“That’s what I was trying to do, Mom.” She turned her face toward the window.
“I know you were.” Once we were settled in the office, I thumbed through a Newsweek, but I couldn’t concentrate on Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing. Lili sat next to me, jiggling her good heel against the floor.
“One of the girls on the track team sprained her ankle, Rebecca Freed, and it was five times this size—” she said, her voice thin and sweet.
“Lili Blumfield.” A pert twentysomething with a diamond stud in her nostril appeared with Lili’s chart.
We only had to wait a few minutes for Felix, a tall man with a ridiculously narrow waist for someone his age. He greeted me with a kiss and asked after Sam.
“He weathering the economy?” Felix picked up Lili’s chart.
Sam’s clients had taken a hit during the recession, and he was working as hard as he had in the early days when he was building his business. “Oh, you know Sam. He always manages to keep himself afloat.”
“Your dad’s a financial wizard, Lili. And a damn fine water-skier.”
Thanks to Sam’s investment savvy, Felix had done well and had invited us to his summer home on Elkhart Lake on a number of occasions to show his appreciation. We’d become business friends with Felix and Betty Nezbith, one of the many couples in our circle of friends who had begun as clients and turned into something that teetered on the fringes of true kinship.
Lili smiled shyly. “He was first place in the Camp Manakee slalom competition five years in a row,” she said, reciting a statistic Sam rattled off frequently. She resumed jiggling her good leg.
Felix laughed. “I don’t doubt that for a second.” He removed his glasses from his pocket. “Okay, then. Let’s see what’s going on here.”
He took one look at her X-rays and two looks at her ankle before he delivered the news. “You have what is called a spiral break. Now, if these bones don’t move, we probably won’t have to do surgery, but it means you have to stay off that ankle.”
Lili bit her lip to stave off tears and mustered the wherewithal to ask the follow-up question.
“When will you know if you have to do the surgery?”
“Two weeks,” Felix said gently
“If I’m okay, then I can start running again?”
“I’m afraid not, Lili. You’ll need a good eight or ten weeks of rehab before you even think about running again.”
Oh, crap. My breath congealed in my lungs. Relax, I told myself. I tried to pretend that I was fine, but I wasn’t fine at all, and instead of imagining Maui beaches and sunsets, as Sheri’s shrink had instructed her to do during moments of anxiety, I started thinking about my mother’s fading faculties and Lili’s inability to manage life without endorphins.
“Mom, are you with us?” Lili sounded frightened.
The room was spinning a smidgeon. “Of course, honey, I’m here. I’m here, just a little off today.”
Felix called in the pert nurse to get me a glass of water. He probably thought I was one of those mothers who was too invested in her child’s achievements, but that wasn’t it at all. Running was Lili’s medicine.
“Thank you,” I said to the nurse as she handed me the glass. Lili looked both worried and mortified.
“You going to be all right, Mrs. Blumfield?” the nurse asked.
I took a sip of water. “I’m fine.”
Felix picked up the chart. “Look, I know this is rough, but if Lili stays off this thing, she’ll have plenty more cross-country seasons.”
“Thanks, Felix, you were a doll to squeeze us in,” I said.
“We’ll get you fitted for a boot and talk in a few weeks. Sound good?”
“Sure,” Lili said as Felix left to see his next patient.
The nurse slid a big black boot on Lili’s foot. “This one seems right. How does it feel?”
Lili futzed around with the boot for a few minutes. “Okay, I guess,” she said and followed me to the reception desk, where I wrote a check for our co-pay. It was painful to watch her limp to the elevator, dragging her big boot behind her. We rode down to the lobby in silence. I offered to pull up the car, but Lili said that she’d have to get used to this boot sooner or later and hobbled to our parking spot. I started the engine and waited for her to break down in tears. She didn’t.
“What happened in there, Mom? You were like on another planet for a minute.”
“I just felt a little light-headed. Let’s not make a federal case out of it.” It was alarmingly easy to lie to my daughter.
“Whatever.”
I felt guilty for snapping at her. “Talk to me, Lil.”
“No offense, like I know Dr. Nezbith is your friend, but that guy’s a quack. I want a second opinion,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. All summer, she’d woken up at six o’clock every morning to run up and down bleachers before she met up with some of the area’s top distance runners for long training runs. Last week, after she won the Menomonee Falls challenge, Coach JJ, Jill Johnson, former NCAA all-American in the mile, who barked at the girls like a drill sergeant, told her she had a shot at winning the state championship.
“I know this stinks, sweetie.”
Lili pulled out her phone and started texting maniacally. After ten seconds, she looked up. “Megan and Kara have last period off today. They’re hanging out at Megan’s. Can you drop me off?”
“Sure. You know, if Dr. Nezbith decides you need surgery, we’ll talk about a second opinion,” I said.
“I’m going to find out who Rebecca Freed saw for her ankle.” She resumed gnawing on her cuticle.
“Okay, honey, so tell me about your new friend Taylor,” I said, trying to distract her.
“Megan and Kara don’t like her. They think she’s too into herself.”
“Maybe they’ll get to know her better throughout the season.” What a dumb thing to say to Lili right now.
“That’s not going to happen. She quit the team today.”
I waited for her to continue. She gave me more information if I refrained from peppering her with questions.
“Kara said Taylor told her that she only joined so her parents would buy her a car.”
I wasn’t surprised. Taylor didn’t seem to fit in with Lili’s other friends, who were more sporty than stylish. Though built like a runner, she wore heavy black eyeliner that accentuated her spectacular irises, as green as those of the famous “Afghan girl” featured on the cover of National Geographic magazine.
“But you seem to like her,” I said.
“I do, and I guess I’ll need someone to hang out with now that I can’t run. Besides, it can’t be easy coming to a new school.”
Her maturity took my breath away sometimes.
“Even if you’re as hot as Taylor,” she added wistfully, returning to her texting.
Megan Travinski lived in Glendale, in a modest home with her two older brothers and her mother, a trauma nurse. Dawn Travinski didn’t have time for PTA meetings or long lunches prepared by housekeepers; her husband had left her when Megan and Lili were in kindergarten, and Megan frequently slept at our house when Dawn had to work extra shifts at the hospital. She knew I had her back; mothering Dawn and Megan filled some maternal emptiness inside me.
I was eager to drop Lili off. I wanted to take off these god-awful clothes and shower. Lili had her hand on the door handle before I pulled into the driveway.
“Thanks, Mom. I got it,” she said, and managed to extricate herself from the car and retrieve her crutches without any help. Dawn came out to say hello. From a distance, she could pass as one of Lili’s friends, with what Sheri called a “gravity-defying tush” that enabled her to pull off wearing teenybopper jeans. I could fit into junior-size clothes but I felt ridiculous in them.
“Rough day?” she asked.
“That’s for sure.” I shook my head and filled her in on the details of Lili’s injury. Then I stopped, because how on earth could Dawn Travinski begin to underst
and that I’d begun my day washing a corpse with a bunch of Chasidic Jewish women in the basement of a funeral parlor? I also stopped because Dawn was typically the one to unload her worries on me, and it felt weird to lean on her.
“You doing all right?” She looked at me closely, taking me in.
Although I spent more time with Sheri, I had a harder time fooling Dawn. “I think I am,” I said, and tried to smile.
“You go home and have yourself a cold one. We’ll keep Lili as long as she wants to stay.”
I thanked her wearily and drove off. I left a message for Sam, giving him the headlines of the appointment with Felix and asking him to pick Lili up on his way home from the office.
At home, I went right upstairs and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. Black was a hideous color on me, and my hair stuck to my head in reddish-brown clumps. I’d forgotten to cover up the large brown sunspot that was beginning to form on my cheek, and my eyes looked small and lifeless sans mascara. I stripped and stuffed my tahara clothes into an old shopping bag. I turned on the shower as hot as it would go, scrubbed every inch of my body with a loofah, and shampooed my hair three times. My skin was raw by the time I finished, but I smelled like me again.
After I dried myself off, I cupped my breasts in my hands; they weren’t full, but they weren’t gray and flat either. I touched the skin on my belly, still taut for a woman my age. I looked past my skin to my insides. You couldn’t see the big parts of me that were missing: childhood memories that normal adults call on without hesitation, a mother’s steady love, and my belief in my childhood shul, maybe even in God. As the body adapts to the loss of a kidney or a lung, I’d been functioning without these organs, failing to consider the strain I’d been placing on the surviving parts.
I was starving. I dressed and went down to the kitchen. While the toaster browned a slice of rye bread, I ran upstairs to retrieve the tahara clothes, took them down to the washing machine in the basement, and doused them with Tide, extra strength. As the machine filled with water, I walked over to my old cedar chest. I’d kept all my confessional letters to Tzippy in a hatbox of my mother’s, which I’d stowed in the bottom of the chest. I missed Tzippy. Sure, I had lots of friends: Dawn, whom I took good care of; Sheri, who took good care of me; Betty Nezbith, whom I enjoyed well enough, but she was a couples-friend. All my other friends fell into one of those three categories. They weren’t Tzippy. I allowed myself to fantasize about an adult relationship with Tzippy, emailing or talking over tea about the people in our lives who troubled or amused us, about our worries and hopes for our children. Eventually we might have grown apart, or I might have left the shul on my own. I never had the chance to find out.
Nothing good could come from opening the hatbox, yet it cried out to me. Hadn’t I learned my lesson from my earlier phone call to my mother? God intervened. I smelled my toast burning and ran upstairs.
Sam and Lili wouldn’t be home for another hour and a half. Tired as I was, I was too wired to take a nap. I needed to get out of the house and put some distance between those letters and the ghosts they would beckon. I spread peanut butter on my toast, wolfed it down, and dashed out the door with my gym bag. Zumba would do the trick. I’d have to focus so closely on the steps that I’d forget everything else.
I missed the four-thirty Zumba class, so I drove to my preschool, which was housed in an annex of our synagogue. It felt good to be back in my normal clothes, walking toward what Sheri called my “second nest.” I was the only teacher who had the after-hours access code to the preschool entrance. Sarah, the director and my longtime colleague, had given it to me when she won the job. She didn’t know that they’d offered me the directorship first but I’d declined because I didn’t want to swap my time in the classroom for an administrative job. I still got to accompany Sarah to early childhood development conferences all over the country, and she never made a hiring decision without soliciting my opinion. We’d built this beautiful school, with a waiting list a mile long, by picking teachers like Mrs. Kessler who knew that working with kids was their calling. We could spot applicants who merely liked kids and needed something to do while their own children were in school.
As I walked down the hall, I imagined myself giving Mrs. Kessler a tour. “Here we have our rooms for our two-year-olds, the Kitten Room and the Cub Room. The student bathroom is over here, and we hold our special classes—music, movement, yoga if you can believe it, and holiday celebrations—in this larger room. These next rooms are for our threes, the Frogs and the Turtles, and I teach one of the fours, the Hummingbirds. Shirley teaches the Robins. She’s the only teacher who’s been here longer than I have.”
I opened the door to my room and flicked on the light. It smelled like plastic from the new bins and antiseptic, but soon it would smell like paint, glue, and bread from the challah baking classes held in the synagogue’s kitchen down the hall. Mrs. Kessler would have been proud of my second nest, of the mural on the wall with the flowering cherry trees, daisies, tulips, and hummingbirds, and particularly of the replica of the bespectacled sunshine she’d drawn on the wall of the nook.
I sat in the rocking chair I used to cuddle a sad child or read a book to the class. I slipped off my shoes and buried my toes in the soft carpet I’d bought on sale at Kohl’s last year. I got up and examined the name tags Theresa had placed over each cubby. I knew half the children because I’d taught their siblings, and the others I’d get to know. That was the best part, discovering these children, each with his or her unique personality and sense of humor. I loved their questions. A surge of good energy shot through me.
The tour was over. I stared up at the mobiles, the array of birds Theresa had so painstakingly traced and cut. Without the breeze of the children, they hung in repose. “Aleha hashalom, Mrs. Kessler, rest in peace.” I turned off the light and went home.
I made us a big spinach salad and heated up the pizza left over from the night before. Lili ate a few bites and then excused herself to go upstairs. She said six words during the entire meal: “Pass the red pepper flakes, please.” My good spirits from visiting my classroom dissolved over the course of our dinner.
Sam shook his head as he reached for Lili’s uneaten slice. “Life without the swing ain’t gonna be pretty.” The swing, Sam’s term for Lili’s running, referred to the electric swing a neighbor had loaned us when she was a colicky infant. Had we not discovered this sanity saver, we would have continued taking turns rocking and holding her for the nine months (not that we were counting) it took for her digestive system to mature.
“It’s different now, though. She’s so quiet,” I said.
“She’ll be back to her feisty self soon, and we’ll be wishing for a little peace and quiet.” He didn’t believe in worrying a concern into a problem.
“She did call Felix a quack.”
We didn’t laugh as we usually did when Lili came out with her acerbically accurate assessments of adults, because this time she was off.
“What a doozy of a day.” I took a swig of Sam’s beer.
“Lili said you had a little episode in Felix’s office. What was she talking about?”
I began peeling the label off his beer bottle. “Fasten your seat belt.” I took one of my yoga breaths. “I got a letter from the rebbetzin.”
“Oh? Probably a fundraising letter. Their yeshiva must need a new building,” he said too fast, his voice disdainful at the prospect of the Schines asking for money from an exile.
“That’s harsh.” I’d always felt irrationally defensive of the Schines, though I kept quiet while our friends derided the ultra-Orthodox Jews—frummies, they called them—as we drove past the mansion on our way to restaurants where we’d freely order shrimp.
Sam knew to veer away from this topic altogether. We’d met when I was almost thirty, years after I’d left the Schines’ world and hit rock bottom. He was content with my carefully crafted synopsis of my life with the Schines, which I weighted equally with details of my ro
mantic history, a string of dead-end if not unpleasant relationships with men I’d met through Chrissie Janikowski, a fellow student teacher from my first job assignment. They were all Polish and Catholic, hulking men with pale mustaches and long hair feathered like Tony Orlando’s, alav hashalom, may he rest in peace. If I felt the need to talk about the Schines, which I almost never did, I’d phone Neil, and we’d speak in code about the shul and our exile, if we spoke of it at all.
“Sorry, honey, but what does the letter have to do with your doozy of a day?” Sam asked with enough contrition that I began to tell him about the tahara. He was a squeamish man, and I had every intention of keeping the account brief and clinical, but once I started detailing the prayer and the careful dance of the pouring, I couldn’t stop, not even when he got up to get another beer or looked at his watch or picked up the front page of the paper, eyes skimming an article about the arrest of the Milwaukee North Side Strangler, Walter Ellis.
I snatched the paper from him. “Are you listening to me?”
“I’m trying,” he said.
I folded up the newspaper and kept talking. By the time I got to the end of my description of the ritual, I was practically shouting. “And then we sprinkled dirt from Israel on Mrs. Kessler’s body and closed the coffin, and that was it.” I took a big swig of Sam’s beer.
He studied me for a second, clearly not knowing what to make of my outburst, and then said, “Where did you park?”
“What?” I stared at him.
He looked sternly at me. “It’s a dangerous neighborhood, and you never know what kind of crazies are out there.” He gestured toward the article on Walter Ellis.
“In front of the funeral parlor, second spot closest to the entrance.” My voice dripped with sarcasm.
He dropped his eyes. “That was a stupid question, I’m sorry. Again. I just don’t understand how after all these years, the Schines write you a note and you run back to them.”
“I did it for Mrs. Kessler. I’ve told you how much I loved her.” Mrs. Kessler might have served as the bait to lure me back to my childhood, but performing the tahara conjured my feelings, warm and cold, about everyone who had mattered to me back then.
Washing the Dead Page 7
