Free Just Kids From the Bronx by Arlene Alda Page A

old-fashioned petunias are among my favorite flowers.
    My mother’s sewing machine was also in the dinette. The word “Singer” stood out in bright golden letters across its black background. My mother was a skilled dressmaker who designed and sewed her own clothing and also earned money by sewing dresses for others. What was a skill and an asset for her was sometimes a curse for me. Why is the machine so noisy? Why does she sew her own clothes into all hours of the night? Why does she have to make my clothes? Why can’t I buy them ready-made like Diana down the hall? My feelings would erupt. The targets were my mother and her machine.
    “Stop sewing.”
    She’d try to placate me. “In a few minutes.”
    “Stop now. I can’t think.”
    No answer, except the rebuke from the incessant drone of the motor with the needle moving up and down, up and down, up and down. My mother hates confrontation. She ignores me. I storm out of the dinette crying. I slam the door to the one bedroom in the apartment.
    It wasn’t just that I was most probably a spoiled brat, wanting what I wanted when I wanted it and often getting it. I was also hopelessly stuck, falling over and over again into the same muddy emotional rut as I watched my mother sitting, hunched over, sewing, while she sang or hummed under her breath. My knowing how she spent endless days and nights working as a housewife—cooking, cleaning, shopping, washing, clothing her kids, and being on call for whoever—became such a clear message to me not to end up like her.
    Thankfully she had the immigrant’s dream. “This is America. Your life can be better than mine.” I can’t say I didn’t love her for that. I can’t say for sure, though, because I had no understanding of what love was.
    Wearing beautiful clothing was important to my mother, but when she dressed up to go out the compliments she craved from my father weren’t there. Maybe it had something to do with the old country and the evil eye. Or maybe it didn’t seem manly to compliment. I never knew. Simon, how do you like my new dress? How do I look? She lived a life of silent and not-so-silent criticism from her loved ones without the counterbalance of positive words or understanding. I know that my father loved my mother in his own way, because when she died at age seventy his sadness included the sobbed words “I’ve lost my best friend.” It took me many years to realize that my parents had a marriage not unlike a lot of other parents’, especially immigrant parents at that time. Putting food on the table was primary. Open affection, friendship, and love were kept under wraps, maybe to be uncovered when the kids weren’t around.
    My father was quiet, introverted, and insecure in most situations that were new to him. He was a commercial lithographer, but often he was the last one hired for a job and therefore the first one fired when work was scarce. A vicious cycle. He took solace from the pressures of his life with its unemployment and financial insecurity by playing cards with his friend Max from the third floor of our building and placing bets on horses with the local bookie. His dream was to make a small killing, not in the stock market or in the lottery like today’s dreamers, but at the racetrack.
    My parents argued about money, but it was often one-sided. She told him that the household allowance he gave her was too little, and complained bitterly about his spending some of it betting on horses at Belmont Park racetrack. He’d retreat to the living room to silently read the newspaper. There even came a time when I, taking my mother’s part, wouldn’t or couldn’t talk to my father because of some disagreement or other. I wish I could remember the tipping point, but I can’t. That’s just what it was. A tipping point. An accumulation of the strain of parents simmering just below the boiling point, the lack of privacy and space, and the noise—amplified in my ears by my growing desires