Free B000FC0RL0 EBOK by Jerry Stiller Page A

leave the barracks.”
    I was relieved of all duties and left wondering what would come next. Two days later I was called in by the lieutenant, who informed me that the sergeant had admitted his guilt. He’d been afraid of losing his honorable discharge if he admitted anything. He could have been court-martialed and might have lost his GI benefits.
    “What made him tell you the truth?” I asked.
    “He just felt sorry for you when you wouldn’t turn on him. We’re going to drop the whole thing and make out it never happened.”
    “What about Officers’ Candidate School?” I asked. “Do I have a shot?”
    He looked at me and said, “This incident is not going to go on your record, but OCS is not going to happen. By the way, I’m still giving you a three-day pass.”
    Was somebody trying to make up for something? I wondered whether he was trying to compensate for having arrested me. I hitched a ride on a C-47 army transport plane at Godman Field, Kentucky. I wanted to get back to New York and away from Fort Knox. I was starting to feel lonesome for my father and mother.
    When I arrived home I wanted my parents to see me in my army uniform. I was eighteen years old, serving my country. That night we were invited to the house of my grandparents, Bobbi and Zeidi, for the Passover Seder. Both of them were bigger than life. When I was around five or six years old they would arrive on Sunday afternoons at our house on South Fifth Street in Brooklyn and advance into the kitchen with large brown bags, like the National Recovery Act, dispensing food to the starving poor. They’d speak a truncated Yiddish, a shorthand that only they seemed to understand.
    There was always a smile on my grandmother’s face as she eyed me with a special glint meant only for her favorite, as it appears I was. Grandmother looked like a queen out of Genesis. Her shiny black hairwas pulled back in a bun and her eyes burned like coals when she looked straight at you.
    My grandfather, a tall, smiling, bashful man, would remove reddish frankfurters from the bag. They were strung together and wrapped in heavy waxed paper. The franks were thrown into a kettle of boiling water. Twice the size of ordinary frankfurters, they were called “specials.” Minutes later they burst. Our mouths watered. The seeded mustard, wrapped in cylindrical brown waxed paper, oozed out onto the rye bread in swirls, like toothpaste. We hungrily devoured all the franks.
    My grandparents’ impromptu visits would elevate our lives on a Sunday afternoon. But they depressed my mother, who watched silently as our daily meals were eclipsed by my grandparents’ grandstand play for affection.
    On Friday nights my father would take me for dinner at my grandparents’ house. The family sat at a long table with a white tablecloth.
    The Friday night candles were always in the center of the table. My grandmother would put a handkerchief over her head, “Tsindt lecht,” light the candles. My grandfather struck the match and lit them, and my grandmother would wave her arms over the brass candle holder and say a prayer, more of an incantation. My grandfather would make a funny aside to take the seriousness out of everything, and all ten of their children would laugh.
    First we’d sip the soup. This was chicken soup like none I’d never tasted. My grandmother cooked all day Friday in preparation. She made the noodles herself. If I arrived early I’d see her flattening the dough with a rolling pin. She would slice the dough into strips with a Lukshen knife and then drop the strips into boiling water.
    At the table, she sat me closest to her. My father, the eldest, came next, then the rest of the family.
    “Ehr iz zoi veir Villie,”
she told everyone in Yiddish.
    “He looks like his father,” my aunts would repeat in English.
    I took this to mean that because I resembled my father I was special, unlike my brother, who looked like my mother.
    When the meal was finished and the evening