Washing the Dead

by Michelle Brafman

  “You have a gift with children,” Mrs. Kessler told me as we stopped at a grocery store. “Maybe one day you’ll have your own classroom.”

  I blushed from my chest to my forehead as I followed her back to her cramped apartment, which, like our house, was only four blocks from the Schines, but in the opposite direction.

  “Let me.” I removed Yossi and the grocery bag from the stroller and carried them up the skinny stairway to the apartment.

  “You saved me a trip,” Mrs. Kessler said when she arrived at the front door, flushed and winded from lugging the enormous stroller up the steps. Yossi’s diaper was warm and full, and I took him to his room. When I returned from changing him, Mrs. Kessler had removed her sheitel and was running her fingers through her cropped hair, which she’d worn in a fat braid twisted around her head before she married. Mr. Kessler, a PhD student at UW-Milwaukee, and according to my dad a math genius, wouldn’t be home until late because he was teaching a night class, so Mrs. Kessler thanked me when I offered to play with Yossi while she prepared macaroni and green peas.

  “You don’t need to call your mother?” she asked.

  I hated Tuesday nights at home; the smell of my mother’s peanut butter cookies, my father’s favorite, made me sick. She’d give half the guilt-batch to my father to take to the girls in the office and the other half to the rebbetzin to serve at her teas.

  I dialed my number, and my father answered on the second ring. “I’m going to help Mrs. Kessler, see you later, okay?” I said quickly, not giving him time to say no.

  “Wait a second, Bunny. How are you getting home?”

  “Mr. Kessler is going to walk me,” I lied and got off the phone. I could picture him in his study. His sleeves would be neatly rolled up, the weekly Torah portion and books of commentary splayed open in front of him. He would slide his reading glasses up his nose and return to learning. My mother probably wouldn’t bother to ask him where I was or if I needed a ride. She wasn’t doing that kind of thing anymore.

  “You’ve got me for as long as you need me, Mrs. Kessler.”

  I set the table while she put Yossi to bed, and then we ate the food she’d prepared. “So, what are your plans for next year?” she asked, spearing a pea.

  “Tzippy’s getting married.”

  She chewed for a second. “I know that, but what about your plans?”

  “I’ll go to Madison, like Neil.”

  “They have a good teaching program.” She raised an eyebrow.

  I couldn’t help but smile. “I have to get in first.”

  “How is school going?”

  “Okay, except for calculus.” I didn’t tell her that I desperately missed Tzippy or that I had just one friend, a girl I liked only because she liked me. She knew that too.

  “Let’s have a look at that calculus.” After she read my problems, she rubbed her hands together. “This is going to be fun.”

  She sat up in her chair, shedding the tense fatigue she’d held in her shoulders, and explained orders of approximation in language I could understand. An hour later, she said, “Oy, look at the clock. I don’t think Mr. Kessler will be home in time to walk you to your house.” She bit her nail.

  “I walk home from Tzippy’s at night all the time. My parents are fine with it.” Actually, I’d only walked home from her house during the summer when it was still light until practically nine o’clock, and now it was dark and the walk four blocks longer.

  She looked tentative. “You’ll call me when you get home?”

  I was seconds away from asking if I could move into her tiny apartment to escape my mother, who sometimes acted enough like her old self to tease me into thinking that I’d been imagining the whole thing with the Shabbos goy. In my heart, though, I knew that I couldn’t pull her back to us.

  I left Mrs. Kessler’s apartment feeling fed and cared for, but by the time I entered my house, my mood had blackened. My dad was studying in his office, and my mother was sitting at the kitchen table in her pink cardigan, smoking and reading the paper. Soon she’d excuse herself for her Tuesday evening bath, and after we were all tucked into bed, she’d take off with the Shabbos goy.

  “Do you want a peanut butter cookie?” she asked absently, lighting a cigarette.

  I stared at her. She wasn’t in one of her mists anymore, but she was different, distracted but happier than I’d seen her in a long time. Couldn’t she be happy and still not pull away from us?

  “You’re doing such a mitzvah by helping Mrs. Kessler. Doing good deeds brings us closer to God, the rebbetzin reminds us.” Each of my mother’s syllables was plump with pride.

  I lapped up her praise despite myself. “Well, it was really Mrs. Kessler who did me the mitzvah by helping me with my calculus.”

  She nodded through a haze of smoke. “Don’t you have a test coming up?”

  “Tomorrow.” I was surprised that she’d remembered my weekly test.

  “You’ll ace it, Sweet B.”

  If she was going to remember my calculus tests and call me Sweet B, I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to eat one of her cookies, her only recipe that turned out well. I took a bite, sweet, but so crispy that it practically nicked the sides of my mouth. “The trick is to use Crisco for the shortening,” my mother had told Tzippy and me once when we’d helped her bake for Shabbos.

  “Good night, Mom,” I said.

  She yawned. “I’m tired.”

  “So you’re going to sleep?” I asked too quickly.

  “After my bath.” She lit another cigarette.

  “To bed? You’re going to bed?” My voice was high and squeaky.

  “Of course,” she lied. “And before I forget, I put a letter from Tzippy on your dresser.”

  I thanked her and took the stairs two at a time.

  October 14, 1973

  B”H

  Dear Barbara,

  I hope this arrives before your quarter-birthday. In a few days, you’ll be seventeen and three fourths.

  Aunt Ruthie isn’t grumpy anymore. She hasn’t been yelling at Miriam for leaving jelly on the counter or Tamar for blowing her nose too loudly. Now she’s just sad. She talks about my Uncle Shlomo, the one who moved to Jerusalem, and how worried she is that he’ll get killed in the Yom Kippur War. I’ve been making all of the dinners for my cousins and me. I’m getting to be a pretty good cook, although I did burn the noodles once. I’ll get better. I have to be a balabusta if I’m going to marry and become a rebbetzin.

  I worry about Uncle Shlomo too. Give my mother a kiss for me. She’s probably upset about him even if she doesn’t show it. My mom’s not always as strong as she looks, but that’s a secret between the two of us.

  Write me soon. I miss you.

  Love,

  Tzippy

  I wrote Tzippy right back, thanking her for remembering my quarter-birthday and promising her that I would check in on her mother. I didn’t tell her that last Shabbos, while Rabbi Schine had ranted on and on about the Yom Kippur War during his sermon, the rebbetzin stared absently toward the front of the shul, biting her pinkie nail. I’d only seen her act worried once before, when Tzippy got a concussion after falling off the monkey bars at school. After I finished licking the stamp, I wrote Tzippy the letter I couldn’t send.

  October 17, 1973

  B”H

  Dear Tzippy,

  Everyone is talking about the war. My worries are small in comparison, yet they feel huge to me.

  Scott Dayne, the oafish boy who draws swastikas on his biology folder, said that he hoped the Jews would lose the war because we had it coming to us. David Koppelberg, now my biology lab partner, said that most Jews were normal, not freaks like us. He said that people who belong to our shul act like Moonies. He called your dad Rabbi Moon-Schine and me Moon-Schine Girl. My father said to ignore him, that one day your dad might unveil David’s neshama, but even if he had a soul, I bet it would be drab. I guess I should pity David’s drab neshama and ignorance of God’s 613 commandments.r />
  Besides, I have my mother’s soul to worry about. She’s going to get caught soon. I know it. Writing this is making me feel worse. I miss you.

  Your best friend,

  Barbara

  Lying under the covers, I listened to the water from the bathtub swish through our old pipes. Any good feelings I’d experienced that day were devoured by my wild obsession with the mikveh and now poor Mrs. Isen, her sad twins, and my father. I wondered what would happen to him if the Schines found out about my mother’s romance. After Mr. Isen left his family, the Schines told Mrs. Isen to rip her lapel and go to shul every day for a year to recite the kaddish prayer of mourning for him, as if he’d really died. Mr. Isen moved to Brookfield, the Gentile part of town, and when my mother and I bumped into him while shoe shopping at Marshall Field’s, he couldn’t even look us in the eye. If the Schines wanted to erase Mr. Isen’s existence for “running off with a shiksa,” as my dad put it, then what on earth would they do to my mother for sneaking around with the Shabbos goy? I was sure she was bound for Brookfield. Never again would she respond to the call of Rabbi Schine’s Shema or savor the sweetness of the rebbetzin’s freshly baked challah. Her soul would be boarded up for good. And where would that leave all of us?

  4

  September 2009

  The letter arrived on a Sunday. Hand-delivered. Someone could have crept up the walk and popped it through our mail slot that morning, while Sam and I were driving Lili to her cross-country meet, or when she twisted her ankle in a gopher hole and fell writhing as her rival sprinted by. It could have arrived while we sat in the emergency room, as I stroked Lili’s hair with one hand and squeezed Sam’s forearm with the other, or while the baby-faced doctor, an Indian fellow, taped her up and advised us to find a good orthopedist. It could have been lying in wait while we drove the five miles home from the hospital.

  When you read about people who have experienced life-altering events, they often say, “Only an hour before, I was fighting with my husband over our Visa bill” or “singing along to Aretha Franklin on the radio.” Me? An hour before I found the letter, I was on my cell phone ordering pizza for the friends Lili had invited for dinner, yammering on about thin versus thick crust, my words crowding out the thought of Lili’s injury potentially decimating her season.

  By the time we arrived home, the Mama Mia deliveryman was waiting for us in the driveway, and I settled up with him while Sam helped Lili into the house. I made a salad, and within twenty minutes Lili’s girlfriends were filing onto the porch we’d recently screened in because Sam insisted, “Everything tastes better when you eat it outside.” The dimming sun bathed Lili and her giggling teammates in amber light, and although she was smiling, I couldn’t suppress my concern. I wanted to pull her aside and make sure she was all right, but she was too old for that, so instead I watched her play with a loose strand of her kinky auburn hair. She abandoned her first slice of pizza while the other girls demolished the four pies in minutes. They were all petite cross-country runners, yet as Sam remarked, they ate like linebackers.

  “Can they hang out for a while?” Lili asked me, and I said sure even though it was a school night. I’d have agreed to just about anything to distract her from her pain. I loved that our home was the fun house. I always made sure to stock our pantry with each girl’s favorite munchie—pretzels, pita chips, and whatnot—and our fridge with cut-up fruit and pop.

  After dinner, the girls went off to the den, sank into our overstuffed couches, took turns playing with Lili’s crutches, and texted while watching Twilight. They knew every line. I never could figure out the hullabaloo over vampires.

  Sam sat at the kitchen table chatting on the phone with his friend and client, Felix Nezbith, the Milwaukee Bucks’ orthopedist. Sam had been handling his investments for years. I walked up behind him and kneaded his shoulders the way he liked, grateful as heck for a husband who could pick up the phone on a Sunday night and score an appointment for the next morning with the best bone doctor in town. After he hung up, I leaned down and pressed my lips to his hair. Always the optimist, he tilted his head back into my breasts, wordlessly telling me to stop worrying about Lili. I couldn’t help it. Only with exercise—God’s Ritalin, we called it—could Lili focus enough to handle her schoolwork and maintain her equilibrium. Without her daily endorphin fix, she was a hot mess. “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child,” a mother of one of my students once said. So true.

  I told Sam I’d join him on the porch for a glass of wine after I tidied up the kitchen. I was wiping Italian dressing from the counter when the front doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” I hollered.

  That was when I saw the envelope.

  I assumed it was an invoice from the tree trimmer who’d been pruning our maple that afternoon. I picked up the envelope from the rug under the mail slot and opened the door as one of Lili’s friends ran in from the den to greet a new teammate, Taylor, and usher her back to the rest of the girls.

  I stood alone in the foyer. It was not a bill; it was a letter, on personal stationery. The noise of Lili and her friends shouting at the vampires receded, and I could hear only my pulse thumping in my ears. I recognized the no-nonsense cursive of the address instantly. I’d seen it a thousand times on four tattered recipe cards of my mother’s. I ran my fingers over the return address embossed on the thin white envelope as if I were reading Braille.

  Rivkah Schine

  3050 Lake Drive

  Milwaukee, WI 53211

  Rivkah Schine. I hadn’t seen the rebbetzin in more than thirty years, not since the Schines cut my mother from the community like a brown spot from an apple. My mother had left them no choice, and while they were at it, they excised Neil and me too.

  I put my thumb over the address: 3050 Lake Drive. The Schines’ shul. Sam, Lili, and I lived a few blocks off Lake Drive, but ten miles north, in a suburban split-level. I avoided driving by the mansion, particularly on Shabbos mornings, so I wouldn’t have to look at the men in their business suits and skullcaps, accompanied by women who covered their hair with stylish hats and held their children’s hands. Four decades ago, I’d been one of those children. Back then, I belonged to the Schines’ shul and my mother belonged to me, two facts that I still could not tease apart.

  I held the white envelope to my nose, half expecting to smell the lemons the rebbetzin and my mother rubbed on their fingers to mute the scent of the onions they’d diced for the Schines’ Shabbos feasts. I closed my eyes and conjured the sound of beef meeting hot oil, and I could practically taste the luscious cholent that simmered for a full day before the Sabbath meal.

  Stop it, Barbara, I almost said aloud. This was absurd. The rebbetzin could not have forgotten that as June Pupnick’s daughter, I was a pariah. Until I married Sam, the most casual mention of the Schines or my mother made me feel like no matter where I lived, there was a boisterous New Year’s Eve party happening two houses down the block and I hadn’t been invited. I’d gotten over all that, and I wasn’t going back.

  I folded the unopened envelope and stuffed it into the pocket of my capris. Its corners pricked my thigh as I walked away from the mail slot in slow motion, like in the ESPN highlight videos Sam watched on his computer after Packers games.

  Mounted on the hall wall were photos chronicling the life I’d built with my family: baby pictures of Lili taken at the Sears in Bayshore; our annual artsy black-and-whites of Sam, Lili, and me in blue jeans and crisp white shirts, our feet bare, our smiles broad and backlit by our love and the late-afternoon sun; a sweet candid of Sam’s parents pushing Lili on a swing. I’d paid a decorator a month of my teaching salary to frame and arrange these photos just so, but despite her efforts I’d never been satisfied with the placement of one photo: my mother, Lili, and I wearing pink birthday hats, the elastic straps cupping our chins, Lili’s lips covered in chocolate. My mother is draping her arm around my shoulders, grinning as if we were a normal mother and daughter.

  I went into the k
itchen, the hum of the dishwasher muting the girls’ chatter. I pulled the envelope from my pocket and opened the trash compactor, the paper shaking in my hands as it hovered over napkins stained with tomato sauce and an abandoned slice of pepperoni. I still had qualms about ordering pizza adorned with rounds of pork, but I did it often, perhaps to erase Barbara Pupnick, the girl who’d been kicked out of the Schines’ world.

  I stuffed the letter back into my pocket and went to the porch. “It’s getting chilly, I’m going to grab my fleece,” I told Sam, who was sitting there with two sweating glasses of white wine. I took the steps to our room, shut the door, and tore open the envelope.

  September 6, 2009

  B”H

  Dear Barbara,

  I am sorry to tell you the news that Mrs. Kessler has passed away, aleha hashalom, may peace be upon her. Please meet me at the Abromowitz Funeral Parlor on Monday at 9 a.m. We will perform her tahara.

  Rivkah Schine

  The news was a sucker punch to the heart. Mrs. Kessler. She materialized in the way the newly dead do. I am five, and she is celebrating her first Shabbos at our shul. I stare at her long braid throughout services, and afterward, during the lunch, I spear a gefilte fish ball with a toothpick and give it to her. She accepts my offering. Later I learn that she hates fish.

  I read the letter again. What was a tahara? The word floated over me like the name of the Alfred Hitchcock movie I couldn’t recall the last time Sam and I played Trivial Pursuit. What was the name of that damn movie?

  I flipped on my laptop and typed in “tahara.” Google sent me straight to a Jewish funerals site. “The tahara is the sacred and secret Jewish burial rite of washing and shrouding the dead and is the highest and purest act of loving kindness.” Vertigo. The Hitchcock movie came to me, creating a dizzying surge in my brain. I tried to imagine the rebbetzin and myself pouring water over Mrs. Kessler, but I could picture neither the rebbetzin through my adult eyes nor a dead Mrs. Kessler.