A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life (10 page)

I think about home. Even though the Snow Ball is a full three hours away, Cleo’s probably starting to get ready. She tried her dress on for me last week, and I told her what she needed to hear and what also happened to be the God’s honest truth—she looks amazing in it. Jake is refusing to wear a tie. I guess this is just a nod to the fact that he’d prefer to wear nothing at all above the waist. But he has a nice black suit, and Dad bought him a white dress shirt with French cuffs, and I’m sure Sam will die when she comes to the door to pick him up, which is something she has to do because Jake is only a freshman. I look down (only for a minute—my eyes are glued to the road, I promise) to see my torn jeans and my beat-up Adidas and my gray zip-up sweatshirt, and I have to admit that I’m far from Snow Ball material. And now here is the bridge. It’s rising out of the fog and presenting itself before me, and I sail right over it.

THIRTEEN

Rivka’s house is pink. I don’t mean Barbie’s Dream House pink, but weathered pale pink. It has gray trim, and the light on the front porch and in the windows is glowing a warm yellow. The driveway of tiny stones is crackling under the wheels of my car. Before I turn off the ignition, the front door opens and Rivka is standing there with a sweater draped around her shoulders. She smiles and waves, and I do the same, then motion that she should stay where she is—I can handle my bags myself. The fog has disappeared; it’s dusk, and the sky is the color of the house, with some low wispy clouds stretched out just above the horizon.

Her house is on the other side of the road from the ocean. It’s a quiet road, lined with trees, and I haven’t seen another car since I turned onto it. When I walk up the steps onto her porch I turn around and can see the last light from the sky bouncing off the water.

“Call your mother,” she says.

“How many times has she called already?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Not really, but tell me anyway.”

“Four.”

I use my cell phone, and at first Mom freaks because she thinks that I’m calling from the car, but I tell her that I’m here, that I’m calling from Rivka’s front porch, and that I can see the water from where I’m standing.

“Okay, honey. I love you. Have a nice time. Call before you leave tomorrow.”

“You too,” I say, and snap the phone closed.

“Come on in.” Rivka holds the door open for me.

I take a few steps into the living room and put my bags down. I look around. There’s a fire in the fireplace and it’s warm in here, and for a minute I feel dizzy. It’s like I’ve stepped into an alternative universe. This could be
my
house. I could just be coming home from school, and those great smells coming from the kitchen would be the dinner that I have here every night, and tonight maybe I’d be eating dinner before going out to the Cape Cod High or Wellfleet High or Whatever High winter dance. And maybe in this alternative universe I would actually have a date.

“Let me show you your room,” says Rivka, and this is too much for me to take at just this moment, so I say, “Can we wait on that?” and she seems to understand.

I walk around the house. The living and dining rooms are part of one large open space that looks out into a backyard surrounded on all sides by tall pines. The floors are dark wood, and in front of the fire are two big comfortable couches separated by an old painted coffee table. There’s a mug on it and a book with its spine facing up that she must have put down when she heard my car. There’s a large photograph of the beach hanging over the fireplace that I immediately recognize as one of Rivka’s. I regret the snide comment I made over Thanksgiving about beach photography, because this picture is stunning. Everything seems to be moving: the gray-blue ocean, the low clouds, the impossibly tall electric-green beach grass in the foreground, even the flat sand.

The kitchen is almost the same size as the living and dining area, with a big island in the middle, a small table, and a built-in window seat with striped cushions. A staircase leads from the kitchen up to something, but I don’t follow it. It must be Rivka’s room. I find a small bedroom with a slanted ceiling just off the living room that turns out to be the room Rivka was going to show me to, my room, but I find it easier to think of it as the guest room. I put my bag on the bed. I put my backpack on a small wooden desk by the window.

“Nice house,” I say, and I really mean it. It’s rustic and cozy, and I’m happy to find that she isn’t one of those people who has doilies everywhere or little porcelain animals or crocheted signs that say
WELCOME FRIENDS
.

“Thanks,” she says. “I love it here. It’s quiet.”

I guess if you grew up with six other kids and the whole neighborhood coming and going all the time, you would learn to love quiet too. I listen carefully and can’t hear a thing but the gentle crackle of the fire.

“It smells great in here.”

“Brisket,” she says. “I figured I’d make the classic Friday night dinner. I hope you eat meat.”

I love meat. I know I shouldn’t but I do. I’m aware it isn’t great for you and that it comes from helpless creatures, but like the bumper sticker I saw once on a VW Bug, my favorite bumper sticker of all time, says, if God didn’t want us to eat animals, then why did He make them out of meat?

When I tell this to Rivka she laughs heartily. “I think that comes directly from the Torah.”

“I’m sure it does.”

She glances quickly at her watch. Am I boring her? Does she have somewhere to go?

“It’s time to make Shabbat,” she says.

Shabbat? I’m not exactly certain what Shabbat is, but I’m pretty sure it’s something religious, and I feel a rush of panic and confusion. Didn’t she say something about leaving this all behind? Didn’t she tell me right to my face that this isn’t who she is anymore? I mean, look at her. She doesn’t look like a religious freak.

“I’m an atheist,” I say quickly.

“Good for you. I admire your strength of conviction. Me? I can’t make up my mind, so I like to keep all my options open. I’m more of an agnostic.”

“So you’re not Jewish?”

“I’m definitely Jewish. But I’m also agnostic. I’m Jagnostic. Or Agnewish.”

“I’m confused.”

“Obviously I am too.”

This isn’t helping matters. I need some clarity here.

“So what do you mean by ‘It’s time to make Shabbat’?” I ask.

She gestures to the dining room table, a country antique with stains and scrapes that has the look of a table that’s fed generations of families. There are two candlesticks with short, unlit white candles, a silver cup filled with red wine, a platter with a loaf of bread peeking out from under a white cloth, and a bouquet of tulips in a green glass vase.

“What I mean is it’s Friday night. The start of the Jewish Sabbath. Every Friday at sundown I light Shabbat candles, drink wine, and eat challah.”

“What do you do with the flowers?”

“Nothing. They just look nice.”

I have nothing against candles or wine or bread. In fact, I’m a pretty big fan of all three.

“Simone, I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. This is just something I do every Friday night. You can go hang out in the kitchen or in your room, or you can stand here and stare at me like I’m completely insane. Whatever you want.”

“It’s okay. I’ll watch,” I say, because what could possibly be so threatening about candles or wine or bread? Rivka seems like a pretty together person. I don’t think she brought me here and went through all this just to try some kind of surprise religious ambush on me.

She takes a pack of matches and lights the candles. Then she takes a deep breath and slowly releases it, stretches her neck to the left and then the right, and drops her shoulders. She’s relaxing. I can actually see it happening; I see her letting something go. She lowers her head. Again I notice how quiet it is in here. With a few slow motions she waves the smoke from the candles up toward her face and breathes in the waxy smell of them. She puts her fingertips to her forehead so that her palms are shielding her eyes from the flames. Then she starts to sing quietly in a language I don’t know but assume must be Hebrew. It’s a melancholy tune, and she has a beautiful singing voice that I clearly didn’t inherit from her. She stops, picks up the silver cup of wine, holds it out in front of her, and starts to sing again. I try to imagine what the words mean. It’s obviously some kind of prayer, but I’m not bothered by it because I have no idea what it means. In fact, it’s having a hypnotic effect on me. Maybe it’s the singing coupled with the fire and an afternoon of staring at the white lines on the road. Whatever it is, I haven’t touched a drop of the wine, yet I feel a warm buzzing in my head.

Rivka finishes singing, takes a deep drink of the wine, and offers the silver cup to me.

“Thanks,” I say. It tastes earthy, like dirt and grass and silver. I realize that doesn’t sound so good, but trust me, it’s delicious.

She tells me she needs to go wash her hands and she disappears into the kitchen. Apparently this is part of the evening’s ritual. When she returns she uncovers two small loaves of bread. I’ve had challah before, from the Organic Oasis. The crust is always really hard and the inside is a little dry. She holds one up for me to grab, and I do—it’s soft to the touch—but she keeps a grip on the other end. She quickly half chants, half sings one last thing in Hebrew and then tears a piece from her end, and I do the same from mine. The challah is chewy and dense and slightly sweet. When I comment on how good it is, Rivka tells me she baked it herself.

“Are you hungry? Should we eat?” she asks.

“That’s it?” I ask. “Shabbat’s over?”

Rivka laughs. “No, it’s just beginning. Shabbat lasts until Saturday at sundown. But now we have to eat brisket. The Lord commands that after you light the candles you must eat brisket with roasted baby new potatoes and braised fennel.”

I help set the table, and she brings all the food out from the kitchen. The Shabbat candles are casting a really beautiful glow in the house. We sit down and I wait for her to start serving up the brisket. I’m trying not to salivate openly. But she just sits there for a minute looking at the table and looking at me. She breathes in the smell of the food, the candles, the fire. She pours the wine from the silver cup into a real wineglass, swirls it around, and takes a sip.

“I’m so grateful to have you here,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say. I feel my cheeks getting warm. I look down at my empty plate. “I’m glad to be here too.”

Everything tastes as good as it smells, and again I ponder the unexplored talents that may lie within me. I’ve never spent much time in the kitchen except for the occasional chopping and peeling. The kitchen is Dad’s turf. But now I’m thinking I should start paying attention to what he does in there because if Rivka’s a good cook, maybe I could be one too, maybe even better than Dad.

“Tell me more about Shabbat.” I’m trying to figure out why she bothers with all this if she isn’t living in the Hasidic community anymore.

“Shabbat is really important to me still,” she says. “It is a way to separate out a part of my life, a time in the week when I slow down and appreciate the things around me. I sit down to a meal with family or friends and try not to let anything intrude on this sacred space.”

This makes perfect sense. It sounds nice. It sounds like what happens in my house, at my dinner table, almost every night, and I feel a rush of appreciation for Mom and Dad and Jake.

“I’ve given up much of the hard-core restrictions we had growing up,” she continues. “For example, I’ll run the dishwasher after this meal without any guilt. In my house growing up—in all Orthodox homes—you don’t use any electricity, operate any kind of mechanical device, or do any kind of work on Shabbat. So I don’t observe it in the strictest sense, but Shabbat has always had deep meaning for me. I light the candles and do the blessings over the wine and the bread every Friday night, even if I’m all by myself, which I am quite frequently.”

I make a mental note to come back to this issue of her being alone. Was she ever married? Did she ever live with anyone? Is there anyone in her life now? But before I get to the bottom of this I still need to understand her relationship with someone else. I need to understand her relationship with the Man upstairs.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “You said you’re agnostic. That means you don’t know if God exists, right? Well, then, why do you bother praying to Him every Friday night?”

“Saying those blessings is more about tradition to me than religion. I do it because it’s what Jews do. It’s part of the Jewish tradition. And tradition gives me a sense of my place in the world. It defines me. Whether or not God exists doesn’t matter that much to me in the end, I guess. I’ve lived moments on both sides, moments where God is nowhere to be found and moments where God is so close I can almost reach out and touch Him.”

She pours me a little bit of wine without even asking if I want any. This makes me feel grown-up, like we’re two friends talking and enjoying our meal. Like we aren’t an adult and a child. Like we aren’t a mother and a daughter.

“So tell me about your family. Go back as far as you can. But hold on a minute,” I say, and get up from my seat. “I need to get my notebook.”

She tells me about her great-grandparents in Russia and her grandparents, who came to America in their twenties. She tells me about Mordechai as a young boy and Hannah as a young girl. I’ve filled five pages with notes. It’s getting late. The wine has gone to my head. The Shabbat candles have burned down to almost nothing, and still I’m transfixed—I can’t keep my eyes off them until finally the one on the left goes out and a tall plume of black smoke rises from it, snapping me back into the moment. I ask about her parents and her siblings now. Where are they? What are they doing?

Rivka yawns and rubs her eyes. She stretches her arms high above her head. “Maybe we can save the rest for breakfast, if you don’t mind. Remember, I have six brothers and sisters. There’s a lot of ground to cover. A lot has happened.” Now she’s staring at the remaining candle’s barely flickering flame. “My mother died five years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am. I don’t know much about Hannah, but I have a feeling I would have liked her. And now she’s gone. She’ll never be anything but a character in a story—in
my
story.

I get up and take the last few dishes into the kitchen. Rivka is still sitting at the table.

“Well,” I say, “I guess I’ll go to bed.”

She looks up at me. “Simone?”

“Yes?”

“I have a favor to ask you,” she says. She looks sorrowful. Apologetic. A little nervous. “There’s a blessing I skipped over. I’ve always wanted to do it and I’ve never been able to, but I could do it tonight with your permission.”

I just stare at her, waiting for her to say more.

“There’s a blessing that comes between the candles and the wine. A blessing you say over your child. I’ve always wanted to say this blessing, to bless you. I’ve thought about it every Shabbat since you were born. May I?”