The Sisters Weiss (18 page)

“Oh, does it have to be on campus? All those chatty students, all that noise…”

Hannah exhaled silently. “So what about Blue Hill Farm on Washington Place, right near the West Fourth subway station?” she said as politely as she could.

“Okay, see you tomorrow.”

*

“Dear Cuzin Hannah, may G-d let you live long,” Hannah read above the din of the lunchtime crowd. “I am your couzin Rivka, the daughter of your aunt Pearl. Maybe you are shocked to get such a letter from a person you don’t know? I am very sorry I never met you. The daughters of two sisters who come from the same mother, this is very tragic. I do not know how this thing happened or who we should blame. And so I write to you, a stranger, and hope you will show some chesed to me.”

“What does that word mean, ‘che-sed’?” Hannah asked her mother.

“First of all, it isn’t pronounced like the past tense of cheese … It’s like clearing the back of your throat when you are getting ready to spit! ‘Chhhhe-sed.’ It means a pure good deed, a favor you do with no desire or expectation of reward.”

“Got it.” She continued: “I am a Bais Yaankov girl, seventeen years of age. I am an excelent student, my teachers all say this, and I very much long to continue my learning. Emes?…”

Hannah paused. “What…?”

Rose got up and walked around, looking over her shoulder at the page. “It means ‘to tell the truth.’”

“Emes? I want to be a doctor! But my parents—may they live long!—forbid me even to think such a thing, because in a secular college they are afraid I will lose my purity and faith and intermarry. Instead, out of this fear, they have found me a man they say I must marry in the next few months.

“I have met this young man twice, and my parents are already arranging the vort.

“What’s that?”

“It’s like an engagement party, only it’s the kind of engagement you can never break. It’s easier to marry and get a divorce.”

“Gee whiz!” Hannah shook her head, looking down at the paper and continuing to read: “I am desperate! I have a right to live my own life. Everybody has that right!”

Rose shifted uncomfortably, coughing, the words eerily familiar but unplaceable. “Wow!”

“Yeah. I know,” Hannah said, without looking up.

“I wish to run away from home before this happens, but I have no wear to go. Please couzin, I don’t know who else to turn to. Everyone in my family is against me! No one understands. Please call me on my cell phone 9 - - - - - - - - -

“Rivka.”

Hannah folded the letter up, slipping it back inside the envelope and handing it to her mother over the small table in the crowded restaurant. Rose lifted her palms in horror, drawing back.

“Honey, if you call this poor girl back and offer her assistance, your life will become a living hell. And so will mine.”

“That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?”

“It’s not the half of it.”

“Mom, even if she was a total stranger, we should want to help her! But she’s blood. How can we just turn our backs?”

Rose hesitated. “Listen, I’m not saying I don’t have tremendous sympathy for her. But as my mother used to say: ‘You don’t need sharp teeth to eat borscht!’”

“Come again?”

“In other words, you don’t need to be a genius to figure this out. First of all, imagine what would happen if I facilitate another runaway bride from the house of Weiss? They’d have the final proof—not that they need it!—that the awful things they’ve believed about me all these years are true. That I made the choices I did not because I was different, but because I was evil.”

Hannah was flabbergasted. “Mom, after all this time, you still care what your family thinks about you?”

Rose hesitated. “You don’t, can’t, understand what it’s been like for me, Hannah. Besides, it’s dangerous.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous. They’re just old-fashioned Jews, not goodfellas. What can they possibly do?”

“Oh, my little naive princess, are you ever clueless! They will send their thugs here and put you and me and little Rivkaleh into the hospital.”

“Give me a break. Thugs?”

“Oh, you better believe it! You think you can’t bash someone over the head with a crowbar if you wear a skullcap and a black suit? You think their beards interfere with their fists? Think again. Don’t imagine that stuff is just made up about them having modesty patrols that roam around beating people up. It’s for real. And they do it all for the sake of heaven.”

She actually looked scared, Hannah thought, shocked. This was nothing like the fearless woman she knew as her mother. “Well, you left, and you are still here to tell the tale.”

“But I never told you anything about what I went through,” she answered with uncharacteristic bitterness.

Hannah shook her head slowly. “When I got this letter, I thought that you, of all people, would sympathize and know what to do. After all, doesn’t she remind you of someone you once knew?”

“Yes, and that’s just the problem. I know what’s lying ahead of her if she goes through with this. She doesn’t, and neither do you. Besides, as you can see from her letter, she’s naive and impulsive. She wants to be a doctor? She can’t even spell!”

“But you had the same horrible education and look at what you’ve accomplished with your life! We could help her to go back to school, Mom. We could guide her. I’m sure she’d be so grateful…”

“Yes, grateful, at the beginning, until the tug of the family kicks in.… It’s like the pull of the magnetic field over gravity. We’ll take her in, try to help her, and then she’ll get discouraged and homesick and look down that long, lonesome road ahead among strangers in an unfamiliar world. She’ll have guilt dogging her every step, thinking God is going to punish her for having a brain and wanting to make her own choices. Then, she’ll blame us for everything and go back home and get married. Maybe she’ll invite you—certainly not me, the scandalous aunt—to the wedding. But you better not go, because your crime of trying to help her will be viewed as so unforgivable that even Yom Kippur will be wasted on you. My family believes some crimes can never be forgiven, and some people are so low they can never repent. And you will be one of them right alongside of me.”

Hannah looked stricken, Rose thought, brushing her daughter’s dark curls out of her serious, dark eyes, her heart aching for her sensible, kind, liberal daughter who gave money to refugees in Darfur and bought bag ladies lattes in Starbucks. She was so much like her father. “I know you want to do the right thing, honey. But sometimes, it’s not so obvious what that is. Do you really need this in your life right now?”

In my life, Hannah thought, the faint hope she’d secretly harbored that her mother might somehow rescue her by offering her own spacious apartment as an alternative slowly slipping away and the reality of another person intruding into her tiny, private space becoming dreadfully real. Where would she sleep? Not on that couch.… With midterm exams coming up and a bunch of papers to write, did she really have time to deal with this?

Besides, maybe her mother was right. Not getting involved would force her young “cuzin” to rethink the whole thing before it was too late. Or was that just a rationalization on her part, a selfish but prudent desire to bar the doors of her ordered life against strange and uncontrollable forces?

“Okay, I hear you. But one day you are going to have to tell me everything.”

“One day…” Rose smiled tepidly, her mouth dry.

Hannah stuffed the envelope back into her handbag, the way she did unsolicited mail from various worthy charities, hoping to delay both the disappointing answer to their requests and her conscience pangs. In the meantime, she hurried to classes.

*

The course was Women in European Society and Politics. The lecture hall was filling up. She scanned the room and saw Jason looking over his shoulder at her with a roguish smile, always at least half a flirt, if not a whole one. He waved.

She squeezed past dozens of knees to get to the seat he had saved (for her or Stacey or Deidre…). His long legs were snugly outlined in worn jeans with strategically placed fashionable rips. His thick, navy blue sweater with the little polo player smelled of fabric softener, the way his blond wavy hair smelled of conditioner. But nothing could drown out the reek of testosterone that oozed from his every pore, at least in her imagination. In a room full of women, he was like a lighthouse.

“Hi. Have you seen this?”

It was a printout of the new Web site for NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Proposals are invited for a panel to be entitled “Documentary Techniques in Pornographic Film and Video” … a panel of three presenters will explore a recent and profound trend that appears across pornographic genres: the emphasis on capturing “real” sex through narrative techniques typically found in the documentary film tradition …

“This is the reason I switched to history. Tell me, is everyone in your department a pervert, or just the vast majority?”

He snorted with laughter.

For months, he had been playing at something that she had yet to figure out. On the one hand, he had never asked her out, but on the other, he saved her seats and could talk to her for hours whenever he ran into her. Once, he even showed up at her apartment. He’d sat there eating her potato chips and sipping her beer until finally hinting he’d like to spend the night.

As if. What did girls who said yes to these kinds of proposals do the day after? Ignore it? Exploit it? Forget it? And were they really capable of doing any of the foregoing without feeling embarrassed, stupid, or used?

Still, she didn’t blame him for trying. She was even a bit flattered. Everybody wanted something. As far as she was concerned, the only unforgivable crime was seeking her friendship just to meet her famous mother.

All her life she had had to deal with those kinds of opportunists: girls in high school who became her best friends in order to get her mother to give them tickets to gallery openings. Teachers who befriended her and then got her mother to give free talks to their favorite charities. Boys who introduced her to friends as the daughter of Rose Weiss, the famous photographer.

Given that he wasn’t guilty of that, and the fact that there wasn’t a great selection of men in women’s studies, she kept hoping against hope something worthy might develop.

“Busy tonight?” he asked.

“What did you have in mind?”

“Well, we’ve got that midterm coming up…”

Of course. What else? Free tutoring.

“Sorry,” she murmured, hiding her disappointment.

“Really?”

“Yeah, Jason. Really.”

She settled back, annoyed, waiting for the lecture to begin.

She’d taken up women’s studies to be inspired. Instead, the more she learned about the lives of women, the more depressed she felt. She’d always held on to the belief that feminism had transformed the world. Yet as much as things had changed, when she studied the modern world in light of what she was learning about the medieval world, the more she realized that they had stayed the same. Men still ran the world, initiating relationships and controlling them.

Take the medieval concept of Kinder, Küche, Kirche. Didn’t every fundamentalist sect today have the same “barefoot and pregnant” attitude toward women? And in the name of multiculturalism, was this attitude not now receiving respect in the Western world, which it didn’t deserve?

Among Jews, though, there was an interesting twist. While fundamentalist Jewish society also glorified the stay-at-home housewife whose “pride is within her four corners,” it also, rather ironically, threw women out into the working world, insisting they support their families so their husbands could sit and learn the Talmud. And so even hundreds of years ago in the shtetel, pious daughters were taught to speak, read, and write in several languages, as well as to do rudimentary math in order to sustain the family business.

Predictably, social custom had risen up to ensure that women didn’t get too uppity, defusing the explosiveness of a society filled with educated women married to unworldly men. Yes, they let their girls learn how to run a store, or teach—or, nowadays, become an accountant or a computer programmer. But, God forbid, they would not be allowed to go to college or become a doctor or lawyer or artist. For how could an unworldly, uneducated yeshiva boy cope with a wife like that?

She thought of her cousin. Perhaps that was why they married off their girls so young, before they had a chance to look around and get ideas into their heads? And when that didn’t work, social custom ensured that breaking an engagement and getting a divorce were major hurdles completely under the men’s control.

A sudden vision of Rivka’s letter tossed carelessly between the leaking pens, half-used tissues, lipsticks, and dusty change in her overstuffed bag made her ache with guilt. Isn’t it my obligation as an enlightened woman to reach out a helping hand? Almost immediately, the thought was countered by a backlash of annoyance of equal intensity. How did she find my address?

“What did I miss?”

She looked up to her left. It was that new guy, Simon Narkis. She felt the butterflies flap their tiny wings inside her stomach. He was a transfer student from Chicago. He had long, straight dark hair and Trotsky eyeglasses and wore a black leather jacket over a vintage T-shirt in some wild sixties print. Today he had a well-worn copy of Madame Bovary sticking out of his pocket—one of her all-time favorites.

There was something intense and appealing about his lean face, Hannah thought, studying him as nonchalantly as she could. While he certainly didn’t have the sex appeal of a Jason, he seemed to have … something else of equal attractiveness. Mystery maybe? He was a Judaic studies major, minoring in Jewish literature, which also piqued her interest. His smile was shy, almost secretive, making you feel it wasn’t shared with just anyone. He was definitely someone she was interested in getting to know.

“Late again, Simon?” Jason said, leaning over her to look at him, a touch of rivalry in his pose, which delighted her.

“Yeah, don’t I know it! I’m working in a bookstore on Second Avenue and the traffic is sometimes impossible.”