Free Modern American Memoirs by Annie Dillard Page A

annoyed me, and he sang it constantly to the admiration of the old uncles and aunts who never ceased to wonder at the speed with which he picked up English songs and the pretty, true voice on which they floated clear, loud, and incessant.
    Instead of a city of silver rivers and golden bridges, America turned out to be Uncle David’s flat on Avenue C in which my father had first lived when he came to America. We walked up several flights of dark stairs and knocked on a door pasted over with glazed patterned paper of connecting rectangles and circles in blue and red and green, whose lines I liked to trace with my eye while the others talked. That door led to a large kitchen with a round table in the center, a few chairs around it, and, off to a side, a brown wooden icebox. At another side, a shining black stove whose cooking lids were lifted by a clever long black hook when pieces of coal had to be added to the waning fire. From the kitchen ran a narrow dark alley with divisions that made niches for beds and then opened into a small living room at whose end there were two windows with viewsof clouds and chimneys. Only once were we held to look down to the street below; never were we to try on our own, and we couldn’t, so thoroughly were we watched by our entranced Uncle David, who looked like God and Moses and, more often, Old King Cole. He had a long white beard and puffs of white hair leaping from the edge of his skullcap and a magical skill of putting his finger inside his cheek and pulling it out to make a big popping sound. He laughed a lot, told incomprehensible stories about Italians whose only English was “sonnomabitz,” drank great quantities of tea, sipped from a saucer and drained through a cube of sugar held in his teeth. Everything about him was wonderful: the black straps and boxes he wrapped on his arms and forehead and the rhythmic bowing of his prayers when he was God; the fluttering old fingers and light touch of his gray carpet slippers as he paced a Chassidic dance when he was Old King Cole.
    The rest of his household consisted of two middle-aged spinster daughters. Rachel was a plump, bustling, talkative woman who addressed us as her little sheep, which made us feel pathetic and affecting and sure we could get anything out of her—another candy and yet another—and we played her. In spite of her bounty and mushy vulnerability, I was afraid of her. She wore glasses so thick that her eyes were invisible behind concentric circles of shine. Though her cheeks were high-colored and her teeth strong and yellow, she looked like a mechanical woman, a machine with flashing, glassy circles for eyes. The third member of the household was completely apart from us and truly fearsome. Yentel (a name, I was later told, that derived from the Italian “Gentile”) was tall and gaunt, blind and deaf. She moved through the small apartment deftly, measuring her spaces with long, constantly moving fingers. She made the beds, pulling, smoothing, lining up the edges with her subtle, restless fingers. She shelled peas, she peeled potatoes and plucked chickens. While my brother sang and shuffled around Rachel and Uncle David, I watched her out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t know what blind really meant; anyone who was so dextrous could not be entirely without vision and I was afraid she would see me staring at her if I watched her with my eyes wide open.
    Though I was relieved of some of the care of my brother, I still had to be in charge many times. Uncle David and Rachel could keephim from banging into Yentel and would prepare his food, but we had confusing language difficulties that I had to unsnarl when my parents went out, my mother wildly eager to see everything and now, particularly while she had such devoted baby-sitters. My brother and I spoke Polish, Uncle David and Rachel had been brought up in Yiddish with a few Polish words they no longer remembered accurately. When my brother