Save the Village by Michele Herman

Author:Michele Herman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

With or Without Pain

Lew’s funeral was at the Italian funeral home on Bleecker Street, because it was the Village where Italians trumped Jews and because Lew happened to know the family. Her cousin Joycie, who hardly ever left her side that week, pulled her into the ladies’ room and insisted on fixing her hair and putting on a tiny bit of makeup and murmuring soothing words. “You’re going to be okay. You’ve got us. You’ll get a juicy part. You’ll meet a guy. You’ll finish school, you’ll go to college.”

Joycie ushered her into the room with the stained glass and the wood paneling and wall-to-wall carpeting. The entire Village, it seemed, had already stepped through the door. Her mother was there with Ben, handsome and tall and with those graying temples that were considered so sexy then. He was definitely a catch, but Doris at least had the decency to refrain from touching him. Becca’s friends from Music and Art were there in an unruly pack in the back with their Afros and their granny glasses, and seeing them helped.

Sheldon Glaberson gave a charming, loving eulogy and the chair of the community planning board spoke. The Lew who was conjured up in words was much more organized and purposeful than the real one. People flooded her afterward with their condolences, many with a similar gesture: a private smile and slight shake of the head, as if to say, Lew, Lew, what are we going to do about Lew?

It was a good story, his death. It happened at St. Vincent’s Hospital, but not in the usual way. It was a Thursday night in the hospital’s huge auditorium, where meetings were often held. As chair of some committee or another, he was on the stage. Becca was there, too, sitting off to the side; she was supposed to be following a local political issue for her U.S. government class and could get extra credit for attending. Lew was taking a motion from the floor or objecting or whatever he did; she was doodling on the brown-bag cover of her textbook. The house was packed, and tempers were rising. The other chair said to someone in the audience who’d stepped up to the podium to ask a question, “No need to have a heart attack; it’s just zoning,” and her father, who was never one for following instructions, promptly went into cardiac arrest. She watched the whole thing: the SOS call, the orderlies running down the long aisle with the stretcher, the attempt to defibrillate; everyone was too stunned to whisk her away.

After the funeral and reception, Becca told Joycie she was going to the ear-piercing place, the little store on Seventh Avenue South with the big sign that read “With or Without Pain.”

“I don’t get it,” said Joycie. They had already gotten their ears pierced when they were thirteen.

“Here,” said Becca, digging her fingernail as deep as she could get it into the hard cartilage near the top of her ear that almost no one pierced then.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.