Loehmann’s, Saturdays, Ridgewood, New Jersey, 1970’s

Elizabeth Crowell

Loehmann’s, Saturdays, Ridgewood, New Jersey, 1970’s

My mother approached the store from the back, through a bumpy, cracked drive, where the roots of the overgrown red oaks pushed the pavement up.

There weren’t a lot of stores like this then mixed with different brands in giant rooms, and something happened to my mother there that didn’t happen at B.Altman’s where

she bought her wool suits, or the local store with bright sweaters and printed turtlenecks. At Loehmann’s, she said she wanted a “little something,” and picked silk blouses, floppy dresses to try on.

In the dressing rooms, I pretended not to look at the tanned ladies with garters, hose with no panties, braless or those who slid on dress after dress then shed them down to their painted toes.

The men, jackets on, with soft leather loafers, slouched in the chairs, with Star Ledgers folded to the crossword, and waited with a patience my own father never had.

When my mother said we weren’t Jewish, she did not yet know her paternal grandmother’s family fled Prague and tucked their religion inside the Holy Bible, where they wrote the births. They kept the cream-cheese, endive, pickled herring, horseradish,

which her heart-fragile father spread on rye bread with roast beef. She did not know that dozens of her relatives died in the Holocaust exactly at the time her beloved brother was shot down by the Germans and spent over a year in a prison camp.

When I looked at those women with their bodies, the loves of their lives slumped outside, I had no idea I was gay, My mother and I lived for a long time, with what we did not know about ourselves.

On the way home, on the Garden State Parkway, in the long blue wagon, windows rolled down, my mother said it was a store worth going to, though many times, like now, she found nothing.