Holding My Breath: A Novel

Chapter One when my parents, Goldie and Saul Levy, got married in 1947, there was no gown. My mother wore a simple white dress, and my father wore the first suit he had ever owned. They didn't get married at the Royal Alex Hotel, and there was no ballroom luncheon. Baba, my grandmother, hosted the wedding at the house with the chuppah in the living room. Everyone stood around them while they were blessed like their forefathers before them. It was August, and Goldie, even though her dress was knee-length, almost fainted from the smell of musty suits, alcohol, cigarettes and cologne. Saul almost fainted, too, but that was out of disbelief. He held his own hands behind his back, while under the chuppah, to stop himself from reaching out to touch my mother. Her face glistened with sweat; her hair up off her face was damp where it met her neck. Nobody else thought of her as a doll except for my father, who wondered the entire ceremony what she was doing standing beside him. The chuppah was one of my grandmother's tablecloths, which she planned to give to the couple for their Shabbos table. My parents didn't want a religious wedding, but Zaida, my grandfather, had insisted on the chuppah, which was at least traditional. He made the poles himself, treating the wood and sanding it in the backyard for two weeks before the wedding day. He made dowels for the poles, too, and carved little Stars of David on each one. On the wedding day, four mentwo uncles, a cousin and a neighbour recently bar mitzvahedheld the chuppah up over the couple's heads so that neither of them could see the stars. My zaida thought of them as bits of God watching over the marriage without my mother and father knowing. Unfortunately, God forgot to watch over the chicken soup Baba had intended to serve for lunch. On the hot August day, with the house packed with melting guests, the soup stayed out too long and nearly boiled in the heat alone. When my father broke the glass and everyone clapped around them, Baba ran to the kitchen to get the soup ready in the bowls. She lifted the lid off the pot, and the soup almost jumped out and grabbed her nose. That was the smell: rotten dill, grey chicken. It was enough to make my iron-willed grandmother the third almost-fainting casualty. She had other food to serve. That wasn't the issue; it was having her soup spoil on a day meant to be as sweet as the first challah dipped in honey that upset her. She did not believe in omens, and she felt that the dybbuk and the evil eye were for women from the Old Country who refused to leave. She was here, in Winnipeg, Canada, at her oldest daughter's wedding. She did not let a single tear drop when she poured the liquid from the soup down the sink. Drops of her sweat mixed with it instead. "Yichud!" Zaida called because everyone was crowding around the new couple. Religious or not, my parents were permitted their first few moments alone as a married couple and my grandfather attempted to usher them up to their room. The room had been my Uncle Phil's and was recently converted slightly to accommodate a double bed (which my zaida also made) and new curtainswhite with embroidered yellow daisies, a gift from a cousin in the United States. My parents would live in that room for the first five years of their marriage until my father managed enough savings to get them a small apartment. Until then, they were to live on Alfred Avenue, in the two-storey, three-bedroom house with white stucco and blue shutters. They would eat dinner at my grandparents' dark-stained dining-room table with matching hutch, and they would share the one small, pink bathroom on the top floor with everyone else. And at night, they would lie in bed, in their room, sandwiched between my grandparents, my aunts, Carrie and Sarah, and the ghost of my mother'Ludwig, Sidura is the author of 'Holding My Breath: A Novel' with ISBN 9780307396228 and ISBN 0307396223.