How to Breathe Underwater

by Julie Orringer

  “I read,” says one of the little girls. “I can read the whole aleph-bet.”

  “That’s right,” her father says, and gives her another slice of bread.

  I finish my dinner, and then it’s left to me to do all the dishes while Aunt Malka bathes the step-cousins and gets them ready for bed. I stand there washing and looking out into the dark yard, seeing nothing, angry at my cousin and worried about her. I worry about my mother, too, lying in the hospital with intravenous antibiotics dripping into her arm, spiritually unclean. I’ve always assumed that my brother’s death was somehow meant to punish me, since I was the one who imagined it in the first place, but now I wonder if we are all guilty. After all, we’ve been walking around doing exactly what we want, day in and day out, as if what God wants doesn’t matter at all, as if God were as small and insignificant as the knickknacks on my grandmother’s shelves, the porcelain swans and milkmaids we see when we go to her house for the High Holidays.

  A thin strand of fear moves through my chest, and for a moment I feel faint. Then, as I look out the window, I see a white shape moving across the lawn, ghostly in the dark. I stare through the screen as the figure drifts toward the road, and when it hits the yellow streetlight glow I see it’s my cousin.

  Drying my hands on a dish towel, I run out into the yard. Esty is far away in the dark, but I run after her as fast as I can through the wet grass. When I get to the road she hears me coming and turns around.

  “What are you doing?” I say, trying to catch my breath.

  “Nothing,” she says, but she’s keeping one hand behind her back. I grab for the hand but she twists it away from me. I see she’s holding a white envelope.

  “What is it?” I say. “You’re going to the post office in the middle of the night?”

  “It’s not the middle of the night.”

  “You snuck out,” I say. “You don’t have to sneak out just to mail a letter.”

  “Go inside,” Esty says, giving me a little shove toward the house.

  “No,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll scream for your mother if you don’t tell me what you’re doing.”

  “You would,” she says, “wouldn’t you?”

  I open my mouth as if to do it.

  “It’s a note to Dovid Frankel,” she says. “It says if he wants to get his book back, he has to meet me at the Perelmans’ tomorrow night.”

  “But you can’t. It’s forbidden.”

  “So what?” my cousin says. “And if you tell anybody about it, you’re dead.”

  “You can’t do anything to me.”

  “Yes I can,” she says. “I can tell my mother this was your book, that you brought it from New York and have been trying to get us to read it.”

  “But she’ll know you’re lying,” I say. “Dovid will tell her it’s a lie.”

  “No he won’t.”

  I know she’s right. Dovid would never own up to the book. In the end he would think about how much he has to lose, compared to me. And so I stand there on the road, my throat tightening, feeling again how young I am and how foolish. Esty smooths the letter between her palms and takes a deep breath. “Now turn around,” she says, “and go back into that house and pretend I’m in bed. And when I come back, I don’t want to see you reading my book.”

  “Your book?” I say.

  “Mine for now.”

  I turn around and stomp back toward the house, but when I get to the screen door I creep in silently. The little cousins are sleeping, after all. There is a line of light beneath my aunt and uncle’s door, and I hear my uncle reading in Hebrew to Aunt Malka. I go to our bedroom and change into my nightgown and sit on the bed in the dark, trying to pray. The eyes of the Lubavitcher Rebbe stare down at me from the wall, old and fierce, and all I can think about is my cousin saying You would, wouldn’t you, her eyes slit with spite. I brush my teeth and get into bed, and then I say the Shema. Saying it alone for the first time, I imagine myself back home in my own bed, whispering to God in the silence of my room, and the thought makes me feel so desolate I roll over and cry. But it isn’t long before I hear Esty climbing through the window and then getting ready for bed, and even though I still feel the sting of her threat, even though I know she’s ready to betray me, her presence is a comfort in the dark.

  I struggle awake the next morning to find that Esty is already out of bed. From the kitchen I can hear the clink of spoons against cereal bowls and the high plaintive voices of the step-cousins. Aunt Malka’s voice rises over theirs, announcing that today we will all go blueberry picking. I sigh in relief. Blueberry picking is what I need. I say the Shema and wash my hands in the basin beside the bed.

  My cousin is in a fine mood today, her short bangs pulled back in two blue barrettes, a red bandanna at her throat. She sings in the van on the way to the blueberry farm, and all the little cousins sing with her. My aunt looks on with pleasure. At first I’m only pretending to have a good time, but then I find I no longer have to pretend. It feels good to swing a plastic bucket and make my slow way down a row of blueberry shrubs, feeling between the leaves for the sun-hot berries. My cousin acts as if nothing happened between us last night, as if we had never fought, as if she never went down the road to Dovid Frankel’s house in the dark. When her pail is full she helps me fill my pail, and we both eat handfuls of blueberries, staining our shirts and skirts and skin.

  Back at home the cousins study Torah with Uncle Shimon, and Aunt Malka and Esty and I bake blueberry cake. Esty keeps glancing at the clock, as if she might have to run out any minute to meet Dovid. When the telephone rings she gives a jolt, then lunges to pick it up.

  “Oh, Uncle Alan,” she says. “Hi.”

  Uncle Alan is my father. I stop stirring the cake batter and try to get the phone from my cousin, but she’s already handing it to Aunt Malka.

  “Hello, Alan,” Aunt Malka says. I watch her face for bad news, but none seems to be forthcoming. “Yes,” she says. “Yes. . . . Yes, we certainly are.” Holding the phone between her cheek and shoulder, she walks out of the kitchen and into the little girls’ bedroom and closes the door behind her.

  “What’s going on?” Esty says.

  “I don’t know.” I pour the cake batter into the floured pan Esty has prepared, and we slide it into the oven. Through the wall I can hear Aunt Malka’s voice rising and falling. “I think it has to do with the mikveh,” I say. “I told my dad yesterday that my mom should go, and he had a strange reaction.”

  “She does have to go,” my cousin says. “You’re supposed to go to the mikveh after you’ve given birth or had your period. Your husband can’t touch you until you do.”

  “Your mom already told me about that.”

  “There are hundreds of rules,” she says, sighing. “Things we’re supposed to do and not supposed to do. Maybe you’ll learn about them when you’re older.”

  “What rules?” I say. “I’m old enough.”

  “I can’t just say them here in the kitchen.”

  “Yes, you can. What are the rules? What are you supposed to do?”

  My cousin bends close to my ear. “You can’t do it sitting or standing,” she says. “You can’t do it outside. You can’t do it drunk. You can’t do it during the day or with the lights on. You’re supposed to think about subjects of Torah while you do it. Things like that.”

  “You’re supposed to think about subjects of Torah?”

  Esty shrugs. “That’s what they say.”

  Through the wall we hear Aunt Malka’s voice approaching, and my cousin moves away from me and begins wiping flour and sugar from the countertop. Aunt Malka comes out of the bedroom, her face flushed, her brows drawn together. She’s already hung up the phone.

  “How’s my mother?” I ask her.

  “Recovering,” she says, gathering the cup measures and mixing bowls.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “No.” She sends hot water rolling into the sink and rubs soap into the dish sponge, then
begins scrubbing a bowl. She looks as if she’s the one who’s been punished, her mouth drawn into a grim line. “You have to do what you think is right, Rebecca,” she says, “even when the people around you are doing otherwise.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “It’s not a problem right now,” she says, “but when you go home it may be.”

  I glance at Esty. She’s looking at her mother intently. “Do you really believe that?” she says. “About doing what you think is right?”

  “Absolutely,” her mother says. “I’ve always told you that.”

  Esty nods, and Aunt Malka continues washing dishes, unaware of what she’s just condoned.

  At twelve-thirty that night my cousin dresses in a black skirt and shirt and covers her hair with a black scarf. She wraps Essence of Persimmon in its brown paper bag and tucks it under her arm. The house is dark and quiet, everyone asleep.

  “Don’t do this, Esty,” I whisper from my bed. “Stay home.”

  “If you tell anyone I’m gone, you’re dead,” she says.

  “At least take me along,” I say.

  “You can’t come along.”

  “Try and stop me.”

  “You know how I can stop you.”

  The dread eyes of the Lubavitcher Rebbe stare down at me from the wall. Protect your cousin, he seems to say, and though I don’t know what I am supposed to protect her from, I climb out of bed and begin dressing.

  “What are you doing?” Esty says.

  “I’m coming along.”

  “This has nothing to do with you, Rebecca.”

  “I was with you when you found the book,” I say.

  Esty looks down at the brown paper bag in her hands. Her face, framed by the black scarf, is dark and serious. Finally she speaks. “You can come,” she says. “But there’s one condition.”

  “What condition?”

  “If we get caught, you have to take the blame. You have to take the blame for everything.”

  “But that’s not fair.”

  “That’s the way it is,” she says. “You decide.”

  We sit for a moment in the silence of our room. The curtains rise and fall at the window, beckoning us both into the night. “All right,” I say.

  “Get dressed, then,” my cousin says. “We’re already late.”

  I finish dressing. My cousin slides the bedroom window as far open as it will go, and we crawl out silently into the side yard. We creep through the grass and out to the road, where no cars pass at this time of night. When I look back, the house is pale and small. I imagine Bluma Sarah hovering somewhere above the roof, keeping watch, marking our progress toward the lake.

  We walk in the long grass at the side of the road, keeping out of the yellow pools of light that spill from the streetlamps. In the grass there are rustlings, chatterings, sounds that make me pull my skirt around my legs and keep close to my cousin. We do not talk. The moon is bright overhead. The few houses we pass yield no sign of life. Tree frogs call in the dark, the rubber-band twang of their throats sounding to me like God, God, God. The road we walk is the same road we traversed on Friday afternoon, our bicycles heavy with Shabbos groceries. I can almost see the ghosts of us passing in the other direction, our faces luminous with the secret of the book, our clothes heavy and damp with lake water. Now we are different girls, it seems to me, carrying a different kind of weight.

  By the time we emerge into the Perelmans’ backyard, our skirts are wet with dew. Our sneakers squelch as we tiptoe toward the screen porch. We pause in a stand of bushes, listening for Dovid Frankel, hearing nothing.

  We wait. The hands on my cousin’s watch read twelve fiftyfive. The lake lies quiet against the shore like a sleeping animal, and the shadows of bats move across the white arc of the moon. At one o’clock we hear someone coming. We both suck in our breath, grab each other’s arms. We see the shadow of Dovid Frankel moving across the dew-silvered lawn. We wait until he comes up, breathing hard, and sits down on the porch steps. Then we come out of the bushes.

  Dovid jumps to his feet when he sees us. “Who’s that?” he says.

  “It’s okay,” my cousin whispers. “It’s just us. Esty and Rebecca.”

  “Quiet,” Dovid says. “Follow me.”

  We follow him up the steps and enter the moonlit darkness of the screen porch. For a long moment, no one says anything. It is utterly silent. All three of us seem to be holding our breath. Dovid looks at my cousin, then at me. “Where’s my book?” he says.

  Esty takes the brown paper bag from under her arm. She slides out Essence of Persimmon.

  Dovid lets out a long sigh. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

  “Are you kidding?” Esty says.

  Dovid reaches for the book, but Esty holds it away from him.

  “It’s a sin,” she says. “Looking at pictures like these. You know you’re not supposed to do anything that would make you . . . that would give you . . .”

  “That would make you what?” Dovid says.

  “I mean, look at these people,” she says, stepping into a shaft of moonlight and opening the book. She takes Dovid’s flashlight and shines it on a drawing of two lovers intertwined on an open verandah, watching tigers wrestle in the tiled courtyard. She stares at the drawing as if she could will herself into the scene, touch the lovers’ garments, their skin, the tiles of the courtyard, the tigers’ pelts.

  “There are laws,” my cousin says. “You can’t just do it on a porch, with tigers there. You can’t do it in a garden.”

  “I know,” Dovid says.

  “I’m serious,” Esty says. She moves closer to Dovid. “There are rules for us. We have to be holy. We can’t act like animals.” She looks up at him, so close their foreheads are almost touching. “We can’t have books like this.”

  “What do you want me to do?” he says. “What am I supposed to do?”

  My cousin rises onto her toes, and then she’s kissing Dovid Frankel, and he looks startled but he doesn’t pull away. The book falls from her hand. Quietly I pick it up, and I open the screen door and step out into the Perelmans’ backyard. I walk through the long grass to the edge of the water and take off my shoes and socks. The water is warmer than the air, its surface still. I take one step into the lake, then another. I am all alone. I pull off my long-sleeved shirt and feel the night air on my bare skin. Then I step out of my skirt. I throw my clothes onto the shore, onto the grass. Still holding the book, I walk into the water and feel it on all parts of my body, warm, like a mouth, taking me gently in. When the sandy bottom drops away I float on my back, looking up at the spray of stars, at the dense gauze of the Milky Way. The moon spreads its thin white sheet across my limbs. In my hand the book is heavy with water, and I let it fall away toward the bottom.

  Care

  Tessa knows how to cross the street with a six-year-old: You take her hand, look both ways, and wait until it’s safe. Then you stay within the crosswalk as you cross. She does all these things as she guides Olivia, her niece, across the street toward the cable-car stop. There’s a right way to take care of a child, she knows, and a wrong way. Many wrong ways. What you do not do: Take the drugs that are in your pocket, the Devvies and Sallies in their silver pillbox. She can make it through the day without them. Even bringing them was wrong—another wrong thing. But it makes her feel better to have them close by.

  The heel of Tessa’s left shoe is coming loose, so she’s been walking on the ball of her foot ever since she left her apartment. She has a blister already. At the stop she sits on a bench and examines the broken shoe. The tips of tiny nails glint in the space between heel and sole. Olivia sits next to her, zipping and unzipping her lavender jacket.

  “What’s wrong with your shoe?” Olivia asks.

  “Nothing,” Tessa says, straightening the heel. She stuffs her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket—Kenji’s jacket, actually, heavy and worn and smelling of his cigarettes—and feels for the pillbox. There it is in the right-hand po
cket, round and familiar, a relief.

  “Can I get a souvenir?” Olivia says, eyeing a shop across the street.

  “Maybe later. We have to wait for the cable car.”

  “Can we just look for a second?”

  Tessa glances down the street in the direction of the car turnaround. A cable car is just beginning to make the climb up the hill. “We have to stay here.”

  “I want a T-shirt and a light-up snow dome,” Olivia says.

  “You’ll get what I give you,” Tessa says, and Olivia goes silent. She slides down the bench, as far away from Tessa as possible.

  Tessa tries to concentrate on the distant clang of the bell. She wills the cable car to hurry up. All her joints feel dry and sore, her mind whitely empty. She bites the inside of her cheek just for the distraction.

  The cable car glides uphill through the intersection of Post and Powell and comes to rest at their stop. It’s packed with tall boys in green-and-white sweatshirts that read BONN JUNGENCHOR. The boys are belting out a peasant tune in three-part harmony. Tessa and Olivia squeeze onto the side rail and grab the brass pole as the cable car begins to move. All around them the boys sing the lilting chorus with its repeating nonsense line: O-di-lon tee-lee, o-di-lon tee-lee. Tessa’s head begins to pound. She wonders if Olivia is too young to be standing on the side rail of a cable car, hanging on to a pole as they ascend Nob Hill. Maybe they should be inside the car, not standing here, where Olivia could fall onto the tracks or be jostled to the pavement. The bell of the cable car is like a pickax inside Tessa’s head. “Clay Street, Clay,” the driver calls, yanking the wooden brake. For a long moment, a metallic screech drowns out the German boys’ song.

  They roll through Chinatown, with its dead-eyed fish on ice and its mysterious herb stores, its smells of frying meat and fruity garbage and wet boxes. Farther along, the German boys stop singing. Olivia knocks and knocks her toe against the brass pole. Tessa wants to make her stop, but she can’t move. There’s a hot fast clawing inside her chest. She takes one hand off the pole and feels for the silver pillbox. With her thumb she flicks the lid open. She can feel the difference between a Devvie and a Sallie, the Devvie like a chalky little submarine, the Sallie hexagonal and coated. She works a Devvie out with her index finger. It calms her just to hold it. Clenching it in her hand, she wraps her arm around the pole and braces herself for the next hill.