An Uncommon Education (7 page)

“Come,” I said, standing up and walking over to the corner of our yard. I could hear him a moment later, running to catch up with me. I squatted down, digging out the dirt in what I felt was the most hidden place we had available to us.

“We’re burying them?” Teddy asked, incredulously, though he was right beside me, watching my progress.

“We have to bury them,” I said, “it’s the only way to be sure they’ll be safe.”

“You’re adopted, too?” he asked.

“No, Teddy! I just have some things I need to keep safe.” He looked duly impressed and left it at that.

It was his idea to get a box. I nodded my approval and he jumped to his feet, disappearing once more behind his house. I could hear him shuffling through the junk his parents kept there and willed him, silently, to make less noise. I tried not to look at what was still in my hands. I wholeheartedly believed that Teddy’s papers belonged to him, but I knew that Rosemary’s weren’t really mine. I knew I had stolen something that did not belong to me.
But
, I thought to myself, as I had in the hospital,
they aren’t anybody’s anymore.
She’d wanted them hidden, hadn’t she? That was the important thing to remember.

I traced the printing of her name, the back of the Earhart photograph now in my lap and facing up at me.
She could fly
. I knew I should pity Rosemary for believing in such a thing, for believing in other women who could fly, for believing things could get so much better for her that maybe one day she herself would, but the pity never came. Every time I thought of those words I thought of something awful and wonderful and terribly wise.

To our mutual surprise, Teddy came back with a beautiful cedar box, a small medicine cabinet his father had built for their old house. “He won’t miss it,” Teddy told me. “He was just going to cut it up so we could build something else with it.” The lid closed with a magnet, and the hinges were attached to slender chains. When we opened it, a waft of something fermented and sweet floated up to us. We gently placed the papers inside, as carefully as we might a living being.

After we buried the box we filled the dirt into the hole and patted it down. Teddy was so close to me that his breath was on my face, sour and soft. When we were done we sat down and looked at our work, Teddy lingering longer than I did. His hand in mine was gritty and warm, and I found myself leaning forward to kiss him on the mouth as lightly as I could, thinking of Hope in her stone dresses.

In an instant, something heavy and soft hit me in the head.

“Shiksa!”

I looked down. It was a bedroom slipper. I looked up to see that Chava was shouting at me in Yiddish, pulling Teddy, first by the hair, and then, when she got a better grip, by the ear.

“She’s not a
shiksa
, Mom!” Teddy was shouting too, but this only made his mother stop and slap him.

“You talk back to your mother! I know a
shiksa
when I see one. Kissing! Not even in school almost.” She turned back to me with one more burst of foreign invective, then pushed her son ahead of her into their house.

I ran in the opposite direction, tears making it difficult to see. I flew through the front door and into my father, who had been brought there by the shouting and the noise. I looked up at him, but he was staring out the door at the Rosenthals’ house. I calmed down and wiped my face. We looked together while I caught my breath.

“What’s a
shiksa
?” I asked.

My father’s voice was low and angry. “What does she know about you,” he said. “What does she know. Nothing. A Saks, no less, on my mother’s side. Her son should be so lucky.” He slammed the door.

Five

M
y father was tight-lipped and silent through lunch. He still needed to sleep in the afternoon, and after we ate he left me alone in the kitchen. His long naps made me nervous, and after having something hit my head unexpectedly I was rattled and suddenly couldn’t bear to have him disappear from me, even if it was just to go upstairs. I tried to stall him but he grew annoyed, and by the time he left the kitchen I was even more rattled, worried now about my father and what I might have done by keeping him up an extra half hour when he’d just had surgery. It was still occasionally hard to think of him as being as healed as he was.

A few moments later I crept upstairs myself, past my father in the guest room, on to the end of the hall. Outside my parents’ bedroom I lay on my back, my hands under my head as I listened to nothing on the other side, the presence of my mother drifting away. I wasn’t allowed to go into their bedroom when the door was closed. I always wondered what was beyond that threshold, even when it was open. But that day it had been closed since the morning, signaling her complete resubmergence. I had known she wouldn’t stay as active as she had been while caring for my father for very long, but I had not wanted to think of what would come after. And now, suddenly, I missed her terribly. I reached up and turned the knob above me, as though this was something I did every day and not some catastrophic breaking of our family code.

It was dark inside, and it took me a while to adjust to the light. My mother was sitting up in bed, leaning on her elbows, her body tense with surprise. I looked at her, knowing I should apologize.

“What’s a
shiksa
?” I asked instead.

“A what?”

“
Shiksa
, I think. That’s what it sounded like.”

“Who called you a
shiksa
?”

I didn’t answer her. “What’s a
shiksa
?” I persisted.

She sighed and fell back into her pillows. For a minute I was afraid she wouldn’t answer me. “It’s a woman. A gentile,” she said finally. “A non-Jew. Usually a temptress. Sometimes a seductress.” My mother’s disconnect from the outside world seemed to make her brave in matters of telling me certain mature truths, ones that might have made a more lighthearted mother blush.

“A seductress?”

“Naomi,” she sat up again, leaning again on her elbows. “Did someone call you a
shiksa
?”

I nodded.

She looked down at me. “Come here.”

I crawled across the floor, too eager to stand up and walk, and was in bed beside her a moment later. I rested on my father’s pillow, looking up at her like we were going to tell one another stories.

She frowned. “It’s a Yiddish word. Meant to insult women who aren’t Jews.” She studied me. “It’s probably because you look like me. It’s a shame, but some people believe in a Jewish look. And we don’t have it.” She touched my hair. She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly between tight lips before she spoke again. “You, in particular, look like my father’s mother.”

My own breath felt trapped in my chest. “I never knew that,” I exhaled.

She sighed. “I suppose you wouldn’t.” Neither one of us mentioned that she was the keeper of a great deal of information I’d like to have but didn’t. “I’ve only seen a picture, but that bow in your upper lip is hers. And her eyes must have been green like yours, too. My father’s were.”

This was more than she had spoken to me, ever, about her family. I wanted to know how to make it last, to capture her interest and keep it.

“I wish I’d known her,” I ventured.

“My grandmother?”—my mother looked surprised. “I never knew her myself,” she said quietly. “But this house is hers,” she added casually, as if attributing a meaningless object to a distant acquaintance. I sat up on my elbow, amazed. “Well, it’s mine, ours, now, but it was hers.” She closed her eyes again at the shock in my face. “It’s one of the reasons why Grandmother Carol doesn’t come around that much. It was left to my father first, and he left it to me. She thought it should have been hers.”

It was an unprecedented offering of information, so much so that I didn’t think to make any real sense of what she was telling me. The fact that she was telling me anything at all was all-consuming. In all of my nine years I had managed to collect only a few key facts about her life: first, she had grown distrustful of the nuns who taught her. Then, when she was seven, her father died. Finally, when my mother was sixteen, my grandmother had kicked her out of the house because, as my mother explained so thoroughly, they “didn’t see eye to eye.” Still, she couldn’t hide our shared genetics, and I had known that both she and I resembled the Irish who’d first sailed to Maine and then Massachusetts long before us: a certain blue and rose transparency to the skin, a straightness to the hair, a blush on the cheeks at even the slightest touch of wind. I thought of my mother’s mother, Grandmother Carol, who looked as polished and stern as my father did messy and penetrable. I wondered if I resembled her at all, hoping I didn’t. I wondered if there was anything about me that resembled him.

“Does Grandmother Carol also not come because we’re Jewish?” I asked.

Her eyes were still closed, “Grandmother Carol and I went our separate ways long before I converted.” She turned her head slightly my way. “She does make her visits to you, though.”

She did, but it felt like we never really saw her. Once or twice a year she pulled into our driveway in her huge silver Cadillac and stepped outside, stopping just after she slammed the car door to check her hair, which was remarkable in two ways. One, it never moved. A stiff breeze would take it on with confidence and dissipate in the process. Two, it was the exact same hue as her car. She stayed for a cocktail, poured by my father, and for an unconcealed visual assessment of me before going on her way. It was like being visited by a cardboard version of someone I might otherwise have loved.

Beside me on the bed, my mother hadn’t opened her eyes again. I couldn’t think of any more good questions. She turned away from me, onto her side. I lay back on my father’s pillow and put my hands behind my head, contemplating the ceiling. I was trying not to cry. Mostly because I didn’t want to acknowledge that my mother was wanting to disappear just at the moment when she’d shown me some of what I so desperately wanted to see, but also because of the way Teddy’s mother had stood watching him at the door, fiercely protective of a son she had made her own. I felt I was upsetting to them both: a child for my mother to comfort when she could not even comfort herself; the sort of newly minted, tainted Jew that Mrs. Rosenthal saw as no different than anyone else who didn’t belong. But instead of crying I choked out a question. She asked me to repeat myself.

“Convert,” I blurted, my words running out from under me, unsettling us both. I felt I couldn’t stop. “Why did you become a Jew?”

She stared at me, her eyes emptying of thought. I’m not sure either one of us could quite believe I had asked such a personal question. I could see her trying to tell me the least complicated, least informative story. I shut my eyes to her expression, willing her to change it. It was silent between us for a long while.

“Judaism would have me,” she said softly after several long minutes, answering me. My eyes flew open in surprise, and my mouth must have, too, because she smiled and shut it for me by placing a finger on my chin. “Also, it’s a religion for people who have questions,” she added. “Or at least for people who are more comfortable with questions than answers. It gave me your father. And you, too,” she added, so softly that I wasn’t sure if she had spoken or if I had imagined she did. “And it let me keep my doubts.”

But with each question she answered, I thought of countless more to ask. They spilled into my mouth, silenced once there by habit, the room around me a familiar reminder of how things would be after this strange blip in time and space where my mother let me in: the cheerless decorations, the hollows under her eyes, the slit of light coming in from the nearly closed shade on the window.

“You know,” my mother said, interrupting my thoughts. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to give you for a while. I think you’re old enough now.” She gestured toward her dresser. “Bring me my jewelry box.” I stood up and did what she said, not thinking immediately of the significance of a mother dispensing her jewelry to her daughter. The scar on her right wrist where she had tried, once, to take her life was always in the back of my mind. I hated it for being there, for being a permanent mark on her skin, a lifelong symbol of her ubiquitous desperation. I think my father was surprised when I asked him about the scar the year before; perhaps he thought by ignoring it himself I might never notice, might never make sense of it on my own. But I’d intuited as much after skimming a graphic novel version of
Antony and Cleopatra
—something about the blood pouring from the asp bites onto her pale white skin—then tricked my father into confirming what I’d feared.

“Yes,” he admitted after he was done beating around the bush. “But it was before you were born.” He paused, and I felt momentarily comforted. It felt right that my birth should have ended that line of thinking. “Also,” he added, “she promised me she wouldn’t try again, once we had you.” I know this additional information was meant to comfort me, but it only served to make me wonder if I was enough to keep her alive.

I stood before her as she opened the box, looking over its edge into what was inside. I had always wanted to know its contents, and I was eagerly trying to make a complete study of them when she lifted the top tray and pulled a green velvet bag from the very bottom before closing the lid once more. She pulled a thin, silver cuff from within the bag, its mottled surface evidence of how long it had been neglected.

She rubbed its surface once with a finger. “I should have polished it first,” she said, more to herself than to me. Then she reached over and took my arm, fitting the bracelet over it. I was a tall girl, but it threatened to slip down my wrist and off my hand. I clutched it, examining it as I did. My mother removed the bracelet with her cool fingers, turning it over and tracing the writing underneath to bring my attention to it.
God is nearest to those with a broken heart
. “It’s from Psalm 34. Both your father and I learned this when we were children.”