The Sea Beach Line (40 page)

“And that's it then? You're just done with him?” She nodded.

“Andrew isn't a bad person. I don't condemn him. I don't hate him. I love him. I—look, fine, I'll tell you this, embarrassing as it is: I was kicking and screaming, when they came for him last night. I shouted at the agents, and I tried to claw their faces. They had to hold me back.” She was getting angry, just relaying the story. She paced around the kitchenette. I was proud of Becca's defiance, and ashamed that I hadn't kicked and screamed at Rayna's brothers.

“Then they brought me straight back here to start the search. I guess they thought maybe I was covering him, after seeing how I wanted to protect him from being arrested, and that I might destroy evidence if they let me come home alone.

“So I was awake all night while they searched my apartment. And my clothes were all messed up, and my hair was all messed up. I was
crying and my makeup was all over my face. I fell asleep in my clothes, sitting on the couch, and slept maybe two hours, while the investigators milled around me. It was humiliating. Then I looked in the mirror, and I thought, I am not doing this shit. I am not letting this dude's bullshit destroy me. So I showered and got dressed, and that's that.”

“Just like that?” I asked. This whole story had unfolded within the past twenty-four hours. But I knew Becca, and if she had made this decision, she would probably stick by it.

“Yeah. Just like that. I'm trying to have it be just like that. I'm so worried about him. Of course I care what happens to him. I don't want him to go to prison! He already tried to call me from jail this evening. And I need to talk to him, to know he's all right. But I refused the call. I declined the collect charges. If he calls here again . . . ask him how he's doing for me.”

“Sure. But why can't you ask him?”

“I can't talk to him. I won't. Because if I talk to him, he'll probably convince me he's being railroaded. And I'll stick by him like a sucker.” She looked out her big window. “I don't want to be like Mom was, wasting half my life in love with a fuckup who's in and out of jail. I promised myself I'd never be like that. In high school and college, I dated thugs, bad boys, fucked-up guys. But I don't want to be that damaged girl, replacing her con-man father with a con-man boyfriend. So I tried to find a nice preppie guy. And he ends up being a hustler too.” She shook her head. “I can't get away from being like Mom with Dad. But I keep trying.”

“That's so bad?” I said. “We'd never have been born if Mom hadn't been with Dad.” I thought of a line from the Talmud that went something like, “It would have been better if you'd never been born. But since you were . . .” And then everything else comes. The kettle whistled. Becca went and turned off the stove, and brought the kettle out to pour the water into our mugs. She sat down across from me.

“I'm glad you're my brother, Izzy. I don't know if I'm glad Alojzy was our father. He was so cruel to Mom. Don't you remember?” I thought of the story she told me in the diner. How many of those was she holding?

“No.” Things were bad when he was gone, not when he was there.

“You were too young to remember.”

“No. I remember. I remember them dancing in the kitchen.”

“Sure. They'd dance for a song or two, when one he liked came on the radio. Some corny '70s rock song. But don't you remember him shouting at her, and punching holes in the kitchen wall?” She looked over at the clean condo wall, as if there would be a hole in that one too.

“No. But I hurt my hand that same way, arguing with Mariam, the girl I dated at school. It's one of the reasons she broke up with me.” Toward the end there were a lot of tense nights, with the two of us stoned and on edge in her room, getting into argument after argument.

“Don't be so proud of that.” Becca glanced down at my purple knuckles. I'd forgotten about the storage-unit door that morning.

“I'm not proud. I'm just telling you. Don't you remember going down to the Lower East Side? On Sunday afternoons? We'd go to the Ukrainian diner on East Twelfth and eat pierogi?”

“Yeah. He always had to go see that creepy guy, Oleg, on Second Avenue. The apartment smelled like cat piss and cigars. He'd look at me weird. Call me a ‘pretty girl.' Put his hand on my head. I hated it there. Alojzy always had to give him some envelope. I don't know what they were involved in. Some sort of gambling thing, maybe?”

“Probably. But don't you remember that afterward he would take us to that bodega next door, where they made egg creams? And we'd each get a chocolate egg cream in a little plastic cup? Then we'd go up to Tompkins Square Park?”

“I don't know what he was thinking, bringing kids around all those junkies that hung out there.”

“No one ever messed with us. We just swung on the swings. Don't you remember that he was so strong he would stand behind and push both of us, one with each hand? And his left arm was just as strong as his right arm, so we were always neck and neck? And we went so high? And then he'd suddenly grab us off the swings, one arm each, and hug us close as we screamed?”

“Yeah. I do.” She didn't elaborate. Her face was a mask again, and I didn't know what memories, good or bad, were playing out behind it. “Drink your tea,” she said.

We were both exhausted. Becca put some clean sheets out on the couch for me, and went into her bedroom. I wondered where Rayna was sleeping. Was she back in her old bedroom at her father's house? Or did they have her locked up somewhere so she couldn't escape? It was strange that we had lain down in our storage space together last night, but by tonight we'd both ended up with our families again. Rayna was a victim, and Andrew was a white-collar criminal, but I felt as if they'd both been dragged away by the same dark force. The same force that had taken Al. It would take Becca and me next.

I lay on the couch and thought about how kind my sister was to me, despite her troubles. The thought surprised me, because I'd spent so long with an animosity against her in my heart. One time, not long after we'd moved to Long Island, some older guys jumped me on the way to the bus stop. We had started at our new school right after Christmas break; when this happened, there were still islands of dirty snow left between the roads and the sidewalks. The two guys came up behind me and started jabbing me in the back with a lacrosse stick. That was one thing that I noticed when I moved to the suburbs: everyone was always carrying lacrosse sticks. They kept poking me and calling me a “faggot,” and I kept stumbling, but I didn't turn around. Finally, they whacked me really hard across the legs and I fell down. They gave me a few good kicks that knocked the wind out of me, and I couldn't get back up. One of them pulled out his dick and took a long piss into a pile of snow. They picked me up and rubbed my face into the piss snow.

A while later, I saw Becca hanging out with those same guys at the mall. I waved but she ignored me. That wasn't the only time she did something like that, and I'd held on to every incident. I know it wasn't easy for her. The fact that she was a little older than me when we moved out there meant that she missed shared bonding experiences like Hebrew school and first sleepovers. It also meant she had a
little city sexiness in her step that made the suburban girls feel threatened. I didn't know what it was at the time; I wouldn't have thought to attach the word “sexiness” to my sister. I just knew that she was always looking for a fight, and it felt like I was usually the one to take the beating, one way or another.

There were other things, though, that I ought to have held on to as well. I don't know how many of those grilled cheeses she'd made me. And I remembered one time, right before we moved to Long Island, when we were at a car dealership. Our mom was spending a lot of time going back and forth between our apartment and Bernie's house, and she decided she needed a car of her own. Bernie probably helped her with the down payment.

She went into the office to sign the paperwork, leaving Becca and me in the waiting room. The salesman had given each of us a big orange lollipop to keep us occupied. I was so excited to eat the lollipop, beyond excited, desperate to taste the sweetness. But when I pulled open the plastic, the candy shattered somehow, just shattered into a dozen little pieces that fell to the carpet and gripped the dirty fuzz.

About a month before he left for good, Al had borrowed a car from a buddy and taken us all driving out in New Jersey. We made a whole day of it, going far out into the country. We stopped at a roadside produce stand, where my mom bought fresh vegetables and Becca and I got to pet a big dog. We got ice cream from Dairy Queen and everyone was having a nice time. My mom was laughing, and my parents were getting along. Then, out on the turnpike, a truck kicked up a rock. At first we thought it was just a little nick, serious enough to send Alojzy into a fury of trilingual curses, but minor enough that my mom could still calm him down. But as we drove, the crack spread. Two rays of the tiny star spread slowly and evenly, curving out in opposite directions. As the crack grew, Al's rage grew inside the car. By the time the glass was divided by a giant S, the rage was choking us. No one spoke.

And when he left, no one said a word then either. No explanation was provided. He was just gone. I asked Becca, but she said it wasn't any of my business, and not to bother Mom. Becca probably didn't know either; she was just upset and holding it together. I think that
was when she learned to act cold and collected all the time. Maybe she learned it from Mom, who was holding it together too. Everyone had to hold it together except for me. I got to cry in the waiting room of a car dealership.

I cried for a long time. My father was gone, and the crack was spreading through everything. A little while later we'd be gone too, to Long Island. Even the little token of sweetness they'd offered me was ruined by the spreading crack. What Becca did next was so strange. She took her own lollipop, unbroken and unwrapped, and handed it to me. The messed-up thing was, she always liked lollipops so much more than me. She genuinely likes sweets, the way I like vinegary things. But she handed me that lollipop, said she didn't even want it. I grabbed it from her and stuck it in my mouth. When my mom came back out of the salesman's office, Becca didn't say a word about what had happened.

20

I REACHED FOR RAYNA
,
but didn't find her lying next to me. When I opened my eyes, I saw that I was in Becca's apartment. Whatever happiness I had felt in my dreams dissipated as the real world asserted itself. Rayna was gone. She had been kidnapped. I hoped that no one was hurting her.

Becca had already left for work. She would rather be busy than sit around the apartment. I needed to get busy too. Not knowing where else to start, I used Becca's computer to search for information about the Glupsker dynasty online. Surprisingly, they had their own website. It had a bit of Yiddish text on it, blue on a white background. The only sections in English were a page to donate tzedakah with a credit card, and a form where you could request a fifteen-minute audience with the rebbe.

I kept searching. There were a few sites in Hebrew and Yiddish that I couldn't read, and one or two in English about Jewish charities. A couple of
Daily News
articles mentioned the Glupskers in passing, in relation to local Brooklyn politics. A blog called
The Spinoza Spin
—written by an anonymous, bitter, ex-Orthodox man—mentioned the
Glupskers, along with two other dynasties, in a long post about the cover-up of sexual-abuse scandals at religious schools. There had been two serious allegations relating to Glupsker schools in particular, but the Brooklyn DA's office had declined to pursue either case. The blog's author connected this to the Glupsker Rebbe's endorsement of the incumbent DA during every election. The Hasidim voted as one uniform bloc. I didn't doubt the allegations for a moment. Rayna had run away from terrible things. She had tried so hard to tell me she needed help, but I hadn't wanted to hear.

The University of Pennsylvania's website had a reference to a dissertation titled
Pyotr the Maggid: The Appropriation and Transformation of Slavic Folktale, Christian Parable, and Extra-Dynastic Hasidic Tale within the Glupsker Tradition
. A few books came up on shopping sites. Most of them were in Hebrew or Yiddish. The only major English translation of Glupsker writings seemed to be the same out-of-print Classics of Western Spirituality volume that had upset Rayna. I couldn't remember if the volume was still in storage or if we had sold it. Either way, I didn't see how getting lost in more tales would help me find Rayna.

There was a brief stub on the history of the Glupskers off of the “List of Hasidic Dynasties” Wikipedia page. All it said, really, was that they were a dynasty that had begun in Poland in the nineteenth century, and whose followers were now divided primarily between Boro Park and Jerusalem, with a few others living in Montreal. Below, it gave the rabbinic lineage of the dynasty, starting with Rebbe Pyotr Gershon of Uman (b. ?, d. Glupsk, 1823) and ending with Rebbe Shmuel Langer (b. 1956, Brooklyn). Rayna's father. I tried to imagine Rayna as a little girl, sitting on a rabbi's lap. In between the two rebbes was a long line, cutting diagonally down across the screen: Rebbe this of Glupsk, Rebbe that of Glupsk. Pyotr, who only had daughters, appointed his son-in-law, Zalman Langer, as his successor. The position had been passed down through the Langer line ever since. Scattered along the timeline were little notes of miracles and pogroms. The article briefly mentioned a rebbe's daughter who had defied her father, and disappeared to America in 1919.