And the man froze.
Just like in the movies.
I jerked the car into a driveway, not really understanding what was going on.
Plaid Coat instructed the runner to drop the purse. “Drop it,” he shouted. “Drop it, drop it, drop it!”
The runner had that deer-in-the-headlights look on his face. He dropped the purse.
Plaid Coat told him to hit the ground.
Just like in the movies.
I bounded out of the car, spoke to Plaid Coat. I pointed to the runner, pointed to my mother’s stolen handbag, and angrily said, “That’s not his purse!”
Neighbors began filing out, offering to call the police. Which was kind of redundant.
Because Plaid Coat turned out to be an off-duty policeman who had been visiting his father, heard me leaning on the horn, and came out to investigate.
Now he took off his belt and began to secure the suspect. At that point I went back to my mother. She was upright and so was the stroller. I pulled the car over, loaded them both inside. Her palms were sore, her pants were ripped at the knees. But, as promised, both she and my baby were all right.
“He took my purse!” my mother sobbed.
“We caught him, Ma,” I said.
“You what?”
“We caught him. We have your purse!”
“Oh. That’s good,” my mother answered. “That’s very good.”
“Very good,” my son coughed from the backseat.
We returned to the scene of the crime, now thick with patrol cars. I explained my story as I held my baby, and my mother explained her story from inside my car. The uniformed police officers were amazed.
“We never catch these guys,” one of them told me.
My mother was required to come down to the station to claim the purse. It would be there waiting for her. The police needed only a couple of hours to process the paperwork.
“She can’t just take it now?” I asked. “Save us both a trip?”
“Nope. Evidence.”
“Fine,” I said.
They congratulated me. I took my mother and baby home. We were all pretty shaken, but life does go on.
I loaded my son back into his car seat and zipped him over to the pediatrician. A good move on my part.
Indeed, it was strep throat.
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.