My Life As A Man

better than that.”

Cantankerous: “What?”

“Using double negatives. Saying I don’t do no-the way your father does. And please don’t sit like that.”

Incredulous: “What?”

“You’re sitting like a boy. Change into your dungarees if you want to sit like that. Otherwise sit like a girl your age.”

Defiant: “I am.”

“Monica, listen to me: I think we should practice your subtraction. We’ll have to do it without the book, since you didn’t bring it”

Pleading: “But today’s Sunday.”

“But you need help in subtraction. That’s what you need, not church, but help with your math. Monica, take that hat off! Take that silly hat off this minute! It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and you just can’t wear it all day long!”

Determined. Wrathful: “It’s my hat-I can too!”

“But you’re in my house! And I’m your mother! And I’m telling you to take it off! Why do you insist on behaving in this silly way! I am your Mother, you know that! Monica, I love you and you love me- don’t you remember when you were a little girl, don’t you remember how we used to play? Take that hat off before I tear it off your head!”

Ultimate Weapon: “Touch my head and I’ll tell my dad on you!

“And don’t call him ‘Dad’! I cannot stand when you call that man who tortures the two of us ‘Dad’! And sit like a girl! Do as I tell you! Close your legs!”

Sinister: “They’re close.”

“They’re open and you’re showing your underpants and stop it! You’re too big for that-you go on buses, you go to school, if you’re wearing a dress then behave as though you’re wearing one! You cannot sit like this watching television Sunday after Sunday-not when you cannot even add two and two.”

Philosophical: “Who cares.”

“I care! Can you add two and two? I want to know! Look at me-I’m perfectly serious. I have to know what you know and what you don’t know, and where to begin. How much is two and two? Answer me.”

Dumpish: “Dunno.”

“You do know. And pronounce your syllables. And answer me!

Savage: “I don’t know! Leave me alone, you!”

“Monica, how much is eleven minus one? Eleven take away one. If you had eleven cents and someone took away one of them, how many would you have left? Dear, please, what number comes before eleven? You must know this.”

Hysterical: “1 don’t know it!”

“You do!”

Exploding: “Twelve!”

“How can it be twelve? Twelve is more than eleven. I’m asking you what’s less than eleven. Eleven take away one-is how much?”

Pause. Reflection. Decision: “One.”

“No! You have eleven and you take away one.”

Illumination: “Oh, take away.”

“Yes. Yes.”

Straight-faced: “We never had take-aways.”

“You did. You had to.”

Steely: “I’m telling you the truth, we don’t have take-aways in James Madison School.”

“Monica, this is subtraction- they have it everywhere in every school, and you have to know it. Oh darling, I don’t care about that hat-I don’t even care about him, that’s over. I care about you and what’s going to happen to you. Because you cannot be a little girl who knows nothing. If you are you’ll get into trouble and your life will be awful. You’re a girl and you’re growing up, and you have to know how to make change of a dollar and what comes before eleven, which is how old you’ll be next year, and you have to know how to sit-please, please don’t sit like that, Monica, please don’t go on buses and sit like that in public even if you insist on doing it here in order to frustrate me. Please. Promise me you won’t.”

Sulky, bewildered: “I don’t understand you.”

“Monica, you’re a developing girl, even if they do dress you up like a kewpie doll on Sundays.”

Righteous indignation: “This is for church.”

“But church is beside the point for you. It’s reading and writing-oh, I swear to you, Monica, every word I say is only because I love you and I don’t want anything awful to happen to you, ever. I do love you-you must know that! What they have told you about me is not so. I am not a crazy woman, I am not a lunatic. You mustn’t be afraid of me, or hate me-I was sick, and now I’m well, and I want to strangle myself every time I think that I gave you up to him, that I thought he could begin to provide you with a mother and a home and everything I wanted you to have. And now you don’t have a mother-you have this person, this woman, this ninny who dresses you up in this ridiculous costume and gives you a Bible to carry around that you can’t even read! And for a father you have that man. Of all the fathers in the world, him!”

Here Monica screamed, so piercingly that I came running from the kitchen where I had been sitting alone over a cup of cold coffee, not even knowing what to think.

In the living room all Lydia had done was to take Monica’s hand in her own; yet the child was screaming as though she were about to be murdered.

“But,” wept Lydia, “I only want to hold you-“

As though my appearance signaled that the real violence was about to begin, Monica began to froth at the mouth, screaming all the while, “Don’t! Don’t! Two and two is four! Don’t beat up on me! It’s four!”

Scenes as awful as this could be played out two and three times over in the course of a single Sunday afternoon-amalgams, they seemed to me, of soap opera (that genre again), Dostoevsky, and the legends of Gentile family life that I used to hear as a child, usually from my immigrant grandmothers, who had never forgotten what life had been like amid the Polish peasantry. As in the struggles of soap opera, the emotional ferocity of the argument exceeded by light-years the substantive issue, which was itself, more often than not, amenable to a little logic, or humor, or a dose of common sense. Yet, as in the scenes of family warfare in Dostoevsky, there was murder in the air on those Sundays, and it could not be laughed or reasoned away: an animosity so deep ran between those two females of the same blood that though they were only having that standard American feud over a child’s schoolwork (the subject not of The Possessed or The Brothers Karamazov but of Henry Aldrich and Andy Hardy) it was not impossible (from another room) to imagine them going about it with firebrand, pistol, hanging rope, and hatchet. Actually, the child’s cunning and her destructive stubbornness were nothing like so distressing to me as Lydia’s persistence. I could easily envision, and understand, Monica’s pulling a gun-bang bang, you’re dead, no more take-aways- but it was imagining Lydia trying to bludgeon the screaming child into a better life that shocked and terrified me.

Ketterer was the one who brought to mind those cautionary tales about Gentile barbarity that, by my late adolescence, I had rejected as irrelevant to the kind of life that I intended to lead. Exciting and gripping as they were to a helpless child-hair-raising tales of “their” alcoholism, “their” violence, “their” imperishable hatred of us, stories of criminal oppressors and innocent victims that could not but hold a powerful negative attraction for any Jewish child, and particularly to one whose very body was that of the underdog-when I came of age and began the work of throwing off the psychology and physique of my invalid childhood, I reacted against these tales with all the intensity my mission required. I did not doubt that they were accurate descriptions of what Jews had suffered; against the background of the concentration camps I hardly would dare to say, even in my teenage righteousness,