Reversing the Curse

nypress, 04-02-2009 » Page 9

Reversing the Curse

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By Marilyn Horan

8 million stories

MARILYN HORAN lives to bowl another day My family has a particular vulnerability, a fatal relationship really, with public transportation. Aunt Aneila, running to catch a bus, was hit and killed by a postoffice truck on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn long before I was born. Uncle Donald had a heart attack and died on the subway on the way home from his job as a limo driver in Manhattan. My father’s father drowned at 31 when he fell off a ship in New York Harbor.When I went to a small town in Ireland a few years ago, I met the Nolans, neighbors of my grandmother’s family, who told me that it was too bad I hadn’t been there a year earlier: My Uncle Patsy, the last member of the Horan family, had been run down by a bus in Dublin just the year before.

Other close calls, while not causing death, suggested that the curse was real: My mother was sent to the hospital for three weeks as a result of a smash up with a livery cab; my Uncle Alphie lost three fingers of his right hand when he slammed them in the door of his huge truck; my dog Augie was killed by a sanitation truck. Doom lingered in my subconscious as a cumulative result.These accidents confirmed my belief in the dangers of my family getting around the city. I was fearful of traffic, always crossing at the light, trusting no driver and saying a small prayer every time I made it alive to the other side of the street.

The most memorable incident, however, was what happened to my Uncle Johnny.The day he was run over by the RR train returning home from his weekly bowling league, I was in the hospital having my tonsils removed. I came home, but Uncle Johnny never made it out of the hospital.The train had amputated his legs.That was a new word to be added to my 8-year-old lexicon, “amputated,” and I still cannot hear it without picturing my uncle as a torso in a hospital bed, blood seeping through his heavily gauzed stumps.

We children—my older sister, brother and I—were not permitted to visit him in the hospital.We got our information by eavesdropping on adult conversations: “Stop the bleeding;” “Never walk again;” “No life insurance;” “His poor mother.”

Feeling left out and overwhelmed by the tragic atmosphere, my sister Janie and I devised our own gruesome recreation of the accident, coming up with imagined bizarre and horrifying details. “What do you think hap pened to his legs?” Janie started. “Did one cop have to tell another one: “Go get the legs?” “You’re sick! You’re disgusting!” Hysterical giggles rose in my throat, still raw and loose from the tonsillectomy. “Do you think his feet still had shoes on?” We laughed hard enough to make our stomachs and my still-raw throat hurt, and giggled loudly enough that my mother stomped up the stairs to ask us if we had gone crazy—laughing at a time like this. When our mother finally talked to us, she revealed that she had never seen my grandmother, a tough and unsentimental 65-yearold widow, cry until she was at Johnny’s bedside. He was now conscious but delirious, and he was complaining that his legs hurt, or were burning, or itchy. Grandma, who slept on a cot in his room the whole eight days he survived, pretended to rub, salve or scratch them, soothing him in comforting tones she had never used before, even with her grandchildren.

Besides a terrible fear of hospitals and the habit of standing well back from the edge of the subway platform, Uncle Johnny left us another legacy. Janie and I were given, why I do not know, his bowling bag, his ball with “JH” on it, tan bowling shoes, a leather glove and a book called Bowling for Beginners.

These things had been with Uncle Johnny on the night of his misfortune, causing much speculation and squeamishness on my sister’s and my part as to whether the bag and its contents fell onto the tracks with him. Being enormously thrifty, Mom couldn’t stand to see anything go to waste, even sports equipment. She viewed this bequest as a sign from God that her children should bowl. Every Sunday afternoon for two years, Daddy took us bowling at Maple Lanes. He sat at the bar drinking whiskey and soda and smoking Pall Malls down to the end, sometimes until they burned his fingers and lips. At the beginning of our weekly bowling trips, Janie and I had to share Uncle Johnny’s bowling shoes, money being tight. As soon as Janie finished one frame, she quickly slid the shoes off and I put them on, complaining that she either had not untied them or that they were hot from her feet. She did the same when I took them off to give to her. Uncle Johnny’s shoes and glove remained in the bag in the closet even though we no longer used them. I read and reread Bowling for Beginners. I decided to adopt the straight arm, straight down the alley, “shaking hands” approach, rather than risk the curve delivery.

It’s been years since anyone in my family has fallen victim to any moving vehicle, so I am reasonably confident that the curse has dissipated.Though still cautious, like every other native New Yorker, I cross the street in the middle of the block, lean over the subway platform to see if the train is coming and view driving in Midtown as competition. Still, when I get to my destination, be it home or just the other side of the street, I know disaster has yet again been avoided. At least this time.

Marilyn Horan recently retired after 36 years as an English teacher and assistant principal in NYC.

Nina's Wedding

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Nina’s Wedding

by Marilyn Horan

02/12/2010

Neighborhood: Park Slope

If my twenty-year-old sister Janet not been maid of honor, I would not even have been invited to my neighbor Nina Milano’s wedding. Nina was 18, one year younger than I, and her fiancé Larry was just 21 on their wedding day, not that unusual in 1969, when many young men, Larry included, were drafted into the Army. Anticipation and excitement were in the air as Janet and I waited with the bride and her sister and mother in the back of St. John the Evangelist Church in Brooklyn. We were expecting Nina’s father who had promised to walk her down the aisle. But he was unreliable--a womanizer and a gambler--and his failure to contribute much time or money to Nina or her sister for the decade he was gone added to his reputation as a reprobate. The wedding guests, even those on Mr. Milano’s side of the family, feared that he would not show. Despite the bitterness engendered by the break-up and the animosity that erupted into public arguments outside Nina’s house, both Mr. and Mrs. Milano agreed to put their hatred on hold for the marriage celebration. During the first hour of Mr. Milano’s failure to appear, we diverted Nina’s growing anxiety by primping her hair, powdering our faces, and reapplying lipstick.

When ninety-minutes had passed and Mr. Milano had not come, Nina began sobbing: “He couldn’t even make it to my wedding! I knew he wouldn’t come!” As she wailed, we tried to calm her. I cursed him under my breath and prayed silently that good-for-nothing would show. In the pews, the bride’s relatives, most of the crowd, whispered and clucked, craning their necks every few minutes to see if the father arrived. Occasionally a scout was sent to the back of the church for an update. Just as Nina reached the point of hysteria, her father burst in, accompanied by his girlfriend, her black hair teased into a beehive, stiletto heels, excessive make-up, short tight skirt, fur stole, and belligerent look met the definition of “tramp.” Nina’s mother and sister controlled their anger and took their seats. Nina, still hiccupping from crying, grabbed her father’s arm and they walked to the altar.

The ninety minutes of waiting at the church was plenty of time for the troops to build defenses, develop allies, draw up battle plans, and steep their hatred in an ugly brew of hair spray and perfume. One of the warring factions consisted of Nina’s mother’s side whose fierce loyalty to her was matched only by their hatred for her perfidious husband. The other faction, Nina’s father’s relatives, defended the man’s right to do whatever he pleased, especially considering that his former wife was, all agreed, a whore—her two young out-of-wedlock children all the proof needed to justify the pejorative.

When we got to the VFW hall it was the usual set up for a party: collapsible tables covered with paper tablecloths, metal folding chairs, a white crepe paper bell, a “Congratulations” sign strung across the room and red and white plastic poinsettias as centerpieces. One table held the wedding cake and the soda and liquor—several bottles of Smirnoff’s, Seagram’s Seven, White Horse scotch, Four Roses—all the components of the highball, and lots of bottles of beer and soda. The hall smelled like all VFW halls—rye whiskey and cigarette smoke with a whiff of Lestoil. The guests came in and took their seats either on Nina’s father’s side or Nina’s mother’s side. Everybody got drinks, and continued to look across the hall and talk in low voices that I knew were making sniping comments, if not outright plans for attack. The air was electric.

My mother and father were at the party and the three of us filled our paper plates with baked ziti, eggplant parmigiana, Italian bread and salad, got a few drinks, and sat at the table with Larry’s only family members—his little sister and his father. I got up to get another drink and a woman on the food line turned around and said to the woman behind her, “Stop pushing me, you fuckin’ bitch, or I’ll punch your fuckin’ face in!” That was the flashpoint, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the sinking of the Lusitania, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on a smaller, but no less incendiary scale. Plates of food and fists went flying. As if on cue, just about everybody, both men and women, started punching somebody. My father returned from the restroom to a scene that looked like a bar brawl in a Western, except there was no wagon wheel chandelier for somebody to swing on to kick people’s teeth out. My father and I, both woozy from the highballs, watched the twenty or so couples or triples swinging, tearing, and smashing. It was like a series of small fires had broken out, the sparks of one igniting another, threatening to become an inferno.

My parents and I stood dazed at our table hoping not to get hit. That’s when two men, clutching each other and grunting, crashed into my mother, sending her sliding across the floor, with such force that she went under a table and smashed into the wall. She emerged from under the tablecloth holding her arm, her hair wild, shrieking, “Jesus! Oh Jesus, Mary, and sweet Saint Joseph! Let’s get out of here.” She went running into the street waving into traffic on Fourth Avenue trying to get any car to stop and give us a ride out of that bedlam. My father and I pursued her, convinced her no one was going to stop and pick her and us up, and pushed and dragged her back into the hall, almost empty now that the melee had ruptured onto the street. She sat moaning and crying, trying to quell her panic. Once I ascertained that she was safe, I turned to leave. “Don’t go out there,” she said, but I had to find my sister who I last saw on the sidewalk jumping up to defend the bride’s mother. My sister Janet was a loyal friend, a fierce fighter and she was in the fray somewhere.»

Photo by Fady Habib

I rushed outside and saw Janet, in her vivid red velvet dress, engaged in battle. As maid of honor and friend of Mrs. Milano, Janet became a target of the father’s party. They could not wait to get their hands on her. Two of the women had grabbed her and dragged her out into the street. One woman dug her fingers underneath my sister’s Grecian curls and was pulling with all her might in what seemed an attempt to rip Janet’s scalp off, while the other woman delivered punches to my sister’s head. Janet was doubled over, trying to keep her hair attached with one hand and flailing at her attackers with the other. “Hey!” I screamed, “Leave my sister alone!” One of the assailants stopped trying to gouge Janet’s eyes out and fixed her demented gaze on me. Oh my God! It was one thing to tell someone to leave my sister alone, it was another to have to physically defend her. My attacker raised her massively fat arm, enrobed in bangle bracelets and black lace, and prepared to deliver a roundhouse blow to my face. I am not sure if it was inebriation or reflex, but I rolled back on my heels and her fist slammed into the plate glass window. She bellowed in pain and I beat it back inside, fortunate to have avoided a broken jaw, and hoping to lock myself in the ladies’ room, should she or any of the other combatants seek to finish me off.

Inside the hall, the best man’s ten-year-old brother Louie, looking anguished, got behind the cake and liquor table. He groaned, winced, and with both hands heaved the table over. The shattering of the combined whiskey, gin, beer, and scotch bottles produced a little ocean, tiny waves of liquor shimmering over the wooden floor, progressing merrily toward the door. For a moment, the hall was beautiful, an inch deep in liquor that looked like the incoming tide at Coney Island. The shards of multicolored glass jutting up like a kaleidoscope of danger were the perfect symbol of a wedding gone really wrong.

Finally the police arrived, eleven cars, and three ambulances. The sight of the cops convinced everyone to stop fighting. The police began lining up the young men, all with clothes shredded and bloody. Of the eight standing outside the hall, just one had a shirt still in one piece, and three of them were completely bare-chested. Inside the VFW, ambulance workers tended to some of the wounded, including my mother who, we initially feared, was having a stroke. The hall looked like a combination infirmary/holding cell--some wedding guests were being bandaged while others were being questioned by the police.

A few people escaped the pandemonium. The bride and groom had found shelter in the back room, a kitchen, and looked out in bewilderment on the mayhem. Nina’s nine-year-old half-brother and six-year old half-sister were found afterward hiding in a subway station a few doors away. Nina’s sister Linda, seven months pregnant, whose father and husband had been opponents in one of the main events in the slugfest, spent the night in the hospital but was released the next day, physically unharmed.

My father and I got away unscathed, but my mother’s upper arm turned black and sagged, literally a bag of blood, for a month afterward. Janet’s face was deeply scratched, and her scalp had several red and sore bald patches, but she used those injuries to redouble her determination to find the two women and kill them.

Nina and Larry stayed married for sixteen years, a solid run for such a shaky start. I recently met one of their two sons, Stephen, at a luncheon of the crowd from the old neighborhood that included Nina, Linda, and Mrs. Milano. He was a friendly 36 year-old, interested in hearing the stories told at the table. When I mentioned that his mother’s and father’s wedding was something to be remembered, Stephen asked me to tell him the story, saying he never really got the whole picture. Feeling that I did not want to embarrass the former bride, her sister, or her mother, I volunteered only that I saw the fight started when the two women on the line began cursing each other out. “Oh, no!” Linda declared proudly. “My father started that fight. I was seven months pregnant and my father didn’t like the way my husband Eddie was treating me, so he told Eddie that he was gonna teach him a lesson, and punched him in the face. That fight lasted til the cops showed up.” “Oh, please!” piped up another voice, the voice of Mrs. Milano, now tiny and frail at 88. “That’s bullshit! What happened was I seen my husband with that bitch he was goin’ with and I went right up to her and said, ‘Come on upstairs with me and I’ll beat the shit out of you’ and she said ‘Hit me right here!’ So I did! I gave her one good slap across her mouth. Then she slapped me back and then everybody got in on the action. I started the fight, not your father, Linda.”

That Linda and her mother both wanted bragging rights shocked me, but should not have considering all that happened at the wedding.

Marilyn Horan was born in Brooklyn and has spent her whole life there. Recently retired from the job of assistant principal in NYC schools, she now has time to write.

Tagged: Family, Sweet and Sour, Vanity, Violence

Don't Call Me--or Chelsea Shiksa

December 10, 2009, 2:29pm

'Don't Call Me — or Chelsea — a Shiksa'

By Marilyn Horan

The recent conversion to Judaism and subsequent marriage of Ivanka Trump to Jared Kushner, and Chelsea Clinton’s even more recent engagement to Marc Mezvinsky have newspapers, magazines and blogs discussing the impact these relationships have on society and on the families involved. In this Daily Beast essay, Samuel P. Jacobs touts Ivanka Trump’s, and presumably Chelsea Clinton’s, seeing the “allure of marrying a Jewish man,” — without mentioning the wealth and power both Ivanka and Chelsea bring to their respective unions. Jacobs goes on to write, “Of course, Jewish mothers worry endlessly about their sons falling prey to the seductive powers of the shiksa.”

As a multicultural society, our sensitivities are heightened. Racial, religious and ethnic epithets that were unfortunately permissible in decades past are no longer tolerated, which is why I was offended to see the word “shiksa” in Mr. Jacob’s essay, and in the sub-headline of Jennifer Senior’s New York magazine piece about the Clinton-Mezvinsky engagement. I was more shocked to see the same insulting word for a non-Jewish woman in John Purchase’s recent “From Salt Lake City to Smoked Salmon Town: On Growing Up Mormon and Marrying Kosher”, published in the pages of the Forward.

It is astounding that shiksa has not been added to the list of politically incorrect expressions — given it is derived from the Hebrew word shayketz, meaning to loathe or abominate an unclean thing.

My personal battle with the moniker began years ago.

As a Catholic schoolgirl from Brooklyn, I was unfamiliar with many Yiddish expressions. Before I looked up the meaning of the word, though, I knew through context and nuance that it was derogatory. I am a schoolteacher, and at a school where I taught, Jewish teachers, women mostly, often pointed out to one another my “shiksa” legs, nose, or hair.

At first, I thought it meant skinny, and it hit a sore spot because I was self-consciously thin. I asked that the term not be used to describe me, but I was reassured that it was harmless, positive even. I did not buy it then, and I do not buy it now.

Not a month goes by that I am not labeled with and angered by the S-word. My tennis partner, who is Jewish, recently remarked that the rain made her hair frizzy while mine remained straight. “Shiksa,” she sniffed. When I objected to the Yiddishism, she acted surprised, saying that it only meant “non-Jewish,” and that it was a compliment. After explaining the definition, supported by my phone’s Google search, she said that she was shocked and would never use it again. At my monthly book club meeting, a Jewish woman asked aloud, “What would I have to do to pass for shiksa?” Conversation ensued with the offending noun used repeatedly by several of the group. Again, I protested.

Despite the repellent meaning of the word, it is commonplace and thriving. Wendy Wasserstein, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright wrote the book of essays “[Shiksa Goddess, or How I Spent My Forties,” which was the forerunner to many “shiksa-themed” books. Type “shiksa” Google and find there is a “Shiksa of the Week Club” on Facebook — with the stated goal is to get non-Jewish girls to send in sexy pictures for Jewish guys to admire. The Jewcy essay “Nakadika Shiksa” is about a mortified Jewish mother refers to her daughter in a low-cut blouse a “nakadika (naked) shiksa.” There are many, many more examples..

Besides being disrespectful to non-Jews, “shiksa” must be offensive to Jewish women to whom the word’s message seems to be that there are females out there who are more beautiful than they are, more sensuous and more desired by Jewish men. The continuation of the myth of the “non-Jew as goddess” perpetuates an inferiority complex among Jewish women and stirs the desire among Jewish men to taste the “forbidden fruit” to fulfill the Jewish boy’s fantasy à la Philip Roth.

Dan Friedman, the Forward’s current arts and culture editor and the founding editor of Zeek, in 2004 wrote “Taking the Gloss off of Shiksa Toes” in the Forward. He wrote:

“Shiksa is the “N” word of the Jewish community. It is so often used jokingly, that we can forget that it’s a vile, sexist, racist word…. But … it remains a crass insult and reveals a state of mind that embarrasses us as a community… . For an often-persecuted people … it seems that many of us have spent too little time thinking about how we refer to the gentile and ex-gentile women in our midst. Let’s get rid of our prejudiced language and put the “S” word to the sword.”

It’s been more than five years since Mr. Friedman made the case for the obliteration of the S-word. So why does the Jewish community continue to sanction its use?