Who Do You Love (7 page)

Rachel

1990

I
ran into the bridal room feeling sick with shame, my eyes burning and my heart galloping in my chest. My party clothes, a gray miniskirt with flounced tiers and a pink-and
-gra
y top, with pink tights and pink Mary Janes, were arranged neatly on the hanger on the back of a chair, and I shoved it over so that the clothes spilled to the ground and lay there in a sad little heap. I had never been so ashamed, never imagined that such shame was even possible, in my entire life.

My bat mitzvah had started off perfectly. I'd studied for weeks, practicing until I could chant every line of Hebrew along with the tape that Cantor Krugman had made for me to play on my Walkman. Nana had taken me shopping and we'd picked out the navy-blue dress that I'd worn for the service (“Sophisticated,” Nana had said approvingly) and the outfit I'd wear to the party. My mother had finally let me get my ears pierced—not at the Piercing Pagoda at the mall, where all my friends had gone, even though I'd begged her, but at my pediatrician's office, “just to be on the safe side,” she'd said. Even though I'd been doing well for the last year and a half, I still had to be careful about infections. The morning of the service, she'd brought me to her beauty parlor, where Annette, who did her hair, had done mine, using a round brush to blow it out perfectly straight. I'd gotten a manicure, my first, and my mom had even let Annette curl my lashes and put on a little mascara and some pink lip gloss. The whole time, she'd sat in the waiting area, watching me in the mirrors, sometimes with her hands pressed together over her heart, sometimes sniffling a little bit, which should have been a warning, if I'd only paid attention.

The service had started at ten o'clock. The sanctuary wasn't packed the way it was on High Holidays, when every seat, even the ones in the balcony, would be taken, but the first ten rows were full, with aunts and uncles and cousins, my nana's sister, my great-aunt Florence, and her husband, Si, my father's two brothers and their wives and all of their kids. My friends sat together, Kara and Marissa and Kelsey and Britt and Josh S. and Josh M. and Derek and Ross, plus every kid in my Hebrew-school class. My parents were in the front row. My mom wore a rose-colored suit, a pleated silk skirt that fell to her knees, and a jacket that buttoned up tightly enough to show her shape, and high heels that matched, and my father and Jonah both wore dark suits and ties. Up on the bimah, holding the heavy ­sterling-silver pointer, moving the finger over each Hebrew word, I'd been so nervous that my knees had almost been knocking together, but once I'd made it through the first blessings I started to calm down, and I sang the prayers and chanted my portion and read my speech almost perfectly. The subject of my Torah portion was sex offenses—which, as Rabbi Silver said, did not lend itself naturally to a bat mitzvah speech. Together, we'd decided that I could talk about rules in general—which ones we should follow, which ones we should question, which biblical injunctions made sense in the 1990s and which could stand what Rabbi Silver called “some interrogation.”

By the time I'd finished my legs felt wobbly, but from relief instead of nerves, and I was excited for the party, which would be held in the social hall as soon as the service was over. Twenty round tables for ten were waiting, draped in pink and silver cloths, with pink and white hydrangeas in silver bowls at each of the adult tables and dozens of pink and silver balloons at the kids' tables. There would be passed appetizers and then the grown-ups would get chicken or salmon and the kids would have a taco bar, and there'd be a disc jockey and six dancers, three boys and three girls, to lead us in the line dances and the games.

Rabbi Silver had given a speech, and then Mrs. Nussbaum from the Sisterhood had presented me with gold candlesticks and a copy of the
Gates of Prayer.
My parents and Jonah and I had stood together, huddled underneath my father's prayer shawl, as the rabbi read a special blessing. “And now,” he'd said, “if Rachel's parents, Bernard and Helen, would like to say a few words?”

I had expected my father to make the speech. When my parents had come up for their
aliyah,
my mom had been crying, and her voice was so faint when she sang the blessings over the Torah that finally the cantor had just shifted the microphone toward my dad. But then, as I'd watched, my dad had put his hand on the small of my mother's back and given her a little push, propelling her forward so that she almost bumped into the fringed blue velvet that covered the bimah. She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket, unfolded it, adjusted the microphone, and cleared her throat.

“When Rachel was born . . .” she began.

“Can't hear you!” hollered my great-uncle Si, who had plumes of white hair protruding from his ears and smelled like Luden's cherry cough drops.

My mother gave a trembling smile. She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and started again, pressing her hands down on the page that she'd smoothed out on the podium. “When Rachel was born it was a difficult time for our family. As many of you know, Rachel was born with a congenital heart deformity that required immediate surgery. For a few days . . .” And here, she made a horrible gasping noise, like she wanted to sob and was trying to swallow it instead. Her next sentence came out in a rush. “For a few days we didn't know if our sweet little girl would survive.”

I felt an iciness come over me, first numbing my toes, then my ankles, then freezing my belly, turning my arms to chunks of wood.
This isn't happening,
I thought.
She isn't doing this.
But she was.

“When Rachel was six . . .” She swallowed hard and sniffled, and then clamped her hand down on my upper arm, grabbing me like she thought I'd try to run. “We found her in her room, and she wasn't breathing. I thank God every day for the paramedics who got there so quickly, who revived her and started her heart again, but you never forget . . .” She gave another awful gulp. “You never forget how it feels to see your child like that. For years, Rachel slept with a heart monitor, next to our bed. Every year, it seemed, there was another hospitalization, another surgery, or a trip to the emergency room, something that would make me think all over again, God is going to take her. And I asked myself why this had happened. Why it had happened to me, and my husband, and our son; why God was testing us this way, why he would have given us such a treasure, only to take her away.”

“Can't hear you!” yelled Uncle Si again. I'd been staring down at my shoes, with my hands clenched, praying sincerely for the first time during the entire service, praying for this speech to end. I made myself look into the audience. Britt Weinstein was staring, her eyes wide and shocked, and both Joshes looked like they were laughing. I'd been to about ten bar and bat mitzvahs by then, and I knew that it wasn't unusual for a parent to get emotional or even weepy giving the speech, talking about how their little boy or little girl was now a man or a woman; only this wasn't just a regular mom having a normal reaction. This was my mother telling the secrets that I'd spent the last nine months trying so hard to hide.

That September, I'd started at a junior high that drew students from five different elementary schools in our town of Clearview, Florida. There would be lots of kids I didn't know there, kids who didn't know me as the girl with the broken heart; poor Rachel, who'd missed all those days of school, who had to sit on the bleachers during gym class while the other kids played flag football; Rachel, for whom they were always making get-well cards in art and who once had to carry an oxygen tank with her to class.

I had spent the summer figuring out how I would remake myself, turn myself into a different kind of girl, a laughing, breezy girl, a girl to whom the worst thing that had ever happened was waking up and finding that her favorite jeans were still in the wash.

Clothes were part of it, and my mother was more than happy to take me shopping, to buy me everything I'd seen in
Mademoiselle
and
Seventeen
and
Sassy:
high-waisted acid-washed jeans, Henley shirts, a pair of shortalls with suspenders that crisscrossed in the back, and even cropped T-shirts that showed a few inches of my belly when I stretched. “Don't show your father these,” she'd said, wearing her usual worried look as she paid, and I'd hugged her and promised that I wouldn't and told her that she was the best mom in the world. When I started school, the new kids saw a confident, smiling girl with tanned arms and legs and shiny, curly hair; a girl who, as far as they knew, had never been sick. Every morning, I spent half an hour on my hair, using anti-frizz serum and mousse and a curling iron to make it look like Elizabeth Berkley's on
Saved by the Bell.
I wore it down, or in ponytails, with pink high-tops on my feet and my shirts always buttoned, or with collars that came up high, so that nobody saw my scar.

By Halloween I had a whole new group of friends, the popular girls and the boys who hung around them. Marissa was funny, with a dirty mouth, and she'd already kissed three boys and gone to second base with one of them. Kara's parents were divorced and her mother had a boyfriend and Kara had the house to herself every afternoon. Kelsey was quiet and smart, but so pretty that she was a member of the popular crowd without even trying, and Britt had been Kelsey's best friend since first grade, even though I wondered whether Kelsey had picked her because she was so ordinary-looking that she made Kelsey look even better, like a plain gold band showing off a diamond. There were boys in our orbit, not boyfriends, but boys who liked us, Derek and Marcus and Josh S. and Josh M., and now all of them were sitting there, staring at my mother, who was sobbing so hard that she couldn't even get out the words she'd written down.

My dad stepped up beside her and put his arm around her waist. He whispered something that I couldn't hear, but my mother shook her head and leaned so close to the microphone that her voice boomed out, making people flinch. I could hear the high-pitched whine from Uncle Si's hearing aid as she said, “I don't know why God chose for our daughter to be sick and to struggle, to have a condition she'll be dealing with all of her life, but I think it's made Rachel not just beautiful but strong, and appreciative of every day that's been given to her, and I know . . .” She pulled back, shoulders shaking. I shot Jonah a desperate look, and he rolled his eyes back at me, as if to say
I can't believe this, either.
It felt good to have my brother on my side, even though he'd been furious at me that morning, probably remembering his bar mitzvah, and how I'd been in the hospital the week before his big day and my mom had been so distracted that she'd forgotten to bring in his suit for alterations and Nana had ended up pinning his cuffs the morning of the service while Jonah had stood with his lips pressed together trying to act like it didn't bother him and like he wasn't going to cry.

“I know it's not for us to question God,” said my mother in her wobbly voice. “And I know that every day with Rachel has been a gift, and I pray that we all have many, many more.” And then, when I was convinced that it couldn't get any worse, now that she'd made my friends think that I was basically one of those bald, scrawny kids on the Make-A-Wish Foundation's commercials, or like Alice, my hospital friend, my mother threw her arms around me and buried her face in my hair, holding me so tightly that I couldn't move, could barely even breathe until Rabbi Silver and my father together had gently pried her away and led her, still crying, back to her seat.

Music was blaring through the walls of the bridal room, Kool & the Gang's “Celebration.” My friends were probably all dancing, their shoes off, wearing the monogrammed
RACHEL
socks that we'd bought as one of the party favors. I sat on the couch, still in my blue dress, thinking that I could just stay in here until the party was over. I'd say I didn't feel good. After my mother's speech, it was a guarantee that everyone would believ
e
me.

“Rachel?” The door opened and Nana came inside, stepping carefully over the pile of my clothes.

“Well,” she said, “that was quite a performance!” I made a noise that wasn't quite a giggle without uncovering my eyes. Nana came and sat beside me and I let myself lean into her, smelling dusting powder and Ivoire perfume.

Nana was my mother's mother, but so different from my mom that sometimes I couldn't believe they were even related. Nana lived in an over-fifty-five community just fifteen minutes away from us, a development full of man-made lakes and identical houses clustered around a golf course, but she was hardly ever there. She used her home like a changing room where she'd stop between trips to do her laundry and spend a week or two visiting friends. Then she'd repack her bags and take off again. “I have wanderlust,” she'd say, and she went everywhere, sometimes with tour groups from the synagogue, sometimes by herself. She'd take cruises to Alaska, tours through Israel and Europe and Japan. Once, she'd gone on safari in Africa, dressed in crisp khaki pants and ballet flats. She'd send postcards of the Wailing Wall and the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, and bring home pictures of jaguars and lions, and laugh as she told us how every shadow through the canvas wall of her tent looked like a big cat but would turn out to be just a tour guide or one of her fellow travelers. She'd promised me that when I finished high school, I could choose a destination and she'd take me with her, anywhere I wanted to go.

In the bridal room, as the music changed to Whitney Houston's “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” Nana squeezed me against her. Her skin was pale and soft, with rouged pink cheeks, and she'd let her hair go white and cut it short, so that now it was a nest of curls on her head. I'd never seen her without makeup, or when she wasn't dressed in what I thought of as an outfit, usually in shades of cream and rose and pink. For my bat mitzvah, she wore a tweed skirt and matching jacket made of tiny squares of pink and white with darker-pink trim around the lapels and the pockets, with a cream-colored silk blouse underneath, and she wore a hat, the way she always did in synagogue, a jaunty disc of pale-pink wool with the tiniest bit of netting peeking out from under the brim.