Washing the Dead (8 page)

The rebbetzin joined us. In silence, we washed our hands, pouring a cup of water alternately over each one. We put on
rubber gloves and aprons similar to the ones I wore to paint with my students. Everyone else approached Mrs. Kessler, but I stayed behind. Although I’d never smelled death, I recognized the scent, acrid and fishy at the same time. A curtain surrounded Mrs. Kessler’s body, yet the cloth did not spare me from feeling her absence. It filled the room.

A sick hollowness was growing inside me. The rebbetzin turned around, and the compassion on her face loosened a brick in the wall I’d constructed between us. I stalled by fiddling with the string on my apron, knowing that she’d wait until I was ready. I’d never be ready. I looked up at her, and she gently pulled back the curtain. I walked toward Mrs. Kessler’s body, covered with a sheet and stretched out on a porcelain bed with a drain that emptied into a sink at the foot.

I glanced toward the rebbetzin, who lifted the sheet from Mrs. Kessler’s face. I shut my eyes for a few seconds before I looked. I recognized her cheekbones, her strong jaw and nose, but the muscles surrounding them had slackened. She looked asleep, but not in a way that suggested a nap or even a coma. I beckoned her spirit as I had done last night, but Mrs. Kessler was dead. This fact clanked against the floor of my heart. A pressure formed behind my eyes.

Mrs. Kessler was gone. Gone. Gone.

Gone. I am six years old, and I am sitting across the table from my mother, eating my after-school snack and watching her smoke. I spread peanut butter on my apple with a paring knife, wondering why she hasn’t noticed that I’m using it or that I’ve lost my front tooth. She is looking through me. We’re sitting so close that I can see her eyelashes, thicker than my doll Cassandra’s, but she cannot see me. This is the first disappearance that I remember, but I now know that her leaving was gradual, an accretion of tiny moments that led to her affair and her slow exit from our lives. You don’t just up and walk out on a family without preparing properly. After I’ve eaten most of my apple, she returns to herself and tells me to please put down that sharp knife. Later she
sneaks into my bedroom and puts a quarter under my pillow, and the next morning I pretend I didn’t see her and that I still believe in the Tooth Fairy. I do, and I don’t. She is my fairy, sometimes make-believe, but still mostly bearing treasures.

Now I was left to mourn both Mrs. Kessler and the hole she had filled for me. My mother was that hole, scary and deep and still tugging at me. I was circling it, hovering between life and death. I touched Mrs. Kessler. Her forehead was cold. I leaned into the body that was no longer Mrs. Kessler and put my fingers to her lips, colorless and thin. They used to curl readily into an amused smile she reserved for children—a smile that I’d appropriated for my students, along with her tranquilizing voice. I wanted to kiss those lips, to breathe life back into her. Her mouth hung open stiffly, which seemed undignified, so I closed it by cupping the rubbery skin of her chin and firmly pushing it up toward her nose, as though I were manipulating a mannequin.

I put my hand on Mrs. Kessler’s cheek, just as she had done to me so often. Her skin had yellowed. A line of age spots mirrored the curve of one of her sparse eyebrows. Thin gray strands had replaced the brown hair that had been too lustrous to cover with a sheitel. I brushed them away from her eyes. I wondered if I would ever be able to touch my mother with such tenderness, alive or dead.

Chana tore a white sheet into small sections and filled a bucket with warm water. She put a drop against her wrist to test the temperature, as you would with a baby’s bottle. “We have to make sure that the water is warm. We treat the dead with the same respect as we do the living,” she told me.

“For the sake of modesty and respect, the body remains covered at all times, except for the part we are washing,” the rebbetzin said, instructing me to wash from the top down, right side taking precedence over left, front over back. She washed in and behind the ears, sealing water from the lips, a courtesy offered to lungs no longer vulnerable to drowning. I cleaned under the folds of her breasts, once so full of milk that they’d strained the buttons of
her blouse. Her areolas were gray and her breasts lay flat against her skin, as crinkly as an elephant’s. I lost all track of the now and the then, and I felt as though I were washing baby Lili, plump and pink and practically nippleless. Memory kindled a fire made of grief and love, and a holy heat tore through my body.

Aviva prepared three buckets of water. No more than three buckets were to be poured in a continuous stream over the body. Devora and I trailed Chana as she walked alongside Mrs. Kessler, and when Chana had nearly emptied her pail, I began pouring. Devora did the same for me so we could sustain a steady stream of water.

The rebbetzin handed me a laminated piece of paper, and I read from Ezekiel in Hebrew. My voice trembled as I spoke with the fluency of someone who had learned the language as a child. “And I will pour upon you pure water and you will be purified of all your defilements, and from all your abominations I will purify you.” How many buckets of water would it take to purify my mother’s defilements?

We all swayed back and forth as if we were praying at the Wailing Wall, our rocking creating the effect of a hypnotist waving a chain in front of my eyes and telling me that I was growing very, very sleepy. I was transported to my canopied bed where I’d sat in my Snoopy nightgown, instructing my mother with great authority when to bow and move her feet three steps forward and backward while she practiced reciting the Amidah prayer. My mother hadn’t known a word of Hebrew before she met the Schines, but she was a quick study and practiced so hard that she could almost pass as an FFB, Frum From Birth, someone who had been born into an ultra-Orthodox home, someone like me. Standing before the body of Mrs. Kessler, I longed for the version of my mother who so desperately wanted to make the Schines’ world a home for us, and my longing devoured my grief.

I hovered between my childhood bedroom and the tahara room while we tenderly patted Mrs. Kessler with a white towel as if she might grow cold from a draft. We shrouded her body, and
then Aviva, Devora, Chana, and I lifted her, giving me a new understanding of the term “dead weight.” The rebbetzin slid the casket under Mrs. Kessler’s elevated body, and we lowered her inside. I couldn’t bear the sight of her loaded into a box, so I let the other women finish up while I removed my apron, gloves, and shoe coverings. I turned toward the rebbetzin, my body humming from the godliness of what we had just done together.

“You performed a mitzvah of the highest order,” she said.

I put my hand to my mouth, only to find the half smile my father had worn when Rabbi Schine asked our family to host one of his new recruits for Shabbos. After decades of exile from the rebbetzin’s community, I was proud that she’d tapped me for this holy ritual and that I’d performed well.

I wanted more praise from the rebbetzin, more Hebrew words on my tongue, more synchronized washing and swaddling of my beloved Mrs. Kessler, and more time travel. I wanted to go back to the Schines’ sanctuary, where I had sat with Mrs. Kessler and Tzippy and my mother, talking to God, believing that He could hear me.

I couldn’t go back in time. My wants morphed into a wily rage that prickled my ears and neck. My old instinct was to quash it immediately by reminding myself that my mother hadn’t beaten or abused me and that the rebbetzin had every right to protect her congregation from our family’s disgrace, but my mother had torched my home, my shul, and the rebbetzin had stood by and watched, and indulging myself in the luxury of hating her for that, if only for a minute, brought me a bitter relief from my sadness. I lingered in my anger for a few moments before I started walking toward the door.

“Barbara,” the rebbetzin said. “Please turn around. We don’t turn our backs on the dead.” She walked backward toward the door.

I followed her instructions, never taking my eyes off the pine box where Mrs. Kessler lay. We filed out to the parking lot in silence, and the rebbetzin handed me a water bottle from her
purse. “Wash your hands and then put the bottle on the ground. We’re not allowed to touch each other until we’ve washed.”

I took the cap off the plastic bottle and poured the water over my fingers as the rebbetzin turned to Chana, Devora, and Aviva. “Go ahead. I want to speak with Barbara for a second.”

Aviva stroked my arm before she walked to her car. “May Mrs. Kessler’s name be a blessed memory.”

“Thank you,” I murmured, and Chana and Devora offered me their sympathies, too.

A man in dreadlocks passed us on his way to the check-cashing business, leaving a sweet smoky scent in his wake. I almost chuckled at the incongruity of the rebbetzin and the Rastafarian.

“How’s Neil?” The rebbetzin smiled at her mention of his name. Everyone loved my brother. He was like my dad that way.

“Busy, happy. Good.” While she didn’t deserve any information about my family, I couldn’t help telling her that he’d taken over our father’s orthodontia practice or about his lovable wife and his three sons, one named Sheldon after our father. Neil and Jenny lived a few miles away and were a regular part of our lives.

She took in my every word, then paused for a few seconds and asked about my family.

I told her that I had a husband and a daughter, and was tempted to add that the parents of my students had deemed me some kind of parenting guru, that my daughter had lots of friends and a sparkling neshama, and that my marriage was easy and satisfying on every level. Instead, I asked after her sons.

She smiled proudly when she told me about their success in what mattered most to her and Rabbi Schine, touching Jewish souls. The least charismatic one lived in Milwaukee and would inherit Rabbi Schine’s pulpit one day. The fiery ones had been detailed to Portland and Biloxi and had built thriving communities from nothing.

Then the rebbetzin volunteered an update on Tzippy without my having to ask. “She’s living in Hong Kong and is quite a rebbetzin herself,” she said with no more familiarity in her voice
than when she’d described her boys’ doings.

“I don’t doubt that.” Tzippy was a natural. My heart was open and raw, and the mention of her name brought back the old pain over losing the closest thing I had to a sister.

We let Tzippy loiter in the air for a few seconds.

“She’s the grandmother of eleven. Kein ayin harah,” the rebbetzin said.

“Eleven!” I put my hands to my cheeks and shook my head. Tzippy was married with a baby while I was student teaching and living in an efficiency apartment on the east side, convinced that I’d stay single and childless forever.

The rebbetzin broke the lightness of the moment. “How’s your mother?”

Blood rushed up from my neck to my temples. Knowing the rebbetzin, she probably sensed the hateful things I’d been thinking in the tahara room. My guard went back up. “She’s fine, thank you.”

“She’s okay?” the rebbetzin said as if she possessed some knowledge about my mother’s welfare. Had they been in touch? Or was she using her superpowers?

I said what I had not yet admitted to myself. “She’s having memory issues.”

“Serious issues?” She used the tone she would in counseling a troubled congregant.

I wasn’t some naive recruit. She was a big phony, coming back to me after all these years with her concern. I wanted to hurt her. “So serious that she thinks we’re still welcome in your shul. She reminded me that I’m a married woman now and I need to cover my hair at Mrs. Kessler’s funeral.”

The rebbetzin looked at me as if I were a naughty child who was acting out trying to win the love that she was ready and willing to provide. I was. Fifty-three years old, and my naked need lay exposed. I still wanted to climb into Mrs. Kessler’s lap, and I still craved knowing that some maternal being was watching out for me, a security I freely gave Lili and my students every day.

“Has your mother seen a doctor?”

“Neil and his wife took her to see a neurologist last week.” What was I thinking sharing such personal family information with the rebbetzin?

The rebbetzin looked into my eyes, unearthing the hidden parts of me: the little girl who had taken such pride in her mother’s coveted seat next to the rebbetzin in shul and the teenager who had been cast out with her mother like Hagar and Ishmael. I was no longer Barbara Pupnick, but I was losing hold of Mrs. Sam Blumfield by the minute.

“It’s probably the medication.” I told the rebbetzin about the cholesterol drugs, and the more I talked, the louder my inner voice insisted that her memory loss was more serious. It was the same voice that had spoken to me yesterday in the emergency room when I saw the doctor’s expression as he read Lili’s X-rays.

“She’ll need you.” The rebbetzin’s words bore the weight of Jewish law, halacha that demanded that I offer food, shelter, medical care, and exquisite, relentless respect to my mother and father. Tzippy and I never dared sit in our parents’ assigned chairs at the dinner table, and we rose when they entered the room.

I studied her face, searching her eyes for some trace of the hurt and humiliation my mother had caused her. They looked the same as always, full of purpose and principle. And love. She could put her old wounds aside for God and for me.

“Our relationship is complex,” I said, “but things are fine between us.” I tried to strain the defensiveness from my words. Despite my little lapse a few minutes earlier, I’d learned to coexist peacefully with my mother, to live without her investment or love.