Washing the Dead (13 page)

We ate dinner without talking much, and while I was getting ready for bed, I noticed puffy circles under my eyes. I was catching a cold, and my head ached. I wrote Tzippy another letter I would never send. It was Tuesday, after all.

Dear Tzippy,

I still can’t believe that you’re getting married. I guess you’ll set a date soon. Mira has a boyfriend. His name is Howie, and she met him at a BBYO bagel breakfast last December. He doesn’t go to our school, so Mira and I still eat lunch together. We don’t see each other after school anymore, but that’s okay. I feel like I need to be home anyway.

Mira and I got into a fight yesterday at lunch. I asked her to please stop sucking the white part of the banana peel from the skin because everyone would laugh at her. She said that we always sat alone at the lunch table anyway, and that if I cared so much about being laughed at, then I should stop dressing like Moon-Schine Girl. I didn’t even cry when I reminded her that Moon-Schine Girl was old news. Now I answer to Zitface.

My dad knows about the Shabbos goy. He looks so sad. The only good news is that he didn’t leave my mother and the Shabbos goy is finally gone. He moved to Wyoming. I hated what my mom was doing, but it hurts to see her in so much pain. These two feelings are rooted around my heart like a wishbone.

I can’t wait until June. Everything will be fine by then, and we’ll have the whole summer to figure out our new lives.

Your best friend,

Barbara

By April, I was working for Mrs. Kessler only once a week. My mother needed me more, so I came straight home from school. She was no longer spending the days in bed, but she rarely left the house. My father never asked me to do the grocery shopping or keep her company, but I think he was relieved that someone was taking care of her.

A week before Passover, I was walking to the Schines to help Mrs. Kessler, and as I turned up the driveway, I noticed a figure wandering along the bluff. It was a gloomy day, and it was easy to spot my mother’s baggy cornflower-blue coat against the gray horizon. She moved her hand to her mouth periodically to puff on her cigarette.

I stiffened. She so rarely went out that she must have come here for a reason. When she passed the carriage house, I thought she’d look toward the window for the Shabbos goy, but she didn’t. She kept walking toward the bluff.

I broke into a jog as I imagined her flapping her skinny arms, cigarette between her fingers, the tiny orange ember releasing smoke into the air. A bird in a blue coat. I wanted to shout, but my throat closed up, so I ran harder until I almost reached her. She stood with her back to me, shoulders slouched and her hands hanging limply at her sides.

“Mom?” I called out softly.

She turned around, and I shuddered. I hadn’t seen her outside of the house, where she’d drawn the shades in every room. In the natural light, she looked pale, but something else about her caught my eye. I recognized the tilt of her head, the distance between her body and the lake behind her. No flowered dress or hat, but this was exactly where she stood in the photo that fell out of the Shabbos goy’s duffel bag.

“What are you doing out here?” She looked as though I’d woken her from a deep daydream. She took a long drag of her cigarette, dropped it on the ground, and crushed it with the tip of her boot. She turned back to the water.

“Mom? Hello? Are you here?”

“Where else would I possibly be?” she replied, not to me, but to the miles of open water in front of us.

After a few minutes, she started back toward the mansion, and I followed. Instead of heading up the driveway, though, she went to the kitchen entrance. When she opened the door, I wasn’t sure if she was looking for the rebbetzin or the Shabbos goy. The kitchen smelled like ammonia. The door shut behind us, and my mother stepped toward the pantry. A surge of the electricity I’d felt in the mikveh seemed to radiate from her body.

“Mom, this isn’t a good idea. Let’s go upstairs to the Schines instead.” Somehow I knew she was in no shape to go back down to the mikveh. She’d fall in and drag me with her. I felt exhausted from the energy I was expending to keep her out of harm’s way.

Mrs. Katz popped out of the pantry, mop in hand. “June!”

“Hello, Malka.” Mrs. Katz was once called Muriel; she was one of my parents’ first recruits.

“I’m doing the first round of Passover cleaning.” Mrs. Katz pointed to the floor and looked at my mother eagerly. A few months ago, my mother would have praised Mrs. Katz for her service to the shul. My mother never mopped our floors, much less the shul’s. Once I overheard her telling my father that she’d grown up with maids and that was why she didn’t know how to clean a floor properly. My father didn’t follow up and ask her more about her servants, like I would have. He simply hired her a cleaning lady whom she let go after the Shabbos goy left. Now it was up to my dad and me to scrub toilets and mop floors.

My mother said nothing. Through Mrs. Katz’s eyes, I saw the knotted hair and the shoulder blades poking through her coat. Mrs. Katz, with her full mouth and giant breasts, only made my mother look more anemic.

“How are you?” Pity draped Mrs. Katz’s fleshy face. She looked nothing like the adoring woman who’d trapped my mother in long conversations at the kiddush lunch table.

My mother reached into her pocket and pulled out a cigarette, but she didn’t light it. “I came in for a match.”

I saw the outline of her lighter in her front pocket and wondered if she’d been such a skilled liar before her affair.

Mrs. Katz reached for a box of kitchen matches on one of the top pantry shelves, slid it open, and held it out to my mother.

My mother took the whole box. “I better not smoke in here.”

Mrs. Katz looked down at her apron and fiddled with the string. “You take good care of yourself, June.”

We filed out of the kitchen with barely a goodbye. I waited until we were on the street to say a word. “Mom, were you going to go down to the mikveh again?”

She lit her cigarette and took a long drag. “No, Sweet B. The rebbetzin has to supervise our visits,” she said, as if I was a recruit and she was informing me of a Jewish law.

The wind blew her smoke into my lungs. She wasn’t going to tell me more. I was relieved that Mrs. Katz had stopped us from walking into that pantry and down the steps to the mikveh, but I felt that pull, too. We walked home in silence, the tacit agreement that I’d keep what I knew of her secrets and lies between us. I let us into the house. She tossed the box of matches on the table, flung her arm around me, and drew me in, both clinging to me and comforting me. Minutes later, she disappeared upstairs, not even bothering to take off her coat and boots.

On a rainy day in May, I came home to find the rebbetzin in our kitchen. The dishes had been washed, and it smelled like chicken was roasting. Two teacups and saucers sat on the table.

“Sit down, my Barbara.” She pointed to a chair.

“I should go—”

“I just came from checking on your mother,” the rebbetzin assured me.

I sat down, although I wanted to dash up to my mother’s room and see her for myself.

“Let’s have a cup of tea.” She poured hot water into the cup belonging to the saucer my mother used for her ashtray and placed a Lipton bag and the sugar bowl near my hand.

“Thank you.” I stirred two teaspoons of sugar into my tea. The warm liquid ran over my tongue and down my throat. The rebbetzin sat with me until I emptied my cup. She always said that sometimes just sitting beside someone with tsuris was all they needed to start to feel better. I had tsuris, that was for sure, trouble aplenty, and I was reveling in her attention.

“I want to discuss your summer plans.”

“Does Mrs. Kessler need help with Yossi?”

“No, Barbara.”

“Then what?” I asked, confused.

“It would be a good idea for you to spend a summer away,” she said firmly.

“Oh, I can’t. My mom needs me. I’m staying home and then taking a few classes at UW Milwaukee in the fall.” I’d been accepted at Madison, but I’d deferred. I’d wait until my mother was healthy. If I could help her get better, then we could all return to our old lives.

The rebbetzin studied the contents of her teacup.

“And I have to stay home because this will be my last summer with Tzippy.” My words sounded stupid as they left my lips. I was no longer the girl who stole cookies or snuck off to the nook or mused about the Shabbos goy’s love life.

“No. You need to go,” she said as if she were giving orders to a procrastinating Tzippy to do her homework.

Her seriousness rattled me. “Why?”

“I don’t think being here is a good thing for you, Barbara.”

“But why?” Sweat started to bead on my upper lip.

She walked over to the sink, her back toward me as she meticulously dried the inside of the basin with a paper towel. “I know that things have been difficult here.”

“What do you mean, difficult?”

“You know, with your mother.” Now she was wiping down each tile under the splashboard.

And then I saw it, as clearly as I had when I looked at my dad the afternoon I skipped school. “You know?” I asked.

She stopped cleaning, but she didn’t turn around.

I didn’t want her to turn around. I couldn’t bear to look at her face. I tried to swallow, but my saliva had dried up. This was it. I’d never considered how she was going to tell us to leave the shul, but it was just like her to do it after making us a nice chicken. I waited for her to serve up an offering from the Talmud that would accompany a long goodbye speech, but instead she said, “I’m sorry.”

My ears filled with a high-pitched noise like the warning signals television stations played once a week.
For the next sixty seconds, this station will conduct a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test.
I put my hands over my ears to stop it, but the ringing had penetrated my skull, and it was lasting more than sixty seconds. The rebbetzin came to me. She stood next to me, and I concentrated on the perfect hem she’d sewn on her skirt and the sound of our breath: mine short and broken, hers punctuated by long sighs. She walked to the sink and ran the water, ruining all her shining. I held my head between my hands.

She put a glass of water on the table and sat down facing me, her eyes focused and bright. She was back to herself, our leader who knew the perfect next move for all of us.

“I have a wonderful opportunity for you, Barbara.” She asked me if Tzippy had ever mentioned her cousin Sari and her husband, Rabbi Levenstein, who were building a community in San Diego. She said Sari was newly pregnant and had such bad morning sickness that she couldn’t take care of her son. “What would you think of helping her out?” she asked me with enthusiasm.

I wanted to cry, but the tears were stuck somewhere inside me. “What will happen to my mother?”

“The first thing we need to do is get your mother well.”

“How can you help her? She disobeyed Hashem.”

“I know
exactly
what she did, Barbara.” She almost sounded as though there was a perfect explanation for my mother’s choices.

“Did my father tell you?”

She smoothed her skirt over her knees. “It doesn’t matter how I found out.”

“Who will take care of my parents?”

“Hashem.” She let out a breath. “And Rabbi Schine and I.”

“Hashem? What about His 613 commandments? Number 74: That the women suspected of adultery shall be dealt with as prescribed in the Torah. Exodus 22:18: You should not permit a sorceress to live.” I recited this passage as if Rabbi Lichtenberg had just called on me in Judaics class.

“This is a difficult situation,” she said as if I was a child and I couldn’t possibly comprehend such a grown-up matter.

None of this made any sense. How could the Schines rip their lapels for Mr. Isen and grant my mother so much leniency? As much as I’d feared the rebbetzin kicking us out of the shul, her acceptance of my mother’s affair unsettled me more. She still looked like the woman who paced back and forth while advising a congregant, transmitting her wisdom through the phone cord wrapped around her fingers, but this time her fingers were busy shredding a napkin.

“Your father thinks this is best, too,” she added.

“You’ve been plotting with him?”

“You’ve been so good to your mother, but this is no life for a young girl.” She cupped my chin in her hand.

I picked at the wet tea bag wadded up on the saucer. “Please, let me stay.”

“I’m sorry, Barbara.” She bit her lip, but her voice remained firm.

“I won’t get in anyone’s way, I promise.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head no.

“Please,” I whispered.

I, not my mother, was the one being exiled to California, which was much farther away than Brookfield.

7

September 2009

D
uring the weeks following Mrs. Kessler’s tahara, I dialed the rebbetzin a half dozen times but hung up before hitting the last number. I don’t know what I wanted from her, maybe an apology for shipping me off to California. Maybe I wanted an explanation for why she’d invited me to wash Mrs. Kessler or implored me to take care of my mother or even spared a thought for a woman she’d expunged from her community, albeit for good reason. I wished she’d gone about her business of saving Jewish souls and left me in peace.