In the middle of the night, I wake to find Esty gone from her bed. The closet door is closed, and from beneath the door comes a thin line of light, the light we leave on throughout Shabbos. From inside I can hear a shuffling and then a soft thump. I get out of bed and go to the closet door. “Esty,” I whisper. “Are you in there?”
“Go away,” my cousin whispers back.
“Open up,” I say.
“No.”
“Do it now, or I’ll make a noise.”
She opens the closet door just a crack. I slide in. The book is in her hand, open to a Japanese print of a man and woman embracing. The woman’s head is thrown back, her mouth open to reveal a sliver of tongue. The man holds her tiny bird-like hands in his own. Rising up from between his legs and entering her body is a plum-colored column of flesh.
“Gross,” I say.
My cousin closes the book.
“I thought you said we were never going to look at it again,” I say.
“We were going to ignore Dovid Frankel, too.”
“So what?”
My cousin’s eyes fill, and I understand: She is in love with Dovid Frankel. Things begin to make sense—our bringing the book home, her significant looks all evening, her anger. “Esty,” I say. “It’s okay. Nothing happened. We just talked.”
“He was looking at you during dinner,” she cries.
“He doesn’t like me,” I say. “We talked about you.”
“About me?” She wipes her eyes with her nightgown sleeve.
“That’s right.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted to know if you’d ever mentioned him to me,” I lie.
“And?”
“I said you told me you went to school with his sister.”
My cousin sighs. “Okay,” she says. “Safe answer.”
“Okay,” I say. “Now you have to tell me what you’re doing, looking at that book.”
My cousin glances down and her eyes widen, as if she’s surprised to find she’s been holding the book all this time. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says. “The book was here. I couldn’t sleep. Finally I just got up and started looking at it.”
“It’s a sin,” I say. “That’s what you told me before.”
“I know.”
“So let’s go to bed, okay?”
“Okay,” she says.
We stand there looking at each other. Neither of us makes a move to go to bed.
“Maybe we could just look at it for a little while,” I say.
“A few minutes couldn’t hurt,” my cousin says.
This decides it. We sit down on the wooden planking of the closet floor, and my cousin opens the book to the first chapter. We learn that we are too busy with work, domestic tasks, and social activity to remember that we must take the time to respect and enjoy our physical selves and our partners’ physical selves, to reap the benefits that come from regular, loving, sexual fulfillment. The book seems not to care whether “the East” means Japan, China, or India; the drawings show all kinds of Eastern people in sexual positions whose names sound like poetry: “Bamboo Flute,” “The Galloping Horse,” “Silkworms Spinning a Cocoon.” My cousin’s forehead is creased in concentration as she reads, her eyebrows nearly meeting.
“What’s the orgasm?” my cousin says. “They keep talking about the orgasm.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Check the index.”
She flips to the index, and under orgasm there is a long list of page numbers. We choose one at random, page 83. My cousin reads in a whisper about how to touch oneself in order to achieve the word in question. We learn that one can use one’s own fingers or any object whose shape and texture one finds pleasing, though the use of electronic vibrating devices is not recommended. These can cause desensitization, the book tells us. But certain Eastern devices, such as ben wa balls or the String of Pearls, can greatly enhance a woman’s pleasure.
“Sick,” my cousin says.
“I still don’t get it,” I say.
“What do you think they mean by the clitoris?”
Though I have a vague idea, I find myself at a loss for words. My cousin looks it up in the index, and when she learns what it is she is amazed. “I thought that was where you peed from,” she breathes. “How weird.”
“It’s weird, all right,” I say.
Then she says, “I can’t believe Dovid Frankel has read all this. His hands probably touched this page.” She lets the book fall into her lap. It opens to a glossy drawing of a woman suspended in a swinglike contraption from the roof of a pavilion, high above a turbaned man who gazes up at her with desire and love. Two servants in long robes hold the cords that keep the woman suspended.
“Oh, my God,” my cousin says, and closes the book. “We have to repent tomorrow, when we say Shacharit in the morning. There’s a place where you can tell God what you did wrong.”
“We’ll repent,” I say.
We stow the book on its high shelf and leave the closet. Our room is cold, the light coming in from outside a ghostly blue. We climb into our twin beds and say the Shema and the V’ahavta. The V’ahavta is the same prayer that’s written in the text of a mezuzah, and when I say the word asher a sizzle of terror runs through me. Has God seen what we have just done? Are we being judged even now, as we lie in bed in the dark? I am awake for a long time, watching the cool air move the curtains, listening to the rushing of the grasses outside, the whir of the night insects. After some time I hear a change in the rhythm of breathing from my cousin’s bed, and a faint rustle beneath the sheet. I pretend to be asleep, listening to the metallic tick of her bedsprings. It seems to go on for hours, connected with the sound of insects outside, the shush of grass, the wind.
The next morning I am the first to wake. I say the Modeh Ani and wash my hands in the basin we leave on the nightstand, cleansing myself as I open my eyes to this Shabbos morning. My cousin sleeps nearly sideways, her long legs hanging off the bed, covers pushed back, nightgown around her thighs. Though her limbs have not seen the sun all summer, her skin is a deep olive. There is a bruise on her knee the size of an egg, newly purple, which I know she must have gotten as we climbed the metal ladder onto the Perelmans’ float. In sleep her face is slack and flushed, her lips parted. It has never occurred to me that my cousin may be beautiful the way a woman is beautiful. With her cropped brown hair and full cheeks, she has always looked to me like a tall, sturdy child. But this morning, as she sleeps, there is a womanliness to her body that makes me feel young and unripe. I dress quietly so as not to wake her, and tiptoe out to the kitchen to find my uncle standing on the screen porch, beside the table, folding his tallis into its velvet bag so he can go to shul for morning services. Sunlight falls in through the screen and covers him with its gold dust. He is facing Jerusalem, the city where he and Aunt Malka found each other. I open the screen door and step out onto the porch.
“Rebecca,” he says. “Good morning, good Shabbos.” He smiles, smoothing his beard between both hands.
“Good Shabbos,” I say.
“I’ll be at Torah study this afternoon. After lunch.”
“Okay.”
“You look tired,” he says. “Did you sleep?”
“I slept okay.”
For a moment we stand looking at each other, my uncle still smiling. Before I can stop myself, I’m asking the question that pushes its way to the front of my mind. “After a person dies,” I say, “is the family supposed to have the mezuzah checked?”
My uncle’s hands fall from his beard. He regards me sadly, his eyes deep and grave. “When my first wife, Bluma Sarah, died,” he says, “I had everything checked. Our mezuzah, my tefillin, our ketubah. The rebbe found nothing. Finally I asked him to examine my soul, thinking I was the bearer of some imperfection. Do you know what the rebbe told me?”
“No,” I say, looking at my feet, wishing I hadn’t asked.
“He told me, ‘Sometimes bad things just happen. You’ll see
why later. Or you won’t. Do we always know why Hashem does what he does? Neyn.’ ”
“Oh.”
“I think God wanted me to meet your aunt,” says Uncle Shimon. “Maybe He wanted me to meet you, too.” He tucks his tallis bag under his arm and buttons his jacket. “Bluma Sarah had a saying: Der gleichster veg iz ful mit shtainer.”
“What’s it mean?”
“The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones,” he says.
All day I keep the Shabbos. This means I do not turn on a light or tear paper or write or bathe or cook or sew or do any of the thirty-nine kinds of work involved in building the Holy Temple. It is difficult to remember all the things one cannot do; as I sit in the tall grass, playing a clumsy round of duck-duck-goose with the little step-cousins, I am tempted to pull a grass blade and split it down its fibrous center, or weave a clover chain for one of the girls. But the Shabbos is all around us, in the quiet along the road and the sound of families in their yards, and I remember and remember all day. My cousin spends most of the day alone. I see her praying in a sunlit patch of yard, swaying back and forth as she reads from her tiny Siddur; then she lies in the grass and studies Torah. When she disappears into the house I follow her. She’s closed herself into our closet again, the door wedged tight against intruders. I imagine her undoing this morning’s work of repentance, learning new body-part names, new positions. When I whisper through the door for her to come out, she tells me to go away.
All day I’m not allowed to use the telephone to call my mother. I walk around and around the yard, waiting for the sun to dip toward the horizon. Aunt Malka watches me from the porch, looking worried, and then she calls me over.
“What’s all this pacing?” she says.
“I’m keeping Shabbos,” I say.
“You can keep it right here with me,” she says, patting the step beside her.
I sit down. Before us the older children are trying to teach the younger ones how to do cartwheels. They fly in awkward arcs through the long grass.
“Your mother sounds much better,” she says. “You’ll be going home soon.”
“Probably,” I say.
“There’s a lady I know who lives near you,” she says. “I’ll give you her number. She and some other women run a mikveh near your house, on Twenty-second and Third.”
“What’s a mikveh?”
“It’s the ritual bath,” she says. “It cleans us spiritually. All women go. Men, too. Your mother should go when she gets out of the hospital. You can go with her, just to watch. It’s lovely. You’ll see.” One of the little boys runs up and tosses a smooth black pebble into Aunt Malka’s lap, then runs away, laughing. “We’re commanded to go after childbirth,” she says.
“Commanded by who?”
“By Hashem,” she says, turning the pebble in her fingers. Through its center runs a translucent white ribbon of quartz.
“Even if the baby dies?” I ask her. “Do you have to go then?”
“Yes,” she says. “Especially then. It’s very important and beautiful. The bath is very clean, and this particular one is tiled all in pink. The women will help your mother undress and brush her hair, so the water will touch every part of her. Then she’ll step down into the bath—it’s very deep and large, like a Jacuzzi—until she’s completely covered. They’ll tell her what b’rachot to say. Then she’ll be clean.”
“Everyone’s supposed to do this?” I ask her.
“We’re commanded to,” she says. “Adults, anyway. For women, it’s every month unless we’re pregnant. When I’m here I do it right in the lake. There’s a woman who had a special shed built on her property, and that’s where we go in.”
“What if my mother doesn’t want to go?” I ask.
“If you tell her how important it is, I’m sure she’ll go,” she says, and hands me the black pebble. I rub it with my thumb, tracing the quartz.
My aunt gathers the little step-cousins for a walk down the lake road, smoothing their hair, retrieving their lost shoes, securing their kippot with metal clips. I imagine her walking into the lake, her dark curls spreading out behind her, and my skin prickles cold in the heat. When she invites me to come along on the walk, I tell her I will stay home. I lie down in the grass and watch her start off down the road, the little step-cousins circling her like honeybees.
Real bees weave above me through the grass, their bodies so velvety I want to touch them. For what feels like the first time all summer, I am alone. I rub the pebble with my thumb, imagining it to be a magic stone that will make me smaller and smaller in the tall grass. I shrink to the size of a garter snake, a leaf, a speck of dust, until I am almost invisible. There is a presence gathering around me, an iridescent light I can see through my laced eyelashes. I lie still against the earth, faint with dread, and I feel the planet spinning through space, its dizzying momentum, its unstoppable speed. It is God who makes the shadows dissolve around me. He sharpens the scent of clover. He pushes the bees past my ears, directs the sun onto my back until my skin burns through the cotton of my Shabbos dress. I want to know what He wants and do what He wants, and I let my mind fall blank, waiting to be told.
When three stars come into the sky, the family gathers for Havdalah. We stand in a circle on the grass outside, all nine of us, and we light the braided candle and sing to God, thanking Him for creating fire, aish. According to the tradition, we examine our fingernails in the light of that candle, to remind us of the ways God causes us to grow. Then we smell spices and drink wine for a sweet week, and finally we sing the song about Eliyahu Hanavi, the prophet who will arrive someday soon to bring the Messiah. I stand with one arm around a little step-cousin and the other around Esty. As Havdalah ends she drifts off toward the house, one hand trailing through the long grass.
Now that Shabbos is over, the first thing I do is call my mother. Standing in the kitchen, I watch my aunt and uncle carrying children toward the house as I dial. For the first time it occurs to me that it might be awful for my mother always to hear children in the background when I call her, and I wonder if I should wait until they go to bed. But by that time the phone’s ringing, and it’s my father who answers anyway.
“Hey, son,” he says. It’s an old game between us; he calls me son and I call him Pa, like in the Old West. This is the first time we’ve done it since Devon Michael was born, though, and it sounds different now.
“Hi, Pa,” I say, playing the game even so, because I miss him.
“Still out on the range?”
“Indeedy.”
“How’s the grub?”
“Grub’s not bad,” I say. “How’s Ma?”
He sighs. “Sleeping.”
“Not good?” I say.
“I think she needs you home,” he says. “She’s not feeling well enough now to do much, but I’ll bet if she saw her kid she’d shape up pretty fast.”
“When can I come home?”
“It looks like a couple of weeks,” he says. “She’s had some problems. Nothing serious, but the doctor thinks she might need IV antibiotics for a little while still.”
“Aunt Malka says she should go to a ritual bath,” I say. “To get spiritually clean.”
There’s a silence on my father’s end, and I wonder if I’ve said something wrong. In the background I hear a woman’s voice on the intercom but I can’t make out what she’s saying. “You there, Dad?” I say.
“I’d like to talk to your aunt,” he says. “If she’s around.”
Something about his tone gives me pause. Even though Aunt Malka’s just a few steps away, talking quietly out on the screen porch with Uncle Shimon, I tell my father she’s gone out for milk. Silently I promise myself to repent this lie tomorrow, during Shacharit.
I can hear my father scratching his head, sharp and quick, the way he sometimes does. “You have her give me a call,” he says. “All right?”
“All right,” I say. “Tell Mom I love her.”
He says he will.
That evening, my cousin disappears during dinner. We’re all eating tomatoes and cottage cheese and thick slices of rye bread with whipped butter, the kind of meal we always eat after Shabbos, and in the middle of spreading my third slice of bread I look over and Esty’s gone.
“Where’s your cousin?” Aunt Malka says. “She didn’t touch her food.”
“I’ll find her,” I say. I go to our room and open the closet door, but the closet is empty. The book is gone from its high shelf. I glance around the room, and it takes me a few moments to see my cousin’s huddled shape beneath her bedclothes.
“Esty,” I say. “What are you doing?”
She lifts her head and looks at me, her cheeks flushed. In her hand she holds a flashlight. “Reading,” she whispers.
“You can’t just leave dinner,” I say.
“I wanted to look something up.”
“Your mom wants to know what’s wrong.”
“Tell her I have a headache,” Esty says. “Say I took some aspirin and I’m lying down.”
“You want me to lie?”
She nods.
“It’s against the Ten Commandments.”
Esty rolls her eyes. “Like you’ve never lied,” she says.
“Maybe I don’t anymore.”
“Tonight you do,” she says, and pulls the bedclothes over her head, rolling toward the wall. I go out to the dinner table and sit down, pushing at my slice of rye with a tomato wedge.
“Nu?” my aunt says. “What’s the story?”
“She’s reading,” I say.
“In the middle of dinner?”
“It’s all right,” Uncle Shimon says. “Let her read. I wish some of these would read.” He casts a hand over the heads of his own children.
How to Breathe Underwater Page 11