Washing the Dead (36 page)

“What’s funny?” the rebbetzin asked. I kept laughing, and soon she was laughing with me.

“I’m thinking about the time you asked Tzippy to get the chocolate sprinkles from the pantry.” I didn’t need to finish the story because she knew exactly what I was talking about. During the hot summer months, Tzippy and I used to eat big bowls of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sprinkles, or jimmies, we called them. Tzippy would have to climb up on a stool to retrieve the vat of sprinkles from the top shelf of the pantry. One time the lid popped off, and the sprinkles showered Tzippy, bouncing off her body and flying into the far corners of the kitchen. The rebbetzin was angry at first. “Tzippy, I told you to burp the Tupperware,” she
chided, but then my mother started laughing, a sound deep and rich and unexpected from a woman so refined. Soon we were all laughing so hard that tears fell from our eyes.

“The rabbi will think we’re meshuganah,” I said, my index finger circling near my temple as I repeated the rebbetzin’s words from so many years ago. Another gale of laughter ensued.

“This is the first time in years when it didn’t hurt to think about her.” I could have been talking about Tzippy or my mother.

“Tzippy misses you too.”

I looked out the window. I’d forgotten how gorgeous the lake was from this vantage point. “What happened when I left town before her wedding?”

The rebbetzin’s words were measured as she described how Tzippy phoned my house and wouldn’t believe my parents when they said I’d gone back to California.

Oh, Lord. Couldn’t I have hung on a few more days in Milwaukee? No, I couldn’t have. “Did you ever tell her why I abandoned her?”

“Not until your mother left the shul.”

My mother had taught me how to walk out on someone in need, but not as she’d taught me how to tie my shoe or peel a hardboiled egg. I’d absorbed the pain that caused me to leave and the belief in its necessity at the time. I told the rebbetzin about the confessional letters I’d written to Tzippy. “I’ve kept almost all of them. Isn’t that strange?”

She walked to the counter and put a few of her apricot cookies on a plate.

“Maybe if I’d just sent one of those letters everything would be different,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“She would have understood why I vanished from her life.” I thought about the letters Tzippy wrote me after her wedding. I couldn’t bear to read them, so I threw most of them away without opening them.

I took a big breath, and the air filled me as if I’d cleared some
debris from the lining of my lungs. “You’re not going to believe what I did.”

“Should I be worried?”

“No, it’s nothing bad, it’s just weird and completely out of character.”

She offered me a cookie. “So are you going to make me guess already?”

“I tracked Daniel down,” I said as if I were telling her that I’d just robbed a bank.

She raised her eyebrows. It wasn’t easy to shock the rebbetzin.

“And I called him up.” I told her about the conversation.

She blinked hard. “That was a brave thing to do, Barbara.”

I made the call out of impulse, but now that I’d confided in the rebbetzin, I was amazed that I had the courage to do it. The fist that had tightened around my heart during that plane ride back to San Diego had opened when I met Sam and bore Lili, but not completely. A few more fingers had released their hold since I’d been visiting the mansion.

The rebbetzin opened a drawer and took out one of Rabbi Schine’s legal pads and a Bic pen. She put them down on the table. “Now do the same thing with Tzippy.”

She left the kitchen, not giving me the chance to protest.

Dear Tzippy,

I never imagined that I’d write you another letter, but here I am, sitting at your mother’s kitchen table doodling tulips on your father’s legal pad, trying to come up with the words to say I’m sorry.

I’m sorry for not showing up at your wedding, but I’m even sorrier for my larger disappearance from your life. When I found out about my mother’s affair, I withdrew from you. I didn’t want to put you in the middle of my trouble, and I was also ashamed, and maybe a little jealous that your life made such sense.

If it’s any consolation, I actually did pour my soul out to you in letters, but I never sent them. Maybe we’d still be friends if I’d given you the chance to separate my mother’s behavior from who I was. I sure couldn’t, and maybe I still can’t.

I hadn’t allowed myself to think about you until your mom turned up out of the blue and invited me to participate in Mrs. Kessler’s, z”l, tahara. Only you would have remembered that Mrs. Kessler ate orange jelly on rye bread every day for lunch and made funny animal voices when she read us stories she’d written especially for us. And only you would have remembered how as teenagers she gave us free rein of the nook so we could have a place to talk and dream after you started going to school in Brooklyn. Mrs. Kessler represents a mere fraction of what I lost when I left the shul.

I guess what I’m saying is that when I lost you, I lost the person I was when we were together. And by excising you from my life, I stole a piece of your history too. That’s what I’m most sorry about.

Maybe one day we’ll meet again in the nook. With your mother’s help, I will face what my family’s ghosts have cost me, most sadly, my friendship with you.

Love,

Barbara

When I finished the letter, I folded it in thirds and scraped my chair back noisily to signal the rebbetzin to return to the kitchen. She materialized almost instantly.

“Tea?” she asked.

“Water is fine, thank you.” I handed her the letter.

“Do you feel better?”

“A little. I’m not as radioactive.”

“But?” Her tone was more intense than it was when she counseled congregants.

“I’m horrible for saying this, but despite everything I’ve learned, I haven’t let go of all of my bad feelings toward my mother
yet.” And with that, I told the rebbetzin the ultimate war story, the one that had bubbled up to my lips during that Mommy and Me class I’d taken with Lili, the one I’d silenced so I wouldn’t poison my daughter with my breast milk.

20

May 1975

M
y father suffered a massive stroke the night Daniel and I ate Chinese food together. My mother called to tell me that he’d died, but the telephone lines at Daniel’s were down from the storm, so she called Sari. When Sari found me on her doorstep, she broke the news of my father’s death with the professionalism of an emerging rebbetzin. Paired with the right rabbi, she could have been a formidable player in the Schines’ world.

She led me to the bathroom, where she’d spent so many hours being sick, and ran a warm bath.

“That’s Daniel’s blood,” I said, pointing to a reddish streak on my foot.

She said nothing as she handed me one of Benny’s Sesame Street washcloths.

I pulled down the waistband of my jeans and pointed to my stomach. “This tan line is from Simone’s bikini.”

“Shhh, shhh, Barbara,” she said the way she did when Benny had a bad dream. She rifled through the linen cupboard over the toilet while I undressed and stepped into the tub.

I poked my toes out of the water. “And that’s Simone’s nail polish.”

She pulled out a fresh towel.

I felt delirious. “See these?” I pointed to my lips.

She placed the towel on the toilet seat.

“I was going to use them to kiss Simone’s husband.”

She motioned toward the hallway. “Barbara, lower your voice, please. The children are sleeping.”

I didn’t say anything else for the rest of the evening, not when she left me alone in the bath or made me a bowl of tomato soup or dug into the tin can she stowed in the pantry, pulled out a wad of cash from her knipple savings, and stuffed it in my purse. I said nothing as she drove me to the airport and hugged me goodbye. I only spoke to the airline agent who sold me a one-way ticket to Milwaukee.

My mother picked me up at the terminal. It was an unseasonably cold May day, and she wore her blue coat, which now pulled at the seams. Her color was good, particularly for a new widow. I hadn’t slept or combed my hair properly since I fled the Coxes’ house.

During the drive home, we spoke of funeral arrangements and such logistics as who was going to pick Neil up at the bus station. My mother parked in the driveway, and I went around to the front steps, where my father had retrieved his
Sentinel
every morning, where he had stood and waved at me for the last time in his clownish pajamas. I wandered through the house touching his kiddush cup, his galoshes, and the white Pupnick Orthodontics lab coat hanging in the laundry room. It had been ironed. I went into my parents’ bathroom to feel his toothbrush, stiff from the excess toothpaste he used when he brushed his teeth.

I heard my mother behind me. “So how did it happen?” My voice was lifeless.

“Frannie found him in his office slumped over his desk. He was in between appointments.”

I picked up his metal comb and pulled out one of his fine black hairs. “He hated to keep people waiting.”

“He was kind,” my mother said in the reverent tone people use when speaking of the newly dead.

I mashed the teeth of the comb into my palm.

“Honey, that must hurt.” She tried to pry the comb out of my hands, but I fought her.

You broke my father’s heart, I wanted to say, but I wanted to tell her something more. I wanted to tell her what had happened at Simone and Daniel’s house. I looked at her reflection in the mirror.

“Why don’t you clean up, darling. You must be exhausted.”

I studied her face. She looked relaxed, like she’d just returned from a long vacation.

I pushed the teeth deeper into my hand, the physical pain a welcome distraction.

“Give me that,” she said as though my defiance over the comb was the real issue at hand. My palm throbbed, but I still wouldn’t let go. This time she succeeded in taking it from me. She stood next to me for a few seconds and rubbed my back, finishing up with a firm pat.

“I did something very bad,” I muttered, but she’d already left the bathroom.

My father’s mourners packed the Abromowitz Funeral Home. Rabbi Schine teared up as he described how my father’s radiant neshama would live on. I sat on my mother’s right, my bruised leg practically touching hers. On her left sat the rebbetzin, and I allowed myself to pretend that Tzippy would appear any minute to whisk me away to the nook. I knew she could never make it home from Hong Kong in time, but that didn’t stop me from wanting her. Thankfully, Mrs. Kessler sat next to me and held my hand as I whispered the mourner’s kaddish for my father.

I felt that unmoored sensation I’d had when the rebbetzin sent me away to live with the Levensteins. I became a camera, recording footage in black-and-white: the rebbetzin seating herself next to my mother in the hearse, Neil staring out the window, the six pallbearers from the shul carrying the casket. I barely felt the rain as we trudged up the path to my father’s plot. Heavy drops soaked through my coat and the brown wool dress I’d bought for Tzippy’s wedding. Neil stood over my father’s grave and stared down into the ground before he picked up the shovel and
sprinkled my father’s casket with fresh dirt. I grabbed a fistful of dirt from the pile, released it into the trench, and wiped my muddy hand on my coat.

We were drenched and chilled by the time we returned home. The rebbetzin had come over the day my father died to cover our mirrors. Today she put out deli platters, courtesy of the Beckermans, and cookies. People piled into our house to tell me how my father had straightened their children’s teeth or how they’d joined the shul because he had invited them for Shabbos or to study the Torah. I remained the camera, recording their mouths moving, catching every fourth or fifth word, while Neil responded to each of them with my father’s grace. My mother, tissue and sad smile at the ready, played the part of the grieving widow beautifully, although if my camera zoomed in tight, it would capture the faraway look that made me miss her even though she was sitting right next to me. It would also catch the rebbetzin monitoring her as she would a child at an adult dinner party.

I went up to bed at midnight. I was no longer the camera. I was me, at the center of this nightmare, and I had to know how severe Simone’s injuries were. I waited until the house was quiet, having learned a few tricks from my mother, and dialed Daniel. No answer. I dialed every twenty minutes for an hour. Between the first two calls, I pulled out the last box of stationery my father had given me and wrote Tzippy yet another letter that I wouldn’t send.

Dear Tzippy,

My father’s dead, and Daniel ran over Simone with his Datsun. It was my fault. Simone caught me wanting Daniel’s comfort. Badly. A certain kind of need can singe your brain, leaving you reckless and selfish. It can make you forget who you are.

Poor Ollie. Who’s taking care of him? I don’t have a father anymore. Who will take care of me?