The sound and motion are delayed only by a twist of the power knob, and a channel switch:
Doug Henning is surprised. He doesn’t handle the emotion like my mother. The magician wears expressions like he wears his clothes, a suit of starlight and skintightness. On the stage beside him rises a great cage. An elephant shuffles inside. The shimmer of a lake-wide cloth floats down just at the high point of a gesture from the animal. A dark trunk waving drowns. Doug Henning’s broad teeth flash. This year’s ambition is clear, and what a notion! What a thing to do! And what a place to allow it. This is where I came from.
“Remember,” says Doug Henning. “The utter glory of the world! The utter wonder of it, is totally available to—”
Poof, stillness and dark. One dot of light hangs in the middle of the screen.
“Is it not obvious you’ve sacrificed the privilege?” My mother has cut off the show.
“No. No! Check my homework!”
“Your achievements in my kitchen I already saw. Your reckless self-endangerment I won’t address. Not yet. The property destruction. Your uniform in ruins. I noticed perfectly good fish sticks in the garbage. Plum jam was consciously applied to my cabinet doors.”
“It was the orphan.” A yellow head pokes from the kitchen doorway. “Her. She made me do it.”
“You ask a friend home, you’re responsible.”
“I didn’t ask! She came all of a sudden from the pharmacy.”
“Okay. Before we get absurd.”
“You can’t! You can’t you can’t you can’t you can’t!”
“Why’s that?”
“He comes on only once a year.”
“In other words he’ll come again.”
“Who knows? What if not? Or what if he comes over there, but we don’t get him here? The first time I don’t think we got him. He’s not from local programming. He’s from the States. Like me.”
She says, “That man is a Canadian.”
The television crackles off spare electricity.
“Sweetness!” my mother says, but not to me. The orphan comes, still chocolate-smeared. My mother takes the towel off my head and with it wipes that dirty face. An orphan squints with pleasure while a mother lets her daughter’s eyes drip tears. “Your friend would like to see you safely off.” The orphan mentions dinner. “Next time we’ll plan for it.”
The elevator sinks. I count each floor by every jolt as we fall, eyes on the door. The orphan breathes behind.
Six. Five.
“You look gorgeous,” she says.
Four.
“Really cute. It’s like no style anyone’s seen yet, like of a real star. You’ll get loads of attention. You’ll feel very proud. But people will be jealous, and for that you will have to be strong.”
Two. I whirl around to face the mirror and the news catches up. Gold yellow stains me like a melted crown. Sorrow comes gushing up again, cascading over me. She rushes to dive in with an embrace but I keep her out. I finger-wag, telling her this: “I only came to represent the class!”
“I know you came!” she says. “That day the people brought good things. For dinner I had marble cake, the best I ever had. Did you get a piece? Did you taste the herring?”
“You lie.” I realize this now. “How many best cakes can there be? So about me helping with your party: I will not. Just celebrate as usual with that shit-breath cat.”
The words are fuller of my feelings than what usually gets out, but she is so crammed full of hers that mine don’t make a stir. She only tweaks a dainty portion of her cowlick. “Zeessie washes herself eighty more times a day than you do,” she says, “if you wash yourself once.”
Ground. Though I hold the door open she stays inside.
She says, “Wasn’t that fun with homework? We could think of more activities like that. Remember how I helped you all the way home? How we ran! We’re good friends. If we made a mistake today tomorrow we’ll make it right.”
“You made it.”
She keeps harvesting that tuft, busily pulling nothing up. “You never said stop.”
“I can’t see my own head! You can. You didn’t say one word. Why? That was your mistake. You make mistakes on purpose. You think no one will figure it out.” She only looks at me, her hand continuing to work. I have given her something to think about. Here’s more: “Your father’s broken. The way you’re going you’ll break him worse. Your mother caught her sickness off your cat.”
Hairs snap. She flicks them, radiant and short, quick fallers, in the air between us. Wordless, she walks out.
The next day is full of troubles from its earliest thought. A sun hat will cover it best. The weather worries me. It’s not so sunny. Questions will come, and how to explain this: My mother has written a note to show the office. The hat stays on indoors.
But the trouble I expect is never first to come. The orphan sits on the stoop outside my lobby. Beside her rests a plastic crate, gray, capped with a board of wood which is secured with rope. She pushes herself to her feet. She comes behind me, helps my book bag off, and slips it onto her bare back.
“What kind of sandwich did your mother make today?” she says. “Salami? Jam.” She bends and hoists the crate, as well, joggling it to reckon with a moving load. Gold eyes peer through the slats.
Who will decide the destinations between home and school and back? The orphan takes too big a part in her own scheduling. Like she won’t do the same in mine? She leaves the group without a parent or permission. Last spring, Amalya Blatt had an appointment for a cavity at noon, and saw the orphan on the sizing bench at Ivgi Shoes, alone, being measured. On a field trip to Nili Street, she snuck into the bakery and bought napoleon cake for a smile. And, summer break, I think I saw her in another city. I was traveling with my summer camp to see the ships in Haifa. On the docks a girl like me sat on a milk crate, thin legs folded Eastern-style, skirt tucked like a diaper. A patent leather lady’s purse was hanging down her side, nobody watching her as she played dress-up in the shadow of the cranes, while men in foreign sailing clothes arrived and went.
A blue-green truck rolls past. It pauses at the stop sign on the corner, flashing left, left. Women sit in the open bed, cloth covering most of the heads. The olive pickers, hiding their contempt. The orphan ducks behind too thin a trunk.
Why go on? I should have abided by the conduct in the grieving home. I could have completed the assignment with the lawful words.
The truck turns. Children of other buildings run out in uniforms of different schools.
“Sometimes she’s with me all day long,” the orphan says.
She sidesteps the ficus and starts to go, her crate leading the way, my schoolbag following.
“Would you have guessed?” she says. “I never told anyone till you. We’ll leave her in the bomb shelter. At break we’ll sit with her, I’ll open up the crate and for the first five minutes she’ll stay close. We’ll take our shoes off. She will lick every single toe. You’re going to get to know her really close. Cats are tigers. I can work her into it and out of it. I know her a long time.” She hands the crate to me. The heavy load does not like being passed.
The orphan dips her hand into her collar.
In the locket she pulls out, young Zeessie looks more like a fawn. The face is miniature, but the eyes and ears full-grown. The red furred torso is stocky, the legs tapered and long, lengthening as she stretches up out of a catnap on a washcloth, spine strained like a bow, hamstrings taut. Pointed head the arrow, baby eyes the shine, she’s ready, aiming to advance her education in the world.
The orphan clicks the locket shut. It doesn’t look fake. The metal is handsome in all its stages, as much where she has polished it as where she has neglected. I did not think the orphan would be carrying a thing so good.
The Verse in the Margins
THIS YEAR’S EARRINGS were reprehensible.
“You remove those, you remove those immediately, and take also the opportunity to go to the rest room and
wipe that paint off your lips, all of it comes off. Also your eyes.”
The girl rose and left Mr. Durchschlag’s classroom.
Under normal circumstances, he liked to think the girls could find in him a father figure. No, he did not think that, so why should a man even in his thoughts to himself settle on an inadequate coinage? Not a father but an uncle figure they found in him, relatively young, kind, though of an acerbic wit, someone from whom a growing girl could exact her daily toll of male attention without risking a holdup. He was a larger presence to tussle with at no risk. These girls had no concept of the risk, of the urges they were so eager to summon from the aggregate of this world’s men. Imagine such earrings as the girl had been wearing before he had sent her out, out! Such ostentation, as if the ear were a rack in the window of a toy shop. If only she understood she advertised not goods but a transaction. However such a transaction she should not consider. How then could he explain what his students would understand only when, as wives, they had to adjust, eyes closed with forbearance, or, God forbid, when it was too late, which was to say too soon for a little girl? Dealing with these girls’ immodesty, their twinkles of metal and jewel or—let him remember where and when he was—plastic, clouds of perfume, gales of laughter, their raids into the meditations of their neighbor, he had no choice but to shed his benignity completely because he was disgusted with how constantly they wanted in.
“Shhh, sha!”
The rising chaos of female voices subsided in declining ripples. Front center by an empty partner seat, Orna Magouri covered her face with both her hands. Across the narrow aisle Mali Shemtov smoothed the pages of her book.
They all commuted here. Perhaps this contributed to the mood of hovering dissolve, the girls so far from home, and moreover placed on crumbly turf here in the dunes of Tel Shamai, to which they flocked from the inner lowlands and the coastal plain, from the cities of Rosh Ha’Ayin, Givat Shmuel, Holon, and Netanya, some even from his native Bnei Brak, to gather here, in one building in an undeveloped area outside Tel Aviv. The sea pulsed near, scenting the air but invisible from the road below the tufted sandy headland. A hotel stood in the distance, a glass-plated tower with no hint of stone, its base hidden upshore but the head seeming to peek up towards the school, as though the waves were less a hold on the imagination than what stood higher and farther inland, in a low maze of corridors, he and they, teacher and students, in a vocational school for religious girls.
Here, on this loose-earthed margin of the country, the girls convened. Their parents paid a deeply subsidized tuition in return for an unusual offer, that their daughters be taught a worldly trade without compromising the work of their Creator—ostensibly. Disadvantaged, the main category of the girls enrolled was called, but what the term commonly referred to was the least of their problems. Didn’t the mere act of birth threaten an overdraft at the bank and an underdraft of the mind? The girls’ most serious shortage was neither financial nor academic. For whether a Tami’s or a Shoshi’s father mixed cement or cake batter made no difference when the real concern was that in no case was he a Jew learned in the commandments and strict in their fulfillment, so forget about his daughter. And how to furnish his Etti or his Dalya and her failing grades with an income upon graduation should weigh immeasurably less heavy on the conscience of a Mr. Edri or Araki or Shimon than the wholesale degradation of the Jewry of the Islamic countries here in the Jewish state.
He could smell their cookery at the mere thought of them, as if before these musings carrying him off he hadn’t been standing in a classroom full of fractious and less-fractious girls, but rather had been climbing the stairs to his apartment, near to dinnertime, when suddenly the door of Rahamim Medina and Medina’s wife on the third floor had opened: chicken, lemon and tomato and—what were all the other accents? Spice wisdom such households held on to; their grip on God’s teachings was feebler. When their immigrant forefathers in, you could still say in some circles, the backward countries, Yemen, Iraq, et cetera, had been summoned here by the exultance and grief howls of the State’s birth days, barely had the newcomers brushed grains of Holy Soil from their longing lips and wiped tears of redemption from their eyes, when Prime Minister Ben Gurion had farmed off their children to labor with the Zionists in agricultural cooperatives. The offspring molded into the new local breed while the immigrant forebears were left to squat in tent cities. Young hands dispossessed of holy books, stuffed with shovels, mouths taught to praise radishes and not the Lord above.
And here their granddaughters sat today, descendants of those few young newcomers whose faith was not altogether lopped off along with their apron strings and sidelocks, who would commemorate their thinned but extant loyalty in a moniker: Traditional. Well, so at least not Secular, at least not “Free,” as the bulk of this regathered nation so shamelessly announced themselves. But also nowhere near Reverent, as he and his fold pledged their souls and their days, not even Observant, as did the rather less committed in their knitted skullcaps and short sleeves and motley fabrics off the same rack as the “Free.” Traditional. As if they bore the foremost loyalty to their tradition makers, to mortals rather than their Maker and His law. How could God’s legacy have been so swiftly reduced in the seed of scholars and commentators and physicians to kings? But also silversmiths and poets and spice mixers, embroidering songsters. He believed that this precisely was their problem, Babel crafts, too many towers, striving in too many directions: a tremor and it all fell apart, and lo. Where now was their sky unto which they had reached? But if God’s worship could degrade to almost nothing, awe on the other hand could not. Reverence kept smoldering in them, dimly, so they sent their daughters here.
To him. The professions that girls learned here they might pick up elsewhere. His discipline they would not. But did he delude himself? What really could the girls glean from their teacher of Mishnaic Law, their welcomer to the first thickness of rabbinical interpretation, to the day richly ordered in accordance with God’s word? Of such devoutness as his they couldn’t conceive, such interaction with the holy, action by action prescribed in worship: the fiber of his clothes, the most recent laving of his hands, the bodily thoughts of which he cleared his mind, the precise distance at which he stood from a female. They would see nothing of it, only this: a pale man of the European Jewry, less effusive than their fathers, less undulating in conversational pitch, a figure identical to and identified with so many others in his neighborhood whose name would mean to them just his sort of person. He in particular was built squarish but trim, fast-moving in his black suit, black hair well clipped beneath black skullcap, beard black also, fully black with not one bristle gray.
A man in monochrome trappings, this they saw, but first a man, and rare at that, one of three in the whole building, the others being the janitor, an old shuffler, and the principal, pock-faced. And so despite his stringent image in black and white, these girls regarded him with dilated eye and flaccid jaw as if he were a pop star. Did he enjoy at least the influence of a pop star on his fans? Recall the earrings, despite everything he said. Thick glazed rounds of plastic in garish colors like sucking candy, the size of them like candy also. A machine spits these earrings out molten and maybe some Arab glues on the posts with which a young unmarried Jewish girl skewers her lobes. Even tiny pearls on a young unmarried girl, however, the smallest chip of gem, what was the need? Why wanton damage to the tissue? And in return for what? How could he but hate this year’s gobs of glistening plastic, dazzle bought so cheap?
And when, as today, the earrings called his attention to organs which previously had been notable for function rather than form— that was to say, when a good girl and a listener suddenly became a displayer—this sickened him most of all. The girl in question had worn the very same pair for the first time yesterday, which he had thought the last time, too. For she was not like the others, not by lineage, not in upbringing or character. He had not expected in her a conformity so swift and stubborn. Did the girl take him
for an ass? No, she was acting in defiance. Yet only three months ago an exemplary child. On the fifteenth day of the month of Shvat he had brought the class dried fruit in celebration of the Renewal of Trees, and she alone amid the garbling gigglers had mouthed the grace before and after just as if fruit could be eaten only thus.
She had appeared just before the Renewal, new herself this year in his tenth-grade Mishna class, moreover new to the country, a startled face in the front row of the Graphics track home-room, as the vice principal Mrs. Adeena Plyer had told him to expect: began the year in a better school, couldn’t keep up with the language, liked to draw pictures. So here was the girl to match the profile, but he would have recognized this Shifra even had every one of the girls in the class been new to him. Immediately it was apparent to him she had sat at the head of the class not to command his attention so much as to exclude the other girls from her selective field of vision. She could only be appalled by their wild gesticulation and trumpeting voices, this pale girl with a tender fetal quality to her pale skin, such skin as might erupt with prickly heat at the slightest adult touch, and flaxen-haired, perhaps of the Hassids of Hungary, though to Israel she had come by way of Sydney. How such pallor could have survived the hot sun of Australia he didn’t know. Perhaps until her family had landed in the safety of the Holy Land the child had been secreted in her mother’s pouch. In her mother’s pouch. Later that day Mrs. Adeena Plyer also would appreciate the joke after of course a little added commentary on his part and a literal explanation to the janitor. Kangaroo! The very word was humorous, strange, straining the jaw with the deep palate sounds doubled. He had made it his business, all jokes aside, to thank the vice principal for admitting such a student into the school. May such a student, he had told Mrs. Adeena Plyer, be the rule here and not the exception. In her dress the girl didn’t follow the strictures of his Bnei Brak set, but though she wore no stockings, her skirt came well below the knees, and though her shirtsleeves bared her elbows, she left only her collar button open; here you called that modesty. And the girl had besides such an awareness of propriety, such a touching shyness, a humble girl, in her quiet, quiet voice and broken Hebrew, catching herself for poise, catching herself for language. Hers was such a delicacy as might be taken for melancholy, having the same unobtrusive waft, like a refrigerated carnation from the florist’s.
The Place Will Comfort You Page 4