by Naomi Ragen
He seemed taken aback, but amused, expressions of mock horror and chagrin flickering over his handsome face. Then he broke into a smile, leaning over the counter toward her and whispering in her ear, “It’s the worst pizza in Brooklyn. In New York State. In the universe.” With lightning speed, he turned his back, disappearing behind the ovens before the eagle eye of Moishy caught him out.
The next time, he was even bolder. “Your face is as pink as a rose,” he’d murmured instead of talking to her about toppings. And she’d blushed furiously, walking out into the night with her limp pizza dripping oil. The entire week, she’d locked his words deep in her heart like a secret treasure, taking them out periodically to wonder over them.
After that, she began taking different clothes with her to school so she could change out of her Bais Yaakov uniform before going to Moishy’s, using the public bathrooms in one of the coffee shops. But that didn’t work out very well; the clothes, wrinkled badly from being stuffed in beside her notebooks and heavy texts, were not very attractive. She’d kept her winter coat zipped up. So the next time, she wore the clothes underneath her dowdy school uniform, grateful for the unusually cold weather and her under-heated classrooms. She chose a pretty, flowered Sabbath blouse and a slim, dark skirt that showed off her petite, slender figure, changing in the school bathroom and only unzipping her coat when she got to Moishy’s.
The effort had proved worthwhile. Not that he had actually said anything, but she could see how his eyes left her face and traveled up and down her body. Then he gave her that smile, that special Duvie smile she knew was meant only for her. It was thrilling.
The very next time, she found a note slipped between the cardboard and the pizza so discreetly that at first she didn’t notice it until she practically took a bite out of it. Delicately, she removed it, slipping it swiftly into her coat pocket without daring to even glance in Duvie’s direction. She fingered it for two blocks until stopping to unfold and read it.
Curious? Meet me after work, 8:30, Dome playground, 16th Avenue, between 37th and 38th, on Thursday.
What was that supposed to mean, curious? Did it mean he was curious about her, that he wanted to get to know her? Or was it a challenge, questioning if she was curious about him? Or was it about something else entirely? And if yes, what else?
She stood there a long time, confused, the paper crumpling in her hand as she squeezed her fingers into a fist. Am I? Curious? she asked herself, feeling something heavy—almost oppressive—mingling with her excitement and joy.
Of course she went to meet him, despite her anxiety about being caught. The playground would be deserted at that time of night, she convinced herself, and dark enough so that people looking out their windows in the neighboring apartment buildings wouldn’t be able to make them out. Shivering, she opened the gate and walked inside, taking a seat on a bench near the jungle gyms behind a large tree.
What am I doing? She shuddered, her eyes searching the streets, panicked she would be discovered by the eagle eye of someone she knew. The consequences would be devastating. Her reputation—or what was left of it, all things considered—would be ruined. But most people she knew were home eating dinner, or learning the Torah, or listening to a shiur, not wandering the streets of Boro Park or sitting in deserted, ill-lit parks. Right?
He was twenty minutes late. She had almost given up when she saw him coming toward her in the distance, his dark hair glistening in the yellow light of Boro Park streetlamps.
He nodded to her, a bit impersonally she thought, chagrined. Then he sat down next to her, his legs wide, and his elbows resting on the back of the bench.
“So what yeshiva are you in? Who is your rebbe?” she asked him innocently, smoothing down her skirt.
He leaned back and laughed, digging into his pocket and pulling out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one and took a deep breath, exhaling smoke rings at the night sky.
“Listen, honey…,” he began.
“Shaindel,” she corrected him.
“Okay, Shaindel. Just so we get this straight, this is not a shidduch date, okay?”
“Who said I want a shidduch?” she replied, hurt. “I just turned seventeen.”
“Is that so?” He moved in closer, offering her the pack.
Why not? she thought, reaching inside and for the first time in her life touching a cigarette. Everyone else was allowed to break the rules, right? Her mother could kill herself, her father could drop out of kollel and marry a girl who once relished pig and shellfish, her stepmother, Leah, could dance around the house naked to forbidden music (or so the latest embellishments to the vicious rumors going around suggested, spread by oh-so-frum people. Not that she believed a word of it. Seriously, Leah? They had no idea. But Leah must have done something.). So I can also break a few rules, she thought, defiantly taking one out and holding it awkwardly between her fingers.
He laughed. “Here, let me show you.” His fingers felt electric as they touched hers to reclaim the cigarette. Placing one end against the glowing end of his own, he blew patiently until it caught fire. Then he placed it between his lips and blew some more. “Here,” he said, handing it back to her.
She felt more than strange putting something in her mouth that had been in his. But fearful of evoking still more mockery, she inhaled. A horrible choking feeling immediately filled her lungs. She couldn’t breathe! She coughed furiously, panic-stricken. Was this some kind of evil trick? Angrily, she spit it out.
He patted her gently on the back, grinning and unsympathetic. “Don’t worry about it, Shaindel. It happens to everyone the first time. Now, try again, but don’t breathe it in so deeply this time. Just a little bit, into your mouth.”
“You think I’m really stupid, don’t you? I’m not touching that thing again!”
Ignoring her, he retrieved it from the ground and dangled it in front of her. “Don’t be a baby,” he taunted, inhaling it and exhaling smoke rings.
She watched him doubtfully. But he seemed fine. Her childishly smooth fingers shaking, she took it back. This time, she inhaled with caution. The mildly acrid sensation of having bitten into something spicy and overcooked enveloped her mouth and throat, but the lethal sense of drowning was gone.
“See?”
“See what?”
“You won’t die if you break the rules.”
“Why did you want me to meet you here?”
He closed his eyes and looked up at the sky. “I don’t know. You keep coming around. I guess I wanted to figure out why.”
Why, she thought. The question she had been afraid to ask herself. She didn’t have an answer, not one she could give him anyway. So she changed the subject.
“You know your father is the principal of my school. Freidel was two years ahead of me.”
“Yes, my dear sister Freidel. She’s getting engaged, you know. Some future gadol hador,” he said mockingly, grinding his cigarette under his foot.
“She was horrible to me.”
He looked up, grinning. “Freidel’s a bitch. And her husband is a yeshiva moron. She got what she deserved.”
“I won’t be invited to the wedding.”
“Don’t worry about it. Neither will I.”
“Really?” She was shocked. “Why not?”
“Because ‘what’s not nice we don’t show.’ And I’m not nice.”
“What did you do?”
“I dropped out of Lakewood.”
“Oh. My father just dropped out of kollel. He was there for twenty years.”
He leaned forward, suddenly interested. “How come?”
“My mother died. We need the money, so he’s working full-time now. He has a new wife. A baalas teshuva from California.”
“I think I heard about that … A redhead? Right?”
“I guess everybody heard.”
“Lucky him. How did he get away with that?”
“He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“And how is it now, for him, for you
?”
She hesitated. “Better than it was. I had everything dumped on me. My little brother and sister. The housework. The cooking. I hated it. And I don’t think I did a very good job. Freidel used to gang up on me with her friends, make me feel ashamed of … of … losing my mother, that my father had a baalas teshuva girlfriend…”
“Yeah, I bet. She’s so good at that. A real tzadakis.”
“What did she do to you?”
“Nothing special. She just made sure I knew she sided with the rest of the family, and that I was damned to hell for ruining her shidduch chances.”
“Did you?”
“If only! But no. She’s marrying exactly the kind of idiot my parents wanted her to.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing—if you want to be tied to some guy who is not planning on doing anything the rest of his life.”
“Why nothing? He’s learning.”
“He’s sitting on his backside, making phone calls and drinking coffee. And after the wedding, he’ll be busy working hard to get my sister pregnant. In the meantime, she and my father and his father will be sending him money every month to pay the mortgage on an apartment they bought for him until they get him some cushy job as a teacher or mashgiach. That will take a while. He’s got to put in the time.”
“Maybe he loves learning. Maybe he’ll be a great teacher or mashgiach.”
“Right. And I’m going to be a chef at a four-star restaurant. Give me a break. It’s all a big joke, don’t you know that?”
“What’s a big joke?”
“That all the frummies who decide to sit and learn are going to be great scholars. They are just too lazy to get a degree and earn a living. They’re taking the easy way out.”
She knew that wasn’t true. Her father had sacrificed so much to sit and learn. It was his passion, not an easy way out. But she decided not to contradict him. “Is that the reason you dropped out?”
“Well, I didn’t, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was more like I was politely told that I should find another ‘more suitable’ place for myself. In other words, I got kicked out.”
She absorbed this. Only real bums got kicked out of yeshiva. It must have been something awful. She didn’t pursue it. It was much too much information already.
He didn’t seem to mind or even notice her silence. “So what about you, Shaindel? Do you have a boyfriend?”
She shook her head. “And I don’t want one.”
He laughed. “So why do you keep coming to visit me at Moishy’s?”
She shrugged. “I like the pizza.”
He slanted his head, studying her. “Soooo. What is it you like about me, little Shaindele?”
“Who says I like anything?”
“You change out of your Bais Yaakov clothes when you come in. I’m not stupid.”
She blushed. “What do you like about me?”
He turned his head toward her, resting his elbows on his knees. “Well, you’re not fat. And you seem a little more interesting than the rest of the girls around here, who would have gone screaming to their parents and gotten me fired for sending a note.”
So he liked her because she had agreed to do something no respectable girl in the neighborhood would have done! She was hurt. But he had also noticed how she was dressed, that she had been trying to please him. And he as much as admitted that he found her attractive (“You’re not fat”). But in the turmoil of her mixed emotions, she found it hard to separate that out from the rest. It was just one more thing in this whole experience that confused and excited her.
Altogether, it wasn’t exactly what she’d imagined young men said to young women they admired and were falling in love with. But, hey, hadn’t he asked her to meet him here, alone? Weren’t they sitting here side by side in the dark? And perhaps, most of all, wasn’t he the elusive, handsome, older brother of her nemesis, Freidel, one of the boys she’d always fantasized about? It was almost as if in enticing him to single her out, she was getting back a little of her own against her tormentor. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?
She liked talking to him. It was so easy, she thought. She didn’t have to pretend, or be on guard, because he didn’t seem to have the same view of things as the rest of the people she knew in Boro Park.
He didn’t touch her, not that first time.
13
LEAH TALKS TO HASHEM
“Dear God,” Leah prayed, sitting in the living room after dropping the kids off at school and day care. “I just thought I’d catch up with You. It’s been a while. I’m sorry. I think about You all the time. I’m so grateful for everything You’ve done for me. Thank You for my husband, for Yaakov. I was so lonely, and in such despair that I’d ever find a man who would love me and be faithful to me. He is everything I could have wanted, HaShem. They say that after the creation of the world, You have time on Your hands, so You use it making shidduchim. You did a great job for me. Thank You. Thank You so much.
“And thank You for the children. Please, keep watching over all of them, keeping them safe and healthy. Keep the little ones, Chasya and Mordechai Shalom, away from sharp objects and hot stoves and the more frightening illnesses kids pick up from the other kids they play with. Please keep helping me to find ways to make them happy.
“I worry a little about Chasya. She is so sensitive and so deep. I know there is a well of sorrow in that little girl. Help me to show her how much I love her and how precious she is to me and to her father and whole family. Don’t let those vicious little snobs in the neighborhood hurt her in any way. And thank You for sending Fruma Esther on the warpath against them. It has helped a lot. Okay, not everyone is on board—there are still a few holdouts—but Chasya has some friends to play with now who come over, Baruch HaShem.
“Now I need to talk to You about myself. Dear HaShem, my dear, dear Friend.” She sighed. “I’m in trouble. And I’m a little embarrassed to even share it with You after all You’ve done for me. It feels … ungrateful. Which I’m not. At least I don’t think I am. But some days, I am finding it impossible to imagine going on this way.
“I’ll start with the easy things. This neighborhood. It’s so dark, so gray. There are no mountains, hardly any trees, and only tiny little patches of grass behind chains and fences. I miss California, the beautiful views, the sunsets, the forests and mountains. I’m starved for them. I can’t stand being in the city … these dusty streets.” She took a deep breath. Facing yourself wasn’t easy.
“And … the truth is … the fact is … I’m lonely.”
Even as her lips formed these soundless words, she felt shocked.
It was true. But how could that be? She had a loving husband, sweet little children who called her Mommy! And she loved them all sincerely, with her entire heart. And they loved her.
“You see, Yaakov isn’t around very often. He works hard all day, and when he does come home, he’s committed to dedicating some of his time to learning. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t resent that … at least I know I shouldn’t. How can I? He loves learning so much, and I knew who he was when I married him. Actually, most of the time, I’m sincerely proud of him, and I’m sure You are, too; he’s earning all of us Your blessings.
“Yes, I love the life You’ve given me, and I’m grateful but … but … You see … I’m home alone all day with the kids and when they leave in the morning, just with my computer. Business is going well, thank You so much! But I go a little stir-crazy. And … and…” This was hard, so hard! But she could tell Him, because of course He knew all about it anyway. “I don’t have any friends in this neighborhood.”
She had expected in time to become a part of the social life of those around her. She’d been realistic; it would not happen overnight. But she’d expected that after a year among them, they would have thawed somewhat; that she would invite and be invited in return for Sabbath meals. That she would be asked to join the other women in participa
ting in local chesed efforts—collecting donations for poor local brides and grooms, baking cakes for newlywed sheva bracha dinners, bringing meals to new mothers … But somehow none of that had happened. The neighbors, who had all been friends with Yaakov’s first wife, had very politely begged off her dinner invitations with one excuse or another and had failed to invite her in return. And no one had come knocking on her door to ask her to join in their little local projects. In fact, except for a polite greeting when coming across each other, they pretty much ignored her. And now, with the whole music fiasco, their children had followed suit. If not for Fruma Esther going door to door and basically twisting their arms, Chasya would still be playing all by herself.
While the intervention had alleviated the problem of the children, it had not endeared her to her neighbors. They still kept their distance. At this point, she didn’t really care anymore. Who needs people like that as friends? she told herself angrily. Which was fine except that it meant she didn’t have any friends.
Of course, there was always Shoshana. But as sympathetic as her best friend in the neighborhood was, she was unable to do much. She was in her last year of residency, and her working hours were off the charts. In addition, she was planning her wedding, a complicated and lavish affair that had to include all the religious strictures necessary to keep her parents and their friends happy, as well as all the American wedding aesthetics taken for granted by the groom’s upper-class Bostonian family. In other words, mission impossible. Shoshana was struggling with it. While they spoke on the phone several times a week and had managed to sneak in time for coffee, Shoshana clearly wasn’t going to be much of a companion.
“I know I should try to help myself, HaShem. I could go back to our skating group on Mondays. But that’s the night Yaakov meets with Meir! I explained this to him, and he really tried to change to another night, but it’s the only night Meir can do it … so I said okay.” She sighed. She hated the way this was sounding. Saint Leah, the martyr.
