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  The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis gave out “Polio Pointers” at school:

  DO wash hands carefully before eating and always after using the toilet.

  DON’T play with new people.

  What we didn’t know was that polio was a fecally transmitted disease. Ironically, improved sanitation helped it spread. Indoor plumbing shielded babies from early contact with the virus. When they were exposed to it later, they were more susceptible. The purer water got, the more difficult it was to build up immunity.

  Before 1955 and the Salk vaccine, parents panicked. They sent their kids out of the city during the summer, hoping fresh air would protect them. There were cucheleins in the Catskills if you didn’t have a lot of money and family compounds by the ocean if you did. And in between, there were sleep-away camps in piney places. Public school ended on June 30, and that night Grand Central Terminal teemed with kids in camp caps and regulation shorts clutching turkey sandwiches and the newest Archie comics. Camp Red Wing met under the west balcony on the north side. The air was filled with the screams of girls who hadn’t seen their camp best friend in ten months. We’d board the sleeper in hot Manhattan, and when we opened our eyes, we were in the Adirondacks. Parents, who might have been exposed to polio in the city, were forbidden to kiss or touch us when they came up for visiting day.

  Sleep-away camp was fine with me, but only if Mattie mailed her hash. I didn’t want to live two months without it. I took a stand. Mom said it was impossible to mail hash.

  “Keep my thermos and mail it in that,” I said. Then I got to camp and loved the food. Willie and Frances, married French chefs from the city, made Poulet au Sauce Supreme, Boeuf en Daube, and Fried Fillet of Sole with capers, tarragon, and sieved egg in the Sauce Tartare. Toast was brushed with clarified butter, then baked in the oven. Royal icing dotted the Galettes Sablées. On visiting days my father would make a formal inspection of the camp kitchen, endearing himself to Willie and Frances, who then gave me extra marzipan roses on my birthday cake—the ultimate bargaining power at Camp Red Wing.

  Watching Mattie, I learned the two most important rules of cooking: Patience and Clean as You Go. I also learned that because of my place in our family, I got a full-size bathtub while she got a New York maid’s-room half. I got a big bedroom, while hers was smaller than my mother’s dressing room. The leitmotif of childhood was an ever-burning fury that I had more than Mattie. Accompanying Mom to Ohrbach’s for a new handbag, I grieved to see it cost twenty dollars more than Mattie made a week. Mothers talked about salaries while they sat on the benches in the playground. They kept on eye on their kids in the sandbox and an eye on the mother who might pay a housekeeper more than the going rate. It was made clear that if you got a new housekeeper, you would pay what everybody else was paying or less. That way, no beloved housekeeper would leave you for a better-paying job. It was salary-fixing. A common refrain was, “Don’t ruin it for us.”

  I was crazed by the injustice. If Mattie made forty-five dollars a week and she worked five and a half days and she got up at seven and went to bed at eleven, that was fifty-one cents an hour, and when she took the subway to Queens, it was a quarter each way, which meant she had to work an hour just to make enough money to get to and from the beauty parlor. If she bought me peanuts from the machine in the subway, that was ten cents, eleven minutes of hard labor. My mother said Mattie chose to wait in the car on road trips when we ate at Howard Johnson’s. When Mattie asked for one Saturday night off a month so she could see her “steady fellow,” my mother, who went out Saturday nights, said, “That would be quite impossible.” The rare times Mattie had a visitor, he came up the back elevator, entered through the back door where the garbage was, and went directly to her dark room.

  Mattie had two kinds of breakfasts: leftovers, and when there weren’t any leftovers, Velveeta on a teaspoon dunked in coffee with cream and sugar. She’d sit on a stool with her back against the heating pipes sucking the warm softened cheese. Mattie sailed even-tempered and steady the eighteen years she took care of me. When I was banished from the dinner table and sent to my room, Mattie smuggled in a plate. The time she caught me in bed with a boy, she got a broom and chased him out of the house. She loathed Harry after that. But it was his fault for getting into bed with me, not mine for raising the covers.

  Once I made her cry. My parents were on vacation. I hated my coordinated all-pink room with the butterfly wallpaper and matching butterfly spreads. I pulled out the carpet and pried up the tacks. I stripped off the wallpaper, lacquered my faux French bureau white, unscrewed the shutters, and sprayed the headboards black. I took the Long Island Railroad into New York and bought my first desk and talked my grandmother into a pair of army-green bedspreads from Altman’s.

  “Oh, no.” Mattie sniffled from the doorway. “Oh, no. Your mother’s gonna murder me.” But she didn’t try to stop me, and I knew she would defend me. Mattie was on my side. She was the youngest in her family too. “We’re the underdogs,” she liked to say. She thought it was shameful we wore hand-me-downs. I liked hand-me-downs. I liked clothes with a past. I didn’t like to look primped. Maybe because I couldn’t look primped. The back of my socks wound up under my arches. My hair was berserk. I wanted to move the easy way boys moved. I wanted to bounce and jangle when I walked and not worry about clothes. Pinching my cheeks with rouge on her fingers before I left for a party, my mother would say, “Now don’t be loud!” I wanted to be whatever I was. Was I loud? If I was loud, what was wrong with loud? Hand-me-downs were fine with me. Less to worry about, and weren’t two used blouses better than one new one?

  The summer I turned nine Mattie left for her birthplace, Rome, Georgia, where she said the best peaches in the world came from. While she was gone, my mother was thrown from a horse in Central Park. Dad carried her to the Ninety-sixth Street transverse and flagged down a car. Her back was broken. The choice was surgery or lying flat for six weeks. Mom chose flat. She called Mattie to see if Mattie would cut her vacation short and come up. But Mattie had decided to retire. She was going to get false teeth. Why couldn’t she get false teeth in New York?

  At least once a day my sister and I saw her walking toward us down the street.

  “Look! There’s Mattie!” and we’d both start running. Then we’d get closer, and it wasn’t Mattie.

  In Mattie’s place Mom rehired Anna Offerman, who’d been my grandmother’s housekeeper when Mom was growing up. Anna had a heavy German accent, a frizzy white perm, and smelled like old onions. My sister used to fire her twice a day. She called us “Jackass.”

  “You Yock-oz.” She’d trudge into our bedroom, brandishing her gray mop like a Valkyrie. “You leef in a peeg-sty!”

  I wrote Mattie begging her to come back. “Anna Offerman is poisoning me! HELP!” We tried to make Anna quit by placing scissors on the sofa just before she plopped down. We refused to let her watch Liberace. Anna would turn the dial to the Liberace channel, then slump on the couch with her rough red hands folded on top of her belly. Then my sister and I would take turns jumping up to flip the station. Anna would lurch herself and flip it back. Eventually she’d give up. “Ach! You boat Yock-oz!” If we made Anna miserable enough, we reasoned Mattie would come back to us.

  When I was eleven, I left our New York apartment for camp, and when I came home, it was to a new place in the suburbs. As I reached for the knob, the door swung open from inside. And there she was, Mattie! I hurled myself into her. I hugged her and sucked in her smell, part almond from Jergen’s lotion, part bergamot. I buried my face in the bright white perfection of her uniform. She laughed and patted me. A door opens, and the thing you want most in the world is there. This happened more than forty years ago. I can still feel it—the moment I got the thing I thought I could never have.

  We never mentioned race. Discussing race would have been “in bad taste.” The words “Negro,” “segregation,” and, God forbid, “colored” were stricken from our vocabulary. “Africa” and
“servant” were taboo too. If a guest said “black” within hearing range of Mattie, as in “Churchill called his depression ‘the black dog,’ ” we froze. Our eyes darted wildly until someone changed the subject. If a guest called a housekeeper “maid” or “the girl,” that guest was not invited back. It was a bizarre New York Jewish sensibility that we could somehow protect Mattie from prejudice by never acknowledging there was such a thing as color in the first place. We pretended to be color-blind, and yet my mother rang for Mattie with a crystal bell. Mattie wore a uniform. I’d study her face when Mom jingled her to clear. Mattie did not appear to mind. But I did. I minded big-time. My mother would not like to be rung for. How dare she ring for Mattie?

  Three years ago a national magazine asked me to write an essay on someone who’d been important to me. I chose Mattie. The editor phoned after reading the piece.

  “We love it!” she said. “I just have a couple of changes. Could you remove the reference to C.O.R.E.? Could you take out her other names and just call her Mattie? Could you delete her birthplace and that bit about giving her a subscription to Ebony for Christmas?”

  “Why?”

  “Our readers don’t want to know she’s black.”

  Mattie and I spent fourteen New Year’s Eves together. She was my steady Saturday night date too. Our ritual was Swanson’s TV Turkey Dinners at the bridge table while watching Route 66, 77 Sunset Strip, then Gun-smoke. I learned about interactive TV from Mattie. “Watch out, Mr. Dillon!” she’d scream. And “Hurry, Chester! He’s got a gun!” We threw pillows at the set. That’s why they were called throw pillows. We believed we could influence the outcome. Because of our intimate relationship with the television, I waited for Mel Torme to call me at home. After school he had a show called Mel Torme and the Mel-Tones. I loved Mel Torme. He was beautiful but not so beautiful he couldn’t fall in love with me. I wrote our phone number on one of my father’s shirt cardboards and held it up to the TV. Every day while Mel Torme sang, I’d sit in front of the TV holding up “SC.4-3290.” When Mel didn’t call, it broke my heart until I realized the numbers probably looked like mirror-writing to Mel through the screen and he couldn’t read them.

  Until I left for college, Mattie woke me for school the same way every day. “Get up!” she’d holler at the foot of the stairs, and when I didn’t, she’d drop a cold, wet washcloth on my face and laugh. Then I’d sit down to her idea of a balanced breakfast: two eggs sunnyside up, six rashers of crisply fried bacon, two pieces of buttered toast, a four-ounce glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, and an eight-ounce glass of milk. In the kitchen, she’d be eating Velveeta or leftovers, congealed spaghetti, chicken necks.

  “Why are you eating that for breakfast?” I’d ask.

  “My stomach doesn’t know what time it is,” she’d say, or “You think fish and onions and cream are any better?”—a slur on pickled herring.

  Then she’d send me off to school with a ham and Swiss, carrot and celery sticks, fruit, and cookies. When I was sick, she cooked “Spit in the Ocean,” an egg fried in a circle cut out of a piece of white bread, a.k.a. “Toad in the Hole.” She introduced me to the wonder of peanut butter and mayonnaise on rye. She didn’t rat when I palmed string beans and brussels sprouts down my underpants to flush away later.

  When Mattie turned seventy-five, she retired again. This time she didn’t want to, but Mom was ready for an invisible housekeeper, the kind that speaks a foreign language and doesn’t expect conversation. Mattie found an apartment on Edgecombe Avenue in her best friend Nita’s building. The place was so small the bed touched three walls. Then she got another job, cooking for a Mr. Ollendorf of the Ollendorf Art Moving Company. I’d gone to college with his grandson, Tommy Ollendorf, a smart, well-mannered guy, and wasn’t surprised when Mattie told me she liked Mr. Ollendorf. He was lucky to get her thoughtful care.

  When Mattie’s legs gave out and she couldn’t climb two flights of subway stairs twice a day, she retired permanently. Her days were spent following the sun on the benches of Morning-side Heights. Mattie always knew where to go for warmth. I’d send money and bring food. She liked tuna, bananas, and bourbon. We’d call each other. She would tell me her dreams. In one of them she saw me give birth “to a big, screaming boy-child.” Nine months later Peter, weighing 8 pounds 12 ounces, was born.

  Mattie died in the bathtub. She was eighty-two. Nita, whom she calls Bonehead, phones to tell me. I’ve known Nita for years, and we make a date to meet. She gives me two black dolls that belonged to Mattie. Chi-Chi and Carmen are dressed like Carmen Miranda, with gold hoops in their ears and fruit on their heads. Nita gives me a patchwork quilt Mattie made too. I used to sit next to Mattie on her bed and watch her piece a quilt. She’d have two brown paper bags: One was greasy and full of Spanish subway peanuts she liked to flick in my mouth. The other bag was stuffed with triangles of cloth she’d pull out and squint at. She had the habit of adjusting her glasses by wiggling her nose.

  I am holding a quilt Mattie made. The batting is coming out in five places. There are rips and open seams. It doesn’t matter. I take it to Camille Dalphond Cognac, founder of the Quilt Restoration Society in Hillsdale, New York.

  “Can you fix this?” I ask.

  She unfolds the quilt on a large table. She gasps.

  “Sometimes in this business you think you’ve seen everything,” she says. “And then you see a quilt like this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She thinks for a moment. “Whoever made this was obviously very happy.”

  “You can tell that?”

  “It has joy all over it.”

  “What else can you tell?”

  “There’s a folk-art element. It’s a variation on Grandmother’s Flower Garden—three hexagons, added leaves plumbed on a square. The fabrics are late thirties and forties. It was made from the scraps of the scraps, housedresses, pajamas. Look”—she points to a place where an edge is cleverly stitched to compensate for a crooked piece next to it—“it doesn’t line up. It’s called ‘Make it fit.’ ”

  “I’m surprised,” I say. “The woman who made this was a perfectionist.”

  “For pleasure,” Camille says, “we do what we would not do in the front parlor.”

  I ask Camille how much Mattie’s quilt will cost to fix.

  “There are multiple-task activities on this quilt,” she says. “It’ll cost about two hundred dollars. But,” she adds, “if you want a quilting lesson, I could teach you how to fix it yourself for fifteen dollars, and you’ll be prepared for any quilt emergency.”

  “You can teach me how to fix it?”

  “I can teach a Mack truck driver in under an hour.”

  A few months later I come back with the quilt. Camille reexamines it. “I have a quiet understanding of what’s going on here.”

  Camille threads a needle. She observes my running stitch and backstitch and shows me how to improve them. She teaches me the ladder stitch. “It becomes invisible.” When by mistake I sew a piece on inside out, she says, “I give absolution for terrible things.” We spend the day together sewing and talking and laughing, and I tell her about Mattie and she tells me about her sons and I think, How wonderful quilting bees must have been, women coming together and making something beautiful and useful, that particular flow of conversation that happens when your hands and eyes are mindfully engaged.

  I sew through Mattie’s needle holes, replace some batting. It feels like spending time with Mattie again. Camille gets out a clear plastic bag. Carefully she folds the quilt.

  “Can I come back if I run into trouble?”

  “You’ll be all right,” she says.

  “I will?”

  “When in doubt, follow Mattie.”

  I have only three photos of Mattie. When you pointed a camera at her, she put her hand in front of her face. One shows Mattie clapping at my sister’s wedding. One was shot on the beach at Brill Island—Aunt Dorothy’s place on Schroon Lake—where Mattie liked to
fish for sunnies. In the third photo Mattie is five. Three neat children surround their long-necked mother in her black floor-length dress. Everyone looks serious except for Mattie, who looks sad. She’d begged her mother to comb her hair grown-up style before the picture was taken, and her mother had refused. The photo was taken right before Mattie’s father died. When I asked her about her childhood, she replayed the same stories each time: How she cried when her mother did her hair before the picture. How, when walking along the top of a fence after she’d been forbidden to, she fell headfirst into a steaming heap of dung. How she couldn’t eat duck, because she’d had to kill them. How her preacher step-father had sent her to church with the family picnic and somehow during the service her hand kept creeping under the lid and picked all the fry off the fried chicken and all the icing off the cake. How her mother died when she was ten, and she went to live with her grandfather in Riverdale, Georgia. How he sent Mattie to work in the post office and kept her salary, so she ran away to Atlanta with a girlfriend. How she married cruel men. How she never had children. “God just didn’t mean for some people to have them.” Then she’d laugh and say, “You’re my child! Now!”

  I don’t know if Mattie and I ever talked about anything more profound than how to get bubbles out of cake batter once it’s poured into a tin or not to use Brillo on Formica. I wish we had. Regardless, she’s with me. I have three recurrent dreams. Two are bad: First, I am losing my teeth in a social situation and have to spit them out like watermelon seeds to keep from choking. Second, I go back to college, but no one knows me and there’s no place to live and my old boyfriend I was horrible to couldn’t care less. My third recurrent dream is good: It’s about a door. I am in a room, and suddenly there’s a door I’ve never seen before. I open it and something wonderful I couldn’t have imagined is on the other side. Sometimes it’s the Garden of Eden. Or an extra bedroom. Once it was a waterfall. When it happened in real life, it was Mattie. The four letters and birthday card I have from her I keep in my bureau tied with a red ribbon. “Dear Patty,” one goes. “Just a note to say hello and that I am doing fine. It’s still very warm here how is it there? How are you doing in school good I hope. Have you cleaned up your room yet I know you have not. I miss you very much. Hope to see you soon. What your new boyfriend’s name. Thank you for your letters. Thank your mother for the lovely card. Tell her I am doing fine. I will have my teeth before Christmas. Please write me soon. Love, Mattie.”