“I could—work at a museum. Or maybe get a job at the radio station.” Wally Weiss owed her that much, she thought wryly, although she could not imagine calling on him for help.
Sensing weakness, Seth asked if he could have a second Coke.
“Sure,” Maddie said, defeated. It was folly to expect a child to care about a parent’s dreams and desires.
When she got home, she stared at the phone, willing it to ring. Ferdie almost never called on Wednesdays. Not because he knew of her standing dinner with Seth, but because—well, he never said and she didn’t want to ask. There was a wife, there had to be a wife. That Maddie could endure. But she was pretty sure there were other women, too, and she was wild with curiosity about them. She stared at the phone, all too aware that she was living that Dorothy Parker story, the one about the girl’s plaintive prayer to God to make the phone ring. Maddie had loved Dorothy Parker as a teenager but never worried about boys calling her. Everything had gone according to her plans until the summer after high school, when she tried to reel in a fish that was much too big for her inexpert hands. She was self-aware enough to realize that the relationship with Ferdie brought back that outlaw time, that it made her feel young, having to pursue another relationship in secret.
The phone didn’t ring.
But there was another sound, like sleet against her window. She went to the bedroom and there was Ferdie on her fire escape.
“I was driving by,” he said, “and I saw the light on.”
“You shouldn’t be out there,” she said, “someone will call the cops.”
“Luckily, the cops are already here.” He swung a uniformed leg over her windowsill.
She was between his legs when the phone started to ring. He placed a firm hand on her head and she found herself working to the phone’s rhythm. It kept ringing and ringing. Who let a phone ring twenty times? Ferdie and the phone finally gave way and she fell back, pleased with herself, when it started to ring again. It had to be Milton, and if it was Milton, then it had to be about Seth. What could have happened in the two hours since she saw him last?
She picked up the phone, but it was just the girl from the jewelry store, asking if she wanted to go to that political meeting. Sure, why not, sometime, depending on her schedule? She would have said anything to get off the call and back to Ferdie.
Later, as Ferdie napped beside her, Maddie wondered how she could keep her promise to her son. She had to do something with her life.
She had to matter.
My family ate black-eyed peas for the New Year.
My family ate black-eyed peas for the New Year. Do you know the custom? It’s supposed to bring luck. My father didn’t like it. He didn’t like anything that had the faintest shade of hoodoo to it. If you spilled salt at the table, he thought it better to just let it lie. He would walk under ladders, cross any black cat’s path. To my father, superstitions were godless. Live right, follow the Ten Commandments, and you wouldn’t have to worry about ladders or cats or the number thirteen. But he let my mama make black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, as long as we didn’t talk about it, and I believed in those peas.
But when I didn’t show up on January first to eat with my family, no one paid any mind. They knew the life I was living. “Flighty,” my father would say to my mother. “She is a flighty girl and I have to blame you for that, Merva.” Even on a humdrum Saturday night, I would have worked or had a date. Sometimes I worked and had a date. No crime in that. Obviously, I would have gone out on New Year’s Eve, no matter how late I worked. It had been an unusually fine day for December, a finer one still for January, topping sixty degrees.
It was, as it turned out, excellent dying weather.
When did my family think to ask after me? I had been there two days earlier, to see the boys. And although I had showered them with gifts at Christmas—because I could now, I had resources—I brought them more toys on the twenty-ninth. I never came to that house empty-handed. Toys for the boys, food for Mama—hams and roasts, things she seldom allowed herself, shopping the bargains at the no-name grocery store in our neighborhood. That night, I brought her a jacket of mine I knew she liked. I would have given her cash money, too. But my father wouldn’t allow that. He said my money was dirty, that he didn’t want it. He said that I should be saving it, so I could take my boys back.
He wasn’t wrong. But it’s a temptation, being paid in cash. It doesn’t feel real, exactly, especially if one’s other bills are taken care of. Except for my share of rent to Latetia, of course, and I never worried too much about that. If I ran short, all I had to do was cry a few pretty tears. And, sure, I spent a little on myself. Not as much as people think—my nicest clothes weren’t new, but good as. Better, I think, because the beautiful clothes in my closet arrived with histories. Any man can buy a woman clothes. My main man was taking a risk when he gave me something.
Are you really missing if almost nobody misses you? I was dead, but being a ghost comes with fewer privileges than you might expect. I couldn’t see my family, couldn’t linger in their rooms, much as I yearned to. Besides, if I had been given the right to haunt someone, I wouldn’t have chosen my family. They deserved better than my sad little ghost, hanging around, full of self-pity.
The mild weather quickly ended, the weather turned bitter, followed by that blizzard at month’s end. It was only then that anyone began to take my mama seriously. There had been rumors that I had gone to Florida, along with Latetia, who ran away to Elkton and eloped on New Year’s Eve. She cabled me that she was moving to Florida with her new man, but the cable sat, unread, in a pile of bills and junk shoved under the door of our place on Druid Hill Avenue. The landlord discovered it when he came by on January 15, to complain about not being paid. He was ready to put all our stuff on the street, but my mama made good on my portion, ransomed my possessions, the ones worth keeping. She bundled up my beautiful clothes and took them back to my family’s place. She wanted so to believe that I would wear them again.
The Afro-American ran the first piece about me on February 14. Happy Valentine’s Day to me; my mother loved me enough to convince people that I hadn’t just walked away on my own. The police began to ask questions, if only out of respect. The last anyone had seen me for sure was heading out on December 31—early January 1, actually—for what I told everyone was going to be a big, big night.
Tommy, who worked the bar at the Flamingo, even remembered my last words: “They say whatever you’re doing on January first is what you’ll do all year. I don’t need to eat any black-eyed peas to know that 1966 is going to be a great year.”
You could have read all of this in the Afro-American, Maddie Schwartz, but I’m guessing that you don’t make a habit of reading the Afro.
March came in like a lion, they still hadn’t found me, and the daily newspapers still hadn’t written a word about me.
Tessie Fine—she was missed right away. I know, I know: she was only eleven. And white. Still, it did not escape my attention that her disappearance was noted almost immediately. You certainly noticed. That was your first taste, the little girl. You’re a morbid one, Maddie Schwartz.
Again, I have to ask: are you really missing if nobody misses you?
The Schoolgirl
The Schoolgirl
I can’t believe I end up fighting with the principal on my eleventh birthday, but I am one of the best students at Bais Yaakov and I like to argue. I’m good at debating. I’m good at everything. I am furious that I will not be publicly called to the Torah in front of my friends and family. I want a bat mitzvah, but modern Orthodox families like mine only allow boys that. Some of the Conservative families will throw parties for the girls, as for Reform—no one cares what the Reform families do. My parents say the Reform aren’t really Jewish.
“This is pride,” Rabbi tells me. “This has nothing to do with your life as a Jew. You yearn to show off. That is not the point of a bar mitzvah.”
It isn’t the first time I’ve been warned about pride, so I have an argument ready. “I am proud of being a Jew, yes. And the boys are proud, too. Even though most of them do not read Hebrew as well as I do.”
“You need to cultivate modesty, Tessie.”
“Why?” I stamp my feet, enjoying the hard sound of the taps that my mother puts on the heels so they’ll last longer.