WET

I wasn’t always an old lady. I was young in Brooklyn in the 1940s. A walk-up apartment house, the lobby with a dampish smell from heat trapped under the marble benches up against the wall. Me running the steps; shoe taps clicking on the stone, wetting my pants in kindergarten.

Mrs. Mallies wore red lipstick. Coarse, dark, salted hair in bangs and pageboy framed her squarish face. And in some unknown magical way (it was years before our party line phone), she alerted my mother. And there she was! In front of the whole class! Fingers holding up a fresh pair of underpants like clothespins on a wash line, laughs and snickers shaming me even more. Mother mine, what were you thinking?

Maybe about babies. She was having one. It came from Macy’s, my father said. Macy’s, where they bought my doll? From behind the counter in a box? Confused, I asked, “How does it come out?”

My mother: “A doctor takes it out in the hospital.”

“How?”

“It’s a secret,” she said in her quiet voice. “Only the doctor knows.”

When the time came, I was bundled off to her sister, Shirley, in Flatbush. My brother Aaron went to her niece’s place, a few blocks away from us. Families lived close then, not like today, scattered all over the country, all over the world.

I was lonely for my mother in a bed that wasn’t mine—it smelled funny—and food I didn’t like. Bosco in my milk? Instead of Hershey’s syrup. Ugh! She didn’t know anything, about Aunt Shirley.

I remembered there was a corner Whelan’s with a pay phone; I could call my mother.

I lifted the receiver from its silver collar and slotted in my nickel. “I want to talk to my mother,” I said when the operator came on. “Her name sis Molly Weingarten and she had a baby in The Hospital,” proud I was giving out important information (I was seven).

“What hospital?”

“Just The Hospital,” I insisted, certain that was all the information she needed.

“I have to know which hospital,” she said, but kindly. “There are several in Brooklyn.”

“Oh!” I said. “Then maybe it’s The Several Hospital. Could you call it and see if she’s there? I want to know when she’s coming home.”

“Puh!” she said, then, “I’m sorry, little girl.” How did she know I was a little girl? “Without more information, I can’t help you.”

I moped around the drugstore for a while. Candy cigarettes, Bazooka bubble gum, Chuckles. I didn’t want any of it so I got going, kicking a can of DelMonte green peas that had fallen from someone’s trash. Kick. Clatter-clatter. Kick. Clatter-clatter. Back to my aunt’s.

A few days later my father came for me and brought me home.

He was so small, my new little brother. Like my doll that came from Macy’s.

I was ten or so when my father had a chance to open a blouse factory out of town; finally, he’d be his own boss. My mother wasn’t keen on it. She’d be away from her sisters, and who did she know in Saugerties? Was there a yarn store? A kosher butcher. Family, yarn stores and butchers went by the wayside when my father let on he was naming his blouse company Molly Darling after her—After me? You’re naming it after me?—our clothes were in suitcases, Stevie’s booster seat in the trunk, and we were in the car, heading onto 9W to the unknown wilds. Two hours away.

“We’re in the country!” my father said with pride when we pulled into the drive of our summer rental. “Look, Molly,” he said as he showed us around. “A backyard for Stevie to play in. A screened porch where you can do your ironing,” he beamed. A family of five? She was always ironing (no drip-dry then). Or mending, or cooking, or knitting—for me, a purple sweater with puffed sleeves, and a Dutch hat with wool braids to match.

I made a friend there in Saugerties. We played at my house. And at hers, which was next to a church. A church wasn’t for Jewish people, my mother said. We had synagogues to go to. But just to look? That would be okay, I reasoned.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take you,” my new friend said when I told her I’d never been inside one.

It was different from a synagogue. Chilly on the stone floor I felt through my thin summer shoes and up my legs. Dark, even with the candles burning (did they think it was Chanukah?). And scary for me, with the man in a diaper up there on the cross looking so sad.

“That’s Jesus Christ, Our Father,” my friend advised when she saw me staring.

“My father is Max Weingarten.”

She looked at me funny, flapped her hand. “Never mind. Just do what I do.”

Before bed that night, I knelt in prayer and crossed myself.

“Huuuh,” my mother gawped from the doorway. “Ma-ax, come in here, Max!” she shrieked.

In his undershirt, scissors still in hand—he’d been cutting a blouse pattern on the porch—“What!? What’s so important!?”

“Show Daddy what you just did, sweetie.” And we were packed up in the Lincoln Zephyr before you could say “Good Shabbos.” So much for Saugerties and I was soon hollering up to Marcia from the street.

My close friend in those growing up years, her neatly combed red hair and white skin was a delight to my fastidious mother, while my dark curls had a mind of their own, my hands and skinned knees grubby from street play.

“Why can’t you keep yourself like Marcia!” she would cry out in frustration.

“Because I’m different from her!” Didn’t she know that?

Marcia’s mother slid up the window, reached out over the sill and called down. “What are you doing back here, Rita? I thought you moved.”

“We did. But there are no Jewish people there!” I shouted out for all the neighborhood to hear. “So we came back.”

To celebrate our return from the hinterlands, we had the family over. A gray velvet sofa with a ropey fringe. Me, on the floor, hand moving back and forth under it, feeling its silky swish on my fingers. “Rita…” my mother calls out from the kitchen. “Come in here, I need help.” I appear as bid and carry a plate to the living room, have myself a chopped egg on Ritz—a favorite or-derve of my mother’s—rearrange the disks, and set it down on the table.

The party is in full swing. Voices loud, and celebratory—the UN has voted to acknowledge Israel as an independent Jewish state. Caught up in the excitement I run from the kitchen—replenishing the egg on Ritz—trip over my cousin’s long legs sticking out in front of the living room’s glass-paned door. My head thunders through a pane. The Ritz goes flying. The noise. The turmoil. “Rita is bleeding to death!” screams my mother. Israel is history in every sense of the word;

“Du bist a ganser yutz!” You are a big stupid person, my father shrieks at my cousin—it has more bite in Yiddish—while wrapping me in a blanket my mother has fetched.

Me in his arms, he races down the three flights to the doctor’s apartment/office off the lobby, where I am stitched up.

“She’ll have to wear bangs for the rest of her life,” I overheard my father saying mournfully to my mother that night. Not for me was it a time to grieve. For me it was a time to announce to one and all—drumroll please—” Wanna see my scar? My head went through a glass door!”

In time my scar faded and I wore all manner of hairstyles; my father was wrong about bangs. It was my mother who knew everything. “Take a jacket, it’s going to get cold.” “Wear your galoshes, it’s going to rain.” And it always did; her magical mother-brain knew all about the weather. It also knew when I lied.

She was in the kitchen (was she ever out of the kitchen?) up on a chair, putting down shelving paper inside a cabinet and trimming the plain edges with pleated rick-rack she’d bought by the yard in the five and ten. “Stella Dallas” played on the radio.

“What’s that in your pocket?” she said, as I was passing the kitchen to my room. I’d come back from babysitting down the block.

“Huh?”

“In your pocket, Rita.” How did she know what was in my pocket from up there? “What’s that bulge?”

“Oh!” I said, reaching in, feigning surprise as if someone else had put it there. “Uh… uh….” Then all in one go, “Mrs.-T-gave-it-to-me,” my heart jumped in my chest as her brass desk calendar gleamed in my palm. Little wheels on either side of it changed the day and the date. It was Tuesday, it was Wednesday. It was six, it was seven. And I was in trouble.

“She gave it to you? Really!”

“Uh-huh.”

It was quiet in the kitchen. Too quiet. My mother was thinking and I didn’t like what she was thinking about. I was glad when our phone rang. But not for long.

“Yes, Mrs. T,” my mother said into the party line. “Hmmm…“ but her mother's eyes were on me. “I see,” she said. “I’ll take care of it,” she said. Thank you for calling.”

She put aside her scissors and little board of thumbtacks, stepped down from her chair, clicked off Stella Dallas and the little mining town she came from, and crooked a finger. Come in here, the finger said. Then came the why? For which I had no answer.

“Are you a kleptomaniac?” my mother said to me.

“No!” I cried out, terrified that I was crazy.

“Do you want to go to reform school?”

“I’ll never do it again. I promise. I’ll give it back now,” I wailed.

“Yes, you will young lady! You will march yourself right back there, apologize, and return it.”

“Please, don’t tell Daddy!” I begged. Telling my father would be worse than reform school. There would be “a war,” “an explosion.” My mother didn’t want his temper any more than I did; it had even shattered a mirror once.

“We’ll keep this between us,” she said, one of many times we did that, forming an allegiance, fearful of riling him, she needed allies and protected me like the mother bear she was.

Older by a couple of years, Marty from the building was in the lobby, a folded newspaper in hand. He beckoned me over, and patted the marble bench. “Want to read Blondie? She’s really good today.”

Why not? I liked Blondie and her curls.

He spread the paper over our laps. I soon felt his hand on my thigh. Don’t talk to strange men. They’ll take you away and you’ll never see me again, my mother had warned me time after time. But this wasn’t a strange man; this was Marty. I shifted away. He shifted and squeezed my thigh. A fear rang in me. I jumped up and somehow felt compelled to apologize for leaving. “Uh.. I have to help my mother upstairs.”

Back in the apartment, I told her what happened. She did not phone my father to see what she should do. Nor did she wait for him to address the matter when he got home from the place. She undid her apron, threw it down on a chair, took my hand.

“We’re going to tell his mother.” Afraid, and embarrassed, I tried to beg off. “I’ll be with you. Come, let’s go.” Gave my hand a little tug.

She marched me down the stairs, across the lobby up to the other side of the building. His mother answered the door. “Tell Mrs. Berg what you just told me.”

“Marty, get over here!”

“Is that true?!” she said to him, after I repeated my story yet again. Her eyes were knives. A big hulking boy, he suddenly looked very small.

I wondered if Mrs. Berg would threaten to send him to reform school. Not tell his father and keep it between the two of them. Was Marty afraid of his father? Maybe everyone was afraid of their father. I sure was afraid of mine. Of his tower of rage that might topple and crush me.

But it did not crush me; it found its way into my bladder and for years I wet my bed. The medical term is “nocturnal enuresis.” My mother’s term was “making wet.”

“Did you make wet again?” she would say, flinging back my blanket to announce my bedsheet’s pee-stained shame.

A short muscular man, with a jaunty side-to-side stride in elevator shoes, my father’s presence was both avoided and sought in our household. Sometimes it caught us unawares.

In the kitchen, my mother, brothers Aaron and Stevie, and me. Raised voices, some arguing going on, and my father, home from a day at the place, in his overcoat and brim hat tipped down over one eye like Dick Tracy. In the hallway, by the kitchen where that mirror hung, eyes flashing, nostrils flared in anger.

And there is his mouth: “I want peace and quiet when I come home!”

And there is his fisted hand. Flying out sideways to smash the mirror hung on the wall. Blood dripping, mirror shattered to pieces. “Look what you made me do!”

Who cleaned up the mess? Was it discussed among us after? I don’t recall. But the impromptu violence is with me still. And yet he never raised his hand to me, or any of us. He didn’t have to. A look was enough.

He read the Sunday funnies, “The Katzenjammer Kids,” “Mutt and Jeff,” “Archie,” taking all the voices with such expression, I laughed till my stomach hurt. He made up his own stories; funny ones, scary ones; maybe that’s where I get it from. He took me to the park, on all the rides in Coney Island. And still, I grew up in fear of him, of what he might do, or when he might do it.

At a Jewish youth group with my friends, there was a boy I’d been dating. And there was Daddy; my very own stalker-Dad, blowing in unannounced, watching from the sidelines to see how I “behaved myself.”

Out of hiding, he introduced himself to my friends and left. “Does your father always follow you around?” the boy asked after he was gone. Humiliated, I tried to joke my way out of it. “Only when he feels like it.” But it came off lame.

Home, I wailed to my mother. “Why does he have to do that!?”

“I told him not to go. He wouldn’t listen. You know your father.”

Indeed, I did. Like a dreaded storm or a flood that could strike at any moment, he was there even when he wasn’t there. Not allowed to “go in cars with boys,”—God knows what might happen!—I would slouch down in the passenger seat, picturing him in his Chrysler Town & Country, cruising the streets, eyes left, eyes right, searching for the delinquent daughter, out for an ice cream with the captain of the debating team.

I wet till I was married and out of his house. Too ashamed to tell my husband—how would I explain such a thing?—I agonized that my affliction would follow me to our bedroom in Jackson Heights, and I’d pee on him in the night. We were both spared. When I became pregnant I worried my wetting was genetic, and I’d pass it down to my children to bear my familial shame. But when they were of proper age, they woke up dry. Mercifully, I hadn’t passed my father down.

It would take decades for me to understand my early (and later life fear of him—thank you, dear therapist—the stress and anxiety that came from him. His rage then. And mine. My repressed emotional frame of mind. Maybe all those years ago, I was “making wet” on him.