Bubbemeisses
by Earl Coleman

First-generation girls in thousands became impregnated
standing up while doing it beneath the rust-streaked marble
stairways, the battered banisters of slapped-up tenements rising
the five stories to the roof. Bubbemeisses, like the poor, are with
us always: you couldn’t get knocked up that way because the
seeds ran out. All girls knew that. Their partners too, despite the
evidence. My mother was no different, though she knew opera.

The bubbemeisses’ role -- to stand against the evidence. The
immigrant parents’ role -- to shrei gevalt and tear their hair;
to disapprove. They’d whisper horror stories in the blackness
of the night; events, ideas, too shocking for the light. A country
where delivery boys wore hats? Where women ate in restaurants
alone? Where boys talked back to fathers with their mishugas?
Where girls of sixteen rouged their cheeks? A shonda, all of it.

Most furtive couplings, misconstrued biology, led quick to
chupahs. Youth had its morality of course, regardless of what
parents thought. Marriages were usual as rain; loveless often,
it was true. Who knew he was a brute, risked table money
playing pinochle? Children on the way, or newly born, were ritual
as Purim groggers celebrating victory, while Henry Ford, the Tsar,
the Pope, the powerful, continued publishing The Protocols of Zion.

It is April. I am nine. Even Dot, the toddler, has her tasks. My mother,
28, sits on the window ledge, confronting all of us and harsh reality; her
water, sponge, beside her on the stone. She needs new bubbemeisses to
sustain herself. She trusts me to hold her feet in place. Her babushka
keeps auburn hair from flying in her face. My smile confirms that somehow
I will get her out of here, and she begins to sing an aria from La Boheme.
The weak sun tries to light our dim interior. We are Spring-cleaning here.