Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Ilene Beckerman Page B

thirteenth birthday party I had with my friend Jean Lowrie. Her birthday is June 10. Mine is June 15.
     
    Jean’s mother took us to the Stockholm Restaurant for a birthday lunch with some of our school friends. My grandmother gave her money for my share.
     

     
    One day my grandmother came and got my sister and me. She didn’t want us to live with my father but with her and Pop and my aunt Babbie.
     
    They owned a brownstone building at 743 Madison Avenue, between 65th and 66th Streets, and had a stationery store on the street level. It was called Harry Goldberg’s. They lived above the store.
     
    After we went to live with my grandparents, I never saw my father again.
     
    Jean, who lived at 24 Central Park South, picked me up at the store every morning and we’d walk together to Hunter College Junior High School at 68th and Lexington Avenue.
     

     
    My grandmother’s name was Lillie but we called her “Ettie”. She had very beautiful, long silver-gray hair that she twisted up on top of her head into a bun that she called a
dreidel
, keeping loose waves in front.
     
    She used two large haircombs to keep up the hair in back and several large hairpins to keep the
dreidel
in place.
     
    She put Vaseline on her hair to keep it nice. She believed in two cures: Vaseline for anything wrong outside the body and hot tea with lemon for anything wrong inside the body.
     

     
    My grandmother usually wore a navy-blue or charcoal-gray cardigan sweater in the store, no matter what the weather was.
     
    The sweater had two large pockets into which she would slip quarters from the cash register.
     
    She told us that she was saving the quarters for me and my sister but we never got them.
     
    The telephone number of the store was RHinelander 4-8096.
     

     
    My grandmother, like many older ladies, rolled her stockings below the knee instead of wearing garters.
     

     
    I wore this black bathing suit when I went to Florida with my grandmother. I was fourteen.
     
    I met a boy on the beach named Bernie Maybrook from Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was twenty-six. He wanted to go on a date with me, and my grandmother said okay as long as she could go, too. So she did, along with Bernie’s father.
     

     

The 1950s
     
    I bought this cotton waffle-weave dress in Bloomingdale’s basement. It was red and black and had a Mexican look to the print.
     
    I went with my friend Judy Gellert to buy it. Judy went to Hunter College High School with me. She lived downtown in Stuyvesant Town.
     
    I had another friend at Hunter named Marilyn Herman. She had long blond hair and was pretty but fat. She wore her clothes too tight. Her mother also had long blond hair and wore big “picture” hats. She was also very pretty and fat and she worked in a court. Nobody else’s mother worked. Marilyn had no father.
     

     
    I wore this blue lace dress with white collar and blue satin cummerbund when I was confirmed at Temple Emanu-El, 65th Street and Fifth Avenue, on May 18, 1951. I was sixteen. The rabbis were Dr. Perlman and Dr. Marks.
     
    Everyone in my confirmation class had a topic to speak on. We didn’t choose the topic; it was given to us. Mine was “Mercy.”
     
    My hair was short and I had bleached it blond with a bottle of peroxide. Whenever my friend Dora saw a woman with a terrible bleach job, she would always say, “Almost as bad as you, Gingy.”
     
    My sister wore a green dress with vivid cerise flowers, and a hat with flowers.
     
    After the ceremony, my grandmother made a small party for me at the Alrae Hotel on 64th Street, around the corner from the store.
     

     
    My aunt Babbie (her real name was Pauline) had enormous breasts. She never got married.
     
    She had very beautiful small hands. Once someone asked her if she wanted to be a hand model but nothing ever came of it.
     
    She had her nails manicured every Saturday afternoon with Revlon’s Windsor pink nail polish. She also had her eyebrows arched and her hair