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  Uncle Al didn’t smile, wore a bow tie, and was the eldest of the five remaining Lieban children. He was Dr. E. (for Elias) Alan Lieban, pronounced lee-ban, the German way, even though it was spelled lie. Lie-ban, a ban on lies. It was a name to live up to, a name meaning truth. But Uncle Al was far from truthful. After dinner Thursday nights at my grandmother’s, I’d slide under the table and eavesdrop. Uncle Al was having an affair with a Miss Dorsey. The name Lieban meant lieb ban then, a ban on love in a loveless marriage. Names so often meant something: Uneeda Biscuit; My-T-Fine pudding; Dr. Char-gin, the dermatologist on Central Park West who didn’t charge Aunt Gertie because she was poor.

  When I was twelve, someone punched me in the mouth. A few days later the tooth that took the brunt of it started to ache. Then it throbbed. When it turned gray, my mother made an appointment with Uncle Al.

  His office was in a penthouse on Central Park South. “You must be Patty,” the nurse said, opening the door. “I’m Miss Dorsey. How do you do?”

  Miss Dorsey! She worked for Uncle Al? I imagined she’d look like Marilyn Monroe, but Miss Dorsey had hair like the man on the Quaker Oats box. She wore a white nurse’s hat and uniform, and laced white heels. “I believe the doctor is expecting you.” She smiled.

  “Oh, Dr. Lieban!” She knocked on a dark paneled door. “Dr. Lieeee-ban, your grand-niece is here!”

  We waited. The knob turned. And there was Uncle Al in a side-buttoned barber’s smock. It had a waistband and flared at the hips.

  “Welcome.” He nodded, but he didn’t kiss me. Away from my grandmother’s table, he looked older. “Some tea, Miss Dorsey,” he ordered without looking at her.

  I’d never been in a room alone with Uncle Al. I knew him solely from my grandmother’s and rare outings to visit his Airedales in Wappingers Falls.

  “Do sit.” He extended his palm.

  We waited for the tea in his dark, book-lined study overlooking the zoo. Uncle Al sat behind his desk. I searched my brain for something to say to a man brilliant enough to write two thoughts on the blackboard simultaneously and treat Erich Maria Remarque: What were my great-grandparents like when you were young? How come you never had children? Why does everyone hate Aunt Lil? Do you and Miss Dorsey do it here?

  Uncle Al shuffled papers. He didn’t look up. The light from his desk lamp cast wild eyebrow shadows on his forehead. He read tracing words with his finger so his shiny head snapped side to side. Could he read two thoughts at the same time too?

  Miss Dorsey came in with a tray. She set it down on Uncle Al’s desk. I watched to see how he looked at her. He didn’t. I believed that people who were having sex wanted to whenever they were together. That wild current passed between them. But Uncle Al spoke to Miss Dorsey in a dismissive way, as if she were a servant.

  The room filled with the smell of burnt rubber. I had never had tea before. Tea was for the elderly. Coffee would stunt your growth. The hot drink for children was cocoa. Uncle Al continued reading while steam curled out of the spout. I wondered what he had looked like when he and his brother Uncle Jerry ran away from home to become song-and-dance men. I tried to picture Uncle Al with a straw boater and cane. I tried to imagine him smiling. I put him in a striped blazer. Now he was edgy with disdain, a bald man with sunspots all over his head.

  The terrible smell filled the room. Uncle Al’s chair faced me, blocking the window. There was nothing to look at except the bookshelves and him. The smell was so bad, I started breathing through my mouth.

  “Tea?” he said finally.

  “Yes, please.”

  “As a member of the American Academy of Dentistry, you must understand I cannot endorse the use of sugar,” he said. “And milk obfuscates the taste of tea. In China, as you may or may not know, they never use milk and sugar in tea.”

  “Really?” I was intrigued.

  “Do you know what tea is called in China?”

  I’d read The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, but couldn’t remember if it was in there. I shook my head. Uncle Al was not pleased.

  “Cha,” he said.

  Black liquid streamed from the spout. Uncle Al handed me an ivory-colored cup with a gold rim. I decided to echo whatever he did. He flattened a napkin in his lap. He blew on the surface of his cup. He took a small slurp. The taste had a metallic edge, like blood. A bitter smoky taste too. I shut my nose down the way people do when they swallow medicine so they can’t taste it.

  “Lapsang Souchong,” he said, raising his cup as if making a toast.

  I rested mine on the saucer in my lap. There was no way I could take another mouthful. Uncle Al had an Oriental carpet. As he sipped his tea, I pretended to cough and, bending over, drizzled the contents of my cup onto the whirling blue and maroon pattern on the floor. The tea sank right in. Then I raised the cup to my lips and pretended to drink.

  “Do you like Lapsang Souchong?” Uncle Al peered over the rims of his bifocals.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Would you like some more?”

  “No, thank you.”

  He rested his back against his chair and said, “Do you know what I do?”

  “You’re an endodontist.”

  “Do you know the difference between endo and exo ?”

  Another test, like cha. I knew Uncle Al wouldn’t just be judging me, he would be judging my mother, who produced me, and my grandmother, who produced my mother. He would be judging my school, P.S. 9, and the entire public school system. He would be comparing me to his other grand-nieces and -nephews, including my smart sister. If I failed the endo/exo test, I failed for everyone. I didn’t know the difference between endo and exo. The only Latin I was familiar with was E Pluribus Unum.

  Endo/exo. I started to panic. Were endo and exo like arrival and departure? Is it the plane that’s arriving or the people arriving to take the plane? Does departure mean people are departing on the plane, or that people who have arrived on the plane are departing and going home? Was daylight saving time fall forward, spring back? Or fall back, spring forward? When you trip, you fall forward. When you spring back, you recoil. But when you fall back in a line, you’re back in line. And when you lunge, you spring forward.

  Uncle Al waited for the answer. I thought hard, and then, as I so often did in school, I took a stab based on nothing, or worse, took a stab that was the opposite of what I thought was right because I was so often wrong: Uncle Al was an endodontist. He worked on root canals, which were in the tooth. So en meant in. But he took the roots out. Exit shows the way out, so endo was out. But the root was in the tooth, and that’s where he worked, so en equals in. En sounds like in. Yeah! No! Too obvious, it must be wrong! Uncle Al wouldn’t quiz me if it was that easy. Besides, if three outs ended an inning, maybe en meant out.

  “Endo is out,” I said, feeling like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and treads air until NONG! It realizes there’s no ground beneath its feet.

  “No.” Uncle Al sighed. “Endo is in, exo is out.”

  That was it. I was short on smarts, a marked girl.

  Although having a root canal in my mouth annoys me every day of my life, the work he did has held up since the fifties.

  SPAETZLE

  Aunt Lil went through life thinking she got the small half. If you gave her flowers, she thought they were wilted. When you brought soup, she found a hair. The butcher shortchanged her. Empty cabs passed her by. She was a self-made outcast, and sooner or later everybody failed her.

  You never knew if Uncle Al was going to be at my grandmother’s Thursday dinners, and if he did come, whether he’d be there with Aunt Lil. Sometimes Uncle Al came alone. Aunt Lil wasn’t blood. She’d married into the family. The room went quiet when she walked in. The sisters rolled their eyes at her baroque fingernails. Further proof of Aunt Lil’s not fitting in was her astonishing challah hair—braided, wound, and woven. The sisters wore their hair short and black with a blond streak in the front. Unlike the sisters, who favored plastic pearlized harlequi
ns, Aunt Lil wore pince-nez. Like the sisters, she dressed only in black, but instead of new jewelry, she favored dangling garnet earrings, brooches on skewers, watches on pins. Aunt Lil’s jewelry was not purchased from the family jeweler, David of Dagil in the diamond district, who specialized in new, shiny, and big. Aunt Lil preferred old gold that came with a story: who it belonged to, where she got it, how much she paid, what the auction was like, what she was sorry she didn’t get at the auction, how the waste from a garnet was ground to dust, then used to make emery boards. She struck me as a freethinker. Is that what bothered the sisters?

  Lillian Berger Lieban made a needlepoint pillow for her couch that read, I’VE NEVER FORGOTTEN A ROTTEN THING ANYONE HAS DONE TO ME.

  If you told Aunt Lil you liked something, she unclasped it and gave it to you.

  “What a pretty ring, Aunt Lil!”

  “It’s a peridot, darling. Here.”

  She’d slip it on my finger.

  “Aunt Lil, I’ve never seen a bracelet like that!”

  “Alexandrites, darling.” She’d pinch the catch closed on my wrist. “Swear to me you’ll use the chain guard.”

  Uncle Al slept with Aunt Lil for eleven years, then refused to marry her because she wasn’t a virgin. She sent out wedding invitations anyway, and his mother, my great-grandmother Jenny Geiger Lieban, told him, “Al, you either go through with it, or you never see her again,” so he did both. He went through with it, and he stopped seeing her. After the ceremony, Uncle Al rented an apartment at the Normandie on Riverside Drive, and Aunt Lil moved upstate to Wappingers Falls. They never had children. They had joint custody of the Shagzies, Airedales Aunt Lil tweezed instead of cut. There was a series of Shagzies—Shagzy the First . . . Shagzy the Second. . . . They all looked the same, and as each Shagzy died, he was replaced by a new Shagzy, like the Lassies on TV. Uncle Al would add the newly dead Shagzy’s ashes to the urn shelf in his closet. When he got dressed, there were the urns. Even with the Shagzies dead, Uncle Al spent more time with them than with Aunt Lil.

  I felt sorry for Aunt Lil. Although Uncle Al was unfaithful to her, no one in the family chastised him. What was ours was wonderful. Aunt Lil wasn’t ours. The first time I heard the sisters light into Aunt Lil, I had no preparation for duality. I was struck by how they pretended to like her when she was around, but out of earshot, they pounced. The gripes were first and foremost that Aunt Lil was a lousy housekeeper. “So help me”—the sisters would raise a right hand as if they were in court—“I wouldn’t eat there if my life depended on it!” Aunt Lil was also accused of not making Uncle Al happy. She spent his money on antiques. She didn’t take care of him. Her biggest sin? Dirt under her fingernails. This was particularly chilling because I had the same problem. Did people talk about me when I left the room? On Sundays my father would inspect us: “Let me see your hands.” I’d hold them out as if they were for sale. He’d study my fingernails, each one capped by a curved black parenthesis, and shake his head. “Are you in the real estate business?” he’d say.

  I tried to keep my nails clean. I kept them as short as a hair. But even if I cleaned them with a damp orange stick (a nailspecific beauty aid from the five-and-ten with a pointy end for cleaning and a chiseled end for cuticle pushing), even if I cleaned them right before going to bed, they were black when I woke up. I took to wondering if Aunt Lil and I gave off some electromagnetic charge that attracted nail dirt.

  Once a year Aunt Lil came to the city, and we’d take Shagzy to the dog show at the old Madison Square Garden. She’d wear a black hat and dress and laced black pumps that had an orthopedic authority. I was proud of her. She looked professional. Every year I was sure Shagzy would win. Aunt Lil had solid faith too. But always the Shagzies screwed up, breaking into a trot when they were told to walk or folding up when the other dogs hung turns. Shagzy and Aunt Lil would be fine in the grooming area. Aunt Lil, doing some last-minute fur fluffing, proudly pinning her number on, flushed as if she were going to a dance. Shagzy, thrilled to be out of his travel crate, sniffing poodles sculpted like cauliflowers, high-stepping past King Charles spaniels and perky chows, dog busy. But when it was time to go into the ring, Shagzy would sense something was up. His stubby tail would clamp down. He’d dig his forepaws in. The leash would get taut, and Aunt Lil would plead. Eventually she’d gather up the current Shagzy and carry him to his position in the ring. She’d repeat the commands as the judges barked them. “Heel!” she’d squeal in her cheese-grater voice. “Heel, Shagzy-boy! Heel! Heel! Heel!” But the Shagzy would bolt, skid on his rear, or flash his sharky teeth. Hairs burst from Aunt Lil’s braid. Sweat grooved her powder.

  Shagzy and Aunt Lil got disqualified in the first round every year. But Aunt Lil never reproached the Shagzy. She consoled him, loved him up, loved him to bits, maybe even loved him more for being so imperfect, so human. She told the Shagzy not to worry, that he was marvelous, that she adored him anyway. Would he like a cube of Muenster? How about a Liv-A-Snap? What a good boy he was! Yes! What a good puppy-lup! Such a lovebug! Yes! Oh, yes! That’s my Shagzy-wagzy! That’s mama’s Shagzy-boy!

  Shagzy wagged his tail stump. Aunt Lil raised her chin for a lick.

  Aunt Lil’s adult shoe size was three and a half. This enabled her to buy her shoes where I did, at Indian Walk on Broadway or a couple of blocks south at Rappoport’s on Eighty-third, where your feet got fluoroscoped to make sure the shoes really fit. You’d stand on the machine and look through the eyepiece and see if there was breathing room for your toes. You’d see your white bones and gray skin and the dark leather curve of the toe box.

  Aunt Lil liked Mary Janes, same as I did, same buckled strap, same grosgrain bow. Her feet were a matter of enormous pride. She favored white stockings to set off the shiny black patent. She liked to pull the skirt of her dress at the hips, then point and flex. Her hair was remarkable for its length and the intricacy of its braid, but no other grown-up had feet like that. Aunt Lil was just over five feet. She was heavy. Microfeet in little-girl shoes had the potential of giving her an air of instability. She could have looked unbalanced, like a ham on top of a pea. But standing still, Aunt Lil looked planted. There was nothing fragile about her except her wounded look.

  When Uncle Al asked her for a divorce, she told him if he ever tried to leave her, she would throw acid in his face. This was around the time the investigative journalist Victor Riesel had acid thrown in his face by a teamster. From that day on, Victor Riesel was blind.

  The Normandie was only three blocks from our apartment, so when Aunt Lil came to town, I’d visit. She’d give me milk and graham crackers and paint pens she saved only for me—the artist in the family—a set of clear plastic tubes with sponges at the tips. You filled the tubes with paint powder, added water, and shook them. The paint soaked down into the sponge, and then you pressed it into the paper and painted. Tinting power was minimal, and no matter how much pigment you used, the colors looked faded. I would offer Aunt Lil a wet picture before I left.

  “Who’s getting that one?” She’d point.

  “My mother.”

  “That’s the one I wanted,” she’d say.

  Finally, Aunt Lil made the whole family permanently turn on her. Since she was living up in Wappingers Falls, after Uncle Al’s funeral my grandmother held the shivah. Aunt Lil rang the doorbell, took one look at the cakes, the turkeys, the chafing dishes. The petits fours, dried fruits, and capons. The herring, smoked salmon, and bagels. The cheeses, the cookie platters, the Everest of chopped liver. She took it all in, turned to my grandmother, and said her last words to our family, “My husband dies, and you throw a party?”

  Eight years after her excommunication, I sent her a note: “Dear Aunt Lilly,” it said. “I just got married, and I’d love to introduce you to my husband. May we come sometime and visit?”

  It was a modest house, smaller than I remembered, filled with wending cats, empty jars, and piles of old newspapers she said she was “saving for the Boy Scouts.”
The papers were nervous-making. They leaned against the walls of her porch, buckling the screens. Near the bottom, they were dark as coffee. Higher up, they got creamy. Newspaper flakes littered the floor. Cat hair swirled in the air. There was a gray tabby in a Budweiser carton with newspaper crumbs in his fur and a calico on a sweater under the rocker. The smell was old damp paper and cat. Aunt Lil had shrunk. Her center part was pink. When I asked if she still had a Shagzy, she threw her head back. “Oh, I’m too old to have a dog.” She laughed.

  Because Aunt Lil’s parents were from Hungary, she made something no one else in our family made. Spaetzle looked like dry scrambled eggs, but it was chewy like gnocchi. Even though she kept her house dark, light bounced off the melted butter. She cooked chicken paprikash to go with the spaetzle. The sour cream was so thick, the chicken beneath the sauce had the soft curve of foothills.

  I watched Aunt Lil make the spaetzle. She reached into a bowl with her long, curved fingernails and curled the raw dough into her fist. Then she pumped her fist, working dough out the small hole at the pinkie end. She’d squeeze her hand, and a yellow worm would emerge. Then she’d clip it off with the thumbnail of her other hand and let it fall into a pot of boiling water. She had a rhythm: Dip. Squeeze, clip, squeeze, clip, squeeze, clip. Dip. When all the spaetzle rose to the top of the salted water, Aunt Lil drained the pot. I’ve seen only one other person turn their fist into a cooking utensil. My father uses his left hand like a pastry tube to drizzle icing into “Happy Birthday.”

  The spaetzle was good. Styrofoam would have been good with all that butter and sour cream. One of the cats jumped onto the table and ate out of the serving bowl. “Such a naughty boy!” Aunt Lil strummed behind his ears.

  After lunch we sat in her living room on a carved oak bench with a high back and velvet cushions that had tassels the size of cantaloupes. It looked like something out of King Lear. We talked.