“Menachem, have mercy. Let your sister catch one. Just one,” Jenny’s voice rang out, teasing.
“I don’t want him to let me. I can do it,” the girl protested.
“No, you can’t. Girls can’t,” the redhead assured her. His words had a strange lilt, almost too carefully enunciated. He sounded, Tamar realized, like Zissel.
“
Ima’s
a girl,” she informed him flatly, putting her face strangely close to his.
“No she’s not! She’s a woman,” he countered.
“Jenny.”
“Tamar!”
They walked toward each other quickly, embracing.
“I’ve been meaning to call you,” they both said, guilty, then laughed. “Come, meet the children.
“This is Menachem, my eldest,” Jenny said, ducking as he leaned out of his wheelchair and reached above her head to snatch the ball. She gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder. “Never stops showing off. And this is Ilana.” The little girl smiled shyly. “And this is Jesse.” She tapped the child on the shoulder and looked into his face in the odd way the little girl had. “This is my friend, Tamar, from America.” The boy shrugged and ran away.
“Terrible manners. A real Sabra. Come in, have a drink.”
The house was a mess. But it was warm and basically clean, with the pleasant smell of cookies baking in the oven.
“Tamar, I didn’t know…”
“You mean Menachem. He was born that way. Something with the spine. I don’t know all the medical terms. But he’s still the best catcher we’ve got in this family.” She smiled.
“And the redhead? He’s deaf, isn’t he?”
“He’s deaf,” she said matter-of-factly. “And Ilana was born premature with a heart murmur. But the doctors have fixed that. Four operations. But it’s over now. She’s perfectly fine.”
“All of your children? How could that be?” She sat down and gulped from the glass Jenny offered her. “When I was here last year, you said your life was so wonderful. That you had been so blessed with everything…”
“But my life is wonderful! I am blessed. The kids are great.”
“But it’s not fair. In one family, so much tragedy…”
“Tamar,” she said quietly, “there isn’t any tragedy. They’re adopted. All of them. I chose them.”
There was a long shocked silence.
“Come out to the patio. It’s quiet there, and the view is beautiful.”
Jenny carried a tray of coffee cups and cake through the living room out to the tiled veranda.
“This is such a pretty room!” Tamar murmured, admiring the stonework around the fireplace, the colorful hand-hooked rugs on the walls, the collection of Hebron glass with its sea blue sparkle. Everywhere things were growing, sprouting green from hand-turned clay pots, cans, wooden buckets, and old bowls. She saw geraniums, African violets, lobelia, and thick-leaved succulents with dazzling red flowers that seemed almost too strange to be real. In the corner was a desk and a word processor. The whitewashed walls were lined with oak bookcases holding hundreds of volumes in English and Hebrew. More books were laid in neat piles all over the floor and coffee table. Children’s toys were strewn on the rug. Worn, hand-knitted children’s sweaters hung on the backs of chairs.
“You’ve kept up with your reading, I see.” Tamar smiled, feeling better seeing the evidence of a life full of many indulgent pleasures. There was nothing monastic about the place, nothing clinical or fanatically self-sacrificing. Just a family, she thought, breathing easier.
“You might say! Except it’s such a hassle to get books. There are so few libraries with anything decent in English, and new books cost a fortune… But I scrounge around in old bookstores and get best-sellers from five years ago… It doesn’t matter. Good books don’t age.”
“And the wall hangings?”
“I do them in the winter in front of the fireplace when the kids are sitting around doing their homework. They complain Ohel Sara didn’t teach me anything because I can never help them with their lessons in
chumash
and
navi
. I don’t know if I forgot this stuff, or just never learned it properly. At least, I never learned
it the way they do here, with maps and pictures. It’s so alive for them. Everything the Bible talks about happened just around the corner!”
They went through the patio doors and sat on big comfortable lawn chairs. The wind whipped through the pine trees, making them rustle with a sound like the tinkling of tiny bells.
Tamar leaned back, listening to the silence, the peace of playing children, of calm weather. The sky was water clear, stretching blue until the explosion of white that was the sun. Even now she could see its blinding power diminishing as it receded into the pink-and-mauve-and-violet shadows that came up from the hills to meet it. She closed her eyes, blurred and blinded by trying to take in all that vivid light.
“The hills are blue today. They aren’t always,” Jenny commented. “Sometimes they’re green or purple, or even gray. I think I like this color best. This midnight blue.”
Tamar nodded, looking at the little white stone houses outlined in the distance, little starbursts in the blue vapors of the hillsides. She heard the birds but did not see them. The sound of a mule braying came from far off.
“He sounds tired today. Usually he’s much louder.” Jenny smiled. “Today he sounds bored. Poor old mule. I’d like to meet him someday.”
The air was so clear, the breeze gentle and cold and crisp. Tamar hugged herself.
“Are you cold, do you want to go in?”
Tamar shook her head. It was cold, but so clear and clean and beautiful. So very, very quiet. They sat drinking hot coffee, the steam warming their cool faces as they watched long shadows bisect the lawn. They talked in gentle, nostalgic, unhurried tones of Orchard Park and subway rides; Italian ices and Thirteenth Avenue on a summer’s day; of Mrs Kravitz and the boy with the bad complexion who had chased them into Temple Emanuel.
And then they sat in companionable silence, watching the sun slowly lose its height, shrinking, compensating in beauty for what it had lost in stunning power, becoming bronze and then copper, sending dark purple shadows flowing like a river along the horizon.
Soon it would be dark. The mule brayed. It sounded like farewell. A flock of birds rose up from the valley floor, startling in their easy freedom.
“We tried for so many years to have a child,” Jenny said softly. “Everything. I was living in Geulah then. Even more pious than Orchard Park. I mean, people were so careful about every tiny thing they ate or wore or read or thought… I had a neighbor who was a teacher in Bais Yaakov. She had three perfect children. Blond, blue-eyed, bright. Gorgeous. And she was always smiling, always happy. She kept telling me to have faith, that a child was a reward from G-d for keeping His laws. She would tell me about how she never used cabbage because it might have worms in it. And how she always wore the thickest stockings in summer because it was an extra show of
mesiras nefesh
; and how she wouldn’t let her children eat local ice cream even though it had a rabbinical stamp because they used powdered milk, which might be imported and might come from cows not owned by Jews…
“And then she got pregnant and had her fourth. She came home and I saw right away something was funny. She didn’t have a baby with her. I asked one of the neighbors what the problem was, and she told me the child had Down’s syndrome and the mother had just abandoned it in the hospital. Just refused to take it home.
“I know you shouldn’t judge someone until you’re standing in their shoes, but this made me crazy. I felt like going in to her, shouting at her: ‘You’re so religious. You try in every small way possible to please
Hashem
. So how can it be a child that He’s created, and He’s entrusted to you, you’re throwing away like so
much garbage? You know what I would give to have a child of my own? Any child?’
“But of course I didn’t. I just kept smiling when we met. I never mentioned the baby. A few months later, I saw she was pregnant again.
“But the worst part of all wasn’t the woman, the mother. Maybe it’s even wrong to pass judgment or condemn her without knowing all the facts… Maybe, if you try very hard, you could even understand her. The worst part for me was the neighbors—all super-
frum
people, women who covered every inch of their hair, or shaved their heads so G-d forbid a hair wouldn’t escape; men who bought exactly the right length black overcoat to wear in summer and had the right length beards and
payess
—all of them, they all accepted this. No one said: Let’s not let our children play with hers. Let’s fire her from teaching in Bais Yaakov. No. It was perfectly acceptable to them that she leave this baby in the hospital to be given away to strangers. It was perfectly okay for her to say: I reject G-d’s will in giving me this child to raise. If she had taken off her wig, or bought a television set, these same people would have been outraged. She would have been ostracized, fired, her kids would probably never find
shidduchim
. . . But this, giving away this baby, this G-d-created human being, this little soul, that was okay with them. It made me sick. They made me sick. I moved out of the neighborhood.
“Afterward I did a lot of thinking. All those religious people, all that carefully measured out adherence to minute details of minute laws… And then they just miss the big, enormous challenges of their lives, their opportunities to show G-d, to show themselves, how much they love, how much they believe. And I decided that maybe I wasn’t any better. Maybe I was also refusing to accept
Hashem’s
will. And I decided to adopt.”
“But why crippled, deaf… Why not a healthy baby?”
“We were on a waiting list for a healthy child for two years
with no end in sight. And then the adoption service called us about Menachem. They said he might have some handicap, but they weren’t sure of the extent. His parents had just left him in the hospital and gone home. Marc and I saw him lying in his bassinet in the nursery, so tiny and alone. His hair was so long and silky, and his cheeks so soft. He looked up at us and started to cry—you know, that frantic newborn cry—like the world is coming to an end. I just picked him up and put him on my shoulder. His head grazed my cheek. And that was it.
“A year later, the call came in about Ilana. And a few years after that, they called us about Jesse. Somewhere along the line, I guess I figured out that maybe this was G-d’s plan for me. That He was saving me to take the ones He can’t quite place. To help Him out.”
“And your husband, didn’t he ever want one of his own… didn’t he ever feel cheated?”
Jenny looked at her strangely. “My husband is the one who can’t have children. Not me. Oh, yes… I thought about… divorce. Believe me, I considered every possible choice. I felt angry and hurt and cheated… But what can I do? I love him.” She shrugged. “He’s a wonderful husband, a fantastic, loving father. And the kids… the kids are… I don’t know how to express it. They’re gifts, each and every one. Oh, I won’t lie. I won’t say I never ache for a child of my own, or dream about what it would have looked like, been like. I’m normal,” she admitted. “But I’ve made my choices and I’m proud to live with them. And most of the time, not only isn’t the cup half full, it runs over. Most of the time, I can’t imagine our family any differently. I look at my husband and my kids and I just
oohf
them, like that girl I went to college with, remember? I simply
oohf
them. Can’t you tell?”
She did look happy. And young and slim and pretty as ever in her soft white sweater and flowing pine green skirt, her dark hair tied back with a pretty silk scarf. Not like a martyr or a
Mother Theresa at all. Just a healthy, happy, pretty, busy, normal mom.
“How do you do it, Jen? Tell me. What’s the answer?”
“I have no idea most of the time, either, believe me! And I change my mind again and again. But one thing I do know: Love is better than hate. I could have chosen to hate. My fate. My husband. G-d. Life. Even when I was a little girl, my father died so suddenly, my life was so messed up. But I think even back then, I decided to love instead.” She shrugged. “ ‘And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ‘And you shall love the L-rd thy G-d with all your heart and soul and strength.’ We say it three times a day, don’t we?”
“We mouth the words three times a day,” Tamar said bitterly. “It’s so much easier to hate. To want revenge. So much more satisfying somehow.”
“It only seems that way because most people don’t really experience unconditional love. We think of it as tit for tat. You did this nice thing for me—my husband, G-d, my child—so I’ll do this nice thing for you. I’m not talking about that measured-out-in-coffee-spoons kind of love, that professional kind you see in ads in women’s magazines, where the mother’s making cookies and smiling. I mean something a lot stronger and in a way much more dangerous. Because you have to let go of yourself. You have to stop keeping score. You have to take a chance on giving more than you get, or getting more than you give. I know I have with these kids.” She grinned. “A
lot
more than I bargained for.”
“But what if you have to choose? If love for one person makes you destroy another? Which love do you choose?”
“That’s hard. But I only know one answer: You go with the
halacha
. It’s not your choice, but G-d’s. You do what you’re supposed to do and hope for the best.”
“Even if it seems cruel, or wrong?”
“Even then. That’s where faith comes in.”
Tamar nodded. It was so simple put that way. So easy. Go with the law. Don’t lie anymore. Just tell the truth.
“My son and daughter-in-law had a baby. A boy. Three days ago.”
“Mazel tov! Your first grandchild!”
“Jen. He’s black. My grandson was born black.”
Jenny’s face froze, her eyes welling. And then she got up and gathered Tamar into her arms. She didn’t pat her, or hug her or try to be motherly. She just stood there, her body connected and undemanding. Tamar leaned against her and they rocked together for a moment, supporting each other as if braced against some great wind. Then, slowly, Jenny pulled back, looking deeply into her friend’s troubled eyes. “And when is the bris?”