“This is a shanda, to be burned. You want to bring a horrible shame in your death?” I asked her.
“I don’t give a shit. If you buy me a plot I’m gonna sell it and keep the money.”
If only.
There. The truth of how I feel about this girl, this woman Wendy has become. Why did I agree to take the girl?
I cannot remember all of the reasons my family gave for why I should take this responsibility. She has always been a burden. Like her mother. Anna.
I have not thought about my sister Anna for many years. I never met her. She is born after my parents came to live in America and died seven years before I came to live with them. Her passing a tragedy the family did not discuss.
Wendy, her child, was born in the mental institution Bellevue Hospital. When the infant was released to live with my parents after the birth, Anna remained at Bellevue. My parents trusted the nurses would take care of her. They thought she might be safer there. She passed a few years later from heart disease, a complication of her disorder. We never spoke of her again.
The child, Wendy, lived with my parents in Brooklyn for ten years believing herself to be their daughter.
Wendy’s father is a man we never knew. We only knew he was a monster. A man who fled after he forced himself into the apartment when no one was around and raped Anna, a woman with a mental disorder. Down’s syndrome.
The guilt my parents suffered. They were still working and sometimes left her alone in the apartment. She was twenty at the time and independent.
When I came to America and lived with my parents, Wendy was a youngster. I marveled at her intelligence and thought she would become the scholar my father had wanted each of us to become.
In the year I spent with them in the Brooklyn apartment, Wendy and I found a quiet appreciation for each other. Later came a time when she couldn’t stay with my mater. My foter passed and my mater, now sick and elderly, was barely able to take care of herself without assistance from the family. No one knew what to do with the girl. Oizer offered to take her, but he had five children and four grandchildren already. He already took so much on himself. None of the others could take care of the child. Rose and Mocher were too old.
I almost laugh out loud to think of it. I thought I was old. I was forty and Yetta … well, now I know Yetta was fifty-two years old when we adopted Wendy.
She kept this secret, like others, with her until after she died. Her youngest sister grudgingly gave me Yetta’s correct age when I needed it for the headstone recently. Yetta was the eldest, not the middle, sister. Not what the shadchen led us to believe many years ago.
In the end, I agreed to take Wendy. It was my responsibility to care for this child. Yetta and Rose arranged a quick adoption with Oizer’s lawyer.
We signed the papers. Yetta wanted her. Wendy was the child she could not, would not, conceive with me. I had never had a want, a need, for a child. Only work. But Yetta believed a child was the natural progression of a marriage, even at her age, and longed for someone to wrap her arms around and care for.
Those were the biggest stones that fell and created the wall between us all those years ago. She became absorbed by the child and gave all the love, all the kindness and gentle caring she possessed, to her. Spoiled her with attention.
I felt left out. I resented the child’s presence.
Yetta and I didn’t know that by behaving as we did toward each other, we shaped her understanding of what a marriage should be. All she saw was frustrated anger and silence. If we had battled like my TV wrestlers it might have relieved the tension.
I behaved like another spoiled child during those years. I shut them out. Work became my focus and my single goal the accumulation of wealth.
For what? For Wendy and her men? For the children? One now lying in the ground? All those years of work and saving.
I should have followed Rose and Mocher down to Florida long ago and retired. I had no need to work any longer and yet I still made the walk to the trolley, to the store. I still spent my days bent over a sewing machine, my shoulders hunched and stiff with arthritis. Every bone in my body aches now in the warm weather as well as the cold. The older, broken ones and the ones I tortured with my work.
I have more help now. The Chinese women who spend their time gossiping while they work. They are good workers. I have learned Chinese over the years and I secretly enjoy the chatter, although it annoyed me before Yetta’s passing.
These days this is the sole conversation I have besides the ones with customers, who come with less and less frequency. People don’t repair their clothing anymore. They buy new, cheap clothing and throw the old away.
Wasteful.
It is time. Time to close the shops and retire.
To what? What do I have to look forward to with a retirement? Long days with a TV and monthly visits from this one and the two remaining grandchildren?
Who will comfort those children?
When I went to the home to sit with the children before the funeral, I knew I would find it difficult to see their faces. I saw the same loss in their eyes I had seen in Reizel and Oizer’s all those years ago.
Who will comfort the children?
As the rabbi’s voice floats over us, I find the face of the young shomeret. I am thinking again, this face is familiar. How do I know this face?
Yet it is not her I remember. It is someone else.
I glanced down to the copy of the Bible she holds in her hands. Her hands.
A memory floods back to me.
A girl on a train.
A girl whose face I saw briefly in moonlight filtering through a forest on a train to Hell. A girl whose hand I held all night.
Rinna.
Rinna.
I force my mind away from the memory of that moment, of that place. Dwelling there is not allowed. That is the place I lived as another.
The rabbi finishes and gestures to me to pick up the shovel. I do, carefully keeping the blade held pointing downwards because this use of the shovel is different from all other uses. I put three shovelfuls into the grave and stick the blade back in the earth. To pass it to someone would be to pass my grief.
I watch as the father, the hated man, goes to take the shovel. I am in front of him in two steps. “No,” I hiss at him. “You don’t deserve this mitzvah. You are the reason the child is in this grave. If you had been where you were supposed to be he would not be dead. You’re a good-for-nothing.”
I watch as my words, like blows, reflect on his face. He is shocked. Throughout his marriage to my daughter I never said to him what I thought of him. For years I felt he was better than nothing for her. Better married than divorced. When he stole the money I gave and spent it like a fool, gambling, I said nothing. I said nothing to the man who left my daughter, left my grandchildren, and moved away without making sure they were cared for.
He is not a man. He is a selfish boy.
I knew this when Wendy brought him home one day to introduce us to him. I knew this all along. There is no reason to deny this now. I could kill him. I could lift this shovel and smash it against his head. I could watch him fall into this hole in the earth with his child. I could do it easily.
I notice the man in the grave next to my grandson’s coffin. I recognize the uniform.
I will protect him now, Pieter says in a woman’s voice.
I close my eyes to shut away the vision.
The rabbi’s hand is on my arm, leading me back to where I was standing before. I peer back to see the father turning away from the shovel.
I won’t go back to the home with the father. I won’t see him. I will go to my own apartment to sit shiva.
My daughter walks forward in the disgraceful black dress. I see she is broken. She weeps as she shovels the dirt.
I want to go to her, embrace her, try to take her pain. I know this will be impossible. Nothing will take her pain. This is the day she will remember as the day her pain took up residence and charged her rent
for the trouble.
This is good. She will know and understand what pain is. She will suffer for her sins. She will know suffering.
It hits me. Moses has drowned on the same day I lost Idel. September 19th. Idel and Berl both gone on that same day. What can this mean? How can this be?
Moses and Idel.
And I realize it is also my sin I am angry with. I am remembering my failure.
I remember my granddaughter, who pleaded with me to let them come and live with us. To take the children so they could be safe from the monsters in their home. It is as much my fault, the death of my sweet grandson, as the parents’. I knew and I failed to protect them.
This is my failure.
Time for the Kaddish. The rabbi begins.
“Exalted and hallowed be His great Name.”
“Amen,” we answer.
“Throughout the world which He has created according to His will, may His Kingship reign and His redemption come forth and hasten the coming of His Redeemer. In your life and in your days and in the lifetime of the entire House of Israel, speedily and quickly say, Amen.”
“Amen.”
“May His great Name be blessed in this world and in all worlds. Blessed and praised exalted and extolled, honored, adored and lauded be the Name of the Holy One blessed be. Way beyond all the blessings, hymns, praises and consolations uttered in the world; and say, Amen.”
“Amen.”
“May there be abundant peace from heaven, and a good life for us and for all and say, Amen.”
Amen.
“He who makes peace in His heaven, may he make peace for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.”
Amen.
The service is over. The father has already gone. Wendy and the nebish walk away. No words. No kindness. No acknowledgement to anyone, not even the rabbi.
Her rudeness, usually an annoyance, becomes a murderer’s stab in this moment. Every ounce of blood in my body turns cold as I watch her step into the sedan without a glance back. I go to the rabbi and thank him. I greet and thank the members of my synagogue who have come to mourn.
The shomeret, the girl, nods at me now. Her eyes are kind. She walks to my side and takes my arm to walk with me to the limousine. She is quiet and courteous with me. At the car she turns and faces me.
“My mother is here. We would like to come and sit shiva with you, if you would allow it?”
“Of course,” I assure her. “It would be an honor to have you and your family in my home.”
Such a good girl, this one. Why couldn’t Wendy be so good? The shomeret introduces me to her mother, who has followed us in the procession to the cars and now steps forward. The girl’s mother takes my hand. I look into her eyes and in one second the heart left beating in a ditch bursts in my chest again.
Szaja’s heart. A miracle.
The blank world is colored in this instant. We stand in a verdant meadow, not a cemetery. I understand why the shomeret appeared familiar. Here in her mother is the face burned into Szaja’s fractured mind.
The girl on the train.
Rinna.
How strange. Unimaginable. I spent many years wondering if she escaped or lived to work with the women somewhere in the camp. Or the worst.
“I’m sorry Szaja,” she says, and I know she knows, has known, who I am.
I cannot take in air. My throat is dry. A deep sob strains against my throat and I fight to keep it from escaping in a wild-sounding noise. I grasp her hand, her hant, and let my breathing come again.
Later, much later, after the joy of this moment and the ones that follow, I realize I have come to believe in angels again, in this moment, despite the new rabbi’s teachings. Only an angel could bring me a woman who could ease a life’s pain in the midst of a funeral.
Sixteen
Jules, 12 years | May 10th, 1974
AWAKE AND ASLEEP
Open.
I walk in the direction of my neighborhood from the elementary school I used to attend. Stillton. It’s sort of like waking up in the middle of a dream, but I don’t think I’m dreaming. I can’t gather any sense of the time, but it seems late in the day. I know this because of where the sun sits in the sky. There’s no traffic and there are no kids out playing. I think it might be dinnertime.
When I step into the yard at our house everything sounds quiet. I see a different car in the driveway. Someone must be visiting. Usually this means a party and loud music, but I don’t see Wendy’s car.
This is the part where I wake up and realize my brother didn’t drown.
As I walk up the porch steps I see schoolbooks stacked on the first step. They seem vaguely familiar. I pick up the one on top, an English textbook. My name is written, in what I recognize as my writing, on the inside of the cover. I pick up the rest of the books and notebooks that lay stacked underneath and bring them in. I can hear the sound of the TV in the den and I walk in that direction.
It still seems like I’ve been sleeping, but now I’ve begun to wake up in my mind and body.
I glance up at the clock when I pass through the kitchen and I can see it’s almost six o’clock. The ending theme song for Lost in Space plays on the TV in the den. David’s hair, longer than I ever remember seeing it, curls around his head. He looks like an overgrown cherub.
David catches me peeking and asks me what’s for dinner. I walk back into the kitchen and open the refrigerator, which contains a plate of broiled chicken and sliced carrots in a saucepan dropped directly into the refrigerator from the stove. I have no idea how it got there, who made it, or where it came from.
I decide to see if Wendy’s upstairs. As I climb, I wonder why, if I’m stuck in a dream, I still feel all of my body and the railing on the stairs?
There are colors. I read that in dreams most people only see black and white. I remember a few where I saw spots of color, but not so many like this. I feel wide awake and everything seems particularly clear now.
At the top of the stairs I knock on Wendy’s closed door.
“What?” Wendy says.
“Can I come in?”
“Yeah.”
From inside the doorway her room looks the same, but it seems different. There’s no cigarette or pot stink embedded in the fabric of the room. It smells like sandalwood and roses. She lies on the bed reading. Her hair, cut shorter, poufs out in curls all around her head, exactly like David’s. They could be brother and sister.
I can’t think what to say.
“I didn’t know if you were here. Where’s Jack?”
Wendy stares at me and pauses before she responds.
“He’s still in California,” she says, like I should know already.
“Right,” I say, after a beat. I add, “I wanted to know, where in California?”
“He’s in Big Sur.”
“Where’s that?” I ask, like I want to know. “It’s northern California. Almost San Francisco.”
That’s where Rice-A-Roni comes from.
“I’m gonna make the chicken and vegetables in the refrigerator for us for dinner, if it’s all right?”
Wendy stares at me again.
“Yeah, go ahead. I figured we would have the leftovers from last night. You’ve got to quit making so much food when you cook dinner, Jules. It’s three until Jack comes back. You keep making too much food.”
“Okay,” I say, and I leave.
I stand at the top of the stairs. I can’t remember making dinner last night, or waking up this morning, or even where I was before I walked up onto our front porch a few minutes ago.
This keeps happening to me since Moses drowned.
Mostly I lose time for a few hours, which used to happen when I fall into my drawing and painting. This time it seems like it’s been much longer. I can’t remember anything that’s happened in the past few days. I start shaking.
I try to recall the last thing I remember.
Liver Lips.
The teacher I have a big crush on, who I called Liver L
ips Louie, called me out into the school hallway to talk to me. Liver Lips just started his first year teaching contract at Withensea Middle School. His lips are the fullest, most sensuous lips I’ve ever seen on a man. When he moved them to speak I became instantly distracted until the content of his words drew me back to reality.
He wanted to talk because Wendy had called the school principal complaining that I’d asked her to purchase notebook paper for homework assignments. She was high, I’m certain, and yelled at the principal, saying we were “too poor to purchase school materials.” The principal instructed Liver Lips to provide writing paper for our homework.
It was all mortifying: the lie, the fact she was probably high, and that my favorite teacher got messed up with her ridiculousness. I’m nervous enough in the presence of his lips. To explain Wendy’s weirdness to this guy was more than I could take. I burst into tears and told him my mother acted “zany” sometimes, which I hoped sufficed as an explanation. He acted nice about it and told me to take as much paper as I needed for homework.
I can’t remember what happened the rest of the day or during the days following my Liver Lips encounter. I don’t remember Jack leaving for Big Sur. I can’t even remember what today is.
It’s a school day, I know, because my schoolbooks were on the porch and Lost in Space, which plays in weekday re-runs now, was on TV when I came in.
The calendar on my wall says April and the last day I’ve crossed is the fifteenth. This means it has only been a few days since it happened. As I stare out the window at the lilac bush, I see there are full blooms on the branches. Which means it’s not April. It’s close to my birthday. That’s when the lilacs bloom.
Terrified, I start trembling again. I can’t understand what’s happening to me.
I decide to go to the kitchen and check that calendar. I run down the stairs. The word May blares out at me from the top of the calendar on the kitchen cabinet wall.
I think for a minute before I poke my head around the corner to the den and ask David, “What day is it?”
The Belief in Angels Page 18