How to Breathe Underwater (11 page)

The next morning I am the first to wake. I say the Modeh Ani and wash my hands in the basin we leave on the nightstand, cleansing myself as I open my eyes to this Shabbos morning. My cousin sleeps nearly sideways, her long legs hanging off the bed, covers pushed back, nightgown around her thighs. Though her limbs have not seen the sun all summer, her skin is a deep olive. There is a bruise on her knee the size of an egg, newly purple, which I know she must have gotten as we climbed the metal ladder onto the Perelmans’ float. In sleep her face is slack and flushed, her lips parted. It has never occurred to me that my cousin may be beautiful the way a woman is beautiful. With her cropped brown hair and full cheeks, she has always looked to me like a tall, sturdy child. But this morning, as she sleeps, there is a womanliness to her body that makes me feel young and unripe. I dress quietly so as not to wake her, and tiptoe out to the kitchen to find my uncle standing on the screen porch, beside the table, folding his tallis into its velvet bag so he can go to shul for morning services. Sunlight falls in through the screen and covers him with its gold dust. He is facing Jerusalem, the city where he and Aunt Malka found each other. I open the screen door and step out onto the porch.

“Rebecca,” he says. “Good morning, good Shabbos.” He smiles, smoothing his beard between both hands.

“Good Shabbos,” I say.

“I’ll be at Torah study this afternoon. After lunch.”

“Okay.”

“You look tired,” he says. “Did you sleep?”

“I slept okay.”

For a moment we stand looking at each other, my uncle still smiling. Before I can stop myself, I’m asking the question that pushes its way to the front of my mind. “After a person dies,” I say, “is the family supposed to have the mezuzah checked?”

My uncle’s hands fall from his beard. He regards me sadly, his eyes deep and grave. “When my first wife, Bluma Sarah, died,” he says, “I had everything checked. Our mezuzah, my tefillin, our ketubah. The rebbe found nothing. Finally I asked him to examine my soul, thinking I was the bearer of some imperfection. Do you know what the rebbe told me?”

“No,” I say, looking at my feet, wishing I hadn’t asked.

“He told me, ‘Sometimes bad things just happen. You’ll see why later. Or you won’t. Do we always know why Hashem does what he does?
Neyn.
’ ”

“Oh.”

“I think God wanted me to meet your aunt,” says Uncle Shimon. “Maybe He wanted me to meet you, too.” He tucks his tallis bag under his arm and buttons his jacket. “Bluma Sarah had a saying:
Der gleichster veg iz ful mit shtainer.
”

“What’s it mean?”

“The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones,” he says.

All day I keep the Shabbos. This means I do not turn on a light or tear paper or write or bathe or cook or sew or do any of the thirty-nine kinds of work involved in building the Holy Temple. It is difficult to remember all the things one cannot do; as I sit in the tall grass, playing a clumsy round of duck-duck-goose with the little step-cousins, I am tempted to pull a grass blade and split it down its fibrous center, or weave a clover chain for one of the girls. But the Shabbos is all around us, in the quiet along the road and the sound of families in their yards, and I remember and remember all day. My cousin spends most of the day alone. I see her praying in a sunlit patch of yard, swaying back and forth as she reads from her tiny Siddur; then she lies in the grass and studies Torah. When she disappears into the house I follow her. She’s closed herself into our closet again, the door wedged tight against intruders. I imagine her undoing this morning’s work of repentance, learning new body-part names, new positions. When I whisper through the door for her to come out, she tells me to go away.

All day I’m not allowed to use the telephone to call my mother. I walk around and around the yard, waiting for the sun to dip toward the horizon. Aunt Malka watches me from the porch, looking worried, and then she calls me over.

“What’s all this pacing?” she says.

“I’m keeping Shabbos,” I say.

“You can keep it right here with me,” she says, patting the step beside her.

I sit down. Before us the older children are trying to teach the younger ones how to do cartwheels. They fly in awkward arcs through the long grass.

“Your mother sounds much better,” she says. “You’ll be going home soon.”

“Probably,” I say.

“There’s a lady I know who lives near you,” she says. “I’ll give you her number. She and some other women run a mikveh near your house, on Twenty-second and Third.”

“What’s a mikveh?”

“It’s the ritual bath,” she says. “It cleans us spiritually. All women go. Men, too. Your mother should go when she gets out of the hospital. You can go with her, just to watch. It’s lovely. You’ll see.” One of the little boys runs up and tosses a smooth black pebble into Aunt Malka’s lap, then runs away, laughing. “We’re commanded to go after childbirth,” she says.

“Commanded by who?”

“By Hashem,” she says, turning the pebble in her fingers. Through its center runs a translucent white ribbon of quartz.

“Even if the baby dies?” I ask her. “Do you have to go then?”

“Yes,” she says. “Especially then. It’s very important and beautiful. The bath is very clean, and this particular one is tiled all in pink. The women will help your mother undress and brush her hair, so the water will touch every part of her. Then she’ll step down into the bath—it’s very deep and large, like a Jacuzzi—until she’s completely covered. They’ll tell her what b’rachot to say. Then she’ll be clean.”

“Everyone’s supposed to do this?” I ask her.

“We’re commanded to,” she says. “Adults, anyway. For women, it’s every month unless we’re pregnant. When I’m here I do it right in the lake. There’s a woman who had a special shed built on her property, and that’s where we go in.”

“What if my mother doesn’t want to go?” I ask.

“If you tell her how important it is, I’m sure she’ll go,” she says, and hands me the black pebble. I rub it with my thumb, tracing the quartz.

My aunt gathers the little step-cousins for a walk down the lake road, smoothing their hair, retrieving their lost shoes, securing their
kippot
with metal clips. I imagine her walking into the lake, her dark curls spreading out behind her, and my skin prickles cold in the heat. When she invites me to come along on the walk, I tell her I will stay home. I lie down in the grass and watch her start off down the road, the little step-cousins circling her like honeybees.

Real bees weave above me through the grass, their bodies so velvety I want to touch them. For what feels like the first time all summer, I am alone. I rub the pebble with my thumb, imagining it to be a magic stone that will make me smaller and smaller in the tall grass. I shrink to the size of a garter snake, a leaf, a speck of dust, until I am almost invisible. There is a presence gathering around me, an iridescent light I can see through my laced eyelashes. I lie still against the earth, faint with dread, and I feel the planet spinning through space, its dizzying momentum, its unstoppable speed. It is God who makes the shadows dissolve around me. He sharpens the scent of clover. He pushes the bees past my ears, directs the sun onto my back until my skin burns through the cotton of my Shabbos dress. I want to know what He wants and do what He wants, and I let my mind fall blank, waiting to be told.

When three stars come into the sky, the family gathers for Havdalah. We stand in a circle on the grass outside, all nine of us, and we light the braided candle and sing to God, thanking Him for creating fire,
aish.
According to the tradition, we examine our fingernails in the light of that candle, to remind us of the ways God causes us to grow. Then we smell spices and drink wine for a sweet week, and finally we sing the song about Eliyahu Hanavi, the prophet who will arrive someday soon to bring the Messiah. I stand with one arm around a little step-cousin and the other around Esty. As Havdalah ends she drifts off toward the house, one hand trailing through the long grass.

Now that Shabbos is over, the first thing I do is call my mother. Standing in the kitchen, I watch my aunt and uncle carrying children toward the house as I dial. For the first time it occurs to me that it might be awful for my mother always to hear children in the background when I call her, and I wonder if I should wait until they go to bed. But by that time the phone’s ringing, and it’s my father who answers anyway.

“Hey, son,” he says. It’s an old game between us; he calls me
son
and I call him
Pa,
like in the Old West. This is the first time we’ve done it since Devon Michael was born, though, and it sounds different now.

“Hi, Pa,” I say, playing the game even so, because I miss him.

“Still out on the range?”

“Indeedy.”

“How’s the grub?”

“Grub’s not bad,” I say. “How’s Ma?”

He sighs. “Sleeping.”

“Not good?” I say.

“I think she needs you home,” he says. “She’s not feeling well enough now to do much, but I’ll bet if she saw her kid she’d shape up pretty fast.”

“When can I come home?”

“It looks like a couple of weeks,” he says. “She’s had some problems. Nothing serious, but the doctor thinks she might need IV antibiotics for a little while still.”

“Aunt Malka says she should go to a ritual bath,” I say. “To get spiritually clean.”

There’s a silence on my father’s end, and I wonder if I’ve said something wrong. In the background I hear a woman’s voice on the intercom but I can’t make out what she’s saying. “You there, Dad?” I say.

“I’d like to talk to your aunt,” he says. “If she’s around.”

Something about his tone gives me pause. Even though Aunt Malka’s just a few steps away, talking quietly out on the screen porch with Uncle Shimon, I tell my father she’s gone out for milk. Silently I promise myself to repent this lie tomorrow, during Shacharit.

I can hear my father scratching his head, sharp and quick, the way he sometimes does. “You have her give me a call,” he says. “All right?”

“All right,” I say. “Tell Mom I love her.”

He says he will.

That evening, my cousin disappears during dinner. We’re all eating tomatoes and cottage cheese and thick slices of rye bread with whipped butter, the kind of meal we always eat after Shabbos, and in the middle of spreading my third slice of bread I look over and Esty’s gone.

“Where’s your cousin?” Aunt Malka says. “She didn’t touch her food.”

“I’ll find her,” I say. I go to our room and open the closet door, but the closet is empty. The book is gone from its high shelf. I glance around the room, and it takes me a few moments to see my cousin’s huddled shape beneath her bedclothes.

“Esty,” I say. “What are you doing?”

She lifts her head and looks at me, her cheeks flushed. In her hand she holds a flashlight. “Reading,” she whispers.

“You can’t just leave dinner,” I say.

“I wanted to look something up.”

“Your mom wants to know what’s wrong.”

“Tell her I have a headache,” Esty says. “Say I took some aspirin and I’m lying down.”

“You want me to lie?”

She nods.

“It’s against the Ten Commandments.”

Esty rolls her eyes. “Like you’ve never lied,” she says.

“Maybe I don’t anymore.”

“Tonight you do,” she says, and pulls the bedclothes over her head, rolling toward the wall. I go out to the dinner table and sit down, pushing at my slice of rye with a tomato wedge.

“Nu?” my aunt says. “What’s the story?”

“She’s reading,” I say.

“In the middle of dinner?”

“It’s all right,” Uncle Shimon says. “Let her read. I wish some of these would read.” He casts a hand over the heads of his own children.

“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.”