The Boston Girl(65)
One thing hadn’t changed: the cemetery was just as bleak as I remembered. The trees had grown and they had planted bushes, but it was January and hard to believe that anything would ever be green again.
I started to shiver when the service began. There wasn’t any wind and nobody else seemed bothered by the cold, but I could hear my teeth chattering. I had to lock my knees to keep from wobbling, and if Aaron hadn’t put his arm around me, I might have keeled over, honest to God. At least Jewish funerals are short.
When they lowered the coffin into the ground, I remember thinking, She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.
But when the first clump of dirt hit the coffin, I realized that I would never stop wanting my mother to tell me that I was all right and that’s when I started to cry.
Life is more important than death.
After we sat shiva, Papa told Betty and me that we were official mourners for a whole year, which meant we were supposed to stay away from celebrations and music or entertainment of any kind. So no parties, no going to the symphony, not even a movie.
After the first month, Betty stopped paying attention to the rules. If her boys wanted to see the new Our Gang movie, she took them and stayed to watch. “You think I’m going to leave them in a dark theater all by themselves?”
I felt like I was living “in the meantime” and I actually didn’t mind being quiet. Papa and I ate suppers upstairs with Betty and her family, then he would go to the synagogue and I usually went to my room to read. It was sort of like living in the boardinghouse.
Not that I was a hermit. I was with people all day at work and I kept going to class. I think it was American history that term. My friends called on the phone and came to the house. Aaron and I saw each other all the time; we just didn’t talk about the wedding.
But when the flowers started blooming and everyone put away their winter coats, I started to feel like a dog on a chain. Everywhere I went, I saw couples holding hands and whispering to each other. Aaron showed me an advertisement for an apartment we could afford. I got up my nerve and asked my father how soon we could get married.
He said, “Anytime you want.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You told me I had to wait a year.”
“Did I say anything about weddings? According to the Talmud, if a funeral procession and a wedding procession cross paths, the wedding party goes first. Life is more important than death.”
You’d think he could have told me that before.
“Just don’t make it fancy,” Papa said. “No music or dancing.”
That wasn’t a problem. I’d always wanted it to be simple, and Aaron didn’t care about fancy as long as it was soon. But when I told Betty and Mildred we were thinking about getting married at the beginning of May, which was just a few weeks off, they acted like it was a disaster only a littler smaller than the Titanic. Betty said that since she didn’t have a daughter, this was going to be her only chance to make a wedding. And why did I want to ruin it for her?
For her, right?
She and Mildred complained and noodged until we agreed to wait until June so they could make everything nice. Rita asked if she could give me a bridal shower to introduce me to the other women in the family before the wedding. I’d never been to a shower—it was a new fad at the time—but my sister-in-law-to-be had read an article about them in Ladies’ Home Journal and she had her heart set on doing it just like it said in the magazine—right down to pink icing and sugar roses on the cake. She wanted to invite my friends, too, so I gave her Gussie’s phone number and said she’d get in touch with everyone else.
Rita planned it as a tea party on Saturday afternoon at three o’clock and told everyone to wear nice dresses and white gloves, if you can imagine.
Irene called me to ask if she could come to my party even if she didn’t embroider a pillowcase, which Rita had asked all the guests to do. When I said I didn’t know anything about pillowcases she said, “Gussie didn’t tell me the pillowcases were supposed to be a surprise. Now I’ve ruined the whole goddamn thing.”
The older Irene got, the more she swore. I remember when her grandson pooped in his diaper at his christening, she said, “Holy shit,” loud enough for everyone to hear. The look on that priest’s face!
On the day of the shower, the Metsky house was full of doilies, lilacs, and a dozen aunts and second cousins. After they all got finished hugging me, I smelled like the perfume counter at Jordan’s.
Rita presented me with a trousseau of pillowcases and towels embroidered with my new initials and I acted as if Irene hadn’t spilled the beans.
There were some other surprises, though. I knew Irene and Helen would be there but I was bowled over when Miss Chevalier and Miss Green walked in with Katherine Walters, who I lost touch with after I left the Transcript.
Miss Chevalier kissed my cheek and said, “I’m so happy for you, my dear.” Miss Green seemed to have shrunk two inches but she still had a twinkle in her eye. “I like to think we had something to do with your marriage, since you met your fiancé in our home.”
The Ediths hadn’t been asked to embroider anything, thank goodness, but Miss Green brought me one of the lovely ceramic boxes she designed; you used to put Barbie shoes in it when you were little.
Having all those women together in one place was like looking through a photo album of my life: from when I was a baby to the Saturday Club to Rockport Lodge to working at the newspaper to meeting Aaron.