Like No Other (6 page)

D
evorah

A
UGUST
29, 5:30
PM

F
ridays, in preparation for Shabbos, are normally peaceful days. Businesses close at two or three
PM
so that commuters can get home well before sundown, and all the shopping and the ironing and the silver-polishing has been done ahead of time, throughout the week, so that Friday afternoons are spent soaking up the smells of homemade chicken soup simmering on the stove and sweet yellow-brown challah baking in the oven while neighborhood children play outside on the street before dinner. That’s
normally
. Today is anything but normal.

For one thing, there’s the aftermath of the storm, which has left the neighborhood looking as if some science fiction creature tramped through, kicking down trees and scattering branches and garbage like confetti across rooftops and power lines. The magnolia tree in our backyard miraculously survived, but the Eliavs’ ancient, nearly dead pine did not, falling straight into their glassed-in sunporch and shattering two windows. I slept in Miri and Hanna’s room last night (when the Shomrim dropped me off, after Jacob called in a favor, Miri met me at the door in tears and refused to fall asleep until I curled myself around her bird-boned body, singing lullabies and petting her hair), and the crash sent all three of us screaming up into Isaac’s room. Then Isaac and I put on rain boots over our pajamas and darted across the front lawn to make sure our elderly neighbors were still alive (yes) and see if they needed help (also yes). So at seven
AM
, once the skies cleared to a mottled gray-blue, I was in the Eliavs’ backyard, ankle-deep in mud and up to my elbows in my mother’s gardening gloves, throwing shards of glass into a paper bag. Incidentally I didn’t find any of Rose’s and my “bad thoughts,” even though I poked around for them. Like everything else on the ground, they must have been swept away.

The other abnormal development is that for the first time in my life, I am in charge of Shabbos dinner. Until the storm hit and Rose went into labor, my parents had planned to stay in Monsey for the weekend, and my siblings and I were going to walk to my brother Niv’s house on Troy Avenue to eat. But Liya’s arrival has changed everything, and now we have to whip up a huge Shabbos dinner out of nowhere, because in addition to being blessed with a new baby, a still-standing home, and all other manner of G-d’s good graces, Rose is getting released early from the hospital. I don’t know what my parents said or did to Dr. MacManus to get special treatment (I hope the doctor is still alive), but my mother called just half an hour ago and told us to set two extra places—one for Rose and one for my aunt Varda, whom my parents couldn’t very well leave behind to fend for herself with one working foot—right before she asked me five hundred questions about every minuscule detail of our prep work. I know she’s beside herself that she had to choose between meeting her first grandchild and micromanaging what Hanna and I have taken to calling
the Shabbos dinner to
end all Shabbos dinners
. Both activities give her such great pleasure.

So now, just two hours before sundown, I’m frantically shifting pots and casserole dishes around our narrow kitchen, each move of my hands sending some sauce or oil splattering onto the teal-and-white decorative tile that borders my mother’s prized double oven, while Hanna sets the table and Miri dusts the baseboards on her hands and knees.

“I cleaned everywhere except places no one can see,” Miri reports, sidling up to me like a soldier at attention, clutching a dwindled roll of paper towels in one hand. The knees of her skirt are covered in dust, and her auburn hair hangs limply around her slender, porcelain-doll face.

“Even if someone gets down on all fours and peeks under the rug edges?” I ask, shoving a steaming tray of potato kugel on top of the fridge to make room for challah braiding.

“I think so?” Miri wipes a hand across her cheek, leaving a trail of dirt. It’s considered a mitzvah to bathe in honor of Shabbos, but suffice it to say none of us has gotten around to obeying that particular commandment. I can still feel the caked mud on my calves from my morning of manual labor.

“Good girl,” I say. “Now go and hide all the wrinkles in the tablecloth with decorative napkins. And find Amos—I need someone to help me braid the challah.”

My mother enjoys entertaining and has been known to spend weeks preparing for celebratory events. It is a fact that at my naming ceremony—seven days after she gave birth to me—she baked and decorated 150 bumblebee-shaped cookies, because “Devorah” means “bee” and also because she is
crazy
. I know that as soon as she walks through the door she’s going to redo everything I’m doing, and I can’t decide if that will be a great offense or a huge relief. Maybe both.

Miri runs off to cover up Hanna’s lackluster ironing skills, and I lean back against the pass-through window, feeling the ache of thirty-six near-sleepless hours deep in my bones. It is the first minute I’ve had to myself since before the Elevator Incident. And as soon as I let my mind drift from my laundry list of Shabbos chores for even a second, all I can see is his face.
Jaxon
. Even though I’ve been distracted all day, I can’t stop thinking about him. It doesn’t help that while the storm cracked to a crescendo overhead last night as I slept in my sister’s bed, I even dreamt about him:

I’m walking down the center of the Brooklyn Bridge, in a huge crowd, on a blindingly sunny day. Everyone around me wears dark coats and hats and keeps their heads down to protect their eyes. But I get this strange feeling that someone is looking for me, and so I turn my face up, and there on the top of the first tower is a figure in a red T-shirt, dangling his legs over the side. Jaxon. He reaches a hand down toward me, and then the sun goes black. Everything turns black.

“Did I hear you
challah
for me?” a voice pipes up. Amos is leaning on the doorjamb, and when I look over he shoots me a lopsided grin. Even though he’s only about four feet tall and has some telltale signs of puberty, like a smattering of pimples and the three hairs dotting his chin that he calls a “beard,” he’s the handsomest of my brothers, with clear blue eyes, dark, wavy hair, and a huge, infectious smile.

“Yes,” I say with a sigh. “Can you help me roll strands? I’m literally up to my elbows in dough.” It’s also all over my shirt and somehow in my nose. Amos laughs.

“Sure, but no promises. Mom doesn’t let me in the kitchen for a reason.” He washes his hands and rolls up his sleeves, and then we divide the thick, pillowy dough into six balls, rolling each between our palms to make foot-long snakes.

“Was it gross?” Amos asks me as he struggles to keep his snake from fraying in two.

“What?” I’m only half listening, my mind running a maddening stopwatch of how long I have before the shower window closes. Heating up liquids on Shabbos is forbidden, which means no hot water once the sun dips below the skyline.

“Rose . . . you know, giving
birth
,” Amos says, wrinkling his nose as only a thirteen-year-old boy can when discussing the miracle of life.

“No!” I playfully swat him with a dishrag. (
Yichud
doesn’t apply here since Hanna and Miri are in the next room, and the kitchen has no door.) “It was scary sometimes, but not gross.” Our snakes completed, I pinch the tops together on a large cutting board and start to braid, drawing the farthest snake on the right over two, under one, and over two, just like my mother taught me when I was three years old.

“What about when the power went out?” he asks. Since he’d be useless at braiding, he’s backed away from the counter and is rearranging refrigerator magnets while I work. “That must have been cool.” Upstairs, I can hear Isaac shuffling around in the study. He would never come down before dinner, not even when help is so desperately needed. And it’s not for lack of kindness on his part; it’s just the way things are: the roles we’ve learned and come to depend on. Amos is the exception to the rule, too precocious to stay out of other people’s business.

“Actually it was stuffy, since the air-conditioning went off, too,” I say with a smile. Amos rolls his eyes.

“You know what I mean,” he says with a sigh. “Was it like—” He purses his lips and makes a noise like a computer powering down. It’s actually pretty accurate.

“Kind of,” I say, finishing the braid and tucking the ends of the challah underneath the loaf. I crack an egg against a ceramic bowl from the cabinet over the left-hand sink; everything in our kitchen has a twin to accommodate two sets of dishes, pots, and pans, one for meat and one for dairy.

“What about the guy you were stuck in there with? Was he scary?” Amos says this like it’s harmless small talk, but it makes my breath catch in my throat. I freeze with half an eggshell in each hand, one holding the virtuous white, and the other the decadent yolk.

“Wait, how do you—”

“Jacob told me you got stuck in the elevator with a man.”

“That’s true,” I say cautiously, discarding the egg whites into the open garbage can as I simultaneously slip the yolk into the bowl and whisk it with a fork until it looks like custard. I hand Amos the pastry brush and let him paint the challah with the glistening egg, hoping it will distract him. No such luck.

“Jacob said he looked dangerous,” Amos says, knitting his eyebrows together in concern.

“What?! No, he—” I struggle to find words that won’t incriminate me. I can’t say that Jaxon was nice; how would I know, if I had kept quiet? “It was scary at first, but . . . he was . . .
fine
,” I say, shoving the challah into the oven so forcefully the baking sheet clangs against the rack. “He didn’t bother me.”

Amos shrugs. “I was just
asking
,” he says, and bounds out of the kitchen as casually as he arrived. I, on the other hand, am almost trembling with anger and fear. Who else has Jacob told about Jaxon? What else has he said?

• • •

“Shabbat Shalom!” my mother trills as she sweeps into the house, cradling a pale, waddling Rose, who looks a bit dazed, her pretty face still puffy from the IV fluids. Jacob and my father—a nursery rhyme duo in the making, one short and scrawny, the other huge and barrel-shaped—trail behind, followed by Aunt Varda, hopping on one leg, and my middle brother, Niv, and his wife, Rivka, who have come bearing trays of roast chicken covered in tinfoil.

We all gather in the entryway and fawn over Rose, asking if we can get her anything. (The one upside to Rose being a
yoledet
is that we’re technically allowed to break the Sabbath for her sake. I wonder: If I made myself smell bad enough, maybe she would
ask
me to take a shower?) But my sister demurs politely and settles into the armchair by the front window, holding her belly gently, as if a baby were still inside.

“Can I see a picture?” Miri asks, running and then sliding to a stop on her knees at Rose’s feet.

“I . . . I don’t have one,” Rose says, looking like she might cry.

“
I
do,” my mother says, settling her petite, round frame onto the couch next to Aunt Varda. (They wear nearly identical straight, shoulder-length, chestnut-colored wigs, which hide the strawberry-blond curls they were born with, a genetic gift from their shiksa mother that no one from my generation has received.) “I took enough for an album.” She pulls a slim silver point-and-shoot camera out of her purse and turns it on, peering expectantly at the tiny, glowing screen.

“It’s almost sundown, Ayelet,” my father warns, but my mother dismisses him with a wave.

“Psssht,” she says. “This is my
granddaughter
. Shabbos can wait.”

Miri, Hanna, and my brothers crowd around the camera like puppies vying for milk, but I hang back. It’s not that I don’t want to see Liya again—I’m dying to, I barely caught a glimpse—but I need to keep an eye on Jacob. Specifically, I need to make sure he’s not spreading rumors about me to my father. Ever since they walked in the door the two of them have been speaking quietly to each other with squinty, serious expressions. Under the pretense of double-checking the silverware placement, I wander closer to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“. . . can’t say for sure,” Jacob says. “
Something
must have happened.” My blood runs cold. Did Jacob somehow find out what happened in the elevator? Could he have heard us through the air shaft? I wouldn’t put it past him to press his ear against the doors.

“Well,” my father says slowly, “we don’t know yet. You shouldn’t blame yourself. Or her.”
Thank you, Daddy
, I think, regaining my composure. He can be intimidating sometimes, and scary-silent, but my father has always been fair. I have crystal-clear memories of him dividing up the last slice of my eighth birthday cake into seven equal slivers with a protractor so that none of his children would feel favored or denied.

“You’re right, I know you’re right,” Jacob says, nervously scratching his beard. “I just can’t understand. Seven weeks early, after seven months of no complications . . .”

Oh. I nearly crumple with shame as I “count” the last place setting. Of course they’re not talking about me; they’re talking about Liya’s birth. And why shouldn’t they?
That’s
the huge news today, not my getting stuck in an elevator. What has gotten into me? Why am I obsessing about it? It was nothing.

Except it wasn’t
.

I ignore my inner voice and take the chicken from Rivka to set on the
blech
, the metal stove covering that keeps food warm once the sun sets and we aren’t allowed to use electricity. While I’m in the kitchen, I turn on the faucet in the left-hand sink, cup the cool water in my shaking fingers, and splash my face until my cheeks go numb.

• • •

Sundown falls at 7:33
PM
, so we’re all seated around the big, rectangular dining table that Zeidy’s father built back in Ukraine and transported to New York in pieces on a steamship—the same one that brought
Zeidy and his eight siblings to the United States—by 7:15. I snuck in a shower just under the wire and have my limp, wet hair tucked behind my ears, dripping onto the back of my shirt. In my house we’ve always sat men on one side, women on the other, so Jacob, Isaac, Niv, Amos, Zeidy, and my dad sit across from Rose, Hanna, Rivka, me, Aunt Varda, and Miri. My mother takes the head of the table, which evens things out and also makes sense since she has to lead the blessings anyway.