Knots in My Yo-Yo String Read online

  And so is remembering, remembering George Street:

  Cooling myself with a Popsicle stick fan … playing chew-the-peg … “smoking” punk … digging up the grass between the front-walk bricks (my most hated chore after taking out the garbage) … Mr. Freilich’s long-handled grocery grippers, allowing him to reach to the highest shelf and pull down a box of cereal … purple ribbons on a door, meaning someone had died in that house … pouring Morton salt on the fat summer slugs that left silver trails across the bricks … Quaker Oats … bathtub-shaped Hudson cars … the bug truck spraying everything, including me, with mosquito poison … cat’s-eye marbles in the dirt … Bono’s fruit and vegetable bus … on a winter morning, a slow white plug of cream pushing up the cap of the milk bottle on our front step … the bread man … the rag man … the rag man’s horse, itself slow and drooping as a sack of rags, as if every clop upon the street would be its last … the rag man’s mournful warbling bleat: “Raaaaaaags!”… the sad, slow syncopation passing George, heading for Kohn, Noble, Buttonwood, westward … “Raaaaaaags!” clop-clop, “Raaaaaags!” clop-clop.…

  Mrs. Seeton’s

  Whistle

  More than a Victrola crank handle or the blizzard of coal dust, George Street was its people. It is something I understand better now than I did then. I can find old marbles and baseball cards in antique shops and rummage sales. I wish I could find the people there, too. I have so much to ask them.

  I have questions for the Freilich family, who operated the grocery store next to us, on the corner of George and Elm. The Freilichs were, I believe, the only Jews on the block, and to live next to them was on some days like living next to another country.

  Nothing but a thin wire fence separated our backyards. On most days the Freilichs’ backyard was just like ours: trash barrel and garbage can, a flower bed or two, a clothesline, a walkway down the middle to the back gate. But on certain Sundays in summer there suddenly appeared in the Freilichs’ backyard people such as I had never seen. The men especially were distinctive, for they dressed all in black and wore black hats and long shaggy beards. Afraid to stare openly at them, I ran upstairs to my bedroom window and stared until my eyeballs ached.

  Next day on the way to school I usually saw Nancy Freilich. Nancy was the older of two sisters. She was thin and had long red hair and walked pigeon-toed in her black and white saddle shoes. She was very bright and friendly, and she would have made a terrific friend, but she was a year older and a grade ahead of me, and fifth-grade boys did not mix much with sixth-grade girls, even if they were next-door neighbors. So I did not ask Nancy Freilich about the black-suited shaggy-bearded people in her backyard the day before. And instead of becoming terrific friends, we simply smiled and waved and said hi to each other.

  Nancy’s older brother Morton was seldom seen on George Street. Unlike most of us, who seemed to have sprouted like grass from the cracks between the sidewalk bricks, Morton Freilich occupied a higher plane. He was brilliant. He became a doctor. He made people well. But he could not make himself well. Morton had always had a bad case of asthma. Sometimes it was hard for him to breathe.

  So he moved himself and his medical practice to Arizona. I pictured him arriving in that faraway state, smiling to see the palm trees and desert sands and adobe-style houses. I pictured him looking up at the cloudless sky and throwing out his arms and going “Ahhh!” and for the first time in his life taking a long, deep clean breath of air. And maybe he did, but within several years the asthma had tracked him down and killed him, Morton Freilich in Arizona, only in his thirties, brilliant, the grocer’s son.

  Nancy’s little sister was Sharon. From the day she was born, some kids on the street, I don’t remember who, seemed to have it in for her. They were always saying unkind things about her. I remember thinking, Why? What did she do? I could understand people getting mad at someone who was always bugging them, but Sharon Freilich had just been born. She hadn’t had time to bug anyone. I wondered if there was a secret that I had missed.

  I began to study little Sharon Freilich as she toddled about the grocery store and the brick sidewalk outside. I tried to detect what it was in her that offended others. I saw her sitting one day on the front step of the store. Her knees were smudged, and I thought, Is that it? Dirty knees?

  She wasn’t just sitting there, she was crying. I looked around to see if someone had said something mean to her, but the block was deserted, and I did not understand that an ugly word, once spoken, once heard, remains in the ear forever. Seeing her cry, alone and dirty-kneed on the front step, as alone as I’ve ever seen anybody in my life, I tried not to feel bad, because I knew so many others who would not have felt bad, who would have laughed. But I failed.

  On the other side of us, at 804, lived the Corys. Virginia, the younger of two sisters, was a year behind me in school. We played together at first, then less and less as we got older.

  My enduring memory of Virginia Cory centers on a particular Fourth of July at Elmwood Park. She was about fourteen years old and had entered herself in the annual talent show at the band shell. When she was announced, she walked onstage and sang a romantic ballad called “Too Young”:

  “They try to tell us we’re too young

  Too young to really be in love …”

  Her normally pale cheeks were red as apples as she sang earnestly—and off-key—into the microphone:

  “They say that love’s a word,

  A word we’ve only heard

  And can’t begin to know the meaning of …”

  Out in the audience I felt uncomfortable, even embarrassed. I wondered if the people sitting around me knew that Virginia Cory was my next-door neighbor. Didn’t she know she was off-key? What ever made her think she could win a talent contest? Why doesn’t she stop? I wondered. But she went on singing and singing into the microphone until the very last note:

  “And then someday they may recall

  We were not too young at all.”

  She took a bow and left the stage. People politely clapped. Naturally she did not win, not even the lowest of honorable mentions. But that was it. What had registered as a catastrophe with me left the rest of the world unfazed. They did not cancel the pet show or the fireworks that night, and Virginia herself, to my knowledge, did not spend a single minute under her bed hiding in shame.

  If I met her today, I would like to tell her that when I think of my favorite songs of those days, I think of Les Paul and Mary Ford singing “Tennessee Waltz” and the Chordettes singing “Mr. Sandman” and Virginia Cory singing “Too Young.” I would tell her that I play it often in the jukebox of my memory. I would ask her to sing it again, and this time to honor her moxie, I would clap long and loud.

  Spider Sukoloski lived next to the Corys, at 806. Spider’s given name was Eugene, but no one (except maybe his mother) called him that. Spider’s hair was long and dark blond and combed back and cemented with Brylcreem. Spider wore his collar up and his sleeves rolled. His pants were pegged so tight at his ankles that they must have threatened the circulation in his feet. On the 800 block of George Street, in the Age of the Cool Cat, in the days of ducktail haircuts and pink shirts and suede shoes, Spider Sukoloski was the coolest cat of all.

  If I could go back, I would ask Spider if I could touch his hair. I would ask if he would like to trade nicknames, for who would not rather be called Spider than Spit?

  The Freilichs did not run the only grocery store on the block. Across the street from Spider’s house was Teufel’s. Teufel’s was about as small as a store could get, no bigger than a row house living room. In fact, it was a row house living room before it was converted to a grocery store.

  My family did most of its shopping at Freilich’s. I bought only two products at Teufel’s: candy and Popsicles.

  There were two Teufels. One was a stout black-haired woman who managed the store. The other was assumed to be the manager’s mother, or grandmother, or great-grandmother, for she was the oldest-looking p
erson any of us had ever seen. We guessed her age at anywhere from ninety to one hundred fifty. She was thinner than a taffy stick. Her scalp looked as if it had been planted with dandelion fuzzballs. I found myself speaking lightly to her for fear that a loud word might blow her over.

  No doubt her skin had once been as solidly pink as mine, but much of its pigment had drained away so that she now seemed skinned in waxed paper. Wherever she was left uncovered, you could follow the humped blue tributaries of her circulation. I imagined that her doctor, examining her, could peer, like a tourist on a glass-bottomed boat, right through to her heart and other organs.

  The older Miss Teufel was seldom seen. She lived behind a doorway curtain that separated the store from the living quarters. But on occasion when the younger Miss Teufel was away, the older one came out to wait on customers. She sorely tested a kid’s patience: It could take forever just to buy a Mounds bar. But I for one did not mind, for watching the old Miss Teufel behind the counter was a fascinating experience. As I stared at the thin, blue-corded hand that passed me the Mounds bar, I wondered, would that be my hand in eighty years? My common sense said yes, but I couldn’t quite believe it. The bell above the green-framed screen door tinkled as I happily rejoined the sunshine and the hard reassuring warmth of the sidewalk bricks. Inside, the old woman disappeared behind the curtain.

  Henry Doerner lived in the next-to-the-last house on the block—the end of the dead end. Henry was a burly, rambunctious kid. He got into his share of trouble. He didn’t take any guff. He was active, feisty, you might even say pushy. When there were games to be played, he was there, in the middle. When there were sides to be chosen, he was there, up front, staring down the chooser.

  Maybe that’s why Henry Doerner was seldom chosen last. On the other hand, he was never chosen first, for Henry had disabilities. He had been born with one leg too short and an incomplete hand. The short leg required him to wear a special shoe, the sole of which was a leather platform about six inches thick. It leveled off both feet to the ground and made walking, if not graceful, at least possible. The hand was a hand in name only. The wrist tapered to one finger with, as I recall, an extra finger or thumb projecting from where the palm should have been.

  And here is the thing: In my memory Henry Doerner is always running. The good leg moves normally, like mine, while the other swings straight outward from the hip, more like an oar than a leg. But he doesn’t seem to know, he doesn’t seem to care. He just runs. And the rocking chair on his porch is empty, and nobody says, “You can’t do that.”

  The other day I found Henry in one of my high school yearbooks. It’s the group picture of Homeroom 49. He stands in the second row, and you can’t see the hand or the foot. But you can see the face, and it’s pure Henry Doerner: eyes that pierce the camera as if it’s the chooser in a pickup game of street football, and a smirk that says, “Go ahead, I dare you not to pick me.”

  If I could go back and if I could be chooser, I would pick Henry Doerner first.

  Among the dead-end population, I count one soul who had no address on George Street. As far as I knew, he had no address anywhere, though he was at home everywhere. He was the hokey-pokey man.

  In the warmer months of the year the hokey-pokey man roamed the streets of town, pushing before him a white wooden cart. The bed of the cart was occupied by a block of ice covered with a dishtowel. Flanking the ice were two rows of bottles containing flavored liquids in a variety of colors that always reminded me of a barbershop shelf.

  The hokey-pokey man knew kids. He knew our ways better than we did. As we got older and our routes about town changed, he was always there, ahead of us, waiting: at the dead-end barrier, outside the school, clattering along a random street. Coming upon him, we crowded around the cart.

  He went into action. He flipped off the dishtowel, grabbed the ice shaver, clacked it like a castanet, and scraped ice until the scoop was full. He deposited a white snowball into a paper cone and awaited the first order.

  “Lime!”

  He snatched the lime bottle, shook it, and—presto—bright green snowball.

  “Grape!”

  “Orange!”

  “Lemon!”

  I waited till last, thinking about the flavors. I always decided on root beer.

  We took off then, relishing the winter on our tongues, giving no thought to the hokey-pokey man. For he was not someone to think about. He was simply there. Where we were.

  And then, in time, he wasn’t. Though still, on a summer’s day, when heat waves dance above the street, I sometimes imagine I see him in the distance, waiting where I have yet to arrive.

  And then there were the Seetons. Officially, the Seetons did not live on George Street. The lived on Elm, with their property running perpendicular to the backyards of the Freilichs, the Spinellis, the Corys, and the Sukoloskis.

  During my grade-school years, as I have mentioned, I considered Johnny Seeton one of my two best friends, the other being Roger Adelman.

  As the years go by, there is something I remember about the Seetons even more than Johnny. It is his mother’s whistle. With it she called in however many of her six children were away from the house at dinnertime. She would come out the kitchen door, stand by the fence, and deliver it once, maybe several times. It was not loud. Not nearly as loud as a hot Chevy revving or a kid yapping or a parent scolding. It was a simple two-note whistle. And yet her kids, all of us kids, no matter where we were—Kohn Street, the tracks, Red Hill—we always seemed to hear it.

  Dinnertime upon dinnertime, year after year, Mrs. Seeton’s whistle reeled in her kids. Sometimes the rest of us came running, too, to our own homes, for a mother’s call somehow touches us all. Those two not-very-loud notes echo down to millennium’s end and powerfully recall to me a time and a place. A fantasy I have goes like this: Mrs. Seeton returns to her house on Elm Street. The nineties neighborhood kids in bubble-soled sneakers stare at the gray, slow-moving woman whom they do not know. She goes to the backyard, to the old spot by the fence, and she whistles. It’s the old two-noter, sounds exactly the way it did in 1955. She doesn’t need to whistle again—one is all it takes, because we’re already on our way. The nineties kids gape in amazement as we return from our homes and cemeteries around the world—Henry Doerner and Spider Sukoloski and Virginia Cory and Jerry Fox and the Teufels and even little Sharon Freilich, her knees still dirty but not crying anymore—across the Schuylkill River and along the tracks and the path and down the streets and nameless alleyways, all of us one more time heading home on Mrs. Seeton’s whistle.

  Night

  chh

  It always began as a solitary chuffing, a sudden explosive snort as if a night beast rising in the distance, down in Conshohocken maybe, had cleared its snout. So faint and faraway was it, so alien, that I usually persuaded myself that it wasn’t there. But sooner or later, again, it was.

  chh

  It seemed to enter my night room from below, catching on the antenna of my bedsprings, running up the coils, whispering through the mattress, the sheet, making an ear of my entire body.

  chh

  Then the furious flurry.

  chhchhchhchhchhchh

  My eyes were wide, groping for light, but I could not even see the pillow. I wished I had the nerve to run for the light switch. I wished my room was not at the back of the house, nearest the tracks.

  The sound was still far off, along the Schuylkill (SKOO-kul) River, somewhere in the East End, but it had movement now, direction. It was coming. The breath of the night beast beat faster and louder. It was passing the DeKalb Street station now, turning from the river, behind the empty dark Garrick Theater, under the erector set Airy Street bridge, Marshall Street now, between the black and white striped crossing gate, bell tinkling, red light blinking—louder and louder—past the sand place, where I went with my father to bring home a wagonful; past the shoebox-shaped Orange Car store, where my mother could buy a bagful of Florida in February; crossing Elm, b
ending with the creek—louder, louder, chhchhchhchhchhchhchh—behind the ice plant now, Astor Street, the stone piles, the dump—louder still—the iron beast pouring sooty blackness into all the world, creating night—how loud can something be?—coming around the curve at the dead end of Chain CHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHHCHH—into my room, the bedsprings under me singing like the fiddle strings of Hell …

  * * *

  Did it really happen? In morning’s comforting sunshine I could never be sure—until I ran my finger along the clothesline or over the yellow face of a pansy in the backyard, and the tiny black particles of grit confirmed: yes, a train—a coal-fired, smoke-belching locomotive—had passed the night before.

  Nighttime lent a horror not only to trains but also to garbage. Garbage had status in those days. Garbage was garbage, and trash was everything else. Garbage had a can of its own, basically an oversize metal pail with a lid. The garbage pail could be found in the back of the backyard. To lift the lid off the garbage can was to confront all the horrors of the creepiest movie: dead, rotting matter; teeming colonies of pale, slimy creeping things; and a stench that could be survived only in the smallest whiffs.

  Ironically, the garbage can was never more disgusting than the day after garbage collection—for the collection was never quite complete. The garbage man would snatch the can from our curbside and overturn it into the garbage truck’s unspeakable trough. He would bang it once, maybe twice, against the trough wall. This would dislodge most of the garbage, including a rain of maggots, but not the worst of it, not the very bottom of it, the most persistent, the oldest, the rottenest, the vilest. I held my breath while putting the lid back on. Sometimes I pushed the can all the way to the backyard with my foot.

  When garbage met darkness, the potential for horror doubled.

  Emptying the garbage after dinner was a frequent chore of mine, but only one particular instance do I remember. My mother had dumped the leftovers into a cake batter bowl and sent me off. The season was winter; it was already dark outside. The light from the back door petered out halfway down the yard, leaving me to moonlight. At the garbage can I went through my usual ritual: I curled my fingers around the metal handle of the lid, took a deep breath, held it, and with an almost audible winching of willpower, yanked the lid off. Careful not to look directly into the can, I overturned the batter bowl. I tapped it against the can to loosen any stragglers—and discovered I had a problem.