by Joshua Braff
“Who did you talk to?” I ask.
“Some old lady.”
“What the hell’s a shatelmaker?” Leo says.
“The wig maker. She’s getting fitted for the wedding.”
“Already?” my father says. “When the hell is it, tomorrow?”
“Two weeks,” Sarah says.
“Okay,” says Leo. “The place I’m shooting is four blocks from here. Let’s get the booth off and we can keep looking for her if you want.”
“Fuck that,” my father says. “We came this far, let’s go now. Did she tell you where the wig lady lives?”
Sarah nods. “I know where Miri lives.” She points behind us and Leo gets back in the driver’s seat. Three minutes later we’re in front of a beige Victorian house with a brick driveway and a sign on the lawn. GOD DOES NOT WATCH OVER THOSE WHO DO NOT OBSERVE TORAH.
“This is gonna work,” my dad says. “Go tell your sister that her father’s outside, waiting for her.”
“I’m not going in there.”
“Why the hell not? You’re owed.”
“What if mom’s in there?”
“Even better. We’ve got momentum on our side. Go. Don’t think about it, just go.”
Sarah and I walk up the driveway together. She points to the door that leads to the basement. It has a bell on it and a sign that reads MIRI’S in elaborate script. Through the window in the door I can see a row of lit vanity bulbs on the far side of the room. Ten or twelve walls of high shelving are arranged in the center of the space. I try the doorknob and it’s open so I push it a bit and peek in. “It’s open,” I say.
“David,” she says.
“It’s open.”
“I had two fittings here before I left. Miri does not like me.” She leans forward and her mouth is against mine. “Good luck,” she says, and leaves me.
“Sarah . . . Sarah!”
It takes a few minutes of standing, still tasting the kiss from the Hasid who ran off. But finally I open the door. I hear and see no one. The shelves are army green and metal and it’s more like thirty of them. I step in and I’m between rows of shelves on which sit many small shoe box-sized containers. Each box has a sticker on it. The ones closest to me say CAUCASIAN EUROPEAN, HANA’S OWN, THE ALLY, THE ELEVEN-FIFTY. As I move further down the aisle, toward the vanity bulbs, I hear a woman’s voice.
“Hello?” I say, way too quietly. The farther I walk down the aisle, the more I hear that woman’s voice.
“Not fifteen!” she says. “Five oh.”
I stop and squat, the lights about ten feet away.
“Fifty percent European human and fifty percent Konecculon. Rifkah!” the voice screams and two shelves away from me a head pops up. It’s a young woman with a sheet-white face and a black wig.
“Yes, Miri.”
“Get me four multilong, custom brunette Europeans and a half dozen of the half-n-halfs.”
“Dark brown?”
“And a custom one fifty-two and a Jolie with cinnamon highlights.”
“Yes, Miri.”
The girl disappears into the stacks of shelves to my left. I stay frozen, listening to the sound of containers being opened. The bell on the door jingles behind me so I run to the aisle to my right. It’s my mother. She’s so small. She has a cup of coffee in her hand. I don’t remember her ever drinking coffee. She walks toward the woman’s voice and I listen to her steps, watching her through the gaps in the shelving.
“Shalom aleichem, Miri.”
“Look at your sheitel, Miriam, it’s, it’s . . .”
“What?” my mother says.
“Have you been washing it?”
“Of course.”
“Only cool water?”
“Yes, yes.”
“How often?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Looks thirsty,” Miri says. There’s a sneeze and then another, my sister. I hear her voice in it.
My mother laughs lightly. “Today, let’s think about Dena.”
“I understand, but please, do not use a standard hair-brush on it.”
“I don’t, Miri. I use the one you gave me.”
“Because here, feel it, touch right here. Tension on the follicles will stretch them. But, okay, you’re right, enough about you. Now, Dena, you’ll need six sheitels total.”
And now I see Debra. She’s sitting on a chair, like one in a beauty parlor.
“With the family you’re marrying into, it would be ashunda, poot, poot, to use synthetics. The father is from the grand rabbi’s home, yes?”
“Yes,” my mother says.
“Mazel tov.”
“Toda Raba.”
“Six wigs?” my sister says. I stand from my crouch and from here I can see her chair in the reflection of the mirror.
“Two for everyday life, two for Shabbos and . . . look at all this hair. This will need to be thinned.”
“I’m not cutting today,” my sister says. “I’m just matching color today.”
“I won’t be able to fit anything on,” says Miri.
“I don’t want it cut.”
“I didn’t say cut, I said thinned. Your wedding is when?”
“Two weeks,” my mother says. “August seventh.”
“Which synagogue?”
“Beth Tikvah.”
“We must do a fitting today or it won’t be ready. If it fits badly at your Sheva Bruchas the women will be laughing at you. Now! I match and design for brunettes better than anyone in the world. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“Synthetics, even if treated perfectly, will begin to show signs of wear in six months.”
“I think we’re out of the Jolies,” says Rifkah as she joins them. “But here is an Indonesian brunette.”
“Oh, this will be perfect for the wedding. This is pure human hair. What do you think?”
“Lovely,” says my mother. “What do you think, Dena? Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It’s . . . brown.”
“It’s the best hair in the universe,” Miri says. “Look at it. Weight, perfect, strength, perfect, texture and high protein content, perfect. Okay, good, we like it, let’s try it on. I’ll snip one inch from the weight.”
“No,” my sister insists. “I just want to pick color today.”
“Two weeks,” Miri shouts. “Two weeks and you will become a woman in the eyes of Hashem! This is not a game, you’re here now, I’m not a butcher.”
“I don’t want to cut it today.”
“Then you’re making my job impossible.”
“Dena!” my mother says. “A little you could lose.”
“I don’t care.” She is firm.
“Okay, first let’s try it on without cutting. Maybe we’ll have a miracle. Now, with this product you can place it on a wig stand and go from curly to straight with an electric curler or pin curlers. From twelve to fifteen wearings in spring and summer and six to eight wearings in fall and winter until washing it. Humidity and air quality are big factors so depending—”
“It hurts!” Debra says.
“Where?” Miri asks. “Hey! Until you buy it, let me do the touching, yes?”
“Take it off,” Debra says. “Please, just get it off me.”
Miri laughs. “It must be the wafting, your hair is too long.”
“Please take it off.”
“So touchy, this one. How about now? I moved it. Is it better?”
“A little.”
“Scissors and comb. I’m only trimming the back where you’re snagging. Nothing more. You are not a little girl anymore, yes? You need to act like the kallah you will become.”
I hear a screech and brace myself to run. It’s then I see my sister moving toward me so I turn and dart for the door. When I get outside I tear off around the building and down the driveway but I don’t see the van. No van. I start to run but where, which way, so stupid that they’d do this. Harrison Street, Mailson Street, a village of stores and Hasids everywhe
re. No van, no white van anywhere. Where the fuck did they go? To unload the stupid phone booth? I get to a street called Blake and I’m pretty sure it links up with Morrison, the street my mother lives on. Five minutes later I see the apartment building. From the other side of the road, I look up at the tree, the windows beyond it. I make out a vase on the sill and the grand rabbi on the wall. Two men walk through the lobby and come out the front door. One of them stops when he sees me.
“Can I help you?” he says. As he looks at me, I watch his face grow confused beneath the brim of his hat. It’s Avram. I remember him from Sarah’s house, when her sister announced her marriage. Red bearded with circular frames. He says something to his friend in Yiddish, then looks up at his window. My stepfather.
“It’s me,” I say, approaching him. “David.”
“I know.”
He nods and smiles through the strain on his face. “We met once.”
“How are you?” I say.
“You look older,” he says.
I can see his mind working, just wishing he’d stayed inside. His friend looks down, contemplating his shoes.
“We have shul,” Avram says.
“Can I talk to you?” I say. In his eyes I see the worry. When he removes his fedora there’s a black velvet yarmulke underneath. He rests his hand on it and sighs. “You’re not the only one,” he says.
“What?”
“I mean, I know other families at the compound who have this problem. Baalai teshuva with family members who are not interested. So you’re not the only one.”
“Oh.”
“I guess my first thought for you is whether you want to repair your relationship with your mother. I think you need to understand, deeply, who she is now. And what her life has become. I also would say she needs to understand who you are.”
“You would? I mean, you do?”
“Of course. When it comes to Hashem, and the laws of halakhah, the lessons are complicated. It’s never easy for young people, especially from split families like yours because . . . you have a father who doesn’t believe in anything, really, so you haven’t been given the chance to learn, to listen, to understand Torah or Talmud. In fact a child of a baal teshuva is—”
“Can I say something?”
He hadn’t been looking at me but now he blinks a hundred times and our eyes meet.
“I’d like to give my sister some photographs. Pictures I took of us.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t have them with me right now. But I can come back.”
“I think I should warn your mother.”
“Warn her?”
“Tell her. I’ll tell her.”
Avram looks to the sky before holding his index finger up to his friend. “Every Jew, David, no matter how his life has unfolded, has the opportunity to begin again.” He reaches in his jacket and takes out a pen. “This is my phone at my office.” He writes it on a piece of scrap paper from his pocket then hands it to me. “Think about your life and where you are. Think about your mother and sister. We choose to make sacrifices in the life we live, and we make them to respect ourselves and to respect Hashem, God. I think you should think about what it means to have your sister and mother in your life.”
I see the van. Leo is driving two miles per hour past the apartment. I lift my arm and when he sees me he guns the engine before screeching to a stop.
“Get in!”
“What?” I say, looking behind me at Avram.
“Your dad.”
I get in the van and Avram is still standing there. “I’ll tell her I saw you,” he says.
Leo floors the accelerator and I fall between the front two seats. “He had a thing, an attack. We called an ambulance from a house over there.”
“An attack.”
“He was holding his arm like this, gripping it and he was in pain, real bad pain.”
“Go faster.”
“I didn’t know where a hospital was and neither did that girl.”
He pulls to a stop across the street from the wig maker and points to a gray house. I run across the lawn and up the porch steps and into the front hallway and I see him there in the living room, unconscious, just lying on this stranger’s plastic-covered sofa.
“Dad,” I say, and my mind flashes to my sister’s face. I hear a child crying, the sound of weeping, and Brandi is on her knees rocking back and forth, her hands pinned together. “I told him, I told him.”
“Daddy?” I touch his earlobe for some reason, just stroke the shape of it, the softness. “Don’t,” I whisper, and Leo shouts, “David! They’re here, they’re here, get out of the way.”
“They’re here,” I tell him. I hear a walkie-talkie hiss and a dispatcher voice.
“Where is he?” a paramedic says, pushing me out of the way to attack my father with violent jerking motions that droop his head back.
“Don’t hurt him,” I say, knowing it sounds stupid.
“Is he alive?” Leo yells at them. My father’s skin, his lips, his hands—all have a white dust on them.
“Don’t die, Marty!” says Brandi and one of the men plunges a needle straight into my father’s heart. He doesn’t budge and one of them pounds his chest with his fist.
“Nothing,” the paramedic says, and presses a stethoscope to his chest.
I reach out my arm and hold my father’s hand. “It’s fine,” I tell him. Every word he ever said to me, every memory we shared is water now and leaking through the floorboards.
“Are you his son?” a man says behind me, and I see the family who lives here, standing by the staircase. Hasids. Six of them, five children and a man. A little girl sucks her thumb and stares at the person on her couch.
“Yes I am,” I say, just as Sarah runs in the house, out of breath.
“He couldn’t breathe, David. He asked for you. I told him you were close. That you’d be right back. Is he okay?” She gets on her toes to see him, to get a glimpse of his body on the couch.
“No,” I tell her. “No. He’s not.”
Lieberman and Wise
I SEE HIM. IN THE shallow of a dream. But it isn’t his hair or his voice or even his face anymore. It’s someone else’s father with his own son on the beach, and the sand is black. The boy is blocked from the sun by a white, flowing sheet and he’s talking to the man, softly, before it all fades amid the sounds of the ocean, that gentle constant, the in and out of the waves.
“Hello? Who’s there?” I say, sitting up in my father’s bed. I don’t remember choosing to sleep here.
“It’s time,” Brandi says from the hallway.
Time to bury my dad.
The gunshots are as steady as a metronome. The shooting range next door. Pop, pop, pop, pop, like the person pulling the trigger is learning to play “Chopsticks.” From the gravesite, I watch Leo and Jocko and Tiki all flinching every time another round is fired. Sarah arrives with the rabbi she found, a guy with Art Garfunkel hair. He tells me I’m the only “official” mourner because Jewish law says you’re not technically a mourner if you’re not the father, mother, son, daughter, sister, brother, or spouse of the deceased.
“You’ll speak after I say a few prayers,” he says.
“I’d like to speak too,” Brandi says.
“Are you a direct relative?” he asks.
“No,” she says.
“Then, please, I only want the immediate family to participate. It’s tradition.”
She’s not happy. Sarah whispers something into her ear but it doesn’t help. We all walk up to the gravesite but Brandi stays back. I try to wave her over, but she’s angry, her back to us now. Jocko goes back down to get her but she won’t listen to him. I can’t worry about her right now. The coffin is pine and unpainted and looks as cheap as it did in the funeral home. But apparently Jews believe that you leave the world in a simple box, wrapped in clothing with no pockets and a shroud of linen or muslin. He didn’t believe in any of this but now, as he lies here in that box, there a
re still rules about who can talk and who can mourn. I’m so sorry for him. In there alone, a stranger’s tallis around his shoulders. I’m sorry that the most religious day of his life is today.
“Oh, Lord, what is man that you should care about him, mortal man that you should think of him? Man is like a breath, his days are like a passing shadow. O Lord bend your sky and come down; touch the mountains and they will smoke . . .”
In the parking lot I see Ira with his wife and some other man. Brandi has no choice but to walk with them now.
“Rescue me, save me from the mighty waters, from the hands of foreigners, whose mouth speaks lies, and whose oaths are false.”
I feel Leo’s hand on my back and it triggers the loss, the weight of where I’m headed. I swallow again and again to avoid tears and the effort is tiring, nauseating. The rabbi says a bunch in Hebrew, then says my name. “You ready?” he says.
I step closer to the grave and look down into it. The walls have roots sticking out of the cracks in the mud. My grandfather’s plot is three feet away.
“I was told I’m the only mourner here today,” I say. “But we all know that’s not true.” A light drizzle starts and the rain begins to darken the pine. “His family was his father, Myron. His daughter, Debra. Me, David. And of course you, Brandi.”
She takes the moment to smirk at the rabbi.
“I miss you already. I wish we could have said a few more things. I didn’t know you were going . . . when you did. If you hear me, I want you to know I love you. And I’m going to miss you.”
After a long silence, the rabbi signals the two cemetery workers, who lower the box into the ground. He asks me to lift the shovel and scoop some dirt on the coffin. A symbol, he tells us, of the finality of my father’s life and the reality of death, according to Judaism, the religion into which he was born.
I do it, I get some on the tip of the shovel and toss it down onto the box. The dirt hits it with an empty sound and most of it slides off the sides. It is a raw and sobering ritual, assisting in the task of his burial. The rabbi takes the shovel, says another prayer in Hebrew but before he finishes, Brandi takes the shovel from his hands. Her scoop is much bigger and hits the box with a muddy plop. She hands it back to the rabbi. She’s crying hard as she walks down the path and into the parking lot. Ira kisses me on the lips and I feel cold, man saliva on my mouth.