't bring themselves to spend. We were prudent with money because we didn't have much, but I, the "baby" in the family, was never allowed to feel that.

MY SISTER, SYLVIA, was seven years older than I. My brother? Lee, originally Eli, born in Russia and brought to this country at the age of six, was seven years older than she was. In reality, they were only my half brother and half sister, the children of my father and his first wife, who had died. My mother was therefore a stepmother to them. They were, I realize only now, technically orphans, and although they never said so, they must have felt at least a little like orphans. I was, then, the baby in the family, treated by everyone, in effect, like an only child, which in some ways I was.

I had no inkling of these family relationships until I was well into my teens, and I was shocked nearly speechless when confronted by the discovery, which unfolded at my brother's wedding. There, my mother's role in the procession down the aisle was to walk behind him, alone, and I listened dumbfounded to the officiating rabbi praise her so generously for the loving care she had given the groom, the son who was not biologically her own, and the daughter, too. I felt victimized, disgraced. My response to rage then, as it chiefly is still, was to break off speaking to the person offending me. I stopped speaking to my sister one time when she took up cigarettes and another time when she bleached her hair. And this time I may have fallen silent with all three of them, possibly with so deep and vindictive a hurt that I would obstinately refuse to tell any of them the cause, for that would be speaking. My oldest friend in the world, Marvin Winkler, with whom as an infant I had often been lodged together in a playpen, was amazed not long ago when I recalled the incident and related my stunned reaction. He was puzzled by my surprise, for he had been informed of the relationship by his mother when he was still a child and cautioned against hurting my feelings by bringing it up. My sister, too, was taken aback to read my account of this event in a biographical piece about me for which she had also been interviewed. She, along with my mother and my brother, had simply assumed, she claimed, that I'd known all along. It was not a scandal, not even a secret. They didn't talk about it because there was no need to.

On the other hand, I know it is true that neither my brother nor my sister ever said anything at all to me about my father, least of all about an earlier marriage, until out of curiosity as an adult I began to inquire. And only once did my mother talk to me about him, volunteering the information that my father could eat a whole chocolate cake at a single sitting--as a delivery driver for a wholesale bakery firm, cakes were easy for him to obtain--and that before he went into the hospital with a bleeding gastric ulcer, his stool was as black as coal. She told me this as an admonition against my own appetite, for I could always eat as much cake as was given me, and still want more. I discovered early in life that shelled walnuts in a bowl of raisins make a lovely late-evening treat for uninterrupted munching till bedtime. I once overheard my mother recounting that when I was a nursing infant, she had to tear me away from the breast, for I would never finish, and I can believe her.

DIFFERENT AS EACH OF US was from the others, and however much there was inside us that we didn't want to talk about, we were, and functioned as, a close family. It was not in our nature to complain, quarrel, demand, or gossip. I remember a number of tantrums I discharged as a juvenile, but I believe that from the time I was an adolescent, I had acquired the family's stoic, resigned, and undemanding nature and didn't complain, quarrel, or gossip, either, My mother, finding herself after six years of marriage a widow with three children, two of them not naturally her own, had brought us up as the mother of us all, and my brother and sister had related to her as such. My brother, I learned, had at one time saved up money enough to buy her a better radio. The gift was poignantly apt, for my mother loved melodic music, Puccini arias in particular. And in those days of radio entertainment, amid the glorious profusion of comedy and variety shows, there was an opulence of weekly broadcasts featuring short selections from opera and other light classical pieces.

Although the period was one of severe economic depression, everybody sooner or later seemed able to find employment. By the time I started school, my brother, fourteen years older than I, was already working at a brokerage in Wall Street as a customer's man, a job for which he was to prove ill suited by his modest manner and unaggressive temperament, and by a disposition to be continually obliging to others. My sister, after graduating from high school and encountering a number of startling rebuffs at employment agencies, would eventually find herself starting at R. H. Macy's department store, where she would remain for something like forty years. And I at sixteen, after classes at high school, would be cutting a dashing figure in a khaki quasi-military uniform as a part-time messenger boy delivering telegrams for Western Union, in office buildings in Manhattan weekdays, on a bicycle weekends to residences in Brooklyn, and mostly exulting in my duties with a sense of adventure and attentive curiosity. My mother, who had been a seamstress and something of a dressmaker before her marriage, worked steadily at home at her sewing machine mending garments for neighbors and doing alterations for a cousin, Sadie Pacon, who owned a dress shop on Gravesend Neck Road in lower Flatbush nearby. She also found steady work at home from laundries, turning frayed collars on men's shirts so that, from the outside and at the neck at least, the shirts looked almost good as new. Some weekend nights, mainly Saturdays, my brother would find extra income filling in at a catering hall for some banquet, dressing up appropriately for his suave role in the cloakroom or as one of the hall's hosts greeting and directing arriving guests. Neighbors outside the apartment building seeing him depart in a tuxedo or a natty, double-breasted, summer sport jacket might remark that he was off on a heavy date. But I knew he was going to work.

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