Run You Down (6 page)

I had saved almost five hundred dollars from money your grandparents gave me for cleaning. The bus ticket cost one hundred. It was the middle of the night when I arrived at the bus station in Ocean City. I had barely slept. Every time I shut my eyes I saw you. Your swirl of fine red hair. Your upturned nose. The tiny, sharp fingernails I had to file down every day. I saw your chubby legs, kicking, always kicking. I saw your smile as I changed your diaper. And your blue eyes, wide open, astounded by everything you saw. You were so beautiful. I looked for Gitty’s name in the phone book attached to a booth outside the station, but she wasn’t listed. I had the address from the year-old letter and I asked the man behind the thick glass if he knew how I could get there. He said it wasn’t far and that I could walk. I waited at the station until dawn and then I started walking. I could smell the ocean but I couldn’t see it. Seagulls circled overhead like vultures, squawking. The streets were quiet. Little houses with little squares of grass in the front. I could feel I’d caught a cold on the bus. I sneezed and sneezed and I didn’t have any Kleenex so I wiped my nose on my sleeve. The address on Gitty’s last letter was a house separated into apartments. There were metal lawn chairs and green Astroturf on the front porch. It was barely eight o’clock, but I felt feverish and desperately wanted someplace to curl up, so I rang the bottom bell. No one answered. I rang the other two. Nothing. I tried the doorknob and it was open.
Hello?
I said. It smelled like cigarette smoke and urine inside. I stepped into a room covered in thin carpet, with old food and beer cans strewn about. A girl was asleep on one of two sofas. There was a dog in the corner, which frightened me. It wasn’t big, but I had never spent the night in a home with a dog. No
Chassidish
family has a pet. They are not kosher. But I felt so weak I would have slept in a room with a tiger. I sat down on the sofa opposite the girl, pulled my feet up beneath me, wrapped my arms around my backpack, and fell asleep.

It must have been hours later when I woke up. The girl on the sofa across from me was still there, but she’d changed positions. I heard voices and dishes, and a shirtless man sat down next to me and turned on the television. He bent forward, revealing a white back spotted with moles. More moles than I had ever seen. Moles with hair poking out of them. I stood up.

“Is Gitty Rosenbaum here?”

“Who?” he said, barely looking up. He was probably my age now. Forty-ish. I remember there was gray in his week-old beard.

“Gitty,” I said again.

“I have no idea,” he said. “Ask one of the girls.”

I walked past him into a tiny kitchen. He called after me: “And while you’re at it, ask which one of ’em is letting that dog piss all over the place. That dog is gonna be gone next time I come here.”

I kept walking down a hallway and found two girls in a bedroom. I asked them if Gitty lived here and they looked at me blankly.

“Ask Sandra,” said one. “She’s been here a while.”

I knocked on the bedroom door across the hall and someone said to come in. The room was black, thick curtains drawn against the sun. I squinted into the darkness and made out a figure in the bed. I asked if Gitty Rosenbaum was here and a female voice said Gitty hadn’t lived there in months. I asked if she had any idea where she was and she said, “I think she’s in her car.”

“Her car?” I said.

“She was parked behind the 7-Eleven on Third,” said the girl, flopping over to face me. She wasn’t much older than me and she had a black eye. I asked her what kind of car and she said a Honda. And then she flopped back over.

I slept that night and the next in a motel room that cost twenty-nine dollars plus tax. I ate what I could buy at the 7-Eleven while I waited for Gitty. On the third day, she appeared in her Honda. She was skinny, and her dark hair was streaked with blond, but I knew her. I called her name and she stopped and turned. And then she screamed. We both did. She ran to me and we hugged and laughed until we were out of breath. But that excitement didn’t last very long. We bought hot tea and sat on the curb outside. I told her my story and she told me hers. She had been living in the Honda since May. It wasn’t so bad, she said, but I knew she didn’t mean it. She had deep puffy circles under her eyes, and a cold sore on her mouth. She smelled bad. I asked why she wasn’t living at the house I’d been to anymore, and she said she left because you can’t stay there if you don’t work.

“Don’t you want to work?” I asked.

Gitty shook her head and looked away from me. “It is not good work,” she said. And she wouldn’t say any more.

We both looked for jobs while we stayed together in the motel. After four days, we were down to fifty dollars. On the fifth day I got a job at a Goodwill store making four dollars an hour sorting through donated clothes, but they only needed me from noon to five. And, I learned at the end of my first shift, it would take ten days for my paperwork to go through, which meant I wouldn’t get paid until then. So Gitty and I slept in the car. The hardest part was finding a place to take a shower and go to the bathroom. Gitty had a bottle she peed in at night, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it. I usually held it in until dawn when we could drive to a McDonald’s. I asked Gitty if she’d ever gone to shul to ask for help and she shook her head.

“This is not Brooklyn,” she said.

Gitty had changed almost entirely since I’d known her. When we were children, our families went to the same bungalow colony in the Catskills and Gitty and I shared a bed. She had a pretty singing voice and she practiced songs in our room. Girls are not supposed to sing in front of boys, but Gitty liked to show off. She was always getting into trouble for singing. Sometimes she made up new words for the songs—inserting impressions of people we knew, making everyone laugh. Tante Leah and my mother told Gitty she talked too much. But now, Gitty didn’t say much of anything. And she never sang. Or smiled. When she did talk, she didn’t talk about anything that mattered. She never once mentioned her family.

I tried not to think about you, Rebekah, but it was impossible. Almost every day I said to Gitty, “I wonder what Rebekah is doing right now?” I imagined you in your stroller on the way to the park with the baseball field at dusk. I imagined your father smiling and cooing at you as he lifted you out of your seat and set you on his chest, your head, still a little unsteady on your neck, wobbling as you tried to look all around you at once. Gitty did not want to imagine with me, but I have played the game of imagining where you are every day since I left. I have told you all my stories. I have asked for your advice. I have carried you everywhere, Rebekah. Always.

After I started at Goodwill, Gitty told me she was spending the afternoons looking for work, but she was bringing men into the car for money. They left their smell. We showered at night by the beach, where there were nozzles for people to rinse off after a day in the sand. And then one night a police car drove into the parking lot behind the Rent-A-Center and saw me peeing beside the car. I spent that night and all the next day and night in a cell with seven other women. One was naked except for a bed sheet. Gitty didn’t come to get me, and when I got out, I called home to Brooklyn. My brother Eli answered the telephone, and at first I didn’t recognize his voice. I had been gone for fifteen months and he had become a man.

“Aviva?” he said. “It’s Eli.”

“Eli!” I cried.

“Aviva, please come home,” he said. “Mommy is dead, Aviva. And we have a new brother.”

CHAPTER SIX

REBEKAH

When I wake up, Iris has already left for work. I open my laptop and find Pessie’s story six headlines down inside the News section.

ROSEVILLE MAN ACCUSES COPS, COMMUNITY OF IGNORING WIFE’S MYSTERIOUS DEATH

By Rebekah Roberts

The family of an upstate mother whose body was found in her bathtub is accusing local police of ignoring her mysterious death.

“I have no doubt that Pessie was killed,” says Levi Goldin, 28, of Roseville.

“I do not know why the Roseville police are uninterested in Pessie’s death. And I do not know why her community seems to have already forgotten her.”

Goldin told the
Tribune
that on the day of her death, his wife was supposed to take their son to the doctor but did not show up and stopped answering her phone. When he got home he found his wife in the bathtub and the child screaming, strapped into his car seat in the living room.

Pessie was born in Brooklyn but her family moved to Rockland County when she was a child.

Roseville police chief John Gregory declined to comment on the case.

I click into Facebook and see that I have a message from someone named Dov Lowenstein.

Hi! I’m SO glad you are trying to find out what happened to Pessie! We grew up together and she was the nicest girl in the world. No WAY she killed herself. Thank you thank you thank you!

I click into Dov’s Facebook page and see that he has more than a thousand “friends.” His profile picture depicts him in short shorts, waving an Israeli flag at some kind of parade. I write back immediately.

Thanks for reaching out! I’d love to interview you about Pessie. Do you have time to chat today?

Moments later, a message pops up.

I’ll be in Brooklyn tonight speaking at a chulent on Ocean Pkway. Wanna come? We can talk after.

He includes a link to a Facebook event page. Fifty people have already RSVPed saying they will attend. According to the invitation, the event begins at 10:00
P.M.
and is BYOB.

I Google “chulent” and discover that it’s a traditional Jewish stew made with beans and potatoes and onions and meat that takes twelve hours to cook. It is also the word used to describe, as the Web site NeoHasid puts it, “a drop-in lounge for folks that have traveled (or strayed) from the Chasidic world, whether in spirit, mind or body, along with their allies and friends.”

I message Dov back saying I’ll be there, then I send Iris a text asking if she’ll come with me. While I wait to hear from her, I click back to the event invite. It appears to be sponsored by a group called OTDinNYC. I click onto their Facebook page, which is open, and see that there are 978 people in the group. A long post in the “About” section lays out the rules of the group, which include refraining from personal attacks and “outing” people who have joined with fake names (“Mikveh Mouse” and “Shtetl Gretel”). The administrator is a woman named Chasi Herzog. She describes the group as a place for off-the-derech and OTD-curious to share, connect, question, and find support and advice. The most recent post is from someone named Ben Silver who asks: “Do you still plan on marrying Jewish?” He posted less than twenty minutes ago and there are already nineteen comments. Further down, a woman named Shimra Reich posted, “If you had a dollar for every person you’ve had sex with, what could you buy?” There are more than a hundred comments. One person named Yisrael Greenberg wrote: “A Ferrari!” sparking a series of comments about STDs and whether oral sex counted. Another, named Hindy Levin, wrote: “A cup of coffee—and not at Starbucks!” Her post was met with approving remarks about honesty, sexual repression in the Haredi world, and invitations to fill her wallet, so to speak. There is a post saying “Like this status if you were thrown out of yeshiva!” There are 235 likes and fifty-eight comments recounting skirmishes over skirt-length, smuggled magazines, OTD siblings, and insufficiently pious parents.

Iris texts back saying that she’s up for the chulent. I tell her I’ll try to leave work early and meet her at home, then we’ll go together. I turn on the shower and undress. For the first few days and weeks after I lost all my hair, I was surprised every time I dipped my head back into the stream of water. I felt the hair that wasn’t there. I’m getting used to it now. Iris encourages me to “play up the look” with big earrings and more makeup, but there’s something interesting about being, well, less pretty than I have been most of my life. I feel like it’s making me stronger; like that little happiness I’d get when I looked in the mirror before all this was a false, or at least a shallow, psychological bump. And now that I don’t have it, I have to find something else, something more substantial, to look for in my reflection.

Ten minutes before I have to leave for my shift I try Aviva again. Again, her number goes straight to voice mail:
This mailbox is full
.
The user is not accepting new messages.
This time, the automated message pisses me off.

“Really, Aviva?” I actually say out loud to the empty apartment. “You’re gonna play me like that? Clean out your fucking in-box.”

It’s a slow news day, so once I plunk out my assigned stories (Staten Island state representative’s son arrested for domestic assault; another crane incident at the luxury condo going up on Fifty-seventh Street; gang-related shooting on the B31 bus in Brooklyn) I Google Dov Lowenstein. Dov, I discover, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against a group called New Hope, an organization of unlicensed “therapists” who purport to turn gay Jews into straight Jews. The
Trib
actually did a story about the lawsuit last year when it was filed. Dov is quoted as saying that the people running the group are frauds who prey on Jewish parents desperate to “fix” their gay children.

Mike lets me leave early when I tell him I’m going to interview a source on the Pessie Goldin story. I get home at nine and Iris asks me what she should wear.

“If the girls are frum they’ll probably be in long skirts and long sleeves and stockings,” I say.

“From?”

“Frum. F-r-u-m. It means, like, observant.”

“Rocking the lingo,” she says, “I like it.”

“Anyway, I don’t think it matters. Clearly they’re liberal. I mean, it says BYOB.”

“BYOB! Really? This could be awesome. Are pants okay? I think I’ll wear pants.”

“I’m wearing jeans.”

“Cool. How about we get a six-pack? I’ll bring a big bag and if it’s weird, I’ll just keep it,” says Iris. I agree this is a good plan.