The Sacrifice of Tamar (19 page)

“I will take care of you, my darling,” Ruth said, moving close to him beneath the warm blankets. Wordlessly she put her arms around him as if he were a frightened child. “Sha, sha, sha,” she crooned, rocking him in her arms.

Still, he could not stop weeping.

“Not so loud, my darling. Sha. The neighbors will hear.”

Chapter thirteen

Orchard Park, 1964

“Three little maids from seminary,” Jenny sang. “We don’t smoke and we don’t chew and we don’t talk to boys who do!”

“We don’t drink and we don’t smoke and we don’t go with boys who’re broke,” Tamar called out, collapsing with giggles on Jenny’s bed.

“Wait, wait, listen to this one,” Hadassah commanded them. “We don’t make out and we don’t dance, and we like men who wear tight pants!”

“I’m not going to sing that!” Tamar said piously.

“That’s over the line, Hadass, come on…” Jenny shook her head. Hadassah looked at her and then at Tamar, and they all collapsed in hysterics.

It was a warm Sunday in July. Already the heat was rising from the Brooklyn pavement like some invisible sea creature, its warm, thick tentacles winding around them, taking their breath
away. Sunday afternoons at Jenny’s. They’d made a ritual of it that summer they were fifteen, before their sophomore year in high school. Behind those closed doors they could do anything they wanted with no parental supervision, since Jenny’s mother didn’t count as a parent as far as Hadassah and Tamar were concerned. Used to the relentless iron chisel of parental sculpting, they viewed the easygoing, mutual respect between Jenny and her mother with wistful fascination and envy. Often, Ida Douglas was gone altogether, taking Jenny’s younger brother to visit relatives or the planetarium or down to the beach in the Rockaways. So that summer Jenny spent Shabbos at Hadassah’s or Tamar’s, and they came to her the next day.

Sundays at Jenny’s. They’d put on their first curlers, tried their first eyelash-curling mascara. They’d practiced painting each other’s faces with enough cheap makeup from Woolworth’s to hide the wrinkles of a dowager, let alone the pretty, clear complexions of young teenage girls.

The image would come back to Tamar later, so strong and sweet. Jenny, her hair in little pink bundles all over her head, and Hadassah on her back, her toenails wriggling in the air as the red nail polish dried, while she, Tamar, changed the records on the record player. “
Wake upa, little Suzy, wake up
.”

And the guitars moving in, strong and as virilely insistent as the picture of the heavenly Everly Brothers on the single record cover jacket bought for twenty-eight cents (four singles for a dollar) in bins at Woolworth’s.

And then Neil Sedaka’s sweet high tenor: “
Breakin up is hard to oooo oooo do…
”

Jenny was the first one to hear of the mop-headed English boys.

“What’s that supposed to mean, Beatles?” Hadassah argued with her. “As far as I’m concerned, Elvis is still king.”

She was the only one who really liked Elvis anymore, which
Jenny and Tamar couldn’t understand, since both of them had always found Elvis too much of a
shegetz
to get excited over. With his long, greasy hair and black leather jacket, he was just too much like those Italian kids in Newrose diners who beat up Ruach Chaim yeshiva boys on their way home from school. But of course, since Hadassah couldn’t keep her Elvis records at home, she always wanted to play them again and again on Sundays.

Paul McCartney, however, in his neat, if longish, haircut and suits and ties, was nice enough to fantasize over, even though he wore no skullcap, a definite problem. Jenny tried to convince Hadassah, but Hadassah just laughed and wiggled her toes. “Elvis,” she’d tell them, “is the King.” And then she’d jump up on the bed, wiggling her hips in a wonderful, banned-for-television imitation.

Tamar and Jenny rolled on the floor, and the unpleasant old Polish man downstairs banged on the ceiling with his broom handle.

“Nobody dances like that anymore, Hadassah! They do this thing called the twist and something else called the frug and the swim… You keep your feet in one place and kind of move your hips like…” Jenny gave them a demonstration.

“They don’t do it that way on
American Bandstand!
” protested Hadassah, who eagerly studied the dancers when the show played on televisions displayed in the storefronts of appliance stores on Fourteenth Avenue.

“Dick Clark is out, Murry the K is in. He’s this disc jockey…” Jenny went into a long explanation, trying to bring the other two up-to-date on what was happening in the World Outside Orchard Park.

Jenny’s house was the refuge, the place to join the planet for a little while, to get off the dizzying satellite that was Orchard Park, where the only singing group recognized was a group of nice yeshiva boys called the Yeshiva Boys (how’d they ever think of such a wild name? Hadassah wanted to know), who sang verses
from the Bible and commentaries of very fine spiritual value with rousing Hasidic melodies they made up themselves. All the girls in Orchard Park were secretly in love with the members of the Yeshiva Boys. All except Hadassah.

“They look like such goody-goodies. Like they go to bed at ten and let their momma tuck them in,” she said, taking a sophisticated drag on a pencil and blowing the imaginary smoke up to the ceiling with half-lidded, sleepy eyes.

“I don’t know. They look pretty neat to me,” Tamar protested.

“Nobody says ‘neat’ anymore,” Jenny informed her.

“What do you mean? Are you sure?” Hadassah asked curiously. Like a desert plant thirsting for any drop of moisture to keep going, Hadassah thirsted for information. Without regular access to newspapers or television or movies, her slang, her knowledge of the latest teenage fads were hopelessly outdated and she knew it. By the time an expression or fad filtered down to Orchard Park, the rest of the country had long discarded it. “So what should she say?”

“ ‘Cool’ or ‘hip,’ ” Jenny suggested.

“ ‘Cool’? But what does that mean?” Hadassah wanted to know.

“It means the latest thing that’s going on,” Jenny explained.

Hadassah hoarded the information jealously. She didn’t dare challenge Jenny, who was not only—as far as she knew—the only girl in Orchard Park allowed to take the train to Manhattan all by herself, but also enrolled in Greenwich Village art classes. Hadassah was hardly allowed to go to the corner by herself. Even visiting Jenny was an anomaly, something her mother adamantly opposed. It was, oddly, her father’s strange insistence that had allowed the visits to continue. “Poor orphans are the true home of the Torah. Whoever shuns them, shuns the Creator himself,” he’d tell her mother, pushing the rebbetzin into paroxysms of silent aggravation.

“Well, the Yeshiva Boys look pretty cool to me. Especially Benjamin.”

“Oh, Ben-ja-min,” the other two girls sighed, clutching their chests in mock devotion.

“Why, what’s wrong with him?” Tamar said, aggrieved.

“Why, nothing is wrong if you like nice yeshiva boys with dark raincoats and black-rimmed glasses and super short hair…” Hadassah mocked.

“I do!” Tamar said innocently, the sarcasm, as usual, lost on her.

“How can you?! They’re so boring!” Hadassah exclaimed, abandoning subtlety. “They look exactly the same. I can’t even tell one from the other.”

“I think Benjamin looks very nice. Very pale. Like he sits inside and studies all day.”

“Give me a tan and long hair!” Jenny sang out.

“And sideburns, not
payess!
” Hadassah screamed. “
You can do anything, but get off of my blue suede shoes
,” she sang at passing cars, hanging out of Jenny’s window.

“Did you hear what happened to Esther?” Tamar asked.

“Mrs Kravitz caught her talking to a boy, so what?” Hadassah said listlessly. Anything to do with rabbis and rebbetzins and Ohel Sara bored her.

“My mother knows her mother. Her mother’s shaved off all of Esther’s hair.”

Jenny and Hadassah stared at Tamar in horror.

“You’re making it up!” Hadassah accused.

“No, I’m not. You just see tomorrow. I bet she won’t come to school at all.”

“I want to tell you something else. Mrs Kravitz told Esther if she does it again, she’ll be expelled. And…” She hesitated.

“Come on!” the girls screamed.

“I don’t know. It sounds so terrible to say it.”

“
Say it!
” they both screamed. The irritated Pole banged on the ceiling.

“Mrs Kravitz told Esther: ‘Why would a man want to buy an opened bottle of soda?’ ”

The girls sat quietly, letting the meaning of the phrase break over them like a wave. They began to scream in delight and anguish. “She didn’t!”

“Okay, don’t believe me. But that’s what Esther said.”

“That is so disgusting!” Hadassah giggled, glancing at Jenny, who also started giggling.

“I just don’t see what’s funny about it,” Tamar complained. “You just don’t take things seriously enough. It’s our lives…”

“Oh, Tamar, what are you worried about? Your husband will get a new bottle…”

Jenny took the pillow and threw it at Hadassah, and then Tamar hesitantly picked one up and did the same, a big grin covering her face.

“You’re messing me up!” Hadassah complained.

“You’re so messed up already, what difference does it make?” Jenny tickled her until Hadassah pinned her hands to her sides.

They breathed heavily, exhausted from the laughter, gulping big drafts of air.

“This is so babyish, pillow fights! Let’s do something cool,” Hadassah begged.

“There is a great new exhibit at the Met… and there are all these crazy things happening in the Village. Street artists and weird clothes stores. Come with me next Sunday?” Jenny urged them.

“But how would we get there?” Tamar shrugged.

“What do you mean? By subway. It’s easy.”

“I’d have to lie,” Hadassah said, considering.

“But why? What’s the big deal about going on a subway?” Jenny asked, exasperated.

Hadassah and Tamar gave each other grudgingly intimate
glances. This was the area in which Jenny was the outsider. A respectable religious teenage girl did not go to “the city” by herself and certainly did not traipse around
goyische
halls of entertainment like museums, which were full of indecently dressed portraits of
shiksas
, as well as totally undressed marble statues of Roman
shkotzim
.

Moreover, Orchard Park was a safe island. Something could happen to a girl who swam to the mainland. After all, hadn’t they all learned in
chumash
class what had happened to Dina, the daughter of the patriarch Jacob in the city of Shechem? She went out, the Bible says. She was a young girl and she was curious, the biblical commentator Rashi explained. And the prince of the city looked on her beauty and dragged her off and raped her (as nature intended and not as nature intended, the commentaries clarified, although these commentaries were skipped over at Ohel Sara, where the plain text was difficult enough to deal with). The “You see! You see!” was embedded between every line.

“My parents would never let me,” Tamar said without regret. She felt a certain smug pride in her restrictions. Her parents were always there, an enormously important part of her life. Their judgment was always infallible. Besides, she felt very protective toward them, especially with her father’s failing health.

“You’re so unbelievably lucky, Jenny, that you can do whatever you want! I can’t sneeze without the whole world knowing about it and telling me how to blow my nose! I don’t really mind lying,” Hadassah said, considering. “It serves them all right. It’s so stupid to be treated like a baby when I’ll probably be matched up and married off in another two years…”

“Doesn’t that ever bother you?” Jenny asked. “I mean, having your whole life just mapped out like that for you?”

Hadassah looked surprised. “Why should it? What else is there for me to do?” she said calmly.

“What do you mean? I mean, I’m just… I’ve just got a million things I want to do. I just don’t know where to start.”

“Like what?” Tamar asked, thinking Hadassah incredibly fortunate, wishing she could be sure the matchmakers would be banging down her door in two years.

“Like, deciding which college to go to. Of course if my grades are good enough, I’ll try Barnard or Sarah Lawrence. But that means getting a merit scholarship. Those places cost a fortune! And I’d have to board. If not, I can always apply to Brooklyn College, or City…”

“After all this time at Ohel Sara, I’m surprised you haven’t changed your mind about going to college,” Hadassah shrugged.

“What do you mean, changed my mind? I have to go! If you don’t go to college, then you can’t really be anything or do anything. Just a secretary like my mother. I don’t know, I’m thinking about being a journalist, or maybe a marine biologist, or a curator at an art museum.”

“Sure, I guess you could do any of that if you don’t care about
chilul Shabbos, gelui aroyos
, and
tarbus hagoyim
,” Hadassah said in the haughty tone reserved for occasions when being the Kovnitzer’s Rebbe’s daughter was a convenient way to defend herself from feelings of ignorance and inadequacy.

Jenny, stung, turned pale.

“Hey, that’s not nice,” Tamar broke in. “I mean, Jenny wouldn’t ever work on Shabbos, or do anything wrong with a boy, or…” she floundered.
Tarbus hagoyim
, the great crime of accepting—worse, enjoying—gentile culture. She thought of Jenny’s trips to Greenwich Village, the novels of Ayn Rand on the shelves, the Beatles records… Jenny was certainly guilty of that. “But Hadassah, you also like
tarbus hagoyim!
You like Elvis!”

Jenny leaned back against the wall and looked steadily at Hadassah. “I’m not like you, Hadassah. I don’t have this wonderful bunch of people carrying me around like I’m crystal, taking me places, buying me things. I’ve got to think ahead about making a living.” She looked away wistfully. “But sometimes, you know,
I envy you and Tamar. I wish someone would be strict and careful and lay down the law with me. I wish someone would worry and care… My mom always says I’m so reliable, she never worries.”