Writings and Reflections

Resentment

by Lloyd B. Abrams

Davie, at age 8, could never stand the family circle gatherings he was dragged to, held in some dark second-story room in a decrepit building in Brooklyn. He hated going even though his uncle Sam would be bringing a projector and showing black and white cartoons for all the cousins, none of whom he got along with. And there’d always be all that food that he couldn’t stand but couldn’t stop eating.

Every time, Aunt Ada greeted him with a stinging pinch on his cheek – not a pinch, exactly, but more of an assault. But then there was Aunt Yetta who was just the opposite – warm, gentle, loving. She’d hold him close after greeting him with, “Oy, Davie … you’re getting so big.”

“You’re getting so big.” It was almost a punch line in the Rosen household. To buy clothes that Davie could fit into, his parents usually made a day of it. They piled into the shared drugstore car – a black Dodge sedan that always made Davie nauseous – which his father and his two partners bought for delivering prescriptions and sundries to the goyem who lived in the estates along the water. In it, his family made the seemingly never-ending trip into Brooklyn. But they could kill two birds with one stone, as his father put it, by also visiting both sets of Davie’s grandparents who lived only a couple of blocks apart.

Then later, in Pearlman’s department store on Pitkin Avenue, where most alterations were free, Davie was made to try on pants from the husky department that were still too long for him. His mother had to kneel down on both knees to roll up the legs to determine if the waist fitted him properly. Only much later could he put the right word to the feeling he had during that try-on process: humiliation. This was many years before Davie was finally able to buy clothes right off the rack.

At age 9, and age 10, Davie began learning a fuller meaning of another word: resentment. He saw it in the eyes of his parents and he heard it under his parents’ faint praise, where their words came out as not-so-hidden jibes: “You’re still a growing boy,” and “You’re just pleasantly plump,” and, when he was supposedly out of ear shot, “I hope he’ll eventually grow out of it.” Or, in their less charitable moments, when his mother might call him a shtick dreck, which translated as a piece of shit, though shtick sounded more like fat to Davie. And his father would sometimes call him tubbish which was short for tub of shit. “But I love you, Davie,” his father would say, trying to stifle a laugh. “You know I was only kidding.”

He also heard stinging words from his older brother – the over-achiever, the concert pianist-to-be, the goodie-goodie, the future high school valedictorian who got A pluses in all of his classes, and who sneered at his younger brother when Davie tried – but inevitably failed – to emulate him.

And he heard it even more clearly from his classmates, who resented this four-eyed kid with the googly glasses and the curly Jew-hair who got better grades then they did with a lot less effort, this out-of-place Christ killer, this Hebe, this fat little Kike who had skipped a grade and was not only a year younger and even less mature than everyone else, but was a readily-available target, an easily beatupable scapegoat. After all, it was the early 1950s – the 1950s in a village on the south shore of Long Island with a long and storied history of Ku Klux Klan activity and antisemitism, a village where an operator answered when you picked up the phone, a village that still had four-digit phone numbers and party lines, and becoming a far-flung suburb of the city was way in the future.

And at age 11, in that same shabby upstairs room in Brooklyn, he slapped away Aunt Ada’s hand with a resounding smack as her claw reached out towards him. His parents profusely apologized, of course – “We’re so, so sorry … we don’t know what got into him” – and made Davie apologize to her as well.

But it was the last time his aunt ever tried to pinch his cheek.

The bitch had it coming.

– This story, originally written in 2004, was resurrected from my “Works in Progress” folder

Sess 1 / October 22, 2004 .. Rev 12 / May 7, 2020

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May 6, 2020 … Copyright © 2020, Lloyd B. Abrams
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