Washing the Dead (44 page)

I held her shrunken hands, the hands that had braided challah dough and put a candle to the fine hairs of the kosher chickens she bought for Shabbos. The hands that had stitched my Purim costumes and shampooed my hair when I was too young to wash it myself. The hands that had given and received love from Andy, the Schines, Neil, my father, and me. I could see her in her
entirety. I prayed for peace, hers and mine. She squeezed my fingers so slightly that I barely felt it. Neil had been surviving on Diet Pepsi and hospital food, and his face looked bloated. And very sad. His relationship with my mother had been less complicated and painful than mine. She’d played a role in his adult life. While I mourned lost opportunities, he was grieving over something real. She knew his kids, and they knew her.

“Do you want a minute alone with Mom?” I asked.

“Thanks, Barbara. You go first, though. I need to check in with Jenny.”

Andy followed Neil out of the room. I had so many things to tell my mother. I scooted my chair up to the bed, until I was only a few inches from her. She no longer smelled like lavender or Chanel, she smelled like hospital and death. I leaned over and whispered to her through the dirty gray strands that covered her ears. I whispered our secrets as if the naming of them could close the distance that had grown between us over the years.

“I know who you are and who you were, Mom. You were a good mother for a long time. You taught me how to write a proper thank-you letter, and you rubbed Vaseline into my feet during the harsh winter months. You listened carefully to Neil and me when we told you about our playground scrapes, and for a long time we knew that we mattered most to you. I know this to be true now, too—it was you, not the Schines, who cast us from the mansion, and I understand why only now, only after I have left my own family when they needed me. I know why you loved Andy and that you didn’t pick him over us. I have felt the powerful pull of our family history. History, you always loved history, yet it kept you from the present. There is no shame in the desperate sorrow of a motherless girl, Mom. Please forgive me. Please forgive yourself.”

I put my head on her chest and listened to her addled heart. She would go soon, I could always sense her impending absences.

The door opened and closed. “I just heard the death rattle,” I told Neil and Andy, and rose from my mother’s death bed. Neil,
Andy, and I sat next to her, afraid to leave for a second, while Jenny came in and out with offers of coffee and vending-machine food.

My mother died shortly before midnight, one week shy of her seventy-ninth birthday. I felt her spirit leave her body before Andy told me that she was gone.

Neil swung into action. He called the nurse, a youngish dark-haired man in scrubs who offered his condolences and explained the procedure for transporting my mother to the funeral home. Andy and I sat with her until the orderlies arrived. They pulled the curtain around her, so we couldn’t see them removing all the tubes, and then they wheeled her away.

Neil came back to the room. “Go home and get some sleep, Andy.”

“Can I have a moment with your sister first?”

“Of course. I’ll be outside.”

Andy stared at the floor and collected himself. “I want you to know something, Barbara.”

“Andy, you don’t have to explain anything—”

“No, that’s not it.” He gave his nervous cough. “You were her Sweet B.”

My nickname on his lips pierced me.

“And she loved you with all of her heart.” Andy reached out his ropy arms, and held me, maybe pretending for a second that his Junie had come back to him. I wished my mother had married him.

I was happy to offer Andy this small comfort. I was grateful to him for relaying a message from my mother, and to the rebbetzin for guiding me back to her. They helped me see that my mother’s absence was a part of her, like a rest in a piece of music, beautiful notes followed by unpredictable silences that made you wonder if the song had stopped playing for good. Now I knew that her music pulsed through the silent notes.

27

I
designated myself as my mother’s shomer; I would watch her body until the funeral.

Neil didn’t dare ask the Abromowitz Funeral Home to accept a dead Jew who had had an affair with a Shabbos goy, so he chose a nondenominational funeral parlor in Mequon. I drove there alone to wait for my mother’s body to arrive. Mr. Gorzon, the funeral director, a middle-aged man in a nice-fitting suit, offered me tea. His easy smile soothed me.

After we finished discussing the details of my mother’s burial, he showed me to a comfortable bench in the drafty corridor outside the preparation room. He offered me a siddur, the same prayer book we used in Temple Micah, and then he patted my shoulder and disappeared. He returned a half hour later, wheeling my mother’s gurney into the preparation room. Her body formed a small mound under the sheet. I lowered my eyes and turned the pages of the prayer book until I located Psalm 51.

       
Have mercy on me, O God

            
According to your unavailing love;

            
According to your great compassion

            
Blot out my transgressions
.

       
Wash away all my iniquity

            
And cleanse me from my sin …

       
Create in me a pure heart, O God

            
And renew a steadfast spirit within me …

I read it over quietly, in a whisper, and then again and again in full preschool-teacher voice until I was hoarse.

Hot air started to blast out of the old radiator across from me, and soon it lulled me into a nap. I woke up when I felt a presence in the corridor. The basement light was dim, and my eyes were bleary from exhaustion and reciting the psalm without my reading glasses. The rebbetzin walked toward me as if she were emerging from an old black-and-white movie. She put her hand on my cheek. I bolted up in my chair.

She was not alone.

Tzippy stood behind her in a sheitel and a long skirt. I recognized her instantly. My mouth could barely form her name.

“It’s me,” she murmured. She sat herself on my left, and the rebbetzin sat on my right. Tzippy put her hand over mine, and we sat together for a minute or two in silence.

“Your letter was beautiful,” she said.

I took her face in my hands and touched my forehead to hers, and we stayed like that for a time, talking without words. I didn’t need to tell her how much I’d missed her, because I knew she felt the same way, and for now that was enough.

I sat back. “I want to pinch you to make sure you’re real.”

“I know, I know.” Tzippy laughed through her tears, and the sound carried me back to all the nights I’d slept at her house, lying on her trundle bed, holding my eyes open with my fingers so I wouldn’t drift off while she was talking. I didn’t want to miss a word.

“Look.” The rebbetzin pointed down the corridor.

I squinted at an approaching figure. Kinky hair and wiry limbs. Lili. She was wearing a modest sweater, a long skirt, and boots. I stared at her, and then I stared at the rebbetzin and Tzippy. “How in the world?”

They got up and started down the hall to leave me with my daughter, but she grabbed their hands. “Please stay.”

“We’ll be right around the corner,” the rebbetzin said and stroked her arm.

Lili knew them! I looked at them, trying to wrap my head around the absurdity of this threesome. “How?” I asked dumbly.

“You’re not going to like this,” Lili said.

“What? What will I not like?”

She played with the buckle on her purse and then swallowed hard. “I know them from the letters.”

“Letters?” I felt ill.

Blood rushed to her cheeks. “In the cedar chest, please don’t kill me.”

“Lili, those were
private
.”

She looked down at her boots. “I know.” She pinched her eyes shut the way she did when she was trying not to cry.

I was scanning my memory for all the embarrassing and taboo things in those letters when Lili came over and sat on my lap. I stopped scanning and held her. On some level, I must have known that an old cedar chest would entice a scavenger like Lili.

“When?” I asked.

“Last summer, a few weeks before my injury. Mom, those letters are so sad.” She told me that my falling-out with Tzippy broke her heart and that she wanted to get us back together, like the sisters scheming to reunite their divorced mom and dad in
Parent Trap
. She’d always noticed my look of longing when I saw her with Meghan or Kara, and she wanted that for me, too.

I rested my cheek against the itchy wool of her sweater.

“And then there was the mysterious Grandma June,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine you leaving me like that. I hated her, and then I felt guilty when she stayed with us after my surgery, because I could see why you loved her, and that made me feel even worse.”

“Oh, Lil. This must all have been so confusing for you.”

Her voice grew shaky. “And then you started to get all distant and weird, and I worried that you were going to run off with some Shabbos goy.”

I almost laughed. “No danger there.”

“Annette,” she said, recalling the name Tzippy and I had given the Shabbos goy’s imaginary dead wife. “After I discovered the
letters, I went on the Schines’ website and found Tzippy.”

“Come,” I said. I helped her up, and we walked down the hall to Tzippy and the rebbetzin.

Tzippy put her hand on my arm. “My mother and I found a way to reach out to you.”

“We knew Mrs. Kessler’s tahara would help us bring you back,” the rebbetzin said.

“But why didn’t you come to me?” I asked Lili.

She pointed to the room where my mother’s body lay. “I thought about it a hundred times, but there are certain topics I know to stay away from. And you got so mad around Grandma when she visited that it freaked me out.”

I took her hand in mine, and I thought of how she must have felt lying in her bed, ashamed and afraid when I went to the hospital for the last time. I remembered how I felt in Madison, and how I couldn’t leave Neil’s bed. I had walked in my mother’s shoes. I had left my child in a moment of need. But Lili had risen from her sick bed, and here she was beside me.

“I wasn’t sure I’d done the right thing,” she said. “You’ve been so, I don’t know….”

“Distracted.”

She smiled. “Kind of.”

The rebbetzin put her hand on her chest. “When Lili cried out for help, I had to face the fact that I’d made a terrible mistake by abandoning you so many years ago.”

“It’s what my mother wanted.”

“It doesn’t matter. It was wrong.”

I felt as though she had unclogged an artery and my blood could now pump freely through my heart. “Did my mother know that we were back in touch?”

“Yes, but I’m not sure she understood.” I pictured the rebbetzin visiting my mother at Lakeline, chatting with Bonnie. “You and your mother. You both carried so much inside. And you, Barbara, you carried your sins and hers. It was time for it to stop.”

We all looked at Lili, not having to say that our demons had
found her, too.

“Your daughter is a brave one. She asked for help,” the rebbetzin said.

“You set this all in motion, Lili. Incredible.” She had felt the holes inside me, and despite her own struggles and resentments, she had summoned Tzippy, the rebbetzin, and my mother back into my life. Lili’s “subliminal awareness,” a term I’d never fully understood until now, assured her that they would accept her invitation. Perhaps it was ultimately my mother’s unearthing of Lili’s gift that had brought us here to the funeral parlor where her daughter and her granddaughter would watch over her soul.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” Lili said. She gave me the smile I’d seen when she won her races, half embarrassed, half proud.

Last summer, I couldn’t have imagined the possibility of Lili reading my letters and still loving me afterward. She knew more about acceptance than I had the capacity to teach her.

The rebbetzin stroked my daughter’s cheek as she’d done mine so many times. “We have another tahara, Barbara, if you’d like to help.”

“We’re going to wash my mother’s body?”

“Yes, Tzippy and I are going to prepare. You take your time with Lili.”

“But there are only three of us,” I murmured. How would we lift her body? I supposed we had no choice; the rebbetzin never would have put Chana and her crew in the awkward position of performing the tahara for my mother.

“Can I help?” Lili asked.

“No, Lili. You stay outside. You are the shomeret,” the rebbetzin said. Lili had always been the shomeret, the one who watches.

I turned to the rebbetzin. “Are you going to get into trouble for this? My mother is far from kosher.”

Tzippy smiled. “It’s okay, Barbara.”

“But I shouldn’t be here either. You’re not allowed to wash the body of a relative.” I was worried about their souls.

“We owe you this, Barbara,” The rebbetzin touched my sleeve. She spoke not as the wife of a rabbi, but with the humility of an old woman seeking forgiveness.