Washing the Dead (3 page)

We pretended to focus our attention on the mumbled chanting of the young rabbis imported from Crown Heights to help Rabbi Schine. They bobbed up and down like ducks pecking at breadcrumbs, their long ivory prayer shawls covering their heads and flowing down their shoulders.

Yossi was growing restless, and when Mrs. Kessler stood to carry him from the sanctuary, we began whispering again.

“Let’s get out of here so we can really talk,” Tzippy said. “We only have one more day together.” Saying goodbye to Tzippy never got easier, although I’d been doing it since sixth grade, after our Jewish day school ended and she started going to school in Brooklyn with her cousins, leaving me to fend for myself in public school.

“The nook?” I asked. That was our name for Mrs. Kessler’s classroom, a warm nest in the basement of the shul.

“We’ll need more privacy,” she said.

Mothers were always wandering into the nook to deposit their antsy kids with Tzippy and me, and more often than not, one or more of Tzippy’s little brothers would find us and we’d have to shoo them away. Tzippy didn’t have any sisters, and when we were young, every time the rebbetzin got pregnant, I would secretly hope for another boy.
I
was Tzippy’s sister.

“Then where?” I asked.

She cupped my ear with her hand. “Other side of the basement.”

Her breath tickled. I stared at her dumbly.

“Barbara,” she said, tapping my temple with her forefinger. “Use your kup. The basement has two parts with two entrances. One for the nook, and one for….”

I hoped like crazy that she wasn’t thinking what I thought she was. “The mikveh?”

She nodded.

“Very funny.” We weren’t allowed to visit the mikveh. Men
and married women went there to purify themselves by dunking their bodies in its mixture of tap water and rainwater, and my mother came home from her monthly visits to the mikveh with damp hair and an odd calm about her, as if she’d returned from a trip to another country. Both Tzippy’s mother and mine would kill us if they knew we ducked out of services to chat in the holiest spot in the entire shul.

“I’m not joking. We should go separately to avoid raising suspicion,” she said. She’d leave the sanctuary first because she knew where to find the key, and I’d follow in ten minutes. She’d wait for me by the door to the mikveh. Before I could officially agree, she was gone. I let ten agonizing minutes pass, hoping either my mother or Tzippy would reappear and sit next to me, sparing me this adventure. No luck. I walked out of the sanctuary and through the social hall, swiping two mandelbrot cookies set out on a platter for the little kids. All of our meetings required a snack.

I entered the kitchen, expecting to run into Andy Noffsinger. Andy was the Schines’ Shabbos goy, a Gentile they paid to turn on lights and ovens and touch anything deemed muksah, forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath. He should have been warming up the blueberry blintzes for the lunch, but today he was nowhere to be seen. I half wanted him to be there, to prevent me from having to go downstairs.

The entrance to the mikveh was off the large pantry. What if the Shabbos goy was inside retrieving a box of toothpicks or a stack of napkins? But the pantry was empty, except for the shelves lined with sacks of flour, bags of egg noodles, and bottles of juice. I opened the oak door and took a step down the stairs. They groaned under my feet. I slid off my loafers to avoid making noise; the stairwell was dark, so I held on to the railing with my free hand.

Tzippy was not waiting for me at the landing. Maybe she’d gone inside without me. I smelled cigarette smoke, but there was no way it was coming from Tzippy’s lungs. Smoking was forbidden on Shabbos, and besides, a few years ago, Tzippy and I had
experimented with my mother’s Virginia Slims out on the bluffs behind the mansion, and Tzippy coughed so much that she swore she’d never smoke again. For days afterward, I’d craved another cigarette.

I was about to go back up the steps when a noise stopped me, a murmuring that escaped through the crack of the mikveh door like a sliver of light. I held my ear to the warped wood. My mother had told me that the mansion’s original owners had built this pool so their polio-stricken son could soak his legs in it, and I swear I felt the boy’s spirit talking to me. I felt sick with fear, yet a dull pressure deep inside my body, between my heart and gut, tugged at me and urged me inside. My fingers tingled as I put my sweaty hand on the brass doorknob and turned it slowly. The door was unlocked. I walked in and the whispering stopped.

The room was black, except for an ember flickering in the distance. The air shimmered, charging every cell of my body. The water was close by. I could smell it. Rain. Gallons of rain. I was too terrified to move, in case I tripped and fell into the sacred pool. My toes gripped the tiles through my socks.

A woman spoke. “Please, give me a second. I’ll be up soon.” I recognized the timbre of the voice, but its pleading tone was foreign to me.

Silence hung between us. My loafers shook in my hand as the tiny light moved toward me. The electricity in the air was starting to crackle, and I thought it would split me in two, like our oak tree that had been struck by a bolt of lightning last summer. My eyes followed the orange dot until the figure was standing close enough for me to touch her. I could only hear the sound of breathing. Hers and mine.

I reached out, and my fingers grazed my mother’s hair. She was not wearing her Shabbos hat. Wavy auburn strands fell loosely around her face.

“Good Lord, Barbara. You scared me to death,” she said, puffs of smoke escaping from her quivering lips.

I was frightened, not of the dark or the boy’s ghost, but of my
mother. I imagined that the smoke coming out of her body was the mist that had chased us, that could swallow us up whole. Its source was here, in the mikveh. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

“Don’t come down here again!” Her voice shook with a mix of anger and fear.

My mother and I rarely exchanged harsh words, and hers felt like a slap. “I won’t. Let’s go.”

“First tell me that you understand me.”

“I do. Please, can we leave?”

“Okay.” The silkiness returned to her voice.

I followed her toward the door. She moved with ease, as if the room were fully lit. I looked around and didn’t see anyone, but it was so dark that someone could easily have been hiding in here. The thought spooked me even more. “Who were you talking to?”

“Don’t be silly. I was alone.” She waved her hand, spraying ashes in the air.

I wasn’t convinced. “Mom, you have to put out your cigarette.”

“Yes.” She took in a long drag of smoke. Had my mother smuggled a cigarette into the shul? She didn’t carry a purse on Shabbos.

“We should hurry.” Tzippy could come down any minute. I looped my elbow through hers and tried to pivot her toward the door.

She didn’t budge. I pulled on her slender arm. “We’ve got to leave.”

“I know, I know.” She brought her cigarette to her mouth, and in the sparse light I could see that she looked trapped between the crook of my elbow and that spot inside herself where the mist nestled. Like a coyote, she’d have to chew off her arm to escape.

After a few seconds, she led me to a door adjacent to the entrance. I waited for her while she let herself into the changing room and flushed her cigarette down the toilet. It felt like an hour.

“Shame on us for playing hooky from services,” she said lightly as we exited the mikveh.

I put my shoes back on and trotted up the steps behind her, my heart beating in my chest. She stood in the pantry, in a patch of
sunlight spilling through the window, and smoothed her blouse. Her eyes were bright again, and she was smiling the way she did when she picked me up from school, as if she’d missed me and couldn’t wait to hear about my day. She was back. My relief over her return always made me feel closer to her than if she’d never left at all. Today was no different.

I looked at her more carefully. Her lipstick was smeared.

“Just a second.” I touched the spot on my lip that mirrored the location of her smear.

“Oh, dear. I’m a sight.” She giggled, rubbing her index finger against her lip, as if she were the type of woman who didn’t understand the fine art of applying lipstick.

“Where’s your hat?” I asked.

She looked coyly surprised and put her hands on her head. Her hair looked more mussed in the light of the pantry. She couldn’t return to shul with her head uncovered. “Oh, just a second,” she said as if she’d forgotten a bag of groceries in the car.

“Do you need to go back down there?”

“Yes. Please don’t follow me.” She flicked one of her ashes from my shoulder before heading downstairs.

I watched her go, not entirely certain that she’d come back. The mikveh repelled me and called to me, like a ghost and a siren combined. I didn’t move a muscle until my mother walked back through the pantry door, slightly winded. She didn’t look at me as she wet her fingers, slicked back her hair, and bobby-pinned her pretty hat to her head.

On our way back to the sanctuary, we bumped into Tzippy, who was coming out of the bathroom. I nodded my head in my mother’s direction, and without missing a beat, my mother winked at us as if she knew of our plan and had decided to overlook our mischief. She returned to the women’s section to claim her seat between the rebbetzin and the Brisket Ladies, leaving the scent of cigarette smoke and Chanel in her wake.

“I’m so sorry,” Tzippy said. “Mrs. Kessler needed me to watch Yossi for a few minutes.” She lowered her voice. “Your mom didn’t
catch you in the mikveh, did she?”

“No. Luckily, I ran into her in the pantry. She was looking for a cracker because we had gefilte fish last night and it makes her stomach hurt.” I was talking too fast. I’d never been so dishonest with Tzippy.

She gave me a funny look, because it wasn’t like me to “prattle on,” as my mother would say. “Plan B. Meet me in the nook after services,” she said.

“Okay.” Thankfully, she didn’t suggest the mikveh again, because I wasn’t going back down there. As I followed her back to our seats in the shul, Mrs. Kessler handed Yossi to me. The fine fuzz on his head tickled my neck. I patted him on the back, and we stifled our laughter when he let out a loud burp.

A few minutes later, Tzippy and I stood up and sped through the silent Amidah prayer, murmuring all nineteen blessings, our lips moving in unison. By the time the service finished, the left side of my head had started to ache mildly. As the hungry congregants began to file into the social hall, Tzippy and I snuck down to the nook, where I planned to tell her everything about discovering my mother in the mikveh. I had to or I would explode. I walked down the steps quickly, eager to breathe in the familiar scents of paint and the Jergens Cocoa Butter Mrs. Kessler applied to her perpetually chapped knuckles. I’d been volunteering for Mrs. Kessler two afternoons a week since ninth grade, and I liked having a role at the shul other than that of Tzippy’s sidekick, although we both knew I felt lost without her.

Mrs. Kessler’s room cheered me. Light from two high windows that gave onto the driveway splashed the blue walls she’d stenciled with a bespectacled sun and clouds that looked like the cotton balls I soaked with alcohol to dry up my pimples. Tzippy and I unfolded two rest mats, lay down on our backs with our calves hanging over the edges, and looked up at a mobile of the solar system. Saturn sagged under the weight of its loose ring, causing the other planets to dangle awkwardly.

“I have to talk to you about something.” I took a big breath and
searched for a way to tell her I had caught my disheveled mother smoking in the mikveh. I knew I wouldn’t tell her about the mist finding its way inside my mother’s body, though. My mother’s moods were private, even from Tzippy.

“What?” Her chin stuck out farther now, and she was chewing on the inside of her lip, as if to keep it from trembling.

“You look like you’re going to weep,” I said. We’d always thought that “weep” was a funny verb, but she wasn’t laughing. Neither was I.

“Trying not to.” Her voice, always high-pitched and loud when she was staving off tears, almost made me cry. I wanted to cry right then anyway.

Her pain trumped my confession. “What’s wrong?”

“I told you before. I’m scared,” she said.

Me too. I was still reeling from standing alone in the dark, creepy mikveh, and the whole encounter with my mother was a secret lodged in my throat, growing into a ball of fear the size of a kiwi. “You were frightened the first year you went to yeshiva too.” I didn’t remind her that we both cried every day for months until we made new friends that we now spoke of with careful enthusiasm.

She sulked. “That was different.”

“Why?”

“Because I wasn’t expected to move to a strange city, much less with a man I’d only met a few times.”

She told me about a cousin, Sari Levenstein, who had just found out that Rabbi Schine’s father was moving her and her husband to San Diego, where they were supposed to ignite Jewish souls. The Rebbe could assign Tzippy and her groom to Duluth or Boise or Singapore.

“Let’s worry about the wedding first,” I said.

She started to sniffle.

“You’re going to be a beautiful bride.” She was. She had high cheekbones and a pretty rose tone to her skin, and she was tall and thin like her mother, but she didn’t slouch.