by Julia Dahl
“Is Gitty Rosenbaum here?”
“Who?” he said, barely looking up. He was probably my age now. Forty-ish. I remember there was gray in his week-old beard.
“Gitty,” I said again.
“I have no idea,” he said. “Ask one of the girls.”
I walked past him into a tiny kitchen. He called after me: “And while you’re at it, ask which one of ’em is letting that dog piss all over the place. That dog is gonna be gone next time I come here.”
I kept walking down a hallway and found two girls in a bedroom. I asked them if Gitty lived here and they looked at me blankly.
“Ask Sandra,” said one. “She’s been here a while.”
I knocked on the bedroom door across the hall and someone said to come in. The room was black, thick curtains drawn against the sun. I squinted into the darkness and made out a figure in the bed. I asked if Gitty Rosenbaum was here and a female voice said Gitty hadn’t lived there in months. I asked if she had any idea where she was and she said, “I think she’s in her car.”
“Her car?” I said.
“She was parked behind the 7-Eleven on Third,” said the girl, flopping over to face me. She wasn’t much older than me and she had a black eye. I asked her what kind of car and she said a Honda. And then she flopped back over.
I slept that night and the next in a motel room that cost twenty-nine dollars plus tax. I ate what I could buy at the 7-Eleven while I waited for Gitty. On the third day, she appeared in her Honda. She was skinny, and her dark hair was streaked with blond, but I knew her. I called her name and she stopped and turned. And then she screamed. We both did. She ran to me and we hugged and laughed until we were out of breath. But that excitement didn’t last very long. We bought hot tea and sat on the curb outside. I told her my story and she told me hers. She had been living in the Honda since May. It wasn’t so bad, she said, but I knew she didn’t mean it. She had deep puffy circles under her eyes, and a cold sore on her mouth. She smelled bad. I asked why she wasn’t living at the house I’d been to anymore, and she said she left because you can’t stay there if you don’t work.
“Don’t you want to work?” I asked.
Gitty shook her head and looked away from me. “It is not good work,” she said. And she wouldn’t say any more.
We both looked for jobs while we stayed together in the motel. After four days, we were down to fifty dollars. On the fifth day I got a job at a Goodwill store making four dollars an hour sorting through donated clothes, but they only needed me from noon to five. And, I learned at the end of my first shift, it would take ten days for my paperwork to go through, which meant I wouldn’t get paid until then. So Gitty and I slept in the car. The hardest part was finding a place to take a shower and go to the bathroom. Gitty had a bottle she peed in at night, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it. I usually held it in until dawn when we could drive to a McDonald’s. I asked Gitty if she’d ever gone to shul to ask for help and she shook her head.
“This is not Brooklyn,” she said.
Gitty had changed almost entirely since I’d known her. When we were children, our families went to the same bungalow colony in the Catskills and Gitty and I shared a bed. She had a pretty singing voice and she practiced songs in our room. Girls are not supposed to sing in front of boys, but Gitty liked to show off. She was always getting into trouble for singing. Sometimes she made up new words for the songs—inserting impressions of people we knew, making everyone laugh. Tante Leah and my mother told Gitty she talked too much. But now, Gitty didn’t say much of anything. And she never sang. Or smiled. When she did talk, she didn’t talk about anything that mattered. She never once mentioned her family.
I tried not to think about you, Rebekah, but it was impossible. Almost every day I said to Gitty, “I wonder what Rebekah is doing right now?” I imagined you in your stroller on the way to the park with the baseball field at dusk. I imagined your father smiling and cooing at you as he lifted you out of your seat and set you on his chest, your head, still a little unsteady on your neck, wobbling as you tried to look all around you at once. Gitty did not want to imagine with me, but I have played the game of imagining where you are every day since I left. I have told you all my stories. I have asked for your advice. I have carried you everywhere, Rebekah. Always.
After I started at Goodwill, Gitty told me she was spending the afternoons looking for work, but she was bringing men into the car for money. They left their smell. We showered at night by the beach, where there were nozzles for people to rinse off after a day in the sand. And then one night a police car drove into the parking lot behind the Rent-A-Center and saw me peeing beside the car. I spent that night and all the next day and night in a cell with seven other women. One was naked except for a bed sheet. Gitty didn’t come to get me, and when I got out, I called home to Brooklyn. My brother Eli answered the telephone, and at first I didn’t recognize his voice. I had been gone for fifteen months and he had become a man.
“Aviva?” he said. “It’s Eli.”
“Eli!” I cried.
“Aviva, please come home,” he said. “Mommy is dead, Aviva. And we have a new brother.”
CHAPTER SIX
REBEKAH
When I wake up, Iris has already left for work. I open my laptop and find Pessie’s story six headlines down inside the News section.
ROSEVILLE MAN ACCUSES COPS, COMMUNITY OF IGNORING WIFE’S MYSTERIOUS DEATH
By Rebekah Roberts
The family of an upstate mother whose body was found in her bathtub is accusing local police of ignoring her mysterious death.
“I have no doubt that Pessie was killed,” says Levi Goldin, 28, of Roseville.
“I do not know why the Roseville police are uninterested in Pessie’s death. And I do not know why her community seems to have already forgotten her.”
Goldin told the Tribune that on the day of her death, his wife was supposed to take their son to the doctor but did not show up and stopped answering her phone. When he got home he found his wife in the bathtub and the child screaming, strapped into his car seat in the living room.
Pessie was born in Brooklyn but her family moved to Rockland County when she was a child.
Roseville police chief John Gregory declined to comment on the case.
I click into Facebook and see that I have a message from someone named Dov Lowenstein.
Hi! I’m SO glad you are trying to find out what happened to Pessie! We grew up together and she was the nicest girl in the world. No WAY she killed herself. Thank you thank you thank you!
I click into Dov’s Facebook page and see that he has more than a thousand “friends.” His profile picture depicts him in short shorts, waving an Israeli flag at some kind of parade. I write back immediately.
Thanks for reaching out! I’d love to interview you about Pessie. Do you have time to chat today?
Moments later, a message pops up.
I’ll be in Brooklyn tonight speaking at a chulent on Ocean Pkway. Wanna come? We can talk after.
He includes a link to a Facebook event page. Fifty people have already RSVPed saying they will attend. According to the invitation, the event begins at 10:00 P.M. and is BYOB.
I Google “chulent” and discover that it’s a traditional Jewish stew made with beans and potatoes and onions and meat that takes twelve hours to cook. It is also the word used to describe, as the Web site NeoHasid puts it, “a drop-in lounge for folks that have traveled (or strayed) from the Chasidic world, whether in spirit, mind or body, along with their allies and friends.”
I message Dov back saying I’ll be there, then I send Iris a text asking if she’ll come with me. While I wait to hear from her, I click back to the event invite. It appears to be sponsored by a group called OTDinNYC. I click onto their Facebook page, which is open, and see that there are 978 people in the group. A long post in the “About” section lays out the rules of the group, which include refraining from personal attacks and “outing” people who ha
ve joined with fake names (“Mikveh Mouse” and “Shtetl Gretel”). The administrator is a woman named Chasi Herzog. She describes the group as a place for off-the-derech and OTD-curious to share, connect, question, and find support and advice. The most recent post is from someone named Ben Silver who asks: “Do you still plan on marrying Jewish?” He posted less than twenty minutes ago and there are already nineteen comments. Further down, a woman named Shimra Reich posted, “If you had a dollar for every person you’ve had sex with, what could you buy?” There are more than a hundred comments. One person named Yisrael Greenberg wrote: “A Ferrari!” sparking a series of comments about STDs and whether oral sex counted. Another, named Hindy Levin, wrote: “A cup of coffee—and not at Starbucks!” Her post was met with approving remarks about honesty, sexual repression in the Haredi world, and invitations to fill her wallet, so to speak. There is a post saying “Like this status if you were thrown out of yeshiva!” There are 235 likes and fifty-eight comments recounting skirmishes over skirt-length, smuggled magazines, OTD siblings, and insufficiently pious parents.
Iris texts back saying that she’s up for the chulent. I tell her I’ll try to leave work early and meet her at home, then we’ll go together. I turn on the shower and undress. For the first few days and weeks after I lost all my hair, I was surprised every time I dipped my head back into the stream of water. I felt the hair that wasn’t there. I’m getting used to it now. Iris encourages me to “play up the look” with big earrings and more makeup, but there’s something interesting about being, well, less pretty than I have been most of my life. I feel like it’s making me stronger; like that little happiness I’d get when I looked in the mirror before all this was a false, or at least a shallow, psychological bump. And now that I don’t have it, I have to find something else, something more substantial, to look for in my reflection.
Ten minutes before I have to leave for my shift I try Aviva again. Again, her number goes straight to voice mail: This mailbox is full. The user is not accepting new messages. This time, the automated message pisses me off.
“Really, Aviva?” I actually say out loud to the empty apartment. “You’re gonna play me like that? Clean out your fucking in-box.”
It’s a slow news day, so once I plunk out my assigned stories (Staten Island state representative’s son arrested for domestic assault; another crane incident at the luxury condo going up on Fifty-seventh Street; gang-related shooting on the B31 bus in Brooklyn) I Google Dov Lowenstein. Dov, I discover, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against a group called New Hope, an organization of unlicensed “therapists” who purport to turn gay Jews into straight Jews. The Trib actually did a story about the lawsuit last year when it was filed. Dov is quoted as saying that the people running the group are frauds who prey on Jewish parents desperate to “fix” their gay children.
Mike lets me leave early when I tell him I’m going to interview a source on the Pessie Goldin story. I get home at nine and Iris asks me what she should wear.
“If the girls are frum they’ll probably be in long skirts and long sleeves and stockings,” I say.
“From?”
“Frum. F-r-u-m. It means, like, observant.”
“Rocking the lingo,” she says, “I like it.”
“Anyway, I don’t think it matters. Clearly they’re liberal. I mean, it says BYOB.”
“BYOB! Really? This could be awesome. Are pants okay? I think I’ll wear pants.”
“I’m wearing jeans.”
“Cool. How about we get a six-pack? I’ll bring a big bag and if it’s weird, I’ll just keep it,” says Iris. I agree this is a good plan.
We leave the house at nine thirty and take the F train to Avenue I. It’s a little warmer tonight than it has been in weeks and it feels nice not to have to rush from one place to the next. I even left my hat at home. The address on Ocean Parkway, it turns out, is a synagogue.
“It’s in a church?” whispers Iris. We’re standing across the street.
“It’s a synagogue,” I say.
“I know,” says Iris, still whispering. “I just meant, you know, a house of worship. I wouldn’t have guessed they’d let them do that.”
“I don’t think they can hear you,” I say.
“Come on,” she says. “Isn’t that strange?”
“I read about two in The New York Times. One was in somebody’s home. One was in a community center basement in Manhattan. A synagogue is kind of a community center, so…”
The ornate stone building is probably at least a hundred years old. Two sets of steps come together in the front, and on them linger about a dozen people. One man is very fat, with an enormous beard and wild brown hair. A Jew-fro, I’ve heard it called. He is wearing a yellow hooded sweatshirt with a Hawaiian scene silk-screened on it, and talking to two girls about my age. Both girls are dressed in long skirts and flat shoes, their hair covered with scarves. But the skirts aren’t plain black like the ones most of the women I saw in Borough Park wore; one is denim, and one is a crinkled, fiery red-and-orange fabric. Little rebellions, I think.
Iris and I walk toward the threesome and Jew-fro greets us.
“We tend to start late,” he says, with a smile. “Welcome. There’s food and drink inside.”
Iris and I say thank you and continue inside the iron gates and up the stairs to the entrance. People are smoking and drinking from plastic cups and chatting with each other. I spot two black-hatted men. We walk into the foyer, an elegant, if worn, mosaic-tiled rotunda with a dome rising fifty feet into the sky. I look up and see a stained glass window. It’s too dark to tell whether the image is abstract or depicts some sort of scene. At my dad’s church they had a stained glass window called the Christ window. It wasn’t a terribly artful illustration—just white Jesus in a white robe with his hands out, a halo above his head—but I remember that when the sun lit the blues and yellows and pinks on the mornings when I used to go to Sunday school I couldn’t help but be a little bit mesmerized by it. Iris and I follow the noise down the hallway from the foyer to a multipurpose room big enough for a wedding or a concert. Plastic and aluminum folding chairs line the walls. There is a buffet set on tables along one side of the vast space. I see beer and wine. We set down our six-pack and Iris opens one for each of us with the flamingo bottle opener on her key chain (a holdover from college). There are probably twenty people in the room. Most of the men wear some kind of covering on their head. Many have black yarmulkes, and several wear sidecurls and black pants. But more than one wears a knit beanie, or a baseball cap. One has a hat that says COMME DES FUCKDOWN. I alert Iris and she loves it.
The buffet is mostly canned or bagged—chips, nuts, salsa, Oreos, a plastic barrel of Cheez puffs—but everyone seems to have chipped in. There is white wine in a box, several varieties of juice and punch, and a half-empty jug of Smirnoff. We drink our beers and look around. It’s mostly men inside, and everyone appears engaged in conversations that don’t lend themselves to interruption, so we walk back out to the front steps. We aren’t leaning against the railing a minute when a woman approaches us.
“Are you here to see Dov?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Are you?”
The woman nods. She is wearing a wig and a navy blue turtleneck. She is probably in her late thirties. “You know him from Facebook?”
“Sort of.”
“I do not agree with everything he says, but I think he is doing a good thing.”
I nod.
“You are frum?”
“No,” I say.
“But you are Jewish?”
I hate this question. Before I moved to Brooklyn, I don’t think anyone had ever asked me if I was Jewish. Now I feel like I get asked every other day, and my answer is more complicated than they assume, or, frankly, want to hear about. Fortunately, Iris jumps in.
“I’m not,” she says. “But she is.”
“Are you from Brooklyn?”
“No,” I say. “We’re from Florida.”
; “Florida! Miami? I have cousins in Miami.”
“Orlando.”
“Are you married?”
Iris opens her mouth, but doesn’t say anything. She’s shocked, I can tell, that we’ve been asked this personal question by a total stranger ten seconds after meeting.
“No,” I say.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
I look at Iris, who speaks, finally, and without any of her usual grace: “Uh-huh.”
“Why not get married?”
“We’ve only been dating a little while.”
“Do you want children?”
Iris shrugs. “Someday.”
“I had my first son when I was nineteen,” she says.
Iris looks at me. She knows I had an abortion when I was nineteen. She smiles and puts her hand on my arm. “Well,” she says to the woman, “I hope that worked out for you. Rebekah, I need to go to the bathroom.” She pulls me back into the rotunda.
“Sorry,” she says once we’re inside. “I just hate that shit. What is she, your mom?”
“Maybe,” I say, which makes her laugh. “I don’t think she was trying to make us feel bad. At least you have a boyfriend.”
“Whatever,” says Iris. “I smelled weed out there. Let’s find that person. I bet they don’t ask why we’re not married.”
The weed, it turns out, is being smoked at the bottom of the stairs by two young men, one in sidecurls and black pants, one beardless, with his button-down shirt open, revealing chest hair. He has a small New York Yankees yarmulke clipped to his hair. Iris approaches first, smiling.
“Got any to share?” she says.
The man in the sidecurls, who is more a boy than a man, freezes. His friend seems momentarily stunned by our presence as well, but recovers quickly, taking the joint from his friend’s hand and passing it to Iris.
“Hello there,” he says, obviously thrilled. “I haven’t seen you before.”
Iris takes a pull from the joint and passes it to me. I decline. I feel like I need to be sober for this. She offers her hand to shake. “I’m Iris. This is Rebekah.” Both men look at her hand. Chest hair shakes, sidecurls does not.
