Down Under

by Sonia Taitz

  Delaney had wandered over to the paddocks where the horses are pastured at day’s end. In the corner of the field, she is sure she sees someone familiar. It is the shirt she recognizes—a shirt David Ewington had worn almost every week during the school year, rugby-style, with red and white stripes, and a big white collar. These are not the colors of their school team (not that he would ever have been on it), and Delaney had wondered why David wore it so often. One day, she’d stood close to David on the lunch line, and noticed the unfamiliar school insignia.

  “Why are you always wearing that?” she had asked, noticing him wince as the server put a ladle of peas too close to his mashed potatoes.

  “Ah—please, keep them separate,” David had said. She noticed how deep his voice was for someone his age, and how he already had the dark down of an incipient beard and moustache.

  “I know,” she’d said, “I hate it when the slop mixes together.”

  “Me, too,” he’d said, smiling, then not smiling, looking at her, then not looking.

  “So your shirt—?”

  “What? This? Oh, it’s from my brother’s school,” said David. “Babbington Academy, it’s a boarding school in Massachusetts, not one of the really famous ones.”

  He had rarely said so much at once, but then no girl had ever asked about his clothes, and with so solicitous a face.

  “You didn’t want to go?” she asked, sympathetically.

  “No, I actually did want to. I got in before my brother did, and in fact I went there for a little bit. But it wasn’t right for me,” he replied, arranging his cutlery just so and walking over to his usual table.

  Afterward, when her clique had left, Delaney had watched David sit alone. She thought of going over and sitting with him as he ate his peas, tine by tine. But she had already been so forward, and he hadn’t seemed to be that interested in her. She knew she wasn’t pretty. Her mother was slim and starched, but Delaney knew that she’d come from a donor egg, and she knew she was a mess, with thick unruly hair, a square jaw, and wide hips that were not in fashion. The arty kids were slim and pale, and next to them she looked like a milkmaid, especially in the clothes that her mother made her wear, pastel blouses and dorky cotton bermuda shorts that zippered on the side.

  Now she notices a familiar boy lying in the pasture, dressed in black jeans and the rugby shirt she’d seen so many times before. He is lying in the grass with a man who wears chaps and cowboy boots. That is all she can see until she quietly strolls closer.

  The two of them are nibbling on Ponipops and talking about women. The older man seems to be saying something to the effect that females are bad, sly, evil. That you can’t trust them. Well, she can agree with that—at least when it comes to her mother, that horseradish whoremonger.

  But then she hears the man (who has a weird voice, alternating between Austin and Australia) go on to say:

  “Ewington, eh?”

  It is David Ewington! What is he doing here? Is this his summer job? She had no idea that he knew anything about horses. People who walked with their heads down and their hands jammed in their pockets were rarely sporty. The sporty guys walked tall and proud, legs apart and arms swinging. Their heads were big and prominent, held high so they could look down on their vast kingdom of fawning girls.

  Delaney listens some more and draws herself closer. It is a good thing she wore her lightest sneakers (the laceless hipster ones she had managed to get past her mother). They do, in fact, allow one to be sneaky, especially in approaches on grass. Anyway, these two seem lost in their conversation, relaxed as two pond frogs.

  She hears the guy with the cowboy boots say something about David’s mother. Nosy! What business is she of his? Sometimes staff can get a little chummy at these places (Delaney remembered a tennis instructor at one of her camps, the one who had to stand behind you to demonstrate strokes, and feel your boobs). Yet David is answering him calmly, as though they are peers. Well, maybe they are, if they are working together, she reminds herself.

  Delaney watches the cowboy sit up a bit, then rest back on his arms, looking up at the sky. She notices his weirdly uneven moustache that seems to have wax on the end. She hears him say something about “punishment,” his voice getting louder on that word. This is getting good. Maybe this guy and her mother could get together, if they both like punishment so much!

  All of a sudden, Delaney sees David Ewington stand up abruptly and dart away, leaving the cowboy behind. It is as though they’d argued.

  What has she missed?

  Delaney stands where she is for a moment, then strolls away in what she hopes is a casual way. The cowboy never sees her as he follows David to the gates of the ranch.

  The next day, Delaney awakens quickly. Early as it is, she is eager to do her rounds and see David again, maybe even talk to him this time. She alters her route so she’ll arrive at the ranch mid-morning. There, she plans to repeat her pattern of the day before—first the stables, then the riding rings. Then she will go to the fields.

  In the second ring, she sees him on a horse.

  He is riding a tall roan mare with a beige mane and tail. Today, he is not wearing his red-and-white rugby shirt, but a too-small black T-shirt that looks good with his jeans, Delaney thinks. He sits tall on the horse, head leaning on her mane, as though he has found the perfect pillow. Delaney realizes that he is riding bareback. His legs hang free, but she can sense a light tension in his knees and thighs.

  Davey feels alive on the horse, aloft and balanced high. His lips are moving, and if Delaney were closer, she could have heard him say, to his mount:

  “Yes. You know me and I know you.”

  “Hi!” says Delaney.

  The sound of the girl’s voice breaks Davey’s reverie, and he almost falls off his mount.

  “Oh, hi,” he answers, awkwardly but successfully regaining his balance. When he is sure he is safe, Davey waves one arm, like a rodeo star, for her benefit, then quickly puts it back at his side to maintain the necessary ballast.

  “Would you please stay outside during the lesson?” asks Gretchen. “Or at least on the benches with the other families?”

  “But I know—I know the instructor. David Ewington, right there? Anyway, his kid’s not here yet, right? His student?”

  “Davey, do you know this person?” Gretchen says.

  Davey looks down at Delaney from the top of his horse. Gretchen sees that he is about to speak, and is silent. This will be good for him, chatting with someone from the top of a mount, balanced and strong.

  “This is Delaney, a friend of mine from school,” he says to Gretchen.

  “Delaney?” Davey continues, “I am ‘the kid,’ and this is my lesson. OK? But what are you doing here?”

  Davey is mortified but proud at the same time. Delaney seems to want to know things about him that he’s always kept private. She is interested, for some reason, in figuring him out. He had noticed her attentions at school, of course—no one else spoke to him.

  But has she actually followed him here?

  “I’m—I’m—”

  Davey feels sorry that she is now flushed and stuttering. Better than anyone, he knows how that feels.

  “No,” he says quickly, “it’s totally fine that you’re here, this is a great place. Are you looking for work here or something?”

  “I already have work—my mom—I’m, I’m kinda just delivering my mom’s foods and treats and stuff all over town, and this is just one of the stops, you know, that I have to make.”

  “Your mom’s the one who makes the food we eat here?”

  “And the Ponipops for the horses, yeah.”

  “Wow. Impressive.” He is too polite to say that yesterday they had tasted very different, much drier.

  All this time the horse, Maple, has not moved, but she is growing restive, flapping her lips and tapping one hoof on the soft ground of the riding ring. Her tail flicks.

  “OK,” says Gretchen, “you two can catch up later. We have
a lot of work to do, Davey.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” he says, giving Maple a barely perceptible nudge to her flank. Immediately, she begins walking away, head high and eyes soft, happy to be summoned back to service.

  “I’ll wait outside for you, if that’s all right,” says Delaney.

  “Uh, sure. Fine,” says Davey, turning around to watch her as she walks away. He puts one hand on the horse’s hindquarters as he turns, and keeps his balance beautifully.

  A Visit from a Holy Man

  One Friday afternoon, just after lunchtime, someone knocks on Jude’s door. She’s been polishing off some of Heidi’s five-bean salad, prepared semi-raw and served tepid, and if no one had appeared, she might have found herself productively in the bathroom, as she often did not long after eating one of Heidi’s fiber-rich repasts. She was always trying to lose weight, and Heidi always said that food with maximal roughage was the absolute key.

  Such was life for the modern human being—semi-raw, tepid, avoirdupois, bowels. And that was for the lucky ones, with enough time and money to become solipsistic, internal and as self-protective as a threatened hedgehog (quills out, rolled into a ball). For them, life could be as slow as peristalsis, and not even as interesting.

  The hand at the door is harsh. Perhaps it was even a banging fist, the kind covered by a studded leather glove.

  Jude is not expecting anyone, much less anyone so avid, and finds her heart racing.

  “Wh—who is it?” she squeaks, picking a fraction of pinto-bean-shell out of her incisor.

  “It is Rebbe Malach,” comes the voice behind the door. “Malach Gipstein, perhaps you have heard of me.”

  “No, I haven’t heard of you,” says Jude, racking her mind to think about all the charities she gave to, and which probably spread her name far and wide, all the way to the pious itinerant at her door.

  “Rebbe Gipstein!” the man says, this time more loudly. “Learned fellow Jew from the town of Croton!”

  It seems to Jude as though the man’s accent and word choice are becoming, with each utterance, more and more Yiddish-sounding. Sometimes, on trips to the city, she’d been stopped by Chasidim asking her, “Are you Jewish? Are you Jewish?” They usually didn’t want anything more than to give you a blessing, or a box of white Sabbath candles. But to find her out here? Did he know the boys’ bar mitzvah tutor? Had he found a mailing list from the Temple they almost never went to?

  “You heard from Croton?”

  “Yes, I heard from it,” she answers crossly, mimicking his immigrant locution.

  “It’s not so far,” the rebbe continues. “You been there once or twice, to Croton which is on the Hudson?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Oh, you should go, there is such a shul there, beautiful like the sunshine, such glass in colors like the rainbow! Red, blue, even green like a, like a—”

  “Like a lawn, I know what green is like!”

  “Not always,” says the rebbe, stroking his black cotton-candy beard.

  “What?” After a moment, her own voice pierces the silence, as though she wanted this bizarre conversation to continue.

  “It’s not always green, a lawn. Sometimes the rain doesn’t fall, what can you do, and what you get is a brown, not a—”

  “What do you want?” Jude interrupts. “I’m a very busy woman.” She was. If the man had not come, she would now be watching a talk show about putting passion back into your life.

  “What do you want from me?” she repeats, conscious that this question, itself, sounded a bit Jewish.

  “Wat I want from you,” answers the voice, with a touch of sadness, and no question mark. Just a declaration.

  “Oy, vat I vant,” he repeates, a poignant echo.

  Jude is curious. She wants to open the door, but she remembers the heavy fist-knocking, and feels there might be some danger lurking in the arm that knocks, and the heart that wants. And yet, that voice is so plaintive. It reminds her of her own father, long gone. Her father would have smiled to see a rebbe at her threshold. Maybe it’s an omen.

  She opens the door.

  It’s a man, neither young nor old, neither fat nor slim. He’s dressed in a long, black coat of a shiny-from-use material; matching trousers, pleated; a crisp white shirt (but no tie); white socks peeping out of the trouser bottoms; and black lace-up shoes that shine like patent leather. On his head the man sports a fedora of the kind that would be worn in a detective movie set in the 1940s and ’50s, the kind used to obscure the face.

  He does look like the pious men Jude sometimes sees in New York City, the ones who want to make a “mitzvah” with her. There were lots of these men, too, in pre-war photographs. These obvious Jews—dressed to be different—were targets. A holy people, a loyal people, her father once said, a people whose culture had nearly been destroyed in Europe.

  Jude feels both repelled by and drawn to the man’s banana-curled side locks and thick, scholarly glasses. There was variation in the beards of Chasidim, some were long and wild, others trimmed—and Rebbe Malach’s beard was long and scraggly, the beard of a madman. You could find a chicken and a chick and the nest in that matted black beard. There was something, too, of the wizard about him.

  For a moment, Jude even feels shamed by her own ignorance. How much he must have read, since boyhood, to wander the world so humbly, knocking on doors in the hope of doing good. How long must it have taken to grow those curly side locks and that sagacious beard.

  Her own life is so bare of meaning. Yes, the boys had had bar mitzvahs, but these were social occasions. Jude defines herself as a “cultural Jew”—on occasion, she likes whitefish and smoked salmon, poppy seed bagels and blintzes. They remind her of her childhood. With her chicken soup, of course she sometimes takes also a matzoh ball. But these days, who didn’t? Besides, on Heidi’s regime, there were few of these heavy foods. Her culinary faith had long been diluted: gefilte fish became “quenelles,” and seltzer, Pellegrino. Even the bar mitzvah food had been haute suburban.

  The man is talking. To her. “So you open at last the door for a Yid.” He says it like this: “Yeed.”

  “So I do,” she challenges. She liked saying “so.” So very Jewish.

  “OK, so then I’ll come in and make myself comfortable. And then I’ll explain for you the purpose of my visit.”

  “So do you really have to come in? To the inside of my house?”

  “Oh, yeh! That is what I really have to do!”

  Jude stands at her doorway, still blocking it. Sentimental as the figure is, she doesn’t want to be dragged into a long talk about charity.

  “Look,” she says. “In the end, are you going to just solicit some money, I mean, gelt, from me? Because my grandmother was a lifelong member of Hadassah, and I think that should count for something in this world.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we gave already. In the Hadassah. I think she even had a gold pin that said ‘Lifetime Member.’”

  “You should never say ‘I gave already,’ because to live is to give and give. But Hadassah? Feh! I’m not from no Hadassah,” says the man, leading the way past her, into the interior of the house. Jude follows, her smaller stride racing after his.

  “And from you anyway I don’t want any gelt,” he continues, once he’s located the large and tasteless black leather sofa that Jude’s husband and boys love so much. The man then sits down with an affected “oof!,” as though he has traveled far, on foot. A pilgrim, she thinks, on the road to the Holy Land.

  But why is my house the Holy Land? Despite herself, Jude feels a tiny bit turned on. He’s not so bad looking, if you can get past the weirdness. She remembers some lore about devout Jewish men not allowing themselves to be alone with women. This must mean that just being in her house is a taboo for the man. Another frisson runs through her.

  “’Lifetime member,’” he chuckles, looking for the briefest second into her eyes. “Your beloved bubbe, may she rest in peace. And me, too. That�
�s what I am. A ‘Lifetime Member,’ God willing, of the community of God. But your grandma, the Hadassah member—she had some manners? Or no?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wouldn’t say no to a glass of tea.”

  “A glass—?”

  “Yeh, I prefer glass, but a cup is good, a mug, you call it. Fine, all right, I’ll drink from a mug!”

  “And what kind of tea—I have cherry-mint, neroli infusion with rosemary, Lady Cordelia’s Four-O’Clock Service—”

  “Orange pekoe you don’t have?”

  “Oh, regular tea?”

  “I like the Lipton, if you would be so kind. Orange pekoe.”

  “I’m sure I can find some regular tea, but it’ll be in bags.” Her father had enjoyed a nice cup of Lipton every Friday night, with lemon.

  “What else should it be if not in bags? And with maybe a little sugar.”

  “White? Brown? Agave?”

  “Nu, I should invent for you a wheel?” he says. “Sugar, thanks God, was already discovered, they make it very nice, a powder that dissolves like magic into your drink and makes it a little bit sweeter. That is what I want. A teaspoon, not more, regular sugar and some Lipton tea in a bag, this bag not dipped too long, and then I’ll be—you know where I’ll be? Already in heaven.”

  Jude walks into the kitchen, a little impressed. What a simple man he is, in the nicest sense of the word! What was the use of all this modern complexity? The man followed rules, dressed in a black-and-white uniform, and drank normal tea with plain old sugar. She remembered her parents doing the same, sometime before the prosperous 1980s, when cappuccino had come into popular parlance. Stealthily, it had ruined the essence of the ordinary world.

  Lost Languages

  Azoy gut!” says Rebbe Gipstein, when he finishes his tea.

  “Excuse me?”

  “So good, this drink! And now you want to know why I am here?”

  “Kind of been curious. I mean, this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day.” Indeed, at this stage of her life, very little happened any day, and even less that was both new and pleasant.