An Unorthodox Match

by Naomi Ragen

  Throwing out the empty bag of cookies after digging out the last remaining crumbs with a moistened finger, she went into her parents’ bedroom to look at herself in the full-length mirror. Touching her round, pink cheeks and patting her tummy, which slightly protruded under her close-fitting skirt, she felt disgusted. Just one word from her father would have helped her stave off these sweet binges, she told herself bitterly. All he needed to do was look at her with his kind, sad eyes and shake his head and say, “My dear, pretty daughter, you must stop eating so many sweets!” But her father was never around, and when he was, his eyes seemed vacant and unfocused as if he didn’t actually see her.

  She tried hard to excuse him. What really pious man would notice such a petty, physical thing like that? Besides, it was more important what other women thought of you than what the men thought. After all, when you went to a wedding, wasn’t there an impenetrable mechitza separating the hall into men’s and women’s sections, so no man or boy could see you? The pains you took with your appearance weren’t to catch the eyes of the men as much as to impress the bewigged matrons who ruled the shidduch world. The best you could hope for was that somebody’s aunt or grandmother would turn their sharp little eyes on you and make inquires. Sometimes, local yentas would single out a particularly attractive girl and make the matches for free, in line with the cherished belief that arranging three successful matches ensured one’s place in heaven.

  It was so important not only to lose the extra weight but to know exactly what to wear, how to do your hair, and how to use makeup to gently coax the best out of your features without appearing like a prutza. To navigate all these things, she desperately needed her mother.

  Mameh. She glanced at the empty, unwrinkled sheets on the twin bed in her parents’ bedroom that now did nothing more than take up room. She would have noticed that the zippers on her Beit Yaakov pleated skirts could hardly be closed. She would have sat her down and given her so much mussar that she would never again have even looked at a rugelach. How she missed her! She needed her hugs, her kisses, her advice, her presence. She had no one to talk to, no one to teach her what she should believe, what she should be doing, how she should behave in the world. With her absence, the house had stopped feeling like a home. It was an empty space, she thought, where she ate and slept and worked her fingers to the bone. She felt so alone.

  The few shy attempts to share some of her feelings with her bubbee had been disastrous. “Az m’veint, veint men alein; az m’lacht, lacht di gantzeh velt mit.” “Cry and you cry alone; laugh and the world laughs with you,” the old woman had said. Or “There is no reason for you to feel so discouraged.” Or “Az m’bt zich gut doh, ligt men gut dort” (He who prepares his bed here, in this world, will lie comfortably there, in the next world). To open your heart and be met with clichés and belittlement and holier-than-thou piety was infuriating. She didn’t repeat her mistake.

  As for her father, he was never around or available. Besides, something inside her froze when she thought of sharing her feelings with him; so many of her questions involved him. Where had he been when her mother needed him after Mordechai Shalom was born? Why had he left for yeshiva every morning as if nothing were wrong? Why had she heard her mother crying behind closed doors? What had happened once the ambulance picked her up? Why hadn’t they been able to save her? And underlying all those questions, the unfathomable mystery at their heart: How could a healthy young woman, still in her thirties, suddenly die? What had really happened to her mother?

  It wasn’t natural.

  It wasn’t fair.

  No one had ever spoken openly about it. That in itself, Shaindele thought, was not unusual. People in their world never spoke about fatal illnesses, and the C-word was never spoken out loud. It was called “a difficult sickness,” whether from superstitious dread or traditional reticence to talk about tragic subjects.

  At first, she had made every effort to absolve her father. He had, after all, been a good husband, a kind father. Part of her heart sincerely went out to him. She could see how lonely and sad he was. But her mother’s death had left a minefield between them that couldn’t be crossed. Each time she tried, little explosions left her with festering wounds that she knew would never heal until there was a full, open reckoning, exposing them to the fresh air and sun of truth.

  Most infuriating was that no one seemed to even realize how deeply she was wounded, how traumatized, how utterly unready to be thrust into the role of housekeeper and mother-substitute. Brokenhearted, she had done her best to undertake her new responsibilities, but it was hopeless. Without someone to guide and teach her, she burned the challah and oversalted the soup, which was tasteless and thin anyway, nothing like the rich broth with floating vegetables she remembered from her childhood. The laundry especially overwhelmed her. She was always accidentally leaving in some colored cloth among the white load that turned all her father’s white shirts pink or blue; or forgetting sweaters in the dryer until they shrank so small even Mordechai Shalom couldn’t wear them.

  Everything she did, she did poorly, she thought, not to mention those things she didn’t do at all, like the ironing. They had an old iron that took forever to heat up and had no steam. Week after week, the ironing piled up, untouched and ignored, until her father went looking for a clean shirt and couldn’t find one, or she tried to lay a Shabbos table with a cloth so hopelessly wrinkled the dishes wouldn’t lie flat and the cups tipped over. She promised herself that at the very least, every day she would iron at least one blouse for herself and for Chasya, and a shirt for her father. She didn’t always succeed.

  But what she was most ashamed of and wanted to hide was how she treated her younger siblings. Before her mother died, they’d always gotten on so well! She loved them. But now, they were acting out. Every time she told Chasya to pick up her toys or wash her hands, the child stubbornly refused. And if she lost her temper and yelled at her and (to her shame) smacked her, Chasya immediately started to weep. “I want my mameh!” she’d cry, which tipped Shaindele over the boiling point.

  “I also want my mameh!” she’d shout at the child, smacking her again even harder. “But she isn’t coming back! I’m all you’ve got, so you’d better listen to me and behave yourself!” Afterward, hiding in her bedroom, she’d want to scream and cry and hit herself for her stupidity and incompetence.

  She had no idea how to comfort herself, let alone the little ones. She was, after all, not that much older. With each passing month, instead of getting more experienced and better at her chores, she felt she was getting worse, her patience stretching thinner, her temper more brittle, breaking through red lines more easily and with greater explosiveness.

  Every day, she asked herself why she wasn’t the person she wanted to be. And what she hated most of all was that she could never stop pretending, never admit failure or ask for help. She could never be herself. “Be strong,” everyone told her at the funeral. “You must be the mother now,” they demanded. Good little yeshiva girls did as they were told.

  Lately, thoughts about death and the fragility of life obsessed her. When she was invited to a simcha—a wedding or bar mitzvah—she looked around the crowded catering hall at the guests, wondering, Who among you will be dead by next year? In five years? She wanted to shout at them, “How can you smile, dance, talk about silly things when the executioner is coming for you?”

  She was sure no one had ever felt this way before, and so there was no point in sharing her feelings, which she was convinced were shamefully freakish, even insane. She lived in terror of someone finding out the truth about sweet little Shaindele Lehman, particularly her father.

  Leah Howard was her nightmare. An outsider who could see and report everything that went on inside the house when the adults weren’t there; who would hear stories from Chasya and see her bruises. Who would see day by day how the housework was being neglected, the ironing piling up, the dishes and pots left unwashed. If it had been up to her, Leah Howard would
never have set a single toe over the threshold.

  Now it was too late. Just as she’d feared, ever since Leah started, it was clear what a difference her presence had made. Where disorder and dirt had reigned, neatness and cleanliness had taken over. Where the children had gone unbathed and unfed and unhappy, there had been not only a schedule but a new joy of expectation. They waited for her by the door on the afternoons she came. “Leah doesn’t do it like that” was Chasya’s new mantra. Leah knew how to brush out the knots in her hair so gently that it didn’t hurt. Leah knew how to make beautiful French braids and draw funny pictures. Leah knew how to bake delicious cookies and whip up pink icing for cupcakes. Leah knew how to wash hair without getting soap in your eyes; to iron dresses so that there were no ugly wrinkles.

  The adults were less forthcoming, but she knew her father and grandmother and the neighbors who visited must have also noticed the difference. While they politely pretended to attribute the better conditions in the house to her, praising her hard work, each time she got a compliment she knew it belonged to the interloper and that if people ever knew the whole truth, they’d be disgusted and horrified with her. The longer Leah stayed, the more this kind of exposure was inevitable.

  Thus, even though having Leah Howard coming three times a week had saved the household from total collapse and herself from exposure as a failure; even though it had allowed her to keep up her studies and had even improved her relationship with Chasya, who was no longer wetting the bed and crying herself to sleep every night, she had been determined to get rid of Leah. At first, her father had ignored her complaints, even giving her pious lectures. But the moment she’d seen the tattoos, she’d recognized victory was at hand.

  She had not been mistaken, she thought, allowing herself a little smile of triumph, which soon faded as she returned to the kitchen and surveyed the chaos. Plunging her soft, young hands into the hot, dirty, disgusting dishwater, she cringed as the Brillo Pads scratched her tender skin, ruining her nails.

  Had she been a modern girl brought up in the usual way, she might have thought, If only I had been born a boy! She might have cast her mind on the incongruities between herself and her elder brothers, Elchanon Yehoshua and Dovid Yitzchak, both safely ensconced in yeshiva in faraway Baltimore, coddled as Shabbos guests by their generous uncle and aunt, with no one expecting them to change their routines, to give up their studies to help out the family! No one, including herself, would hear of them changing yeshiva to move back to Boro Park where they’d be able to help out, at the very least with occasional babysitting, not to mention part-time jobs to alleviate the family’s dire economic situation. Her entire life, she had been led to internalize the idea that learning Torah was not only her brothers’ right but their obligation, overriding all other responsibilities. Keeping their behinds glued to their seats in yeshiva—even as their family fell apart—was deemed both fortunate and worthy.

  Outwardly, she accepted this idea with meekness and humility. But inwardly, she raged with inchoate fury, her heart a frothing cauldron of hatred that blackened her soul. She flailed, looking for someone to blame, someone to hate, without going against her upbringing and cherished beliefs. And then, one day, Leah Howard walked into her life, giving her the perfect target, a person she could find a million pious reasons to despise. So what if she was only trying to help and had made Shaindele’s life so much easier?

  “I don’t need anyone. I don’t want anyone!” she fumed, scrubbing away.

  She would survive her horrible secret guilt, the tragedy of her life, this mess, all these people who had abandoned her. And one day, she, too, would escape, she thought, smiling with grim pleasure as she savagely scoured the burned-on grease off yet another huge pot. She had her own plans. She would surprise them all, and they wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.

  Until then, being shown up by Leah Howard as an incompetent wasn’t in the picture. At least with that, she had finally succeeded brilliantly.

  16

  Leah watched the doctor unwrap the bandages from her wrist. The ugly blisters and brown scab were gone, along with her eagles. Not a trace of them remained. She choked, feeling her lungs deflate as if the living breath had been sucked out of them.

  It was, she thought, almost like having a limb amputated.

  She had lived with them for so long. They’d been such an important part of Lola the college coed with the long, golden-red hair; Lola the runner and biker and fearless hiker who wore shorts and stomach-baring T-shirts. It wasn’t just the tattoo that had shriveled and died; it was Lola herself. And who had taken her place? she thought, looking down at the dull skirt that hung loosely from her well-padded hips to mid-calf. A stranger. A person the old Lola would never have noticed in a crowd except to pity.

  She thought about Icy and Cheeky. How she missed them! She wondered what they had been told and if she had done the right thing staying away. Would they be angry at her absence? Or had they forgotten all about her over the last two weeks? Kids had such short memories. She was determined to at least visit them one last time to say goodbye, even though no one in the family had invited her or suggested it (rudely, she thought). The family owed her that at least after all her hard work. She’d postponed it until her hand had healed and the bandages were removed. Icy, she knew, would have been upset seeing her bandaged up, and that dear, sweet kid had been through quite enough.

  “I’m sorry, am I hurting you?” the young doctor said, watching her wipe away a tear.

  She shook her head. “No, it’s fine.”

  She stared at the slightly reddened new skin, as smooth and featureless as a newborn’s, underlining the fearsome reality of the revocation of her old life. It was terrifying and sorrowful, and yet—dared she hope?—filled with new possibilities. A rebirth.

  Whatever the case, she needed to see the children. She looked at her watch. It was only a little past eight in the morning. She wondered if the toy stores in Boro Park opened that early.

  It was early spring, a cool, damp day of filtered light that passed through thick clouds. She pulled her raincoat closed, shivering.

  While the sign hanging at the entrance to the largest toy store on Eighteenth Avenue indicated nine as the opening hour, Leah noticed a woman was already ensconced behind the cash register. Tapping gently on the glass to get her attention, Leah smiled gratefully as the woman walked toward the door, unlocking it and gesturing her inside.

  “Thank you so much!”

  “A toy emergency?” The woman laughed, locking the door behind her.

  “You could say that.” Leah smiled.

  “Need help?”

  “No, thanks, I’ll just look around. I have some ideas.”

  She wandered down the aisles, looking over the piled-high box games. Some were familiar—Monopoly and Clue—but others had Hebrew lettering or transliterated Yiddish words. There was Mitzvah, Blik, and a card game called Old Maid depicting amusing ultra-Orthodox cartoon characters—men with skullcaps and old women in wigs. Another was called Yiddishe Kop (Jewish Mind) and Uber Chochom (Great Genius). She’d be no help in showing the children how to play such games, she realized, troubled. It was just then she saw the jigsaw puzzles. She imagined spreading out the pieces on the big dining room table as the children sat around watching. Mordechai Shalom would be sure to taste them, destroying whatever they managed to put together. But it would probably bring back good memories for Shaindele of Shabbos afternoons and holidays with her mother, fitting together the pieces to the pictures that now hung, laminated, on the walls.

  Not that Shaindele deserved a present, she argued with herself. But soon she relented. She was just a kid—a stupid, arrogant, snobby kid—but still, just a hurting child who was suffering the loss of the most important person in her life. Leah understood that kind of loss. Impulsively, she picked out a beauty, a Ravensburger with eighteen thousand pieces! If they ever finished it, it would look lovely laminated and hung on the wall. For Chasya, she found a doll d
ressed up exactly like a Boro Park matron, with long sleeves, a long skirt, and even an elaborate head scarf. It was a riot! As for Mordechai Shalom, a soft ball that lit up in different colors and made barnyard noises when it was jiggled seemed perfect.

  She was happy when she got home, laying her bundles on the table, anticipating the children’s joy when they opened their presents. Even Shaindele might crack her face with a smile! But that would have to wait. After two weeks of not being able to get her bandages wet, she couldn’t wait another second for a shower.

  Quickly stripping off her clothes and turning on the water, she cautiously tested the temperature with a newfound respect on her undamaged hand. It was perfect. How lovely, she thought, luxuriating under the warm flow, using up the last of her expensive European shampoo to lather her hair with gusto. It had gotten so long again. She desperately needed a cut and blow dry, but in Boro Park, it was next to impossible to find anyone who worked with hair that was still attached to a woman’s head. Most women stayed home and just sent in their wigs. Hairdressers were used to dealing with Styrofoam head forms instead of human beings.

  She was only halfway through rinsing off when her cell phone began to ring. It rang and rang and rang. Probably that new customer, Herschel the butcher, who always wanted everything done yesterday. She ignored it, annoyed. He and his glatt kosher chopped meat and brisket would just have to wait.

  When she was done, she reached for her thick, lavish robe—another remnant from her old life—relishing its warmth and softness. The phone was still trilling like a madman, almost hopping off the counter.

  “Okay, okay, Herschel. Keep your pants on,” she told it, reluctantly picking it up.

  But it wasn’t Herschel. It was Rebbitzen Basha.

  “Chasya is in the hospital. She hasn’t stopped calling for you. Please go quickly!”

  Leah caught her breath, trying to voice some basic questions: What happened? Which hospital? When are visiting hours? But she found herself struck mute with terror, allowing the phone to drop to the floor as if it were molten lead.