Page 56 - WTP Vol. IX #9

Housewidow (continued from preceding page)
glue dried. I smiled up at him, but his eyes were glued
on the door.
Later, I asked my dad to quiz me on spelling words. I’d already begun to prepare for the third-grade bee. I’d long since memorized the regular word list; now I was drilling myself on the advanced ones: believe (“i” before “e”), pray and prey, temperature (which every- one pronounced “tempracher”), and triumph, which I hoped would be mine come February.
“Leave Dad alone,” my mother said. “He works hard all week. He deserves one day off.”
“He helps Mrs. Sullivan on Sunday,” I pointed out. “You’re not a widow,” my father said.
“Or, thank God, an orphan.” Mom squeezed Dad’s hand.
Not only were my parents united against me, I’d lost out to Mrs. Sullivan. I pulled out my worksheets and wrinkled (silent “w”) my nose. I vowed not to lose the spelling competition too.
The next month, my father set up the landlady’s Christ- mas tree in her apartment and hung lights at the front of the house. Since we lived on the first floor, the lights were actually around our windows. My mother tried to stop him. “For God’s sake, Leo. We’re Jewish. Tell Fiona the lights belong outside her window.”
Dad patiently untangled the wires and screwed in the little colored bulbs. “She lives on the second floor, Perl. Would you rather I climb on a ladder to hang them up there?” Mom gave up and resumed knitting a baby blanket. But she bought a big menorah for
our window and a new pack of construction paper so I could make dreidels and Stars of David. Then we sprinkled them with glitter. Framed by the Christmas lights, they sparkled the whole holiday season.
The rest of the winter passed by without any argu- ments. My father shoveled the walk and driveway, and repaired wind-damaged shutters. The big activity was inside our apartment, where he laid
new linoleum tile in the kitchen, dining room, and hallway—faux marble squares of white and beige. The old sheet linoleum had been dark brown and the new tiles brightened up the whole house. My parents also switched bedrooms with me and Reva. They took the smaller one, and my father built a divider in the bigger one. Reva and I shared two-thirds of it and the other third became a nursery for the baby. Reva got a real bed, and I got a new bedspread.
When my mom wasn’t knitting, she cooked like crazy. All the Hungarian favorites she’d learned from my bubbe: goulash, schnitzel, and a potato-egg thing- amajig called rakott krumpli. Best of all, when I announced in February that I’d won the spelling bee for the whole third grade, she made flodni, a des-
sert with apples, walnuts, and poppy seeds between sheets of dough. I’d grabbed the crown with the word “monarch.” My parents congratulated me. Reva didn’t know what we were celebrating but she got in the spirit and banged her spoon. We drank a ginger ale toast. The bubbles made Reva sneeze and she cried until she hiccupped. That put the kibosh on the party, but not my happiness. Winning the bee and my parents’ attention were a double prize.
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My brother was born just before Passover and named Emil for my dad’s father. Mom and Dad were ecstatic. You’d think he was another baby Moses come to lead our people from downtown Cleveland to the promised land of the suburbs. A few weeks lat- er, I won the school spelling bee, beating the fourth grader with “referee,” fifth grader with “accede,”
and sixth-grade champion with the seventh-grade word “quandary.” I would represent Mount Pleasant Elementary at the Ohio Spelling Bee, held at the Ohio State Fair, with a grand prize of twenty-five dollars.
I planned to make my grand announcement that night at Shavuos dinner, which marks the day when God gave Jews the Torah on Mt. Sinai thousands of years ago. My father would tell the story of how the mountain quaked and the people, awed, swore to obey God’s commandments, including, I assumed, his favorite. There would be wine to make Kiddush and to toast my victory.
Mom had made hideg meggyleves, sour cherry soup, a Hungarian tradition on Shavuos because the holiday coincides with the late-spring cherry har- vest. I set the table and played with Reva so Mom
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