19. The Romeo and Juliet of Shady Glen

THE ROMEO AND JULIET OF SHADY GLEN

"I'm not happy about this meeting," Dickie's son, Jimmy, announced when they'd all sat down at one of the tables in the empty dining room. "I had to take the morning off work for something that doesn't concern me because Marlene"—he jutted a thumb at his wife—"forced me to."

"I didn't force," Marlene replied. "I strongly encouraged."

"Well, either way, let's get it over with," Jimmy said. "I have a job."

"You think you're the only one?" Ginny's granddaughter Lydia said. "I have to be in court tomorrow."

"Oh, you have to be in court tomorrow?" Jimmy said, mimicking Lydia in a way that surprised the boy.

The Person from Corporate hustled in, smiling brightly with white teeth and sweating a bit through her blouse. She eyed the boy and Maya-Jade and then through her teeth hissed a singsong "What are they doing here?" to Julio.

"They volunteer here, and—" Julio began, but was interrupted by Jimmy asking if they could just get on with things.

"Well, yes," the Person from Corporate began, measuring her words. The policy at corporate was the Customer Is Always Right, though the customer was not usually the resident but the relatives who controlled the purse strings. She needed to keep Jimmy and Lydia happy.

"I want to thank you so much for coming in and for giving us the chance to reassure you that the health and welfare of our residents is of the utmost importance," she began.

"Then why did you separate Ginny and Dickie?" Maya-Jade blurted. Her cheeks were pink with emotion. The boy kicked her under the table. This was not one of their talking points. "What I meant to say," she corrected, looking at her clipboard, "is that Mr. McGinity and Mrs. Koong should not be separated. They make each other happy, and studies have shown relationships in facilities like—"

"With all due respect"—Jimmy interrupted in a tone that had very little respect—"your grandmother is not my concern."

"She's my grandmother!" Lydia said, exchanging an eye roll with Maya-Jade.

"Then who is this one?" Jimmy asked, pointing at Maya-Jade.

"These are the two volunteers who contacted Mrs. Koong's granddaughter," Julio said. He'd thought the two kids would apologize and that would be that. He had not counted on talking points.

"Yeah," Lydia said. "Says a lot about this place that I heard about it not from anyone on staff but from a couple of kid volunteers."

"We don't need your permission to make a decision for my father," Jimmy countered.

"They've been in a relationship for more than three years. Don't you think this impacts her, too?"

"I don't want them to be in a relationship! I tried to stop it, but that other one, the Black lady who's usually in charge, she always had some excuse about them being consenting adults."

Lydia, Maya-Jade, and Julio all exchanged a look the boy didn't fully understand.

"Wait a minute," Jimmy's wife, Marlene, said. "You claimed you moved your father because of dementia. Not because of his girlfriend."

"Why can't it be both? Kill two birds with one stone," Jimmy said.

At this, Lydia and Marlene both gasped. "Birds?" Lydia said. "These are people."

"People who don't know what they're doing," Jimmy replied. "Trust me, if my dad had his wits about him, he wouldn't be with your grandmother."

"Because she's Asian?" Lydia fumed.

"I didn't say that!" Jimmy said. "But c'mon. Your grandmother carries a freaking baby doll."

"And your father can't remember his own name," Lydia shot back.

"Studies have shown that dementia patients are only a danger to themselves if they wander, and Mr. McGinity does not have a history of…" Maya-Jade trailed off when it became clear no one was listening.

The adults were all bickering about Dickie's inability to remember names and Ginny's baby doll. Acting like kids. All of them were, the boy thought with a growing sense of frustration, completely missing the point.

"Balderdash!" the boy exclaimed.

Balderdash was not only a fun word to say but an effective one. The arguing quieted. All eyes turned to the boy.

"You shouldn't separate them, because they love each other," he continued in a halting voice. He thought of Ginny and her doll, both of which had given him the willies when he arrived, but now he kind of understood why she had that doll. She needed someplace to put her love. So many people in Shady Glen had lost the people they loved, because their spouses had died or their children had moved away. When the people you loved left, that love remained, floating around, desperate for a place to go. And if it didn't find a place to go… bad things happened. Love turned into anger, fear, hate. This was something the boy at twelve knew all too well. How did the grown-ups not see this?

"It's the worst thing in the world to have someone you love taken away from you," he continued.

Even though this was decidedly not in their talking points, Maya-Jade gave him a supporting nod and mouthed, Go on.

"When a person you love goes away, you don't stop loving them. You just have this…" The boy stopped, trying to find the words to explain it. "This hole. It's the empty space where that person was. And it's the loneliest feeling in the world. So why would you take two people who aren't lonely and make them lonely? Why would you do that?"

After that, nobody spoke for a moment.

"Well, that's a lovely sentiment," the Person from Corporate began, but she was interrupted by Jimmy.

"Is… is my pop lonely?" he asked, his voice soft and a little bit husky, like he'd come down with a cold in the last thirty seconds.

"All of our residents have a fully active social—" the Person from Corporate began. But she was interrupted by Marlene.

"You remember how it was after your mom died," she reminded Jimmy. "Your dad was lost without her. And he's been so happy with Ginny. So what if they have their cognitive issues? The boy's right. They're happy together."

"And if your dad is anything like Ginny," Maya-Jade said, "he's not happy now either."

"Then we'll go see if he's okay," Jimmy said.

"Oh, I really don't think that's a good idea," the Person from Corporate said. "There's always an adjustment period."

But Julio was already standing up. It was like he'd been infected by the boy's bravery. "I can take you now," he said.

"And they did! They actually went to see him!" the boy told me later that afternoon, the words spilling out like a shaken bottle of champagne. "Me and Maya-Jade weren't allowed to go but Julio did, and he said that that Dickie was lying in bed, miserable, holding that flower book that he and Ginny read to each other. His son saw his dad like that and demanded they move him back. And they're doing it right now. Dickie and Ginny are together in the lobby for bingo while his son fills out paperwork and the aides move his stuff. And that lady, the one who was asking you all the questions about goats and stuff, she was so mad! But Dickie and Ginny were so happy and even their families seemed happy."

"That was very brave, what you did," I said.

And I could feel how happy the compliment made him. It lit up the room with joy. It lit up the room with love.

I LIKE TO THINK THAT even without the benefit of Hitler's interference, Mother and Olka would've eventually grown close. But stripped of the luxury of snobbery, the two became thick as the thieves they now were, at least according to the Third Reich. Olka relocated the stolen furs from our store to the coal cellar in her uncle's building where she was still living, a dangerous decision given her uncle was in full support of the Nazi government and would've surely turned in his niece if he found out she was helping not just a Jew but a Jew she was engaged to. "I'll just tell him I looted the store," Olka reassured me when I worried for her safety. "He might even respect me for it."

When you are the frog in the pot, you sometimes congratulate yourself for surviving the heat, failing to notice the temperature increasing. But Olka noticed: First the Jewish schools were shut down; then Jews were barred from secular schools, including the one Olka and I had attended. A curfew was imposed. Jews were no longer permitted to ride the trams. We were ordered to wear a blue Star of David affixed to our clothing any time we ventured outside.

Olka knew they would take our home next, which was why, after the furs were sold, she convinced Mother to sell our furniture, jewelry, clothes, Mother's sterling silver tea set, the gold-inlaid cuckoo clock, transforming any belonging of value into cash.

"If you keep selling our plates, we'll be eating off the floors," Father complained when Olka carted off Mother's twelve-serving Limoges china set. What he thought was a hyperbolic exaggeration would come true all too soon.

"What good are plates without a table?" Mother shot back. "What good is a table if they take our home?"

"They wouldn't take our home," Father declared.

"And why not?" Mother snapped back at him. "Did they not take our store?"

"A business is one thing, but a home is…" Father trailed off.

"Evictions have already begun, Pan Kravitz," Olka replied. "People are leaving the city altogether or being moved to Kazimierz."

Mother wrinkled her nose in distaste. Kazimierz was a lively if cramped neighborhood where Krakow's less wealthy and less assimilated Jews lived, the type of people who didn't sport the latest fashions from Paris but wore black hats and long peasant skirts, the type of people who didn't speak Polish let alone French or German, but Yiddish, which Mother called a "peasant tongue."

"I'd rather move into the professor's flat," Mother replied. "It's small, but it's just sitting there."

The flat had been empty for months, ever since the professor had gone back to work. One morning he'd knocked on our door and jubilantly shown the invitation from the new occupation government ordering him to return to the university. "You see, I told you everything would go back to normal," he told Mother. "Soon you will be back in school," he told me, "and you back in your store," he told Father.

Not long after, he left for the university. He never returned. Father said he must have gone to the country to finish his latest book, an act of fabrication that was a stretch even for a dressmaker. But sometimes it's easier to believe a pretty lie over a hideous truth. And the truth was that the professor was either imprisoned or dead. The Nazis had called all the professors—not just the Jewish ones but the gentiles like Professor Palansky, too—to a meeting as a trick. Once assembled, the intellectuals were arrested, deported, or killed.

We were unable to move to the professor's flat, and we stayed in our home until we were turned out and landed in Kazimierz. Though our new two-room flat was a downgrade from our luxurious apartment on Lipowa Street, we were—thanks to small bribes from the money Olka had helped us obtain—better off than many families who had to crowd three times as many people into half the space.

But the bribes could not save us from the mandate that all able-bodied Jews work, not for payment but for the privilege of staying alive. Mother was sent to work in a munitions factory while I cleaned latrines at the railroad station. Father had grown too frail for labor, so he joined the Jewish Council, a puppet organization meant to placate the Jews into thinking we had some modicum of control, even as the Nazis seized control of all aspects of our lives, our property, our businesses, our livelihoods, our dignity.

We saw less of Olka then. A gentile was more conspicuous in Kazimierz than in the central part of the city we had lived in. And whenever she did manage to stop in, the visits were contentious because she was lobbying for us to leave Poland. But none of us wanted to. Father still feared the Soviets more than the Nazis. Mother was still clinging to the hope of moving to Paris, though France was about to fall to Hitler. And me, I didn't want to leave Olka.

"You're being foolish," Olka told me more than once.

"I'm being patient," I replied. "My father lived through the last war. He says that this is the nature of wars: they ebb and they flow, like the tide."

"Unless they swallow you up like the stormy sea," Olka replied.

We had the same fight every time we saw each other, Olka wasting our valuable time together by begging me to leave. The more I refused, the more frustrated she grew.

"I can't keep having this conversation with you," she said to me after one such argument. "Maybe we should end things. That way maybe you will leave."

"Maybe that's what you really want," I replied, my pride, my vanity wounded.

"You think that?" she asked, her eyes burning. "You think that's what I want?"

I did and I didn't. I knew she loved me, but I also knew that our lives had flipped. Olka now had a job, a paying job, working as a bookkeeper. She had a purpose, helping Mother and now other families in the area sell their valuables on the black market. And, in an unexpected twist, war had turned Olka, a woman who once had no patience for fashion, glamorous. Mother had given Olka several fine suits and dresses she had no use for in our current life. She showed Olka how to style her hair in waves and how to wear makeup. Now Olka was never without a tube of red lipstick. Not out of vanity, she assured me, but because with a red lip, a dash of charm, and her now-fluent German, it was easier to dazzle the German soldiers into thinking she was, if not one of them, close enough.

"Maybe it is what you want," I replied.

She twisted the ring on her finger. Babci's ring, which was meant to be temporary until I got her a fine diamond.

"Maybe you should sell that, too." I gestured to the ring. "Though it's probably as worthless as I am."

She held the ring to her heart. "It is precious to me. Just like you are."

"Please. Don't coddle me! I was hardly worth the trouble before, but at least then I did something with my life. I was somebody. Now I do nothing but clean excrement. I have nothing to offer you."

"You think I loved you because you had something to offer me?"

I shrugged. "I was rich. You were not. It had to be part of the appeal."

Mother, who had been eavesdropping from the other room, hissed, "Jozef! Stop this provocation. You love each other."

"You would've looked down on her were it not for the war." When Olka flinched, I tasted bitter victory. "Now you just need her," I told Mother before returning my spiteful attention to Olka. "But need is not the same as love, is it, Olka?"

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she turned to me and said, "No, Josey, it is not."

She left. I was sure she wouldn't be back. I was miserable about it, but also reveled in it. Why would she come back? I was nothing.

I didn't hear from Olka for three torturous nights. I alternately hated myself for ruining the one good thing I had and hated Olka for making it so easy to ruin. When there was a knock at the door late on the fourth night, I sprinted, desperate for it to be her.

But whoever had knocked was already gone. They'd left a large wooden crate. I brought it inside and pried it open. Inside was an old-fashioned sewing machine, the kind operated by a foot pedal. I knew it was from Olka. What I didn't know was that it was the second time sewing would save my life.