* * *
“You know the crazy old lady in 4-C?” I said at supper that night. “She’s a famous poet. A publisher came to see her today. What’s a publisher?”
“She’s not crazy and she’s not old,” my father said. “It’s just that they experimented on her in the camps.” He took the bowl of boiled potatoes, ladled out three, spread them with margarine.
“They? Experimented?” The meatloaf looked good. Tomato soup on top and slices of bacon.
“What’re you now, ten, right?” He took two slices of meatloaf and reached for the ketchup bottle.
“Mike!” my mother said. “She doesn’t need to know about such evil—”
“She’s a tough kid. She can handle it.” He gave me a straight look. “You’ve heard of the camps, right?” He poured himself more beer from the Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle.
“You mean, like in the Catskills, where Jessica goes?” “Jeez—what’da they teach you in that school? The concentration camps, I mean. Auschwitz. Dachau.”
He told me, but I didn’t want to believe it. “They really did those things?” That’s how dumb I was.
“Yeah, and worse.” He spooned canned peas next to the potatoes. “That’s what we fought for in the war, to beat those Nazi bastards. If they won, who’da been next? First the Jews and the Polacks and the qu—”
“Charlie!” My mother clamped a hand over his mouth.
He pushed it away and gave a short laugh. He drinks a lot of beer when he’s going on night shift. “Maybe the Irish were next, for all we know. Jews. Micks. This whole neighborhood woulda been wiped out.” He laughed again and took another drink.
I put my fork down. I’d lost my appetite.
* * *
That night there were Nazis in the closet by my bed. I didn’t know what they looked like, not exactly, but I could
Mrs. Blaustein called the next day. My mother frowned. “Rachel Cohen must be lonely. She seems to have taken a liking to you. You want to go have cake with her?”
“Okay,” I said. I don’t know why. I didn’t really want to.
Mrs. Blaustein had set the table with a lace cloth and some nice china dishes with gold rims. Very
“I don’t like cake,” Miss Cohen said. “But you go right ahead.” She drank cup after cup of the blackest coffee I ever saw from what looked like dolls’ cups, while I ate two slices of coconut cake. The filling was so sweet I almost couldn’t taste the lemon, so sweet it made my teeth ache. I loved it.
Miss Cohen talked almost the whole time. About knives and needles. About acid and electric shocks. About cattle cars full of Jews. About barbed wire. About ovens that weren’t for baking cakes in.
“The day they took us away, I put on my white linen dress with the eyelet embroidery. I thought if I looked nice, they’d know I was a nice girl,” she said. “Stupid. I was twenty when I went in…a pretty girl. When I came out seven years later I was a hundred and twenty. Can you imagine it?”
I could. All too well. It was time for me to go home.
“You come see me again,” she said, “and I’ll read you some of my poems.”
“Okay.” But I didn’t think I could stand it, to go back again.
There were two more slices of cake left, on a yellow china plate. How could she not like cake? Poor Miss Cohen.
When I got home, I looked all over for my communion dress, white with eyelet embroidery, and then I buried it in the very back of the closet where nobody, not even the Nazis, would ever find it, behind my father’s old wedding suit that didn’t fit anymore. All night long something tried to drag me through thick, hot air into the dark depths of the closet.
“You been up to 4-C, ain’t you?” Katy-Ann Cooper skated around me in circles, her wheels rolling
“What’s it to you?”
“My daddy says just because that lady’s famous doesn’t mean she’s not a Jew and a Commie. He knows. He alla time used to listen to Father Coughlin. You should stay out of 4-C—she’s nutso.”
“Is not.”
“Is so.”
I wanted to grab that chain around Katy-Ann’s neck, the one that held her St. Christopher medal and her skate key. I wanted to grab it and twist. Katy-Ann’s big mouth was the one thing that made me decide to go back to 4- C.
Or maybe it was the two leftover pieces of coconut cake. Or maybe it was just because Miss Cohen said I should come, and I was a good girl who did what I was told.
They were horrible, Rachel Cohen’s poems, two books of them, and some in magazines. We sat in the library by a table covered with medicine bottles. Tall brown ones with skinny necks. Small fat green jars. But the poems were beautiful/horrible, if you know what I mean. Like—fascinating. That’s another good word,
She read them out loud, one first and looked at me, and then another and looked at me, and then just when I wanted her to stop she wouldn’t stop. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but my mother taught me to be
