Sotah (40 page)

“But I thought, it’s such a pretty color. Listen, Maury, I don’t have time to get a new dress!” a woman’s voice pleaded.

“Well, excuse me. If you didn’t waste it, you’d have it for things that are really important.”

“What do you mean by that, by ‘waste it’?” she said levelly.

“Like drawing pictures for nickels for some fag art director. Like washing windows and letting the maid sleep!”

“Keep your voice down! You don’t know the first thing about my work. Not everything is money, Maury. We agreed this is my choice, my decision. So just butt out. As far as the maid’s concerned, she’s exhausted. Anyway, she isn’t supposed to wash windows. The Polish girl washes the windows and the floors …”

“Oh, excuse me. The Polish girl. And she’s the Israeli girl. And all I know, because obviously I’m an idiot, is that I write the checks for cleaning help and maids and I wake up in the morning and my wife is washing windows. So where is the Polish girl?”

“She’s got the flu!”

“It’s spring. Nobody gets the flu in the spring.

“So she’s got an allergy. What difference does it make what excuse she gave me? She didn’t show up.”

“Call another service! I don’t have to remind you about the party, do I? I mean, there’s no question that the house will be ready by then? Assure me that I’m right about this, Joannie …”

“I assure you.”

It was Joan’s voice, Dina recognized. And although such a conversation between a married couple was inconceivable to her, the man was no doubt Joan’s husband. Dina listened, frightened and appalled, and yes, a little exhilarated at the frankness and harsh honesty of such an equal exchange of views.

Dina heard a short, tentative knock at her door.

“Come in.”

Joan walked in slowly. She sat down on the side of the bed. Dina pulled the covers up, ashamed. She had not changed into a nightgown. Even her shoes were still on her feet. “You are angry?”

Joan shook her head. “Not angry. It’s just … We have guests coming for a party in two days. There is so much to be done. And the other cleaning girl didn’t show up … Do you understand me?”

Dina shrugged. She knew English from school. From the letters from her American relatives. She was good with languages. But this was so fast!

Joan repeated everything patiently, slowly, wondering at the desolation in the young girl’s lovely blue-green eyes.

“I understand.” Dina nodded, filled with the same kind of courtesy that made her give her seat on a crowded bus to an older woman struggling with packages. She wanted to get up, to help. Still, she felt uncomfortable and embarrassed as she glanced at Joan’s fashionably tight jeans, which seemed to outline her legs and crotch in indecent detail. Dina felt her skin prickle with disgust.

“Are you feeling all right? I mean, you haven’t even undressed, or washed, or eaten …”

Dina heard the slight, nervous edge to Joan’s voice, the edge of distress and more than a little concern, and suddenly she saw herself through her employer’s eyes. She sat up, blushing. “I’m … so … sorry,” she said in slow, halting high school English. “I was just … like … you say … tired. I will try better. Yes.”

She hurried out of bed and into the bathroom. Automatically she poured water over her hands from a cup, three times on each hand to wash away the evil residue of sleep, but somehow she didn’t feel herself rid of it. She looked at herself in the mirror, shocked. The wig was all matted and awry, the face dull and creased from sleep, the dress wrinkled and stained.

“I’m sorry, really. I feel badly about getting you out of bed. It’s just that, as I said, we’ve got these people … company—very important company—coming in two days,” Joan’s voice pleaded through the bathroom door. “I’ll wait downstairs for you. We’ll have some breakfast. We’ll talk.”

Dina heard the door close. Hurrying, she changed into clean clothes and automatically reached for her prayer book when the radical change in her status suddenly struck her: she was their maid, and she had no right to time. She had slept it all away. She kissed it and put it away, making her way quickly down to the kitchen.

“Dina, my dear. First sit down. Have some breakfast. Now I know all about ‘kosher.’ I even called the rabbi at the temple,” Joan said with pride. “I’ve got this wonderful Jewish rye bread and some fresh butter. Or you could have cornflakes and milk …”

Dina looked at the package of bread, turning it over slowly, searching for the stamp of kashruth, the Hebrew words that would tell her which rabbi had supervised the preparation of the dough, making sure all the ingredients were kosher and that the flour had been properly sifted, and that a portion of the unbaked dough had been taken off and burned as a remembrance of the dough portion owed the priests in the holy Temple. She looked at the cornflakes box and at the container of milk, seeking to know if proper rabbinical authorities had seen to it that the ingredients in the cereal were permissible and if the milk was
cholov Yisroel
, milk that had not been touched by gentile hands, an added stringency that was meant to prevent the remote possibility that cow’s milk had been mixed with unkosher donkey’s or camel’s milk.

On the bread she found only the word
Jewish
without any rabbi’s certification. And on the milk she found nothing. Only the cereal box had a little symbol, an “O” with a little “u” inside. She had heard of this. It was the stamp of America’s Orthodox Union of Rabbis, and although they were certainly not as reliable as
badatz
, she remembered hearing that they could be relied upon somewhat.

“I’ll take this.” She picked up the cornflakes.

“Fine.” Joan smiled, bubbling with nervous relief. “And here’s a bowl and a spoon.”

“I’m sorry to say … to ask … but is this your milchig set or your fleishig set?”

Joan felt a little sensation of distaste at the sound of the Yiddish words. She felt ashamed of herself. After all, she was a liberated, open-minded American, a sophisticated New Yorker brought up to respect other cultures and religions. So what was it about her own that made her cringe? “I’m afraid I don’t speak Yiddish, Dina.”

“Is it your dish for the milk or for the meat?” Dina repeated.

“It’s my everyday Noritake willow pattern,” Joan answered, bemused.

“Only one set for both? Milk and meat both?” Dina’s eyebrows lifted in horror, pushing the bowl away. “Can’t use it.” She felt a sudden irrational anger that there were Jews in the world who only had one set of dishes for meat and milk.

“Does that mean you can’t eat anything?” Joan asked, chagrined, feeling like a student who has prepared carefully for an exam only to find out it was on a different subject altogether. “Well, what about paper plates and cups? Plastic.” She hurried to get out her picnic supplies and was rewarded by Dina’s first, hesitant smile.

Dina shook some cornflakes into a plastic bowl, took a plastic spoon, and began to eat.

Joan watched her, appalled. “Don’t you want some milk with that?”

“Not good. Gentile milk. Not
cholov Yisroel.
”

Again, those horrid Yiddish words! Joan felt them explode in her ears like some embarrassing secret.

“Just get out of my face, you little brat. Mom, Suzy is in my room again,” her fifteen-year-old’s voice rang through the halls. The usual morning bedlam was beginning.

“Just a minute, Stacey. I’m in the middle of something here,” Joan called up to her eldest. “Please, just give your little sister a hand getting dressed this morning, Stacey, honey.”

Stacey, a tall, slim redhead wearing a sweatshirt that left one shoulder bare and a short tight skirt, walked casually into the kitchen. “She’s your responsibility, Mom, not mine. You were the one who decided to have her. Don’t try to push it off on me, like you’re always doing. What’s for breakfast, anyhow? Oh, hello”—she turned to Dina—“who are you?”

A young boy, his hair wet, his eyes barely open, shuffled morosely into the kitchen. His hand shot out automatically to turn on the television. Without moving his eyes from the screen, he took down a bowl and filled it with cereal and milk. Then, his eyes all the while fixed with dull, steady interest on the tube, he ate.

“And good morning to you, Steven dear,” Joan said dryly, switching off the set. The act evoked a sudden surge of life from the child.

“Hey,” he cried in outrage. “That sucks! What you do that for, jerk?”

“Stacey, Steven, I want you to meet Dina, our new maid. She’s from Israel …”

Steven turned the set back on. Stacey turned it off. “Your mother’s talking to you, cretin,” she told her brother.

“Die,” he answered her, switching the set back on.

“After you,” she replied sweetly. “Hello, Dina, and good luck,” Stacey said, grabbing a doughnut and sailing out the door.

A little girl wearing a dress backwards walked sleepily into the room.

Joan lifted the plump little cherub, kissing her soft cheeks until they glowed pink.

“No more kissing, Mommy.”

“Maybe just one. Just a teeny, tiny one,” Joan teased her.

“No more,” the child said grumpily, wiping the kisses away.

“Suzy, sweetie, this is Dina. She’s going to be helping Mommy keep the house clean. Won’t that be nice? Isn’t she pretty? Say hello, then have your breakfast before you miss your ride to school.” Joan sat her down and poured her a bowl of cornflakes and milk.

“Don’t want cornflakes.”

“But, honey, you always eat cornflakes.”

“But I don’t want cornflakes.”

“But I’ve already poured them for you. See, I’ve already added the milk, Suzy sweetie.”

“I want Frosted Flakes.”

“Now, honey, you know Mommy doesn’t buy that anymore. That it’s too full of sugar. Remember what Dr Meyer said about cavities. Now, just eat your cornflakes.”

“
No cornflakes.
”

“Shut up, brat,” Steven told her.

“Mommy! Steven called me a bad name! He said ‘shut up,’ too.”

“Beam up,” Steven told her, his eyes still fixed on the set.

“Well, why don’t you just have a doughnut, then, Suzy.” Joan sighed.

“A chocolate doughnut?” the child interrogated.

“No, a sugar doughnut.”

“I only like chocolate doughnuts …”

“Suzy, you’re going to miss your bus, dear.” Joan smiled sweetly through gritted teeth. Every morning was usually a little bit like this, but never
so much
like this. Or maybe she was just more embarrassingly aware of how it looked and sounded because of a stranger’s presence.

Actually, Dina did seem a bit surprised. Her eyes were wide and confused as she surveyed the family goings-on. But, aside from that, she didn’t seem unduly upset. Joan had no way of guessing that behind Dina’s uncomprehending stare lay a shock as profound as any the young woman had ever experienced.

Chapter forty

A
fter all the children had gone, the house took on an unnatural stillness that magnified everything that had come before. Joan experienced an odd sensation of heaviness, as if her very limbs were weighing her down.

“Well. That’s nice. A little quiet. They’re usually not so … well, they
are
usually, but today they were especially …” she apologized, strangely flustered by Dina’s silence.

Dina didn’t look at her. Her eyes were gazing out the window at the angled cut of the city sky visible through the skyscrapers. It was the same blue she remembered. And the trees and flowers seemed to bloom in those same colors familiar to her from her former sojourn on earth. Yet the distance she had traveled from her home to this one seemed at this moment no less than interplanetary.

She looked at Joan with frank astonishment that bordered on horror. “Never, never in my life,” she said with quiet but intense passion, “have I seen a family where the older children did not help the little ones! Never have I heard a brother say such things to his sisters! Never, never have I …” She paused, pushed beyond shyness, beyond politeness by outrage and grief, struggling vainly to find a word that would fully express her total inability to comprehend anything that she had witnessed. “Never have I
dreamt
of such a thing as a CHILD WHO TREATED A MOTHER WITH DISRESPECT! And such a mother! So kind, so nice, so generous, who does so much for her children … who gives them everything in such a beautiful big house!” She shook her head, distraught.

Joan’s mind swam. She was at the same time both grateful and bitterly offended. I do do an awful lot for those kids, she thought, pleased at the recognition. But on the other hand, she couldn’t very well ignore the implication that her kids had been poorly brought up, badly educated. She felt herself careening wildly between thinking: She’s absolutely right! to How dare she!

“Joan, I do not mean to hurt you. But in my home, nobody ever raised his voice. I never heard my parents raise their voices to us or to each other. In a religious home, the children say softly ‘Mother, please,’ or ‘Thank you, Mother.’ We were ashamed not to help our parents. We fought only over who could do more.”

Joan felt herself shrinking, as if the hard substance of her ego were being sucked out of her, leaving behind a thin, fragile shell. But then the humor of it struck her. She looked at Dina’s matted wig, her sleep-creased cheeks and tired eyes. This, after all, was the result of such an exemplary upbringing. Yet she suppressed her smile not just out of politeness, but from a sober recognition of some sad truth. “You don’t understand Americans, Dina,” she defended herself weakly. “American mothers are not in the business of producing perfectly behaved little angels. We believe in creativity, spontaneity, independence … You sound like you were raised in a pressure cooker and you’re too repressed to even realize it …” A knot formed in her throat. She wasn’t even convincing herself.

Dina took a hesitant step toward her. “You feel bad … angry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean. My English. It is not so … very good. I hope you understand. I hope I did not … Perhaps you did not understand.”

“Oh, I understand all right.”

“I hope I have not hurt you.”

Joan summoned up all her anger, preparing to go on the offensive again, to tell this
employee
not to presume to think … to tell her where to get off, when all of a sudden, without warning, her eyes overflowed with big salty tears that gushed down her cheeks.