The Smartest Woman I Know by Ilene Beckerman Read Free Book Online

THIS STORY IS MOSTLY about Ettie, all 4′10″ of her. She was one of the smartest women I ever knew, even though she never made it past the third grade.
    Also in the story are:
    Mr. Goldberg, who at four o’clock every afternoon, left the store and went upstairs where he and Ettie lived, to take a nap in his blue easy chair.
    And God, to whom Ettie spoke several times a day . . .

    You got a minute, God? I’m not really complaining but it says in the Talmud that a man has 613 mitzvahs to do but a woman only has 3. So how come I am busy from the minute I wake up in the morning until I go to bed at night, and Mr. Goldberg, who has 613 mitzvahs to do, has enough time to go upstairs at four o’clock every afternoon and take a nap?
    Two other characters in the story are:
    Tootsie, my sister, older than me and much prettier, who I occasionally hated . . .
    and Gingy, me.
    My sister and I went to live with Ettie and Mr. Goldberg in 1947, when I was twelve years old and my sister was seventeen. The reason we went to live with them is a story for another day.

    A few years earlier in Atlantic City
    The first year we lived there, Ettie cried a lot. Sometimes because she was peeling an onion. Sometimes because President Roosevelt had died. Sometimes because of things I was too young to understand at the time.
    I remember Tootsie going out on a first date with a boy from Westchester that year. She thought he had money. He thought she had money. Both were wrong.
    I remember hiding a paperback copy of
Forever Amber
, the hottest, bawdiest book of the time in an
Adventures of Superman
comic book.

    “‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly. ‘I didn’t expect to find you a virgin.’”
    Forever Amber
? In my house? The Talmud’s not good enough for her?
    Tootsie lived with Ettie and Mr. Goldberg for one year, until she got married at eighteen. I lived with Ettie and Mr. Goldberg for six years, until I went to college.
    Some of the things I remember about those six years might not really have happened. I might have mixed up my memories with my sister’s memories or with movies I saw. Sort of like the Kurosawa movie
Rashomon
. In that movie, many witnesses to the same event describe in detail what they saw. Each recollection is different.

    If there was only one way of looking at something, God wouldn’t have given you two eyes.

    To me, everything I’m going to tell you really happened. Like the time I was fifteen and bought a black dress for a New Year’s Eve party and Ettie said to me, “You’re wearing black? You’re going to a funeral?”
    Maybe what happened in those small moments shaped my life more than I realized. Maybe we are the memories we hold on to. Things that happened a long time ago seem to have happened yesterday. Even now, sixty years later, when I wear a black dress, I remember Ettie’s words.

DURING THE YEARS I lived with Ettie and Mr. Goldberg, the world changed a lot. World War II had ended, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, Israel became a state, long-playing vinyl phonograph records and the Diners Club credit card were introduced, Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted a “witch hunt,” the Rosenbergs were executed, 50 percent of Americans owned television sets, and the Korean War ended.
    But during that time, life didn’t change very much for Ettie. After raising three children while working in the store seven days a week, she found herself, at the age of sixty-five, raising two grandchildren while working in the store seven days a week.
    Just about all day, everyday, Ettie would either be standing by the cash register, waiting on a customer, or sitting on a folding chair in the back of Goldberg’s candy and stationery store holding court and schmoozing with the customers.

T HE S TORE
    A NYBODY WHO WAS ANYBODY in the neighborhood—the
machers
, the mavens, the
meshuggeners
—came in to Goldberg’s. Most of them weren’t Jewish.
    Loyal customers like Mr. Arnold, who never went out