Bread Givers. Anzia Yezierska
own old hat from her head, flung it on the floor, and kicked it under the stove.
Mashah pushed up her shoulders and turned back to the mirror, taking the hairpins carefully from her long golden hair and fixing it in different ways. “It ain’t my fault if the shops are closed. If I take my lunch money for something pretty that I got to have, it don’t hurt you none.”
Worry or care of any kind could never get itself into Mashah’s empty head. Although she lived in the same dirt and trouble with us, nothing ever bothered her.
Everywhere Mashah went men followed her with melting looks. And these melting looks in men’s eyes were like something to eat and something to drink to her. So that she could go without her lunch money to buy pretty things for herself, and not starve like the rest of us.
She was no more one of us than the painted lady looking down from the calendar on the wall. Father’s preaching and Mother’s cursing no more bothered her than the far-away noise from the outside street.
When Mashah walked in the street in her everyday work dress that was cut from the same goods and bought from the same pushcart like the rest of us, it looked different on her. Her clothes were always so new and fresh, without the least little wrinkle, like the dressed-up doll lady from the show window of the grandest department store. Like from a born queen it shined from her. The pride in her beautiful face, in her golden hair, lifted her head like a diamond crown.
Mashah worked when she had work; but the minute she got home, she was always busy with her beauty, either retrimming her hat, or pressing her white collar, or washing and brushing her golden hair. She lived in the pleasure she got from her beautiful face, as Father lived in his Holy Torah.
Mashah kept part of her clothes in a soapbox under the bed. Everything in it was wrapped around with newspapers to keep the dirt out. She was so smart in keeping her things in perfect order that she could push out her box from under the bed in the middle of the dark night and know exactly where to put her hand to find her thin lace collar, or her handkerchief, or even her little beauty pin for the neck of her shirt-waist.
High up with a hanger, on a nail nearly to the ceiling, so that nobody’s dirty hands should touch it, hung Mashah’s white starched petticoat, and over it her pink calico; and all around them, an old sheet was tacked about with safety pins so she could tell if anybody touched it.
It was like a law in the house that nobody dared touch Mashah’s things, no more than they dared touch Father’s Hebrew books, or Mother’s precious jar of jelly which she always kept ready for company, even in the blackest times, when we ourselves had nothing to eat.
Mashah came home with stories that in rich people’s homes they had silver knives and forks, separate, for each person. And new-ironed tablecloths and napkins every time they ate on them. And rich people had marble bathtubs in their own houses, with running hot and cold water all day and night long so they could take a bath any time they felt like it, instead of having to stand on a line before the public bath-house, as we had to do when we wanted a bath for the holidays. But these millionaire things were so far over our heads that they were like fairy tales.
That time when Mashah had work hemming towels in an uptown house, she came home with another new-rich idea, another money-spending thing, which she said she had to have. She told us that by those Americans, everybody in the family had a toothbrush and a separate towel for himself, “not like by us, where we use one torn piece of a shirt for the whole family, wiping the dirt from one face on to another.”
“Empty-head!” cried Mother. “You don’t own the dirt under their doorstep and you want to play the lady.”
But when the day for the wages came, Mashah quietly went to the Five and Ten Cent Store and bought, not only a toothbrush and a separate towel for herself, but even a separate piece of soap.
Mother tore her hair when she found that Mashah made a leak of thirty cents in wages where every cent had been counted out. But Mashah went on brushing her teeth with her new brush and wiping her face with her new towel. And from that day, the sight of her toothbrush on the shelf and her white, fancy towel by itself on the wall was like a sign to us all, that Mashah had no heart, no feelings, that millionaire things willed themselves in her empty head, while the rest of us were wearing out our brains for only a bite in the mouth.
As Mother opened the door and saw all my sisters home, the market basket fell from her limp arm.
“Still yet no work?” She wrung her hands. “Six hungry mouths to feed and no wages coming in.” She pointed to her empty basket. “They don’t want to trust me anymore. Not the grocer, not the butcher. And the landlady is tearing from me my flesh, hollering for the rent.”
Hopelessly, she threw down her shawl and turned to me. “Did you put the potatoes on to boil?” Then her eyes caught sight of the peelings I had left in the sink.
“Gazlin! Bandit!” her cry broke through the house. She picked up the peelings and shook them before my eyes. “You’d think potatoes grow free in the street. I eat out my heart, running from pushcart to pushcart, only to bargain down a penny on five pounds, and you cut away my flesh like a murderer.”
I felt so guilty for wasting away so much good eating, I had to do something to show Mother how sorry I was. It used to be my work to go out early, every morning, while it was yet dark, and hunt through ash cans for unburned pieces of coal, and search through empty lots for pieces of wood. But that morning, I had refused to do it anymore. It made me feel like a beggar and thief when anybody saw me.
“I’d sooner go to work in a shop,” I cried.
“Who’ll give you work when you’re so thin and small, like a dried-out herring!”
“But I’m not going to let them look down on me like dirt, picking people’s ashes.” And I cried and cried so, that Mother couldn’t make me do it.
But now, I quietly took the pail in my hand and slipped out. I didn’t care if the whole world looked on me. I was going to bring that coal to Mother even if it killed me.
“You’ve got to do it! You’ve got to!” I kept talking to myself as I dug my hand into the ashes. “I’m not a thief. I’m not a thief. It’s only dirt to them. And it’s a fire to us. Let them laugh at me.” And I did not return home till my pail was full of coal.
It was now time for dinner. I was throwing the rags and things from the table to the window, on the bed, over the chairs, or any place where there was room for them. So much junk we had in our house that everybody put everything on the table. It was either to eat on the floor, or for me the job of cleaning off the junk pile three times a day. The school teacher’s rule, “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” was no good for us, because there weren’t enough places.
As the kitchen was packed with furniture, so the front room was packed with Father’s books. They were on the shelf, on the table, on the window sill, and in soapboxes lined up against the wall.
When we came to America, instead of taking along feather beds, and the samovar, and the brass pots and pans, like other people, Father made us carry his books. When Mother begged only to take along her pot for gefülte fish, and the two feather beds that were handed down to her from her grandmother for her wedding presents, Father wouldn’t let her.
“Woman!” Father said, laughing into her eyes. “What for will you need old feather beds? Don’t you know it’s always summer in America? And in the new golden country, where milk and honey flows free in the streets, you’ll have new golden dishes to cook in, and not weigh yourself down with your old pots and pans. But my books, my holy books always were, and always will be, the light of the world. You’ll see yet how all America will come to my feet to learn.”
No one was allowed to put their things in Father’s room, any more than they were allowed to use Mashah’s hanger.
Of course, we all knew that if God had given Mother a son, Father would have permitted a man child to share with him his best room in the house. A boy could say prayers