The Sacrifice of Tamar (22 page)

“And all Gérard de Lairesse did was to be born,” Jenny added quietly.

Tamar was silent, thinking of her mother and concentration camps, of thousands of small children gassed to death in the Holocaust. What could they have possibly done to deserve that? She felt confused and a little anxious, the way she always did when people revealed the holes in the fabric of her understanding of faith, G-d, and providence.

“Well, you’ve both been very good girls. As a reward, I will now take you to see the naked statues.” Jenny smiled.

“You go on ahead, I’m going to look for a bathroom,” Tamar said.

“I can’t believe you’re really serious! You’re just chickening out! Come on, Tamar, admit it. Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for?” Hadassah teased her.

“I really… just… go ahead. I’m…”

“Okay, but you’ll be sorry! We’re going now,” Hadassah warned her.

“It’s fine. Don’t let Hadassah bully you. We’ll come back for you,” Jenny comforted.

Tamar walked back until she reached the Rembrandts. She
stood in front of the portrait of Gérard de Lairesse and stared. He was ludicrous, hideous, sickeningly ugly. He was G-d’s will. And the artist had not judged him, seeing in him neither a monster nor a curiosity, but a human being. And he was forcing her to do the same, she realized with a start.

“There she is! We thought you’d gotten lost,” Hadassah called.

“You should have come with us. They weren’t so terrible.” Jenny smiled.

“Yeah, most of them are broken and have fig leaves.” Hadassah sighed, disappointed.

“But why did you come back here? . . . I thought you hated the picture?” Jenny asked.

“My feet are really killing me now. These boots! Come on, Tamar!”

As if awakening from a dream, Tamar’s eyes slowly focused. “Were they any good, the statues?”

“We just told you!”

“You did? What did you say?”

“Never mind, let’s just go! I’m starving!”

They made their way outside, caught the Fifth Avenue bus, and got off at Central Park. They bought cool cans of
Coca-Cola
, which they all agreed was kosher even though it didn’t have a rabbi’s written stamp of approval. They took out homemade sandwiches and fruits.

“It’s so unfair, not being able to eat out,” Hadassah mourned, biting into her soggy tunafish. “It’s like standing with your face pressed up against the window to some wonderful party that everyone is invited to but you. I hate it!”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t bother me so much. I wouldn’t want to eat that stuff anyway. It probably tastes terrible!” Tamar said.

“You’re not supposed to say that! Remember we learned
you’re supposed to say: Oh, how I’d love to eat bacon and a cheeseburger, but what can I do? G-d doesn’t want me to. So for Him I have to give it up,” Jenny corrected her. “Besides, in my youth, I tasted all those things, and they taste great! But I envy you, Tamar. It’s so easy for you to be religious. I wish it was easier for me. I just feel like I’m fighting every single minute! I… I have such doubts all the time. I mean, my mother is this totally nonreligious person, but she’s… well… she’s a good person. She does things in her own way, and she means well. But every time she cooks something on Shabbos, or crumbles bacon on top of a salad, it makes me ashamed and sad. Sometimes, it even makes me feel like I hate her a little! So what kind of a good person can I be if I feel that way about my own mother?”

Hadassah daintily took the last mouthful of her sandwich and dabbed the corners of her pretty mouth. “Want to hear what I think? I think you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You know Shayndee Libner? She once told me she wants to be a doctor. She’s really interested in medicine and everything. Her uncle is this big doctor. But she said if she went to medical school, it would break her parents’ heart. And if she doesn’t go, it will break her heart. So whatever she does, she’s damned, damned, damned.”

“So what do you think she’ll do?” Jenny asked.

“She says she’s just going to give it up because if she doesn’t go, then only one person will be unhappy, her. But if she does go, she’ll make her whole family miserable. Majority wins!”

“But it’s not an election! It’s her whole life! You can’t just take a vote on that!” Jenny exclaimed.

“I think she’s right not to go,” Tamar said. “Being religious is a sacrifice. Look at us! Aren’t we sacrificing all the time? Not eating ice cream in Schrafft’s, not going to the beach on Shabbos… But it’s for a good purpose. After all, we’re not here to be happy. We’re here to do His will.”

“But didn’t we also learn that G-d created man as a kindness? That we’re supposed to be happy, to enjoy every good thing in this world we’re allowed to? Otherwise we’re just ingrates,” Jenny pointed out.

“How come you always remember good stuff like that, and I never do?” Tamar complained.

“Maybe because I’m always hoping to hear it, and when I do I don’t forget.” Jenny laughed.

“Talking about enjoying ourselves, let’s go to the Village and see all the street artists,” Hadassah suggested, her eyes restless.

“Or we could watch the skaters in Rockefeller Center,” Jenny said.

“I don’t know. It’s getting kind of late. Maybe we should start home.”

“
It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, Tamar!
” Hadassah yelled at her. “I’m not going back to Orchard Park any faster than I have to. Skaters are boring. I say the Village.”

“Are we agreed?” Jenny asked.

Tamar bit her nails. She had told her parents she’d be with Hadassah. They wouldn’t worry unless it got dark and she wasn’t home. If it got dark, they’d worry.

She didn’t want to worry her parents.

She envisioned her father, his pale delicate skin, the dull surprise in his eyes, like the faces of convalescing soldiers in wheel-chairs in old photographs of World War I.
Tateh
, she thought painfully. A relative had given him a job packing boxes for a novelties jobber. His footsteps were careful and measured as he walked to the bathroom every morning; sad and defeated as he walked back into his bedroom every night.

Her mother was working full-time at a linen factory near the house, sewing blanket covers and curtains. Often, she would stay late and use the machines to sew clothes for herself and for her daughters. Pretty clothes, carefully made from the latest Vogue
patterns. But she and Rivkie were under strict orders not to tell anyone that the clothes were homemade. They were also strictly forbidden to reveal that their mother worked or that they had sold the bedroom set and the little spinet piano… But most of all, no one was ever, ever to know that their father had been hospitalized.

Even they hadn’t known. They’d just come home from school one day and found him gone. A vacation, their mother explained. Where? When is he coming back? Soon,
mamalehs
, soon.

She’d found out the truth by accident, three weeks later. “How is your father doing? Is he out of the hospital yet?” their kind Hungarian landlord had asked her one day, and she’d stared at him blankly, like an idiot.

They’d moved soon afterward to a cramped two-bedroom rental on the third floor of an old apartment building on Seventeenth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. Her mother had paid the moving man extra to hang the crystal chandelier in front of the living room window facing the street.

“Well, I’m not traveling home on the subway myself. But we’ve
gotta
be back before dark. My parents…”

“You’re such a good child, Tamar. Such a dutiful daughter. What
nachas
for your dear parents,” Hadassah said venomously.

“Cut it out, Hadassah! There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to hurt your parents. I think you should worry a little more about that yourself,” Jenny warned her.

“Me! I should worry about my parents?!! I’m going to spend my entire life doing exactly what my parents want me to do! I’m the precious bird in the gilded cage. I flap my wings, but I’ll never have enough room to use them, to really fly.”

“You’re here, aren’t you? Not exactly where your parents would want you to be? How would you feel if they found out?”

“They won’t.”

“But what if…”

Hadassah was silent.

“Exactly. So don’t make fun of Tamar. She’s just honest enough to admit she cares very much about her parents. We all do. We’re good Jewish girls, remember?”

“Oh, all right. Sorry, Tamar.” Hadassah smiled with irresistible charm. “Please come to the Village. I promise to leave whenever you want to after that.”

“All right,” Tamar agreed, pacified.

Girls in brightly flowered ankle-length skirts or tight, short leather ones that barely covered their behinds sauntered lazily down the tree-lined streets. Big, teased bouffant hairdos exploded off heads, and wild manes of long, shaggy hair trailed down slim backs. Thin guys strutted with open-necked ruffled Byron shirts, suede leather vests, and pointy-toed boots. And everything had this bright, wild, unregulated, unwashed, and uncombed kind of look. The absolutely, dead opposite to Orchard Park look.

They wandered, wide-eyed tourists. Babes in goyland.

“Look at that girl’s eyes! They look tasseled!”

“False eyelashes,” Jenny the tour guide informed them.

“How does she keep them on?” Hadassah asked.

“With glue!”

“And then how do you get them off?” Tamar wondered.

Jenny shrugged.

“Those pants look like they’re painted on.”

“Stretch pants.”

They did stop at some sidewalk art displays, but the offerings seemed so pale in comparison with the still undigested glories of the Met that they couldn’t take them seriously. Besides, the real works of fantasy and imagination were the people themselves. So they stopped pretending to be interested in the art and just bobbed along with the joyfully disrespectable, happy-looking, and somehow childishly harmless-looking people all around them.

Hadassah stopped at a small store with Indian shawls spread around the floor and came out with a little bag.

“What’d you buy?”

She spilled the contents into her hand. Colorful glass and metal beads, exotic feathers on a leather thread. She put it around her neck. “How do I look?”

“Like Purim.” Jenny laughed. “But so does everybody else here.”

“But when will you ever wear it?” Tamar asked, perplexed at the waste of good money.

“Why, on our next trip to the city! I can’t believe I have to go back to Orchard Park. I never want to leave! It’s so much fun here! Not one person is wearing the same thing as anybody else. It just makes me feel like I can—I don’t know—just dance in the middle of the sidewalk,” she said, skipping down the block.

“You’re
meshugah
.” Jenny laughed, skipping after her.

“Everybody will look! How can you?!” Tamar whispered furiously, hurring to catch up.

“Look around you, Tamar. Nobody’s even noticed!”

It was true. Someone was playing bongo drums, and a few people were dancing. On the other side of the street, a young man was holding on to his stomach and moaning, lurching down the sidewalk. No one’s attention could be gotten so easily, let alone exclusively, on Greenwich Avenue.

Hadassah laughed out loud. “See, isn’t it wonderful? No one pays any attention at all!”

“I don’t know. It kind of scares me,” Tamar said, her eyes following the man’s uneven spurts of violent, painful progress down the street. “It’s close to four. I think we should go.”

“Wet blanket! Next time, let’s not take her, Jen, what do you say?” Hadassah said malevolently.

“She’s right. I also want to go. I wouldn’t want to wander around here in the dark.”

“Why not? I bet there are a million fun things to do at night—Look at that: ‘Trude Heller’s Discoteque, Twist and Bossa Nova’!”

“You wouldn’t catch me here by myself at night. Anything and everything goes! You know that man we saw across the street? Drugs.”

“What do you mean? Like aspirins and penicillin?” Tamar asked in all innocence.

“No, these other things you can’t buy in the drugstore. It’s supposed to make you feel good. High, they call it. They smoke this stuff called pot and get these crazy visions, and then some inject themselves with needles… It’s called dope.”

“They do this for fun?” Tamar shook her head. “Dope is right.”

“What does it do? The dope,” Hadassah probed.

“I don’t know. But this girl in my art class who tried it says it’s the most wonderful feeling in the world. Like…” She blushed.

“
Nu?
”

“Like sex.”

“I never heard that was so wonderful. I thought it hurt but you did it anyway because it’s a mitzvah and you—”

“
Tamar!
” Hadassah wailed, overcome. “Open your eyes! If it was so horrible, why would all those girls on the other side of Newrose Avenue be doing it all the time even though they’re not married and they don’t want to have babies? For the mitzvah? …”

“Tamar’s right. We have to go. Come on, Hadassah. If you’re a good girl, you can come with me again soon.”

“Not soon enough,” she said, mesmerized, looking over the passing girls with envy and fascination, longing for it to be next Sunday at Jenny’s so she could try out all that black eyeliner…

The late afternoon train was, if anything, even emptier than the morning’s.

Their feet began to ache, and no one suggested standing up and looking out the window.

“Let’s get the map out and plan our next trip,” Hadassah suggested, spreading it over their three laps.

“I was thinking maybe we’d go over to the Guggenheim, or the Museum of Modern Art. Just seeing the outside of the Guggenheim is worth the trip,” Jenny suggested.

“What does it look like?”

“Like an upside-down layer cake or the inside of a washing machine is as close as I can get.” Jenny laughed. “Actually, it doesn’t look like anything a sane person could imagine awake. It’s wonderful! And then I thought we’d travel up to Fort Tryon Park and see the Cloisters—this Benedictine monastery they shipped from Italy. It’s really another world!”

“Another world…” Hadassah said dreamily.

“I don’t know. That sounds so far way. What if we got lost or something?” Tamar worried.