“Why are you taking these pills?” he asked as I walked into the front door of our little apartment. He came toward me, his eyes wide, waving the little pink case. “How long have you been taking these pills?”
I did not have an immediate answer. I hesitated.
“Aviva!”
“Not too long.”
“I don’t believe you.”
What could I say? I do not lie well. I omit, but I rarely lie. He left the apartment and did not return until morning. He said that he wanted a divorce. He said that he was still young enough to have children and that he wanted a wife who wanted to give them to him. I know he felt betrayed. He also felt foolish. He had turned his embrace of my infertility into a kind of martyrdom, and now he saw that I had duped him. I asked him what he would tell people, and he said he didn’t know.
“Tell them I was having an affair,” I said.
“I might.”
The terminal was empty when my plane landed. In the bathroom at the gate I changed into jeans and uncovered my hair, and at the luggage pickup I became a young American woman back from traveling abroad, not a sneaky frum failure. I took a taxi to the house in Coney Island, praying on the way that it was still a place for me. I imagined Saul in the kitchen. The front door was open and the people living there were asleep. I set my bags in the living room and walked to the beach. There had been changes in New York since I left. The Twin Towers had fallen only a month before. We watched them crumble from the television in the tiny triangle of a café on the corner of our street in Jerusalem. I remember that I’d thought about all the times I snuck into Manhattan as a child. I understood the grid, but the streets below Houston did not conform, and when I needed a marker to tell me where north and south and east and west were, I looked for the towers. What did people look for now?
I sat in the sand with my knees pulled to my chest. It was warm for October, and as I listened to the shuffle and fizz of the black waves sliding in, I thought about you. I had watched the American girls when I saw them in Jerusalem, on tours with their parents or a school group. I looked for you. I wondered if you’d been told about me. And if so, what you’d been told. I hoped that what I’d done hadn’t hardened your father. He was such a loving man. His loving felt strange to me, but to you, I hoped, it would feel natural. I hoped you would always know what love felt like. I hoped you would feel it enough for both of us.
Saul no longer lived by the house in Coney Island. The two semipermanent residents were Yael, a woman from Crown Heights fighting an ugly custody battle over her three children, and a young man named Isaac who grew up in Williamsburg. Isaac was twenty and gay, and unlike Yael, who was always running off to meet a lawyer or see her children, Isaac had nothing to do, so we quickly became close. He took me downtown to see where the towers had been, and on Thanksgiving we served food to the men and women working on the piles. Before I left, New York had seemed to me such a rigid, angry place. Everyone fighting to get where they were going, everyone with their heads down, their worlds small inside the enormous city. But the New York I came back to in late 2001 was a place where people smiled at one another. Thankful, perhaps, that they-and their beloved city-had survived. I remember taking great comfort in the smiles of strangers. I remember thinking I had made the right decision by coming home.
Etan sent papers to sign and I signed them. I knew my family had moved to Roseville, and I wrote to my brother, asking after Sammy and my father and the girls. Eli did not write back, but little Sammy did.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Larry isn’t at his desk when I call to fill him in on what Van Keller said. I leave Nechemaya a message saying that I definitely want to talk to the neighbors about Pessie, and reiterating that I’d appreciate any leads on friends or family who could tell me about her. I look back through my e-mail and open the attachment the library sent on Pessie. Her address is just two miles from the police station, so I decide to do a drive-by before heading north to Ryan Hall’s in search of Sam.
I pull into a Shell station along the main road to fill up and use the bathroom. At the pumps on either side of me are men in Hasidic dress, phones pressed to their ears, putting gas into minivans. In the convenience store, the shelves by the bathroom hold plastic-wrapped magazines, but instead of Playboy and Hustler, the titles are Yiddish, and the covers feature old men with white beards. Yiddish movies and music are stacked in a rotating rack, and I notice that no women appear in the images on the CDs and DVDs for sale. I pour myself a cup of coffee and as I wait in line I watch a man in sidecurls and a hairnet slide a platter of what looks like bread pudding into a heated serving tray. He sets a paper notecard atop the glass display case: potato kugel. Beside the kugel is a steaming tray of something that smells fantastic but looks like brown slop. It is marked “chulent.” I’ve never had either dish and decide that, despite the possible inadvisability of eating gas station food, it’s time to try. I motion to the man and point to the stew.
“What size?” he asks. He is very tall and thin, with olive skin and a black unibrow.
“Small. And I’ll have a piece of that, too,” I say, pointing to the kugel. Next to me, a woman says something in Yiddish to the man, who nods at her. The woman is dressed all in black except for the white-and-green floral-patterned scarf wrapped over her head. I look down at my jeans and Doc Martens and am conscious, for the first time, that I might as well be wearing a sign that says “not one of you.” As the server ladles the chulent into a cardboard container and slides a lasagna-sized slice of kugel into a Styrofoam box, I wonder what this woman thinks of me. My first instinct is to imagine that she is jealous; that she would trade places with me and run off to the city for bacon and barhopping if it didn’t mean losing everyone she loved. But that’s me transposing my values onto her, and that’s exactly the opposite of what a real journalist is supposed to do. I’m in this work because I’m curious about people, because I want to bring the truth of their circumstances into the light. If I can’t even imagine outside myself, I can’t do that. And I certainly can’t do it if I feel sorry for everyone who doesn’t live like I do.
I pull Saul’s car to the parking lot beside the gas station and open the steaming cup of chulent. It is delicious: savory and sweet, hearty but not heavy. Jewish food, I think. Who knew? I put the container on the passenger seat and snap a photo with my phone, then send it to my dad.
Upstate on a story, eating Jewish food!
A minute later, he texts back:
Good for you, hon!
My dad still doesn’t know that Aviva contacted me through Saul in January. I didn’t tell him because I didn’t really want to deal with his reaction-whatever it was. He deserves to know, I know that. I’d been thinking that I’d wait and tell him when, if, I actually meet her. But now that I’m upstate, where she is-or was when she called-I want to share what’s happening with him.