The first time I heard Grace Paley read, about eight years ago, she reminded me of my own grandmother—physically, I mean, and in her enjoyment of certain foods and phrases. The resemblance ended there; my grandmother had led a much more timid life. If she was capable of expressing depths of passion—and I believe she was—she only hinted at it. Could she have said the things that Grace was saying in her poems and stories? If only... but she might have recognized something of herself in what Grace had to say.
After that reading, I wrote this little Grace-inspired story, which, who knows, Grace herself might have enjoyed. And so, in honor of her Grace Paley's life, and my grandmother's, my poor imitation:
[Continues below the fold]
After Hearing Grace Paley Read from Poems and Essays, and Thinking of My Grandmother, Who Looked a Bit Like Her
My grandmother—I mean my mother’s mother: she would have written about cow shit, too, if she had had the chance; expounded on the erotic infatuations of insects; stood up and shouted when the curtains of the world raised just that little bit to expose injustice from behind the scenes. If she had had the chance—but what chance, exactly? If she had unbound herself from the knots that she herself had helped to tie? If, one day, coming out from the kitchen, drying chapped arthritic hands on her checkered towel, she had stared across the pinochle table and said, “Nat, it’s time you learned to use the toaster”? or: “Nat, that baby’s bottom needs a diaper, and only you can change it”? (Nat whispering behind his hand, “Women know about that stuff. Women like that.”)They once took an elderhostel course, and studied Yiddish; she recovering a lost language of her youth. She had come, as a girl, from a world of Russian limericks, Polish epithets, and Jewish meals. What mysteries of taste had to be erased before she could call the new world ‘home’? She was five when her family wintered on a store of old potatoes, hiding from SoldiersCossacksNazis in the loft of a farmer’s old barn. Sometimes the farmer left beets for them. The children giggling as they sliced them up, tongues and fingers red. Fay remembered. Her older sister. Fay was nobody’s fool. One day some Russians came into her shop on 42nd street to have a ring appraised. “Watch the yid whore doesn’t cheat us,” they said.
In English they said, “Why a pretty girl like you, here, working day in, day out, a slave, what?”
In Russian they said, “Look at that greedy Jew-glint in her eye.”
In English: “Ah, but that price cannot be right. This ring, I have it from my father’s father, who had it from his father’s father, who had it from the Tsar himself.”
But Fay would not be moved. They haggled until spit sprayed into their mustaches, cursing her to the old country and smiling their ingratiating nonsense in the adopted language of their witnesses. She did not bend. At last they folded to her price, and as they turned to stomp away, she called to them with a fluent flash of the mother tongue, “Thank you, gentlemen, and good day.” The Russians turned pale in their boots, and slammed the door.
Fay knew, but not my grandmother Estelle, who lost three words of Yiddish for every English syllable committed to memory. She wasn’t stupid, though she lacked Fay’s sharp edge and tongue. She had the gift for forgetting. She forgot, for instance, the picnic with her uncle, riding the Warsaw trolleys through the city to the park. Under the favorite spreading shade tree a crowd had already gathered, shouting, and from high up on her uncle’s shoulders she could see, before he could, the blood and spewing teeth, the old Chasid being pummeled by thugs his great-grandson’s age. Her uncle turned around, and they went home, riding in the same, packed, Sunday cars. They never spoke of it, and so it never happened, until one day when she was eighty, and then it all seemed clear as yesterday.
With a few, well chosen words you've conveyed a depth of layers about these women. I feel like I've known them.
Superb close to the story!
Posted by: Kat | August 30, 2007 at 05:54 PM