The herbs were burned while my father was at work, fixing machinery for Westinghouse that frequently took him all over Michigan. He was gone for days at a time all through my childhood, and with me sick and presumably dying, he was gone as much as possible. That made Hannah’s activities much easier to carry out. He never smelled the herbs, he never saw the salt, he didn’t notice the hand hung on a string around my neck. The rabbi came and went without his knowledge. Saving me was a secret between my grandmother and my mother. But Hannah was the one who did all the work.
I began to be conscious more and more. Whenever I woke, Hannah was praying over me in Yiddish. Although she was the daughter of a rabbi back in Lithuania near the border with Russia, part of the Pale of Settlement to which Jews were confined (except for prostitutes much in demand and boys taken for the Tsar’s army who seldom survived to return), Hannah did not know Hebrew. She knew Yiddish, of course, Russian, Lithuanian, some German and heavily accented English, but she regarded herself as almost illiterate because she was ignorant of Hebrew. Women often prayed in their own language while the men prayed in Hebrew. She often spoke to me in Yiddish but I answered in English. I have no idea why this was how it was. Somehow it was expected.
I can close my eyes and see her rocking back and forth davening in a singsong, almost musical voice, standing over my bed. She was a small woman in height, like my mother, like me—particularly as I age and shrink. Unlike other Orthodox women, she had long hair and not a wig because my grandfather, dead ten years by this time, had forbidden her to cut it. He said if any angels were tempted, they would have to come through him to get at her. Sometimes when I opened my eyes, I would see her with her hair braided round her head, occasionally covered with a kerchief. Sometimes when I woke, I would see her as she came to bed with me, her long chestnut hair streaked with white tumbling down, cascading around her shoulders. In her seventies, she had lush hair like a waterfall and it smelled good, not perfume, something else. Once she had been entirely beautiful, but giving birth to eleven children in poverty and sometimes in danger had robbed her. Her face was puffy and wrinkled, her eyes glazed with cataracts that would eventually blind her from doing embroidery for money. She was stooped and round. But her face when she prayed almost glowed in the twilight of my room where the blinds were closed and the curtains drawn. She was talking to G-d, imploring him, demanding, begging, speaking to him as a wife might speak to a husband in those days. Reminding him of the good things, the mitzvot, she had done, giving tzedakah to the poor even when she too was poor, taking in an orphan when she already had so many children, lest the child be neglected. Now it was Ha Shem’s turn to do right by her granddaughter.
I began to be aware of the voices from the house next door, right across their driveway from us. I heard kids playing in the street, allye, allye-outsinfree. I heard the ice cream truck jingling its tune, the horse clopping past pulling the car of the fruit and vegetable man, the knife sharpener calling to housewives. I had been gone from the world into a hot dark place of nightmares, gone from life. Now I was slowly coming back to my bed, my sickroom, my Hannah, my tuxedo cat Buttons who was now allowed to visit me.
I remember the first day I could sit up in bed. My mother read me a story from a book I loved, about an adventurous goat. I remember eating raspberry-flavored rennet pudding. I remember my mother’s chicken soup, of which I could take a little. Usually I helped her make it. We would pluck the feathers together and burn off any remaining nubs. Sometimes we made dusters of the feathers, tying them together. My mother added the unborn eggs to the soup.
Everything felt new and precious, but when I tried to stand, I fell. I had lost half my body weight. Photos from before show a slightly chubby kid with banged up knees and a big grin always doing something. Nobody in my family took any more photos of me till I was in high school, when girlfriends took them of each other. When I returned to school in the fall, I was pale blue, you could barely see me if I stood sideways, and I fainted a lot. I was as weak as a kid could be and survive. From a strong active tomboy, I turned into a bullied nerd who began to read a lot and excel in school. It was all I was good at now. I believed my bobbelah had saved me, but for what I wasn’t sure. My old pleasures were gone. My parents seemed to be ashamed of me, especially after I was diagnosed as nearsighted by the school nurse and sent with my mother to have my eyes tested and fitted with a cheap pair of glasses. Four eyes, I was now. I was regularly beaten up, especially by the Polish Catholic kids. Only my old alliance with the African American girls saved me sometimes. I escaped into books. I wrote stories about my heroic cat Buttons. The books I liked the best were animal stories because it didn’t matter if it was Lad or Lassie who was saving the drowning boy. Girl animals could have real adventures and be heroes. The other kind of books I liked were adventure stories supposed to be for boys. The girls teased me about the books I read during library periods. I didn’t care. The books for girls were insipid. The weaker I was, the more I dreamed of having superpowers, of great deeds, of harrowing adventures on the high seas or in space or in the jungle. I still loved going to Cleveland, when I could go to shul with Hannah and the other ladies would make a fuss over me. I liked being with women only. It felt safe and warm.
By the time I was twelve, I had regained my strength although not my good eyesight. That I would never get back. But I could walk ten miles, I could run faster than all but one Black long-legged girl in my school, I began to hold my own in fights. I had friends again.
When as an adult I was studying with Reb Zalman, he admired my golem novel He, She and It. One day he asked me my Hebrew name. I told him. He was displeased. He changed it to Ma’ora, bringer of light. I said I would hyphenate but I could not abandon the name my Hannah had given me when everyone said I was dying and had given up on me—except her. I honor her with the Hebrew name of bitterness that she gave me so the angel of death would pass on—and it did. And I lived and grew up to write about her and many others whose stories would otherwise be lost.
Somebody Who Understands You
We were all in love with Mr. Danelli, every one of us girls on the high school newspaper, the Signpost, and more besides who’d had him for English and still dropped in to talk. His first name, we knew from Laura who was a study hall aide and peeked in his file, was Domenico, but the other faculty called him Dan. He was short, stocky, intense with dark brown hair combed over the reddening center of his scalp. His eyebrows were coarse and jaunty over his big grin. He would look you directly in the eyes, leaning forward, till you were sure no one could interest him more. Besides, he had the habit when talking of touching your hand or forearm or if you were standing, your shoulder. His hands were always warm.
I used to wonder why he endured us: lonely, over-imaginative girl nerds bringing him our writing, our drawings, our videos or merely our troubles to his corner desk in the Signpost office. “My mother won’t let me …” “My father took away my cellphone for a month just because …” “I need a car, really I do, and will they listen?” “Everybody lies all the time!” “School is a waste of time.” “Do you think I’m queer?” “Why does everybody bully me?” “I hate my brother!” “Do you believe in telepathy?” “… and he never called me back!” In the world we were rebelling against, jammed in aging tract houses between the half-empty mall and the abandoned car parts factory, he stood torch high, our embodiment of the intelligent liberal.
When any new girl came into the Signpost office, he would call them over for an interview. He could spot the type of gauche eager nerd that interested him in five minutes. Don’t imagine he was scouting for sex; physical contact never went further than that touch on the hand or shoulder.
He had friends among the younger faculty, married men and unmarried women who sent students in to be mined. He liked to think of himself as better at departmental politics than he was; we knew that the principal, the chairman of the English Department and the other brass didn’t quite trust him. He was much too friendly
with students. We felt protective. Almost we wished him to be in danger of being fired, so we could rush to his defense. But being one of the only faculty who taught a couple of courses at the community college gave him some kind of prestige. He was one of the few teachers with a PhD.
During our second intimate talk, he invited me to use him as a father confessor—his idea of his relationship with us. Well, we confessed everything but our collective passion. A few into drugs or drink dared tell him. Muffled rivalries clashed about him. Heather or Kelly would walk in while I was pouring out my father’s callousness and would search for something in the filing cabinet behind him until she got rid of me.
He did more than sympathize: he polished us—oh, roughly, but we were as spiny as sea urchins. He taught me to say Moht-zart, what I should admit liking to read, the location of the only good bookstore in our city, not to dress as if my body were two sizes larger. He determined our beliefs as thoroughly as any church: a highly partisan Democratic interest in politics and civil liberties, a craftsman pose that people were to be admired who did anything well, no matter if it were cake- or poem-making, pitching or playing the violin, playing tennis or singing the blues.
Yet what did we love but the steadiness of his dark gaze that seemed to see us whole as we wanted to be seen and the warmth of his hands, his vulgar humor. His was the only real animal presence among the faculty. No one but me ever saw the poems Kelly wrote about him. I remember she used sun imagery.
Kelly Aimes was his favorite that year, as she had been the year before. She was a year ahead of me, brilliant, becoming attractive in a rose and auburn way. I envied her. Yet she was desperately lonely. Her parents were divorced, her mother bitter and mistrustful and madly possessive. More than a helicopter parent, she wrapped herself around her daughter like a net. If Kelly told her mother she was stopping after school at my house, Mrs. Aimes would call her to check. Mrs. Aimes would harass her with questions if an errand took longer than expected. Her senior year, her mother put a GPS on her cell that showed where Kelly was at all times. Yet she did not complain as I did. I would hear Mr. Danelli’s deep voice, intimate and mocking by turns, and her quick passionate soprano. A pal of his who taught algebra would drop by between classes. Mr. Danelli would lean back in his chair grinning in easy camaraderie while Kelly sat tense and impatient, ignoring the intruder.
“How goes it, Dan?”
“Performing the seven life functions. How was the meeting?”
“Another cop in the school. The scandal of a few butts in the urinals. How’s Pat?”
Pat was the wife. A couple of times when he had me over on a Sunday, I met her. Kelly went oftener. Somehow Mr. Danelli had charmed Mrs. Aimes into believing he was a good influence on her daughter, so Kelly could visit without an armed escort.
Pat was plump and full-bodied, with straw-blond hair and wide brown eyes. We had grudgingly to admit that for a woman her age, she was not bad although she should lose twenty pounds. Brandon was ten, Ethan, five, and Emily, two. They were harder to swallow than Pat: the tricycle on the lawn, the litter of toys, the bathtub rimmed with rubber ducks, a potty you had to pick off the toilet. I was a little shocked that the kids spent much of Sunday watching TV in what he called The Animal Room.
The house itself surprised me. It was way out in a suburb I’d never heard of where streets were called lanes and named for revolutionary war battles. Although the houses were newish, the trees had not all been chopped down. There was a wall of windows giving on to the rather straggly garden with a basketball hoop and a gas grill. The whole first floor was one huge room except for the kitchen, which seemed weird to me because the stove was in a granite island in the middle of the floor. The chairs were high stools like I’d seen when I passed the dim bar The Cozy Corner although it wasn’t on a corner and reeked of beer and stale smoke on my way from the bus to our house. This ceiling was high but sloped and a tiled fireplace stuck up all the way. He told me his father had built it for them and I was naïve enough to think he meant by hand.
Supper included the first artichokes I had ever tried to eat, then shrimp and spaghetti, which they called pasta. I helped scrape dishes for the dishwasher. Then we sat before the fireplace while jazz played. His wife served sherry that he let me taste but not drink, then occupied herself putting the children to bed before it was time for him to drive me all the way back home. Kelly said Pat was omnipresent but seldom in the room. I didn’t like her either. Kelly said they had married while he was still in graduate school. We fancied that they had to get married. She said his father was a wealthy contractor Dan detested. The father had tried to force Dan into his business, where Pat’s two brothers functioned and grew fat and powerful.
We knew he was bored with high school. He taught a couple of night courses at the community college. “Why don’t you teach full-time there? Or at the city college?” I asked him. We felt he was too good to be wasted here—once we were gone, of course.
“You know how many applicants there are for every position? Grad schools turn out ten PhDs for every available job. I get paid almost nothing for those courses—not enough to keep one of my kids in clothes for half a year. We’re too used to living beyond our means, anyhow.”
You have to put writing first, he’d tell us, or music or art or dancing. Art was a discipline of mind and body. If one of us produced an artifact that pleased him, he’d flood her with praise and confidence. I remember prancing home filled with a sense of expectation so intense I felt the streets should ring with music.
Other times he would be abrupt, leering. Once Kelly and I came in to ask him about colleges. He listened wearily. Then he looked at us with intense disgust. “What does it matter where you go? You’ll get married, put your husband through and then the five D’s will take over.”
I let Kelly ask him what they were. “Dishes, daddy, diapers, discontent and then, finally, divorce.”
“Think that’s clever? Better than eraser dust, Eliot and exhibitionism. Up your ego!” She walked out.
Every other week they spatted. Only two days after that I overheard him telling her, “Never mind these idiots. Someday you’ll meet a man who can appreciate you, your mind as well as your looks.”
I remembered that conversation the next spring when Kelly came back to see us during spring break from the state college. “You’re looking fit,” he told her. “I like your hair long.”
She was boiling with news. She loved college. Her English professor thought her poetry showed talent. The dormitory was so noisy she bought herself earplugs. She sat on the edge of his desk, swinging her ankle. Her old tense defensive posture was gone. “I met this music student. He’s twenty. We’re sharing a dorm room but I think we’ll move out to an apartment next fall …”
He waved me out of the room. The rest of the conversation I heard from Kelly, sputtering over coffee. “He implied I was being an idiot. That I’d fallen for the first guy who ever paid me any attention. That all Mason wants is sex—somebody he’s never met. That I’d get pregnant and have to drop out of college. That I was throwing my life away … and on and on. He sounded like my mother.”
“Does she know?”
“Are you kidding? The two times she drove up to visit me, we moved his stuff out and my girlfriend Chloe pretended to be my roommate. Mason and I, we’re both thinking of going to summer school so we can stay together.”
“Will your mother let you?” After all, she was paying most of the bills the scholarship didn’t cover.
“I’ll sell it to her as a way to graduate faster and save money. She’s afraid of taking out a loan. She has a terror of owing money, from when my father dumped her and left her with a mortgage.” She shook her head. “I just can’t believe how absolutely uncool Mr. Danelli turned out to be. He kept berating me like I’d done something terribly wrong. I mean, I was a virgin till Mason. Half our class were fucking their boyfriends by junior year—or sucking them off, anyhow. It isn’t like I’m screwing the football
team! He’s a major disappointment. Don’t trust him with your secrets anymore, believe me.”
I wondered if he were jealous. After all, Kelly had been his favorite. I was just one of his chaste harem of nerdy girls. I even wondered if perhaps he knew something about Mason that Kelly didn’t. After she returned to college, he lectured all of us about what a mistake Kelly had made, “None of you will ever do anything but breed like your mothers. Is that what you want, to end up in a decaying tract house in a decaying neighborhood in a dying city?” I said I didn’t think she’d done anything tragic, or even unusual. He roared and lectured for two weeks and then he stopped. We were all grateful that the crisis had passed and he was restored to good humor and an interest in our individual troubles and attempts at creation.
That Saturday Kelly called me. “How’s college?” I asked her.
“How would I know? My mother made me come home. She cancelled her last check and she called the dean of students and said I was needed here.”
“What happened? Did somebody die?”
“She found out I was living with Mason.”
“Did she come up without warning?”
“She was told. Guess who.”
“He couldn’t!” But I knew immediately that she had to be right.
Kelly’s mother was determined to separate the couple. She would not lose her daughter, she kept saying.
“Don’t send her away to another college,” Mr. Danelli warned Mrs. Aimes. “She’s only get in the same mess. Send her to the community college where I can keep an eye on her—and it will save you a bundle anyhow.”