Beyond the Pale: A Novel (43 page)

“Life is always working, of course, but it must have happiness,” her Mama had said long before piecework banished happiness from the tenement. “You must find a way to fill your heart with the pleasure of everything around you. It’s even a Commandment.” Mama never told Rose which one. Something about not forgetting the way God moves through creation like the wind.

That was her childhood. When Chava came to Odessa, Rose was thirteen. She had just learned that the smoothness where her thigh met the opening between her legs was the best smoothness on her body. She remembered when Chava had been her slightly older, independent cousin who ran through Kishinev’s streets, knowing all the shortcuts and alleys. Had she loved Chava since they were little girls? Chava had always been so serious—of course, because she was an orphan and saw her parents die.

What would she have done if
her
Mama had been killed? It would have been terrible to be alone with Aaron, Harry, Saul, Jacob. She tried to be as serious as Chava, to hold herself up because her cousin’s parents were killed in a pogrom. Before Chava came to live with them she hadn’t thought so much about being a Jew, even with everyone’s Cossack stories. Now she thought about it all the time, trying to figure out if there was something different inside them, something they were born with, not just that their ancestors were Jews. And even if there was something different—if many had long noses, if they were ugly to others, like Chava wrote, or didn’t believe in Jesus—was that a reason to make pogroms on them? Even in America, where Jews were supposed to be free, the American-born mocked them, and anyone who could, took advantage. When Rose found herself on the wrong street, she felt how mean their words were, even when she didn’t understand their language.

Chava’s heart must hurt her very much, Rose thought. When Chava came to them, she was hard as an elbow, always jabbing herself out into the air, as if to say, “Keep away.” But Rose had seen how tender she was on the other side, so she let her be. With anything frightened, you had to be gentle. Even in the beginning, when she thought of being gentle to Chava, parts of her body fluttered inside. After a little while, being gentle with Chava was a secret delicacy.

Chava was brave but Rose was more sophisticated, she knew. She understood the world as a woman, even when they were girls. Chava knew about the revolution and suffering of course, but she was always putting suffering behind her as though it had nothing to do with all her grand political schemes. To Rose, the emotions of the world were more interesting, not intellectual life or abstract theories about economics and women’s position. Anyone could know what women’s position was just by opening their eyes. Who wanted to stare at that all the time?

All these girls, like Chava, had such a passion for ideas, their belief in a better life, a better way to organize living. What Rose loved, really—she looked up, noticing the pink clouds paling to gray—was their excitement. If Chava had, instead, a passion, a genuine fever, for buying property, Rose would have loved her for that. (Maybe—it was hard to picture either of them as landladies!) Ardent. That’s what Chava was, ardent. Her need to change the world, that was what swept Rose into her.

Was she simply a log on the fire of someone else’s passion? Rose rolled a pebble down the cliff. No, she was her own. She could make her own way. After all, she supported the family as much as Chava did, more until recently. Chava made her way through all those clawing shop foreman, the perils of the workplace, by simply not seeing them, not believing they were there, that they could be meant for her. Chava didn’t really know herself as a girl, and she never had.

Rose shook her head, not sure exactly what this meant. She used to believe that fashion meant so little to Chava because she was in constant mourning, but now Rose understood her differently. And yet, Chava moved like a woman, felt like a woman: the softness of the inside of her upper arms, where Rose loved to reach in under the nightgown, and hold, while Chava’s legs wrapped around her and rubbed over Rose’s bone and belly, engulfed in a klezmer melody, the deep breaths they took sometimes melancholy and sometimes, in rare moments when they were alone, as raucous as a wedding dance.

Weddings. Rose bit her knuckle. Her mama and papa expected her to get married eventually. They were starting to hint about consulting a shadkhn, “just for advice,” in a year or two maybe, since they didn’t want her to go with some dance-hall dandy or an impoverished tailor. How were they going to make a good match for their only daughter? In America their boys could, and were, taking care of themselves. If Rose happened to meet a college student or a young lawyer or even someone successful in his own business—but how would she meet this person?

They didn’t seem to care about Chava the same way, and not just because she was only their niece. They appeared to have a little story they told themselves about how Chava was going to end up married to organizing, and in a way, they almost approved. Mama more than Papa. Mama had a respect for Chava. Maybe because she too saw how strong Chava was, and how sweet and good underneath that strength, how her idealism kept her connected—to the working women, to Jews. So many girls got buried alive in marriages. Mama wouldn’t think of it that way but sometimes Rose saw her sewing, sewing, and saw that Mama was buried too.

If Rose had to get married, it wouldn’t bury her. Chava would live with them, and—no, Chava wouldn’t stand it, and Rose couldn’t imagine seeing her, bewildered and wounded every night, even if they spent all their time together and everything else was the same. How
could
she get married? She’d only do it for Mama. And maybe it would be nice to have children, if there was enough money for them. She’d never make her girls into servants for boys.

Children. Rose looked over her shoulder and made out a few girls moving at the edges of the camp, some still singing, most doing evening chores, hauling armloads of branches, hanging out wash, sweeping up the pathways. She should have been helping with dinner. There was a familiar smell of onions and garlic in the breeze.

Maybe they should get an apartment together the way Chava wanted. They could get new lampshades, with fringes, and maybe she’d needlepoint some cushions for their chairs. Just the two of them would be such a luxury. Gutke and Dovida managed to live together very nicely. And many women lived together, at Henry Street, everywhere. They wouldn’t need a lot of money. She hated to think of leaving Mama, but they wouldn’t have to go far. And Mama could use their room for boarders, which would make up at least half of the wages they’d been giving her. Certainly they’d have to wait until this depression ended. She’d rather live with Chava than with any man she’d ever met.

Rose’s stomach gurgled. She gave it a little pat. “All right, then,” she said to her stomach, sliding off the rock. “Let’s go see what this bunch thinks of food. They can’t all want to live off the air of ideas.”

F
ROM OUR MAKESHIFT TENT
, Rose and I could see the occasional shape of a girl walking by. We lay in the night heat listening. Branches and dry leaves crackled as they were added to late cooking fires. Laughter, bits of song and discussion floated on the humid air. A layer of perspiration enclosed me like a sticky soap bubble, making me feel that no matter how much I wanted to touch Rose, she’d find me unappealing. A firefly flew inside our sheet-wall. I watched it try to find its way out again, blinking through the shadows. Rose took my hand.

“No one will bother us here,” she said.

“I’m covered with sweat.”

She licked my arm slowly. “Yes,” she said, “salty.”

“I don’t smell bad?”

“You smell better than dinner to a laid-off seamstress.”

A light breeze came up the cliffs from the river and dried my arm where her tongue had been, giving me a shiver. I leaned up on my side and looked at her. There was just enough light from the moon and the camp lanterns to see by. Her hair was pinned up off her neck and I could make out the small mole below her ear. She was wearing her lightest cotton slip, twisted tight across the mound of her belly. Sometimes her body seemed as far away as the moon when I watched her cleaning up on Essex Street or coming out of work with her friends. But tonight the moonlight was in the river and I could dip my hand in and drink it if I dared.

“Maybe I don’t smell so good to you?” she asked. Her eyes, which had echoed the July sky all day, were gray in the dark. Even so I could see, now that I was looking at her body, her confidence leak away. I put my nose close to her armpit.

“You smell like the plum orchards of Bessarabia.”

“You’re a liar.”

“You accuse me, your own cousin, of lying?” I poked her side lightly and she poked me back.

“At the very least, a flatterer,” she said, pressing her hand against my arm.

“I know what I smell, and you smell delicious.” I put my face under her breasts, resting on the upward curve of her stomach. In fact, we both smelled sweaty and smoky. How she really smelled was familiar and strange at the same time, the smell of a freshly bound leather folio, compelling. “Rose—”

“Yes?”

I turned my face up to look at her. “Would you take your slip off?”

She looked at me intently and we both sat up. All these years, we’d never lain naked together. We’d hardly seen each other’s bodies unclothed except for the few seconds between pulling off our skirts and putting on our nightgowns, and when we let our towels loosen in the baths. I could feel a stone poking my thigh through the featherbed. I didn’t care. From a few directions I could hear soft moans but no footsteps.

Rose heard the moans too and smiled. “Yes,” she said as she pulled the slip over her arms. She folded it neatly. “Now you.”

I peeled mine off and used it to wipe the sweat from my face before I threw it in the corner. Sitting, Rose’s flesh made a generous fold above her belly. I slid my hand under the fold and squeezed her flesh upward lightly. Rose’s eyelids trembled, her lips parted as an “aaah” crept up her throat, and then she opened her eyes wide, as if she were frightened.

“Rose,” I said, leaning close to her ear, “you are my heart’s desire.”

“Flatterer,” she mumbled into my check, relaxing as she kissed me. Then we were prone again, naked on our bedrolls. And scared. Strangers surrounded us. Yet we were also beyond fear—the shop girls’ camp was like a wall protecting us against our ordinary tenement life. I loved her softness, the resiliency of her flesh when I pressed my palm into it, the way a mossy riverbank springs back from your step. I rolled over on her body.

“I’m not too heavy like this?” I could feel the pressure of my chest flattening her breasts.

“No, you feel good.”

We were sweating so profusely that I slid against her. I swayed into that sliding sensation, holding myself up on my wrists, back and forth, my small breasts tickling the pillowy surface of hers. We giggled when I guided my nipple exactly onto her nipple, and they both puckered, taking on the shape of ancient towers. I started to rock, my thighs slipping up and down hers. She pushed her belly up hard into mine and rocked with me.

“Put your whole weight on me again,” she whispered.

I fell into her mouth, grabbing her thighs for balance. We kissed and swayed, slipping. My feet tilted off her calves and curled back around her toes. Between my thighs the sweat gave way to a different stickiness and behind my shut eyes a bright green flashed, seesawing my focus between mouths and lower limbs. Our legs tightened together, straining into each other, as if we wanted to get beneath the thin cover of our skins or melt the skin together, like candle wax. In a corner of my mind I could see the havdale candles I made as a child, felt my hands braiding the warm wax while it was pliant, two wicks intertwining, mingling with the sharp smell of the spicebox.

I opened my eyes to watch her face as she filled, moving beyond self-consciousness, moving with me. I arched to let one hand move between our bodies, supporting myself on my other arm. Rose seemed to hold her breath. I rubbed the curly hair below her belly, tugging it lightly until she gasped, and opened her eyes.

“Anything,” she breathed, “anything you want.”

“Anything you want,” I echoed with the same urgency, “—everything.” I turned my hand sideways, holding the fingers tightly together and entered the folds of her as I might slice through the uncut leaves of a book. I closed my eyes again, listening. Rose was taking short, hungry breaths and I could find the rhythm of her breathing in the pulse I felt coming up through her inside lips. I turned my hand again so that two fingers stroked her small mound. We called it the inner nipple, since it grew larger and harder when we excited each other and seemed connected to our other nipples by an invisible thread of flame. Rose grabbed my arm. Her grip was strong from years of sewing and carrying, and I felt almost faint from the pressure, from flooding. Rose was moaning and for the first time I didn’t feel a need to shush her. I heard myself groan as I slipped the two fingers deep inside her and she tightened her muscles around me, clasping me as I shook and pumped.

For a moment Rose seemed to stop breathing altogether. Her muscles grabbed my fingers tight and her hips strained upward from the featherbed while her head rolled back. Then she gave a cry and jerked, gasping for air, relaxing and then squeezing my fingers and crying out a second, a third time. I felt my interior muscles contracting with hers, and cried out too. Then she collapsed in on herself.

Her laughter surprised me. At home she often pushed a pillow over her head when we got this far, to stifle any noise. I pulled my hand out. A thin film made a web between my thumb and forefinger. I held it to my nose and sniffed, smiling at her strong smell, which carried a faint scent of the herring we’d eaten for dinner.

She took my hand and put it to her lips, kissing my fingers. “You are a blessing, Chava, my blessing.”

Far away I heard another girl laughing—because of listening to us or her own pleasure? I rolled back onto my side, wiping my hand on the bottom sheet of our makeshift tent. Then I lay in her arm, nuzzling her breast slowly. What a pleasure to be naked. Rose stroked my hair, murmuring deep in her throat.