This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (11 page)

In the end it was Yitzy who told me how it had happened between my mother and father. He didn’t know the whole story, but just enough. He told me all of what he knew because he was bad with secrets. Also because I crashed into him holding the picture of my father and his gun.

It was early March, and still gray and chilly, but inside it had been a marvelous day. It was the end of Purim, my favorite holiday, and I had dressed up as a Chinese lady. Nachum had been dressed up as a cowboy who made weird faces.

Purim was a fun day, a celebration of the time centuries before when the gentiles in the Persian Empire had tried to kill the Jews but failed. It was Queen Esther who had saved the nation by persuading the Persian king to instead kill Haman, the evil plotter who came up with the murderous plan. The king allowed the Jews to hang the treacherous Haman and his ten sons in the main city square. So it was an upside-down day of joy and miracles, and the reason that, once a year, we dressed up in merry costumes, and exchanged food, wine, and holiday money.

My mother had sent Nachum and me with a basket of strudel, pineapple, and wine down the block to the witch who lived in the corner house. The witch was a woman who my mother said was just an old, lonely lady, and who Briendy said was a witch, definitely a real witch—and as she was the one who lived in the house next door, I figured she knew better.

So I sent Nachum, basket in hand, to knock on the witch’s door. Perhaps she’d turn him into a frog. He walked up the steps, basket and all, but then turned to me where I was half hiding behind a parked car. I banged furiously in the air to show Nachum how to knock, but he just laughed as though it was funny. He then stared at the doorknob for a long minute, and just when I thought I’d have to do it myself, he pushed the little black button doorbell.

The lady who was a witch opened her door. She peered at him, but she did not turn him into a frog. Instead, she took the basket and gave him twenty dollars. Then she closed the door, and Nachum came back down, looking at the money as if it was a mystery. I dragged Nachum back down the block, irritated at the stupid witch and wondering why, today of all days, she had to be nice. But then Nachum let me have the money in exchange for a perfectly round rock I found right there, so I forgave him for not turning into a frog.

It was late that night, after the festivities, that my mother told me I was to wake up early the next morning. Passover, she said, was in a little over a month, and the house was nowhere near done. The cleaning lady was arriving at seven sharp the next day to begin the great Passover cleaning with my room, particularly my mattress, which had a lot of crumbs because of all the snacks I ate there.

I was too tired to think of it until I lay in bed. Then I remembered the thing I’d hidden under that very mattress, the one that was to be cleaned first thing. It was a picture of my father as a soldier. It was the picture I’d taken with me from the secret place, so I could look at it sometimes before I went to sleep. The picture could not stay. By early morning my mattress would be pulled out, turned over, and tilted sideways against my closet doors, and anything found beneath it thrown out—or worse, put in the palm of my mother’s hand.

I stood up. Gently I pushed up the corner of the mattress and pulled out the photo. I needed to return it to the secret drawer now.

I waited for silence, for the house to quiet down and the sounds of voices to fade. I nearly fell asleep standing, but the lights in the kitchen finally went dark, and the door to my parents’ bedroom clicked shut. I counted to sixty and then ran down the hall toward the study, to my mother’s closet. I wanted to put the picture back fast, maybe slip it in the space between the fake and real floor so nobody could see it and realize that it had been taken out. That’s why I didn’t see Yitzy coming from the other direction until I crashed right into his chest. I gasped and stumbled back. I watched the picture as it flew into the air, swirling once between us, then floating down and landing gently on the floor.

My hand reached for the photo, but it was too late. Yitzy had already seen it. He looked down at it, then at me. I looked up at Yitzy, then down at the photo. My father’s gun pointed out from it. When I looked up again, my brother’s eyes were wide and his lips formed a perfect O. We stared at the picture lying between our feet as if it had us under a deadly spell. We did not move. We did not dare bend down.

Then a mattress creaked. There were footsteps in my parents’ room at the end of the hall. Paralyzed with fear, I stared at Yitzy and saw panic in his eyes too. He snatched the picture, grabbed my hand, and together we ran down the stairs.

It was five quick steps from the bottom of the staircase to Yitzy’s room. He locked the door behind us for safety. We listened in silence to the movement above our heads. When it was finally still, we breathed.

Yitzy held out the picture.

“Where did you get this from?” he whispered, half angry, half wondering.

“From…from…from there,” I stammered, pointing in a general upward direction.

“Huh?” Yitzy asked. “There?”

“Yes, there,” I said. “There. In the room. Upstairs. In the drawer where Mommy put it.”

My brother looked doubtfully at me.

“Mommy didn’t put this in a drawer!”

And then, just like that, I could not hold it in any longer. I burst out in a defiant whisper. “It was in the secret place under the closet floor!”

Yitzy’s expression changed. At first he looked plain surprised, as if he couldn’t believe I’d go and do such a thing. Oh, he’d known about the place under the floor for a long time; it was no secret. But that I’d gone and rummaged through it? At night? By myself? I should’ve called him first.

But then he looked as though he was thinking, the way he did when he couldn’t decide. I could see him wondering if he could trust me, could see the wavering in his eyes.

I sat very still.

In the end he told me what he knew because he was bad at secrets. He liked telling stories he wasn’t supposed to tell. But he made me vow that I would not spill the beans to anyone else. A promise was not enough, he explained. A vow was what we needed, the strongest kind of promise, accepted as a pact not only on earth between men, but also in Heaven by God.

So I vowed that I would not tell, eyes closed, legs crossed, hands held out so he could see that my fingers weren’t crossed. I agreed that if I ever broke the agreement, I’d lose half of my afterlife to Yitzy, as God Himself was witness. This was a very grave thing.

Yitzy didn’t know the entire story, but enough of its parts and pieces, some from my aunt and some from his friend who knew from his older brother. The older brother had heard it from his father. Or maybe a cousin. Yitzy had put together bits of the story like scattered puzzle pieces, one here, another there, about the cursed-love thing and how it had come about.

Once, in the faraway land of Jerusalem, there lived three sisters who came from a noble family. The eldest daughter, Chana, was engaged a week from the day she turned eighteen, to a lucky young man from among the finest and wisest of scholars, and from a family of substantial means. And so it should have been with the second daughter, Zahava, more beautiful than the first, who became of marriageable age just twelve months after her older sister.

Zahava, the middle daughter, was known for her charm and intelligence, and her dark, lovely eyes, just like those of her mother, Madame Miriam Strauss. When Zahava walked down the street, Chassidim quickly bent their heads to the ground, so as not to stare at the slender, regal girl, dressed in fashionable yet modest clothes from the designer boutiques of Tel Aviv. A girl like that should have been contentedly married the way her older sister had been, but Madame Strauss was a very particular woman. She was particular about her diet, her clothes, her shoes, and the man her favorite daughter would marry. The phone in the apartment with the spacious roof porch rang shrilly day and night. Matchmakers arrived at the door unannounced. From far and wide, marriage prospects were suggested from the richest and most important Chassidic families of Israel, Europe, and New York.

The millionaire Glutnick promised a summer house in Switzerland. The Tybergs offered their eldest son, renowned for his brilliance and piety. Everyone wanted a bride like Zahava, with royal bloodlines, sterling character, and queenly looks.

But Zahava turned nineteen, and twenty, and then twenty-one, and still, for Madame Strauss, no man was good enough. If there was money, then he did not have the right looks; if he had the looks, then out there, there must be greater scholars. Menachem Strauss, the father of the noble sisters, tore out his hair in anguish and worry. His beautiful Zahava was nearly twenty-two.

“The greatest scholars have come and gone,” he cried. “The princes in their prayer shawls have all married other, less choosy girls.” And his queen and princess were still looking for a dream. It was not only his second daughter he was worried about, but the third and youngest, who sat waiting. Waiting and waiting. For tradition dictated that the elder must be married off before the younger, like the engine of a train whose wheels must start rolling before the second car can follow. There is simply no other way for a train to run.

Esther was quiet about how long her sister was taking to make a match. But often, in the evenings, she’d leave her house. Sometimes she’d wait in the central bus station for the bus that drove across town. Sometimes, impatiently, she’d walk. She’d go out to where her central neighborhood ended and another began. It was there that she met with the soldier she loved; it was there that they could walk and talk for hours, far from peering eyes.

The streets were wider where they met, lined with wealthy residential homes and carefully tended rosebushes. Soon the soldier would finish his service in the army and would be free to build his life. He had joined for the family stipend and the free education, but now, three years later, his duty was nearly done, and Zahava was still not married.

In the secluded spots of the city’s parks and on the streets where Jews who did not wear hats lived, the soldier and the youngest of the Strauss sisters pondered their lives and laughed, remembering the past. For they had known each other for years already, from when they were teenagers chatting in the kitchen of the soldier’s home, when he was still only the oldest brother of Tziporah, her best friend.

No one but Tziporah and her older sister, Hadassah, knew of their secret love. They, of course, had known of it for a long time. It was Tziporah who had declared them to be a perfect match. But recently, she had followed the rest of her family and moved to New York, where there were jobs and opportunity, and where they did not have to be so poor.

Only the soldier had stayed, waiting, waiting for Zahava to find the man lost in her noble dreams and for Esther to be free. But it wasn’t just the waiting that was hard. It was not knowing what would come after. Because though Esther knew exactly whom she wanted to marry, she could not imagine how she’d get her family to agree.

The morning after Yitzy told me this story, I woke up early, because the cleaning lady had come at 7:01 to clean for Passover. I ate a bowl of cereal and napped on the couch, waiting for the yellow school van’s strident honking. In the van, Leah had saved me a place, but I shrugged and walked past her because I wasn’t in the mood. Instead, I went to the backseat, bumping all the way to school on the scratched-up bench as if everything was just regular, and nothing had happened.

But something had happened—something terrible. My mother and father had fallen into love.

I could not understand it. My father had lied to me. My mother had betrayed me. Without the Holy Rebbe’s permission, they had just gone and fallen into love. Who in their right mind would do such a stupid thing? And now look at how much trouble it had brought upon us.

At first I was angry, but by the time we arrived at school, that was gone. I felt only fear. I did not sing along during prayer time. I could not remember the right place in the holy book. I spent most of recess in the bathroom, and during English I gave my snack to Blimi because I wasn’t hungry. Blimi told me that she’d let me copy from her homework, but I didn’t really care. None of it mattered anymore, now that I was cursed. Because Nachum wasn’t the only one named after my grandfather. I was named after him too. In fact, I had been named after him first.

My mother’s father, Reb Menachem Baruch Strauss, had died a sudden death in 1978, a year and a half before I was born. My mother, consumed with grief, badly wanted to name a child after her beloved father, and waited for a son to be born. But instead, she gave birth to me, a girl. It was the
rav,
a Torah scholar certified to answer religious questions, who explained to her that she could use the female version of her father’s name—Menuchah for Menachem, and Bracha for Baruch—until such time that a boy would be born. And so, on the Shabbos after I was brought home from the hospital, I was to be named after my grandfather: Menuchah Bracha Strauss.

But then my father changed his mind. He changed it on the way to the synagogue, two blocks before he arrived. Suddenly, half an hour before the naming ceremony that followed the Sabbath prayers, he remembered that no grandchild had been named after his own pious grandmother, the devout Bubba Tzirah, the one he and his brother Zev had jumped on as she lay dead in the bed.

My father thought it over for a moment, maybe two. Then he made his decision. It would be a compromise.

In the synagogue, he stood at the podium facing the Holy Ark, the tables against the walls filled with herring, kugel, and wine, as is traditional for these ceremonies, and declared my name to be Menuchah Tzirah Strauss, one half after my grandfather, and one half after my great-grandmother. “And may her father and mother be blessed to raise her in Torah and in marriage, and in good deeds.
Amen!
”

For days afterward, my mother did not speak to my father. Perhaps for weeks. But what she could not have known at the time was that it was not my father but an angel who’d put the thought into his head. It was God who’d made my father change his mind in that last, crucial moment, and then left him to face my mother, trying to explain.

It had been a miracle from Heaven, and it was the only reason I was sane.

I had been saved when my father changed his mind, but Nachum was doomed. It was he, a boy, who bore the full brunt of my grandfather’s rage when he was properly named after him: Menachem Baruch Strauss. Because my mother’s father, I knew, had never forgiven her for falling in love. It was said he died of a broken heart, and when she gave my brother his name, he cursed her from Heaven with a son who could not feel or love, who could not speak or understand, a child who would tear her sinful marriage to pieces.

I was certain that if I’d been named after my grandfather, I would have been crazy, just like Nachum.

When I came home from school, I went straight to my room, now spick-and-span and hopelessly clean for Passover. I sat in my blanket box with my diary, breathing in the scent of Windex and Soft Scrub as I tried to think.

I thought about my family. Were my mother and father meant to be or not? If not, did that mean that my entire family was never meant to have been either? And what was I supposed to do about that now that I already was?

If love cannot be, as everyone said, and my parents’ marriage was not preordained, then had my siblings and I all come about by accident, an unexpected flaw in the Grand Master Plan? Could love be made forgivable, for example by repentance, or only through suffering as punishment? And once there had been suffering and punishment, did the marriage become okay, approved by the heavens after the fact? Perhaps God did change His mind, preordaining the unordained, unordaining the long ordained, switching and replacing the meant-to-be pieces of His vast, cosmic plan. It was impossible to know, which I thought was terribly unfair.

I thought about my grandfather and the half-a-name I carried. If love was not forgivable by suffering or repentance, then maybe even Bubba Tzirah’s name wasn’t enough to protect me. Maybe my grandfather still meant to curse me too. He was just waiting for the right time, when I grew older, and then suddenly he’d strike me with half the doom for the half-a-name I carried. Perhaps my grandfather was simply biding his time, waiting until the dawn of my bas mitzvah, or one week before my wedding night. Only then would he unleash his rage as I slept in my bed, and I’d wake up forever half crazy.

I could barely sleep that night, worrying that, in the morning, when my mother came into my room, I’d be mad like Nachum. Did it hurt to be crazy like that? Would I know that I was me? Would I be able to scream for help, to tell anyone that I was trapped inside the madness? I imagined opening my mouth and only funny sounds coming out. How would my father ever know that I was in there? How would my mother know that I was trying to reach her?

My cousin Shaindel said that craziness was catching. You could get it if you shared the same blood. That’s why nobody wanted to marry me or my family. And maybe that’s why it was enough for my grandfather to curse just Nachum. From there it would spread on its own, and I’d be infected by my brother until I was halfway gone.

I stood in front of my bedroom mirror, staring at my reflection. I looked closely into my eyes—would I know the crazy if it was there?—and then at the rest of my face, trying to imagine what the curse would look like if it came.

It was pitch-dark in the house by the time I fell asleep, murmuring the nightly prayers for the third time. Nightly prayers kept bad dreams at bay. Maybe they’d do the same for a curse.