by Rachel Simon
One by one, as each set of bells began to clap and the chimes began to tinkle, our friends raised their heads from their amusements.
“That’s my mother,” Ruthie said first.
“There’s my house,” Linda said, hearing hers.
“Dinner’s ready,” Deborah added.
They stood up from our games. “I have to go now,” Ruthie said.
“See you later,” Linda said.
Naomi and I were used to this. Many times she and I had remained behind in the meadow as the others ran off, alerted by the distinct harmonics of their family’s bells. Now, I braced myself, already angry once again at the injustice of my parents’ stubbornness, and already feeling so alone.
Crouched on the ground, watching ants march through the grass, Naomi turned to me. Her eyes shone with the thrill of listening for the sounds of her home, calling out from far beyond the meadow. Until now, neither of us had had any reason to pay the slightest attention to the many bells that rang out at dusk every day, and so distinctions had blurred for both of us. Often we never even heard them at all. But now, she turned her head, listening for the chimes she knew were meant for her. I fixed my focus back on the ants, hoping they would never come.
But then a voice joined the fray: Pinckle-jinkle-ping.
She jumped to her feet. “That’s for me!” she said, bursting into a smile.
I stood too. Already Ruthie and Linda and Deborah were running off down the path. Naomi took a step toward them, and I wondered what I would do here, all alone in the meadow. I wasn’t much for ants on my own.
Then she paused. “Come on,” she said. “Come back with me.”
I didn’t want to. My mouth tightened with resentment. My parents were being too mean.
Naomi looked at me. She didn’t say anything. She just waited a second. When I didn’t move, when I didn’t even return her smile, she looked away. This is it, I thought, imagining that now I too would be like my poor parakeet, alone for good in her cage.
But then Naomi looked back. And with a sudden movement that I didn’t even notice, she seized my hand, and yanked me toward the woods. Had she been any other child, I would have resisted. But she was Naomi, so I laughed.
Off we ran, together, toward our houses. Her chimes kept ringing, as did the entire choir of neighborhood clangs and jangles and peels, and as the air rushed into our lungs, and the scents of the woods filled our heads, and our sneakered feet sprang down the wooded path and then out onto the sidewalks, I listened to the sounds for the first time. Each bell, I now truly heard, sounded completely different, yet inevitably sweet and soothing. Sort of like the way the sunlight felt sifting through the trees. Sort of like the way I felt, when Naomi went exploring with me, or my parents swept me up in their arms. Maybe, I thought, this is the way God speaks to you. Each person hears her own special sound. You just have to be listening.
We rounded the corner and saw our two houses, side by side, and giggled with the fun of it all as we tumbled into our yards. Although her house still sang its Naomi tune and mine persisted in its silence, I decided, as we barreled toward our respective doors, that tomorrow and the next day and every day after, I’d have to listen to everyone and everything. I’d listen hard until I recognized his voice, so when God called me to dinner, I’d know.
The Greatest Mystery of Them All
My mother shot me to death last night. I was trying to keep her from going on a drug run, but she insisted. “It’s just this once,” she said, buttoning a purple blazer over her orange stretch pants. “Ha! You think I’m an idiot?” I said. “I know you’ve been doing this for ages. But this time is more dangerous — I can feel it. Please don’t go.”
I started crying. I thought she’d respond to tears; mothers usually do. For the first time in my fourteen years, I felt desperate. I’d do anything to stop her: cling to the cuff of her pants as she marched out the door; call the police.
I guess she knew that. But my mother is not a woman to be deterred.
So when I grabbed her and hugged her tight to say goodbye, planning as I felt her large breasts pressing into me how I would turn her in just to stop her, she pulled out a pistol and shot me four times in the stomach.
I stumbled backward and looked at her. She was calm as she fitted the pistol into her pocket, the same one where she kept her Kleenex and Chap Stick. I was stunned but I wasn’t angry. I knew she did what she felt she had to do. I said, “See you in Heaven,” because I had a feeling that she was going to die soon. She said, “Jews don’t believe in Heaven.” She was holding me in her arms, and I could feel her love for me. Then I faded into death.
In Heaven my grandfather found me the first day at a corner playground. I was shooting baskets by myself. Here they let you look any way you wanted. I’d chosen to become a slender blonde with a little button nose and perfect white teeth. But Grandpa had stayed the same: short, round, and bald, still hunched over from the years in his tailor shop. He wore a yarmulke, like all the other men I’d seen.
“Your mother,” he said to me after we’d hugged each other. “She’s up to no good down there.”
“I know,” I said. “She’s how I got here in the first place.”
“Nice here, isn’t it? No roaches. No rent.”
“I didn’t think Jews lived after death,” I said.
“Az men lebt, derlebt men zich alts,” he said, shrugging. “If you live long enough, you will live to see everything.”
I never told the neighbors that my mother dealt drugs. “Oh, not her,” they’d have said, laughing. My mother was known for baking the best gingersnap cookies on our block. Also, she made excellent whitefish, and always got all the bones out. After school she and I would sit down and watch TV. My mother liked old movies best. Sometimes she’d get a call during a show and would have to leave the room, and then I’d change the channel to reruns of I Dream of Jeannie. All the while I could hear her down the hall, mumbling things like, “Is the recipe right?” and “Well, taste some of it, then!” I’d seen those callers when they pulled up to our house at night in what looked like normal pizza delivery trucks. Tall men with beard stubble and cigarette butts hanging from their lower lips. They’d do their transactions on the porch. She’d turn off the Chinese lanterns and slip the contraband into the metal credenza where she stored the badminton set.
I watched from my window. My mother is not as she appears, I wanted to tell my neighbors. But I knew they would laugh me off. And what difference would it make to them anyway? They wouldn’t be affected by her actions.
There are places up here where you can find windows in the ground. They take the place of manholes. If you want, you can look through them and see what’s going on below.
My mother is now on a ship in the middle of a vast blue ocean, streaming toward some unknown destination. At her side she fingers the barrel of an Uzi submachine gun. She is still wearing her orange stretch pants, but has changed into a rayon blouse with a pattern of pink flowers splashed across the front. The buttons gap at the apex of her breasts.
Her face is set into that hard look she always got when she told me I had to do something and I tried to resist. Like after the divorce, when she sent me away to that all-summer camp. Or a little later, when she joined a mah-jongg club and insisted that I attend the synagogue youth group. I knew she wasn’t playing mah-jongg; she was driving into the city to meet sinister types in back alleys. I could tell because she’d talk jive when she picked me up late at night. “Now, you best do your homework, girl, or you ain’t gonna get nowhere, dig?”
Up here I get to meet all my dead relatives. Uncle Saul, who, my mother told me, observed the no-work rule of the Sabbath so strictly that he tore enough toilet paper on Friday afternoons to last him till the evening of the next day. My second cousin Mordecai, who, this again from my mother, lost all his money trying to find a way to make fortune cookies out of matzah. My grandmother, my great-grandparents, cousins — all long dead. They assemble in the Jewish
deli on the corner of the street where my apartment is located. Once they get over the way I look — they have all retained their original appearance — they relax and seem pleased to meet me. We sit down and drink cream soda. They pinch my cheek. They speak Yiddish. I do not understand Yiddish. Even death does not change that.
After the divorce, my mother became very strict. Suddenly, every week: Hebrew lessons, meetings with the rabbi, services. “Why do I need to learn all this?” I’d ask, yanking at my stockings on the way to synagogue. “Because our people have been around for thousands of years, and you have a responsibility to carry on the tradition,” she would say. I didn’t feel any responsibility. I didn’t even feel Jewish, except for how I looked and for my limited ability to stumble through the prayer books. I failed every test they gave me. The teacher: “Name four cities in Israel.” Me: “Uh, Jerusalem and, uh, uh …” The teacher: “Why are blue and white the colors of Judaism?” Me: “——”
The kids at Hebrew school lived in large houses. The girls had their hair done at beauty parlors. The boys discussed politics in the Knesset. Their mothers held bridge parties in the den, their fathers hung PEDIATRICIAN or DENTIST signs outside the entrances to the additions to their ranch houses. Being a Jew meant being like them. My mother and I rented the first floor of a two-family house in a Gentile neighborhood. She was a salesclerk in a five-and-ten. We dressed in remainders from end-of-the-season sales.
At Hebrew school, the other kids would compete to answer the teacher’s questions. Me, I’d sit in the corner, staring out the window across the room, stewing about my mother’s freedom. She could go anywhere she pleased. She could hang out with bums, if she chose. She could become a drug runner.
In Heaven I go to visit God, but He is not presiding on a throne, the way I’d expected. Here there are different versions of Him, one to a neighborhood. Our God is a butcher. He stands behind a glass counter, taking orders for kosher meat. “How can I help you?” He bellows when I hand Him the ticket with my number.
“I feel so alone here,” I say. “Not that I had flocks of friends down on Earth. But here I don’t have anyone.”
“You have your grandfather, and all your relatives.”
“But their lives were so different from mine. We have nothing in common.”
He leans back and places His hands on the counter. “What would you like me to do?”
I roll a few ideas around in my head. “Find me a way to occupy my time.”
“Do you feel that’s the answer?”
“Yes.”
“Fine, if that’s what you wish. A few blocks from here is a library, and in it are books that will tell you about anything in history. Go ahead. They’re in English. That should keep you busy for a while.”
What I like about Heaven is that I can learn all the mysteries of the cosmos. Like how evolution really works, and what religion — if any — is right, and if there is life on other planets. They are big questions, but actually they have little answers, and once you’ve learned them, there’s not much left to think about except the details. It gets kind of boring, with all this certainty. That’s what I don’t like about Heaven. There is nothing left to wonder about.
I am watching my mother through the manhole. She is lying on a huge, round bed. Portholes look out onto the ocean. Beside her sits an Arab with a black-and-white checkered cloth hanging from his cap. The cloth covers the back of his head and neck like a curtain. I am surprised she is with an Arab, given that she always said they were crazy. She and the Arab are watching Wheel of Fortune on the television across the room.
The Arab screws up his face in confusion. “Send me? Send my?”
My mother says, “Send my regards to Broadway.” She sighs.
“You are so smart, my little Ernestine,” the Arab says. He is smoking a fat cigar. The ashes are falling onto the sheets. I cannot believe my eyes. My mother does not wipe the ashes off or slide an ashtray under the Arab’s chin, though she wouldn’t even let me eat gingersnaps in the living room without a plate and napkin. I cannot understand it. Evolution and the universe are big questions, but my mother is the greatest mystery of them all.
I used to wonder about Heaven. Even though my mother didn’t believe in it. Could Heaven be full of harps and mist and good-looking people wearing white robes? Did it hurt to have the wings put on? Or was Heaven more like a bop on the head — one quick thunk and then you’re nothing? I admit I liked the uncertainty. Why read a whole book if you already know the ending?
My grandfather tells me he cannot understand my mother’s behavior. “She was such a good girl. She studied Hebrew. She did her lessons at regular school. Once she got married, she was not so good at keeping the Sabbath, and she did neglect your religious education. But still, she had a kind heart.”
“She’s very good at acting,” I tell him. “The neighbors and the rabbi thought she was a model mother.”
“Where’s your father?” he says.
“Haven’t you been watching? Three years ago he left her for a lady professor. That’s when my mother started making me go to synagogue. That’s also when she started dating. The men were OK at first, guys who owned companies and did things like take me to ball games. But sooner or later, something would go wrong and she’d be alone again. She’d cry for a few weeks, then drag herself back out. After a while, I guess she lost her heart. First she took up with a bartender. Then it was an ex-con with a betting habit. And then a coke dealer who carried around the phone numbers of hit men in his wallet. And all the time she kept signing me up for more religious school activities.”
“Have you told your father about this?”
“He said I could stay with him for a weekend, if I really needed to. I told him I’d try to stick it out. I didn’t think things would get as bad as they did.”
The Arab is my mother’s lover. That much is for sure. He arranges to have a carton of heavenly hash ice cream parachuted onto the ship. He never takes off the hat with the veil, not even in bed or in the shower.
From up here, you can see people down there doing everything. Using the bathroom, fooling around in bed, picking their noses. You get used to it after a while. Maybe even begin to enjoy it.
We don’t do much of anything up here. The books are boring once you’ve read a few of them. And my relatives spend their time gossiping about people from their past. All I can make out are phrases like “Finkelstein! Ach! Der mensch iz meshugge!” I go for walks and it’s the same thing: people sitting around, eating fatty Jewish food, speaking Yiddish. They glance at me, with my new photogenic looks, and pause for a second, as if trying to place me. Then they wave their hands, and turn away.
On Earth I used to watch the models in commercials. They were all five feet eight with teaspoon breasts and teeth that had been blessed by an orthodontist. I made notes about them on a pad I kept on a shelf above the TV. I ate through boxes of pretzels and cans of macaroons as I followed the models’ careers.
Before I went to bed I’d stand in front of my mirror. Face front. Turn to the right. The proportions were all off, and the shadows from my nose buried half my face in darkness. I would think of my mother’s line: “If a girl has no other virtues, even a freckle can be considered one.” I would scrutinize my reflection for a freckle. But even that, I could not find.
My mother’s ship docks somewhere in Asia. The bay is cramped with small fishing canoes and ramshackle houseboats. Some people in the houseboats are leaning over the sides to scrub their clothes, while others stand on the decks and empty baskets of garbage into the water. My mother steps down the ramp in her green wraparound skirt and white blouse with the big bow on the collar. The Arab is at her side.
Little Asian children swarm around my mother. She smiles at them and walks across the docks and into the streets of the city.
In every doorway, people are selling their wares: vegetables, fish, shoes, dresses. My mother and her lover pay no attention as the merchants call out to them. She and the Ar
ab stride with a sense of purpose. Children skip behind them.
When my mother reaches a white house with one side settled lower into the ground than the other, she turns and addresses the little ones who are following. “Children,” she says, “you will have to leave us now. I have things I must do.”
One of the larger children translates for the others. A few of them cry, but they all walk away. My mother and her lover enter the house.
My grandfather is squatting beside me over the window. Company is something I never had before, when I looked out my window, waiting for my mother to come home from her dates. “I don’t know what I did wrong,” my grandfather says. Neither do I. I am wondering how she got into drug running at all. Of all the hobbies she could have chosen, why this one? If she wanted excitement, she could have put food coloring in her cake batter. She could have taken up smoking. Or even read dirty novels from the library. But no. She had to go in for danger.
Inside the sinking Asian house is a huge room. It is filled with delicate plants and there are pillows on the floor.
“Look at this place,” my mother says to the Arab. “Look at this mess. These people should put their things away the minute they walk in the door, not just drop them wherever they please.”
The Arab lifts the lids of several tin boxes that are lying on the pillows. Inside each box is a colored powder, each a different shade of white or brown. He stuffs his pockets with the powder. His jacket bulges, and powder flurries down his front like snow.
At the far end of the room, two Asian men appear with a large scale, the kind you use to weigh meat. “I’ll take two hundred and thirty-five pounds,” my mother calls out. She walks up to them. I think it humorous that she chose that number, as it used to be our address. When she gets close, she pulls out her pistol. “And keep your thumb off the scale. I’ve got my eye on you.”
One time my mother discovered me watching the neighbors. “How could you do that?” she said. “It’s rude.”
“It’s only rude if they find out,” I said.