“To me, yes. She says it happened to Alex. He says it did happen to him but nothing about a kitchen or pair of pants, which she seems to remember hearing he did it in, or my dad. That he was in a bathtub by himself — one of the first times. Till then he had always bathed toe-to-toe with Jerry, but Frieda throught they were too grown-up for that so had it stopped — when he suddenly shit. Two big—”
“Come on, spare me.”
“So he called out that he’d just made kaka in it. Frieda came, grabbed some of it out of the water and put it in his face. He said he never kakaed again in the tub or anywhere but in the potty, or at least that he doesn’t remember being anything but toiletized after that.”
“How about you?”
“I don’t know if what Frieda did to me stopped me from having kaka accidents or even was the last time she put it in my face. I do think it happened to me. For sure. Memory of it’s too vivid for it not to have happened, but I guess that doesn’t have to be the case.”
“So, are you going to see her?”
“Yes, I think so, you mind? I had Olivia two hours today, so I’ve at least done part of my daily share. When I come back I’ll take her to the park or something and you can get back to work.”
He goes to his mother’s. Has the keys, lets himself in. “Hi, hi, it’s me,” he says, walking through the living room. They’re having coffee and cookies in the kitchen. Frieda sees his mother look up at him and smile and turns around. “Oh my, look who’s here,” she says. “What a nice thing to do,” and holds out her arms. He bends down and kisses her cheek while she hugs him around the waist. Still that strong scent of that German numbered cologne she always wore. He wondered on the subway if he should bring the shit incident up. If it did happen to him or has he been imagining it all this time? If he has been imagining it, that’d say something about something he didn’t know about himself before. But he’d never bring it up. It would embarrass her, his mother, ultimately him. Or immediately him, seconds after he asked it.
“You didn’t bring the little one,” Frieda says. “Or your wife. I never met them and was hoping.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t even think of it. Maybe no time to. When my mother called you were coming, I just ran right down.”
His mother asks if he wants coffee. “Black, I remember, right?” Frieda says.
“Always black,” his mother says.
Frieda talks about her life. He asked. “As I told Mrs. T., we’re still living in the same small house in Ridgewood and we’ll probably die there. That’s Ridgewood Brooklyn, you know, not Queens. There, just over the line, it’s always been very different. But our area’s been much improved. Young people are living in. Excuse me, moving. Many good whites, blacks, Spanish — hard-working people, with families, and honest. You’d like this: some artists, even. For years we couldn’t go out on the streets after six. Even during the days it was dangerous sometimes. We needed escorts — you had to pay for them; they simply didn’t volunteer — just to go shopping.” The same high reedy voice, trace of a German accent. Must be a more accurate way — a better way — to describe the distinctiveness of it, but it’ll do for now. “Martin is as well as can be expected for someone his age.” He asked. “He still does all the baking at home. Breads, rolls, pies, cakes — he does one from the first two and one from the second two every other day. I don’t understand how we stay so thin, and he still only uses real butter, a hundred percent. The baking company gave him a good pension, and with the Social Security we both get — Dr. T. helped set it up for me. I really wasn’t eligible to be paying for it at the time, but oh my God, could he finagle. For good reasons mostly, I’m saying, for he knew we’d need it later. So, we live all right and have no complaints other than those every old person has. But Mrs. T. looks wonderful, thank God,” and she knocks twice on the table. “Such a tough life, but she never changes, never ages. She’ll always be a beautiful bathing beauty and a showgirl, which she only stopped being, you know, a few years before I came to work for her. She’s amazing,” and squeezes his mother’s hand. “The parties you gave then — I still see them in my head.”
“That’s what I just told you about yourself,” his mother says. “Look at her. Everything’s the same. She doesn’t age.”
“No no no no.” She closes her eyes modestly. Those stove hoods for eyelids. Not stove hoods but something like them. Roll tops of roll-top desks. Her sister is very sick. He asked. “She lives with us now. She has since Fritz died. I don’t want to say this, but it’s possible she won’t live out the year. Age is awful, awful, when it gets like that.”
“Awful,” his mother says. “No matter how good you feel one day; at our age, the next you could snap, go.”
Her nephew married and moved to Atlanta and bought a house. He asked. “They want to have children. Buy a house after you have a child, Martin and I told them, but they wanted one first. He’s an air controller, went to a special school for it. Six to six for months. We loaned him five thousand dollars of our savings for the house. After all, he’s our only nephew and we love him, and his wife is like our only niece. So he’s like our only son in many ways. You were like one of my children when I worked here. I can still see you pulling your wagon down the street. Red, do you remember?”
“I do if he doesn’t. It said Fire Chief on the sides.”
“I don’t remember that,” Frieda says, “but it probably did, since it was that color red. A very fine wagon — very sturdily made — and with a long metal handle he pulled. You were so small you couldn’t even carry it up to the sidewalk.”
“It was even almost too heavy for me,” his mother says. “We got it from our friends the Kashas. It was their son Carl’s.”
“They were so old then they must be both dead now.”
“He did about fifteen years ago. Bea — Mrs. Kasha — moved to Arizona and I never heard from her again.”
“Too bad. Nice people. But I’d do most of the carrying up the steps for his wagon. The neighborhood was very safe then so we’d — your mother and I — let you go by yourself to the stores you could get to without crossing the street. Think of anyone letting their child do that today. He wasn’t even four.”
“He was so beautiful that today he’d be kidnapped the first time.”
“You’d have a note in your hand. It would say this, when he went to Grossinger’s, which is where he wanted to go most: ‘Three sugar doughnuts, three jelly doughnuts,’ and perhaps some Vienna or their special onion rolls and a challah or seeded rye. You had a charge there, didn’t you?”
“At all the stores on Columbus. Gristede Brothers. Hazelkorn’s kosher butcher. Al and Phil’s green grocers. Sam’s hardware and so on. But sometimes we gave him money to buy. Shopkeepers were honest to a fault then, and when he did carry money I think the note always said to take the bills out of his pocket and put the change back in.”
“It would have had to. So you’d go around the corner with your wagon and park it outside the store. Then you’d go inside and give the note to the saleslady, who was usually Mrs. Grossinger—”
“She passed away I think it was two years ago. She had a bad heart for years but never stopped going in every day.”
“Oh, that’s too bad; a very nice lady. I hope the store was kept up. There aren’t any good home bakeries where we are.”
“Her son runs it and even opened a branch store farther up Columbus.”
“Good for him. So Mrs. Grossinger or the saleslady would give you whatever was on the note and you’d put the bags in your wagon one by one and start home. But sometimes I got so worried for you, or your mother did where she’d send me after you, that I’d follow you all the way there and back — maybe he was around five when he did this, what do you say?”