Beside me, Esty looks down at her plate and fingers the satin trim at the waist of her Shabbos skirt. I catch her looking at Dovid Frankel, too, who seems oblivious to us both. From the bedroom,
Essence of Persimmon
exerts a magnetic pull I can feel in my chest. I watch Esty as we serve the soup and the gefilte fish, as we lean over Dovid Frankel’s shoulder to replace his fork or remove his plates. My cousin’s cheeks are flushed and her eyes keep moving toward Dovid, though sometimes they stray toward pregnant Mrs. Handelman, her belly swollen beneath the white cotton of her dress. Mrs. Handelman is Dovid Frankel’s oldest sister. Her young husband, Lev, has a short blond beard and a nervous laugh. During the fish course, he tells the story of a set of false contractions that sent him and Mrs. Handelman running for the car. Mrs. Handelman, Esty whispers to me, is eighteen years old. Last year they went to school together.
We eat our chicken and kugel, and then we serve the raspberry cobbler for dessert. The little step-cousins run screaming around the table and crawl underneath. There is something wild and wonderful about the disorder of it all, a feeling so different from the quiet rhythms of our dinner table at home, with my mother asking me about my day at school and my father offering more milk or peas. Here, when everyone has finished eating, we sing the Birkat Hamazon. By now I know all the Hebrew words. It’s strange to think that when I go home we will all just get up at the end of the meal and put our plates in the sink, without singing anything or thanking anyone.
When the prayer is over, my uncle begins to tell a story about the Belkins, a Jewish family some thirty miles up the lake whose house burned down in June. “Everything destroyed,” he says. “Books, clothes, the children’s toys, everything. No one was hurt, thank God. They were all visiting the wife’s brother when it happened. An electrical short in the attic. So when they go back to see if anything can be salvaged, the only thing not completely burnt up is the mezuzah. The door frame? Completely burnt. But the mezuzah, fine. A little black, but fine. And so they send it to New York to have the paper checked, and you’ll never believe what they find.”
All the men and women and children look at my uncle, their mouths open. They blink silently in the porch light as if my uncle were about to perform some holy miracle.
“There’s an imperfection in the text,” my uncle says. “In the word
asher.
The letters aleph-shin are smudged, misshapen.”
Young Mr. Handelman looks stricken. “Aleph-shin,” he says. “Aish.”
“That’s right. And who knows what that means?” Uncle Shimon looks at each of the children, but the children just sit staring, waiting for him to tell them.
“I know,” Dovid Frankel says. “It means fire.”
“That’s right,” says Uncle Shimon. “Fire.”
Around the table there is a murmur of amazement, but Dovid Frankel crosses his arms over his chest and raises an eyebrow at my uncle. “Aish,” he says. “That’s supposed to be what made their house burn down?”
My uncle sits back in his chair, stroking his beard. “A man has to make sure his mezuzah is kosher,” he says. “That’s his responsibility. Who knows how the letters got smudged? Was it the scribe, just being lazy? Was it his assistant, touching the text as he moved it from one worktable to another? Maybe a drop of water fell from a cup of tea the scribe’s wife was bringing to her husband. Should we blame her?”
“For God’s sake, don’t blame the wife,” my aunt says, and all the women laugh.
“I like to have our mezuzot checked every year,” says my uncle. He leans back in his chair and looks at Dovid, crossing his fingers over his belly. “We alone are responsible for our relationship with Hashem. That’s what Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught us in the eighteenth century.”
“We should have our mezuzah checked,” Mr. Handelman says, squeezing his wife’s hand. He looks with worry at her swollen belly.
“I made a mezuzah at school,” says one of the little step-cousins, a red-haired boy.
“You did not,” his older brother says. “You made a mezuzah
cover.
”
Esty and I get up to clear the dessert plates, and Dovid Frankel pushes his chair away from the table and stands. As we gather the plates, he opens the screen door and steps out into the night. My cousin shoots me a significant look, as if this proves that he has sinned against Hashem and is feeling the guilt. I take a stack of dessert plates into the kitchen, trying to catch a glimpse of Dovid through the window. But it is dark outside, and all I can see is the reflection of the kitchen, with its stacks and stacks of plates that we will have to wash. When the men’s voices rise again, I go to the front of the house and step outside. The night is all around me, dew-wet and smelling like milkweed and pine needles and lake wind, and the air vibrates with cicadas. The tall grass wets my ankles as I walk toward the backyard. Dovid is kicking at the clothesline frame, his sneaker making a dull hollow
clong
against the metal post. He looks up at me and says, “Hello, Esty’s cousin,” and then continues kicking.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
“Thinking,” he says, kicking the post.
“Thinking what?”
“Does a smudged mezuzah make a family’s house burn down?”
“What do you think?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead he picks up a white stone from the ground and hurls it into the dark. We hear it fall into the grass, out of sight.
“Don’t you believe in Hashem?” I ask him.
He squints at me. “Do
you
?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I stand silent in the dark, thinking about the one time I saw my brother before he died. He was lying in an incubator with tubes coming out of every part of his body, monitors tracing his breathing and heartbeat. His skin was transparent, his eyes closed, and all I could think was that he looked like a tiny skinny frog. Scrubbed, sterilized, gloved, I was allowed to reach in through a portal and touch his feverish skin. I felt terrible for him.
Get better, grow,
kick,
I said to him silently. It was difficult to leave, knowing I might not see him again. But in the cab that night, on the way home with my father, I was imagining what might happen if he did live. The doctors had told us he could be sick forever, that he’d require constant care. I could already imagine my parents taking care of him every day, changing his tubes and diapers, measuring his tiny pulse, utterly forgetting about me. Just once, just for that instant, I wished he would die. If there is a God who can see inside mezuzahs, a God who burns people’s houses for two smudged letters, then he must know that secret too. “Sometimes I hope there’s not a God,” I say. “I’m in a lot of trouble if there is.”
“What trouble?” Dovid says.
“Bad trouble. I can’t talk about it.”
“Some people around here are scared of you,” Dovid says. “Some of the mothers. They think you’re going to show their kids a fashion magazine or give them an unkosher cookie or tell them something they shouldn’t hear.”
I have never considered this. I’ve only imagined the influence rolling from them to me, making me more Jewish, making me try to do what the Torah teaches. “I didn’t bring any magazines,” I tell him. “I’ve been keeping kosher all summer. I’ve been wearing these long-sleeved clothes. I can hardly remember what I’m like in my normal life.”
“It was the same with your cousin,” he says. “When she and your aunt first came here, people didn’t trust them.”
“I can’t believe anyone wouldn’t trust them,” I say. “Or be scared of me.”
“I’m not scared of you,” he says, and reaches out and touches my arm, his hand cool and dry against my skin. I know he is not supposed to touch any woman who is not his mother or his sister. I can smell raspberries and brown sugar on his breath. I don’t want to move or speak or do anything that will make him take his hand from my arm, though I know it is wrong for us to be touching and though I know he wouldn’t be touching me if I were an Orthodox girl. From the house comes the sound of men laughing. Dovid Frankel steps closer, and I can feel the warmth of his chest through his shirt. For a moment I think he will kiss me. Then we hear a screen door bang, and he moves away from me and walks back toward the house.
That night, my cousin won’t talk to me. She knows I was outside with Dovid Frankel, and this makes her furious. In silence we get into our nightgowns and brush our teeth and climb into bed, and I can hear her wide-awake breathing, uneven and sharp. I lie there thinking about Dovid Frankel, the way his hand felt on my arm, the knowledge that he was doing something against the rules. It gives me a strange rolling feeling in my stomach. For the first time I wonder if I’ve started to
want
to become the girl I’ve been pretending to be, whose prayers I’ve been saying, whose dietary laws I’ve been observing. A time or two, on Shabbos, I know I’ve felt a kind of holy swelling in my chest, a connection to something larger than myself. I wonder if this is proof of something, if this is God marking me somehow.
In the middle of the night, I wake to find Esty gone from her bed. The closet door is closed, and from beneath the door comes a thin line of light, the light we leave on throughout Shabbos. From inside I can hear a shuffling and then a soft thump. I get out of bed and go to the closet door. “Esty,” I whisper. “Are you in there?”
“Go away,” my cousin whispers back.
“Open up,” I say.
“No.”
“Do it now, or I’ll make a noise.”
She opens the closet door just a crack. I slide in. The book is in her hand, open to a Japanese print of a man and woman embracing. The woman’s head is thrown back, her mouth open to reveal a sliver of tongue. The man holds her tiny bird-like hands in his own. Rising up from between his legs and entering her body is a plum-colored column of flesh.
“Gross,” I say.
My cousin closes the book.
“I thought you said we were never going to look at it again,” I say.
“We were going to ignore Dovid Frankel, too.”
“So what?”
My cousin’s eyes fill, and I understand: She is in love with Dovid Frankel. Things begin to make sense—our bringing the book home, her significant looks all evening, her anger. “Esty,” I say. “It’s okay. Nothing happened. We just talked.”
“He was looking at you during dinner,” she cries.
“He doesn’t like me,” I say. “We talked about you.”
“About me?” She wipes her eyes with her nightgown sleeve.
“That’s right.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted to know if you’d ever mentioned him to me,” I lie.
“And?”
“I said you told me you went to school with his sister.”
My cousin sighs. “Okay,” she says. “Safe answer.”
“Okay,” I say. “Now you have to tell me what you’re doing, looking at that book.”
My cousin glances down and her eyes widen, as if she’s surprised to find she’s been holding the book all this time. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says. “The book was here. I couldn’t sleep. Finally I just got up and started looking at it.”
“It’s a sin,” I say. “That’s what you told me before.”
“I know.”
“So let’s go to bed, okay?”
“Okay,” she says.
We stand there looking at each other. Neither of us makes a move to go to bed.
“Maybe we could just look at it for a little while,” I say.
“A few minutes couldn’t hurt,” my cousin says.
This decides it. We sit down on the wooden planking of the closet floor, and my cousin opens the book to the first chapter. We learn that we are too busy with work, domestic tasks, and social activity to remember that we must take the time to respect and enjoy our physical selves and our partners’ physical selves, to reap the benefits that come from regular, loving, sexual fulfillment. The book seems not to care whether “the East” means Japan, China, or India; the drawings show all kinds of Eastern people in sexual positions whose names sound like poetry: “Bamboo Flute,” “The Galloping Horse,” “Silkworms Spinning a Cocoon.” My cousin’s forehead is creased in concentration as she reads, her eyebrows nearly meeting.
“What’s the orgasm?” my cousin says. “They keep talking about the orgasm.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Check the index.”
She flips to the index, and under
orgasm
there is a long list of page numbers. We choose one at random, page 83. My cousin reads in a whisper about how to touch oneself in order to achieve the word in question. We learn that one can use one’s own fingers or any object whose shape and texture one finds pleasing, though the use of electronic vibrating devices is not recommended. These can cause desensitization, the book tells us. But certain Eastern devices, such as
ben wa
balls or the String of Pearls, can greatly enhance a woman’s pleasure.
“Sick,” my cousin says.
“I still don’t get it,” I say.
“What do you think they mean by the
clitoris
?”
Though I have a vague idea, I find myself at a loss for words. My cousin looks it up in the index, and when she learns what it is she is amazed. “I thought that was where you peed from,” she breathes. “How weird.”
“It’s weird, all right,” I say.
Then she says, “I can’t believe Dovid Frankel has read all this. His hands probably touched this page.” She lets the book fall into her lap. It opens to a glossy drawing of a woman suspended in a swinglike contraption from the roof of a pavilion, high above a turbaned man who gazes up at her with desire and love. Two servants in long robes hold the cords that keep the woman suspended.
“Oh, my God,” my cousin says, and closes the book. “We have to repent tomorrow, when we say Shacharit in the morning. There’s a place where you can tell God what you did wrong.”
“We’ll repent,” I say.
We stow the book on its high shelf and leave the closet. Our room is cold, the light coming in from outside a ghostly blue. We climb into our twin beds and say the Shema and the V’ahavta. The V’ahavta is the same prayer that’s written in the text of a mezuzah, and when I say the word
asher
a sizzle of terror runs through me. Has God seen what we have just done? Are we being judged even now, as we lie in bed in the dark? I am awake for a long time, watching the cool air move the curtains, listening to the rushing of the grasses outside, the whir of the night insects. After some time I hear a change in the rhythm of breathing from my cousin’s bed, and a faint rustle beneath the sheet. I pretend to be asleep, listening to the metallic tick of her bedsprings. It seems to go on for hours, connected with the sound of insects outside, the shush of grass, the wind.