The Smartest Woman I Know Read Online Free PDF Page B

everything.
    “I’m not telling you what to do,” Ettie said, “but you should go to college. Today everybody needs to go. In college is where you get smart and after you get smart, you get rich. And in college is where you’ll find a husband.
    “Go to Boston. They have schools there for doctors and lawyers. Go look for one.”
    So I left my life on Madison Avenue and I started a new life as a college freshman in Boston.
    Ettie, Mr. Goldberg, the store, and my “situation,” as Ettie would say, disappeared before the train even got to Back Bay.

    Ettie was in her seventies by the time I left for Boston. She had never lied about her age.
    “A spring chicken I’m not,” she often said, “but I remember what it’s like to be young.
    “When you’re young, you think you’ll always be young. You can’t imagine that the day will come when you’ll be happy just to have a nice hot glass of tea with lemon, a good bowel movement, a glass to put your teeth in, and praise God because you slept through the night and woke up in the morning without a pain.”
    When Ettie was in her nineties, she lay dying on the green couch in the living room. I saw Mr. Goldberg kneel down next to her and take her hand. With tears in his eyes, he said, “You know, Mrs. Goldberg, I could have done a lot worse.”
    Let me tell you something, if you’re lucky, you’ll get old.

E PILOGUE
    E TTIE’S DEATH WASN’T a great loss to the world, but it was to me. Many years had passed since I had lived at 743 Madison Avenue. I was busy with children of my own. Often I found myself saying to them the same words Ettie had said to me. More time passed and I had grandchildren. I remember Ettie saying there were things I wouldn’t understand until I became a grandmother.
    How right she was.

Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
    a division of Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
    © 2011 by Ilene Beckerman. All rights reserved.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
    E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-117-3

As part of our celebration of Mother's Day, we hope you enjoy this special preview of our latest anthology,
    WHAT MY MOTHER GAVE ME ,
    edited by Elizabeth Benedict.

    AVAILABLE WHEREVER
BOOKS ARE SOLD

Introduction
    It is said that all books begin with an obsession, and this one is no exception.
    In this case, it’s a beautiful winter scarf my mother gave me toward the end of her life, probably the last gift I got from her. After she died in 2004, I became more attached to it. Th e times I thought I’d lost it, I went into full-blown panics. It was only partly that I didn’t know where to find a replacement for this embroidered wool scarf whose label said MADE IN INDIA . Mostly, it was feeling that I’d lost my connection to my mother—a connection that was restored as soon as I found it.
    Th e intensity of my feelings about the scarf surprised me, because I had felt so distant from my mother for most of my life. But because she was kind, loving, and needy, my feelings for her were layered with guilt, and the guilt so thick it sometimes felt like torment. After she died, I just felt sad and intensely aware of the scarf, which I wear around the collar of my coat all winter long, every year.
    I lived silently with this welter of feelings year after year. I didn’t know whom to talk to about it, or what to say; the scarf was attached to a free-floating, inchoate grief. Or was it something other than grie f ? For years, the feelings were beyond any words that I could summon. In 2011, my brooding gave way to curiosity, and I began to wonder about the experience of other women. If this one gift meant so much to me, if it unlocked the door to so much history and such complicated feelings, might other women have such a gift themselves?
    What My Mother Gave Me is the affirmative answer to that question. Each of the contributors describes a