The Garden Of Eden And Other Criminal Delights

T he Summer Of My Womanhood

“The Summer of My Womanhood” is perhaps the most emotional piece in the anthology. It’s about my father, who died thirty years ago at the age of fifty-three, and by the time I finished writing this essay, I was engulfed by a cloud of wistfulness. Dad owned a deli and a small bakery, and I was fortunate enough to work with him as a preteen and teenager. In order to earn spending cash, I often stood for hours behind the counter helping customers. Of course, my ultimate reward was spending time with my dad, and as I remembered him, my heart filled with treasured memories.

My father wasn’t a distant figure in my childhood, but I certainly didn’t know him well. Like many men of the World War II generation, he worked excruciatingly long and hard hours, not for career fulfillment or self-enlightenment but in order to pay the mortgage on a Veterans Affairs-financed three-bedroom, one-bath house in the hot, dusty San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles County. My father was in the retail food business, not by default but by choice. His decision, especially since he came from a religious Jewish background in which education had always been prized, always puzzled me.

When World War II broke out, Dad was drafted. Instead of immediately being sent to Europe, he was deemed smart enough by the army to send to college. After two years of attending classes at Rutgers University, studying subjects that obviously excited him-he spoke about them well into my young adulthood-he was offered officers’ training. After declining the chance for advancement because it meant a longer tour of duty, he was shipped overseas and into the infantry. God must have shone His light on Dad, because he spent only two weeks in the front lines, though it probably felt like years. After the brief stint, he was reassigned to the medical corps. Trained as a medic, he desperately tried to save what the enemy was determined to destroy. After the war, Dad’s fluency in Yiddish made him invaluable to the army because he understood many of the languages spoken by concentration-camp victims. He would often translate for his superior officers, aiding in placement and relocation of those who’d survived the Nazis’ final solution.

When he talked about the war, it was not often and not very much. But I do remember what he told me. Yes, he revealed stories of the human atrocities, but he was much more intrigued by the ability of ordinary people to rationalize those horrors away, by the denials in Polish towns where the stink of the crematoriums could be detected from miles away. It affected his lifelong outlook. How could it not.

Honorably discharged from the army, my father did what most newly married men did back then: They took jobs not for their glamorous titles but because they needed money. Even though Dad had passed entrance exams to local law schools, he decided to skip three years without income in favor of immediate cash. My father became Oscar the Deli Man-following in the footsteps of his father, Judah (Edward) the Butcher.

I’m sure money had much to do with it. But after observing my father at work up until he died, I do think he was happy with his occupation. It was backbreaking toil, which involved but wasn’t limited to toting hundreds of pounds of meat, lifting cases of canned goods, shivering in walk-in freezers and coolers during the winter in stores with no heat, and putting in ungodly hours- from dark to dark. Sunlight was something that glared through plate-glass windows. But the money he earned was from the sweat of his own brow, and that was good enough for Oscar Marder.

As a small child, I was often put to bed before Dad came home. As an older child, I remember watching TV with him. He didn’t talk much except to ask me if I had yet guessed the plot of the latest Streets of San Francisco or, at the very least, the quarterly subtitles given after each commercial break during the hour show. Heart-to-hearts were nonexistent, but some sort of primordial communication-that of father and young daughter-did exist.

Dad staked out his claim by renting space in independent food markets. Usually, he ran just one operation at a time. Occasionally, he managed two locations. His booth consisted of a fresh delicatessen with all the traditional meats, cheeses, salads, and, of course, lox and pickled herring. He also took on a small bakery that catered and complemented items sold in a deli. His breads included loaves of soft yellow egg challah, caraway ryes, savory onion rolls, kaiser twists covered with poppy seeds, and oh, those aromatic fruit and cheese Danish and coffee cakes. Dad’s kiosk had everything needed for the perfect Saturday picnic or the in-law Sunday brunch. I loved the food, and I loved everything that went along with it. Because I loved my father.

When my older brothers reached double-digit age, they worked in the deli on weekends and helped our father out. When I was eleven, no such demands were made of me. This, of course, angered me. If Dad wasn’t going to require it of me, I’d simply require it of myself.

When I announced that I was going to work at the deli, Dad said that was fine, although I was sure it wasn’t fine at all. But that didn’t stop me.

He didn’t know what to do with me. Being short and slight, I didn’t fit the job description. There was a physical component to the work that called for muscle mass. I had none. The most skilled chores required an adeptness with sharp objects-meat slicers, cheese slicers, knives for trimming and cutting lox. I had small hands and fingers-way too little to handle industrial equipment that could slice a digit as easily as a corned beef.

There was the retail side-the greeting and the waiting on customers-but I was too short to be seen above the countertops. To the consumers on the other side, I was more or less a floating head. My father was constantly dodging me because I was underfoot and the operating space behind the counters was minimal. The starched white apron my father gave me for protection was way too big. It dragged on the baseboards, picking up sawdust around the hemline. Occasionally, I’d trip on it. When that happened, I hiked up the cloth. Eventually, it would fall down again.

I’m sure I was a disaster. I’m sure I got in Dad’s way. But he never said anything to me about it.

Dad knew I couldn’t remain an ornament. He had to give me something to do. My first assignment was shoveling the three most popular salads-potato, cole slaw, and macaroni (this was prior to the urban elite pasta salad)-from the cooler into pint or half-pint containers. This job was a snap because the salads were priced by the pint. A pint of cole slaw was X number of cents. A half pint totaled X/2. I was a math whiz in school. I had absolutely no trouble figuring out how to halve things.

Having mastered salads, I was given my next assignment- the weighing and wrapping of dill pickles. This, to my surprise, turned out to be a very tricky affair.

I was given a stool in order to see and read the scale. But first I needed to learn how to read a scale. Back then, before the advent of LCD and the digital revolution, watches were analogs, and scales were mean critters consisting of columns of prices and rows of weights-a veritable crisscross of numbers that bounced up and down with a spring weight. To find out how much something cost necessitated finding the correct intersection between price and weight along a skinny red line. I’ve known adults who never mastered the art of reading this kind of scale, just as I’ve known those who never got the hang of a slide rule.

It took me some time. For the first week, all my pickle prices magically came out in pounds, half pounds, or quarter pounds because-being a math whiz-I could divide the price by factors of two. Anything in between was rounded off to the nearest whole number divisible by two. In order to please the customer, I usually rounded down. I’m sure I cost my father some pocket change.

If he noticed it, he never said anything.

Eventually, I vanquished the scale. It was a proud moment that should have been worthy of some kind of certification. But knowledge has its own rewards. Reading the scale now allowed me to weigh things-items like lox and precut cheeses and meats, fishy pickled herring and the wonderfully oily Greek olives.

With two skills mastered, I was determined to crack an-other-wrapping. Origami enthusiasts needn’t have worried. Still, I was proud of my neatly swaddled packages with just the right amount of sticky tape on them. And when I wrote the word “pickles” or “Swiss” on the white paper in my own handwriting, no one could have been more pleased than I was.

My weighing and packaging skills had been honed to such an extent that Dad took an enormous chance. No, I was still forbidden to use the meat slicers, but he let me try the bread slicers.

For those unschooled in the literature on bread slicers, I shall explain. To slice a whole loaf of bread, one usually places the bread against a back bar, then turns on the machine. With a manual handle-which the operator slowly pulls toward him or her- the bread is advanced and forced between a series of moving parallel blades until it emerges out the other side in neat, perfect slices.

Immediately upon exiting the blades, my first rye fell apart, the slices fanning out like a deck of cards. Spotting the trouble, Dad once again explained to me that as the bread advances between the blades, it is necessary to secure the loaf on the other side with your hand. This must be done with care, as fingers are not supposed to get close to the blades. Was I up to the challenge?

Indeed I was. After a couple of failures, I was finally able to produce a successfully sliced loaf of rye. I was even able to hold it aloft, vertically by the heel, as the experts did.

Alas, it was the next step that tripped me up. I placed the rye directly into the white waxed-paper bag. Needless to say, again the rye fell apart.

As I apologized profusely, the customers just laughed it off.

Isn’t she cute?

C’mon, guys. I’m trying to do a job here.

Of course, the crucial error was not housing the rye in a tight plastic bag and securing it with a flexible steel tie before I placed the loaf in the white waxed-paper bag. Of course, that step necessitated opening the plastic bag while still holding the rye in the air.

Not an easy task of coordination. A few of my loaves ended up as fodder for the sawdust floor.

More waste.

If it bothered Dad, he never said so.

Eventually I mastered the coordination necessary for packing the ryes. And not just ryes but loaves of challah and wheat bread as well. These were a challenge unto themselves, because challahs and wheat breads are much softer. They required a delicate touch with the bread slicer.

Not one to rest on my laurels, I demanded more. Dad must have felt that I was up to the ultimate challenge, because he put the entire bakery under my charge.

The entire bakery, and I was only eleven.

This was monumental.

Faye the bakery lady.

Take a number, please!

There I was, wearing a hairnet, slicing breads, twirling plastic bags with a flourish, and handing out free sprinkle cookies to toddlers.

The coup de grâce came when Dad started taking me to the wholesale bakery to pick out items for our little bakery. We chose the usual rolls and breads and bagels and Danish. But now, since Dad had a genuine bakery lady, he began to invest in more coffee cakes, coffee rings, babkas, and cookies.

The smells were incredible. Hot and yeasty doughs laden with sugar, chocolate, nuts, and cinnamon, glazed with thin white frostings. The aromas, more than the visuals, made my mouth water. We chose our fare straight from the ovens, still hot, resting on parchment paper. At first my dad made all the selections. As I got bolder, I began to make a few suggestions of my own. Sometimes he listened. Sometimes he did not.

One week there was a particular coffee-ring cake that appealed to my eye as well as to my nose. It was a typical cinnamon yeast dough topped with circles of cherries, lemon, blueberries, and apple, the fruit swimming in seas of pectin and sugar. I had to have it. Though not particularly aromatic, it appealed to my eye.

“It will never sell,” Dad said.

“But it’s pretty.”

“People buy with their noses, not with their eyes.”

“People like fruit rings,” I countered. “And if it doesn’t sell, we can take it home.”

I was the youngest in my family and the only daughter. I batted my eyelashes and Dad melted. Arriving at the store before the opening hour, I set out the coffee cakes, the cookies, the rolls, and the breads. I tidied up the plastic and paper bags. Unplugging the cord to the bread slicer, I cleaned it of yesterday’s crumbs and seeds. I plugged in the bread slicer. Then, with my duties done, I waited for the customers to come out of the starting gate.

Our first consumer came in a few minutes after the doors opened at nine. She was a forty-plus woman-Jewish, as many of our customers were-who scrutinized my baked goods. I saw her eyeing my pretty coffee ring. The artificially red cherries, the egg yolk-colored lemon filling, the blueberries, and the apples.

She scrunched up her brow. “I’ll take that one,” she stated.

My father was looking over his shoulder as I scooped the cake under my hand and placed it in a pink bakery box, tying it with bakery string.

“Bingo, skittle ball in the old pocket,” he whispered to me.

I had never heard the expression before. And Dad never used it again. But I never forgot it.

I decided to take on the job full-time during my summer vacation. It was hard work. I was on my feet most of the time, and I worked four- to eight-hour shifts. Halfway through the month of July, I experienced an epiphany. I was not going to do this for the rest of my life, putting up with cranky customers, flaky vendors, the whims of mechanical equipment, and fallen arches. I made a decision to go for an advanced educational degree. Though writing wasn’t in my sights at the time-I never had the audacity to dream I could get published-I was still a person with many options. I could be anything I wanted to be. What I wanted more than anything was to do interesting work while seated.

One morning right after the store opened, I went to the rest-room and realized, after a very startled reaction, that I had begun my menses. Enormously embarrassed, I didn’t know what to do. Sneaking off, I called my mother from a pay phone, and she came to pick me up. No stickum pads back then. We girls were inducted into the clumsy world of belts and napkins. After the problem had been secured, Mom took me back to work.

She must have said something to my dad. He came up to me with a perplexed look on his face.

“Are you okay?” he asked with the concern of those men who stayed clear of female things.

“I’m fine, Dad.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“I think you have a customer.”

“Then I’d better go help her.”

After that moment there were no more references to female things. We were just two people trying to earn an honest buck.