Milk and Cookies

by Kenneth Kapp

“Honest, Mom, they were just being nice to me. You said yourself how nice their garden was. And we’re always getting those seed packages in school, two cents each, and if we could grow our own veggies, think of the money we’d save.”

Rose turned and strode to the sink, counting to ten. She squeezed the countertop and spit into the sink, muttering, “This for Tzar Nicholas, mamzers (bastards) kidnapped Uncle Pichus.” Rose’s mother was continually ranting on in Yiddish and Russian what she had heard from her own grandmother before her family fled to the United States. Her grandmother was three, but her fear was passed onto Rose, who still worried that even here her children would disappear on their way to or from school. When they were small, she had walked them herself; when they were older, she screamed at them that they should always stay together. The boys she warned, “They grab you and ship you to Canton. Fifteen, twenty years you’re gone. March, march, march – shoot guns, make soldiers for cannon fodder. You girls, I can’t say. Much worse. Bubba’s bubba. Two of her brothers. Siberia, that’s where they sent them to some remote canton. Never came back.” Rose couldn’t free herself from those memories.

Karl knew he had to be patient. His mother’s mother, Bubba Brunya, died when he was five, but he still remembered how she had squeezed him tight, making all kinds of signs over his head, and tracing a four-fingered hand in his palm with a jagged fingernail. He had recoiled from the old woman’s breath and had pulled his hand away after she jabbed it saying something about an evil eye. “Kein ayin hara, kein ayin hara.”

He was sitting at the far end of the kitchen table. His mother stumped back from the sink, planting her hands on the table. Her face, alternating between anger and fear, turned red. “Shmul-lie, what did I say to you about strangers? You remember. I don’t care if this is a good neighborhood. Bad people are everywhere and you’re still a little boy. Don’t worry, but you must take care. Nobody knows those two old people. And they don’t speak good English. Even worse than your Bubba Brunya of blessed memory.”

“But, Mommy, I was just looking through the fence at their vegetable garden. It really looked good. And the old man was out there working in it. He asked if I would like to see what he was growing. He even pulled up this big red radish; it was the same kind Bubba ate. He washed it from the watering can and cut it in half with his knife, then he waved me in.”

His mother yelled. “He did what? And he had a knife. Are you meshuga? I should call the police. Crazy, I have a lunatic for a son. Creedmoor. They should take you or me to Creedmoor, so we’ll live with all those other crazies. For this we came to America?”

Karl swallowed, rolling his eyes, he pleaded, “Mom, stop calling me Shmulie, we’re in America, you were born here. Uncle- shmunkle. I don’t care; I’ve an American name. And the cookies were Orioles. His wife put the cookie bag on the table and motioned I should eat, just like old Aunt Lillie does with the back of her hand, going ess’n, ess’n. She was saying some like yistu. I couldn’t tell, I don’t think she had her teeth in.” He knew better than to tell his mother that she was acting as if they had never come to America.

Rose turned pale and pushed herself upright, putting her hand to her head. “Enough! No more are you to go to those foreigners. And no TV for the rest of the week. You’ll learn to listen to your mother, or you’ll be the death of me.”

Karl watched as his mother held her breath, thinking that this could go on for a while. He once bet his friend Joey that his mother could hold her breath for five minutes; the best either of them could do was two minutes and seventeen seconds.

This time it couldn’t have been more than two minutes, and Karl knew what was coming next.

“I’m feeling faint. I need to go up and lie down. You tell your father when he comes home that you didn’t listen to me and that he needs to cook dinner. Everything is in the refrigerator. And no starting with dessert. For you, smarty pants, no dessert!” Rose spun and marched to the stairs to the bedroom, waiting there as if for a curtain call in a Broadway production.

Karl sat there, his mouth open, finally he cried, “But Mommy, it was only milk and cookies!”