Washing the Dead (2 page)

“Madison. Business trip.”

Sam hadn’t missed a sonogram appointment yet. Bridget had
handed him a tissue when he wept after seeing the baby’s heartbeat for the first time.

“I wanted him gone. He doesn’t care about the gender as long as the baby is healthy, and I—” My sentence was too ugly to finish.

I stared at the feline overhead. “It’s not that I don’t know how to handle a little girl. I’m a teacher.” I was a good teacher, too. I’d received the Milwaukee Early Childhood Education Golden Apple award two years in a row. I liked girls; I simply had too much baggage to raise one of my own.

Bridget waited for me to finish my thought.

“And I had a good mom.” I paused. “For a while.”

“Do you want to tell me about her?”

“I don’t know.” I considered what I would say. Maybe that she sang me Ella Fitzgerald to lull me to sleep and taught me how to knead challah dough. And she was a superb listener.

Bridget waited without making me feel rushed. I knew she had a packed schedule, and I felt like the person who shows up at a busy grocery checkout line with a wallet full of coupons.

“I’m keeping you from your next patient,” I said.

“I’m fine.”

I swallowed. “My mother baked me chocolate cakes from scratch for my birthdays and let me lick the batter off the beaters.”

“To heck with salmonella,” Bridget joked.

I smiled, still staring at the kitten, remembering my Saturday-morning walks to Shabbos services with my mother. She held my hand with a touch so light that it felt like her fingers were blowing mine kisses.

“Seriously, it sounds like you had a good mom,” Bridget said, fishing her glasses out of her pocket.

I reached for her arm. She folded her hands in her lap.

“I can’t take care of a girl,” I whispered.

“Oh, get out of town. Of course you can. Look at all the things your mom taught you!”

My mother had shown me how to ditch her children when
they needed her most, to walk out the front door without so much as a glance over her shoulder after shaming them with her bad behavior.

“Yes she taught me a lot of things.”

I was breathing hard now. Hot red circles were colonizing my breastbone, and my armpits were sweaty and rank, as they’d been since I woke up this morning. No matter how much deodorant I put on, I smelled like an onion bialy. Even Sam had noticed it when he kissed me goodbye, and he has no sense of smell.

“Deep breath, honey.” Bridget took my hand in hers and held it tightly for a few seconds.

“Okay,” I said obediently, and then waved my hand in front of my nose. “Sorry for the stench.”

“Not to worry.”

I tried to dry my armpits with the sleeve of my robe.

“Forget about the pits for a second. I want you to listen to me,” Bridget said.

I shifted my gaze until I was staring into this semi-stranger’s kind blue eyes.

“You’re not the first woman to lie on this table, scared witless that you’ll hurt your girl like your mom hurt you.”

How did she know?

“These women go on to become good moms and love the dickens out of their daughters, and if you have one, you’ll do the same.”

I hope I can.

Bridget squeezed my hand hard. “Trust me, or better yet, trust you.”

Trust.
It was something I could think about. I shivered. My toes were icy, despite the vents blasting hot air in my direction. We sat in silence for a few seconds. Through the thin walls, I heard my OB recite his mantra to another patient: “Small meals throughout the day. Call me with any questions or concerns. You’re never a bother.”

“Okay, let’s do this.” My voice sounded gravelly.

“You don’t want to wait for Dr. Mathison?”

“No.” I didn’t want anyone else to see me this whacked out.

Bridget got up from Sam’s designated chair and walked around the table to the ultrasound cart. She gently undid my robe for me, which I liked. She squirted a glob of jelly on my stomach and spread it around tenderly. I liked that too. She detached the wand from the machine and moved it around my belly. I shuddered.

Bridget squinted into the screen. “Everything looks
real
good.”

I breathed my usual sigh of relief, but I didn’t let the breath entirely escape from my body.

“Mrs. Blumfield?” she said softly.

“Yes?” I answered to the cat above.

“You’re having a perfect baby girl.”

I stared at the screen, at the baby’s heartbeat, and each pulse of light propelled me forward in time. I knew things. I knew that I would name my daughter Lili, and that after she was born, I would reach out to the mother who had left me. I knew that my mother and I would have biweekly desultory phone calls to compare the hues of the leaves falling from our elm trees or the price of unleaded gas at our respective Mobil stations. I would not sing Lili Ella Fitzgerald, even if I could carry a tune. I would choose raw folky singers like Marianne Faithfull and the Cowboy Junkies. But I too would be a superb listener.

When Lili turned two, I would run into Bridget at Sendik’s, at the deli counter, but I wouldn’t recognize the woman who had sat next to me and pried my fears from me as she would a sharp object from a small child’s fingers. When I prayed, I would thank God for my triumph over my mother’s legacy, knowing that my mother would one day need me as much as the baby now growing in my womb, and that the sour smell I’d so easily washed away after my sonogram would return with more pungency.

My glue would hold for fifteen years, until a gorgeous September day when a letter would arrive through my mail slot and blast me back to the tail end of my childhood, to the morning my mother began her final goodbye.

2

August 1973

M
y mother’s mood hovered over us, a mist that could either turn to rain or vanish into the sunlight. During our family walk to Shabbos services, I saw her eyes honeying over, the first sign that at any moment she could dip away from us, into that place inside herself. Ever since last April, the mist had turned soupy, and I worried that we would both drown in it.

“Let’s do the last block fast, Mom.” If we moved quickly, we could outrun the fog.

“Okay, Barbara,” she said, as if I were a small girl and had asked her to play one more game of Go Fish. I was seventeen. She appeased me, and we took off. We were both small and wiry, and we walked quickly, our heels touching the pavement in synchrony.

“Faster, Mom. They’ll never catch us.” I looked back at my father and my brother, Neil, both panting to keep our pace.

She slowed down, as if faltering. “I’m tired today, Sweet B.”

I grabbed her hand, and she squeezed my palm with her fingers, cool and long as a concert pianist’s. Then she let go. She didn’t like to be touched when the mist overtook her.

“Let’s let your father and Neil catch up,” she said, the glaze thickening over her eyes.

Her goneness filled my chest. I wanted her back, but only if she could return as my normal mother. Her mists terrified me.

We ambled past the old beer-baron estates, with their carriage houses and panoramic views of Lake Michigan, on our way
to the mansion that belonged to Rabbi Schine and his wife, the rebbetzin. Twenty-five years ago, Rabbi Schine, grandson of the great Chasidic leader Rav Isaac Schine, had been dispatched from Brooklyn to Milwaukee to ignite Jewish souls. A mysterious donor had given Rabbi Schine the mansion, which he’d converted into our synagogue, our shul. We stopped at the foot of the Schines’ long driveway and faced the Tudor and its freshly cut front lawn, almost the length of a football field. The air was heavy with the scent of grass and lake. My mother, elegant in the new green hat that matched her eyes and blouse, stared beyond the house, drinking in the miles of waves fanning out behind it, as if they could absorb her. The water was unnaturally blue that morning, and its expansiveness made me feel hopeful that she would come back to us soon.

Out of habit, I glanced up at the top floor of the mansion, to the Schines’ living quarters, for the signal that would tell me if Tzippy, my best friend, had already come downstairs for services. Not yet—her shade was still drawn. Our summer together was running out. Tomorrow Tzippy would go back to her yeshiva in New York to study with other Chasidic girls, and we wouldn’t see each other for months and months. My mother’s moods were much easier to manage when Tzippy was around.

Neil and my father caught up to us, and when we arrived at the mansion’s front entrance, we took turns touching the mezuzah on the doorpost and kissing our fingers. We walked through the musty foyer, past the enormous portrait of Rabbi Schine’s grandfather, whose eyes I imagined were following us as we made our way to the sanctuary, a converted ballroom with high ceilings and a real crystal chandelier.

My father and Neil sat in the front of the shul, and I trailed my mother back to the women’s section. The Brisket Ladies, two women who cooked briskets for congregants who were ill or in mourning or had given birth, scooted down so my mother could take her chair next to the rebbetzin. My mother had earned this coveted seat by hosting Shabbos lunches for the nonobservant
suburban Jews my parents helped recruit to the Schines’ shul. My mother hated to cook, so the rebbetzin had written out four easy recipes for her on index cards. These dishes never turned out well, but it didn’t matter; my mother had a quiet charisma and knew firsthand how to sell Orthodox Judaism to people brought up in synagogues with stained-glass windows and organ music. The rebbetzin and my mother spent long hours together writing and editing the talks the rebbetzin gave around town. “There would be no shul without June Pupnick,” the rebbetzin said often. This was the biggest compliment she could pay to any congregant, because the shul meant everything to the Schines. The rebbetzin loved my mother like a sister and daughter rolled into one, and my mother offered the Schines all she had, except for the parts of herself that none of us could touch.

The rebbetzin leaned over to wish us a good Shabbos and kiss us hello. She was tall, exactly the same height as Rabbi Schine, and I guessed that was why she slouched and wore flat shoes with the stylish suits she sewed for herself. She was thin, too, thinner than my mom, and her skinniness accentuated the bones in her face: the bump on her nose, her tiny forehead, and her underbite, a Class III malocclusion that Tzippy inherited and my father fixed. Her eyes were round, though, and a warm, milky brown. When she looked at me, which wasn’t often because she had so many people to look at, I felt important to the shul and to Hashem, God.

“Good Shabbos, Rivkah,” my mother said. Nobody but my mother called the rebbetzin by her name. Ever. We all called her “the rebbetzin” like the English referred to Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor as “the Queen.”

My mother gave the gummy grin she used only when she was trying to act like everything was normal, but a look of recognition crossed the rebbetzin’s face under her brand-new sheitel, styled into a light brown pageboy that suited her pale skin. The rebbetzin touched my mother’s arm and pointed to something in the prayer book, and though my mother leaned her head into her friend’s shoulder like she always did, I knew she wasn’t paying attention.

Tzippy and I always sat in the far corner of the shul so that we could see everything. Mrs. Kessler, my former nursery school teacher, was sitting in the row in front of ours today. As soon as I caught her eye, she flashed me a smile so bright that it shone a light on what I liked best about myself. Her attention was different from the rebbetzin’s; she was more focused on me and less on what I meant to the shul and to God. I wanted Mrs. Kessler to pull me into the cocoon of her lap and assure me that my mother would be back to pick me up from school before I knew it. Silly idea. Mrs. Kessler’s lap was occupied by her baby, Yossi, and I was about to enter my senior year of high school.

My mother stopped pretending to pay attention to the rebbetzin’s finger scrolling through the Hebrew words of the prayer. She excused herself and left. The rebbetzin’s eyes tracked my mother but then returned to the prayer book. I checked the doorway for signs of Tzippy, whom I relied on for her sunniness and steady advice on everything from whether to tell my parents that I’d caught my brother eating a cheeseburger with his friends to which novels were appropriate for me to read.

I knew Tzippy’s face better than my own, and when she showed up, I saw she’d been crying. Her lids were slightly swollen, and her chin jutted out the way it did when she was upset. She slid into the empty seat I’d reserved for her.

“What’s wrong?” I mouthed.

She spoke into my ear. “My parents talked to a shadchen yesterday.”

“A matchmaker?” I whispered back. Tzippy’s family came from a Chasidic sect in which matches were still made and men wore long black coats and hats. My family was Orthodox, which meant that I got to pick my own husband and my father wore regular clothes.

“Yes!” Her breath warmed the inside of my ear.

“Aren’t you happy?” We’d been planning our weddings since we were in third grade.

“No, petrified.”

“Girls.” Mrs. Kessler turned around and scolded us gently, but
she could never really get mad at Tzippy or me. When we were her students, before Yossi was born, she’d given us her entire heart.