Washing the Dead (14 page)

My life, however, was anything but peaceful these days. Lili’s bones had shifted, and she needed surgery. She had stopped telling me her friends’ orthopedic-recovery stories and was withdrawn and in a constant state of unrest, partially from her discomfort, but more because her body craved exercise. One night, after struggling with a trigonometry problem, she threw her pencil against the wall. Pencils hadn’t flown in our home since she was in the seventh grade. The pencils I could live with, but Lili’s sullen silences were new, and when they hit, they knocked me on my rear. I’d have done anything to make her feel better, so I spoiled her with designer cupcakes, an iPhone, and an expensive little Coach purse she didn’t even want.

Felix scheduled Lili’s operation for the week after Rosh Hashanah. We were all counting down the days until she healed enough to start running again. I missed my old Lili, and I missed
her friends sprawled out on our couches, texting and eating the collection of snacks I’d so carefully curated. Lili hadn’t invited anyone over since the night of her injury. The house was deadly quiet, and I hated it.

My only refuge was my classroom, even though I had a biter, along with two boys who were exhibiting signs of a spectrum disorder, and our class hamster, Buttons, had suffered an untimely death. For the first time since I had Lili, I’d been lingering after school, chatting with Sarah and Theresa about the kids.

The morning before the first night of Rosh Hashanah, Lili’s mood miraculously lifted. She stopped fidgeting and laughed at two of Sam’s corny jokes. We felt lighter as we prepared for the holiday and the arrival of Sam’s parents. Unlike many of my friends, I treasured my in-laws’ company. Sam’s brother, Paul, had never married or had children, so Lili and I received second helpings of his mother’s affections. Rose brought us gift bags filled with travel-size moisturizers and trendy hair accessories, and when we visited Deerfield, she showed us off to her friends, who had known Sam since he was in diapers. Rose’s shameless bragging embarrassed Sam, and sometimes Lili, but I bathed in the warmth of her spotlight, and when she had her hip replacement last winter, I happily flew down to Miami and took care of her for a week.

Lili helped me cut up melons, wash strawberries, peel oranges, and quarter grapes. Shortly before Rose and Artie were scheduled to arrive, I phoned my mother. I’d called her twice since Mrs. Kessler’s tahara, but we’d gone back to our old conversations, which she kept too brief for me to discern much about the state of her memory.

“Happy New Year,” I said.

She paused for a second. “Happy New Year to you.”

“Have you packed for your big trip?” My mother had signed up for a senior women’s bus tour of Washington DC and Philadelphia. I’d wondered about her ability to handle the trip, but the tour company was taking care of every detail.

“Oh, I decided not to go.”

“But you were looking forward to it.” My mother was practically a George Washington scholar.

“I know, but I can’t leave my tomato plants for that long.”

Yet she had no problem leaving Neil and me for good. Stop it, I scolded myself.

“Can’t Greg look in on your plants?” Greg Gein was a widower who owned a Kinko’s franchise and lived next door to my mother. He’d succumbed to her charms and made sure her driveway was shoveled, her gutters cleared of leaves, and her garbage disposal kept in working order.

“I’ll visit Monticello this winter. It will be a good break from the cold.”

“You mean Mount Vernon.” It wasn’t like her to confuse her historical sites, especially ones that pertained to U.S. presidents.

“I said Mount Vernon, darling.” She spoke with enough authority for me to question whether I’d misheard her.

I changed the subject. “Neil’s coming over to celebrate,” I said with a pang of guilt. Her loneliness was a result of her choice to isolate herself, I rationalized, but I still felt rotten. For years, we’d engaged in this dance where she’d pretend that she was too busy to visit even if the holiday fell on a weekend, and I’d feign disappointment.

“How lovely, is there a special occasion?” She was officially disoriented.

The relief I’d been enjoying from Lili’s good spirits vanished. “Rosh Hashanah.”

“Of course, silly me. What time is Norman coming?”

Norman was her late brother, whom she never spoke of. My fingers tightened around the receiver. “Norman?”

“Is he feeling up to it?” She sounded more sure of herself when she was drifting into the past.

“Do you mean Neil?”

Now she changed the subject, telling me that Greg’s schnauzer had died. After we exhausted our short list of safe topics, I handed the phone to Lili.

“Happy New Year, Grandma,” she said politely, and after a few minutes of stiff conversation handed the phone back to me. “She wants to talk to you again,” Lili whispered.

“Mom?” I said.

“Happy New Year, Sweet B.” She sounded like she was trying to prove something to me by remembering Rosh Hashanah, but she hadn’t called me by my nickname since I was eighteen. It still made me melt.

A few minutes later, Rose and Artie’s Buick pulled into the driveway—Artie only bought American cars—and Lili grabbed her crutches and limped outside to greet them. The kitchen window was open, and I could hear Rose fussing over Lili’s ankle and Lili reassuring “Grose,” a nickname resulting from Lili’s inability to pronounce “Grandma Rose” when she was a baby. Then Sam pulled up and hugged them all. He knew better than to retrieve his parents’ luggage from the trunk. Artie was a proud man who worked out with a trainer twice a week and was still perfectly capable of carrying his own luggage, thank you very much. Rose looked terrific, too, in sleek black slacks she’d had shortened and taken in slightly across the hips—“because properly fitted clothes really do make you look put together”—and a slenderizing black sweater with a V-neck to minimize her large breasts. “You’re lucky you have those little knishes, big breasts make you look heavy,” she told me the first time she saw me in a bathing suit. Her eyebrows had been professionally tweezed into a perfect arch, and she’d expertly fleshed out the thinning outer ridges with a pencil.

When she came into the kitchen, I put my arm around her and kissed her cheek. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I said. And I was. Her love nourished me.

“Me too, sweetheart. Me too.” She put a large shopping bag on the table and pulled out a pan covered in foil. “I made a new noodle kugel recipe. Six points per slice, not that you need to concern yourself with such things.”

She lowered her voice and patted her tummy. Rose had joined Weight Watchers in the mid-1980s after her mother told her that
she looked like she’d been “eating yeast” and had since built up an SRO crowd at her Monday morning meetings.

“We all have our demons,” I said, perversely pondering what Rose would do if she discovered mine.

Lili returned to the kitchen with an impish smile. “Newsflash! Grandpa Artie told me that Dora Perlstein’s granddaughter came home from college with an emerald stud in her eyebrow.”

“Your grandpa wasn’t too crazy about that idea, was he?” Rose winked at Lili.

“How do you think I’d look with a little emerald, Grose?” Lili teased, pointing to her nostril.

Rose, one of the few people shorter than me, reached up to Lili’s chin, angled her face to the side, and studied her closely. “You’re more of a sapphire girl, aren’t you?”

Lili’s phone buzzed, and she pulled it out of her pocket and read a text.

“Lili, your grandmother is talking to you,” I said.

Her thumbs moved furiously across the screen. “Just let me answer this text.”

I was annoyed but also happy to see her engaged with her friends.

“It’s Taylor. She wants me to come over later tonight. Can I?”

“No, Lili. It’s Rosh Hashanah.”

“When I was Lili’s age, I always wanted to go off with my girlfriends, too,” Rose said.

“Grose says it’s okay.” It wasn’t like Lili to push.

“Let it go, Lil,” I said as nicely as I could. I was about to take the chicken out of the oven when Jenny, Neil, and their son Ethan arrived with a platter of homemade brownies and some chopped liver from Benji’s. It was hot out, and sweat beaded on the top of Neil’s head, his baldness a genetic misfortune he addressed by keeping himself so fit that he looked younger than I.

I hugged Jenny hard. I was grateful that Neil had had the good sense to marry her and break his pattern of falling in love with women who needed rescuing. They were all petite and pale, and
he found their helplessness and infidelity irresistible. Sheri Jacobstein’s shrink would have said that he was dating our mother over and over again. Sheri’s shrink might have pointed out that Neil had rescued me, too, and she would have been right. After my mother left, he appointed himself my friend and protector.

“Your hair looks great,” I said to Jenny. She had lustrous locks that she colored at home. Tonight, she was a honey blond.

“I don’t know, I think my eyebrows are too dark for this color,” she said. “Are people going to wonder if the drapes match the carpet?”

I laughed. “You’re terrible.”

“The red looked better, dear.” Rose said, missing Jenny’s lewd joke.

Jenny slung an arm around Rose, who fit right under her armpit. “I love this woman.”

Rose was fond of Jenny, too. It was hard to resist Tell It Like It Is Jenny, a nickname she’d given herself. Nobody ever described her as sweet, as they did me, but truth be told, she clobbered me in the nice department. She knew about my complicated relationship with my mother. Her own mother had died a few weeks after she met Neil, and she frequently told me how grateful she was for the chance to spend time with mine, an arrangement that worked well for all parties, or so I told myself.

We gathered around the table. Rose had purchased two round challahs, but we didn’t bless the bread or the wine. This was a more secular celebration, to which Neil and I had adapted. Still, it always felt as strange to me to take the first sip of wine or dive into the challah without a prayer as it had to attend cross-country meets on Friday nights. When Lili was in preschool and kindergarten, we lit candles every Friday and blessed the challah, the wine, and our daughter. Slowly, we began choosing races and dinners with Sam’s clients over Shabbos, until it felt like an enormous effort to rally the troops. Every Friday, I felt an ache when the scent of challah wafted down the halls of the preschool, and I was grateful to teach my students about the holidays, to keep to
the faint beat of the Jewish calendar.

As Jenny and Rose helped me refill platters, I caught snippets of a discussion about President Obama’s ability to resuscitate the economy. The conversation heated up when Artie, a single-issue voter who had supported Bush because he thought him “better for the Jews,” argued with Neil and Sam over whether Netanyahu should freeze settlements on the West Bank.

At the other end of the table, Ethan, the youngest of Neil’s three sons, was entertaining Lili with a story about one of his fraternity escapades. Lili would have loved a sibling, but my uterus had ruptured during her delivery. I was crushed. I’d assumed we’d fill our house with children, maybe as many as four. I wanted a loud, bustling house. The most painful time was when friends I’d made through Lili started having their second and third kids. Sam and I had discussed either using a surrogate or adopting. He was willing to do anything I wanted, but in the end we decided against having a second child. I told myself I was happy because I had Lili and fourteen little munchkins to take care of every day, and you had to take the lemons God gave you and make lemonade. Besides, until recently, there had been no shortage of kids or noise in our house.

I stacked plates and motioned for Neil to follow me into the kitchen. We’d been missing each other’s calls, and I needed a dose of him about now. “You’ve got KP duty tonight, big brother.”

He got up from his chair and followed me. “Lili seems in good spirits,” he said.

I ran the warm water and began washing while he dried. “She is tonight. May it continue.” I crossed my fingers.

He crossed his fingers too. Neil was Lili’s biggest fan. He called her after every meet for a stride-by-stride account of her race.

“How’s Big Al?” I asked. Jenny’s father, Al, was a hulking, broad-shouldered man with a booming voice like hers. He’d entered the final stages of lung cancer and now weighed less than she did.

“Sliding downhill at warp speed. He doesn’t have long.”

“God, that was fast. I’m so sorry.”

“Hard when your only parent gets sick.” He picked up the challah plate and swiped his towel over it.

“I talked to Mom before you came over,” I said.

His jaw tensed. “So you know she canceled her tour.”

“Probably a good thing.”

“Probably.”

Neil and I knew that our mother was not the type to be herded by a chirpy guide or endure countless dinner conversations with widows and divorcees who would be seduced by her stubborn beauty and interest in their lives. Unwilling to divulge anything about herself, she’d steal away to read her historical fiction and biographies of dead presidents, which would only make them vie for her attention more, but we both knew that she hadn’t canceled the trip because she couldn’t handle traveling with a group.