Other dates were just boring. My grandmother was full of life and adventure and in her younger days had a wicked sense of humor.
“There was one young man who was sweet but boring. Sweet like sugar and sticky like honey. You couldn’t get rid of him. And much too proper. He wouldn’t even call me by my first name. Miss Eisenberg this, Miss Eisenberg that. My girlfriend from the factory had the same problem with her young man. So we went on a double date and at the subway we told them we needed to use the ladies’ room for a minute. As soon as the front door closed we climbed out the back window and took the first train in another direction!”
For years after hearing that story I imagined an earnest young man standing outside the subway ladies’ room door for hours, asking each woman entering if she could check if a Miss Eisenberg inside was all right.
The list of suitors for Freida Sima was a long one but the months passed with no progress in sight. Some candidates were unsuitable but others were handsome, traditional, hard-working young men who for one reason or another she rejected as marriage partners. When pressed by her aunts for an explanation, all she could say was that they “weren’t right’ and that when her bashert, her destined one, would come along, she would know it straight off.
“By the time this one finds her bashert, Mashiach will have come and gone,” sighed Tante Molly in despair.
* * * * *
Why indeed did my grandmother remain single for so long? Why did she reject all her potential suitors? When I asked, she would answer with stories about the dating world of the 1920s. How she and her girlfriends would go to the shvitz and take Epsom salts before dates to lose weight and fit into their fancy dresses, bought years earlier when they were slimmer. How they wouldn’t even drink a glass of water during the date so as not to burst their seams. How she preferred adventures with her brothers and cousins to those with her suitors, as with the family she could be herself, rather than always being on her best behavior.
The more things change the more they remain the same, I thought, comparing it to the world I knew decades later. But even so, there was always a part of the story that was missing, one I discovered only after meeting Lilly.
Coming home from school one day I found a middle-aged brunette with apple cheeks and a beaming smile sitting at our dining table.
“Come and meet Lilly,” said my grandmother, who now lived with us. Staring at a pile of chocolate yeast cakes I would later learn were Lilly’s trademark, I discovered the full story of my grandmother’s “lost years” from the woman who had disappeared from her life for decades and suddenly returned after she learned of my grandfather’s recent death.
When my grandmother was in her mid-twenties, seven-year-old Lilly and her father became her neighbors in the boarding house where she rented a furnished room. Lilly’s mother had refused to immigrate to America, staying behind with the other children while sending her husband and youngest daughter to the New World. She also refused to accept a Get, a religious divorce, preventing her husband from remarrying in America. Although many immigrants in such situations married illegally and began life anew, Lilly’s father was a religious man and doing so was unthinkable.
Lilly, however, desperately wanted a mother and “adopted” Freida Sima as such, spending her free time in my grandmother’s furnished room, doing her homework under her supervision, learning how to cook and keep house.
