Memoir: My Ned Chapter 16 Waltham
May. 18th, 2018 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
badgerladyI had never learned to drive. Early in my high school years, I’d repeated to my mother something I’d heard an upperclassman say: “That car is God in our house; whenever they want me to do something, they hold it over my head.” I’d mentioned it because I thought it was a stupid and unfair approach; I was horrified to realize what ammunition I’d handed Mom when a smug smile came over her face and she said, “That’s the way it’s going to be around here, too.”
Give her that weapon? Never. So those first days in Waltham, I’d sit in the motel with the baby while Ned ran errands and looked for a place for us to live. I don’t know what I was doing the day he registered at Brandeis, though, but I know I wasn’t watching Sarah—we have the pictures they obligingly shot of her as for a student ID.
He found one place I never set eyes on, but its image is clear in my mind as he described it: a white frame cottage on a wooded lot, with built-in bookcases around the window seats and bittersweet growing by the back door. It still sounds attractive. We didn’t manage to get it, though.
We ended up in an apartment in a ‘50s brick four-flat on a quiet back street. There were arabesque ogival arches between the rooms and swirled designs in the ceiling plaster. It was otherwise very plain and modest: an eat-in kitchen, living room with a picture window staring at the picture window of the equally undistinguished apartment across the street, microscopic entrance foyer and two bedrooms flanking a biggish bathroom.
But there was a big, shady fenced backyard, space for our car in the garage, and four whole rooms: incredibly spacious after the Chicago quarters. Of course, because of the robbery, we didn’t have much of anything to put in those rooms. We went out and bought a mattress and put it on the floor of the back bedroom. We slept on it under our coats. Sarah slept in her buggy in the front bedroom.
We put a cardboard box in the middle of the kitchen floor to serve as a table and covered it with one of the crib sheets that stranger in Chicago had given us. I bought two boxes of Dreft laundry detergent; they had cheap but serviceable dinner plates in them in those days, stuck right in with the soap. When my Bard friend Marcy, who was going to art school in Boston, came to visit, I bought another box of detergent so there’d be a plate for her. We sat on the floor around the box to eat.
It took several weeks for the insurance money to come through. Inadequate as it was, it looked like a fortune: $5,000 all in a lump. We went to Woolworth’s and drew a gaping crowd by spending more than $100 there—at that time you could feed a family of four for a week on $100. But we needed everything: potato peeler, tooth glass, salt and pepper shakers, pot holders, scissors, tape, knives, a bread board, a butter dish, aspirin, a broom and a mop and a pail, bath towels, sheets and blankets and pillows for us, muslin Priscilla curtains for the baby’s room.
We rented a crib for Sarah, which we eventually bought. We also bought an inexpensive living room suite, “Early American” maple with colonial-print upholstery, a Tole floor lamp and a maple desk and a maple kitchenette set—we still have those last two, though at this writing the kitchen table and chairs are on their last legs and probably won’t make another move.
We discovered second-hand and antique furniture stores, a revelation to me, a furniture merchant’s daughter. We went to one looking for a spice rack to replace the many-drawered pine one we’d loved and lost in the robbery, and came out with what we—but no one else I’ve ever encountered—call an étagère: an oak coat rack with a mirror and a seat. We also call it our spice rack. An oak and glass barrister’s bookcase completed our material furnishings.
We didn’t have much energy to spare for the furnishings of our mental state. Ned was immediately plunged into the challenges of graduate classes in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department. I went to Brandeis, too, to find a job.
We’d gotten a break on the rent when Ned took on some janitorial responsibilities; the only one I remember is that he had to haul the four apartments’ trashcans to the curb every week. And he had a grant from the university. But we needed more income. Neither of us expected I’d find it in the High Energy Physics department, working indirectly for the Atomic Energy Commission.
Luckily, the job didn’t require any actual science expertise. It involved sitting at a table with another grad student’s wife scanning film projected onto the table surface of reactions in a near-absolute-zero bubble chamber. As atoms collided, their subatomic particles made little trails in distinctive shapes (oddly enough, the patterns looked like Greek letters: alpha, sigma, delta). We were to record the positions and frequency of the particle trails.
So two virtual strangers sat in a darkened room for hours, staring at a slow-rolling, hypnotically repetitive filmstrip, doing an almost mechanical job that required little thought. Naturally, we talked. And talked. And talked.
It was like do-it-yourself therapy, I thought. After the initial get-acquainted period, we free-associated and ended up sharing all kinds of stuff about ourselves and our pasts. That resulted in an after-hours friendship, since her husband and Ned also liked each other. We got together several times a week and every weekend, for planned and unplanned jaunts; we shared meals and opinions and dreams.
And then one day, when after a year or so she and I had moved on to other jobs, he informed Ned that she never wanted to see me again and our friendship was over. Ned couldn’t get an actual reason out of him: he’d only say that she had “sick friends,” too, and was tired of hearing about mine. None of Ned’s protestations or pleas for a meeting made a dent. That was it.
My own theory is that it wasn’t my past but hers that haunted her. I think she’d told me too much, in those long hours in the dark room staring at the deaths of atoms in the cold, cold chamber. We hadn’t really known each other before we started free-associating; she didn’t really trust me to keep her confidences, or not to attack her vulnerabilities.
Aside from the pain of rejection, and the fury at the injustice, and the frustration that they wouldn’t give us a chance even to talk about the problem, the experience had a deep effect on Ned and me as a couple. We had other friends, good friends—some of them are still our friends, forty-five years later. And we would make more over the years, and we would love them.
But we would never completely trust anyone else again. We trusted each other and, on a profound level, we needed no one else.
I Googled that couple not long ago. From what I could see, I wouldn’t trade the lives they’ve led for mine for a million dollars and a pound of tea. I’ve had happiness and meaning and children and work that’s made a difference in people’s lives, in a partnership bound closer together by their betrayal.
So I suppose I should thank them. I don’t much feel like it, though.
Another major shift in our lives developed in those early years in Waltham, a much happier one.
As Ned became more and more involved in his graduate studies, it became clear to me that Judaism was not only an intellectual interest. His heart was increasingly engaged, and part of him was searching for a way to connect on a deeper level.
So one November Friday night, I took the brass candlesticks we’d found at the East India Trading Company on the wharfs in Boston, set Shabbat candles in them, and lit them in the window where Ned would see them when he came home from the university.
“What’s that about?” he asked when he came in.
“I thought it was time,” I answered.
How he loved to tell that story. He accounted it one of the greatest gifts I’d made him, to show him an avenue for his increasing love of his tradition. Over the years, our Sabbath observance would grow till it was one of the highlights of our lives. We would study the prayers and requirements and customs, and add richness and texture to our practice.
He learned to make challah, the ritual braided honey-and-egg bread, one week when I was too sick to do it. It was a revelation to him: he loved the creativity of judging the proportions of the ingredients, the sensuousness of the kneading, the triumph of bringing forth a steaming, wholesome pair of loaves to feed his family. He made it nearly every week for the next forty years.
In later years, he would talk about how it complemented his work with students. “You don’t know how they’re going to turn out for years, and sometimes not even then,” he’d say. “With bread, you know in a few hours whether you did it right.”
He taught our children to make it, and our grandchildren after them—they call it “Grandpa Ned bread.” Our oldest grandson makes it now… when we have it. We don’t do the full Shabbat observance every week any more. Without him, the heart’s gone out of it for us, as with so much.
Still, a lot of joy sprang from that pair of candlesticks in the window.
Give her that weapon? Never. So those first days in Waltham, I’d sit in the motel with the baby while Ned ran errands and looked for a place for us to live. I don’t know what I was doing the day he registered at Brandeis, though, but I know I wasn’t watching Sarah—we have the pictures they obligingly shot of her as for a student ID.
He found one place I never set eyes on, but its image is clear in my mind as he described it: a white frame cottage on a wooded lot, with built-in bookcases around the window seats and bittersweet growing by the back door. It still sounds attractive. We didn’t manage to get it, though.
We ended up in an apartment in a ‘50s brick four-flat on a quiet back street. There were arabesque ogival arches between the rooms and swirled designs in the ceiling plaster. It was otherwise very plain and modest: an eat-in kitchen, living room with a picture window staring at the picture window of the equally undistinguished apartment across the street, microscopic entrance foyer and two bedrooms flanking a biggish bathroom.
But there was a big, shady fenced backyard, space for our car in the garage, and four whole rooms: incredibly spacious after the Chicago quarters. Of course, because of the robbery, we didn’t have much of anything to put in those rooms. We went out and bought a mattress and put it on the floor of the back bedroom. We slept on it under our coats. Sarah slept in her buggy in the front bedroom.
We put a cardboard box in the middle of the kitchen floor to serve as a table and covered it with one of the crib sheets that stranger in Chicago had given us. I bought two boxes of Dreft laundry detergent; they had cheap but serviceable dinner plates in them in those days, stuck right in with the soap. When my Bard friend Marcy, who was going to art school in Boston, came to visit, I bought another box of detergent so there’d be a plate for her. We sat on the floor around the box to eat.
It took several weeks for the insurance money to come through. Inadequate as it was, it looked like a fortune: $5,000 all in a lump. We went to Woolworth’s and drew a gaping crowd by spending more than $100 there—at that time you could feed a family of four for a week on $100. But we needed everything: potato peeler, tooth glass, salt and pepper shakers, pot holders, scissors, tape, knives, a bread board, a butter dish, aspirin, a broom and a mop and a pail, bath towels, sheets and blankets and pillows for us, muslin Priscilla curtains for the baby’s room.
We rented a crib for Sarah, which we eventually bought. We also bought an inexpensive living room suite, “Early American” maple with colonial-print upholstery, a Tole floor lamp and a maple desk and a maple kitchenette set—we still have those last two, though at this writing the kitchen table and chairs are on their last legs and probably won’t make another move.
We discovered second-hand and antique furniture stores, a revelation to me, a furniture merchant’s daughter. We went to one looking for a spice rack to replace the many-drawered pine one we’d loved and lost in the robbery, and came out with what we—but no one else I’ve ever encountered—call an étagère: an oak coat rack with a mirror and a seat. We also call it our spice rack. An oak and glass barrister’s bookcase completed our material furnishings.
We didn’t have much energy to spare for the furnishings of our mental state. Ned was immediately plunged into the challenges of graduate classes in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department. I went to Brandeis, too, to find a job.
We’d gotten a break on the rent when Ned took on some janitorial responsibilities; the only one I remember is that he had to haul the four apartments’ trashcans to the curb every week. And he had a grant from the university. But we needed more income. Neither of us expected I’d find it in the High Energy Physics department, working indirectly for the Atomic Energy Commission.
Luckily, the job didn’t require any actual science expertise. It involved sitting at a table with another grad student’s wife scanning film projected onto the table surface of reactions in a near-absolute-zero bubble chamber. As atoms collided, their subatomic particles made little trails in distinctive shapes (oddly enough, the patterns looked like Greek letters: alpha, sigma, delta). We were to record the positions and frequency of the particle trails.
So two virtual strangers sat in a darkened room for hours, staring at a slow-rolling, hypnotically repetitive filmstrip, doing an almost mechanical job that required little thought. Naturally, we talked. And talked. And talked.
It was like do-it-yourself therapy, I thought. After the initial get-acquainted period, we free-associated and ended up sharing all kinds of stuff about ourselves and our pasts. That resulted in an after-hours friendship, since her husband and Ned also liked each other. We got together several times a week and every weekend, for planned and unplanned jaunts; we shared meals and opinions and dreams.
And then one day, when after a year or so she and I had moved on to other jobs, he informed Ned that she never wanted to see me again and our friendship was over. Ned couldn’t get an actual reason out of him: he’d only say that she had “sick friends,” too, and was tired of hearing about mine. None of Ned’s protestations or pleas for a meeting made a dent. That was it.
My own theory is that it wasn’t my past but hers that haunted her. I think she’d told me too much, in those long hours in the dark room staring at the deaths of atoms in the cold, cold chamber. We hadn’t really known each other before we started free-associating; she didn’t really trust me to keep her confidences, or not to attack her vulnerabilities.
Aside from the pain of rejection, and the fury at the injustice, and the frustration that they wouldn’t give us a chance even to talk about the problem, the experience had a deep effect on Ned and me as a couple. We had other friends, good friends—some of them are still our friends, forty-five years later. And we would make more over the years, and we would love them.
But we would never completely trust anyone else again. We trusted each other and, on a profound level, we needed no one else.
I Googled that couple not long ago. From what I could see, I wouldn’t trade the lives they’ve led for mine for a million dollars and a pound of tea. I’ve had happiness and meaning and children and work that’s made a difference in people’s lives, in a partnership bound closer together by their betrayal.
So I suppose I should thank them. I don’t much feel like it, though.
Another major shift in our lives developed in those early years in Waltham, a much happier one.
As Ned became more and more involved in his graduate studies, it became clear to me that Judaism was not only an intellectual interest. His heart was increasingly engaged, and part of him was searching for a way to connect on a deeper level.
So one November Friday night, I took the brass candlesticks we’d found at the East India Trading Company on the wharfs in Boston, set Shabbat candles in them, and lit them in the window where Ned would see them when he came home from the university.
“What’s that about?” he asked when he came in.
“I thought it was time,” I answered.
How he loved to tell that story. He accounted it one of the greatest gifts I’d made him, to show him an avenue for his increasing love of his tradition. Over the years, our Sabbath observance would grow till it was one of the highlights of our lives. We would study the prayers and requirements and customs, and add richness and texture to our practice.
He learned to make challah, the ritual braided honey-and-egg bread, one week when I was too sick to do it. It was a revelation to him: he loved the creativity of judging the proportions of the ingredients, the sensuousness of the kneading, the triumph of bringing forth a steaming, wholesome pair of loaves to feed his family. He made it nearly every week for the next forty years.
In later years, he would talk about how it complemented his work with students. “You don’t know how they’re going to turn out for years, and sometimes not even then,” he’d say. “With bread, you know in a few hours whether you did it right.”
He taught our children to make it, and our grandchildren after them—they call it “Grandpa Ned bread.” Our oldest grandson makes it now… when we have it. We don’t do the full Shabbat observance every week any more. Without him, the heart’s gone out of it for us, as with so much.
Still, a lot of joy sprang from that pair of candlesticks in the window.
