An Unorthodox Match

by Naomi Ragen

  She swooped with a mad urgency to retrieve it. “Okay, I’m coming,” she said, hurriedly hanging up.

  She grabbed some clothes from the closet, hardly noticing what she put on, towel-drying her hair. There was no way she could spare fifteen minutes to blow-dry it. She searched for a hair tie but couldn’t find one. Desperate, she took a rubber band off a bunch of asparagus on the kitchen counter, forming a messy ponytail that reached halfway down her back. She grabbed Josh’s vintage orange-and-green backpack, stuffing in her phone and wallet, and only as an afterthought remembering her raincoat. She was halfway down the stairs when it struck her that she had left Chasya’s new doll behind. Racing back up two steps at a time, she shoved it into the backpack. Only halfway down the block did it occur to her that she had no idea where she was going.

  She called Rebbitzen Basha back, writing the address on the back of her hand, hurrying. The skies had darkened, and a light drizzle began to fall, frizzing her already damp hair into a million curls that formed a halo around her head. She hardly noticed. Running to catch the bus, she felt her heart beating violently through a combination of exertion and fear. Only when she actually entered the hospital building, did she take her first deep breath. Where to go? She looked at the signs. Rebbitzen Basha had told her Chasya had been admitted to pediatrics. Ignoring the elevator, she ran up three flights of stairs.

  “Please,” she said, her tone almost desperate as she grabbed a nurse by the arm. “Chasya, Chasya Lehman? Where is she?”

  The nurse was about to call security, when she looked into her eyes. “Are you family?” she asked, softening.

  “Yes, no, please,” Leah blurted out.

  “Room 6A, around the corner,” the nurse said, pointing. “Hey, she’s going to be fine!”

  Leah hardly heard her, hurrying forward and almost losing her balance around the sharp turn, resting her shoulder against the wall to stop herself from falling.

  The door was open.

  She saw Chasya lying there sobbing, her little face as white as the sheets.

  “Icy!” Leah called out.

  The child stopped crying, pulling herself up into a sitting position. “Leah!” She wept, reaching out with both her small arms.

  Vaguely aware there were others in the room, people she did not recognize and had no time for now, Leah threw her backpack to the floor and leaned in, hugging the child, whose sobs subsided immediately into soft hiccups.

  “What’s wrong, Icy?”

  “My stomach. It hurts so much!”

  Leah held her close, patting her back, kissing her pale, sweet cheeks. Another stomachache? And now she was in the hospital. A frisson of fear made her spine go rigid.

  “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave now,” a nurse told her.

  “No, wait. Can I just—?”

  “Leah, don’t go!” the child wailed.

  Yaakov stood up shakily from the chair he had been glued to all night, watching the scene in amazement. “Are you that Leah, the volunteer?” he asked her, although he already knew the answer.

  Leah looked around in surprise. It was him, the man from the wedding photo! But he wasn’t fat and bald and old. He was slender and young, and if not for the weary wretchedness of his expression, as handsome as ever. Only the eyes, she thought, those big, blue eyes, were different. Instead of gentleness and hope, they had narrowed into pools of unfathomable misery.

  She felt suddenly shy. “That’s me,” she told him, nodding, overcome by a small, panicked thought as to what she must look like to him.

  Leah! The kind woman he had treated so badly! Instinctively, he looked at her hands, searching for the tattoos. But all he saw was some ink on the back of them.

  Leah followed his gaze, embarrassed. “I was in such a hurry, I called on the way to get the address. I didn’t have any paper.” She rubbed the ink off with a moistened finger.

  He felt overwhelmed by his sins. There was nothing! Shaindele had lied. And he had fallen for it. He had raised a gossiper and slanderer, a child who had violated serious commandments from God Himself. As it is written: Do not be a talebearer among your people. It was a sin whose punishment was the death of the soul. But instead of reprimanding his child, educating her, he had listened and believed her, and even acted upon the slander. According to the Code of Jewish Law, his sin was the more grievous.

  The Torah forbade a Jew from listening to loshon hara even if what was being said was true and accurate. This included discussions ranging from criminal misconduct to lackadaisical Jewish observance, such as not keeping kosher or not giving charity. Having a tattoo certainly fell into that category, as did using roller skates. And it didn’t matter if the information was conveyed verbally, in writing, or just silently implied. And it didn’t matter how exalted the gossiper was, if he or she were one’s parent or even one’s rav. It was an inexcusable sin. This was also true concerning factual information. How much more infinitely damnable, therefore, was spreading slanderous lies?

  Now he understood why his shidduch dates had gone so badly, why his child was suffering, and why God had brought him back to the blank walls of the hospital where his life’s tragedy had unfolded, a place he had never wanted to see again as long as he lived.

  “Please, let her stay,” Yaakov said to the nurse.

  He saw her glance shift between himself and Leah—curious, questioning—and felt a sudden blush ride up his neck.

  The nurse shrugged. “The doctors are making rounds now. You’re both going to have to leave for a few minutes.”

  Chasya moaned, clutching Leah tighter.

  “It’s okay, honey,” the nurse crooned, patting the child’s arm. “It’s just for a few minutes. Your dad and…”

  “Leah,” Yaakov said.

  “And Leah will be right back.”

  Leah pried the child’s hands gently from her neck, holding them in her hands and kissing them. “Your tateh and I will be right outside the door, Icy. And when I come back, I have a big surprise for you. Something nice, okay, honey? Can you be very, very brave for me?”

  The child nodded, smiling through her tears, lying quietly back on her pillow.

  Yaakov and Leah sat down awkwardly side by side in the only chairs available in the hallway, watching as the battery of doctors entered, closing the door behind them.

  He shifted his weight, stiff and uncomfortable, lowering his eyes. What could he say to her? He was so ashamed. Should he try to explain, to apologize? But that might embarrass her even more, knowing that she’d been the subject of gossip. She might suspect that she’d been willfully discarded and not—as he hoped had been respectfully conveyed to her—reluctantly and gratefully parted from now that the family was back on its feet, thanks to her chesed. He tried to decide.

  Compounding the problem was the fact that he had no idea how to talk to young women who were not family members. His only experience had been the formally arranged and carefully orchestrated shidduch dates. And look how they had turned out! And this woman—he glanced at her shyly—looked nothing at all like those women.

  He had never seen hair like hers—so thick and massively curly, the very color of sunrise. It was like a crown, he thought. No woman in his world had hair like that, or if they did, they’d probably chop it off or torture it into some tight braid, or imprison it with hairpins until it was small and neatly tucked away and out of sight. Certainly the rabbis would never allow a married woman to fulfill the commandment of covering her hair by wearing a wig like that! She’d be ostracized, condemned for immodesty. Her husband would divorce her.

  But this woman wasn’t married and didn’t have to cover her hair. And although he was no expert, it didn’t seem to him to be artificial; it was simply too wild to be the creation of hairdressers from a Boro Park beauty parlor. God himself had given her that hair. No artifice was involved. Even the band she’d used to hold it back was the commonplace kind found wrapped around newspapers. It was unequal to the task, he noted, threatening at any
moment to burst under the strain. As it was, so many tendrils had escaped. They were lovely, trailing down her back, framing her long, white neck, her forehead and cheeks. He looked down at his shoes, mortified by where his mind was wandering.

  Leah spoke first. “What’s wrong with Chasya?”

  He shrugged helplessly, not looking up. “It started yesterday. Vomiting, stomach pains. We thought it was another virus, but then it got worse. She couldn’t hold anything down.”

  “How is Cheeky? Uh, I mean, Mordechai Shalom.”

  For the first time, he relaxed, a little smile playing on his lips as he looked up to face her. “Cheeky?”

  “It’s what I call him. His cheeks are like big, pink marshmallows.”

  “Yes, they are.” He nodded. His beautiful baby boy. “My mother-in-law is watching him. He is also upset. The house is in turmoil.”

  “Shaindele is at school, right? Her midterms?”

  He nodded, surprised.

  “And you are missing kollel and your night classes. It must be hard.”

  He was amazed. She knew everything about him and his family, this woman he had never bothered to meet and thank, while he knew next to nothing at all about her except for the ugly gossip and lies that he—to his everlasting shame—had allowed himself to be fed. He stared down at the floor again, mortified.

  Leah took that as the usual religious man’s sense of modesty that did not permit him to look at a woman. She used the opportunity to study him.

  His forehead, so broad and intelligent, was wrinkled in concentration, the expression on his handsome face almost rigid with fear. His generous lips were pinched together anxiously. And those eyes, those big, innocent blue eyes so like his son’s, were miserable. Without willing it, her heart went out to him in a primal and motherly way, disconnected from any sexual feeling. She wanted to wrap him in softness and comfort, the same way she had so often embraced his little boy.

  “Maybe it is just another virus,” she suggested. “Or maybe it’s psychological. She’s had a hard year. The mind-gut connection, you know?”

  “God should help us, if only! I pray it’s nothing serious. In fact—”

  Her phone rang.

  “Sorry, I have to take this. It’s my customer.” She got up and walked down the hall.

  He followed her with his eyes, catching a glimpse of the long, flowery gypsy skirt and crisp white blouse that winked beneath her open coat. It was shockingly summery for such a day, he thought. And rather girlish. He remembered the women on his shidduch dates, their heavy bodies squeezed into tight girdles and covered with dark, heavy material that was no doubt as expensive as it was tasteless. In contrast, she seemed unfettered, carefree, her natural plumpness reminding him of his young daughter’s.

  Instead of a purse, she had an old backpack slung across her shoulder. It was a strange color—orange and green—worn and scruffy, the kind young people off on adventures all over the world carried with them. How he had always envied that! The freedom to wander and discover the bri’ah!

  From his earliest childhood, he had never had the opportunity—nor, honestly, the desire—to stray from the straight-and-narrow path so clearly marked out for him by his parents and his rebbes. In his world, to go off that path, that derech, was deemed a tragedy worse than death, a rejection of all that was holy and good.

  This idea had always kept him in place, a horse in harness pulling behind him the heavy load of his responsibilities and others’ expectations as he struggled down the well-rutted trail that had been carved out thousands of years before by others just like him. His sons and his future sons-in-law were already in harness and would do the same.

  She leaned against the wall, continuing her phone conversation. As she spoke, he drank in the lively timbre of her womanly voice, the way she stopped to laugh, going silent for a few moments until the sound broke out, catching up with the look in her eyes and the upturned corners of her mouth. How blue her eyes were! The color of a summer lake in the Catskills. Her mouth was generously curved with a soft, pillowed lower lip, which she gnawed at in a way that somehow touched him with its concentration and uncertainty.

  When she put away the phone and returned to her seat, he smiled at her.

  “You have a nickname for Chasya also? Icy?”

  She smiled back. “Yes. That first time, we bonded over mango ice pops. I also love them.” She looked down, squeezing the sides of her chair and dangling her feet off the ground. “How is the new arrangement working out?” When he didn’t immediately answer, she gave him a furtive sidelong glance.

  “The new arrangement?”

  “I understood that you don’t need volunteers anymore. That you have made some other arrangement.”

  “Oh, that.” He nodded, ashamed. “I’m not sure … not so good.”

  She raised her head, her heart leaping up in secret joy. “Really?”

  “Yes, you know, we didn’t like to take charity. People were so kind. You especially were coming, donating so much of your time to us. I understand you have your own business now?”

  When had he been told about her business? That couldn’t have been the reason he’d found someone else to care for the children, could it? “I was working with Rabbi Weintraub, helping to create a website and mailing list online for the yeshiva. That’s what I do, marketing. It did well. And then other people heard about it and wanted the same thing, and now, Baruch HaShem, it’s my job.”

  “How is it for you?”

  “I’m lucky. I have a good income, flexible hours, and most of the time, I can work from my apartment. I have plenty of time to volunteer,” she stressed. She paused hopefully, allowing him to take her up on it. To her bitter disappointment, he didn’t. While she was mentally licking her wounds, the door opened. The doctors and nurse walked out. They gestured toward him to join them.

  She wanted to join, too, desperate to hear the diagnosis, but she had no right. It wasn’t her place. “Can I go back in?” she asked the nurse, who nodded.

  “Thank you, Leah,” Yaakov said, hurrying after the doctors. He, too, wished she could join him. He didn’t want to hear this alone.

  There were three doctors. One he recognized—the young intern who had admitted them to the emergency room—and two other important-looking men with graying hair. They introduced themselves as the head of pediatrics and gastroenterology.

  “We’ve done a number of tests. We’ve ruled out her heart, her lungs, her liver, her kidneys. Her stomach is normal. Her blood tests are normal. Her pain isn’t coming from her appendix. It’s over her belly button. We understand she has been having this off and on for about a year?”

  “Yes, but never this bad. We thought it was a virus. But she wasn’t getting better.”

  “And the symptoms are always the same?”

  He nodded. “Vomiting, stomachache…”

  “Diarrhea, constipation?”

  He racked his brain. “I don’t think so.”

  The two doctors consulted with each other, including the intern in their conversation. Then they turned back to him. “It doesn’t seem to be anything serious. For some reason, she seems to be feeling better now.”

  A weight the size of a bulldozer rolled off his heart. “What is wrong with her, Doctor?”

  “We think it’s an abdominal migraine. It’s fairly common among children.”

  “Migraine? I thought that was when your head hurt. My late wife, she had migraines.”

  This information was greeted with knowing nods among the doctors. “There might be a genetic component, then. What we think your daughter has is similar, but in the stomach area. It presents with exactly the symptoms your daughter has and can be triggered by stress. We understand she lost her mother last year? Did anything happen recently that might have put her under stress again?”

  He thought of his daughter’s face as she sat up in bed and held out her arms to the young woman he had ripped from her life with no thought at all as to how it might affect her. />
  “Her babysitter hasn’t … couldn’t … be with her for the last two weeks.”

  “Well, yes, that could certainly have done it. Look, we will keep her for another day, do a few more tests. But in our opinion, the child is suffering from an overload of stress. If it continues, she might need counseling. In any case, did she have any attacks with this particular caretaker?”

  “None at all,” he realized.

  “Can she, the caretaker, return to work now?”

  “I … don’t know.”

  “Well, if she is available, it would be best for the child. And if she has to leave, it should be done gradually, nothing abrupt that would remind her of losing her mother.”

  I am an idiot, he thought, appalled that he had not made that connection. Of course!

  Chasya wrapped her arms around Leah, lying her head on her shoulder. “I missed you so much. Why did you go away?”

  Leah felt tears come to her eyes. “I also missed you so much. Wasn’t your new babysitter nice?”

  “No one came to take care of us. Only Shaindele.” The child’s eyes filled with tears. “She’s mean. She hits me and yells.”

  Leah sat up straight. So, the minute no one was watching, she thought she could get away with it again.

  “Please come back, Leah!”

  “I will talk to your tateh. But now, look what I have for you!” She opened the backpack and slipped out the big box with its cellophane wrapper. The child’s eyes grew round with awe. Leah helped her ease the doll out of the box, unpinning her plastic body from the packing materials.

  Chasya took off the head covering and patted the hair. Then she ran her hands over the eyes, opening and closing the lids. She unbuttoned the long-sleeved shirt. “She is a frum doll?”

  Leah nodded, trying to keep a straight face. “She is very, very religious. She prays three times a day and only eats glatt kosher food from Herman’s deli.”

  Chasya hugged the doll, kissing it. “It’s so beautiful I should make a bracha,” she said with a big smile.