Stuffed by Patricia Volk

Author:Patricia Volk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307427991
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Aunt Ruthie makes the front page after hostage negotiators exchange her for two cigarettes. (She never kept kosher.)

BUTTER COOKIES

Your Uncle Albert and I had a whirlpool romance,” Aunt Ruthie tells me. Then she pauses. “Is that the word I mean?”

We’re having lunch to celebrate her eighty-ninth birthday. She dabs a little applesauce on her blintzes.

“I make the best applesauce,” she says. “You want to know the secret? I put in the pits.”

“You leave them in?”

“There’s taste in the pits,” she explains. “You quarter the apples, cook them in water, then you put them through a . . . through a . . .” The word is gone.

There are 159,260 women in New York City over eighty. You see them taking tai chi at the Y. You see them at Fairway elbowing toward the Florida grapefruits or examining the string beans one by one. They’re on the bus after ten and before three. In winter they wear woollies. You used to see them at the Women’s Exchange and Mary Elizabeth’s. You used to see them at Schrafft’s having tuna on toasted cheese bread and hot fudge sundaes with coffee ice cream. New York’s oldest women have outlived their hangouts. Most have outlived their husbands. One of them ran the marathon last year. Few are as lucky as Brooke Astor and Kitty Carlisle Hart and my mother’s friend’s mother Lola, who, at ninety-seven, stands on her dining-room table twice a year to clean the chandelier. What’s a little old lady anymore anyway? Grace Paley? Matilda Krim? Aunt Ruthie?

“If I live to be a hundred, I won’t finish these blintzes,” Aunt Ruthie says. “Take one, darling.”

“You really leave the pits in?”

“And the skin.”

Maybe you’ve heard of my Aunt Ruthie. She’s the woman who was taken hostage in her Bronx apartment by an ex-paratrooper on August 4, 1990. It was a hot night. She left her bathroom window open. José Cruz climbed in and held Aunt Ruthie at gunpoint for seven hours. BRAVE, the Daily News ran under her photo on page 1. YIDDISH CHARM NAILS SUSPECT, said the New York Post. He ate all her plums, a wedge of Jarlsberg, and three nectarines before the police exchanged her for two cigarettes.

“When you go to prison,” Aunt Ruthie counseled him, “take out some books. Learn a different profession. It’s important in life to get hold of yourself.”

Aunt Ruthie got hold of herself young. After graduating Morris High, she got a clerical job at the Pathé Exchange on West Forty-fifth Street. Aunt Ruthie couldn’t help noticing that the office supervisor, a Miss Maloubier, was taking lunch from twelve to four. Six months later Aunt Ruthie had Miss Maloubier’s job. “I was so fast and thorough, they advanced me.” She made fifty dollars a week, which she gave to her mother, who gave her an allowance. “That’s the way it was then, darling. I didn’t think anything else.”

A woman who looks like George Burns sits down at the table next to us. She knows Aunt Ruthie

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