Washing the Dead

by Michelle Brafman

  She narrowed her eyes. “Taylor took me to Kopp’s.” Her lips curled into the beginning of a smirk.

  “Glad you ate,” I said, refusing to react. I didn’t recognize this girl with the added layer of flesh and the new baseline mood of irritability.

  “I flunked my geometry test, in case you’re interested.”

  Her words made me shiver; I remembered throwing the same wounded accusation at my mother when she stopped tracking my schoolwork.

  “Of course I’m interested,” I snapped. “Haven’t I been sitting with you every night trying to help you?”

  “You suck at math.”

  Three deep breaths, Barbara. Math wasn’t my strength, true, but working with Lili frustrated the hell out of me. I could tolerate the busiest four-year-old, but I couldn’t help her for more than a half hour without wanting to tear my eyelashes out. Her stream of patter looped around her worries that she wasn’t going to finish her assignment, that she was going to fail the test, that her ankle wouldn’t heal, that she was going to miss the new episode of Glee. She couldn’t sit more than five seconds without jumping up to fill her water glass or go to the bathroom.

  “Your dad will help you tonight.”

  “Great, pawn me off on Dad,” she snarled.

  That was it. I was calling her doctor tomorrow and pursuing the Adderall prescription her academic support team had been suggesting.

  “I’m going upstairs to shower, Lili. We can discuss this after we’ve both calmed down,” I said. Her obnoxious behavior signaled that she needed me more than ever, but I had nothing to give her right now.

  When I emerged from the shower, Sam was waiting for me. “What happened down there?”

  “Your daughter was being a pill.”

  “That’s my girl you’re calling a pill.” He held me for a second, my wet hair leaving an imprint on his shirt.

  “Why does she have to be so mean?” I asked.

  “She’s hurting.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  He unbuttoned his oxford shirt and retrieved a sweatshirt from the drawer. “Are you still thinking about clearing things up with your mom?”

  I wrapped my hair in a towel. “Jenny the warden won’t let me see her.”

  “What’s that all about?”

  “My mother’s visit here, or shall I say, her visit with me, agitated her.” My lip quivered.

  Sam pulled his sweatshirt over his head to avoid telling me what we both knew, that Jenny had a point.

  “Let me talk to Lili, and we’ll finish this up later.” I kissed his shoulder, went to Lili’s room, and knocked on her door.

  “Come in.” She sounded contrite.

  She lay on her bed in an oversized T-shirt she’d sweet-talked Sam into buying her when he took her to see the Jonas Brothers for her twelfth birthday. A history book was open across her legs.

  “Do you have a history test?”

  She shut the book. “Yes. What’s the difference if I get a C or a C-?” She handed me her last test, which was littered with red checkmarks. “See? It’s not just math.” Tears started streaming down her face. “I’m dumb.” She looked so small in the big shirt, her nose running, her eyes red.

  “Move over.” I crawled into the slot between the bed and the wall. “You, my girl, are anything but dumb.” I wrapped a strand of her wiry hair around my finger.

  “I’m just smart in different ways,” she said, mimicking me. She let me hold her for a few minutes before she squirmed away. “I’m perceptive.”

  “You see things, Lili,” I said. “You know that.”

  “Maybe things I shouldn’t,” she said.

  I sat up. “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Better get back to it.” She opened her book.

  I maneuvered myself out of her bed. “Do you want me to help you study?”

  “No, I got it, Mom.” She tried to sound brave.

  “Let’s try the Adderall, Lil.”

  “Do you think it will help?”

  “Only one way to find out,” I said, instead of what I was thinking. Can’t get much worse.

  That night, I dreamed about Simone Cox. She was wearing a red bikini that revealed her outie, as small as a buttonhole in the collar of an oxford shirt. Her hair shielded the face of a little boy who was whispering in her ear. I woke up panting as if the smell of smoke had seeped into my sleep. Who was that little boy? Mrs. Kessler’s Yossi? Sari’s Benny? Simone’s Ollie? He was not Josh Fader or Brett Cooper or any of my students. They never would have been so bold as to intrude upon my subconscious.

  I was afraid to revisit my dream, so I lay still and listened until the birds started to chirp outside my window. Sam, Lili, and I spoke little over breakfast. After I slogged through a morning of teaching, I put on my sneakers and went for a long walk.

  I made a beeline for our kitchen computer as soon as I got home. I hit the return key and studied my screensaver, a photo of Sam, Lili, and me in Cheesehead hats, smiling after a Packers victory. Sam always looked slightly triumphant, as befitted a person blessed with an allegiance to a baseline level of happiness.

  I opened my browser, and the Google welcome page swallowed up the image of my grinning family. I searched “Daniel Cox and coffeehouse and San Diego,” and up popped a business address for Java Books in Encinitas. It made me happy to know that he was living his dream. I clicked on the website, which featured a photo of Daniel lounging on a big white chair, holding an oversized coffee mug. He was still beautiful, though middle-age had dulled his features. My hand shook as I dialed the West Coast.

  “Java Books.” Daniel sounded exactly the same.

  “This is Barbara Blumfield. I used to be Barbara Pupnick.” My hand shook harder. Maybe I’d made the wrong choice.

  He paused, and I heard the grinding roar of an espresso machine and bustling sounds of a busy coffeehouse. I wondered if he was going to hang up on me.

  “How’s Ollie?” I asked.

  “Ollie’s a public defender up in Spokane. Got sick of the sunshine.” His voice was tight.

  I had a flash of the bright little boy I’d bathed and chased down the flat San Diego beaches. I put my hand to the place on my cheek he liked to kiss, half expecting to find grains of sand from his lips.

  “Did you call to check in on Ollie after all these years?” Daniel asked.

  I took a nervous swig of bottled water. “I called to apologize.”

  The espresso machine quieted. “Are you in some kind of twelve-step program?”

  I laughed weakly. “No.”

  I could hear someone ask him if they had any raspberry scones left.

  “In the back, in the pink box,” he said. “Sorry, Barbara. Let me go outside so I won’t be interrupted.”

  I listened to the din of the shop yield to the sound of the ocean and waited for him to speak.

  “It was an accident,” he said, sounding like he had when he and Simone were just about to make up after an argument.

  “You’re generous, but I should have stayed to see if Simone was okay.”

  He took a breath as if he was about to speak, but I cut him off. “Please don’t make this easier for me.”

  “I just don’t see the use in reliving that nightmare.”

  “How long did it take for her to get well?”

  “Months. She … um … her hip and knee are still a little messed up.”

  I imagined Simone running through the sand in one of her bikinis, her muscular legs devouring the ground beneath her. Daniel told me about her recovery, about the two surgeries and the long rehabilitation, and I gathered my courage to ask, “Did you ever have more children?”

  I could hear waves in the background.

  “Yes, a girl.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful, wonderful. Congratulations!”

  “She was born in 1977, but thanks.”

  I laughed out of relief that Simone had been spared the heartache of failing to conceive. I wondered if she ever got the reading
she wanted from Marci.

  “Barbara, we’ve forgiven you.” He sounded like he wanted to get to the point of this phone call and move on.

  “How?” I asked, thinking of the damage I’d caused.

  “You were fragile.”

  Fragile. It was the word the Shabbos goy and the rebbetzin had used to describe my mother. “That’s no excuse for hurting people.”

  I could tell that he was walking toward the water by the intensifying sound of the waves. “Do you know what our biggest seller is right now?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “It’s a kid’s book called Zen Shorts.”

  “I know that book. I’m a preschool teacher.” I felt my old excitement when I learned that he was a Gatsby fan.

  “Okay, Barbara, then go and reread—”

  “ ‘A Heavy Load,’ ” I blurted. It was the story about two traveling monks who encounter a rude young woman in silk robes, sitting in her sedan chair, waiting grumpily for someone to ferry her across a mud puddle. The older monk obliges, and she treats him shabbily. Hours later, the younger monk complains about the woman’s rudeness.

  “Yes, that’s the one. Remember the ending, when the older monk says something like, ‘I set the woman down hours ago, why are you still carrying her?’ ”

  It was the type of exchange that I was once young and foolish enough to mistake for Daniel’s romantic interest in me. “I get it.”

  “I know you do,” he said warmly.

  “So you got your wish,” I said. “A coffee shop where people can talk about their favorite books.”

  “Yeah, I did.” I pictured his shy smile.

  We mumbled a clumsy farewell, and then he spoke my name just as I was about to hang up.

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe I hadn’t fully set down the woman in the robes until you called.”

  “Then I’m glad I did.”

  With the warm phone in my lap, I thought of my recurring nightmare of the naked woman floating in the mikveh and the man paddling around in his dirty work boots. Now I could see her face. It was mine.

  I didn’t sleep the night I called Daniel. Our conversation had released an energy so uncomfortably wild that I couldn’t settle back into myself. I went down to the kitchen, heated some milk in a saucepan, and emptied it into my favorite mug, a Mother’s Day gift Lili made when she was twelve. She’d laminated a collage of the two of us to the cup. I’d always focused on the cleverness of Lili’s artwork and her conscientious gathering of mementos: the words “Benji’s Deli” cut out of an old menu, a piece of thread from a disastrous sewing class we’d taken together, a dried blueberry we’d picked in Door County. But now that I examined the photos, I noticed that she’d selected images where my lips were smiling but my eyes were not.

  It took me a week to digest my conversation with Daniel, but by the time November arrived, I was ready to visit the rebbetzin to discuss it. She kissed me hello, and I followed her into the kitchen where my mother and I had worked as a team, stacking dirty plates from the Shabbos table, arranging bakery platters, grinding coffee for the rebbetzin’s teas. I started to giggle.

  “What’s funny?” the rebbetzin asked. I kept laughing, and soon she was laughing with me.

  “I’m thinking about the time you asked Tzippy to get the chocolate sprinkles from the pantry.” I didn’t need to finish the story because she knew exactly what I was talking about. During the hot summer months, Tzippy and I used to eat big bowls of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sprinkles, or jimmies, we called them. Tzippy would have to climb up on a stool to retrieve the vat of sprinkles from the top shelf of the pantry. One time the lid popped off, and the sprinkles showered Tzippy, bouncing off her body and flying into the far corners of the kitchen. The rebbetzin was angry at first. “Tzippy, I told you to burp the Tupperware,” she chided, but then my mother started laughing, a sound deep and rich and unexpected from a woman so refined. Soon we were all laughing so hard that tears fell from our eyes.

  “The rabbi will think we’re meshuganah,” I said, my index finger circling near my temple as I repeated the rebbetzin’s words from so many years ago. Another gale of laughter ensued.

  “This is the first time in years when it didn’t hurt to think about her.” I could have been talking about Tzippy or my mother.

  “Tzippy misses you too.”

  I looked out the window. I’d forgotten how gorgeous the lake was from this vantage point. “What happened when I left town before her wedding?”

  The rebbetzin’s words were measured as she described how Tzippy phoned my house and wouldn’t believe my parents when they said I’d gone back to California.

  Oh, Lord. Couldn’t I have hung on a few more days in Milwaukee? No, I couldn’t have. “Did you ever tell her why I abandoned her?”

  “Not until your mother left the shul.”

  My mother had taught me how to walk out on someone in need, but not as she’d taught me how to tie my shoe or peel a hardboiled egg. I’d absorbed the pain that caused me to leave and the belief in its necessity at the time. I told the rebbetzin about the confessional letters I’d written to Tzippy. “I’ve kept almost all of them. Isn’t that strange?”

  She walked to the counter and put a few of her apricot cookies on a plate.

  “Maybe if I’d just sent one of those letters everything would be different,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She would have understood why I vanished from her life.” I thought about the letters Tzippy wrote me after her wedding. I couldn’t bear to read them, so I threw most of them away without opening them.

  I took a big breath, and the air filled me as if I’d cleared some debris from the lining of my lungs. “You’re not going to believe what I did.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “No, it’s nothing bad, it’s just weird and completely out of character.”

  She offered me a cookie. “So are you going to make me guess already?”

  “I tracked Daniel down,” I said as if I were telling her that I’d just robbed a bank.

  She raised her eyebrows. It wasn’t easy to shock the rebbetzin.

  “And I called him up.” I told her about the conversation.

  She blinked hard. “That was a brave thing to do, Barbara.”

  I made the call out of impulse, but now that I’d confided in the rebbetzin, I was amazed that I had the courage to do it. The fist that had tightened around my heart during that plane ride back to San Diego had opened when I met Sam and bore Lili, but not completely. A few more fingers had released their hold since I’d been visiting the mansion.

  The rebbetzin opened a drawer and took out one of Rabbi Schine’s legal pads and a Bic pen. She put them down on the table. “Now do the same thing with Tzippy.”

  She left the kitchen, not giving me the chance to protest.

  October 20, 2009

  B”H

  Dear Tzippy,

  I never imagined that I’d write you another letter, but here I am, sitting at your mother’s kitchen table doodling tulips on your father’s legal pad, trying to come up with the words to say I’m sorry.

  I’m sorry for not showing up at your wedding, but I’m even sorrier for my larger disappearance from your life. When I found out about my mother’s affair, I withdrew from you. I didn’t want to put you in the middle of my trouble, and I was also ashamed, and maybe a little jealous that your life made such sense.

  If it’s any consolation, I actually did pour my soul out to you in letters, but I never sent them. Maybe we’d still be friends if I’d given you the chance to separate my mother’s behavior from who I was. I sure couldn’t, and maybe I still can’t.

  I hadn’t allowed myself to think about you until your mom turned up out of the blue and invited me to participate in Mrs. Kessler’s, z”l, tahara. Only you would have remembered that Mrs. Kessler ate orange jelly on rye bread every day for lunch and made funny animal voices when she read us stories she’d written especially for us. And
only you would have remembered how as teenagers she gave us free rein of the nook so we could have a place to talk and dream after you started going to school in Brooklyn. Mrs. Kessler represents a mere fraction of what I lost when I left the shul.

  I guess what I’m saying is that when I lost you, I lost the person I was when we were together. And by excising you from my life, I stole a piece of your history too. That’s what I’m most sorry about.

  Maybe one day we’ll meet again in the nook. With your mother’s help, I will face what my family’s ghosts have cost me, most sadly, my friendship with you.

  Love,

  Barbara

  When I finished the letter, I folded it in thirds and scraped my chair back noisily to signal the rebbetzin to return to the kitchen. She materialized almost instantly.

  “Tea?” she asked.

  “Water is fine, thank you.” I handed her the letter.

  “Do you feel better?”

  “A little. I’m not as radioactive.”

  “But?” Her tone was more intense than it was when she counseled congregants.

  “I’m horrible for saying this, but despite everything I’ve learned, I haven’t let go of all of my bad feelings toward my mother yet.” And with that, I told the rebbetzin the ultimate war story, the one that had bubbled up to my lips during that Mommy and Me class I’d taken with Lili, the one I’d silenced so I wouldn’t poison my daughter with my breast milk.

  20

  May 1975

  My father suffered a massive stroke the night Daniel and I ate Chinese food together. My mother called to tell me that he’d died, but the telephone lines at Daniel’s were down from the storm, so she called Sari. When Sari found me on her doorstep, she broke the news of my father’s death with the professionalism of an emerging rebbetzin. Paired with the right rabbi, she could have been a formidable player in the Schines’ world.

  She led me to the bathroom, where she’d spent so many hours being sick, and ran a warm bath.

  “That’s Daniel’s blood,” I said, pointing to a reddish streak on my foot.

  She said nothing as she handed me one of Benny’s Sesame Street washcloths.