Washing the Dead

by Michelle Brafman

  I stowed the envelope in the drawer of my nightstand and went downstairs, pausing for a moment in the kitchen. Through the silvery mesh of the screen door, I stared at Sam’s silhouette, his trim body held in repose, his full head of salt-and-pepper hair, his strong cheekbones.

  “Barbara?” Sam called. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here.” Tahara. Tahara. I couldn’t wait for the house to quiet so I could Google the word again in peace.

  I could hear Lili’s friends leaving. I bade them goodbye, and Sam gave Lili a piggyback ride up the steps. It felt good to hear her giggle. Sam and I fell into bed and held each other. “She’s going to be okay, Barbara,” he whispered into my hair. He said these words at the beginning of every crisis.

  I waited for his breathing to grow regular, then untangled myself from his warm body and went downstairs. I rarely kept any big news from Sam.

  I sat in the dark at my tiny desk, I needed to think this tahara thing through carefully, alone. The Schines had erased my mother’s existence and by default, mine. I was nineteen. The whole shul found out about my mother and the Shabbos goy, which meant I lost Tzippy, the Schines, and Mrs. Kessler all at once. I never thanked Mrs. Kessler for keeping me company during my mother’s affair and shining a bright light on my professional path. She knew that teaching preschool was my calling before I did. But it was more than that—my work had served as an oasis from the disruption in my childhood, and grounded me enough as an adult to make and sustain a brand-new life with Sam. In exchange, I’d squandered her love, closing myself off to her for all these years, years when I could have visited her and exchanged notes about our students. She could have remained a mentor, and maybe I could have become her friend.

  Mrs. Kessler was the only person who could draw me back to the Schines’ shul. And the rebbetzin knew it, in the way she’d known to arrange for me to volunteer for Mrs. Kessler in the first place. Despite how busy she was with the shul and raising her kids, she made time to look deep inside all of us and find what we needed and wanted most, which she’d shrewdly match with a specific Jewish custom or job in the shul. Worshiping the rebbetzin was a hard habit to break, but I’d done it. Or had I?

  It didn’t matter right now. I would put my feelings toward the rebbetzin aside and perform Mrs. Kessler’s tahara. According to my Google research, the tahara is the purest possible act of kindness because the recipient can never pay you back. I wanted to give Mrs. Kessler this pure love. I owed it to her.

  The next morning, I woke up early and phoned Theresa, my teaching assistant, to tell her that I’d have to miss our prep day because of Lili’s injury and that she’d have to set up the classroom alone. Barely five feet tall, with a mop of hair dyed magenta and thick-lensed glasses that magnified her eyes, she ate ramen noodles every day for lunch and supplemented her measly pay by taking care of people’s children and pets. When I apologized to Theresa for dumping so much work on her, she responded predictably, “You take good care of your girl and leave setting up the room to me.” Her puppy-like response made me want to jump through the phone line and scratch her scalp the way I used to do to our late black lab, Richard.

  I felt bad about missing setup. Creating a warm and cozy nest for my students was one of my favorite parts of my job, and this year Sarah, the director, had given me extra money for new manipulatives and blocks. Last Friday morning, I’d picked up some bins at Staples, and ever since I loaded them into the trunk of my car, I’d been itching to wipe them down with 409 and organize the new materials by color.

  Lili hobbled into the kitchen. She was never chatty when she first woke up, but normally she’d have run miles before breakfast and would arrive at the table flushed from her workout, hungry, and cheerful. Today, she stared down at her plate, picking at her pancakes and spilling maple syrup on her T-shirt.

  “Way to start the day,” she said.

  Sam entered the kitchen, freshly shorn and handsome in a pale pink Oxford shirt that showed off the tan he would maintain throughout the fall by playing golf with his clients. He glanced at Lili slumped over her plate and raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Lil, I’ll take you to school,” he said.

  I was glad Sam could take her because he could help her in and out of the car more easily. Sam was good with her, but we had an unspoken agreement that I would shepherd Lili’s care. During the most painful and frustrating months of her academic struggles, I’d guided her, trying to echo Sam’s chipper confidence. Inside, her unhappiness consumed me to a degree that I knew was unhealthy.

  Lili went to the bathroom to change her shirt, and I walked over to Sam and kissed his smooth cheek, letting my face linger against his and breathing him in. He’d been wearing Polo since his fraternity days, mixed with his own clean scent, and he always smelled like sun-dried laundry.

  “You’re sniffing me.” He laughed and stroked my hair. We both knew I did this when I was troubled.

  “I am.”

  “It’s an ankle injury. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” He drew me to him.

  “What if she can’t run?” I asked.

  “We’ll figure something else out.” He paused. “Or I should say, you will.” His tone was self- deprecating.

  “I don’t want to wrinkle your shirt.” I pulled away, sniffing him again, but his scent wasn’t working to allay my other big fear, seeing the rebbetzin after all these years.

  Lili returned to the kitchen, and before I kissed them both goodbye, I told her I’d pick her up at noon for her appointment with Dr. Nezbith.

  It was a warm day, but out of respect for the Orthodox funeral home, I dressed in a black ankle-length skirt, a matching long-sleeved T-shirt, and an old pair of sneakers. It took me only twenty minutes to drive to the west side, a part of town I rarely visited. As I neared Beckerman’s Butcher Shop, I remembered how in exchange for my mother’s June smile, Mr. Beckerman would give her the best cuts of meat and me a free roll filled with his specialty, pickled tongue and spicy mustard. Transactions like that made me feel as though my mother and I were gliding through her errands in a golden chariot.

  An old ache for my mother seized me: I remembered her comforting me the first September that Tzippy left to study in Brooklyn. I held in my tears until I got home, where she was waiting for me with two tall glasses of Nestlé Quik. We sipped pink milk through striped straws while I told her how the popular girls had pointed me toward the “reject” lunch table. She looked as sad as I felt. I had a good cry, and then she fixed the grammar on the English homework I’d done during lunch period to avoid socializing.

  On impulse, I took out my cell phone and dialed her house. After my father died, thirty years ago, she’d moved up north, to Steven’s Point. She never remarried. I waited for her to pick up, imagining her tending to her tomato plants in her oversized blue work shirt, rolled-up jeans, and straw hat, à la Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond, her cheeks rosy from the sun and her exertion. She was an excellent gardener.

  “Mom.” I should hang up.

  “Hello, darling. How lovely to hear your voice.” Normally, my mother’s diction was so perfect that she could narrate a book on tape. Today, her voice sounded less dressed.

  “Were you out gardening?” Two years ago she’d retired from her job in the university’s history department. She’d started out as a secretary, but the professors had come to rely on her research skills. Her work had been a safe topic for us; now we spoke incessantly about her planting and pruning.

  “The weatherman is predicting a frost tonight.”

  I cut off the usual small talk so I wouldn’t lose the courage to share my news. “I’m calling because I wanted to tell you that Mrs. Kessler died.”

  “Oh, that’s such a shame, dear,” she said absently, as if I’d told her that Lili had overfed her goldfish.

  “I thought you’d want to know.” Get off the phone, Barbara. You’re not going to get whatever it is that you’re looking for from her.

  “Sure I do,” sh
e said vaguely.

  “Mom, do you remember Mrs. Kessler?”

  My mother had a superb memory, but she paused for what seemed like five minutes.

  “Mrs. Kessler was the teacher who wore that gorgeous braid around her head,” she said as if she’d come up with the correct question to a Jeopardy! answer, which she often did when we watched the show as a family. Afterward, Neil and I would make our own game out of trying to stump my mother with arcane facts we’d looked up in the encyclopedia.

  “She was a lot more than a lady with a braid to me.” I wanted my mother to acknowledge how Mrs. Kessler had gotten me through calculus and taken me to buy new underpants and bras, and I wanted her to apologize for not doing these things herself. A spasm of poorly archived anger gripped me like a charley horse or a menstrual cramp.

  “Darling, do you have a hat to wear to the funeral?” she asked as if she were a mother who tended to such things and we were a family welcome in the Schines’ shul.

  Her question shocked me. “What?”

  “Do you have a hat, Barbara? You need to cover your head. You’re a married woman now,” she explained as if I’d gotten married just the other day.

  Neil had mentioned that my mother seemed confused lately, but I hadn’t paid much attention because the doctors suspected her new cholesterol medication might be the culprit.

  “I have a hat.”

  “Good. You know, my poor little tomato plants might have a time of it with that frost coming in.” Only now did the sympathy I’d sought over Mrs. Kessler’s death surface in her voice. “There’s no there there,” Sam always said when it came to my mother’s heart. I could see how he’d come to this conclusion, but then again, he’d never sat across from her and sipped fake strawberry milk.

  I couldn’t worry about her loopiness right now. I said a quick goodbye as I approached the funeral parlor, which was sandwiched between a Chinese takeout restaurant and a check-cashing business. We’d held my father’s funeral here, and I hadn’t seen the rebbetzin since a week after his death.

  My armpits were growing moist, and my oniony scent drew me back to a disturbing place I could not name. I wanted to turn around and drive home, exactly as I had the first time Sam took me to Little Switzerland, when I stood on top of the hill and prayed that a ski patrol would show up and carry me down. Had I thought through that ski trip or the call to my mother or Mrs. Kessler’s tahara beforehand, I would have made different choices. Now I had to maneuver myself down the mountain with as little damage as possible when I should be scouring bins with Theresa and catching up with my colleagues about their summer vacations.

  My shoulders were so tight that they hovered around my jaw. An old Toyota Camry pulled in next to me, and four women emerged. The rebbetzin turned toward me, her face brushed by the weak morning sunlight. She was foreign and familiar at the same time. The three younger women, perhaps in their early forties, all in long skirts and dark headscarves, lingered around the car as the rebbetzin walked toward me. My skin started to tingle. I’d forgotten how tall she was; she’d slouched so much of her life that her upper body had taken on the shape of a question mark. She was thinner, and her slenderness accentuated the architecture of her face. Her eyes had faded to a softer brown, but they hadn’t lost their glint.

  “Barbara,” she said.

  I wanted to say “Rivkah,” but my lips protested. Only my mother was allowed to call the rebbetzin by her name. “Hello.”

  “I’m glad you came.”

  “I had to.” I tried to sound neutral, but my voice trembled. “How did Mrs. Kessler die?”

  “Mrs. Kessler, aleha hashalom, she had a massive stroke,” the rebbetzin said.

  “No warning?”

  “No.”

  I let the news settle in for a few seconds before I asked about the funeral.

  “Tomorrow morning,” she said, and I remembered how after my father died, she tearily told me that my mother would no longer be welcome in the shul, informing me without words that the sight of me would make the Brisket Ladies and everyone else uncomfortable. Even now, when I said kaddish for my father on the anniversary of his death, I mourned the loss of the shul too.

  “Such a shame,” the rebbetzin said, and I saw a flash of sadness and something else as she looked at me. This time she wasn’t peering inside me, she was taking me in as I did with old students who came to visit me, but I never looked at them with the remorse, or maybe guilt, that flickered ever so briefly in the rebbetzin’s eyes. Yes, such a shame.

  She started to give me a hug, but I hesitated. She patted me on the back instead. Then she turned toward the car and motioned the women to join us.

  “Barbara, meet Chana Shapiro, head of our Chevra Kadisha, and two of our members, Aviva Minsky and Devora Klein.”

  “The Chevra Kadisha is our burial society,” Chana said.

  Even without my research, my old knowledge of Hebrew helped me figure out what a Chevra Kadisha meant.

  “I’m sorry about your teacher, may her name be of blessed memory,” Chana said, and Aviva and Devora chimed in. They all had the rebbetzin’s Brooklyn accent, and I figured they were each married to one of the rabbis the Schines had hired to teach at their new yeshiva.

  “Thank you,” I said stiffly.

  “Are you familiar with the tahara ritual?” Chana asked.

  “I’ve never done one, but I know what it is.” I knew as much about the ritual as you could discover from a thorough internet search.

  “Just follow us, you’ll be fine,” the rebbetzin said with no trace of her earlier vulnerability.

  The five of us walked into the funeral parlor lobby, and I vaguely remembered how the rebbetzin had held my mother’s hand and ushered us inside to the front row, a few feet from where Rabbi Schine was about to eulogize my father.

  “Hello, Yossi,” the rebbetzin said as we encountered a man coming out of the restroom.

  Yossi. His round hazel eyes were bloodshot from fatigue and grief. He’d grown into a lanky man with a small pooch belly like his father’s. He’d lost most of his hair, a cruel reminder of the time that had passed since his baby fuzz tickled the underside of my neck.

  “I’m so sorry, Yossi,” I offered.

  “Thank you.” His words fell from his mouth like tears. I wished he were still a baby so I could scoop him up in my arms and distract him with a cookie. I couldn’t tell if he remembered me. How could he? He was barely a toddler when I left the community. Even now he might be ignorant of the shame my mother had brought upon the shul, or maybe he knew of my family’s shanda and didn’t see me as damaged goods but simply as a person who belonged to the burial society.

  The rebbetzin walked over to Yossi. Men and women were not allowed to touch unless they were married, so she couldn’t hug him, but her mere arrival seemed to relax him. The rebbetzin motioned the three women to go ahead, and they responded as if they were used to taking her cues. She remained at Yossi’s side as I followed the Chevra members down a long carpeted corridor to the steps leading to the basement. An older man in a rumpled suit and yarmulke sat slouched on a comfortable chair in front of the door, reciting psalms from a prayer book on his lap. He was the shomer, and so it was his job to sit with the body.

  Before we entered the preparation room, Aviva touched my arm. “Are you ready?”

  “I think so.”

  The room was cold and quiet. The floor tiles were white and freshly scrubbed. A table lined with nail polish remover and canisters brimming with Q-tips, cotton balls, and toothpicks sat on our side of the curtain. The empty pine casket lay open near the window, waiting for Mrs. Kessler.

  The rebbetzin joined us. In silence, we washed our hands, pouring a cup of water alternately over each one. We put on rubber gloves and aprons similar to the ones I wore to paint with my students. Everyone else approached Mrs. Kessler, but I stayed behind. Although I’d never smelled death, I recognized the scent, acrid and fishy at the same time. A curtain surrounded Mrs. Kessler’
s body, yet the cloth did not spare me from feeling her absence. It filled the room.

  A sick hollowness was growing inside me. The rebbetzin turned around, and the compassion on her face loosened a brick in the wall I’d constructed between us. I stalled by fiddling with the string on my apron, knowing that she’d wait until I was ready. I’d never be ready. I looked up at her, and she gently pulled back the curtain. I walked toward Mrs. Kessler’s body, covered with a sheet and stretched out on a porcelain bed with a drain that emptied into a sink at the foot.

  I glanced toward the rebbetzin, who lifted the sheet from Mrs. Kessler’s face. I shut my eyes for a few seconds before I looked. I recognized her cheekbones, her strong jaw and nose, but the muscles surrounding them had slackened. She looked asleep, but not in a way that suggested a nap or even a coma. I beckoned her spirit as I had done last night, but Mrs. Kessler was dead. This fact clanked against the floor of my heart. A pressure formed behind my eyes.

  Mrs. Kessler was gone. Gone. Gone.

  Gone. I am six years old, and I am sitting across the table from my mother, eating my after-school snack and watching her smoke. I spread peanut butter on my apple with a paring knife, wondering why she hasn’t noticed that I’m using it or that I’ve lost my front tooth. She is looking through me. We’re sitting so close that I can see her eyelashes, thicker than my doll Cassandra’s, but she cannot see me. This is the first disappearance that I remember, but I now know that her leaving was gradual, an accretion of tiny moments that led to her affair and her slow exit from our lives. You don’t just up and walk out on a family without preparing properly. After I’ve eaten most of my apple, she returns to herself and tells me to please put down that sharp knife. Later she sneaks into my bedroom and puts a quarter under my pillow, and the next morning I pretend I didn’t see her and that I still believe in the Tooth Fairy. I do, and I don’t. She is my fairy, sometimes make-believe, but still mostly bearing treasures.

  Now I was left to mourn both Mrs. Kessler and the hole she had filled for me. My mother was that hole, scary and deep and still tugging at me. I was circling it, hovering between life and death. I touched Mrs. Kessler. Her forehead was cold. I leaned into the body that was no longer Mrs. Kessler and put my fingers to her lips, colorless and thin. They used to curl readily into an amused smile she reserved for children—a smile that I’d appropriated for my students, along with her tranquilizing voice. I wanted to kiss those lips, to breathe life back into her. Her mouth hung open stiffly, which seemed undignified, so I closed it by cupping the rubbery skin of her chin and firmly pushing it up toward her nose, as though I were manipulating a mannequin.