Hush (24 page)

“Kootchie Mootchie died las’ night. I stayed up all night sayin’ goo’-bye. We gotta bury him. We gonna bury him near the back fence, in back of the garage, okay?”

My mother blinked. I could see the disgust pass over her face as she tried not to grimace at the dead cat.

“Sure,” she said. “Okay, uh, I gotta go.” And she turned away from the door.

Kathy and Leo walked slowly out of the house. Pulling on my brother’s slippers, I followed quickly after them.

“How did he die?” I asked Kathy. I’d never seen a dead cat before. I stared at the tail swaying imperceptibly in the wind.

“God took ’im,” Kathy said. “He was a good cat, and the time came to take ’im.” She wiped her nose. “He had a good life.”

Behind the garage, near the back fence, was a patch of neglected earth, a few feet away from the small garden. Leo placed the cat gently near the wall, took the shovel out of the garage, and his muscular arms heaved up and down as the dirt whipped out from the ground. Kathy, on her knees, bent over the dead cat and stroked the blanket.

“Oh, poor Kootchie Mootchie.” She sobbed. “This is a special blanket. Warm and fuzzy, his favorite, so he shouldn’ be cold in there even in the winter.”

She grunted and pushed herself up. “He’ll be fine in his next life, my little Kootchie.… He was a good cat. I’m gonna make him a nice headstone. It’ll say Kootchie Mootchie, a good cat. May Jesus give him a good and loving family in his next life.”

“What next life?” I asked.

“Cat’s got nine lives,” Kathy told me. “If they good in one life, they get a good next life. And I know my Kootchie Mootchie’s gonna do just fine. He gonna get a nice little family with a sweet girl like you who gonna love him and care for him jus’ like I did.”

Nine lives. That sounded like an awfully long time to be on Earth. But I supposed cats liked it. What would they do in heaven? I didn’t like Kootchie too much, but I hoped he got a good next life, maybe a family with a pizza shop or something so he could do nothing but eat all day. Kootchie would like that. Everyone got their own kind of heaven, I guessed. Even cats.

I did not tell my mother of the little funeral and certainly not about the grave with the J— sign. She was muttering when I came into the kitchen that she could not believe she let Kathy bury the cat in her backyard. She just wanted that dead cat out of her face. She sliced the tomato into two perfect halves. “And that is the last animal that woman will ever bring into this house.

“Hashem.” She pulled her snood over her forehead. “The things these goyim fall in love with.…”

Kathy gave me a handful of candies that afternoon, after I went up to talk with her, she being so sad and lonely after Kootchie Mootchie’s death. She showed me some pictures she took of the cat and said he was the best companion she had ever had—after Leo. When I came downstairs with the candies, my mother wanted to know what it was I was eating. I told her it was candies I got from Kathy. She said she couldn’t believe I was eating candies from a
goyishe
house and who knows what it was that she gave me. I told her they were kosher candies that Kathy had bought from a kosher store and there was nothing wrong with them.

“What do you mean, nothing wrong?” she demanded angrily. “You don’t eat food that comes from a goy, no matter what. You say ‘thank you’ nicely and then throw it out just in case it’s not kosher enough! Where did you grow up anyway, in goyland?”

Something snapped in me, deep inside. I told her that Hashem had more to worry about than candies that were just-in-case-not kosher-enough. I told her that kosher was kosher wherever it came from because Hashem was everywhere. I didn’t have to climb the tower of our house or chant along with my class during prayer in school to reach Him, because if I closed my eyes, and reached inside of me really high, I would touch the heavens from wherever I was.

My mother stared at me, her face gone white, her eyes stunned. I walked away from her, back to my room, and sat on my bed. I said a blessing to Hashem out loud, tore open the wrappers of all five candies, and stuffed them into my mouth.

And they were very good.

I walked up the gray concrete steps of Precinct 66. I pushed open the heavy doors. The policeman sitting at the front desk told me to wait in her office; Miranda would come in a few minutes.

I sat down in the folding chair and looked at the desk. The metal sheet covering the front of the desk was bent inward. I had kicked it hard. I looked down, embarrassed of how I’d behaved. Miranda came in immediately after. She smiled at me hesitantly. She then pulled the chair around the desk, bringing it to the front, right across from my chair. She sat down empty-handed. She waited.

“Maybe after I’m married,” I said.

Miranda folded her hands on her lap. “Okay.… Why then?” she asked.

“Too many people will be hurt now.”

She was quiet.

“Do you want to get married?” she finally asked.

That question. Always that question. “I want my parents to love me,” I said. “I don’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t want to leave. I have siblings who will suffer. Schools that will kick them out,
shuls
that will ostracize them, a community that does not forgive. Shmuli won’t be punished, only
we
will.”

Miranda was silent.

“I can’t do it,” I said. “Maybe after I’m married.”

“Do you think you can forget?”

I nodded my head. Then I shook it. I nodded again.

“Do you still have dreams?”

“No. The dreams went away. She stopped coming. I don’t see her anymore. Maybe she just wanted to know what had happened.”

“Are you upset you came here?”

“No. I…I just needed to know. I just needed to know what had really happened.” I bit my lips. “Are you disgusted with me?”

“You are only seventeen.”

“Still…”

“You are the one who suffers. Only when you are ready, maybe after you are married, you’ll come back.”

I looked at the desk. It was empty. Just a bare surface with no paper.

“Do you still have her file?”

“Of course. I rewrote it.”

“Will it stay open?”

“Of course.”

“Okay.”

It was the first week of summer vacation. I held my father’s hand as we walked down sunny, blossoming Ocean Parkway. Every week, after the heavy
Shabbos
meal, my father liked to take a long walk to settle his food before the traditional
Shabbos
nap. My mother and sister usually came along, but this week I was the only one. Everyone else was too lazy. We were strolling together, hand in hand, pointing at the tiny white-petaled flowers springing from the grass, when something happened—and this time Hashem was almost crushed.

My father was telling me some old jokes he knew from his childhood, but I wasn’t in the mood to laugh. So we walked quietly down the long, shaded block, watching the birds chattering and running on their tiny, pencil-thin feet when a
shaygetz
—non-Jewish boy—passed by us, the kind I often saw from the safety of the school van window, laughing loudly in the streets. As he passed us, he grabbed my father’s
shtreimel
off his head and sped down the block. My father yelled at him to drop the hat and took off after him,
kippa
in hand,
payos
flying in the air. When the goy reached the end of the block, he was forced to stop. There was a green light, and cars were speeding by him so he had nowhere to run. My father had almost reached him when the goy, realizing he wouldn’t get away with it, raised the
shtreimel
and threw it into the rush of speeding cars. He then fled back down a side street and disappeared.

My father and I watched the
shtreimel
as it rolled beneath one car and then under another and another. Beneath the speeding vehicles it looked like a helpless penny rolling, turning, spinning between flashing wheels on the black asphalt street oblivious to the trembling hat that held Hashem deep inside.

Somehow the thought passed through my mind that maybe Hashem, realizing His danger, would make the green light turn red and then the speeding cars would stop and my father would save the
shtreimel
. But He didn’t. Stunned, I watched as a long, sleek limousine, its metallic tire rims flashing in the sun, rolled right over the tall fur
shtreimel
as if it were a mere hat, crushing it completely. When the light finally turned red and the limousine was long gone, all that was left of Hashem’s hat was a mangled piece of fur, flat as a pancake, stuck savagely onto the black asphalt pavement.

I cried all the way back home. I wanted to know what had happened to Hashem. Was He crushed in the hat beneath the heavy wheels of the passing cars? My father hadn’t even bothered to pick up the hat. He left it there in the middle of the street, saying that there was nothing left of it anyway. In tears, I looked behind me until I could no longer see the mutilated hat abandoned on the road. I wanted to tell my father that it was all my fault—my fault that Devory was dead, my fault that Hashem was crushed completely beneath the wheels of a car. I had wanted to be a goy; I kept going up to see Kathy; I had eaten five entire candies from goyland and they had been really good. But I didn’t tell him. He would never believe that I could do such things, that I could hold such thoughts in my head.

My father smiled at my tears. He held my hand and said that I shouldn’t worry for Hashem. He had escaped and was safely up in heaven. But he cursed the goy who had killed the hat and said that he would go straight to hell for what he had done. He called him a wild
shaygetz
, and now he would have to buy a new
shtreimel
—and they were so expensive. I asked my father if Hashem would be in his new
shtreimel
too, and he laughed and said that Hashem was wherever righteous Jewish people were.

The next day my father came home with a new
shtreimel
. He showed us the new hat, so tall and majestic with its shiny new fur. When he put into its box, he turned it gently, around and around, so all the fur would lie in one direction. He then took the hat box and placed it up on the shelf near my mother’s $180 Versani shoes, and once more, it stood there, tall as my father, round as a pancake, and as confusing as Hashem.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The price of fur had gone up. It seemed as if there were no more foxes in North America, Mr. Weiss of The Hat Store on Sixteenth Avenue said, scratching his scraggly beard behind the glossy counter.
Shtreimels
were now mostly imported from Asia. It was a bit more expensive, but what can one do?

My father didn’t care. He said, “For my daughter’s groom? Only the best!”

His fingers ran expertly over every strand of fur, closely observing the stitching, gently stroking the silk lining inside.

Standing near the wall-length mirror balancing the
shtreimel
on my own narrow head, I laughed. The tall fur hat fell lopsided over my face, looking absurd on my thin, brown, shoulder-length hair.

My father smiled when he saw me. “It’s a heavy hat, isn’t it?” he said, turning back to the
shtreimel
. “He’ll get used to it.… Come look at this one. It’s perfect.”

And it was. Fur so new it glowed, so black it shone, so smooth it left a velvet touch on the skin, every last lustrous strand bent in perfect circular symmetry.

I had never been in a hat store before, had never seen the rows of black
shtreimels
,
shtreimlichs
, and fedoras, bent-downs lined up like soldiers on the slanted, dark wood shelves lining the store’s walls.

“At one thousand dollars a hat, a
Chassid
only buys a
shtreimel
once in twenty years,” my father had said. “It’s important that you help me choose the hat that will be on your husband’s head until your own child’s wedding.”

My mother laughed when she heard that my father and I had bought the
shtreimel.
“Hashem! She was engaged only two days ago! She still has ten months till her wedding!” But she ooohed and aaaahhhd as my father pranced proudly around the dining room table parading in the hat and said it was truly a
gezinta shtreimel
—a great hat—and that we had better put it away somewhere safe.

On December 2, six months after I had graduated from high school, one month after I had turned eighteen, and two weeks after the third girl in my class had gotten married, I had finally become engaged.