The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah by Nora Raleigh Baskin Read Free Book Online Page B

Brownsville, Brooklyn, five-year-old Freida Gozinky hauled back and slapped the little girl right across the face.
    Â 
    No, you didn’t!
    I did. It left a big white handprint on her red cheek.
    Omigod. What happened then?
    Nothing. I ran away. I ran all the way around the block and hid on somebody’s stoop. I stayed there, crying and crying, until I was sure they had gone. I felt terrible. I still feel terrible today.
    Nana, it was a hundred years ago.
    Well, I wouldn’t say that.
    So that’s it? That’s the story?
    Yup.

16
    Bloomie’s in Winter
    Practically every time we went to New York City to visit my grandmother she took me to Bloomingdale’s at least once during my stay. She loved to shop and I was like the perfect excuse to do it again. Sometimes Poppy would go with us, but usually he just waited at home with Sammy. He said his circulation was bad, and his feet hurt when he walked too far on city pavement. Besides, it was his day off from work. He liked to relax and listen to Nat King Cole on his new CD player.
    â€œI’ll be here when you two beautiful ladies get back,” he’d tell us. He’d winked at me. Then just as we were leaving, he’d slip me a single dollar bill and whisper that I shouldn’t spend it all in one place. He was always making jokes like that.
    But especially every December, even the one right before my nana got sick and I wasn’t paying enough attention to notice, we went to Bloomingdale’s. Any other time, the mobs of people walking down the street would just pass right by all the storefront windows of Bloomingdale’s and Saks and Lord & Taylor. But in December all those stores put out ropes and barriers to hold back the lines and keep the crowds in order. People came from all over, not just to shop for the holiday but for a chance to look at the window displays. They were amazing. It was like a minitrip to Disneyland. Inside the windows were moving, singing, lit-up Christmas scenes. Mechanical figures, fake snow, moving sleds and reindeer. Every window, a different scene. Every store, a different theme.
    All about Christmas.
    And close by was the biggest Christmas tree in the world, at Rockefeller Center, all decorated with miles and miles of colored lights. My grandmother made sure we walked right by it on our way to Bloomingdale’s.
    â€œAre you getting too cold, my shayna maideleh ?” my nana asked me. She was holding my hand in hers, leather glove wrapped around wool mitten. We had been standing for a while waiting for the line to move. There were even people in store uniforms that gently urged the crowd along when someone took a little too long at one window. The line wrapped around the velvet ropes three times.
    â€œA little,” I said.
    I really wasn’t that interested in the window displays. I knew it was my grandmother who loved them. “But I’m fine,” I added. “I can wait.”
    â€œI can see them anytime,” my grandmother said. “I thought you wanted to see them.”
    â€œNah, not really, Nana.”
    She tugged at my arm and pulled me out of the line. “Let’s go inside, then.”
    In and up we went, directly to the girls’ department, with the toy section in the back corner. It wasn’t big, not like FAO Schwarz, and it was mostly collectible toys—fancy train sets, expensive stuffed animals. And dolls.
    She walked right up to the glass display counter. The Madame Alexander dolls were all on display. Some on the shelves in the counter and more on the shelves against the wall. “For your holiday present this year,” my grandmother began. “Which one do you want?” That’s what she always called it, a “holiday present,” I think so she wouldn’t hurt anybody’s feelings.
    My grandmother had already bought me three other Madame Alexander dolls. To start my collection.
    I wish I could have told her I didn’t