A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, page 8
But as I reach for the door handle, I access the file with the image of a woman in a long dark skirt, a boxy blouse, and a wig.
I open the door to find a woman with her own short, dark straight hair wearing blue jeans, brown suede boots, an orange V-neck sweater, and a killer shade of lipstick. She’s young and she’s beautiful. As for her age, this I could easily have figured out if I’d bothered to stop and think. She was sixteen on that November afternoon seventeen years ago. So right now, on this Thanksgiving Day, Rivka is only thirty-three. As for her beauty, I have this immediate reaction that I’m embarrassed to admit to, but here goes anyway. I think: Wow, maybe there’s still hope for me.
I meet her eyes, her almond eyes, and hers meet mine, and we stand there for a moment. She takes a step back. And another one. She sits down on the bench on our porch and says, “I don’t know about you, but I could use some air.”
She already needs air and she hasn’t even set foot in our cinnamon-scented house. But I’ve been in here all day and I actually could use some air because I feel like I might pass out, so I close the front door behind me and sit in an old wooden rocker. I’m not quite facing her, but I’m positioned in such a way that I can get a good look at her without seeming like I’m staring her down.
“Thanks for inviting me,” she says. “I know this must be strange for you. It sure as hell is strange for me.”
I sneak a quick look, and the thing is, she looks completely and immediately familiar to me. I can’t pick out anything unusual or surprising in her face. It’s as if I’ve looked at her face every day of my life, and I don’t say this as a way of telling you that it’s like looking into a mirror, because it’s not, I’m different. But I don’t know how else to describe it—her face is just familiar to me.
Her brown boots (I’d love a pair just like them) and her jeans and orange V-neck sweater, unlike her face, catch me by surprise.
“I thought you were Hasidic.”
I would never in a million years have imagined that these would be the first words I would speak to my birth mother face to face. But there you have it.
“And I thought you had blue eyes.” She looks down and shakes her head as if she wishes she could take that back. “I mean, that’s what I remember about you from the day you were born. I thought you had blue eyes, and I couldn’t understand how that could be.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just sit there slowly rocking in the rocking chair.
“I guess all babies’ eyes look kind of blue at birth and the true color doesn’t develop until months later, and of course I wasn’t around months later to see that your eyes aren’t blue at all. Your eyes are brown. I don’t think there’s ever been a blue eye in my family, and God knows, with all of the kids and kids’ kids, we certainly have given the gene pool enough of an opportunity to cough one up. Oh, Jesus. I’m rambling, aren’t I? I do that when I’m nervous. I’m making a total ass out of myself.”
“No, you’re not. It’s okay.” Look at me, acting like the grown-up, trying to make this easier on her, smoothing things over for her. I have a sudden impulse to break the silence that has come over us with a scream that would echo on my front porch and across the snow-covered lawns down my street: What about me? But of course I don’t. I sit here quietly and rock.
“About the Hasidic thing,” she says. “That isn’t who I am anymore. You don’t really know who I was, so maybe that doesn’t mean much to you, but anyway, it’s not who I am anymore.”
“You aren’t Jewish?”
“I didn’t say that. Look, this is complicated. I’d love to talk about it with you sometime, but it’s going to take a longer conversation than we can have right now, and anyway, I want to know about you. Tell me something about you.”
“I’m hungry,” I say, and stand up and invite Rivka into my home.
ELEVEN
Dinner was delightful. We stuffed ourselves. We talked about how thankful we are. We laughed uproariously. Then we gathered around the piano and linked arms and sang show tunes. Okay, none of that is true. Well, maybe Dad stuffed himself, but we don’t even have a piano. Dinner was strange. Horror-movie strange. Foreboding tinkly music strange. If it had been a horror movie, something would have burst through the walls and everyone would have screamed and the table would have been kicked over, and I found myself thinking that it would have been a relief if something, anything, had burst through the walls and put an end to the awkward silences.
Good old Jules tried her best to fill those silences with tales from her last few terrible dates, which included one with a guy who had a home gym but not one book anywhere in the entire house. Literally. Or illiterately. (That was Jules’s stupid joke, not mine, and Rivka didn’t laugh, so at least I know she has a good sense of humor.) I kept looking at the six of us around the table trying to figure where Rivka fit in. She seemed trapped somewhere between the adults and the children. Obviously Rivka is an adult. She’s thirty-three. But she isn’t as old as Mom and Dad and Jules, and the last time Mom and Dad saw her she was exactly my age, so I think they must in some way still view her as this helpless young girl, and this made the dinner-table dynamic kind of strange. There’s that word again: strange. I’m aware that I’ve used this word way too many times. I know plenty of synonyms for strange: perplexing, astonishing, eccentric. Even though these are perfectly good words in their own right, none of them applies to this day or to my life lately as well as the word strange does, so that is why I keep using it again and again and again.
We move into the living room for dessert, and this change helps ease some of the tension. I think about how in almost every other house across the nation today, this is the moment when people loosen their belts or undo the top buttons of their pants. But for us, at this moment, when we move from the hard, straight-backed dining room chairs to the comfortable couches in the living room, we all seem to loosen something inside us.
Jules takes a bite of the pie she brought and asks, “So, Rivka, what do you do?”
This is the first real question anyone has asked her. That’s probably why Mom and Dad invited Jules. They know her tendency to talk a lot and ask a lot of questions, and I guess they figured she would probably step up if I sat there like the mute I’ve been all afternoon.
“I’m a photographer.”
A photographer. Like Zack Meyers. I’ve never spent much time messing around with a camera, but maybe I should. Maybe I could be a photographer.
“What do you photograph?” I ask her. “Or is it what’s your subject? Or what do you shoot? What’s the right way to ask someone who takes pictures what they like to take pictures of?”
Rivka smiles. “Any of those will do.”
She folds one leg underneath her. I look down at my lap. I’m sitting in the exact same position.
“I mostly photograph landscapes. I live on Cape Cod, so that includes a lot of beaches and sand dunes and grass. One of the reasons I live there is because of the light. The Cape has the most amazing light.”
“And you make enough money doing that, taking pictures of the beach?” This comes out a little harsher than I intended. I don’t even know who I sound like. Neither of my parents would ever phrase a question like that.
“Mountains of money,” she says, deadpan. “I’m loaded.”
“Really?”
“Not at all. But I do have my work in several galleries on the Cape, and it does sell from time to time, mostly to rich tourists. I also shoot family pictures, portraits; I’ve done a few weddings. Last month this couple in Truro hired me to take photographs of their schnauzers.”
Jake has been lying on the floor. He props himself up on one elbow. “Did they dress them up in little outfits? I hate people who dress up their dogs.”
“No. They were as naked as the day they were born.”
“So you shoot doggie porno?” I ask.
Rivka laughs. “Yes, but only very tasteful doggie porno.”
Dad disappears out of the room and comes back with two sets of Scrabble. Leave it to Dad to have an extra set on hand. He’s such a Scrabble freak. My family always plays on Thanksgiving, and since we have six people Dad suggests that we do a sort of round robin where there are two games of three people each and then the winners play each other in a final face-off. He’s the only one excited by this idea: Dad is highly competitive. None of us agrees to the final round, so two winners there will be. Dad pouts as he takes his seat at the board with Mom and Jake. Jules and Rivka and I set up next to them. Despite Jules’s earlier joke about illiteracy, she does a miserable job against Rivka and me, who are neck and neck through the whole game until I dump my final letters and win by going out on the three-letter word kin.
I’m showing Rivka my attic. I feel a little like I did when I was younger and used to have friends over and we’d go barricade ourselves in my room and whisper about things we didn’t want the grown-ups to hear. But of course Rivka is a grown-up and I’m not a little kid anymore. And we don’t have to whisper because now I live in the attic.
“This is a real oasis up here, isn’t it?” she asks me.
I nod.
“I would have killed for a space like this when I was your age. I shared my room with my younger sisters, and our house was always filled with people. I never had anywhere to be by myself when I was growing up.”
“And yet you still found the time and space to get pregnant. Amazing.”
She doesn’t stare at me or look hurt or startled or anything.
“Yes, well, I guess you wouldn’t be surprised to know that it didn’t happen in my little room in my crowded house.”
“How did it happen?” This is the question that’s been on my mind all through dinner and dessert and Scrabble. While I’ve been visited throughout my life by thoughts and images of Rivka, I’ve never stopped to think about him. But now that she’s before me and I can finally see her and study her and no longer have to imagine her, the mathematical part of me suddenly needs to fill in the other properties. I need the second half of the equation.
“I take it you don’t really mean how?”
“No, I’m pretty up to speed on how babies are made. I mean who. Who was he?”
She takes a deep breath and lets it out. She turns my desk chair around and sits on it so she’s facing me. I’m sitting on my bed.
“He was just a boy.” Her face is even more beautiful, I notice, when it’s filled with sorrow or nostalgia or longing or whatever it is she’s feeling right now. “He was a boy I thought I loved. I mean, I did love him, but where I was wrong, I guess, was in believing that he loved me. Although when I look back at the situation, I’m not so sure he didn’t love me.” She stops and seems to realize that this isn’t the real point here. “It was all very complicated. Too complicated. But here’s something simple: his name was Joe.”
“Joe.”
“Yes. Joe.”
“Tell me more. It’s all the complicated stuff that’s interesting to me.” I mean this. I’m pretty well practiced at hearing stories of teenage angst and love and sex, and to think that this story actually involves me is thrilling.
“Yeah. To me too. Okay.” A strand of her hair has fallen in her face, and she tucks it behind her ear. “Joe was a Lubavitcher. What that means is that he was a member of this big Hasidic group—the biggest, actually. He was the cousin of a friend of mine from the neighborhood. He lived in Boston. I would go with her sometimes to visit her family, even though my father wasn’t a big fan of Chabad.”
She’s totally losing me. She reads this on my face.
“Chabad is pretty much the same thing as Lubavitcher. Never mind. None of this is important except for you to know that as the oldest daughter of the Rebbe, even though I was only sixteen, my parents already had a pretty good idea about whom I would marry, and I never liked that boy too much. And who was thinking about marriage, anyway? Certainly not me. But Joe was really cute and smart and had these amazing cheekbones, and I was just crazy about him. We started this secret love affair, because not only was he Chabad and not whom my parents had in mind for me, but there really is no such thing as dating among the Hasidim. It’s even forbidden for a man and woman, or a boy and a girl like we were, to be in the same room with the door closed unless they’re married. But we were kids and fell in love, and the rules didn’t matter.”
This is starting to sound like Romeo and Juliet but with lots of hair and heavy dark clothes. It strikes me as totally absurd when I conjure up a picture of two bad-ass Orthodox kids breaking all the rules. But then I look at Rivka’s face and I can imagine her as just a kid, a kid like me, and I realize that I very easily could have been one of them. If fate hadn’t snatched me away, I would have been born into an Orthodox life. Would that mean that I wouldn’t have a crazy crush on a guy like Zack Meyers? I don’t think so.
“And then, obviously, I got pregnant. Would you believe that it happened on the very first time? Just my luck.”
“Jesus.”
“Simone, I’m not telling you this as some kind of lesson about abstinence or anything. Sex is great. It’s amazing.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Well, you’ve heard right. And whenever you’re ready you should have lots of it. All the time. But be more careful about it than I was. And be more careful about whom you have it with.”
I’m turning red. Mom would never talk to me like this. She’s very cool and very open, but when it comes to sex she clams up and says something vague about how I need to be responsible, which I’ve always interpreted to mean: Don’t have sex, but if you do, by all means don’t tell me about it.
“Anyway. Like I said, I loved Joe. When I told him I was pregnant, though, he totally freaked out and basically refused to ever talk to me again. And that really hurt—I mean, it really, really hurt. But in the end it was okay, because I may have been only sixteen, but I knew enough to know that I didn’t want to get married, even to Joe. I had no idea what to do. I was lost. I was terrified. I was in total darkness. And then—and I still believe this to this day—God sent me your mother.”
Jules disappeared while Rivka and I were up in the attic talking. Now Rivka is on her way back home, probably somewhere on Route 3 heading south toward Cape Cod. I wonder what she’s listening to. What kind of music does she like? Or maybe she’s listening to NPR? A book on tape? I’m stretched out on the couch in the living room, pretending to read a magazine. Mom and Dad and Jake are in the kitchen cleaning up, and I’m taking advantage of the situation—given everything I’ve had to deal with today, no one’s going to ask me to so much as dry a dish.
I keep turning over Rivka’s words in my head. God sent me your mother. I realize that a simple comma would change everything. Watch: God sent me, your mother. See? But this isn’t what Rivka said. She didn’t say God sent me, your mother. She didn’t say God sent me, Rivka, your mother. No. She said God sent me your mother. She said God sent my mother, Elsie Turner, to her, Rivka Levin, in her time of need. Well, if God was looking out for Rivka, then you kind of have to wonder why he let her get pregnant in the first place, don’t you? But then again, if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, I wouldn’t be here. So maybe God sent me my mother. Wait a minute. I don’t even believe in God.
I look out the window. The air is thick with fog, and I hope it isn’t too difficult to see on the road. I can picture her face illuminated by the headlights of cars carrying people away from Cape Cod back north toward the city.
My family emerges from the kitchen together. A united front. Jake is drying his hands on his jeans. They all find seats in the living room and pretend to do something else as they take turns studying me slowly flipping through the pages of my magazine. Finally Jake can’t stand it anymore.
“So?”
I fold the magazine and put it down. They look at me expectantly.
“It wasn’t half bad,” I say.
And my mom and my dad and my brother all smile their same smile at me.
TWELVE
Winter break is just around the corner. They used to call it “Christmas break” only a few years ago, but they changed it to the neutral and less controversial “winter break.” The school did this without pressure from the Atheist Student Alliance because there was no Atheist Student Alliance at Twelve Oaks a few years ago. So winter break is just around the corner, and that’s a good thing because I’m falling behind in my schoolwork. I have this massive history paper due, and I haven’t even started.
I don’t have time to think about U.S. history. I’m too busy thinking about my history. I hate to admit it, but Mom and Dad were right. I need to know more. I have to know more.
I’m a person with a three-pronged story. There’s Mom and there’s Dad and there’s Rivka. Now that I’ve seen her face, I can’t continue to pretend that she isn’t part of who I am. My story has three prongs, not four, because Joe was just some boy who is gone. Vanished. Evaporated. He isn’t even a ghost. He’s nothing. Anyway, from what Rivka has heard, he moved to Israel thirteen years ago and doesn’t plan on ever coming back. So he might as well not exist, which is irrelevant because, like I already said, he doesn’t exist to me anyway.
I’ve been talking on the phone with Rivka. She invited me to come down to her house on Cape Cod and spend the night and she’ll tell me more about her family. I’m going this Friday. I’m taking the Subaru and going by myself. I’ve never driven that far alone, and I’m kind of excited about that. I thought maybe Mom and Dad would object. They aren’t crazy about me driving alone, and also I’m wondering when this whole enthusiasm for my relationship with Rivka might begin to wear out. I know they wanted me to meet her—they pushed me to meet her so that I can know about myself and my story—but they don’t want me to make her too big a part of my life, do they? I’m confused. I think if I were in their position I’d feel jealous or threatened, but they just smile and encourage it all and bend over backward to make it easy for me, including breaking their own rules by letting me drive all the way to Wellfleet alone. What can I say? I don’t understand my parents.
