There are years of Sundays welded together to form a mosaic of the time I spent with my mother, grandmother, and cousin Marilyn at the Automat on 34th Street.

My mother and I came in from Queens, a multicultural borough short on culture, long on parochial schools, twenty-three minutes from Manhattan on the IND subway line.

When the train arrived, I’d race into the car, determined to get the seat opposite the Miss Subways poster. Every month a different girl was selected to be “Miss Subways.” Her photo was accompanied by a short bio listing her achievements. This was not a beauty pageant. You did not have to be gorgeous or have a nose job to qualify. I had a chance here. Hypnotized by the newest poster, I was delighted to learn that Angela Leibowitz enjoyed baking and snorkeling.

I wondered what I might say: “Eleanor Mandler likes ice skating and knitting” sounded okay, though truth be told, I hated both ice skating and knitting and wondered if Angela really liked snorkeling, which was not a Jewish sport.

My mother would sit opposite me and flap the back of her hand under her chin in an upward motion, signaling me to close my mouth and adjust my face into a more socially acceptable position.

I called my mother “Miss Vera,” her name on the street, Seventh Avenue, the home of the garment district in N.Y.C. She was a successful fashion designer, divorced, bitter, and the resentful matriarch of a family of nut jobs, myself included.

We dressed for these Sunday outings, Miss Vera in a hat and veil, antique Victorian jewelry, and red suede, ankle-strap shoes. She was not a beauty but classy, confident and apparently wonderful company for everyone but me.

I wore the creations that my mother assured me were “the latest thing.” I remember sporting a brown felt bowler hat with a jaunty feather, high crown, and narrow brim and wearing a classic, double-breasted chesterfield coat. If I ran into a classmate in this outfit, it would be the end of me. There was no margin for error. I survived by making myself invisible and certainly not being controversial.

She dressed me up for these Sunday visits. “In case we run into a talent scout,” she’d say jokingly but she meant it. She imagined me on the cover of Teen magazine, gainfully employed.

“Always be prepared for opportunity,” she’d say as she braided my hair so tightly it created a permanent grin.

When that didn’t work, we paid a visit to the Conover Modeling Agency. I cringed as the agent looked me over. She selected her words carefully and suggested I get some headshots and come back in a year. Our eyes locked. “This will be our secret,” the eyes said. “We know you will never be a Conover model, but your mother can still have her fantasy,” and she winked.

On the IRT, arriving from the Bronx, were Grandma and my cousin Marilyn. She was seven days younger than I was and had always lived with Grandma.

We did not look like we were related. She was skinny with bony knock knees, stringy yellow hair, and an unexpected tooth that grew from her palate, a pale-blonde, smiley child with trusting eyes. She was dressed like a ragamuffin, her loose socks curled over her hand-me-down, patent-leather Mary Janes.

I was a chubby preteen brunette with stick-straight hair, bangs, braces, and a perpetual grimace.

I had everything that a teenage girl wanted in the 1950s: poodle skirts, crinolines, brown-and-white saddle shoes, and a phonograph. Marilyn had none of this and didn’t even know she wanted them.

No one ever explained to me what had happened to her parents. I only knew an abridged version. My family could have been in the Witness Protection Program. My mother was ashamed of her immigrant mother, her divorce, her gangly niece, and her chubby daughter.

Marilyn’s mother, my mother’s sister (nameless), was hospitalized on one of those creepy islands off Manhattan. She had either TB or mental illness.

That’s all I know.

Her father disappeared when Madge Elita (Marilyn’s given name) was an infant. He may have died in a building fire or returned to his home in Canada. My mother referred to him only as “the Canuck.”

That’s all I know, again.

Grandma was left to bring up Marilyn in Yiddish. She spoke almost no English. “Take care, put your koichip on” and “eat up” are the only complete sentences that I can remember Grandma saying.

They moved around a lot. In the early fifties rental apartments were plentiful. The landlords offered a few months’ concession for you to move into their buildings. Whenever she could, Grandma would move and walk away with a freshly painted apartment and a few hundred bucks.

When they relocated Marilyn would start her life over again at a new school. Sometimes she did not go to school until the truant officers tracked her down. She was smart but with Grandma as her mentor, she never had a chance.

* * *

We would arrive at the Automat at approximately 11 a.m. every Sunday. When I entered through the revolving doors, I was awed by the gleaming marble floors, polished chrome fixtures, and stained-glass windows. The coffee was dispensed from large, silver dolphins into delicate, white china cups, five cents with refills.

The restaurant was filled with the homeless, tourists, weirdos, drifters, and middle-class folks. A glamorous stage setting, inhabited by lost souls.

We had “our” table in the corner. We always sat in the same seats, ate the same meal, and covered the table with napkins.

There was a large buffet line. Ladies in hairnets and white aprons served us. I always ordered Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and creamed spinach. I couldn’t risk being disappointed so I took no chances.

The staff knew us well by now. “The usual, honey?” they’d ask. We were like extended family. “Sure I can’t tempt you with the pot roast, beautiful?”

After lunch we went to the coin-operated vending machines for dessert. I slipped a nickel into the coin slot, opened the door, and retrieved a bowl of rice pudding. Within seconds a bony hand appeared from behind the marble wall, spun the cubby around, and replaced my pudding with a portion that seemed bigger than mine, ready and waiting for the next customer.

I wondered about these faceless rice pudding replacers and imagined them living in the room behind the cubbies. They crept out when the Automat was closed. They ripped off their hairnets, drank coffee from the silver dolphins, laughed and danced like puppets until, at daybreak, they returned to Automat Purgatory.

Grandma and Miss Vera huddled at our table, arguing and exchanging money. Grandma slipped it into a worn, gray leather change purse with three sections, fingering the coins and sometimes exchanging one for another. She seemed to have a system. I never understood it or why she and my mother were so furious with each other. They argued in Yiddish; it definitely had something to do with money. “Ikh hab nisht ken gelt” (I have no money), they both said over and over again.

Grandma never smiled, stroked my hair, kissed me, or laughed. She was always bitter. She moved her food around the plate with disgust, apparently waiting for something better to appear.

Marilyn and I amused ourselves during these visits, which lasted for hours. We played games in the bathroom, crawling under the doors and scaring those in the next stall by placing plastic roaches on the floor.

I remember a smell of poverty, despair, and mothballs. It still makes me nauseous.

We talked to the homeless people who sat around day after day, nursing a cup of coffee or making tomato soup with hot water and ketchup.

I wanted to know what was in the shopping bags they clung to. I could see packages of newspaper wrapped around oddly shaped items. Occasionally they would show us photos of another time in their lives. A husband, a nephew, a baby. How did this happen to them? Could it happen to me? Had it already happened to Marilyn? I tried to understand how to avoid this fate by asking questions. It was hard to get the answers since they preferred to hear about our lives. I made up elaborate stories to entertain them.

Typically, we were abandoned by our parents, lived in a house filled with snakes. Came from a family of trapeze artists. We had six parrots and a koala bear. They loved these tales and always wanted more; they could hear them again and again.

We planned to take them on a dinner cruise around Manhattan, the island that they lived on but were not part of. We really meant to do it someday when we were rich.

I was fourteen years old in 1951 and was beginning to hate these Sundays. Nothing changed except me. My mother and grandmother were still decimating each in Yiddish; Marilyn was still running after me, needing me in a way I did not want to be needed—How could I throw a lifeline to someone with no hands? It was too much to expect from me.

I never visited their apartments until the very last one, an SRO (single room occupancy) on 14th Street.

The hallways were painted black, the lights fluorescent, the air pungent with the smell of liquor and orange rind.

We would run back and forth through the hallways, tempting fate. An occupant with unwashed hair, a bobbing Adam’s apple, and a red flannel shirt buttoned high at the neck poked his head out the door and told us to “Shut the fuck up, ya little Jewish brats.” My outfit was a dead giveaway of my almost privileged life.

They rarely visited us. When they did, my mother brought them in through the basement. She did not want the neighbors questioning her. They were in awe of her style and talent, her independence and creativity. How could she explain Grandma trudging behind her and Marilyn skipping around like she had a reason to be happy?

Marilyn would walk around my room, holding my dolls and stuffed animals, pressing them to her face and smothering them with kisses. She would nestle in my bed and stare up at the shimmering star decals on the ceiling. I was not happy when she was in my bed. I was afraid she had lice or would break or steal something, though I had no reason to believe it to be true. But how could she not wish me ill when she compared our lives?

One afternoon my mother took me to her friend’s house for lunch on a porch. I played in a treehouse and paddled around the pond in a floating chariot. I stroked a tiny bird in a birdbath.

It was a wonderful day.

As we were leaving the friend took my hand and led me to her grown daughter’s old room. It was filled with dolls, dolls so elegant you were afraid to touch them. “Pick any one,” the friend said. “You can keep it.”

Overwhelmed with the choices, I stayed in that room a long time and finally chose a small Mexican doll, probably purchased at a roadside stand in Tijuana, dressed in a wool shawl, carting a baby on her back, not the least bit elegant. The crappiest doll in the collection.

Why did I pick the Mexican peasant instead of the princess? I wondered.

The following Sunday I got rid of the question by giving the doll to Marilyn.

I was spared Marilyn’s miserable life and acted like I had earned mine.

I flaunted it and felt superior. Could I refer to that as an achievement when I entered the Miss Subways contest?

I distanced myself more and more during that year. I couldn’t take any chances. My entrée into society was precarious enough. I couldn’t even invite someone into my house; it was a mess. When I pleaded with my mother to fix it up, she gave me a quizzical look. “Why do I need to fix up a house? I don’t have a husband,” leaving me to devise schemes to keep people out. A favorite was throwing sheets on everything, claiming that the house was being painted.

I imagine my choice of a career in interior design was an attempt to save others from that fate.

I stopped showing up most Sundays. My last memory was of meeting there on a Saturday afternoon on my way to a party at the San Remo, one of the most beautiful buildings on the Upper West Side. It had sweeping views of the Hudson River, both a doorman and a concierge, private elevators, duplexes, and a kitchen just for the help.

I went to the Automat to show everyone the grown-up version of me. My mother had designed a beautiful, white shantung cocktail dress for the occasion. It was accented with black velvet stripes that ran up and down the bodice to form shoulder straps.

The staff I’d grown up with came out of the kitchen to see me. My homeless buddies clapped when I stood on a chair for a photo.

My grandmother gummed me a smile, Marilyn beamed, even my mother looked pleased. I graduated from the Automat that day and never returned, leaving Marilyn to fend for herself. Even the silver dolphins had lost their luster.

I erased all our pathetic rituals and left through the revolving doors. I did not want anything interfering with the life I wanted.

Grandma died shortly after that. Marilyn could not live alone; she was fifteen at the time and had not been taught the skills she needed to survive. Grandma’s three sentences were not enough to get by on.

Miss Vera was her guardian and didn’t want her; she could not be part of the image my mother had crafted. Neither did I.

She came up with a bad plan and placed her in Letchworth Village, a mental institution later exposed for its deplorable conditions. I visited her a few times. We passed though a long double line of patients lined up for lunch. They reached out to pet the little dog I’d brought along with me to show Marilyn, hands groping as we walked through the lines.

We were not allowed in the building and sat out on the grounds. There was nothing to say, it was unbearable, I had to leave. I abandoned her again.

I was a coward.

* * *

Marilyn stayed in Letchworth for many years, eventually becoming a housekeeper for a young family, returning to Letchworth Village every evening. Eventually she married and had a child. She worked as an aide in a hospital until she retired with a pension. Her husband left her and took their only child to live with him in California. Far away and with no resources, she rarely saw him.

She never complained. I never saw envy or anger. I admired her dignity.

I could barely fathom her graciousness.

When her son was a grown man, he wanted her in his life. She moved to California and was loved by his family. We spoke once when she was in hospice.

She always adored me, never held me responsible for my shallow behavior, and accepted me without words or recrimination, always happy for me and my lucky life.

Marilyn never belonged in an institution. It was all a terrible mistake.

The pain was so searing I had to run. Why her and not me? I know that I can never answer that question, but that doesn’t mean I can’t ask it.

For years I lived in two different worlds, drifting in and out, never quite knowing where I belonged. An imposter in both.

—————————————————————————

During the past three years, Eleanor Windman has participated in the San Miguel Literary Sala, Iowa Summer Writing Festival, Women of Woodstock and Erma Bombeck School of Comedy. Eleanor’s work is forthcoming in The Congolomerate, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Scoundrel Time, The Smart Set, and Steam Ticket. She is a retired designer who at eighty-two years old started writing to keep old age from blindsiding her—it worked.

Art:
Zoe Brester-Pennings
Untitled (Crush)
Lithograph, Silkscreen, Makeup
Varied Edition
18”x24”
2020