Flowers For Shiksa

To be honest, my family is boring. Conservative, both socially and politically, although charitable, their main life goal seems to be puttering along, making money and never doing anything creative or interesting. This has frustrated me to no end. “That’s because all of the interesting ones are dead,” my father once told me, somewhere between an explanation and a warning. The stories we tell are pretty dull as well – an aunt who liked to drink (gasp!), a lovely Bar Mitzvah, whose in-laws screwed over whose. The far better stories, I have found, are the ones we don’t tell about the relatives we don’t talk about. After several years and careful prodding of elderly relations, I have pieced together most of the story of my Uncle Robert. The Jewish religion is a funny thing; although Robert is, as far as anyone knows, still alive, he is officially dead to us. You see, Robert, alone amongst my extended family, has left the faith.
Robert Merenstein, my father’s brother’s wife’s brother, was born in 1954 in Merrick, Long Island, two years before my aunt Estelle. In early pictures of my aunt’s family, Robert seems like a typical happy-go-lucky child, although he does have the strange tendency to not quite look directly at the camera, as if there is something perennially interesting just over there. Robert’s mother, my great-aunt Julia, was raised Orthodox, but was not nearly as strict with her children as her own parents. My aunt was, for example, allowed to leave the house on Friday nights and rip her own toilet paper during the Sabbath.
In the summer of 1971 Robert got a job working in an ice cream truck. The truck was old and hadn’t been properly serviced in years. Heat was a major trouble because, although the ice cream was kept cold, the exhaust from the refrigerator blew not out of the truck but into the cabin. Combine that with a typical 80 degree Merrick summer, and you have an extremely sweaty situation. Robert often drove with no pants on and a battery-powered fan between his legs to help him stay cool. In a picture from that summer, my aunt and her parents stand in front of the truck eating ice cream, and Robert is sticking his head out the window. Out of all the admittedly few pictures that remain, he looks the happiest in this one. Perhaps, being a bit of a prankster, he thought that secretly not wearing pants in a family portrait was funny, and he was right. But I have a hunch that there is another reason.
Robert’s ice cream route took him nearly halfway across Long Island, from the Jewish neighborhood of East Merrick out to the gentile-filled West Merrick and beyond. This is roughly equivalent to having a paper route that takes you from Rome to Gaul, or Malibu to Compton. It was along this route that Robert met Irene. Not much is known about Irene Campbell, or at least not much is remembered. When I asked Julia, she told me never to speak that name in her house again; I would ask my great-uncle Oscar, but he can barely remember to button his pants. That fall Irene had been the year ahead of my aunt at Mepham High School. As she remembers it, Irene was “nice enough,” although “not the prettiest girl in school,” but she did have a “developed figure,” so, uh, way to go Uncle Rob.
That fateful meeting went a little bit like this: Irene Campbell, in a fit of heat-induced ice cream craving, ordered a double chocolate ice cream cone from Uncle Robert. But the overheated truck took its toll, and the chocolate that day was a little bit too soft for its own good. The glob of dairy soon tumbled onto the lovely dress of its owner, and then straight onto the sizzling pavement, leaving behind a messy brown spot. “Oh no! My dress!” Irene said, “What am I going to do now? You don’t have any stain remover back there, do you?”
“No, ma’am, we don’t, I’m sorry,” said my Robert with the reflexive formality that had been bred into him. “I feel awful about ruining your dress, though. Here, let me give you a ride home,” he said, perhaps forgetting that the inside of the truck was hotter than the street, and he was in his underpants.
“I don’t know, it looks pretty hot in that truck. Besides, I don’t think I should be accepting rides from strange ice cream boys.” A long second passed as Robert desperately searched his brain, looking for a way to persuade her into his truck. It was not a skill that came easy.
“Say, don’t you go to my high school? You aren’t one of those ‘pirate pride’ girls, are you?”
“Ugh, I hate sports. They’re so pointless. And we can’t even win.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t be all that upset if their bus had an accident either, but I think they might expel us if we don’t cry at the funeral.” She smiled against her will. “Come on. Aren’t you curious about the inside of an ice cream truck? I’ll show you where we keep the scoops.”
“Scoops, huh? Throw in a Klondike and you’ve got a deal.”
Despite the awkward beginning, it must have been one hell of a ride; the two hit it off instantly. She became a regular customer, and then she started seeing my uncle outside of an ice cream truck. It wasn’t long until word reached Robert’s family that he was running around with an outsider. A Merenstein boy chasing some shiksa, the women murmered, unspeakable, unthinkable, disgrace upon the father and the father’s father, a black spot on the tallis. It was simple enough: Oscar forbade his son from seeing her and from leaving West Merrick unsupervised. Stripped of both girlfriend and car, Robert became despondent, but there was nothing he could do. He waited and as soon as he got his car back he drove straight to the Campbell house. This lead to stricter punishments, which Robert snuck around whenever he could. Things continued this way for two years; Robert was essentially a prisoner in his own home. Tensions grew, and in June of 1973, they reached a breaking point.
It was a Saturday, the day of Mepham’s graduation ceremony. Estelle caught Rob picking a handful of daisies out of the garden. “Hey, what are you doing?” she said, “Those aren’t for who I think they’re for, are they? They better not be, Dad’ll kill you.”
“No, they’re not for her,” her brother said. She iced him. “They’re not! Don’t look at me like that. Now get out of here, it’s none of your business.” She stared him down. She had grown just as tired of Irene as her parents; it was nothing personal, she just wanted to end all the fighting. So she started the biggest fight they would ever have. “MOM!” she cried with a calm, strong voice. “Robby’s messing up the garden!” Julia demanded to know why he felt the need to rip up and ruin her garden like he was 8 years old again. Robert’s formidable skill at lying to his mother fell through that afternoon, and he confessed that the flowers were for Irene. Robert’s father was called, and an all-out screaming match ensued in the garden.
“Where do you think you’re going with those flowers, son? The goyeh’s place? You can forget about it!” he roared, frightening away a few mid-afternoon clouds. “Give me those flowers, right now!”
“No, Dad. I’m taking them. And that’s not all I’m taking.” That’s when he pulled a diamond ring out of his pocket. Oscar was astonished; how could his boy possibly have enough money for a diamond ring? Robert had been saving up for over two years. He was going to propose to Irene and that was that. The price for his betrayal was excommunication. Robert was to be cut off: no money for college, no money for an apartment, no money for anything.
Oscar thought his son wouldn’t last a week. In fact, he lasted six months. Finally, though, he came back to his parents with his pride in his throat and asked them to take him back. He told them he had broken up with Irene, that it hadn’t worked out. They believed him and welcomed him back with open arms, because they were his parents. They never saw Irene again. But, the truth is, Robert continued to see Irene behind his parents’ backs, going so far as to bring home other girls for the holidays to throw them off the scent.
Three weeks after Robert’s graduation, his family received a letter. It was a wedding invitation. The wedding was to be Protestant. Not a single person Robert invited even showed up; Estelle wanted to but her parents wouldn’t allow it. And from that day to this, no one in my family has spoken to or about Robert Merenstein.