Excerpt from Marina Lewis's "Egritophilia"

My sister Egrit was so gorgeous that certain neighborhood ladies named their babies after her. Thirty-nine year old Francesca Cucci was the first and when I saw Isabella and Sofia and Roseanna-Maria Cucci elbowing each other for control of the high-handled baby stroller that contained their sister, eight-week-old Egrit Cucci, it gave me a strange feeling that I couldn't identify as good or bad, like a tickle on the lung.

I'd been sitting on the stoop, thinking about what it would be like to make out with Blind Mark Ierardo, hoping he'd stop by like he did when Egrit was alive. Maybe now, since I'd smothered her scent with Bounce sheets shoved beneath her old mattress and in each dresser drawer he'd kiss me, kiss me and not feel torn apart like a piece of cheese between two mice, neither of whom would pounce. There were benefits I could see in kissing Blind Mark. I wouldn't have to shut my bright bedroom light. His hands would certainly be sensitive and gentle. All that Braille. I was glad I never got acne on my back. If we went to second base would I have to wear a slinky bra? It wouldn't even have to be black-the tactile would tell. Maybe he'd like lace, or would it remind him, as it did me, of his Grandmother Chisari's tacky lace tablecloths? Lunches there, fourth Sunday of the month after Church (I waited outside), I'd lift the lacey edge and scratch floury dust with my right pinky. Mine wasn't the only messy house in the neighborhood. Mark's house was like a sieve. If I lifted a pair of old galoshes I'd find a surprisingly clean print and I'd replace them carefully in the same overturned way I'd found them. Their chaos was recorded. Dust even managed to slip beneath plastic couchcovers, through fine, microscopic holes. If I sat on the couch and moved my butt back and forth a few times I'd make lintballs. And they just stayed there. I checked. Once in a while, for a special event like a fiftieth anniversary or a sweet sixteen, Mark's grandmother would peel back the cloth and Lemony Pledge the cracked oak table. When I went over there, to get math help from Mark, I never put my clean books on that table.

When we start to hang out alone now, and fall in love, Blind Mark's hands will notice every change in my body. His palms will watch me closely. They'll know if I have my period. They'll know if I eat too much ice-cream at work. Salt. Everything. His hands'll take time on my changing girl-belly. This might not be good. But then again, if he touches only me, having never touched Egrit, never even really seen Egrit, he might be the only person in New York who knows what I look like on my own. He'll be a good kisser, I'm sure. I'll even kiss the crease of his eyelids, permanently bent since they never move much. I'll pull them down, gently, if I have to, to get to those creases. They're private, like the insides of bellybuttons.

This was a good daydream. Seemed like it could happen.

I know you're supposed to close your eyes for these things but I wanted to watch the stroller pass, wanted to see the baby. She'd be dark, of course, like the other Cucci girls. What was Francesca thinking? That my sister's name was fairy dust, an incantation for a radiant golden beauty? Why torment the child with that name in this neighborhood? Can you imagine the nicknames? Had Egrit been a little more normal, a little less of a freak (in the most esthetically positive sense of the word) and therefore untouchable, she'd have grown to hate my father (our father) who was from Denmark, and very nice, and did not know about creative public school nicknames. No one except Blind Mark ever dared used those nicknames on my sister, names that should have run rampant. Blind Mark also refused to wear thick dark glasses and get a seeing eye dog. Dogs bit him. All dogs, he claimed. He wore his mottled eyes up front and knew the street value of the name Egrit. Egret. Ickrit. Tickpit. Eggtit.

Everyone else was bullied by her beauty. She might as well have been a Rothschild.

The three Cucci girls passed before me and said Hi, Hey, How ya doin but didn't check out my look like they usually did. They didn't ask who was I going out with now and what happened to the last one and how'd he take it better than the last yeah that guy was a real mess. Guys are such babies, yeah, and the oldest, Isabella didn't break away for a sec and ask me quietly had I seen her father and would I please come and get her should I hear anything before ten. And of course, Please don't let her mama know.

They were chattering, embarrassed that the baby wasn't named after me. They should be embarrassed, I thought, embarrassed at their lack of cultural sensitivity. As a Jew I knew for sure, I think, that you were supposed to wait at least a year after someone's death before stealing their name. But Francesca was getting older and her husband was getting drunker and I'm sure she didn't want to let this opportunity waste. Besides, they weren't Jewish, I was one of the only people in the neighborhood who was, and I guess Egrit was too, but nobody remembered anyway because my name is Christine and her name was, well, Egrit and no one I know except my father pronounced it in that yummy European refugee way. My father always said Ay-greet, with the sound of the r back and high, like a bubble at the top of his throat. Most people say Egg-writ. But even that sounded good when you laid it on her. My parents aren't even Jewish anymore, except in the way that everyone in New York is sort of Jewish. Even the Haitians say schmuck.

My father's name is Pietr Fink-Heinemann. He's from Denmark and wears his hair in a diligently maintained bowl cut. He refuses to talk about his childhood, which is a rather discreet tick, something I associate with survivors of trauma, and I mean real trauma, concrete and objective involving almost certain death. Something therapy could only make worse. My father was born just-post-war, so perhaps his relatively mild traumas embarrass him. He knows enough, though, to be grateful for his parents' travails. But that's a word he'd never use. He'd say difficulties. Escape transforms tragedy into difficulty.

That's why I'm named Christine, after King Christian of Denmark who'd managed to save almost all the Danish Jews in 1943, including my grandparents Ida and Harald, by hiding them on local farms and then slipping them by boat to Sweden. Ida and Harald made it to New York. Not much later my father was born at Bellevue. They were very poor, but very comfortable in the way you judge comfortable when you know your alternative was Dachau or Treblinka or a deadly thrashing by your neighbors. My father explained things, which for him was to explain what we could or could not have, to explain what afford means. I think my father wanted us to feel, strongly, that we were Americanlyupwardlymobile, that we had it so much better, that he'd been one of the starving children we had to finish our dinners for. But he doesn't like to lie and so, has been silent, except to reiterate the evils of waste. We re-use tin-foil.

My mother talks and talks now, she won't shut up. People say she's suddenly chatty. They understand. It's not the worst thing that could've happened. She's quiet from 5 AM to 7 AM, count on it, she sits in her pretzel pose, prays to her Buddha statue. He doesn't seem authentic to me, or carry the weight of tradition like my rusted old menorah or Grandmother Chisari's black wooden crucifix. He's seven inches high with a shiny blue head and he's hollow, not heavy. If someone broke in he wouldn't do us any good. A useless weapon in a volatile time. Buddha's fat though, and specially made by one of my mother's former lovers as a symbol that her mind could have a better place to go. She prays to this Buddha, this golden calf of hers, before she leaves for work, the Haagen-Dazs franchise she owns on Eighth and Macdougal.

She bought the franchise three years ago and made me a manager of the three to ten shift. I was starting my eighth grade summer break and was very persnickety about money. Owners like that. Free time and penury. I created a good relationship with the scoopers who didn't seem to resent that they were working for a child labor law violator. They were mostly dancers and scholarship students from the Joffrey Ballet and we hired them automatically since Robert Joffrey lived directly above the store. The dancers were generally good employees. They avoided ice cream like it was acid. The true anorexics among them scooped in skintight surgical gloves that they surreptitiously exchanged for free ice-cream with St. Vincent's Hospital orderlies (scoopers were each allowed eight free ounces per day of product, and I didn't care what they did with it). It was like an ABC Afterschool Special black market.

        Watcha got?
        Macadamia Nut. Pint. Hawaian.
        For a box of gloves?
        They pull out like Baggies? I like those kind.
        Not the folded ones.
        Sure thing.
        Disposable?
        Always.

Freaky anorexic dancers (as opposed to normal ones) wore the gloves since they feared the calories would seep in through their pores. I didn't blame them. The best day of my life was when we got Colombo Fat-Free Frozen yogurt. I could take my eight ounces for a walk in the park on my break without having to hide it from the dancers, pretend I was eating a hard boiled egg and a banana. They were so judgmental.

Robert Joffrey liked Butter Pecan. On a wafer cone. He would slip downstairs at 9:55 PM (last cream call was at 10) and ask that I prepare it for him. If I were busy counting money or doing the ordering he'd stand tall and wait. His dancers, in their zeal to please, would always make the scoop too large. Like they were doing him a favor. Passive aggressive, I would think.

Scooping was an excellent way to meet boys. Due to Health Code, we all had to wear hats, but they were cute little baseball caps and I would carefully comb my short red bangs forward so they framed my face. I avoided tight, pulled back dancer-buns which only worked well for thin, straight, malnourished hair. We all wore red T-shirts, which said Strawberry on the back, baby doll tight, and I had the real world, as opposed to dancer-world, advantage of not being a negative double A cup. Concave was the dominant look at the store. The dancers screamed that breasts were just fat, which I guess they are, but as long as they don't show up on your ass who cares? We employees could wear whatever we wanted on our bottoms, and with the warm summer weather I was the favorite Strawberry in Greenwich Village.

When Egrit was a baby, locked up tight in a carriage, she was easy to deal with. Her beauty was swathed, but because everyone's dotty about their own little baby my parents assumed that their perceptions, and fears, about her sparkle were just their imagination.

Everyone wanted to play with her. She'd suck each finger hard, including thumbs.

When my father and mother found a baby mouse curled up in Egrit's small shoe, they thought it was cute.

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