Washing the Dead (21 page)

“Can’t you wake her, Dad?”

“Tell me about San Diego,” he said.

“It’s sunny. There are palm trees, and the water and sky are abnormally blue. Come on, Dad. I’m worried.”

“Barbara, this is why you need to spend some time away. You’re too young to worry so much.”

“I don’t want to spend time away, Dad.” I wanted to sob until I’d exhausted myself.

“I don’t want you to either.” He sounded defeated.

“Then let me come home. I want to be with you and Mom. I’ll help more. I won’t have school, so I can help write the rebbetzin’s talks to the newcomers like Mom did. I can cook too. I’m a better baker than Mom. And I could make the Shabbos meals, and Mom would only have to come downstairs and eat. And if I had extra
time, I could spend it with Tzippy.”

“It’s okay, Bunny. It’s okay. You’ll be back before you know it.”

It was no use. The rebbetzin had sold him on her plan. Even if I hitchhiked home, she’d just send me back to San Diego, or she’d pawn me off on another family, in Anchorage or Hagatna. After I said goodbye, I bawled my eyes out. When I finished, I was harder inside.

The next morning, I helped Sari unpack her boxes. She sat on the couch and told me where to put her things, clearly self-conscious about having to pay someone to play with her child and find places for her books and candlesticks. She spat often into a coffee cup, and when she got up to get sick, I rinsed out the cup in the sink.

I would take care of Sari and her saliva because it was my job. If we’d met during a different time, we might have become friends, but the last thing I wanted was to tether myself to another rebbetzin. I’d always assumed that if the rebbetzin found out about the Shabbos goy, we’d leave the shul as a family, but the rebbetzin had taken my place in nursing my mother, and I was living with strangers. The Rebbe’s familiar eyes following me when I passed his photo, the ritual washing cup hanging from the kitchen faucet, and the hushed Yiddish falling from Rabbi Levenstein’s lips when he spoke to his parents in Brooklyn served as painful reminders that the Levensteins’ condo was only a pale imitation of the Schines’ mansion, my real home.

Sari looked exhausted, so I took Benny for a walk around the housing development. “Children need to be run,” Mrs. Kessler used to tell me.

I picked up a eucalyptus leaf and offered him a sniff.

He made a face. “Smells like medicine.”

I took a whiff and made his same face, and we both laughed.

I spotted a digger on the horizon. “I see something you’re really going to like,” I said as he slipped his little hand in mine.

He looked up at me. “What?”

“You’ll see,” I said.

He was a fast walker for his size, and soon we were standing in front of a yellow truck with a claw appendage. Benny’s eyes widened when the claw reached down and scooped up dirt.

“What’s it doing?”

“I think it’s making room for new homes,” I said. The houses in my Milwaukee neighborhood were all old and made of sturdy materials like brick. I thought I could blow one of these new condos down with a huff and a puff.

For almost an hour, we watched the digger while the construction workers stole glances at his forelocks and my long skirt. When he finally got restless, we walked on a good half mile up a steep hill, and Benny pointed his finger toward what lay on the opposite side.

“What’s that?” he asked.

I looked up at yellow steel forming an enormous V against the brilliant sky. “A crane, Benny.”

“No, that!” He pointed toward a line of blue far off in the distance.

I put my hand to my forehead to shield my eyes from the sun. “Do you mean the ocean?”

“Yes! We saw it from the airplane.”

Again he pointed toward the miles and miles of water new to both of us. Something opened up inside me, just a crack. For the first time since my mother got sick, I could see out of the well I’d jumped in to save her.

“Benny, have you been to the beach yet?”

He shook his head no.

The Levensteins had been living in San Diego for six months and Benny had never seen the ocean? I would find a way to get us to the beach. The water would bring me more of that sunlight, I was certain of it, even as I felt a flash of guilt over leaving my mother alone in the well.

For the next few nights, while I browned hamburger meat
for farfel and bathed Benny, I plotted how to convince Rabbi Levenstein to loan me his car. Because Sari was so nauseous, he and Benny dined alone, and then I ate and cleaned up the kitchen while he told his little boy a children’s version of the weekly Torah portion.

One night, instead of retreating to the basement after supper, I waited for him in the kitchen, busying myself with cleaning the burners. “Rabbi Levenstein,” I called before he disappeared into his study.

“Yes, Barbara?”

I’d figured out his schedule. He visited the hospital on Mondays and the college campuses on Tuesdays, but mostly he locked himself in his study to pore over the Torah.

“One day when you’re studying here at the house, can I borrow your car and take Benny to the beach?” I asked.

He stroked his beard as if he were contemplating a Talmudic matter.

“Or the zoo, or Balboa Park.”

“Let me think about it, Barbara.” He gnawed the tip of his forefinger. The old Barbara would have said something to make him feel more comfortable because she empathized with his shyness. Exiled Barbara stared at his finger until he grew self-conscious and put his hands in his pockets. I’d established my dominance, like an alpha dog in a new pound.

“Thank you, Rabbi Levenstein,” I said as if he’d already given me the key.

The next morning I was halfway up the basement stairs when I overheard Sari and Rabbi Levenstein talking. I sat on a step and eavesdropped.

“The Rebbe called to ask if I needed more prayer books.” Rabbi Levenstein’s voice vibrated with tension.

“What did you tell him?” Sari spoke with more energy than I’d heard from her voice before.

He sighed. “You don’t need prayer books if you can’t find ten
men to make a minyan for a Shabbos service.”

“Invite those men you met at the university, the ones with the long hair and the crosses. They’ll stay for lunch.”

I’d heard my parents talk about the beatniks and Werner Erhard dropouts, lapsed Jews who found their way to the Schines’ table. These recruits were young and often sad-looking, and therefore, according to my father, ready to receive Rabbi Schine’s teachings. They were nothing like the well-dressed young mothers who showed up at the rebbetzin’s teas.

“When you’re feeling better, Baruch Hashem,” Rabbi Levenstein said bleakly.

“You are a learned man, Shimon,” Sari reassured him. “You will find a way to touch these souls.”

“By next summer, we’ll be on our own.” He sounded tense. “No more stipend.”

Sari was stacking dishes in the sink, but I could still make out her words. “You’ll touch people, and they’ll want to help us build a shul, and it will all work out.”

I walked up the steps and interrupted their conversation. “I’ll cook Shabbos lunch for you.”

Rabbi Levenstein and Sari looked at each other.

“Thank you, Barbara, for the light of your Jewish neshama.” Sari smiled at me with relief.

My Jewish soul was actually feeling rather shaded. I felt a little sorry for the Levensteins, but I wasn’t interested in helping Sari as my mother had helped the rebbetzin. Exiled Barbara wanted to guilt the rabbi into giving me the key to his car so that Benny and I could go to the beach already.

The next Friday, I engaged in an odd little act of rebellion against the rebbetzin while I cooked her Shabbos menu. I used a milchig fork designated solely for dairy foods while poking the beef for the cholent. Aside from one Yom Kippur when I’d forgotten I was fasting and ate a cherry Lifesaver after the Kol Nidre service, I’d never so much as broken a minor rule.

I prepared way too much food; the rabbi couldn’t find ten men for his minyan. How was he ever going to fill a shul if he couldn’t even fill his living room? Benny followed me around the kitchen while we listened to the anemic chanting of the rabbi and the two men he’d met during his rounds at the hospital.

When he reached the end of the service, I brought Benny out to the living room to hear the Ein Keloheinu prayer. I ducked into the kitchen, retrieved one of the lemon candies Sari sucked on to relieve her nausea, returned to the living room, and rolled it toward the rabbi. “Go get it, Benny,” I said, remembering with a twinge how as children Tzippy and I had climbed up on the crowded bimah during the prayer and scrambled around the altar for candy.

The men from the hospital politely declined the rabbi’s offer to stay for lunch, so he and Benny and I ate my bad imitation of the rebbetzin’s cholent. A small eater, Benny went off to peruse his picture books, leaving the rabbi and me to finish our pareve nondairy coffee dessert, its icy blandness freezing the tip of my tongue. The faint sound of Sari’s retching drifted down the steps as Rabbi Levenstein played with his spoon.

“You’ll find a minyan if you keep trying the hospitals.” Here I was, a babysitter, telling the rabbi what to do, and relishing every second of it.

He started to rise from the table.

“Rabbi Schine found my mother there,” I added confidently.

Rabbi Levenstein settled back into his chair, and I told him my mother’s appendicitis story, which I knew by heart because she’d recited it to the dozens of lost souls the Schines assigned to our Shabbos table. I told him about how the Schines visited my mother in the hospital after her appendix ruptured and how she started coming to services after she recovered and then met my father at one of their Shabbos lunches. I paused in all the right places, finishing up with her favorite line. “I hate to think where she would have ended up without the Schines.”

“That’s quite a story, Barbara.” Rabbi Levenstein scratched his
beard.

“Yeah, quite a story.” I ached to hear my mother tell it. Since I left home, she hadn’t come to the phone once during my weekly calls.

He shifted in his seat but didn’t try to get up from the table again. “What about your father?”

I told him that my father had been tapped at the Wailing Wall by one of Rabbi Schine’s brothers while he was traveling in Israel after he completed his orthodontics program. Thinking about my father or talking to him during our Sunday night phone calls made me feel like I’d bumped a bruised knee into the sharp edge of a coffee table. I lowered my voice. “Keep trying the college, but what you really need to do to build your shul is to find one or two suburban souls. They’ll raise your money and recruit others to help them.”

He started leafing through his prayer book, pretending he was looking for the Birkat Hamazon, a blessing he recited after every meal.

“Page 48, Rabbi Levenstein.” I barely recognized my new sassiness.

The tops of his cheeks flushed, and I started feeling sorry for him again. Poor man, he was not blessed with Rabbi Schine’s instincts or charisma. How was he ever going to spot the perfect recruit? I could smell them a mile away, the ones who would plunge themselves into the community, like the Brisket Ladies and their doctor and lawyer husbands who chipped in to buy a new hot water heater for the shul last year. Even if I brought the rabbi some live ones, eager secular Jews, would he know what to do with them?

After lunch, Sari felt well enough to play with Benny, so I retreated to the basement, content to read the books I’d purchased when I drove Sari and Benny to the mall. I was taking a break from Jane Austen. The rebbetzin would disapprove of these novels with their glossy covers featuring busty, raven-haired beauties embracing handsome men who had rescued them from Hester Street tenements, but their stories gave me hope that with a little luck and chutzpah, my life could change too.

11

O
n a Tuesday morning, a few days after I first prepared Shabbos lunch for the Levensteins, I found a brown bag labeled “Barbara” on the last step from the basement to the kitchen. The paper crinkled as I stuck in my hand and pulled out a map of San Diego and a long silver key with “Pontiac” inscribed on the shiny metal. Holding the key made me feel giddy.

“How about we go say good morning to the dolphins?” I asked Benny.

He looked as if I’d just surprised him with a new toy. “You’re taking me to the beach?”

I could hear Sari coughing and gagging as I poured Benny’s cereal and juice. Rough morning. I stuffed two towels into a grocery bag and scribbled a note to Sari, waiting until she was in the bathroom to tape it to her door. I buckled Benny into Rabbi Levenstein’s Pontiac, and when I put the key in the ignition, my whole body quaked at the sound of the engine. I drove past rows of townhouses, lonely in the wide-open canyon and turned onto the windy road leading to the La Jolla beaches. Every time I rounded a corner, I caught a glimpse of the ocean. I’d always used the lake to orient myself, but now heading toward a large body of water meant I was traveling west instead of east. The country had done a somersault, and I’d come out on the other side.

I had no trouble parking at La Jolla Shores beach. It was so early that half the waterfront was still shaded. Benny and I looked at each other as if we were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
landing on the moon. I forgot my embarrassment over my long skirt, and we sprinted to the beach, my brown grocery sack in tow.