Just Desserts

B.K. Smith

Description

Sylvia Stanger has always lived in the asphyxiating brick community around Canal Street in New York City in the fifties. She never stepped over the invisible line that separated the Jews from the Italians. She was a voluptuous woman in her thirties, married to Martin who worked at his uncle's shirtwaist factory, with two young daughters.

One morning, an ordinary morning, something changed. Sylvia work up as usual one morning but the day was anything but usual. Sylvia's past came knocking on her door and she had to get out of bed in order to answer it. Or else!

It is a subtle journey into madness.

'Poetica,' the Jewish Literary Magazine, chose 'Just Desserts' as a 2014-2015 fiction selection.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Loss
• Psychology
• Grief

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 04 octobre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780979872648
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Stiletto Stories

B.K. Smith
Lipstick Mountains Press
Madison Avenue Publishers, LLC
2015
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
JUST DESSERTS
About The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs by B.K.Smith
LIPSTICK MOUNTAINS MEMOIRS #1-“Chelsea Matinee, Memoirs of an Easy Woman”
LIPSTICK MOUNTAINS MEMOIRS #2-“Sands Point - Memoirs of a Money Trader”
LIPSTICK MOUNTAINS MEMOIRS #3-“RattleSnake Lodge - Memoirs of a Seeing Woman”
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, includes electronic information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publishers except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
JUST DESSERTS
B.K. Smith
Copyright © 2007, 2015 B.K.Smith
Ebook ISBN-10:0979872642
ISBN-13:978-0-9798726-4-8
Also by Lipstick Mountains Press
The Stiletto Stories - The Novellas
LAINA and the VAMP
Picture Books:
The Ecology of Photography
The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs Series
#1 CHELSEA MATINEE -
Memoirs of an Easy Woman
#2 SANDS POINT -
Memoirs of a Money Trader
#3 RATTLE SNAKE LODGE -
Memoirs of a Seeing Woman
#4 MANIFEST DESTINY -
Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman
#5 THREADS -
Memoirs of a Weaving Woman
‘Just Desserts’ was originally published in 2007 in a collection of unusual love prose titled “The Holding Pen.” The story was selected for publication in the Jewish Literary Magazine, Poetica, in 2015.
[e-mail]
Everything I know I learned from someone.
I especially wish to thank the late Rose VanSand for mentoring me at Lerner Shops Corporate Office in the seventies and the “21” Club; the late Peter A. Duffy for hiring me on Wall Street where we traded various vehicles of yield in the WTC in the eighties; and the late Paul Smith for supporting me through my various graduate programs in the nineties. To my teachers who brought literature and poetry, the exercise and the beauty that is in writing, into my life at CUNY and Lehman College in the Bronx, where I did my required reading as a literature major, and the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, where I began this very story in a writing class. Many years later I developed in prose a flawless depiction of the etiology of mental illness in young women of untreated trauma and isolation.
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled,
whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.
--Edgar Allan Poe, “Eleonora”
JUST DESSERTS
The shop at the end of the street was more than a candy store. It was a sweet place where many of the more social people in the neighborhood gathered. And Bob Cohen, the proprietor, was the biggest yenta of them all. He had a wonderful sense of humor, they said, and a great big laugh, and on most days the shop was busy from open to close and rich with community flavor and gossip-as well as homemade desserts. If anyone wanted to know anything about anything or anyone or wanted everyone in the neighborhood to know something about someone or something, anything, the place to inquire was The Sweet Shop and the person to tell was Mr. Sweets himself, Bob Cohen.
Oddly, no one seemed to know much about him, like where he came from, or who his people were. Some said he was an orphan. Some said he came over on the boat alone. I don’t know. He drifted into town a few years back. He bought the building, started the business, and lived in an apartment over the store. He never married and he rarely went out. And why would he? He held court in his own social parlor and charged two cents for the refreshments he served his guests. There’s no free lunch. He seemed to have it all figured out.
One afternoon Sylvia Stanger entered The Sweet Shop with her daughters, Nechama and Deborah, to buy each a candied apple. Sylvia was a voluptuous woman around thirty, pleasant enough, married to Martin Stanger. She was a homemaker and a mother. She had been raised in a traditional Jewish family; she could read and write and she could have finished high school if she had wanted. She was also obedient and she was terribly vain. She always had a little extra money in her purse to spend on sweets.
Until today Sylvia, never thought much about going to work, or worried much about what she would do if her husband did not or could not provide for her and the children. She assumed that she had a good marriage, a reasonable enough one, even though she did not enjoy sex especially, and she did not care for loud parties, music, or popular dancing. The most outrageous thing she had ever done was not keeping a traditional Kosher home, which wasn’t hard for her because Martin’s people were reformed, and it was a lot less work.
The sight of Miss Lisa Olson sitting at the counter on a stool when Sylvia entered the shop gave her a bit of a start and, as usual, set her teeth on edge. Lisa was sipping a carbonated sarsaparilla through a long straw, teasing Bob Cohen with it while he talked to her about something quietly, and she wrote in a notebook. No one seemed to know very much about Lisa Olson either, except that she had enough money, style, and beauty to solicit appreciative nods from men on the street and a few unappreciative glares from some of the women. An unmarried woman at her age-and with her ideas-they gossiped, was scandalous even in the modern world of the 1950s.
Shopkeeper Bob Cohen was so enthralled or infatuated, and engrossed in his conversation with Lisa Olson, what with her bright green eyes and flashy red hair, that he didn’t seem to notice Sylvia standing there waiting for his attention, nor Nechama and Deborah who were running their sticky wet fingers along the front side of the glass candy counter. Sylvia cleared her throat, clearly agitated. Bob turned to Sylvia and raised an eyebrow. His face formed a question mark, and then took on that familiar look of annoyance that always put Sylvia off.
Sylvia pointed to the two red candied apples. At the counter, Lisa stood up abruptly, said a loud goodbye, and left the store. Bob glared at Sylvia, who put a nickel on the counter and walked out with the girls, slamming the door behind her.
Him! He’s the one!
The words were always inside her head.
Continuing about her errands, Sylvia entered the photography store across the street and again bumped into Lisa Olson. As Sylvia approached the counter, the proprietor waved shalom to Sylvia, excused himself and disappeared into a small darkroom at the back of the store. Sylvia glanced momentarily at Lisa and then at the photograph in Lisa’s hand. Sylvia could not contain herself and gasped. It was a photograph of Sylvia’s husband, Martin Stanger, in this woman’s hand.
Martin was a relatively handsome and hardworking man. He never had much ambition as a boy, but always worked at his uncle’s shirtwaist factory. Martin tried to study Hebrew but wasn’t much interested in it or anything else religious or academic. He married Sylvia right out of high school because his family arranged it. He didn’t give it much thought. His only aspiration was to own a big house on Long Island and to own a big car, maybe red.
Sylvia and Lisa both started for the door and found themselves face-to-face. Sylvia, almost feeling and smelling Lisa’s perfumed breath on her face, felt faint, but a surge of new anger propelled her. Nechama and Deborah, undaunted, lingered in the doorway. Sylvia pulled them away and down the street. Her heart was beating very fast, but she held onto her parcels and her children and ran, afraid to stop for fear she would crumble right here, dead on the pavement. She came around the corner and stopped. The girls were upset.
What’s wrong, Mama? What’s wrong? Sylvia’s hand clutched her heart to soothe where it hurt. She needed to be strong for her children. Her daughters were her main focus now.
Somewhere from the sky came a strange sound, a faint moan or a cry that did not express fear or agony, rather resolve-despair, but resolve. Sylvia looked around. People passed in the street. She doubted for a moment that she actually heard it. It sounded like a noise that could have easily come from her. She heard it again, too clearly now, and it was outside of herself. She fussed with the lace of her collar and her big shawl to compose herself as best she could. She began to walk, her daughters ahead of her. Not since her father died had she been moved so easily to tears. She began to gulp and put her hand over her mouth as she looked up in time to see a figure, a woman, in a long white nightdress, glide from the rooftop of a tall building and crash onto the sidewalk. Sylvia let out a horrible scream and then stood in the street screaming hysterically. Deborah ran to her, eyes wide, puzzled. Nechama stood speechless; her candied apple fell to the ground unnoticed. Sylvia enveloped them in her shawl like great butterfly wings, hoping to protect them as a commotion stirred and a whistle sounded and people were moving in from all different directions.
The Rabbi stopped by for a moment, but seeing that there was nothing he could do, tried to move the crowd back and away- go home, go home. Rabbi Abrams approached Sylvia. He put his arm around her and walked her away, with the girls, to the building where she lived. They didn’t speak until they turned the corner. The Rabbi said that he and his wife, Varda, were going to the Catskills for the holy days. His daughter, Michelle, asked if she could stay with Sylvia and her girls. The Rabbi, who looked very pale and sad, insisted that Sylvia would be doing him a great personal favor if she said yes. Nechama and Deborah seemed to have easily forgotten about the woman who just fell to her death in the street. They were excited that Michelle wo