would cook overnight in the heavy orange pot in the still-warm but turned-off oven, until Saturday afternoon, when they would eat it for lunch. Bethie would sit at the kitchen table, or in the living room, looking at her library books, while the house filled up with good smells of roasting chicken and fresh-baked challah. Sarah would bustle around the kitchen, her skirt swishing, her high heels tap-tap-tapping, whisking the gravy, snapping the ends off the green beans, getting out the Shabbat candlesticks, the candles, and the wine. When it started to get dark, Bethie and Jo would have their baths and get into fresh dresses. Daddy would come home and, together, the girls and their mother would make the blessings over the candles. “Good Shabbos,” Sarah would say, and give each girl a kiss, leaving a red-lipsticked bow on their cheeks. Bethie would smell her mother’s hairspray and perfume and hear the rustle of her mother’s dress, and her heart would feel like a balloon, stretched tight, bursting with love. Her father would bless the bread and the wine, and Bethie and Jo would each have a little sip of the sweet red liquor, and the family would sit at the table, beneath its special Friday-night white tablecloth, and eat chicken and gravy and fresh challah with honey, honey cake or rugelach rolled in nuts and sugar and cinnamon and filled with apricot jam for dessert. When it was bedtime, she’d lie in the darkened bedroom, with her face and hands washed and her teeth brushed, with the house full of good smells and her tummy full of good food and her sister in the next bed, close enough to touch. Then the best part of Friday would come. Jo would tell her a story about a princess named Bethie who lived in a castle, where the birds and mice would sew her dresses and help her make her bed. Something bad would always happen. The princess’s mother would die, and Princess Bethie’s father would marry a wicked woman, who hated Princess Bethie because of her beauty, and she would make Bethie be a servant, or send her into the haunted forest, where, after dark, the trees’ branches would turn into arms and reach out to grab little girls.
“Not too scary,” Bethie would whisper.
“Princess Bethie ran and ran, until there were holes in her pretty silk slippers, and her long silk dress was ripped,” Jo would say. “She ran through the darkness until she found a tall stone tower stretching high up into the sky. The door was shut, but Bethie pulled on the iron handle as hard as she could, and it creaked open, and she began to climb . . .”
Sometimes the princess would climb to the top of the tower, only a thicket of thorns would grow, hiding Princess Bethie from the world, and the birds and mice would have to bring her tiny sips of water and berries to eat. Sometimes Princess Bethie would prick her finger on a poison spinning wheel, and she would sleep for fifty years until a prince’s kiss woke her. Sometimes a fairy godmother would grant Bethie her wish for wings, and she’d go flying out the window, soaring high above the kingdom, or the prince would help her onto his horse and they would ride away together, or she would fly away on a dragon that she’d tamed. Whatever came next, however Jo told it, Bethie knew how the story would end. Princess Bethie would escape the tower or tame the dragon. She would marry the prince and inherit the kingdom, she would save her father from the evil witch, and all of them would live happily ever after.
Jo
Josette Kaufman, get back here right this minute!”
Jo raced down the hall, feet flying, arms pumping, chest tight and her breath coming in short, painful gasps. She ran to the bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it, startling her sister, who was lying on her bed, paging through The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island. Before Bethie could ask what was going on, Jo opened the closet, climbed onto the dresser, reached onto the top shelf, and nudged her blue suitcase with its shiny brass clasps until it fell on the floor.
“Jo!” Sarah was hammering on the door, sounding furious.
Jo ignored her, tossing her suitcase onto her bed. The suitcase, made of cardboard and covered in a blue tweedy fabric, had a stretchy pale-blue satin pocket stitched inside for underwear and socks.