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Authors: Dana Reinhardt

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Family, #Adoption, #Fiction

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BOOK: A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life
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“What I mean to say, Simone, is that it’s up to you to offer this invitation. I’m not going to do this for you. I think it’s the right thing to do. She’s reached out to you; now it’s your turn. But if you don’t want to do it, I’m not going to force you, and I’m not going to make the call for you.”

I sit there for a long time after Mom has left the room, staring at the floor. Then I go up to my room, shut the door, and pick up the phone.

TEN

Our house smells like cinnamon. I’ve never been a big fan of cinnamon, but Dad keeps telling me I won’t taste it. Hard to imagine how this is possible when its smell is overpowering every other ingredient in the kitchen. Rivka is due to arrive in about an hour. I’m hiding out in the attic.

So of course I called Rivka and invited her for Thanksgiving, and obviously she accepted or else I wouldn’t be up here. Our conversation didn’t go much beyond this invitation, although I did ask if there was anyone she wanted to bring with her, and she said that she would be coming alone. Scratch the image of a house filled with kids. Put a question mark next to the husband.

My first meeting with Rivka was starting to have a feeling of inevitability about it, so I figured why not have it at my house on my turf? It’s strange, but I just somehow know that this is where things have to go, so I’m going along with it. It’s like a story is being written, and it requires that the character of Simone and the character of Rivka finally meet face to face. I can’t do anything about it, and I don’t really want to do anything about it anymore. I want to see her face.

 

When I was little I never played with dolls. I never had baby dolls with little changeable outfits. I never had a doll who closed her eyes when you tilted her head back, or said “mama,” or, like Cleo’s doll, peed when you fed her a bottle of water. (I always thought that was kind of gross.) And I never, ever played with Barbie dolls because in my house Barbie was pretty much the devil incarnate. But I did have this one soft toy that I never would have called a doll, though it had yarn for hair and a flat, soft face with painted-on features. I had her for years. She went through the wash so many times that eventually her features faded to nothing. This is what Rivka has become to me. She’s not a mongoose from a famous children’s story. She’s not a place. She’s a person with a blank space where a face would be. While some things are becoming clearer and some blanks are being filled in, I still can’t imagine her face. And in about an hour or so I won’t have to.

 

Jake comes up to the attic to ask if he can borrow my headphones.

“Why? What’s wrong with yours?”

“They’re broken.”

“That makes sense.”

“Huh?”

“Your head seems to get bigger and bigger every day now that you’re this supercool high school jock. These things aren’t made of elastic, Jake.” I toss him my headphones.

He laughs and says, “Ha ha, very funny,” and tells me to shut up, but he looks a little hurt. I can’t help it. Everything just seems so easy for Jake. He moved effortlessly from adorable little boy to hot freshman guy without his nose and Adam’s apple growing at twice the rate as the rest of him. He’s a great athlete. Teachers love him. He has tons of friends. I’ve heard there are several junior and even senior girls with crushes on him. And he has only one mother and one father, both downstairs in the kitchen cooking a Thanksgiving dinner with too much cinnamon in it.

“Simone, are you okay with this today?”

To top it all off, he’s unbelievably sweet.

“I guess so.”

“Well, that’s good, because I’m kind of freaking out.”

This catches me off guard. I didn’t ever stop to think about what effect all this might be having on Jake. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

It was a big enough step for Jake to come up here and admit that the Rivka Situation is bothering him; I can’t expect him to actually articulate
why
it’s bothering him. I didn’t even need to ask him why, because it makes perfect sense to me. This must disrupt Jake’s world and his sense of our family.

Jake sits down in the armchair. “I don’t want her here. I wish she would just go away, and I don’t really understand why Mom and Dad have been making such a big deal about this.”

The boy has a point. I can’t figure this out either. They still haven’t given me a reasonable explanation. Why are they forcing this on me? Why now?

Jake looks so unhappy. “You know Mom and Dad,” I say. “This is just part of their whole approach to life. They need to talk about everything. They need to process everything. They want everything out in the open. It’s one of the hazards of having hippie do-gooders for parents.”

“Yeah, well, whatever. I think their timing sucks. I just want to have my Thanksgiving in peace, and now it’s going to be all weird.”

“No, it won’t, Jake. It’ll be just another family Thanksgiving. I mean, what’s weird about having a Thanksgiving turkey with Mom and Dad and you and me and some lady who gave birth to me sixteen and a half years ago and hasn’t seen me since?”

“Oh, yeah. You’re right. Nothing at all.”

Jake sinks deeper into the chair and leans his head back, and I can see the tension leave his body. I guess he just needed to know that I’m still able to joke about this, that I’m still the sister he knows and loves. We stay up in my attic together until we hear the doorbell ring.

 

It’s a false alarm. It’s just Jules. She’s come to join us for Thanksgiving and a front-row seat to the Simone freak show. Cleo left for Scottsdale last night, and I’ve already talked to her twice. She said that the little girl whose name she can’t remember (Carly) is fat and that she thinks the little boy (Craig) has Tourette’s syndrome because he constantly blurts out “penis” for no apparent reason. They’re having some kind of southwestern Thanksgiving meal involving chipotle chiles and cilantro that Cleo says her “mommy” has spent days preparing. She thinks it’s funny to call Edward’s wife her “mommy,” and she’s pretty sure that Edward and the wife don’t find it so funny, which makes Cleo think it’s even funnier. She says that the pool has too much chlorine in it and she misses Darius. This I don’t really understand. Well, I do understand that too much chlorine can be really unpleasant, but I don’t understand Cleo missing Darius. Does she miss Darius or does she miss having sex with Darius? Because to me, the sex seems to be the cornerstone of their relationship.

During our second conversation of the day, when for the third time she mentioned how much she missed Darius, I just asked her, “Are you in love with him?”

Cleo laughed. “Honestly, Simone, grow up.”

“Screw you, Cleo.”

“Come on. I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean that nobody cares about love or being in love anymore.”

“What, you mean love went out along with the grunge look?”

“No, I mean it’s just not something I spend time worrying about. I just like to be with him and I don’t want him to be with anyone else, and that’s all I know for now.”

Cleo. She’s four months younger than me and still seems like my older, wiser sister. I hung up the phone feeling annoyed and also sort of foolish. Yes, she did tell me to grow up, and that accounts at least in part for my feeling annoyed and foolish, but also no one bothered to tell me that love is out, and I walk around still believing in it or searching for it or at the very least trying to make some sense of it.

 

When I see Jules down in the kitchen she asks, “Have you heard from Cleo?”

“Yeah. Haven’t you?”

“Of course. She’s having a good time, isn’t she?”

“I guess.”

Cleo is never all that forthcoming with Jules, even in the best of circumstances, so I’m pretty sure Jules is trying to pump me for information, but this is
my
day for weird family stuff. I don’t have time for anyone else’s drama.

Rivka was due five minutes ago. Maybe she got cold feet. Maybe she decided to keep driving north and is headed toward New Hampshire or Canada or somewhere beyond the Arctic Circle.

I can hear the sound of a clock ticking, but I notice that the only clock in the room is digital, so I must be losing my mind. Everyone is doing his or her best to pretend that this is just another Thanksgiving meal, just some family and friends hanging out in the kitchen with nothing out of the ordinary about to happen.

The doorbell rings.

Everyone freezes and stares at me. We didn’t plan this out. We didn’t decide who was going to greet her at the door, take her coat, ask her if she wants a drink. Without saying anything, I get up. The sound my stool makes as it drags along the kitchen floor could shatter glass. Mom grabs my arm.

“Do you want me to go?”

I put my hand over hers. “No, Mom, it’s okay. I’ve got it.”

 

Let me back up just a minute here to say that with everything that’s been going on and everything I’ve learned and all the mysteries and surprises and the other things that I can’t even begin to come to terms with, I haven’t dwelled at all on the fact that Rivka is a Hasidic Jew. You’d think that this would be at the top of my list of hard things to deal with, and I don’t in any way mean to sound xenophobic or anything, but it’s pretty strange, especially considering my outlook on God and religion. I guess right now everything seems so strange to me that it’s hard to separate out the
really
strange from the just plain strange. So I made a note of this fact, Rivka—Hasidic Jew, and then kind of placed it in my file of information without examining it too carefully.

But as I reach for the door handle, I access the file with the image of a woman in a long dark skirt, a boxy blouse, and a wig.

I open the door to find a woman with her own short, dark straight hair wearing blue jeans, brown suede boots, an orange V-neck sweater, and a killer shade of lipstick. She’s young and she’s beautiful. As for her age, this I could easily have figured out if I’d bothered to stop and think. She was sixteen on that November afternoon seventeen years ago. So right now, on this Thanksgiving Day, Rivka is only thirty-three. As for her beauty, I have this immediate reaction that I’m embarrassed to admit to, but here goes anyway. I think:
Wow, maybe there’s still hope for me.

I meet her eyes, her almond eyes, and hers meet mine, and we stand there for a moment. She takes a step back. And another one. She sits down on the bench on our porch and says, “I don’t know about you, but I could use some air.”

She already needs air and she hasn’t even set foot in our cinnamon-scented house. But I’ve been in here all day and I actually could use some air because I feel like I might pass out, so I close the front door behind me and sit in an old wooden rocker. I’m not quite facing her, but I’m positioned in such a way that I can get a good look at her without seeming like I’m staring her down.

“Thanks for inviting me,” she says. “I know this must be strange for you. It sure as hell is strange for me.”

I sneak a quick look, and the thing is, she looks completely and immediately familiar to me. I can’t pick out anything unusual or surprising in her face. It’s as if I’ve looked at her face every day of my life, and I don’t say this as a way of telling you that it’s like looking into a mirror, because it’s not, I’m different. But I don’t know how else to describe it—her face is just
familiar
to me.

Her brown boots (I’d love a pair just like them) and her jeans and orange V-neck sweater, unlike her face, catch me by surprise.

“I thought you were Hasidic.”

I would never in a million years have imagined that these would be the first words I would speak to my birth mother face to face. But there you have it.

“And I thought you had blue eyes.” She looks down and shakes her head as if she wishes she could take that back. “I mean, that’s what I remember about you from the day you were born. I thought you had blue eyes, and I couldn’t understand how that could be.”

I don’t know what to say, so I just sit there slowly rocking in the rocking chair.

“I guess all babies’ eyes look kind of blue at birth and the true color doesn’t develop until months later, and of course I wasn’t around months later to see that your eyes aren’t blue at all. Your eyes are brown. I don’t think there’s ever been a blue eye in my family, and God knows, with all of the kids and kids’ kids, we certainly have given the gene pool enough of an opportunity to cough one up. Oh, Jesus. I’m rambling, aren’t I? I do that when I’m nervous. I’m making a total ass out of myself.”

“No, you’re not. It’s okay.” Look at me, acting like the grown-up, trying to make this easier on
her
, smoothing things over for
her
. I have a sudden impulse to break the silence that has come over us with a scream that would echo on my front porch and across the snow-covered lawns down my street:
What about me?
But of course I don’t. I sit here quietly and rock.

“About the Hasidic thing,” she says. “That isn’t who I am anymore. You don’t really know who I was, so maybe that doesn’t mean much to you, but anyway, it’s not who I am anymore.”

“You aren’t Jewish?”

“I didn’t say that. Look, this is complicated. I’d love to talk about it with you sometime, but it’s going to take a longer conversation than we can have right now, and anyway, I want to know about you. Tell me something about you.”

“I’m hungry,” I say, and stand up and invite Rivka into my home.

ELEVEN

Dinner was delightful. We stuffed ourselves. We talked about how thankful we are. We laughed uproariously. Then we gathered around the piano and linked arms and sang show tunes. Okay, none of that is true. Well, maybe
Dad
stuffed himself, but we don’t even have a piano. Dinner was strange. Horror-movie strange. Foreboding tinkly music strange. If it
had
been a horror movie, something would have burst through the walls and everyone would have screamed and the table would have been kicked over, and I found myself thinking that it would have been a relief if something, anything, had burst through the walls and put an end to the awkward silences.

Good old Jules tried her best to fill those silences with tales from her last few terrible dates, which included one with a guy who had a home gym but not one book anywhere in the entire house. Literally. Or
illiterately
. (That was Jules’s stupid joke, not mine, and Rivka didn’t laugh, so at least I know she has a good sense of humor.) I kept looking at the six of us around the table trying to figure where Rivka fit in. She seemed trapped somewhere between the adults and the children. Obviously Rivka is an adult. She’s thirty-three. But she isn’t as old as Mom and Dad and Jules, and the last time Mom and Dad saw her she was exactly my age, so I think they must in some way still view her as this helpless young girl, and this made the dinner-table dynamic kind of strange. There’s that word again:
strange
. I’m aware that I’ve used this word way too many times. I know plenty of synonyms for
strange: perplexing, astonishing, eccentric.
Even though these are perfectly good words in their own right, none of them applies to this day or to my life lately as well as the word
strange
does, so that is why I keep using it again and again and again.

We move into the living room for dessert, and this change helps ease some of the tension. I think about how in almost every other house across the nation today, this is the moment when people loosen their belts or undo the top buttons of their pants. But for us, at this moment, when we move from the hard, straight-backed dining room chairs to the comfortable couches in the living room, we all seem to loosen something inside us.

Jules takes a bite of the pie she brought and asks, “So, Rivka, what do you do?”

This is the first real question anyone has asked her. That’s probably why Mom and Dad invited Jules. They know her tendency to talk a lot and ask a lot of questions, and I guess they figured she would probably step up if I sat there like the mute I’ve been all afternoon.

“I’m a photographer.”

A photographer. Like Zack Meyers. I’ve never spent much time messing around with a camera, but maybe I should. Maybe I could be a photographer.

“What do you photograph?” I ask her. “Or is it what’s your subject? Or what do you shoot? What’s the right way to ask someone who takes pictures what they like to take pictures of?”

Rivka smiles. “Any of those will do.”

She folds one leg underneath her. I look down at my lap. I’m sitting in the exact same position.

“I mostly photograph landscapes. I live on Cape Cod, so that includes a lot of beaches and sand dunes and grass. One of the reasons I live there is because of the light. The Cape has the most amazing light.”

“And you make enough money doing that, taking pictures of the beach?” This comes out a little harsher than I intended. I don’t even know who I sound like. Neither of my parents would ever phrase a question like that.

“Mountains of money,” she says, deadpan. “I’m loaded.”

“Really?”

“Not at all. But I do have my work in several galleries on the Cape, and it does sell from time to time, mostly to rich tourists. I also shoot family pictures, portraits; I’ve done a few weddings. Last month this couple in Truro hired me to take photographs of their schnauzers.”

Jake has been lying on the floor. He props himself up on one elbow. “Did they dress them up in little outfits? I hate people who dress up their dogs.”

“No. They were as naked as the day they were born.”

“So you shoot doggie porno?” I ask.

Rivka laughs. “Yes, but only very tasteful doggie porno.”

Dad disappears out of the room and comes back with two sets of Scrabble. Leave it to Dad to have an extra set on hand. He’s such a Scrabble freak. My family always plays on Thanksgiving, and since we have six people Dad suggests that we do a sort of round robin where there are two games of three people each and then the winners play each other in a final face-off. He’s the only one excited by this idea: Dad is highly competitive. None of us agrees to the final round, so two winners there will be. Dad pouts as he takes his seat at the board with Mom and Jake. Jules and Rivka and I set up next to them. Despite Jules’s earlier joke about illiteracy, she does a miserable job against Rivka and me, who are neck and neck through the whole game until I dump my final letters and win by going out on the three-letter word
kin.

 

I’m showing Rivka my attic. I feel a little like I did when I was younger and used to have friends over and we’d go barricade ourselves in my room and whisper about things we didn’t want the grown-ups to hear. But of course Rivka is a grown-up and I’m not a little kid anymore. And we don’t have to whisper because now I live in the attic.

“This is a real oasis up here, isn’t it?” she asks me.

I nod.

“I would have killed for a space like this when I was your age. I shared my room with my younger sisters, and our house was always filled with people. I never had anywhere to be by myself when I was growing up.”

“And yet you still found the time and space to get pregnant. Amazing.”

She doesn’t stare at me or look hurt or startled or anything.

“Yes, well, I guess you wouldn’t be surprised to know that it didn’t happen in my little room in my crowded house.”

“How did it happen?” This is the question that’s been on my mind all through dinner and dessert and Scrabble. While I’ve been visited throughout my life by thoughts and images of Rivka, I’ve never stopped to think about
him
. But now that she’s before me and I can finally see her and study her and no longer have to imagine her, the mathematical part of me suddenly needs to fill in the other properties. I need the second half of the equation.

“I take it you don’t really mean
how
?”

“No, I’m pretty up to speed on how babies are made. I mean
who
. Who was he?”

She takes a deep breath and lets it out. She turns my desk chair around and sits on it so she’s facing me. I’m sitting on my bed.

“He was just a boy.” Her face is even more beautiful, I notice, when it’s filled with sorrow or nostalgia or longing or whatever it is she’s feeling right now. “He was a boy I thought I loved. I mean, I did love him, but where I was wrong, I guess, was in believing that he loved me. Although when I look back at the situation, I’m not so sure he didn’t love me.” She stops and seems to realize that this isn’t the real point here. “It was all very complicated. Too complicated. But here’s something simple: his name was Joe.”

“Joe.”

“Yes. Joe.”

“Tell me more. It’s all the complicated stuff that’s interesting to me.” I mean this. I’m pretty well practiced at hearing stories of teenage angst and love and sex, and to think that this story actually involves me is thrilling.

“Yeah. To me too. Okay.” A strand of her hair has fallen in her face, and she tucks it behind her ear. “Joe was a Lubavitcher. What that means is that he was a member of this big Hasidic group—the biggest, actually. He was the cousin of a friend of mine from the neighborhood. He lived in Boston. I would go with her sometimes to visit her family, even though my father wasn’t a big fan of Chabad.”

She’s totally losing me. She reads this on my face.

“Chabad is pretty much the same thing as Lubavitcher. Never mind. None of this is important except for you to know that as the oldest daughter of the Rebbe, even though I was only sixteen, my parents already had a pretty good idea about whom I would marry, and I never liked that boy too much. And who was thinking about marriage, anyway? Certainly not me. But Joe was really cute and smart and had these amazing cheekbones, and I was just crazy about him. We started this secret love affair, because not only was he Chabad and not whom my parents had in mind for me, but there really is no such thing as dating among the Hasidim. It’s even forbidden for a man and woman, or a boy and a girl like we were, to be in the same room with the door closed unless they’re married. But we were kids and fell in love, and the rules didn’t matter.”

This is starting to sound like Romeo and Juliet but with lots of hair and heavy dark clothes. It strikes me as totally absurd when I conjure up a picture of two bad-ass Orthodox kids breaking all the rules. But then I look at Rivka’s face and I can imagine her as just a kid, a kid like me, and I realize that I very easily could have been one of them. If fate hadn’t snatched me away, I would have been born into an Orthodox life. Would that mean that I wouldn’t have a crazy crush on a guy like Zack Meyers? I don’t think so.

“And then, obviously, I got pregnant. Would you believe that it happened on the very first time? Just my luck.”

“Jesus.”

“Simone, I’m not telling you this as some kind of lesson about abstinence or anything. Sex is great. It’s amazing.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Well, you’ve heard right. And whenever you’re ready you should have lots of it. All the time. But be more careful about it than I was. And be more careful about whom you have it with.”

I’m turning red. Mom would never talk to me like this. She’s very cool and very open, but when it comes to sex she clams up and says something vague about how I need to be responsible, which I’ve always interpreted to mean:
Don’t have sex, but if you do, by all means don’t tell me about it.

“Anyway. Like I said, I loved Joe. When I told him I was pregnant, though, he totally freaked out and basically refused to ever talk to me again. And that really hurt—I mean, it really, really hurt. But in the end it was okay, because I may have been only sixteen, but I knew enough to know that I didn’t want to get married, even to Joe. I had no idea what to do. I was lost. I was terrified. I was in total darkness. And then—and I still believe this to this day—God sent me your mother.”

 

Jules disappeared while Rivka and I were up in the attic talking. Now Rivka is on her way back home, probably somewhere on Route 3 heading south toward Cape Cod. I wonder what she’s listening to. What kind of music does she like? Or maybe she’s listening to NPR? A book on tape? I’m stretched out on the couch in the living room, pretending to read a magazine. Mom and Dad and Jake are in the kitchen cleaning up, and I’m taking advantage of the situation—given everything I’ve had to deal with today, no one’s going to ask me to so much as dry a dish.

I keep turning over Rivka’s words in my head.
God sent me your mother
. I realize that a simple comma would change everything. Watch:
God sent me, your mother.
See? But this isn’t what Rivka said. She didn’t say
God sent me, your mother
. She didn’t say
God sent me, Rivka, your mother
. No. She said
God sent me your mother
. She said God sent my mother, Elsie Turner, to her, Rivka Levin, in her time of need. Well, if God was looking out for Rivka, then you kind of have to wonder why he let her get pregnant in the first place, don’t you? But then again, if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, I wouldn’t be here. So maybe God sent
me
my mother. Wait a minute. I don’t even believe in God.

I look out the window. The air is thick with fog, and I hope it isn’t too difficult to see on the road. I can picture her face illuminated by the headlights of cars carrying people away from Cape Cod back north toward the city.

My family emerges from the kitchen together. A united front. Jake is drying his hands on his jeans. They all find seats in the living room and pretend to do something else as they take turns studying me slowly flipping through the pages of my magazine. Finally Jake can’t stand it anymore.

“So?”

I fold the magazine and put it down. They look at me expectantly.

“It wasn’t half bad,” I say.

And my mom and my dad and my brother all smile their same smile at me.

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