The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights Part 41

I bounded out of the car, spoke to Plaid Coat. I pointed to the runner, pointed to my mother's stolen handbag, and angrily said, "That's not his purse!"

Neighbors began filing out, offering to call the police. Which was kind of redundant.

Because Plaid Coat turned out to be an off-duty policeman who had been visiting his father, heard me leaning on the horn, and came out to investigate.

Now he took off his belt and began to secure the suspect. At that point I went back to my mother. She was upright and so was the stroller. I pulled the car over, loaded them both inside. Her palms were sore, her pants were ripped at the knees. But, as promised, both she and my baby were all right.

"He took my purse!" my mother sobbed.

"We caught him, Ma," I said.

"You what?"

"We caught him. We have your purse!"

"Oh. That's good," my mother answered. "That's very good."

"Very good," my son coughed from the backseat.

We returned to the scene of the crime, now thick with patrol cars. I explained my story as I held my baby, and my mother explained her story from inside my car. The uniformed police officers were amazed.

"We never catch these guys," one of them told me.

My mother was required to come down to the station to claim the purse. It would be there waiting for her. The police needed only a couple of hours to process the paperwork.

"She can't just take it now?" I asked. "Save us both a trip?"

"Nope. Evidence."

"Fine," I said.

They congratulated me. I took my mother and baby home. We were all pretty shaken, but life does go on.

I loaded my son back into his car seat and zipped him over to the pediatrician. A good move on my part.

Indeed, it was strep throat.

The SUMMER of

MY WOMANHOOD.

"The Summer of My Womanhood" is

perhaps the most emotional piece in

the anthology. It's about my father, who

died thirty years ago at the age of fifty-

three, and by the time I finished

writing this essay, I was engulfed by a

cloud of wistfulness. Dad owned a deli

and a small bakery, and I was fortunate

enough to work with him as a preteen

and teenager. In order to earn spending

cash, I often stood for hours behind the

counter helping customers. Of course,

my ultimate reward was spending time

with my dad, and as I remembered

him, my heart filled with treasured

memories.

MY FATHER WASN'T A DISTANT FIGURE IN MY childhood, but I certainly didn't know him well. Like many men of the World War II generation, he worked excruciatingly long and hard hours, not for career fulfillment or self-enlightenment but in order to pay the mortgage on a Veterans Affairs-financed three-bedroom, one-bath house in the hot, dusty San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles County. My father was in the retail food business, not by default but by choice. His decision, especially since he came from a religious Jewish background in which education had always been prized, always puzzled me.

When World War II broke out, Dad was drafted. Instead of immediately being sent to Europe, he was deemed smart enough by the army to send to college. After two years of attending cla.s.ses at Rutgers University, studying subjects that obviously excited him-he spoke about them well into my young adulthood-he was offered officers' training. After declining the chance for advancement because it meant a longer tour of duty, he was s.h.i.+pped overseas and into the infantry. G.o.d must have shone His light on Dad, because he spent only two weeks in the front lines, though it probably felt like years. After the brief stint, he was rea.s.signed to the medical corps. Trained as a medic, he desperately tried to save what the enemy was determined to destroy. After the war, Dad's fluency in Yiddish made him invaluable to the army because he understood many of the languages spoken by concentration-camp victims. He would often translate for his superior officers, aiding in placement and relocation of those who'd survived the n.a.z.is' final solution.

When he talked about the war, it was not often and not very much. But I do remember what he told me. Yes, he revealed stories of the human atrocities, but he was much more intrigued by the ability of ordinary people to rationalize those horrors away, by the denials in Polish towns where the stink of the crematoriums could be detected from miles away. It affected his lifelong outlook. How could it not.

Honorably discharged from the army, my father did what most newly married men did back then: They took jobs not for their glamorous t.i.tles but because they needed money. Even though Dad had pa.s.sed entrance exams to local law schools, he decided to skip three years without income in favor of immediate cash. My father became Oscar the Deli Man-following in the footsteps of his father, Judah (Edward) the Butcher.

I'm sure money had much to do with it. But after observing my father at work up until he died, I do think he was happy with his occupation. It was backbreaking toil, which involved but wasn't limited to toting hundreds of pounds of meat, lifting cases of canned goods, s.h.i.+vering in walk-in freezers and coolers during the winter in stores with no heat, and putting in unG.o.dly hours-from dark to dark. Sunlight was something that glared through plate-gla.s.s windows. But the money he earned was from the sweat of his own brow, and that was good enough for Oscar Marder.

As a small child, I was often put to bed before Dad came home. As an older child, I remember watching TV with him. He didn't talk much except to ask me if I had yet guessed the plot of the latest Streets of San Francisco or, at the very least, the quarterly subt.i.tles given after each commercial break during the hour show. Heart-to-hearts were nonexistent, but some sort of primordial communication-that of father and young daughter-did exist.

Dad staked out his claim by renting s.p.a.ce in independent food markets. Usually, he ran just one operation at a time. Occasionally, he managed two locations. His booth consisted of a fresh delicatessen with all the traditional meats, cheeses, salads, and, of course, lox and pickled herring. He also took on a small bakery that catered and complemented items sold in a deli. His breads included loaves of soft yellow egg challah, caraway ryes, savory onion rolls, kaiser twists covered with poppy seeds, and oh, those aromatic fruit and cheese Danish and coffee cakes. Dad's kiosk had everything needed for the perfect Sat.u.r.day picnic or the in-law Sunday brunch. I loved the food, and I loved everything that went along with it. Because I loved my father.

When my older brothers reached double-digit age, they worked in the deli on weekends and helped our father out. When I was eleven, no such demands were made of me. This, of course, angered me. If Dad wasn't going to require it of me, I'd simply require it of myself.

When I announced that I was going to work at the deli, Dad said that was fine, although I was sure it wasn't fine at all. But that didn't stop me.

He didn't know what to do with me. Being short and slight, I didn't fit the job description. There was a physical component to the work that called for muscle ma.s.s. I had none. The most skilled ch.o.r.es required an adeptness with sharp objects-meat slicers, cheese slicers, knives for tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and cutting lox. I had small hands and fingers-way too little to handle industrial equipment that could slice a digit as easily as a corned beef.

There was the retail side-the greeting and the waiting on customers-but I was too short to be seen above the countertops. To the consumers on the other side, I was more or less a floating head. My father was constantly dodging me because I was underfoot and the operating s.p.a.ce behind the counters was minimal. The starched white ap.r.o.n my father gave me for protection was way too big. It dragged on the baseboards, picking up sawdust around the hemline. Occasionally, I'd trip on it. When that happened, I hiked up the cloth. Eventually, it would fall down again.

I'm sure I was a disaster. I'm sure I got in Dad's way. But he never said anything to me about it.

Dad knew I couldn't remain an ornament. He had to give me something to do. My first a.s.signment was shoveling the three most popular salads-potato, cole slaw, and macaroni (this was prior to the urban elite pasta salad)-from the cooler into pint or half-pint containers. This job was a snap because the salads were priced by the pint. A pint of cole slaw was X number of cents. A half pint totaled X/2. I was a math whiz in school. I had absolutely no trouble figuring out how to halve things.

Having mastered salads, I was given my next a.s.signment-the weighing and wrapping of dill pickles. This, to my surprise, turned out to be a very tricky affair.

I was given a stool in order to see and read the scale. But first I needed to learn how to read a scale. Back then, before the advent of LCD and the digital revolution, watches were a.n.a.logs, and scales were mean critters consisting of columns of prices and rows of weights-a veritable crisscross of numbers that bounced up and down with a spring weight. To find out how much something cost necessitated finding the correct intersection between price and weight along a skinny red line. I've known adults who never mastered the art of reading this kind of scale, just as I've known those who never got the hang of a slide rule.

It took me some time. For the first week, all my pickle prices magically came out in pounds, half pounds, or quarter pounds because-being a math whiz-I could divide the price by factors of two. Anything in between was rounded off to the nearest whole number divisible by two. In order to please the customer, I usually rounded down. I'm sure I cost my father some pocket change.

If he noticed it, he never said anything.

Eventually, I vanquished the scale. It was a proud moment that should have been worthy of some kind of certification. But knowledge has its own rewards. Reading the scale now allowed me to weigh things-items like lox and precut cheeses and meats, fishy pickled herring and the wonderfully oily Greek olives.

With two skills mastered, I was determined to crack another-wrapping. Origami enthusiasts needn't have worried. Still, I was proud of my neatly swaddled packages with just the right amount of sticky tape on them. And when I wrote the word "pickles" or "Swiss" on the white paper in my own handwriting, no one could have been more pleased than I was.

My weighing and packaging skills had been honed to such an extent that Dad took an enormous chance. No, I was still forbidden to use the meat slicers, but he let me try the bread slicers.

For those unschooled in the literature on bread slicers, I shall explain. To slice a whole loaf of bread, one usually places the bread against a back bar, then turns on the machine. With a manual handle-which the operator slowly pulls toward him or her-the bread is advanced and forced between a series of moving parallel blades until it emerges out the other side in neat, perfect slices.

Immediately upon exiting the blades, my first rye fell apart, the slices fanning out like a deck of cards. Spotting the trouble, Dad once again explained to me that as the bread advances between the blades, it is necessary to secure the loaf on the other side with your hand. This must be done with care, as fingers are not supposed to get close to the blades. Was I up to the challenge?

Indeed I was. After a couple of failures, I was finally able to produce a successfully sliced loaf of rye. I was even able to hold it aloft, vertically by the heel, as the experts did.

Alas, it was the next step that tripped me up. I placed the rye directly into the white waxed-paper bag. Needless to say, again the rye fell apart.

As I apologized profusely, the customers just laughed it off.

Isn't she cute?

C'mon, guys. I'm trying to do a job here.