The Beautiful Possible

CONTENTS

When my mother and I would enter the paneled sanctuary on Shabbat mornings my father would peer down from his red velvet rabbi’s chair and bite his lip. It was a wink of recognition, barely a gesture. I would fold my hand in hers and we would swing our arms in a proclamation of private joy. The congregants would turn toward the aisle, gaze at their sultry rebbetzin in her wide-brimmed hat, and behold her as if she were a queen.

My mother’s body was a source of pleasure to me: the strawberry scent of her face cream, the delicate veins on the backs of her hands, the satiny texture of her summer Shabbat dresses. One dress was made of crisp white cotton, patterned with red bricks. The sleeves ended at her elbow, huge flower-shaped buttons ran down the front, a thick patent leather belt cinched her waist. I would sit next to her in the front row and lay my cheek against the bricks that covered her upper arm. My father would read from the Torah and deliver his sermon and I would twirl the buttons of my mother’s dress as if they were radio dials and I controlled the frequency.

The synagogue stairwell was my first jungle gym; its parking lot my first hopscotch course. I was the congregants’ flower child, their little pet.
Come sit on my lap, Maya! Point out the words to me; have a lollipop; sing me a little song.
As soon as I learned Hebrew, my father taught me how to move my fingers around a page of Talmud as if I were a blind person reading Braille. I once believed all the words of the Torah
were true, just as I once assumed that my mother and father belonged to each other in the way of ordinary married people.

I was Sol and Rosalie Kerem’s late-life consolation prize: accident, miracle, and redemption rolled into the form of a lanky girl whose bangs reached her nose. Whenever my mother invited me to make a birthday wish, I would close my eyes and imagine things already present in this world: a white flower, an arched doorway, a footpath crossing a river. I lip-synced my favorite songs in front of a mirror, and when no one was watching I would peek into the ancient books on my father’s shelves, hungry for a phrase to swirl on my tongue and taste its meaning.

At night my parents would sit on the sofa in my father’s study and listen to records.
Fly me to the moon
, sang Frank.
Dance me to the end of love
, sang Leonard
. I say a little prayer
, sang Dionne. I would spy them studying the liner notes as if the lyrics were sacred texts, yet something about their marriage always eluded me. Our house was a palace of stories—the ancient ones in the books, the love stories in the songs, the secrets my mother whispered into the phone late at night. At times, I would drift off to sleep and imagine how all the stories were part of one great book that hummed with sadness and longing.

I was once content with my flower, my doorway, my footpath. What I had was more than enough. I did not know that I was also written into this great book, and that my parents were entangled in a web of desire that began long before I was born.