The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  “Paul! Of course. How is your family?”

  “Our son Jacob is a father now.”

  Rosalie doesn’t respond. She twirls her masking-tape bracelet and glances at the rolls of shelf paper scattered on the floor. This holiday is beyond ridiculous, she thinks. Maybe Paul can invite them to Eden Ranch; the Kerems can hold a karmic seder in the circle of stones they called the amphitheater.

  “Listen to me, Rosalie. Last month Walter was hit by a car in Bombay. He was biking on a crowded road and probably sniffed something in the distance and got mired in his thoughts. There were witnesses but no single story.”

  Rosalie moans.

  “I handled the cremation.”

  She slams her arm on the counter, crushing the roll of tape.

  “No, Paul. It can’t be—”

  “I’m so sorry. I loved him more than I can say.”

  “You have no idea—”

  “It was way too soon. He crossed over before his time.”

  Rosalie drops the phone, lays her head on the countertop and screams into the granite.

  “Are you still there, Rosalie?”

  She stiffens up, holds the handset to her mouth, and whispers.

  “He has a daughter.”

  “Yes,” says Paul. “I know.”

  Rosalie winds the phone cord tightly around her arm until it bites into her skin, and then loosens it. Why now, when she had finally figured it out? He would have returned from India via New York; she and Maya would have met him at the airport, just as before. But this time Rosalie would tell Maya that this man was important to their family in so many ways. Simple as that. And Maya, such a wise girl, would look at the man she had already met and everything would become perfectly clear.

  Rosalie finds a napkin and a pen, and writes: Walter is gone. She reads the word gone, then x’s out the line, and replaces it with the words he would have used: Walter has crossed over. She folds the napkin in half and writes SOL on the flap.

  She grabs the car keys and without putting on her shoes, drives down the Hutchinson and the Henry Hudson, and parks outside the Seminary building. She sits behind the wheel and sobs, and when she catches her breath she looks up, hoping to see Walter walk out of the building, wearing a green kurta and cloth shoes. I’ve been waiting, Rosalie. Lower geniza or upper. Both, Walter. I want both. Sol and Walter. Milk and meat. Always both. No limits.

  Sol arrives home from a meeting and notices the car is gone. Out shopping, he thinks. A dress for the seder or something new for Maya to wear to all those bat mitzvah parties. Sol would never admit this to Maya or to Rosalie, but compared to other girls her age, Maya appears dowdy in the calico dresses and chukka boots she wears; she dresses like an Orthodox girl, all buttoned up. Well, he thinks, her time will come.

  His enterprising wife left the rolls of shelf paper scattered on the floor, God bless her. The shelves are almost lined, all dressed up for the holiday. The preparations will be finished just in time, as always; the miracle of Passover will be complete. He finds the napkin note on the counter. At first he doesn’t allow himself to recognize the name Walter and then he doesn’t understand why Rosalie wrote crossed over—a phrase she never used. But then Sol reads again, quite soberly, and lets the words sink in. He sits on the bottom stair, waiting for tears to come.

  The rest of the day and evening Sol drives around Briar Wood, looking for his wife. After a few hours of circling the dark streets, Sol returns home and walks up to Maya’s room. He gazes at his sleeping daughter, kisses her forehead, and leaves. Sol spends the rest of the night weeping silently on the sofa, waiting for Rosalie to return.

  Just before dawn, he rises and crosses the parking lot to the shul. He enters the sanctuary and finds Rosalie in a middle row, slightly disheveled, sitting perfectly still. Sol takes the seat directly behind hers and she reaches her hand toward his. When the men arrive for morning services, they linger in the back of the sanctuary, unsure if they should disturb the rabbi and his wife. After a few moments, Rosalie and Sol rise together and walk home, hand in hand.

  Later that morning Rosalie marches into the office of Maya’s school.

  “I’m signing out my daughter, Maya Kerem.”

  “Doctor’s appointment? Death in the family?” asks the secretary.

  “No. Yes. Sort of,” mutters Rosalie.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Maya trudges in. “Who died? What? Are you serious, Mom?”

  “Please come with me, Maya.”

  “I can’t. I have chorus practice today and it’s my turn to present my book report and it’s Deena’s birthday and—”

  “I signed you out already.”

  “Who died?”

  “Everyone you know is fine.”

  “Then go home. I’ll see you later.”

  “I need to be with you.”

  “Are you pulling me out of school just because—”

  “Yes, Maya. Just because.”

  “I used to wish you would pick me up for no reason at all. I once would have wanted this,” she says. “But not today.”

  “Please.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Rosalie drives and Maya fumes silently in the passenger seat. “Can we at least spend our little date at the mall? I need a dress for Deena’s bat mitzvah.”

  “Who?”

  “Wake up, Mom. Deena. My best friend since second grade. And stop looking at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You keep staring at me.”

  The darkened store reeks of overly spiced teen perfume and Led Zeppelin blasts from the sound system. Maya searches for dresses to try on and Rosalie sits in a leather chair, waiting to say what she has no words for. Her head pounds and she shuts her eyes to block out the throbbing music and then opens them to block out the pain. She pushes her fingers onto her eyelids and presses, sealing her eyes shut.

  Maya is alone in the dressing room and she feels bereft. Her mother usually follows her inside and replaces the clothes on their hangers. Maya tries on a simple flowered dress, looks in the mirror, and pouts. Too childish. She wore a calico dress to her own bat mitzvah and to every party since, but Deena is her best friend and she wants to look more sophisticated this time—elegant, fancy. Dressed, as her mother would say. You should look put together. Like a young lady.

  She tries on a black cocktail dress with spaghetti straps and rubs her hands over her hips. Her father would never approve of her wearing this to her best friend’s bat mitzvah. It’s about time, she thinks, admiring her reflection in the mirror. Her friends wear slinky dresses and heels to these parties and Maya has been slow to catch on. Enough, she thinks. Her mother is too distracted to refuse her and her father would never say no to her. He never does. She is his best girl, his occasional chavrusa. Don’t you want to learn Talmud with someone your own age? she once asked him. You get this, he said. Learning with you makes me feel young again, like everything is possible because we can interpret these ancient words together. We are creating a bridge, Maya. One day you will understand.

  When Rosalie opens her eyes, Maya is standing before her, modeling a black silk cocktail dress that makes her look like a woman. Rosalie shakes her head.

  “It’s too revealing.”

  “But how do I look?”

  “Turn.”

  Maya spins around slowly and then faces her mother again.

  “You hold his beauty,” says Rosalie.

  “Whose?”

  “Your father’s.”

  Maya rolls her eyes.

  “Whatever.”

  “You want it?”

  “I do, but it’s expensive.”

  “What is?”

  “The dress, Mom!”

  “Yes, of course.” Rosalie stammers. “I have something for you to wear with it, sweetheart.” She reaches into her pocketbook and pulls out a silver bracelet nestled in tissue paper. She hesitates and then places it in Maya’s hand.

  “It matches nicely, don�
��t you think?”

  Maya unwraps the paper and slips it on.

  Days later, at their family seder, Rosalie stares at Maya’s bracelet. It fits her perfectly, neither too loose or too snug. Walter had noticed her small wrists; a random observation on a misbegotten Hanukkah night. She gazes at Maya, sandwiched between Charlie and Philip, her voice rising boisterously with every verse of Dayenu, her brothers banging their hands on the table. She will know and she won’t know, thinks Rosalie. Both at the same time.

  When Maya stops singing for a moment she realizes that her father isn’t singing, and he barely claps his hands. She looks at Rosalie and notices that she too has dropped out of singing the endless refrains of this melodic thank-you note to God—freedom from slavery, manna in the desert, Shabbat and Torah and the Land of Israel—every gift bearing just one more and then one more. Maya tries to meet her mother’s eyes and invite her back to this moment, but Rosalie gazes out toward the window, lost in a private dream.

  Months later Rosalie stands in the back of the paneled sanctuary on a Shabbat morning, looks at the faces in the room, and reflects on the narrowing field of her life. This place is her ashram, her Shantiniketan, the place to consider what she does not think of as God but rather as Desire—the desire that sets all things in motion. She stares at these people with whom she has walked through the chapters of her life, each of them aging in sync with one another and yet—despite the mah-jongg confessions and shared life-cycle events—she barely knows them.

  Prayer is impossible for Rosalie, but she sees now that it is impossible for all of them, impossible for anyone. Her daughter and her friends use this room as a showcase for their blooming bodies. If her grown sons were home for a holiday (they rarely are) they would roll their eyes at the modest gathering and they would think, such sad lives. Why do these people come here to listen to Rabbi Sol Kerem preach about God when the world is so vast with possibility?

  It’s inexplicable to her, even after all these years. Faith becomes a habit that cannot be explained. A few of the congregants practice it like a musical instrument; they open the black prayer book and shuckle from side to side as someone once taught them. They place themselves in this paneled room once a week, take the same seats. Bev sits to the right of Serena; Missy and Nathan Samuels claim the second row. One Shabbat after another, these people show up at the shul for reasons that cannot be explained in words and if Rosalie would ask, Why are you here?, Bev would laugh and say, I come because I used to bring my father, may he rest in peace. And Serena would say, I come to see you, of course, now turn around, I love that dress. And Missy would strike a pose because she needs to be seen, and the more she is seen the more proof she has that she is alive, truly alive. The great mystery is played out in Temple Briar Wood week after week, year after year. The pulsing heart of theology drums its beat in this paneled room. Missy and Nathan and Serena and Bev—who now sits in the row that was once designated for her father’s wheelchair—are to Rosalie a sampling of souls that express the unquenchable thirst of humanity.

  Walter wrote about this in the introduction to one of his books; Rosalie remembers when he told her the story.

  On a research trip to Varanasi I approached a man who was bathing in the Ganges, the ashes of the freshly cremated bodies floating around his legs. He was wearing a Western suit and tie and I was surprised to see him standing in the water with the legs of his pants rolled up. When I asked him why he said, “My father bathed in the Ganges and called it holy. So at first I came here for my father, to understand the heart of the man who raised me. And then I came back again and looked at the people who were lifting their tunics and walking into the filthy river and I admired their faces. And then I realized I was one of them. A cesspool became love became dignity became everything that mattered. Love in this dirty holy water. Love on my body. Love on the faces of the people who are doing this with me, who are me, who could be me, and the dead who once loved this world too, who once stood in this water, just like me.”

  By the time she turns fifteen, Maya has colonized all the upstairs bedrooms. When she wants to write in her journal she encamps in Lenny’s old room and burns white musk. When she wants to listen to music and burn sandalwood, she stretches out on the butterfly chair in Charlie and Philip’s room. The entire second floor of the Kerem house smells of the incense Maya buys off the street in Greenwich Village on Sundays. She no longer takes voice lessons with Lucie Morgan but spends every Sunday carousing Manhattan record stores, spending her babysitting earnings on albums by Flora Purim, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus. After, she rides the subway simply to look at the people who surround her in the crowded cars and test out her theory of Everyone-Is-Beautiful-on-This-Train.

  Maya holds a book in front of her nose, gazes up, and glances from face to face she alights on someone who seems wounded in some harsh way. Then she stares, trying to locate what shines from within. An inkling of longing. Someone turning the page of a book, yearning to find out what happens next. A harried woman who combs the knots from her hair, a student who pinches the pleats of his jeans, a homeless man who wipes crumbs off his beard and then sniffs his palm, looking for the remnants of the roll he ate for breakfast. Every Sunday Maya rides the #1 local from 14th Street up to the Bronx, gazing at the faces of strangers until she finds some degree of beauty underneath what seems so broken, so lost, so unbearably sad. She thinks of the congregants and their brave lives in Briar Wood, dressing up for shul every Shabbat morning and listening to her father reach for a bit of wisdom that could wake them up in some way. They were also a little bit broken and a little bit radiant—often both at the same time. Just like her parents. Just like everyone.

  One night after she finishes her homework, Maya joins her father in the study.

  “Pull up a chair,” he says. “I miss learning with you.”

  “Okay. One for old times, Abba.”

  “She’elah,” says Sol. “Why do we count the days of the Omer between Passover and Shavuot?”

  Maya answers, “Teshuvah: We measure days to fathom the mysteries of time. We throw ourselves against the truth of numbers to block out the unforgiving light.”

  Sol looks at Maya and thinks of the contents of the purple binder, the frolic of words that saved him and his rabbinate.

  “Did you come up with that idea yourself or did you read it somewhere?”

  Maya smiles. “All mine.”

  Sol kisses the top of her head. “You’re so much like him.”

  “Who?”

  “Walter. The man you met. Always full of surprises. When we were young he and I traveled through the texts—”

  Maya thinks of the strange barefoot man who gazed at her, and how she heard words spoken on the other side of a door, words she vaguely remembers but didn’t understand.

  She wraps her arms around his neck. “Just like we do,” she says.

  Rosalie phones Madeline every week. She sits at the kitchen counter late at night and winds the cord around her arm as she once did when she talked to Walter. Sometimes Madeline asks Rosalie how she copes in the wake of so much loss. Rosalie gives the same answer every time: If I asked myself such a question I would not survive my life. I just keep going. But she doesn’t tell Madeline how grief ripples through her body and surprises her at least once a day. When she walks past Lenny’s old bedroom she feels a great weight in her belly that she recognizes as the immovable ballast of sorrow. It never dissipates and makes her feel old and heavy, like an ancient hag. When she thinks of Walter—of course I do, Madeline—she is overcome by a floating sensation and she needs to shut her eyes, reclaim her balance, and go on. Before she falls asleep at night Rosalie indulges in recollection, hoping that the thought of Walter will invite him to enter her dreams, but he never appears.

  On Maya’s last night in the house before she leaves for college, she pulls a volume of Mishnah from her father’s bookshelf. She often scans the Mishnah at random, but always returns to her favorit
e seder, Zeraim (“Seeds”). She alights on the description of how the figs grown during the sabbatical year may not be cut with a fig-cutter but with a knife, and how many cubits render a vineyard authentic enough to grow grapes for wine. Know the dimensions of a vineyard and you can grow grapes for the wine that you will one day bless. Know how to cut a fig with the proper knife and you will understand how to tell a story and make it bear fruit. Maya is in love with these laws, with this obscure book she thinks of as an ancient Farmers’ Almanac. If she knew how to sketch, she would create a series of drawings based on these figs and these grapes, breathing new life into their ancient skins.

  THE KISS

  June 1999

  When Sol is just shy of seventy-two Rosalie drives him to the same hospital where she gave birth to her sons in the maternity wing decorated with balloons and flowers, and where Lenny died in a room along the corridor decorated with aquarium-themed wallpaper. Sol has lung cancer, the non-smoker’s kind. Lungs poisoned from simply breathing, and in Sol’s case—so he believes—inhaling the dry ink from the pages of the Talmud he loved.

  During Sol’s last weeks Charlie and Philip keep an around-the-clock vigil with Rosalie, and Maya flies home from Los Angeles, where she attends rabbinical school. When Maya arrives in his room, Sol sits up in bed and asks her to play the she’elah-teshuvah game with him.

  “Sure, Abba,” she says. “Ask me anything. You go first.”

  “She’elah: Where does God live?”

  “Teshuvah: Within the seeds.”

  “That’s it, Maya? You sound like some kind of enigmatic rabbi. Too much subtlety and you won’t have a following.”

  “I’m not sure I want one.”

  “Do yourself a favor and stay away,” says Sol. “It’s a terrible profession.”

  “Stay away from what?” asks Rosalie.

  “The rabbinate. Let her love the Torah in complete freedom.”

  “She’s doing what she wants, Sol.” Rosalie smiles at Maya. “And in her own way.”

  Maya excuses herself to get some water and bursts into tears. Charlie meets her in the hallway.