by Naomi Ragen
“Do you want me to try calling some of Shaindele’s other friends?” Leah asked, picking up the unfinished conversation that was on both their minds as she buckled her seat belt and started the car.
He didn’t speak for a moment, holding Mordechai Shalom close to him. Then he just shrugged painfully, shaking his head as if he couldn’t find the words.
“Yaakov, I’m sure it’s fine. She’s a good girl. She’s changed so much.”
But he just shook his head.
14
WHERE IS SHAINDELE?
“Where are we going?” Shaindele asked Duvie, who just shrugged with a lopsided grin as he swiped his metro card at the turnstile.
“I suppose you never use the subway?” he said from the other side. “Here, take my card.”
“I use the subway,” she responded, a little insulted, taking the card and swiping herself through. “In fact, last year, I even ran away from home. Got all the way to Baltimore from Grand Central, just so you know.”
He peered at her a little more closely. “Gevaldik,” he murmured appreciatively, laughing. “I want to hear all about it.”
From the decrepit outside platform, the bulky, graffiti-scarred buildings of the surrounding neighborhoods looked like the decaying carcasses of some hulking prehistoric beasts, she thought, shuddering. It was all so ugly when viewed from this unfamiliar height and angle. The wind blew cold and wet against them until she felt utterly chilled. She glanced at him to see if he felt the same. But he was studying the subway map, ignoring her, completely oblivious to what she might be feeling. She seriously considered going home and leaving him there. But then, finally, she glimpsed the approaching lights of the Manhattan-bound F train.
They sat next to each other in the crowded car, barely speaking.
“So are you interested?” she finally asked him.
He looked at her blankly.
“About my running away?”
A light went on in his head. “Oh, that. Sure. Why not?”
“Well, you don’t seem very interested.”
“Look, Shaindele. I’m as interested in you as you are in me.”
She swallowed. “What do you mean?”
“How come you never ask me a single thing about myself? About what happened in yeshiva? What I want to do?”
She was taken aback.
Honestly, almost nothing about him interested her, she realized, except for the physical attraction between them.
It was pretty obvious Duvie wasn’t what anyone would consider a “good shidduch.” He was clearly the black sheep in his family of Torah luminaries, rabbis, and principals; a yeshiva dropout going nowhere fast. She didn’t want to hear about it or to give him a platform to air all his whiny bad excuses. She was still her father’s daughter. Hearing the details would just make her even more ashamed of herself than she already was for being attracted to him and meeting him behind her father’s back.
She kept showing up because she had never experienced lust before. It fascinated her. After the ordeal of meeting strange men on her brief escape to Baltimore, she’d been terrified that she might never want to be a wife and mother. These new feelings, even toward someone as unacceptable as Duvie, were a huge relief. As it is written: Were it not for lust, man would not marry, bring up children and do business.
“So tell me. What are you up to, Duvie Halpern?”
“Wish I knew!” he laughed uproariously, slapping his thigh.
She looked around the car anxiously, embarrassed. She sniffed the air to see if she could detect the scent of alcohol. That would have been nothing new for Duvie. Often he had shown up at their meetings smelling like the inside of an Irish bar. Not that she had ever been inside such a place! But long ago, she had passed by outside just as someone was swinging open the doors and been engulfed by that pungent, slightly sweet-and-sour smell. She didn’t smell it now. But he kept laughing. Soon, the whole train would be looking at them, she thought, mortified.
“Shh! What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. What’s wrong with you?” He took a few deep breaths, putting his hand in his pocket and pulling out his cigarettes.
“You can’t smoke in here,” a man across the aisle called out to him.
“What’s it your business?” he answered belligerently as if he, too, were six foot two with the girth of a heavyweight champion like the man now looking darkly across at them, as if he were about to spring up from his seat. Duvie sullenly put the pack back into his pocket.
“Let’s go,” he told her, suddenly grabbing her hand and pulling her roughly through the aisle to the next car.
“You’re hurting me!”
“Sorry,” he mumbled, letting go and motioning her to two empty seats.
Reluctantly, she joined him.
“Why aren’t you interested in me?” he asked again, sliding his arm around her shoulders.
“Don’t!”
He removed it peevishly. “Such a tzadakis all of a sudden.”
She blushed, looking at him sullenly.
“So okay, I’m sorry. But, taka, are you or aren’t you interested, huh?”
“What’s with all the questions, Duvie?” She was getting more and more annoyed until she suddenly noticed his hands were trembling. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”
“Nothing … Well … I had this … thing … with my parents. They are kicking me out of the house if I don’t go back to yeshiva.”
She caught her breath. “HaShem Yishmor! So what will you do?”
He clasped his hands together between his knees and stared at the floor. “How do I know?”
“So go back to yeshiva. What would be so bad?”
He lifted his head and stared at her pretty, childish face, flushed pink from anger and the cold. “I’m never going back to yeshiva. I’d rather live on the streets.” He sat up, his eyes suddenly bright. “Listen, I’ve got this plan. I started playing poker on the internet. First I did it for fun, just a few dollars. But I was really, really good at it. Every time I played, I made money! So I’m going to get a stake together and start playing for real. And when I have enough, I’m going to buy a ticket to Vegas and play there for real. You know, they have, taka, these poker tournaments and you can, taka, like win a million dollars! Yeah, a million dollars.” His eyes shone.
“Isn’t that … like … assur?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re not allowed to gamble.”
He grinned at her. “And isn’t it, like, assur for a nice Bais Yaakov girl to meet boys in dark parks and take the subway into the city at night?” he mocked. “Where do your parents think you are?”
She blushed a deep crimson. “What’s that your business?”
He leaned back, spreading his arm casually behind her, almost touching her shoulders. This time, she let him. “So let’s make a deal. No mussar, okay? Let’s just have some fun tonight?”
“Where are we going?” she asked again, leaning back. It was a relief to be with someone as bad as Duvie, who you knew was in no position to judge anything you did. No matter how bad you were, he was always worse. All her wrongdoings seemed so mild compared to his.
“You’ll see,” he said mysteriously.
They got off at Broadway-Lafayette. The neighborhood didn’t look too promising to her.
“What’s so great about this?” she asked him, wondering why they hadn’t gone to Forty-second Street and Broadway. She’d had her heart set on seeing all the bright lights, the theaters and movie houses, places she’d only ever heard about.
“Stop complaining already, or I’ll leave you here!”
This was new, this nastiness. She wasn’t sure how a boy you liked was supposed to treat you, but this didn’t sound right. She looked around at the dark, unfamiliar streets. She didn’t even have a subway card to go home and had no idea where to buy one. Reluctantly, she followed him.
It was a long walk. The houses seemed exactly like the ones in Boro
Park, cramped old brownstones with no yards or driveways.
“What a dump!”
“Yeah, a five-million-dollar dump!” he hooted. “You see over there, that’s Bedford and Grove Street!”
“So?”
“So that’s where the Friends apartment is!”
“What friends?”
“The television show! With Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox and Matt LeBlanc…”
“From where do you have a television?”
“You can watch it on the internet. On your phone, even. It’s very famous. I’ve watched the whole series, start to finish, about six times. Wait … you don’t have internet?”
“Why would you think I do?”
That question, of all the things she’d asked him that night, was the single time he actually looked puzzled. “I don’t know, I just thought, if you were meeting me in the park, you were like me. Fed up with people telling you how to live, what you can and can’t do. I thought you wanted to be free, too.”
“I do want to be free!” she answered him stubbornly. “I’m just not sure yet of what!”
“Well, you’d better find out soon, little Shaindele. Because if someone sees you out with me, very soon you’re also going to be kicked out of Bais Yaakov and probably your family. So you’d better have a plan B.”
“B?”
“Yeah. It means another plan when your original one doesn’t work out. What was your original plan?”
“I want to be a teacher in Bais Yaakov. Like my mother, God watch over her.”
“Such a rebel!” he mocked, grinning, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. He offered her one, but she refused.
“What do you like about them?”
“About what?”
“Cigarettes. I just don’t get it.”
He took a deep drag, considering as he blew out smoke in rings under the powdery yellow halo of a streetlamp. “I don’t know. I guess the way it makes me look. Tough.”
Now she laughed, relaxing. “You don’t look tough, Duvie.”
He glanced at her, annoyed. “So what, then?”
“You look like a boy trying really hard to pretend he’s a man.”
“And you look about twelve. I mean, except for the boobs.” He stared at her pointedly.
“What makes you think you can speak to me this way, Duvie?” She was close to tears.
“Okay. I’m sorry. I ask mechilah. Let’s just have some fun, all right?” He put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed. She slipped decisively out of his embrace.
He shrugged, taking another deep drag on his cigarette and moving ahead. “Do what you want, little Shaindele.”
Grudgingly, she followed him to the brightly lit but somewhat seedy commercial area. There was a Black man with pink hair and tights, and groups of teenage tourists all weaving their way through ordinary working people entering McDonald’s and Ace Hardware. Her feet were cold and tired when Duvie finally said, “We’re here.”
It was a bar with a shiny black storefront and a marquee in the shape of a grand piano. It jutted out fantastically, covering their heads.
“Best jazz club in the world!” he exulted, throwing open the doors.
“Jazz?” Shaindele repeated, following close behind him.
“Such a Boro Park girl.” He shook his head sadly. “Wow, look who’s playing tonight! Jimmy Cobb! He’s an old-timer. Played with Davis and Coltrane!” he rejoiced, uncharacteristically super-excited.
She was glad of that, although she couldn’t understand what in all this had achieved such an instantaneous transformation. She looked around, searching for answers in the people sitting at tables and all along the bar, packed together as tightly as women crowding up to the mechitza to get a glimpse of the men dancing during Simchas Torah. Waitresses weaved around them, balancing trays of alcoholic drinks, hamburgers, and fries.
Up front, a blue-lit stage held a large piano, drums, and a double bass. The musicians didn’t look anything like what she’d imagined. Instead of tuxedos and evening gowns (this she’d once seen in a wall poster advertising a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), they wore sleeveless undershirts, their arms covered in tattoos, or black jackets and baseball caps, their eyes surprisingly shaded with sunglasses in the gloom. One even had a long beard. All he needed was a black velvet skullcap and a black bekesha, she thought, and this could be Fourteenth Avenue …
They squeezed into the bar, mostly to get out of the way.
“What do you want to drink?” a bartender asked.
“Not sure,” Duvie answered, taking out his thin wallet and flipping through it.
“There’s a twenty-dollar cover charge for the show if you don’t order,” the bartender informed him. “So maybe you’d like some food?”
“Well, in that case, sure. How about a hamburger and fries, and a large tap beer.”
Shaindele gasped, but he just grinned at her.
“And for your girlfriend?”
“Oh, she’s good,” Duvie said. The bartender glanced sympathetically in her direction, rolling his eyes.
“I’ll have a Diet Coke with rum,” Shaindele suddenly spoke up. “And can you put that into a paper cup?”
The bartender winked at her.
“I hope you have some cash on you, Shaindele.”
“I have,” she answered him defiantly. “I didn’t know you eat treife.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” He shrugged.
I bet, she thought. And even more I don’t want to know.
She watched as the plate of food was set in front of Duvie, almost holding her breath as he took a large bite out of the still-red meat encased in the whitest and softest of buns only gentiles ate. In Boro Park, the equivalent would have been challah rolls, smaller versions of the braided egg bread that graced the Shabbos table. Something about the roll’s spongy whiteness stained with the hamburger’s bloody residue nauseated her.
“Here, take one,” Duvie said, offering her a fry dipped in ketchup.
She shook her head, fastidiously removing the paper from her straw and sticking it into the paper cup.
“What, even the glass here isn’t kosher enough for you to use?” he scoffed.
“We said no mussar tonight, right? So leave me alone!”
Before he could answer, someone got up to the microphone. She could hardly understand anything he was saying, although Duvie and everyone else seemed ecstatic, laughing and applauding. And then this person put down the microphone and sat down by the piano and began to play. As soon as he did, someone else began to play the drums, and someone else plucked on the long strings of the double bass.
It was a funny kind of music, she thought, without a real beginning, middle, or end. It just seemed to ramble on from place to place without giving you a clue what was coming next and why. It wasn’t that she didn’t like it, she just didn’t understand it, the way you understood wedding music that had a beat you could dance to and came with words everyone knew by heart. And even though the people around her were nodding and snapping their fingers, it didn’t seem to have any particular rhythm.
“Isn’t this fantastic?” Duvie said, his eyes shining.
“What kind of song is that? What are the words?” she asked him.
“It’s not … a song. It’s…” He stopped, exasperated. “They are just making it up as they go along. Somebody starts and the others kind of feel the vibe and pick it up and add their own. It’s like they’re each doing their own thing, but also making something together.”
She listened to him, surprised. It was probably the most intriguing and intelligent thing she’d ever heard him say. He wasn’t stupid, she acknowledged, sipping her drink, trying to hear what he heard. Then someone new came onstage and started blowing a kind of horn. A trumpet, like in the Bais Hamigdash?
A strange feeling came over her, spreading through her chest and stomach along with the alcohol in her drink. The notes were sad, but sexy, too, and a bit dark, she th
ought, suddenly understanding the lighting. If you could hear the color blue, it would sound like this. When they stopped playing for a moment and everyone hooted and applauded, she found herself clapping as well, genuinely looking forward to when they would begin again. The next set seemed happier, almost jolly, but equally unscripted and wandering. She wondered how the musicians knew how to do that—to put their feelings into the music—and if they all really felt the same way at the same time, or if they just adapted themselves to get along and support each other? She wondered if they took turns taking the lead, or if everything they did surprised each of them as well?
To her surprise, she forgot about Duvie, about him sitting there eating his bloody, treife piece of meat in a roll so white it no doubt had been made with milk, which was forbidden to eat with meat, still another transgression. The music, which she had found so unsettling, suddenly seemed to flow through her, exciting her with its spontaneity.
What would it be like to live the way those men played, each day a new flow, in directions you couldn’t predict but just try to follow? To experiment every day? To be open to the lead of others, to the strangeness, to the newness?
It was the very opposite of everything she had ever been taught—that there was only one path, well traveled by every good Jew who had ever existed, and to step off it was to step into the uncharted wilderness leading to sin, ugliness, and death.
Then she suddenly thought of her poor mother, locked in the bathroom, bruised and broken, wandering in the darkness. She had never strayed, never taken a spontaneous step into foreign, untested terrain. How, then, had she wound up there?
A startling thought suddenly ripped through Shaindele Lehman’s seventeen-year-old heart—her mother, faithfully putting one foot in front of the other, doggedly keeping to the path of righteousness, the path of her forefathers, and still it had led her there! How could that have happened? Her poor, devout mother! She felt tears of sorrow fall quietly down her cheeks. She turned to Duvie, reaching out for him. But he was turned away from her, oblivious. His bangs were plastered to his sweating forehead like a little boy’s, his fingers moist and discolored by a sticky brown-and-red stain that also stained the white cuffs of his yeshiva boy shirt.