I picked up the silver pointer, in the shape of a small hand with the index finger extended. I touched it to the parchment gently, like Rabbi Grussgott had told me. The words were in my head—I’d listened to them so many times on my iPod that I knew every sound, every syllable—and as I chanted and slid the pointer over the Hebrew, my nervousness fell away.
By the end, there was a crowd gathered around me of everyone who’d been called to the Torah for an aliyah: both of my grandmothers, Aunt Elle and Uncle Josh, Samantha and Maxi, my mother and Bruce. Now it was time for my speech, my message, the thing that I wanted to tell them.
“We read today from Genesis,” I began. “Abraham was Isaac’s father. When Isaac was forty years old, he married Rebecca. His wife was barren, and Isaac pleaded with God for her sake.”
Behind me, I felt my mother stiffen.
“God granted his plea, and Rebecca became pregnant. But the children clashed inside her, and when this occurred, she asked, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ She went to seek a message from God. God’s word to her was ‘Two nations are in your womb. Two governments will separate from inside you. The upper hand will go from one government to the other. The greater one will serve the younger.’ When the time came for her to give birth, there were twins in her womb. The first one came out reddish and as hairy as a fur coat.” Someone—maybe Todd or Duncan Brodkey—snorted. I kept reading. “They named him Esau. His brother then emerged, and his hand was grasping Esau’s heel. Isaac named him Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when Rebecca gave birth to them.” I paused, then said, “Which, in my opinion, was totally unfair. I mean, he’d be, like, seventy-eight when they finished high school.”
My mom laughed. I bent my head back over my typed pages. “The boys grew up. Esau became a skilled trapper, a man of the field. Jacob was a scholarly man who remained with the tents. Isaac enjoyed eating Esau’s game and favored him, but Rebecca favored Jacob. Jacob was once simmering a stew, when Esau came home exhausted from the field. Esau said to Jacob, ‘Give me a mouthful of that stew! I’m starving!’ Jacob said, ‘I will, if you sell me your birthright first.’
“‘Here I’m about to die!’ said Esau. ‘What good is a birthright to me?’ ‘Make an oath to me right now,’ said Jacob. Esau made the oath, and sold his birthright to Jacob.”
I looked down at the three pages spread in front of me on the dark red velvet covering the bimah. The words swam in front of my eyes. What had I meant to say? What did any of it mean? I blinked and could make out individual words: “obligation” and “responsibility” and “traditions of our people.” I felt my mother’s hand on my shoulder, and I knew that people were staring, but all I could think, all I wanted to say, was I miss my dad.
I blinked again, hard, and looked at the pages. “I’m supposed to tell you about what I’ve learned this year as I got ready to become a bat mitzvah,” I said. “And I had a speech like that all written. It was about my Torah portion, and the idea of obligation, and how if you do something wrong then you have to make it right, but really, the truth is, what I learned this year is that life is hard.”
My mother’s hand tightened on my shoulder.
“Good people die for no reason. Little kids get sick. The people who are supposed to love you end up leaving.” A lump grew in my throat. I swallowed hard and kept going. “I imagine how Esau must have felt. It wasn’t his fault he was hairy, and it wasn’t his fault he was hungry, and it probably wasn’t his fault that his mother liked Jacob better. Jacob was sneaky, but he’s the one who got his father’s blessings. He’s the one whose descendants are supposed to be numbered as the stars in the sky.” I looked down and managed another breath. “But Esau kept going,” I said. “He didn’t get his father’s blessing. He had to live by the sword. But he at least got to live. Isaac told him that the fat places of the earth could be his dwelling, and he could still have the dew of heaven to drink.”
I folded up my pages and pressed my hands on top of them. “When you don’t get what you want, you take what’s left and make the best of it. The Torah tells us that Esau had two wives, and maybe they helped him out. I know that my mom and my grandmothers have helped me a lot this year. And my aunt Elle and uncle Josh, and my . . . and Bruce. Even when I did the wrong thing or made the wrong choice, my family stood with me. What I learned this year is probably what Esau learned, even though in Jewish history, he’s just the other brother, the one nobody talks about much. Bad things happen. Stuff doesn’t work out.” I looked down at the sheet of paper, the important words I’d written down. “Everyone has sorrow. Everyone has obligations. Everyone keeps going. You lean on the people who love you. You do the best you can, and you keep going.”
I folded up the pages again and tried to stuff them in my pocket before I remembered that my fancy dress didn’t have one. Rabbi Grussgott raised her eyebrows with a look that very clearly said, What happened to the speech we worked on? Then she gave a little nod and gestured to my mother, who looked like she was going to start bawling as she stepped up to the microphone with her red dress rustling.
“Joy, my daughter, my darling,” she began. Behind me, I heard Grandma Ann start to cry. “I am so very proud of you today, as you stand here before us, reading so beautifully, looking so beautiful and so grown-up.”
My mom wasn’t crying. Her eyes were sparkling, and I thought it was because she was happy, even impressed with me, as if I’d turned out to be just as special, just like she’d always said I was.
“I know how proud your father would be, too. I know how proud you always made him. You were—you are—the most wonderful daughter anyone could ever ask for, and even if you drive me crazy sometimes . . .” I smiled a little, and she did, too. “And I drive you crazy a lot of the time . . .” She wiped underneath her eyes carefully, with just the pad of her forefinger, like Elle had shown her. “You’re the best thing I’ve ever done. You’re the best thing I could have ever hoped for. And I know that you will be, as the Torah says, a woman of valor, like Sarah and Rachel and Rebecca and Leah, your namesake. I know that even if you don’t get exactly what you want exactly when you want it, you’ll be strong and you’ll be smart and you’re already beautiful, and I know that you’re going to have a wonderful life, because I know you’ve already learned one of the most important lessons of all.”
• • •
“Close your eyes,” I said as we walked into the ballroom of the College of Physicians, and I held my hands over my mother’s face to make sure she couldn’t see. I walked behind her, guiding her into the ballroom. “Okay . . . now!”
For a minute she didn’t say anything, and then she started to cry. “Oh, Joy,” she said, and clapped her hands. “You didn’t!”
I did. All of my years building scenery for a dozen different Philadelphia Academy plays and musicals had finally come in handy, and my friends had helped. We’d been able to transform the big ballroom into a Sound of Music wonderland in celebration of the sappiest musical of all time, which of course was my mother’s favorite. Each of the tables was one of “My Favorite Things.” There were raindrops on roses (Tamsin and I had worked for an entire Sunday making papier-mâché flowers, then gluing round crystals to them) and whiskers on kittens (that was the kids’ table; we’d bought a pile of stuffed animals, and each kid could take one home). There were bright copper kettles (Aunt Sam knew a party planner who’d gotten a bunch of them on loan from Fante’s in the Italian Market) and warm woolen mittens (Grandma Ann and Mona had spent the last three weeks speed-knitting). The favors were in brown paper packages tied up with string, and for dessert there were crisp apple strudels, even though I’d drawn the line at serving schnitzel with noodles for lunch, because I didn’t know what it was and thought it sounded disgusting.
“‘Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes,’” my mom recited. Tamsin twirled proudly and beamed.
“‘Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes,’” I recited, and led my mom to the head table, where there
were a dozen different snow globes as the centerpiece (each one had a different Philadelphia scene at its center and a blank space for guests to slide in a picture that the photographers would take).
“‘Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings’?”
“Um. The banquet manager nixed that. You can’t have wild livestock in a public place for the purposes of . . . you know . . . entertainment.”
“Well,” she said, “I have no doubt that you tried.”
Todd strolled over, wearing a silver suit, pulling a skateboard with a spool of rope on top of it. “See if you can get it,” he said.
She only had to think for a minute. “Are you ‘So, a needle pulling thread’?”
“You see?” said Todd, turning to his sister. “It’s obvious to anyone who knows the musical.”
“I still think the lederhosen looked better,” she said.
Todd handed the skateboard to his sister and pulled me toward the empty dance floor. “Come on, Joy,” he said. “Let’s dance.”
It wasn’t as fancy as Tyler’s party, or as big as Tamsin and Todd’s, but all of my friends had fun. There was a chocolate fountain for dessert, which the caterers shut down after Max tried to jump inside it. There was even a small scandal when my mom hauled Aunt Elle into the lobby and whisper-yelled at her for dirty-dancing with Jack Corsey (“The boy is thirteen years old, Elle!” she said, and Aunt Elle smirked and said, “Today he is a man”).
I danced with Todd. I danced with Bruce. I held Max under his armpits and let him balance his little black loafers on top of my silver sandals. I even danced with Cara for a minute, before she sniffed and said, “Stupid,” and went back to her table. When Duncan Brodkey tapped my shoulder, saying, “Hey, you wanna?” I smiled at him and took his hand, feeling my skin, my whole body, lighting up when we touched.
After the cake-cutting and the candle-lighting and the speeches, when the music was just starting to wind down, I sat on a bench in the medicinal herb garden, thinking about my father. We’d go to the Franklin Institute and walk through the giant heart, or to the Academy of Natural Sciences to look at dinosaur skeletons. We would ride our bikes on the towpath from Manayunk all the way to Valley Forge, and my mom would meet us there with a picnic lunch. We’d go to the Reading Terminal for blueberry pancakes and turkey bacon at the Dutch Eating Place, and buy whatever looked interesting (a leg of lamb once, and another time a guinea hen), and bring it home and figure out how to cook it for dinner.
The bench creaked as my mom sat down beside me. “Are you all right?”
I nodded. I miss my dad, I wanted to say, but it was as obvious as the air around us, the ground underneath my feet. So instead I said, “My . . . your, um, father. He didn’t stay for the service?”
She sighed. “I think he took off. At least, I didn’t see him.”
I pulled the silver dollar out of my purse and handed it to her. My mother turned it over in her hand. “He used to throw these in the swimming pool, and we’d dive for them,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “It was in your book.”
She sighed and nodded.
“It was nice of him to come, I guess,” I said. She said nothing. “So maybe he really was okay. Right?”
“Nobody’s just one thing or another,” my mother said. “Nobody’s just bad or just good.” She sniffled and wiped her eyes. “It was nice that he came.”
“It was,” I said, and for a minute I leaned my face against her shoulder and let her hold me up.
When I got home I hung my beautiful dress in my closet. I’d never wear it again, I knew. Maybe I’d give it to Cara, and she could wear it someday—except probably the fashions would change in the next three years, and she’d have her own ideas about what was beautiful.
I took the silver dollar out of my purse and my jewelry box off my bookshelf. The box had been a birthday present from Maxi when I turned eight. Inside was a plastic ballerina; she spun and played “Beautiful Dreamer” when you wound the knob on the back. There wasn’t much in there: a silver bracelet my father had given me for my last birthday, two twenty-dollar bills from a babysitting job, and a picture of Duncan Brodkey that I’d taken from the yearbook office’s pile of discards. It was better than nothing, I thought. A silver dollar that my mother had once dived under the water for, an I’m proud of you. A mother who loved me, maybe more than I wanted her to sometimes. A father who’d loved me, then died. It was more than a lot of kids got.
I ran my fingers along the bottom of the box until I found what I was looking for: my old silver baby rattle, engraved with JOY. It could work for another baby, I thought, and I slipped it in my pocket and went downstairs to look for the silver polish.
FORTY-ONE
As the days piled up into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and fall slid into winter, I realized one of the great truths about tragedy: You can dream of disappearing. You can wish for oblivion, for endless sleep or the escape of fiction, of walking into a river with your pockets full of stones, of letting the dark water close over your head. But if you’ve got kids, the web of the world holds you close and wraps you tight and keeps you from falling, no matter how badly you think you want to fall.
Frenchie scratched at the screen door, and I let her out, and when she whined, I let her back in. Joy outgrew her shoes, so I took her to the mall to get another pair, plus winter boots and a new winter coat. When she drank all the milk, I would go to the supermarket, just like a normal person, and buy more . . . and if anybody noticed that I was wearing a men’s blue bathrobe under my long winter coat, none of them said a word. I cooked dinners, ran the dishwasher, emptied it, then cooked some more and filled it up again. The leaves fell, and I swept them off the sidewalk. The snow fell, and I shoveled it and salted the front steps, trying not to cry when I pulled the shovel out of the closet, trying not to remember the way Peter and I would tease each other about whose turn it was.
December was awful. I avoided the stores full of tinsel and carols and holiday lights, the happy hand-holding couples lingering in front of the jewelry-store windows on Sansom Street, the crowds of families at the mall, but eventually, I had to go to Target to pick up Tupperware and paper towels, washcloths and diapers and wipes. I was doing fine, piloting the shopping cart around the perimeter of the store, avoiding the video and music section, where Peter and I used to linger, when the bread-machine display stopped me in my tracks.
I groaned out loud, remembering. We should get a bread machine, Peter had said. Fresh bread would make the house smell good.
But the bread always comes out gummy, I’d said.
It’s good when it’s toasted, he’d replied.
I’d told him that we didn’t have the counter space, and he’d said that maybe we could consider relocating the cappuccino machine because, honestly, how often did we use it? And I’d said the cappuccino machine was more aesthetically pleasing than a boxy plastic gummy bread maker. Then I’d go home and make a frothy, noisy cappuccino, and he’d sigh and give up until the next time we walked past bread machines in a department store, when he’d look at them wistfully, as if they were a row of girlfriends who’d gotten away. Sometimes he’d run a finger down one of the digital displays and heave a sigh, and I’d say Forget it and keep pushing the cart toward the toilet paper and the juice boxes.
On the speakers overhead, Mariah Carey’s “O Holy Night” gave way to “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” I leaned against the Crock-Pots and started to cry. Why hadn’t I just bought the damn bread machine? It would have made him happy. It would have made the house smell good. And even bread-machine bread was good when it was toasted. What was wrong with me? Why hadn’t I—
“Ma’am?”
I wiped my eyes. A clerk in a red polyester pinny was staring at me. I pulled a package of tissues out of my pocket (these days I never left home without them) and pointed at the Crock-Pots.
“I thought they were on sale,” I said weakly. The clerk led me to what must have b
een the break room, a cheerless white-tiled windowless space with red plastic tables, a refrigerator, and a microwave. “He’s never coming back,” I said to myself. Or I’d meant to say it to myself, but the clerk must have heard me.
“Ma’am?” he said. “Are you sure you’re all right? Do you have anyone I can call?”
“I’m okay,” I managed, and hurried to the cash register, then my car, where I could cry in peace.
Time passed. I read the copy of See It, Be It that my sister had given me, and tried to visualize my desired end results: not just looking normal but feeling that way, too. In March I baked hamantaschen for the Preschool Purim Parade, because I always did that, and I hadn’t called the synagogue to say that I wouldn’t, because I couldn’t stand the thought of explaining to the stranger who might answer the phone that they’d been my husband’s favorites, only now my husband was dead. In April I planted purple and yellow pansies in our window boxes so that ours weren’t the only empty ones on the street. I cut back the roses. I watered the hostas. I swept and weeded, keeping up appearances, thinking that I could fake normal, could fake happy, even if I never felt that way again.
I went on walks with my mother, out to brunch with Samantha, to New York to visit my sister, and I talked to Maxi on the telephone. I sat on the sidelines at Joy’s softball games and tried not to stare at Peter’s replacement as first-base coach, a man I’d never seen before, with reddish hair and twins in the outfield. I found a therapist for Joy—a man, at her request—and I dropped her off every Wednesday and didn’t ask questions when I picked her up, even though I could tell from her swollen eyes that she’d been crying in there. She had to cry somewhere, I figured. At home she was making lists, doing price comparisons of diapers in bulk on the Internet, printing out articles about educational toys and signing the as-yet-unborn child up for music appreciation, which began at the unbelievably early age of three months.
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