The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler

downstairs in the newly finished basement that was now the family rec room. They had a TV, too, which we didn’t have yet. It sat right beside the record player on a special piece of furniture that took up half the wall and that Sol called the entertainment centre. Their records were mostly Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee and the Barry Sisters, though they also had Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies and Brahms’ Symphonies 1 and 2 and Kiss Me, Kate , which was a musical they had seen when they went to New York City for their honeymoon. And Chuck Berry, of course. I say “of course” because one night the previous spring, soon after the move, we were all in the rec room, where Sol and my father were setting up the ping-pong table bought speciallyfor the new house. Elka put on a song she said she had heard on the radio and it had reminded her so much of Sol that she had to run out and buy it. It was “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by Chuck Berry. As soon as Elka put it on, it made her want to dance, she said. It made me want to dance too, I said, so she pulled me off the couch, where I had been wiggling to the music, and she started teaching me how to jitterbug.
    “Careful, Elka,” Sol warned her. She was in her ninth month of pregnancy then.
    “Don’t be such a square,” Elka said, and she pulled him away from the ping-pong table to dance with us.
    He laughed a little but then he started dancing. Then Jeffrey started dancing and Mitch also—though his version of dancing was just to stand in one spot turning round and round and round, laughing the whole time. My father didn’t join the dance but he leaned against the wall smiling as he watched us. And then Elka said, “Ooh” in a sharp sort of way and put her hand on her stomach, and Sol said, “What? Oh my God.” And she said, “It’s okay, I’m just going to sit down for a minute,” which she did, with Sol standing beside her going, “What? What?”
    When the song ended Elka was still sitting with her hand on her stomach, though Sol had stopped saying “What? What?” by then.
    After a little while she said, “You know, I think we’d better go to the hospital.”
    My father and I stayed at their house to take care of the boys until Ida Pearl and Bella could get over, but even before Ida and Bella arrived we had a call from Sol that the baby had been born. It was that fast.
    “Good thing they left for the hospital when they did,” Isaid, to which my father smiled, tousled my hair and agreed, “Good thing.”
    They were going to name him Chuck, my father said. After Chuck Berry.
    “They are?” I asked, and we both laughed.
    He told me then about how his mother wanted to name him for the ship he was born on.
    “She did?”
    “What’s wrong with that?” he asked. “You don’t like the name Vedic?”
    I told him I liked Chuck better, and we laughed again.
    Ida Pearl, though, didn’t think naming a baby was something to laugh about. (Not to mention that it was bad luck to tell the name of a boy before his bris .) “Chuck?” she asked as soon as she and Bella arrived and heard the news. “What kind of name is that?”
    “I think his official name will be Charles,” my father said, which seemed to help a little. We didn’t tell her about the Chuck Berry part.
    My father’s record collection included Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies and Brahms’ First and Second Symphonies just like Elka and Sol’s. (There had been a period of time a couple of years back when Bella was giving records of symphonies for presents.) He also had records by Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald and Artie Shaw and Art Blakey and Charlie Parker and a whole lot of other jazz musicians. And then there were the two records of Israeli folk songs and Peter and the Wolf , which were mine.
    On the bookshelf beside the record player was my set of Childcraft encyclopedias, my father’s siddur , the Soncino book of the weekly Torah and Haftarah portions, and some artbooks that had been a