Open Doors

by Gloria Goldreich

  The synagogue was dimly lit, the rain lightly hitting the darkened windows and, for a moment, she thought she might have gotten the date wrong. She hesitated at the entry but when a gray-bearded man approached, snapped his umbrella shut and smiled tentatively at her she followed him into the lobby.

  “The bereavement group?” he asked, and she nodded.

  “Downstairs.”

  She walked behind him down the stairwell into the Hebrew school area and then into the largest classroom where she recalled going to meet with her children’s teachers all those years ago. Sandy, she recalled, had been the most troublesome, mischievous in class, disrespectful to the harried rabbinical students who tried to teach the children who had no interest in being taught. She wondered if those despairing teachers would be surprised to learn that the irrepressible Sandy now called herself Sarah and lived in Jerusalem with her husband, a Talmudic scholar. She smiled and looked around the room.

  Four women and two men sat in a semicircle at the scarred pale wood desks with attached benches that were too small to accommodate them. Two of the women were determinedly battling their age, their hair expertly colored to nearly identical chestnut shades, loose attractive sweaters almost concealing the resistant bulge of their abdomens. Their pale fleshy faces appeared to have been washed smooth by grief. They were the widows, Elaine decided and touched her own cheeks, pleased that she had remembered to apply makeup.

  The other two women, who both wore tailored pastel-colored pantsuits, were thinner, one blond, one dark-haired. The blonde had sharp features, thin lips, narrow green eyes, the pale lashes stiff with mascara. She wore too much jewelry; a necklace and earrings of heavy gold, a matching bracelet that weighted her very slender wrist. The brunette’s eyes were large and dark, bright red lipstick accentuating the fullness of her lips, too much rouge dotted high cheekbones. The divorcees. Elaine congratulated herself on the accuracy of her perception.

  The men were both tall and both wore track suits that hung too loosely. One of them was bald except for a silver fringe of hair, meticulously trimmed. He sat erect, his hands thrust into the pockets of his gray jacket. Widower.

  The other man was florid-faced, his dark hair thick and matted, his light brown eyes moist. He toyed with his cell phone, placed it in his backpack, removed it and returned it. He coughed, smiled, coughed again. Divorced man, Elaine decided.

  Newly confident, she slid into a chair beside the gray-bearded man whom she had followed into the classroom.

  The thin blond woman coughed, smiled and spoke in a silky, well-trained voice.

  “Hi. I’m Judith Weinstein and I’m the facilitator of this group. Some of you have been here before and some of you are new. Perhaps we can go around the room and introduce ourselves and speak briefly about why we are here.”

  She smiled expectantly and Elaine cringed. She had been wrong, dead wrong. She saw now that Judith Weinstein wore a wedding band of thick wide gold that matched her other jewelry. She herself was not bereft. She made notes on a pad as each member of the group volunteered a first name and murmured the defining word. Widowed. Divorced. Their voices were soft, hesitant. They did not give their last names. It occurred to Elaine that they should be renamed Grievers Anonymous, a support group for the lonely and the newly disoriented.

  Pam, the heavy women who sat closest to her, was a divorcee. Lila was a widow. Edna, the dark-haired thin woman, was a widow. Greg, the balding older man, was divorced and Stew, the younger man, was widowed, his wife having died of leukemia only three months earlier. He had, he added, two young children, a three-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter. Mark and Emily. He held his hands out hopelessly as though they might fill his empty palms with suggestions. Elaine thought to take his hands in her own, to invite him to bring his children to her studio, to ask him the name of the young wife who had died, but she said nothing and averted her eyes from his face, now a crumbled mask of grief.

  Len, the bearded man, had lost his only son. “Cancer,” he said hoarsely. “Thirty-one years old.” His wife had not spoken since their son’s funeral. “She watches television all day. She goes to the door. Opens it, closes it, and then goes back to the damn TV.” He looked around the room as though daring them to match the enormity of his loss, his suffering. His gaze rested on Elaine. She whispered her own name, whispered the word widow but could say no more. She sat back as Judith Weinstein asked carefully phrased questions and waited patiently for the painfully phrased answers.

  Elaine listened as they spoke. Their pain vested them with honesty. Pam, the divorced woman, had come because she hoped to meet new people, people who would understand how hard it was to be suddenly alone. Her old friends had abandoned her. Married women were afraid of women who were newly single. Elaine thought of Claire Newnham’s face, grown suddenly tight, of the glance she had exchanged with the other doctor’s wife. Pam was not wrong.

  Lila had come because her children had urged her to. She wanted to please them. They saw her participation in the group as her first step toward coping with widowhood.

  “They’re right,” Judith Weinstein said encouragingly.

  Lila neither agreed nor disagreed.

  Edna had come so that she might hear the sound of other voices.

  “It’s the silence that I can’t bear,” she said.

  Greg did not know why he had come. It was someplace to go, something to do, he said defensively, removed his hands from his pockets, clasped and unclasped his fingers nervously as he spoke.

  Stew and Len remained silent. Their revelations had exhausted them.

  “Elaine.” Judith Weinstein’s voice was soft. She had been well trained.

  Elaine stared at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just have nothing to say.”

  She seized her raincoat and hurried from the room, almost running down the long corridor, mounting the steps two at a time, not bothering to lift her hood against the battering rain as she ran to her car. She drove home too fast and entered the house chilled and shivering.

  “I am not like them,” she said aloud as she went into the kitchen and filled the kettle. “I am not like them,” she repeated, as she sat in the living room sipping her tea. She closed her eyes against the memory of the misery in their voices, the sorrow on their faces, the emptiness in their lives. “I have places to go. I have things to do. I have my children. I will have a life.”

  She was back at her worktable at first light and she worked with great intensity during the days that followed. She completed the tiles and the insets for the mural. The set of womb-shaped bowls was fired. She called Mimi Armstrong and told her that they would be shipped that week. Politely she declined an invitation to a cocktail party Mimi was giving and a new commission for a ceramic tabletop.

  Sarah called at the end of the week, her voice edgy with apprehension. Why was her mother never at home? Why didn’t she have a second line installed in the studio? She was worried and Lisa and the boys were concerned.

  Elaine imagined her children speaking urgently into the phone, trading anxieties, suggesting plans of action. Their worry filled her with grateful tenderness.

  “I’ve had a big push on to get everything done,” Elaine explained. “I think you’re right. It’s time for me to visit you.” Serena’s words echoed in her memory. She would not lie to her child. “I want to see you, Sarah. I need to see you.”

  “Oh, Mom. Oh, that’s wonderful.”

  Elaine heard the relief in her daughter’s voice, the welcome in her tone. She was gripped by a sudden eagerness.

  “Yes. I think it will be,” she said. “I want to call Lisa and your brothers and tell them about it. I’ll call when I know exactly when I’ll be arriving.”

  “Oh, Mom, I love you.” Sarah’s voice was very soft.

  “And I love you,” Elaine said. It had been such a long time since she had spoken those words. She murmured them again even as she held the silent phone in her hand.

  “I love you
.”

  She sat that night opposite Neil’s empty chair in a circlet of lamplight and listened to Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. It had been Neil’s favorite and her own.

  five

  Sarah Chazani wandered through the rooms of her sun-drenched Jerusalem apartment, pausing to straighten the framed Anna Ticho pen-and-ink drawing of the Judean hills that held a place of pride over their living room sofa. She knew that her mother would immediately notice the misalignment. The paintings that hung in the Westchester home of Sarah’s childhood were always perfectly positioned, just as the upholstery was always clean, the bright cushions on the couch carefully plumped, the glossy wood surfaces smooth and free of any clutter. Even during the week of mourning, her mother had maintained that domestic order.

  Sarah looked despairingly about her own living room. The children’s toys and books, relegated to a corner just that morning, had once again been strewn about the room when they arrived home for lunch. The toddlers, Leah and Yuval, were being cared for, as usual, at Ruth Evenari’s home which was the small community’s informal day-care center. The older children, Ephraim and his sister Leora had dashed back to school. The brightly colored sweaters they had discarded littered the floor and she gathered them up and tossed them into a closet already so crowded that she could barely close the door. The Talmudic tractate that Moshe was studying lay open on the table. She had thrust the bags of hand-me-down clothing which Ruth had delivered just that morning behind an easy chair, but she saw now that they were instantly visible from the doorway. Wearily, she carried them one by one into the boys’ room and concealed them beneath a trundle bed. Her mother would be even more disapproving of a jumble of faded overalls and children’s shirts than she would be of a badly hung picture but then of course, her mother had never had to cope with clumsy parcels of much-needed hand-me-down children’s clothing. Sarah and Lisa, Peter and Denis had had new wardrobes for each season of the year, the transitions effortlessly accomplished. There had been no overflowing shopping bags or cartons of used clothing in Elaine Gordon’s smoothly run, clutter-free household.

  Elaine’s disapproval would be unarticulated, Sarah knew. Their parents had seldom criticized but Sarah and her siblings had always known when they disappointed. Sarah did not want her mother’s visit to begin with that diplomatically contained disappointment and, impulsively, she hurried out to the balcony and gathered in the laundry so that when Elaine looked up, her first glimpse of her daughter’s home would not be diapers dancing in the wind.

  She folded the newly dried white cotton squares and carried them into the children’s room, glancing at her watch. Elaine’s plane had landed at Ben Gurion Airport forty-five minutes ago. With any luck she had cleared customs and she and Moshe would now be on their way to Jerusalem. Elaine’s smart red-leather luggage would be stowed in Moshe’s van which he had cleaned out last night, as carefully as Sarah had cleaned the house, gestures of welcome, bids for approval.

  Sarah imagined her mother and her husband sitting side by side as Moshe drove south to Jerusalem, struggling to make conversation, Moshe pointing out landmarks, Elaine asking questions about the children, about Sarah’s home-based business. Her husband would, as always, be uneasy with Elaine and her mother, in turn, would try too hard to relate to him.

  “She’s really a wonderful woman,” Sarah had told Moshe that morning. She wanted him to appreciate Elaine’s talent, her energy, her independence of spirit.

  “It’s not that I don’t like your mother,” Moshe had replied. “It’s that I hardly know her.”

  Although Sarah and Moshe had been married for ten years they had seldom spent time with either her family or Moshe’s parents who lived in an upscale Cleveland suburb. Moshe’s father, a prominent attorney, and his mother, an interior designer, were bewildered by their son’s embrace of orthodoxy. How had Mike Singer, the clean-shaven captain of the Berkeley rowing team, a student who had aced his MCAT exams, and happily trekked through the far east now with one girlfriend, now with another, morphed into Moshe Chazani, the bearded Talmudic scholar? How could they, his parents (who loved him still, who, of course, would always love him) deal with his lifestyle, so alien to their own? Harriet Singer, his mother, gaunt with disappointment, had asked Neil that question as they sat together at their children’s wedding. Her voice had been bitter, her eyes glazed and Neil, who had similar questions about his own daughter, had offered an uneasy response, a throwaway professional platitude. Sarah and Moshe (as they now called themselves) were mature young adults, capable of deciding their own destinies, he had assured her.

  He had not told her that he and Elaine had also been unhappy with Sarah’s decision. Unhappy but accepting. Their children were independent adults. Sandy (he had always had difficulty thinking of her as Sarah) had the right to live the life she had chosen.

  Still, Neil and Elaine had visited Jerusalem only twice since the wedding, once when Leora was born and once to see the small apartment on Ramat Chessed that they had agreed to help purchase for the growing family. It had not surprised Sarah that her parents had not come more often. She understood that they led busy lives, that her father’s schedule prohibited long journeys and that her mother would not leave him for any length of time. As always, they prioritized the time they spent together. She knew that they had no real understanding of the life that she and Moshe had chosen.

  She remembered their shocked reaction on her return from her junior year at the Hebrew University when she told them that she had decided to embrace orthodox Judaism and that she was determined to return to Jerusalem and study at a woman’s yeshiva.

  Her father had been conciliatory. Ever the skilled analyst, he had probed her reasoning, asked subtle and not so subtle questions. Was she fearful of growing up, of assuming the responsibilities of adulthood? Was she retreating into the protective cocoon of an insular religious community because she could not cope with the demands of real life? Perhaps she wanted to see a therapist who might help her work through her decision. He had, as always, been gentle and when he saw that she would not be swayed, he said no more. He had, at last, set one condition. She was to complete her senior year and then, if she still wanted to, she could return to Jerusalem.

  Her mother, however, had been more persistent.

  “But why? Tell me why you are so attracted to this community, these ultra-orthodox people. You are our Sandy. Why should you become their Sarah? What do you have in common with them? What can they possibly offer you?”

  And Sarah had struggled to explain. She had tried to speak to her mother of that autumn afternoon, her very first month in Jerusalem when she had agreed to accompany her roommate, Tina, to the Western Wall of the temple on a Friday afternoon.

  “It’s supposed to be really spiritual,” Tina said.

  Tina was a tall, thin Californian who wore her light brown hair in a long lank braid and played mournful tunes on her recorder. She had taped a huge colored poster of Buddha over her bed and, at odd intervals, she dimmed the lights of their room and lit fragrant candles.

  “I don’t even know what that means. I’ve never thought about being spiritual,” Sarah, then still called Sandy, had protested but in the end she had agreed to go and had even worn the requisite costume, a long denim skirt and an Indian shirt whose sleeves fell to her elbows.

  The approach to the Western Wall was crowded, as it always was, on the eve of the Sabbath. Sandy and Tina were caught up in a throng of jostling Chassidic men draped in prayer shawls and religious women, their heads covered with scarves of a gossamer weave or crowned with scalp-hugging wigs. Small boys in huge skullcaps, their curling earlocks damp from their visit to the ritual bath, ran past them, twirling the fringes that dangled from their oversize white shirts. In front of the Wall, members of religious Zionist youth groups organized graceful circle dances, the boys on the men’s side of the plaza and the girls on the women’s side. Sandy stared at them, moved by their faces so bright with joy, each dance step a prayer in motion,
their eyes lifted now and again to the slowly darkening sky. She watched as women stepped forward to place carefully folded bits of paper in the crevices between the ancient stones.

  “What are they doing?” she asked Tina.

  “They’ve written out prayers that they want answered,” Tina replied indifferently. Her eyes raked the crowd and she waved suddenly to a tall blond bearded youth whose corn-yellow hair was twisted into a very tight ponytail. Sandy recognized him. He was Craig, a British student in her philosophy class who asked irrelevant, sardonic questions and was rumored to have access to very good pot.

  “Do you have a prayer you want answered?” Tina asked as Craig approached them.

  Sandy did not answer although she knew what she would pray for. She would pray for a belief that would give her the same ardent joy that illuminated the faces of the dancing girls. Ignoring Tina and Craig, she moved forward and suddenly, surprisingly, she was directly in front of the Wall. She lifted her fingers to it, surprised by its smoothness, even more surprised to see the outcroppings of greenery between the stones, nature’s tenacity affirmed. Impulsively she pressed her lips lightly to the cold stone. She wished for a prayer but having none, she returned to where Tina and Craig stood.

  “Hey, we’re going to a café in the Old City,” Tina said. “Want to come with?”

  Sandy shook her head. “You’re through with being spiritual?” she asked wryly.

  “We just want to get some coffee. Can you get back on your own?”

  “Sure.”

  Tina and Craig left then and she stood alone in the plaza that was slowly emptying as the worshippers and dancers hurried toward their Sabbath dinners.

  “Are you alone?”

  She veered around. A tall bearded man wearing a long black coat, a black hat perched on his very large head, smiled at her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “May I invite you to have Shabbat dinner with my family? We live not far from here and my wife, Rachel, is an excellent cook.”