Such a Happy Day (revisited)

“Once there was a girl and her name was I Can’t Hear You, and whenever someone asked her her name she said I Can’t Hear You, so then they’d ask her again and she’d say I Can’t Hear You, and then ....”

“Honey,” I say, “I get it.”
    
“You do?”
    
“Uh huh.”
    
“Do you think it’s funny?”
    
“Yes, it’s hilarious.”
    
“I made it up.”
    
“You’re a very clever girl.”
    
We walk on, she and I, west to east across the city, which isn’t as far as it sounds because we aren’t all the way west and we aren’t going all the way east.

I push some stray hairs behind her ears. It’s very windy out today but she wouldn’t wear a hat because the sun is shining and she wants to feel it on her head.

“Once I owned the sun,” she says, “no, not owned, I mean once we were friends and we played together all the time. Even when nobody else could see the sun I could because she was my best, best friend. ”
    
“What happened?” I ask.
    
“Hunh?” she asks.
    
“What happened with the sun? Are you still friends?”
    
“Of course we are. Can’t you tell?” She throws her head way back so that her face is exposed to even more of the sun's rays.
    
There’s an ice cream truck up ahead so I reach into my purse for my wallet, but she grabs my hand. “We can do better,” she says. It’s the first time she’s used this expression. I hear my mother’s voice in her; it makes me feel mushy inside, right next to my heart.
    
“Once,” she says, “there was a man and he wasn’t very nice and he carved an ugly face on a pumpkin, but then a fairy came and she made the pumpkin beautiful and she put the ugly face on the man.”
    
“That’s only fair,” I say. We stop for the light.
    
“I like red,” she says. “Red Bed Dead Said Red Led Wed Fed Red.”
    
The light changes and we hurry across. We’re holding hands. I give her fingers a little squeeze. I could say something about that one word, dead, but I keep my mouth shut.
    
“I like green, too,” she says, and she starts to skip in that hop-jump way she has. “Green Bean Seen Mean Teen.” She gives a little laugh. “Teen Teen Teen Teen Teen Teen.” She looks up into my face and says it again. “Teen.” This is her favorite word.
    
“One day when I grow up I will be a teenager,” she says, for the umpteenth time, and I say, “You surely will, Honey.”
    
I don’t think she knows any teenagers. Her cousins are eight and three, her babysitter is 54. Still, she knows being a teenager is the best thing in the whole wide world. She tells me this all the time.
    
“Once,” she whispers, so I have to bend over to hear her, which is very awkward, but I do it, “there was an old lady who lived in a shoe and when she went to sleep at night she had to lace herself in so no one could hurt her, but what do you think happened?”
    
“I don’t know,” I say. 
    
“But what do you think?”
    
“Did someone come along and steal the shoe with her in it?”
    
“No, they did not.”
    
“Then I’m afraid I don’t know.”
    
“Don’t be afraid, I’ll tell you. A magic person found the shoe and sprinkled magic dust inside, in the holes, you know, for the laces, and in the morning when the old lady woke up she was an orange.”
    
“An orange?” I ask.
    
“Uh huh. The kind you eat.”
    
“Are you hungry?” I ask.
    
“Yep. But not for an orange.”
    
“We’re almost home,” I say.
    
A woman on the other side of the street is walking under a huge striped umbrella.
    
“It isn’t raining,” she says.
    
“I know.”
    
“She is wasting her umbrella.”
    
“Yes,” I say, “she is.”
    
“Once,” she says, “a very silly lady who was also foolish, and had once been an orange, decided she wanted to learn how to fly so she jumped up onto a little bird’s back, but the bird was in a tree and it wasn’t flying that day so the silly lady never learned how to fly.

“Once,” she says, barely taking a breath, “there was a boy and he was very bad and his mommy made him eat nails, and they tasted like,” she pauses for a second to think, “they tasted like dirty nails.”
    
“Yuck,” I say, “that doesn’t sound so nice.”
    
“It isn’t nice, because you know why?”
    
“Why?”
    
“Because he wasn’t nice. He was — he was throw up.” I know where this is heading. “He was a big fat disgusting stinky blechy ball of throw up.”
    
“Okay,” I say, “that’s enough.”
    
“Is it?” she asks.
    
“Yes, I think it is.”
    
“I don’t think it is. I think it’s not enough.”
    
I give her hand a little squeeze and she squeezes mine back and she says, “Okay, it is enough, I guess.”
    
By now we’re at our corner and she waves to a stranger in the dry cleaning store. Whenever we walk past the dry cleaning store she waves, and if there’s no one to see through the big window she just waves at the window. She loves the dry cleaning store. She tells me every day that her favorite smell in all the world is the smell that's inside the dry cleaning store. I could worry about this, but I decide not to.
    
There are so many things I could worry about but today I decide not to worry about any of them.
    
We take the elevator upstairs and leave our sneakers in the hallway by the front door. We slip our feet into slippers. We both love doing this. She loved it first and I learned it from her.
    
She runs to the bathroom to pee. I can hear her singing from her perch on the toilet: “Tinkerbell Stinkerbell Honeybell Moneybell Vunderbarbell.” She has a clear, strong voice. She sings very loudly.
    
I’m preparing two bowls of vanilla ice cream. Baby marshmallows and blue M & M’s go in hers.
    
When she comes out of the bathroom we take our bowls to the living room and sit on the couch. Her feet don’t touch the ground. Not even close. For a second the sight of her legs dangling over the edge, in those blue dungarees with the cuffs folded back and the red plaid flannel showing, almost makes me sob. But then I laugh, instead. She wiggles her feet up and down until her fuzzy purple slippers fall off and she laughs, too.
    
“This was such a happy day,” I say.
    
“What happened today?” she asks.
    
“Nothing,” I say.     

The Loneliest Night of the Year (family fiction)

(Sharing this story again, for Christmas Eve)

It was the summer when every pink transistor radio was playing beach party music, and every girl every place wanted to be Annette Funicello. It was the summer of skimpy two-piece bathing suits that were not quite bikinis, and teased hair; of smoking candy cigarettes like they were the real thing; of begging to be allowed to shave your legs.
    
We were in Far Rockaway — my parents, my grandparents, my sister and me — staying in a little yellow rented bungalow with a screen door. It was the screen door that impressed us the most, even more than the ocean a block away. We were from the Bronx. In the Bronx you don’t have screen doors.  
    
In Rockaway we lived like regular Americans, walking around in halter tops and short-shorts, with cheap rubber flip-flops on our feet. We ate on paper plates with plastic knives and forks. There was watermelon every night, and corn on the cob, not corn out of a can.
    
Late on Friday afternoons my father and grandfather would show up at the bungalow, pale from their weekday city lives, ready to transform themselves into beach bums. After my father changed into a sports shirt and a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts, and my grandfather substituted a short sleeved white shirt for his usual long sleeved white shirt, we’d walk half a dozen blocks to the China Palace. This was our ritual. I thought all Jewish families celebrated Shabbos with eggrolls and wonton soup. Sure, spareribs, why not?
    
But this one night I want to tell you about, this night that was different from all other nights, my father stopped, right there outside the restaurant, and inhaled.
    
“Eve,” he said to my mother, “I  smell something.”
    
“You’re standing next to the vent, Morty, of course you  smell something.”
    
“I’ve got a headache, Eve. Just from smelling, I’ve got a headache.”
    
“Stop it, Morty.” My mother wasn’t having it.  “If you’re so concerned, we can tell the waiter to leave it out.”
    
At that, my grandfather jumped in. “If you have to tell the waiter, already it’s not good. What guarantee do you have that he’ll remember?”
    
My father and grandfather were worried. They’d heard rumors. This is what men thought about, alone in the city, in the heat, with their families far away by the cool, wet, ocean. On the long Friday afternoon subway rides, the men worked themselves up with worry.
    
The women, made of tougher stuff, wanted egg foo young.
    
“Come in,” my grandmother said, ushering us toward the front door. “If we feel sleepy, we’ll take a nap later. A headache? A headache won’t kill us.”
    
Who knows if it would have killed us. We never found out because before we could even order, while we were still dipping our crispy noodles into the duck sauce — ”Duck sauce, Morty? You think they put it in the duck sauce? Eat it. You love your duck sauce" — the woman at the table next to ours keeled over. Keeled right over onto the floor. Her chair fell back and she was O - U - T, out. Out like a light. Fainted.
    
She’s fainted. Fainted. Fainted. Fainted.
    
It buzzed around the restaurant like a gust of stinky hot air.
    
Then:  MSG. It must have been the MSG. Sure, what else could it be? MSG. MSG. MSG.
    
The place emptied out in three minutes flat. My family made an instant conversion from China Palace Shabbos to White Castle Hamburgers Shabbos.
    
A couple days later, there was talk in the sandy alleyway where the women spent late afternoons hanging up wet bathing suits and towels.
    
Maybe that lady, you know the one, the one that fainted in the Chinese restaurant, maybe she was just a little bit pregnant.
    
Sure, have you seen her stomach lately? Did you see it in that orange bathing suit?
    
Could be she had a little indiscretion, a little accident, even.
    
I see the way she is with Feingold, the pharmacist. How many people get shmutz in their eye every day, she needs him to take it out with a Q-tip?
    
And always with the smile, always making with her tushy.
    
Fainting, that’s a sign, don’t you think?
    
Could be. Could be.
    
That woman at the table next to ours, maybe she was pregnant. Or maybe she wasn’t. But as far as my father was concerned, the vote was in. The verdict was guilty. And the blame was placed firmly on the MSG. He didn’t even know what the initials stood for. All he knew was: stay away from it.
    
Everything changed for the worse after that. My mother and grandmother, bored by the predictability of White Castle hamburgers, turned their attention to cleaning. God forbid a speck of sand should make its way into our little bungalow. My grandfather spent Friday nights with other weekend men, playing pinochle. He never won anything and it aggravated his ulcer.
    
My father started in with crossword puzzles, which in his case was not an individualized sport. “What’s a five-letter word for a wooden shoe, Eve?” Or:“T-blank-blank-K; what does that spell, kids?”
    
Somehow, in extreme misery, my family managed to drag itself through the rest of that Rockaway summer. Then we returned to the Bronx and staggered into the fall. Friday nights were long, sad expanses of unrelieved deprivation.
    
And then, before we knew it, it was late December. Christmas Eve. The loneliest night of the year for Jews. Let’s face it, what’s Christmas Eve without a pu-pu platter? Something inside my mother cracked.    
    
“Listen to me, Morty,” she said, through clenched teeth, “no one is trying to poison you. It’s Christmas Eve! For God’s sake, we’re going.”
    
We bundled into our hats and scarves and walked around the corner to meet up with my grandparents. They were standing outside of their apartment building, waiting for us with nervous smiles on their faces.
    
Together we made our way toward the Grand Concourse, and that night, in the dark recesses of the Pink Pagoda, we gorged ourselves on moo shu pork, shrimp in lobster sauce, and sweet and sour everything.
    
Life was back to normal. Somehow, we’d learned to live with the threat of MSG. We were survivors.