East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's Read Online Free Page A

“What are you talking about? Do you know what you’re saying?” Turning to her mother, he said, “She’s talking narrishkeit, foolishness, she don’t know what she’s saying. Go on, you talk to her.” He threw up his hands in a gesture of resignation. “I can’t talk to her.” He turned to his daughter in a swift motion and asked, “What language am I speaking, hah? Do I speak a foreign language to you, do I?”
    Her mother put her hand over her husband’s tightened fist that now rested on the table. Glancing from her daughter to her husband, she said, “Listen, Morris, don’t excite yourself. Don’t get a heart attack. You come home from the shop, you worked enough. Don’t get excited.” And to her daughter just as her son, David opened the door of the flat and entered into the kitchen, “Your father works like a dog all day for them, the Margulies, in their shop. Don’t let him get excited. You hear, Claire? Listen to him, he wants the best for you.”
    “Ach!” her father said angrily as he removed his hand from his wife’s clutch. “What do they care, Claire, even David? Nothing. Not a thing. What am I to them?” Glancing angrily at David, he said, “You got a look on your face I don’t like to see. You got something to say, I don’t want to hear it.”
    Standing near the table, David had stopped to listen. Disregarding his father’s remarks, he said, “What’s going on?”
    “What’s going on?” His father said. “Don’t you hear? Dear God, don’t you have ears?”
    Now his mother said to David, “Claire don’t want to get married.”
    “Not to him!” Claire snapped. “I don’t want him! Why can’t you—?
    “You don’t want him?” her father said incredulously. “He wants you, you don’t know how lucky you are.”
    To Claire her father’s voice went on and on, all the words familiar now, the slow drip of the kitchen faucet a soft punctuation to his words. She glanced across the room to where David’s cot stood folded and erect against one of the walls, a flowered print material covering its bulk. She became lost in the flowers of the material as her father’s voice droned on and on. It was the same thing over and over again, never ending, always hammering at her, beating at her, there was no escape. And always, however hard she tried to make her parents understand her feelings, there was total incomprehension, their words flung at her, Why was she acting like this? Didn’t she understand the prize she would be getting? other girls would do anything to get a catch like that. What was wrong with her?
    David remained standing, a spectator, his eyes slowly moving over the three of them. Claire burst out, “He’s forty-eight, he’s an old man, I can’t do it, I don’t want to do it.” She turned her head away from her parents, staring deeply into space, seeing nothing.
    “So he’s forty-eight, so what? He’s still young. He’s an accountant, he’s got a good job. Who’s working these days? We got a Depression, yeah? Who’s making a living? Tell me. What do you want to do, marry somebody from your shop, someone who’s always out of work? A koptzint, a pauper,” her mother said.
    “He’ll make you a good husband,” her father said leaning over the table, his face closer to Claire’s. “He’ll make a good living for you.”
    Her mother moved closer to Claire, her chair scraping across the scarred linoleum, and now her voice was pleading as she said to Claire, “You won’t have to worry about what to eat, you’ll have to eat, or about the rent, about buying clothes. You’ll live in a nice apartment with steam heat, not like here,” she said pointing to the black coal stove that was on the other side of the room. “Not like here, a tenement. A toilet in the hall for three flats. You like that, hah? You’ll have a frigidaire, not the box that we got on the kitchen window outside, that metal thing nailed to the window outside we use in the winter, and