"When Your Ovaries Stop Working"

Zelda is a Jewish grandmother by birth alone. She wears her Judaism in gilded stars around her neck and diamond-studded chais on her ears. Her ethnicity can only be heard in her fast-talking speech punctuated with Yiddish words. Zelda is the American Jew: a bagel with lox and cream cheese in one hand and a ham sandwich in the other. She is the woman behind the Chanukah bush, the grandmother with the flashiest menorah in Dix Hills but without a clue about the Maccabees reclaiming the Temple in Jerusalem. Marrying a Jewish man is as important to Zelda as the diamond engagement rings from each of her four husbands. “It’s about culture. It’s about keeping the rituals going,” she’d explain.


“Then why are you marrying Ryan?” I asked the morning of Zelda’s marriage to Ryan Judd: a sweet, Irish Catholic man who owned several cigar factories.


“Did you learn about ovaries yet?” She fussed with the ivory-veil in the mirror.


I nodded because I wanted to understand what made it okay to have a priest at this ceremony, and not the others. But at eleven, I didn’t know. The word ovaries made me think of cities on other planets, something having to do with galaxies that had more important matters to consider than religion.


“Well, my ovaries stopped working. The egg factory is closed so I don’t need to worry about the mishigas of raising children with a goy.” She sucked in her already non-existent stomach and admired her tiny profile in the floor-length, sparkly gown. “And when my time to play is over I can rest next to your grandfather the way a good Jew is meant to,” she smiled.


Grandpa Saul Silver, my mother’s father, I never got to meet. He died right after my mother’s fifth birthday. The only one of Zelda’s husbands I got to call Grandpa; the only one she didn’t marry for money.


Now I am fourteen and know what ovaries are. Mom’s are still working and this is why Zelda made sure that Irish-Italian Vinny McGee came to her daughter’s birthday dinner. She needs to see if something is blooming between the freckled landlord and Sam.