“The service was very crowded,” I say.
“I’m glad,” she says.
“Were you there?”
“No,” she says. “It was… too much.”
That’s the same thing Mrs. Shoenstein said about why Chaya didn’t go. Too much.
“Is there anything else about her you could tell me?” I ask, figuring I should at least try to get a quote I can give the desk. “Was she… had she been acting differently at all?”
Miriam’s eyes wander toward the back gate.
I repeat my question and Miriam pulls her eyes slowly back to me. But she says nothing.
“Because, you said you hadn’t seen her since Tuesday? I just wonder if…”
“I am not certain about the dates.”
“Oh,” I say. “Okay. Well, is there anything you could tell me? What did she like to do? Did she…” I’m flailing around for examples of activities, but everything that comes to mind-movies, sports, adventure travel-seems culturally inappropriate. “Did she like to read? Or… cook?”
Nothing. It’s almost as if she doesn’t hear me.
I lower my voice. “I heard… I was told she’d lost a baby recently.”
Miriam shakes her head. I can’t tell if she’s indicating that, no, she did not lose a baby, or yes, and it was very sad.
“Thank you,” she says finally. She begins walking toward the back gate. “Rivka would have liked you.” She opens the gate. Apparently it is time for me to go. “She liked to talk.” And with that, Miriam turns and walks back into the house. I stay in the yard for a moment. Once again, I forgot to ask her last name. Maybe Saul can help with that.
I get to the Starbucks before Saul and pull out The Oprah Magazine while I wait. When I open it, a piece of paper slips out. It is a handwritten note.
Chaya,
I know you are frightened. I was frightened after becoming engaged. I think most of us are frightened. But I cannot answer your questions about whether your marriage will be a happy one. I married because it hadn’t seemed possible to do otherwise. I know now that I always had a choice. Had I chosen not to accept Aron’s proposal, my life would have become more difficult in many ways. I do not know where I would have lived, but now I know that I would have lived.
What does this life mean to you, Chaya? Why do you pull on your stockings in July? What do you feel when you pray? I wish I had asked myself these questions when I was 18. Hashem can see the truth inside your heart. And I now believe that to defy that truth is to defy Hashem. Your choices may cause pain before they bring joy, but no joy can come from lies. Especially lies you tell yourself.
Yours always,
Rivka
I read the note again. The handwriting is a mix of print and cursive. Flourishes on the y’s and f’s, but otherwise utilitarian. The paper is thin and pink, the kind of paper I wrote notes to my friends on when I was eleven years old. Not notes like this, though. This note is more honest than any note I’ve ever written. And judging by its soft, easy crease, Chaya read it often. My dad used to tell me stories about my mom as if she were a character in a fairy tale. Like most suburban girls growing up in the 1990s, I learned about sex young. I was nine when our Girl Scout troop went to Planned Parenthood to learn about ovaries and sperm. I learned the rest sporadically from Madonna songs and Maury Povich and maybe someone’s mom’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I had several years for the act itself to morph from mildly horrifying to potentially cool, and several years after that to actually get involved in doing it. Not my mother. My mother, my father said, learned about sex only in whispers. And then one day her best friend, a girl named Naomi, became engaged to a man in his twenties. Naomi was seventeen, and my mother was sixteen; neither had ever traveled farther than the Catskills. Her interaction with men was limited to family. And suddenly, Naomi was to be married. Which meant sex. My mother, my father said, stayed with her the night before her wedding. Naomi was sick with dread. She knew not to expect love, but when she’d met her fiance, she told my mother, he made her stomach turn. Your mother, said my father, vowed she would not find herself in Naomi’s position. She was not ready to run away then, my father said, but she was planning. She knew that the best way to postpone an engagement was to make herself undesirable to a potential groom’s family. That was the word he used, “undesirable.” When he came to this part of the story, I always pictured my mother burping in public, or parading around in dirty clothes. That’s what undesirable meant to me: ugly, unladylike. But that’s not what my mother did. What my mother did was start reading-and asking questions. Word got around, and it bought her some time.
I fold the note back into the magazine. I’m somewhat surprised I haven’t heard from the city desk, which is good because I’m not sure what I should tell them. There is no way I’m turning the letter over. They’d print it.
Saul arrives, and when he sits down I hand him the magazine.
“There’s a note inside. It’s from Rivka.” As he opens it, carefully, I explain. “I met an old woman at the funeral who said her daughter Chaya had been friends with Rivka. So I went and talked to her. She was very pregnant. Her mother knew about the gardener, but Chaya thought maybe Rivka died in a car accident. It seemed weird that the mom knew so much, and Chaya knew so little.”
“Not necessarily,” says Saul as he opens the note. “Most Hasidim do not watch television or read English newspapers or use the Internet. But there is a lot of talk, especially around something like this. Depending on who they had spoken to, they could have heard completely different stories. Or nothing at all.”
He stops talking while he reads the note, which he balances open on one wide palm. After a minute or more, he closes the note and slips it back into the magazine. “This was given to you?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We were sitting in the kitchen and she told me that Rivka had been her babysitter and had sort of counseled her before she got married. Then she went into her bedroom or something and came back with this. And then she told me to leave.”
“A magazine like this is contraband in an ultra-Orthodox home.”
“Really?” I could see Cosmo being banned, but Oprah?
“Hasidim are taught to fear influences outside their community. They consider most of American culture to be corrupting and much effort is expended to avoid and demonize it. You don’t see it, but there are highly subversive ideas in this magazine. Even Oprah herself. Unmarried. Childless. Hasidic girls are taught that having children and bringing them up in a Jewish home is the most important work there is. They are called and blessed by God for this work.”
“Right, but…”
“There is no ‘but.’ Not for many people. For many people, this is enough.”
I’ve offended him. “I’m sorry.”
Saul shakes his head. “Thank you for this note. This note is very revealing. Have you spoken with your editors at the newspaper about it?”
“No,” I say. “They’d probably print it.” I chuckle, trying to lighten the moment. Saul doesn’t smile. “Seriously. It’s yours now.”
“Thank you,” says Saul.
“I spoke to Miriam again. And the little boy. Yakov.”
“Rivka’s boy?”
“He was coming home from the service. He said his father told him his mother had been sick.”