Washing the Dead (5 page)

“Mom!”

The word was swallowed up by the familiar grumble of the blue Dodge idling in the alley, five houses past ours. I watched my mother walk to the car and glide into the Shabbos goy’s arms as if she were his Olympic figure-skating partner. I watched the Shabbos goy open the passenger door and the wind blow my mother’s hair wild.

3

T
he night I caught my mother sneaking off with the Shabbos goy I was afraid that she’d never come home. She did. For the rest of the week, I lay awake every night waiting for her to creep out of the house. She stayed put until the following Tuesday, and when I heard the faint creak of the steps, I put my hands over my eyes, mouthing the words of the Shema prayer—
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One—
into my palm, begging God to please send her to the den to smoke. Then I heard the back door shut. I sprang out of bed, went over to my window, and watched her drive off.

I turned on my lamp and opened my nightstand drawer, where I kept Tzippy’s letters. I wanted to reread the one that had arrived earlier today.

Dear Barbara,

I’m sorry about your horrible headache. Your mom probably told you that I came over to say goodbye. I took our usual walk on the bluff while my parents had their Shabbos nap, and then Mrs. Berger came over to talk to my mother about a problem, and I played with her baby, Dovid. He’s not as cute as Yossi, but Yossi only likes you and Mrs. Kessler holding him.

Aunt Ruthie didn’t get much happier over the summer. As scared as I am to get married, I think it would be worse to wind up like her, alone at thirty. Now I worry that the shadchen might not
find someone for me either. You’re lucky you get to pick your own husband.

School starts tomorrow. I’m going to wear the new maroon skirt my mom sewed for me. I miss you more than ever. My cousins are nicer than they used to be, and I don’t mind sharing a room with them anymore. But they’re not you. I wish we hadn’t lost our last afternoon together.

Love,

Tzippy

I wrote Tzippy two letters. The one I mailed was in direct response to hers and contained a newsy account of my week. The other letter I kept. Writing it made me feel like Anne Frank, calling out to a best friend who lived outside of her crazy world, one who would never read her words.

Dear Tzippy,

My mother is the Shabbos goy’s Annette! She has been sneaking off with him while my dad snores in their bed. He picks her up in the alley, and I saw them one night.

It’s so obvious now. My mother’s moods got worse back in the spring when the Shabbos goy started working for your parents. Your last Shabbos here, when we were supposed to meet in the mikveh, I found my mother smoking there, hatless and her lipstick a mess. She was deep into one of her mists, and I just wanted to run away from her and the spooky mikveh. I knew she wasn’t alone because before I walked in, I swear I heard her whispering to someone. I replay that morning over and over in my head, and I can only come to one conclusion. The Shabbos goy was hiding somewhere in that dark mikveh
.
Writing this spooks and shames me at the same time.

I don’t know what to do. I want to tell your mom about it, but if I do
she and your father will have to kick my mom out of the shul
.
If I don’t, I will betray my father, your parents, the shul, and God. Sometimes I worry that I will crumble under the weight of this secret.

Love,

Barbara

Tuesday became my mother’s designated evening with the Shabbos goy, like bowling night or her Thursday-morning beauty parlor appointment. Her lie was like the ugly orange sofa that came with our house. My parents had sworn they’d replace it, but they grew accustomed to the pall it cast over the entire living room.

Mrs. Kessler saved me during the months of my mother’s affair. My high school classes ended at one o’clock, and I’d rush to the Schines’ and go straight to the nook, where I’d sweep scraps of felt from the floor, sit quietly next to Mrs. Kessler and help her sort and staple, or watch Yossi whenever his babysitter called in sick.

On the first Tuesday in October, I found a distressed Mrs. Kessler in the corner of the nook, trying to engage the Isen twins with Yossi braying and fussing in her arms. Six months before, their father, a founding member of the community, had run off with his Gentile paralegal. Mrs. Isen was likely upstairs crying her eyes out and talking with the rebbetzin.

Mrs. Kessler looked up at me, and the gratitude in her eyes made me feel like Superwoman. I looked at the sullen Bini and Liba Isen and flashed on a memory of the two of them giggling as they played cat’s cradle in the hallway of the shul.

“It’s my lucky day!” I marched over to the supply closet and grabbed a ball of green yarn and a pair of scissors. I felt all eyes on me as I cut a long piece of yarn and tied it tightly at the ends. I sat on the floor across from the girls, huddled together on a beanbag chair, and threaded the yarn through my hands. Tzippy and I used to play hours of cat’s cradle when we were in second grade, the Isen girls’ age. I extended my hands to Liba first. “Go ahead.”
A smile began to form on her lips. I had her. She grabbed the crossed strings, and within seconds the three of us were pinching and passing while a mesmerized Yossi looked on. After we’d played a dozen rounds, Mrs. Kessler cupped my shoulder. “Well, girls, your mother is here.”

I looked up to see Mrs. Isen standing at the door. The pale green scarf she wore to cover her hair made her skin look sallow, and her blouse hung loosely. Only months ago, she was so plump that the zipper on her new Shabbos dress threatened to burst. My throat closed up. What would my father look like if he ever found out about my mother and the Shabbos goy? Bini tugged on my arm, snapping me out of my thoughts.

“Can we play again with Barbara?” she asked, her face bright and relaxed.

“I hope so! In the meantime, you two practice.” I handed her the yarn, hugged her, and then Mrs. Kessler and I walked the girls to the door.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Isen said to Mrs. Kessler.

Mrs. Kessler deposited Yossi in his stroller and slid her arm through mine. “It was all Barbara. She’s a magician with kids.” In Mrs. Kessler’s presence, I could fly.

I didn’t want to part with Mrs. Kessler or Yossi or my powers, so I offered to accompany her home.

“You have a gift with children,” Mrs. Kessler told me as we stopped at a grocery store. “Maybe one day you’ll have your own classroom.”

I blushed from my chest to my forehead as I followed her back to her cramped apartment, which, like our house, was only four blocks from the Schines, but in the opposite direction.

“Let me.” I removed Yossi and the grocery bag from the stroller and carried them up the skinny stairway to the apartment.

“You saved me a trip,” Mrs. Kessler said when she arrived at the front door, flushed and winded from lugging the enormous stroller up the steps. Yossi’s diaper was warm and full, and I took him to his room. When I returned from changing him, Mrs.
Kessler had removed her sheitel and was running her fingers through her cropped hair, which she’d worn in a fat braid twisted around her head before she married. Mr. Kessler, a PhD student at UW-Milwaukee, and according to my dad a math genius, wouldn’t be home until late because he was teaching a night class, so Mrs. Kessler thanked me when I offered to play with Yossi while she prepared macaroni and green peas.

“You don’t need to call your mother?” she asked.

I hated Tuesday nights at home; the smell of my mother’s peanut butter cookies, my father’s favorite, made me sick. She’d give half the guilt-batch to my father to take to the girls in the office and the other half to the rebbetzin to serve at her teas.

I dialed my number, and my father answered on the second ring. “I’m going to help Mrs. Kessler, see you later, okay?” I said quickly, not giving him time to say no.

“Wait a second, Bunny. How are you getting home?”

“Mr. Kessler is going to walk me,” I lied and got off the phone. I could picture him in his study. His sleeves would be neatly rolled up, the weekly Torah portion and books of commentary splayed open in front of him. He would slide his reading glasses up his nose and return to learning. My mother probably wouldn’t bother to ask him where I was or if I needed a ride. She wasn’t doing that kind of thing anymore.

“You’ve got me for as long as you need me, Mrs. Kessler.”

I set the table while she put Yossi to bed, and then we ate the food she’d prepared. “So, what are your plans for next year?” she asked, spearing a pea.

“Tzippy’s getting married.”

She chewed for a second. “I know that, but what about
your
plans?”

“I’ll go to Madison, like Neil.”

“They have a good teaching program.” She raised an eyebrow.

I couldn’t help but smile. “I have to get in first.”

“How is school going?”

“Okay, except for calculus.” I didn’t tell her that I desperately
missed Tzippy or that I had just one friend, a girl I liked only because she liked me. She knew that too.

“Let’s have a look at that calculus.” After she read my problems, she rubbed her hands together. “This is going to be fun.”

She sat up in her chair, shedding the tense fatigue she’d held in her shoulders, and explained orders of approximation in language I could understand. An hour later, she said, “Oy, look at the clock. I don’t think Mr. Kessler will be home in time to walk you to your house.” She bit her nail.

“I walk home from Tzippy’s at night all the time. My parents are fine with it.” Actually, I’d only walked home from her house during the summer when it was still light until practically nine o’clock, and now it was dark and the walk four blocks longer.

She looked tentative. “You’ll call me when you get home?”

I was seconds away from asking if I could move into her tiny apartment to escape my mother, who sometimes acted enough like her old self to tease me into thinking that I’d been imagining the whole thing with the Shabbos goy. In my heart, though, I knew that I couldn’t pull her back to us.

I left Mrs. Kessler’s apartment feeling fed and cared for, but by the time I entered my house, my mood had blackened. My dad was studying in his office, and my mother was sitting at the kitchen table in her pink cardigan, smoking and reading the paper. Soon she’d excuse herself for her Tuesday evening bath, and after we were all tucked into bed, she’d take off with the Shabbos goy.

“Do you want a peanut butter cookie?” she asked absently, lighting a cigarette.

I stared at her. She wasn’t in one of her mists anymore, but she was different, distracted but happier than I’d seen her in a long time. Couldn’t she be happy and still not pull away from us?

“You’re doing such a mitzvah by helping Mrs. Kessler. Doing good deeds brings us closer to God, the rebbetzin reminds us.” Each of my mother’s syllables was plump with pride.

I lapped up her praise despite myself. “Well, it was really Mrs. Kessler who did me the mitzvah by helping me with my calculus.”

She nodded through a haze of smoke. “Don’t you have a test coming up?”

“Tomorrow.” I was surprised that she’d remembered my weekly test.

“You’ll ace it, Sweet B.”

If she was going to remember my calculus tests and call me Sweet B, I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to eat one of her cookies, her only recipe that turned out well. I took a bite, sweet, but so crispy that it practically nicked the sides of my mouth. “The trick is to use Crisco for the shortening,” my mother had told Tzippy and me once when we’d helped her bake for Shabbos.

“Good night, Mom,” I said.

She yawned. “I’m tired.”

“So you’re going to sleep?” I asked too quickly.

“After my bath.” She lit another cigarette.

“To bed? You’re going to bed?” My voice was high and squeaky.

“Of course,” she lied. “And before I forget, I put a letter from Tzippy on your dresser.”

I thanked her and took the stairs two at a time.

Dear Barbara,

I hope this arrives before your quarter-birthday. In a few days, you’ll be seventeen and three fourths.

Aunt Ruthie isn’t grumpy anymore. She hasn’t been yelling at Miriam for leaving jelly on the counter or Tamar for blowing her nose too loudly. Now she’s just sad. She talks about my Uncle Shlomo, the one who moved to Jerusalem, and how worried she is that he’ll get killed in the Yom Kippur War. I’ve been making all of the dinners for my cousins and me. I’m getting to be a pretty good cook, although I did burn the noodles once. I’ll get better. I have to be a balabusta if I’m going to marry and become a rebbetzin.

I worry about Uncle Shlomo too. Give my mother a kiss for me.
She’s probably upset about him even if she doesn’t show it. My mom’s not always as strong as she looks, but that’s a secret between the two of us.