Free Up From Orchard Street by Eleanor Widmer Page B

but after all, that’s life, a man loses himself for a minute and God forbid his wife or mother should find out. Anyhow, here’s the story, and no disrespect to Lil, but this woman, she’s clean as a whistle, immaculate and she does a perfect job in half an hour.” Rocco wrote a name and address on a piece of paper. “A Mrs. O’Brady. In east New York. She wears a cross,” Rocco added.
    My father put a match to the paper.
    Everyone admitted that the Gypsy fortune-tellers who lived right under the Williamsburg Bridge sold pills that brought on a woman’s period. Buy pills from Gypsies? Jack paced the floor, chain-smoking. “Who knows what Gypsies are selling? Could be cyanide. Could be made from cat’s piss, God knows what. Those pills are out of the question.”
    “All right,” Lil sobbed, “no pills, no Irish midwife.” She added wildly, “What am I supposed to do, jump off a bridge?”
    As soon as the words flew out of her mouth, Lil bought a jump rope and every morning and every night she jumped rope a hundred times in the kitchen. My grandmother fanned herself with her Hoover apron. “Please,” she protested, “you’ll get a heart attack. You’ll kill yourself with this jumping.”
    “I used to do double Dutch when I was a girl, up to a hundred.”
    “You’re not a little girl now. What’s worse, having a baby or having a heart attack?”
    For jumping rope Lil wore an old pale nightgown that once may have been pink but now had faded into gray, the color of Lil’s skin as she persisted with her rope skipping. Her blonde hair bobbed up and down as she counted with increasingly shallow breath, “Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.” As she reached twenty-five, as if possessed by some childhood demon she called out, “Crisscross,” and twirled the rope to jump inside it at one count and out at the other. We could hear her panting as she counted, “Thirtyfive, thirty-six, thirty-seven . . .”
    Lil went dead white. The rope slipped from her fingers as she crumpled to the floor. My grandmother ran to her side, wiping the sweat from her face, crooning softly to her, rocking her in her arms. Bubby put her ear to Lil’s heart. “It goes too fast, too fast. I hear it like an ocean, rocking like the ocean on the boat from Odessa.”
    Her voice held a note of panic as she asked me to bring the slivovitz liqueur from its accustomed jug in the kitchen cupboard.
    “A bissel,” she instructed me, “a little.” The whole scene frightened me. My hands shook with the responsibility of the task but I poured a few drops into a water glass. Bubby took the glass and brought it to Lil’s lips. “A drop,” she coaxed, “try to drink one drop.” Lil didn’t drink alcohol except for some Manischewitz wine at the Passover seder, and little at that. Bubby forced a few drops into her mouth, then placed the glass on the floor and sprinkled the slivovitz on Lil’s lips and nose. We could see her chest heaving through the material of her nightgown but her eyes began to flutter. She sat upright in my grandmother’s arms and slowly the two pulled themselves to their feet.
    Lil rested in bed while Bubby hovered over her, bringing her sips of chicken broth, one or two strawberries that she had preserved during the summer served over a bite of sponge cake. “Sugar is good for you, some fruit it’s very good, it will make you feel stronger.”
    Lil dozed fitfully, but at 7:30 she rose and took hot water from the tea kettle that seemed never to run dry. Bubby helped her sponge her entire body. When Lil dressed in a navy blue shift with an all-pleated skirt that showed off her shapely legs Bubby said, “You know, Lil, if women could do away with pregnancies by jumping rope, the Gypsies and the midwives would be out of business.” Then she looked up at me and Willy and reminded us, “Don’t tell!”
    My father, home from work on Division Street that night said, “Lil, you look like a million