The One Who Stayed

I          

      I am standing in the doorway of the tiny, messy former tack room turned office of Atlantic Paper Products. It is sometime in the nineteen-seventies.  My Aunt Annie, my father’s sister, is seated at her ancient roll top desk about to open the day’s mail.  She is wearing a cardigan over a muumuu she sewed herself, dark stockings, staunch oxfords. She is in her fifties, I am in my early thirties. 

A friend of mine, an acquaintance really, is doing a story about still functioning Jewish businesses on the Lower East Side, emphasis on still and Jewish. I have offered up Atlantic Paper Products as a perfect example and my Aunt Annie as a vivid storyteller. She has refused.   So I have come downtown to convince her, even though part of me knows it’s hopeless. 

             “They never get it right,” she says in explanation, referring to journalists in general.

Aunt Annie aged about 35

“But it’s for public radio,” I plead. “You like public radio. You listen to public radio.”

I really want her to do this interview because, even though I know it’s ridiculous, I want to earn some points from the universe for being part of the real thing, the authentic Lower East Side of yore and now. I want her to earn those points for me.

            Years later it occurred to me that I was asking Aunt Annie to change her first principle of living which was: Be safe. Never raise your head. Never stand out. Never put your name on a list because it might someday be used against you.

She shook her head again, no, and started opening envelopes, extracting a check or bill from each one, filing it and then taking the envelope and slicing it on either side so that it lays flat. These smoothed envelopes she placed to her left, on a pile that she used as scrap for her initial noting of a phone order. And since there was mail every day, the scrap pile remained at about the same height, a never diminishing totem to her and my father’s frugality.

Once, a few years earlier, I had tried to tease her about this pile.  “The ones at the bottom are covered in dust,” I said, “What are you saving them for?”

 She was hurt and shot back, “Would you stoop to pick up a nickel?”

A good corrective for me because, of course, due to the hard work she and Uncle Lou and my father put in, I never had to stoop to anything.

 Now we were at a stalemate about the public radio program and she kept slicing open the envelopes. There was a pause and then, in order, perhaps, to drive home her point, she told me about a customer of theirs who had been written up in some New York magazine.

“A real chiseler.”

 In the language of Atlantic Paper Products, a chiseler is only a notch higher than a complete deadbeat. A deadbeat customer never pays the bill.  You cut him off. A chiseler tries to wheedle out of some of the bill, so you usually argue and keep him on unless he (It’s always a he.) gets too aggravating.

“They made him out to be the nicest, the most charming person you could imagine. A real weasel.”

 My Aunt Annie was my only relative who spent her entire life on the Lower East Side.  She never wanted to live elsewhere.  It was fine with her to walk to work each day, east to west on Delancey and return by the same route each evening.   She liked to walk. It was good exercise. And with a shopping cart you could buy everything you needed on the way home. She was exactly what you imagine a Lower East Side aunt or mother to be: short, buxom, energetic and warm, with a good command of Yiddish when she wanted to use it.  Except she was that person when most of her generation had moved to the suburbs and were busy shedding, as fast as they could manage, the habits and tones of the old neighborhood.  Aunt Annie never wanted to and never did. 

She was devoted to the business with the same intensity as my father.  Regular customers usually phoned in their orders and answering these calls was her primary job. She was patient. Her voice, with its strong New York accent, had a sweetness, a youthful and lilting contralto, even into her sixties.  Sometimes when she was taking a phone order, the storeowner who was making the order would ask her out to dinner. When she refused, which she always did, being long married with four grown children, one or two tried to woo her with offers of expensive gifts.  

“Do you know how old I am?” She would reply and laugh.  And regale my father with the story later.  He, in turn, would tell it to us the over dinner in Queens.

         “Somebody propositioned Aunt Annie again today.” And our whole family would enjoy the joke Aunt Annie could play on the universe of New York retail.

II

As had happened at the butcher store, my adolescent attempt to work at Atlantic Paper Products one summer turned into a family drama.  The trouble started on the first day, after I had finished some filing and was about to go to lunch.

“Where are you going?” asks my aunt.

“Yonah Schimmel’s for lunch,” I reply.  Yonah Schimmel’s  was a knish shop on the edge of Houston Street, which also served excellent made-in-house yogurt in tall glass molds. It still exists.

 “I have plenty of food,” says my aunt. “ With Moishe’s pumpernickel. Isn’t that your favorite? Some nice peaches.”

            “Yonah Schimmel’s is that good?” Asks my father, who has clearly never been, a fact which confounds me since it’s only two short blocks away.

“I love their yogurt,” I say.

My father rummages in a paper bag, takes out a silver foil package, and unwraps Aunt Annie’s beautifully crisp baked farmer cheese loaf with its golden crust.  It is a culinary thing of beauty, and I often enjoyed it when we visited Aunt Annie and Uncle George on a Sunday.

            “Here. Look,” he extends it to me.

            “ But I want to go out,” I say, getting a little feverish, metaphorically speaking. “ I like to go out.”

This, apparently, has never occurred to either of them.  Of course, you go out to a restaurant for a special occasion, but just for a break? A break is when you’re finished. You’re finished at the end of the day.

            We had some version of this conversation at noon every day of my five day stint. I wasn’t fired. I just told them I couldn’t do it. And they, who did not expect much of me anyway in the way of work, were probably relieved.