Page 51 - WhyAsInY

WHo are tHese PeoPle? (Part 1)
Mrs. Stahl’s Knishes, which is still located beneath the elevated subway in Brighton Beach.
The obvious problem with this diet is that it is the last fare that someone should be consuming in quantity if that someone was fat. I was that someone. I weighed over 160 pounds in the sixth grade, although I was then barely five feet tall. While I recall that my mother’s weight and my father’s weight would fluctuate over the years during which I was at home, I have no recollection that mine did, at least when I was a pre- adolescent. When my mother had to buy pants for me, she would take me to a special store and buy oversize trousers that were charmingly known as “huskies.” It was a humiliating experience but not humiliating enough to lead me to lose weight.
My mother also set a beautiful table when she entertained, which was frequently. She was particularly proud of her china, her crystal, her sterling silver, and various serving pieces of all types. Like her mother, at least as I am told, she was a vivacious hostess who enjoyed a good time and would start dancing (very well) at the drop of a hat. She was par- ticularly proud of having led the conga line at what she referred to, curiously, as an “affair” (a catered dinner with some purpose, such as a wedding or a bar mitzvah) at the Waldorf Astoria. (Unfortunately, her only heart attack occurred while she was dancing at a party at Windows on the World, atop the World Trade Center when she was about sixty years of age.) Not only was she a graceful and energetic dancer, but, as I noted, she was also a good athlete. Every once in a while, she would remind me that she had been a pretty fair softball pitcher in her youth, and to demonstrate that fact, she would commence to play catch with me in the kitchen, using (what else?) an orange.
She was also a very knowledgeable baseball fan, who rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers with something just short of a passion. So far as I was aware, this is the only subject on which my parents openly dis- agreed. Dad was a Yankees fan. After the conclusion of the 1955 World Series, in which the Dodgers beat the Yankees for the first time, Mom had absolutely no reluctance to exercise her bragging rights. But she did so lovingly. I was a distraught Yankees fan who believed, and to this
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