Korê in New York

What happens when a kid refuses to leave the past behind? What happens when the past won't go away? Read on and don't worry about the emotional damage.

1. First Lessons in Religious Education

   Saturday morning before RoAnn left for Ithaca, I took Nervy Worm to Lincoln Square. The rabbi’s assistant at Larisa’s synagogue had recommended Lincoln Square and I had always intended to go. Nervy had a dark “uniform skirt” that she wore with a favorite sweater and I wore one of my synagogue skirts, so having the right clothes was not a problem.

   The problem was once we bid adieu to the Dominican door person and headed down town on Central Park West that I realized how absurd and stupid the whole errand was. Now going to synagogue is a good thing. RoAnn is right there, but she was leaving on Sunday, and I should have been spending time with her. Of course there was an empty place now from when she used to go out and get pastries for Ivanna. That was all the more reason I needed to stay with her.

   Then there was my father. He was here to look after Nervy and me, but when RoAnn returned he would be gone in a matter of days for a matter of weeks. Time with my family was precious, and time in a house of worship was NOT time with my family. Of course Nervy Worm was family too, but once we reached the synagogue, I needed to deposit her in the Kindergarten and Grade One religious class. Also, Lincoln Square reminded me of Houghton Middle School. Little kids and even some older kids did not go to their classes but instead roamed around or hung out at the main service with their parents. I could see kids on the playground. Did they ha ve a mental health exemption like the one from Houghton’s dress code? I felt faintly irritated. Nervy did not have to be exposed to bullshit like this. I knew that once she saw it, she would feel poisoned on learning what for her, thanks to our secular parents, was a totally  new religion.

   I tried to concentrate on the service. The Bible reading was the best part even though it was the curses in Leviticus which frightened many superstitious people. I’m not superstitious, and besides, I was cursed for three years. It was called Houghton Middle School.

   The singing was the second best part, though I didn’t know the songs, and the service is all in another language. Public schools teach French and Spanish (and sometimes other Western languages. Chinese is trendy but it’s just a fad. They do really teach it at Brooklyn Tech though.) not Hebrew, so I had to follow along in English to understand the words which meant I could not sing. They were pretty songs with great singable tunes. Many of them were prayers. I realized that if Nervy and I stuck with going to synagogue, we were going to need a practice CD to learn the songs.

   They had piles of junk food for what they called kiddush after the service. I warned Nervy not to eat too much since we were going to Fairway and then either out to eat for supper or to have a very late lunch at home. We did not have that many lunches as a family, and family was more important than the food. A lady in a dusty pink suit introduced herself to me as Ms. Gross (What an awful name with which to go through life. If I was named that I would change it!) asked if Nervy and I had any place to go for lunch. We had our apartment of course. She then asked where our parents were. I told them that my stepMom was a lapsed Catholic and my dad was not religious. Then I realized I should have told the lady with the gross name to mind her own business, but synagogues are full of nosey people. At least no one said we couldn’t go to the service.

   I walked Nervy home and got ready to hear her complain, though she doesn’t whine much around me. “It was good, but all the songs are in another language,” Nervy stated. This was not exactly a complaint. “We have a lot of catching up to do. I’m going to get us a CD so we can learn the songs.”

   “Why not download it?” asked Nervy.

   “I don’t think they have religious CDs on the net. Besides we’d have to burn it anyway. You don’t have an MP3 player.”

   I then asked if they had read the Bible in Nervy’s religious class. “They did somethign called Torah portion. It was about Moses and the Jewish people.”

   “Sounds like Bible. They have fancy names for things,” I explained back. “We need to get a children’s Bible so you can learn about that stuff.”

   “Then I’ll be a great student?” Nervy’s killer instinct surfaced.

   “You got it,” I gave my favorite Nervy Worm a smile. The nosey ladies and kids who were three steps ahead of us due to being in religious families hadn’t caused my little sibling to lose interest in religion. Maybe RoAnn was right. This kind of a project would be good for us.

   I told Dad about all the stuff we needed to buy as we rode to Fairway. RoAnn had Gigi, an old Broadway show playing on the CD player in the truck. We were not walking and RoAnn was not giving any one else a choice of CD. RoAnn needed her music even though she would have it all five hours on Sunday for the long drive to Ithaca.

   “I guess we have our trip on Sunday planned out,” Dad said with a laugh that could not have been happy. It was, obliging. That was the best word for it. “We can visit the Judaica stores in Williamsburgh in Brooklyn. You can ask the peple who run them if they make what you need. The Bible stories we can buy at Barnes and Noble or Books a Million. Do you have the money for this?” Dad asked.

   The answer was yes. I had over a hundred dollars saved and I was willing to invest fifty or more in obtaining some kid friendly and beginner friendly religious material. “And now,” Dad announced. “You are going to load up on a week’s supply of pork products.”

   “Keeping up in synagogue is not going kosher,” I snapped back.

   “One step at a time,” RoAnn ended the argument.

   “What would you do if Kore went frum?” Dad asked his wife who is also my stepmother.

   “Who knows?” RoAnn sighed. “My sister, Jacqueline used to to drag me to mass regularly, but even she never considered becoming a nun.”

   “It’s different for Jews,” Dad explained. “There are whole frum families at Lincoln Square. They’re not cloistered.”

   I thought of Ms. Gross. I wanted to laugh at the name, but for a moment I remembered her utter nosiness, and the efforts to stuff Nervy and me full of junk food.

   “First, Kore and Nervy would have to change their diet,” answered RoAnn.

   “RoAnn, do you know what keeping kosher involves?” Dad asked.

   “No meat and milk together and no exotic meats,” I answered.

   Dad smiled. “It’s more than that. It involves throwing out all our dishes and buying new ones.”

   “No one around here is going to do that,” I replied. “Besides, I’m not ready to give up cold cuts.”

   “I don’t think you have to worry for a while,” RoAnn told Dad and we headed into Fairway for the weekly stockpiling  of food.

   Sunday Dad was good to his word. “You need to see what you’re both getting into,” Dad told us as we descended into the 86th Street subway. Dad didn’t know about Ms. Gross. I all ready knew about nosey people and rabbis who didn’t really answer questions which was why we were going to do some home religious education.

   “No one’s even thinking about making RoAnn throw out all the dishes,” I told Dad. “We’d have to get rid of that beautiful blue, Muranno bowl. That would be traumatic.”

   Dad smiled, and then his smile faded. He held on to a pole so he could keep an eye on us girls while we sat on the subway’s hard plastic seats. We wore dress code clothes. It was too cold for shorts, and it was Sunday after all. Still we wanted to look clean and respectable. It was in between coat weather, and my in between coat was too short in the sleeves and ratty from two years of middle school. I thought the coat smelled like Houghton.

   I was glad Nervy did not complain. Dad promised to take us out to lunch “somewhere good,” which since we did not have RoAnn with us, meant somewhere where we didn’t have to worry about a picky stepmother finding what to eat that did not revolt her.

   RoAnn by now was probably across the New Jersey/New York border and somewhere bewtewen Rockland and Orange Counties. Perhaps she had made her way to the throughway which she would take to Suffern. Beyond Suffern, she would follow a road called the Qickway into the Catskills as far as Binghamton and then she would head north to Whitney Point and then east to that temple of learning, Ithaca.

   I thought of the last time I had been in Ithaca. I was not yet nine. Dad and RoAnn asked if I had a nice skirt to wear. I had a nice dress, a red plaid one. I packed it along with dark socks to pick up the black in the plaid and my school shoes and good barettes for my hair. I was a vain kid at times.

   We rode north past Binghamton and then through Owego and into a town with a college like a city. This was Cornell where Dad had his undergrad, Mom had her bachelors, and RoAnn had earned her PhD. It was also where the English department ate Anthony DiFranco alive. Anthony and Ivanna were now in Asheville, North Carolina, but Anthony was long gone on that day and Ivanna was with RoAnn.

   There was no other place for my dad and stepmom to get married. Cornell had a beautiful chapel called Sage with pictures of philosophers on the walls and in the mosaic on the floor. There was even an organ, and don’t ask me how my dad or stepmom had hired an organist to play Lady by the Little River Band instead of Here Come’s the Bride All Dressed in White. Ivanna and I watched Dad and RoAnn get married. The irony is that Dad married Mom in Sage Chapel too. I know this from my mom’s wedding albums. I wonder where Mom would have married Barry if the two of them had not broken up. Ithaca is the place in my family where people get married and in RoAnn’s family where they get divorced too.

   In Times Square we changed subway trains. Nervy did not complain. She needed to tie her shoe and to pee. We found a ladies room. Dad did not complain. We rode the train to Brooklyn and part of it was above ground after the train went through deep tunnels under the East River. Dad talked about the sand hogs who dug the tunnels and about how they had taught scientists about the bends which you get from working at high pressure in the sand under the river bottoms.

   We emerged in a part of Brooklyn called Williamsburgh. Many of the people here were what Dad called frum. The men wore long black suits and a few wore knickers or breeches. The women didn’t get to wear knickers. They were dresses and all seemed to have their hair dyed a reddish brown. I would later learn that most of the women wore wigs. Some wore head scarves though shot through with shiney material or in pretty floral prints. I would have preferred a red bandanna myself. I had on a red sweater and air force blue military surplus pants with red piping. I wore trouser socks and shoes. Nervy’s sweater was chartreuse and her pants were black courderoy. Dad had on a plaid flannel shirt and he had his jacket open.

   It took us a while to find the Judaica stores. There were several of them all piled up. The first one had a man with a big white beard and a yarmulke on his head behind the counter. I thought of the Calliope for some reason but everything was such a mess in this little store, Nervy and I could find nothing. The man gave us an ugly stare too. He said he didn’t have stuff for goyim. I said that we were Jewish and would take our business elsewhere.

   “We’re going to get in trouble,” Nervy advised me.

   “Any luck?” Dad asked.

   “No,” I said and we tried the next store. Here the proprietor had a reddish brown beard and he asked why we wanted to learn Jewish songs. I told him we attended services at Lincoln Square.

   “Are you Jewish?” he asked.

   “Are you fucking nosey?” I thought. I felt like telling the man that we were secret Nazi spies sent to take notes, but I didn’t. Instead I said that of course we were Jewish and we were interested in getting more out of the service. The man had a CD we could buy for thirty-five dollars.

   I said we’d think about it. He offered it for thrity-two dollars. I felt like telling him to fuck off. I knew we needed to get out of that store fast. I did not want to cause a riot.

   “Any luck?” Dad asked.

   I shook my head. “I’m glad you didn’t get really pissed off,” Nervy summed things up.

   “Did someone insult you?” Dad asked.

   “Yeah,” I answered.

   “Do you want to go home?” Dad asked.

   “I want to try another store,” I said.

   This time a man with a salt and pepper beard manned the counter. I explained what we needed when I saw that half the CD’s were in a locked cupboard and had tiny Hebrew titles. Were there Jews who shoplifted, I wondered. The man opened the case and offered us three CD’s for twenty-four dollars.

   He asked how long we had been going to schul. “What’s schul?” this time it was Nervy who spoke up.

   “Syn-a-gog,” the man translated. “Do your parents know you’re doing this?” the man asked. There is a fine line between  nosey and insightful and you can guess which side this proprietor was on.

   “Yes,” I said. “It’s my stepmother’s idea.”

   “Is she Jewish?”

   “She’s Italian American,” I replied.

   “I’m glad you’re wanting to learn,” was the man’s answer. He gave us his businss card and threw in an easy siddur in English for Nervy and a book of Jewish teen values for me for another six dollars.

   I showed Dad the goods when we emerged from the store. I didn’t expect Dad to be pleased. He looked at the book of Jewish teen values and sniffed. “You ought to try reading this,” he said. I told him I was more interested in the Bible. I reminded him I’d written a paper on the Song of Songs for English. I thought about bringing Mr. Markelow, the proprietor, a copy of my Song of Songs paper.

   We went all the way to Queens for Sunday dinner. Dad wanted to try a Uighur restaurant where they served lamb though he got the vegetarian plate. Nervy and I had a lamb dish with bread instead of rice, and there were potatoes and string beans with what tasted like Indian spices. The meal left us stuffed. Nervy said she was tired.

   We sat on a bench for a while. I was not ready to read any of the new books. I wanted to think of RoAnn who was probably in Ithaca, checking into her room at the Meadowcourt which is where she had Dad had had rooms when they got married. I pictured the Meadowcourt motel in my mind. It’s a little place on Rt. 13 but it is always well kept, though it is a long way to campus. I remember a long walk through the flat lands of sad houses that looked not that different from the houses in Scranton. At eight, I had found that reassuring.

   We had ended up at the court house across with its back to a gorge that had become a stream down on Spencer Street. “This is where Anthony and I got our divorce,” RoAnn had told me. Anthony was Ivanna’s father and RoAnn’s exhusband. I thought of that courthouse now because RoAnn would be there on Monday with the Young  Achiever’s Team and Anthony would be there with the ECBAS legal team. The whole hearing would be very political. I also knew from emails that Ivanna would be there too.

   I’d be in school. We’d be starting working on library programs and patterns for the Drama Club’s One Act Extravaganza of experimental productions. According to Javonovich “this is going to be fucking hard work.”

   I thought about lighting programs, and the pictures of Ithaca faded from my mind. I wanted to pray for RoAnn and Ivanna. I wanted to pray for the drama club members. I wanted to pray for Nervy girl who really did regain her energy and who talked quietly about the teacher asking her where she was going to school for first grade. Nervy was glad she had a place picked out. Apparently, she liked the idea of staying in New York. I was not going to tell my little sibling she was being dumped. Just like RoAnn’s hearing was going to be political, Nervy’s childhood was political. All the grownups either worked for ECBAS or were involved in the political fight for Young Achiever’s. School politics mattered. Schools were the future. Schools were the way out. That was why I had books in my backpack and CD’s of songs with translations in English. School had taught Nervy and me how to learn for synagogue or anything else we wanted. Learning was worth fighting for.

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