Washing the Dead (6 page)

Write me soon. I miss you.

Love,

Tzippy

I wrote Tzippy right back, thanking her for remembering my quarter-birthday and promising her that I would check in on her mother. I didn’t tell her that last Shabbos, while Rabbi Schine had ranted on and on about the Yom Kippur War during his sermon, the rebbetzin stared absently toward the front of the shul, biting her pinkie nail. I’d only seen her act worried once before, when Tzippy got a concussion after falling off the monkey bars at school. After I finished licking the stamp, I wrote Tzippy the letter I couldn’t send.

Dear Tzippy,

Everyone is talking about the war. My worries are small in comparison, yet they feel huge to me.

Scott Dayne, the oafish boy who draws swastikas on his biology folder, said that he hoped the Jews would lose the war because we had it coming to us. David Koppelberg, now my biology lab partner, said that most Jews were normal, not freaks like us. He said that people who belong to our shul act like Moonies. He called your dad Rabbi Moon-Schine and me Moon-Schine Girl. My father said to ignore him, that one day your dad might unveil David’s neshama
,
but even if he had a soul, I bet it would be drab. I guess I should pity David’s drab neshama and ignorance of God’s 613 commandments.

Besides, I have my mother’s soul to worry about. She’s going to get
caught soon. I know it. Writing this is making me feel worse. I miss you.

Your best friend,

Barbara

Lying under the covers, I listened to the water from the bathtub swish through our old pipes. Any good feelings I’d experienced that day were devoured by my wild obsession with the mikveh and now poor Mrs. Isen, her sad twins, and my father. I wondered what would happen to him if the Schines found out about my mother’s romance. After Mr. Isen left his family, the Schines told Mrs. Isen to rip her lapel and go to shul every day for a year to recite the kaddish prayer of mourning for him, as if he’d really died. Mr. Isen moved to Brookfield, the Gentile part of town, and when my mother and I bumped into him while shoe shopping at Marshall Field’s, he couldn’t even look us in the eye. If the Schines wanted to erase Mr. Isen’s existence for “running off with a shiksa,” as my dad put it, then what on earth would they do to my mother for sneaking around with the Shabbos goy? I was sure she was bound for Brookfield. Never again would she respond to the call of Rabbi Schine’s Shema or savor the sweetness of the rebbetzin’s freshly baked challah. Her soul would be boarded up for good. And where would that leave all of us?

4

September 2009

T
he letter arrived on a Sunday. Hand-delivered. Someone could have crept up the walk and popped it through our mail slot that morning, while Sam and I were driving Lili to her cross-country meet, or when she twisted her ankle in a gopher hole and fell writhing as her rival sprinted by. It could have arrived while we sat in the emergency room, as I stroked Lili’s hair with one hand and squeezed Sam’s forearm with the other, or while the baby-faced doctor, an Indian fellow, taped her up and advised us to find a good orthopedist. It could have been lying in wait while we drove the five miles home from the hospital.

When you read about people who have experienced life-altering events, they often say, “Only an hour before, I was fighting with my husband over our Visa bill” or “singing along to Aretha Franklin on the radio.” Me? An hour before I found the letter, I was on my cell phone ordering pizza for the friends Lili had invited for dinner, yammering on about thin versus thick crust, my words crowding out the thought of Lili’s injury potentially decimating her season.

By the time we arrived home, the Mama Mia deliveryman was waiting for us in the driveway, and I settled up with him while Sam helped Lili into the house. I made a salad, and within twenty minutes Lili’s girlfriends were filing onto the porch we’d recently screened in because Sam insisted, “Everything tastes better when you eat it outside.” The dimming sun bathed Lili and her
giggling teammates in amber light, and although she was smiling, I couldn’t suppress my concern. I wanted to pull her aside and make sure she was all right, but she was too old for that, so instead I watched her play with a loose strand of her kinky auburn hair. She abandoned her first slice of pizza while the other girls demolished the four pies in minutes. They were all petite cross-country runners, yet as Sam remarked, they ate like linebackers.

“Can they hang out for a while?” Lili asked me, and I said sure even though it was a school night. I’d have agreed to just about anything to distract her from her pain. I loved that our home was the fun house. I always made sure to stock our pantry with each girl’s favorite munchie—pretzels, pita chips, and whatnot—and our fridge with cut-up fruit and pop.

After dinner, the girls went off to the den, sank into our overstuffed couches, took turns playing with Lili’s crutches, and texted while watching
Twilight.
They knew every line. I never could figure out the hullabaloo over vampires.

Sam sat at the kitchen table chatting on the phone with his friend and client, Felix Nezbith, the Milwaukee Bucks’ orthopedist. Sam had been handling his investments for years. I walked up behind him and kneaded his shoulders the way he liked, grateful as heck for a husband who could pick up the phone on a Sunday night and score an appointment for the next morning with the best bone doctor in town. After he hung up, I leaned down and pressed my lips to his hair. Always the optimist, he tilted his head back into my breasts, wordlessly telling me to stop worrying about Lili. I couldn’t help it. Only with exercise—God’s Ritalin, we called it—could Lili focus enough to handle her schoolwork and maintain her equilibrium. Without her daily endorphin fix, she was a hot mess. “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child,” a mother of one of my students once said. So true.

I told Sam I’d join him on the porch for a glass of wine after I tidied up the kitchen. I was wiping Italian dressing from the counter when the front doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” I hollered.

That was when I saw the envelope.

I assumed it was an invoice from the tree trimmer who’d been pruning our maple that afternoon. I picked up the envelope from the rug under the mail slot and opened the door as one of Lili’s friends ran in from the den to greet a new teammate, Taylor, and usher her back to the rest of the girls.

I stood alone in the foyer. It was not a bill; it was a letter, on personal stationery. The noise of Lili and her friends shouting at the vampires receded, and I could hear only my pulse thumping in my ears. I recognized the no-nonsense cursive of the address instantly. I’d seen it a thousand times on four tattered recipe cards of my mother’s. I ran my fingers over the return address embossed on the thin white envelope as if I were reading Braille.

Rivkah Schine

3050 Lake Drive

Milwaukee, WI 53211

Rivkah Schine. I hadn’t seen the rebbetzin in more than thirty years, not since the Schines cut my mother from the community like a brown spot from an apple. My mother had left them no choice, and while they were at it, they excised Neil and me too.

I put my thumb over the address: 3050 Lake Drive. The Schines’ shul. Sam, Lili, and I lived a few blocks off Lake Drive, but ten miles north, in a suburban split-level. I avoided driving by the mansion, particularly on Shabbos mornings, so I wouldn’t have to look at the men in their business suits and skullcaps, accompanied by women who covered their hair with stylish hats and held their children’s hands. Four decades ago, I’d been one of those children. Back then, I belonged to the Schines’ shul and my mother belonged to me, two facts that I still could not tease apart.

I held the white envelope to my nose, half expecting to smell the lemons the rebbetzin and my mother rubbed on their fingers to mute the scent of the onions they’d diced for the Schines’ Shabbos feasts. I closed my eyes and conjured the sound of beef meeting hot oil, and I could practically taste the luscious cholent that
simmered for a full day before the Sabbath meal.

Stop it, Barbara, I almost said aloud. This was absurd. The rebbetzin could not have forgotten that as June Pupnick’s daughter, I was a pariah. Until I married Sam, the most casual mention of the Schines or my mother made me feel like no matter where I lived, there was a boisterous New Year’s Eve party happening two houses down the block and I hadn’t been invited. I’d gotten over all that, and I wasn’t going back.

I folded the unopened envelope and stuffed it into the pocket of my capris. Its corners pricked my thigh as I walked away from the mail slot in slow motion, like in the ESPN highlight videos Sam watched on his computer after Packers games.

Mounted on the hall wall were photos chronicling the life I’d built with my family: baby pictures of Lili taken at the Sears in Bayshore; our annual artsy black-and-whites of Sam, Lili, and me in blue jeans and crisp white shirts, our feet bare, our smiles broad and backlit by our love and the late-afternoon sun; a sweet candid of Sam’s parents pushing Lili on a swing. I’d paid a decorator a month of my teaching salary to frame and arrange these photos just so, but despite her efforts I’d never been satisfied with the placement of one photo: my mother, Lili, and I wearing pink birthday hats, the elastic straps cupping our chins, Lili’s lips covered in chocolate. My mother is draping her arm around my shoulders, grinning as if we were a normal mother and daughter.

I went into the kitchen, the hum of the dishwasher muting the girls’ chatter. I pulled the envelope from my pocket and opened the trash compactor, the paper shaking in my hands as it hovered over napkins stained with tomato sauce and an abandoned slice of pepperoni. I still had qualms about ordering pizza adorned with rounds of pork, but I did it often, perhaps to erase Barbara Pupnick, the girl who’d been kicked out of the Schines’ world.

I stuffed the letter back into my pocket and went to the porch. “It’s getting chilly, I’m going to grab my fleece,” I told Sam, who was sitting there with two sweating glasses of white wine. I took the steps to our room, shut the door, and tore open the envelope.

Dear Barbara,

I am sorry to tell you the news that Mrs. Kessler has passed away, aleha hashalom, may peace be upon her. Please meet me at the Abromowitz Funeral Parlor on Monday at 9 a.m. We will perform her tahara.

Rivkah Schine

The news was a sucker punch to the heart. Mrs. Kessler. She materialized in the way the newly dead do. I am five, and she is celebrating her first Shabbos at our shul. I stare at her long braid throughout services, and afterward, during the lunch, I spear a gefilte fish ball with a toothpick and give it to her. She accepts my offering. Later I learn that she hates fish.

I read the letter again. What was a tahara? The word floated over me like the name of the Alfred Hitchcock movie I couldn’t recall the last time Sam and I played Trivial Pursuit. What was the name of that damn movie?

I flipped on my laptop and typed in “tahara.” Google sent me straight to a Jewish funerals site. “The tahara is the sacred and secret Jewish burial rite of washing and shrouding the dead and is the highest and purest act of loving kindness.”
Vertigo
. The Hitchcock movie came to me, creating a dizzying surge in my brain. I tried to imagine the rebbetzin and myself pouring water over Mrs. Kessler, but I could picture neither the rebbetzin through my adult eyes nor a dead Mrs. Kessler.

I stowed the envelope in the drawer of my nightstand and went downstairs, pausing for a moment in the kitchen. Through the silvery mesh of the screen door, I stared at Sam’s silhouette, his trim body held in repose, his full head of salt-and-pepper hair, his strong cheekbones.

“Barbara?” Sam called. “Are you there?”

“I’m here.” Tahara. Tahara. I couldn’t wait for the house to quiet so I could Google the word again in peace.

I could hear Lili’s friends leaving. I bade them goodbye, and Sam gave Lili a piggyback ride up the steps. It felt good to hear her giggle. Sam and I fell into bed and held each other. “She’s going to be okay, Barbara,” he whispered into my hair. He said these words at the beginning of every crisis.

I waited for his breathing to grow regular, then untangled myself from his warm body and went downstairs. I rarely kept any big news from Sam.

I sat in the dark at my tiny desk, I needed to think this tahara thing through carefully, alone. The Schines had erased my mother’s existence and by default, mine. I was nineteen. The whole shul found out about my mother and the Shabbos goy, which meant I lost Tzippy, the Schines, and Mrs. Kessler all at once. I never thanked Mrs. Kessler for keeping me company during my mother’s affair and shining a bright light on my professional path. She knew that teaching preschool was my calling before I did. But it was more than that—my work had served as an oasis from the disruption in my childhood, and grounded me enough as an adult to make and sustain a brand-new life with Sam. In exchange, I’d squandered her love, closing myself off to her for all these years, years when I could have visited her and exchanged notes about our students. She could have remained a mentor, and maybe I could have become her friend.

Mrs. Kessler was the only person who could draw me back to the Schines’ shul. And the rebbetzin knew it, in the way she’d known to arrange for me to volunteer for Mrs. Kessler in the first place. Despite how busy she was with the shul and raising her kids, she made time to look deep inside all of us and find what we needed and wanted most, which she’d shrewdly match with a specific Jewish custom or job in the shul. Worshiping the rebbetzin was a hard habit to break, but I’d done it. Or had I?