Free The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir by Sonia Taitz

away (or run at all) that she kept me on a leash. Actually, it was a harness that wrapped around my shoulders and belted around my waist like the top of some wonderful lederhosen ensemble. On the other end was Bubbe, who liked to sit on the bench right outside the gated “water sprinkler area” in the park. I was tethered to her in the heat as the other children, primarily Irish, ran barefoot in their underwear beneath the cold sprays.
    My grandmother wore dark, loose-fitting dresses with a narrow little belt of the same fabric, suggesting the latitude where her waist had once been. She was neither fat nor round, but staunch and distinguished, with the stolid, unmovable air of an Indian chief in an old daguerreotype. Her wispy hair surrounded a strong, tragic face with high, dignified cheekbones and thin, unimpressable lips. Bubbe was grim in her task of keeping me from all harm, and harm began at the door of our apartment. When I look at it now, the playground she took me to seems mild and tame. In my childhood, I saw it through her eyes, as a wilderness full of naked savages (the “other” children, the “gentile” children), mountains (a little rock formation where my brother used to climb, out of her line of sight, free as a goat in Heidi’s Alpine wonderland), some metal swings, a sprinkler area, monkey bars and a couple of seesaws. Our poor little grandma was tired and sad and old. My mother often told me that she had been happy and game before the war, that she had had a beautiful voice and sang well. There was a picture, from much later, of my grandmother laughing, as she and mother rowed a boat together. For years and years I thought this was how they had come to America. And I thought that that was the last time she really enjoyed herself, side by side with her daughter, rowing to freedom (they were actually on the lake in Central Park).
    To me, Bubbe was someone who wore boxy brown old-lady shoes, tying up the sides with assertive laces. I wonder now—when did grandmothers stop wearing this uniform? It must have been relaxing, in those days, to be permitted to give up so thoroughly, to simply surrender to softness, comfort, and anonymity. My Bubbe, like many others, wore dark colors, those amazing shoes (they must have been reassuring, a solid, yet soft, base for her on earth), a tichel covering her head on colder days. The grandma palette contained nothing but soothing browns, grays, and nearly black navy blues. Fabrics tended toward the tweedy and fuzzy. Buttons were large and often interesting. Cardigans were de rigeuer. In the rain, Bubbe would pull out a polka-dotted, plastic version of her kerchief. She wore no makeup, and over her regal bones the skin was soft and scored with majestic wrinkles, suggesting vast knowledge which no child could understand. In her bag, which closed with a large metal clasp, she carried no lipstick, no mirror—just a little money and a white, embroidered handkerchief with which, in the summer, she dabbed moisture off her face, or wiped the ambient dirt off mine.
    I wore little white socks with lacy edges, and well-polished, sturdy white shoes of the type immortalized in brass on many a mantel. I wore a stiff cotton dress with a ruffled petticoat underneath, and a cardigan with embroidered flowers and pearly buttons. But I had eyes, and I could see something I liked. There they were—children playing gleefully. These were our neighbors, fellow immigrants’ kids, with runny noses, scabs on their knees, dirt under their nails. They suggested a wild, unbridled freedom—the freedom to hurt, to be hurt, to soar, to fall, to laugh and splash and be crazy. Two of these, a pair of twin sisters, used to come up to me sometimes; their clear blue eyes and crazy orange hair amazed me.
    “Hey, I’m Loretta!”
    “Hey, and I’m Charlotte!”
    “Whycome you can’t play?”
    “And whycome you don’t talk?”
    “Who’s that lady, your great-granny or somethin’?”
    Long pause