Hush (4 page)

I asked Devory what to do now that our Kathy-the-Gentile secret pact was broken and all that borrowed gum had been for nothing. She said that there was no choice but to make another one after the furor had ceased because death had not yet done us apart.

The next day after school, I trudged home with Chani chattering excitedly behind me. She had never been in a
goyishe
apartment before and she knew that it was a sin, but it didn’t really matter because afterward she would repent. And, anyway, maybe the goy wasn’t really a goy, but only a secret Jew from a thousand years ago. Finally we got to the house that didn’t quite seem to reach the heavens anymore. Chani asked me in a whisper where they lived, and I pointed up to the tower. She stopped dead in her tracks and stared at the place with her mouth slightly open until I yelled at her to come on already!

After supper I wanted to do homework, but Chani said no way—she wanted to see the goy now. We climbed up the forty-one steps to Kathy’s attic apartment and I knocked loudly because Kathy couldn’t hear well. Chani stood behind me trembling in awe and fear, ogling the brown door and the gentile that stood somewhere behind it.

Kathy finally opened the door and she was delighted to see me. Her curly red hair bobbed happily all over her face, and she was wearing a huge red shirt over long white denim pants. Kathy had always been fat, but I never noticed just how heavy she was until that moment. I walked into the tiny living room cluttered with furniture and plants and almost stepped over Kootchie Mootchie, Kathy’s large, white furry cat that I had stupidly forgotten all about.

Chassidish
Jewish families do not have cats or dogs because they are dirty and scary and not kosher. Chani, who had never seen a cat up so close, shrank back in fear, and I quickly asked Kathy to please, please lock up Kootchie Mootchie in her bedroom until we left. So out went Kootchie Mootchie, meowing angrily, as Kathy led us into the living room and sat us down on the sofa squarely in front of the big black TV.

Big black TVs were even worse than cats and dogs and were strictly forbidden in our little world. Kathy sometimes watched TV in the late afternoon, so I would always try to come up then because my mother told me not to. This time, though, I secretly kissed Hashem for seeing to it that the TV was off. There was also a large picture on the wall right on top of the TV with a pretty lady in a shawl looking down at a tiny baby in a cradle surrounded by a sheep and a goat. It was Mary and her baby of course, but I didn’t dare say that I knew. Chani wanted to know if the nice-looking lady in the shawl was Kathy’s grandmother, but Kathy laughed and said, “Oh, no, that’s Virgin Mary.”

Chani was about to ask further on just who that might be when Mr. Leo Prouks walked into the apartment and Kathy left the room. I thought desperately of a good explanation, and I told Chani that Virgin Mary was Kathy’s husband’s grandmother and the baby was Leo’s father. Why else would the lady and the baby be hanging all over the place in the apartment? There was one picture near the entrance, another one in the kitchen, and another one I had seen once in the bedroom.

But Chani wanted to know why Kathy had a small statue of the lady and baby over there on the table, and what were the goat and the sheep doing there? I told her that that was the way the goyim did it in the olden times. All the mothers would stand looking down at the baby, who lay in a cradle near a goat and a sheep, because that was the way it was and that was that, okay!

Leo walked into the room then, and Chani turned pale at the sight of the big non-Jewish man, but he only nodded at us and set up a small standing tray near the armchair right where we were sitting. Leo was a silent man and I had always been a little afraid of him. He looked just like a
goyishe
man was supposed to, at least in all the books I had read. He was very large with curly, thick black hair atop a gruff, dark, silent face—and he even had a hoarse voice. Once, when I was little, he helped me fix my bike, and since then I wasn’t afraid of him.

But Chani was, and she gave me a look that I ignored until Leo left the room and Kathy came back with a tray of all-the-way kosher candies. They were ultrakosher, she convinced us, setting the tantalizing tray of my favorite toffees in front of our faces. The grocer who sold them to her had a long white beard and looked like a rabbi. We recognized the familiar kosher company slogan scribbled across the candies and we each grabbed a handful.

Kathy giggled like an eager child and began blabbering to Chani about how she was my good, good friend since I was this teeny and just came out of my mother’s stomach, and what a pretty baby I had been, and how my eyes turned from dark green to brown when I was two months and three days old, and she still had the card I made for her when I was in pre-l-A, and I had always come up to her to sing songs that I learned in school, and some other things.

I chewed fiercely on the sticky toffees and hoped Chani wouldn’t believe what Kathy said or she would go tell everyone that I was friends with a goy. I was desperately trying to interrupt when Leo walked into the room holding a plastic plate heaped with food in one hand and a small cup of milk in the other. He set it all gently down on the tray in front of Kathy and told her she should eat. But Kathy pointed to the cup of milk, whined like my little brother did at supper, and said that she doesn’t like milk in that cup—he should bring her the big cup.

Kathy acted like a baby sometimes, and I knew it was from the breakdown, but Leo didn’t seem to care. He just picked up the cup, walked out, and soon returned with a large glass of milk. Kathy then pointed to the fork and whined that she couldn’t eat with such a small fork, would he please bring her the bigger one. He brought her a bigger fork, cut up the chicken on the plate, and with a huge teasing grin told Kathy that there was an ice cream fudge in the freezer that he had brought home from the restaurant. She should eat it when she finished supper. Kathy laughed and said, “Oh, no, why did you do that? You know I shouldn’t eat that.” But Leo just laughed back, and when he finished cutting up the chicken he left the room.

Kathy told us that she was always trying to diet, but Leo didn’t care how big she was and always brought her ice cream and goodies. Leo worked as a chef in a small restaurant somewhere far away. He would leave the house every morning at four a.m. and sometimes I would hear the steps creaking painfully as he strode down the stairs on his way to work. That was why he didn’t eat with her, Kathy explained. He went to sleep at eight when he came home from work because he had to wake up so early. Kathy gobbled her food and told us that she would give us some but it wasn’t kosher, and Hashem wouldn’t be happy if we ate it.

I was about to tell Chani that it was time to leave when a barefooted Leo walked in wearing a blue-and-white-striped bathrobe. His hairy toes stuck out from beneath the long robe, and we were shocked that somehow they strongly resembled our fathers’ toes. Leo bent over Kathy, and she looked up at him and quickly wiped her mouth. He stroked her cheek softly with one hand, and they gently rubbed their faces together.

Then they kissed.

It was a short kiss on the lips, but it confused me completely. I knew that goyim kissed, but I thought that was only in the TV box, where there was always a bunch of pretty people who slobbered over one another. Fat people never kissed like that, and definitely not ugly ones, and I could not understand why they had done that. I had never seen any couple kissing each other before and it made me feel funny inside. Then I thought that maybe it was because they didn’t have children. The mothers and fathers I knew never acted that way. They just lived together and were mothers and fathers.

Kathy never noticed our stunned faces. She chattered on after Leo left, and I decided it was absolutely time to leave. Kathy walked us to the door and told us to please come again. We were such beautiful girls, and next time she would buy us kosher chocolate. I said maybe and quickly ran downstairs with Chani giggling all the way behind me.

My parents attended a wedding late that night. It was way past my bedtime, and my sister yelled at me to go to sleep, so I didn’t. I wanted to see how late I could stay up. After all, if I ever mistakenly turned into an adult, my bedtime would be in the middle of the night. But really there were more pressing issues keeping me awake. My goyim-in-the-attic secret was out and I knew that I was in trouble.

There was no way Chani was going to keep Kathy a secret; she had such a big mouth, and by tomorrow morning I must find a solution or everyone would know everything and I would be lost forever. They would all know of the big, white furry cat; of the big black TV; of the statue of Leo’s grandmother and her baby near the sheep and the dreadful goat; and most of all, that they had kissed on the lips together.

When I finally fled into bed after my parents arrived home, I knew I had no choice. Kathy had to die.

I didn’t really want to die. Sometimes, though, I wanted to fall asleep and never wake up again. Dying wasn’t the same as sleeping forever. If you just slept forever, you never had to see the dead. You never had to look at them, at their agonizing sorrow, and answer questions they did not know to ask when they were alive.

- - -

I told Kathy that I couldn’t do it any longer. The first time I came up to see her after all those years she smiled happily and said, “Gittel, you are a young lady, and even prettier than when you were a baby.”

“Do you remember me from when I was a baby?”

“Of course I do.” She laughed, remembering. “You had those green, green eyes, so pretty, and then one day when you were ’bout two months, they jus’ turned a different color. Now you got dark eyes, nice brown dark eyes.”

“Do you have pictures of when you were a baby?”

“Me? Oh, my pictures were still black and white.”

“I’ve never see them. Let’s look at them.”

“I gotta drag ’em out from that closet.” She pulled a folding chair to the corner closet. “Let me see, here it is, I can’t reach this thing—take it.”

She stepped clumsily off the chair. A picture fell out of the album. Kathy picked it up, panting lightly. “Oh, look at this—just look at this picture. It got only half of each of us here. See, here’s me and here’s Leo right when we got engaged. Look how nice and thin we were.”

“Who made your marriage?” I asked.

“Made it? Nobody made it. We met at a dance on New Year’s Eve in Greece, where he lived, and we fell right in love.”

“What kind of love?”

“Love kind of love. The kind you fall into when you fall in love.”

“What’s that?”

“What?”

“Love.”

“Oh, Gittel, one day you’re gonna fall in love and know.”

“We don’t fall in love.”

“Everyone does.”

“We don’t do such things.”

Kathy sat down heavily on the couch. “Oooo—you just look—here’s my niece. She’s just a baby here. Now she’s nineteen and all in love with Rob. He’s her neighbor and they’ve been friends since eighth grade.”

I was bewildered. “Do gentiles have a deadline for falling in love? Like we have to get married. Is not falling in love a terrible thing? Like for us not getting married?”

“Well, it’s complicated,” she said. “Let’s look at the pictures now.”

I sat down next to her on the couch in front of the TV. She showed me her two brothers and sister dancing in the garden. She showed me her father holding her when she was two, pigtails sticking out from the sides of her head. She showed me more pictures, but I don’t remember because she looked up at me then and said, “Gittel, why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying.”

“I see the tears in your eyes.”

I could see the black-and-white pictures blurred and fading in front of me.

“I…don’t know.”

“Gittel, don’t cry. Tell me what happened.”

“I did.”

“Tell me again.”

“Why?”

“It will make you feel better.”

“No.”

And I cried and I cried and couldn’t stop. I could hardly bear this when it happened because the tears always came without warning, sometimes in the kitchen or in school with my friends, and I would have to run to the bathroom or my room and tell them that it was nothing, just stomach cramps, because no one was allowed to know that I haven’t forgotten. No one was allowed to remember what I knew. Sometimes I hit myself to stop it. I would hit myself hard on the head and in my face until it hurt, until I would get angry instead of sad, and then I would stop crying. But that day, I didn’t. I cried and I told Kathy about Devory, how she was always knocking on my window.

“Devory?”

“Devory…”

“What does she tell you?”

“She doesn’t speak. She only comes to my window every night, knocking. I can see her outside in the wind. Her hair is always wild, flying in the cold, and she wears the same light blue nightgown, the torn one that she got from her sister.”

“Do you open the window?”

“I have to. If I don’t she keeps knocking, and I can’t go back to sleep.”

“So why don’t you open it right away?”

“I do, but then she just disappears. Last night I ran, I ran really fast, but as soon as the window is open she disappears. There is only wind.”