by Miriam Cohen
At bedtime, her mother brings her nightgown, deodorant, Styrofoam wig head, and the book she is reading into Yael’s room. Yael guesses the divorce has started now. Her mother removes her wig and places it its Styrofoam head. Her real hair always looks so disappointing when she takes off the wig. Everything about her is stranger, smaller, without it. The wig head has a disproportionately long neck. Also, her mother has stuck wig pins into the center of one of its eyes, and Yael half-expects it to bleed. She closes her eyes and feels the softness of her lid, the delicate, gel-like ball beneath.
Her father comes in to say good night to Yael while her mother is changing. She is in her underwear. “Not right now,” she says.
“Oh, come on,” he says. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“I told you not right now.”
He sits down on Yael’s bed. “I have a right to say goodnight to my daughter.”
For a second, Yael thinks he is talking to her.
“Fine,” says her mother. She takes off her underwear. She takes off her bra.
“I’m going to tell my daughter a story,” Yael’s father says.
Yael’s mother walks across the room, naked. This is nothing for anyone to ever find out about. It’s not nice. It’s not modest. Good mothers, the ones who are pious and whose daughters’ clothing always match, don’t even take off the head-coverings in the house. Their hair is too private even for the walls. Their hair is for their husbands only. Also, good mothers have five, six kids, sometimes ten or eleven (though ten or eleven is a little weird, because then your hair might not always be washed—but really, Yael shouldn’t speak, because she’s not always that clean herself). The problem is there’s something wrong with her mother’s uterus, which is a word that’s not nice to say in front of other people.
The bare skin of her mother’s belly brushes the top of Yael’s head as her mother reaches for her nightgown. The nightgown is red and made of silk. Yael has never seen it before.
“Once upon a time,” her father says, and a part of Yael wants to interrupt, to tell him, no, she is too old for this, she’s in second grade already, but another part of her wants to do what she does do, which is lean her head into the hollow of her father’s neck. The itchiness of his stubble is a fair sacrifice to make for the vibrations of his voice humming pleasantly in her own throat.
“There was a fairy princess.”
Yael smiles. The princess, she knows, cannot be anyone but her.
“And a dashing, chivalrous prince.”
Yael does not know what “chivalrous” means, but she likes that her father thinks she does. She stores these new words next to each other: “valid,” “chivalrous.” Her mind is a shelf.
“Oh, and but this prince loved the princess. He loved her more than anyone loved her. But the princess, you see”—here her father stops and wags his finger in the air—“she was born without a soul. It was a defect she hid well, of course.”
Yael’s mother has changed into the red nightgown. It goes only to her thighs, and it’s see-through enough for her nipples not to be a secret.
She says, “I’m just going to…” and leaves the room.
“Then what happened?” Yael says.
“What? Oh, why don’t we wait for Mommy to come back? She wouldn’t want to miss the end of the story. It’s her favorite, you know.”
They don’t say anything after that. They just wait. When her mother comes back, it’s with a bottle of lotion. She raises one leg onto the foldaway bed and squeezes a small circle of pink lotion onto the center of her palm. Then she rubs both her hands together and moves them slowly up her leg, beginning with her ankle, ending at the top of her thigh. When she’s done, she switches legs.
“So the soulless princess,” Yael’s father continues, too loudly, “she seduced the handsome prince—”
“Chivalrous,” Yael corrects him, savoring the sounds of this new word as she pushes it between her teeth and tongue like a candy bar’s nougat center.
“Chivalrous,” her father agrees. “The chivalrous prince fell head over heels for the soulless princess. Invited her right into his chariot. Married her with the finest rabbi of the land officiating. But it was all a clever ruse, wasn’t it?”
Yael is not sure if he is asking her a question. She lifts her head from her father’s neck.
“Nah, she was just taking him for a ride. She wanted his soul for herself, is all.”
Yael’s mother says, “Stop it.”
“His soul, his checkbook.”
Her mother closes the cap on the lotion. She laughs, but it sounds more like she is coughing. “His checkbook?”
Her father’s back goes very straight. Even though he has not finished the story, he stands and kisses Yael on the forehead, the spot he uses to check for a fever. Her cheek is where she is supposed to be kissed goodnight. The door closes behind him.
The foldaway bed is still empty and neatly made, but Yael guesses her mother has forgotten about it, because she crawls into Yael’s bed with her, her legs slippery-smooth. Yael looks at her digital watch and sees that it is midnight, and the world is not magical the way she has always imagined midnight to be. It’s just the same. Yael turns over in bed so her spine matches her mother’s and, together, they are the two sides of a butterfly.
Yael knows she should be sad about the divorce, but all she feels is excited. For show and tell today, she will have something to tell. She is grateful that her parents are divorcing now, while she is still in second grade, because strictly speaking, show and tell should have ended in first grade; it’s only by the grace of Mrs. Friedman that they have show and tell this year at all. Definitely, by third grade, it will be something babyish and outgrown and altogether boring. For now though, show and tell retains its appeal, though the prize from a cereal box no longer means anything to anyone. Show and tell, in second grade, is serious.
Last month, for example, Aliza broke her finger during recess, and instead of telling the teacher, she waited, and the finger, which was by then blown up and a different color and bent back too far, was her show and tell. She had to go to home after that. The next day, her finger was in a splint, a disappointment because a splint is not a cast and cannot easily be signed. Yael thinks her show and tell will be better than Aliza’s because it’s not gross, and because, unlike Aliza, she will not have to leave the room before she is done. She will tell the class everything, and they will listen, and she will be special and popular and tragic.
On the school bus, she tries hard to act like this is a regular day. She peels the green tape off the seat in front of her, revealing yellowish foam that reminds her of cheese curls. She sticks her finger into the foam. It’s soft and disgusting. She picks off some foam and holds it in the web between her forefinger and thumb, looks to make sure no one is watching, then stuffs the foam into her mouth. Now she knows what bus tastes like.
Elisheva, who lives down the street, gets on the bus and sits down next to her. Elisheva does not eat cereal and milk in a bowl. Instead, every morning she comes on the bus with a plastic baggie of dry cereal. For lunch, she eats two slices of white bread that is a sandwich of nothing. She is very picky, like a queen. Yael eats cereal and milk in a bowl and a sandwich with peanut butter or cream cheese or tuna at lunch.
Yael holds her news inside her lungs like air before diving. And she knows, better than she has ever known anything before, that even though Elisheva has long hair, and the lights on her sneakers still work, and her sticker book is almost entirely full, Elisheva is not, after all, that great.
“Gross,” Elisheva says, pointing to the seat. She untwists her baggie and begins to eat her cereal. Today it’s cheerios. She eats each cheerio individually, sometimes sticking one on the tip of her tongue.
Yael sucks on the sides of her cheeks. “I have something cool for show and tell,” she says.
Elisheva touches her cheerio-ed tongue to her nose. This is a trick Yael has tried, but cannot do. “What?”
/> “It’s a surprise,” Yael says.
Elisheva shrugs. Her hair is down to her tush, and when she sits, she arranges herself so that she is sitting on it. She tells people she has to sit on it. Yael watches her, and knows that she doesn’t. She can, but she doesn’t have to.
Aliza gets on the bus. Her finger is healed, and she doesn’t wear the splint anymore. It’s just a regular finger. Yael feels sorry for Aliza. She’s glad a divorce isn’t something that goes away.
The school bus pulls up in front of the elementary school. The doors open, like, Yael imagines, the chariot in her father’s story. She feels like giving out her autograph.
After morning prayers and math, and current events, it’s at last her turn for show and tell. Yael walks to the front of the room wearing what she hopes is a modest smile.
“She doesn’t have anything, Mrs. Friedman, she doesn’t have anything,” says Shira, who has a custard-colored birthmark that takes up half her face. She bounces up and down in her chair like she has to pee.
“I can’t hear you when your hand isn’t raised,” says Mrs. Friedman.
Though it is maybe the millionth time she has said this, Yael is always astounded by the willingness, on the part of her teacher, to lie, and so blatantly: there is no one, in the second grade, who could possibly be under the impression that, in the event of a teacher’s inability to hear her student, she would say anything less than, What?
Shira raises her hand. Mrs. Friedman calls on her.
“She doesn’t have anything.”
Yael opens and closes her fists. “I do,” she says. “It’s just a ‘tell’, not a ‘show.’”
“But it’s show and tell, not show or tell,” says Shira.
Yesterday, during recess, Yael told Shira that her birthmark was a slice of Munster cheese. She is dismayed at the thought that Shira would hold this against her. She had not even meant to be mean. Failing to share this revelation with Shira, the owner of the birthmark, would have been like finding a shape in the clouds and keeping it to herself, allowing everyone around her to see ordinariness when really, in the sky, was a dragon.
Yael thinks it is likely that she will cry, and after that, she will punch Shira, right in the stomach.
“Did you forget your show and tell today?” Mrs. Friedman says.
“It’s a tell,” Yael says.
“It’s very important to be responsible and to remember when it is your day for show and tell. What if everyone forgot? What would happen then?”
Yael feels like her head is filled with bus-foam.
“I didn’t forget,” she says, and Mrs. Friedman begins to speak again, and her voice is firm and flat and getting louder, but Yael does not hear it. She does not hear it and she will not sit down.
“My parents are getting divorced,” she says, and Mrs. Friedman stops speaking.
“Where did you hear that word?” she says.
“From my parents.” Yael thinks her teacher is possibly the stupidest person she has ever met.
“Yael,” Mrs. Friedman says, “it’s very wrong to lie.”
Yael is in trouble again. Only this time, it’s actually not fair. Other times, when she has spoken out of turn, or pulled Elisheva’s hair, or gone to the bathroom without asking, the note to the principal has felt inevitable. But the note Mrs. Friedman is writing now does not make sense. Yael wants to run across the room and rip it into confetti.
Two doors down, in the principal’s office, Rabbi Klein smells of cloves. When Yael’s father wears a suit, which is on Shabbos, he smells this way too. Rabbi Klein has a beard, which her father does not have. Some fathers do, and some fathers don’t. It’s better when they do. The reason he is calling her parents, Rabbi Klein explains, is because this is not the first note. It is not the second or the third or the fourth, but the fifth. He raises one hand in the air, almost like he is waiting for her to high-five him.
Yael may not go back to class while she waits for her parents; instead, she will sit on the bench in the secretary’s office. She will not talk to anyone. If someone tries to talk to her, she is to tell them, politely, that she is in trouble and cannot speak right now. She will think about what she has done. What she has done is been disrespectful.
Yael likes the secretary. She gives Yael a butterscotch candy. Yael sucks on the butterscotch until it’s a thin, translucent disc with tiny holes around the edges. The secretary answers the phone and types on the computer. Because there is no school nurse, when a teacher’s aid brings in a kindergartener with a lopsided yarmulke and a scraped knee, the secretary is the one who helps him. First, she cuts a Band-Aid in half lengthwise. Then she crosses the two thin Band-Aid halves over each other. Holding the edges carefully, she gets up and places the sticky X on the little boy’s knee, patting it firmly. “Good as new,” she says, and then the boy gets a butterscotch. He takes the teacher’s aid’s hand and Yael watches them leave. She thinks he must have been pretending, for attention, because the kindergartner’s knees bend easily as he skips.
Yael wishes she could ask for another butterscotch. If she could have just one more candy, she would be happy, completely. But even without the candy, she thinks this bench is somewhere she could live.
When her mother arrives, Yael is disappointed. Her bench days are over. She says, “Mommy,” even though she is not allowed to speak, because when her mother is there, Rabbi Klein is less in charge. Her mother bends down to give her a quick kiss, and when she does, Yael realizes there is something off about her mother. It takes her a moment to see it exactly, and when she does, it seems impossible that it has taken her so long: her mother isn’t wearing her wig. Yael checks her mother’s left hand, but her wedding band is still there. She can’t figure out what these two pieces of information mean together: only unmarried women don’t cover their hair; only married women wear wedding bands.
Rabbi Klein calls them into his office. “This kind of repeated chutzpa,” he says, shaking his head. “Behavior we just can’t have.”
Yael’s mother crosses her legs and then folds her hands onto her lap. “My husband is sorry he couldn’t be here.”
Rabbi Klein nods and swats at the air, as if the apology is a bug he means to kill.
Yael folds her hands into her lap the way her mother has. She considers the phrase “my husband.” Suddenly, she feels she has made a mistake, that she has somehow misunderstood, and her parents are not divorcing. It is like getting the chain call on a snow day, only to be called back, a moment later, with the news: there will be school.
“He couldn’t get away from work,” her mother continues, and Yael almost corrects her. She is absolutely sure that her father is not at work, because he has not been to work in two months. First he called his time at home “Being laid off.” Now he calls it “Exploring other options.” She knows it has been two months because her mother has put a star next to every day on the calendar her father has not been to work, and October and November are full of stars. She almost corrects her mother, but doesn’t. Maybe her father just got a new job, and today is his first day, or else maybe he just got tired of being at home and went back to his old job.
Good fathers—the kinds with six or seven or eleven kids—don’t work. They have to study Torah all day because that’s how come the world gets to stay up. They’re called learners. Fathers who are less good, like Yael’s father, are called earners because they do work, but it’s not actually the worst thing, because they give money to the learners, and also they can give the school all the money it asks for, which is called full tuition. And that’s also why, despite all the behavior notes Yael gets, her parents sometimes get a plaque that says Parents of the Year.
This year, Yael guesses, there won’t be a plaque.
“Of course,” her mother says now, laughs. “Of course, I have to work too.”
Rabbi Klein wrinkles his forehead. Even when he stops wrinkling, some wrinkles stay.
“Yael introduced a word to the class that may upset some
parents,” he says. “Divorce,” he says, glancing around the office. “I don’t know if that word could have come from a relative, or if there’s a TV somewhere…”
He looks at them like he knows they are liars and is waiting for them to just say so already. But they don’t have a TV. Yael is almost absolutely sure of this. If they have one, she has never seen it.
“We don’t have any option at this point but suspension.” Rabbi Klein drops his head like he is sorry. The tip of his beard makes a rustling sound against his tie.
“Well, then,” her mother says. Her smile makes Yael’s cheeks hurt.
Yael’s parents take her out for dinner that night, and it feels like a celebration. The restaurant is milchig, so you can get pasta with cheese, pizza, whatever’s dairy. Meat is next door. The whole block, basically, is kosher. There’s also a bakery.
Yael’s mother says she can order whatever she wants, so she orders chocolate-chip waffles. The waitress smiles at Yael’s parents and tells Yael in a sing-song voice that it’s dinnertime.
Yael’s father takes out a five-dollar bill from his wallet. He reaches out as though to shake the waitress’s hand, even though Yael knows he wouldn’t ever really touch her: she is a woman who is not his wife.
Of course she doesn’t shake his hand. “We really do stop serving breakfast at eleven.”
Yael’s father slaps the table and there is the five-dollar bill, wrinkled and small.
“Great. That’s perfect,” her mother says.
The waitress taps her pencil against her notepad, eraser side down.
“Can I get you something else? Or…”
Yael waits for the waitress to finish. Or what? she wants to know. Or the chef will make the waffles special for her? Or the waitress will offer to make the waffles herself?
“Do you want to order drinks, first?” the waitress says.
“I’ll have a Diet Coke,” Yael’s mother says. “No, wait, Diet Sprite.” She nods her head. “That one’s caffeine-free, right?”
“It’s a soda,” Yael’s father says.
The waitress asks if they need more time. She looks over her shoulder at the other tables, which are not filled with customers, because it’s a Wednesday and it’s nine-thirty at night, and people have to be at home.