Suddenly an argument erupted on the other end of the line and Jacob was talking on the extension. “What about the ceiling? You’re going to ruin a perfectly good ceiling.”
“When the partition comes down,” Miriam explained, “it leaves a one-and-a-half inch gap that’s patched over with drywall.”
“And the floor?” He sounded borderline hysterical. “There’s fancy Italian tile in the kitchen and carpeting on the other side.”
“I can lay a solid oak threshold over the damaged area. Or you and Sophie can go to the lumberyard and pick out whatever you want.”
“What I want,” Sophie interjected, “is a new kitchen. And we won’t let you work without being paid. How soon can you start?”
So the renovation wouldn’t interfere with her regular job, it was agreed that Miriam would do her cousin’s work on weekends. The first Saturday she brought a DeWalt reciprocating saw to cut down the wall. Sophie had sent her girls to stay with the grandmother for the day. Jacob was pacing the den like a lunatic, fumbling with his beard and muttering to himself.
“It’s going to get a bit messy,” Miriam cautioned. After smashing a few holes in the sheetrock with her framing hammer, she ran the reciprocating saw through the top row of vertical studs, then cut away the section altogether from the bottom. Easing what was left of the dismembered wall out the patio slider, Miriam dragged the refuse into the back yard.
The two-by-four sole plate was pried free with a foot-long gooseneck wrecking bar. A nail claw made short work of the handful of bent and disfigured nails. Next, Miriam brought down the top piece in sections, hurling it out into the back yard in a heap with all the other debris..
“Baruch ha Shaim! Baruch ha Shaim! – Praise God! Praise God!” Sophie danced about the open space. “So much light. My new kitchen - it’s like miracle.”
“A dusty miracle,” Miriam qualified. She went out to the car and brought back her screw gun and utility knife. “Now the fun starts.”
Earlier in the week, the supply company had dropped off several sheets of drywall, which Jacob lugged into the living room. She cut a length of sheetrock to fill the cavity left in the wall, and then screwed the board firmly in place.
“You and Jacob can hold this board up against the ceiling, while I secure it to the joists,” she said, indicating a thin strip eight feet long. Climbing up on a step ladder, Miriam fished a handful of sheetrock screws out of her leather pouch. Whirr. Whirr. Whirr. Five minutes later, the ugly gash in the ceiling was repaired with drywall.
“That’s enough for one day,” she said.
Jacob was wandering about the room with a glazed expression. “What a difference.” He pointed at the late afternoon light flooding in through the patio slider. “All that glorious light.”
Later that night while she was preparing supper Miriam’s mother said, “You’re becoming quite the celebrity.” She was grating potatoes into a bowl for latkes. She diced some onion then added a raw egg, salt and a fistful of flour. “Even hoity-toity Jacob was telling everyone how great the new kitchen looks.”
“There is no new kitchen.” Miriam grabbed a gooey wad of potato batter, shaped it into a pancake and placed it in a pan of hot vegetable oil. After a moment, the edges of the batter began to bubble and turn light brown. “It’s just the old kitchen minus one wall.”
Five minutes later, Miriam removed several latkes, placing them to drain on a paper towel. “It’s a wonder they didn’t laugh me out of the house, I looked so silly.”
Mr. Applebaum said that it wouldn’t be proper for Miriam to wear her work clothes during the renovations, so the girl chose the overly long, moss green skirt and a demure, checkered blouse that buttoned at the wrists - no makeup whatsoever, hair tied back in a dark kerchief. To this drab outfit she added her steel-toed work boots. No matter how absurd, the boots were a matter of safety and non-negotiable. “I can be a good Jew and a carpenter.”
“Yes, Miri.” Her mother brought a braided challah from the breadbox. “It is becoming quite evident that you have knack for doing both equally well.”
In the morning, Miriam arrived back at Sophie’s house with a five-gallon bucket of joint compound and a bag of taping tools. First, she ran a length of mesh tape over the section of ceiling that needed repair. With the blade of a putty knife she kneaded the spongy joint compound deep into the crevice, burying the seam.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” Sophie asked.
Miriam held a twelve-inch sheet of aluminum centered on a plastic grip in her left hand. With a flat putty knife she was working a thick glob of joint compound into position. “You got to get it just right on the edge of the knife,” Miriam explained, “or the trailing edge will run rough and leave a jagged mess.” She flicked the white gooey mix onto the taped sheetrock, pulling a moist line the length of the wall. “Now, we feather the edges away from the joint so the surface stays nice and flat.” She lifted the blade at a sharp angle and made a second, lighter pass over the fresh work.
At noon Sophie called and ordered pizza. When it arrived, she set the food out on the deck. No sooner had they begun eating, the baby woke and began whimpering. The mother brought the new edition out to join them, and, cradling the infant in her lap, began breast feeding.
The late June sun was high in a cloudless sky. Near the rock garden, a goldfinch flitted from a Scotch pine to the telephone line. “My husband doesn’t agree with your choice of professions,” Sophie spoke with a self-deprecating smile as she shifted the baby to a more comfortable position. “Actually, it’s not the work so much as the fact that you’re employed outside the Jewish community.”
“Jacob works at a secular university, where half the student body is either Latino or black.” Miriam reached for another slice of pizza. “I think your husband ought to get his priorities in order.”
“The man is an intellectual snot, but he’s got a heart of gold.” With her free hand, Sophie poured herself some black cherry soda. “I think the prevailing sentiment is that Miriam Applebaum is such an attractive and resourceful woman. It would be a shame if she became emotionally involved with a shegitz, one of those knuckle-dragging Neanderthals from the construction site.” Sophie spoke with a droll, deadpan expression that belied her underlying sense of the absurd.
“Another limb ripped from the tree of Judaism.” Finishing with the pizza, Miriam collected the plates and silverware.
The baby, having finished with his own liquid diet, was sleeping soundly in the mother’s arms. “Truth be told,” Sophie added, “most of the Hassidic men folk would be jealous of any woman who could tear down walls and flood my gloomy kitchen with heavenly sunshine.”
The following Saturday afternoon when Miriam returned home from work, she found a police cruiser pulled up in front of the house. She could hear her father bellowing like an ox from fifty feet away. Inside the house a uniformed officer, hands on hips, was glowering at the older man. “Don’t shoot the messenger, Mr. Applebaum.” The officer was clearly in a rotten mood. “I drove over here as a courtesy to you and your family.” Without waiting for a reply, the officer spun around on his heels, went back to his cruiser and drove off.
Miriam’s mother was standing by the stove with her face buried in her cupped hands crying noisily. “Okay. Okay,” Mr. Applebaum spoke in an unnaturally furtive, high-pitched tone. “It’s not the end of the world. Now, let me go upstairs and get my checkbook.”
“What happened?” Miriam asked when her father was out of earshot.
“Saul was arrested for soliciting a prostitute.”
“One of the immigrant Russian girls?”
“Ten times worse!” the mother wailed. “An undercover police officer. They got my baby, the future rabbi, locked up in the pokey.”
Mr. Applebaum returned. He had changed into a freshly ironed shirt. “I’ll go with you,” Miriam said, draping her tool pouch over a chai
r. On the short ride to the police station, Mr. Applebaum was unnaturally quiet. An air of resignation, more like defeat, had settled over his grim features. “It’s not like someone was maimed or murdered,” Miriam spoke softly. “I can think of a hundred things worse than what Saul did.”
Her father cleared his throat. “Name one.”
Incest. Sodomy. Pedophilia. Fratricide. Almost immediately, Miriam regretted her last remark.
“What he did isn’t the problem.” Mr. Applebaum looked straight ahead. “The schlimazel never learns from his mistakes.” Like a blind person groping his way down an unfamiliar street, the older man tripped and faltered over his words. “He doesn’t understand why it’s wrong to do what he does.” The older man’s lips trembled. “It’s the ‘why’, not the act itself, that worries me.”
At the Brandenberg Police Station, Mr. Applebaum craned his neck to one side, scrunching his shaggy eyebrows together while sniffing the humid air. “Well, your brother’s definitely been here.” The undeniable scent of St. Johns Bay rum with a hint of West Indian lime seemed embedded in every permeable object.
They discovered Saul waiting docilely in a cramped jail cell. Out of a sense of compassion – or was it sick humor? – the door had been left wide open. There he sat with his neatly-trimmed, wispy beard, wire-rimmed glasses and paisley yarmulke like a traveler seated on a bench waiting for the next bus to pull up to the curb.
“What happened to your hands?” Miriam asked.
Saul stared at his bony fingers which were smudged with dark stains. “They fingerprinted me.”
Miriam could just picture her brother having his fingers rolled over a pad of blue ink. Then the humiliating mug shot. Did he even have the good sense to remove the yarmulke? If the picture appeared in the local press, the entire Jewish community, not just immediate family, would be scandalized!
A thirty-something blond with a voluptuous figure was sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup thirty feet away. Her top, a low-slung halter trimmed with frilly sequins, was overly tight. She had kicked off a pair of patent leather, stiletto heels, which lay to one side on the linoleum floor. The woman was chatting energetically to a uniformed officer. At one point she glanced brazenly over at Miriam’s brother but just as quickly averted her eyes. In her left hand she clutched an official-looking document, most likely the police report identifying Saul Applebaum as the dim-witted ‘John’ who propositioned her earlier in an otherwise uneventful evening.
“You couldn’t keep your lousy schmeckel in your pants,” Mr. Applebaum, who was staring morosely at the well-endowed under-cover officer, growled. “Now the whole family’s disgraced.”
Saul cringed and seemed to wilt under the crass indictment. Miriam, who had never heard her father use foul language, felt her brain grow numb. The penultimate insult - now, not only had her brother victimized the Russian immigrant women, but his parents as well. What was it she told to her mother only a week earlier? The past has an uncanny habit of doubling back and biting you squarely on the tuchas. With the vengeance of a deranged pit bull, it rips your tender ass to shreds.
“Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.” Mr. Applebaum’s voice had gotten even softer, almost childlike. Not a good indicator of things to come. He turned to the officer who had brought them into the rear holding area where the prisoners were held. “Now we will pay the bail and go home.”
At the front desk, Saul had to sign for his belongings: a gold watch – a cheap knock-off of a Rolodex he bought from a street vendor on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City, his belt, wallet, some pocket change, a handkerchief with his initials embroidered in wine colored thread and two lubricated condoms wrapped in plastic. “Why two?” Miriam thought. “Was he planning to move from one brothel to the next?”
Around ten o’clock Mark Fournier heard the doorbell chime. Miriam was standing on the front stoop with a pillow and an overnight bag. “Was wondering if I could crash for the night.”
Mark held the door open. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the cop car in front of your place earlier this afternoon?”
She told him about her brother soliciting the undercover police officer. “He gave her thirty bucks so they got him dead to rights.”
“Tough luck.”
Miriam grinned. “No, fitting justice. His name will be printed in the Brandenberg Gazette police log along with all the sordid details.” She tossed the pillow onto the sofa, depositing the bag on the floor. “In the morning, my father will call the shadchun and withdraw Saul’s name as an eligible suitor. Ellie Gorelnik will be free to look elsewhere.”
“You seem a little …” Mark didn’t quite know how to finish the sentence. “Can I get you something to drink? A cup of soda or tea?”
“Why don’t you ever ask me out on a date?” She blurted the words with such force that he took a full step backwards.
“You’re an Orthodox Jew. I figured - ”
“Well maybe you figured wrong. Remember, I’m the heretic, the Isaac Babel of the female set.”
Mark leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. “Don’t talk nonsense. You’re not like that.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. “I want to sleep with you tonight. In your bed.”
“I don’t have any protection.”
Miriam fished a Trojan condom from her shirt pocket.
“Where did you get that?”
“While my father was downstairs berating my brother, I went rummaging through his dresser. He had a whole carton full.”
“Guess he won’t need them any time soon.” Mark pulled her close and felt her warm cheek wedged against his neck. “That Hasidic saying about the two pockets—tell it again.”
“According to Hasidic tradition, everyone must have two pockets, so they can reach into the one or the other, according to need.” Her voice was tinged with a dreamy, effervescent quality, a breathy, musical sonority such as he had never heard before. “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.’”
“And what are we?”
“Too soon.” She rose up on tiptoes, brushing his ear with her lips. “Ask me again in the morning.”
Return to Table of Contents
Curbstone Justice
Seventy-eight year old Melba Fischer rested her body weight on the arms of an aluminum walker as she stared out the living room bay window. The lilac bushes bordering her rock garden were in full bloom, perfuming the air with a sweet fragrance. Pivoting gingerly on the yellow Addidas tennis balls her son, Dwayne, had wedged onto the walker’s front feet, the frail woman shuffled back to the kitchen.
“Brandenberg Police Department. Is this an emergency?”
Melba squinted dully at the phone while holding the receiver at arm’s length for a good ten seconds before returning it to her mouth. “Melba Fischer here. Slate blue house on the corner of Hathaway and Elmgrove. I’d like to report a strange occurrence.”
“Is this an emergency, mam?”
Melba sighed, causing her thick shoulders to heave, and made a disagreeable face. “In a matter of speaking, yes. I’d like to report a semi-naked man in my front yard.”
“Naked?”
“Mostly.” Melba eased down into a rattan chair. She made a mental note to put on her pressure stockings as soon as she hung up the phone. The edema always worsened as the morning progressed making it next to impossible to accomplish the task if she let it go much beyond ten o’clock. “There’s some fuzzy stuff… looks like feathers or a geriatric diaper, but other than that he’s buck naked.”
There was a prolonged silence. “The corner of Hathaway and Elmgrove. We’ll send a patrol car over there right away.” Through the slider near the kitchen sink, Melba had a clear view of the bird feeder where a bevy of raucous blue jays were laying waste to the last of the corn and thistle seeds. The thistle was meant for the smaller birds – goldfinches prefe
rably – but the aggressive jays effectively scared all the other species away. “Lady?” The officer on the other end of the line rudely dragged her to the present predicament.
“Yes?”
“You might want to lock the front door.”
“Dana, get in here!” Chief Polanski hollered. The head of the Brandenberg Police Department only raised his voice with that degree of gruff insistence when the patrolmen’s union was planning a strike or the mayor threatening to slash the annual budget.
A slim brunette drifted into the cluttered office and closed the door behind her. In her late twenties, Dana Crowley’s body exuded an androgynous, tomboyish quality, as though the adolescent years had wound down prematurely. But what the detective lacked in feminine charms she recouped in other ways; close-cropped chestnut-colored hair, a pert chin and slender neck complimented her economical features to good advantage.
“You heard about the two-bit punk they found hogtied on Mrs. Fisher’s front lawn?”
“Town Bully, Wally Whitcomb, gets his comeuppance,” she returned with a poker face as though reading a fictitious headline smeared across the front page of the Brandenberg Gazette.
“The perps beat Wally half to death,” Chief Polanski noted with a sober expression. “Of course, hospital staff only discovered the injuries after cleaning away the tar and feathers.
Debridement – that was the technical term the emergency room doctor used. Dana had watched with grim fascination as they alternately bathed, lubricated and plucked away the noxious debris. “Maybe the attack was gang-related… a vendetta.”
Chief Polanski waved a thick hand dismissively. “They beat him meticulously with a blunt object… a rubber hose or baseball bat. They took great care to inflict as much physical pain as possible without breaking a single bone. I figure the lowlifes this joker hangs out with wouldn’t go to half that trouble.” The chief shifted in his seat and lowered his voice to a whisper. “What with the way the situation unfolded, we want to keep it hush hush.”