From a Sealed Room

by Rachel Kadish

  In the grainy light, I sit against the low arm of the sofa. I pull my suitcase toward me and take out the photograph. The revelers, crowded together on their European porch, are gathered for a celebration I’ll never understand. Yet as I look at the expressions frozen on their faces, I allow myself this prayer: May the waif poised at the edge of this gathering fly into the air. May she defy logic, gravity, and the two dour adults behind her. May she sail over the heads of the others and into the sky and, freed from this picture at last, speak to me.

  Shifra.

  “I’m sorry you had to come,” she says. The medication has eased the sharp lines of her face. Her lids hover in near-sleep, but she seems determined to speak. “I hope you didn’t ruin any plans on my account.”

  “It’s all right,” I say.

  A hospital cart trundles down the hall.

  My throat is so tight it threatens to choke the words. In a few sentences I will strike myself down, throw away her love forever. And—I believe this with all my strength—she will rise.

  But before I can begin, she speaks in a ponderous Hebrew. “It is so long since I spoke this language. I almost forgot how.”

  My whole body feels weak. “Ani edaber itach,” I answer. I’ll speak with you.

  She nods.

  The truth floats in my mind—half in Hebrew, half in English. I struggle to shape a first sentence, telling myself that once I do, the rest will come easily. My body aches with the effort. This time I don’t imagine joining her in the narrow hospital bed; I imagine taking her place.

  “Maya.” The Hebrew makes her shy. “Exciting, isn’t it? All the things you are doing in Israel. I am glad.” Her gaze slips to one side, she permits herself a few seconds’ rest before continuing in English. “I gripped the world with both hands when I was young, too.”

  Her eyes are closed, she speaks on unevenly. “Not that I ever did as much as you. I wasn’t brave about exploring new places. Meeting people. I used to wish I had that kind of nerve, but I was a bookworm. I had to fight that bashfulness so hard, when I got political. Maybe you never knew that, Maya?” She swallows. It seems to take forever. “Bravery came later. When I was so angry about what I was seeing, I didn’t care anymore what anyone thought of me.” She raises her lids, then closes her eyes again, satisfied that I’m listening. “That was when your father and I started to fall apart.”

  And now, in English as stumbling as her Hebrew, my mother begins to unburden herself.

  “It was when I was your age, and my parents didn’t want me to get involved with the Freedom Riders, that things got bad. Of course I went to Mississippi against their orders: And they were furious.” She sighs, and is quiet for a while before continuing. “My parents just wanted me safe. They didn’t understand why I needed to do this. But I had to. Just like you need to be in Israel, Maya. And so I never argued with you for a second, even though the news from that part of the world makes me worry.”

  “Worry?” I echo, unbelieving. For an instant I wonder whether the medication might be affecting her mind. “You’ve worried about my safety?”

  “I never show it.” Without opening her eyes, she raises her eyebrows: a single gesture of satisfaction. “I tell myself, ‘I took my own risks for what I loved, Maya will take hers.’And see? You’re fine.” She laughs. “See, you never knew I worried. I always promised myself I’d never crowd my child the way my parents did me.”

  Her lids flutter; she looks up at me as if she expects thanks.

  I say nothing.

  “Sometimes,” she confesses, “in darker moments, I wonder whether resisting my parents was the reason I never did get on that boat to Haifa.”

  I can’t keep the panic out of my voice. “I thought you didn’t move to Israel because of the movement. And later because of Dad. But you always wanted to.”

  “Yes.” She shakes her head. “I know I said that. And believed it. But quite possibly another reason I didn’t go to Israel is that if I’d gone, my parents would have accepted it. They supported Israel—it was the only thing we agreed on. They were the ones who sent me to Hebrew classes and youth meetings in the first place. Of course, their version of Zionism was giving money to plant forests in Jerusalem. All they knew about youth meetings was that I’d meet Jewish boys. They would have been horrified by my fascination with the socialist kibbutzim.

  “By the time I started college I was so angry with them.” She pauses to catch her breath; an old resentment crosses her face. “You never knew your grandparents, you never knew how difficult they could be. Still, they were good people. I should have been more of a grown-up. I should have tried to understand their point of view. But the movement was overwhelming, Maya, there’s no way to explain. It just took you in like a family, only better than your own family, and you could put everything into it and still wish you had more to give. And then of course I met your father. I met him on the bus. We were already family, all we had left to do was fall in love.

  “Marrying a non-Jewish man—it drove my parents wild. Which gave me a certain satisfaction. So maybe that’s why I never moved to Israel—I couldn’t stand to concede an inch of my life to them.”

  I want to plug my ears. I’ve wished for so long that my mother would explain herself to me, but now I don’t want to hear anything else that will turn the world on its head. I don’t want to accept her confession, these stories she passes to me, relieved to place them, at last, into steadier hands.

  “I’m sorry your grandparents didn’t live to meet you. That might have softened their position on my choices. And maybe I would have been grown-up enough by then to admit some of my own bullheadedness. I never really did, you know, before they died.” Her voice is shaking. “Maya, your coming to me now, our talking like this . . . it’s more than I deserve.”

  Embarrassed by her own tears, she wipes at them with one palm. As they slow, she gazes at me with open longing.

  I have no idea what she notices as she teeters between pain and medicated drowsiness. Does she see the dark bruise that has emerged on my jaw, does she see my shadowed eyes? Or only a thriving daughter whose friendship she’s won by hiding her worry?

  I know that I can’t tell her the truth.

  From her expression I can see that the pain has taken hold once more. She settles her head on the pillow and blinks at the ceiling. “Talk,” she says.

  There is a moment when I try to speak but cannot. Words in two languages collide in my throat. Then I fill the room with stories.

  She doesn’t object when I repeat things or contradict myself; she dozes, wakes, and dozes again. The afternoon light softens, evening rush hour arrives. Below the window the sidewalks are crowded and cars wait at a traffic light. Still I talk, shaping a Jerusalem again and again in this sterile white room.

  By the time my mother stirs, my throat is sore from speaking. “Maya,” she (says. “Will you go back to Israel?”

  I turn from the window. “I’m staying here to take care of you.”

  “After,” she says.

  “After you’re better.” I lean against the pane, my back to the cool glass. “Of course. Of course I’ll go, I’ll spend the fall semester there and maybe stay longer.” I search her face for clues: Is this what she wants to hear?

  We listen while a doctor is paged over the P.A.

  “Talk to Faye about getting me out of this room,” my mother tells me. “It may only be a few more days, but even a few more days will cost them a fortune.” She attempts a laugh. “If there’s anyone in the world who knows I like to economize, it’s Faye. Ask her. Ask her, Is she trying to hurry me out of this world?”

  I listen to the blowing of the hospital ventilation system. I try to feel some movement of the room’s tepid air against my skin, but I can’t.

  “Gil and I are talking about getting married.”

  The happiness blooms slowly on her face. “That’s wonderful, Maya.”

  “So we’ll need you well for the wedding.”

  She
says nothing. Her smile is a wrought-iron rose, dark and delicate and thorned.

  In the corridor, lights assault at every corner. I reach the merciful darkness of the telephone booth and use both hands to make sense of the smooth shallow buttons.

  I’ve woken Gil, but he tells me he doesn’t mind. He tells me he misses me. His questions about my mother are detailed and careful. “Good luck,” he says. “I’ll be waiting right here for you.” The connection is bad and sometimes his words are indistinct, but I cling to them. His steady voice is a lifeline reaching me from afar. Wrapping me firmly under the arms, while all else dissolves. I keep him on the telephone for a long time.

  “That was the year of the moon landing,” she continues. “Everyone was crazy for the news. Your father was in an argument with an old boyfriend of mine. . . .” Old boyfriends, best friends, rallies, disappointment: my mother dips a ladle into the vast well of everything she’s never said to me, and spills stories over my open hands. Because I’ve fooled her into thinking I can be trusted.

  The day King was assassinated, the demonstrations on campus. Hurrying along a tightrope between sleep and pain, my mother sheds the months and years she has accumulated—lightening her load for a journey. Quietly she confesses dreams, and shortcomings. “Maya, maybe those sacrifices I made drove us apart. I didn’t know how to talk to you, for so many years. I always found it easier to know the right thing to do at the Center.”

  Her stories race between my fingers. I try to hold them all but there are too many.

  Don’t die.

  “There have been times,” she tells me, “when I’ve felt lost. Times I’ve looked out my barred window onto fields of broken glass. And I’ve felt abandoned by everyone. By the country, Maya, and by its promises. I’ve had doubts. I’ve asked myself, Why keep trying? Sometimes I’m afraid that for all we do, we’re just going backward faster and faster. Into despair and hate and division.”

  That cannot be. The words pop into my mind. America cannot be burning.

  “I’ve been lonely,” she says.

  Outside the window, streetlights begin to glow. I lean against this un-openable window and listen to my mother’s soft breathing. While she rests, I begin another description of my neighborhood.

  “‘Prepare for the coming of the Messiah’?” She interrupts in a whisper.

  “Yes.” In the dusk the room is blurred and dim, like a frame in an old film. “The signs are all over the place.”

  “I’ve seen those here, too. In Crown Heights.” She reaches for the metal rails on the sides of her bed and straightens herself on the mattress. The effort drains her and she waits to recover her strength. “I suppose if they want to prepare for the Messiah, it doesn’t hurt anyone.”

  The room is getting darker.

  “No,” she says. “That’s not what I mean. What I mean is, it doesn’t hurt if they believe in a redeemer, so long as they also believe we need to work to fix the world. And fix it for everyone, not just Jews. The people I work with live in the worst of conditions. They might or might not believe in redemption, but they certainly aren’t waiting around idly. Black, white, brown—it doesn’t matter, they know we’ve got to do at least half the work of the Messiah.”

  She signals me to turn on the light. “Tell me more about your trip to Tiberias.”

  I flip the switch and the room is abruptly, unnaturally bright. As I speak my mother brushes the fingers of her right hand drowsily up and down the inside of her left wrist. “I thought of you a lot during that Tiberias trip,” I say, “because I know you always wanted to travel there.”

  Something in my words catches her attention. “What does that have to do with you?”

  “Nothing. I just mean it’s something you never did.”

  She looks me over. “There are a lot of things I never did, Maya. But everyone has plenty of things they don’t do. What does my unfinished business have to do with where you travel?”

  I shrug. “Nothing. The trip to Tiberias was terrific. After we got back to Jerusalem I thought I’d need to rest for a week from all the walking, and Gil kept saying he wanted to go back and adopt one of the stray dogs for a pet. I told him—”

  “Maya.”

  I wait. She breathes hard.

  “Maya, is that why you went to Israel? Because of me?”

  “Of course not.”

  Her body is tense with watchfulness.

  My hand, unbidden, rises to my cheek; her eyes narrow with suspicion. She makes the barest of gestures. Obediently I drop my hand.

  “What’s happened to your face?” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  Her lips press together, a thin, precise line. She doesn’t waste the strength to say, Don’t play games with me.

  Tears are running down my cheeks. I wipe at them hurriedly. “What? There’s nothing wrong with my face. Except maybe I lost a little beauty rest from jet lag. You’re saying I’m ugly?” I try to laugh. “So I’ve got circles under my eyes, maybe.”

  My mother is struggling to sit.

  “I lost a little beauty rest, that’s all, when the Shachars came to find me.”

  “Came to find you? I thought you were back in Jerusalem already when they called you.”

  “I mean came to my apartment to find me.”

  She is sitting, her knuckles sharp on the bed’s railing.

  “Maya. Look at me.”

  I can’t look at her.

  “Look at me. God damn it, look at me.” Her voice is frantic, clawing at the walls of my silence; it would be a bellow, were it not hollowed by weakness. “Maya, there’s something going on. Tell me.”

  I lift my head and meet her stare.

  My mother’s eyes are a fierce, reflectionless black in the severe pallor of her face; shadows dark as bruises have stationed themselves beneath. She never wrote to me about a turn for the worse. She never told me about deciding to give up on treatment. And I chose, for months on end, not to know. My own stupid blindness makes me furious. “You lied to me in your letters,” I accuse. “You didn’t tell me the treatment didn’t work. You didn’t tell me—” I can’t bring myself to say it. I gesture weakly at the IV. “Why didn’t you tell me you were getting sicker?”

  Her reply is clipped: the answer is so obvious it shouldn’t need to be spoken. “I didn’t want to burden you.”

  “And now I’m not burdened?” The sarcasm of my reply is not what I intended.

  She blinks at me—at the end of some long and exhaustive argument, I’ve unexpectedly stumped her.

  My fingernails have carved painful indentations in my damp palms. Stop, I tell myself. But since arriving here I’ve determinedly filled my mother’s silences with words. Now, when I should stop speaking, I can’t. “Why do you shut yourself off from everyone?” I demand. “You’ve always got to be the heroine of the story. You’ve always got to be crusading for something, sacrificing more than anyone else. Maybe you could have given me the chance, stopped controlling everything for once in your damn perfect life and let me know you were getting sicker. But you can’t, you never let anyone help you.” I spit out the words without thinking. “Dad was right.”

  She doesn’t move and doesn’t answer.

  All around us, the hospital is silent. “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She doesn’t move.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She is looking at the wall as if, with enough perseverance, she could see through it to the street below. “I wanted you to be happy.”

  Soft laughter comes from the nurses’ station down the hall. Somewhere nearby, a door bangs. Footsteps recede.

  “And you’re happy in Israel,” she says. “If I had told you, you would have worried and come home. I gave you six happy months. I did that. Didn’t I?”

  I’m not in control of the muscles of my face.

  “Besides. What on earth do you think you could have done, Maya? What could you have done if you’d known? Swoop down and save me?” Her mouth twists humorle
ssly; she shakes her head. Then she stops.

  My lips won’t form words.

  I can tell she’s afraid she’s been too harsh. Sitting back against her pillow, she begins to say something, then changes her mind. “Maya.” She waves a hand in apology. “Let’s not argue now. It’s not your fault.” She watches me evenly, then continues in a businesslike manner. “Now tell me what’s happened.”

  The pain in my palms nauseates me. The darkening world swoons outside the window; in this room, under the bright fluorescent bulb, my mother is near the end of her strength. For a moment her death flashes before me. I can see this room, this chair. The hospital bed, empty.

  “It’s nothing, Mom,” I tell her. “Why don’t you get some rest?”

  Doubt enters her eyes. “Maya?” She calls out my name and I understand she is asking me to tell her I’m all right. Thoughts pass like clouds across her face. Without words she shows me: She has ached to have me here. She has denied herself my presence fastidiously, hour after hour, in order to give me the gift of another day; now she pleads my forgiveness for not summoning me earlier. She asks humbly that I confirm her reward, the fruit of this last sacrifice in a life of sacrifices—my well-being.

  She is exhausted. And something more: She is afraid—for me, and also for herself. From her bed she searches my expression; I am the sum of her lifetime of good intentions, the final verdict on a difficult course she has struggled to navigate for years. Should she have failed, she is too tired to make amends. If I lie to her, her eyes show me, she will choose to believe.

  I step forward. I cross to the bed, place a scored and damp palm on her forehead. “I’m fine. I’ll feel better when I know you’re resting, though.”

  I watch the relief spill over her face: a quiet, final peace. She draws a long breath, then smiles faintly. At last, she can set down her long task. In the descent of her lids is a heavy satisfaction.

  “A few more minutes,” she says. “I’m tired but I don’t want to sleep yet.”