River

by Shira Nayman

  Something flickered within me, as it seemed, also, to flicker within her.

  “But you knew that, didn’t you,” she said. Then: “Help me, darling—” She gestured for me to help her sit up in bed. She had become so thin and frail, helping her up felt like helping to move a child.

  “I just love Ray,” she said, her eyes pale, as if the color were leaking away. “He’s your bashert.”

  “Bashert?” I asked. My Australian relatives would sometimes use words from their Jewish culture, words I didn’t know, since I had been raised without religion, and an ocean away from them.

  “Soul mate, life mate,” Grandma said. “He’s—well, he’s everything. Kind, honorable, creative, smart. And he loves you fully, I can see that. For who you are. And who wouldn’t!”

  She tilted her head, then gently sang, “To know, know, know you, is to love, love, love you.” She’d sung that to Billy and me when we were young. Her trained singing voice astonishingly still held some power.

  “He has the right values,” she added. “How I wish I could meet his family. His mother, father, grandparents, and of course his brother and sisters. I always thought marriage was partly a clash of family cultures—but not for you, Emily! Seems like a beautiful merging.”

  Ray’s family had in fact embraced me. I’d loved becoming part of their rowdy, opinionated, loving, sometimes contentious brood.

  “And he’s been blessed with your family, too. It may be small, at least the American contingent. But there is no finer.”

  Grandma closed her eyes. Talking was clearly tiring her. For a minute, her breathing slowed, and I wondered if she’d fallen back asleep, but then her eyes again snapped open.

  “I understood,” she said, something urgent, now, in her tone.

  “What did you understand, Grandma?”

  “What happened. That summer. The last time you were here. Such a long time ago … you were only fourteen.”

  I felt a curdling of old anxiety, a feeling that somewhere along the way I’d put to rest.

  “You see, after you left, I thought a lot about—well, everything. And I realized something. All these years I’ve wanted to say something to you about it … I never found the right moment. You were so involved in building your life—as it should be. I didn’t want to bring up—well—”

  “What, Grandma? What didn’t you want to bring up?”

  “The past.”

  She raised her hand with some effort and gestured to her bedside table. “Open the drawer.”

  The drawer was filled with little boxes, trays, and soft pouches, in which she kept jewelry, everything neatly arranged. Grandma’s bedside drawer had always looked just like this.

  “All the way in the back,” she said. “The little blue pouch.”

  I retrieved the pouch, made of silky blue fabric in a floral design.

  “Go ahead, open it,” Grandma said.

  I opened the zipper and withdrew a tiny china plate that looked like it was from a child’s tea set. It flashed with a familiarity that felt personal.

  “I’ve always wanted you to have this. Ever since I was a girl myself. It’s yours, after all.”

  “What do you mean, Grandma? What do you mean that it’s—mine?”

  “It’s been yours for a very long time. And then you left it here, all those years ago. I don’t think you meant to, but you did.”

  I had no memory of the little plate, though it did seem oddly familiar. Was Grandma confused?

  “Thank you, Grandma,” I said, turning it over in my hands, noting the delicate border of miniature roses. “I will treasure it.”

  “Maybe now is the right time,” Grandma said, her voice a whisper. “To talk about it. About what happened. You see I remembered it myself, remembered it from when I was fourteen.” She took in another of those shallow breaths that frightened me. “From when we were both fourteen, all the way back. I remembered everything.”

  Her eyes went milky and I felt a spear of alarm. I could feel her spirit lightening, disappearing somewhere, and then, her eyelids closed and her breathing steadied and I realized that this time, she had fallen back asleep.

  I sat there for a very long time, Grandma’s soft hand in mine, listening to her erratic, shallow breathing, as fragmented images leapt about within. I didn’t know what to make of all this—and yet I also knew that it was coming back. A piece of myself I’d long ago hidden away. The light disappeared as night emerged and the shadows elongated.

  Grandma did not stir when Ray knocked on the door and then entered, nor when I extricated my hand and planted a kiss on her downy cheek and whispered into her ear, “I love you, Grandma. I’m so grateful you are my Grandma.”

  I drew away. Tears spilled from my eyes.

  It all came back, every little bit.

  We were leaving early in the morning and I knew there would be no sleep.

  Ray and I stayed up through the night. It wasn’t so much that I needed to tell him everything. It was more that I needed to reclaim it for myself.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE SUMMER I TURNED FOURTEEN was a time of extremes. Excitement and fear, fun times and peril, togetherness and wrenching apart.

  Mama and Papa had talked about the cross-country trip for as long as I could remember; the big family adventure had existed in the distant future, like a shining North Star. I think I didn’t quite expect it to happen. Then, that Friday evening before our final week of school, they announced their plan. Mama looked secretive and happy as she cooked our favorite meal of salmon and fried rice. She stood by the stove, framed by the picture window that looked out onto our small Brooklyn back yard. The overgrown yew trees, scraggly against the darkening sky, hugged the clubhouse we’d built for Billy, with its cedar-shingled sides, pitched-tar roof, and tiny double-paned windows we’d bought at Home Depot. Mama looked small by the window, which came as a jolt—my mama, who had always been larger than life to me, with her electric energy and heightened good cheer. The cooking fan hummed and the blue tile above the stove twinkled. I glanced around the loft-like space—Papa on his computer at the kitchen table, Billy drawing at the kiddie table in the corner, under the leaves of the ficus tree Mama had planted when Billy was born that now reached almost to the ceiling.

  “Want to help, Billy?” I asked, and he jumped up from his chair.

  “I do the napkins!” he said. “And how ‘bout the forks and spoons?”

  “You can crack open the eggs when you’re done,” Mama said. She always put the little ribbons of fried egg into the rice last so that they’d be fresh and fluffy. Billy grinned so widely his lips seemed to disappear. He loved cracking the eggs.

  With everything ready, Papa put away his computer and we sat down to eat. Billy offered one of his original versions of grace—Thank you, Universe, for this wonderful life.

  Papa smiled. “You got that right, Billy,” he said, looking back and forth between my face and Billy’s. “Tell you what, kids—It’s happening! From sea to shining sea!”

  I knew immediately what he meant. “Our trip!” I said to Billy. “The Great Big Ride across our Great Big Country!”

  Billy was a sponge for whatever emotion was coursing through our family. He jumped up from his seat, “Oh boy! Oh boy!” and did a little happy dance, nose crinkling with joy.

  All that weekend, our apartment was a frenzy of duffel bags and guidebooks, things being searched for, lists being made. Papa taped a huge map of the United States onto the dining room wall and we all had to say one place we most wanted to go.

  “Where’s SeaWorld?” Billy asked, peering anxiously at the map from his perch on the dining room chair.

  “SeaWorld isn’t on the map,” I said.

  “I gonna see the whales. Dolphins, too,” he said with five-year-old determination. Papa wrote SeaWorld in red magic marker right over Orlando in Florida, adding NASA, his own choice, nearby in black.

  “The Pacific,” Mama said.

  That’s when I noticed so
mething new in her face—a gray shade in her skin that seemed part mood and part sky and felt like a cold wind, brewing with storm.

  “What is it, Mama?” I asked, scanning her face. Her eyes creased with smile and her features relaxed, but the blue-gray was still there and it sent a shiver of panic through me.

  “I’ve always loved the ocean, you know that,” she said, “and the Pacific joins my new home to my old one.” Mama had come from Australia to the United States to go to graduate school and then stayed when she met Papa. “If you stand on the cliffs at Santa Cruz, you can hear the seagulls singing ‘Waltzing Matilda.’”

  She knew my question was about the strangeness in her face, not about why she wanted to see the Pacific. But her smile told me to leave it alone—to look at the map with the rest of the family, to tumble into the excitement of planning our America-sized journey.

  We packed way too much stuff; it wouldn’t fit in the trunk of our old bomb of a car, a 2000 Nissan Maxima we’d recently bought with eighty thousand miles already on it.

  None of us wanted to weed belongings, and we were all eager to get on the road.

  “Here,” Mama said, reaching for several plastic containers packed with toys, CDs, and board games, “I’ll just stack them on my lap.”

  No one stopped to think of what that would mean—Mama sitting for three thousand miles on the way there, and three thousand more on the way back, her lap piled with stuff. We just had our eyes on the road, itching to feel it peeling away beneath us.

  “Up, up, and away!” Papa said as he wheedled his way out of our tight parking spot, a half block from the Brooklyn brownstone I’d lived in since coming home from the hospital two days after my birth. I craned my neck to look behind at the chocolate-colored facade. I fixed on the second-floor window to the right, my bedroom, which I pictured sitting empty.

  “I’ll be back soon,” I whispered, picturing the white four-poster bed we’d bought at IKEA, with its red flower-print comforter and mass of cushy pillows. I saw my collection of plush animals—scraggly bear, bright blue whale, silky flamingo, and the rest of my nighttime lovables. My arms ached to hold them; my whole body ached to be back where I belonged, in our lively, open, wonderful home.

  But I also ached to spread my arms and run out into the world, to feel new air on my face, to plunge into unknown territory and unexpected adventures.

  We’d planned a journey that didn’t make a lot of practical sense but was true to everyone’s passions and wishes.

  “That’s the fun of it,” Mama had said.

  It was one of her favorite sayings. She’d said it when she opened the bucket of flour she kept for us to play with when we were little. Billy and I and the kitchen floor would end up covered in white powder and Mama would clap her flour-covered hands and we’d watch as the snowy white billowed in the air then fell softly to the floor.

  I had the feeling that this vast country of ours, which had always been a fuzzy mystery to me, would begin to come into focus.

  The first part of the drive involved a zigzag, heading north and east to Rhode Island to visit the oldest synagogue in the United States—Mama’s choice—then south to Orlando to hit NASA—on Papa’s list, as well as mine, and SeaWorld—pure Billy. Next stop would be the Belle Meade Plantation, and then Elvis’s Graceland and Sun Studio. How tantalizing it all felt in anticipation, each place we talked about an entire and exotic world promising riches of delight.

  I had not, however, imagined the extremes. Poverty, like nothing I’d ever seen before: skinny kids in ragged clothing standing stock-still at the edge of the trailer park, peering through the chain link at our car cruising by. Heat so intense that the moment we stepped from the air-conditioned lobby of the Hampton Inn into the parking lot, we were covered head to toe in a layer of sweat. And stretches of straight, flat road cutting through high green cornstalks on both sides: nature’s curtains, Mama said.

  We would make it to the impressive antebellum Belle Meade Plantation in Tennessee, where we almost stayed one night, before everything ruptured. Instead of continuing across the vast landscape to the other shining sea where Mama might have put her toes into the Pacific Ocean, as she’d hoped, the trip would come to a rude halt, Billy and I flung into an adventure of a different kind.

  The minute we got out of Brooklyn, I opened my notebook and began drawing columns for things we were going to count. Churches, animals (with number estimates of livestock), town halls, libraries, schools.

  Strapped into his car seat, Billy craned his head my way. “What you writing, Sis?” he asked. I read aloud what I’d written.

  We settled into our “serious watching,” staring out the window to start collecting our visual finds.

  Snacks appeared every now and then, along with a juice box or metal flask of water, passed back by Mama, who was in charge of the food. The car sparkled with happiness; we were a family who loved road trips.

  We were fond of visiting churches on our travels. I loved the vaulted spaces, with their cold stone and soaring steeples: the way the air felt, the baptism wells and banks of candles to commemorate the dead, the organ pipes and carved pews baked with the scent of frankincense and myrrh. The Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, felt altogether different—an imposing rectangular building with nothing vaulted about it. The interior was grand, rather than lofty: an open rectangle with a balcony running all the way around, supported by twelve enormous columns representing the twelve tribes of Israel, each carved from a single tree. In the center of the room, an elaborately carved podium draped in gold brocade dominated a square stage edged with banisters; above the stage, massive candelabras hung down from the ornate ceiling.

  We sat on the old wooden seats and Papa read from the informational pamphlet.

  “The Touro Synagogue is the oldest synagogue in the United States. Building was completed in 1763.”

  We heard about the ups and downs of the Jewish community through the Revolutionary War, when the British used the synagogue as a hospital and meeting house, and on into the Civil War, when most of the Jewish community fled. I was intrigued when Papa got to the part about George Washington visiting Newport in 1790 to rally support for his Bill of Rights, three months after Rhode Island joined the union.

  “As part of the welcoming ceremonies for the president of the United States,” Papa read, “Moses Mendes Seixas, then president of the synagogue congregation, was given the honor of addressing George Washington. Seixas raised the issue of religious liberties and the separation of church and state. Later, Washington quoted Seixas’s thoughts in stating the new government’s support of First Amendment rights.”

  “How astounding!” Papa said. “This small community apparently had an important impact on the drafting of our constitution.”

  “Who knew!” Mama said.

  “Look at this, Sis.” Billy had wandered over to where a plaque was affixed to the wall. “Go on, read it!” he said.

  “Okay, here comes your reading machine.” I joined him by the wall.

  “In 1790, the congregation received a letter from President George Washington that said, ‘The government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.’ The letter, sent before the Bill of Rights was ratified, is held up as an affirmation of the fledgling government’s commitment to religious liberty.”

  Papa took a stab at explaining what I’d just read to Billy.

  Mama pointed to the podium. “That’s the bimah,” she said. “It really is beautiful.”

  “Where’s the organ?” Billy asked, craning his head around.

  “Synagogues don’t have organs,” Mama replied.

  “Where’s Jesusonthecross?” Billy said it as one word, scanning the walls.

  “No Jesus either,” Mama said. Then added, “Wouldn’t it be fun to stay for a service?”

  “Today’s Thursday—we could stay an extra day and go for Friday night service,” Papa said.

  Mama’s face flushed with hap
piness. I found this confusing. Though Mama was Jewish and had had a “full-on Jewish upbringing”—the words she used whenever anyone asked—our lives had been shorn of organized religion. Papa had been raised without any religion, his father having been low-key generically Christian, and his mother, from Iceland, raised as an atheist.

  “Good idea,” Billy said. “Maybe if we come to the synagogue I could be whole Jewish instead of just half Jewish.”

  “What’s wrong with being half Jewish?” Papa asked with a smile. “That way you get to be two things, instead of just one!”

  “Elias is whole Jewish. He told me so,” Billy said. Elias was one of Billy’s friends from kindergarten. “That means you get to sing the special Itsy Bitsy Spider. Maybe that’s what they do at the bimah, Mama, right? Sing the special song.”

  “What’s the special Itsy Bitsy Spider song?” Mama asked.

  “The one with the naughty word in it. Bum.”

  Mama and Papa both laughed. Billy looked offended.

  “Elias told me about it! They’re having it this summer!”

  “Having what, darling?”

  “Elias’s older brother. He’s having his Bum Itsy. You know,” Billy put his fingers in the walking spider shape and sang out in his piping voice, “Itsy bumitsy spider, climbed up the water spout.”

  “Who told you about the song?” Papa asked.

  “Nobody told me about the song. I figured that part out myself.”

  Mama explained that Billy had misunderstood. She told him the words Bar Mitzvah and tried to tell him what that was all about.

  “Well, then, I want to do that. The Bar—Mitzvah. So I wanna get whole Jewish for that.”

  “You could do it if you wanted to,” Mama said, growing serious. “First of all, even if you were what you call half Jewish you could have a Bar Mitzvah. But according to Jewish law, you are in fact whole Jewish, since in the Jewish tradition, if your mother is Jewish, you are as whole Jewish as you can get.”