When I woke up the next morning, I had no idea where I was. Then I remembered. I felt strangely safe and relaxed. The basement had a window, and the sun shone white through the glass. It was 11:30, and I realized I’d slept late because of all the wine. Someone had brought down clean clothing for me—a long skirt and a long-sleeve shirt—but I decided to put back on what I had been wearing the day before. I didn’t take a shower, but I fixed my hair as well as possible with sink water.
I went upstairs and found Miriam and Mrs. Schwebel sprawled on the avocado-green sofas in the living room. They were drinking tea, and both of them had little plates of crumbs—the remnants of what looked like challah. There was also a plate with a half stick of margarine on it and a bowl of dried fruits and nuts. At this point I didn’t know where I stood with food at all.
“Well, you’re finally up, sleepyhead,” said Miriam.
She looked so happy to see me. But what did she even know about me: that I was Jewish, ate frozen yogurt every day for lunch, and lived far away from my family? Was that enough to make a person like you? I supposed it was.
I could only look at her and grin. Her mouth was wet with tea. I wished I could go over and pull her close to me, give her a big warm kiss. I wondered how she would kiss, if she’d know what to do from studying old movies or find her way intuitively. How would she react when my tongue entered her mouth? Would she prefer me just to suck on her lips lightly, or would she follow my lead and put her tongue inside my mouth? I wanted her tongue in my mouth. I wanted to swallow her tongue right there in the living room.
“Would you like some tea?” Mrs. Schwebel asked.
Of course I did. I wanted to be part of their little party, whatever they were talking about. They’d been gossiping, I could tell from the tinkle of laughter as I approached.
“We will be having lunch, but not until one o’clock,” said Mrs. Schwebel. “You must be famished. Let me fix you some challah with margarine like we had for breakfast.”
“Okay,” I said.
It was amusing to think of an hour and a half as too long to go without food. In my old life, I’d considered anything less than four hours easy. Four hours meant that food was on the horizon, and it was the idea of forthcoming food that mattered most: an edible future. I’d subsisted on ideas, fantasies. But in this house, an hour and a half of hunger was not to be suffered.
The three of us talked while I drank my tea and ate the challah. The tea was sugared and nondairy creamed, and the challah sweet.
“In my day, in Monsey, you would never have thought of staying home from synagogue,” said Mrs. Schwebel. “Everyone was up in everyone else’s business. The women were always secretly taking attendance.”
“More nosy than here in Los Angeles?” asked Miriam.
“You think the community gossips here? It is nothing compared to Monsey. You could not do anything as a child, good, bad, or otherwise, without someone else sniffing around you and reporting it back to your parents. And I’m not even talking about having a drink, but something as simple as lifting your skirt above your ankles for a moment on a hot day. You are lucky, Miriam, that we are so liberal.”
I wondered if Mrs. Schwebel ever desired to be even less religious than she was now. Did she ever want to lift her skirt even higher? Above her knee? What would she have done with her life if she hadn’t been religious at all? She might have gone to college, gotten an MBA. I could see her as the CEO of a nationwide chain of restaurants, rebranding Dairy Queen, infusing the Blizzard with lactobacillus and other friendly bacteria. Mrs. Schwebel as industry renegade, Mrs. Schwebel profiled in Forbes magazine, arms bared, no wig. I wasn’t sure that was necessarily any better or more important than what she was doing right now.
“Whatever, Mom,” said Miriam. “Everyone here is up in each other’s business too. Like when Chaya Spielvogel started secretly dating a goy. Everyone knew in about four seconds what was going on, because Tali Diamond gossiped about it to a bunch of other people. Tali was supposed to be her best friend!”
“Oh, that’s different,” said Mrs. Schwebel. “I mean, that is something of major interest, you know? If I were the Spielvogels, I would be very ashamed.”
So that was her official stance: no non-Jews for her kids. Was this how the Jews had stayed around for so long? We didn’t recruit or attempt to convert anyone. We didn’t go on pilgrimages, and we had no missionaries. But those who were already Jewish—we wanted to keep them Jewish at all costs.
In the living room, the sun was warming everything, warming me too. I couldn’t imagine anything as delicious as sitting here with Miriam and her mother, gently filled with challah, sipping hot tea, so languid. What would Mrs. Schwebel think about the fact that I wanted to date her daughter? On the one hand I was Jewish; on the other hand I was a woman.
I watched Mrs. Schwebel smooth her red wig. I imagined that my mother would see the wig as archaic. My mother ate shrimp, ignored Shabbat, and hadn’t been in a synagogue since my bat mitzvah. She referred to Orthodox Jews as “Oy, those people.” But I was sure that she and Mrs. Schwebel shared some of the same prejudices when it came to their daughters. In this regard, neither of them had come very far from the shtetl.
I thought about the mikvah, the ritual bath where women would go together on their periods. Warm women, wet women, women together, women taking care of one another, women naked in the same hothouse. Some of them must have secretly gotten it on.
When the rest of the family returned from synagogue, I felt like it was my family returning from synagogue, but a family I liked. It was as though they knew me well by now, despite knowing barely anything about me. It was as though you could know a person without knowing the details of their life. You could know their light, because you shared the same light, the way I’d known the prayers the night before without knowing I knew them. I had never imagined this kind of warmth could be so safe, abundant. I’d spent so much time cutting and carving away at myself, worshipping cold. I feared that light and warmth were a trick, a tease, false offerings that lured you into relaxing, and just when you made yourself vulnerable, they would be seized. Better to adapt to the cold. Better to thrust the cold on oneself. Be prepared.
Yet with the Schwebels it was so easy. The light was sustained, plentiful. It wasn’t going anywhere. And so I ate what I wanted, when I wanted, maybe even overindulged compared to what a normal person would eat. I wasn’t sure exactly what that was yet, to eat normally. But I feasted on the food and the warmth, the cozy togetherness, and I realized that the food itself was only one part of what a person needed in order to be sustained.
Mrs. Schwebel served a one-dish lunch, cholent, a stew of warm beef, carrots, beans, and potatoes that had been simmering on the stove all night. I thought of all the parts of the stew as I ate it: the carrots, the onions, the beef, the gravy. I imagined the vegetables growing in the ground. I imagined the cows grazing. Each element was nourishing in its own right, but even juicier and better when they came together as a whole. It was meant to be savored. Life could be savored. I was surprised to think for a moment that if there was a god, this could be god’s wish for us.
Later that day, when the sun finally went down, I didn’t want to leave and go back to my real life. Forget work, I didn’t even want to go back to my apartment. No one was kicking me out, but I didn’t want to overstay. I kept testing them, making sure they weren’t sick of me yet. But each time I would say, “Okay, I’m gonna be leaving soon,” they would all say, “No! Rachel, stay! Stay until sundown at least!”
When I finally got in my car, it seemed strange to be inside it, alone. I couldn’t believe it was the same car or that it belonged to me. I looked at my hands and they didn’t even look like my hands. I felt in that moment that I did not know myself at all, that the Schwebels, who knew nothing about me, somehow knew more about me than I did. What was a person supposed to do with herself in life? Maybe we did need spiritual guidance. No wonder I’d turned to the elliptical machine.
Miriam had traveled fewer places than I had. She still lived with her family and had no grand plans for any kind of career. Yet somehow, she seemed to be moving forward more freely than I was, or if not forward, then deeper and higher, in a series of infinite crescendos. While I was aggressively pedaling nowhere, she was orbiting peacefully.
I had thought that I was the sculptor and she was the golem. But now I considered that she might be the sculptor, the maestro, the creatrix, expanding and improving me, giving life to my dead parts, laughter to my breath. Maybe she was remaking me in her image. Maybe we were remaking each other.