Washing the Dead

by Michelle Brafman

  I put my hand on Mrs. Kessler’s cheek, just as she had done to me so often. Her skin had yellowed. A line of age spots mirrored the curve of one of her sparse eyebrows. Thin gray strands had replaced the brown hair that had been too lustrous to cover with a sheitel. I brushed them away from her eyes. I wondered if I would ever be able to touch my mother with such tenderness, alive or dead.

  Chana tore a white sheet into small sections and filled a bucket with warm water. She put a drop against her wrist to test the temperature, as you would with a baby’s bottle. “We have to make sure that the water is warm. We treat the dead with the same respect as we do the living,” she told me.

  “For the sake of modesty and respect, the body remains covered at all times, except for the part we are washing,” the rebbetzin said, instructing me to wash from the top down, right side taking precedence over left, front over back. She washed in and behind the ears, sealing water from the lips, a courtesy offered to lungs no longer vulnerable to drowning. I cleaned under the folds of her breasts, once so full of milk that they’d strained the buttons of her blouse. Her areolas were gray and her breasts lay flat against her skin, as crinkly as an elephant’s. I lost all track of the now and the then, and I felt as though I were washing baby Lili, plump and pink and practically nippleless. Memory kindled a fire made of grief and love, and a holy heat tore through my body.

  Aviva prepared three buckets of water. No more than three buckets were to be poured in a continuous stream over the body. Devora and I trailed Chana as she walked alongside Mrs. Kessler, and when Chana had nearly emptied her pail, I began pouring. Devora did the same for me so we could sustain a steady stream of water.

  The rebbetzin handed me a laminated piece of paper, and I read from Ezekiel in Hebrew. My voice trembled as I spoke with the fluency of someone who had learned the language as a child. “And I will pour upon you pure water and you will be purified of all your defilements, and from all your abominations I will purify you.” How many buckets of water would it take to purify my mother’s defilements?

  We all swayed back and forth as if we were praying at the Wailing Wall, our rocking creating the effect of a hypnotist waving a chain in front of my eyes and telling me that I was growing very, very sleepy. I was transported to my canopied bed where I’d sat in my Snoopy nightgown, instructing my mother with great authority when to bow and move her feet three steps forward and backward while she practiced reciting the Amidah prayer. My mother hadn’t known a word of Hebrew before she met the Schines, but she was a quick study and practiced so hard that she could almost pass as an FFB, Frum From Birth, someone who had been born into an ultra-Orthodox home, someone like me. Standing before the body of Mrs. Kessler, I longed for the version of my mother who so desperately wanted to make the Schines’ world a home for us, and my longing devoured my grief.

  I hovered between my childhood bedroom and the tahara room while we tenderly patted Mrs. Kessler with a white towel as if she might grow cold from a draft. We shrouded her body, and then Aviva, Devora, Chana, and I lifted her, giving me a new understanding of the term “dead weight.” The rebbetzin slid the casket under Mrs. Kessler’s elevated body, and we lowered her inside. I couldn’t bear the sight of her loaded into a box, so I let the other women finish up while I removed my apron, gloves, and shoe coverings. I turned toward the rebbetzin, my body humming from the godliness of what we had just done together.

  “You performed a mitzvah of the highest order,” she said.

  I put my hand to my mouth, only to find the half smile my father had worn when Rabbi Schine asked our family to host one of his new recruits for Shabbos. After decades of exile from the rebbetzin’s community, I was proud that she’d tapped me for this holy ritual and that I’d performed well.

  I wanted more praise from the rebbetzin, more Hebrew words on my tongue, more synchronized washing and swaddling of my beloved Mrs. Kessler, and more time travel. I wanted to go back to the Schines’ sanctuary, where I had sat with Mrs. Kessler and Tzippy and my mother, talking to God, believing that He could hear me.

  I couldn’t go back in time. My wants morphed into a wily rage that prickled my ears and neck. My old instinct was to quash it immediately by reminding myself that my mother hadn’t beaten or abused me and that the rebbetzin had every right to protect her congregation from our family’s disgrace, but my mother had torched my home, my shul, and the rebbetzin had stood by and watched, and indulging myself in the luxury of hating her for that, if only for a minute, brought me a bitter relief from my sadness. I lingered in my anger for a few moments before I started walking toward the door.

  “Barbara,” the rebbetzin said. “Please turn around. We don’t turn our backs on the dead.” She walked backward toward the door.

  I followed her instructions, never taking my eyes off the pine box where Mrs. Kessler lay. We filed out to the parking lot in silence, and the rebbetzin handed me a water bottle from her purse. “Wash your hands and then put the bottle on the ground. We’re not allowed to touch each other until we’ve washed.”

  I took the cap off the plastic bottle and poured the water over my fingers as the rebbetzin turned to Chana, Devora, and Aviva. “Go ahead. I want to speak with Barbara for a second.”

  Aviva stroked my arm before she walked to her car. “May Mrs. Kessler’s name be a blessed memory.”

  “Thank you,” I murmured, and Chana and Devora offered me their sympathies, too.

  A man in dreadlocks passed us on his way to the check-cashing business, leaving a sweet smoky scent in his wake. I almost chuckled at the incongruity of the rebbetzin and the Rastafarian.

  “How’s Neil?” The rebbetzin smiled at her mention of his name. Everyone loved my brother. He was like my dad that way.

  “Busy, happy. Good.” While she didn’t deserve any information about my family, I couldn’t help telling her that he’d taken over our father’s orthodontia practice or about his lovable wife and his three sons, one named Sheldon after our father. Neil and Jenny lived a few miles away and were a regular part of our lives.

  She took in my every word, then paused for a few seconds and asked about my family.

  I told her that I had a husband and a daughter, and was tempted to add that the parents of my students had deemed me some kind of parenting guru, that my daughter had lots of friends and a sparkling neshama, and that my marriage was easy and satisfying on every level. Instead, I asked after her sons.

  She smiled proudly when she told me about their success in what mattered most to her and Rabbi Schine, touching Jewish souls. The least charismatic one lived in Milwaukee and would inherit Rabbi Schine’s pulpit one day. The fiery ones had been detailed to Portland and Biloxi and had built thriving communities from nothing.

  Then the rebbetzin volunteered an update on Tzippy without my having to ask. “She’s living in Hong Kong and is quite a rebbetzin herself,” she said with no more familiarity in her voice than when she’d described her boys’ doings.

  “I don’t doubt that.” Tzippy was a natural. My heart was open and raw, and the mention of her name brought back the old pain over losing the closest thing I had to a sister.

  We let Tzippy loiter in the air for a few seconds.

  “She’s the grandmother of eleven. Kein ayin harah,” the rebbetzin said.

  “Eleven!” I put my hands to my cheeks and shook my head. Tzippy was married with a baby while I was student teaching and living in an efficiency apartment on the east side, convinced that I’d stay single and childless forever.

  The rebbetzin broke the lightness of the moment. “How’s your mother?”

  Blood rushed up from my neck to my temples. Knowing the rebbetzin, she probably sensed the hateful things I’d been thinking in the tahara room. My guard went back up. “She’s fine, thank you.”

  “She’s okay?” the rebbetzin said as if she possessed some knowledge about my mother’s welfare. Had they been in touch? Or was she using her superpowers?

  I said what I had not
yet admitted to myself. “She’s having memory issues.”

  “Serious issues?” She used the tone she would in counseling a troubled congregant.

  I wasn’t some naive recruit. She was a big phony, coming back to me after all these years with her concern. I wanted to hurt her. “So serious that she thinks we’re still welcome in your shul. She reminded me that I’m a married woman now and I need to cover my hair at Mrs. Kessler’s funeral.”

  The rebbetzin looked at me as if I were a naughty child who was acting out trying to win the love that she was ready and willing to provide. I was. Fifty-three years old, and my naked need lay exposed. I still wanted to climb into Mrs. Kessler’s lap, and I still craved knowing that some maternal being was watching out for me, a security I freely gave Lili and my students every day.

  “Has your mother seen a doctor?”

  “Neil and his wife took her to see a neurologist last week.” What was I thinking sharing such personal family information with the rebbetzin?

  The rebbetzin looked into my eyes, unearthing the hidden parts of me: the little girl who had taken such pride in her mother’s coveted seat next to the rebbetzin in shul and the teenager who had been cast out with her mother like Hagar and Ishmael. I was no longer Barbara Pupnick, but I was losing hold of Mrs. Sam Blumfield by the minute.

  “It’s probably the medication.” I told the rebbetzin about the cholesterol drugs, and the more I talked, the louder my inner voice insisted that her memory loss was more serious. It was the same voice that had spoken to me yesterday in the emergency room when I saw the doctor’s expression as he read Lili’s X-rays.

  “She’ll need you.” The rebbetzin’s words bore the weight of Jewish law, halacha that demanded that I offer food, shelter, medical care, and exquisite, relentless respect to my mother and father. Tzippy and I never dared sit in our parents’ assigned chairs at the dinner table, and we rose when they entered the room.

  I studied her face, searching her eyes for some trace of the hurt and humiliation my mother had caused her. They looked the same as always, full of purpose and principle. And love. She could put her old wounds aside for God and for me.

  “Our relationship is complex,” I said, “but things are fine between us.” I tried to strain the defensiveness from my words. Despite my little lapse a few minutes earlier, I’d learned to coexist peacefully with my mother, to live without her investment or love.

  The rebbetzin patted her heart with her open palm. “I will help you find your way back to her.”

  “What?” I didn’t know whether to be shocked or angry. This made no sense at all. Why would the rebbetzin want to be a part of our lives after shunning our family? And why would I want to find my way back to my mother? She’d cost me the nook and everything good about my childhood.

  “It’s important, Barbara.”

  I stared at the rebbetzin’s hand flat against her sweater and tasted something like bile in my mouth. Where had she been when my mother bailed on me? Did she think we could resume our old relationship without addressing our years of silence? I took a second now to compose myself before I said something I would regret. I said tersely, “I’m fine, but I appreciate your concern.”

  The rebbetzin’s eyes bored into me. She knew I wasn’t fine, but if I chose to let my mother back into my heart, the rebbetzin would be the last person I’d ask for guidance.

  I thanked her for allowing me the honor of doing this mitzvah for Mrs. Kessler and said goodbye. She reached into her pocket and handed me a piece of paper with her phone number. She didn’t need to; I still knew it.

  “I have to go. I have to take my daughter to the doctor.” I folded the paper, turned on my heel, walked to my car, and drove back toward my life.

  5

  While I was performing Mrs. Kessler’s tahara, Sam had left three messages on my cell, all of them telling me that Lili’s appointment had been moved up an hour, which meant that I wouldn’t have time to stop home and change before I picked her up. I needed to shower badly. The taste of death lingered on my tongue, and the onion stink was back. I recalled the initial onset of this horrid odor, the morning I discovered I was carrying a girl. I’d since read somewhere that perspiration has no scent; it’s the stress hormone cortisol that makes our sweat smell bad.

  I pulled into the parking lot of Lili’s high school, feeling both wired and sleepy, as though I’d been roused from a nap that had ventured too far into the REM sleep cycle. I ran into Sheri Jacobstein in the lobby. Sheri and I had stayed friends since Lili and her son Max were born. She was my fashion consultant and a buddy who made a place for me in her book club, on her PTA committees, and at other such adult lunch tables; she felt like home to me—well, the home I’d created with Sam. I adored her. She grinned, revealing her newly whitened teeth against her tanned skin, a contrast that resembled that of a film negative. She eyed my sneakers, the unseasonably warm shirt, and the long, frumpy skirt, and I folded my arms across my chest to ward off a hug. I didn’t want her to smell me.

  “You okay?” She stared at me.

  “Fine.” I smiled, and she looked at my outfit again, but I didn’t explain. I wouldn’t have known where to begin.

  “Lunch next Thursday, right?” she asked, and I told her that I was looking forward to it, which I was. She’d have her live-in housekeeper poach us salmon, we’d indulge in a glass of white wine, and I’d feel pampered. I’d relax into the details of her bounty: a prohibitively expensive rug she’d just purchased or the theme she was considering for the synagogue’s annual gala. Last year it was The Brady Bunch, and almost all the women dressed as Marcia, who was the ultimate shiksa goddess, according to Sheri’s husband, Brad. I went as Alice because I admired her can-do attitude and her ability to keep the Brady household running smoothly.

  “I’m sure I’ll see you before then,” I said as we parted. I couldn’t wait to shed these clothes and return to my capris and a tank top. Sheri had advised me to wear sleeveless shirts and dresses as much as possible because my Michelle Obama triceps were to die for. My mother still had pretty arms, even in her seventies, but she never showed them off until she left the Schines’ community. I’d felt self-conscious wearing sleeveless clothing well into my twenties.

  Sheri disappeared into one of the offices seconds before the bell rang and the halls filled up with students. Lili came limping down the sophomore corridor with Megan, Kara—carrying Lili’s backpack, which we’d joked equaled half her body weight—and Taylor, who stood on the outskirts of the triangle. Taylor had recently moved to Milwaukee from Boston, and Lili had befriended her during their summer cross-country practices. My daughter gathered people effortlessly. Like my mother and me, she had full lips that didn’t quite fit over her teeth, giving the impression that she was always smiling. Although she struggled with geometry and spelling, she possessed an uncanny ability to read people. She had inherited Sam’s knack for zeroing in on what mattered to people most and engaging them in conversation about their passion. Sam often reminded me of this when she was struggling in school. “You don’t need to worry about that one,” he’d tell me. “She can sell ice to Eskimos, and that’s what matters in life.”

  “Thanks, girls,” I said to Lili’s friends.

  Kara handed me the backpack, which might well have equaled half of Sam’s body weight.

  “How you doing, Lil?” I was so happy to see her that I put my arm around her.

  “Whoa, Mom.” She recoiled.

  “Did you like eat a raw onion or something?”

  “You don’t care for my new fragrance?” I put my wrist to my nose and breathed in.

  “And what’s up with the shoes and skirt?”

  “What’s wrong with my new look?” I joked.

  Lili studied me for what seemed like five minutes, and I squirmed under her scrutiny, knowing that my diversions weren’t working. I feared that she’d push me further and I’d have to fib. I was a horrible liar. But then she laughed. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong
with it, you just look kind of Amish.”

  I giggled too enthusiastically, more out of relief than amusement.

  During the drive to Felix’s office, Lili regaled me with stories about running friends who had suffered tiny setbacks after their injuries and bounced back fast. Her voice was tinny, filled with fear and hope, as mine had been when I described my mother’s memory loss to the rebbetzin. Neither one of us wanted to ponder life for Lili if she couldn’t run. In seventh grade, she’d started exhibiting what the specialists called soft signs of ADHD, that—combined with a mild learning disability, a drastic increase in her homework, and the onset of puberty—made our efforts to help her with schoolwork a bloody battleground. I was so wrecked by her despondency I barely ate that year. Sam and I were just about to put her on Ritalin when a miracle occurred. One day in gym class, she up and ran a sub-six-minute mile. Boom. An athlete was born. She earned the nickname Lightning Bolt Lili, and with her new status and ability to concentrate, she turned into a solid student and peace returned to our house.

  “Lil, we’ll wait and see what Dr. Nezbith has to say,” I offered, trying my best to sound hopeful.

  She jumped on the last word of my sentence. “You mean you think he’s going to bench me for the rest of the season?”

  I wanted to tell her that she was going to be just fine, like Sam would, but Sam believed it because life hadn’t offered him many bad surprises. He said that I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. “Let’s stay positive, Lil.”