Jew Store by Stella Suberman Page A

floor. My mother tried to pick Miriam up in case she might be tiring, but Miriam fought against it. Joey was running ahead, trying to produce sparks on the marble steps with the new taps on his heels.
    As my mother told the story, she was already sitting at the kitchen table, a glass of tea in front of her, when Aunt Sadie came in. Aunt Sadie had to be in on everything, my father would always say, “like without her nose in it, the world can’t turn.”
    My Aunt Sadie was not a favorite of my father’s, chiefly because of this. As the oldest child, she perhaps saw her role as family protector, at which she indeed had had a lot of practice. When the family had first arrived in America, she had been the one to go out and see what was what and to get the family settled. Now, even though everyone had moved out from under her wing in one direction or another, she clung to her old power base as adviser and arbiter. “As boss,” my father said.
    When Aunt Sadie came into the room now, Miriam was lying on the floor under the spidery gray enameled legs of thestove, pretending to be drinking from one of her old bottles that my grandmother still had. My mother knew her sister would have something to say about a three-year-old child playing like this, but Miriam had already made it clear that she was in charge of herself. She was, as they say nowadays, firmly inner-directed.
    The house would have been quiet. My grandfather would have been in his pushcart warehouse for hours; my mother’s younger sister, my Aunt Hannah, in school; and her brother, Uncle Philip, the youngest in the family, in school as well. My mother’s older brother, my Uncle Meyer, was married and no longer lived at home.
    Aunt Sadie sat down. She glanced at Miriam and, to my mother’s surprise, only shrugged. Aunt Sadie perhaps sensed this was to be a special, and intense, convocation and was saving her arguments. My grandmother brought her a glass of tea.
    My mother was working on a way to open it up. Finally she got out that my father wasn’t happy. A few words, a lot said.
    To give time for this to sink in, she took a sip of tea. My mother, of course, drank tea in the European-Russian-Jewish manner: The glass went to the mouth with a finger curled around the spoon to keep it from flopping into the eye, and then, as an economy measure, the tea was sipped through a fragment of a sugar cube held between the front teeth. My mother finished her sip and repeated to my Aunt Sadie, “He just ain’t happy.”
    If my father wasn’t crazy about Aunt Sadie, she returned the favor. Miriam and I have always agreed that Aunt Sadie’s antagonism toward my father was not without its envy component. Vetted or not by a matchmaker, my father obviously had an appeal that her Izzy didn’t, her Izzy having come directly from the immigrant pool.
    Aunt Sadie said now to my mother, “If it makes him happy to be happy, so let him be happy.”
    Even in later years it seemed never to have occurred to mymother that what Aunt Sadie had said was ridiculous, though she said she
was
perplexed. So she answered Aunt Sadie only, “So who don’t it make happy to be happy?”
    After everyone had been served, my grandmother would have come to the table with her own glass of tea, moving leisurely, in an easy flow. My grandmother was never in a hurry. In the taking of tea there was a gentle sliding into her chair, a thoughtful spooning of a dollop of jam from the pot on the table, a letting fall of the jam into the glass, a slow stirring.
    At this small klatch, my grandmother would, as always, be in a black long-sleeved shirtwaist top and a black floor-length full skirt. She was a little woman—perhaps “minute” is the better word—who seemed overwhelmed by fabric.
    My grandmother neither spoke nor understood English. When English was spoken around her, she waved her hands about her head as if brushing off spider