wants to try it on right away. It takes ages to get the snug snowsuit on
over the top of Marianne’s clothes, but ĕnally we are ready for the
park. We trundle down the ĕve Ęights of stairs to the street. When we
reach the sidewalk, Marianne says she needs to pee.
“Why didn’t you tell us before!” Béla explodes. He has never yelled
at Marianne before.
“Let’s get out of this house,” I whisper that night.
“You got it, princess,” he snarls. I don’t recognize him. His anger
frightens me.
No, the anger I am most afraid of is my own.
* * *We manage to save enough money to move into a little maid’s room at
the back of a house in Park Heights, Baltimore’s largest Jewish
neighborhood. Our landlady was once an immigrant herself, from
Poland, but she’s been in America for decades already, since long
before the war. She calls us greeners and laughs at our accents. She
shows us the bathroom, expecting us to be amazed by indoor
plumbing. I think of Mariska and the little bell in the Eger mansion
that I used to ring when I wanted more bread. It is easier to feign
astonishment, to fulĕll our landlady’s expectation of who we are, than
to explain, even to myself, the gulf between then and now.
Béla and Marianne and I live together in the one room. We turn off
the lights when Marianne goes to bed and we sit in the dark. e
silence between us isn’t the intimate kind, it’s taut and burdened, a
rope beginning to fray under the weight of its load.
* * *We do our best to be a normal family. In 1950, we splurge and go to
see a movie in the theater next door to the Laundromat on Park
Heights Avenue. While our clothes spin in the machine, we take