“Okay, so now what?” He didn’t have much patience for such detours.
I put my napkin over my pizza and blotted up the excess oil. “I’m done, don’t worry, I’m not going to go all born-again on you.” My laugh came out as a grunt.
Sam stared at my hands, moving efficiently across the cheese. “There’s something else bothering you.”
“You know me too well.” I noted the absurdity of this statement. He knew so little of my history.
“So what is it?” he asked softly.
I told him about my conversation with my mother and Neil’s concern about her memory. I spoke with my hand over my mouth, an old habit from my youth, when I described how the rebbetzin had practically implored me to participate in my mother’s care.
Sam’s cell phone rang, and he looked at the number. “I have to take this. Hold that thought.”
He walked toward his office, and I got up and started the dishes, fretting about my mother. When I’d spoken with her a few weeks ago, she’d laughed her old laugh, hearty yet feminine, the way she did when I was a girl and showed her the false eyelash I’d found in my soup bowl during Shabbos lunch at the Melnicks. Today she’d seemed out of it, and yet also less defended.
Sam returned to the kitchen while I was sweeping the floor. He came up behind me, turned me around, and rested his warm hands on my shoulders. “I’m amazed by what you did for Mrs. Kessler, and I see why you did it.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, and I know you’re worried about your mom, but we don’t have a diagnosis yet, so for now I think we need to focus on getting Lili back to herself, which we will, I promise.” He gave me his best reassuring smile.
I looked at him with fresh eyes. In the months since the economy faltered, new lines had formed on his forehead, yet I’d been the one who was scared when his business first slowed down. He’d grown up with parents who loved each other and lived comfortably off the proceeds of their car dealerships, the sale of which provided a net for us. I knew better. A home could go up in smoke like that, even ours. Poof—everything in our house could be foreclosed: the farm table we’d had custom built so that we could squeeze as many guests around it as possible, the red afghan I’d crocheted so we could cuddle while we watched movies and American Idol, the collages Lili had made of our lives. We could lose the big beautiful rooms that I dusted myself and filled with a citrus-and-basil potpourri I bought every summer from a candle store in Door County.
When one of Sam’s best clients couldn’t pay his bill, I’d quit the gym, limited my trips to Sendik’s, and turned down the thermostat an extra few degrees at night. But Sam, although he was stressed from working long hours, was not afraid. I’d only seen him afraid a few times in our marriage, once after Lili’s birth when he saw my clots of blood soaking the mattress and another time when our plane nearly crashed on the way to Miami for his cousin’s bar mitzvah. And he was mildly frightened of leeches because at summer camp one had attached itself to his testicle and spawned babies. No, his job was to comfort me, to convince me that our sturdy little nest was safe from intruders of any sort—Walter Ellis or my mother—and my job was to be comforted and take care of Lili and the life we’d created for ourselves.
I put my arms around him, and he held me for a few seconds.
“I need to make another call,” he said with apology in his voice.
I drew him closer before I let him go. “Go make your call.”
I swept the same patch of floor again, wondering what it would be like to be married to a man who wanted to know the why behind my fears, who would muck about in my swampy past. Shame on me for my greediness. Maybe that was how my mother felt with the Shabbos goy. Would I ditch my family for such intimacy? No. When Lili started kindergarten and I went back to work, a handsome father of one of my students stopped by my classroom after school one day to talk about his daughter’s aggression on the playground. His name was Ari, and he had a magnificent smile and waited an extra second or two after I finished talking before he responded. I found myself sharing a story about how Tzippy and I had bullied poor Margie Weinstein into eating an orange crayon. There was nothing remarkable about the story, except that I’d shared it so casually. I never uttered the name Tzippy. Too raw. Ari told me that my story brought him comfort, so I regaled him with another Tzippy story, about the time we got caught trying on her aunt Gittel’s sheitel during her visit to the Schines for the High Holidays. Had Sam not phoned at that moment, I would have told Ari, with the bovine-looking eyes, every detail about growing up in the shul. He stopped by again later that week, but I politely shut him down. No way was I going to risk everything for a little extra attention. I daydreamed about him for a month, as I’m sure my mother did about the Shabbos goy, but my fantasies weren’t sexual; they were much more threatening to my marriage. Ari had invited me to revisit a time when the pieces of my life—the shul, my mother, and Tzippy—all fit together. My mother couldn’t have felt this pull to the Shabbos goy; their relationship was a mere affair. I’d witnessed their kisses. The term “Shabbos goy” seemed terribly derogatory to me now, and although I couldn’t bring myself to call my mother’s ex-lover Andy, I allowed myself to wonder what had happened to him.
Sam came back into the kitchen. “Let’s call it a night.”
I took his hand and led him upstairs.
Sam’s Barbara Pupnick Blumfield worked for our family, and he clearly didn’t wish to excavate the parts of myself he’d helped me bury. But the subconscious has a mind of its own, and that night I dreamed an old dream. A woman is floating in the mikveh. It’s too dark to see her, but I can hear splashing and whispering. A hot electric pressure penetrates the core of my body, pulling me toward the water and the whispering.
My dream was so vivid that it left a residue on my consciousness in the morning, like the grease on my fingers from the pizza. While Sam was in the shower, I left Theresa a voicemail message: “It’s Barbara, I’m sorry to do this to you again, but….” I told her that we were seeking a second opinion on Lili’s ankle injury. I could have easily said that I was attending a funeral, but I wasn’t prepared to negotiate either her questions or her sympathy. I asked her to meet me at noon to finish setting up the room. We’d have plenty of time before tomorrow, our first day of school.
After Sam and Lili left the house, I dressed in a modest black suit. My mother’s suggestion from the day before to wear a hat returned uninvited, like a garlic belch. I didn’t own a hat.
I couldn’t eat a bite of my yogurt or concentrate on today’s article about Walter Ellis’s capture. Mrs. Kessler’s funeral was scheduled for ten o’clock, and I waited until half past nine to get into my car and head toward the Schines’. I ached to say a formal goodbye to Mrs. Kessler, but something more powerful was pulling me to the mansion. I avoided driving by the Schines’ whenever possible, and when Sam took a route that passed it, I’d turn my head. My hands clutched the steering wheel too tightly as I drove by the palatial estates hugging the lake. The radio was still tuned to one of Lili’s pop stations, and I shut it off. My nerves couldn’t handle the cloying electronic drums and insipid lyrics.
As I neared the Schines’, the tugging sensation from my dream heightened. Traffic was backed up for a block behind their long driveway. This was no surprise; Mrs. Kessler had taught many of us who had grown up in the shul. As I waited for the oncoming traffic to let up, I reached into the glove compartment for my big sunglasses that Sheri had convinced me to buy. She said they made me look like an auburn Jackie O.
I made the turn into the driveway, half expecting my car to implode the moment the wheels hit Schine property. The sun was starting to burn a layer of fog off the lake. My body hummed from the part in my hair to my toenails. The Tudor house looked bigger than ever to me. The Schines had converted the Shabbos goy’s carriage house to an annex to accommodate their growing congregation. I’d read about the project in the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. The Schines still lived on the top floor of
the mansion, though, and Tzippy’s old shade was down.
A man in a bright orange vest directed me to the front lawn, to an empty space in a new row he’d marked off with cones.
I got out of the car and started walking across the lawn to the house. My high heels dug into the grass, so I had to step on my tiptoes. When we were children, Tzippy and I used to take off our shoes and socks and sprint barefoot on this grass, racing each other from the house to the driveway. I always won, even when Tzippy cheated.
The lake breeze blew strands of hair toward my face, and I self-consciously tucked them behind my ears. My mother was right; I should have worn a hat.
I was just about to put my fingers to the mezuzah at the front door when I felt someone behind me. I turned around to face Mrs. Pincus, one of the Brisket Ladies. She’d grown fatter and walked with a cane, but it was her. I hadn’t set eyes on her since I was buying diapers for Lili at the Kohl’s on Oakland Avenue. We pretended we hadn’t seen each other, but in the second I caught her staring at me, I recognized her pity for June Pupnick’s daughter. My mother had become Mr. Isen of Brookfield. I never shopped at that Kohl’s again.
“Barbara,” Mrs. Pincus said, and the pity had not left her eyes. I was older now than she was when we’d first met, but she clearly couldn’t separate me from the girl whose mother had disgraced the community.
I dabbed at the corner of my mouth. “Hello, Mrs. Pincus.”
“Are you coming inside?” she asked, and all I could hear was her desire that I wouldn’t.
People were starting to form a line behind Mrs. Pincus, but I couldn’t move from the mezuzah. I wanted to tell her that she wouldn’t even be standing here had my mother not invited her over to our house to answer all her questions about the Schines’ way of life. It had been a cold winter afternoon, and she’d gobbled up half a plate of my mother’s peanut butter cookies with her tea. I eavesdropped on my mother’s gripping retelling of the story of the Schines finding her in the hospital after her appendicitis attack. Now I looked at Mrs. Pincus trying to offer me a smile, and my anger dissolved. She too had made the mistake of idolizing my beautiful and persuasive mother.
“Barbara,” she said gently.
“What?” Was she going to tell me to leave?
She pointed behind her to the line of mourners. I looked at their faces, and their lips, noses, chins, and hats all blurred into one. I didn’t know any of them, but I knew them all. And they knew me. I couldn’t go inside, and I couldn’t kiss the mezuzah. “Excuse me,” I said. “I think I left something in the car.”
I walked down the driveway, blinking away the memory of the last time my feet had touched this asphalt, placing my hands over my ears so I wouldn’t imagine Tzippy’s voice calling after me. I walked faster, faster than I had when I was a girl and my mother and I were running from one of her fogs.
By the time I reached my car and slid into the front seat, I was out of breath. I removed my Jackie O sunglasses and rested my head on the steering wheel. The driveway couldn’t accommodate two-way traffic, so I had to wait until the stream of cars stopped entering the grounds. Nice going, Barbara, I scolded myself as I sat trapped on the Schines’ front lawn.
The parking attendant noticed me and walked over. “You okay, ma’am?”
I smiled at him weakly. “I’m not feeling well.”
He cocked his head toward the road. “Should slow down any second. I’ll cue you.”
“I appreciate that.”
I glanced up at Tzippy’s window, waiting for her to pull up the shade, run down to the foyer, and walk toward the women’s section, where Mrs. Pincus, my mother, the rebbetzin, and Mrs. Kessler would all be arranged properly in their seats.
The parking attendant knocked on my window and pointed toward the driveway, and I sped away from the mansion like I’d just taken a turn at Ding Dong Ditch. A part of me didn’t want to flee, though. I was like my college roommate who suffered from both kidney disease and heroin-like cravings for the salted fatty meats that could destroy her. The filminess of my dream clung to the dead parts of me, luring me back inside.
6
November 1973 – May 1974
Because I lived in constant fear that my mother would get caught with the Shabbos goy, I panicked when I found the rebbetzin waiting for me in Mrs. Kessler’s room the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Maybe my mom and the Shabbos goy had been reckless and she’d found them together in the mansion. If so, the rebbetzin was here to fire me. She couldn’t have the daughter of such a woman poisoning the community she’d dedicated her life to building, much less working with children. I scanned her face for the lips she pursed when she was disappointed with Tzippy. Her lips looked perfectly relaxed, but that didn’t make me feel any better.
“I’m so glad you’re here, Barbara.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Mrs. Kessler had to take Yossi to the pediatrician, and I’m finishing a meeting upstairs. Can you handle the class alone?”
I let out a breath so big that it parted my bangs. “I’ll be okay.”
The rebbetzin nodded. “Listen to Morah Barbara, children. She’s in charge.”
“Don’t worry.” I wasn’t afraid. This was the one place I felt confident. Nobody was sneering at my long skirts or staring at my pimples. I smiled at the twelve children, but then two of the boys began to wrestle, and one little girl started to cry. Within seconds the classroom had devolved into chaos.
“Itzik.” I placed my hand on the shoulder of one of the fighting boys. “Please go sit with Rena.” Then I went over to Rena, who adored the rambunctious boy. “Itzik is going to sit with you,” I said, wiping a tear from her face with my sleeve.
I remembered a song Mrs. Kessler had taught me when I was about their age. “Is everyone ready for a round of ‘Father Abraham’?”
I sang about the silent father of seven sons who could only move parts of his body to communicate. Each verse demanded that we wave a new limb in the air, and by the end of the song, we were dancing around the room, swinging our arms, legs, and tongues.
Rena cheered loudly and the others chimed in. “Let’s do it again, Morah Barbara!”
I feigned exhaustion as I sat down against the wall, and in no time, twelve four-year-olds were clamoring for a spot on my lap. When I looked up, the rebbetzin was leaning against the door.
“Mrs. Kessler is right. You sure are a magician with these kids.” She beamed, kvelling, as if I were one of her own children.
I floated home, elated that I’d impressed the rebbetzin. I couldn’t wait to tell Neil, who had taken the afternoon bus from Madison for Thanksgiving break. I opened our back door to find him sitting at the kitchen table, his face ashen.
“You need to go see if Mom’s okay,” he said.
“She’s in the tub,” I said. She always took a bath on Tuesdays.
“I heard noises coming from her room,” Neil persisted. His voice was tight, and he was clenching his jaw. “Crying, I think.”
Maybe Rabbi Schine had caught my mother with the Shabbos goy. The thought of the great rabbi, in his long beard and black garb, finding my mother and a man who wasn’t my father groping each other made me feel sick. But what if something else was wrong? My legs felt rubbery as I bolted up the steps and knocked on my parents’ door. No answer.
“Mom, it’s me. Open the door.”
Still no answer.
I wiggled the glass knob, and the heavy door swung open. The blinds were drawn, and I heard a whimper coming from the bathroom. I burst through the door like Hawaii Five-O’s Steve McGarrett during the climax of a chase scene. My mother sat slumped in the empty tub in her slip, a lacy strap falling down her shoulder. Her hair was matted, and the whites of her eyes were so red that her pupils looked green.
She was holding a sheet of notebook paper in her hands. I pried it from her gently, and she barely resisted. I unfolded the letter, my bitterness dissolving like a sugar cube in a cup of hot tea.
November 28, 1973
My Jun
e,
I’m moving to Wyoming, for you, for me, for us. I will always love you.
Andy
She sat staring at nothing, her hands resting in her lap limply, a string of mucus dangling from her nose. I’d only seen her so unkempt once before, when I was ten and she caught a terrible flu. My father saw how frightened I was by her feverish moaning and wouldn’t allow me to enter her room until her temperature went down. She was even scarier now. I hadn’t touched her since the day after the mikveh incident, and I hesitated slightly before I waded through her fog and climbed into it with her. Stepping into the tub, I squatted behind her and sat down, wrapping my legs around her. I wiped her upper lip with the sleeve of my sweater and rocked her as I would one of the children in Mrs. Kessler’s room.
“Come on, Mom. Let’s get you out of here.” I maneuvered myself out of the tub.
She shook her head despondently. “I’m fine.”
I managed to lift her and guide her to the bed. I covered her with a blanket and lay down on my father’s side of the mattress. We were facing each other, and her smoky breath warmed my cheeks. She closed her eyes. I waited until her lids stopped fluttering before I got up, ripped the note into a dozen pieces, and threw it in the trash. I removed the bag from the basket, fixing her blanket and kissing her on the forehead before I went downstairs. I was petrified, but I also felt important coming to her rescue, and I was glad she was back, shattered and all.
Neil was sitting exactly where I’d left him. “If she’s okay, I’m going over to Hank’s.” He was always on his way out the door. I envied his clear skin and dozens of Gentile friends.
“No, you stay here with Mom,” I said, stuffing the bag in the garbage. “I’ve got something to do.”
Before he could object, I was out of the house running to the Schines’ mansion, the static of lake water buzzing in my ears. By the time I reached the long driveway, I was sweating and gasping for air. Through the Schines’ window, I could see the rebbetzin standing over the kitchen sink. Tzippy’s shade was down, of course. The light in the carriage house was on. I had no idea what I would say to the Shabbos goy or what I would tell the Schines if they saw me, but I marched up the driveway anyway.
Washing the Dead Page 8
