Free Modern American Memoirs by Annie Dillard

choo-choo train and then the big, big ship that will take us to our father in America. He is silent in these dreams, his face old, serious, as if he were listening to the fears under my bright optimistic patter.
    The next vision is actual recollection: a long cobbled quay marching into a world of water, more water than I had ever imagined. On the side of the quay a stall at which a woman shining with smiles and sweat stands frying small cakes. My mother buys three and hands me one. I expect it to be sweet and it tastes like fish. The vomit leaps out of my mouth, down my clean dress, and into the cracks around the cobblestones. What do they do in this place to girls who vomit on their streets? Will they keep me off their ship? The pink sweaty lady washes it away with a bucket of water. My mother thanks her in the Dutch she has picked up, I say my best Polish thank you, my smarty brother dazzles her with a “ Merci beau-coup ” someone had taught him on a train, and we go to look for the Susquehanna , my mother carrying my brother and one big valise and I two big bundles.
    Just as I find it a great loss not to know my grandparents’ first names, I feel deprived of what should have been an unforgettable sight: the big ship as it swayed on the waterfront and, later, the endless corridors, the stairs, the crowds of people, the disorder, the shouting, the weeping in terror, in relief, in joy, that my mother described. We were on the ship a full month, listed in steerage. I don’t know where my brother and I actually stayed, however. As if our lives were designed to fill every requirement of the classic immigrant hegira, typhus raged through steerage, my exhausted mother one of the victims. We children must have been taken care of in some other part of the ship by strangers whom I cannot remember except as sensations of pleasure: an India rubber ball whose lovely colors played hide and seek with each other and the man who gave it to me, a slight man in a brown hat who limped. I searched for him for years after. A slight man in a brown hat who limped was the dream lover of my adolescence, a steady image through the short, searing crushes, the unbuttoned blouse and the frightened crawl of boys’ fingers.
    Knowing that there would be a long wait at Ellis Island, my father had equipped himself with a couple of Hershey bars to nibble on, and when he finally picked me up to kiss me, I tasted the chocolate and announced to my mother, “Our father has a sweet mouth.” It was frequently quoted as an example of my dainty, feminine grace, and only four years old, mind you. I have oftenthought it was an act of propitiation: I am eager to love you; love me, please.
    At Ellis Island we were questioned and examined by immigration officials and told our English names. Because my Polish birth certificate said “Jew-child Carolina” I was dubbed and registered as “Caroline,” a barbed-wire fence that divided me from myself throughout my school years. I hated it and would never answer my father when he tried to be fancy and American in public, addressing me by a name that belonged entirely to P.S. 58, P.S. 57, P.S. 59, to Theodore Roosevelt High School, to James Monroe High School, to Hunter College, not to me. How we got to Kate I don’t know. My mother must have sought it out to keep as clear as possible the link to her grandmother Kaila, not realizing how intensely Catholic a name it then was. Being serenaded as “K-K-K-Katy, my beautiful Katy” was a flattering bewilderment until I realized it was not written for me and then grew bored and irritated with the repetition from elderly relatives. (As bored as I later became with their descendants and their witty greeting, “Kiss me, Kate.”) My brother, the master mimic, learned “K-K-K-Katy” immediately and learned, too—our weaponry of injuries that were deep and yet unpunishable was uncannily sophisticated—how much it