Schloyme’s Liquor Store

“Nice little girl, Stevens,” Schloyme said, leaning against the edge of the door into his liquor shop.

My father held a case of wine. “How much’ll you give me for her, Schloyme?” he called over his shoulder, then glanced into the front seat of the car to see if I was paying attention.

Indeed I was paying the kind of close attention a five-year-old does when her father might sell her to the tall, dark-haired man with grayish circles around his eyes, a man whose store smelled of sweet booze like her parents’ left-over cocktail glasses. He was kidding. I sat up straighter and watched.

“I’ll give you five dollars,” Schloyme said, sliding a toothpick across his full lips. Purplish lips, ugh! Inside, Schloyme’s wife, Zelda, sat on a stool behind the cash register. When I went inside with my father she smiled and offered me a candy, just like the witch in Hansel and Gretel and I knew how that story ended.

“Naw, she’s worth more than that,” my father said, sliding the wine into the back seat. He closed the door and peered down at me, lanky, dark-eyed Daddy. He grinned and turned back to Schloyme.

“Make it fifty and she’s all yours,” he said.

Only a joke. Not very funny. At all! Why had I ever wanted to come with him on this errand? I was so glad to see him when he drove into the yard after work that I leaped into his arms and begged to go.

“Okay, okay, kiddo.” His pet name for me. Well, sometimes for other people but I ignored that. Wasn’t that often. He unlatched my arms and legs. “Let me get into some clothes.” By that he meant, out of the suit and tie and into khakis and sneakers.

Friday afternoons he was free to be around for the whole weekend except in winter when he might have to stoke the coal furnace at the mill where he manufactured a fancy kind of dust. Golden dust. That’s what I saw when I went to the mill with him or with my mother when she took her car for gas. There was golden dust inside the mill and all over the turnaround. The small manufacturing business my parents owned ground up feldspar, mixed it with mysterious ingredients and sold it as a floor cleaner to supermarkets.

Worth-Spar, Inc., owned the old brick mill, a relic of an earlier Connecticut economy, and a hundred-acre mine site a few miles south of Cobalt. The mill itself was only two miles north of Cobalt, home to Mickey’s Cobalt Market and Schloyme’s Cobalt Liquor Store beside it. Shared the same concrete foundation, steps and roof. Surely they were not just the only Jewish merchants for miles, they were family kin as well. Yes, memory prompts that they were brothers-in-law. Close enough that Schloyme could send his son to Sadie to change a hundred dollar bill or borrow something from her cash register. Business partners, too, then.

Mining the surface feldspar demanded a loader and a truck which needed gas so the mill had a gas tank and an old red and white pump with a round gauge on top. When Mom pulled up beside it, one of the Italian workmen, Morris or Andy, would come out, wiping his oily hands on a towel and throw the pump lever up as he unscrewed the gas cap. An ancient engine ground into life in the throat of the pump. Morris and Andy who had worked for my father for thirty years, as had all of the men, were handsome, dark-skinned guys with big white teeth. And they treated us as if were royalty.

“So Italian. Always very charming,” my mother would say, dreamily. I loved the sound of the gas whizzing and gurgling into the tank and I liked the smell of the fumes.

Mom always put her cigarette out before we even got there. She didn’t have to pay anything, of course, it was just one big holding tank all the vehicles used. Company car, gas, etc., perks of being on the Board of Directors.

If that makes you think of a large, successful family corporation, shrink that thought to a one-man with one secretary/accountant and six or eight Italian stone blasters, loader operators, truck drivers and crushing and milling machine mechanics. Which altogether produced the golden dust. My father supervised the mill and sold bags of his Worth-Spar product from Boston to Washington, D.C.. Was he a tycoon? The last year of his life, 1960, my father told me, more than once, that he had finally broken five figures. Meaning he made over $10,000. Then he died at fifty-seven.

My father took me deer hunting on that quarry land two or three times. We’d put a candy bar in a jacket pocket, find the mittens which were somewhere in a distant drawer, it being only November and not yet cold enough. Then Dad would take out his .22 rifle which smelled deliciously of nitrate—almost salty—and gun oil. He checked the chamber to be sure it was empty, reset the safety button, watching all the time to be sure I was paying attention which indeed I was, then wrapped it in a flannel shirt and laid it carefully across the back seat of the car.

It would be a typical Connecticut fall day, not clear, not cloudy, just hazy enough to take the color out of the blue sky. An enervating sky, really. But the sky I lived with and there was my handsome father, limber as a Pinocchio, telling me how to stalk a deer. How to look for, yet never find, fresh deer droppings. If we saw some little green pellets, we called to each other like scientists on a dig. Were they fresh, Dad would ask me. They had no fresh gleam, I saw. Ah, very perceptive. Now we could go on our hunt confident we would not encounter our prey any time soon.

It could have been rabbit poop, he wasn’t sure and I wasn’t sure he could pull the trigger on either one. Yet we thrashed on through the skinny swamp oak and swamp maple trees, eyes down like Indian trackers, my father carrying the gun in the crook of his right arm, muzzle down, of course, ready to lift, sight and squeeeeze the trigger. Which would blow a bullet right into the deer. Or the bunny. I never thought of that.

Golden oak leaves crackled underfoot as we traipsed to a high point or what my father promised would be a high point but was only a rise of feldspar outcropping with a close view of more skimpy trees, some low dark laurel bushes we’d come back for at Christmas and not a sign of any living thing. I don’t believe one bird flew anywhere near central Connecticut that afternoon.

Secretly we each blamed each other. That is, I blamed him for not finding a deer and he probably blamed me for making him even think about shooting a deer for he was a very soft-hearted guy. I never considered the consequences of killing or, worse, injuring an animal on purpose. Just for the meat? Why not go to Mickey’s?

Gee, the deer hunting happened later than the Me auction. Let’s go back.

“Fifty, eh?” Schloyme turned his head to speak into the black interior of his shop. “Zelda, got fifty in the box?”

An indistinguishable sound from inside, not necessarily encouraging. Schloyme nodded as if it were, still moving the toothpick over his horrible lips. He wore grayish-pink eyeglasses. His belly hung over his belt, a little.

“Now let me see,” my father said, grinning widely now. He looked in on me. By then I was bolt upright and ready to escape. Run home right now! How could my very own father—

“I don’t know, Schloyme, let me think about it.”

He slid in beside me and held in his beautiful right hand the key to my salvation. He turned and said, “Don’t you worry, kiddo. I wouldn’t trade you for all the tea in China.”

I exhaled with relief. He wasn’t going to sell me. This time.

Mom's Meat

When rationing finally ended, I was about six, just in time to begin to feast on Sunday roast. We didn’t have much money but there was always meat: glorious standing rib roasts, tender lamb legs, crispy fatty pork loins and cheap hamburger from Milton’s once a week.

Every Wednesday Mom sent me to Milton’s store with the $30 grocery check Dad had given her. Milton would cash the check and pay off the tab we ran at his grocery-cum-post office in center of Middle Haddam, a tiny village time has yet to discover. Creaky board floors, trembling fluorescent lights and once a week, a delivery of fatty hamburger, the only real meat in the case if you didn’t count a fat roll of bologna and a smaller roll of liverwurst, sometimes spotted with blue mould. By Thursday, the hamburger would be doubtful, too.

Dust settled on Milton’s canned sardines and beets. Only the candy items moved well as we kids hung out waiting for the school bus and neighbors came to pick up their mail. Milton was an irascible old coot—probably almost fifty, then—who watched us kids like a hawk to be sure we didn’t steal a roll of Necco wafers.

“Don’t be looking in other people’s boxes, you hear?” he’d snarl if we idled too long in from of the post box wall. Each box had its four inch square glass door that opened with two brass knobs. Our combination was E1, P1. I always wondered if that combination would work with any other box. I never got to try them all but I could see who had mail and who didn’t before he drove me away.

Milton himself would unload the big canvas mail bags and furiously stuff the boxes, first letters, then junk mail. Only his daughter, Sandra, a good pal of mine, was allowed anywhere near the mail sorting room behind the boxes and he wasn’t nice to her, either. We all felt sorry for Sandra having such a father. Sometimes I’d dawdle at the postal window where I could watch him, just to annoy him. It sure did. “You got nothin’ else to do? Get outta here.”

“Why is Milton so crabby?” I asked Mom.

“Now dear, that’s not nice.” But she herself called him crabby or worse. “Probably because we don’t shop there enough.”

“But there’s nothing to buy. It’s all old stuff we don’t like.”

No comment from my mother. We did buy stuff but only last minute things like margarine or Uncle Ben’s rice.

“Do you have any cranberry sauce?”

“Of course we have cranberry sauce,” Milton would reply testily. “It’s Thanksgiving, ain’t it? Right over there next the peas.” Sure enough, the familiar purple and white Ocean Spray can, right next to the Green Giant peas but not the tiny, tender peas we preferred. We all knew better than to suggest items for Milton to stock. November was the only time Milton carried cranberry sauce.

Mom was ambivalent about shopping at Milton’s. She felt sorry his store never seemed to thrive although it was smack in the middle of Middle Haddam. But his prices were higher than Mickey’s, two miles up the road. If you google Middle Haddam you’ll find it in the dead center of Connecticut, far, far from the glorious moneyed suburbs of New York City. And yes, there is a Haddam and an East Haddam, but no North Haddam or West Haddam so I couldn’t tell you how the ‘Middle’ came to be. Take a guess.

Certainly Mickey’s store had more selection, almost as much as the A&P supermarket way over in Middletown, twenty minutes away. In Middletown (no relation to Middle Haddam at all) we could shop at an Italian greengrocer—exotic fruits and vegetables even in winter—an Italian bakery and a real Jewish deli: all three sold fabulous food. Oh, the late night pizza in the bakery after the bakers set the loaves to rise and the dripping, warm, freshly sliced pastrami on fresh, black rye bread. Artichokes, fresh string beans, brilliant tangerines, Christmas colors in the wood cases open to the weather all winter. Milton’s store would never compete with that.

Of course Milton knew it and it griped him. If more people would shop with him, he’d stock more inventory but until people bought more, the hell with us. Well, the third-class post office probably carried the store. Along with Necco Wafers.

Once a week we shopped at Mickey's. The store was brightly lit, the shelves were freshly stocked and it smelled of bread. By the cashier, those boxes of Entenman's coffee cakes, soft, raisony, thinly iced. Daddy loved these for his Sunday morning breakfast. He could eat almost the whole box. He was welcome to it. Mom and I thought they were way too sweet. And she never ate any breakfast but black coffee and a Chesterfield cigarette.

Behind the meat case, Mickey Adler or his kid Jackie, a taller and handsomer version of his old man, greeted Mom with a big smile, wiping his hands on his bloody white butcher apron. A short guy with a moustache under his big nose, Mickey could barely see over the top of the meat case.

“So, Sally, a nice Porterhouse today?” he rasped in his lower East Side Jewish accent. “Just got in some beauties. Let me show you.”

Before Mom could answer he ducked into the cooler and returned with a loin of beautifully marbled beef cradled in his arms like a child. “About like this?” he marked a spot with his fingers. “One? Maybe two?”

Mom shook her head. “One’s enough for today, thanks. Same as usual, about two inches.” She was already moving down the long case toward the pork. “And that pork loin looks good.”

Mickey nodded and set the beef down on the cutting counter. He swiped the long curved knife up and down against a sharpening rod and leaned the blade into the flesh. When the steak fell into his left hand he held it up like a gift for her to see before he slapped it on the scale.

“Sure you don’t want another?” Then he was wrapping it and fixing the paper with a yank of tape. He scribbled the price. His wife or a daughter-in-law would ring it up.

For Sunday dinner it had to be a Porterhouse steak or a rib roast. Alongside the roast, potatoes in the pan turned brown all over. When Dad carved, he first set aside a thin slice of the salty, caramelized dark outside, then worked into the pink and red center. I liked both: some of that outside and the rare inner.

If Mom was feeling fancy, she’d make Yorkshire pudding in the pan. But that meant no drippings for gravy, a high price to pay for one meal's crispy popover.

The next night would be cold sliced beef, then hash from roast bits and pieces browned in the fatty parts frizzled up with a dash Worcestershire Sauce and left-over potatoes or just poured over white bread. If there was enough, a divine sandwich in between these meals. My mother loved roast beef sandwiches. No horseradish, just salt. Her big, strong teeth ripped the rare beef like a tiger's.

Wednesday night, hamburgers from Milton’s or spaghetti with Milton’s burger in the sauce. Never, ever, any canned spaghetti sauce, only burger, tomato paste, garlic and water. Just as Lydia’s Family Table makes it. And spaghetti al dente, of course.

In the Middle of Nowhere, Connecticut, on thirty bucks a week, we ate well.

Mashed potatoes

When I die you can bury me in a coffin full of mashed potatoes and turkey gravy. Not just any old mashed potatoes but Mom’s mashed potatoes and Mom’s gravy.

I say that every year about this time. I don’t even have to close my eyes to hear the sound of the potato beater rackety-racketing in the heavy pot she used. I kept that old, wooden-handled tool for years until I wore it out.

No lumps! No ricer! No skins, either, and no milk, but real cream, baby, and butter, lots of it. My job to peel and cut up the spuds, put ‘em on to boil about half an hour before the turkey was ready. Keep an eye on ‘em so they didn’t overcook, then tell Mom they were ready. Too heavy for me to drain.

Drain and sit back on the electric burner—no gas in Connecticut then—to dry out a bit. Then the beating. If there were a lot of potatoes Dad would have to take a turn, Dad or anyone who waltzed into the tiny kitchen with an opinion about the food. Most just wanted to taste the gravy or pull a crispy bit of skin off the neck end.

When’s dinner ready? We all whined over the sounds of the football game.

Do I have time for another round? My father asked. He liked Manhattans. With a cherry in the bottom. (Oh God, Daddy.) He'd already pulled the cork from a bottle of French red from the case in the cellar.

Mom made a roux in the turkey pan and I swirled in the giblet broth until the gravy was as smooth and silky, as richly brown as the roasted turkey itself. Another glob of butter to round it out. Hope there'd be enough for tonight and tomorrow. And tomorrow.

Fill my plate, hell, fill my coffin with Mom’s mashed potatoes and just pour that gravy all over me. Then bury me. I’m done.

Ups and Downs

An alert fellow writer in Santa Fe, Tori Shepard Warner, keeps me up to date on the New Mexico literary scene now that I've left that delightful country. Tori’s novel, Now Silence, published last year by Sunstone Press, is chock full of Santa Fe history at the time of building The Awful Atom Bombs. Talking about bombs, Tori, I don’t know if you saw the horrible review last Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal gave my Santa Fe Dreamhouse. Ouch, big time.

What should an author do about a bad review? Nothing. It hurts but what can I say? He really, really didn’t like my book. End of story. But I saved the clipping.

I had lunch with another writer last week, landscape architect Jim Chadwick whose second book, Landscapes, was a hit for several months last year. It’s witty, artful and downright gorgeous. We talked writers’ doldrums while he downed a giant hotdog and I got outside a duck leg at the local Frenchie bistro in downtown Campbell. Jim sold his book at speaking engagements and then demand dropped off and the upshot is, he’s tired of flogging it. My enthusiasm for pitching my book is also wearing thin.

It’s the Famous Person whose books sell. Unless you are Sarah Palin, in the public eye again and again because she's cute and political, even big time writers have to keep up the popular persona or they drop out of sight. Alas, writers are not, per se, famous persons. Even Jane Smiley who won the Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres and has writ other wonderful books on and beyond the NYTimes best seller lists, has to do an 11-stop coast-to-coast book tour to plug her new novel, The Georges and the Jewels . Phew! Airplanes, hotels, dinners with strangers. (Although Smiley wrote that she loves travel. Perhaps before the security lines.) No way do I want to do that. Teaching is hard work and I’m too old to begin a career as a Famous Author, Professor of Writing and National Pundit. But there is some prestige and a great pleasure in being a small time author and pundit. I am grateful for old friends revisited and new friends made.

Here’s some consolation for tired authors. I had three goals in mind with Dreamhouse. #1: save my Santa Fe memories; #2: enjoy the appreciation of my readers, however many there may be; #3: sell the story rights. So far I’m two out of three.

Next book will be an E book. See of the Albuquerque Journal gets to review that.

No Cell

I felt naked at first without a cell phone although I couldn’t see the screen without my Walgreen readers and now that we can’t drive and gab I don’t really need a mobile phone. Plus I am way too old to even know anyone who texts or who would want to text me and if I talked, texted, photographed to upload to YouTube I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.

So I first loaned my cell to a stranger who needed it and when she brought it back, I accidently on purpose stashed it in the car cup holder—in case it might ring, Husband could be reminding me to pick up a quart of Lactaid, yes, that’s how old we are which isn’t all bad—only the cup had water in it and that was the end of my powerful cell phone. Kaput forever.

I do feel something is missing. Not the car keys, not my sunglasses or my wallet. I’ve lost the part of me that existed from the time I first signed a two-year contract with some gigantic phone company and delighted in the power of connecting from everywhere. That depended on a faceless network that owned a part of my life, subject to rate increases and counting minutes. In my real estate agent days the cell seemed to pay for itself over and over. But now that I’m pretty house-bound land lines are quite sufficient. Clearer, too.

Whoa, not totally sufficient. Just now the Husband cells me from a doctor’s office to ask a detail. Cells, yes. If you can Skype or Text or Message, why not Cell somebody?

What have I lost? The terrific charge into economic activity the cell allowed. But there isn’t any real estate activity and even if there were, I wouldn’t want to do it again. The business of sales owns the saleswoman. It turns every human contact into a sales lead. It changes the relationship between me and my fellow humans, makes me a shill for property sales. Forces me to edit every conversation to enhance the Pitch. In a saleswoman’s life, every friend, every family member, every person at the Thanksgiving table is a potential commission. You have to make nice, bring a pie and keep your opinions to yourself.

I am so glad to be back into my preSales life where I can be truly me, speak my mind freely and let the devil take the hindmost. It’s been seventeen years of slavery. Who says Elderhood is all bad? I can live without a cell. I’ve got a real Second Life.

Long-Term No Care

I don’t have Alzheimers but I might as well because I visited a neurologist in June to check myself. Mom had it. It wasn’t pretty and I’d like to spare Jim from having to tie me to the bed and change my diaper. That would sure cast a shadow over our lifetime romance. And break the retirement bank.

No Alzheimers, just normal, age-related cognitive disorder. Dis-fucking-order? Well, who cares? I forget a few things but I know where my keys and my glasses are and I can do the crossword and play bridge and recall your name. And the doctor says, no Alzheimers.

Great. Until I applied for long-term health insurance. That visit to the neurologist cost Medicare two hundred bucks but it may cost Jim and me thousands because no insurer will write a policy for anyone with any cognitive disorder.

Moral of story: if you visit a doctor for possible Alzheimers—or diabetes, the other NoNo—don’t ask your insurance company to pay for the visit. If it’s true that 70% of folks over 65 will require long term care, in or out of the home, then Jim and I are rather screwed.

Temperature rising, security falling

Ach du lieber (that means, 'heavens' in German, I think), my snorting and hacking and noseblowing cleared several checkout lanes at Trader Joe's this morning. I feel too warm. I tink I em catching a cod. Good time to go beddy bye with "Golden Dreams: California in an age of abundance, 1950-1963,” Kevin Starr’s surprisingly lively perspective on that generation’s economic, social and cultural forces. I’m only a hundred pages into this seventh volume of California history and I haven’t read any others. Yet. But this is good information for those of us who hope to live another fifteen years.

If you don’t live on the Left Coast you may not give a damn about the state's past or present. But you ought to. California is the eighth largest economy in the WORLD and we're in dire straits here because, Starr writes, it's the last territory of global abundance. Of plunder, if you like. That means, folks, that the good times are over. Forever.

Not just because of W. Bush or Wall Street’s greed but because we are at the end of empire.

Reset your expectations and hunker down.

Beware what went before

Writing from my old houses opens the forgotten files of memory. What comes up when I look into “New Hampshire”, that darling old Cape Cod in Epping, the first house I owned on my own? (You don’t really own a house if you share title.) Small, it had room for me and my kids, the dog and cat and a pair of guinea pigs, those boring little rodents people eat in South America. Probably taste like chicken, what doesn’t? Oh, and ten acres of worn-out pasture for my mare. All that remained after He went off with his Secretary.

A darling old house, I said. Do I recall stockings hung by the chimney, happiness closing over the wounds of divorce like frosting on a cake? Did we recover our aplomb and move into rosier futures?

No indeed. The events that come to mind are stark and brutal and the feelings these memories evoke are just as strong as thirty, forty years ago. The bleak loneliness of the empty cornfields, the misery of a tangled new growth woods, black as old bones in winter rains. Where was the value?

Oh yes, some jolly evenings by the fire and a very exciting chimney fire where I threw out the fire department and doused the flames myself. Power! In this house I learnt the intoxicating joys of home ownership, learnt that property makes a citizen the fire chief had to obey. Learnt that I could make it alone.

Memoirist, beware. The old dogs you have put to rest are only sleeping between some juicy brain cells. We are all the sum of our days and all the other days of our time here, newspaper headlines, shopping lists, phone calls to people whose names we could not recall even under hypnotism along with the flat tire on a deserted street, the horrible tantrums we threw for no good reason, things we lost, remorse.

Writing a novel must be easier. When those old dogs nip at the novelist’s elbow, she can throw them a little bone, give them a minor role, sleep on it and delete them the next day. Not so with memoir.

Unless you are writing only from the top of your pretty head.

“I grew up in a happy family. Mother and Father did not divorce nor did they bless me with siblings. They gave me everything I ever needed and a lot more.”

Riveting, isn’t it?

No, if you want to write your life, be prepared to suffer the old slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and at the same time suffer the remorse of knowing now how futile it all seems.

First Lust

So much for my grand teacherly theory. Getting my memoir to fit into this blog is like stuffing boa constrictors into a pillowcase. One little distraction and they’re all out. Now I’m not sure I can blog a whole memoir. If you’d like to try, post your ravings as a comment here and let us see if we should shoot it or feed it.
Now, having said that, I feel better. I can tell you a little more about that knee wall house. It was the location of my first lust.
I was ten and chubby. Thick glasses, stringy ponytail. No sibs—not with those parents—and clumsy. Felt large, dumb, always opening my big mouth to say wrong things. I was grateful for the well-adjusted four kids older and younger than I right across the field next door. Yes, field. Middle Haddam, a village in Nowhere, central Connecticut. Woods, big Connecticut River down the hill half a mile away, remains undeveloped to this day.
When the neighbors got hay for their sheep these kids and I played Doctor and Giant in the neighbors’ haybales. That is, we took down our pants and lay on on the scratchy hay top of each other for no reason I could think of, our legs opened the way we did for the doctor. Like babies having their diapers changed. Unconcerned. Being poked between the legs was rather pleasant. Being noticed by Big Kids was even better. But this was not lust, this was wanting to be one the Big Kids.
The older girls, ten or so, I six or seven, were nervous about a Grownup finding us. Which they did. Their mother called my mother and my mother smacked me hard and made me walk home across that field without even my underpants. I was angry, embarrassed, perhaps shamed, for the first time. I began to understand the Great Grownup Secret: Things done with bottom parts were bad.
“Oversexed.” My mother and father were grim. “We must control this.” Serious spankings, tears, vows to never again, but then again a few more times, furtively. Still, not a twinge of lust, just shameful, secret playing at sex.

But when I was ten, chubby and foolish, I fell in love with a younger brother of a friend of my parents, an older teen my mother said was just a dumb farm boy. He never said a single word but who cared, to me he was a god on long blue-jeaned legs. A younger version of Daddy, now that I look back on it. I flung myself into his surprised lap in our living room, right under my childish bedroom with the cowboy wallpaper and snuggled up to his newly bearded chin. I loved feeling his lean body under me. His manly body stirred something in my bottom parts. I ground my ass into his lap. I wanted to crawl all over him.

Oversexed, all right. My mother must have had a heart attack watching me try to seduce him. He was probably horrified. In spite of her fierce scoldings, the hairbrush, even the belt, the farmboy lit the flame in my groin. A flame she could never, in spite of mighty efforts, extinguish.