Questioning Return

by Beth Kissileff

  Hillary Clinton and the Dead Head walked over to Wendy. Hillary asked in what sounded like a British accent, “What do you want? We’ve got beer and wine, some mixed drinks, and a pitcher of peach bellinis.”

  The Dead Head said, “Josh. Nice to meet you,” and held out his hand.

  “Wendy. Hi.” After she shook Josh’s hand, she said to Hillary, “What’s in the pitcher looks good. I’ll have some of that.”

  Hillary said, “It is.” Wendy noticed that the peach colored liquid in his glass was at the bottom. “I’ll get you some.”

  Josh the Dead Head said, “I’m Dr. Hideckel’s resident this year. How do you know them?”

  “Oh,” Wendy thought. Do I say to another psychiatrist, I went to see Dr. Hideckel after one of his patients committed suicide partly because of me? Not lighthearted Purim banter there. “I’ve just started going to Atarah’s classes and she was nice enough to invite me.”

  “Cool. I’ve heard she’s a great teacher.”

  “I’m not religious, but I really wanted to learn more and she’s just . . .” Wendy couldn’t think of the appropriate adjective as she lifted her jingling hand to accept the drink Hillary was offering and said to her, “Thank you, Hillary. What brings our lovely first lady to Israel?”

  “Taking care of our Jewish constituents,” she said as she patted the bottom of her wig. “You?” she asked Wendy.

  “I’m a gypsy; we wander. Can’t you tell?” she said, shaking both her wrists so the bracelets made their jingle-jangle tones.

  “Read my palm,” Josh the Dead Head said. Before she could respond, Hillary stretched out her hand, palm up towards Wendy. “Ladies first,” she said in a falsetto voice, looking at Josh pointedly. Josh got the hint and left to refill his glass.

  Wendy put her untasted drink down on the table near her. “Let’s see.” She planted her left hand underneath Hillary’s, while the right traced the patterns on the palm. “There is a line here,” Wendy said, tracing the line on Hillary’s palm while simultaneously looking up at Hillary’s clear blue eyes underneath the mask with the politician’s face. She hadn’t been entirely certain of Hillary’s gender; the unshaven legs under the stockings, along with the hands, confirmed maleness. Hillary’s hand had fingers thick enough to have an impact, looking like they could open the lids of stubborn jars. The fingers were not fat or too large, but fleshy enough to contain gentle feeling, tender sensations.

  In Wendy’s experience, palm reading was a girl thing. Only women, unable to say out loud, I want to earn money or go on a long trip or find the love of my life, could use the excuse of going to a fortune teller and having her say, “Oh yes, this will happen to you”—and then shaping a life to match hoped-for predictions. Wendy never believed in palm reading, though at the overnight camp she attended, all campers on the girls’ side feigned firm belief in it. She was grateful to remember enough from Camp Kodimoh’s late night palm-reading sessions to put on a reasonable show.

  She continued to hold “Hillary’s” hand in hers, and heard herself asking, “First? Whether you’ll be president yourself one day? What the chances are that health care reform will pass? Whether there will be an indictment for Vince Foster’s suicide?” Wendy stupefied herself by being able to joke about this.

  Hillary responded, “Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost told me all that with the Ouija board. I want to know whether I’ll meet anyone new—Bill and I are history.”

  It was a strange intimacy, standing in the living room of Shaul’s psychiatrist and Wendy’s new teacher. They were surrounded by people, yet it was just the two of them, his trust reposing in her, hand in hers.

  “Someone male or female?”

  “Female, definitely,” “she” said in a falsetto voice. “It was great at Wellesley. Bill has been man enough for the rest of my life.”

  Wendy laughed and lifted his hand closer to her face to peer at it with mock attention. “Let’s see. Your heart line looks forked, so divorce is in the offing, but the forked part continues, so there will be more relationships.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I can’t tell more about who it will be . . .”

  “I’ve met you,” she said, looking fiercely at Wendy with those blue eyes behind the mask.

  Wendy didn’t know how to interpret this. She couldn’t tell what she thought of this guy since all she could see of him were his blue eyes and his hand, which did have a nice heft, in hers. She wasn’t ready to flirt—it depended on what he looked like when the mask was off, and who he was. She decided to continue in her role as gypsy chiromancer. “You’ve met me, and there is a good line of intuition, shows you have good judgment. Here’s the travel line, some long trips in the future . . .”

  “You do palm readings, Wendy? Good,” said Dr. Hideckel, returning to introduce her around. “Is my resident Uri here staying in Israel or going back to merry olde England?”

  “I was reading Hillary Clinton’s palm. I hadn’t been introduced to Uri.” She put out her hand. “Uri, I’m Wendy.”

  He removed the mask that went over the whole head with its attached wig, revealing a face that complemented the eyes. Blue eyes, thick brown hair with no signs of receding. This was good, since Wendy hated premature baldness in men. His evenly spaced and immaculately white teeth made her picture a horse’s. They weren’t too big, but had a certain equine health and vitality. So stupid, she kicked herself inwardly, to be thinking about breeding qualities—baldness or its lack, good teeth—with a man she had just met. His eyes had nice crinkle lines when he smiled, suggesting sensitivity and vulnerability. Worth flirting with, and he seemed to like her.

  “Hag Sameach,” he said. When had she heard Hebrew words, especially with that guttural phlegm-filled “chet,” sound so sexy?

  “Same to you,” she said, not wanting to risk butchering the throaty sound that remained slightly out of reach even after a half year of ulpan.

  “Wendy, did anyone get you a drink?” Dr. Hideckel interjected.

  “I had something. I put it down to read Uri’s palm.” She looked around and spied the glass she had put on the table. She went to retrieve it.

  “Let me introduce you to the others,” said Dr Hideckel as she returned, glass in hand. The doorbell rang, and Uri said, “Dan, I’ll introduce her. You get the door.”

  “Take care of her.”

  As Elvis meandered off, Uri asked, “How do you know the Hideckels? Are you related?”

  “I’ve been taking classes with Atarah.” Wendy didn’t annex an apology about not being religious.

  “I’ve heard her teach a few times. She blew me away.”

  “Me too. I’ve really been . . . challenged . . . by her.”

  “What else are you doing in Israel besides studying with Atarah? Not that it wouldn’t be enough . . .” Uri laughed awkwardly, hoping he hadn’t made a blunder.

  “I’m questioning return.” He gave her a blank look. “I’m in Jerusalem working on my dissertation.”

  “Brilliant,” he said in his clipped British accent. “Your field?”

  “American religion. You?”

  “Me? I work for the man, Dr. H. I’m his resident.”

  “You drink with your boss? Whenever I go to department parties, everyone is so awkward and self-conscious. You are trying to be clever and brilliant and ambitious, but everyone else is too, and it is supposed to be a party and fun and it isn’t and you just go home with a huge stomachache. The food is always bad.”

  “Don’t worry about that here. The Hideckels are amazing cooks.”

  “They both cook?” Wendy said, surprised.

  “Shabbos and holiday meals are collaborative.”

  “Hmm.” Wendy was surprised to hear a busy doctor cared to make time to cook. She didn’t know what to say next. “How did you pick psychiatry as a field?” came out. Would he see her as an idiot for such a dull query?

  “Picking psychiatry?” Uri echoed Wendy’s question thoughtfully and took a big swig of hi
s drink. “If you really want to know, we’ll have to sit down.” He did this both to see whether she would follow him and to decide what information might interest her most. Wendy liked the British tinge to his accent.

  She followed Uri over to a couch in the living room. There were others there, but he didn’t introduce her. They sat down and Wendy continued to sip her drink.

  “I feel like I’ve met you before,” he said. “Or maybe I’ve just already had so much to drink that I’m kind of floating.”

  “I’ve never been to England—is that where you are from?”

  “Sort of. My parents were born here, but I’ve lived mostly in England, partly here. I might stay in Israel. I don’t know. I like the approach to psychiatry here. I want to help people change how they think about themselves, not dispense pills. Drug companies are so dodgy, you know?” Again the British accent came out with the word “dodgy.”

  “I’m studying how people think about themselves. You could probably help me analyze the data.” Oh, that sounds so stupid. How enticing is an invitation to analyze data? Get a bit warmer, back to the gypsy role; he liked that, she advised herself.

  “Do you want me to read your palm as Uri now?” He held it outstretched towards her, and she put her drink on the floor to grasp it in both hands.

  He inquired, teasingly, “Is this a sham or do you know how to read palms?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Don’t care at all,” he said, leaning his head back on the couch and smiling up at her sitting upright.

  Just then, Dr. Hideckel called everyone to the table for the meal.

  Atarah was sitting at the head of the table, wearing an exaggeratedly large corona made of colored cellophane paper and plastic jewels. Her garment was a galabiyya, a Morroccan embroidered gown, of deep purple. If not for the wig, Wendy decided, she would look like a total hippie. The garishness of the both the silver and gold embroidery on the galabiyya, and the homemade crown, gave her a look entirely different from the carefully selected garments that were her usual attire.

  Dr. Hideckel made a mock Kiddush in Hebrew, which consisted of lots of biblical and talmudic quotes extolling the appropriateness of wine and its great qualities. Wendy got the oft-repeated words yayin, wine, and gefen, vine, but there were other places where everyone except her laughed at the sacred parody. She didn’t like not getting the jokes, but kept taking sips of her drink and felt pleasantly overcome by the alcohol, in that rosy state one gets after sufficient drinking, before one is entirely drunk. The group went to ritually wash their hands before eating bread, and the meal began.

  After all were sated with copious amounts of food, along with corresponding drink, Atarah spoke. “So we aren’t here to have a corroboree tonight, though that is certainly part of it. We are trying to define the line between sober and inebriated. It is like an asymptotic line, coming closer and closer to drunkenness without truly approaching it.”

  Wendy was too awed by Atarah’s wisdom to do anything beyond continuing to drink. She was rarely in such a state; now that it was so pleasant, she wasn’t sure why drink had never had a whole lot of appeal for her. She had to remember not to drink like she did her first Shabbat in Jerusalem, with Donny. She would not make that mistake twice, if she could help herself.

  Atarah asked everyone to go around and introduce themselves. “Now, I want names as well as”—she paused and did her signature glance at the faces of all those present—“an absurd fact about yourself, in keeping with the tone of the holiday.”

  When they went around introducing themselves. Wendy said, “I’m questioning return. I’m trying to see what it means for people who didn’t grow up with Jewish rituals to suddenly declare this is the only possible path they could have taken, their return to religion inevitable, which can be seen as an absurd claim. What does ‘return’ truly mean when it is to something one has never experienced?”

  Uri smiled at her from across the table.

  Wendy got an e-mail from an unfamiliar address a few days later: Ushalem@hadassahhospital.edu. She couldn’t figure out what it was from looking at it—a funny name, Ushalem—sounded like some kind of play on Jerusalem. She almost deleted it, but then thought it could relate to Shaul or another one of her subjects. Uri wrote that he found her address on the Princeton religion department website, where all the advanced graduate students had postings with short synopses of their projects. He said he enjoyed meeting her on Purim and inquired whether she’d do another palm reading—he had been too drunk to remember her advice. She wrote back that she wasn’t sure sobriety would improve the readings, but she’d be glad to try again. They decided to meet the coming Thursday afternoon, at five, at Uri’s favorite café in Jerusalem, B’Sograim, on Ussishkin Street. He figured Thursday at this time was good because he didn’t have to work on Friday. If they had a good time, they could get dinner afterwards or a movie. If not, then they’d just part. He liked Wendy but needed to set it up for both scenarios, staying and leaving, the classic single-guy ploy of leaving himself with an out if needed.

  Wendy was pleased he had contacted her via e-mail—it meant he hadn’t asked the Hideckels for her phone number and they wouldn’t know she was going out with him. If she knew he had gotten her e-mail from Dr. Hideckel, she might have said no. But the accent, the hands that had the promise of tenderness, the blue eyes, the wiry thick hair, and her general sense that he was interesting all made Uri an attractive possibility.

  There hadn’t been any males on her horizon recently. She was going back to the States in three months, at the end of June, so it was sort of irrelevant anyway. Before then, Wendy needed to wrap up her interviews, fill in gaps, and actually start writing. This terrified her. What if, when she began to write things up in the States, she needed to clarify a point and couldn’t find her interview subject via e-mail? What if she wanted to speak to one of the rabbis again? Stay focused. Reply to his e-mail; don’t get into a whole thing about the future just yet, she told herself as she wrote down the meeting place in her planner. Even if she had someone to go out with for the next three months, it would be nice. Uri was appealing, cute, and a Jewish doctor in training.

  The only problem was that he was religious. But he put his hand in hers and let her touch it. She knew from her baalei teshuvah that a strictly Orthodox man wouldn’t touch her at all. Uri seemed normal, comfortable with himself, able to joke around, calling Dr. Hideckel, “the man.” She would never be comfortable enough to get drunk with her dissertation committee. The religion thing would take care of itself somehow; being with him couldn’t last longer than three months anyway so it wasn’t a big deal. And, it would be a great punishment to her mother to taunt her by dating a religious Jew. Not that Sylvia was antireligious. She wasn’t. Sylvia loved being Jewish—wouldn’t deny it, or try to hide it—but only up to a point. Jews in any way more religious than herself went far beyond Sylvia’s definition of “up to a point.”

  Wendy vowed not to tell Orly about Uri till after the date. She knew Orly would tease her mercilessly about dossim who only wanted to have sex with a sheet with a hole in it.

  Thursday morning, the day of their date, was a sunny day, in the sixties Fahrenheit. Spring was finally in the air. Wendy dressed more carefully than usual, in a white sleeveless V-neck sweater and matching cardigan, paired with a blue cotton miniskirt. She wore her new red sandals, a present to herself for finishing transcribing the interviews she’d done. Every time she walked past Freeman and Bein shoes on Yaffo Street she had coveted these cherry red shoes, which were like clogs, with a buckle. She didn’t usually like items of apparel that called attention to their wearers, but maybe the ways women around Jerusalem dressed, much less conservatively than in Princeton, influenced her. The thought of wearing the red shoes in Princeton, bringing a piece of the flamboyance of Jerusalem back with her, gave Wendy great pleasure. And she wore her Michal Negrin earrings, another Jerusalem find, with their bright colors—red, green, yellow, and blue enamel. Th
ey were colorful but not too big, sort of shimmery and ultrafeminine, but not too dangly and un-serious. The outfit was topped off by a light patterned scarf, also in bright red, green, yellow, and blue colors she’d found in one of the stalls off King George in the center of town, when transferring buses from the university to her house. When she went to the library in the morning she didn’t put makeup on, but brought it with her so she’d be ready for tonight. She wanted to look nice, but not look like she had made too huge an effort. When she left the bathroom at the Hebrew University library before taking the bus to the center of town, she was pleased with how she looked.

  She had a bit of trouble finding the place. She had the street address, but there was a parking lot to cut across, which made it unclear how to get there, so she was a few minutes late. Finally, Wendy entered the restaurant, formerly a stone house with mosaic tile patterns on its floor. It had narrow old-fashioned windows, original artwork on the walls—mostly photos—and fresh flowers on the tables. The atmosphere signaled that the food was prepared with more than usual care.

  Uri was sitting in a corner in the back, reading the Journal of Psychiatry. There weren’t that many other people inside the restaurant; most of the customers were outside on the porch enjoying the beginning of spring. There were two other tables with single occupants, and another with a young couple. Uri was the only man alone, but Wendy was still relieved to see the journal, a sure sign that it was him. On the table in front of the journal was a slim black segment. As she approached closer to the table, she realized it wasn’t a beeper; it was a wallet that he must have removed from his back pocket and placed there. It was remarkably like the wallet her father always carried. She walked over to the table and put her hand on his arm, lightly. He looked up, confused, startled for a moment out of the concentration of his reading. She said, “Hi, Uri.”