Being Esther by Miriam Karmel Page B

mein?”
    Finally, Esther allows that she saw her mother on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. And from there she’d conjured a kitchen in the Indiana Dunes. “The rich families drove to Wisconsin, to Lake Geneva, to the fancy resorts. But we spent two weeks every summer at Mrs. Zaretsky’s rooming house in the Dunes. Four or five families crowded into her home, one family to a room. The men stayed in the city during the week, leaving the women and children to enjoy the fresh air and the beach. I loved the commotion, the sound of the screen door slamming, the cries of the children playing tag. And then Mrs. Zaretsky would come tearing out and yell at us to pipe down and stay away from her flowers. At any time of day, you could find a couple of women in the kitchen. Someone was always complaining that somebody, she’s not naming names because that somebody knows who she is, took two eggs from her shelf in the refrigerator.” Esther pauses and stares out the window, as if those summer days were parading past the plate glass window.
    â€œGo on,” Lorraine urges.
    â€œWhere was I?”
    â€œSomeone had taken the eggs.”
    â€œRight! The eggs. But by the end of the day, when the cooking was done and the children had been fed, the women sat around the table gossiping, as if they hadn’t spent the afternoon trading insults and accusations. I loved crouching in a corner, listeningto their stories. Sooner or later, though, someone would point a finger and say, ‘How long has she been there?’”
    Esther closes her eyes and smiles. When she opens them, she says, “They called those summer places kachaleyns. It means ‘cook alone.’ Funny, because nobody was ever alone in that kitchen.” She shrugs. “I suppose the name was meant to be ironic.”

T he next day, while waiting for Lorraine’s call, Esther takes out her journal and reads the entry in which her mother is washing the floor. “You and your floors,” she says, smiling, as if her mother were sitting right beside her. If only she could have smiled when her mother was alive. Oh, how they fought. Was there anything that didn’t trigger a quarrel? Even her mother’s obsession with floors became grist for Esther’s anger.
    Esther can still hear the pride in her mother’s voice as she pronounced, about one woman or another, “Her floors are so clean, you can eat off them.” This bestowing of praise for cleanliness, as if it were really a virtue, drove Esther, whose housekeeping standards were rather lax, berserk. Once, after Esther’s mother had sung a song of praise for her daughter-in-law Clara’s floors, Esther set Barry in the middle of her mother’s kitchen with a can of PLAY-DOH and told the toddler, “Make Nonna a cake.” When Mrs. Glass protested that she’d just washed the floor, Esther reached into her bag and handed the toddler another can of clay. At this, Mrs. Glass collapsed onto the nearest chair, opened the top three buttons of her housedress, fanned herself with her hand and waited for her dizzy spell to pass.
    Now Esther makes a fresh entry in her journal. “I’m sorry,” she writes, then studies the words. Is this what the teacher had in mind when she instructed the class to write something every day? “Even one line,” she’d said, explaining how one sentence often leads to another. Esther ponders the entry, wondering whether twowords constitute a sentence. And suddenly she is writing more, her thoughts tumbling faster than she can transfer them onto the page. You were right, Ma. About so many things. Not about the floors. You and I will never agree on that, though you’ll be pleased to know that my standards, though nothing like Clara’s, have improved. Yet I think I understand. When you got down on your hands and knees and ran that sudsy rag across the linoleum, you were in command.