Free Bertrand Court by Michelle Brafman Page B

together for warmth, they’d listen for Mama’s last noodge and then yank back the yellowed goose-down comforter from the old country and leap into the cruel winter morning.
    A tear formed somewhere in the bottom of Sylvia’s throat, but it never found her eyes. She poked around in her sweater sleeve for a tissue, just in case it did. Without looking at Sylvia, Goldie reached into her own sleeve and handed her sister a yellowed handkerchief.
    Sylvia’s heart filled up so full that she thought it might pop like a balloon. She felt Goldie watching as she spread the handkerchief on her lap and placed the spoon in the center. Before she folded the material around it, she paused to finger the faded pink embroidered roses and the inscription: Always, Sylvia.

SKIN
    Eric Solonsky, October 1995
    O n a warm Yom Kippur afternoon, Eric Solonsky stood on his front lawn, waiting for a delivery of Thai food and listening to the birds converse. A blade of overgrown grass brushed his ankle as he imagined his sisters, Hannah and Amy, and the rest of his family fasting and beating their breasts for a year’s worth of sins in the main sanctuary of Hannah’s synagogue.
    He handed a twenty to a young man wearing an oversized Old Navy T-shirt and took a deep breath before returning to his in-laws and an exhausted Maggie, who was trying with a patient fervor to get their newborn to nurse. Eric felt useless in the pursuit, so he loitered for a few more minutes in the scraggly yard of 1935 East Bertrand Court, down payment compliments of his father. Maintaining a lawn, shopping at a store called Buy Buy Baby, ordering takeout on Yom Kippur, not to mention gathering thirty people, including his gentile in-laws, to watch his son’s penis get whacked tomorrow at noon — it all seemed a little surreal.
    He entered the house quietly through the back door and found Alec swaddled like a burrito, sleeping on top of Maggie’s chest.
    â€œHe ate,” Maggie’s mother mouthed. Maggie’s parents had flown in from Milwaukee the day before Alec’s birth.
    Eric grinned at his wife, gave her a thumbs-up, and pointed to the brown paper bag of food in his hand. Without rousing Alec, Maggie managed to get up from the couch and lower him into the bassinet they’d set up in the family room. He’d left a spit-up stain the shape of Florida on her T-shirt, and one of her engorged breasts was nearly double the size of its partner. Loose flesh encased her middle, pimples covered her chin, and blue veins popped out of her calves. Eric had spent his senior year of high school, back in Milwaukee, fantasizing about Maggie Stramm’s loveliness, and he still saw her as the cheerleader whose finely sculpted nostrils flared as she rooted for boys with athletic ability and smooth skin. Maggie hadn’t remembered him ten years later when she saw him playing bass with a U2 cover band at an Earth Day fundraiser on Capitol Hill.
    â€œAre you sure you don’t want to stay?” Eric asked Maggie’s mother, dutifully. “Looks like they gave us an extra order of pineapple fried rice.”
    â€œOh, gosh, I’m not an adventurous eater, although Will and I do go for chop suey now and then. What was the name of that Oriental family who went to your high school?”
    Maggie bit. “Asian, Mom. They were Asian.”
    â€œOh, Maggie. Asian, African American, American Indian…Who can keep up? Eric, do you remember them?” Helene smiled at him.
    â€œThe Kimuras. They were Japanese, I think,” he answered.
    No doubt, Helene said these things to rile Maggie, who worked for a diversity training company whose CEO regularly pinched her ass, but Eric guessed that Helene would have added Jews to the list if she were sipping her zinfandel at the club. In the heat of the wedding planning, Maggie had relayed Helene’s comment that if she had to marry a Jew, she could at least have picked a lawyer or