Gravity

by Leanne Lieberman

  When we reach the island we stand on a fallen log, holding onto the mattress. “Looks a lot like the other side,” I tell Bubbie.

  “Yep.” She points to a blue heron skimming across the water. I rest in the shade a few minutes. Bubbie says, “We’d better get going.”

  “Five more minutes?”

  “You don’t want to be late for your parents.”

  I sigh and take one more look around. I grab hold of the air mattress next to Bubbie and together we push it with long lazy kicks.

  AT THE END of the day I stand on the dock, gazing out at the island. The sun sets pink and gold over the bay. I stay one more minute and then wrap my arms around a tree trunk before leaving to join Bubbie in the car. Now I know the feel of wet pine needles on my arm, the crunch of dry leaves in my palm, small berries rolling under my feet.

  In the city I know all the surfaces already: concrete, linoleum, plastic, Formica, porcelain, all cold and hard. Polished wood at best, but with a layer of paint over top.

  Four

  Ima bursts out of the airport, her eyes glittering with an alarming intensity. Abba follows her, luggage-laden, jetlag etching his smile. They climb into the car, showering us with kisses.

  “You had a good time?” Bubbie asks.

  “Wonderful,” Ima says. She leans forward and squeezes my hand before putting on her seatbelt.

  “Absolutely amazing,” Abba says.

  Bubbie pulls out of the airport into the maze of sun-scorched highway.

  “It was just incredible,” Abba sighs. “When we got off the plane we could smell orange blossoms. And I tell you, the land feels different there.”

  Bubbie rolls her eyes.

  At the house, Abba opens windows, turns on taps, sifts mail into piles. Ima grabs my hand and pulls me up the stairs with her suitcase. “I have so much to tell you.” She closes the bedroom door and turns on the air conditioner. When she pulls off her blue cotton scarf, her rich brown hair cascades over her shoulders, sweaty and threaded with gray. I notice the leather dye of her new sandals has bled into her white socks.

  Most of Ima and Abba’s room is taken up by the bed with its patchwork comforter. A low wooden dresser is jammed below the window with framed pictures of Abba’s parents, Bubba Rosa and Zeyda Yuri, on it. The air conditioning gradually cools the room, cutting the thick humidity. I sit on the bed and stretch my T-shirt over my knees.

  “So? Tell me about the trip.”

  Ima kneels on the floor beside her suitcase and starts filling a laundry basket with crumpled blouses and balled-up socks. “It was unbelievable,” she says. Outside a dog barks. “Wonderful,” she repeats.

  “Did you see the sea?”

  “The sea? We went to Israel. It’s a desert.”

  “Sand dunes?” I imagine sand fanning out, licked by the wind’s tongue into crescent-shaped grooves.

  “No, it’s more rocky and hilly.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it’s ours.” Ima’s eyes flicker with excitement. She leans back on her heels, her arms wrapped around her legs.

  I nod, letting my hair fall forward to hide my face. Neshama and I have had long discussions about whose land it is.

  “That slice of sand and desert with its heat and all its troubles, it’s ours,” Ima continues. “Here is all kinds of different people, not Jews.” She takes a deep breath. “There the land is ours.”

  “The Kotel, did you go to the Kotel?” For weeks before Ima left, all she spoke about was the Western Wall.

  “Oh.” She flushes. “I’ll have to tell you about that later, when Neshama comes.”

  I stare at her sparkling eyes.

  “Here,” she says, digging in her bag, “I brought you something, a present.” She pulls out a small plastic bag. I expect a book or a necklace, something Jewish.

  “For you,” she says stroking the bag, “I have brought”—her voice dropping to a whisper—”a perfect Israeli specimen.”

  She sits down on the bed bedside me and pulls out a fruit, round like a tomato, the color of an orange. I roll the rubbery sphere, my brow furrowed. It smells of the earth, not tangy or citric. “You snuck fruit through customs?”

  Ima ignores my raised eyebrows. “What tastes like a peach, looks like a tomato, but is the color of an orange?”

  “You brought me a riddle?” I squint at Ima.

  She smiles again and pulls my head close to hers until I can smell her familiar lavender scent. “Sultan’s peach, Roman tomato, King David’s orange,” she whispers. She picks the fruit out of my palm. “This persimmon is my Israel.”

  She pulls a pocketknife out of her suitcase and slices the fruit into quarters. I pull the skin off with my teeth. The smooth peach-like flesh tastes like perfume.

  “This persimmon is like smashing the cup at the end of a wedding,” she says.

  “What?”

  “It reminds me of our tenuous hold on Jerusalem. We own the land now, but around every corner I saw shades of the past, shades of how light our hold on the country is. Sure, we build new settlements to...to sink our teeth into the soil, but it’s only sand. It crumbles, gives way. In this fruit”— she grasps the persimmon’s remaining brown seeds, her knuckles white—”I see every army that ever passed through Jerusalem, and I understand how lucky we are to have it.”

  “Uh...yeah.”

  Ima cradles her bag of persimmons in her lap before putting them on the bedside table next to the small copper lamp. “Did you have a good time with Bubbie?”

  “Yeah, I had a great summer. I swam a lot and learned to paddle a canoe.” Heat crawls up my face. “So you didn’t swim in the Mediterranean?”

  Ima zips up the empty suitcase and shakes her head.

  Of course they didn’t, not my modest, white-skinned parents. Not on the beach in Tel Aviv where I’ve seen pictures of scantily-clad Israelis in bikinis with uncovered hair, naked limbs. Like Lindsay. I start to blush again and duck my head so Ima can’t see. If I ever get to Israel, the ocean will be the first place I visit.

  Ima has had a summer of sand and dust, while I have been learning to swim. Crouching by the water’s edge, I looked at crayfish, rising early to push a canoe through the quiet water to chase loons around the bay. I think of the wet mulch at the edge of Lake Missisagagon, the mist rising off the water.

  “Oh, here, I brought you something else. It’s from the desert and also the sea.” Ima rifles through her straw shoulder bag, pulling out a handful of mints and a film canister. “Hold out your hands.” She pries off the lid of the canister and pours gritty bits of sand and some tiny white shells into my hands. “It’s from Mitzpe Ramon, this crater in the south.”

  I stare at the shells. “By the sea?”

  “No, in the middle of the desert.”

  “There are shells there?”

  “Yes, I thought you’d like that.” Ima smiles at me.

  I sift the sand, poke at the gritty bits, the small white swirls. I imagine the sea raging across the sand, then departing, leaving remnants on the shores. I squeeze the bits in my palms. “What is this, evidence of Noah?”

  Ima’s back to sorting laundry. “Maybe.” She glances up at me. “Where’s your necklace?”

  My hands fly to my neck. “I took it off to swim.”

  “It was Bubba Rosa’s.”

  “I know. I just forgot to put it back on.” I go get it from the suitcase under my bed and fasten the chain around my neck. I lower the neckline of my T-shirt to show Ima the small gold heart with the Star of David carved on it. The necklace feels tight around my neck.

  “Beautiful,” she says and kisses my forehead.

  THE CAMP BUS drops Neshama at home in the evening. She is tanned, blonder than before—streaks, I suspect—and carries one more bag than she left with. I peer at it suspiciously.

  Ima hugs her. “How was camp?”

  “Wonderful, amazing,” she says.

  Abba studies her outfit—a three-quarter-length-sleeve sundress with but
tons down the front—before he kisses her.

  Upstairs she nudges the imitation Louis Vuitton suitcase under her bed. I raise my eyebrows. She pushes me into the bathroom, pink pearl nails fluttering, while Ima goes to get a laundry basket.

  “Contraband,” she hisses.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “Things for you too,” she adds.

  “From camp?”

  She shoves me into the towel rack. “No, silly. We sneaked out.” We hear Ima on the stairs. “Outlet mall,” she whispers. “Wait till you see.” She smiles and pulls her dress tight against her chest to show me the outline of her bra. It’s not the shapeless beige kind Ima buys for us.

  Neshama puts on a long-sleeve cardigan, covering her forearms. “Don’t want to piss off Abba too soon.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Later,” she hisses.

  After my parents have gone to bed, the air conditioner droning in their room, Neshama pushes the lacy pillows and teddy bears off her bed and spreads out her new treasures on the pink bedspread. Neshama’s room is stuffed. Her dresser is strewn with tubes of lipstick, nail polish and jars of makeup brushes. Fashion magazines and romance novels spill out from under her bed. A shelf holds her collection of music boxes.

  I wedge my feet between the pillows and bears and watch her spread out short-sleeved V-neck T-shirts, and matching bra and underwear sets in stripes and lace trim. She pulls out a pair of slim-fit, faded Levis with orange tags and a button-up fly. “Here,” she say. “These are for you.”

  I clasp the jeans to my face, breathe in their new cotton smell, feel the stiffness of the material. I have never had jeans before. “Thanks,” I whisper. I get up and step into the pant legs, pull them up over my hips, struggling with the buttons. The jeans rest just below my belly button. I look in the mirror at the long smooth line of my legs.

  “Check out your butt.”

  I peer over my shoulder and swivel my hips as if I’m in a TV commercial.

  Neshama giggles. “One more present.” She pushes a small pink plastic bag into my hands. I wrestle with the tissue and pull out a matching bra and panty set, satiny dark blue with only half cups and panties cut high on the sides. “It’s the color I imagine the ocean might be.”

  I squeeze her tight.

  “Perfect for your future honey.”

  I shoot her a sidelong glance.

  “What?” she asks.

  I sit down at her desk, shuffle her papers into piles. I kissed Lindsay in the clearing and her lips were warm and soft. “Not me, I mean, not now, I—”

  “Just kidding.” Neshama punches my shoulder. “Abba isn’t really going to choose one of those pale, sick-looking yeshiva buchers for you.”

  “He’ll find someone for you first.”

  “No, not me.”

  “Still leaving?”

  “Yes.” Neshama clasps a V-neck T-shirt. “Not much longer now.” Her mouth forms a thin line. Cords stand out at her throat and temples.

  “You still have another year of school, Ness.” I fuss with the tissue paper, refolding the lingerie inside.

  Neshama drops the T-shirt and sits on the edge of her bed, facing me. She stretches out her hands in front of her, her knuckles straining, nails glinting in the lamplight. She lets out a big breath. “I’m taking some math courses by correspondence. Then I can apply to university business programs for next fall.”

  My eyes open wide. “Have you told Ima and Abba yet?”

  “They don’t need to know. Not yet, anyway. Bubbie has already promised to help me with the tuition.”

  I tug at the edge of the sheet on Neshama’s bed. My parents want us to become religious schoolteachers like them. “Oh,” I say, too awed to add anything else.

  We’re silent a moment. Neshama pulls up her skirt and studies her shin.

  “You never asked about the cottage,” I say tentatively.

  “How was the cottage?” She concentrates on picking an ingrown hair.

  “It was good.” I smile.

  “Let me guess,” Neshama says, still picking. “Bubbie snuck cigarettes, watched birds. You had cocktails at five, deli at six, and oh, you were all excited because you did something gross with amphibians. Right?”

  “Yes, but there was more.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “There were other people there.”

  “Boys?” Neshama stops picking and looks up, suddenly interested.

  I pause, not sure how to answer. “No, not boys. A girl. I made a friend. She’s not Jewish.”

  “Big deal. Girls, shmirls. I had an entire summer— please—an entire life of girls.”

  I ponder this, the idea of a summer camp of nothing but girls. I turn to Neshama. “Look.” I pull down the neckline of my blouse and show her the white strap marks of my bathing suit. “Bubbie bought me the suit.”

  Neshama looks at my shoulders. Then she opens her blouse at the neck. Her shoulders are perfectly golden without a single mark.

  I sigh and get up to go. “Thanks for the contraband.”

  Back in my room, I tuck the clothes, along with Lindsay’s jean cutoffs and tank top, into the suitcase under my bed.

  NESHAMA HAS ALWAYS been waiting to escape. When we were little she was sure we were born into the wrong family and no one knew except us. According to her, we weren’t supposed to be daughters of reborn Orthodox Jews, ba’al t’shuva, but part of a family of traveling circus performers or eclectic spiritual healers. At best she thought we belonged in Bubbie’s “normal” world.

  Neshama and I used to play a game we called Escape! “What if you need to leave fast?” Neshama would ask. “What would you take?” We’d each grab a bag or a suitcase, and we’d have a minute to pack. Then we’d meet in the basement to see what we’d taken. Sometimes the game was more elaborate. Neshama set the rules. “There’s a fire in the house, or a knock at the door.” Most of the time, we packed as if we wouldn’t be coming back. Neshama always started with clothes and her small blue teddy bear—the bare essen-tials—and quickly moved to bigger heavier items, cramming her bags with felt pens and rainbow notepads, stuffed animals and her collection of Little House on the Prairie books.

  I would spend most of the time deciding between a favorite book and three pairs of socks. When we met in the basement, Neshama struggled under the weight of her bag. I clutched a bar of soap, a toothbrush and a siddur.

  “You’ll be cold,” she said.

  “But clean,” I replied. We stared at each other.

  We stopped playing the game when Bubba Rosa, Abba’s mother, died.

  Abba’s parents lived in a small apartment over their dry-cleaning and tailor shop off Yonge Street. I remember them as people who held fear in their backbones, in the angles of their shoulders, a tenseness Abba has inherited.

  Abba’s parents bent over the steamer, cut cloth, inhaled dry-cleaning chemicals and lived their whole lives within the confines of the shop. The front window allowed passersby a glimpse of Bubba Rosa eating a plate of cabbage salad or Zeyda sewing on his ancient Singer. Neshama once asked if he had brought the machine from Poland. Zeyda laughed. “I came with a pincushion, I should be so lucky.” He always had a yellow pack of Chiclets for us in his breast pocket. Zeyda once asked, “Who does Neshama look like?” He stroked her fine blond hair. Goldilocks, he called her.

  “My sister,” Bubba Rosa replied. “My sister who was.”

  WHEN BUBBA ROSA died, less than a year after Zeyda, Ima handed Neshama and me each a garbage bag when we went to clear out their apartment. They left behind broken china, cheap chachkas, endless pairs of pantyhose. I watched as their privacy was invaded. Ima cleared out drawers of faded saggy underwear, cabinets of medicines long out of date. As she packed shapeless dresses and worn shoes with broken laces, I heard Bubba Rosa’s heavy accent, saw her old hands pressing a worn change purse full of silver dollars into my palms. I held a scarf Bubba had once woven through my hair with her old gnarled fingers, felt it thin and worn
, heard it swish into the bag.

  In the bedroom, Neshama and I found a suitcase under the bed. Inside were pairs and pairs of new underwear, socks, pantyhose all still in their cardboard packages. Bars of soap, a shaving kit, sweaters, cans of tuna and a bag of peanuts.

  Neshama and I never mentioned the suitcase. We never played the packing game again.

  Leaving was always Neshama’s game, not mine. Now when I close my eyes, I see Lindsay beckoning to me as she glides by in her cherry-red canoe.

  FRIDAY MORNING OF the Labor Day long weekend I wake to the churn of the washing machine, clothes flapping on the line, the dishwasher humming.

  Time at the cottage was a blur. Here at home we mark the days, cutting the line sharp between regular and sacred time. We order our weeks, months, into neat segments: work and rest, holiday and ritual. We sit heavier in our chairs on Friday nights, let the wood take the weight of our spines.

  “Two weeks until yontif,” Abba says, rolling out dough for cookies he will freeze.

  “Eight hours until Shabbos,” Ima says, running the vacuum in the living room.

  Eight hours. Enough time to move slowly in the humid heat, the windows open to birds and traffic. Shabbos doesn’t start until sundown: seven forty. Time stretches out hot and slow.

  I polish the Shabbos candles, set the table with wine-glasses and the good china. When I’m finished, I fold laundry on the kitchen table: T-shirt sleeves in first, then bodies neatly tucked up. Underwear crotches up, sides in. I refold the tea towels Ima has shoved in the drawer.

  Our kitchen is all yellow: both the sunshiny cupboards with their old metal handles and the lemony walls. The nicest thing about our kitchen is the hardwood floor, although it needs to be refinished. Everything else is awkward and old. The drawers either stick or come flying out, whisks, spatulas and soup ladles spilling to the floor. The tap drips or gushes, and the kitchen window sticks open or dangerously smashes down unless propped with a brick. The gold-flecked Formica counters are knife-marked, rippled with age and crowded with porcelain containers: sugar, flour, coffee, tea. Abba couldn’t bring himself to part with Bubba Rosa’s old jars. The heavy meat grinder she used for making chopped liver takes up counter space beside the oven.