This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (12 page)

The next day, Miss Smiley, the resource room teacher, called me out of class. She said that I was to start going to the resource room every day during math. Because I was dumb, she said, slow, crazy. Something like that.

All right, of course Miss Smiley never used the word “dumb.” She said that I needed remedial help to improve my skills in math. But it meant the same thing—dumb, the beginning of broken—because the resource room was a place where stupid girls went, girls who did terribly in math or reading. It was embarrassing being pulled out of class by Miss Smiley, with all my classmates staring at me and knowing that I was going to the dumb girls’ room.

It was all Nachum’s fault, of course. It was in the blood. I’d gotten the worst of it not only because of our names but because I was closest to him in age, barely a year older. Why, we were almost twins. My teachers often said that I seemed to be in another world, spaced out completely. Sometimes I rocked myself to sleep, bumping my head on the mattress, back and forth.

My siblings did not share this danger. Rivky was smart and got As on her tests. Yitzy was a top student in yeshiva. Miri had taught herself how to read one fine summer day, and at age two Vrumi had the vocabulary of a four-year-old. Only I was going to the resource room with the stupids, because Nachum was just thirteen months younger than me and we shared the most blood.

Over the next few weeks, I vowed to stay as far from Nachum as possible. I pushed him down the hall if he came close to my room and ran away if he came near me. He’d given me enough of his crazy and I wasn’t going to catch even one drop more.

Rivky got angry at me when she saw me doing this. She said that I was the most selfish and sinful girl she’d ever seen after I refused to stand near Nachum when we posed for a family picture.

It was a Sunday afternoon in April. My mother had laid out our holiday clothing especially for the occasion, and brushed my hair into an elegant half ponytail, just the way the high school girls wore theirs. Dressed up, hair combed, faces scrubbed to a shiny pink, we marched outside, where the photographer was waiting behind his black camera perched like a crow on top of the tripod.

But then my mother set us up in order on the corner steps of our house. She said, “Yitzy, stand here. Rivky, you there. Miri, come here—don’t move from this spot,” so that we stood in a V shape in order of age, with Rivky two steps behind me and Nachum just in front.

So I refused to pose for the picture. Not with Nachum only three steps down.

The photographer held the button he would click to take the picture.

“On the count of three,” he announced. “Everyone say ‘Cheese!’” I sat down on the steps, my arms folded over my chest, and said that I would not stand up until Nachum moved. He could pose near Yitzy, or Miri, or in the backyard. Just not near me.

My mother looked at me, exasperated.

“What does it matter where he stands?” she asked. “Just look at the camera and smile!”

But it mattered a lot, and for five long minutes I sulked. Finally, Rivky agreed to switch places, rolling her eyes at me all the while. Then the photographer said “One, two, three,” and we all said cheese.

After it was done, Rivky called me a selfish brat whom God would shove into the deepest parts of Gehenim. So I was a selfish and sinful brat. At least I was a normal one. Being generous was useless if I was also half mad.

Three weeks after the family pictures, I stopped going to the resource room. I had scored a ninety-one on my math test, and Miss Smiley said that I no longer needed remedial help. I was up to my class level.

My mother proudly hung up the test on the fridge. My father said I was a genius, pure and simple. Mrs. Friedman gave me a pack of stickers and promised two colorful erasers if I did well again. She also told me that it just showed that I was smart, and if I’d only stop dreaming so much, I’d be among the best in the class.

I said thank you and that I’d try, but I didn’t really care much, not about the stickers or the colorful erasers. Mrs. Friedman could keep them in her prize drawer or give them to someone else. I was just relieved, deeply so, that I wasn’t crazy after all. The curse hadn’t struck. Not just yet.

The Baal Shem Tov dressed up often as a pauper, wandering the roads and forests of western Ukraine disguised as a simple peasant. Few realized who he was. None dreamt that beneath the torn garments glowed a mystical soul.

Through the dark of night, the Baal Shem would study Torah. He bent over the pages of holy books in the synagogues of small towns and villages, while around him, all the world slept. On hard wooden benches, in the silence of the shul, the Baal Shem delved into the realms of Heaven until the sun rose. Then, with the first specks of light above, the Baal Shem would stand up. Holding a walking stick in one hand, a satchel in the other, he’d take leave of the small village to wander the mountains and forests once more, a vagabond, invisible to all.

For years the holy Baal Shem traveled in this way, until one day he reached the city of Brody. There he encountered a great scholar and rabbi who realized quickly that this was no simple man. Reaching out, the rabbi asked the unkempt wanderer many questions. When the Baal Shem realized that he could not hide from the persistent Jew, he stopped pretending and revealed himself. Together, the rabbi and the hidden saint engaged in many debates and discussions on the laws and ways of the Torah. Over time, the great rabbi grew so impressed with the Baal Shem’s brilliance that he offered his daughter, Chana, for the wanderer to take as a bride.

The Baal Shem agreed, and the rabbi and the beggar saint wrote out a marriage agreement, one that remained just between them. For reasons unknown, they kept it a secret, and when the rabbi returned home, he did not tell even his daughter that she was engaged to a tzaddik in a pauper’s disguise.

But shortly afterward, the great rabbi died, and the Baal Shem arrived at the family’s home, with the marriage agreement in hand. When the son of the great rabbi, himself a renowned scholar, opened the door, he threw coins at the poor man and waved him off, eager to return to his studies. But the Baal Shem banged on the door again, shoving the paper into the son’s hand as soon as it opened. When the scholar read the signed contract between the pauper and his father, he nearly fainted.

This uneducated boor? This man in torn clothes? There was no way his gentle sister from a noble family such as theirs could marry him.

“It must have been a mistake,” he explained to his sister, Chana. “You don’t have to do this…You mustn’t.”

But Chana insisted on marrying the beggar. She trusted her father completely, and realized that this man was destined to be her husband. Privately, the Baal Shem told Chana of his secret, but his bride told no one, not even her own brother. Appalled at the unbecoming match, Chana’s brother convinced the couple to leave town and spare him the embarrassment, so the Baal Shem and his wife moved to a small hut in the Carpathian Mountains. There the saintly Chana dug lime and clay for a living, as the Besht (an abbreviation based on his initials) studied and meditated in the fields. This would be their home until the time came for the Besht to reveal himself to the world.

Seven years passed before that time came. Only at age thirty-six did the Baal Shem unveil his mystical soul to the world. It took several years more for the stories of his miracles to spread and his reputation to grow, but eventually that happened too. It was then that Chana’s brother finally realized the truth. He embraced the Baal Shem as his rabbi and leader and became his most devout follower. At last he understood that it was his brother-in-law who had carried the noble blood all along.

And so it was.

The high school girl who babysat us before Passover told me this story. She also told me to hurry up. We needed to get to Mendelsohn’s pizza shop quickly, before Nachum started acting up. It was only a few more blocks to Eighteenth Avenue. If I behaved myself, she said, she’d tell me two more stories on the way back home, but only if I did not fight with Nachum even once.

I promised no such thing.

Nachum should never have come with us to the pizza shop to begin with. He should have stayed home with my mother as he normally did, or gone out with the special therapist lady who cared for him sometimes. But things were different now because it was nearly Passover. With only two weeks left before the holiday, school was out, and the teachers, therapists, and helpers who normally kept my brother busy were cleaning and preparing their homes for Pesach. So my mother had asked a high school girl, Devorah, to take Nachum, Vrumi, and me for a few hours to the pizza shop in Borough Park, saying that it was out of the house with all of us, or she’d go mad.

Rivky and Yitzy had stayed home to help, and Miri was playing at a neighbor’s house, so it was only my two younger brothers and me walking under the bridge to the other side, where the kosher shops were. I didn’t mind the long walk. It was April and pretty outside. I saw white petals peeking out from little azalea bushes, and green leaves budding on the trees.

We walked past Mendel’s pizza shop on Fiftieth Street. Outside the shop, I saw one of my friends from school leading her three younger brothers down the street to the park. In front of Shoe Palace on Forty-Eighth, I saw my teacher from second grade rushing to get into a livery cab while holding a pile of shoe boxes in her arms, a harried expression on her face. On the corner of Forty-Seventh, we wove Avrumi’s stroller through a small crowd of high school girls walking in and out of Designer’s Paradise, holding bags of holiday clothes. Then we passed Landau’s Supermarket, and the beggar man sitting on his plastic crate, angrily shaking a cup in the faces of passersby and proclaiming, “
Tzedakah, tzedakah,
buy your place in paradise!,” and spitting at those who would not. Mendelsohn’s pizza shop was on the next block, a narrow, crowded space bursting with families of six to twelve, all out before the holiday.

Nachum, who had been calm until then, turned agitated when we went inside, but Devorah, squeezing Vrumi’s carriage through the aisle, never noticed. When we reached an empty table by the back wall of the pizzeria, she sat Vrumi down on a plastic baby seat and shoved the folded-up stroller under the table. She pointed a finger at me.

“Don’t move,” she said. “Stay right here on the bench. I’m going to get the pizza. Make sure Nachum doesn’t go anywhere until I come back.” Then she turned and walked across the store.

I could see the line for pizza stretching from the counter to the restroom at the other end of the shop. It was hard to hear anything over the men shouting orders, and the older sisters hushing younger ones, and the babies babbling from every corner. Nachum, sitting close to me, kept his head down, and I could hear him saying “Hungry…Hungry…” to himself. I told Nachum that I was hungry too, but that we’d eat very soon. The babysitter was waiting in the long pizza line. She’d bring fresh, hot pizza in just a few minutes.

But Nachum was hungry. He was hungry right now. And it didn’t help to tell him to stay in his seat, because he didn’t understand how to listen or wait.

Nachum stood up, his eyes shifting, his jaws moving as he bit his tongue. He blinked urgently as he looked around. Then he stopped, his eyes on a lady dressed in fancy white clothes and perched on a plastic chair at a table right in the middle of the shop.

The lady did not see Nachum coming. She was talking to the four girls who were sitting around the table, wearing matching pink sweaters and skirts. In her left hand, she held a wet napkin and pointed to a stain on one of the very pink sweaters. In the other hand, she held a slice of pizza, folded and wrapped in a large paper towel. The girl took the wet napkin from her mother and dabbed worriedly at the stain. The lady shook her head, her black wig shining, and then lifted the steaming pizza slice to her mouth.

But Nachum grabbed the slice of pizza right out of the lady’s hand and shoved it into his own mouth, chomping down on the melted cheese.

The lady gasped. She stared at her empty hand, and then at my brother, gripping the pizza, tomato sauce dripping from the sides of his chin. But Nachum never looked at the lady—only at the pizza. Then he turned with the slice and walked back down the aisle toward our table.

I slid to the end of the bench as fast as I could. I slumped low, trying to sink into the ground, where no one could see me. The lady was now coming after Nachum, her eyes slits of outrage and disbelief, but following at a careful distance, until he reached his seat. She looked around, searching for a mother.

Then she saw me. Her eyes bored into mine. She asked me where my mother was, and I pointed to the long line.

“Babysitter,” I whispered from where I was slouched at the farthest corner of the table. The lady stared at me as if I knew the secret of Nachum and why he had grabbed her slice of pizza. I looked back at her, saying nothing, because I really did not.

The dressed-up lady finally turned. She sat back down at her table with the four girls in matching pink, who whispered to one another and stared. She kept looking back at us, waiting for the babysitter to come.

But Devorah was still waiting in line, and now Nachum wanted ice cream. I knew he wanted ice cream, because I had been getting a snack for Avrumi from the folded-up stroller, and when I looked back up from under the table, I found Nachum holding a cup of someone else’s dessert.

My brother stuck his finger in the ice cream and licked. I cringed, looking fearfully around, but nobody seemed to notice or care. Maybe he had taken it out of the garbage, I thought. Maybe someone had given it to him. I looked to the middle of the store, but the lady in white was busy cutting up another slice of pizza.

So I licked at the stolen ice cream along with Nachum. He didn’t mind, and even held out the cup for me to share. And when we couldn’t reach the bottom half of the cup because there was no spoon, Nachum simply turned the whole thing upside down, shaking the ice cream out onto the Formica tabletop.

The ice cream was good, even on the table. Nachum slurped some, and then waited for me to do the same. He giggled watching me, my face covered in white, licking off the tabletop with nothing but my tongue. I laughed when it was his turn too. Then we both giggled, because it really was funny, slurping up the ice cream, one after the other, always just in time to catch the melting ooze right before it slid to the floor.

Just then the babysitter returned from the pizza line. She towered above us, holding up a steaming pie. As she stared down at our sticky faces, behind her the lady in white looked ready to get up and come over to us. From another table we heard a boy exclaim, “My ice cream! A
ganuv
took my ice cream! Where’s my ice cream?” Devorah set down the pie with a thump, her eyebrows high up on her forehead.

Grabbing a few napkins, she swiped at Nachum’s cheeks. Then she ordered me to the bathroom sink, saying she could not believe what we had done. But Nachum wanted the ice cream from the table, the ice cream that she had wiped up. He stared anxiously at the crumpled napkins in the babysitter’s hands.

“Ishe cream,” he said loudly. “Ishe cream!”

“No,” said Devorah. “There is no ice cream. Not for any of you. Pizza will be enough.”

Nachum leaned forward, straining his neck.

“Ishe cream!” he said louder, his eyes clenched shut. “Ishe cream. Ishe cream. Ishe cream—”

“You already had ice cream,” said the babysitter sternly, dropping the napkins into the trash. “No more.” But Nachum lunged forward abruptly, his head crashing into the table, because he could see ice cream, both chocolate and vanilla, in cups and cones everywhere. He could see ice cream in sticky hands and on cluttered tables like a bright white light in a blur of movement and faces.

Nachum rocked hard. He screamed, “Ishe cream! Ishe cream! Ishe cream! Ishe cream!” His voice spiraled up into a high-pitched frantic shriek and bounced off the walls of the shop.

The lady in white behind the babysitter froze. A large family tumbling in through the shop’s entrance stopped cold. Nachum rocked back and forth, faster, more furious, until his skull hit the table with that sickening thud. He was still chanting,
“Ishe cream, ishe cream, ishe cream, ishe cream, ishe cream, ishe cream!”

The lady of the stolen pizza slice stared at him, her brightly painted lips hanging open. A waiter on the way to a table halted, balancing his tray of food in midair. Everyone in the shop was looking at us. Girls with high ponytails and boys with gelled side curls edged closer to our table to see.

A kind man with a beard walked hastily toward us. He looked worriedly at Nachum, maybe wanting to help. But then he stopped short, the loud whispers of his wife pulling him back.

Devorah leaned over Nachum, trying to stop the screaming. She whispered frantically into my brother’s ear, but Nachum never heard her. I could see tears welling up in her eyes as she turned and rushed to the front counter, ignoring the long line. The man holding the ice cream scoop looked at her, at first bewildered. Then my brother’s high shriek cut through the store again, and, startled, the man jumped and began shoveling ice cream hurriedly into a large cup. The babysitter grabbed the cup right out of his hand and ran back to us.

When she reached our table, she stopped. Then, gripping the cup like a weapon, she aimed straight for Nachum’s mouth, holding the ice cream inches below his chin just as it came back down. There was a soft thud, as my brother slammed his face right into the cup. He gasped at the cold shock, jerking his head in surprise, blobs of ice cream like puffs of little clouds all over his chin and mouth. But Nachum stopped screaming.

There was silence in the store. I could hear the rhythmic whirring of the fan blades above. The babysitter was still holding the ice cream, but now she handed it to him and he clasped the cup as if it were a lost treasure. There were mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, sisters and brothers in Mendelsohn’s pizza shop, and they all watched as the babysitter grabbed Vrumi, the stroller, our bags, and our jackets as fast as her hands could move. They watched as she gingerly wrapped a hand around my brother’s arm. They watched as she moved him cautiously forward toward the door of the shop.