Washing the Dead (24 page)

“Excuse me.” She leaned across me to open the glove compartment. She smelled like coffee and the cloves the rebbetzin used in her gingered spice cake.

“One of Ollie’s markers.” She pulled off the cap and touched my knuckles.” I don’t have any paper. May I write on your hand?”

“Of course.”

She took my hand. Her fingers were stubby and strong. “Can I read your palm first?”

I felt a rush about experimenting with what the Schines would consider sorcery. I was a little scared, too, but I opened my hand and didn’t recoil when she traced the line that ran diagonally from my index finger to the edge. “What do you see?” I asked.

“This is the heart line.” She held my palm up to the street light streaming through the front windshield. “Very unusual.”

“Why?” I liked that something about me was capturing her attention.

She drew my palm further into the light. “Your heart line splits in two here.” She pointed to the break in the line.

“What does that mean?”

She looked more closely. “I’m an amateur, so I shouldn’t say.”

“You have to tell me now.”

She returned my hand to my lap. “I think it means that you’ve had a rupture in your life.”

“Yes.” The rupture had brought me here, to Simone’s car.

“I see some tiny fractures too, but they all connect to the big split.”

I bit back the tears that had been waiting for release since I left Milwaukee.

She took my hand again. “But then they come back together right here.” She moved her finger further up my palm. “It’s beautiful.”

I laughed anxiously. “Why is that beautiful?”

She looked right at me. “It means that you will mend the big tear and all of the little ones attached to it, too.”

I wanted her to tell me more about my heart line, although I found it unsettling that she’d intuited things about my broken life. “Thank you, Simone.”

She held up the marker and reclaimed my hand. “Here, I’ll write my phone number on the top so you can look at those lines on your palm if you want to.” She spoke sweetly, in a tone she might use with Ollie or a patient.

The marker tickled, but I didn’t giggle.

“You’ve got a job and a place to live if you want to come back. Ollie would love it.”

I weakly promised to call Simone if I decided to come back to San Diego, but now that I knew I would mend this tear, my life in Milwaukee would return to normal, and the rebbetzin would let
me stay there for good.

“Barbara!” I awoke to the sound of Rabbi Levenstein pounding on my bedroom door. My clock read 4:48 a.m. As Sari and the rabbi rushed out of the house, I dressed quickly, then stretched out on the couch to wait for Benny to wake up.

Rabbi Levenstein’s adrenaline was contagious, and I was too restless to fall back asleep. I poured myself some cereal and doused it with milk and sugar. I ate the entire bowl and returned to the couch, sated and sleepy. Just as I nodded off, I felt Benny’s warm breath on my face.

“Where are my mommy and daddy?”

“Hey.” I sat up. “Your mommy is having her baby right now.”

Benny started laughing and pointed to my left cheek.

“What’s so funny?”

“You wrote numbers on your face.”

We went to the bathroom mirror and he pointed to my cheek, where the phone number had rubbed off. I must have slept on my hand. I couldn’t find a pad of paper, so I tore off a corner of a grocery bag and transcribed Simone’s number. Then I returned to the bathroom and rubbed my face with a sponge until there were no traces of the marker.

Two days after Miriam Levenstein was born, I packed my things, changed the sheets, and scrubbed the floors until they gleamed. Sari’s parents were flying in from New York, and as much as she appreciated my help, I could tell that she no longer wanted to share Benny. My usefulness to the Levenstein family had expired.

On the flight home, I tried to concentrate on reading
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
, a graduation gift from Neil, but I was too distracted. In a few hours, I would face my mother. If she was a normal weight and her color was good, it could mean one of two things: she’d gotten over the Shabbos goy, or he was back.

Of course it was over, I assured myself. There was no way
my mother could have accepted the rebbetzin’s forgiveness and kindness and then turned around and resumed her love affair. No, she was done with the Shabbos goy. Everyone made mistakes. We would all move on and heal from this. I massaged those lines in my hand, hoping that Simone had been right.

My mother was waiting for me at the gate in the cornflower-blue coat that she now filled out and a scarf I’d given her for her birthday. It was full of blues and greens that set off her eyes, and her cheeks no longer sank into her head. New lines had formed around her mouth, but she looked happy.

“Hello, hello.” She wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me toward her.

I couldn’t help but warm to her embrace. She was back! She’d returned from wherever she’d gone while she was sick.

“Let me take a look.” She studied me in a way she hadn’t since before the Shabbos goy stole her from us. “All that sunshine agreed with you.”

“I loved it there,” I replied.

“Oh, everyone should have an adventure at your age, sweetheart. I’m just glad you’re back.” She looped her arm through mine as we walked to the baggage claim.

Our house smelled the same: cigarettes and the Lemon Pledge our cleaning lady used to polish the floors. My father’s galoshes were lined up neatly next to the back door. I dragged my suitcase upstairs and ran a hot shower. My bathroom at the Levensteins had a mirror slightly larger than my head, so I hadn’t seen my naked body since I left. I cleared the condensation from the long mirrors in my bathroom. Thick strands of gold striped my hair, and new freckles sprayed the bridge of my nose. My hands and wrists were brown. I turned around to look at the back of my body. My legs and rear were taut and sinewy from walking and racing Benny down the beach. My eyes reluctantly traveled up my back. A miracle. The skin had nearly cleared. I wished my arms were miles long so I could reach over my shoulders and feel
the smoothness with my own fingers. Maybe the rebbetzin hadn’t exiled me; maybe she knew that I needed to grow new skin. I was home, and my mother was healthy again, and that was all that mattered.

My father greeted me when I came downstairs.

“How’s my California girl?” he said, shaking his winter coat from his shoulders. His skin looked gray and his lips slightly blue, and he hadn’t gained back the weight he’d lost while my mother was sick.

I walked over to him and put my arms around him. “I missed you, Dad.”

He hugged me back in his awkward way, and we both waited an extra second before we let go. “Me too, Bunny.”

My mother called us to the table, and over meatballs and rice, my favorite meal, I told my parents about Benny and Ollie and Simone. My dad nodded and smiled, and we talked about his patients and my mom’s history paper. They told me that Tzippy would be home in a few days to prepare for her wedding. The mention of her name gave me a jolt. I mentally counted the hours until I could see her.

When my mother got up to refill the rice bowl, she put her hand on my father’s shoulder, which I took as a sure sign that the Shabbos goy was out of the picture. I tried not to grin when my father’s eyes, shining with love and admiration, trailed her into the kitchen.

“I ran into Mrs. Kessler a few weeks ago at the butcher, I forgot to tell you.” My mother dug her fork into a meatball. “She’s proud that you’re going to pursue Madison’s teaching program.”

Yes, I could become just like Mrs. Kessler, adored by the children, respected by their parents, someone who always did the right thing. I chewed on that idea while my dad and I watched
Kojak
, his favorite show. Maybe I was imagining things, but his breathing seemed labored. I kissed his cheek and went off to bed.

“Glad you’re home, Barbara,” he said as he picked up his newspaper and disappeared into the front section.

It was Tuesday, and I couldn’t help lying awake, alert, waiting for my mom to creep out of the house, even though the information coded onto my palm and my physical transformation gave me hope that all of life’s blemishes had disappeared with a little sunshine and a glimpse of a different world. I heard nothing as I listened for my mother’s footsteps.

I didn’t let the bitter weather interfere with my morning walk. I trudged up and down Lake Drive, the air whistling through my cap. My ears were numb by the time I returned to our warm kitchen. My mother placed a steaming mug of cocoa in front of me and asked if I wanted to go shopping.

“I’d love to.” We hadn’t been shopping together in more than a year.

“First, we have a stop to make.” She ran upstairs and returned from her bedroom with a canvas bag she used to tote library books. The bag was heavy and dragged on her shoulder. She set it down and signaled me to look inside. I thumbed through the pile of Michener novels.

“You read all these?” I asked.

“Every last one,” she said with pride, telling me without the exact words that we were done with her illness and the Shabbos goy. I wrapped my arms around her, and she didn’t feel as if her bones would break. She pulled me close and stroked my back for a few seconds. I almost started to sob.

We spoke little as we drove to the library and then to the Boston Store, but my mother looked over at me a few times and smiled. We walked into the mall like any other mother and daughter visiting a department store, shopping for an outfit to wear to a wedding. She snatched a reddish-brown wool dress off the rack and held it up to my face. “This looks pretty with your hair.”

She waited outside the changing room while I glided the dress over my head. It was a soft wool, a grown-up fabric I’d never worn before, and it fit as though it were made for me. The neckline revealed a tiny bit of collarbone, and because I was short, it
hung below my knees, so I could wear it to the Schines’. I pulled my shoulders back and examined the way the dress fell over my breasts. I tentatively exited the changing room and walked toward the stool where my mother sat, by the three-way mirror.

She stood beside me and put her hand on top of my head. “When did you grow taller than your mom?”

“Guess it was the California sunshine.”

“So what do you think?”

“I like it.” I was referring to both the dress and the feel of her hand.

My mother touched my neck lightly. “It will look nice with my pearls.”

I felt like Eliza Doolittle in the dress and the pearls I imagined against my skin. She bought me the dress, a pair of nylons, and a white half-slip. It wasn’t elegant or sexy like hers, but she told me that it would make my dress hang better on my body. It did. I held two large shopping bags on my lap as we drove out of the parking lot.

“You don’t mind if we stop at Beckerman’s on the way home?” She turned on her blinker. “I just need to pick up some sandwich steaks.”

The butcher shop was small and dingy, and you could just see the back room where maroon beef carcasses striped with columns of white fat hung on giant hooks. My mother greeted Mr. Beckerman, a small man whose beard overpowered his tiny face.

“Hello, Mrs. Pupnick. Let me go and get your steaks,” he said as if my mother was his best friend.

Just then, the front door opened, and a gust of cold air assaulted my ankles. I turned my head. The rebbetzin stood in the doorframe in a stylish cap and the black double-breasted coat she’d sewn a few winters back. Her nose was red from the cold. My anger toward her had been dissolving for months, and now I was just happy to be here with her and my mother. She held my mother’s hands and then turned to me and pinched my chin with one of her cold fingers.

“I heard wonderful things about you from the Levensteins,” she said.

I looked down at my feet, a little embarrassed but wanting to hear more about the Levensteins’ compliments. “Benny was easy.”

“You did a real mitzvah,” the rebbetzin said. “And your mother didn’t tell me how gorgeous you look. Tzippy can’t wait to see you. She’ll be home the day after tomorrow, early she’s coming. Ten o’clock.”

“I can’t wait either,” I said, blushing.

Mr. Beckerman returned with a brown paper bag. “Hello, rebbetzin.” He turned to my mother. “Let me take this to your car, and I’ll be right back.”

“Take your time,” the rebbetzin told him, “and then I want the news from Florida.”

My mother rubbed the rebbetzin’s hands. “Your fingers are like icicles, Rivkah.” She gave the rebbetzin her gloves. “I got two pairs for my birthday last year.”

“June, keep your gloves. I have some at home.”

“I only have two hands! I don’t want you to get sick before the wedding.” My mother put both gloves in her palm and extended it to the rebbetzin. She paused for a second before she accepted my mother’s gift, which further convinced me that my mother had ended things with the Shabbos goy. After all, the rebbetzin would never warm to my mother’s touch, much less take her gloves, if my mother were still having an affair.

During the drive home, I noticed that my mother’s fingernails had purpled from the cold. My hands were sweating inside my mittens, so I took one off and handed it to her. She touched my fingers to see if they were warm and then took one mitten for the hand she used to steer the car and placed her other hand in her pocket.