The Family Orchard: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Nomi Eve

  Sometimes, before joining her father in the back of the shop, Rebecca would begin to draw. She clutched the pencil down low and began to draw the czarina. She gave her big catlike eyes and a small but elegant mouth and cheekbones that stretched all the way across Mother Russia. Rebecca loved to draw members of the royal family; she consulted her memories of a murky parallel past and tried her best to recreate the faces of her family’s patrons so as to do her great-grandmother Chana Frieda appropriate honor.

  Rebecca drew in the little room in between the shop and the bakery. She sketched on the flat, unconstructed white cardboard boxes they used to pack cookies in. The unmade boxes were stacked up high on a long shelf to the right of the table in the little room. Once a week a huge pile of them would be taken up front where the shop girls turned them into boxes to fill orders. Of course, Rebecca wasn’t supposed to be drawing the feline eyes, the imperious cheekbones of any czarina on the boxes, and when her parents first caught her “doodling on the bakery equipment” they told her to stop it. But she couldn’t help herself. When she wasn’t working in back with her father, or helping up front with her mother, Rebecca’s fingers would inevitably make their way to the boxes, which beckoned, milky white, to be decorated with pretty pictures. And then, whether on purpose or by accident, her drawings would get mixed in with the “clean” boxes, and that is how her art first made its way out into the world. The first customers to receive those boxes were confused. No one was sure if it was a joke, a gimmick, a prize, or some kind of mistake.

  Rebecca drew unconsciously. She drew compulsively. She drew with her stomach muscles taut and her lips half-puckered. Rebecca clutched the pencil down low and began to draw her parents. She drew her mother’s sensually swollen lips and her father’s strong jaw, angular features, curly hair. She drew the “honeymoon look” they always had in their eyes when glancing at each other. Rebecca paused, sharpened her pencil, and continued to work. She drew and she drew, until finally one day Leah, with her hands on her hips and her full lips pulled tight in anger, sent Rebecca out of the bakery and up into the house. “You are banished from the boxes!” she yelled after her daughter as Rebecca ran up the steps. “Banished! No one on Harvard Street expects portraits on their pastries!”

  Leah walked away from the steps and back to the little table. Now, Leah knew her youngest daughter had talent for drawing. But until this point she didn’t know the extent to which Rebecca was gifted. It must be said without hyperbole that the drawings Leah saw on those boxes knocked her socks off or, more precisely, grabbed hold of her girdle. Until now, overly busy with the round-the-clock demands of the bakery and shop, Leah really hadn’t paid attention to what Rebecca was always drawing. She was drawing faces, and they were extraordinary. Leah flipped through portraits of Gladys the senior salesgirl who always batted her eyelashes at the gentlemen customers; there was Stevie, Leah’s own little brother, bald as he could be at thirty-four; there was big-nosed Doris from down the street; handsome Milty the butcher; there was the czar, unmistakable in his old-fashioned mustache and military collar; there was the czarina, of course; and Demchick the corset-maker who made all the ladies look shapely but told stupid jokes. Leah kept flipping through the pictures until she came to one of her husband, David, and then she saw her own face. It peered out at her from off one of the boxes, like a sudden twin from one of life’s many mirrors.

  A COURT RECEPTION IN ST. PETERSBURG

  Leah thought, My goodness. My goodness. Leah, mistress of this little bakery kingdom, was well aware of the many intrigues, sorrows, and simchas that coursed through the lives of her sweet-toothed congregation. But even she didn’t know everything. And now she was surprised to see Tova Rabinowitz’s affair with Morris Goldberg clearly depicted on the cookie boxes. Tova always came in for jelly donuts, and Morris had a sweet tooth for cherry danish. Even though they were on different boxes, it was obvious to Leah that Morris and Tova—Tova with her bouffant blond hairdo, Morris of the flaring nostrils—were making eyes at each other. “How did Rebecca do that?” Leah wondered. “What is it about their eyes that lets me know they are looking at each other?” The customers spoke to Leah from the sketches, confessing a story of sweet passion sprinkled with a dash of dread (after all, they were both married, and in-laws to boot). Leah lifted up another flat box and there was pretty Betty, her own older daughter, in profile, looking as she did on her last day of high school, exalted, relieved, and staggeringly grown-up. On another box were Tony the cake-baker’s bulging eyes and jowly cheeks, and there on another box was Johnny Johnson the delivery man. Johnny was smiling so widely from off of the box that you could tell from glancing at him that his youngest child had just been born. Leah said out loud, “Thank God! Congratulations!” because she hadn’t seen Johnny in days, and so hadn’t known that his wife had safely delivered. Leah held the faces and for the first time was aware of the talent in the hands of her youngest daughter. She took a deep breath and lifted up the edge of one of the boxes, only to be again astounded at the portraiture underneath.

  That night, she sat on the edge of Rebecca’s bed, brushed a lock of red hair out of the way, kissed Rebecca’s forehead, and said, “Honey, you can keep it up with the boxes, but please do try your best to draw mostly strangers. We can’t afford to scare away the regulars with art.”

  And that is how Rebecca’s drawings ended up on the cookie boxes. At first when the faces began to appear people were surprised by them. But soon there were many in the shop and neighborhood who counted themselves as Rebecca’s patrons, her boosters, her collectors. For as their faces began to adorn the sweet packages tied with white string, and were carried out of the bakery and into the streets of Boston, those who carried them felt as if they were purchasing much more than a half-pound of kmish, or assorted cookies, much more than a braided or seeded loaf of bread. There was stunning intimacy in Rebecca’s fine-lined art. And Lily’s Famous became known to its habitués as a place where one knows they will be treated to something delicious and at the same time as a place where being known itself was considered a recipe rare and drawn and delicious.

  At first Rebecca tried to draw only strangers—that is, strangers mixed in with the occasional member of the Romanoff clan. But soon familiar faces began once again to come from her pencil. She couldn’t help it. It’s just what she did. She drew what she knew. It is true that those customers with something to hide (Harry Blackman who hit his wife; Edna Levinsky who stole the occasional pickle from the grocer) stopped coming to Lily’s Famous and began to buy their pumpernickel from bakeries less daring or different. But most of the clientele and most of the staff were brought closer by Rebecca’s creations. And people didn’t even really mind when their secrets made their way onto the boxes. After all, Tova Rabinowitz and Morris Goldberg really were in love. So what if they were in-laws? So what if divorce was out of the question? Love, no matter how illicit, wants to be known, drawn, honestly depicted. Everyone knows that secrets generally come to be known anyway on a city block. And at least this way, in Rebecca’s cookie-box drawings, the things they wanted kept quiet were made not into scandals but into art.

  Chapter 18

  REBECCA AND ELIEZER

  I WRITE:

  Rebecca met Eliezer at a party and immediately knew she was bringing him home. “Eliezer Sepher,” he said, “Israel, I just to come.” Rebecca was taken by Eliezer’s big blue eyes and exotic air. And she was also attracted by the fact that he couldn’t put an English sentence together. “School, America States, I to come.” She didn’t pity him, but she right away trusted Eliezer’s choppy irreverent form of communication. She knew that he wasn’t doing it on purpose, but still it seemed to her as if this young foreigner was being particularly wise with his words. Rebecca, a visual artist, thought in pictures and resented the fact that people were expected to live their lives under a net of dull, shapeless, colorless, squiggly little words. She held out her hand and smiled, “Rebecca, I to come too,” she said, and Eliezer, s
ensing that he had met a soul mate, smiled back.

  FROM THE GRAFTER’S HANDBOOK BY R.J. GARNER

  After the party, Rebecca took Eliezer home with her. The bakery was just a ten-minute walk away. They walked down Louis Street, right on Chestnut, left on Druett, and then straight until Harvard. The bakery was the third shop from the corner. It was 12:30 a.m. when Rebecca and Eliezer arrived, and Lily’s Famous was wide-awake. David, dressed in whites, his red hair very shiny, took one look at Eliezer and immediately decided that it was his duty to induct this foreign-born boy into the cult of their domestic goddess—bread. It was four days before Rosh Hashanah; David was short-staffed and less interested in Eliezer as his daughter’s brand-new suitor as he was in Eliezer as a human being possessed of a pair of workable hands. David sized a man up by his hands and had noticed the second Eliezer had walked into the shop that his were fine-tuned instruments, heroically callused but infused with a balletic grace of palm and knuckle that was instantly recognizable to David as the mark of someone who could do some good with dough. David was not mistaken. Eliezer’s hands were hardworking creatures. They had tamed many a recalcitrant graft—not by forcing the tree into place, but by convincing the branches through a mixture of faith and dexterity that the graft was good and the sapling would take. David smiled at the young man. Eliezer tried to introduce himself and to tell David who he was and where he was from, but he just barely managed to pronounce his own name. David mercifully interrupted, saying, “Welcome to our country, young man, now come stand by me and I’ll put you to work.” Eliezer was given a spot at the bench across from Rebecca and right next to David. There were six other men also working that night, including Rebecca’s older brother and three of Leah’s younger brothers who looked almost identical, except that two had mustaches and one didn’t.

  Eliezer, who had never worked with dough before, was a quick study. And as they were just making regular challah, once he learned the pattern—over, under, over, under, over, under, pinch, pinch—he, like the others, fell into a floury silence that was decorated every thirty seconds by the hot percussion of the oven going round. But while quiet ruled the mouths of the small company, a conversation did seem to emanate out from all of their fingers, so that by the end of the night, which was also the beginning of the morning, even though no one had “said” much, Eliezer felt as if he knew this family, and as if they knew him. When they were done, David nodded to the boy, and, after wiping his hands on his pants, motioned warmly for Eliezer to come upstairs for breakfast with him and Rebecca and the rest of the workers, most of whom were family, the rest of whom were friends.

  Upstairs, Leah had the table set with coffee, orange juice, hot bagels, a thick white square of cream cheese, and a variety of smoked fish. Leah had been down in the shop during the night and had already met Eliezer. Unlike David, she was interested in him for reasons other than just a pair of hands, though, like David, Leah had also noticed that Eliezer’s hands were lovely. Leah knew a suitor when she saw one, and now, at the breakfast table at four a.m., tried her best not to ask too many questions— not only because Eliezer couldn’t put two English words together to formulate an answer, but also because she knew that later, after this curly-headed young man left, Rebecca would draw a sketch of his face on which the Israeli’s character would be revealed in full detail and the only questions left would be about the colors with which to fill his life in.

  As the sun slowly rose over a sleeping Boston, all the workers filled their bellies and talked of the day’s coming business. No one seemed particularly tired, but then again everyone looked a little strange. Eliezer could not tell whether their complexions were naturally so white, or if the fine layer of flour that coated his face also coated their own. Eliezer was exhausted but exhilarated, and he smiled at Rebecca as he took a bite of his bagel and fish. Rebecca was sitting next to him at the big round table. At first Eliezer did not try to join in the conversation. But soon Rebecca was saying something to him. He didn’t really understand what she was saying, but he tried to answer back, “Cousins know me, now not there, yes, to missing.” She took his hand under the table, and Eliezer knew from the way that she squeezed his fingers and gently tickled his palm that his attempt at conversation had not failed completely.

  Walking home to his cousins’ house, Eliezer thought about the bustle of the bakery and the warmth of Rebecca’s family. The happy way that David had looked as he had worked reminded Eliezer of how his father, Zohar, always looked when he was grafting. But later, when Leah and David had looked at each other in the kitchen, it had seemed so strange to Eliezer that parents could be so visibly in love. And then, even though he was so far away from Shachar, the part of Eliezer’s soul that had not left the village whispered maliciously that the word for “beloved” had the same gematria as the expression for “and primordial emptiness, void and waste”—Ahooovah and Ovoohoo both added up to nineteen. David had taken Leah’s hand and together they had eaten, their heads inclined, their bodies connected. Eliezer walked on, past stores still shuttered, and houses still sleeping. The sky was gray and steadily lightening. It was now almost five a.m. And as he walked on, he willed the part of himself that had left the green village and come here to the city of Boston, to whisper back that math sometimes works magic with opposites and that equivalencies are just one way the world has of righting its own mistakes. He thought about the soft way Rebecca had held his hand under the table. As he turned the final corner, and walked up the steps to his cousins’ door, Eliezer willed himself to think about how the machinery in the bakery had been so shiny and modern and huge and then he told himself that if the bakery were a song it would have lots of percussion, and that humming it would make your throat tickle and leave you almost laughing. And Eliezer was almost laughing as he slipped inside his cousins’ house, hoping to wake no one up.

  On their subsequent dates, Eliezer told Rebecca that he had never fasted on Yom Kippur. Rebecca looked at him incredulously and said, “But I thought that Israel was the land of pious Jews.” Eliezer had laughed and said, “No, praying here people with you, in Boston.” The next day she had drawn him with a full belly. She drew the insides of his stomach stacked high with a whole meal of food—there was a lambchop and a baked potato and a whole piece of fresh fruit. On another date, he described the orchard, telling her how it smelled—not like you would expect, like citrus, but like “orange naked, fruit with no clothes, not embarrassed smell, but new like baby.” And the next day Rebecca drew oranges and lemons naked like people. She gave them interesting pulpy-looking privates—dividing them up into boys and girls, and then she drew the trees the oranges hung on, and then she drew the insides of the trees, their rings dating back not thirty, forty, or fifty years as Eliezer had described them, but dating all the way back to King David whose reign she inscribed in velvet circular strokes. And when Eliezer got tired of telling Rebecca the truth, and Rebecca got tired of drawing it, he made things up. He told her that the women in Israel always wore ball gowns to do their housework, and the men wore top hats and canes in the fields, white gloves and tails to graft and plant and harvest. That night Rebecca drew Eliezer all fancy-dressed and proper, more Fred Astaire than Middle Eastern farmer.

  But mostly, Eliezer told Rebecca about himself, and she asked questions or just listened. They didn’t speak much about Rebecca, not because Eliezer wasn’t interested, but because her life surrounded them. She was a child both of the bakery and of Boston, and the smells and sounds and tastes of her environment did not need to be explained. Sometimes, Rebecca would take Eliezer to the back of the shop, and he would stand next to her at the bench as she worked on a regular order, or on a fancy loaf of holiday bread. Occasionally, Eliezer would work with her, other times he would sit on the hard bulging sacks of flour and work on his English studies, asking Rebecca for help on conjugations.

  Once, when he was tired of English, he had stood next to her and she had put a piece of dough in Eliezer’s hands. He had fashioned it
into something complicated that was also simple. When he was done, Eliezer just stood there looking at it. He sighed, and then scratched an itch on his cheek with a floury hand that left a little mark of white on his skin. Rebecca was watching him. Eliezer had no words to call this dough creature forth, and he did not walk around the bench in any magic circle, but he felt threatened by its presence and at the same time felt as if it had fashioned him, and that even now in this bakery it was calling on a part of him that was both ancestral and frightening. Rebecca watched as Eliezer grew agitated by the little decorative lump of dough, and even though it looked benign and ordinary, it seemed to represent something intrusive and malignant. Eliezer reached out and, in one squeeze of his hand, destroyed his creation. Then he banged his fist on the table with great force, and then, as if nothing had happened, he began to talk too loudly about something they had already finished discussing. And because he talked loudly not only with his voice, but also with his body, Rebecca was not surprised when Eliezer knocked his English books off the bench and onto the bakery floor. Eliezer lifted them up and seemed to look both stunned and insulted that his books would obey the forces of the universe and actually fall when pushed. Rebecca continued to work. She did her best to ignore Eliezer’s obvious agitation. He was still speaking so loudly.