The Big Nap (13 page)

The flight was every bit as horrific as I’d expected, and then some. While it had certainly occurred to me that Isaac might spit up all over himself, I forgot that a goodly portion could land on me. I’d brought plenty of changes of clothing for him, but none for myself. By the time we got off the plane we were a sight to behold.

My parents swept us up in their arms and packed us into their massive Chrysler. We stopped at my grandmother’s nursing home on the way to their house, and my parents entertained the kids in the solarium while I held my grandmother’s hand. She didn’t recognize me. My mother had prepared me for that, but it came as a shock nonetheless.

Once we got back in the car, I fell asleep immediately and barely woke up to walk into my parents’ house and crawl up the stairs to my old room. Hours later, when I’d slept enough to recover from the flight, I ambled downstairs to find my children happily playing in the kitchen in which I’d grown up. The radio was, as usual, earsplittingly loud. My parents’ radio is perpetually tuned, full blast, to a news station. Until I started spending time at friends’ houses in grade school I’d assumed all families carried out conversations over the blare of a radio announcer yelling,
“You give us ten minutes, we’ll give you the world.”

I walked across the room and turned off the radio. I rubbed my eyes and smiled at my mother and father.

“What time is it?”

“Two in the afternoon,” my father answered. His hair had grown even more Einstein-like in the months since I’d seen him. It stood up in soft white peaks all over his head. His blue eyes looked out of a crinkled face and his cheeks were slightly reddened. I kissed his bald spot.

“Hi, Daddy. I’ve missed you.”

“We’ve missed you, too,
mamaleh.
Ruby here is teaching me how to color a rainbow.” Ruby was perched on his lap, a red crayon gripped firmly in her hand. Next to my tiny girl, my father looked even older than his seventy-five years. Sometime in junior high school I realized that my parents were much older than those of my friends. My mother had me when she was forty, long after she’d given up hopes of having a child. My younger brother came along just two years later. Back then, before the dawn of the age of Pergonal and Chlomid, that was decidedly rare.

My parents came from a different generation than the other parents they saw at ballet recitals and Little League. Their Brooklyn accents and the
yiddishisms
peppering their speech gave them a vaguely Old World air. They cared more about politics and social justice and less about material acquisitions than most of the other grownups I knew. As an adult, I grew to be proud of them and glad to have been raised in a house where Woody Guthrie songs were sung at bedtime and a McGovern poster hung in our window well into the mid-seventies. As a child, I’m ashamed to admit that they embarrassed me.

I walked around the table to where my mother was sitting, holding Isaac. She was feeding him a bottle full of yellowish
liquid. It gave me a moment’s pang of concern. The only thing he’d consumed thus far in his life was breast milk.

“I’m giving the boy some chamomile tea,” my mother said. “It says in that book over there that it’s good for them.” She pointed to a brightly colored tome on the kitchen table. I pulled it over and read the title:
The Holistic Baby.

“Wow,” I said.

“Listen, alternative medicine is a perfectly legitimate thing. Don’t be so dismissive,” she said. My mother has always been willing to jump on any new philosophical bandwagon, especially if the word “alternative” can be used to describe it. She was a beatnik, a hippie, an ardent feminist (that one stuck) and now, apparently, she was into the New Age. But she always looked exactly the same. Like a Jewish grandmother from Brooklyn.

“What dismissive?” I protested. “How am I being dismissive? I just said ‘Wow.’”

“It was your tone.”

“What tone? There was no tone.”

“Ladies, ladies,” my father interrupted. “Could we please have five minutes of peace and harmony before the fighting begins?” That’s my father’s job. Mom and I argue, and he steps in and referees.

“Mama and Grandma are fighting?” Ruby said, sitting bolt-upright on her grandfather’s lap.

“Nobody’s fighting,” I said. And we really weren’t. We were just bickering, like we always do.

“Hi, Ma.” I kissed her on the cheek. She handed the baby over to me. He immediately began rooting around my shirt front, so I sat down and took out a breast to nurse. My father blushed and began closely studying Ruby’s drawing.

“So, Ma, are you taking time off while we’re here?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, nodding her head vigorously, the tight gray curls of her perm bouncing like so many little antennae. My mother’s undying loyalty to the hairstyle she’d chosen in the mid-seventies is a source of mystery to me. Every three months she spends two hours in Hair-omatic, having her steel-colored locks tightly wound up in pink rods. Because she’s rail-thin and about four foot ten, she looks decidedly like a Q-tip. In fact, when I was in my senior year of high school, she greeted trick-or-treaters wearing a white tunic and tights, with her hair dusted in baby powder. I was the only one who got the joke. The other kids all thought she was supposed to be a nurse.

I popped Isaac off my nipple and propped him on my shoulder where he promptly let loose with a tremendous belch. My parents burst into a round of applause. You would have thought he’d just hit the winning run in the World Series.

“So, Ma, Daddy, do you know any Hasidic Jews in Borough Park? Preferably Verbover.” I asked.

My father wrinkled his brow and tapped his chin with one finger. “Margie, didn’t the son of one of your Russian cousins become a Hasid?” he asked my mother.

“What
tsuris
that family had. They weren’t here six months before Anatole, the father, had to have bypass surgery. They were burned out of their first apartment, and the insurance company wouldn’t pay off. Then, that terrible thing with the daughter’s baby. It was born d-e-a-d.”

“And the Hasidic son?” I reminded them, just in case they’d forgotten that I had actually asked for something other than a litany of familial tragedy.

“What was his name, Gene? Do you remember?” my mother asked.

“It was something Russian. And then he changed it to
Jewish. Like Sasha to Schmuel. Or Boris to Binyamin. Like that,” my father answered.

I rolled my eyes. Getting a straight answer out of my parents was harder than getting Isaac to sleep through the night. I bounced the baby on my knee, trying not to express my impatience.

“I remember!” my mother shouted. “Josef. That’s his name.”

“What’s Russian about that? Or Yiddish for that matter?” I asked.

“Nothing. Who knows where your father got that. He’s senile. Ignore him.”

“What senile? It’s spelled with an
F
, that’s Russian.”

“This Russian Josef, do you think I could call him?” I asked.

“I don’t see why not,” my mother said. She picked up the phone and riffled through her ancient Museum of Modern Art address book. She found the number and dialed it on the telephone stuck to the wall next to the fridge. My mother’s hair isn’t the only seventies throwback in my parents’ house. They don’t own a cordless phone, but rather make do with a couple of ancient appliances that they used to rent from Bell Telephone. The one in the kitchen has an extra long cord that is still twisted in the knots I made while talking endlessly to my high school girlfriends about whether Larry Pitkowsky did, indeed, like me or if Maxine Fass was his dream girl. They also have a couple of old TVs, one of which has a pair of rusty pliers permanently attached to it in place of the channel dial. I think the dial got lost sometime when I was in elementary school. Back then the set only reliably received two channels, PBS and some religious station out of upstate New York. My mother used to insist that that was precisely enough TV. PBS gave
us a little culture and the religious station allowed us to understand the true soul of America. Or something like that.

My mother mouthed “machine” at me and waited for a moment, then said, into the phone, “Josef, this is your cousin Margie. Margie Applebaum. Remember my daughter, Juliet? The one who went to Harvard Law School? She’s in town and would love to talk to you. Give us a call.” She left the number and hung up. There are an infinite number of ways to work the words “Harvard Law School” into a sentence, and my mother has mastered them all. I’ve heard her respond to an innocuous comment about the weather with a declamation on how her daughter had suffered through the bitter Cambridge winters while attending law school.

“Not home,” she said.

“So I gathered,” I replied.

I sat quietly for a while, sipping at the coffee my father had poured for me while my mother was on the phone. I could think of only one other Hasidic Jew who might be willing to give me a little insight into their community. She might even know the famous Hirsches of Borough Park.

Libby Bernstein nee Barret, my freshman-year roommate at Wesleyan University, was a daughter of a Daughter of the American Revolution and member of the Mayflower Association, who had somehow ended up an Orthodox Jew. Her husband, Josh Bernstein, was a couple of years ahead of us at college. They’d begun dating at the end of our freshman year. After he graduated, Josh moved to Brooklyn. He’d started out as a run-of-the-mill, assimilated Jewish kid, but as he got older he become more and more interested in religious Judaism. After graduation, he joined the Verbover Hasidic community. After a while Josh must have realized that he couldn’t be an Orthodox Jew and date
a
shiksa.
He broke up with Libby, and she was utterly devastated. She spent two weeks crying on the shoulder of every one of her friends, me included, and then took off for Brooklyn herself. She begged Josh to take her back and promised she would do whatever it took to be with him.

Libby never came back to college. She moved in with a Hasidic family and began to study for conversion. Her host family had nine children; Libby was an only child from a WASPy New England family. The contrast between her silent home and the apartment stuffed with children must have been astonishing. Libby’s mother had died when she was in high school and the woman of the house became a second mother to her. I know Libby had longed for a mother-daughter relationship, and I’m sure it felt wonderful to have a woman take care of her, and teach her.

When I’d call Libby on the phone from college she would wax rhapsodic about Yaffa, her “mother.” She told me they spent hour after hour in the kitchen, drinking tea, cooking, talking. There was an endless amount of work to do in that house, what with all the children, but Libby said Yaffa never seemed overwhelmed. Every day had its schedule, its activities, and Libby and Yaffa did them together. Yaffa would quiz Libby on her Hebrew and on Bible studies while they kneaded dough or chopped onions.

Libby’s conversion was complete within two years, and, with the Verbover
rebbe
’s permission, she and Josh married in a traditional ceremony. It was kind of a trip for the few of us who came down from Wesleyan for it. We women were kept strictly separate from the men. We sat by ourselves, ate by ourselves, and even danced by ourselves. But it was pretty incredible. People were so full of joy, whirling and twirling to the
klezmer
band. And Libby
seemed genuinely delighted with the life she’d chosen. I remember dancing the hora at the wedding, feeling as if I were part of something ancient, exciting, and beautiful. People, my people, had danced to this music for hundreds of years. It was so compelling and wonderful that it made someone like Libby desperate to be a part of it, of us. When Peter and I were married people danced the hora; they even raised us up on chairs, but somehow it wasn’t the same. It felt almost hollow, and I don’t think anyone was sorry when the DJ changed the record to the Rolling Stones.

Libby and I kept in touch for the first few years, but then life kind of gobbled each of us up. Last I’d heard, she’d had a couple of sons and was still living in Brooklyn.

I decided to give her a call. Handing Isaac back to his grandmother, I went out to the front hall, where my father had left my bags. I dug my Palm Pilot out of my purse and looked up Libby’s number. Peter had given me the little electronic organizer for my last birthday. Initially, I was disappointed that the box it came in didn’t contain the sapphire earrings I’d had my eyes on, but I’d quickly grown to love it. It kept all my addresses and all my appointments current and available at the touch of a button. True, I didn’t actually
have
any appointments, other than the kids’ doctor’s visits, but if I
had
had somewhere to go, I’m sure my Palm Pilot would have helped me get there on time. I found Libby’s number and went upstairs, where my voice wouldn’t have to compete with the shrill giggles of my children.

Libby was home.

“Libby! You’ll never guess who this is!”

“Juliet Applebaum!” she said.

I was flabbergasted. “How did you know? We haven’t talked in what, seven years?”

“I think it’s closer to eight. I have no idea how I knew it was you. I just recognized your voice. How are you? Where are you? Are you married? Do you have kids?”

“I’m great. I got married about five years ago. I have a daughter named Ruby, she’s three, and a son named Isaac, who’s just about four months. And you? I remember you had two sons. Any more kids?”

“Well, you know about Yonasan and Shaul. And then I had three more, all boys. David is five, Yiftach is three, and the baby, Binyamin, is a year and a half old. And I’m pregnant.”

“Wow. Libby, that’s incredible. Five boys. And another one on the way. You must be absolutely exhausted. Do you know what you’re having?”

“Well, I’m a little tired, but mostly I’m just very happy. The boys all keep each other busy. I don’t know what’s coming this time, but I’m hoping for a girl. I think Josh would be happy if we had six more boys, but it would be lovely to have a little girl. You’re so lucky. Is Ruby just a doll?”

“She’s great, really, but she’s hardly a doll. Unless Mattel has come out with a new extra-bossy Barbie. Ruby’s a lovely kid, but she sure knows what she wants.”