“Well, yes, but there was usually one who took care of your mother and her brother.”
I considered what it would have been like if Lili had been raised without me.
“None of them lasted more than a year. There came a time when they wanted to start their own families, no matter how hard your mother smiled at them.”
“The June smile,” I said, and the rebbetzin nodded her head in recognition. Maybe that was how she developed it, to keep the maids around. I felt my mother’s aloneness cloak me.
“Barbara, I’ve been wanting to ask you a question.” She paused.
“You can ask me.”
“Do you think you might be ready to go back to the mikveh?” Her voice held a hint of pleading, as if she had as much to gain by my return to the mikveh as I did.
“I think so. Yes.” I stood and followed the rebbetzin out of her apartment. My breathing quickened as we neared the pantry, but this time we didn’t stop. She continued down the special stairway and stopped outside of the heavy wooden door. The room was pitch-black. I half expected to smell my mother’s cigarette smoke, but only the scent of rainwater filled the air. “Will you please turn on the light?” My voice trembled like a child’s.
“Of course.”
The rebbetzin flipped the switch, and a weak yellow light illuminated the pool, which was the size of the men’s section of the sanctuary, a space big enough to fit its sixty-seven folding chairs. The pool reminded me of the kidney-shape pools on the top floors of cheap motels. At the far end were two chairs. My mother must have been smoking in one of them. The ember had seemed close to me and far away at the same time. The water was as smooth as a freshly made bowl of my mother’s grape Jell-O.
The rebbetzin led me to the changing room, a large bathroom. She took my hands and examined my nails. “There’s some nail polish remover over there. You’ll have to take off your jewelry and makeup, too.” She handed me a pair of clippers. “To clean your fingernails and toenails.”
My mother had told me that before you entered the water, the mikveh lady would pluck any stray hairs from your back, inspect your nail beds, look between your toes, and ask you to check your own belly button. I thought of how we’d cleaned under Mrs. Kessler’s nails.
The rebbetzin handed me a cotton robe. “When you finish, I’ll be outside waiting.”
I dipped a cotton ball in the nail polish remover and wiped the clear shellac from my fingers. I washed my face and scrubbed my eyes with the gentle soap until my mascara came off in clumps that speckled the basin. I undid my tiny silver hoops and removed my black jeans, green turtleneck, and bra and panties. Lastly I slipped off my wedding ring, a band of white gold with a handsome emerald-cut diamond. I never cared much about jewelry, but the ring had been handed down from Sam’s grandmother, and it meant something to him.
I filled the bathtub and soaked for as long as I could, but I was too jumpy in such close proximity to the mikveh, so I turned on the shower and scrubbed every part of my body clean. I rinsed my hair of the remnants of shampoo and conditioner from early this morning, I cleaned under every nail twice, and I swirled a Q-tip around the inside of my navel. I checked my shoulders for stray hairs, and then I put on the robe and walked out to the mikveh, where the rebbetzin sat waiting for me on one of the chairs. She put her arm around me and prayed into my ear.
“Before God shall you become pure of all your aberrations. Whatever your past may have been, no matter where, when, and how you may have strayed before God who owns and dispenses all of the future, you can and shall rise up to a new future of purity. You shall rise again before God with a new spirit and a new heart, with a pure new mind receptive once again to all things godly, joyously going out toward all that is good and pure.”
I absorbed every word as though it had been spoken just for me. I walked toward the mikveh, turned my back to the rebbetzin, and removed my robe. The humid air felt good on my damp skin, but I was breathing hard. These waters terrified me. My mother had drowned in them.
“I’m here, Barbara,” the rebbetzin assured me. “Now dip your entire body three times so that you have immersed every strand of hair in the water. We’ll say a prayer after the first immersion.”
The water was cool. I shivered as I waded in and felt it travel up from my toes to my thighs to my waist. I turned around and faced the rebbetzin, who stood at the lip of the pool. I was not conscious of my nakedness, though my every blemish and loose fold of skin was exposed. I looked directly into her eyes, and her love fell around my body like a silk sheath.
“Repeat after me,” she said. “Baruch atah adonai … asher kideshanu bemitzvotav vetzivanu al hatevila … Blessed be He our God who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us on immersion.”
I repeated the prayer, my voice caressing every syllable. I breathed in, filled my lungs with air, and emptied them so that I wouldn’t float to the top of the water. I sank into the pool a second time, letting the water wash over me. I immersed myself again and then floated on my back, staring up at the ceiling, my arms outstretched.
The rebbetzin repeated the last line of the opening prayer. “You shall rise again before God with a new spirit and new heart, with a pure new mind receptive once again to all things godly, joyously going out toward all that is good and pure.”
“A new heart,” I murmured and a few more fingers of that fist uncoiled.
I lingered in the mikveh, inviting the holy water to wash away the dead parts of me. I asked God to help me love my mother as I had when I was very young, before her mists and wanderings. Since I’d caught her here in the mikveh, my elbow had been locked in hers, me holding on for dear life, her desperate to flee. I’d alternated between hope that this time she would stay and hurt when she inevitably didn’t. It hadn’t occurred to me that her absences were a part of her, like negative space in a painting, or that they’d become a part of me. I knelt down in the water and folded my arms over my breasts. I wanted to settle every score, to rinse away every old hurt.
“Why didn’t you come and find me after my father’s funeral?” I knew my question would pain the rebbetzin, but I had to ask.
She winced. “Your mother begged me to leave you alone. She didn’t want you anywhere near these waters and the shul.”
“What?” I was stunned.
The rebbetzin spoke quietly, as if my mother could hear. “Her ghosts had taunted her, and she didn’t want the same for you.”
“I thought it was you who didn’t want me here,” I said like a hurt little girl.
The rebbetzin put her hand over her heart. “Never,” she said, her voice vibrating with love. “Your mother knew you’d build a good life for yourself outside the shul. And you did.”
“Yet here I am.” I felt my nakedness before her.
“Strong enough to face down her ghosts. And yours.” The rebbetzin wore years of remorse on her face. “It’s not too late. She’ll have more lucid moments. People live for years with Alzheimer’s.”
“I forgive both of you,” I said, and dunked back under the water.
THE FINAL WASHING
If we cannot name our own, we are cut off at the root, our hold on our lives as fragile as seed in the wind.
—Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
22
I floated home, relieved that I wouldn’t have to face Sam or Lili for another hour and that they’d return fed.
Lili was in good spirits when she got home from a babysitting job. She hadn’t had time to babysit when she was training hard, and she enjoyed being with kids. The Adderall was helping, too. Sam came in and kissed me on the cheek before he went through the day’s mail. I was content not to ask him about new clients or fish around for information that would assure me that the engine of our home was running smoothly.
“You’re quiet tonight, Barbara,” Sam said.
Lili examined me. “And a little spaced out.”
“Just tired,” I said.
Ne
ither of them asked why, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell them that I’d spent the afternoon at the mansion or that I’d stood naked before the rebbetzin.
“But I’m ready to think about Thanksgiving,” I said. All my senses were alive. I could smell Sam’s aftershave and feel Lili’s calm. Tonight she wasn’t jiggling her foot.
I was so fond of a holiday that forced you to be grateful that I’d begun keeping a Thanksgiving journal when I started teaching. The idea stemmed from the turkeys I cut out of brown construction paper, each with a line for children to list something they were grateful for. I put a halt to this exercise when a smart little girl pointed out that we ate turkeys and were therefore eating the bearers of our thanks, with cranberry sauce, but I still kept the journal.
“Over the river and through the woods,” I sang to Sam when we were in bed. Our tradition was that a week before we drove down to Deerfield to spend the holiday with Grose and Artie, I’d open to an old entry, complete a new gratitude list for the year, and read both to Sam.
He looked up at me from his Newsweek, which he read religiously. He loved me and indulged me this exercise that I knew he found goofy. I unsnapped the little gold lock on the journal and opened it to a random page.
“Ew, November 2005,” I said.
Sam removed his reading glasses. “That should be interesting.”
It was the year Lili combusted. “Okay, here goes.” I inhaled dramatically.
“Number one, Lili’s discovery of her gift for running.”
“Yes, the swing.”
“Now it’s the Adderall,” I said.
“Let’s move on to item number two.”
“Number two, Sam’s foot rubs.” I put the book down and turned to him.
He kissed me on the mouth.
“None of that until we’re done. Three, Jenny’s Kitchen Aid mixer.” I snorted.
“Are you still angry with Jenny?”
“Never mind. Number four, the arrival of Theresa in my classroom, and number five was your new office space.”
“Let’s go back to number two.” Sam reached for my foot.
“After I finish my new entry,” I said, pulling out the Cross pen I used exclusively for this task. It had belonged to my father, and he’d used it to sign the New Year’s cards we sent out to the families we’d hosted for the Schines.
I smoothed the pages and wrote “November 2009.”
1. Lili’s physical health.
2. Sam’s success in weathering the financial shit-storm, as he calls it.
3. My Educator of the Year award.
The next two items felt like they came straight from my heart to the pen to the page.
4. The rebbetzin.
5. My mother.
I closed the journal, twisted the pen shut, and returned both to my nightstand.
“What? You’re going to keep me in the dark about your 2009 list?” Sam asked, a hint of mockery in his tone.
“Tomorrow, honey. I’m really tired.”
Sam returned to his Newsweek, and I tried to go to sleep, but a torrent of gratitude for him overcame me. I took the magazine from his hands and removed his reading glasses. He asked me what I was up to, and I showed him. He was a magnificent kisser, and we made out like teenagers at a drive-in. And then we made slow love. I was ready for him. I’d been to the mikveh.
The next morning I was thrilled to find that my new calm had not vanished overnight. I had more energy than I’d had in weeks as I cleaned Daphne Meckleman’s vomit from the hallway and sang ditties about turkeys. “You sure have some pep in your step this morning,” Theresa commented. Poor Theresa had been carrying the class for me these past few months. I made a mental note to pick up a gift certificate to Kohl’s for her as a little Thanksgiving token of gratitude.
After I finished teaching, my car practically drove itself to Neil’s office. I was ready to see my mother, and I was still peeved that I had to plead my case to Jenny and Neil to visit her, but less so. Before I entered the building, I kissed the gold letters of the old black Pupnick Orthodontics sign as I would a mezuzah. God, I missed my father. It struck me that Neil was like my mother in a way; he’d chosen to return to his father’s home.
Neil’s office manager, Donna, greeted me with a big smile. “Oh, hi there, Mrs. Blumfield. Dr. Pupnick’s finishing up his last appointment before lunch. Is this an emergency?” She was a ferocious protector of his schedule.
“It kind of is,” I said apologetically.
“Hold on a quick sec.” She went off to find Neil.
He greeted me with a dental wire in his gloved hand. “Is everything okay?”
“We need to talk.”
He cleared his throat. “Follow me.”
He took me to his office in the back of the building. My dad used to bring me here on Sunday mornings, and I’d wheel around on his squeaky gray stool or make blizzard scenes with cotton balls I found in his supply room. Neil had kept the stool.
He removed his gloves and threw the wire in the trash. Instead of sitting behind his sleek new desk, he took the easy chair next to mine, as he probably did with parents of children in need of college-fund-draining orthodontia.
“I need to see Mom.”
“I have a patient waiting for me with twelve wires sprouting out of his mouth. Can we discuss this tonight?”
“No. This is a private conversation.” I didn’t have to say that I didn’t want to include Jenny.
He paused. “Let me see if Jack can finish up for me.”
“Okay.”
Neil came back and sat down at his desk. “Barbara.”
“Just hear me out,” I said.
He nodded, and proceeded to receive my story of the tahara and what I’d learned about our family history with a look of wonder and love etched all over his face. By the time I finished, the room was so still that I could hear the faint ringing of his phone in the reception area. Neither of us said anything for what seemed like hours.
Then I told him about the mikveh, and how some of the water must have seeped into my chest and made my heart expand like a sponge, because I wanted to understand every part of my mother, even the parts that had hurt me.
“You sure you’re okay digging all this up? I’m not just worried about Mom.”
“You can say it. You’re scared that I’ll go loco again.” I tried to make a joke of it, but he didn’t laugh.
We’d carefully constructed a moat around my breakdown, both of us too afraid to examine it through the lens of our adult selves or as parents who would never desert a child, sick or healthy. Neil was still the boy who had fed me yogurt, and my rooting around in our past frightened him.
“I know it wasn’t an easy time for you either,” I said.
“It wasn’t. Why can’t we just let it all go, Barbara?” He sounded tired and exasperated. He couldn’t meet my gaze.
“Don’t you see? I can’t let it go now. It was Mom who wanted us to leave the shul.”
“I do see, and maybe she was right, but it felt awful.” He looked like a little boy whose feelings had just been hurt for the first time. I’d always seen myself as the only victim in all this.
I wasn’t angry with him anymore for keeping me from my mother. “You were a good brother, Neil. The best.”
He pulled a wire from his pocket and fiddled with it.
“I want to go back to the mikveh.” Our code word for my mother’s absence.
“Well, don’t fall in,” he said, and now he was trying to be funny, and we both strained to laugh.
“I have to do this.”
Neither of us had to say, “before it’s too late.”
“Go see Mom,” he said, his eyes beginning to tear.
I stopped by Sendik’s to buy my mother a pumpkin pie on my way to Lakeline, a U-shape building with a big circular driveway lined with pale green gourds shaped like swans. A fall motif, no dead summer flowers. Nice.
Sunlight streamed through the skylights above the lobby, and the
scent of freshly baked cookies and Lysol filled the air. A large woman in a long blue smock greeted me at the front desk.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m Barbara Blumfield, and I’m looking for my mother. June Pupnick.” I glanced around the lobby, wondering if I’d spot her.
“You know, I was going to ask if you were Mrs. Pupnick’s daughter. You favor her, so pretty and petite you two are.”
I blushed. “Thank you.”
“I’m Bonnie, by the way. I’ll take you to see your mama.” Her polyester-clad thighs rubbed together as she led me down the hall. She swiped her badge against the side of a large door and waited for a click.
Why was my mother in a locked facility? Hadn’t she just been diagnosed? God, how awful.
“You know, your brother and his wife are real honeys.” Bonnie turned to me and smiled.
“They’re good people.” It was true.
I followed Bonnie through the lounge and dining area, which smelled like old people’s waste. The lounge area was almost empty except for a hunched woman engaged in an animated monologue and a distinguished-looking man in a Brewers cap shuffling to a chair.
“Good work, Mr. Kuper.” Bonnie gave the man a thumbs-up.
Mr. Kuper saluted her.
“Mr. Kuper was a Green Beret,” she told me as we approached a wooden door with a small white sign: June Pupnick. My mother had a room in this ward? “Thank you, Bonnie. I’m okay from here,” I managed to say.
“Doesn’t work that way, hon.” She lowered her voice and tapped my wrist. “I have to announce you to the patient first.” She opened the door and stuck her head into the room. “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Pupnick, your daughter’s here.”
My mother sat in a chair that nearly engulfed her, like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann character on Laugh-In. My father loved that bit. She’d lost weight in the weeks since I’d seen her, and the fit of her blouse reminded me of when Lili wore Sam’s old shirts as smocks for her kindergarten art class. Over it, she wore her old pink cardigan, which Jenny must have had dry-cleaned, because the coffee stain was gone. Gray infiltrated the roots of her hair, now an even brassier red than Jenny had dyed it. She looked well cared for, but the mother I knew would never have left the house without her lipstick.
Washing the Dead Page 28