1400 and listen to songs like “Blue Shadows,” “Fool, Fool, Fool,” and “Please Send Me Someone to Love.” She’d sing along with the radio while she ironed the Kaufmans’ clothes. When the ironing was done, she’d cover her hair with a brightly colored scarf before vacuuming the carpets and mopping and waxing the floors.
Sometimes Mae would bring her own little girl with her. Mae’s daughter’s name was Frieda. Frieda was skinny as a string bean, with knobby, scabbed knees and the same golden-brown skin as her mother, and she wore her hair in two braided pigtails that stuck out from the sides of her head. Frieda was the same age as Jo, and she was wild. She and Jo would go racing around the backyard, climbing the cherry tree, playing Cowboys and Indians, coming back all sweaty and out of breath, with grass stains on their clothes. Bethie preferred to stay inside and play with her paper dolls, but Jo adored Frieda, and she’d stay in the kitchen with Mae even when Frieda wasn’t there, handing Mae things to iron and singing to the radio.
The Kaufmans had two cars, the New Car and the Old Car. The New Car, which lived in the garage, was that year’s new-model Ford, purchased with a discount, because Bethie’s daddy worked in the accounting office of the Ford plant. The Old Car, parked in the driveway, was the previous model, handed down to Sarah. When Bethie was five, the Old Car was a Ford Tudor sedan, with four doors and a pistachio-green body and a darker-green hardtop roof. On Fridays, Mommy would climb into the driver’s seat and lean forward with her hands tight on the wheel as she would drive them carefully from their new home to the old neighborhood, a mile away, where they used to live and where Sarah’s parents, Bethie’s bubbe and zayde, still lived, in a three-bedroom apartment on the corner of Rochester and Linwood, where the white-painted walls were stained brown from Zayde’s cigars, and the air smelled like tobacco, yeast, and flour, and good things cooking.
Bubbe and Zayde were old and small and wrinkly, their skin the color of walnut shells. They looked like the set of wooden Russian nesting dolls that stood on the mantel at home, because it seemed like every week, they had turned into newer, smaller versions of themselves. Zayde had stooped shoulders, and he wore black pants pulled up halfway to his chest and belted tight and short-sleeved white shirts so thin that Bethie could see the U-shaped neckline of his undershirt. The fringes of his tzitzit, his prayer shawl, would hang from the hem of his shirt. Bubbe was even shorter than her husband, even more stooped. Her thin iron-gray hair was pulled back and knotted at the base of her neck, and her dresses were shapeless and black. She would pinch Bethie’s cheeks and call her shayne maidele, and she’d always be baking something sweet when they arrived. She would slip Bethie little bits of dough, pillowy soft and crunchy with sugar, and Bethie would eat them when her mother wasn’t looking.
Bubbe and Zayde were very old. They hadn’t been born in America, like Bethie and her mother. They only spoke Yiddish, no English, and so Mommy would do their banking and pay their bills. While Mommy and Bubbe would sit at the dark wooden kitchen table with the checkbook, Zayde and Bethie would make the challah. With smiles and gestures, Zayde would show Bethie how to sprinkle the yeast over warm water and spoon in a little honey to make the yeast bloom. Bethie would tip a cup of oil into the giant wooden bowl. Zayde would crack the eggs and give Bethie a whisk to stir with. Zayde was small, but his gnarled hands were strong. He’d mix in the flour and, with quick motions with the heels of his hands, knead the dough, pushing it this way and that, flipping it over, gathering it up, and kneading it some more. When the bread was back in its oiled bowl, covered up and rising in the warmed oven, Bethie would go to the living room, where Bubbe kept a shoebox full of paper dolls for Bethie to dress up and colored pencils for her to draw with, or Zayde would walk her to the drugstore, where he would buy cigars for himself and Life Savers for Bethie. Back at their apartment, Bethie would study the single framed photograph