by Joshua Braff
“No. Come out here. I could really use . . .”
“What? You could really use what, Dad?”
“A cigarette.”
I smile at myself for a second and watch the corners of my mouth rise. But it’s fleeting, of course.
“We better tell your sister.”
Ya Fe Na Ne
NO ONE PICKS UP THE phone. I envision my mother sitting there, staring at it, boring a hole through the receiver while saying “We’re not here” to Debra. “We’re not here.”
But I’ll find her. It’s no problem. I’ll be the one to find her and tell her. He’s in the hospital. Not sure what’s wrong. But he needs you. He needs family. No one picks up the phone. Pick up the fucking phone.
By noon the next day I’m driving to the Danowitzes’ house in Vincent. I pull up in front and across the street, a neighbor with peyos and a furry black hat stares at my every move. I wave to him but he doesn’t wave back. There’s a small, yipping dog on the lawn next to theirs and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Hasidic dog, or a Hasid with a dog. This one barks at me and I try to tell it to go kill itself in my mind but it doesn’t seem to hear me. As I step closer to the porch, the dog moves closer to me. Shaindee, Sarah’s sister, is at the door.
“Shut up, Kippy, just shut your stinkin’ trap.” Words from a girl in a sheitel. The dog turns around quietly and disappears.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m David.”
“Oh. Hello,” she says.
“Hello.”
“Who is it, Shaindee?” A voice from beyond.
“It’s David,” she calls, and I hear footsteps.
“What are you doing here, David?” Becca asks, with the screen door closed.
“I’m looking for my sister.”
“She’s not here.”
She’s trying to smile. I can tell she doesn’t know about yesterday.
“Isn’t she with your mother?”
“No one picks up the phone over there and—”
“Is ales git?” the peyos guy asks, now standing in their driveway.
“Of course, Menachem,” Becca says, “Of course, everything’s fine.”
Sarah is behind her mother. I can’t see her face, just her elbow.
“If I hear anything, I’ll call you,” says Becca. “Let me have your number.”
“Do you know where Dena is, Sarah?”
She emerges with her eyes on me. “She might be in Brooklyn.”
Her hair is gone. Like a marine but a girl. A Hasidic girl. Just a fuzz a half inch off her head. Becca glances at her daughter’s scalp with nauseous disdain.
“Is ales git?” the neighbor repeats behind me.
“Yes, Menachem. Everything is fine. You can go back home now.”
“Where in Brooklyn?” I ask.
“Kingsford, probably,” she says, touching her head.
“I need to find her,” I say to Becca. “My father is sick. He’s at Roosevelt Hospital. Can I please, please take Sarah to Brooklyn?”
Becca’s eyes widen as she shakes her head. I can see the whole row of her bottom teeth. “Alone?”
Sarah says something in Yiddish and her mother responds in a higher, angrier voice.
Silence.
“If I hear from her, I’ll tell her,” Becca says.
“Can you write down some street names in Kingsford?” I say. “Some directions.”
She’s gone, off to find paper and pen, I hope. Sarah comes out toward the door.
“Like it?” she says. “I did it myself.”
I see a birthmark behind her right ear, and think about Peter Rabbi.
“My dad’s sick, Sarah.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t even know how bad it is. But I have to find her. Will you help me find her?”
She looks back into the house for her mother or sister. “I have an idea. Meet me at my school at one o’clock.”
“Today.”
“Yes. But not in the parking lot. On Posner Road. Across from the post office. It’s one block away.”
Becca is back. But she doesn’t have anything to write with. It’s the Sabbath. When I look at Sarah, she turns her back to her mother and begins.
“Do you know how to get to the Kingsford Bridge?” she asks.
“Not really,” I say.
The dog begins to bark again, as if it’s never seen either of us before. I sit down on the stoop and Sarah plops down next to me, her shoulder touching mine. Verboten 101. Menachem, the nosy neighbor, just stares us, gawking at Sarah’s crew cut. He slowly lifts his arm to point and Becca moves us apart with her right shoe. “Asshole,” Sarah whispers. I look up at her.
“From Manhattan,” Sarah says. “You listening?”
SHE’S NOT ON Posner when I get there but then I see her, running toward me, between two trees, ducking now, as if she heard a gunshot. When she gets in she’s out of breath and laughing. “We should go, I’m not sure if they saw me.” I start to drive and she looks back at the school through the yard she came from.
“Did you just walk out?” I say.
“Recess,” she says, rolling down the window. “Just get me back by four.” She turns the radio on. Everybody is “kung fu fighting.” She starts to dance to the music, her shoulders seesawing.
I reach over her knees to get my map from the glove box.
“You won’t need that,” she says, and when I face her, I am so close to her, so alone with her.
“I’ll tell you how to go,” she says. “Do you have any gum?”
“No.”
“We should get some gum,” she says, and puts her head out the window. She keeps it out there for most of the trip, just grinning as the wind blasts her face. When I need directions, she calls out the highway numbers as we approach them. “Route 46 to the L.I.E., to West Thirty-fourth Street to Twelfth Avenue to Route 27 to East Fifth Street and on into Brooklyn.” The sidewalk, the street, all the stores are filled with people in black. I’m driving by a supermarket with Hebrew writing on the window, just a bridge away from Manhattan. Jewish book stores and kosher candy stores and an ad for toothpaste with Hebrew lettering. Two boys with peyos and yarmulkes play Wiffle ball on their driveway, just off the main strip. Moishe’s Hardware has a sign that boasts of a zumer sale that’ll “knock 10 percent off any gas-run leaf blower and any forty-gallon trash can,” if you buy it before the end of yuni. The sign looks as if it were written by a child on the back of a large piece of cardboard. When we drive past the store, I see him, a little boy with peyos and tzitzit, sleeping in an easy chair. I see mostly women and children on the street and wonder if any of them know my sister.
“Where are the men?” I ask.
“In shul. They’ll be done by four and you’ll see them everywhere. Keep going straight and make a right at the light.”
I was picturing more of a city but the side streets are almost as suburban as Newstead. I do see redbrick brown-stones and cookie-cutter apartment buildings separated by narrow, overgrown driveways but it’s quiet and the trees are lush with life right now.
I’ve seen ten girls who could have been Debra and we’ve been here five minutes. An elderly, bearded man in black stockings and what look like knickers, walks quickly down the street with a prayer book clenched against his chest.
“Can I see your hands?” Sarah says.
“My hands?”
“Yes.” She takes my right hand in hers.
“You have a short life line.” She runs her thumb down my palm.
“Oh yeah?”
“And this line here is for love.” The tips of her middle and pointer fingers walk down my hand until my wrist, and I start to get a boner.
“Oh, oh, wait, stop, stop the car,” she says, and she’s out and walking up to an apartment building. She speaks to a teenager on the grass, then jogs back to the car.
“She may be on this street. Just keep driving. That girl I just talked to,” she says, “Tzivi’s her nam
e. She goes to the compound in Maine. She once told me that as soon as she graduates from yeshiva, she wants to become a prostitute.”
Sarah laughs as she looks back at the girl. I keep my eyes on the road, don’t even look at her.
“Her parents must be so pleased,” I say.
“Look at my neck,” she says.
When I face her, she unbuttons the top of her shirt and pulls it back, revealing her collarbone.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Come on, look.” She taps a reddish circle on her skin, a few inches from her ear.
“What happened?” I ask.
She laughs again, mouth wide, and slaps me on the arm. “It’s a hickey, dum-dum.”
“Oh.”
And there it is. She pushes her fingertips into it and it disappears for a second. Ryan is his name, a “nineteen-year-old,” she tells me. “He helped me cut my hair.” Poor Peter Rabbi. Oceans upon oceans of Orthodox Judaism just pumped for years into this girl’s bloodstream and what happens? Some Irishman with an electric razor is sucking on her neck.
She laughs, slouched in her seat, still touching her wound. “Turn right,” she says.
We drive past a yeshiva and it turns out to be a school for Lichtiger boys. I pull the car past the building and immediately see a familiar face. “I know that guy.”
“You know which guy?”
“That guy. Right there, on the lawn.”
“It’s Yussi,” she says. “He’s been to my house a hundred times, don’t pull over.”
“I won’t, I won’t.”
I drive up to the corner and make a right. “I have to ask him. Stay here,” I say. I park, get out and run back to the school and up to the group of boys. They glare at me, all turning at the same time, to see the stranger on their sidewalk.
“We’ve met,” is what I say. “Yussi? Right? We met at the Danowitzes?”
He steps closer to me, lightly bumping the shoulders of his peers as he approaches me.
“You’re David,” he says.
“That’s right. That’s right, I’m looking for my sister. Have you seen her?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I didn’t know she was here.”
“I was told Kingsford. They may be staying with someone.”
“With who?”
“I wish I knew.”
His eyes widen when he looks over my shoulder and I see all the boys doing the same. “I speak Yiddish,” Sarah says, and I turn to see her. And just as they all hear a girl’s voice, they look away in unison, like a flock of penguins. One of the boys says, “Ya fe na ne,” and holds his heart.
“Vart den ir numen is Devoria Arbus.” Just Sarah speaking makes them roar and scatter, pounding each other on the backs. Yussi can’t stop looking at her haircut.
I give him my phone number written on a paper scrap from my wallet and Sarah walks away toward town, as if she’s not with me. In the car I drive around but don’t see her. Fifteen minutes later I find her back near the school on the same street I parked on. She looks relieved.
“You should have just stayed in the car,” I say.
“Some of them don’t speak English,” she says.
“Yussi does.”
“How am I supposed to know? I don’t talk to him.”
“Now he’s gonna go tell your parents you were with me, Sarah.”
“I know, I know. Who cares?”
“I’m taking you back,” I say.
“Do you want to find her or not?”
“And what if I find her, Sarah? What then? Whoever she’s with will see you. My mother, for example.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Now Yussi knows. You should’ve waited.”
“He’s not a jerk like that.”
“I’m taking you home.”
“You don’t have to be afraid, David. I do.”
“I am afraid.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Of Hasids. Of getting caught with you in my car.”
I drive back to Vincent before rush hour and we don’t say a word the entire ride. I drop her off in the same spot and she’s upset with me, pouting and slamming the door. I watch her walk back through the trees, ducking as she did earlier.
“Good-bye,” I yell through the window, but she doesn’t look back.
IN THE HOSPITAL my father, Brandi, and Leo are all listening to the doctor talk about chemotherapy. The mood afterward is depressing, even dire, as Brandi tries to rally the silent room with some cheer she knows. “B aggressive. B-E aggressive. B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E.” My father seems comfortably giddy or on some drug, I don’t know. He tells Leo and me to go home and we end up at a triple feature a few blocks from the Imperial. Spawn of the Vampire: Daughters of Dracula is first. Leo’s so happy when he sees the marquee. He starts to tell me the plot and can’t wait to get inside the movie theater. It turns out the film has started but we buy tickets anyway. The huge double balcony theater looks out on a gigantic movie screen. I lean over the railing. People are throwing popcorn and talking back to the actors. The movie itself is horrible. It looks like someone made it in his own backyard. Leo just roars at parts, especially those meant to be dramatic. The next movie is Mother Juggs and Speed and the third is a grind-house flick called Eat, Fuck, Kill. If escapism was the goal, I think it worked. But when the movies end, nothing’s really been skirted and walking out of the theater and into the light of day makes me wish I were back in the dark.
The Imperial is empty when we get there, not a person in the audience and not a sole upstairs in the live-peeps booths. A girl named Lana is alone in the store with two customers and I watch as she attempts to sell them each a six-foot blow-up doll called Lu-Lu Lips. They both cackle as one of them puts his thumb inside her O-shaped mouth. A group of already drunk Japanese salary men walk in. Sal starts the music for them—“Love to Love You Baby”—and announces a new dancer. She looks much older than the others and swings a fluffy purple boa around her neck.
“Who hired that girl?” says Leo. “Jocko?”
Jocko walks down from the sound booth.
“Did you hire that old lady up there?” says Leo.
“Yeah,” he says. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s old.”
“She’s not old. She said she was thirty.”
“She’s a hundred and six, Jocko, look at her.”
“David, Leo, Jocko,” says Ira behind us. He’s wearing a maroon Adidas jogging suit and brown loafers. “I’m calling a meeting. Now! Up in the office.”
We all follow him upstairs and are greeted by two girls on the couch. The person closest to me is a tall blond with sallow cheekbones and nothing on but a pearl-colored teddy and white boots. The other is a redhead with giant, basketball-shaped boobs in a torn mesh cat suit. She’s eating from a bag of popcorn.
“What do you think?” says Ira, “Stars, right? Okay, Leo, David, Jocko, meet the girls who are gonna help us get things started.” He faces the girls and they laugh and he laughs and when I look at Leo he’s smiling and nodding and lifting a movie camera from behind the desk.
“What’s your name?” Ira says.
“Auburn.”
“Awburn?”
“Yeah.”
“Ya danced on the strip before?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“The Exotic.”
“The Exotic Circus?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever do anything like this before?”
“No, but I wanna,” she says, and laughs some more.
“Perfect,” says Ira, “that’s just what we’re looking for.”
Leo holds the camera out to me but I don’t take it.
“I have to go,” I tell him.
“What the hell are you talkin’ about?” Ira says. “You’re workin’ tonight, right?”
“I don’t feel well.”
Leo hands the camera to Jocko. He hits the on button and starts to sho
ot Leo.
“Get that off me,” Leo says, his giant palm held out. “Quit it, Jock!”
He points it at Ira next. A film of a man staring at me as he eats some prostitute’s popcorn. “I need you tonight,” Ira says. “You took off twice last week.” When he sees the camera on him he tries to swallow quickly and grins like he’s at a bar mitzvah. “Oh, hello, hello . . . aim it over there, at the girls. Girls, do your thing. The director is ready. Say action, David. Say action!”
“Action.”
Jocko points the camera at the girls and they step closer to each other. Auburn drags the back of her hand across the other’s breast. It is quiet in the room as all of us stand there, gawking. The girls start to kiss.
“Tell ’em what you want ’em to do,” Ira says.
Silence.
“David.”
“You do it,” I say, and walk to the door.
“Hey!”
The girls stop and the blonde one wipes saliva from her lips. Ira walks over to me. “Your father gave you a chance, David, to do the deal with Abromowitz. Didn’t he?”
I nod.
“Didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Who fucked it up? Right! You fucked it up. I got a fifteen-thousand-dollar peep-show system and not one usable porn flick. Whose fault is that?”
“I know, I should’ve—”
“What do you got? Dildos, lots of ’em, that’s what you got. How many you sold?” He’s stares at me with rage in his eyes. “Forget that. What eighteen year old kid in his right mind turns this job down? The boy doesn’t want to do it, Leo. Good. Fuck it.”
The girls are both glaring at me.
“What are you, a faggot?”
“No.”
“Good, I didn’t think so. Now prove it and take the camera. You’re the pro, remember?”
The phone rings on my father’s desk and Ira lunges for it. “The Imperial . . . What? Yeah, yeah, here.” He holds the phone out to me. “Take it. It’s for you.”
“Hello?”
“Is this David?”
“Yes.”
“This is Yussi.”
“Yes, yes, hello, thank you, thank you for calling.”
“Leo? Bring your big ass over here and help me move the couch,” says Ira.
“I talked to my friend.”
“Does he know my sister?”
