They wanted to love us, but they were women who had never learned that language

As told to Shoshana Gross

T

he first time I remember knocking on their door, I was four years old, standing behind my siblings, in a line. The house loomed before us, tall, dark, heavy with secrets we couldn’t name. It sat at the bottom of a hill with no immediate neighbors, adjoining the yeshivah, isolated in its grandeur.

When one of them finally answered, peering through the crack, asking, “Who is it?” in that sharp voice, I felt something I was too young to understand: the terrible weight of loneliness pressing against the door from the other side.

Edith and Ruth. You had to say their names in that precise order, honoring the two years that made Edith the eternal elder, the unquestioned boss. They were children of prewar Europe, women carved from another era, speaking in Litvish-tinged accents to us, switching to the local English dialect for the outside world. We heard that they were shrewd businesswomen, dealing with properties scattered throughout the city, managing tenants from every class of English society, but they never mentioned that part of their lives — and they certainly didn’t dress the part.

They moved through life in identical floral dresses, brown sensible shoes, army-style overcoats for outdoors, nylon housecoats for housework — with pockets to stow the overused handkerchief. Both short women in their fifties. Ruth more prematurely white than her sister, her hair light and fluffy. Edith’s more grayish, coaxed into the short, shapeless curls so popular in the 70s. Often, they wore necklaces, fitting them on one another as they did their watches, small acts of tenderness disguised as practicality. Their greatest adornment was the smile, but it came rarely, rationed like something precious.