I could only see his work boot snuffing out a cigarette before he loped around the side of his Dodge and out of our view. “Not now. He only visits her at night,” I said with authority.
We laughed too hard, grabbing onto a joke of two innocent girls, the stolen mandelbrot cookies crumbling in my pocket.
By the time I got home from services, my head ached so badly that my hair follicles hurt. I skipped lunch and crawled into bed, and when I opened my eyes, my parents were standing over me. My father held a thermometer in his hand. Dazzling waves of colored light danced across the pale pink cardigan my mother wore because she was always cold.
She sat down on the edge of my bed and put her fingers against my forehead. “What hurts?”
I pointed to my temple and reveled in the concern blossoming all over her face.
My father shook the thermometer. “Let’s see if you’ve got a temperature, honey.” He was an orthodontist, and he was speaking in the voice he used while stringing long wires through bands on his patients’ teeth. He put the thermometer under my tongue, waited a minute, then removed it and read the red mercury line. “No fever, June,” he said to my mother.
My mother gave me aspirin, and my parents sat on either side of my bed. I liked the way my mattress bowed at the corners from their weight. As I drifted off to sleep, I tried to piece together the filmy scraps of what had happened in the mikveh. Had there been someone with my mother? If so, who? Why had she removed her hat? Why was her lipstick smudged? And where did she get that cigarette?
In the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of my own moaning.
My mother, who was sleeping on the floor next to my bed, started. “Where exactly does it hurt?”
“Just the left side.” A violent wave of nausea struck me, and I ran to the bathroom. My mother held my hair while I knelt before the toilet, but I didn’t throw up.
After she helped me back into bed, she removed the pillow from under my neck and put on a fresh case. The crisp cotton felt cool against my face. “Does the light bother you?”
“Uh huh.” My mouth was dry, and my spit tasted like I’d been sucking on dirty socks.
“I got my first migraine when I was about your age.”
Normally, I’d gobble up the few details of her childhood that she parceled out. I didn’t find out that my grandparents were dead until I was six and asked if my bubbe and zayde could visit like Tzippy’s did every May, and then it was my father and not my mother who told me that I didn’t have any living grandparents on either side. Whenever I’d press my mother for information, she’d say that her childhood home didn’t exist any longer. I didn’t understand exactly what she meant, but when she did speak of her past, her voice would grow small and distant and her eyes would lose focus. I needed her to stay put, so I stopped asking her questions and tried to forget what I’d seen in the mikveh.
My headache had disappeared by morning. I found my dad in the kitchen, slurping milk from his bowl of Raisin Bran, his shoulders hunched over the Milwaukee Sentinel, a roll of stomach hanging over his pants. He looked up. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Bunny.”
He hadn’t called me Bunny in years. I smiled, remembering the blanket with the pink bunnies that I’d carried around until it was in tatters. I poured myself a bowl of Cheerios.
“What’s on your docket for today?” he asked as he folded up the sports page.
“Not sure.” I grabbed the comics and immersed myself in “Doonesbury,” which was “lampooning Richard Nixon again,” as my dad said.
My dad wasn’t the type to push, so he kissed the top of my head and went upstairs into my parents’ bathroom. I thought of him sitting on the side of the tub while my mother performed her weekly task of trimming his nose hair, which grew from his nostrils like the fur on a chipmunk’s tail, an unfortunate physical trait for an orthodontist. Maybe he’d been the one who had messed up my mother’s lipstick. No. My father in the mikveh? He would never have skipped out of shul in the middle of services.
I loafed around the house all day. Tzippy had left early in the morning for Brooklyn, so I had nothing to do. I wasn’t used to being home, because Tzippy and I spent our summer at her house, helping the rebbetzin with her cooking or babysitting a child of a congregant who had come to talk to her or Rabbi Schine about a problem. Tzippy said that I made the work fun, and even if we were peeling potatoes, the rebbetzin made us feel like we were part of something big and important.
In a few days, Neil would be leaving for college. I joined him out on the back stoop, and while he read his Sports Illustrated, I stared down the alley at a neighbor who was painting his garage yellow, wondering why he would bother. Nobody ever used this alley. I shrugged and turned my thoughts to the letter I’d write Tzippy once I felt better. Right now, she’d be settling into her aunt Ruthie’s cramped apartment. In our next exchange of letters, we’d take a break from the wedding talk and return to griping about the summer ending and her spinster aunt’s grumpiness and smelly gas.
The air was starting to reek of alewives—the bad part of living so close to Lake Michigan—so I went inside and up to my room. My parents’ bedroom door was open, and I could smell cigarette smoke, which meant my mother was alone. My father hated it when she smoked in their room. I thought about her face in the dark mikveh, the smoke floating out of her nose and mouth, and I darted toward my room.
“Barbara? Is that you?”
My room was right across the hall, so I couldn’t very well lie. “It’s me.”
“Come on in. I want to look at you,” my mother said, an exhalation of smoke cloaking her voice.
I walked through her door toward the chaise longue where she was reclining primly in her weekend denim skirt and cotton blouse, her legs crossed at the ankles. She took another drag of her Virginia Slim, and when she put it out in the saucer of her coffee cup, a cluster of black ashes fell onto the shag carpet. I blinked away the memory of the ashes dusting the mikveh tiles.
“Better clean those up or your father will have my head.” My mother winked. My father worshipped my mother, but she liked to pretend he suffered her. She gave me what my father had dubbed her “June smile.” Her lips curled spontaneously, but slowly, as if I were the sudden cause of her happiness, and then halfway through the smile, she looked right into my eyes, her gaze direct, yet shy. The June smile made people do nice things for her, so I spent hours in the mirror trying to mimic it, to no avail.
I knelt down to help her clean up the ashes, and as she bent over, I could see the top of one of her full slips, cream-colored silk with a built-in lacy bra and a pink rose with a green stem sewn between the small cups. My mother bought her lingerie from a fancy boutique in Whitefish Bay. Once when she wasn’t home, I tried on one of her slips. It fit me perfectly, and I felt like a bony Sophia Loren.
She sat back on the chaise longue and folded the corner of a page of The Winds of War. My mother and I gobbled up fiction without chewing. We went to the library once a week and came home with our arms full of books. “I was just going to sneak in a chapter, but I guess I got a little carried away,” she said impishly, patting a spot next to her. The phone rang.
“Do you mind?” she asked. She hated talking on the phone so much that we had only one phone and it was in our kitchen.
I ran downstairs, breathless by the time I answered.
“Barbara?” Instantly I recognized the rebbetzin’s voice. She and Tzippy pronounced my name “Barb-a-ra,” with an accent that was a mix of Brooklyn and Yiddish.
“Hello, rebbetzin.”
“How’s your head?”
I wrapped the curly phone cord around my finger. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“Good. Please tell your mother that I’m home and that she can come by now.”
I thought of all the congregants who waited patiently for their time with the rebbetzin, and here she was summoning my mother to the shul. My mother would go eagerly, regardless of her mood. Of all the places in the wor
ld, she was at her most peaceful when she was sitting at the Schines’ kitchen table, her foot tucked under her opposite leg, dropping sugar cubes in her tea, listening to the rebbetzin explain a Jewish law and scrawling notes furiously on one of Rabbi Schine’s legal pads. Then she organized the rebbetzin’s thoughts into chewable nuggets and transferred them to index cards just like the ones the rebbetzin used to write down recipes for my mother. The rebbetzin got nervous when she had to speak in front of a group, but she could do it if she had her cards and a chance to practice in front of my mother. My pride in my mother’s role in the shul was a life raft that I clung to at school when the kids either teased me about my long skirts or looked right through me. Yesterday, my mother had poked a hole in that raft, a thought that turned from unpleasant to scary and then evaporated inside me, all within in a matter of seconds.
I returned to my mother’s room and sat down where she had patted the cushion. “That was the rebbetzin, she wants you to come over.”
“Okay, but first you. Feeling better?” She traced my hairline with her fingertips, and I could smell nicotine and her lavender soap.
“Just a little tired, that’s all.” I was still knocked out from my migraine.
“Too tired to come to the Schines’ with me? I’m going to help the rebbetzin with the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur talk she’s giving next week.” Her eyes were bright. “We’re expecting a big group at the shul.”
“No, thanks.”
“No fun without Tzippy, huh?” She patted my knee.
She was one hundred percent my mother again: inhaling novels that the rebbetzin might not approve of, smoking while my father was out of the house, and putting aside her book and cigarettes to assist the rebbetzin, all the while making me feel like I was her accomplice.
“You going to be okay, Sweet B?” She squeezed my hand and held it.
“I think so.” I was going to be more than okay. The sound of my nickname on her lips felt like a gift, the wrapping paper her voice, as soft as the cloth she used to clean her silver. Her eyes radiated love as she picked up her dirty coffee cup, roused herself from her chaise, and prepared to go off and help the rebbetzin reach out to women who relied on the Schines to show them the way back to Hashem.
The four of us ate an early supper that night so we could watch Walter Cronkite together. Over my mother’s leftover Shabbos chicken, my father started ranting about Nixon and Agnew and the whole lot of liars. They should all resign, like Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and John Dean, he said. When my mother politely pointed out that John Dean had been fired, Neil winked at me, and we laughed until my father told us to pipe down. I told myself that things had returned to normal, that whatever had happened in the mikveh was over and my old mother was here to stay.
Later, in bed, I was fretting about the mikveh again when my parents’ door opened and I heard my mother’s light tread on the stairs. I wanted her to assure me once and for all that we were okay. I pulled back the covers, leaped out of bed, and ran down the steps, practically tripping over the hem of my nightgown. I looked for her in the den, assuming I’d find her tucked into a corner of the couch, smoking. She’d take my hand, lead me to my room, sit at the foot of my bed, and listen to my worries about her smudged lipstick. She’d rub my feet until my whole body felt like mush. She’d soak up my fears like a paper towel on a juice spill.
She wasn’t smoking in the den. She wasn’t in the kitchen or sunroom either. “Mom?” I called quietly as I moved toward the back of the house, stubbing my big toe on the hall coat rack. I opened the door, and the strong lake breeze sent a shiver through me. I ran barefoot down the steps into the deserted alley, past the freshly painted garage, my feet slamming against the pavement, my toe throbbing.
“Mom!”
The word was swallowed up by the familiar grumble of the blue Dodge idling in the alley, five houses past ours. I watched my mother walk to the car and glide into the Shabbos goy’s arms as if she were his Olympic figure-skating partner. I watched the Shabbos goy open the passenger door and the wind blow my mother’s hair wild.
3
The night I caught my mother sneaking off with the Shabbos goy I was afraid that she’d never come home. She did. For the rest of the week, I lay awake every night waiting for her to creep out of the house. She stayed put until the following Tuesday, and when I heard the faint creak of the steps, I put my hands over my eyes, mouthing the words of the Shema prayer—Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One—into my palm, begging God to please send her to the den to smoke. Then I heard the back door shut. I sprang out of bed, went over to my window, and watched her drive off.
I turned on my lamp and opened my nightstand drawer, where I kept Tzippy’s letters. I wanted to reread the one that had arrived earlier today.
September 3, 1973
B”H
Dear Barbara,
I’m sorry about your horrible headache. Your mom probably told you that I came over to say goodbye. I took our usual walk on the bluff while my parents had their Shabbos nap, and then Mrs. Berger came over to talk to my mother about a problem, and I played with her baby, Dovid. He’s not as cute as Yossi, but Yossi only likes you and Mrs. Kessler holding him.
Aunt Ruthie didn’t get much happier over the summer. As scared as I am to get married, I think it would be worse to wind up like her, alone at thirty. Now I worry that the shadchen might not find someone for me either. You’re lucky you get to pick your own husband.
School starts tomorrow. I’m going to wear the new maroon skirt my mom sewed for me. I miss you more than ever. My cousins are nicer than they used to be, and I don’t mind sharing a room with them anymore. But they’re not you. I wish we hadn’t lost our last afternoon together.
Love,
Tzippy
I wrote Tzippy two letters. The one I mailed was in direct response to hers and contained a newsy account of my week. The other letter I kept. Writing it made me feel like Anne Frank, calling out to a best friend who lived outside of her crazy world, one who would never read her words.
September 6, 1973
B”H
Dear Tzippy,
My mother is the Shabbos goy’s Annette! She has been sneaking off with him while my dad snores in their bed. He picks her up in the alley, and I saw them one night.
It’s so obvious now. My mother’s moods got worse back in the spring when the Shabbos goy started working for your parents. Your last Shabbos here, when we were supposed to meet in the mikveh, I found my mother smoking there, hatless and her lipstick a mess. She was deep into one of her mists, and I just wanted to run away from her and the spooky mikveh. I knew she wasn’t alone because before I walked in, I swear I heard her whispering to someone. I replay that morning over and over in my head, and I can only come to one conclusion. The Shabbos goy was hiding somewhere in that dark mikveh. Writing this spooks and shames me at the same time.
I don’t know what to do. I want to tell your mom about it, but if I do she and your father will have to kick my mom out of the shul. If I don’t, I will betray my father, your parents, the shul, and God. Sometimes I worry that I will crumble under the weight of this secret.
Love,
Barbara
Tuesday became my mother’s designated evening with the Shabbos goy, like bowling night or her Thursday-morning beauty parlor appointment. Her lie was like the ugly orange sofa that came with our house. My parents had sworn they’d replace it, but they grew accustomed to the pall it cast over the entire living room.
Mrs. Kessler saved me during the months of my mother’s affair. My high school classes ended at one o’clock, and I’d rush to the Schines’ and go straight to the nook, where I’d sweep scraps of felt from the floor, sit quietly next to Mrs. Kessler and help her sort and staple, or watch Yossi whenever his babysitter called in sick.
On the first Tuesday in October, I found a distressed Mrs. Kessler in the corner of the nook, trying to engage the Isen twins with Yossi braying and fussing in her arm
s. Six months before, their father, a founding member of the community, had run off with his Gentile paralegal. Mrs. Isen was likely upstairs crying her eyes out and talking with the rebbetzin.
Mrs. Kessler looked up at me, and the gratitude in her eyes made me feel like Superwoman. I looked at the sullen Bini and Liba Isen and flashed on a memory of the two of them giggling as they played cat’s cradle in the hallway of the shul.
“It’s my lucky day!” I marched over to the supply closet and grabbed a ball of green yarn and a pair of scissors. I felt all eyes on me as I cut a long piece of yarn and tied it tightly at the ends. I sat on the floor across from the girls, huddled together on a beanbag chair, and threaded the yarn through my hands. Tzippy and I used to play hours of cat’s cradle when we were in second grade, the Isen girls’ age. I extended my hands to Liba first. “Go ahead.” A smile began to form on her lips. I had her. She grabbed the crossed strings, and within seconds the three of us were pinching and passing while a mesmerized Yossi looked on. After we’d played a dozen rounds, Mrs. Kessler cupped my shoulder. “Well, girls, your mother is here.”
I looked up to see Mrs. Isen standing at the door. The pale green scarf she wore to cover her hair made her skin look sallow, and her blouse hung loosely. Only months ago, she was so plump that the zipper on her new Shabbos dress threatened to burst. My throat closed up. What would my father look like if he ever found out about my mother and the Shabbos goy? Bini tugged on my arm, snapping me out of my thoughts.
“Can we play again with Barbara?” she asked, her face bright and relaxed.
“I hope so! In the meantime, you two practice.” I handed her the yarn, hugged her, and then Mrs. Kessler and I walked the girls to the door.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Isen said to Mrs. Kessler.
Mrs. Kessler deposited Yossi in his stroller and slid her arm through mine. “It was all Barbara. She’s a magician with kids.” In Mrs. Kessler’s presence, I could fly.
I didn’t want to part with Mrs. Kessler or Yossi or my powers, so I offered to accompany her home.
Washing the Dead Page 3
