And yet, what if …
It was fortunately misty enough out that the dirt was good and sticky and clumpy. I hauled a few armfuls from Zaide’s yard to the soup pot; if he noticed the hole the next day, he’d blame it on squirrels or moles. Not that he would notice. He took pride in his wild lawn, in the bright yellow spots of dandelions and wiry patches of wild onion everybody else on the street tried to get rid of. The weeds are just living their lives. Who am I to interfere? he’d say, and then he’d pick a piece of wild onion and chew on it with his few remaining teeth, and his breath would smell gross when he kissed me goodbye.
The soup pot was now nearly full. I carefully lifted the envelope and poured its dirt inside, making sure to grab the shem before it could flutter away on the breeze. I gently tucked the paper into my pocket, where it would be safe while I sculpted its new residence.
Now. First things first. How was I supposed to go about making a golem?
I probably should have googled this or something.
My hands moved by instinct. Sure, I could make it look like the typical lumpy clay brute, but I didn’t want Zaide to have a heart attack if he found it sitting in the kitchen. Instead, while I worked, I thought about how I was the only person Zaide could really trust, about how I was the only one who didn’t want to send him away. I could make Zaide a golem that was just like me. But maybe even a little bit better.
I mostly liked the way I looked. I imagined on the golem my wild brown hair, my cheeks that were so rosy Lexy used to say I didn’t even need makeup, and my brown eyes that glowed gold in the right light. But of course I gave it a normal nose.
My mind wandered as my fingers worked the clay. If I were a golem, what else would I want?
To fit in and be popular at school. To sit at Isabella Lynch’s lunch table and know instinctively when to laugh. To have everybody know me and like me and want to be like me.
To fit in with the world, too. To get to tell exciting family stories about being descended from a duke in England or a chief in Nigeria and not have to give the usual speech about how so much Jewish history in Europe was destroyed during the Holocaust that I didn’t know exactly where I’d come from, but probably from peasants hiding from people who wanted to kill them throughout the centuries. To feel more normal and not have to worry about who’d hide me in their attic if the time ever came here.
My fingers dug and smoothed, pinched and poked. I’d want to know exactly how to understand people, to know what they were thinking, to know what was coming. Like in chess. I’d be able to win more than just 20 percent of the time if I knew how to manipulate the board. Or if I knew what was going on in Zaide’s mind, what he was seeing.
Or Matty’s and Jed’s minds, a little part of me whispered. I frowned, punching the clay harder with frustration. They couldn’t ignore the problem with Zaide forever. I’d want to know exactly how to make them talk and how to make them listen.
I had lots of ideas. But in reality, I was no sculptor, and what I was working with wasn’t exactly fine clay—it had too many pebbles in it. In the end, what I was left with looked like a pile of dirt with some lumps. I just had to hope that she’d absorbed my intentions. As long as you had good intentions, that was what mattered, right?
“Open wide,” I murmured. I’d given her a hole for a mouth, so she didn’t have to actually open anything, and also she was an inanimate lump of dirt, so she couldn’t actually open anything. But whatever. I folded the shem as small as I could without tearing the fragile paper and shoved it into my lumpy golem’s mouth hole. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to say anything or if the original ancient rabbi’s incantations over this dirt and paper would hold.
“Okay,” I said, waving my hands over it in a mystical sort of way. Then I felt silly, so I stopped. “Here we go. Come to life, please. Um. Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Amen.” That was the blessing said over bread, but I didn’t know what else to say. Bread rose the way I wanted this golem to rise, so maybe they were similar enough?
I sat back on my heels and waited. And waited.
And waited.
I’d been waiting about forever minutes when I started feeling even sillier than when I’d waved my arms around over the soup pot. Of course this wasn’t going to work. What had I been thinking? “Stupid,” I said aloud, rising to my feet. My knees hurt from where the gravel stuck to them, but I deserved it. Hopefully, my parents hadn’t noticed I was gone. I had no idea how I’d explain my absence to them.
As I was rounding the corner back to Zaide’s front yard, a rustling noise rose behind me. I stopped in my tracks. Even my heart stopped for a second.
Was that…?
But then a bird burst free from the branches above. My heart jump-started and raced along with my feet as I hustled toward my house. “Stupid, stupid,” I mumbled to myself.
When I heard another rustle behind me, I didn’t even bother looking back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I SOMEHOW FELT EVEN STUPIDER Saturday morning. Maybe it was the bright light streaming through my blue checkered curtains. In the dark and the haze of almost sleep, anything seems possible: That looming shadowy form on the other side of the room is a monster; that wrinkle in the shower curtain means there’s a murderer hiding behind it. Then you turn on the light, and the monster is only a pile of clothes on your chair, and the shower curtain IS ACTUALLY HIDING A MURDERER! WATCH OUT!
Just kidding. There is not a murderer hiding in your shower.
Probably.
Downstairs, Dad was frying eggs in the kitchen. I padded in and sat at the table, my cheeks creaking in a yawn. “Sleep well?” he asked me.
Good. He suspected nothing. “Okay,” I said.
After breakfast I read some of my fantasy book, and then it was already time to head over to Zaide’s. I put on my green skirt / black leggings / white flouncy shirt combo because I wanted Matty to see how fashionable I was, and waited for Mom and Dad.
We got there before Matty and Jed. Mom and Dad went into the kitchen to put the chicken salad they’d brought over for lunch in the fridge while I said hello to Zaide. His papery lips brushed against my forehead. “Leah Roslyn,” he said. It felt good to hear my name come out of his mouth. I had to fight the urge to look victoriously over at Mom and Dad. See? He knows us; he knows exactly where he is. “How are you today?”
I hesitated for a moment, then decided to answer honestly. “Not great, but not terrible.”
He laughed. “Your honesty is refreshing, my dear.” The laugh dropped away. “I have been thinking about what you said at our chess game a couple weeks ago.”
I looked around to make sure Mom and Dad were too far away to eavesdrop. I was sick of hearing them tell me I should take pride in my nose.
Zaide stared straight into my eyes. I squirmed a little in my seat because something about the weight of his gaze made me feel like he was staring into my very soul. “You seemed to think there was something I should be changing about myself in order to be happy.”
That was exactly not what I’d said. “I think you’re perfect just the way you are,” I assured him. Unlike my parents, I thought, but didn’t add.
His eyes wrinkled extra as he smiled. Which was saying something, since the rest of his face was basically one giant wrinkle. “Leah Roslyn, I have a secret to tell you.”
I loved secrets! I leaned in to hear it.
“Sometimes I think it would be nice to have more teeth or fewer wrinkles,” he said.
I leaned back. That was a disappointing secret, but you couldn’t tell someone that, so I just nodded in what I hoped was a sympathetic way.
“I miss the feeling of people not immediately assuming I am weak and doddering and deaf because I am so old and toothless,” Zaide went on. He was getting pretty deaf, but that was beside the point.
“You know, there’s plastic surgery for that,” I told him. Like how I was going to get a nose job someday. He might not know th
at he could get fake teeth or some of those wrinkles smoothed out.
He shook his head. “Not interested,” he said. “I know changing my appearance would not change me on the inside. I would still be old. I have still lived all of these years, and I am proud of them. Look at what I’ve made!”
He might have been talking about the old telephone company building, but I chose to believe he was talking about me.
“Zaide?” Mom asked, stepping over. “What’s going on?”
Zaide winked at me. I tried to wink back, but I think it was actually just a blink. “Nothing.”
While Mom and Dad talked to Zaide about boring adult things—they didn’t talk about the “assisted-living facility,” which was surprising to me because if I were Zaide, that would be all I could talk about with them—I wandered out into the living space. A corner of the rug was peeling up, revealing the gray concrete beneath. I sighed. It was boring in here without my cousins, and something was simmering inside me. A little bit of annoyance at Zaide. He’d clearly been talking about me and my nose, but he didn’t understand the situation. People did treat me worse and think of me differently because of my nose, so obviously getting it taken care of would change that. No matter what he said.
“I’m going outside to wait for Matty and Jed!” I hollered back toward the kitchen. Nobody answered, which I took as a fine.
It was still chilly outside for March, but I was fine with my coat on. I paced back and forth across the front yard. I couldn’t believe I’d been here last night in the light of the moon. What had I been thinking? I snorted a laugh at myself.
“Hello? Is someone there?” The voice was young and clear as a bell … and it was coming from around the side of the house.
I stiffened. There shouldn’t be anyone over there. Matty and Jed and I had spent our entire childhood trying to figure out a way through that fence; it wasn’t fair if some other kid had gotten through it before we had. “Yeah,” I called back cautiously.
No response, but curiosity had already grabbed me by the ear and was pulling me toward the side of the house. Over the grass, a jump over the hole from my digging yesterday, and feet crunching hard over pavement and gravel—
And there she was. A girl, probably around my age, sitting in the soup pot. I blinked. She was too big to fit in the soup pot, so she was awkwardly tilted back into it, her butt in the pothole and her legs and arms balancing her from falling over.
I noticed the outfit first because it was identical to an outfit Isabella Lynch had worn last week. Loose, baggy pants that cinched at her waist and flared at her legs in a shade of mustard yellow. I’d thought that nothing could possibly go with pants like that, but Isabella—and this girl—had paired it with a tight shirt striped vertically in olive green and mahogany brown that somehow went perfectly. To carry it all, she wore simple plain white sneakers. Isabella’s had been fashionably scuffed, while this girl’s were bright white and pristinely clean.
What an odd coincidence. Maybe they’d both bought the outfit off the same mannequin?
“Could you help me to my feet?” the girl asked, her voice ringing in my head like a bell. It sounded familiar, though I couldn’t place how. “I can’t seem to stand.”
She could’ve said please, but I moved forward anyway, my eyes searching her face. Brown hair curled wildly around it in a perfectly-mussed-beach-waves sort of way. Her eyes shone clear and hazel gold over rosy cheeks and plump pink lips and a … a perfect Disney-princess nose …
No. No way. It couldn’t be.
I stopped in my tracks a few feet from the girl. “How did you get here?” I asked her, my stomach churning.
She laughed, and that’s when I saw it. Her tongue, a pale petal pink … stamped in black with the letters of the shem.
“You put me here,” she said, as though it were obvious. No. Way. “It would be very rude of you to leave me like this.”
I stared down at her, my mind sparking all over the place, but somehow, my arm extended itself. She grabbed my hand. I wasn’t sure what I expected hers to feel like—dirt? Cement?—but it was warm and squishy and bony, just like a real human hand.
She pulled hard, and I staggered, nearly dragged to the ground beside her. But she rose, her back lifting itself off the ground. I got the feeling that she didn’t actually need my hand to stand up, she just wanted it. Maybe she wanted to see if our hands felt alike.
And then she was standing there in front of me, her feet spaced on either side of the soup pot, dusting those human hands on her pants. “So,” she said. “What next?”
I blinked hard, like if I blinked hard enough, she would simply poof out of existence. She didn’t. I tried again. Still there. So I probably wasn’t losing my mind.
Which left no other explanation. Zaide’s story had been true. And I had done it. Created a golem. It was hard to describe the mixture of pride and relief and excitement and terror that whooshed through me, blowing me up like a balloon. I had created a life that I was responsible for, on a much bigger scale than the egg babies we carried around last year for home ec, but maybe I’d actually solved my problem. The golem would live with Zaide and take care of him, and nothing would have to change.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Leah. Um, Leah—”
“Leah Roslyn Nevins. I know who you are.” She smiled wide; her eyes glimmered with hope. “I’m not supposed to name myself, but I have. Is that okay?”
What was she doing, asking me for permission? I was just a kid. I didn’t have to give anyone permission to do anything. I didn’t have the authority to do that, unless you were, like, five years old. I could definitely boss around a five-year-old. “Sure,” I said faintly.
“Good!” she said cheerfully. Her eyes sparkled with happiness. “Then my name is Elsa Aurora Ariel Belle.”
Those were Disney-princess names. To go with her Disney-princess nose. If she introduced herself by her full name, people would wonder what the heck was going on. “Maybe you should just go by Elsa,” I said.
Elsa, which wasn’t really a Jewish name. Then again, was the golem Jewish? I hadn’t thought about that as I made her. Did that mean she wasn’t? Then again again, lots of Jews didn’t have traditionally Jewish names. I did, but it wasn’t like Lexy or Julie or Matilda were especially biblical.
Elsa’s brow furrowed over her nose for a moment, like she was going to get angry at my comment on her name. I braced myself for an explosion, but the clouds cleared up, and she went back to smiling. “Whatever you say.”
“Okay,” I said uncertainly. “Okay. Well. We should probably come up with a cover story, right?”
She tilted her head, still smiling away. It was starting to get a little creepy, honestly. “A cover story?”
I gestured in front of me like my hands might be able to spell it out in the air. “You know. A story that says who you are, how I know you, what you’re doing here, all that. So my family doesn’t get suspicious.”
She shook her head, her smile fading a little. “That’s easy. I am a golem, created last night by you in the light of the moon and the damp of the dew, and my name is Elsa Aurora Ariel Belle. I am here because you wanted me here.”
“Yes, but…” I let out a frustrated sigh. “That’s the real story, but not the cover story. There’s no way my parents will believe the real story. They’ll think I’m a little kid making things up. We need to tell them something that sounds true and that they won’t find suspicious.”
The golem—Elsa—looked confused again.
“Leah? Leah?” Voices drifted over from the front yard. Matty’s and Jed’s. I hadn’t even heard them pull up, but Mom and Dad must have told them I was waiting for them outside. It was only a matter of seconds before they found me. I needed to figure out a cover story right away.
So naturally, my mind wiped itself blank. Think! I screamed mentally at myself. Think, um … What’s your name again?
I was doomed.
Matty and Jed rounded the corner, their faces
breaking into smiles as they caught sight of me. “Hey, Leah!” Matty said. Leah. Right. Matty waved at the golem. “Hi! I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Matilda, and this is Jed. Are you a friend of Leah’s?”
The golem shook her head. “Nope! I’m a—”
“She’s joking!” I interrupted, forcing a laugh that came out sounding more like a bark. “Ha! Ha-ha! Isn’t she funny?” I slung an arm over the golem’s shoulders and squeezed, which distracted her enough to keep her from naysaying me. “Yes, she’s my friend. She … lives on this block, too. Her name is Elsa.”
“Hi, Elsa!” Jed said, but Matty looked a little skeptical.
“We’ve been visiting here every Saturday our whole lives, and we’ve never met any other kids living on this block.”
“Right,” I said, my mind racing for an excuse because of course that was all true. “Well. See. Elsa’s always lived here, but her family always had something to do on Saturdays.” My mind blanked again. I knew it was a bad idea before the words even left my mouth, but you’ve got to understand—I had no other options aside from standing there and letting my mouth open and close silently and stupidly like a guppy until I literally sank into the earth and died. “Elsa, what was it again?”
She had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. “Skydiving,” she said without hesitation.
That one word was enough to jar my mind back into making sense again. “Skydiving? Is that the best you could—” I suddenly realized how Jed and Matty were looking at us. Eyebrows pinched, eyes wary, nostrils a little bit flared: caution. “I mean, right! Skydiving, that’s it. Yes.” I turned back to Jed and Matty, nodding vigorously. “Elsa’s family are all skydiving enthusiasts, and they used to go every single Saturday until … um, Elsa’s mom’s parachute broke.”
The Trouble with Good Ideas Page 5