Authors: Michelle Brafman
“Great. You just caught your daughter smoking, but
I’m
the problem?”
He rinsed his mouth out and looked at me.
“Okay, so maybe I
am
the problem. You cannot believe all the ways I’ve offended people lately.” I told him about the comments that had been flying out my mouth.
“Wow.” He led me to the bed, sat me down, and studied me as if he was seeing me new.
“Wow is right,” I said. “I’m way off my game right now.”
He pulled me toward him. He smelled like bratwurst. “You haven’t been the same since your mother’s visit.” Sam was perceptive when he was paying attention or when he had a stake in the matter. In this case, he did. Me.
“I haven’t been the same since I washed Mrs. Kessler’s body.”
“What are we going to do about it?” he asked, a smidgeon of fear rippling underneath his question. We were losing the me that he knew.
“I need to see my mother.”
“Maybe you two just need some time apart. Let things settle down a little.”
“Maybe,” I said, but I knew there was only one thing to do. The idea presented itself to me as intuition. The rebbetzin could help me find my way, as my mother would have said, and how funny that my way back to my old self would be via June Pupnick.
N
early forty years had passed, the amount of time the Jews wandered in the desert after building the golden calf, since I last set foot inside the Schines’ mansion. I drove slowly up the long driveway and parked in one of the guest spots. My palms were hot, but the tips of my fingers were ice cold. This time I was going inside. I walked the familiar path to the synagogue, faced the arch of the front door, and raised my hand to the mezuzah. I let my fingers travel up and down the engraved metal plate, and then I put them to my lips. There was no Brisket Lady hovering, just me. I submitted to the pull I’d always felt toward the Schines, and to something else that I could now name. My legacy.
It was a Wednesday, and the shul was so quiet that I could hear the grandfather clock ticking in Rabbi Schine’s den. I walked toward the back of the house, the Rebbe’s eyes still following me. Keep your stare to yourself, you’re a guest here, I wanted to say. I stopped at the sanctuary, which still smelled like musty prayer shawls, and looked around at the rows of brown connecting chairs and the dingy shades barely spanning the windows. I turned on the chandelier that my grandparents must have purchased, studying the long crystals of glass, imagining the room as my mother might have known it, red velvet drapes and my grandfather’s guests chatting in their evening wear. The ballroom is filled with men dressed like Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca
, lighting cigarettes in long black holders for women in silk gowns.
I walked to the kitchen and up the adjacent steps to the
Schines’ living quarters. The rabbi opened the door. His once-black hair was fully gray, but there were few lines around his mouth and eyes.
“Hello, Rabbi Schine, is the rebbetzin here?” I averted my eyes out of habit.
He hadn’t looked at me directly since I became a woman, but even without eye contact, I could feel his energy shift toward me, perforating my heart. Not now, I thought as sweat began to bead on my forehead and under my arms. I willed it to stop, but I was sweating onions again, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.
The rebbetzin emerged from the kitchen with the phone cradled against her ear. She smiled as if she’d been expecting me and held up her index finger to signal that she’d be with me in a second. I discreetly wiped my face with the sleeve of my turtleneck as I followed the rabbi into the living room and sat down on the well-preserved couch. Tzippy and I never sat in the living room because it was reserved for their Shabbos guests, people who came to the shul to heal, to reclaim the light in their souls. Now they were me.
“Tell me about your family, Barbara.” The rabbi sat down on the chair opposite me.
“My husband is a financial planner. He’s from the North Shore of Chicago.” I’d heard the rabbi do this to dozens of guests. He’d engage them in conversation, and then they’d melt in his interest. It was what he must have done to my father. I knew better than to succumb to his charm, but it seduced me just the same.
The rebbetzin appeared and exchanged glances with the rabbi, and I stopped talking. “Come, Barbara,” she said.
The rabbi stroked his beard. “Your father, alav hashalom, I miss him.” He didn’t ask after my mother.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
“And we miss you too.” His words touched the deepest part of me. I’d been Schinified.
I said goodbye to the rabbi and trailed the rebbetzin into the kitchen, which smelled like a Wednesday, coffee and the chopped
liver she’d served the rabbi for lunch. She always had to remind him to eat because he became so lost in his studies. It wouldn’t start smelling like Shabbos until tomorrow, when she’d begin preparing her cholent.
I was relieved to see that the Schines had kept their old kitchen table, with its gray marbled top and sturdy metal legs. Tzippy and I had quizzed each other on our multiplication tables here and peeled potatoes for the rebbetzin’s kugels. We’d colored pictures of tulips and butterflies on the legal pads the rabbi bought to write his sermons on, the same ones my mother used to help script the rebbetzin’s talks.
The rebbetzin put the teakettle on and placed a sugar bowl, saucers, and two bags of Lipton on the table. She stroked my cheek as if I were a child. Her hand was that of an old woman, bony and freckled.
“Barbara,” she said.
I paused and let her name roll around inside my mouth. I wasn’t a kid anymore, and I wasn’t one of her congregants. “Rivkah.”
She gave me a small smile of approval. “Yes, Rivkah.”
“This is surreal,” I blurted. “First washing Mrs. Kessler’s body and now sitting in your kitchen waiting for the kettle to sing, like no time has passed.”
She rested her chin in her palm and gazed at me, taking me in carefully.
“But time has passed,” I said.
“Yes.”
I pinched my thumb and forefinger together. “I was this close to going to Mrs. Kessler’s funeral, you know.”
“What happened?”
“Mrs. Pincus happened, and all my shame came back.”
The rebbetzin put her hand over mine. Her fingers had always been cold, no matter the season.
“I could have reminded Mrs. Pincus that there really would be no shul without June Pupnick.” I looked down as I repeated the
words the rebbetzin had spoken so often during my childhood.
She smiled sadly. “A real gift for bringing people into the shul, your mother had.”
“There’s that. Plus, didn’t she
give
you this mansion?” I looked right at her, the kettle whistling and neither of us getting up to attend to it.
After a few seconds of the ugly whine, she got up and poured water into our cups. I wondered if she’d stand with her back to me again, as she had when we sat in my childhood kitchen and I discovered that she knew about my mother’s affair. She brought us our cups and sat across from me, steeping her tea, her shoulders bowed, and I felt like Dorothy facing the Wizard of Oz. She wasn’t the answer lady for everyone’s problems or the sensible adult who had shipped me off to California or the spiritual leader who had implored me to take care of my sick mother. She was sitting in front of me, stripped of the cloak of her status as the interpreter of God’s mitzvot. The rebbetzin had paid in blood for keeping an enormous gift from someone who had violated her principles so radically. The cost was inscribed all over her body, from her sagging shoulders to the foot she was rubbing nervously against the leg of the table.
“You have questions.” She sounded drained.
“I already hunted down the Shabbos goy for answers.” I laughed at the absurdity of it.
She jerked her head toward me, unable to feign nonchalance at the mention of the Shabbos goy.
“He wouldn’t tell me much. So protective!” I said.
She fidgeted with her tea bag. “I’m not surprised.”
“And after everything my mother has put us through, somehow I’ve turned into the ogre.”
“Your mother has struggled.” I detected the same protectiveness I’d heard in the Shabbos goy’s voice.
“He told me about how you found her in the hospital.”
She winced. “That was an awful time.”
I took a sip of my tea but could barely swallow it. “I’m scared.”
“Tell me, Barbara.” She looked scared too.
“My daughter’s been so down in the dumps. What if she’s inherited our depression gene?”
She twisted the string on her tea bag while she crafted her answer. “I’m not a psychologist, but you and your mother were depressed for real reasons. I venture to guess that Lili’s home life is strong.”
Had I mentioned Lili by name? I was sorry I’d mentioned her at all, because I didn’t want to give the rebbetzin a chance to escape into her adviser role. “What happened to my mother? Help me put these puzzle pieces together. Please.”
“She’d lost everything. Her parents, her brother.” Her fingers trembled against her cup. “Her baby,” she whispered.
The word hung in the air. “Her what?”
She pursed her lips, trying to hold in her tears. I’d never seen the rebbetzin cry. “Her baby.”
I had no words.
“We met her in the hospital.”
“For her depression,” I insisted.
“Yes, and more.” Pain creased the rebbetzin’s face. “She’d suffered a botched abortion.”
I let the news travel through my body, to my heart. “Who was the father?”
The rebbetzin was sniffling now. “I never found out.”
“Oh, God.” I covered my face with my hands.
She sat with me quietly.
I dropped my hands and looked around the shabby kitchen, at the chairs that needed mending and the smaller framed pictures of the Rebbe and the steel cup hanging over the sink for ritual hand washing. “This was my mother’s happy place, right here in your house.”
The rebbetzin smiled. “I loved it when she visited.”
“And the mikveh? That was her
unhappy
place.” Mine too.
“The mikveh was a sacred place for your mother. She told me that she kept your uncle company in the water and helped him
with his exercises.”
“Did it bother her when it became a public place?”
“She assured us that it didn’t, but I know she went down there when she was….” The rebbetzin paused. “Grieving.”
“I want to go there,” I said, feeling that old tug.
“Come.” She got up.
I followed her out of the apartment, down the steps, and through the mansion to the kitchen where Tzippy and I stole cookies while the Shabbos goy put kugels in the oven. I summoned memories that belonged to my mother: a cook, probably a big farm girl from the northern parts, preparing platters of roast beef, not kosher. If my mother’s family could afford this mansion, they must have been wealthy assimilated Jews who would have eaten ham with buttered potatoes and trimmed their Christmas trees. I touched the walls and doors, claiming them as my own.
The rebbetzin waited for me in the pantry. I was just as frightened to walk into that closet as I’d been when Tzippy asked me to meet her in the mikveh to talk about her fear of marrying. The familiar scent of Lysol and cinnamon ferried me back to my childhood, and an old charge fired in my cells. I looked around at the cans of Rokeach gefilte fish and tuna stacked on the shelves. I looked toward the door leading down to the mikveh. That charge threatened to overtake me.
“I can’t go downstairs. Not today, rebbetzin.”
“When you’re ready, Barbara.”
“Can we still talk?” My voice sounded small.
She nodded and led me through the kitchen toward the front of the house. I paused at the entrance to the sanctuary. Then I walked to the rebbetzin’s designated seat and the one informally assigned to my mother, and touched them both. I felt as though I was standing on an empty stage, improvising in front of a theater filled with ghosts. I could practically feel Tzippy’s warm breath in my ear and Mrs. Kessler’s smile bathing me with its light. The mansion had always felt holy to me, and to this day I couldn’t hear the Shema without longing to sit in this very sanctuary. My
mother felt it too, the pull and the desire to both escape from the dead and commune with their ghosts. Of course, we were never meant to stay here for long, which made every moment in here feel both electric and lost.
The rebbetzin rubbed my arm the way I’d seen her do with the troubled congregants who sought her out on Shabbos. Her touch unknotted the nerves that had bundled themselves around my muscles. I could no longer deny how much I’d been craving her counsel. She sat down in her chair, and I took my mother’s spot.
“I heard what you said about taking care of my mother, but I can’t do it.” I told her about my mother’s stay at our house. “She’s got Alzheimer’s.”
“Oh, Barbara. I’m sorry.” Her voice held her usual sympathy, but also a deeper sorrow for the sad news about a friend.
I was so tired. “How did we get here?”
“You’re trying,” she said.
“And failing miserably.” I told her that I felt like Lili, who could no longer rely on her running to cope with her ADHD. Whatever I’d been using to temper my anger wasn’t working anymore, not even my teaching.