Home for Pesach! It has a good sound, like home for Christmas, or for Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July. Where is home? Home is where grandparents live. The children’s books still say that Gramp lives on the farm and the city children come to visit to see the chickens and the cows. In our family, it’s the other way round. The children live in the country and come to visit Grandma in her city apartment.

“My grandma’s house is bigger than the Town Hall, the Library, and the Post Office put together,” boasts my daughter.

“It’s like a castle,” says her sister. “It’s a red brick castle with a drug store downstairs for emergencies, a candy store around the corner, and a bakery that you can smell all day.”

We pack for a three-day visit as if we were bound for a trip around the world. Who knows what the weather will be in April? We’re prepared with snow suits and straw bonnets, boots and pink sandals.

I make a list. I must tell the cat-sitter where the food is. The water and electricity must be shut off. A capricious dishwasher once turned itself on while we were gone. Like an idiot sorcerer’s apprentice, it nearly washed the house away before the pump gave out.

The phone rings as I shut the last door. It’s a Mrs. Johnson to ask a favor. She has been invited to play the violin at a Women’s Club tea. She would like me to accompany her on the piano. I agree, and explain that I cannot stop to talk. “I’m going home for. . . Easter,” I say.

“Of course,” she says. “I forgot, you lucky girl. I love New York. I adore the lights, the shopping, and the shows. Have a marvelous time and be sure to come see me as soon as you come back.”

Finally I join the family in the car. We take leave of the half-opened narcissus nodding into the swollen brook and the crocuses strewn like orange peels across the lawn. Goodbye to our own little piece of exurbia!

The drive is supposed to decompress me and offer a transition from my hurried, disciplined life to the one I will lead in Brooklyn. At home, every morning, I count out the hours of the day like money in the bank; so much for the children; so much for the typewriter; so much for the garden and so much for the stove; so much for the piano and for friends and so little for miscellaneous interruptions. Two friendly telephone calls or a bloody little nose can wreck the accounting system.

Ahead of me yawn three days of visiting with relatives, hours in the kitchen, gossiping, while I sit with empty hands. I might enjoy it if I were more adjustable. But I grow tense at the thought that I will have to stop running. Once I visited a friend in her trailer and moved so fast I cracked my head in a low doorway and knocked myself out. I tell myself to remember it. Running in my mother’s house will have the same effect.

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Ready or not! Five hours and two hundred and fifty miles later I pull the lollypops out of the children’s hair and wipe the graham cracker crumbs off their cheeks. We’re home.

My father has been sitting at the window waiting for us. My daughter jumps into his lap before he can get up. She strokes his last white hairs, kisses his ears, and takes the pennies out of his pockets. My mother wipes her hands on her apron, and stares at us hungrily and smiling, as if we might disappear if she blinked.

While we carry in our valises, I notice that the couch sags a little deeper than last year. The linoleum is worn a darker brown and the cracks in the ceiling have not been repaired. But everything is in order and very clean. The furniture gleams and the cotton doilies and net curtains are stiff with starch. Every corner has been scrubbed in honor of the holiday and even scrubbing isn’t enough to make the surfaces suitable for Passover.

The kitchen table is covered with three sheets of heavy cardboard. The cupboards where everyday dishes are kept are locked. The stove has a sheet of tin over it to hide the porcelain that has been touched by leaven and the sink has a Passover drain board. If anything falls into the sink, it will be thrown away.

Grandma explains what can be touched and what must be left alone. The children listen eagerly, entranced to discover that there’s a taboo in every corner. They obey without questioning. In an enchanted castle, spoons, dishes, and cloths may have a life of their own that must be respected. Kitchen closets containing cereal, beans, and cans of salmon may be locked as if demons would escape if they were opened.

When the car is emptied and parked, my husband stretches out on the couch and goes to sleep. There’s little else for him to do. Two children find tricycles and ride them up and down the long hallway. The television blares though no one looks at it. My son beats a drum, abandoned by his cousins, with his fists, while I try to hush him.

“Please,” begs my mother. “It was quiet last week and it will be quiet next week. I hear them only once a year. Let them!”

I stand in the kitchen, looking for work to do. The beet soup bubbles in the pot. Three potato pies are in the oven and my mother pulls pinfeathers out of the fourth chicken. She refuses to tell me how I can help her but I know enough to find the chopper and the chopping bowl. I pound away at the onions, the chicken livers and hard boiled eggs, and glue them together with globs of golden chicken fat. The chopper thumps rhythmically while I watch my fingers. One year I left a piece of my thumb in the bowl. I remember how surprised I was to find it didn’t hurt. I wondered whether all losses could be borne if they were not premeditated. Thinking brings the pain, the guilt, and the understanding.

My mother and I work in silence for a little while. We both fear that words will obscure the waves of affection that flow between us. She does not scold me for being too thin and I watch her devotion to superabundance and do not say, “What do you need it for?” The children take turns bolting into the kitchen. Each time they get cookies and kisses. They look at me with questioning eyes, asking for permission.

“I’ve had five already,” admits the eldest.

“Don’t ask,” says my mother. “If Grandma gives, take.”

I’m proud of my self-control. I don’t warn her that she will make them sick or remind her that she tried to fatten us all to obesity. I refused to eat, but my sister knew years of struggle and discipline before she came back to normal size. My brother is still huge.

It pleases me to be indulgent and passive, a grown woman, no longer impatient with my mother and angry at my father. My brother and sister have ceased to be inadequate extensions of myself and have miraculously turned into real human beings with dreams and sorrows of their own. It seems a pity that it has taken me thirty-five years to come to these discoveries. No harm would have come out of learning sooner.

When silence palls, we look for safe subjects to discuss. I ask about aunts and cousins and hear that they are all, “Thank God, the same.” The familiar phrase reminds me that in our family change has a connotation of trouble if not outright disaster.

“The old lady with the fiddle,” Mamma says, “how is she? She has still trouble with her children?”

Mrs. Johnson, who wants me to call her Mary, is the old lady Mamma means. I sent home clippings from the local newspapers when we last played together. The last time I was home, Mamma stared at the pictures while I told her of Mary Johnson’s accomplishments, noting again and again that she was almost as old as Mamma.

“What could be missing to such a woman,” said my mother with such unabashed envy that I stopped telling her about the rose garden and the beautiful white house, about the trips to Florida in the winter and the Cape in the summer. Instead I shared Mrs. Johnson’s troubles with her. Her thirty-year-old son had no interest in work of any kind. Her daughter had just divorced her second husband.

Mamma dispensed with all comfort and luxury with a wave of her hand. “I won’t trade with her then,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to live if I didn’t have pleasure from my children.”

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That night is the first Passover Seder. My younger sister and older brother come with their children. The dining table is opened as far as it can go and two bridge tables are added for the children. The white tablecloth is covered with a sheet of plastic so that the wine can be mopped up as fast as it’s spilled.

My father makes the blessing over the wine. My youngest nephew begins to ask the four questions that begin the ceremony. He stumbles. His father glares at him and the boy bursts into tears. He runs away from the table with his mother after him.

Papa asks himself the questions and gives himself the answers. He tells the story of the Exodus in Hebrew which only he can understand. He chants in a monotone, stopping only to point to the chicken bone that is supposed to be the paschal lamb, to the celery that symbolizes bitter herbs, to the chopped apples and nuts that remind no one of mortar or clay. The younger children do not even look. Two older ones beg to sing the portions they have learned at Hebrew school, but my father doesn’t know the tune they know and he can’t stop to wait for them. They get even by giving each other sly pushes and kicks and wiggling the rickety table. A little one chokes on a crumb of matzah. Another throws up his taste of horseradish that he thought was cherry jam.

Papa doesn’t look up from the Haggadah. He reads doggedly without changing a word or skipping a sentence. When he is done my mother brings the food she has been preparing all day, according to her own unchangeable ritual.

I help carry in the soup, made exactly as it has been made the twenty-five years I’ve been carrying it. The smell of it reminds me of all the battles and quarrels against the rigidity and stubbornness in my father’s house—all lost battles. But they look so different now that I’ve established a secure beachhead for my own rigidity. I imagine that whatever dignity my parents have comes from their refusal to accommodate themselves to me.

The second day is the same as the first. Cousins and aunts come to visit in the afternoon. I hide in the kitchen with my mother. Each guest is offered a dish of pancakes and a glass of wine. I beat the eggs in batches of four and pour the fat into the frying pan. Nieces and nephews roll nuts in the hallway. My children are delighted with the timelessness, the freedom. They can run around the block whenever they feel like. They can play hide-and-seek under the high old-fashioned beds and they can eat all day long. They wallow in the noise and confusion.

My mother is in her element. Her face is flushed at the stove. Her hair is disordered and her apron is streaked with food. We’re together, doing women’s work, gossiping about relatives, and discussing the prices of apples and potatoes.

The second Seder is the same as the first. The chanting, the squirming, and the soup are unchanged. But this time my nephew doesn’t stumble. The food, the wine, the Haggadah, and the children make conversation impossible. My brother, who sells fabrics to dress manufacturers, says that business is good. My brother-in-law complains that television sets are not moving. A sleepy child cries and gets everyone’s attention. Boredom settles on us all, like a frost.

We ask the family to excuse us the last night before going home.

“Where are you going?” they ask.

We don’t know. We’re going out to find Mrs. Johnson’s New York. We’ll look for lights, for shows, for something to take home. First we call our old friends. They’ve all moved to Larchmont, Bellaire, or Darien. We take the subway uptown, alone.

We think that we might eat a huge lobster as an antidote to all the potato pancakes we’ve eaten. Perhaps, we’ll see a show. It doesn’t matter what it costs. We’ll find a Modigliani print in a bookstore. We can even go to a night club.

Instead we wander around Times Square, like lost teen-agers. There are no tickets for anything we would care about. We’re too full to eat, and are really not interested in a night club. We want desperately to be frivolous but have no idea of how to begin. We don’t speak of it, but feel that there is something improper about spending as much money for an evening’s entertainment as the family could use for a week’s food. No matter where we go, we will come back to sleep on the broken sofa and wake up to see the cracked ceiling above our heads.

When we’re tired of walking, we permit ourselves an Italian movie, and a pastrami sandwich and a glass of beer. The best part of Italian movies is that when you come out of the theater to American reality, you feel so lucky.

In the morning I call my sister and sister-in-law to say goodbye. I know that we’ve said very little to each other, not only because children didn’t let us, but because we don’t know how to talk to each other. I ask, “What are you doing?” They answer, “Nothing much,” and the fence is up. I imagine that they think I’m boasting or complaining when I volunteer information.

“May we be together again next year,” says my mother.

“If God wills,” says my father. “May next year find us alive and in good health!”

The children cry because they want to stay longer. But our visit is over.

All the way home I make lists of what I shall do. The children sing nursery school songs. I feel as if I were coming out of a tunnel. The way home to the country always seems shorter.

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The next morning I find that the rain has washed the crocuses away, but the narcissus has opened and the violets are showing their heads. I have a light-headed feeling when I take the children off to school.

Mrs. Johnson is at her mailbox when I drive past. I have to stop. She insists that I have some coffee with her. I can tell that she is troubled and needs someone to talk to. It doesn’t seem right to have troubles in her beautiful white house. She grew up in it. But its paint is always fresh. There are no cracks in the ceiling. It’s in perfect order and repair.

“There ought to be a way to protect parents from the greediness of their children,” she says bitterly.

I’m embarrassed to listen. Sometimes she complains of problems, years old. I never know whether she is remembering her daughter’s adolescent rebellion or her adult dependence; her son’s indolence or stupidity. She speaks of the younger generation with anger, forgetting that I am of the younger generation.

The dogs, three boxers, jump around us, and I pretend I don’t mind. I really dislike their firm, warm bodies against my legs and wish they would go away. Mary Johnson pats them affectionately and talks baby talk to them. “My best children, my best sweet children! No problems with these babies!”

Mr. Johnson has coffee with us. He looks on patiently while his wife shows me a new black and gold tray that she has painted and reminds her of some plants she said she would give me for my garden.

I don’t say much at first. I always feel something strange about my friendship with my neighbors. Perhaps it’s because they assume that we understand each other and they know nothing about me. All I know of them is that Mr. Johnson is a retired businessman. He fishes and plays golf in the summer and goes to Florida or Arizona for the worst of the winter. I see his name in pieces about the local Rotary. Mrs. Johnson is still a pretty woman, well cared for. She’s the secretary of the County Historical Society, a vice-president of the Women’s Club, and she paints trays and plays the violin very nicely.

Some rainy days we play sonatas together. She brings me the perennials that she thins out of her garden and samples of her jelly when the strawberries are ripe. Though she’s not known to be a warm person and prefers dogs to children, she’s always very friendly and warm with me. We have a kind of symbiotic relationship. I need someone older to look after. She needs a daughter who can play the piano and be independent of her parents.

I’m embarrassed when her children are at home. She scolds them as if they were infants or pokes fun at them as if they were her enemies. Conscious of her voice, I hear my own, and I find I have three separate sets of vocabulary and inflection.

I have an everyday voice for children, husband, and old friends. I have my Brooklyn voice, half dead-end, half Yiddish, that I affect as soon as I see my family, and then I have a special voice that I hear in Mrs. Johnson’s living room. I hear myself as if in a record at the speech clinic. My—brown—cow. . . . What am I doing? I’m imitating Mrs. Johnson. I do so well I could pass for a Wellesley girl.

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Mrs. Johnson wants to hear all about New York. . . . What can I tell her? For the first time, she asks about my family.

“What does your father do?” she asks.

I redden slightly, angry at myself that I do, and tell her that he’s a presser.

At first she doesn’t seem to understand, but finally she says, “Like that nice little tailor in the square.”

I get a feeling that she’s pleased to be a liberal person who can be friends with a tailor’s daughter who plays the piano. But it may be all in my imagination.

“How old is he?” she asks.

“Over seventy,” I say.

“He must be terribly strong,” she says enviously. I cannot help but look at Mr. Johnson, well-tailored even in the morning, and smelling of shaving lotion. His cheeks are pink from the winter and summer sun. I think of my hollow-chested, bent father, with dry, trembling hands and sunken face. His whole body screams exhaustion, but he refuses to rest, afraid that a day’s uselessness will condemn him to death.

I think I have to explain it to Mrs. Johnson. I tell her that he’s an Orthodox Jew, an immigrant from Poland, whose English after forty years in America is still unsure. She knows, of course, that we’re Jewish, but she is so pleased that we look just like anybody.

I find myself describing a Seder. I tell no lies, but neither do I tell the truth. I let her get a vision of a genial patriarch and his respectful family acting out an ancient play. She thinks of a great feast, not hard-boiled eggs and boiled chicken. She enjoys the sound of the words and repeats them after me so that she will remember the paschal lamb, matzah, bitter herbs with ginger and apples and nuts.

“I love old customs,” she says, “especially when they’re happy.” She thinks I should write down what I have told her for the Historical Society newspaper. “It’s absolutely charming,” she says and remembers that someone had once explained the Jewish New Year to her, but she had not liked it at all. “It was morbid,” she said with revulsion, “but the Seder is delightful. Thank you for telling me about it.”

When I get up to go she gives me some music, a Victor Herbert medley that we will play at the Women’s Club tea. We both prefer Beethoven but the ladies begged for something lighter when we played the “Spring Sonata” last time and we promised to find something familiar.

I’m ready to go, when her daughter comes down. I smile. She nods.

“Don’t you dare go downtown in those vulgar red pants,” says her mother. She turns to me and in another voice, “It was lovely, dear. Come again soon!”

I have the door open when she adds, “That girl of mine has always been demanding. When she was little she wanted me to be in the house waiting for her whenever she came home. She still does.”

I look back at the house and see her at the window, surrounded by the dogs. One is up at her shoulder snuggling his nose against her cheek. The other two have their paws on the window sill. Something about the composition reminds me of my mother with my children clinging to her, the purest devotion in their faces.

I race the motor. I don’t know the time. I’m terrified that the littlest one may have come home before me to be frightened by an empty house.

I rush for nothing. When I get to the driveway, I see the nursery school station wagon, a little bit down the road behind me.

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