Mosaics: a memoir of childhood

During the war, when the air raid sirens sounded, all the lights were turned off and I shivered with fright in bed. As a special treat I rode in the rumble seat of a black Buick that belonged to my father's friend. He wore his army uniform on leave and was married to a WASP from Texas named Othel, whose name, dress, and accent seemed stranger than a Martian's. Our German-born neighbors named Traig hated Jews and boasted of Hitler's victories until the war turned against them at Alamein and Stalingrad.

My brother and I had very different temperaments. He was three years younger than me but, because I'd skipped two grades, was five classes behind me and usually in a different school. He wasn't good at sports and we had no mutual friends or common interests, apart from our bond as victims. I didn't pay much attention to him unless there was nothing else to do, easily beat him in all our games, and teased him mercilessly. I also bullied him, as Judy bullied me, and even used him as a target and shot BB pellets into his legs. He once drilled a hole in the wall between our bedrooms and was severely beaten for his pathetic attempt to keep in close contact.

Though most of our social life involved weekend visits to uncles and aunts, I didn't feel close to my relatives. I had thirteen cousins, but eleven of them were girls and the two boys were too young to interest me. My uncles--middle-class coat, liquor, furniture, or glass salesmen (we could get all these items wholesale)--paid no attention to me. Apart from playing with the pots and pans in Aunt Bess's house and exploring her junk-filled attic, I found these visits intolerably boring. The two exceptions were the rare trips to my great-uncle Moe, who owned a poultry shop with feathers and sawdust on the floor, and would wring the necks of birds right in front of my eyes; and to my great-uncle Morris, who owned a chicken farm in New Jersey. His short-sighted wife once embraced a much taller friend I'd brought along for company and remarked on how quickly I'd grown.

Servants

We had a long series of live-in maids and Judy also made their lives miserable. She drew up an impossible list of jobs they were supposed to do each day, then followed them around and criticized their work. We had an Irish maid when I was an infant. She was succeeded by a number of "colored" maids, most notably Pauline. Tall, beautiful and elegant, even in her starched uniform, on Saturday afternoons she'd straighten her nieces' kinky hair with a hot iron that produced a sickening smell. She loved to flirt with the handsome, straight-haired Bill, who waxed the floors and washed the windows on Fridays. There was a strong sexual current between them, but I was warned to stay away from her room when she was entertaining the smooth-talking handyman.

Willa, less romantic but a better cook, had a phantom husband named George. He never answered the phone when he was supposed to be home and never picked up Willa when she waited for him. If I drove Willa home, she never let me come in to meet him. I doubt if he ever existed. Emma, who remained with my mother after she sold the house, was treated like indentured labor. If I phoned and asked, "Is Mrs. Meyers at home?," she comically replied with four short, stammered words and a long-drawn out one: "Yes, yes, yes, yes... no-oo-oo."