Free TREYF by Elissa Altman Page A

could be seen walking around The Champs-Élysées Promenade in a stained cream-colored trench coat, whatever the weather. There were the Garbfelds, who were possibly married and possibly not, and their daughter, Shaina, who might have been Moishe’s child or might have not. Whenever we saw her, Judith spent as much time eyeing my mother’s unique outfits as my mother did hers; Judith wore tight polyester hip-huggers in bright colors and puffed-sleeved blazers over too-short blouses that revealed a ribbon of putty-colored flesh. Waiting for the elevator together, they gaped at each other like gladiators: Judith stared at my mother’s riding outfits. My mother gawked at the roll of creamy fat that bulged between the top of Judith’s pants and the bottom of her shirt. The tension between them cleaved to the air like humidity.
    The enmity between the Steinmans, the Garbfelds, and my parents was mutual; they were never invited to visit us, nor we them. Instead, my mother and father did their cocktail partying to Trini Lopez and Peggy Lee, and their coffee and Entenmann’s after a movie with a small coterie of other couples, all of them mixed-faith, who lived in the buildings.
    My mother’s best friend, Inga Hoffmann, was an earthy, warmhearted redhead who loved to laugh, and who had grown up in a devout Lutheran home in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. Inga was married to George Hoffmann, a bug-eyed, potbellied itinerant magician whose most notable physical characteristic was that his feet drastically turned outward, making it impossible to know which direction he was heading in when he walked. George performed regularly at my birthday parties, turning everything—our dog’s Milk-Bones, a red silk hankie, a small budgie—into a burst of yellow flame that exploded from the depths of a threadbare Goodwill top hat, and sent me hurtling to the floor, where I cowered in terror. He employed his children, Eddie and Tor, in his magic tricks: he ran a narrow, almost invisible wire from a small magic button in his trouser pocket down the leg of his triple-weave trousers and up into the pants legs and shirtsleeves of his two boys, and down into a tiny battery that they held in their closed hands. While the boys waited in silence for their cue, George casually zapped his sons with shocks when he asked them in front of a rapt audience of six-year-olds to G
o on, guess how many scarves Daddy is going to pull out of his magic top hat
, and they’d wince accordingly: once, twice, three times, four, or five.
    â€œFive scarves, Daddy,” towheaded Eddie Hoffmann would miraculously guess, smiling through his stubby, clenched baby teeth, his Sta-Prest white shirt and tiny black clip-on tie damp with sweat.
    Inga and the boys left George in New York for two months every summer and went to Denmark, where her mother still lived.When she returned home with Eddie and Tor at the end of August, my mother and I would spend our late afternoons at the Hoffmann apartment in The Brussels, which with every passing summer became increasingly festooned with all manner of imported Danish foods, paintings of rock-jawed Scandinavian sea captains, yellow Dansk Kobenstyle cookware, small rubber trolls, and miniature statues of helmeted Vikings that Inga carried back to New York with her. Her sliver of a galley kitchen had been packed with processed junk foods before she left for Denmark every summer: there were bags of Funyuns, boxes of Pop-Tarts, jars of Tang, cans of spray cheese, sour Slim Jims smelling of rancid pork fat. But when she came home from Copenhagen, she made a clean sweep of her cupboards, replacing everything with the Scandinavian foods that she loved. Every day after picking Eddie and me up from the school bus, my mother and Inga planted themselves for hours at Inga’s tiny table opposite her stove. While Eddie and I played Eric the Red or Rape and Plunder in the bedroom that he shared with Tor, Inga poured