Washing the Dead (10 page)

“But you seem to like her,” I said.

“I do, and I guess I’ll need someone to hang out with now that I can’t run. Besides, it can’t be easy coming to a new school.”

Her maturity took my breath away sometimes.

“Even if you’re as hot as Taylor,” she added wistfully, returning to her texting.

Megan Travinski lived in Glendale, in a modest home with her two older brothers and her mother, a trauma nurse. Dawn Travinski didn’t have time for PTA meetings or long lunches prepared by housekeepers; her husband had left her when Megan and Lili were in kindergarten, and Megan frequently slept at our house when Dawn had to work extra shifts at the hospital. She knew I had her back; mothering Dawn and Megan filled some maternal emptiness inside me.

I was eager to drop Lili off. I wanted to take off these god-awful clothes and shower. Lili had her hand on the door handle
before I pulled into the driveway.

“Thanks, Mom. I got it,” she said, and managed to extricate herself from the car and retrieve her crutches without any help. Dawn came out to say hello. From a distance, she could pass as one of Lili’s friends, with what Sheri called a “gravity-defying tush” that enabled her to pull off wearing teenybopper jeans. I could fit into junior-size clothes but I felt ridiculous in them.

“Rough day?” she asked.

“That’s for sure.” I shook my head and filled her in on the details of Lili’s injury. Then I stopped, because how on earth could Dawn Travinski begin to understand that I’d begun my day washing a corpse with a bunch of Chasidic Jewish women in the basement of a funeral parlor? I also stopped because Dawn was typically the one to unload her worries on me, and it felt weird to lean on her.

“You doing all right?” She looked at me closely, taking me in.

Although I spent more time with Sheri, I had a harder time fooling Dawn. “I think I am,” I said, and tried to smile.

“You go home and have yourself a cold one. We’ll keep Lili as long as she wants to stay.”

I thanked her wearily and drove off. I left a message for Sam, giving him the headlines of the appointment with Felix and asking him to pick Lili up on his way home from the office.

At home, I went right upstairs and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. Black was a hideous color on me, and my hair stuck to my head in reddish-brown clumps. I’d forgotten to cover up the large brown sunspot that was beginning to form on my cheek, and my eyes looked small and lifeless sans mascara. I stripped and stuffed my tahara clothes into an old shopping bag. I turned on the shower as hot as it would go, scrubbed every inch of my body with a loofah, and shampooed my hair three times. My skin was raw by the time I finished, but I smelled like me again.

After I dried myself off, I cupped my breasts in my hands; they weren’t full, but they weren’t gray and flat either. I touched the skin on my belly, still taut for a woman my age. I looked past my
skin to my insides. You couldn’t see the big parts of me that were missing: childhood memories that normal adults call on without hesitation, a mother’s steady love, and my belief in my childhood shul, maybe even in God. As the body adapts to the loss of a kidney or a lung, I’d been functioning without these organs, failing to consider the strain I’d been placing on the surviving parts.

I was starving. I dressed and went down to the kitchen. While the toaster browned a slice of rye bread, I ran upstairs to retrieve the tahara clothes, took them down to the washing machine in the basement, and doused them with Tide, extra strength. As the machine filled with water, I walked over to my old cedar chest. I’d kept all my confessional letters to Tzippy in a hatbox of my mother’s, which I’d stowed in the bottom of the chest. I missed Tzippy. Sure, I had lots of friends: Dawn, whom I took good care of; Sheri, who took good care of me; Betty Nezbith, whom I enjoyed well enough, but she was a couples-friend. All my other friends fell into one of those three categories. They weren’t Tzippy. I allowed myself to fantasize about an adult relationship with Tzippy, emailing or talking over tea about the people in our lives who troubled or amused us, about our worries and hopes for our children. Eventually we might have grown apart, or I might have left the shul on my own. I never had the chance to find out.

Nothing good could come from opening the hatbox, yet it cried out to me. Hadn’t I learned my lesson from my earlier phone call to my mother? God intervened. I smelled my toast burning and ran upstairs.

Sam and Lili wouldn’t be home for another hour and a half. Tired as I was, I was too wired to take a nap. I needed to get out of the house and put some distance between those letters and the ghosts they would beckon. I spread peanut butter on my toast, wolfed it down, and dashed out the door with my gym bag. Zumba would do the trick. I’d have to focus so closely on the steps that I’d forget everything else.

I missed the four-thirty Zumba class, so I drove to my preschool, which was housed in an annex of our synagogue. It felt
good to be back in my normal clothes, walking toward what Sheri called my “second nest.” I was the only teacher who had the after-hours access code to the preschool entrance. Sarah, the director and my longtime colleague, had given it to me when she won the job. She didn’t know that they’d offered me the directorship first but I’d declined because I didn’t want to swap my time in the classroom for an administrative job. I still got to accompany Sarah to early childhood development conferences all over the country, and she never made a hiring decision without soliciting my opinion. We’d built this beautiful school, with a waiting list a mile long, by picking teachers like Mrs. Kessler who knew that working with kids was their calling. We could spot applicants who merely liked kids and needed something to do while their own children were in school.

As I walked down the hall, I imagined myself giving Mrs. Kessler a tour. “Here we have our rooms for our two-year-olds, the Kitten Room and the Cub Room. The student bathroom is over here, and we hold our special classes—music, movement, yoga if you can believe it, and holiday celebrations—in this larger room. These next rooms are for our threes, the Frogs and the Turtles, and I teach one of the fours, the Hummingbirds. Shirley teaches the Robins. She’s the only teacher who’s been here longer than I have.”

I opened the door to my room and flicked on the light. It smelled like plastic from the new bins and antiseptic, but soon it would smell like paint, glue, and bread from the challah baking classes held in the synagogue’s kitchen down the hall. Mrs. Kessler would have been proud of my second nest, of the mural on the wall with the flowering cherry trees, daisies, tulips, and hummingbirds, and particularly of the replica of the bespectacled sunshine she’d drawn on the wall of the nook.

I sat in the rocking chair I used to cuddle a sad child or read a book to the class. I slipped off my shoes and buried my toes in the soft carpet I’d bought on sale at Kohl’s last year. I got up and examined the name tags Theresa had placed over each cubby. I knew
half the children because I’d taught their siblings, and the others I’d get to know. That was the best part, discovering these children, each with his or her unique personality and sense of humor. I loved their questions. A surge of good energy shot through me.

The tour was over. I stared up at the mobiles, the array of birds Theresa had so painstakingly traced and cut. Without the breeze of the children, they hung in repose. “Aleha hashalom, Mrs. Kessler, rest in peace.” I turned off the light and went home.

I made us a big spinach salad and heated up the pizza left over from the night before. Lili ate a few bites and then excused herself to go upstairs. She said six words during the entire meal: “Pass the red pepper flakes, please.” My good spirits from visiting my classroom dissolved over the course of our dinner.

Sam shook his head as he reached for Lili’s uneaten slice. “Life without the swing ain’t gonna be pretty.” The swing, Sam’s term for Lili’s running, referred to the electric swing a neighbor had loaned us when she was a colicky infant. Had we not discovered this sanity saver, we would have continued taking turns rocking and holding her for the nine months (not that we were counting) it took for her digestive system to mature.

“It’s different now, though. She’s so quiet,” I said.

“She’ll be back to her feisty self soon, and we’ll be wishing for a little peace and quiet.” He didn’t believe in worrying a concern into a problem.

“She did call Felix a quack.”

We didn’t laugh as we usually did when Lili came out with her acerbically accurate assessments of adults, because this time she was off.

“What a doozy of a day.” I took a swig of Sam’s beer.

“Lili said you had a little episode in Felix’s office. What was she talking about?”

I began peeling the label off his beer bottle. “Fasten your seat belt.” I took one of my yoga breaths. “I got a letter from the rebbetzin.”

“Oh? Probably a fundraising letter. Their yeshiva must need a new building,” he said too fast, his voice disdainful at the prospect of the Schines asking for money from an exile.

“
That’s
harsh.” I’d always felt irrationally defensive of the Schines, though I kept quiet while our friends derided the ultra-Orthodox Jews—
frummies,
they called them—as we drove past the mansion on our way to restaurants where we’d freely order shrimp.

Sam knew to veer away from this topic altogether. We’d met when I was almost thirty, years after I’d left the Schines’ world and hit rock bottom. He was content with my carefully crafted synopsis of my life with the Schines, which I weighted equally with details of my romantic history, a string of dead-end if not unpleasant relationships with men I’d met through Chrissie Janikowski, a fellow student teacher from my first job assignment. They were all Polish and Catholic, hulking men with pale mustaches and long hair feathered like Tony Orlando’s, alav hashalom, may he rest in peace. If I felt the need to talk about the Schines, which I almost never did, I’d phone Neil, and we’d speak in code about the shul and our exile, if we spoke of it at all.

“Sorry, honey, but what does the letter have to do with your doozy of a day?” Sam asked with enough contrition that I began to tell him about the tahara. He was a squeamish man, and I had every intention of keeping the account brief and clinical, but once I started detailing the prayer and the careful dance of the pouring, I couldn’t stop, not even when he got up to get another beer or looked at his watch or picked up the front page of the paper, eyes skimming an article about the arrest of the Milwaukee North Side Strangler, Walter Ellis.

I snatched the paper from him. “Are you listening to me?”

“I’m trying,” he said.

I folded up the newspaper and kept talking. By the time I got to the end of my description of the ritual, I was practically shouting. “And then we sprinkled dirt from Israel on Mrs. Kessler’s body and closed the coffin, and that was it.” I took a big swig of
Sam’s beer.

He studied me for a second, clearly not knowing what to make of my outburst, and then said, “Where did you park?”

“What?” I stared at him.

He looked sternly at me. “It’s a dangerous neighborhood, and you never know what kind of crazies are out there.” He gestured toward the article on Walter Ellis.

“In front of the funeral parlor, second spot closest to the entrance.” My voice dripped with sarcasm.

He dropped his eyes. “That was a stupid question, I’m sorry. Again. I just don’t understand how after all these years, the Schines write you a note and you run back to them.”

“I did it for Mrs. Kessler. I’ve told you how much I loved her.” Mrs. Kessler might have served as the bait to lure me back to my childhood, but performing the tahara conjured my feelings, warm and cold, about everyone who had mattered to me back then.

“Okay, so now what?” He didn’t have much patience for such detours.

I put my napkin over my pizza and blotted up the excess oil. “I’m done, don’t worry, I’m not going to go all born-again on you.” My laugh came out as a grunt.

Sam stared at my hands, moving efficiently across the cheese. “There’s something else bothering you.”

“You know me too well.” I noted the absurdity of this statement. He knew so little of my history.

“So what is it?” he asked softly.

I told him about my conversation with my mother and Neil’s concern about her memory. I spoke with my hand over my mouth, an old habit from my youth, when I described how the rebbetzin had practically implored me to participate in my mother’s care.

Sam’s cell phone rang, and he looked at the number. “I have to take this. Hold that thought.”

He walked toward his office, and I got up and started the dishes, fretting about my mother. When I’d spoken with her a few weeks ago, she’d laughed her old laugh, hearty yet feminine, the
way she did when I was a girl and showed her the false eyelash I’d found in my soup bowl during Shabbos lunch at the Melnicks. Today she’d seemed out of it, and yet also less defended.

Sam returned to the kitchen while I was sweeping the floor. He came up behind me, turned me around, and rested his warm hands on my shoulders. “I’m amazed by what you did for Mrs. Kessler, and I see why you did it.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, and I know you’re worried about your mom, but we don’t have a diagnosis yet, so for now I think we need to focus on getting Lili back to herself, which we will, I promise.” He gave me his best reassuring smile.