Potato Soup Broth

He'd only recently sold the old green and white Rambler station wagon he'd driven around South Providence for so many years.  He thought he was 85, but that was just a guess.  Near enough.  He was a loner, a short, quiet man with a ruddy complexion and a gentle smile.  As a peddler of sorts he’d worked hard, walking door-to-door among the three-decker houses looking for business.  The back of the Rambler filled with used clothing, "shmatuhs" and small appliances: a broom, a lamp, a clock.  Household items to mostly barter for fruit and vegetables and maybe a few bucks.   From year to year, somehow, Zaida Louie made a living.  On Sunday mornings he and my father played gin at the kitchen table.  They said little, intent on bagels, whitefish and strong black coffee. 

My walk home from school took me past Bubbie and Zaida's house, my father's mother and father, where I’d often stop for something to eat.  Thick slices of brown bread spread generously with real butter.  A treat I never got at home.  The kitchen was a chorus of rich, exotic, cooking aromas.  Bubbie made the most exquisite sour dill green tomatoes.  The kind that forced your face to scrintch up and your eyes to close.  She often made "gribuhniz," chicken skin and onions fried in “shmaltz” - chicken fat   Zaida, with his cast iron stomach, couldn't get enough – mixing forkfuls with bites from a whole raw onion as though it were an apple. 

 Bubby Annie kept house.  She sat by the radio in the kitchen listening to opera while rolling bandages for the hospital nearby.  With soft, smooth features she had a quiet dignity, her eyes glazed over from a gradual blindness now complete.  She smiled often and never complained.  Her hands always warm and loving.  She and Louie spoke in a thickly accented, potato soup broth of Yiddish and English from childhood in the old country and a long life here.  There was never a visit when she wouldn't pull out a dollar from her worn change purse, encouraging me to go get a soda.  “But Bubbie,I'd mutter,   “a soda only costs a dime.” She'd shush me and close my fist around her gift.

Zaida never said much except when he watched the soaps.  As the plot thickened, he'd point his finger in scorn, "vhut a mumzuh dat vun iz !"  It was the only time I ever saw him get excited.  When he thought Bubbie couldn't hear us, he'd slip me some change and ask me to go fetch him a milkshake.  “Go, go,” he’d say with urgency – “go de front vay so your Bubbie don’t see.”  Royal's still had a soda fountain with shiny chrome stools and red naugahide trim.  Every inch of the compact corner store was a delight of candy, comic books, rubber balls and baseball cards with pink bubble gum.  In Bubby Annie's kosher kitchen, milkshakes from outside were forbidden, though one of Louie’s frequent “traif” indiscretions.  God usually cut him slack and looked the other way.  Though Bubbie couldn’t see, she always knew.

Maybe because the Rambler was gone or a sense of impending mortality, Zaida Louie found religion.  After a long life of indifference, he asked my father or my Uncle Sam for a ride to the Orthodox shul on 8th Street every morning where the two old rabbis, father and son, wore black and smelled of onion.  Maybe it was the companionship he’d never made time for throughout his life or the bagels and cream cheese served after the minyan.  Whatever the reason, he loved the action.

By the time they were near the end, Bubbie and Zaida had given away whatever they’d managed to save.  They died within six months of one another.  The last time I saw Louie, he was lying peacefully in a hospital bed.  When his eyes opened, he managed a small smile, his eyes crinkling at the corners in the sly way they always did.  As though the illicit milkshakes were a secret only he and I shared.  I wondered then if he might ask for one, but he didn't.  "Go see your Bubbie," he said, with what little voice he had left, "I tink she's in de kichin."  And then he was gone.