“My mother wears a medium,” Suzanne said quietly, as if she were giving away top-secret information. “And she’s bigger than your mom.”
“Go with the small, then,” Athena advised Miri. “She can exchange it if it’s the wrong size. What color? We have it in white, pink and navy.”
“She goes to business in New York,” Miri said. “She wears dark colors, especially in winter. So I think navy.”
“An excellent choice,” Athena said. “Can I show you anything else?”
“I need to get her something for Hanukkah, but—”
“Hanukkah is like Christmas,” Suzanne told Athena.
“Yes, of course,” Athena said.
Miri gave Suzanne a look. Why would she bother to explain? Not that Suzanne didn’t pride herself on knowing all about the Jewish holidays, not that she didn’t love throwing around the Yiddish expressions she’d picked up from Miri’s grandmother. Suzanne knew way more about the story of Hanukkah than Miri knew about Jesus.
“I can’t spend as much this time,” Miri told Athena. Both she and Suzanne had saved their babysitting money for holiday shopping. They’d already chipped in to buy the little sisters they babysat a box of five finger puppets for $1.50. The girls were going to love them. But at this rate Miri wasn’t going to make it through her list.
“How about stockings?” Athena said. “You can never have too many, especially when you go to business.”
“But stockings are so boring.” Miri turned to Suzanne. “Don’t you think stockings are boring?”
“I don’t know,” Suzanne said. “I was thinking of getting my mother stockings for Christmas.”
Miri backtracked. “I didn’t mean they’re not a good idea.” Suzanne’s mother was a nurse. She wore white stockings with her uniform. But Suzanne chose the new seamless stockings by Lilly Daché, three pair in “Dubonnet Blonde,” nicely packaged and tied with a red ribbon.
Miri was thinking of a less practical gift, something that would make her mother laugh. Something Rusty could show her friends at work, saying, My daughter gave me this for Hanukkah. My daughter is such a card! When she was little she’d always made something at school, a painted clay ashtray, a decorated coaster, a pin made of buttons. Rusty had saved every one of her handmade gifts. But now that she was a month from her fifteenth birthday, painted clay ashtrays were a thing of the past.
Suzanne checked her mother’s name off her neat, alphabetized list. Miri’s list was in her head and was neither neat nor alphabetized. But at least she had a good birthday present for Rusty. At least she had that.
“I hope you’ll shop with us again,” Athena said.
“We will,” Miri told her.
Then she whispered to Suzanne, “The next time we need to buy lingerie,” making Suzanne laugh as they opened the door and stepped out into the icy wind and blowing snow from yesterday’s storm.
Rusty
On Sayre Street, a brisk fifteen-minute walk from downtown in decent weather, a ten-minute bus ride on a day like today, Rusty Ammerman had already finished the laundry and vacuuming. The two-family house on a street of other two-family houses, each with a small, neat front yard, was divided into an upstairs apartment, where she lived with Miri, and a downstairs one, where her mother, Irene, lived with Rusty’s brother, Henry. But the doors between the two floors were never locked and Miri spent as much time at Irene’s as she did upstairs.
Rusty was putting the finishing touches on the Hanukkah gifts she was wrapping for Miri. The Lanz nightgown was at the top of Miri’s wish list, not that Miri had told her in so many words, but Rusty knew. All the girls had Lanz nightgowns. She’d seen that in the photo from Natalie’s slumber party, with four of them in Lanz and Miri in ordinary pajamas.
She hadn’t planned on the white angora mittens with leather palms, but she couldn’t resist when she saw them in the window of Goerke’s last week on her way home from the train station. They certainly weren’t practical, but Miri loved angora. The next best thing to having a pet, Miri said, since the dog or cat she wanted was out of the question. The house was too small, no one was home all day, and pets were a responsibility, not to mention an expense. Besides, Irene wouldn’t hear of it. Rusty should know. She’d lobbied for a dog when she was a girl, when they’d lived on Westfield Avenue in a single-family house with a backyard, close to her father’s shop, Ammerman’s Fine Food Emporium. She’d recruited Henry to beg with her.
“We already have a cat at the store,” her mother had said. “You can play with Schmaltzie anytime you want to.”
What kind of name was Schmaltzie for a cat? Rusty’s father had named him. “Because he’s fat,” he’d explained. “Because he looks like he eats too much schmaltz.” Her mother used chicken fat—schmaltz—in the chopped liver she made every Friday.
“Schmaltzie catches mice,” Rusty had said. “That’s why he’s fat.”