Washing the Dead (4 page)

“You’re going to be there, right?”

“Like I’d miss your wedding for anything in the whole world.” My head was starting to pound.

“It’s going to happen a year from January.”

“Then we’ll have one more summer together,” I assured her.

“Yeah.” She wiped her nose. “What did you want to tell me?”

I looked at her blotchy face. “Just that I wish you weren’t leaving tomorrow,” I said. Keeping the mikveh incident from Tzippy was making me feel more alone than I’d ever felt in my life, but telling her about it would not make it go away. Our worlds were about to crack open. I could feel it.

“Hey, I see the Shabbos goy’s feet.” Tzippy half smiled, then bolted up and dragged me to the basement window. We scampered up onto a couple of tables to get a better view.

All summer Tzippy and I had been stealing glances at the Shabbos goy, who lived in the carriage house and had started working for the Schines last March. When I slept over at Tzippy’s house, we’d stay up late, rhapsodizing about the stick-straight blondish hair he tied into a ponytail and the peace sign he wore around his neck. His bell-bottom jeans hung around his slim waist, and he had a cleft chin like Kirk Douglas. We’d listen for him to start the engine of his blue Dodge and watch him back out of the driveway. He looked about the same age as our parents, too old to be a bachelor, so we made up elaborately tragic stories about his visits to the grave of a wife we named Annette, a woman we imagined as a buxom blonde who sauntered about in gauzy blouses cut low enough to reveal a matching peace sign.

“He’s going to visit Annette,” Tzippy said sadly.

I could only see his work boot snuffing out a cigarette before he loped around the side of his Dodge and out of our view. “Not now. He only visits her at night,” I said with authority.

We laughed too hard, grabbing onto a joke of two innocent girls, the stolen mandelbrot cookies crumbling in my pocket.

By the time I got home from services, my head ached so badly that my hair follicles hurt. I skipped lunch and crawled into bed,
and when I opened my eyes, my parents were standing over me. My father held a thermometer in his hand. Dazzling waves of colored light danced across the pale pink cardigan my mother wore because she was always cold.

She sat down on the edge of my bed and put her fingers against my forehead. “What hurts?”

I pointed to my temple and reveled in the concern blossoming all over her face.

My father shook the thermometer. “Let’s see if you’ve got a temperature, honey.” He was an orthodontist, and he was speaking in the voice he used while stringing long wires through bands on his patients’ teeth. He put the thermometer under my tongue, waited a minute, then removed it and read the red mercury line. “No fever, June,” he said to my mother.

My mother gave me aspirin, and my parents sat on either side of my bed. I liked the way my mattress bowed at the corners from their weight. As I drifted off to sleep, I tried to piece together the filmy scraps of what had happened in the mikveh. Had there been someone with my mother? If so, who? Why had she removed her hat? Why was her lipstick smudged? And where did she get that cigarette?

In the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of my own moaning.

My mother, who was sleeping on the floor next to my bed, started. “Where exactly does it hurt?”

“Just the left side.” A violent wave of nausea struck me, and I ran to the bathroom. My mother held my hair while I knelt before the toilet, but I didn’t throw up.

After she helped me back into bed, she removed the pillow from under my neck and put on a fresh case. The crisp cotton felt cool against my face. “Does the light bother you?”

“Uh huh.” My mouth was dry, and my spit tasted like I’d been sucking on dirty socks.

“I got my first migraine when I was about your age.”

Normally, I’d gobble up the few details of her childhood that
she parceled out. I didn’t find out that my grandparents were dead until I was six and asked if my bubbe and zayde could visit like Tzippy’s did every May, and then it was my father and not my mother who told me that I didn’t have any living grandparents on either side. Whenever I’d press my mother for information, she’d say that her childhood home didn’t exist any longer. I didn’t understand exactly what she meant, but when she did speak of her past, her voice would grow small and distant and her eyes would lose focus. I needed her to stay put, so I stopped asking her questions and tried to forget what I’d seen in the mikveh.

My headache had disappeared by morning. I found my dad in the kitchen, slurping milk from his bowl of Raisin Bran, his shoulders hunched over the
Milwaukee Sentinel
, a roll of stomach hanging over his pants. He looked up. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Bunny.”

He hadn’t called me Bunny in years. I smiled, remembering the blanket with the pink bunnies that I’d carried around until it was in tatters. I poured myself a bowl of Cheerios.

“What’s on your docket for today?” he asked as he folded up the sports page.

“Not sure.” I grabbed the comics and immersed myself in “Doonesbury,” which was “lampooning Richard Nixon again,” as my dad said.

My dad wasn’t the type to push, so he kissed the top of my head and went upstairs into my parents’ bathroom. I thought of him sitting on the side of the tub while my mother performed her weekly task of trimming his nose hair, which grew from his nostrils like the fur on a chipmunk’s tail, an unfortunate physical trait for an orthodontist. Maybe he’d been the one who had messed up my mother’s lipstick. No. My father in the mikveh? He would never have skipped out of shul in the middle of services.

I loafed around the house all day. Tzippy had left early in the morning for Brooklyn, so I had nothing to do. I wasn’t used to being home, because Tzippy and I spent our summer at her house,
helping the rebbetzin with her cooking or babysitting a child of a congregant who had come to talk to her or Rabbi Schine about a problem. Tzippy said that I made the work fun, and even if we were peeling potatoes, the rebbetzin made us feel like we were part of something big and important.

In a few days, Neil would be leaving for college. I joined him out on the back stoop, and while he read his
Sports Illustrated
, I stared down the alley at a neighbor who was painting his garage yellow, wondering why he would bother. Nobody ever used this alley. I shrugged and turned my thoughts to the letter I’d write Tzippy once I felt better. Right now, she’d be settling into her aunt Ruthie’s cramped apartment. In our next exchange of letters, we’d take a break from the wedding talk and return to griping about the summer ending and her spinster aunt’s grumpiness and smelly gas.

The air was starting to reek of alewives—the bad part of living so close to Lake Michigan—so I went inside and up to my room. My parents’ bedroom door was open, and I could smell cigarette smoke, which meant my mother was alone. My father hated it when she smoked in their room. I thought about her face in the dark mikveh, the smoke floating out of her nose and mouth, and I darted toward my room.

“Barbara? Is that you?”

My room was right across the hall, so I couldn’t very well lie. “It’s me.”

“Come on in. I want to look at you,” my mother said, an exhalation of smoke cloaking her voice.

I walked through her door toward the chaise longue where she was reclining primly in her weekend denim skirt and cotton blouse, her legs crossed at the ankles. She took another drag of her Virginia Slim, and when she put it out in the saucer of her coffee cup, a cluster of black ashes fell onto the shag carpet. I blinked away the memory of the ashes dusting the mikveh tiles.

“Better clean those up or your father will have my head.” My mother winked. My father worshipped my mother, but she
liked to pretend he suffered her. She gave me what my father had dubbed her “June smile.” Her lips curled spontaneously, but slowly, as if I were the sudden cause of her happiness, and then halfway through the smile, she looked right into my eyes, her gaze direct, yet shy. The June smile made people do nice things for her, so I spent hours in the mirror trying to mimic it, to no avail.

I knelt down to help her clean up the ashes, and as she bent over, I could see the top of one of her full slips, cream-colored silk with a built-in lacy bra and a pink rose with a green stem sewn between the small cups. My mother bought her lingerie from a fancy boutique in Whitefish Bay. Once when she wasn’t home, I tried on one of her slips. It fit me perfectly, and I felt like a bony Sophia Loren.

She sat back on the chaise longue and folded the corner of a page of
The Winds of War.
My mother and I gobbled up fiction without chewing. We went to the library once a week and came home with our arms full of books. “I was just going to sneak in a chapter, but I guess I got a little carried away,” she said impishly, patting a spot next to her. The phone rang.

“Do you mind?” she asked. She hated talking on the phone so much that we had only one phone and it was in our kitchen.

I ran downstairs, breathless by the time I answered.

“Barbara?” Instantly I recognized the rebbetzin’s voice. She and Tzippy pronounced my name “Barb-a-ra,” with an accent that was a mix of Brooklyn and Yiddish.

“Hello, rebbetzin.”

“How’s your head?”

I wrapped the curly phone cord around my finger. “I’m fine, thank you.”

“Good. Please tell your mother that I’m home and that she can come by now.”

I thought of all the congregants who waited patiently for their time with the rebbetzin, and here she was summoning my mother to the shul. My mother would go eagerly, regardless of her mood. Of all the places in the world, she was at her most peaceful when
she was sitting at the Schines’ kitchen table, her foot tucked under her opposite leg, dropping sugar cubes in her tea, listening to the rebbetzin explain a Jewish law and scrawling notes furiously on one of Rabbi Schine’s legal pads. Then she organized the rebbetzin’s thoughts into chewable nuggets and transferred them to index cards just like the ones the rebbetzin used to write down recipes for my mother. The rebbetzin got nervous when she had to speak in front of a group, but she could do it if she had her cards and a chance to practice in front of my mother. My pride in my mother’s role in the shul was a life raft that I clung to at school when the kids either teased me about my long skirts or looked right through me. Yesterday, my mother had poked a hole in that raft, a thought that turned from unpleasant to scary and then evaporated inside me, all within in a matter of seconds.

I returned to my mother’s room and sat down where she had patted the cushion. “That was the rebbetzin, she wants you to come over.”

“Okay, but first you. Feeling better?” She traced my hairline with her fingertips, and I could smell nicotine and her lavender soap.

“Just a little tired, that’s all.” I was still knocked out from my migraine.

“Too tired to come to the Schines’ with me? I’m going to help the rebbetzin with the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur talk she’s giving next week.” Her eyes were bright. “We’re expecting a big group at the shul.”

“No, thanks.”

“No fun without Tzippy, huh?” She patted my knee.

She was one hundred percent my mother again: inhaling novels that the rebbetzin might not approve of, smoking while my father was out of the house, and putting aside her book and cigarettes to assist the rebbetzin, all the while making me feel like I was her accomplice.

“You going to be okay, Sweet B?” She squeezed my hand and held it.

“I think so.” I was going to be more than okay. The sound of my nickname on her lips felt like a gift, the wrapping paper her voice, as soft as the cloth she used to clean her silver. Her eyes radiated love as she picked up her dirty coffee cup, roused herself from her chaise, and prepared to go off and help the rebbetzin reach out to women who relied on the Schines to show them the way back to Hashem.

The four of us ate an early supper that night so we could watch Walter Cronkite together. Over my mother’s leftover Shabbos chicken, my father started ranting about Nixon and Agnew and the whole lot of liars. They should all resign, like Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and John Dean, he said. When my mother politely pointed out that John Dean had been fired, Neil winked at me, and we laughed until my father told us to pipe down. I told myself that things had returned to normal, that whatever had happened in the mikveh was over and my old mother was here to stay.

Later, in bed, I was fretting about the mikveh again when my parents’ door opened and I heard my mother’s light tread on the stairs. I wanted her to assure me once and for all that we were okay. I pulled back the covers, leaped out of bed, and ran down the steps, practically tripping over the hem of my nightgown. I looked for her in the den, assuming I’d find her tucked into a corner of the couch, smoking. She’d take my hand, lead me to my room, sit at the foot of my bed, and listen to my worries about her smudged lipstick. She’d rub my feet until my whole body felt like mush. She’d soak up my fears like a paper towel on a juice spill.

She wasn’t smoking in the den. She wasn’t in the kitchen or sunroom either. “Mom?” I called quietly as I moved toward the back of the house, stubbing my big toe on the hall coat rack. I opened the door, and the strong lake breeze sent a shiver through me. I ran barefoot down the steps into the deserted alley, past the freshly painted garage, my feet slamming against the pavement, my toe throbbing.