Stephen Dixon - Frog

“‘You won’t believe this,’ my mother told me. ‘No one would if I swore on a stack of bibles and had motion pictures with sound on them plus six of the most reputable witnesses. Your father called his mother on our wedding night to say I was a virgin. Right from the hotel room. It must have been 2:00 a.m., or maybe it was seven or eight, so the next day. He thought I was still asleep. He just sat at the edge of the bed, placed the call through the lobby desk and whispered in Yiddish to her “She’s all right, one piece.” Then I heard her say back in Yiddish “Good, for tragedy for you and me and everyone connected with your marriage if she was anything but.” Your father taught me Yiddish just so I could speak to her. I’d taken German in high school and did well at it so I had a head start. Every other day for an hour he sat down with me for conversation in it. First the curses: Gehn bud and so on. Then a few weeks before the marriage he asked me to have my father get me tutors for several hours a day because I wasn’t learning fast enough to be fluent by the time of the wedding. She was an ignorant woman. Let’s face it: a tough shrewd illiterate peasant who loved what she was and never wanted to be anything else. Who wouldn’t even learn our yes or please or thank you. His father, who got out in the world more as a darner and weaver, at least spoke some broken English and apologized for not knowing more. You of course know you’re named after her: Hinda — Howard. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but she died three months before you were born. I always hated to say this, but that was the happiest pregnancy I had. With Vera, which should have been the best since I had nine months free of my mother-in-law, your father was already in trouble.’”

“My mother talking: ‘My mother and mother-in-law were sitting at the main wedding table with me. “Let me see the nice jewelry Simon gave you,” my mother-in-law said. So I held my hands out to show her the diamond watch and engagement ring, both of which she’d seen ten times before, but never in front of my mother. I say “my mother,” since if my father were at the table at the time she never would have asked it. She knew he’d see right through her immediately and tell her off. Oh, my father was on to her from the start. He was born of peasants but moved himself to the city quickly and became a man of the world. Anyway, all this was in Yiddish, you understand. Not my mother. Besides English she spoke Polish and German, but never in front of us. That they only did when they got into fierce arguments. Then my mother-in-law said “Why don’t you take them off so I can really have a look at them?” So I took the ring and watch off and held them out. She took them and turned them over and over and said things like “Very nice, very expensive, my son has very good tastes and knows how to take care of a lady. Listen, my darling,” she said, “let me hold them for you while you’re on your honeymoon. I heard those Spanish islands can be very unsafe places for Americans,” and she started putting them in her bag. Did I let her? You must think I was crazy. She wanted to keep them to see if I was going to be a virgin that night. If your father told her I wasn’t, and he’d never lie to her on anything, she would make him leave me and she’d keep the jewelry. And if she was told I was a virgin, which I was but she never believed him because of my good looks and dancing in all those Broadway shows and with almost nothing on sometimes, she would have kept the jewelry anyway because she would have said he was lying to protect me. So I told her no, if I feel unsafe before we go I’ll let my mother hold them for me. And if I don’t feel unsafe till we’re on the cruise, I’ll leave them in a safe they must have on the ship. That way I kept my jewelry. And when he told her the next morning I was a virgin-called her just for that purpose, right from the hotel lobby phone before we went in for breakfast — she had no reason to argue with him about it. As it was, I had to sell all my good jewelry months after your father went on trial, as the lawyer costs and your father not working had made us almost dead broke. Good thing she was gone by then or she would have died during the trial or when he went to prison. What am I saying? — she’d never let anything hurt herself. She would have just pretended she got some kind of heart attack, and then he would have got very sick over it in prison and perhaps died. Maybe I’m being too hard on her, but for the first ten years of my marriage that woman ruined my life. If ever there was a real witch in this world…. Well, I could tell you stories’”

“A story his mother liked to tell. ‘Make what you want of this. I suppose it shows what a devil I was. I was playing hooky. First time too, and I walked around the neighborhood, feeling free but not really finding anything interesting to do — I always had to be stimulated — so I walked around my school a few times. Dumb of me when you think of it, but I was probably trying to make some point. I was pigheaded and a tomboy too. So I yelled up to Miss Brody’s window — the assistant principal and a real doll. She’d say “Your principal is your pal; that’s also how to spell it.” I loved her. Always very kind to me. I yelled “Miss Brody, Miss Brody, here I am”—she wasn’t Irish, you know. Brody could be a Jewish name. From a town in Poland where they congregated. They came over here. The immigration official would try to pronounce their names — Dyzik, Pytzik — and say “I can’t say it, how am I supposed to spell it?” So he’d look at their cards which had where they were from and what shots they got and say “Brody, you’re from Brody so your name’s now Brody, a good American one.” You didn’t fight it, if you could in English, since you were afraid of being detained another week or sent back. She was the first Jewish assistant principal in the system, it was said. The public schools were dominated by the Irish then. They probably thought she was one, with that name, but it’s surprising it first went to a woman. Maybe because there were so few Jewish men teachers because the pay was so bad. Worse than anyone’s. But if they didn’t know she was Jewish, then really no surprise, because they probably had about a dozen Irish women assistant principals by then, so what was one more? But I yelled “You can’t see me, Miss Brody, but I can see you.” I couldn’t, but that’s what I kept yelling to get her attention. “I’m playing hooky, Miss Brody, what do you think of that? I’m not going to school today or any other day, or if I do, only for a day a week and only the day I want.” I’m telling you, I was something. She finally came to the window and said “You come straight upstairs, dear, or you’ll be in deep trouble, I hate to say.” I said something like “Why should I? I’m having too much fun walking around free as a bird.” Just then she said “Watch out, dear, someone’s coming,” and slammed the window. Everyone knew my father and was afraid of him. He was out for his daily hour stroll from his café. Cane he didn’t need, for show, always the freshly blocked homburg. I thought it was the truant officer she meant and started to run. But he had already come up behind me and put the hook part of the cane around my neck, grabbed me by the scruff of it and marched me into the school right up to Miss Brody’s office. Then he threw me on the floor there and said “You’re too easy on her. She yells like that from the street at you or stays out of school without our permission, this is what you do,” and he lifted me up by my hair and slapped me hard on my left ear. Oh, I heard ringing and buzzing, besides all the pain, and when the noises stopped I heard him saying “And maybe even harder to her, maybe much harder. She’ll learn, and her parents will only thank you if you smack her like that. That’s a promise.” I was deaf in that ear for weeks, but he wouldn’t let my mother take me to a doctor for it. I still only have about ten to twenty percent of my hearing there. Maybe it was because of his slap. But maybe it was bad before that and his slap made it worse. I don’t want to apologize for him but I do want to be fair. Or maybe it was always that bad, from birth, or even before, and we only became aware of it after he slapped me and I started complaining I couldn’t hear in that ear, to take some of the blame of playing hooky off me. And then who knows? Maybe I was a hundred percent deaf in that ear before he hit me and his hitting me improved it by ten to twenty percent, but still made us realize my hearing problem. I don’t remember any hearing problems before, but that’s not saying there wasn’t. Probably not. But Miss Brody. She was a lovely person. The first to urge me to be a doctor or lawyer or something substantial. But she never so much as touched me after that when before she used to hug me whenever she saw me in the halls or so. And other times shove or nudge me gently when she thought I wasn’t doing things just right when she knew I had it in me to.’”