An Unorthodox Match

by Naomi Ragen

  “Are you sure you’re ready? How are you going to support yourself?” her mother heckled, suddenly changing her tune.

  “I’ll get a job.”

  “Rents in New York are sky-high!”

  “I’ll get a roommate.”

  “The weather is terrible.”

  “I’ll buy boots.”

  And finally, “Why do you want to move so far away from me?”

  “This is not about you, Mom. I’m not leaving you. I’m starting my own life. Be happy for me.” Her chin quivered. “It’s not easy to start over.”

  Her mother sighed, patting her on the shoulder and lighting up a cigarette.

  Leah wrote to Laurel, her friend from Santa Clara who was at NYU. Luckily, she needed a roommate.

  “What should I do with all your boxes, Lola?”

  She had three choices: open up each one and go through the contents; never look inside again as long as she lived, saving them for her grandchildren; or throwing everything out. She chose door number three, taking only the same suitcase full of clothes she’d come with. “Just drop them off at Goodwill, Mom, okay?”

  “And what should I do with the candlesticks from your grandparents?”

  “Whatever you want,” she said wearily.

  The only other thing she took with her besides her clothes was Josh’s old, ugly, orange-and-green backpack.

  * * *

  New York City was another world. Fast, dangerous, full of vitality, color, and movement. It made her dizzy. And it helped her forget. For two weeks, she pounded the pavement looking for work, trying to learn to walk and think like New Yorkers, who seemed always to be either rushing toward or away from something. But it was no use. She couldn’t keep up, loitering to marvel at the skyscrapers like the out-of-town hick she knew she was.

  After growing up in a place that had no sidewalks because everyone—except those convicted of DUI or vehicular manslaughter (and even they took buses)—drove, walking everywhere was a new experience. As for running again, she was afraid to, sure if she didn’t get mugged, raped, or cut up and put into large plastic garbage bags, she would surely die of lung cancer from inhaling all the carcinogens in the polluted air. Laurel, who often ran along the Hudson River Greenway or did the East River run from the top of Central Park over RFK Bridge to Randall’s Island and then to Queens and back, made faces at her and told her to stop being such a sissy. Finally, when she couldn’t fit into any of her clothes and couldn’t afford anything new, she laced up her New Balance cross-trainers. To her surprise, it was lovely: the fresh wind in her hair, the smiles and waves from the other runners, the beautiful New York City skyline. Taking up running again did something for her spirit, too, reconnecting her to the happiest time in her life.

  She improved her résumés, dressed up, got her hair professionally cut and straightened, bought killer heels that got caught in subway gratings and escalators, and went to interview after interview. All of them went something like this:

  Smile, handshake. Sit down in front of a desk. Smooth your hair and tug the sensible dark skirt of your good business suit over your knees. Try to look awake and enthusiastic even though you went to bed at midnight, and only fell asleep at 2:00 a.m. Look the interviewer in the eye. Try not to focus on their stubble / bad teeth / cleavage / horrible bra with the stitch lines showing through.

  Tell me, Lola, what gets you up in the morning?

  TRUTH: The alarm clock.

  ANSWER: I’m just an optimistic person who envisions each day as a new beginning with new opportunities. I’m young, and I’m eager to use all the skills I’ve learned during my academic career. I was an intern at a top Silicon Valley company, Gardis, for two summers, and I have a letter of recommendation from the head of marketing. Gardis just went public.

  What motivates you personally and professionally?

  TRUTH: Terror of not having my share of the rent by the first of the month.

  ANSWER: I’m motivated by the idea that I can be part of a successful team that is building something extraordinary like (insert whatever the hell their business is selling to the gullible public) that will take it to the top of the industry. I’ve read all about (your product) and your company online, and I was so impressed by how you’ve grown. I would love to be part of such a success story, and know I have so much to contribute. My first mentors at Santa Clara University always told us that (blah, blah, blah, look up something inspiring on the internet and memorize it). I keep those words close to my heart.

  That part always went so well. Everyone was smiling, flowing. And then came this:

  Tell me, Lola, about one of your most challenging experiences and how you overcame it.

  TRUTH: Watching my fiancé fall off a cliff. I will never, ever overcome it, but I tried being a couch potato and death by chocolate.

  ANSWER: [Coughing] Excuse me. I need to use the restroom. Quick exit. End of interview.

  Finally, running out of money, she went to a temp agency who only asked when she could start. She got placed as a receptionist in dusty Brooklyn offices, or as a typist in factories out in Staten Island. She stopped sending out résumés.

  The apartment was on Walker Street, between Chinatown and Little Italy. It was tiny and faced a brick wall on one side and the flashing, seizure-inducing, neon lights of an all-night Mexican restaurant and bar on the other. They had two tiny bedrooms and basically a hall and a bathroom. The “kitchen” was a refrigerator from the fifties and a four-burner gas top with no oven, situated smack in the middle of the hallway.

  Most of the time, the house was quiet. Laurel, beautiful, black, with an Angela Davis throwback Afro, was hardly ever home; when she wasn’t slaving away on papers for her master’s in communications (she was going to be the next Oprah Winfrey), she worked in a sports bar delivering beers to loud, obnoxious jocks. She made up for this by enjoying a busy and rather wild social life on the weekends in which she generously tried to include Lola (thinking of herself in the past, she couldn’t think of herself as Leah, who was another creature altogether). But the one time Lola accepted her invitation, she found herself cornered by a horny, drunk, insistent bore at 3:00 a.m. in someone’s dirty, crowded living room in Bushwick with no way of getting home without taking her life in her hands on the subway or paying some cabdriver a week’s food money. So that was the end of that.

  When she felt herself getting weepy and claustrophobic in the tiny apartment, she took long, solitary walks. It was from these forays into the city that she discovered that the loneliest you could ever be was walking down a crowded street in Manhattan teeming with people you didn’t know, and with whom you would never exchange a single word. More than once, these ambles had wound up in dangerously ill-lit spaces where strange men leaned against buildings eyeing her as she passed by. In the best case, they sometimes called out ugly, sexual epithets; in the worst, they caused her to pull out her whistle and pepper spray (both of which she had purchased to scare away bears on California hiking trails). She’d only used the spray once. It turned her assailant’s face a bright red and blinded him. Unfortunately, it dyed her fingers as well, providing incriminating evidence if the guy filed a complaint. Afraid of being arrested for assault, she dropped the spray and sprinted as fast as she could to the closest well-lit space where she could hail a cab. After that, she didn’t go out after dark anymore.

  She was actually getting used to living like a hermit when Laurel sat her down. The landlord wasn’t renewing the lease. He had cousins coming in from China. They needed to move at the end of the month.

  “But where will we go?” she pleaded, panic-stricken.

  “Well, actually … I’m moving in with Jeremy.”

  “Jealous Jeremy? The one who follows you like a KGB agent? I thought you were going to take out a restraining order?”

  “He’s not so bad. We talked about it. He understands—”

  “Laurel?”

  “Okay, he has a beautiful two-bedroom in Murray Hill his parents
are paying for.”

  “Remember that book by Tama Janowitz, Slaves of New York, about all those people selling themselves for an apartment in Manhattan?”

  “I think we’re in love.”

  Right. You and the apartment, she thought. So that was it. She had one month to find an apartment and a roommate in New York City at a rent she could afford. It was mission impossible. She couldn’t even decipher the ads.

  “What’s ‘Tr ld blk’?” she asked Laurel.

  “Tree-lined block.”

  “And what’s ‘wbfp’?”

  “Wood-burning fireplace. Look, I’ll help you. We’ll go together.”

  “May God bless you.”

  Their first foray was to the upper Upper West Side. The building was defaced by graffiti, and overturned garbage cans littered the sidewalks. Two very suspicious men loitered on the front steps. At their approach, one of them turned around and stared, then stood up and slowly moved closer. He had a heavily pockmarked face, a black leather jacket, and numerous gold chains. Laurel reached into her purse, clutching her pepper spray.

  “Hi,” he said. “You girls come to see the apartment?”

  He turned out to be the agent. The apartment itself was about ten blocks away.

  He led them to a car that looked exactly like the two dumpsters it was parked between, opening the door and gesturing them to get in. She looked at Laurel, who shrugged. So they got inside, sure they would both make the headlines of The New York Post the next morning when their bodies were found. But he actually pulled up to an attractive brownstone on a Tr ld blk. Unfortunately, it was soon apparent that the house had been converted into who knows how many college-student-abused apartments. The one he ushered them into made their present accommodations look like a suite in Trump Tower. When Laurel turned on the burner, an army of black cockroaches scurried out madly in every direction.

  “Aah!” they screamed, clutching each other, disgusted.

  “A spray can of Raid will take care of it.” The agent shrugged. “The guy who lived here before was an animal-rights activist.”

  “How did he feel about rats and mice?” Laurel sputtered, lifting her feet up and checking behind her.

  “Never complained,” said the agent, avoiding the real question.

  The bathroom was worse. Something crawling down the side of the toilet made the roaches look Disney-cute. And a single tiny room with no window at all was presented to them as the bedroom.

  They flew down the steps, gasping for air.

  “So, are you interested? This is going to go fast,” the agent called after them warningly.

  “Not as fast as we are,” Laurel muttered, grabbing Lola’s arm and sprinting away.

  They tried a few more times. They saw apartments that had bunk beds, where you could choose top or bottom. They saw apartments in the bowels of buildings you were expected to share with the heater and boiler. They saw apartments with ceilings so low you had to be the height of a five-year-old or crouch the entire time you were inside.

  “I may have to buy a tent and bunk in Central Park,” Lola wailed.

  “No. What you have to do is talk to Rafi,” Laurel said decisively.

  Rafi turned out to be a two hundred–pound former Israeli commando with a knitted skullcap on his almost bald head who was now studying film. Rafi lived with his roommate, another sabra who had been a paratrooper and was now studying graphic art. When he opened the door to their apartment in Brooklyn, she gasped. It was like something out of a movie set. A newly renovated duplex, it had a white spiral staircase, large picture windows, and a dream kitchen. But that wasn’t the best part.

  “Tell her how much rent you pay,” Laurel playfully nudged Rafi, who grinned. “Go on. Tell her.”

  “Nothing. We pay nothing,” he said, his grin widening.

  She knew it. Drugs, she told herself. Except, that skullcap …

  “This is what happened,” said Rafi, sitting them down on the sofa and plying them with Israeli halva and Oreo cookies.

  “I finish the army and want to go to college, but I don’t have the bagrut—uhm, this means high school matriculation. So I ask, who will take me? Nobody in Israel takes me. But they tell me you can go to New York, and they even give you scholarship! So, I take out loan for plane, a few dollars extra maybe. Take subway from airport to school. Two months they give me a room. After that, they tell me, you on your own. I meet another Israeli. Same boat. So we go to Jewish neighborhoods, put up signs in Hebrew—‘looking for cheap apartment.’ We tape them up in kosher butcher shops, glatt kosher delis. Then, we are taping, and a Chassid comes over, reads sign, looks me up and down, looks Yossi up and down—Yossi makes me look small—and Chassid says, ‘I got deal for you. Beautiful apartment, no rent, and $200 a week salary.’ Me and Yossi we look at each other, then we ask him: ‘Who do we have to kill?’ But he says, ‘I got a hundred apartments. You two go every month, collect rent.’ So I’m thinking what if somebody don’t pay? But he says, ‘They see you and your friend, they pay. If not, you call me. I have friend, policeman. I take care of it. You don’t beat anybody up. Against my religion.’”

  That was two years ago, he said. Now he’d joined the union and was working as a cameraman, making good money. But he’d kept his first job and the apartment. Yossi was still his roommate. “How can I help?” he asked.

  Laurel dramatically repeated all the horror stories of their apartment hunt. “We can’t find anything!”

  He thought about it for a few minutes. “I have good idea. One apartment leased to two girls. Last week, I went to wedding. Other girl, very nice, needs new roommate. Maybe she takes you?” he said to her.

  “Where is it?” she asked.

  “Crown Heights.”

  “Brooklyn. A lot of Chassidic Jews, blacks, and Asians,” Laurel explained, chewing nervously on her lower lip.

  Rafi raised his eyebrows in mock condemnation. “What’s to be afraid? Crime rate 71 percent lower than rest of country. Safer than 72 percent other American cities. No murders, no kidnapping, no rapes. Better than Little Italy. Better than Manhattan.”

  “Is it a nice apartment?” she asked, convinced.

  “Beautiful. I’ll show you now. And rent, special rate. Landlord like Orthodox girls.”

  “But I’m not religious,” she protested.

  “But you are Jewish?”

  “Barely.”

  “Good enough. Roommate is convert. Orthodox enough for both of you.”

  “Rafi, you take Lola right now to see that apartment before someone else snatches it up!” Laurel stood up. “But I have class. Are you okay going yourself?” Laurel asked her. Leah nodded happily. Rafi might be built like a tank, she thought, but she could clearly see he was as cuddly and sweet as a puppy.

  The girl who opened the door was about her age, with coal-black hair and big, brown eyes. Seeing Rafi, she smiled, swinging the door open.

  “Hi, mate. How are you cuttin’?”

  “Hi, Dvorah. I bring you new roommate. Lola, nice Jewish girl from Santa Clara.”

  “Fair play, mate! Come in, come in!” She looked at her. “Isn’t this apartment deadly! Are you as delira and excira about it as I am?”

  “What language is that?” she asked her.

  “Sorry, it’s Irish. But don’t eat the head off me!” Dvorah laughed, examining her red hair and freckles and blue eyes. “Excuse me gawkin’, but out of the two of us, it’s me who looks Jewish! You’d fit in anywhere in the Pale. That’s Dublin.”

  Dvorah took her on a tour. The apartment was spotlessly clean, light, and airy. There were two generous bedrooms, a living room, and a real kitchen with whole appliances, a counter, and white cabinets. The bathroom gleamed with polished white tiles and smelled like perfumed soap.

  “It’s fantastic,” she blurted out with unrestrained enthusiasm that she knew was like asking for a rent hike. She couldn’t help herself. “But I’m on a very tight budget,” she threw in too late, trying to mitigate
the damage. “How much are you asking?”

  “What were you paying Laurel?” Rafi asked her.

  She told him.

  He looked at Dvorah, and the two of them exchanged a smile and a nod.

  “I think that might work. I’ll talk to the landlord.”

  She put her arms around him as far as they would go and hugged. He seemed embarrassed, like a boy caught out by his friends picking flowers for his mother.

  “Well, okay. I go now. You talk. I make shidduch. You decide if you marry. I have television show to film.”

  They sat across from each other at the kitchen table.

  “Is he your fella?” Dvorah asked her.

  “Who? Rafi? Oh no. We just met.”

  “Well, Jews … at least the ones in this place, they don’t get physical with each other even when they are dating. So that hug…”

  “Well, I guess I’m kind of a lapsed Jew. My grandparents were observant, but I was raised differently.”

  “I was raised pretty much a lapsed Catholic. I never gave much thought to God at all. All I ever wanted to do was get married and have children. Of course, I had a fella, a grand one. We met when we were fourteen years old and in high school. I had it all planned out. Even the color of my wedding dress—cream—and the kind of sleeves, sort of Princess Diana puffy-like. I finished high school and started uni, and so did he. Then one day, after six years together, he wasn’t around anymore. Just like that. Went around to his place—I thought for sure he’d kicked the bucket—and found him in bed with some slag. But I say Baruch HaShem now.”

  She pressed her lips together to repress a smile at Dvorah’s accent. Yiddish with an Irish brogue!

  Dvorah laughed. “It’s okay. I know it’s funny. You should listen to me daven … Anyhow, I thought God is giving me a wake-up call. Just imagine if all my plans had come true and I’d walked down the aisle with that ejeet! What a life that would have been, huh? So, since nothing I planned was going to work out, I realized I’d try not having a plan. I dropped out of school, put on my backpack, and used my waitressing money to see the world. I was in Jordan, and someone told me that I should go scuba diving in Eilat. So I wound up in Israel. I took a job as a chambermaid at this hotel. There was another backpacker there, a Jewish girl from Argentina. And one weekend, when we got tired of the heat, we thumbed it to Jerusalem. I was gobsmacked. To see the place where Jesus walked! And there we are, at the Wailing Wall—although no one was wailing as I could see—and this woman covered up from head to toe asks me friend if she is Jewish, and she says yes. So she invites us both to spend Saturday at this women’s seminary in the Old City. Me friend wasn’t too keen on it, but I thought it was a deadly idea. I was delira and excira about it. One thing led to another, and I wound up stayin’. Two years later, I was dunking in the water and pronounced a Jew.”