A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life (7 page)

EIGHT

Did I mention that Amy Flannigan is also on staff at the
Oaks Gazette
? This makes it all but impossible ever to have a conversation with Zack Meyers alone. I know everyone says that they’re just best friends, but if that’s true, you’d think she could spread the wealth a little bit and let Zack talk to another member of the female species unsupervised. But no. When Zack and I are finally assigned to the same story, we make a plan to meet at the
Gazette
office after school. And guess who’s hanging out with him when I arrive? You got it.

It’s a pretty unusual assignment for the
Gazette
and for me too. I’m writing a story about my mother. I just realized how that sounds. Let me clarify: I’m writing a story about my mother, not about Rivka. The idea came up at a staff meeting, and Marcel, the editor, suggested that we do a profile on the lawyer who is bringing the town seal case. He didn’t know that she’s my mother. You can probably imagine how fast my heart raced when Zack interrupted and said, “The lawyer’s name is Elsie Turner, and she’s Simone’s mom.”

Everyone agreed that it would be a pretty cool piece for the paper, especially if I wrote it. Then Zack volunteered to take the pictures.

We’re meeting today so that he can go over a draft of my story and brainstorm some ideas of how to take an interesting companion photograph.

We stand around talking for a little bit, all three of us. But when I dig my draft out of my backpack and hand it to Zack, he takes a seat at one of the tables and says goodbye to Amy. She’s dismissed. Zack puts his elbows on the table, holds his head in both hands, and starts reading my article. He’s gripping a red pen. I’m biting my cuticles. I think I may be sweating, and I pray to the God whom I forsake that my deodorant does what the label guarantees it will do for its full twelve hours of long-lasting protection.

He looks up. “This is pretty good.”

Let me translate for you. What Zack just said is:
This is the worst piece of crap I’ve ever read. You are an illiterate moron.

“Thanks,” I say lamely.

“I mean it’s pretty good.”

“Thanks,” I say again.
Oh, Jesus
.

“Well, what I mean to say is, I think you can do better.”
Ouch.

“Yeah? How so?”

“Well…you can go deeper than just the facts of this case and how it came to the ACLU and why your mom decided to take it.” He pauses. “Look, I love your writing.”

Did he just say he loved me? No. Get a grip. He said he loved my writing.

“But this piece is a little flat, which is surprising considering your access and your relationship to the subject. Or maybe that’s the problem…. I think you need to try to forget that she’s your mom when you do the interview.”

I guess maybe he’s right. I did throw this together pretty quickly based on a series of short conversations I’ve had with Mom over the past few days. I guess I thought I could kind of sit back and let the whole mother-daughter aspect of it work on its own. Clearly I was wrong. I have delivered a piece of crap. A “little flat” piece of crap.

Zack readjusts his glasses and kind of tugs at his earring. “Start with what inspires her. Not just about this case. Maybe you should start by asking her about her first big case as a young lawyer and what she learned from that experience. Make this more of a personal journey for her.”

And that is how Zack Meyers, without knowing it, and without knowing nearly anything about me or my family, became responsible for my finally learning how Rivka came into my parents’ lives, and how I then came into theirs.

His name was Mordechai Levin. But everyone just called him the Rebbe. He lived in a suburb south of Boston with his wife and seven children. That’s right. I said seven. Apparently Hasidic Jews don’t believe in birth control, but beyond that, they believe that God commands them to have tons of kids. God said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” And they do because that’s what God said. So I guess having sex is a way of serving God. (Maybe Cleo should have tried out this excuse on Jules when Jules found out that she and Darius are having sex. More on that later.) Anyway, Mordechai was the spiritual leader of this small but densely packed Hasidic community south of Boston. Hasidic Judaism, I’ve learned, because I’d never heard of it before, is a type of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. You can picture Orthodox Jews, right? All I know is that the men have big beards, heavy dark clothes, and funny hats, and the women have long skirts and bad hair. (The hair is actually a wig!
That
I didn’t know.) So Mordechai was the spiritual leader of this community, and that’s why they called him the Rebbe.

Every Friday night and then again on Saturday morning all these Hasids would gather in the Rebbe’s rather large home and worship and pray and sometimes read from the Torah (which is what they call the first five books of the Old Testament) and listen to the Rebbe’s sermons. And basically, this started to piss off some of the Rebbe’s neighbors. Because like I said, the Rebbe lived in this suburb south of Boston. And when I said that the community was densely packed with Hasidic Jews, I meant that there were a lot more Hasidic Jews living there than there are in most other communities, like mine for instance, but I didn’t mean that there were
only
Hasidic Jews living there. In this suburb there were also tons of Irish Catholics and all sorts of other Christians and nonbelieving people like me. On the Rebbe’s street there was a businessman who commuted to the city and his schoolteacher wife, a family who owned a gardening shop, and a woman who worked out of her house selling computer software over the telephone. None of these people took kindly to the Friday night and Saturday morning parades of Hasids marching up and down their street on their way to the Rebbe’s house. So what did they do? They called the town zoning commission and ratted out the Rebbe. Because according to the zoning laws, it was forbidden to operate any kind of business, which includes a house of worship, on a residential street. And what did the Rebbe do when his disgruntled neighbors ratted him out? He called the ACLU. And that is how Mom comes into this story.

This might seem strange given what you know about Mom and her devout atheism and her fight to get the cross removed from our town seal, but she didn’t hesitate in taking the Rebbe’s case. The ACLU, she will tell you, exists to defend the freedom and liberty of everyone. That includes protecting not only an individual’s freedom from religion but also an individual’s freedom of religion. In other words, the government shouldn’t force you into a religion like they do when they put a cross on your town seal, but they also shouldn’t prevent you from being able to practice whatever religion you choose. Mom took the case because if the Hasids of this little suburb were not allowed to worship in the Rebbe’s house, then they would have been unable to worship at all. Hasidic Jews can’t travel on the Sabbath. They can’t drive cars or take buses or taxis. They gathered at the Rebbe’s house because there was nowhere else for them to worship within walking distance of where they all lived.

When Mom first met the Rebbe, she disliked him immediately.

His wife, Hannah, led Mom into his study for their first meeting about the case. Hannah knocked gently on his door, opened it slowly, and said, “The lawyer from the ACLU is here.” My mother, twenty-eight years old and sporting a new leather briefcase, entered his poorly lit study.

He looked up from his papers and at my mother with a puzzled expression. Mordechai’s beard was thick and black, without a trace of gray even though he was not a particularly young man and had a house filled with seven children. He leaned back. He tugged at his beard.

“They sent a woman,” he said.

“I’m not sure who you think ‘they’ are, Mr. Levin,” Mom said. “But I am the one who decided to take your case. We spoke on the phone. Remember?”

“Yes, I remember. But I believed that you were the receptionist or perhaps the legal secretary.”

My mother fought off the urge to use a word from her deep reserves of profanity. “Well, I’m not, Mr. Levin. I’m your lawyer.”

He looked at her for a long time and then motioned to the chair facing his desk. “Please have a seat. And please, it’s Rabbi Levin.”

Over the six months that they worked together, the Rebbe and my mother came to have a civil but not friendly relationship. On the other hand, Mom and Hannah, in those brief moments before Hannah would deliver Mom to Mordechai’s study, discovered that they shared more in common than you would imagine. Hannah had an extremely analytical mind that was greatly underused in her role as the Rebbetzen, which is what they call the Rebbe’s wife. Not only was Hannah a homemaker and the primary caregiver for her brood of seven, but as the Rebbetzen she was expected to play hostess and advisor and confidante to all of the women in the community, and this was not a role that she particularly enjoyed. So Hannah looked forward to Mom’s visits because it gave her a chance to talk about things that she didn’t generally have the opportunity to talk about with anyone else.

Mom also started to get to know some of the children in the Levin house. There was the eldest, a quiet and beautiful girl about sixteen years old with long straight dark hair and almond eyes. Then there were three boys, each separated by just one year, who were almost indistinguishable to Mom but who were equally loud and sweet and funny. Then there were two younger girls, neither as beautiful as their older sister, and a baby who never seemed to be out of Hannah’s arms.

One afternoon, about four months after Mom had started regularly visiting the Levin house, she was surprised to find the eldest daughter at the front door.

“Can we take a walk?” she asked my mother.

Mom didn’t quite know what to say to this girl. So she asked for Hannah.

“She’s not here this afternoon. She has an appointment. Please. I really need to talk to you.”

Mom peeked behind her into the house and could see Mordechai’s closed study door at the end of the hallway.

“Let me just—”

“No,” the girl interrupted. “Please. I don’t want him to know.”

So Mom went for a walk with this girl because she saw something desperate in her eyes, and at twenty-eight she didn’t feel too far away from her own years of teenage isolation and the times that she’d wished there were someone she could talk to.

And on this walk through the neighborhood of this little suburb south of Boston, while paused under a large oak with almost no leaves left on it (because like it is here now, it was November then), Mordechai and Hannah Levin’s eldest child, their daughter Rivka, told my mother that she was pregnant.

NINE

Mom won her case. It was her first big victory as a young lawyer; it got a lot of press and put her on the map in the legal community, and it helped shape her views on religion and freedom. This is what made it into my article for the
Oaks Gazette
. It made for a great story, and Zack took a really cool picture with Mom in front of a church holding a sword and a shield, which, in case you don’t get Zack’s brilliance, showed her as both an aggressor against and a protector of religion. That’s what I wrote about, even though for Mom, everything about her first big case was eclipsed by this young girl and her sidewalk confession made on that November afternoon.

Rivka didn’t know who else to turn to, and she figured that my mother, this liberal lawyer from the city, could help her find a place to get an abortion.

Of course, Mom was a firm believer in a woman’s right to choose, but she had never come face to face with this belief. And here was Rivka’s face, not the face of a woman but that of a girl—young, frightened, and confused. Before this moment, choice was an abstract concept to Mom. It was an idea to believe in. It was something to fight for. But now here it stood, right in front of her, asking for help, asking what to do, asking that Mom be the lawyer, judge, and jury.

She said she would do whatever she could to get Rivka through this, but that Rivka needed to talk to her parents first. At this suggestion Rivka sat down, right there in the middle of the sidewalk under the oak tree, and wept. She said her parents would disown her; she said that she would bring shame upon the Rebbe’s house. She said it would be the end of her life. Mom had spent enough time by now with Mordechai to know that Rivka was probably right about how he would react, but Mom had also caught glimpses of a Hannah who might be able to see things differently.

Mom was right. Hannah, before being a Hasidic Jew, before being the Rebbetzen, before being anything else, was a mother who loved her daughter. She didn’t want Rivka, at the age of sixteen, to have a baby. But she also didn’t want Rivka to have an abortion.

Hannah asked Mom to help them find a home for the baby, a good home with a good family. Her contact with the world beyond the Hasids in their little community was limited. She didn’t know where to go or who to call or what to do.

Hannah wanted this done quietly. No one was to know, especially not the Rebbe. It was to their advantage that he never took a careful look at his daughter and that the Hasidic uniform of long skirts and ill-fitting tops was naturally forgiving to someone in Rivka’s condition. She would need only a few larger, baggier outfits in the final months. As it turned out, Rivka was already four and a half months pregnant and was hardly showing. Hannah fully expected that Rivka would carry this baby neatly and close to her slender frame, just as Hannah had done with all seven of her pregnancies.

On some days the dual role Mom played in the Levin house would be too much for her. She would come home to the little apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Vince Bloom, only twenty-five and a student at the art institute, exhausted, teary, depressed, and filled with anxiety. Her sleeplessness kept him up at night. They talked of almost nothing else.

One night, about five weeks after Rivka’s sidewalk confession, Mom got off the T, briefcase in hand, and walked up the snow-covered cobblestone street in Beacon Hill where she and Vince lived. She could see into the second-floor window of their apartment. The living room was illuminated by an unusual light, soft and full of movement, as if there were a fire in the fireplace she always wished they had. She left her boots in the entryway and unlocked the front door. Vince was sitting on the couch clutching a bouquet of white tulips. The flames from hundreds of tiny votive candles flickered everywhere.

“What’s going on in here?” was all my mother could say, and it occurred to her right then that she sounded just like her own mother did when she discovered her children doing something they shouldn’t.

“Come here,” Vince said, and patted the couch next to him. He took away her briefcase and took my mother’s hands. He put the tulips down on the coffee table. Their stems had been crushed by his nervous grip.

“I know this sounds crazy, Elsie, but I think we should do this. I think we should take this baby. We may be young and stupid and have absolutely no experience with babies, but nobody knows what they’re doing when they first have a baby, and I think we’ll be just as good at not knowing what we’re doing as anybody else. And,” my father said, “I want you to marry me.”

During all of their late-night conversations about Rivka and Hannah and Mordechai they had never discussed the possibility that they adopt Rivka’s baby. And it wasn’t until she saw Vince sitting there in the candlelight with the crushed tulips, the ink from his drawing class still under his fingernails, that Mom was able to admit that in her secret heart she had imagined them taking and raising this child. Even though neither of them was a believer in fate or destiny or God, they agreed that this was simply what was meant to be. It was decided then and there. They drank a very expensive bottle of wine and looked around their tiny apartment and wondered where they would fit all of the things that go along with having a baby.

They were married three days later at city hall and would have done it even sooner if it weren’t for the three days it takes to get a marriage license in the state of Massachusetts.

So there you have it. That’s pretty much how I got here. Did you catch the part where my parents weren’t even married? For some reason, this rocks my world more than almost anything else. It’s sort of the reverse of those stories you hear about people who get married because they find out that, whoops, we’re having a baby, we’d better hurry up and get married. No. My parents thought,
Wow, there’s this baby out there and we really want her, so quick, let’s get married and make ourselves look respectable so we can adopt her.
And I suddenly feel this intimacy with them that is not at all strange because I was there with them that night almost seventeen years ago when they decided to get married.

For so long I’ve been so good at keeping information out, and now I’ve just opened up the floodgates and let all this stuff in, and I can’t seem to rid my thoughts of Rivka and Mordechai and Hannah and all those other nameless Levin kids. These people aren’t even real to me, yet they won’t leave me alone, and it’s hard for me to find moments when they aren’t with me, tapping on my shoulder or tugging on my sleeve. And did I mention that my parents think we should invite Rivka for Thanksgiving?

Talking to Cleo has always been a good way to clear my head, but these days lunchtime at school is about the only time I get to talk to her about the sex that she and Darius aren’t having because Jules won’t let her leave the house or even talk on the phone. Just to back up for a minute: Cleo and Darius finally started having sex. Their first time was at Darius’s house when his parents were away for yet another weekend and just for a change he wasn’t having a party. Since that first time it seems like they’ll do it anywhere there’s a horizontal surface and a door that closes, although sometimes they’ve gone at it without one or the other. Usually they just go to Cleo’s house after school. Sure enough, one day last week Jules came home early with an upset stomach that probably wasn’t helped by the scene she discovered in Cleo’s bedroom. You already know how I feel about the prospect of catching my parents in the act, so when I try to put myself in Jules’s position I really feel for her. And God knows I spend enough time trying to put myself in Cleo’s position. Wait. That sounds a lot dirtier than I intended it to. What I mean to say is, for me, having sex seems like something I will do one day, on another planet, in a galaxy far, far away. So for now I have only Cleo’s experience to live through.

When I find Cleo in the cafeteria she’s sitting with James and they’re both pouting. Apparently I’m not the only one with Thanksgiving problems. (Again, I’d like to give a shout out to Halloween and its complete lack of complication.) Cleo is still furious about having to go to Scottsdale, but she can’t complain anymore because she gave up the moral high ground with Jules the minute Jules threw open the door to Cleo’s bedroom. James was thinking about visiting Patrick in New York, but Patrick hasn’t thought enough about James to return any of his last three phone calls. When I tell them that my parents want to invite Rivka to our house for Thanksgiving, James and Cleo do what good friends do and quickly make it seem as if my Rivka problem trumps their Scottsdale and Patrick problems, but I know that there’s no winner here. Now the three of us are pouting when the bell for fifth period rings.

In history class I stare out the window. It’s a pretty nasty day, and I think it fairly well mimics my mood. I wish I were Cleo, not because of her boobs or because of the sex, although I’ll admit that I’m curious about what it would feel like to have either. I just wish I could go three thousand miles away for Thanksgiving, where it’s hot and dry and flat and different in every way from what it’s like right here. Maybe we could switch places. It’s a brilliant plan. Rivka wouldn’t even have to know. And it’s been so long since Cleo has seen Edward, he might not notice either.

I have a
Gazette
meeting after school. Even there I can’t seem to pay attention. I’m sleepwalking through my life. During the meeting I further examine what I have come to think of as the Zack and Amy Conundrum. Zack and Amy’s relationship, like the existence of God, defies everything I know about logic. I try to apply some simple formulaic thinking: if Z and A are always together and if A keeps Z from ever talking to another girl, then Z and A
must
be more than friends. Right? At the very least A is in love with Z. But I can’t seem to crack this question: is Z in love with A?

I try this out on James, who is giving me a lift home from school. He doesn’t even know about my crush. I’m slower than most of my friends to share this kind of information, because unlike Cleo, it doesn’t usually end up with me getting the guy.

“Is he the one with the camouflage high-tops and Flash Gordon earring?”

“Flash Gordon? I guess I thought of it as a Harry Potter earring, but yes.”

“Well, whatever it is, it has to go.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“Ah, yes…the are-they-or-aren’t-they question. Well, you’ve come to the right place. I am the resident expert on sublimated sexuality.”

James clears his throat, straightens a nonexistent tie, and launches into a mock lecture about people who are clearly in love but for one reason or another never act on their sexual feelings and instead develop all the trappings of a relationship without consummating it.

“Like me and Graham,” James says, referring to this guy in our class he’s always had a crush on and who has never given him the time of day, “except without the whole developing-the-trappings-of-a-relationship thing.”

“Or even the acknowledging-the-other-person’s-existence thing.”

James laughs. “Flash Gordon is awfully cute, Simone. But you don’t want to get tangled up with that.”

“Are you saying that a guy and a girl can’t ever be best friends?”

“If they’re just best friends, then why does she give you the evil eye whenever you go near him? Come on. Haven’t you ever seen any teen movies? It always ends with the best friends realizing they’re in love. Then the cheesy pop melody kicks in, and the camera does a complete rotation around them while they share their first kiss using way too much tongue.”

“This is depressing.”

“This is reality.”

This is what I love about James. He never tells you what you want to hear just because that’s what you want to hear.

My mother, on the other hand, tells me when I get home that we have to make a decision about Rivka and Thanksgiving and she’s leaving that decision up to me. This is what she thinks I want to hear, that it’s my decision, like I really have a choice in the matter. It’s funny how parents do that. They’re tremendously skilled at making you think you’re in control when really they’re just hovering somewhere high above you like master puppeteers, tugging at all of your strings. Right hand up. Left hand down. Head from side to side. Call Rivka. Invite her for Thanksgiving.

But I’m older now. I’m wiser. This time I see right through her. “Obviously your mind is made up about this, so why don’t
you
invite her and stop pretending that I have anything to do with this decision?”

“No, Simone, this is really up to you,” says Mom.

“That is such a lie! If this were really up to me, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. If this were really up to me, you’d just say hi and let me go up to my room and not make me come sit here on the couch and listen to another one of your lectures.”

Where’s Dad? Why did he leave me here alone, defenseless against Mom? I feel like one of those baby animals on a nature program, trying to graze peacefully in a field while a puma is circling me behind the tall grass.