Chains Around the Grass (20 page)

“Please,” he bowed, gesturing uneasily toward his office door. Ruth followed him. She closed the door behind her firmly, not wanting the kind woman in the office to witness what was about to happen next. For she had no illusions. It had taken her many long nights, many unhappy days to get to this point. But now she was finally there, she understood. There was no turning back.

“Please, sit. Tell me about your son.”

“He’s in…I mean…he’ll be in tenth grade come September. He’s a bright boy. Reads all the time,” she began eagerly.

“And his grades?”

“Well, good…actually not so good. Could be better. Which is why I was hoping to change…”

“Mrs…?” Rabbi Lerner asked abruptly. “Markowitz,” Ruth replied.

“Yes. Mrs. Markowitz. You know this is a private school. We’re very expensive. Do you have the means to send your son here?”

“Someone told me you take in some smart kids even if their parents can’t pay. My father was very religious. I want my son to go here. I want you to give him a scholarship!”

“Mrs. Markowitz, I want to tell you something,” Rabbi Lerner said, leaning forward on his elbows, smoothing down his mustache with one clean ?ngertip. He smiled—a little tight smile—and shrugged his well-fitting suit shoulders.

“Everybody in this town has money for everything. They’ve got money for new cars before the paint chips on the old ones; for finished basements in houses that are way too big to start with; for pianos nobody’s ever going to know how to play; for restaurant-size refrigerators stuffed with enough lox and pastrami and corn beef to feed a congregation after Yom Kippur. But there’s one thing they have no money for. Ever. Education. Jewish education,” he pounded the desk for emphasis, bored and irritated by the familiar speech, “to make a mensch out of their kids, to give them something to live for, something to live up to, a tradition, a culture to make it all worthwhile. For that, they never have money. If only half the Jews in this town would send their children here, we’d be able to build a new gym, add classrooms…” his voice grew weary, “give scholarships.”

How many times a day would he have to make this speech at the beginning of this school year, he wondered. Ten, fifty? He was sick of hearing himself talk. Everybody wanted a scholarship, a reduction, some way to weasel out of their obligations. Nobody got past him. If they wanted the little blue registration cards the kids handed in to the teachers the first day of school (and without which they’d be ignominiously and mercilessly sent home in front of all their little friends), they’d have to pay up.

Undaunted, Ruth met his determined eyes with her own. “Rabbi,” she began quietly, just as she’d planned. “I lost my husband last year,” she lowered her head, letting the words sink in, watching their effect. “I’m living on social security and even,” she lowered her head still further, sinking down in her chair, just as she’d thought she would, “welfare. My son has had a very hard time, with his father dying so young. He’s in Hoover High—it’s a bad place! I’m afraid for him. He’s so bright, you see. Reads all the time. But the teachers there, the kids. They don’t let him live. They don’t know how to…”

“Mrs. Markowitz,” Rabbi Lerner interjected, shaking his head sympathetically but firmly, “our scholarship money is very limited. And your son is very old to be starting out here. We have a dual program—Hebrew in the morning, then all regular, college prep classes in the afternoon. The Hebrew is on a very high level. Most of the children here have been studying it since first grade. We’d have to put him into first-grade Hebrew until he caught up…”

“He could catch up fast, Rabbi! I would help him. I still remember my Hebrew. My father used to teach me. He’d open the Chumash, the Talmud, and read to me,” she looked up, beyond Rabbi Lerner’s head, to a blank, clean spot on the wall.

“Well, could you pay something? I mean, for your own pride. We could make up the rest in scholarship. Let’s say,” he groaned and sighed, “three hundred a year?” One-tenth the going rate.

Ruth shook her head defiantly.

“Three hundred? Two hundred? One hundred? Fifty? Twenty-five?” his voice rose incredulously.

She looked up at him. He wasn’t a bad fellow, she supposed. Just doing his job. But she also had a job to do. She clasped her hands in front of her and looked up into his eyes.

“I’m a poor widow with three small children,” she said quietly. Her tone was perfect. Humble, downcast yet wheedling and impressive. She felt the power of the words and saw their devastating effect. “A poor widow,” she repeated, knowing that thundering through his head were the words: “Thou shalt not oppress the widow and the orphan. Lest thy wife be made a widow, thy children, orphans.”

With a certain perverse pride, she stepped out of herself, looking in on the scene. She almost felt herself rooting for the little man. What choice did he have against this blackmail? None, she knew. She was more powerful. And the twenty-five dollars could come out of someone else’s pocket, after all, even though she could afford it. But why should I pay?—she thought defiantly. If God has cast me in this role, I’ll play it to the hilt. I shall not give an inch. A penny.

“It’s food money,” she told him, mercilessly. “Food from my children’s mouths. It’s not mine to give.”

She saw Rabbi Lerner lean back, take out a white handkerchief and wipe his suddenly glistening forehead. His smile was gone.

“Forgive me,” he pleaded. “Who am I to judge you? We’ll take your son, if he wants to come. Do you have any other children in school?”

“A girl, Sara, going into second grade.” She hadn’t thought of

Sara. The child was happy, so far as she knew, in public school. “Sara. We’ll take her in too.” He motioned with his hands, palms up, defeated. Come one, come all. Hey, you only live once, he told himself. And Yom Kippur was only two months away, at which time God, like a celestial CPA, would be finalizing the balance sheet—subtracting bad deeds from good ones to get the bottom line which would decide his fate for the coming year. He could almost feel the Almighty peering over his shoulder, watching this scene with profound interest; almost see the heavenly pen poised to record the results.

“God bless you. And you should have a good, healthy year. And I hope you will bring both children down soon so we can test them for grade level. Would they like hot lunches too? Of course. Good hot lunches in our cafeteria!”

He got up and walked around the desk, opening the door. “Please give Selma all the details. Address, phone number.”

Ruth got up, staring at him. “Thank you, thank you so…” she said with abject gratitude, playing her part. But her look was knowing and full of pity. Poor Rabbi Lerner, she thought, controlling her urge to laugh out loud. Or to weep. He hadn’t stood a chance.

“They’ll need IQ tests,” Selma said calmly, writing down all the information. “Oh, he didn’t mention that, did he? Yes. And you have to pay for them. Five dollars a test. That’s ten dollars.”

Ruth hesitated. She considered a repeat performance, but somehow couldn’t bear the idea. Not in front of this audience. “Here’s five. It’s for one child. All I came about was for the one child.”

Chapter nineteen

Now what? You’re sick in the head, that’s what!” Jesse shouted. “Hebrew school…with first-graders?! C’mon! Anyway, I’ve got other plans.”

“You shouldn’t speak to a mother that way! Fresh! What do you mean, plans? What plans?”

“I got other plans,” he repeated cryptically.

She felt like an idiot. She’d been so sure he’d be delighted, after all the complaining he’d done about Hoover! Here he had a chance to start over, to make new friends from good homes! She explained all this to him until she felt enraged, then depressed, then finally humiliated. After all that! She’d look like such a fool in front of the Rabbi and that nice secretary! And the five dollars!? A waste. A waste…

It was the five dollars that gave her another idea.

“Saraleh? How would you like to go to school in a beautiful white building with nice little Jewish girls?”

Sara wasn’t interested either. She was happy in public school; at home in the familiar draughty red building that smelled of crayons and papers and crushed chalk. She loved the windows stenciled with snowy-looking turkeys and pumpkins. Besides, she already went to school with nice little girls. Maria of the neat tight braids and lovely, shiny black skin, the smartest girl in the class, winner of prizes for spelling and drawing. She herself had won a prize: a ticket to a Police Athletic Association Christmas party. Inside the school, she was happy.

But walking up and back from the projects frightened her. And getting safely up the elevator home. If she agreed to go to Day School, her mother had promised to walk her to the bus stop and wait for her there to take her home. Reluctantly, she agreed.

The iq test was more like a game of sizes and shapes and words. She drew little boxes inside other little boxes. “What does ‘afraid’ mean,” the man asked her.

She could feel the meaning. It sat inside her, like a meal digested. “It means”—dark hallways smelling of pee, dark strangers in shadowy corners, groups of teenagers guarding entrances, Jesse getting mad…“it means…afraid,” she repeated stupidly. But the man simply smiled and told her mother that she’d done just fine.

On the first day of school, Sara stood shyly in the classroom doorway, aware of all the eyes. She looked down at herself, noting the spots of grease that yellowed her carefully ironed blouse, the unmatched white of her socks and how they heaped around her ankles instead of hugging them with new elastic. Instinctively, she knew all this might make a difference here, just as surely as it had made no difference in PS 44.

She found a seat. It was not so bad. Their eyes were simply curious. Not like the eyes of her relatives during shiva, that probed the way a sharp fingernail probes a sore. Under those eyes, she had felt herself transformed into a creature both pitiable and grotesque, someone against whom they could measure their own happier circumstances, reveling in their achievements. They were not fatherless. They were not poor. They had watched her, she believed, hoping for her acknowledgment, for a stricken look of misery that would make

it official.

She never gave it to them. She looked around the schoolroom. And never would she allow these strange children to feel with smug joy the abundance of their own charmed lives by revealing the deficiencies of her own.

No way! She would never tell, never let it show! No one had to know! Unless—could they tell, she panicked, just by looking at her? Was there something about her face, her body that revealed all those things she lacked, the things that made her different—less—than them?

At recess she escaped to the bushes, watching in safety as the girls and boys separated to their different games. The girls played punch ball and would pick teams. Marcia and Linda were the captains. They wore soft mohair sweaters and pleated skirts. As the days went by, she saw that if they wore a pink sweater they wore a pink hair band and pink tights. If they wore plaid, the headband changed magically to plaid. Marcia had short hair, layered and teased like a movie star. Linda’s was long and blonde.

Sara watched as Marcia and Linda pointed their fingers at the girls, choosing up the punch ball teams. Sara was amazed and frightened at the rash courage, the blind hope, of those who stood around waiting to be chosen; fearless creatures that could not even imagine the possibility that they might be left behind, standing on the sidelines.

Each morning before leaving the house, her stomach would roll thinking of the girls and their pretty clothes, of how they stared at her when she came in late from the bus, of how they stood rashly, hopefully, waiting to be chosen, and how the lucky ones squealed with joy when the magic finger pointed in their direction.

“I feel sick, I don’t wanna go,” she would say, feeling her mother’s cool palm against her forehead.

“You’re not hot,” her mother would answer, unsure. “Oh, but my stomach. It hurts me, mommy.”

Sometimes she would stay home—for two, three days—watching TV, staring out of the window, and her stomach would not hurt then. But as soon as she got off the bus and neared the school, the ache would begin again. She’d sit down to rest until it went away, oblivious of passing time. When she walked into class, the children would say “Ooooh” very loudly because she had come so late, and her Hebrew teacher—old, gray, bearded Rabbi Bender—would shake his head and sigh. He tried to teach her Hebrew.

Bais aw baw. Daled aw daw. Gimmel aw gaw.

She struggled with the strange letters that had to be written backward. It was so hard. And her stomach hurt so much.

Bais aw baw. Gimmel aw gaw. Daled aw daw.

Rabbi Bender made her mother come to school and soon afterward her mother bought a little notebook to write down if she ate breakfast in the morning. But she didn’t want to eat breakfast. Not when her stomach hurt so much. Mama! Did it hurt!

One morning, when Sara was very late, and the class had said

“Ooooh” very loudly, Rabbi Bender told a story.

“Once a man, a very good man, went to heaven. And he was a very good man so the angels made him a very good place to stay, and the man was very happy. But then one day, he looked down and he saw his little girl. And she was not listening to her mother. She was not eating her breakfast.”

Sara froze, lifting her eyes to look at Rabbi Bender, terrified he was looking at her and that everyone would see.

He wasn’t.

“Well,” Rabbi Bender stroked his beard, continuing, “this made him so sad. Oh so sad, because he was in heaven with God and happy and he wanted his little girl to be happy too. So you know what happened?” The class leaned forward eagerly.

They’re not looking at me, Sara thought. They don’t know. “She started to be a good girl, to listen and eat nicely and then he stopped being sad.”

Tears came to her eyes. She felt sick with hatred. He’d come so close to telling…so close! And the story, the awful idea of it…a father far away and happy to be there!! Stupid, evil man, she thought, hating Rabbi Bender. Oh Mama, did her stomach hurt now! And he was looking at her, the rabbi, but the other girls did not look so they must not know. She stared straight ahead. What if he pointed to her, she panicked. What if he told? She felt her panic rising, cutting off her breathing. What if…?!