A Pocket Full of Seeds by Marilyn Sachs Read Free Book Online Page B

had been married nearly two years.
    “How can you call them newlyweds?” I asked Maman. “They have been married nearly two years.”
    “Yes,” said Maman, “but they really haven’t had a chance to enjoy being married. They’ve had to keep on running away from the Germans, first from Poland and now from Paris.”
    “But now they won’t have to run any more, will they, Maman ? The Germans will never come here, will they ?”
    “I hope not,” Maman said. “They have signed a treaty, saying they will stay in the occupied part of France, but they have signed other treaties which they have broken.”
    Berthe and Isaac decided to remain in Aix-les-Bains. Isaac was a carpenter, and he went around looking for a job, but nobody needed him. There weren’t enough jobs to go around. Maman said he could help her with the business until Papa came home. She also said they could stay with us until they found a place for themselves. Jacqueline and I slept in Maman’s bed, and Isaac and Berthe slept in our bed. When Papa came home, I could sleep on the sofa and Jacqueline could sleep in two chairs pushed together.
    Now Maman and Isaac left early in the morning for the markets. When we came home from school, we found Berthe waiting for us with our favorite snack of bread and butter and chocolate, and hot tea. Berthe only went out of the house to do the shopping. The rest of the time she stayed indoors, and cooked and cleaned, and curled her hair and polished her fingernails. She was always polishing her fingernails, and she did ours too. Sometimes she did our toenails. She had many little bottles of fingernail polish, and let us choose the color we wanted. Once Jacqueline asked her to use a different color on each fingernail, and she did.
    She was so fat that her fingers looked like little pink sausages. But her skin was beautiful, and when she put rouge on her cheeks, they were like soft, juicy peaches. In the afternoon, if we stayed in, Berthe sang songs for us—all about love and fickle girls and unfaithful men. Most of the songs were in Yiddish or Polish.
    She told us how Isaac lived in the same town as she but never noticed her, although she had always noticed him. One day, when she was all dressed up, very beautifully, in a dark purple dress, and wearing the same shade of fingernail polish that Jacqueline was presently wearing, she sat near him at a cafe, and they began talking. One thing led to another, and here they were, happily married.
    Berthe believed in dressing up for a man. On most days she tried to put on a clean dress, comb her hair out, and have her fingernails all done by the time he came home. But sometimes she forgot to take out the curlers, or other times if she took out the curlers, she might forget to put on a clean dress. But Isaac never seemed to notice. You could hear his quick footsteps hurrying up the stairs. He would burst into the room, and not stop until he found her.
    It was very romantic but it was a pity that she was fat, and that he had such large, yellow teeth.
    Sometimes Berthe sat outside on the veranda with us. Now that it was July, we kept the windows open most of the time. I could lean out and watch for Papa.
    Jacqueline and Berthe were sitting around the table looking through some magazines, and talking about clothes.
    “You see this white voile dress with the sweetheart neckline, and the lace on the hem? Well, I had a dress exactly like that, with a little fuller sleeve, and a strawberry pattern instead of the rose—but otherwise just the same—and that was when Isaac took me to the movies for the first time. I wore it with a pink flower in my hair, and a pair of shoes—I still have them—white, with very high heels. I’ll show them to you. But oi!, they were so tight, I could hardly walk. But the dress, I had to leave in Poland. We left so fast, I had to leave most of my nice things.”
    “Here, look at this one, Berthe. Isn’t it pretty?”
    “I don’t know. It’s not my