The role of confidante made me feel so important that I ignored the sun burning my ankles. I just wanted Simone to keep talking.
She covered my ankles with the corner of her towel. “Careful, this sun is stronger than you’re used to back in Milwaukee.”
I was pleased that she’d remembered my hometown.
She pulled her wallet out of her bag. “Wanna see Daniel?”
She smoothed the buckled plastic over a snapshot of Ollie in the arms of a man with shoulder-length wavy blond hair. His teeth were as white as Simone’s, and he had Robert Redford’s chiseled jawline. They were the most gorgeous human beings I’d ever seen.
Tzippy didn’t come home from Brooklyn until late June because the rebbetzin flew to New York to help her shop for the wedding and to spend time with Tzippy’s Uncle Shlomo, who had survived the Yom Kippur War. I didn’t miss her until I knew she was back. Her first letter from Milwaukee made me cry so hard that I had to put ice cubes on my eyeballs.
July 1, 1975
B”H
Dear Barbara,
I hate being home without you. I keep thinking that I’ll find you in all of our old spots. The bride’s room. No Barbara. The bluffs. No Barbara. The nook. Nothing. Of course, I haven’t looked for you in the mikveh. Ha, Ha.
There’s nobody to giggle with when Mrs. Berger pulls out the goopy tissue from her sleeve and uses it to clean her glasses. This is how you must feel when I leave for Brooklyn. I’m lonely.
I still don’t understand exactly why you couldn’t stay home this summer, but my mother said that helping my cousins is a great opportunity for you to do a mitzvah and experience another part of the country. I shouldn’t be selfish.
Please send my love to Sari. Isn’t she nice? Please send my love to yourself too.
Your best friend,
Tzippy
I didn’t write Tzippy back for weeks. It hurt too much. I distracted myself by looking for Simone and Ollie at the beach. July was an unusually hot month, and Benny and I went to La Jolla Shores three or four times a week. We didn’t run into Simone and Ollie again until the last week of August, and when we did, Benny climbed on my lap and buried his face in my chest.
Simone knelt beside him. “There’s someone who’s been asking to see you,” she said.
Benny picked up his head and smiled shyly at Simone while Ollie shouted, “Benny! Let’s play!” The two trotted off with their buckets and waited for the water to reach their toes.
“He gets bashful,” I explained.
Simone laid out her towel. “Ollie gets that way too sometimes.”
I was hoping Simone would tell me more about psychics and palm readers. After our last conversation, I borrowed Rabbi Levenstein’s Chumash and looked up the line from Deuteronomy that I vaguely remembered Tzippy showing me after the Purim incident: “For these nations which you inherit, they listen to fortune-tellers and diviners; but as for you, not so has Hashem your God given.”
Simone pulled a bottle of coconut suntan oil from her bag. “So what’s new?” She seemed tired.
“Oh, the same, you know. And you?”
She yawned. “I’m beat.” She said her new live-in babysitter had decided to move up to Monterey with her boyfriend, so she was taking care of Ollie during the day and working night shifts.
I’ll be your babysitter, I almost said, fantasizing about packing up my things and leaving a note for Sari, but I could never desert Benny or let the rebbetzin down, so instead, I offered Simone a sympathetic nod. She drizzled the oil on her legs and handed me the bottle, and I poured too much on my ankles. I dabbed it up with my fingers and rubbed it into my hands, grainy from the sand sticking to them.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to waste your oil,” I said.
“It’s cool.” Dark circles had formed under her eyes.
I wished I could offer to take Ollie home with me, but I didn’t think Sari would approve. “I can watch the boys if you want to sleep,” I said.
“I couldn’t ask you to do that,” Simone said, but something in her tone made me think that if I asked again, she’d say yes.
“I don’t mind. You should get some sleep.”
Simone leaned back on her towel and shaded her face with her arm. “You’re too good to be true.”
“Come on, boys.” I took their gritty hands in mine. We walked down to the water, the wind blowing my hair into my eyes. I pushed it away with my wrist, and the scent of coconut, Simone’s scent, flooded my nose. While Simone dozed, we built sand-castles. It made me feel important to help her, which I would do for as long as she wanted me to.
One Wednesday afternoon in October, we returned from the beach to find Sari wearing a big smile and holding a plate of cinnamon cookies she’d baked. I left Benny to his mother and went down to my room. A few minutes later, I heard laughter and splashing coming from Sari’s bathroom. Her morning sickness had dragged on longer than she’d expected, and I was glad she finally had the energy to bake cookies and give Benny a bath. After I showered and dressed, I took my skirt and Benny’s shorts out to the back porch to shake the sand out, thinking that it would be so much easier if we could both wear bathing suits. I was lucky, though: Many Chasidic rabbis wouldn’t have allowed their children to visit a public beach at all.
When I got back to my room, I found an envelope from Tzippy on my pillow, along with a note from Sari that my mother had called. Not long after I met Simone and Ollie, my homesickness had begun to dull. It helped that Tzippy had returned to Brooklyn to help Uncle Shlomo’s wife take care of their triplets, and that my mother had started coming to the phone, sounding more like her old self with each conversation. She’d even gone back to school for a degree in American history, so we had plenty to talk about. Her recovery was a good thing, and I dared to hope that life would return to normal when I got home, but sometimes I’d find myself stewing, regretting that I hadn’t attended my high school graduation because I knew my mother couldn’t extricate herself from her bed to be there, or swearing to my father that I didn’t want to go, or worrying that the horrible grades I’d received while she was sick would cause Madison to change their mind about accepting me.
My parents and I usually only spoke on Sunday nights, so I phoned back, worried that something might have happened. “Is everything okay?” I asked after my mother accepted my collect call.
“Yes, darling.” She sounded good. “Have you heard from Tzippy lately?”
Tzippy had written me a brief note last week. I knew she was getting married in January, but it stung to read about her wedding plans that were progressing very nicely without me. My face grew warm.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m so happy you’ll be home for the wedding,” my mother said cheerfully. “I’m going to send you a plane ticket tomorrow.”
“Me too, thanks.” I remembered the pledge I’d made to Tzippy in the nook a lifetime ago. I wasn’t going to let her down for anything.
After we hung up, I reread Tzippy’s letter.
October 9, 1975
B”H
Dear Barbara,
I’m starting to get excited about the wedding. When I was home over the summer, my mother showed me her long lace veil that my grandmother brought from Poland. I told my mother that we’d already figured out how to wear our hair at our weddings. All of those hours playing beauty shop in the brides’ room will pay off!
I can’t wait to see you in January. I hope we’ll have a few days together before things get crazy. I miss you.
Love,
Tzippy
I wrote Tzippy about her wedding and the lace veil, and then I wrote another letter that I would tuck away in my suitcase and never send.
October 17, 1975
B”H
Dear Tzippy,
While you’ve been planning your wedding, I’ve been imagining what it will be like to come home. I still can’t believe that your parents did not kick my mother out of the shul. I worry that they will now that my mother
is healthy again.
We’ll move to Brookfield, near Mr. Isen, and my mother will realize what she’s done and fall back in love with my father, and he’ll join us. We’ll miss your parents and our old lives, but we’ll all be together, in Brookfield, away from people gossiping and staring at us like we stared at Mr. Isen. There’s life outside of the shul, I’m finding out. It’s not that bad.
Of course, I’d hate living in Brookfield more than anything. I want our family to stay in the shul, but it’s good to be prepared.
Your best friend no matter what,
Barbara
I put my sneakers on, snuck out of the house, and walked. I walked and walked until my calves burned, three miles to La Jolla Shores in the dark and home again. If I kept moving, I could forget everything I’d left behind and distract myself from wanting it all back.
12
I experienced my first Santa Ana in late December. Hot, dry winds blew so fiercely that they made my eyes burn and my skin chalky. The sun was relentless. The night after the winds passed, I took one of my long walks to meander along the shoreline and listen to the sound of the waves. It had been a gray day, but now a round patch of sunlight broke through the clouds and shone on the water like a spotlight illuminating a dark stage. I’d never seen anything like it. I was pleasantly surprised to spy Simone walking toward the light. She looked like some sort of angel, dressed in her white nurse’s uniform with matching stockings and shoes, her hair out of her bun and flowing down her back. She must have stopped here on the way home from her shift.
“Where’s Ollie?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
She stretched her arms over her head. “Daniel’s home with him now. Long week.”
Daniel. When I read my romance novels, I imagined that the heroes looked like either Paul Newman or the photo I’d seen of Simone’s husband.
“You hungry?” she asked me.
“Yeah.” I was hungry, and I hadn’t given up hope that we’d talk again like we had before she started coming to the beach to nap.
I followed her to her powder-blue VW bug. I’d never ridden in such a small car. Simone skillfully moved her feet between the three floor pedals while negotiating the skinny stick shift with her right hand and adjusting the rearview mirror with her left. She drove us to a little diner in La Jolla and flagged down a waitress with gold hoop earrings and bleached blond hair (it seemed like everyone was blond in San Diego). She ordered coffee for herself and a vanilla milkshake for me. I stared at an older couple sharing a hamburger, fascinated by the man, who was counting out the number of fries he put on each plate.
Simone caught me staring and teased me. “What do Wisconsin restaurant patrons look like?”
“My family rarely ate in restaurants,” I said.
“Was it the kosher thing?”
“Sort of.”
“Is your mom like Sari?”
I took a sip of my milkshake, wondering if they possibly could have used kosher ice cream. “What do you mean?”
“You know, does she wear a wig?”
I laughed, imagining the Shabbos goy admiring my mom’s wig. “Definitely not.”
“Someday maybe you’ll tell me about your parents.”
I couldn’t imagine telling Simone about my family. I didn’t want to.
She dropped five dollars on the table. “My treat.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
Simone threw her keys in the air and caught them as she walked toward the door. “It’s the least I can do for all the sleep you’ve given me.”
“I didn’t mind.” I loved taking care of the boys.
Simone didn’t need me to point out the Levensteins’ house. I’m sure there weren’t too many townhouses with enormous menorahs planted on the front lawn. If things went as well as they had for Rabbi Schine and his brothers, Jews would soon move into the neighborhood so they could stop driving to shul on Shabbos. Tzippy and I had watched it happen lots of times. But this was unlikely in Rabbi Levenstein’s case. He had recruited a dozen men from the hospital who needed a place to say kaddish for their dead wives, but they wouldn’t last. Rabbi Schine could “Schineify” newcomers with a single glance, my dad always said. Rabbi Levenstein wasn’t Levenstein-ifying anybody. Sometimes I just wanted to sit him down and tell him to find Orthodox Jews who looked secular enough not to intimidate the recruits. I’d tell him to hire an ugly Shabbos goy, though.
“You there?” Simone touched my knee lightly.
“I’m probably going back to Milwaukee soon,” I said. “Sari is due next week.”
“Do you want to stay?”
The option had never occurred to me. “I have to get back for my best friend’s wedding.”
“She’s getting married now? What is she, eighteen or something?”
“Yeah.” For the first time in my life, I imagined how the matchmaker arrangement would sound to an outsider. Simone would never understand.
“Are you getting married too?”
I laughed. “Me? No. I’ll find my own husband somehow.”
“Why couldn’t you move out here after the wedding?”
“I don’t know about that.” I still missed home, but the thought of moving to San Diego made me feel wildly free.
Simone pulled up to the condo and turned off the motor. The menorah looked gigantic.
“Excuse me.” She leaned across me to open the glove compartment. She smelled like coffee and the cloves the rebbetzin used in her gingered spice cake.
“One of Ollie’s markers.” She pulled off the cap and touched my knuckles.” I don’t have any paper. May I write on your hand?”
“Of course.”
She took my hand. Her fingers were stubby and strong. “Can I read your palm first?”
I felt a rush about experimenting with what the Schines would consider sorcery. I was a little scared, too, but I opened my hand and didn’t recoil when she traced the line that ran diagonally from my index finger to the edge. “What do you see?” I asked.
“This is the heart line.” She held my palm up to the street light streaming through the front windshield. “Very unusual.”
“Why?” I liked that something about me was capturing her attention.
She drew my palm further into the light. “Your heart line splits in two here.” She pointed to the break in the line.
“What does that mean?”
She looked more closely. “I’m an amateur, so I shouldn’t say.”
“You have to tell me now.”
She returned my hand to my lap. “I think it means that you’ve had a rupture in your life.”
“Yes.” The rupture had brought me here, to Simone’s car.
“I see some tiny fractures too, but they all connect to the big split.”
I bit back the tears that had been waiting for release since I left Milwaukee.
She took my hand again. “But then they come back together right here.” She moved her finger further up my palm. “It’s beautiful.”
I laughed anxiously. “Why is that beautiful?”
She looked right at me. “It means that you will mend the big tear and all of the little ones attached to it, too.”
I wanted her to tell me more about my heart line, although I found it unsettling that she’d intuited things about my broken life. “Thank you, Simone.”
She held up the marker and reclaimed my hand. “Here, I’ll write my phone number on the top so you can look at those lines on your palm if you want to.” She spoke sweetly, in a tone she might use with Ollie or a patient.
The marker tickled, but I didn’t giggle.
“You’ve got a job and a place to live if you want to come back. Ollie would love it.”
I weakly promised to call Simone if I decided to come back to San Diego, but now that I knew I would mend this tear, my life in Milwaukee would return to normal, and the rebbetzin would let me stay there for good.
“Barbara!” I awoke to the sound of Rabbi Levenst
ein pounding on my bedroom door. My clock read 4:48 a.m. As Sari and the rabbi rushed out of the house, I dressed quickly, then stretched out on the couch to wait for Benny to wake up.
Rabbi Levenstein’s adrenaline was contagious, and I was too restless to fall back asleep. I poured myself some cereal and doused it with milk and sugar. I ate the entire bowl and returned to the couch, sated and sleepy. Just as I nodded off, I felt Benny’s warm breath on my face.
“Where are my mommy and daddy?”
“Hey.” I sat up. “Your mommy is having her baby right now.”
Benny started laughing and pointed to my left cheek.
“What’s so funny?”
“You wrote numbers on your face.”
We went to the bathroom mirror and he pointed to my cheek, where the phone number had rubbed off. I must have slept on my hand. I couldn’t find a pad of paper, so I tore off a corner of a grocery bag and transcribed Simone’s number. Then I returned to the bathroom and rubbed my face with a sponge until there were no traces of the marker.
Two days after Miriam Levenstein was born, I packed my things, changed the sheets, and scrubbed the floors until they gleamed. Sari’s parents were flying in from New York, and as much as she appreciated my help, I could tell that she no longer wanted to share Benny. My usefulness to the Levenstein family had expired.
On the flight home, I tried to concentrate on reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a graduation gift from Neil, but I was too distracted. In a few hours, I would face my mother. If she was a normal weight and her color was good, it could mean one of two things: she’d gotten over the Shabbos goy, or he was back.
Of course it was over, I assured myself. There was no way my mother could have accepted the rebbetzin’s forgiveness and kindness and then turned around and resumed her love affair. No, she was done with the Shabbos goy. Everyone made mistakes. We would all move on and heal from this. I massaged those lines in my hand, hoping that Simone had been right.
My mother was waiting for me at the gate in the cornflower-blue coat that she now filled out and a scarf I’d given her for her birthday. It was full of blues and greens that set off her eyes, and her cheeks no longer sank into her head. New lines had formed around her mouth, but she looked happy.
Washing the Dead Page 17
