The Glow of the Spotlight: My Journey with Rebecca

Rebecca gets ready for school the next morning, and I already dread the long day ahead without her. Since I am staying with the family, her mother decides I should spend the day helping Bubbie, Rebecca’s grandmother, with the housework. Rebecca warns me not to be put off by her grandmother’s gruff manner, insisting Bubbie is sweet underneath it.

Bubbie greets me at the door with a bottle of furniture polish and a clean cloth. I say hello to her, but fumble over Bubbie’s surname. She chuckles and says it’s a hard name for Americans. Since I’m staying with the family, I might as well call her Bubbie. In the Old Country, she explains, the word belongs to any older woman a person knows and loves well, not just a grandmother. I relax a little at that, glad to be included.

Bubbie looks doubtfully at my outfit before asking whether I know how to polish. I confess I have dusted plenty of tables but never tackled real polish before. So she sets me to shaking the lacy doilies out the window while she polishes. Then she shows me how to clean the carpets by using a long-handled contraption that sweeps up lint with little brushes. I have to go over the same pieces of lint several times to pick them up, so it’s much less efficient than a vacuum cleaner!

Between chores, my mind drifts to the play Rebecca and I have been plotting. Cinderella seems like a natural choice, and I picture Benny as a fittingly handsome prince, though I wonder whether Sadie and Sophie would agree to play the mean stepsisters.

Bubbie catches me daydreaming and asks where my head has wandered off to. When I admit I am thinking about stories, she settles onto the sofa beside me and confesses that as a girl growing up in Russia, she loved tales about the witch Baba Yaga. Hunching her shoulders and twisting her face into a grimace, she cackles out a greeting from the witch herself, then dives into the story of two children who stumble into the witch’s forest hut, where she plans to eat them for supper. By befriending some birds and a cat, the children trick her and escape.

It reminds me of Hansel and Gretel, and now I cannot stop wondering whether Baba Yaga might make an even better play than Cinderella. Bubbie is clearly eager for Rebecca to come home so we can start rehearsing, but first we need to settle on which fairy tale to bring to life.