A Tale From The Old County

//benjamin feiler

My older brother had a singular artistic skill: he could make life-like rats out of steel wool. One time, he was careless, and the thin metal fibers worked their way into the pores of his hands. He scratched obsessively. When the livid rash spread to his wrists and turned the exact pinkish color of Bazooka bubble gum, my father marched us down the street to a dingy suite of offices where Dr. Emmanuel J. Marcus conducted his practice. He was a widower who lived where he worked. If the door to his tiny apartment was open, you could smell burnt coffee and catch a glimpse of an unmade bed.

Dr. Marcus always wore a frayed wool sports coat and a skinny rep tie secured by a silver clip that looked like scissors. As a little boy, I was fascinated by the tie clip. “He went to Harvard,” my father would tell me. “A Jew at Harvard.” In the mid-1950s, that was enough to convince him that the doctor had magical powers.

My brother, Reuben, would never dare confess to my father that the source of his rash was steel wool. He also knew that I would be too frightened of retribution to betray him. On the walk to the office, he pinched my arm to remind me. He wasn’t at all concerned that Dr. Marcus would get to the bottom of the matter. For whatever reason, and for a whole variety of reasons, the elderly doctor had given up years before and was just going through the motions. His curiosity about the source of the rash was perfunctory.

“Does anyone else in the family have it?” he asked my father.

“No.”

“Good. Let’s make sure.”

Dr. Marcus grabbed one of my hands and studied it. My brother sat on an ancient gurney, half-folded next to an X-ray machine. He had a tearful look which was part of his genius as an actor. I could not fool anyone about anything

“Did you ever hear of soap?” the doctor asked me. I grinned, but he stared coldly at me to demonstrate that he wasn’t joking. He was old with a wrinkled forehead and clumps of cottony white hair on his ear lobes.

He turned and smiled sympathetically at my brother. “Use the lotion, boychik. It should go away, but there’s no telling when.” For the next few weeks, until the metal fibers worked themselves out by themselves, Reuben rubbed the fragrant white lotion on the rash every morning. Then he would walk around with his hands dangling in front of him as if he were sleepwalking. He milked his condition for all it was worth.

“A sheynem dank, Dr. Marcus,” my father said deferentially.

“You’re welcome,” the doctor said, not deigning to answer in Yiddish. “How’s your pleurisy?”

“No problems,” my father said.

The doctor treated him for chronic pleurisy. At the time, we didn’t know that he was suffering from congestive heart failure. Since they had no way to fix this anyway, it wasn’t exactly malpractice. With pleurisy, there were treatments. My father took pills to make him cough up mucus, morphine sulfate tablets when the pain was unbearable, and laxatives to deal with the constipation resulting from the morphine. He had a positive attitude, convinced that he was making progress. Every day, he lugged dozens of heavy wooden crates from the delivery trucks that announced themselves with bleating horns and idled noisily in the back alley, the noxious fumes from their exhaust pipes adding another layer of poison to the air.

Then my father would take a smoke break with the drivers and hand them a cold Coke. Occasionally, they would help him maneuver the crates down the narrow steps to the cellar where he kept his inventory. “Hard work is good for you,” he would say while he was sitting on the couch at night. His eyes would fix on his most beloved possession, a Sylvania TV. Sometimes, the pain would come, and he would arch his back to get relief. Other times, when it was worse than usual, my mother would rub his shoulder blades with alcohol. Either way, the TV seemed to put him in a trance, a self-medication that apparently eased the tightness of his arteries and his complaining heart. A long Pall Mall cigarette would protrude from his knuckles like an extra finger. When he wasn’t inhaling, he tapped it rhythmically against his lips. He was never without one, even at the dinner table.

Months before, my father had hit a number and was confronted by something he had seldom experienced before: extra money. For days, my parents argued in Yiddish, and though I could only understand a word here and there, I knew the arguments were fierce. Finally, he put his foot down and bought a giant Sylvania TV. A clerk at the furniture store conned him into buying the greatest innovation since television itself. It was called the “halo light,” a brilliant advertising ploy that promised to transform an inchoate technology into a heavenly experience. The halo light was a curved fluorescent lamp that surrounded the screen. Soon after purchase, it began to buzz and crackle, and give my father headaches. One night, he slapped the halo light again and again to get it to work right. I had seen his technique before, and even then I knew that tools were probably a better option. After his repairs, the screen was surrounded by a blackened circumference of glass, and my mother sneered at it openly every time she had the opportunity. It was a savage, unabashed old-world Russian sneer, and the ferocity of the contempt made my father turn his head away. Her guttural Yiddish probably reinforced the fact that the money belonged in a bank account, not in some flickering contraption that had robbed her of his undivided attention, and hence, of all the wisdom she could dispense.

One morning, I opened the refrigerator to see a huge rat resting comfortably on a paper napkin. At first, I didn’t realize that the high-pitched scream I heard was coming from me. It was definitely a girl’s scream, an alarming shriek that my older sister would make if we got her angry or stole music magazines from her room. “Elvis eats waffles every morning,” she announced to us one day. “Eight waffles and sausage.” It might have been an accidental revelation of the diet he favored in later life, or just fan spam, but I was impressed. Since my mother kept a kosher house, sausage was not a possibility on our family menu. So one morning, I substituted dill pickles because they seemed to have the shape and size of sausage. I would not advise anyone to try this experiment because the combination of maple syrup and pickles works exactly like ipecac. Or it did for me.

After I confronted the surprise inside the refrigerator, I battled the same kind of queasiness, and it was the fight of my life. The shock didn’t even recede with logic. Why would a rat crawl inside a cold refrigerator and go to sleep on a napkin? It wouldn’t. Nonetheless, I moved tentatively toward the rodent, not fully convinced. The shape of the rat was perfect, the ears perked up, the mouth closed in what looked like a half-smile, and a long, skinny steel wool tail. It occurred to me that dinosaurs, rats, alligators, and virtually all creatures with long snouts look like they’re smiling when their jaws are closed. I began to admire the artistry. From just a couple of feet away, it would have fooled anyone.

My sister Rachael was away every day, attending Margaret Morrison, the women’s college at Carnegie Tech. My father and mother both worked at their little grocery store on Murray Avenue. So I knew the prank was meant for me, and though my brother was three years older, I was determined to get even. We lived in Pittsburgh. It was a time when the sulfur and other pollutants from the nearby steel mills prickled our noses and gave us colds that lasted for weeks. The whistles signaling the end of the shift would wake us every night and again in the early morning. “You want to work there?” my father would ask us. “That’s why you need to study. If you work near the open hearth, you need to wear coats made out of asbestos. In the summer, people pass out if they don’t take their salt pills. It gets to 140 degrees. You have one job to do,” he would say. “One responsibility. Do you understand? Your sister was top of her class. So what about my sons?” Implicit in his reasoning was that he would have preferred his sons to be the scholars in the family since girls had limited options. Nurse, teacher, secretary. Low-paying careers that were less desirable in his mind than my sister marrying a “professional.”

Nonetheless, his lectures didn’t take very well. My brother would sneak our mother’s good beaver coat from the closet and make me wear it while I dug up the backyard with a spade. “See how you’re sweating?” my brother would say. “That’s how a steelworker feels.” Though he undoubtedly found this amusing, he didn’t know that my fervent goal at the age of eight was to be a steelworker. And wear the asbestos coat. I wanted to see hot glowing ingots lifted by giant tongs dipped into huge vats of water, red embers filling the air. I wanted to wear steel-toed work boots and chug an entire bottle of beer with a quick flick of my wrist. I wanted to drive an Oldsmobile 98 with chrome trim and skirts and spinners on the hubcaps. I wanted to say fuck this and fuck that with no scolding or punishment. Just like the kids of steelworkers from Homestead and Garfield and Hays who glared at me at school until I averted my eyes in surrender. That’s why I stole my sister’s music magazines. The greasy duck-tailed haircuts and leather jackets appealed to me. I wanted to loop my thumbs into the tight pockets of my blue jeans and catcall at the pretty girls who walked by. I wanted my friends to be named “Tommy” and “Patrick.” Not Sheldon or Sammy. I wanted to carry a switchblade and spit impossible distances with impunity.

Unlike my brother who was tall and thin with light hair and blue eyes, I was short and squat like my mother. Women would beam at him and try to touch his curly hair. I never got that kind of attention. His nickname for me was Freddy the Foreskin, and he told me without smiling that I wasn’t born but was cobbled out of foreskins by a demented mohel, a Jewish Dr. Frankenstein.

In the morning, before school, I would walk my sister Rachael to the trolley on Murray Avenue, a commercial strip with individual stores that fed the needs of our Jewish neighborhood. We would hurry past the kosher chicken stores with their freshly slaughtered products displayed proudly in the windows. Their necks were skewered on sharp-looking hooks. Even though I knew the chickens were dead, it still looked painful to me. We passed drycleaners, barber shops, bakeries, delis, and one store that sold religious trinkets and prayer shawls. “How much money can you make from menorahs?” my father once remarked. “Hanukkah is once a year. If you have one menorah, why do you need another?”

Though I was little and could offer no protection in the unlikely event that we were accosted, my mother insisted that I walk with her. She called my sister’s beauty a curse, and worried about it constantly. Her perfect smile, animated, clever eyes, and slim body were too American for my mother. Being naturally seditious like all repressed daughters, she flaunted her striking looks every chance she got. After we descended the steep hill from our home, she would pull off her silk head scarf, and toss her curls dramatically. Then she would remove a compact from her purse and I would hold the tiny mirror while she stooped and applied lipstick with just two practiced swipes of her hand. One swipe for the upper lip, one for the lower.

Then she would smile broadly, and I would check for lipstick on her teeth. Since she never had anything but coffee for breakfast, I would stop my lungs and try to ignore her morning breath. It reminded me of the synagogue on Yom Kippur when everyone was fasting. Reuben said the air was like poison gas and could kill a small bird.

But I still felt privileged to lug her heavy books and would wait until the 7:15 came lumbering up the street with a harsh squeak of wheels against tracks and a conductor with a black hat who would smile at the sight of her.

She would fish the paper streetcar pass out of her purse to be punched, always at the last second, and climb aboard with a little wave of her fingers over her shoulders. She loved her art classes at Carnegie Tech, and sometimes, I would help her with a huge black portfolio case, which was almost bigger than me. She had wanted desperately to go away to school, to be free of my parents’ incessant scrutiny, but college itself was a costly privilege. We were also Orthodox Jews. To my parents, a young girl living away with no supervision was unthinkable. So Rachael helped with the cooking and cleaning and worked at the grocery store on Sundays, chopping lox, bagging the big-eyed smoked chubs and speaking to the customers in Yiddish, head scarf securely in place. An obedient daughter.

I would do anything for her. Since she was ten years older, she was more like a mother than a sister, and she knew that I would never betray her modest rebellions, never reveal the fact that she pocketed a few dollars every time she worked at the store. It was her “escape” money, she told me. Once my father invited a young man over for dinner, the nephew of a rabbi. He was thin with small eyes that never stopped moving, and his suit smelled like mothballs. If looks could actually kill, then my sister’s unflinching glare across the table would have done the job ten times over. She was furious that my parents had arranged the meeting without telling her, and even worse, considered this timid, religious boy an acceptable prospect for marriage. My mother, mortified by her attitude, dropped a bowl of sour cream on the dining room floor and spent ten minutes on her knees cleaning, refusing help from anyone else. She obviously welcomed the distraction. The Hasidic boy hardly ate, and I felt sorry for him. My sister was implacable, however, said thank you for coming in Yiddish, and disappeared, running up the stairs to the sanctity of her bedroom.

“She’s very beautiful,” the boy said, his voice betraying the hopelessness of any serious overtures.

“Beautiful,” my mother repeated bitterly.

That night, I heard arguing in the kitchen, then a slap and a scream.

“This isn’t Poland!” my sister cried. “You have no right to hit me.”

“Oh, mine God,” my mother screamed. “What kind of daughter do I have?”

“What kind of mother do I have?”

My brother and I shared a bedroom. Two old-fashioned cots with a night table in between. Hidden underneath the drawer of the night table was an old photo of a burlesque dancer with giant breasts that my brother had gotten somewhere. I had looked at the photo often, and knew every tear and crease. The dancer had blond hair and her eyes squinted seductively at the camera. “She looks like a doughnut, but what can you do?” my brother said. He was eleven, and his hormones were already raging. “I once saw inside Sandy Gottlieb’s robe, but she’s uglier than her brother. And that’s about as ugly as you can get. I guess even ugly is better than nothing. Maybe that’s why they invited him over.”

“She would kill herself before she would marry him,” I said, feeling protective and angry.

“No, it’s different for Jewish girls. They do what they’re told.”

“Not Rachael.”

“Even Rachael. Just watch. In a few years, she’ll have a bunch of ugly babies, shave her head and sit on the porch with the other babushkas on summer nights, talking about recipes.”

“I saw a rat in the cellar this morning,” I lied. “A real one. It ran into a corner and I couldn’t find it again.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I did. Dad set a trap. He used Gefilte fish because it stinks. A little piece of Gefilte fish. He told me the trap was so powerful, it could snap off my fingers.”

The Gefilte fish was an inspired bit of verisimilitude to make the story credible. My brother was smart and hard to fool, and I was proud of myself. I didn’t like to think of my sister as a babushka.

“Never corner a rat,” he told me. “If they have no place to run, they can jump six feet in the air and bite your face.”

I pretended to shiver, my mother’s powder puff hidden securely under my pillow. I would use it later, when my brother was fast asleep. It didn’t occur to me at the time that my brother made steel wool rats to somehow deal with a phobia that began in the dank, moldy cellar of my father’s grocery store. A rat popped out of a hole once and stared at him. When my brother stomped his feet, the rat didn’t flee. It just continued to stare. After a few years, the rat became as big as a cat in his mind, and it frightened him to death.

Tonight, he was busy jamming bath towels and washcloths into the gap at the bottom of the door. “They can flatten themselves out,” he said, “and wiggle through anything. You can’t go to the bathroom again tonight. You’ll have to hold it.”

“Okay.” In real emergencies when the bathroom was occupied for long periods of time by my parents or sister, I would aim carefully and pee in a little gap in the bare wooden flooring next to the radiator. I had no idea where the pee went and didn’t connect my actions to the plumber who seemed to visit on a monthly basis. My father knew his father. His name was Lenny Caplan. “He’s a schlemiel,” my mother told my father. “I don’t care if he doesn’t charge an arm and a leg like other plumbers. He doesn’t deserve a fingernail. He never fixes anything.”

“He’s a good boy.”

“He wears two different shoes. One is brown, and the other is black. And he bangs on the pipes with a wrench for no reason. No matter what he does, the cellar still stinks.”

But my kidneys were fine, and I didn’t need an emergency outlet that night. My brother tended to fall asleep quickly, usually in the middle of a sentence. I crept out of bed with the powder puff and squatted between the beds. I switched the night table lamp off and waited for my eyes to adjust. When I could clearly identify the features on Reuben’s face, I made the powder puff hop over his forehead. Then I ran it down his cheeks in quick little jumps as I imagined a rat would move. My brother opened his eyes. They stared at the ceiling for a few seconds without moving. His hand curled furtively over his bed covers. In a single movement that I would never be able to replicate (though I tried often), he vaulted over the foot of the bed and pawed for the overhead light switch next to the door. At the same time, he started to scream.

I was still crouched between the beds. At this point, I deeply regretted the prank and concluded that revenge was not nearly as satisfying as you expected it to be. Especially if it resulted in the beating of your life.

“Did you make up the story about the rat?”

I nodded.

Instead of becoming angry, my brother looked relieved. “Good one,” he said.

Then my sister knocked and pushed at the door, but it resisted because of the bath towels. She pushed harder and stumbled into the room.

“What’s all this? Are these clean? She’s going to kill you.”

“A rat,” my brother said.

“What?”

“There’s a rat in the house.”

“Where? Oh, my God. Did you see it? Where did it go?”

“It crawled across my face,” my brother said.

My sister vaulted from the room. At first, I thought she was going to alert my parents and ask for help. But Rachael’s compassion had limits. I heard the door to her own room slam shut with so much force that the windows rattled. I imagined her taking our brother’s lead and stuffing bath towels under her door. I wondered if they were a real deterrent. Since rats could chew through cement, a bath towel would not pose much of a challenge. For a moment, I forgot that the rat was fiction. My sister slammed her door again, apparently not convinced that it was secure.

“What’s going on?” my father screamed.

“A rat,” my brother said.

“It’s that Caplan again. That son of a bitch,” my mother said. “He leaves the side door open all time. To get his ladders.”

“All right, all right. Call someone else. I don’t care. Call anyone. Call Samuels and Sons. They advertise on the radio.”

“He’s a gonif. How do you think he makes enough money to go on the radio?”

I climbed into bed, feeling exhausted. I wanted the world to go away.

“I’m sorry,” I said to my brother.

“Why? You scared yourself more than you scared me. So I won.”

“You did not.”

“Did, too. I won, you lost. End of story.”

“Shut up!” my father yelled.

My mother continued to complain in Yiddish until my father left the bedroom and plodded downstairs to sleep on the couch, rats be damned.

For days after the arranged date, my sister wouldn’t speak to my mother. Even my father didn’t try to intervene. Dinner was silent. We listened to the news on the radio. Sometimes, my sister would call and tell my father she was at the library. On those nights, he would stay awake until she called back. Then he would drive the short distance to Carnegie Tech and pick her up.

“Studying,” my mother would say bitterly. “I know what she’s studying.”

For one night, I became the center of attention because my teacher, Mrs. Howe, sent home a note that I wasn’t permitted to open.

“Puppets?” my father asked, squinting at the note in puzzlement. “What’s this about puppets?”

“I don’t know.”

“She says you’re obsessed with puppets, that you draw them on all your homework and your tests.”

“That’s not me!” I screamed. “That’s Howard Applebaum. She thinks I’m Howard Applebaum!”

“Oy,” my mother said.

“He smells like a dirty diaper and always says, ‘Howdy, I’m Howie,’ to people and thinks it’s funny. He’s an idiot.”

My sister started to laugh. Even my mother smiled.

“That’s not funny. I don’t want her to think I’m Howard Applebaum.”

I asked my father if he would talk to Mrs. Howe.

“What? To tell her you’re not Howard Applebaum?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll see her at Open House. When’s Open House?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do me a favor,” my brother said. “Say ‘Howdy, I’m Howie.’ Okay? You smell like him and I want to see if you sound like him, too.”

“Go to hell,” I said.

My father pointed his finger in the air, a signal to go to my room. I ran up the stairs. Only he and my mother were permitted to curse.

The next morning, my brother handed me a letter. “It’s sealed,” he said. “Dad felt bad after you went to bed. Just give it to Mrs. Howe.”

Salvation was in my hands. I hurried to Colfax School and caught Mrs. Howe before classes started.

“From my father.” I said.

Mrs. Howe opened the letter and then gave it back to me without expression, staring at me through her thick bifocals.

It said: “As a prominant citizen of this great community and the city of Pittsburgh, I can say without reservations that my son, Nathan, is not now and never has been Howard Applebaum. Farthermore, the only puppet he plays with is between his legs.”

“Who gave this to you?” she asked.

“My brother,” I said, feeling panic rumble inside my chest and make me breathless. “He said my father wrote it, but it’s his handwriting. See?” I held it up for her to inspect more closely. “He always dots his i’s with little circles.”

“Yes, Nathan. I think I figured that out. Hang your coat up and take a seat. I’m sorry I confused you with Howard Applebaum. You just look alike, I guess.”

My brother had gotten his revenge for the rat incident. But oddly, he had also solved my problem. I didn’t know whether to be angry or grateful. Then I looked up from my meditation and saw Mrs. Howe standing in the corner, as if she were being punished. Her back was facing me, but her shoulders bobbed up and down. She coughed loudly a few times and covered her mouth. After a minute, I realized she was laughing and trying to hide it from me.

It suddenly dawned on me that she would cherish the note like a celebrity autograph and pass it around in the teacher’s room. They would all laugh at me, too.

I said nothing at dinner that night. This time, my sister and father were arguing, and I knew better than to interrupt.

“What is this study group?”

“We meet in the library at night.” My sister’s voice was tight. She could fend off my mother’s inquisitions, but my father was a different story. He was always worrying about other problems and rarely confronted us. When he did, we knew it was serious. “Sometimes we get coffee from the vending machines,” Rachael added. I cringed because I knew the extra detail was incriminating, the sure sign of a lie.

“Do you? Then why were you holding hands with a blond-haired boy last night?”

“You were spying on me?”

“I came early. I took a little walk. That’s not all I saw.”

Rachael looked down at her plate. My mother was silent. And that was ominous.

“Is he Jewish?”

“This isn’t Poland,” Rachael said softly, her voice quavering. “This is America.”

“Eddie Fisher married Debbie Reynolds,” Reuben said. “He’s Jewish. And they look pretty happy.”

My mother slapped him loudly on the back of his neck to silence him. To prove she was serious, she slapped him a second time.

My father was oblivious. He stared straight ahead at something no one else could see, tapping an unlit cigarette against his lips. His pale blue eyes always seemed to twinkle behind his thick glasses. Tonight, I realized it was just a distortion caused by optics. His yarmulke had slipped sideways on his head. He didn’t make his sons wear them because we went to public school, and he didn’t want us to be harassed. We quickly discovered that his concessions to modernity had limits.

“On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I burn fifteen yahrzeit candles on the mantel. You know this. You help me light them. We say the names together.”

Rachael nodded.

“One candle for every person I lost to the Nazis. My parents, my brothers, my sisters, my aunts, my uncles. Everyone who took up a collection and gave me the money to come to America. You know this, too. I was supposed to be the first, but I was the last. It got to a point where you couldn’t even bribe your way out of there. And they tried and tried.”

“That was another world.”

“It’s the same world. Do you think we didn’t sit like this at dinner every night with our family? Do you think we ever thought for a minute that the people we loved would be thrown into ovens and burned up like garbage? Every place can be Poland.”

“Dad…”

“I’m not done. Our so-called goyishe friends gave us up to the Germans and stole our property as soon as they could. You were allowed a single suitcase, and most people stuffed them with pictures, believe it or not. Not jewelry or food, but pictures. To remind them what they had. And now you lie to me and think you know better. You don’t.”

“I’m sorry.” My sister was crying.

“You’ll move to Rochester and go to school there. You’ll live with Aunt Elsie and Uncle Morris. Your mother’s family is stricter than I am, and that’s good. I’m saying this in front of your brothers so they’ll take a lesson. I should have listened to your mother. She said you were too full of yourself to listen to anyone.” My father slumped in his chair, looking spent, as if he had just trudged up the hill from his store. “This is hard for all of us. Do you understand?”

“No, I don’t understand! I made a mistake and you want to punish me for it. She wants to punish me for it,” Rachael said angrily, glaring at my mother through her tears. “I’m sorry I wasn’t honest.”

“We’re punishing ourselves, too. Aren’t we? Aren’t we? It’s painful to spend your life missing the people you love. Believe me, I know. It’s a curse. The worst thing that can happen to you. A broch! But I want you to grow up and be responsible.”

“I’m not going.”

“The decision is made. We’ll buy your train tickets tomorrow.”

“I’m eighteen. I can go anywhere I want.”

My father nodded. “Yes,” he said bitterly. “That’s your choice. You can do what you want.”

That night, while we were lying in bed and trying to absorb the shock of losing our sister, Reuben filled me in on his escape plan. He would forge a check with our father’s name, cash it at the bank and give it to Rachael so she could go to Hollywood and become an actress. She would change her name to “Rachael Smith.”

“Why ‘Rachael Smith’?” I asked.

My brother shrugged. “So she doesn’t sound so Jewish. Do you know Schmulkie Popkin?”

“He’s the paperboy.”

“Would you ever go to a movie starring Schmulkie Popkin?”

“No. He’s the paperboy.”

“What difference does it make if he’s the paperboy? I’m talking about his name.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” my father said from the next room, three times, just like that. He spoke in a cigarette growl, but there was something so tired and hopeless in his request that we didn’t say another word.

A week later, Rachael was packed and ready to move to Rochester. She would leave on Sunday morning. Before my parents drove her to the train station, she called me into her room. It was as clean and uncluttered as I had ever seen it. The dresser was bare of the usual items, and the single bookcase was empty. There were symmetrical white spots on the wall where her dime store prints of Van Gogh and Picasso used to hang. Only a big poster of Elvis remained, her last rebellion. She closed the door and sat on the bed. Then she patted a spot beside her.

“Sit,” she said.

She handed me a white, unmarked envelope. “My escape money,” she said. “You know where Dad keeps all the bills in the secretary?”

“Yes.”

“Put this in the same drawer in a week or two. Can you do that?”

“Yes?”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

She hugged me. I could smell the perfume that she borrowed from the well-polished vanity in my parents’ room. “Shipped all the way from the old country,” my mother would boast.

Then Rachael handed me a large stack of music magazines. They were secured by a red ribbon with a fancy bow that I had seen her make many times with a pair of scissors. Her hands moved so fast, it seemed magical to me.

“A gift,” she said.

“You’re really leaving? To live with Aunt Elsie?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to be a babushka?

Rachael laughed. “Not if I can help it.”

“Good,” I said, feeling relieved.

I stared at the floor, not knowing what else to say. There wasn’t anything else to say. She tapped me on the shoulder and smiled. “We’ll see each other on holidays,” she said. “It’s not such a big deal.”

I nodded.

“Goodbye, Howard Applebaum.”

“Goodbye,” I said.

Afterwards, I remember feeling lightheaded and fighting gravity, as if I were a helium balloon detached from its string. Just floating aimlessly in the air and wanting to stay there. The feeling lasted for days. I was too young to understand that I was simply numb. I didn’t know that numbness is the body’s first feeble defense against unacceptable loss. I would have plenty of time to learn.

//Benjamin Feiler has published fiction and poetry in national magazines. He was an ad agency creative director for most of his working life before he retired. He was born in Pittsburgh, moved to Philadelphia, and now resides in Palm Springs, CA. He has two grown children.