Read Online Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth by Edeet Ravel - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Edeet Ravel
Tags: Fiction, General, Female friendship, Holocaust survivors, Self-realization in women, Women art historians, Children of Holocaust Survivors
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school, and she’d arranged to work on Saturdays so she could leave the dry cleaners early on weekdays.
But this morning I had only to pick up my report card and empty my locker and I’d be free to go. I’d finally graduated from Coronation Elementary School. This break in routine was creating havoc in the Levitsky domicile—or rather a focus for havoc. My mother wouldn’t be at home when I returned from school, and Bubby had strict instructions not to answer the front door.
—mamaleh don’t forget a key my sunshine where are you—
I emerged from my bedroom and Bubby handed me a clean towel, in case I was seized by a sudden urge to shower. I bowed, flung it open, and spread it around my shoulders like a cloak. “Meet me at dawn, and I shall have satisfaction,” I declaimed. My mother laughed, and panting with the exertion of being manic she raced past us, first one way, then another. She had to set aside Bubby’s lunch, a stew, and fill three glasses with juice and soda water—the soda bottles were too heavy for Bubby to lift.
My mother placed an empty pot on the stove and repeated instructions my grandmother had heard, or not heard, every day for the past seven years. How to turn on the stove, how to turn it off, what to do if there was a fire, who to phone if she felt faint. The glasses of juice and soda water, protected from the elements by Saran Wrap, were lined up carefully on the bottom shelf of the fridge. Saran Wrap! What would we do without it? Our lives were held together by Saran Wrap.
Bubby nodded patiently. She often spent the day baking, and had evidently mastered the finer points of turning the stove on and off without burning down the house. But in all the commotion of juice and stew and projected fire, in the commotion of trying to help my mother unfold the Saran Wrap as it stuck to itself, I did forget the key.
In class, I waited for my name to be called. Laurie Leahy, Maya Levitsky. I’d miss Laurie’s euphonious name, our alphabetical proximity. I walked up to the desk and with a silly grin I accepted the report card that seemed to fill everyone but me with holy, or unholy, dread, as if it were somehow more than a piece of blue cardboard folded in half.
With a blind animal sense, children grasp the basic principles from the start. I knew, for example, that my mother wanted me to be a parent as well as a child. This was partly because she believed that anyone born in Canada automatically had access to privileged information denied to immigrants, and partly because of there . My poor mother had lost her confidence there . This mighthave unsettled me, had Bubby Miriam not arrived just in time. With my bubby to hold the fort, I didn’t have to worry about poor Fanya’s deference to me.
I expected the same latitude in school, and so did my mother, on my behalf. When the time came to enrol me in first grade, my mother found herself in a quandary. She’d heard that teachers were allowed to hit children in Canadian schools— sooner I would die than allow such a crime— Tears flowed down her cheeks, smudged her mascara. The solution was to send me to a Hebrew school; I’d be safe enough there from teacher brutality. There were four or five Jewish schools in the city, and the children of my mother’s card-playing friends all attended one or the other.
But my mother had had enough of being Jewish. What if they came again? They would go to those schools first. She agonized for weeks, until one of the many casual acquaintances and passersby whom she accosted with her dilemma informed her that the Protestant School Board had recently banned corporal punishment. My mother rushed home with the good news. She tried to hug me, but, as always, I squirmed away from her embrace; even when my mother was happy, I was afraid of vanishing inside the vortex of her helplessness. All the same, I was relieved. No one could lay a finger on me, no matter what.
So much for discipline. In school, as at home,
But this morning I had only to pick up my report card and empty my locker and I’d be free to go. I’d finally graduated from Coronation Elementary School. This break in routine was creating havoc in the Levitsky domicile—or rather a focus for havoc. My mother wouldn’t be at home when I returned from school, and Bubby had strict instructions not to answer the front door.
—mamaleh don’t forget a key my sunshine where are you—
I emerged from my bedroom and Bubby handed me a clean towel, in case I was seized by a sudden urge to shower. I bowed, flung it open, and spread it around my shoulders like a cloak. “Meet me at dawn, and I shall have satisfaction,” I declaimed. My mother laughed, and panting with the exertion of being manic she raced past us, first one way, then another. She had to set aside Bubby’s lunch, a stew, and fill three glasses with juice and soda water—the soda bottles were too heavy for Bubby to lift.
My mother placed an empty pot on the stove and repeated instructions my grandmother had heard, or not heard, every day for the past seven years. How to turn on the stove, how to turn it off, what to do if there was a fire, who to phone if she felt faint. The glasses of juice and soda water, protected from the elements by Saran Wrap, were lined up carefully on the bottom shelf of the fridge. Saran Wrap! What would we do without it? Our lives were held together by Saran Wrap.
Bubby nodded patiently. She often spent the day baking, and had evidently mastered the finer points of turning the stove on and off without burning down the house. But in all the commotion of juice and stew and projected fire, in the commotion of trying to help my mother unfold the Saran Wrap as it stuck to itself, I did forget the key.
In class, I waited for my name to be called. Laurie Leahy, Maya Levitsky. I’d miss Laurie’s euphonious name, our alphabetical proximity. I walked up to the desk and with a silly grin I accepted the report card that seemed to fill everyone but me with holy, or unholy, dread, as if it were somehow more than a piece of blue cardboard folded in half.
With a blind animal sense, children grasp the basic principles from the start. I knew, for example, that my mother wanted me to be a parent as well as a child. This was partly because she believed that anyone born in Canada automatically had access to privileged information denied to immigrants, and partly because of there . My poor mother had lost her confidence there . This mighthave unsettled me, had Bubby Miriam not arrived just in time. With my bubby to hold the fort, I didn’t have to worry about poor Fanya’s deference to me.
I expected the same latitude in school, and so did my mother, on my behalf. When the time came to enrol me in first grade, my mother found herself in a quandary. She’d heard that teachers were allowed to hit children in Canadian schools— sooner I would die than allow such a crime— Tears flowed down her cheeks, smudged her mascara. The solution was to send me to a Hebrew school; I’d be safe enough there from teacher brutality. There were four or five Jewish schools in the city, and the children of my mother’s card-playing friends all attended one or the other.
But my mother had had enough of being Jewish. What if they came again? They would go to those schools first. She agonized for weeks, until one of the many casual acquaintances and passersby whom she accosted with her dilemma informed her that the Protestant School Board had recently banned corporal punishment. My mother rushed home with the good news. She tried to hug me, but, as always, I squirmed away from her embrace; even when my mother was happy, I was afraid of vanishing inside the vortex of her helplessness. All the same, I was relieved. No one could lay a finger on me, no matter what.
So much for discipline. In school, as at home,
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