by Yael Levy
The waiter laughed.
“Look, I insist.” She pulled a pen and paper from her evening bag and wrote her name, address, and phone number. “Could you send me the bill?”
He accepted the paper and then looked over her shoulder. “My manager is watching. I’ve got to be off.” He grinned. “More dishes to wipe. I mean clear.”
Smiling back, Rachel watched him go.
“A waiter, Rachel?”
Rachel turned to see Suri standing with her arms crossed, drumming her lacquered fingernails. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve barely started dating, and you’re looking at a waiter?”
“No, I just dropped — ”
“Sweetie, I was young once, too. I know how it is. But your mother will be very disappointed with a waiter. And he’s so dark … Who is he?”
Rachel gave a sad sigh. “I don’t know.” She watched, still feeling sadness as the bride was escorted to the dais, held up on both sides by her mother and future mother-in-law. There she sat soberly, her smile frozen and distant. Rachel wondered how they’d gotten her to finally stop crying. Maybe a sedative?
The musicians played louder, the sounds of their frenetic pace enveloping the wedding hall. The first guest ascended the dais to wish “mazel tov” to the bride.
Rachel watched as Malky squeezed her mother’s hand tightly.
One by one, the rest of the guests lined up near the dais to tell the bride how beautiful she looked; and one by one, they wished her well.
CHAPTER TWO
Leah Bloom wiped the sweat from her brow as she jogged past the shops on Avenue J, then up Bedford Avenue, by her aunt Suri’s mansion, and back toward the apartment above a hair salon, which she shared with her mother on Nostrand Avenue. It was a cool autumn day, and most people were still sleeping while she jogged at the break of dawn.
Leah enjoyed the quiet stillness of her neighborhood that would grow deafeningly loud as its inhabitants awoke, taking in only the sounds of birds chirping and her sneakers hitting the pavement. She reached her home and ran up the few short steps of the front stoop, letting herself in. After she had something to eat, she had to get to campus and study like a madwoman.
“What are you running around for at this hour — like a thief?” Leah heard her mother’s accusation as she headed to the kitchen.
“I love jogging,” she said.
“Love,” her mother grumbled as she fixed a tight kerchief around her graying hair, “is a word people don’t use right. You eat fish — yet you love it?”
Leah shrugged. “I love fish, too.”
“Hmph,” her mother sighed. “You love yourself, not the fish. Love is giving.”
“I love jogging,” Leah repeated.
Her mother stood in the kitchen dressed in her housecoat, arms crossed, examining her only daughter. “You’re sweating and your hair is a mess. What will people think?”
“They’ll think that Leah Bloom loves jogging?”
“Tsk!” Mrs. Bloom exclaimed. “How does that look for a match?”
“Nobody’s even awake. They don’t see me.”
Mrs. Bloom shook her head. “Still, the way that T-shirt clings to you, you look … loose.”
Leah flinched as if she’d been smacked. “You know I’m not.”
Leah’s mother clenched her jaw. “It’s bad enough they say that. You don’t have to feed into the stories and dress the part.”
Leah wiped her glasses clean with the hem of her skirt. “Will I have to apologize my entire life for a rumor Wolfy Krumeister spread about me in high school?”
Mrs. Bloom swallowed and stared at her daughter. “Yes — until you’re married. How could you go and reject that perfectly good lawyer? A lawyer! Your attitude — along with everyone knowing we can’t support a son-in-law learning in yeshiva — is destroying you.”
Leah shrugged. “That’s not what’s destroying me,” she said.
Her mother shook her head. “Slim pickings, Leah. There isn’t much choice for you anymore. You’ll have to make do, just like I did.”
Leah shook her head. “You can’t force me to marry a yeshiva guy. I’m not signing up for a life of poverty so that my husband can study all day.”
“You have to be willing to sacrifice.”
“Not my whole life.”
“Then a year or two. You have to show everybody that you’re good, that our family is respectable.”
Leah nodded. “How could I forget?”
Her mother eyed Leah’s midriff. “Seems like you forget when you go out jumping around the neighborhood like a — slut.”
Leah gulped down her drink. “You keep telling me I have to maintain my weight — jogging helps.”
“In my day, nobody jogged,” her mother said and sniffed. “Just watch what you eat.”
Leah reached for a cookie from the top shelf in the pantry. Normally she wouldn’t go for something so unhealthy, but she needed some chocolate.
Her mother grabbed it away. “This isn’t for you!”
“Then why do you bring it home?” Leah said. “I’m hungry!” She shook her head. “Just forget it. I have to get ready for school.”
Her mother followed Leah up to her room. “I want you to have more than I’ve had,” she said quietly, sitting on Leah’s bed. “For this you’re angry at me? The only person in the world who loves you?”
Leah faced her mother. “Ma, I don’t need this guilt trip. But I do have an exam coming up that I need to review for. If I want to go to medical school — ”
“You shouldn’t be so into school,” her mother insisted, changing her tone. “You should concentrate more on getting married!”
Leah sighed. “Right.”
Her mother scowled. “In my day, proper young women did not go to college.”
“I know that,” Leah agreed. “Which is why you now work part-time in a bakery.”
Mrs. Bloom’s nostrils flared. “You think you’re better than me?”
Leah’s face paled. “I didn’t say that.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not better than me.”
Leah recoiled and ran into the bathroom. She turned on the shower faucet and tried to drown out her mother’s words, but they kept reverberating in her head. She washed herself with vigor, as if the soap could scrub away the morning.
As she thought about it, she realized that she felt sorry for her mother. She did want a better life than her mother had had, but she also wanted to support herself. Help people. She wanted to get married, too. She had to, and that lawyer was cute but … Oh, what was the point? She couldn’t figure this out right now. Leah quickly bound her curls into a bun and donned a long sleeved white shirt and black skirt (which Aunt Suri had bought her, but her mother had insisted was too tight), and then ran to school, avoiding her mother altogether.
Once she entered the campus at Brooklyn College, a quad of green surrounded by stately buildings, she sat outside on the lawn and listened to her iPod. Her mother didn’t let her listen to secular music, so she’d had Rachel buy it for her and hid it like most of her contraband in her school bag — which she knew her mother would be afraid of and never search. Elvis crooned in her ears and she felt herself calming down from the morning’s craziness. Rachel had downloaded Lady Gaga’s album, Born this Way, for her, but she didn’t feel like listening to it now. Leah needed Elvis reassuring her “That’s All Right, Mama.”
“I think you dropped this?”
Leah turned her head to see a guy from her class that would start in another few minutes. He wore blue jeans and crouched down low to where she sat on the lawn to pick up a lipstick that had fallen out of her book bag.
“Thanks,” she said and slowly lowered her eyelashes as she stood up. He was dark and cute.
As they chatted about programming and the upcoming exam, Leah glanced at her watch and wondered how much time she had to make him fall in love with her and take her away from the misery she called “home.”
• • •
The incessant ringing of the phone woke Rachel. She’d wanted a cell phone for years, but her parents wouldn’t hear of it. She moved her hand over the night table to grab the receiver.
“You just got up?” asked Ma.
Rachel looked at her radio alarm clock; it was ten after eight.
“I’ve been up and about for three hours already. What’s with you, Rachel?”
“Sorry. My class today isn’t till ten.”
“But still.”
Rachel rose, shoving her stuffed bear and red coverlet off her bed.
“I’ll be home late tonight, mamale. Make supper and don’t burn the chicken.”
Rachel yawned and rubbed her eyes. “Sure. Everything okay, Ma?”
“They are driving me meshuga at work. It’s no picnic being a stockbroker — pressure from every angle.”
“More stressful than being an artist?”
Ma laughed. “I’d say! How many women are stockbrokers — let alone religious mothers? Oy. The stress!”
“But you love it.”
“Yeah, love it.” Ma sighed. “I love that I can help support my family and marry off you and your brothers!”
Rachel eyed her bed, momentarily wondering if she could go back to sleep.
“And Rachel, don’t throw your things on the floor. It’s disgusting. You’re a kallah maidel already. Girls of marriageable age don’t need stuffed animals.”
“Right, Ma.” The portable phone cradled in her neck, she walked to the bathroom, stepping over a notebook, copies of Vogue magazine, and two Harlequin romances.
“Since you’re already in slow motion today, stop off by Suri’s before school. Give her back that stupid detective novel I borrowed.”
“Sure, Ma.” Rachel washed her hands, three times on each side as per tradition, thanking God for returning her soul, giving her another day of life.
“Make sure you aren’t wearing those schmattes you call clothing.”
Rachel studied herself in the bathroom mirror, debating whether or not to plaster herself with makeup. “Ma, I can’t dress like I’m on a date when I go to FIT. Everyone will look at me like I’m from Mars.”
“You’re a Jewish girl, Miss Fashion Institute of Technology. What’s wrong with that? What’s to be ashamed of?”
“I’m not ashamed, Ma. But silk shirts and suede skirts will get ruined in my painting classes.”
“Nu. Suri says she has a boy for you, the one Leah went out with but said there was no chemistry. He’s a lawyer — he’s a good guy. Don’t go seeing Suri in that bag lady look.”
Debby Shine always seemed to want to make a good impression in front of Suri. Suri’s husband, Michael Kaufman, was Rachel’s father’s business partner, and it was Suri who had convinced Michael to take Abe on and form the law firm of “Kaufman and Shine.” Suri also had three sons about Rachel’s age, but Ma had warned her years ago that they weren’t “right” for her.
Rachel picked up a light-rust-colored Lancôme blush and matching eye shadow, but deciding that her face needed to breathe, she replaced them unopened.
Ma got off the phone, and Rachel slipped on a faded blue denim skirt and white cotton T-shirt. She then added her woolen fuchsia sweater to glamorize her work clothes, to always look marketable — to prevent Ma from killing her.
Lugging her black vinyl portfolio, she walked along her block of twenty-five similar three-story wooden houses, all seemingly narrow homes that belied their true depth. Most of the homes were occupied by Orthodox Jews who were rich, poor, and everything in between. Some had bought when prices were low, others rented. But as all religious Jews had to walk to synagogue on the Sabbath, they lived close together, regardless of their financial standing. Some of the houses had been carefully remodeled in palatial brick, though a few looked neglected, with chipping paint, as if their owners just couldn’t be bothered to care for them. All the homes had small front gardens and stoops and were built right up close to the sidewalk — as in your face and confrontational as everything else in Brooklyn.
She came to a huge red brick mansion with a meticulously landscaped lawn. Years back, Suri had bought two of the old Brooklyn houses and knocked them down to build this stately one. Suri’s youngest son, Macy, thought it was over the top; Rachel agreed but didn’t dare say it. Macy was her favorite of Suri’s boys: They were the same age, and he, Leah, and Rachel had played together as children. Rachel hardly saw him anymore and wondered when he would be home.
“Suri?” Rachel called from the front stoop. She saw her Lexus in the driveway and assumed her mother’s friend was inside, but nobody came to the door.
She rang again.
The maid answered the door. “Señora is out back.”
Rachel walked around the house and saw Suri kneeling in the middle of her yard, frenetically digging at the ground with a sharp rock.
“Suri?” Rachel called again.
As Suri dug, earth splattered her arms and her face, emphasizing the ghostly pallor of her skin.
“Suri, what are you doing?” Rachel slowly walked closer.
Suri looked up, her eyes red and haunted, her uncovered hair in disarray. “Ich ken nisht. They’ll come for us. They’ll kill us all,” she said, her tears falling on her pink cashmere sweater. Fervently she clawed at the earth, mud, and grass staining her black leather skirt.
Hesitantly, Rachel moved next to her.
Suri looked up again, straight at Rachel. “Mama?” she said, and then spoke rapidly in her native Hungarian.
Rachel listened with growing alarm. Where was the effervescent, collected Suri Kaufman? Who was this woman?
“Suri, it’s me,” she said in a soft voice. “Do you need a doctor? It’s me, Rachel. Should I get help?”
Suri returned to her digging as if Rachel wasn’t even there. “I have to bury them.”
“Suri, are you okay? What’s going on?”
“What?” Suri snapped.
“I, uh, just wanted to give you back your book.”
Suri looked up, recognition spreading to her eyes. “Rachel,” she said simply and stood up, dusting off her hands.
“Suri, what — ”
“Please, darling.” Suri shook her golden hair, her voice and demeanor returning to the smooth one Rachel had always known. “I was only planting.”
“In October?”
Suri gave her a dazzling smile. “Potatoes. You can plant them all year long.” Suri stood as if she had not a care in the world and looked Rachel up and down. “Nice sweater. Why aren’t you wearing any makeup, sweetie?”
“What?”
“Lipstick, darling. You look so pale.”
“I’m on my way to school. But what were you doing?”
Suri waved a muddy hand, appalled. “Terrible attitude, Rachel. Terrible. You never know who’s looking. You should always look your best.”
“I’m not my best?”
“Please, darling, why would you want to ruin potential matches because you looked plain? You have what you have to work with. Make the most of it! Why be vulnerable to the yentas?” She meticulously wiped her hand with a handkerchief, clucking at her chipped, earth-stained fingernails.
“Vulnerable? Suri, what was that with planting the potatoes?”
Suri’s smile froze.
“Suri, you, like, weren’t there. You frightened me.”
“Why all these questions about me? It’s you I’m concerned about.�
��
Rachel gently kicked a rock in the garden. “Look, Suri, I have to be going. I’ve got to get to school.”
Suri’s eyes widened in horror. “Seriously? Without any makeup? Are you insane?”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “I’m the insane one because I’m not wearing makeup?”
Suri sniffed. “No need for dramatics.”
Rachel kicked the rock again, harder. What was wrong with this family? No wonder Leah tried to stay away from her aunt.
Suri shook her head. “Really, Rachel, you must put your best foot forward.”
“Suri, I really have to be going. I have a class at ten.” Rachel began walking toward the house.
Suri grabbed her arm. “Look, I told your mother about this boy. He’s wonderful, a real catch! His name is Daniel Gold. He’s a brilliant lawyer from Columbia University. In fact, he’s friends with Yossie and — ”
“I’ll look into it,” Rachel replied. She wasn’t sure what she would think of a friend of Yossie’s. If this Daniel were one of Macy’s friends or even Aryeh’s, Suri’s middle son, then she would feel a little better. Aryeh worked with Hindy at the import/export business of her parents’ associate Harry Green, and he always seemed like someone she could trust. Besides, she had to find out what happened between Daniel and Leah before she agreed to anything.
“Daniel checked you out already. Your rabbi gave a lovely recommendation — though you should know your eleventh grade history teacher thought you were airy.”
“I am airy. But my high school history teacher? I didn’t realize she even knew my name!”
Suri sighed. “Fine. Call me when you’re ready. No guarantee the boy will still be available, though. A catch like him will get snapped up soon.”
Rachel leaned over to kiss Suri’s cheek. “Thanks, Suri.”
“It’s only because I love you, mamale. I wouldn’t care otherwise.”
“I know.”
Rachel went back into the house, passing by Suri’s ornate gold-framed hallway mirror. As she waited for the maid to let her out, Rachel observed her pale reflection. Was Suri right? Would makeup change her all that much? She enjoyed playing with makeup — but it seemed that everybody wanted her to paint on the same face every other girl was expected to paint, too.
