Hush (20 page)

That Sunday, as I trotted in after my secret
Cinderella
viewing, my mother had begun cleaning and was already talking Pesach jargon. I was
not
to go downstairs with food, I was
not
to dare go into her room with a drink, and I was
not
to go into the study at all.

Devory and I held hands and ran to my room, where we played until dark, then my father took her home.

Spring had finally come and we played dangerous games in our backyard every afternoon after school. Devory said it was healthy to do so; it would make us stronger and braver. She took my purple jump rope, climbed up on the garage, and tied it to the thick branch of the cherry tree. She then held on to the jump rope, ran across the sloping roof, and pushed herself off the garage. I screamed at her that she was breaking my favorite jump rope and I would never be her friend again, but she just laughed and swung wildly. Angrily, I climbed up after her, and she jumped nimbly onto the roof, turned the glittering rope in her hand, and said, “See, it didn’t even break.”

We also played “Kill the Dragons,” then “Kill the Lions,” then “Kill the Bad People.” By the end of the week we had killed so many of everything, I told Devory Hashem would never let us into heaven. Not that I minded staying on Earth forever, considering the unpredictability of the people of paradise. Devory said it was all fake killing, so it didn’t matter. But then she wanted to play jump off the roof, for real. She stood on the garage roof, her short blond hair flying in the wind, her arms stretched out, her eyes closed, and said that she would jump off the roof. I told her that she would break her hands and feet, but she only giggled happily at the thought. Finally, after she dared me to jump, I grew angry. I told her that if she wouldn’t come down now, I would call my mother. She said, “Okay, then let’s kill some more.” But I was tired of playing mean games and said that I was going inside to read. I did, and Devory went home alone.

Two weeks before Pesach my class went to visit a nursing home. Every year each class went to visit a nursing home, where we would sing songs, give out cards, and walk around chatting with the residents. My teacher told us it was a big
mitzvah
to visit the nursing home because the people in there were lonely and they loved to have visitors to keep them company.

Devory and I said hello to some old drooling people who barely looked at us. I told Devory that I was never going to do anything as stupid as grow old. In fact, I had no intention of ever growing past
Bas Mitzvah
, when life seemed to be too annoying to be much fun. Devory said I was being dumb and took me over to a tiny old lady in a too-large light blue bathrobe, staring at us from the door of one of the rooms. I smiled dutifully and held out our card, which had a picture of two girls smiling with the words
Have a great day
printed on it.

She did not take the card. “Which school do you go to?” she asked.

I told her. “Oh, that’s a
Chassidish
school,” she said.

I was surprised because she said
Chassidish
with the right accent, yet she did not cover her hair.

“You know,” she said, the wrinkled skin around her mouth sagging as she spoke, “I came from a
Chassidish
family when I was a young girl. Here, look.” She pulled up her sleeve. We saw the familiar green numbers etched into her wrinkled skin. “But this is where I stopped. After God murdered my whole family. He is a cruel God, a very cruel God, and only I, who survived, know His ugly, merciless face.”

She bent over us, her small face close between ours.

“You know what He let them do? You know? He let the Nazis take the babies, live, screaming babies, and He let them throw them alive, alive into the fire. That’s what they did. I saw it; they played it like a game—grabbed them by their hand or foot and threw them into the fire.”

She pointed a crooked finger at me.

“That is the God I survived. That is the God you worship.”

Stunned, we stared at her.

“But…but He punished them,” Devory said.

The old lady laughed. She laughed long and hard and it scared me.

“He punished them with what? How do you punish for millions of dead, twisted, burned bodies? Punished whom? He has a very short-term memory, that God. Look at Germany today.” And she laughed again.

That’s when Miss Goldberg arrived and firmly led us away.

“Thank you very much,” she said sweetly, her heels clicking softly on the shining waxed floors. “Have a nice day.”

I wanted to go home. I cried that I did not want to stay any longer. Miss Goldberg held my hand and said I shouldn’t listen to the old lady. Sometimes they went a little crazy and it was hard to judge them, but we just must stay away from those. She pointed to an old black man sitting in a wheelchair and said, “Why don’t you go talk to him?”

“Him?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “He looks lonely, and it would be a big
kiddush
Hashem—a good deed to sanctify G-d’s name—to show him how good
Yiddishe
girls behave.”

So we went and spoke with the old black man. We gave him another card and spoke to him about the bike race Devory and I had had yesterday, because he couldn’t talk. He just nodded his head and smiled at everything we said.

My teacher said we did a big
mitzvah
.

Sarah Leah had brought
Oprah
magazines to the sleepover.

It was almost midnight when we finally settled in Hindy’s old basement after a long dinner with her older sisters. They had come over with gifts and balloons for their youngest sister, shrieking and giggling over baby pictures of her while her mother wiped tears over her youngest, grown so fast.

Sarah Leah had arrived a little later. She was the oldest of nine and first had to put the house in order and the younger ones to sleep before she marched down the stairs holding a large bag of too much food and magazines.

“What?” she asked as we stared at her sitting on the floor pulling out
cocosh
cake, homemade cookies, jelly rolls, tuna salad, and hot soup in plastic containers. “My mother said we might be hungry.” She shrugged and pulled out a foil-wrapped something, staring at it curiously. “I have no idea what this is. What? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Hindy said as she set down bowls of popcorn, pretzels, chips, and salad. “We are all famished.”

But Sarah Leah was not done. Smiling secretively, she pulled a thick glossy magazine out of the bag and held it out. “Guess what I have,” she said excitedly.

We looked at the magazine. It said
Oprah
on top.

I looked closely. “Who’s that?”

Sarah Leah’s eyes widened. She opened her mouth as if in stunned surprise. “You don’t know who Oprah is?”

I looked at Chani. She looked at me. We looked at the picture again. Hindy waved nonchalantly. “Oh, of course I know. She’s this big singer. Or politician. One of them.”

Sarah Leah rolled her eyes. “She is not a singer.”

Hindy hurled a pillow at the mattress across the room. “Not a regular singer,” she explained. “An opera singer. It’s her name—see? Op-r-ah.”

“Then why is she publishing magazines?”

“She’s a really big opera singer.”

Sarah Leah flipped back her pony. “I can’t believe you don’t know who Oprah is. She’s, like, this huge actress by the goyim. She’s all over the TV. My mother buys it sometimes, and when she’s finished she hides it in the storage room in the basement. I brought a bunch of them. You wanna see it?”

We sat on the bed and huddled eagerly over the magazine. Sarah Leah turned the pages. We read, curiously. We saw advertisements for brand names we did not know and luxury brands we could not pronounce. We saw pictures of models who were sort of dressed, halfway dressed, not even pretending to be dressed—Sarah Leah turned that page fast.

“Ugh,” I said, carefully covering one eye. “How is she not embarrassed to show her whole front off like that?”

Chani snorted. “You’re asking questions about these ladies?”

Hindy turned back the page to the model. Sarah Leah put her hands over the picture. Hindy pushed it away. I quickly turned the page again. Chani turned it back. I turned it again. Back and forth, back and forth, until we flipped the page back together. We stared. There was a loud thud on the stairs. We jumped. Chani ripped the page out of the magazine. She crumpled it up fast in her hand. We looked at the doorway, toward the stairs. There was silence. Hindy threw the unholy model in the wastebasket.

We then read an article on how to lose weight. And another article on how to maintain weight. And another article on what to do when you regain the lost weight. We read an article about love, how to know if he’s Mr. Right. And another one about divorce, when after all, he’s Mr. Wrong. We read about self-esteem. A nutritionist explained how to feel satisfied and happy with one’s body, no matter what size, which we would have read had we not been staring at the skeletal model advertising chocolate-chip cookies on the adjacent page. Then we read more on love.

“It’s amazing how they live,” Chani commented. “They really think marriage is love, love, love.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Which is how they all end up divorced, divorced, divorced.”

We giggled. Then Hindy’s mother came down the stairs. Sarah Leah threw the magazine under the high-riser. We began to sing loudly.

Hindy’s mother came in holding a plateful of homemade Rice Krispies peanut chews. We sat on the floor chewing as she sank onto the old mattress and remembered her girlhood days when there was only one
Bais Yaakov
high school that every Orthodox girl attended.

We argued about it, if it was better that way or worse. After all, if every religious girl had to attend the same school, they would be susceptible to one another’s ideas. And who knew what ideas could enter a girl’s head from a classmate whose father wore a different hat. There were major differences separating the ultra-Orthodox sects, Sarah Leah explained. Like the accent.

“Why should my parents who pray in one accent want their kids to attend a school that teaches the prayers in a different Hebrew accent?”

Chani agreed. It made sense, she explained, because having only one accent as opposed to many would certainly confuse Hashem come prayer time. How was He supposed to know who was really
Chassidish
and who was not? This way it was clear immediately.

Hindy’s mother did not agree. She took a bite out of the peanut chew, sighed, and said, “Oh, like my father used to say—today’s fanatics are tomorrow’s moderates. Then, we thought we were better than the goyim. Now with every group in their own school, everyone thinks they’re also better than the Y
iden
.”

“So why didn’t you send me to a different school?” asked Hindy.

Her mother winced. “Are you crazy? How would you ever get married?”

She then went upstairs, and we read
Oprah
magazines till dawn.

It was nearly Pesach. All the girls’ schools were on break until after the holiday so that we could help at home. This was not a vacation. My mother was nervous and screechy and tense, and I could not move one inch without being told that I should
not go anywhere
without cleaning first. The cleaning lady who was supposed to have arrived at seven a.m. did not show up, and my mother complained furiously to my aunt on the phone.

“This
goytah
, may she burn in hell! One week before Pesach and she doesn’t show up!! What am I supposed to do now?”

I stuffed my mouth with a cookie and looked up at the ceiling.

“Please, Hashem,” I whispered ever so quietly. “Could you make me a goy just until Pesach?”

But a Yid I remained, and I found myself scrubbing and rubbing and cleaning out all my crumb-filled drawers until my mother left the house to do some shopping. Sighing in relief, I sneaked outside when Surela wasn’t looking. Devory showed up soon after. She told me that she had made such a mess cleaning for Pesach that her mother had kicked her out of the house and told her not to come back until late.

We made sure that no one was in sight and then climbed the tree and up onto the garage. My mother always warned us that it was a dangerous thing to sit on the sloping roof of the garage and that we might fall, but we never did. We used the rough trunk of the cherry tree standing by the garage as our ladder and after much scratching and giggling, we pulled ourselves onto the roof. We sat there, hidden by the branches of the tree, surrounded by hundreds of candylike cherries, and Devory told me that she was sleeping by me for the whole Pesach, starting tonight. Pesach was in a week and I was really excited that Devory was coming.