Now Esty sits up beside me on the raft and looks toward shore. As she stares at the road beyond the Perelmans’ yard, her back tenses and her eyes narrow with concentration. “Someone’s coming,” she says. “Look.”
I sit up. Through the bushes along the lake road there is a flash of white, somebody’s shirt. Without a word we climb down into the water and swim underneath the raft, between the orange plastic drums. From the lapping shade there we see a teenage boy with copper-colored hair and long curling peyos run from the road to the bushes beside the house. He drops to his knees and crawls through the tangle of vines, moving slowly, glancing back over his shoulder. When he reaches the backyard he stands and brushes dead leaves from his clothes. He is tall and lanky, his long arms smooth and brown. Crouching beside the porch, he opens his backpack and takes out some kind of flat package, which he pushes deep under the porch steps. Then he gets up and runs for the road. From the shadow of the raft we can see the dust rising, and the receding flash of the boy’s white shirt.
“That was Dovid Frankel,” Esty says.
“How could you tell?”
“My mother bought him that green backpack in Toronto.”
“Lots of people have green backpacks,” I say.
“I know it was him. You’ll see. His family’s coming for Shabbos tonight.”
She swims toward shore and I follow, my skirt heavy as an animal skin around my legs. When we drag ourselves onto the beach our clothes cling to our bodies and our hair hangs like weeds.
“You look shipwrecked,” I tell my cousin.
“So do you,” she says, and laughs.
We run across the Perelmans’ backyard to the screened-in porch. Kneeling down, we peer into the shadows beneath the porch steps. Planes of light slant through the cracks between the boards, and we can see the paper bag far back in the shadows. Esty reaches in and grabs the bag, then shakes its contents onto the grass. What falls out is a large softcover book called Essence of Persimmon: Eastern Sexual Secrets for Western Lives. On the cover is a drawing of an Indian woman draped in gold-and-green silk, reclining on cushions inside a tent. One hand disappears into the shadow between her legs, and in the other she holds a tiny vial of oil. Her breasts are high and round, her eyes tapered like two slender fish. Her lips are parted in a look of ecstasy.
“Eastern sexual secrets,” Esty says. “Oh, my God.”
I can’t speak. I can’t stop staring at the woman on the cover.
My cousin opens the book and flips through the pages, some thick with text, others printed with illustrations. Moving closer to me, she reads aloud: “One may begin simply by pressing the flat of the hand against the open yoni, allowing heat and energy to travel into the woman’s body through this most intimate space.”
“Wow,” I say. “The open yoni.”
Esty closes the book and stuffs it into the brown paper bag. “This is obviously a sin,” she says. “We can’t leave it here. Dovid will come back for it.”
“So?”
“You’re not supposed to let your fellow Jew commit a sin.”
“Is it really a sin?”
“A terrible sin,” she says. “We have to hide it where no one will find it.”
“Where?”
“In our closet at home. The top shelf. No one will ever know.”
“But we’ll know,” I say, eyeing her carefully. Hiding a book like this at the top of our own closet is something Erica might have suggested, long ago.
“Of course, but we won’t look at it,” Esty says sternly, her brown eyes clear and fierce. “It’s tiuv, abomination. God forbid anyone should ever look at it again.”
My cousin retrieves her bike from the shed and stows the book between a bag of lettuce and a carton of yogurt. It looks harmless there, almost wholesome, in its brown paper sack. We get on our bikes and ride for home, and by the time we get there our clothes are almost dry.
Esty carries the book into the house as if it’s nothing, just another brown bag among many bags. This is the kind of ingenious technique she perfected back in her Erica days, and it works equally well now. Inside, everyone is too busy with Shabbos preparations to notice anything out of the ordinary. The little step-cousins are setting the table, arranging the Shabbos candles, picking up toys, dusting the bookshelves. Aunt Malka is baking challah. She punches down dough as she talks to us.
“The children need baths,” she says. “The table has to be set. The Handelmans and the Frankels are coming at seven, and I’m running late on dinner, as you know. I’m not going to ask what took you so long.” She raises her eyes at us, large sharp-blue eyes identical to my mother’s, with deep creases at the corners and a fringe of jet-black lash. Unlike my mother she is tall and big-boned. In her former life she was Marla Vincent, a set dresser for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. Once I saw her at work, hanging purple velvet curtains at the windows of an Italian palazzo.
“Sorry we took so long,” Esty says. “We’ll help.”
“You’d better,” she says. “Shabbos is coming.”
I follow my cousin down the hall and into our bedroom. On the whitewashed wall there is a picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, with his long steely beard and his eyes like flecks of black glass. He’s on the east wall, the wall my cousin faces when she prays. His eyes seem to follow her as she drags the desk chair into the closet and stows Essence of Persimmon on the top shelf.
“What do we say to Dovid Frankel tonight?” I ask her.
“Nothing,” she says. “We completely ignore him.”
I make one last phone call to my mother before Shabbos. It’s always frightening to dial the number of the hospital room because there’s no telling what my mother will sound like when she answers. Sometimes she sounds like herself, quick and funny, and I can almost smell her olive-aloe soap. Other times, like today, she sounds just like she sounded when she told me Devon Michael had died.
“I can hardly hear you,” she says, her own voice small and faint, somewhere far off down the line. The phone crackles with static.
“We went swimming today,” I tell her, trying to speak loud. “It was hot.”
Far away, almost too quiet to hear, she sighs.
“It’s nearly Shabbos,” I say. “Aunt Malka’s baking challah.”
“Is she?” my mother says.
“How are you feeling?” I ask her. “When can you come home?”
“Soon, honey.”
I have a sudden urge to tell her about the book we found, to ask her what we’re supposed to do with something like that, to find out if she thinks it’s a sin. I want to tell her about Dovid Frankel, how we saw him sneaking along the lake. I tell my mother things like this sometimes, and she seems to understand. But now she says to send her love to Aunt Malka and Uncle Shimon and Esty and all the step-cousins, and before I have a chance to really feel like her daughter again, we’re already saying goodbye.
At six-thirty, the women and girls arrive. They bring steaming trays of potato kugel and berry cobbler, bottles of grape juice and sweet wine. The men are at shul, welcoming the Shabbos as if she were a bride, with the words bo’i kallah. Here the women do not go to synagogue on Fridays. Instead we arrange the platters of food and remove bread from the oven and fill cups with grape juice and wine. We are still working when the men and boys arrive, tromping through the kitchen and kissing their wives and daughters good Shabbos. My cousin, her hands full of raspberries, nudges me and nods toward a tall boy with penny-brown hair, and I know him to be Dovid Frankel, the boy from the lake, owner of Essence of Persimmon. I watch him as he kisses his mother and hoists his little sister onto his hip. He is tall and tanned, with small round glasses and a slender oval face. His mouth is almost girlish, bow-shaped and flushed, and his hair is close-cropped, with the exception of his luxuriously curled peyos. He wears a collarless blue shirt in a fabric that looks homemade. I don’t realize I’m staring at him until Esty nudges me again.
Everyone gathers around the
dinner table, which we’ve set up on the screen porch. The men begin singing “Shalom Aleichem,” swaying with the rise and fall of the melody. I feel safe, gathered in, with the song covering us like a prayer shawl and the Shabbos candles flickering on the sideboard. I pray for my mother and father. Dovid Frankel stands across from me, rocking his little sister as he sings.
Uncle Shimon, in his loose white Israeli shirt and embroidered yarmulke, stands at the head of the table. His beard is streaked with silver, and his eyes burn with a quick blue fire. As he looks around the table at his friends, his children, his new wife, I can tell he believes himself to be a lucky man. I think about my previous uncle, Walter, who has moved to Hawaii to do his astronomy research at a giant telescope there. Once he brought the family to visit us at Christmas-time, and in his honor my mother set up a tiny plastic tree on our coffee table. That night we were allowed to eat candy canes and hang stockings at the fireplace, and in the morning there were silver bracelets for Esty and me, with our names engraved. Esty’s bracelet said Erica, of course. I wonder if she still has it. I still have mine, though it is too small for me now.
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.