My brother had departed in a whirr after ferrying me there promising to return in a week or so The grandkids were taking turns watching over their adored Mamma Jenny In her last days sleeping on the floor by her bed Jenny now over ninety and legally blind She still drank black coffee all day A potent elixir kept warm at the back of the stove Her meals were delivered but rarely eaten Her pals brought her pastries and soft fruits she ate in small bites pulling off bits of danish with two fingers and swallowing them with coffee She saw mostly shadows and outlines yet she could pick a straight pin from the carpet and cautioned me about my bare feet She was at the center of a bunch of old ladies that had been together at the Golden Ages for decades—now dwindling There were four peer counselors remaining One, a nun who spoke yiddish visited almost every day The rest met around her bed weekly Sometimes they played canasta or rummy on a black lacquer bed table perched on her lap She often drifted off but they didn’t seem to notice Jenny was born in Ukraine in a shtetl near Minsk She came to the US in 1917 married to Sam by shidduch so they could travel to the new world together He was an actor with the yiddish theatre and very handsome When he impregnated one of the Polishikas In her sweatshop Jenny sent him packing Now a single mom with two children she lived in a tenement on the lower East Side Where she copied the latest fashions from windows on fifth avenue And sold patterns and samples To the discounters She was always very political and socially conscious a communist until Czechoslovakia In her later years in California she was an activist with the progressive party In the fifties McCarthy tried to have her deported But her second husband had a bad heart and so they let her stay When we lived in Florida the FBI in dark suits and dark glasses sat sweating for weeks in a parked car across the street from her tiny stucco house with an orange tree on the front lawn We sat at her kitchen table by the window having grilled cheese and iced tea and watched them watching us While I took my turn at her beside she remembered that I could cook And made a decision to eat all the foods that had been forbidden her Like meatballs and spaghetti and strawberry shortcake After a bit we settled into a pattern Sometimes she would get up for morning coffee But mostly I brought it to her bedside while we planned the day’s menu In the late afternoon we shared a glass of sherry from the bottle that had been her one request Harvey’s Bristol Myers she called it And beating her old misshapen slippered feet on the floor next to her bed she reproduced the sound of the thundering hooves of the cossacks approaching her village And then resting her beautiful head on the propped up bed pillows continued the story of hiding in the haystacks with her cousin while the village filled with smoke Provincetown, 2019/2025
Hiding Out