While on the phone with Barry, Judith found her calling—that of Soother with a capital S. It was a role she knew well. Mother of three children, the amount of boo-boos, she cleaned and bandaged obscene. Except for young Jenny, who relished cuts and scrapes and lived for the sight of blood. Beyond boo-boos, Steph required solace on a constant basis due to her dramatic flair. Everything, a crisis for a teenager. Her socks not crimped enough—God forbid. Not the right scrunchie for her hair—suicide. The on-again, off-again tragicomedy of her relationship with Kent, a boy whom Judith found decidedly not Jewish enough, more like the type who ran singalongs at a Christian camp. Then there was me, the middle child, whose wheels were always turning like a cat. Smarter than her, mischievous but sensitive like the rest of the Gimmelmans, except Jenny. No matter how much trouble I got in, Mom always forgave her favorite “little cub” and wouldn’t let me feel bad for behaving like a shit.
But what to do with Barry now, who she’d known and grown up with since they were sixteen and took charge in a way that sometimes took her breath away. Barry always had a plan, then a backup one, and a third lingering around just in case. When as teens he said he was going to make a lot of money and give her everything she desired, he was right. Every goal reached. She liked to think she was a part of the reason for that success, holding together a strong home while he shone, but she wondered if that was really true. Barry, so bright that he outshone everyone around him, the need for others dimming in his light. And yet now, now, he needed comfort, assurance. She had it in spades to give.
She focused on what was truly important. Health. Family. But when she got off the phone, she poured a hefty glass of vino and wandered into her walk-in closet of hat boxes galore. Each of them, a friend. How could she possibly say goodbye?
If you would’ve told young Judith that this would be her life, she would’ve spit in your eye and laughed at the tall tale. The fact that jewelry dripped from her body when all she planned on that day was going to the grocery store. A family vacation in the Seychelles where she swam in water so clear it was like a mirror, and they had a private hut on the edge of the world. That she devoted Tuesdays to shopping with a gaggle of other rich girlfriends and that those Tuesdays were now in the past. No more bottomless credit cards. She closed the walk-in closet door.
And yet, she had told Barry she didn’t care. She’d grown up with little. Things, tough for her from the start. When she was a child, her father had a swift battle with pancreatic cancer. Dead in two months. She watched him disintegrate. The hospital bills left her and her mom with nothing. Bernice took work as a seamstress, the only skill she had, her without even a high school degree, while Judith rebelled. By fourteen, she smoked a lot of pot. At sixteen, she followed bands around on tours, living in the back of VWs. She grew her hair long and never wore bras, found psychedelics, and hitchhiked to Woodstock. It was there she met Barry, whose crazy hair stood out like a bush, and even though it wasn’t burning, it was the first time she believed she saw God. Bernice had become borderline religious. They kept Shabbat, not even allowed to turn on a light. Nothing unkosher was allowed inside the house once her father got sick. Bernice went to temple whenever she wasn’t working, and it was open, but Judith never bought what Judaism was selling. That was until she met Barry, her own spiritual Torah, in the body of a five-foot-nine Jewish kid from the Lower East Side.
He had a crooked nose that she wanted to honk and these doofy glasses, swaying to Joplin’s “Cry Baby.” She popped an acid tab and glided over as if a force linked them. Like a wraith, she appeared in his line of vision. They danced together before they even spoke. He had a couple of friends with him, and she had gone there with Jeanie and Ruth, two girls she had known since grade school, but she couldn’t remember their names anymore, or even her own. His breath smelled like Rheingold beer, a tongue probing her soul as they Frenched, his shirt unbuttoned, and a carpet of chest hair she clung onto. He scooped his hand in hers as the acid kicked in and pulled her away from the crowd to a tree that looked like an enormous spider.
“I’m Barry,” he said, and thankfully she remembered her name.
“Judy,” she said, because that was what she went by at the time.
With the music making history in the background, they talked over one another, telling the story of their lives. He had just graduated high school, got accepted at Columbia. She dropped out, following music wherever it took her. He was going for a business degree because his parents owned a bakery that was always struggling and in danger of closing. He never wanted to live that way. She told him of her own tough ride: burying her father, a newly religious mother who’d given up on her. He asked what she planned on doing with her life, and she had no idea. She honestly had never thought about it. She wanted to simply float. And then the acid really kicked in, and he made weird, swirling love to her up against the spider tree, both of them going in and out of their bodies, and afterward she nestled in his chest fur and thought of it as home. When fall came, she moved into his dorm room even though he had a roommate. By senior year, she was pregnant with Steph, and his parents had passed. Surviving the Holocaust together, one could not exist without the other, they were too enmeshed. When his mother got very sick one winter and died of a mysterious infection, his father was gone before spring arrived. Barry sold the bakery, and they lived in Colombia housing while he went to B school. When he graduated, he got a job, and by the time they had me, he’d saved enough to buy their first home in New Jersey. Bernice had moved down to Florida at that point to live in an Orthodox community. If, on a random day, you would ask if my mom was happy, she’d definitely say yes. Beyond her wildest dreams, even though she’d never fantasized about them specifically. She simply floated into this existence.
But now she knew of the Gimmelmans’ inevitable decline, the state of their finances. Their first home upgraded for a bigger one, impossible to pay off. The mortgage piling up. And did they need his and hers Maseratis? Neither paid off either. Everything on credit. Barry always assuring her they were earning way more than they were spending, but not after today. The plunging market, a halt to their parade. She didn’t know how much they had actually lost and what Barry meant by everything. It was impossible to lose everything. They had too much. But she’d never heard him speaking the way he did on the phone. A scared undertone reverberating in his voice, as if he had given up. She’d coax him back to reality. She couldn’t lose him. She had not an iota of skill that could put food on the table and, as a single mom of three, would be lost. The only thing to do was soothe. Ease him off the edge. Pull him away from the nightmares. On the news, there had been images of men flinging themselves off of high buildings on Wall Street, and she couldn’t watch for fear of seeing him. And then his call. His nervous, babbling call, and a commandeering voice bubbling in her she never knew she had. He’d provided for her for over twenty years. Now it would be her turn to help him rise again.
She knocked back her glass of wine as the front door slammed open, and the kids burst inside, oblivious to the sinking universe around us.