The Two-Family House(66)
That first time she was in Teddy’s room, Rose had wandered around in circles. She wanted to touch everything. Did the bedpost feel different? The desk? What should she do with his books and his clothes? Rose had opened the door to Teddy’s closet and found the tall wicker basket that served as his hamper spilling over with dirty clothes and sheets from that morning in December. She picked up the basket to carry it downstairs to the laundry room, but on the way down the steps, the scent emanating from the sheets overpowered her, and she let the basket drop. She watched it fall, tumbling down the steps and knocking into the walls of the stairway, until it landed at the bottom with a thud.
Rose never washed the sheets or the clothes. Instead, she folded them neatly and placed them, unlaundered, in the back of Teddy’s closet. Teddy’s scent was all she had left of him, the last tangible trace that could conjure him to her.
After that day, Rose went to Teddy’s room every now and then when she wanted to be alone. She would pretend she was dusting if anyone asked, but the girls never did ask, and Mort never questioned her. She would sit at Teddy’s desk and stare out the window, and sometimes, when she was particularly upset, she would open up the closet and pick up the sheets. She would hold them close to her chest and breathe in the scent she had almost forgotten. Sometimes in Teddy’s room, as surprising as it was to her, Rose almost felt like she wanted to pray.
Rose had never paid attention to the prayers that were spoken at the services she attended. She was not a religious person, and, like many women her age, she had never learned how to read Hebrew. After Teddy died, however, she found that bits and pieces of certain prayers started popping into her head at different moments. Some fragments had tunes and some were just words. Tidbits from holiday prayers and arbitrary blessings would come together in combinations that made no particular sense to her. Most of the time she didn’t even know the meaning of the Hebrew words she was humming.
After her argument with Mort, Rose felt a new incantation composing itself. So she went into Teddy’s room and opened the closet door. She clutched the worn sheets and let the words fill her head. This time they came to her as a melody, something she had learned as a young girl, from the end of the Mourner’s Kaddish. Oseh shalom bim’ro’mav, Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, V’al kol Yisrael V’imru, V’imru amen. The melody repeated itself over and over, until part of the Unetaneh Tokef, the prayer the rabbis read every year on the High Holy Days, interrupted it. This time it was in English. Who shall have rest and who shall wander, Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued, Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented …
There was no question that she was being tormented now. And somehow Mort was the one finding peace. How could that be the result after all the trouble she had gone to, all the sacrifices she had made to give her husband what she thought he wanted, and all she had lost in that terrible process?
*
A few months later, when the time finally came to take Judith to Boston, Rose tried to avoid making the trip with her and Mort. But Helen had offered to take Mimi and Dinah for the night, leaving Rose no excuse for missing the ride. She could express to no one why she wanted to stay home or why her participation in the excursion would be so painful. Soon they were leaving together, bound for Massachusetts to give Judith the education and the adventure that Rose always thought had been reserved for Teddy alone.
Rose watched the miles go by through the dusty patches on the car window. Mort navigated the road and Judith sat behind them in the backseat, carrying on a conversation with her father as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Rose sat in silence, listening to them talk, listening to the familiarity that had sprung up between them like weeds through a sidewalk crack. And all the while Mort drove and all the while Judith chattered, Rose gripped her hands together on her lap and clamped her lips together. She was afraid to open her mouth, even to breathe, because in the car’s small space, stuck between her husband and her eldest daughter, Rose felt the anger brewing inside her push its way out of her chest and into her throat. She could feel it, twisting and bending, like smoke on her vocal chords, ready to burn its way up to her tongue. She pursed her lips tighter in an effort to stop it, for if she couldn’t, she knew, the truth would burn its way out of her and escape from her mouth in one inexhaustible scream.
Part Four
Chapter 49
NATALIE
(May 1961)
“I’m never getting married,” Natalie announced. She was standing on a small wooden box while Mrs. Tuber, the tiny seamstress in an ancient housecoat, pinned up the hem of her bridesmaid dress. The pale blue fabric was stiff and itchy. The skirt was too full, the neck was too low and the waist was uncomfortably tight. She couldn’t wait to take it off.
“Mmm hmm.” With a mouthful of pins poking out in all directions, Mrs. Tuber was unable to respond. Her gray head was bent over the hemline of Natalie’s skirt, and Natalie was afraid the woman might never make her way back to an upright position. “Are you sure you’re good all hunched over like that?” she asked.
Mrs. Tuber shuffled forward and bent down further. “Mmm.”
This was Natalie’s first time at Mrs. Tuber’s. The shop consisted of one small room, with a rack of clothes on one side and an old wooden table on the other. Two sewing machines were set up on the table, and spools of thread in every color were strewn across the top. Natalie wanted to leave. She didn’t like how people passing by on the street could see her through the shop’s picture window. She kept her back to the glass while she stood on the box, but she could see the reflections of the people walking past in the mirror that ran the length of the shop’s rear wall. One little boy pressed his face up against the glass and stuck his tongue out at her. She glared back.