Gravity (8 page)

I wedge my feet between the pillows and bears and watch her spread out short-sleeved V-neck T-shirts, and matching bra and underwear sets in stripes and lace trim. She pulls out
a pair of slim-fit, faded Levis with orange tags and a button-up fly. “Here,” she say. “These are for you.”

I clasp the jeans to my face, breathe in their new cotton smell, feel the stiffness of the material. I have never had jeans before. “Thanks,” I whisper. I get up and step into the pant legs, pull them up over my hips, struggling with the buttons. The jeans rest just below my belly button. I look in the mirror at the long smooth line of my legs.

“Check out your butt.”

I peer over my shoulder and swivel my hips as if I’m in a
TV
commercial.

Neshama giggles. “One more present.” She pushes a small pink plastic bag into my hands. I wrestle with the tissue and pull out a matching bra and panty set, satiny dark blue with only half cups and panties cut high on the sides. “It’s the color I imagine the ocean might be.”

I squeeze her tight.

“Perfect for your future honey.”

I shoot her a sidelong glance.

“What?” she asks.

I sit down at her desk, shuffle her papers into piles. I kissed Lindsay in the clearing and her lips were warm and soft. “Not me, I mean, not now, I—”

“Just kidding.” Neshama punches my shoulder. “Abba isn’t really going to choose one of those pale, sick-looking
yeshiva buchers
for you.”

“He’ll find someone for you first.”

“No, not me.”

“Still leaving?”

“Yes.” Neshama clasps a V-neck T-shirt. “Not much longer now.” Her mouth forms a thin line. Cords stand out at her throat and temples.

“You still have another year of school, Ness.” I fuss with the tissue paper, refolding the lingerie inside.

Neshama drops the T-shirt and sits on the edge of her bed, facing me. She stretches out her hands in front of her, her knuckles straining, nails glinting in the lamplight. She lets out a big breath. “I’m taking some math courses by correspondence. Then I can apply to university business programs for next fall.”

My eyes open wide. “Have you told Ima and Abba yet?”

“They don’t need to know. Not yet, anyway. Bubbie has already promised to help me with the tuition.”

I tug at the edge of the sheet on Neshama’s bed. My parents want us to become religious schoolteachers like them. “Oh,” I say, too awed to add anything else.

We’re silent a moment. Neshama pulls up her skirt and studies her shin.

“You never asked about the cottage,” I say tentatively.

“How was the cottage?” She concentrates on picking an ingrown hair.

“It was good.” I smile.

“Let me guess,” Neshama says, still picking. “Bubbie snuck cigarettes, watched birds. You had cocktails at five, deli at six, and oh, you were all excited because you did something gross with amphibians. Right?”

“Yes, but there was more.”

“Yeah, so?”

“There were other people there.”

“Boys?” Neshama stops picking and looks up, suddenly interested.

I pause, not sure how to answer. “No, not boys. A girl. I made a friend. She’s not Jewish.”

“Big deal. Girls, shmirls. I had an entire summer— please—an entire life of girls.”

I ponder this, the idea of a summer camp of nothing but girls. I turn to Neshama. “Look.” I pull down the neckline of my blouse and show her the white strap marks of my bathing suit. “Bubbie bought me the suit.”

Neshama looks at my shoulders. Then she opens her blouse at the neck. Her shoulders are perfectly golden without a single mark.

I sigh and get up to go. “Thanks for the contraband.”

Back in my room, I tuck the clothes, along with Lindsay’s jean cutoffs and tank top, into the suitcase under my bed.

NESHAMA HAS ALWAYS
been waiting to escape. When we were little she was sure we were born into the wrong family and no one knew except us. According to her, we weren’t supposed to be daughters of reborn Orthodox Jews,
ba’al t’shuva,
but part of a family of traveling circus performers or eclectic spiritual healers. At best she thought we belonged in Bubbie’s “normal” world.

Neshama and I used to play a game we called Escape! “What if you need to leave fast?” Neshama would ask. “What would you take?” We’d each grab a bag or a suitcase,
and we’d have a minute to pack. Then we’d meet in the basement to see what we’d taken. Sometimes the game was more elaborate. Neshama set the rules. “There’s a fire in the house, or a knock at the door.” Most of the time, we packed as if we wouldn’t be coming back. Neshama always started with clothes and her small blue teddy bear—the bare essen-tials—and quickly moved to bigger heavier items, cramming her bags with felt pens and rainbow notepads, stuffed animals and her collection of
Little House on the Prairie
books.

I would spend most of the time deciding between a favorite book and three pairs of socks. When we met in the basement, Neshama struggled under the weight of her bag. I clutched a bar of soap, a toothbrush and a
siddur
.

“You’ll be cold,” she said.

“But clean,” I replied. We stared at each other.

We stopped playing the game when Bubba Rosa, Abba’s mother, died.

Abba’s parents lived in a small apartment over their dry-cleaning and tailor shop off Yonge Street. I remember them as people who held fear in their backbones, in the angles of their shoulders, a tenseness Abba has inherited.

Abba’s parents bent over the steamer, cut cloth, inhaled dry-cleaning chemicals and lived their whole lives within the confines of the shop. The front window allowed passersby a glimpse of Bubba Rosa eating a plate of cabbage salad or Zeyda sewing on his ancient Singer. Neshama once asked if he had brought the machine from Poland. Zeyda laughed. “I came with a pincushion, I should be so lucky.” He always had a yellow pack of Chiclets for us in his breast pocket.
Zeyda once asked, “Who does Neshama look like?” He stroked her fine blond hair. Goldilocks, he called her.

“My sister,” Bubba Rosa replied. “My sister who was.”

WHEN BUBBA ROSA
died, less than a year after Zeyda, Ima handed Neshama and me each a garbage bag when we went to clear out their apartment. They left behind broken china, cheap
chachkas
, endless pairs of pantyhose. I watched as their privacy was invaded. Ima cleared out drawers of faded saggy underwear, cabinets of medicines long out of date. As she packed shapeless dresses and worn shoes with broken laces, I heard Bubba Rosa’s heavy accent, saw her old hands pressing a worn change purse full of silver dollars into my palms. I held a scarf Bubba had once woven through my hair with her old gnarled fingers, felt it thin and worn, heard it swish into the bag.

In the bedroom, Neshama and I found a suitcase under the bed. Inside were pairs and pairs of new underwear, socks, pantyhose all still in their cardboard packages. Bars of soap, a shaving kit, sweaters, cans of tuna and a bag of peanuts.

Neshama and I never mentioned the suitcase. We never played the packing game again.

Leaving was always Neshama’s game, not mine. Now when I close my eyes, I see Lindsay beckoning to me as she glides by in her cherry-red canoe.

FRIDAY MORNING OF
the Labor Day long weekend I wake to the churn of the washing machine, clothes flapping on the line, the dishwasher humming.

Time at the cottage was a blur. Here at home we mark the days, cutting the line sharp between regular and sacred time. We order our weeks, months, into neat segments: work and rest, holiday and ritual. We sit heavier in our chairs on Friday nights, let the wood take the weight of our spines.

“Two weeks until
yontif
,” Abba says, rolling out dough for cookies he will freeze.

“Eight hours until
Shabbos
,” Ima says, running the vacuum in the living room.

Eight hours. Enough time to move slowly in the humid heat, the windows open to birds and traffic.
Shabbos
doesn’t start until sundown: seven forty. Time stretches out hot and slow.

I polish the
Shabbos
candles, set the table with wine-glasses and the good china. When I’m finished, I fold laundry on the kitchen table: T-shirt sleeves in first, then bodies neatly tucked up. Underwear crotches up, sides in. I refold the tea towels Ima has shoved in the drawer.

Our kitchen is all yellow: both the sunshiny cupboards with their old metal handles and the lemony walls. The nicest thing about our kitchen is the hardwood floor, although it needs to be refinished. Everything else is awkward and old. The drawers either stick or come flying out, whisks, spatulas and soup ladles spilling to the floor. The tap drips or gushes, and the kitchen window sticks open or dangerously smashes down unless propped with a brick. The gold-flecked
Formica counters are knife-marked, rippled with age and crowded with porcelain containers: sugar, flour, coffee, tea. Abba couldn’t bring himself to part with Bubba Rosa’s old jars. The heavy meat grinder she used for making chopped liver takes up counter space beside the oven.

The window over the sink looks out on the narrow strip of our yard. Next to it, our yellowed fridge hums loudly. Neshama has clipped out pictures of new kitchens and taped them to the refrigerator, hoping Abba will take the obvious hint. He never does, although he did buy an extra freezer to hoard his baking.

Our rickety kitchen table sits between the pantry and the door to the hallway. Above the table is a black and white photo my Uncle Isaac took of Ima. In it she sits in our kitchen, her arms crossed over her pregnant belly. Her cheeks are full and flushed, a band of freckles across her nose making her look almost tanned and robust. Neshama stands on a chair, pigtails sprouting out the sides of her head, whispering to Ima, her small chubby hand cupped to her mouth.

“What was the secret?” Neshama always asks.

“I don’t know,” Ima says. “I only remember Bubba Rosa was over, teaching your father to bake.”

Abba loves to bake. He forgets about his studies and teaching and spreads ingredients out on the counter: room-temperature eggs, butter, bags of flour, poppy seeds, squares of chocolate, tubs of sour cream. Then he mixes, stirs, kneads, licks and tastes. He listens to opera, his beard full of flour. “Raisins,” he sings along with
Carmen
or
Aida
, and he dumps a handful of plump raisins into
sweet cinnamon twists, or between layers of soft malleable dough. He makes
rugelach
with chocolate or cinnamon sugar filling, rich and oozing and buttery on your fingers. In his kitchen, blueberry Bundt cakes slide from pans, the slow suck of air hissing steam. He makes yeasty
challahs
with shiny yolk coating, flaky apple strudel dripping warm raisins and soft apple slices. His thin poppy-seed cookies are delicious with tea. He makes
mandlebroit
, crumbling and nutty, for dunking in coffee. He bakes yeast rolls and sour-cream coffee cake and chocolate brownies, all of it producing rich aromas that waft through the kitchen and seep into the wallpaper on the stairs. Our kitchen is dingy and uneven, but saturated with the most delicious smells. “Your father bakes love,” Ima says.

When I am done my chores, I wander up to my room and flop down on my bed. My room is similar in size to Neshama’s, but without all the stuff. I have a blue quilt, a whale poster over my bed and gray shag carpet on the floor. Shells Bubbie has brought me from Florida line the window sill. I keep my collection of fossils, polished stones and bits of minerals in my top desk drawer.

A lawn mower drones next door. Abba’s opera blares from downstairs, colliding with Neshama’s radio. At the cottage there was just the water slapping against the shore. Lindsay and I used to paddle through the marsh in the late afternoons. I was supposed to look out for logs, to prevent the canoe from getting scratched or stuck in the shallow murky water. When we did get stuck, I’d watch Lindsay’s arms flex as she maneuvered us off a log. Later when we swam, she’d slide her jean
shorts off her narrow hips. My face flushes, the hair on my arms standing erect. Don’t, Ellie.

I pick up my
Chumash
from the shelf by my desk and flip through Leviticus, searching through the section on sexual taboos and laws about lepers. I’ve skimmed this a zillion times before, red-faced and giggling. We don’t talk about this part at school much. I leaf through the pages until I find this:
A man should not lie with a man the way he lies with a woman. It is an abomination and they should be put to death.
Leviticus 18:22. I read a few more lines. Nothing about women lying with women.

The drone of the lawn mower grows louder, buzzing inside my head. I check the Hebrew translation. Yes,
toevah,
an abomination, death. I shudder a moment and flop on the bed. How can a man lie with a man the way he does with a woman? Are people really put to death, or is it like when the Torah says to stone people who don’t keep
Shabbos
? I close the book and slide it onto my bedside table. My temples throb; my whole body is feverish.

The mower shuts off and now only the sounds of traffic on Eglinton and Abba’s opera waft into my room. I get down on the floor and do push-ups until I’m panting hard on the gray shag.

In the bathroom, I turn on the shower and sit in the tub. I let the water rain down cool on my head, slide down my back, like a rainstorm. I scrub my skin hard with a loofah until it sloughs off in small tawny piles.

I change into the tank top and shorts Lindsay gave me and flop down on my bed with the Toronto phone book. I scan the names until I find a M. McMullen, Lindsay’s mom.

I dial the number, my pulse racing. The phone rings four times; then an answering machine picks up. “Please only leave a crucial and short message,” Lindsay’s mother demands. I hang up without saying a word.

What do I want to say, and how short can I make it? I dial again, gritting my teeth. “Hi, Lindsay. This is Ellie Gold, from the cottage. I was wondering if you could call me back— four eight two-two nine four two.”