When he reached the end of the service, I brought Benny out to the living room to hear the Ein Keloheinu prayer. I ducked into the kitchen, retrieved one of the lemon candies Sari sucked on to relieve her nausea, returned to the living room, and rolled it toward the rabbi. “Go get it, Benny,” I said, remembering with a twinge how as children Tzippy and I had climbed up on the crowded bimah during the prayer and scrambled around the altar for candy.
The men from the hospital politely declined the rabbi’s offer to stay for lunch, so he and Benny and I ate my bad imitation of the rebbetzin’s cholent. A small eater, Benny went off to peruse his picture books, leaving the rabbi and me to finish our pareve nondairy coffee dessert, its icy blandness freezing the tip of my tongue. The faint sound of Sari’s retching drifted down the steps as Rabbi Levenstein played with his spoon.
“You’ll find a minyan if you keep trying the hospitals.” Here I was, a babysitter, telling the rabbi what to do, and relishing every second of it.
He started to rise from the table.
“Rabbi Schine found my mother there,” I added confidently.
Rabbi Levenstein settled back into his chair, and I told him my mother’s appendicitis story, which I knew by heart because she’d recited it to the dozens of lost souls the Schines assigned to our Shabbos table. I told him about how the Schines visited my mother in the hospital after her appendix ruptured and how she started coming to services after she recovered and then met my father at one of their Shabbos lunches. I paused in all the right places, finishing up with her favorite line. “I hate to think where she would have ended up without the Schines.”
“That’s quite a story, Barbara.” Rabbi Levenstein scratched his beard.
“Yeah, quite a story.” I ached to hear my mother tell it. Since I left home, she hadn’t come to the phone once during my weekly calls.
He shifted in his seat but didn’t try to get up from the table again. “What about your father?”
I told him that my father had been tapped at the Wailing Wall by one of Rabbi Schine’s brothers while he was traveling in Israel after he completed his orthodontics program. Thinking about my father or talking to him during our Sunday night phone calls made me feel like I’d bumped a bruised knee into the sharp edge of a coffee table. I lowered my voice. “Keep trying the college, but what you really need to do to build your shul is to find one or two suburban souls. They’ll raise your money and recruit others to help them.”
He started leafing through his prayer book, pretending he was looking for the Birkat Hamazon, a blessing he recited after every meal.
“Page 48, Rabbi Levenstein.” I barely recognized my new sassiness.
The tops of his cheeks flushed, and I started feeling sorry for him again. Poor man, he was not blessed with Rabbi Schine’s instincts or charisma. How was he ever going to spot the perfect recruit? I could smell them a mile away, the ones who would plunge themselves into the community, like the Brisket Ladies and their doctor and lawyer husbands who chipped in to buy a new hot water heater for the shul last year. Even if I brought the rabbi some live ones, eager secular Jews, would he know what to do with them?
After lunch, Sari felt well enough to play with Benny, so I retreated to the basement, content to read the books I’d purchased when I drove Sari and Benny to the mall. I was taking a break from Jane Austen. The rebbetzin would disapprove of these novels with their glossy covers featuring busty, raven-haired beauties embracing handsome men who had rescued them from Hester Street tenements, but their stories gave me hope that with a little luck and chutzpah, my life could change too.
11
On a Tuesday morning, a few days after I first prepared Shabbos lunch for the Levensteins, I found a brown bag labeled “Barbara” on the last step from the basement to the kitchen. The paper crinkled as I stuck in my hand and pulled out a map of San Diego and a long silver key with “Pontiac” inscribed on the shiny metal. Holding the key made me feel giddy.
“How about we go say good morning to the dolphins?” I asked Benny.
He looked as if I’d just surprised him with a new toy. “You’re taking me to the beach?”
I could hear Sari coughing and gagging as I poured Benny’s cereal and juice. Rough morning. I stuffed two towels into a grocery bag and scribbled a note to Sari, waiting until she was in the bathroom to tape it to her door. I buckled Benny into Rabbi Levenstein’s Pontiac, and when I put the key in the ignition, my whole body quaked at the sound of the engine. I drove past rows of townhouses, lonely in the wide-open canyon and turned onto the windy road leading to the La Jolla beaches. Every time I rounded a corner, I caught a glimpse of the ocean. I’d always used the lake to orient myself, but now heading toward a large body of water meant I was traveling west instead of east. The country had done a somersault, and I’d come out on the other side.
I had no trouble parking at La Jolla Shores beach. It was so early that half the waterfront was still shaded. Benny and I looked at each other as if we were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon. I forgot my embarrassment over my long skirt, and we sprinted to the beach, my brown grocery sack in tow.
We passed a young woman and a little boy with curly blond hair who looked to be about Benny’s age. They were playing in the water. The woman had long, straight hair the color of coal. The strings of her red bikini top formed a loose bow at the base of her neck, and a gauzy white dress billowed against her bronzed skin as she ran in and out of the waves, part gazelle, part dolphin.
We walked farther down the beach. When we reached the pier, I laid our frayed bath towels on the soft sand. I picked up a fistful of warm grains and let them fall through my fingers onto Benny’s toes.
“That tickles,” he said with delight.
I tugged at the rim of his Yankees cap, a shield to protect his pale skin from the sun and his forelocks from the secular world. We pushed the sand into a mound, and when Benny grazed it with his hand, it collapsed.
“It’s broken now,” he said forlornly.
He sat on my lap and rocked his little body against mine until we grew hypnotized by a cluster of pelicans that had gathered on a rock for their morning kaffeeklatsch. I’d only seen pelicans in my father’s National Geographic magazines.
“We’ll build a new sandcastle.” I kissed his hair.
Benny shook his head in agreement as the little blond boy came running from the water. He approached Benny. “Hi!”
Benny looked at his blond curls and bare brown chest. “Hi.”
“Ollie!” The woman in the red bikini jogged toward us and leaned down to talk to Benny. “I think my little boy wants to play with you.”
I stared at her as Benny stared at her son. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful in person before. And the way she’d been playing with Ollie in the water made me think that she wasn’t some summer sunbather like the types we saw back home at Atwater Beach; this was her turf. What would she want with me? We stood together watching Benny and Ollie shovel sand into a bucket, and I felt so pale and weird-looking that I wished she’d take her son and go play someplace else.
“We were just going to get some water.” I pointed to the ocean like a dunce. “For our sandcastle.”
“Mommy, can we all build a sandcastle?” Ollie asked. Who could say no to that grin?
The woman looked at me. “I’m okay with it. Are you?”
“Sure,” I said.
“This is Ollie.” She put her hands on her little boy’s bare shoulders, brown and sturdy compared to Benny’s.
“And this is Benny,” I said.
“I’ve seen Benny before.” She touched the tip of his nose. Benny gave a little wave, but his eyes didn’t register recognition. “I used to see him at the park with his mom.” Her lazy smile revealed a mouthful of perfect white teeth. Probably in her midtwenties, she was only slightly taller than me, but more muscular.
I kicked at the sand. The fact that she’d met Sari made me feel more comfortable talking to her.
“I’m S
imone Cox,” she said, extending her hand.
I shook it. “I’m Barbara Pupnick.”
Simone pulled a shovel and a bucket out of her bag. “Barbara and Benny, then. Let’s go.”
I took Benny’s hand and we walked to the shoreline, giggling as the cold water rushed over our toes. Benny and Ollie sat down and dug their shovels into the sand. Simone spread out her large red and orange flowered beach towel a few feet behind the boys where it was dry. “Sit,” she said. “Please.”
I sat, and she plopped down next to me. Although my clothes embarrassed me, I preferred my odd outfit to flouncing around in a bathing suit, my horrifying back acne exposed to Simone and the rest of the world.
“Is everything okay with Benny’s mom? I haven’t seen her at the park lately.” Simone adjusted her aviator glasses. She reminded me of Joan Baez, my friend Mira’s favorite singer, but with an upturned nose and green eyes.
“Do you know her?” I couldn’t imagine Sari and Simone together.
“Not really, just from seeing her at the park. We never talked or anything.” I contemplated how much about Sari I should reveal. “Just smiled at each other a lot,” she continued. “The last time I saw her she looked a little pregnant.”
Well, if she already knew Sari was pregnant, there could be no harm in telling her about Sari’s condition. “She’s been having bad morning sickness.”
Simone shook her head sympathetically. “I’m a little relieved, though. I was worried that something was wrong. I’m an RN. I’ve seen lots of bad stuff go down.”
Benny and Ollie were running in and out of the ocean, giggling their heads off every time the cold water touched their feet. It warmed me to see Benny so carefree, but I couldn’t help yell, “Don’t go past your ankles!”
“So is everything okay with the baby?” Simone asked, again showing genuine concern.
“Everything’s fine. She’s just sick all day.”
“That’s hard. I was sick with Ollie. I ran my own IV before my shifts, I was so dehydrated. God, it was worth it, though.” She stopped and glanced at my long skirt and sleeves, her first acknowledgment of how out of place I looked on the beach. “I’m sorry. Saying God. Did that offend you?”
“It’s fine.”
“Anyway, I used to lie in bed with a cold rag on my head and listen to a Peter and the Wolf tape my husband bought me. To this day, Prokofiev makes my skull throb.”
“Sounds miserable,” I said.
“Nah, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.” Simone poured sand over her toes. Her nails were painted purple, and she wore a silver ring on her middle toe. “Hmmm. Sun feels good.”
I watched the boys, terrified to take my eyes off Benny. He was a cautious child, but I didn’t want any bad stuff to happen on my watch.
“Hey, Ollie!” Simone called.
Ollie turned around and smiled at her, and then he put an arm around Benny’s shoulders, which were covered with a wet T-shirt, and the two boys grinned. Simone and I sat in silence, listening to the waves and the seagulls and the boys’ laughter.
The sun was beginning to scorch my neck, and I was afraid Benny would burn. “Benny, it’s time to go,” I called out. The boys charged at us.
“Can he stay for just five more minutes?” Ollie asked.
“We should get going too,” Simone said, “I’m taking Ollie to visit his grandparents.” She stood up and shook out her towel. “Up in Laguna, or Laguma, as Ollie would say.”
I laughed at her joke, although I had no idea where Laguna was. “Have a good trip.”
“I’m glad I met you, Barbara.” Simone was living proof that a whole world existed outside of the Schines’ and the Levensteins’ communities. Maybe my parents had felt this kind of excitement when they met the Schines. Maybe this was how Rabbi Schine and the rebbetzin had turned my shrimp-eating father and my mother, a Christmas-tree Jew, into their poster couple for Orthodox Judaism. I felt like a character out of the novel I was reading, a frumpy Jewish Hester Street girl (with big aesthetic potential) who gets whisked away to the Upper East Side.
We returned to the beach the next day in search of Simone and Ollie. No luck. A few young women who looked to be about my age rubbed lotion on their shoulders while their boyfriends played pepper with a volleyball. As I walked by, I caught snippets of conversation about how late they’d stayed out the night before.
“Where’s Ollie?” Benny asked.
“I’m not sure if he’s coming today, Benny.” I wanted to see Simone and Ollie as much as he did. They made me feel free. I took his hand and walked him to the spot where he’d played with Ollie. We squealed when a cold wave surprised us.
I wrung out the bottom of my wet, sand-coated skirt, revealing my calves, white and fuzzy. I saw no need to shave the fine gold hairs since I always wore long skirts. Benny jumped in a puddle of water. I loved his laugh, full and direct.
“Now, that’s a contagious laugh,” Simone said as she walked toward me. I grinned involuntarily. Benny paused briefly when Ollie approached him and then the two ran off, chasing each other down the beach.
“Benny needs to be with kids his own age,” I said.
“He does,” Simone agreed. “It’s good for Ollie too. And his mother.”
I studied the design on my towel to hide my hunger for Simone’s attention.
“So are you from Michigan or something?” she asked. “I had a cousin from Detroit, and he talked like you.”
“Milwaukee.”
“I’ve never met anyone from Milwaukee before. Far out.” Simone adjusted one of the strings on her bikini top. Seconds later, with one hand, she intercepted a volleyball flying toward my head. She looked up at two young men with ponytails and leather ankle bracelets.
“My ball.” The darker one laughed and gave Simone the once-over before his eyes shifted toward me. He stared at my skirt and my hairy ankles with what I imagined was disdain.
Simone hurled the ball at him so hard that he lost his balance. He walked away sheepishly.
“Where did you learn to throw like that?” I asked in awe.
“I played a lot of beach volleyball when I was in high school. With guys just like him.” She pulled a bag of potato chips out of her tote bag and offered me some. If I hadn’t been with Benny, I would’ve contemplated ignoring the laws of kashrut and accepting.
“No thank you.”
“You sure?” She extended the bag to me.
I shook my head no.
Simone put her hand on my arm. “I’m so stupid. I saw a woman offer Benny a cookie once at the park, and his mom flipped out. Is it the kosher thing?”
“Yes.” I wished this conversation would disappear.
“So what is it that you can’t eat besides ham and pork?” she asked with interest. “I work with a doctor who I think keeps kosher.”
She listened intently while I told her about the hechsher symbol. I described the “u” inside of the “o” and explained how it marked whether or not a food was kosher.
“I’m going to start noticing the hikshaw from now on,” Simone said.
I laughed. “It’s hechsher.”
Benny and Ollie ran up to us, and Simone handed them shovels from her bag.
“Thank Mrs. Cox, Benny,” I said.
“Thank you, Mrs. Cox,” he said shyly, and ran off with Ollie.
Simone liked to talk. In what seemed like one run-on sentence, she told me about how she’d met her husband, Daniel, on an airplane to Morocco. Simone had eaten some bad egg salad in the airport, and Daniel rubbed her scalp and gave her his barf bag. He was engaged to his high school sweetheart, but he and Simone traveled through Morocco and Spain together and cozied up in single beds in youth hostels where they did “everything but.” When she got home, she wanted to find out if she had a future with Daniel, so she visited a psychic named Marci whom she’d met when Marci was in the hospital visiting her sick mother. Marci lived in a little house in Hillcrest that smelled like patchouli, and she had locate
d two missing children for the San Diego police. Marci made a believer out of Simone when she warned her about a cavity in her bottom incisor and recited obscure facts about Simone’s ex-lovers.
“So what did Marci say about Daniel?” I asked when Simone took a break to breathe.
“Ollie, don’t go too far in,” Simone called. “That we’d get married and have one son.”
“How did she know?”
“She read my palm,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were telling me that she’d had her tonsils removed.
I waited a second before I asked the next question so I wouldn’t sound too interested, which I was. “So how did you two end up together?”
“I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. You probably don’t believe too much in psychics?”
“I’ve never heard of a psychic,” I replied, “so I don’t know if I believe in them or not.” Once, one of the new Schine recruits dressed up as a gypsy for the Purim carnival, and the rebbetzin admonished her for toting around a fake crystal ball. Tzippy told me that the rebbetzin politely took the woman aside to inform her that fortune-tellers were evil and that only the goyim believed in sorcery. Simone didn’t seem evil, although she did frighten me a little, but in a thrilling kind of way.
Simone smiled at me with admiration. “You’re so real, Barbara.” She pulled a floppy hat out of her bag and put it on my head.
“Thanks.” I adjusted the hat. Real? Did she mean it?
“Anyway, two weeks after we returned from our trip, Daniel dumped his fiancée, and he just kept showing up at my house. We got married in my parents’ garden.” Simone looked off into the horizon. “In the rain.”
I didn’t ask her if she believed in rain causing bad luck.
“But Marci was wrong about one thing. We’re going to have three more kids.”
“Daniel must love children too,” I said, assuming that a man who would rub a strange woman’s scalp while she threw up egg salad would be patient and kind and want a houseful of kids and animals.
“He does. We’re working hard on it,” she said cheerfully, but she no longer looked like the woman who had shamed the smart-ass volleyball player with her bionic arm.
Washing the Dead Page 16
