“Your sister is a whirling dervish,” Elaine told Lisa who called regularly. “Me? I’m fine. Really.”
She knew that her children worried about her. She overheard Sarah’s late-night conversations with Peter and Denis, her murmured reassurances.
“Mom’s doing great,” she told her brothers. “I think she really needed this change. And she’s helping me a lot.”
Elaine worked with Sarah on fabric designs, urged her to use more complex patterns, more challenging shapes. She listened as Sarah explained the mysteries of silk-screening, of how she cut her patterns so that the folds of the robe did not obscure the design. Elaine wakened in the night and made quick sketches. A pouch of a solid fabric could be attached to a sash. Pockets could be fashioned as flaps. The ceramicist’s tricks, layered dimensions, could be translated onto fabrics. She would fall back into a light sleep. Her nights were restless but her days passed in a frenetic pace that was at once soothing and exhausting. Loss clung to her like a shadow but there was no time for grief.
She moved easily through Ramat Chessed, learned the names of Sarah’s neighbors, the ages of their children. She was greeted on her walks with pleasant smiles. She was a guest in their community and they accepted the fact that she did not cover her hair, that often the sleeves of her shirts did not entirely cover her arms. She understood that for now that was acceptable. And she, in turn, made small compromises. She did not wear slacks, she was careful not to extend her hand in greeting when she was introduced to a religious man.
She acknowledged that Sarah’s serene adherence to the mores of the community, the strict separation of men and women in the synagogue, of boys and girls in the schools, mystified her. She and Neil had fled the orthodox synagogues of their childhood, the small crowded rooms that stank of the sweat of the worshippers and the mildewed pages of their prayer books, reverberant with the atonal cacophony of mumbled prayers and droning Torah readings.
They understood that their immigrant parents had clung to the practices of their past, that they had derived comfort from prayers intoned in familiar accents, but they themselves had opted for the bright and airy suburban synagogue where families sat together in comfortable cushioned pews crafted of pale wood. They had attended only infrequently but it pleased them that their children were exposed to an aesthetic ambience, to a dignified service presided over by a rabbi who spoke with a Boston accent and a cantor who occasionally gave operatic performances. Sarah, Lisa and their brothers had attended religious school in wide-windowed rooms and celebrated their bar and bat mitzvahs with a tasteful service followed by a joyous party. How was it then that Sarah, who had read so beautifully from the Torah at her bat mitzvah, was content to attend services in the Ramat Chessed synagogue where she sat behind a curtain in the stifling women’s section and passively listened to a prayer service in which only the voices of men could be heard?
Elaine dared not ask. She simply avoided the synagogue. It was good to sleep late and awaken to an empty house. There was little enough privacy during the week.
She wakened early each morning, dressed swiftly and set a pot of water on the stove even before she brewed her tea. Vegetables for that evening’s meal were simmering by the time Moshe returned from the predawn prayer quorum. She watched as he lifted his fingers reverently to the mezuzah affixed to the doorpost, as he carefully replaced the royal blue velvet bag that contained his prayer shawl and phylacterics in the drawer, as he washed his hands and murmured a prayer, and then poured himself coffee and came to sit beside her on the small enclosed balcony that overlooked the garden. He spoke softly to her then with the quiet intensity of a man who was not afraid to share his thoughts and feelings. In that, he was not unlike Neil, Elaine realized, a similarity that was unsurprising. Hadn’t Neil, accomplished analyst that he was, often observed that women tended to marry men like their fathers? Sarah had not proven him wrong.
She listened sympathetically as Moshe spoke of his worries about the children. Leora was too quiet, Ephraim too mischievous, Yuval caught cold so easily and Leah was an exhausting bundle of energy. Elaine offered patent reassurances. Children change, they develop, they grow. And sometimes they grow into strangers. The thought came unbidden. She hugged it to herself as her son-in-law refilled his cup.
Moshe told her how grateful he was that she was helping Sarah. His wife worked too hard. There was her business, the children, her devotion to the needs of the community. It would be wonderful if Elaine could spend more time with them, even more wonderful if she could see herself living in Jerusalem for even part of the year. The parents of many of their friends had done just that and their presence made a difference.
“It’s not an easy life that we have chosen,” he said, but there was no regret in his voice.
“Why did you choose it?” Elaine asked.
He considered, then answered carefully.
“It gives me everything I did not have before. All through college, then in medical school and when I traveled, I felt a kind of emptiness. I wanted my life to mean something beyond myself and I wanted to feel myself part of a caring community. I found all that in the yeshiva world. There’s a spiritual and intellectual complexity in the sacred texts that engage me in a way that my secular education never did. I love studying and I love teaching. And it comforts me to know that there is meaning in every small action of my life, acknowledged meaning. Everything is sanctified—the washing of hands, the sight of a rainbow, the rising of the sun. I wish I knew a blessing for Sarah’s smile. She’s wonderful, your daughter, my wife.”
“Yes, she is.” Elaine smiled at him in agreement as the household stirred into wakefulness and another busy day began.
Each morning Moshe loaded the van, some days with the bolts of fabrics which he would distribute to Sarah’s small army of seamstresses and on other days with the cartons of finished garments to be delivered to customers in distant enclaves. The rest of his day would be spent at the yeshiva where his time would be divided between teaching and studying.
Elaine helped Sarah dress the children and give them breakfast. There was the inevitable search for a vanished shoe, the dash to prepare lunches, spats between Ephraim and Leora.
“Stop teasing me.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
“Baby.”
And then both children were running down the road to school turning to wave goodbye to Sarah and Elaine who stood on the balcony and waved them on.
Together, they walked Yuval and Leah to Ruth’s house, already in chaotic disarray as toddlers scampered through the garden, cradled stuffed animals, laughed and sobbed. Ruth moved calmly through her small kingdom, her cell phone tucked into the pocket of her bright red apron, a diaper always in readiness on her shoulder. Now and again, she would respond to a buzz on the intercom and rush upstairs, leaving her daughter Michal in charge.
“Avi probably needs her,” Sarah explained to Elaine the first time Ruth dashed away in midsentence.
Avi worked at home. He was a theoretical physicist whose research had attracted international attention. His work was accomplished on a specially designed computer. He was blind. Sarah had told her in that calm, accepting tone that Elaine found both admirable and infuriating. A grenade had exploded in his face as he guarded a school in a Gaza border settlement while he was on duty there.
Occasionally, if Sarah had errands to run, Elaine remained at Ruth’s. She showed the toddlers how to shape clay, amused them by creating small animals with scraps of plasticene, intricate shapes with pipe cleaners. She watched as Ruth rushed from one child to another, dispensing hugs, smiling reprovingly at two small girls who quarreled over a stuffed animal.
“You’re wonderful with children,” she said.
“It’s my joy,” Ruth replied. “It’s my way of giving back.”
“Giving back?” Elaine asked.
Ruth hesitated, looked hard at Elaine but before she could speak, Avi, tall and lean, his hair and beard the
color of the ochre desert where he had been born, approached them, tapping his way carefully across the garden with his white-tipped cane. He smiled pleasantly at them and lifted his face to the sun.
“It’s good to feel the warmth beginning. You will see how beautiful our country is in the springtime,” he told Elaine. “You can feel the heat even in the evening sun.”
She marveled at how he had adjusted to the loss of his sight, of his ability to see the changing colors of his country as its meadows burst into blossom, how he could speak with such pleasure of the evening sun whose light was forever lost to him.
It surprised her then when some days later Avi had himself talked about Gaza in his calm, gravelly voice, during a Shabbat dinner.
“Gaza, Gush Katif, was beautiful,” he said, in the wistful voice of a man who would never again be able to focus his gaze on beauty. “But the price the State paid for it was too high.”
“If you had it to do over again, would you serve in on the border, Abba?” It was Ruth and Avi’s lovely teenaged daughter, Michal, who asked the question. Michal, Elaine knew, would begin her army service within months. Unlike many orthodox girls, she had elected to be inducted into the regular army. Elaine wondered if Michal was suddenly questioning her own decision.
“I would,” Avi replied, twisting the handle of his white cane. “You know, Michal, I found my way to orthodoxy only after I was wounded. I began to ask questions about why it was that I had been sent to that settlement, why it was that I was standing in that exact place at that exact moment and I came to understand that it was the hand of God that sent me there. That grenade could have hit the school, could have hit children. And if I had not been wounded, I would not have been sent to Hadassah Hospital and I would not have met your mother. Again, God’s hand.” He smiled and moved closer to Ruth, pressed her fingers to his lips.
“But why didn’t the hand of God prevent that grenade from being thrown at all?” Elaine asked, struggling against a sudden anger. And why didn’t the hand of God prevent that clot, that berry-shaped cluster of blood from exploding in Neil’s brain? She choked the thought into silence. Her hand trembled and drops of wine from the glass she held spilled out onto the snow-white cloth. Tear-shaped scarlet drops.
Her question, each word etched with anger, ricocheted against their wall of silence. She demanded reason. They could only offer faith. Too swiftly, Sarah began to clear the table. The remaining flames of the Sabbath candles sputtered and burned out. The older children slipped away from the table, as though sensing the new uneasiness. It was Moshe who spoke at last.
“The sages teach us that we cannot always understand the ways of the Lord. Avi speaks of the hand of God and we understand that it is a hand that often moves in mysterious ways,” he said gently.
Elaine did not reply. She looked around the table. Moshe, his eyes closed, had already begun to chant the grace after meals. Dov, one of his students, lightly tapped the table as he lifted his voice in prayer. She envied them their faith, their certitude. She did not open her own prayer book but sat in silence, smiling only when Leora, who sat beside her, rested her head on her shoulder.
Later that evening, as she sat on the balcony, Sarah, wearing a long gauzy robe of her own design, came and sat beside her.
“I want to thank you for trying to understand, Mom,” she said. “I know it’s hard for you to accept our life, our belief.”
Elaine nodded. “I’ve tried. But I think of the difference between your life and Lisa’s. I don’t agree with all the choices she’s made but her path is easier. She used her talents. She has a profession, a comfortable life. She lives in familiar territory.”
“Familiar to you. Alien to me. And not everything about Lisa’s life was a choice.” Immediately, she regretted her words. Lisa’s secret was her own. Sarah was not free to share it with their mother. “And I am using my talents. I’m still involved with my art. You know that. We’ve been working together, you and I, haven’t we?” She willed Elaine to acknowledge their shared efforts of the weeks past. “And I’m using my talents as a mother, a Jewish mother.”
“As I didn’t?” Elaine asked.
“I didn’t say that. But for you and Dad, being Jewish was just part of who you were. It wasn’t central to your lives. You belonged to a synagogue the way you belonged to a political party. You sent us to Hebrew school the way you gave us piano lessons. Bar and bat mitzvahs were more like social occasions than religious observances. It worked for you and Dad because I think in a way you were each other’s spiritual life, but I always felt a kind of emptiness. I don’t feel that anymore.”
Sarah fell silent and leaned forward, studying the small Sabbath eve parade that progressed past the balcony. She loved the peace of this hour, the communal pattern repeating itself week after week. Couples returning from Sabbath dinners strolled homeward at an unhurried pace. A sweet stillness blanketed the neighborhood. There was no traffic on the road, no sound of radios or television, only the distant hum of Sabbath songs. A group of boys looked up and waved at her as they passed. A small family walked down the quiet street, the father carrying a sleeping child, his black fur-trimmed hat pushed back, his eyes lifted skyward. He sang softly, perhaps a prayer, perhaps a lullaby. She rested her hand on the gentle rise of her abdomen. Was it possible that her unborn child could hear that prayer, that lullaby? She leaned closer to her mother who spoke so softly that she had to strain to hear her.
“We both grew up in orthodox homes, your father and I,” Elaine said. “Immigrant homes. Our parents—your grandparents’ lives had been poisoned by all that had happened to them in Russia. All they kept were the rituals. Joyless. Life-stifling. And the fear. They went to the synagogue to weep. We wanted our lives, your lives, to be different. We didn’t want your childhoods to be darkened as ours had been. We had Friday night dinners, the holidays, and it seemed enough. None of you ever asked for more.”
“I didn’t know what it was I was missing until I came to Jerusalem, until I spent Shabbat with the Cohens. And then I realized what I had been missing and what I wanted. I tried to talk about it with you but I kind of felt an emotional shutdown. Dad put all sorts of psychological slants on what I was saying and you just listened, argued briefly and accepted it—the way you accepted Denis’s homosexuality and Peter’s decision to marry Lauren and Lisa’s decision not to marry at all. So I stopped trying.”
“Then I stand guilty of the sin of acceptance?” Elaine asked harshly. “What would you have had me do, what would you have had me say? Was it so bad to accept my children’s decisions, to accept the lives they had chosen for themselves?”
She stared at her daughter, flushed with anger. She and Neil had prided themselves on being unlike friends who had descended into depressions when a child dropped out of college to trek through the far east, or another couple who had disowned their son when he married an Asian doctor. Even Serena, her college roommate, had been estranged for many years from her daughter when she revealed that she was gay. But the Gordon children had always been free to make their own decisions. And now, it seemed that it was that very freedom that Sarah—and perhaps the others—had resented. She waited tensely for Sarah’s answer.
“Not bad. Just not enough.” Sarah’s voice trembled with sadness. She would not tell her mother that it was Lisa who claimed that their parents’ calm acceptance came easily because they simply did not care that deeply.
“They are central to each other’s lives,” Lisa had said bitterly. “We’re just appendages. You and me. Denis and Peter. Oh sure, they love us, but we’re not their focus. All we have to do is not rock their boat, not interrupt their gourmet dinners for two, their quiet evenings alone, their precious work.”
“What would have made it enough?” Elaine asked.
“We would have wanted you to understand why we made the choices we did, to be part of our lives. To do what you’re doing now, sharing and caring.”
Elaine touched her daughter’s hand. It was ve
ry cold. She encased it in both her own and they sat together for a few more minutes in the velvet darkness and then went inside, wearied and unconsoled.
Some days later Moshe suggested that Elaine accompany him on one of his longer journeys to deliver completed orders of Sarah’s robes to customers north of Jerusalem.
“We want you to see Israel. Jerusalem is wonderful but the rest of the country is beautiful. I’ll be driving along the coast and through orchard country. And now both the citrus trees and the almond trees are in blossom. Sarah, can you spare your mother for a short while?”
“Of course,” Sarah agreed. “And Moshe is a great guide, Mom.”
“Can I go?” Leora asked wistfully.
“You have your school trip, Leora. You don’t want to miss going north with your class. And Michal will be going along to help the teacher,” Moshe said.
“All right then,” Leora said, no longer disappointed. She adored Michal and always contrived to sit next to her when the Evenarises came to dinner. Perhaps she could sit next to her on the bus. She kissed her grandmother, as though to apologize for being so easily dissuaded and dashed off to find the bright yellow sun hat Elaine had brought from America. She wanted to wear it on the trip.
“So what do you say?” Moshe looked expectantly at Elaine.
“Well, if Sarah can manage.”
She glanced at her daughter, who nodded. It occurred to Elaine that perhaps they were mutually relieved to have some time apart. There had been a subtle tension between them since their conversation on the balcony. They had said too much, or perhaps not enough. She was certain only of one thing. She would no longer be content with a counterfeit acquiescence. Sarah had demanded sharing and caring, an abandonment of superficial acceptance. She would follow that dictate. Hazardous as it might be, she would speak her mind.
“You’ll have a great time, Mom,” Sarah said.
“Yes. I think I will. It sounds like fun.”
She saw Sarah and Moshe exchange a glance of amusement. Fun was not a word they had expected her to use.
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