Miriam squatted down on her haunches, took a wooden stirrer and mixed paint, which had begun separating from the base coat. “About a month ago, my father spoke with a shadchun, a Jewish matchmaker, about finding my brother a suitable match and weaning him away from his perverted pastime.”
“And?”
“She found an eligible woman, the daughter of Mordechai Gorelnik.” She glanced up with a dry smile.
“Gorelnik’s Appliances?”
“None other.” Miriam nodded.
The Gorelniks owned a string of appliance outlets – ranges, refrigerators, dryers and washing machines - throughout southeastern Massachusetts and nearby Connecticut. Their radio and TV ads ran non-stop from early morning through the late-night talk shows. “Not a very pretty girl, but when your father has that much money, ones physical attributes don’t necessarily figure in the equation.”
Mark went back to work.
On the ride home after Miriam’s first full day of work at Fournier Construction, a cell phone with a decidedly minor-keyed melody chimed and Miriam fished about in her pocket “Nu?... Gar nicht. Ich bin fahrtig.” She hung up the phone, glancing at the driver self-consciously. “My mother. She wanted to know if I’d been molested or forced to bow down before graven images.”
Mark, who was becoming accustomed to the girl’s eccentric mannerisms shrugged. “Why do your parents dress like they’re living in the Middle Ages?” They were a mile from home, pulled up at a traffic light.
“We’re Hasidic Jews. The Eastern European tradition goes back to two hundred years.”
Which tells me nothing.”
Miriam stared out the passenger side window for the longest time before replying “According to Hasidic tradition, everyone must have two pockets, so they can reach into the one or the other, according to need.” Mark flipped his directional on as they neared Hathaway Street. “In the right pocket are to be the words: ‘For my sake was the world created,’ and in the left: ‘I am dust and ashes.’”
The truck pulled up in front of the slate blue house with the shutters. “See you tomorrow, Miriam Applebaum.”
Three months passed. Bit by bit, Miriam learned construction. Not that she was anything more than a carpenters helper, rank novice, gofer - go for this, go for that - or fledgling apprentice. Still, she got up every day, and, even when her back ached, hauled her weary carcass off to work.
At first her father showed no interest one way or the other in his daughter’s aberration. To his way of thinking, that’s all it was – a fleeting mental derangement. The Goyim weren’t necessarily bad or misguided; they just did things differently. Religious Jews led perfectly sensible lives. Nice Jewish girls didn’t pound nails. They didn’t work in blue collar trades, building homes for people who worshiped several gods at once and had spent the last two thousand years tormenting God’s Chosen People.
But by the third week of the second month, Morris Applebaum had seen enough. “Meshugenah! What is this craziness?”
Miriam had just returned from work. She unbuckled her leather carpenter’s tool belt and let it fall on the floor next to the bed. “We finished the senior center today,” she said ignoring his belittling tone. “Tomorrow we start renovating that mill complex over by the YMCA. High-end luxury condos—that’s what the developer wants.”
“And this is a job for a nice Jewish girl? Nothing good can come of it.” Rolling his eyes, Morris Applebaum began pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind his back. Miriam momentarily drifted into the bathroom where she stripped her clothes off down to her underwear. Pulling a bathrobe over her limbs she returned to the bedroom. “Fifteen pounds,” she said. “I lost fifteen pounds since I started this job, and I never felt so healthy in my life.”
“You know what you are?” The father suddenly wheeled around waving a finger menacingly in the air. “You’re a Babel. An Isaac Babel!”
“Gotenu! Bite your tongue to say such a thing!” Miriam’s mother was standing in the doorway. The large-bone woman placed a trembling hand over her mouth. “Isaac Babel was no better than a traitor,… a Molotov-cocktail-throwing Jew who joined the Cossacks, the very people who persecuted our race. How could you say such a thing?”
You’re a Babel. An Isaac Babel! Miriam understood perfectly well what Morris. Applebaum meant by the outlandish remark. Isaac Babel was a haskelah Jew, an enlightened soul equally comfortable among Bolshevik rabble rousers as mystical Jews. His stature as a great writer only complicated matters. Hero, traitor, lunatic, visionary, political agitator, heretic, prophet – how one understood the anomaly that was Isaac Babel depended as much on one’s personal biases as what side of the bed he woke up on.
Mr. Applebaum threw both hands up in an attitude of despair and rushed from the room almost knocking his wife down in the bargain. When he was gone, she slumped down on the bed next to her daughter, took Miriam’s hand and kissed it. Then she turned the palm over. “Your beautiful fingers are covered with calluses.”
“From honest labor.” In the yard adjoining their property, a lawnmower fired up. Miriam retrieved her framing hammer from where she abandoned it in near the closet. “Kenny, the man who does all the fancy work, showed me how to properly set nails.” She raised the shank chest high. “Your arm is just an extension of the tool.” She snapped her wrist and let the head of the hammer fall in a broad sweeping arc, striking an imaginary nail dead center. “I can set a sixteen-penny framing nail in three strokes. No wasted effort. Perhaps it’s not as impressive as studying the midrash but still it’s an accomplishment of sorts.”
Miriam’s mother kissed her cheek and sighed. “What we have here,” she waved a hand fitfully in the air, “it’s not enough for you?”
“I’m going to take my shower now,” Miriam replied evasively.
Before she reached the doorway, her mother said, “In a fit of anger, your father compares you to Isaac Babel.” The older woman spoke in a confidential tone so the words wouldn’t carry beyond the threshold. “But deep down, in his heart-of-hearts, you’re the ben h’bachoor.”
“The first-born son,” Miriam translated from the Hebrew. The tacit implication was both flattering and unsettling. The first-born son inherited the father’s fortunes; he honored and preserved his family’s good name. Saul, the religious zealot and sexual glutton, was not up to the task. Wrong man for the job. Miriam was the new ben ha’bachoor – by default, the Applebaum dynasty’s heir apparent.
Her father could rage about the house, muttering to himself, arms flailing like a madman, but squirreled away behind the fierce eyes and bushy eyebrows was an inchoate fear. The fear of losing his beloved Miri, the indisputable ben habachoor. Mr. Applebaum followed all the precepts of his religion. He recited his prayers, never straying from Hasidic custom. When he crawled out of bed in the morning, the stoop-shouldered man carried the added burden of two thousand years of Jewish tradition on his portly frame. But not one word in the many dozens of frayed books that lined his study taught the devout seeker of eternal truths how to love his wayward daughter with moderation.
“Any news from the Shadchun?
“Your father met with Mr. Gorelnik on Tuesday and they discussed certain possibilities.”
“What about the daughter’s feelings?”
“Things haven’t progressed that far yet.”
Miriam lowered her voice. “What Saul does with the Russian girls isn’t right – not for Jew or gentile. Some of those girls are here without work permits or proper visas. If someone abuses them, they have no place to turn.”
“Once your brother is engaged to the Gorelnik girl,” her mother replied nervously, “all that ugliness will all be in the past.”
Miriam laughed abruptly making an unfeminine snorting sound through her nose. “The past has consequences that can come back to haunt you.”
Since graduating high school, Miriam noted a creepi
ng malaise among her friends. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen. But waiting for what? For the moshiach, the messiah, to come the first time? The ‘other one’, according Mr. Applebaum was a well-intentioned, if somewhat misguided, false prophet.
Her best friend, Mitzi, was waiting – waiting to find a husband and begin raising a family. Mitzi’s brother, Yossi, attended Brandeis. He returned from the prestigious college with a bachelor’s degree in nothing-in-particular. After loafing about the house for the better part of a year, the boy went to work in his uncle’s delicatessen cooking brisket, corned beef and tongue. And waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting to figure out what to do with the rest of his miserable, well-educated existence on planet earth.
Of course, Miriam’s brother, Saul, didn’t suffer from any such existential ennui. On Saturday evening, she spied him prancing about the house in a freshly ironed shirt, his frizzy hair blow dried, and cheeks reeking of St. Johns Bay Rum cologne. He favored the fragrance with West Indian lime that left a cloying trail of pungent citrus odors in every room he passed through. “Where’re you going all dolled up?”
Saul was preening in front of the bathroom mirror. With a pair of pointed scissors, he snipped a few errant hairs– his beard was still a work in progress - from the side of his chin. “No place special.” Pulling a billfold from his back pocket, her brother took silent inventory of his finances.
“Must be a heavy date,” Miriam said in a goading tone.
Flashing her a dirty look, he bolted for the front door.
Did he have to call ahead, Miriam wondered, to let the Russian whores know that the rabbinical student, Saul Applebaum, was on his way? Slathered in St. Johns Bay Rum with a hint of lime and horny as hell, God’s anointed messenger would be arriving shortly.
Later that night as she lay under the covers, Miriam felt like a dry leaf in late October. Waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. For what? To fall. To fall and, perhaps, be caught in a frigid updraft of autumnal air. No more malaise. A new life. A new beginning. Which was not to say that Miriam would ever turn her back on her faith. Once a Jew, a Jew for life. But a Jew with a myriad of options. Just as the Sephardic Jews in Medieval Spain learned from the Moslem invaders to cross-pollinate their Cabalist theology with Sufi metaphysics, so too would Miriam Applebaum, the carpenter’s helper, find a way to pass cleanly through the eye of the needle.
On Saturday afternoon, Miriam walked over to Mark’s house, where she found him in the driveway hosing down the truck. “I want my own circular saw.” Over the past few months she had been borrowing a reconditioned Ryobi model that the crew used for odds and ends.
Mark ran a soapy sponge over the tires and muddy hubcaps. “They got a real nice seven-and-a-quarter inch Rigid over at Home Depot for a little over a hundred with discount if we put it on the company account.” He rinsed the wheels off and carried the bucket of soapy water around to the opposite side of the truck. “That’s worm drive, not traditional.”
“Worm drive?” Miriam repeated.
“The motor housing runs parallel with the saw blade and uses gears to increase torque,” Mark explained, “so it’s better suited for the type of heavy-duty construction we do.”
“How soon could I get it?”
He came out from behind the truck, tossing what remained of the soap out across the lawn. “Let me clean up and we’ll take a drive over there right now.”
At Home Depot they went directly to the tool department. “The handle feels a bit strange.” With the fingers of her right hand wrapped around the grip, Miriam hoisted the tool up in the air and made several passes over an imaginary sheet of half-inch plywood.
“Once you get use to it, you won’t feel comfortable with anything else.” He grabbed a carbide-tipped, Freud blade off the display rack. “You’ll want a decent blade to compliment the new saw. My treat.”
After paying for the tools, they went to Friendlies for coffee and dessert. “My father’s unhappy with my choice of careers.”
“Can’t imagine he would be.”
“He called me a modern-day Isaac Babel.” Mark stared at her blankly. “A turn-of-the-century, Russian Jew,” she explained the obscure reference, “who ran off and joined the Red Cavalry.” “Babel was on familiar terms with rabbis, thieves, Cossacks, religious mystics, anti-Semites and murderers. Being a traditional, goody-two-shoes Jew was never enough.”
“So, what happened him?”
“Under Stalin’s reign of terror, Babel was arrested by the Soviet secret police, tortured and executed.”
Mark shook his head in disbelief. “Just what I like - a story with a happy ending.”
“Yesterday in the late afternoon,” Miriam’s mind scurried off in another direction, “Tom was hanging sheet rock in the vestibule.”
Tom McSweeney, an immigrant Irishman, was painfully shy. He arrived fifteen minutes early to work every morning with a metal lunch box, thermos of hot chocolate and piece of fruit. Not much of a talker, he was always kind and respectful. The previous week, when the fire-coded wall board that lined the stairwell leading to the second floor arrived, Tom warned Miriam, “Don’t try lifting that alone.” Interrupting his own work, he helped her lugged the absurdly heavy sheets to the where a metal staging had been erected in the stairwell.
No one on the crew could hang drywall as fast or accurately as Tom. At six-foot-four, the gangly Irishman with the scraggily red beard was constantly in motion, measuring cutting and screwing the gypsum boards in place. Like a whirling dervish, he snapped a line of blue chalk every sixteen inches, hoisted the board in place against the studs, then ran a vertical row of black screws from ceiling to floor leaving a dimpled impression in the gypsum board.
Tom started the vestibule a little after four and by five-fifteen had the entire room covered with the gypsum board from sub-floor to the scruffy furring strips that crisscrossed the ceiling joists. Letting the electrical cord slither through his fingers, the tall man gently lowered his screw gun to the floor. Removing his dark-frame glasses, he wiped the lenses clean. “Here, let me give you a hand with that.” He grabbed a push broom and began sweeping up the white powder and scattering of blue-black sheet rock screws that littered the perimeter of the room.
As they were leaving work that day, one of the other carpenters offered Tom a pair of tickets to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. “Thanks but I got choir practice all week.”
In response to her questioning look, Tom explained, “I sing liturgical music in a community choir. We’re getting ready for a big concert with full orchestra. Carmina Burana.”
“Carmina what?”
“It’s a collection of religious songs dating back to the Middle Ages,” Tom noted. “Pretty intense stuff.”
Miriam leaned across the table. “If I hadn’t come to work at Fournier Construction, I’d never have met someone like Tom.”
“He’s married and the wife’s pregnant with their third kid, so don’t get any ideas.”
Miriam made a face. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”
Mark sipped at his coffee. “There’s Tom and then there’s foul-mouthed Ralphy, who whacks his wife around, goes on a bender and drinks up all the grocery money.” Mark shook his head from side to side. “You’re glamorizing a mundane task; it’s just Tom, a journeyman carpenter, working at his chosen trade.” He gulped down the last of the coffee. “I got to get home and make some calls.”
On Friday afternoon as work was winding down, Mark took Miriam aside. “I’m having a barbecue Sunday afternoon for the crew and their families, if you’d like to join us.”
“I’d love to, but my cousin Sophie had a baby and I got to attend the bris.” In response to his quizzical expression she added, “On the eighth day after male babies are born, there’s a ritual circumcision.”
Miriam’s cousin already had two daughters so the bris was a big deal. All the relatives crowded into the cramped house, while the mohel
laid out the various tools of his trade – the hemostat, scalpel and surgical gloves. When the bris was finished along with the prayers and blessings, the family retreated to the living room for coffee and dessert.
“Our living room is so cramped,” Sophie groused. “I feel like I got to apologize when company comes to visit.”
Miriam pointed at the partition separating the living room from the kitchen area. “Why don’t you just knock that wall down and make the two rooms one.”
“Do that,” Sophie’s husband, Jacob, noted, “and the roof might cave in.” Jacob, who taught philosophy at the state college, ran a thumb and forefinger through his goatee.
“That wall,” Miriam clarified, “runs parallel to the roof rafters. It’s not load-bearing and serves no structural purpose.”
“Look at all the light you’re losing.” Miriam rose and stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling glass slider that opened out onto the rear deck. “The light bounces off that partition,” she pointed at the wall in question. “Get rid of it and not only do you open up the space, but all that glorious sunlight streams straight through to the kitchen area.
“It’s not a load-bearing wall?” Jacob repeated what she said just a moment earlier.
“Absolutely not,” Miriam replied. “That’s the supporting wall over there - the one that runs side to side. This is just a partition. Nothing more.”
“Well, it makes no difference,” Jacob added with a constipated expression, “The wall is a minor inconvenience. Otherwise, we’re perfectly happy with the house.”
Later that night, Miriam’s mother came to her room. “Cousin Sophie’s on the telephone.”
Miriam went to the kitchen. “Yes, Sophie.”
“Can you tear down the wall?”
“Yes, I suppose. But I thought - ”
“I’m the one who slaves away in that claustrophobic kitchen seven days a week—a kitchen that resembles a gloomy dungeon.” There was a brief pause. “About the cost …”
“Just buy the materials. You don’t need to pay me.”