For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories (10 page)

“She couldn’t,” Doe says.

“Of course not. I didn’t even get to explain it. A whole mess. She was outside dragging me into the house soon as I turned the corner. She was crying, shrieking: Where had I been and where were my shoes and how did I cut my leg and how in the hell could I laugh? Well, how could she scream in the face of the magic of that moment? She just went on with her tantrum. The kids, small, were terrified. Right to the hospital. Right then. And I lost it on the way. The ability. I didn’t get to say goodbye. And I wanted to, desperately. A chance to say it right, no one gets that. I had it and I wanted it. And I tried for it in the car. I was clawing at this all-around place, trying to get back in.” Marty leans over, takes hold of Doe’s arm. “I never admitted to anything. Knew enough to deny it. But that feeling, that last time with my mother, it’s as real to me as my wedding day. Only it’s more real because it was better than real. More wonderful and amazing than anything I’ve experienced before or since. And sometimes it’s too tempting to try to get there again. To skip the meds and see where I land. Now tell me—how am I supposed to explain that to Robin?”

“Can’t,” Doe says.

“Exactly. That’s why I need your brother. He gets her back for me. He swings things my way with Jewish family talk and pity-for-the-ill and lots-in-life and fathers-for-children. He talks her home for me.”

“Does he know that I’m with you?”

“No,” Marty says. “But he’ll find out on Wednesday. Robin wants to see me at his house. We’ll have a double reunion. You and I will arrive all gussied up and well balanced. They will
look at us and know. It will be emotional—that can’t be helped. People will cry. Maybe all of us. But they will see us looking handsome and healthy, and your brother, the master of forgiveness, will be first. His usual fine example. And then both families will be reunited. Simple as that.”

There was finagling involved, a call for the manager, some trained, disgruntled-customer-style indignation, and Marty succeeded in getting his Brooks Brothers account reinstated. Both he and Doe left for the reunion at Rabbi Baum’s house in sharp, classic pinstripes—the picture of sober style.

Doe fiddles with the glove compartment. He tries to slide his hand into a jacket pocket sewn shut.

“Probably I should wait,” he says.

Marty turns off the main avenue onto Baum’s block. He stops the car.

“No, sir. We should go in there together. Dazzle them. Sweep them off their feet with our fine appearance and good intentions.”

“Tell him first,” Doe says. “Go tell him that I’m here.”

“And what, you’ll sit in the car and wait? Like an idiot?”

“Yes,” Doe says, “an idiot.”

“Won’t have it. We’ll make our entrance together. A pair of fallen men reborn.”

Robin is talking to the rebbetsen on the front steps as Marty and Doe make their way up the slate walk.

“Moish,” the rebbetsen calls into the house. “Moish, get out here,” she calls through the closed storm door. It is the tone she uses when the children fall and there is blood. Robin turns and her smile drops away. Rabbi Baum is out on the steps, his breathing short. He does not touch his wife in public,
and over the years physical cues have been shunted into looks. He gives his; she responds. Wordless. And he focuses on the man behind Marty.

A reunion. The rabbi runs down the stairs. He is a small man, narrow, though his face is large, with the tacked-up eyes. A Baum face, if ever there was. As he approaches, Marty thinks he may be reversing in scale, getting smaller instead of larger with every step.

“A nightmare,” Rabbi Baum says. “Horrible enough over the years, wondering when you’d be in together. Each time you were out, I’d wait, then nothing. I thought maybe I’d be spared.”

“Your brother, Rabbi. Looking like a million bucks.”

The rebbetsen covers her mouth with both hands. She is talking, you can tell, into her palms. Robin makes her way over.

“Who is this?” she yells. “Tell me what you’ve done.”

The rabbi and Doe stand staring at each other. The similarities between them are clear.

“The rabbi’s brother, Robin. He was in with me on the ward. A fluke. A friendship. He sleeps in Sammy’s bed. Today is the day of the double reunion. I’ve brought the rabbi’s brother back from the dead.”

The rabbi takes his brother by the shoulders. He does not hug him but turns him around. “Go,” he says, “back to your gutter. Take your fancy clothes and get away.”

“No reunions,” Robin says. “No more wasted life.”

“Go,” the rabbi yells. He stamps a foot, as one might to scare off a cat. Doe is still facing the street, his cheeks and neck and ears turning bright red.

“Take it easy there,” Marty says and touches Doe’s arm. “We don’t want any trouble.” Marty says this to all of them. “We are better now, under control. We have made mistakes and now we are sorry.”

“You are a man without boundaries,” the rabbi tells Marty. “There are limits, prescribed, written. You’ve overshot, both of you. Mercy is not required. Nowhere does it say I must forgive.” From behind the rebbetsen’s hands comes a noise, a weird triple-sound that is yelling and crying and praying to God. And behind her, in window after window, faces begin to pop up. One little one behind the storm door tries to get out. The rebbetsen steps in front of her, stands half in and half out of the house, watching from behind the glass of the door.

Marty does not answer. He is watching the rebbetsen and the half-open door. He can’t help but think of that sweet stink from their house, the by-product of life, of their happy home, seeping out into the air. Seal it in, he wants to tell her. If they ever leave, you will need it to survive.

“Go, both of you get away.” The rabbi shoves his brother in the back, and Doe takes a baby step forward.

“But you haven’t made peace yet,” Marty tells him. “Your job. My rabbi. The fate of the Jewish family. Look at how my wife hates me for no reason. She hasn’t agreed to come home.”

“No more forgiveness,” she says. “Nothing left in me for anyone’s sake.”

“I’m out of advice,” the rabbi says, such a pale little man, trying to sound as if he has some control. “Maybe it’s better if your family goes broken. Sometimes, in extreme cases, there is nothing more to be done.”

“There’s always more,” Doe says. Turns back. “Even brothers beyond forgiveness surface looking for more. Even knowing what they’ve done.”

“You’ll go!” The rabbi again tries to turn him, but this time Doe does not give. He takes his brother’s hands from his shoulders, pushes him back and away. Rabbi Baum catches a heel, hitches a foot on a piece of slate. He trips. He falls to the ground, bounces, and rocks his head.

“You will be the same until the end of time,” Robin says. “You will torture us all and live long past when we’re dead. A sick man is not a devil. You, Marty, are both.” She spits at his feet and curses him.

But it was Doe that knocked the rabbi down, not Marty. He feels that she should curse Doe. Spit at
his
feet. This would be more fair, after all.

The rebbetsen runs down to her husband. Robin moves over to the rabbi but does not bend or ask if he’s hurt. Doe stands, red faced, his hands balled into fists. And Marty looks up at all the many faces of the children filling the windows and wonders, If forty days are accorded a Torah, how long must a child fast when his father is knocked to the ground?

The Wig

C
olors and styles, she takes note of. Hemlines, accessories, heel width and height. Also, that the girls get taller every month, bonier and more sickly looking. Ruchama had quite a figure herself as a girl, kept it until the first three children were born. But never, from the age of twelve, was she without a chest and a bottom. She really can’t imagine how these fence posts manage to sit down.

It’s hair that Ruchama is studying. She goes through the new
Bazaar
page by page. The magazines are contraband in Royal Hills, narishkeit, vain and immodest, practically pornographic. But she needs to keep up. Her customers will bring her pictures like these, folded up small and stuck into wallets, bra cups, pulled from under the wigs they wear. And they expect Ruchama to be familiar. They are relieved when she takes a wrinkled photo, nods with confidence, and says, “Yes, again they are highlighting bangs.”

Ruchama has come into the city for the silk caps onto which she and Tzippy—best friend and right hand—knot the hair. The newsstand is at Twenty-third and Sixth, convenient to her supplier and far enough from Royal Hills, oddly enough located, that she will not see anyone she knows. She flips through the magazines between Jamal’s stand and the trash basket on the corner. She pays for her browsing rights, forces Jamal to accept the crumpled bill she drops on the counter when new issues arrive. She thinks this appropriate. For she would take them home if she could and knows that, if a familiar
face appears in the crowd, she’ll drop the magazines in the basket and fall in with the flow of foot traffic, crossing whichever way the walk sign allows.

She does not spot anyone. She finishes flipping through the magazines. She places them, one by one, back in their slots on the rack. Good as new.

Tzippy carries a box of braids down the inside stairs to the workshop.

“New hair,” she says, and drops the UPS package on the separating table.

Ruchama spits three times to ward off the evil eye. Whenever a box of braids arrives from Eastern Europe there is always a shadow, a gloomy revenant. Tzippy drinks her tea. Ruchama pinches the flat of a double-edged razor blade between her fingers and with three quick passes sets the tape on the box whistling and folds open the cardboard flaps.

Taking out a braid, Ruchama pulls her thumb across a blunt end, letting the tips fan back with natural spring. Like a paintbrush. Good and thick. She holds it up to the light, checking color. She and Tzippy never refer to colors by their useless names. They have learned from disappointments, stood united before a red, red wig they had spent two months creating while a client screamed at them, literally screamed, “Does that look red to you?” They had squinted, moved closer, adjusted lamps. What else was it but red? They have learned. There are over one million shades of auburn, two million meanings for “chestnut brown.” They now work in similes: “Darker or lighter than pumpernickel bread?” “Newsprint black? Or black like black beetles in black ink?”

Judging the braid she holds, Ruchama places it in one corner of the vast separating table. From there they will build outward, creating a map of color and length and curl.

Tzippy puts down her tea and reaches into the box. “Wet wood spoons,” she says, displaying her choice. That is exactly the color. Ruchama is always amazed by her accuracy.

Tzippy begins unraveling the braid, brushing through the hair with her fingers and burying her face in it. She is smelling for a past, sniffing out the woman’s shampoo and sweat, the staleness of cigarettes or the smoke that drifts down from some factory nearby. She breathes deep. She is onto a scent, a wind from a village, a mist of perfume.

“They are paid top dollar,” Ruchama tells her.

“Women with choices leave their hair to be swept off salon floors,” Tzippy says.

“Maybe these women are more prudent.”

“With such hair?” Tzippy waves the braid’s open end at Ruchama. “These are women who have to sell some part of themselves and this is where they begin. This one,” she says, sniffing again, “is on break at a bottling plant thinking of her lover. She sold her hair to pay his gambling debts and she wonders now where her hair is and where that bum has gone.”

“My own life is depressing enough, Tzippy. Why must you make it like we’re scalping orphans?”

“A teenage girl,” Tzippy says, “a girl with everything she needs. Only, there is a used scooter her parents won’t buy her and a boyfriend she lusts after who lives all the way on the other side of the lake.”

“You’ve been reading novels again, Tzippy. Don’t tell me there isn’t a romance hidden under your bed.”

The front room gets natural light from the windows that open onto the cellar well. The room is carpeted and painted and, in front of the long windows, there is a pair of comfortable chairs. There are stools and a counter, and on the counter mirrors—one standing on a silverplate base and an assortment of hand
mirrors that Ruchama has no real attachment to, though it is intended to appear to customers that she does.

Ruchama finds it difficult to live up to the expectations of the room. She is more comfortable in the back with Tzippy on the cement, hair-strewn floor of the work space.

Nava Klein is sitting on an overstuffed chair in front of the window. Tzippy sits on a stool, her feet resting on the crossbar. Ruchama stands; she looks better standing, her dress hanging loose off her chest, concealing. She has not sat down in front of Nava Klein in at least half-a-dozen years.

The whole back wall is covered with framed photographs of wigs on Styrofoam heads. Nava is pointing to one. “Third in,” she says. “That’s got to be Aviva Sussman.” Ruchama’s work is so distinct, you can pick out half the neighborhood.

“You can’t tell me that’s not Aviva’s hair.”

“Please,” Tzippy says.

Nava grimaces, turns her attention to Ruchama.

“I saw your oldest,” she says. “A real beauty and such a rail. She reminds me of you when you were that age. You were striking, striking as a girl.” Nava sighs, signals with her head to Tzippy, as if she were not part of the adult conversation. “Only Tzippy stays the same, her hipbones pushing at the front of her skirt. The rest of us ragged old women have to hide behind our daughters’ good looks.”

Nava shakes her head. “How do you do it, Tzippy? Where in Brooklyn is your fountain of youth?”

Tzippy blushes. Ruchama wants to scream. Every compliment the woman gives releases a dandelion’s worth of barbed spores. Tzippy looks great because she is barren. Her figure has been spared because her womb has walls of stone. And Ruchama, she is a proud mother. Of course she is, with six wonderful children and a chin to show for each one.