Alterations

ALTERATIONS

Stories

by

Rita Plush

Many of these stories hark back more than fifty years, unwritten stories that lived in me the way stories do, as a bit of memory – a certain smell, the turn of a head, or the particular sound of a voice. Or, in the case of Love, Mona, in a quilted dime-store night table and a sleeping Mexican painted on a cupboard door.

My Brooklyn stories were told through the eyes of a child growing up with the rumble of the El along 86th Street, walking with her mother in her big-shouldered mouton coat, as she did her errands and talked with the shopkeepers. The walkup apartment house where she lived with her family, the damp steamy smell of the lobby where the metal taps on her shoes made a satisfying clicking sound as she ran up and down the marble steps. The seamstress in her apartment building, her friend’s father who seldom spoke, the people her parents knew, the relatives – her ear pressed to the wall, hearing talk that was not for her to hear – the people they spoke of in Yiddish so the child would not understand.

Decades later, they called to me, the memory of them morphing, changing, altering, becoming characters that were and were not them. And I kept writing about the loving and sometimes mysterious bonds of family. I dressed my characters, gave them habits and a particular way to speak, and put them down on the pages, wanting things they could not have, remembering things they wanted to forget. They mended and they sewed, they owned stores and boutiques, they jerry-made contraptions and carved dollhouse furniture. They dug in the dirt and planted tomatoes, they hunted for bear and did a jigsaw puzzle in a far off mountain cabin. Makers and fixers, they had the creative qualities derived from my parents and passed down to me.

Beginning with Frances, the young child grieving for her mother in Love, Mona, these stories come full circle to Rusty in Feminine Products, pregnant but unmarried, desperate to make a family for her unborn child. Family is a recurrent theme in my stories.

I hope they keep you turning pages, interested and entertained as the characters become ‘altered’ by their circumstances and continue to make their way in life.

ALTERATIONS

Stories

by

Rita Plush

Licensed and Produced through

Penumbra Publishing

www.PenumbraPublishing.com

SMASHWORDS EDITION

EBOOK ISBN/EAN-13: 978-1-938758-14-0

Copyright 2013 Rita Plush

All rights reserved

Also available PRINT ISBN/EAN-13: 978-1-938758-15-7

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Licensing Note: This ebook is licensed and sold for your personal enjoyment. Under copyright law, you may not resell, give away, or share copies of this book. You may purchase additional copies of this book for other individuals or direct them to purchase their own copies. If you are reading this book but did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, out of respect for the author’s effort and right to earn income from the work, please contact the publisher or retailer to purchase a legal copy.

~TABLE OF CONTENTS~

Introduction

Copyright Information

Praise for Alterations

Author Acknowledgement

Brooklyn Brisket

Soup

Love, Mona

Dance with Me

Halter Tops and Pedal Pushers

Alterations

The Blatts

Queen of Sheba

Keria

Odette

Red Dress and Curls

Mixed Bag

No Raving Beauty

Turnaround

Going by the Book

Damaged House

What He Had

Signs

Feminine Products

About the Author

~PRAISE FOR ALTERATIONS~

Among all the touching insights into a past that seems to haunt these stories by Rita Plush, I hear a character say, Tell me you understand. Anxieties of not knowing or of not knowing how to make the other person understand tell the upsetting truths of these vivid fictions and create their curious momentum.

–Joseph McElroy, author of Night Soul and Other Stories and the forthcoming Cannonball

Rita Plush’s short stories hold you on the edge of heartbreak. She writes eloquently of plucky children who have not been able to experience enough of childhood, but who weave tenderness out of whatever emotional threads they can string together.

–Maureen Brady, author of Folly and Ginger’s Fire

Rita Plush has written stories which deal with the evolution of one man. Outwardly, he deals with problems in teaching teenage boys and inwardly, with himself and his failures. Her stories are well written and draw in the reader; we will certainly be open to publishing her stories in the future.

–Elizabeth Kircos, Fiction/Non-Fiction Editor, The MacGuffin

All these pieces feel so immediate and alive – the voices, every detail – like memoir. They’re intimate, and funny, and full of surprises. They’re big – about The Big Subjects, love, death, sex, loss, longing. A number of these stories are told from the point of view of a young child, sharp-eyed, all senses on high alert. I especially enjoyed Love, Mona. The intimate, beautiful portrayal of grief and hope ends with a wordless gesture so tender and expressive, I will never forget it.

–Mary Azrael, Editor, Passager

Good and thoughtful stories that win the reader over. More truth than a reality show, and more vivid than most fiction. The wants, needs, satisfactions – and, yes, disappointments – of the characters are recognizable from our own stories.

–Phil Wagner, Editor/Publisher, Iconoclast

~AUTHOR ACKNOWLEDGEMENT~

My thanks go to my dear husband Herb, and my family and friends who continue to encourage and support my work. Kudos to the Bayside Writers Group, including Hannah Garson, Muriel Lilker, Ted and Roberta Krulik, who have helped make these stories better. I offer my appreciation to Melody Lawrence and Phil Wagner for their wonderful insights and critiques on earlier versions of these stories. I am indebted to Pat Morrison at Penumbra Publishing who helped me understand that a collection is much more than a group of stories put between the covers of a book. Lastly, I would like to thank Joseph McElroy in whose Masters Fiction Classes I first learned about the art and craft of the short story.

The stories included in this collection have appeared in the following publications, some in slightly different versions. I offer my thanks and acknowledgements to those editors.

The Blatts in The East Hampton Star (1996)

Keria in The Alaska Quarterly Review (1997)

Brooklyn Brisket in Passager, Issue 30 (1997)

No Raving Beauty in Roswell Literary Review (1998)

Soup in Passager, Issue 27 (1999)

Odette in Dark Regions (2000)

Alterations in New York Stories (2000)

Red Dress and Curls in Bibliophilos (2000)

Love, Mona in Bibliophilos (2002)

Halter Tops and Pedal Pushers in The Iconoclast (2002)

Feminine Products in The Iconoclast (2006)

Damaged House in The MacGuffin (2010)

What He Had in The MacGuffin (2011)

Going by the Book in The Iconoclast (2012)

Mixed Bag in The East Hampton Star (2012)

The last story, Feminine Products, is a preview excerpt from my newest novel, while the first two short pieces are about my parents, Molly and Max Weingarten, in whose loving memory I have dedicated this collection.

–Rita Plush

ALTERATIONS

Stories

by

Rita Plush

BROOKLYN BRISKET

Long before my mother was strapped to a wheelchair and fed on beige fluid that dripped into her stomach, she could stand and cook for twenty as easily as I might toast a bagel. She is gone now, and often when I think of her, I think of all those steaming, braising, frying pots of deliciousness. But mostly I think brisket.

Sometimes it was splashed with a healthy dose of Manischewitz, or served with raisins a-swim in Hunt’s tomato sauce, with whole cranberries or walnuts. It was packed in brown sugar, and once in a pepper and lemon crust, so tart it made us choke. But no matter its reception at my mother’s table, her affection for that salted, rinsed, and near bloodless koshered meat never waned. Now that she is gone, it is a particular brisket I remember, a Brooklyn brisket, of years and years ago.

I was maybe ten, eleven years old, walking with my mother in her mid-thirties, those prime years of her womanhood, when there was about her such health and verve, such an aliveness to the way she moved. It gleamed on her skin that day, and in her eyes, and in the reddish upsweep of her hair.

Right off the train from A & S on Fulton Street, we walked to our neighborhood butcher – she in one of her cotton printed dresses with the gored skirt, self-belt, and short sleeves that showed the freckles on her arms, and me, sweating in the wool of my new light-blue princess coat with the navy blue velvet collar.

With a handkerchief, my mother patted the swell of her breasts showing out of the sweetheart collar of her dress. It must be ninety degrees, she complained. For the life of me, I can’t understand why you’re wearing that coat.

Because... I said, smoothing my collar, tapping each velvet button, if they put it in the box, it would get all wrinkled.

Behind a wooden table in the butcher store, a man with black curls on his head smiled right away at my mother, little dents appearing in his cheeks. He handed me a thick slice of salami. There on the sawdusted floor I slid, sucking the fat and salt out of the meat, looking down at my buttons, not up at the slanted-top display case, upon which parsleyed trays lay, filled with the meat and bones of animals.

Bloodied apron around his waist, a yarmulke on his curls, he sharpened his big knife on a silver rod, wrist swiveling, red lines of blood in his knuckles, all the time looking at my mother, who sometimes looked at him and then looked away. His eyes shining, the dents in his cheeks deepened. I didn’t like his big shiny smile on my mother, so instead I watched the blade slice into the cape of fat atop the brisket’s hump.

Lean, my mother said, make it nice and lean.

He bunched the fingers on one hand and shook them near his ear, his eyes at the top of her dress. Fat, you want a little fat on it. That’s where the taste is.

The blade probed and poked the raw meat, severing all fat, save a thin white overlay on top that would smoke up the kitchen when the burner flame got too high.

He folded and taped brown paper around the brisket and then looked up at my mother. Very slightly, his head moved up and down, as if he were asking and answering a question in his mind and, when he spoke, his voice was slow and serious, as though he was explaining something that my mother might not understand. Like I said, Mrs. Gluck, not for every customer would I run out to Queens, but for you I would deliver.

Then, to me he said, Where did you get such a beautiful sister? Bloodied fingers offered more salami.

She’s not my sister, she’s my mother, and I’m full from the last piece, I snapped, pulling on my mother’s hand to leave.

In the street I asked my mother, Why did he say you were my sister?

I don’t know... was her smiling answer, and once again she dabbed her chest with her handkerchief.

SOUP

When I was ten, I was the same size as Grandma standing on a child’s bench at the stove. Onions sizzled in chicken fat, and stuffed cabbage puffed and steamed while Grandma squinted through the fog of her eyeglasses, flinging salt into the cookers, stirring, tasting, drizzling coarse grains of pepper from her hard fingers.

But it was the life bubbling on the wooden chairs around the table, and one meal in particular at Grandma’s, that takes me back to the Bronx kitchen ... my mother in her upsweep and shoulder pads, my father in his Adler elevators, and Grandma ladling soup from a pot she cradled like an infant. "Ess, Sammela, ess," she said to my father. Eat, Sammy, eat.

Eyes closed, my father noisily sucked broth from the spoon. No one makes soup like you, Mommy.

My mother, sitting stiffly in her chair, made it known by her posture and grim expression on her otherwise pretty face that she did not want soup, or anything Grandma cooked, with excuses at the ready should anyone inquire. I am not hungry. I have already eaten. I am on a diet.

I liked Grandma’s soup with its dewdrops of fat glistening on top, but I was afraid of the little pin-feathers still on the cooked chicken floating in my plate. I was even more afraid of the vein on my father’s right eyelid, throbbing like a heart. It always gave me cramps to watch it. Any minute he was going to let someone have it. But when he started talking Yiddish, I knew it would not be me.

His words were for Grandma, who had to sit on two telephone books so she could reach the table like a grownup. I remember her hand moving a magnifying glass above the strange print on The Jewish Daily Forward. ‘The Forvitz,’ she called it. Once in a while she looked up from it at my father, and then went back to her page.

My father was shouting now, and I heard ‘raffle’ mixed in with the Yiddish words, and right away I knew the whole story. It was about Grandma at the wedding the previous week and how she went around with her raffles. Like the photographer, she didn’t miss a table. Her pencil’s square tip poised above her purseful of chances for the yeshiva, the orphanage, the burial society. Embarrassing my father. Hadn’t he said he would buy every last one of her raffles? What was she – a pushcart peddler from Orchard Street?

My father was an American now, ‘a provider’ of a Queens address, piano lessons, and the swaying tails on my mother’s new mink stole. But pull out those raffle tickets, and he was an immigrant in the tenements again, six years old and no father, hawking soap and towels outside the public baths on Allen Street.

Grandma stopped reading, and her head with its thinning hair done up in pincurls, tilted up at my father, who stood and was still talking as he turned and left the room.

A moment later he returned, looking very serious, and comical too, what with Grandma’s big black purse slung over the arm of his double-breasted suit. He set the purse in front of Grandma. With great ceremony, she opened the purse. Eins ... zwei ... drei... One, two, three, she counted, totaling the unsold raffles. She handed them over to my father, who, with equal ceremony, reached for his wallet, pulled out ones and fives, and slid them across the table.

Heavy silence filled our Lincoln Zephyr as it wheeled us over the Tri-Boro Bridge. My mother rolled down the window and said to the night, "What’s wrong with my soup?"

LOVE, MONA

She opened the door and snapped on the lights. I could hear us breathe as we walked silently through the hot apartment. From my closet and my drawers she took out clothes for me to wear and folded them into a brown bag. Then she asked me if there was anything else I wanted for the time bing.

"I don’t want a time bing! I said, arms strapped across my chest. I sat down on my bed. Stay here ... wait..."

She crouched to my height and said, Frances... and it seemed her voice too had shrunk. Frances, she whispered, so that I leaned forward to hear. Mommy can’t come back. Remember ... we talked about it? Be a big girl. She pulled on my arm. C’mon, Frances, my legs are killing me. She pinched up her slacks. Her humped, purple very close veins bulging out her skin made me get out of there.

At the doorway of my mother’s room, I saw her quilted night table. I ran in, threw my arms around it, and rested my head on its flowery top. Her brassieres were inside.

Let’s go, Frances, Mona said, tapping on my shoulder.

But I need this, I said, hugging the night table. And this. I slipped my hand under my mother’s pillow and pulled out her nightgown. I handed it to Mona while I tried to open a drawer of the night table. It didn’t slide right out, so I moved it side-to-side the way my mother did. I took the nightgown from Mona and put it in the drawer and closed it. I lifted the front legs and sloped the night table toward Mona. I need to take this, I said.

Okay ... but be careful ... just be careful... she said. She went first, backward, lugging the night table out of the apartment and down the steps to her floor.

Paul opened the door. His round smooth cheeks were pink. He was having a conniption because he worked like a dog and couldn’t get a decent meal around here. What the hell is that you’re schlepping? he said.

Relax a minute, Paul, Mona said, and backed us into the stork room. Mona had been waiting for the stork to come, but so far it hadn’t figured out where she lived.

At night, in bed, with one hand touching the night table, I watched the stork she had painted on the wall. The outside street-lamp was on it, lighting up its tall skinny legs, and its wings that were spread, and the diaper with a baby in it hanging from its long yellow beak. How come