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On a Sunday in mid-October, two weeks after Sukkot, the week-long festival when you’re supposed to build and eat and study in temporary structures, structures through which you can see the stars, Lisa dresses up at the old, slightly battered dresser mirror in highnecked white blouse and long black skirt to go visit Dad. She listens to her mother’s voice in her inner ear: You look so grown up. . . . And even though she’s put the words in her mother’s mouth, it’s comforting. She’s got a room to herself here at Uncle Leo and Aunt Ruthie’s—a boy’s room, plain, walls with the pin holes from childhood posters, with adolescent photos of Red Sox players and a faded blown-up poster of a bearded rabbi who gave a talk in Boston. This is Nathan’s room; Nathan is at some big-deal yeshiva in New Jersey. The room retains his odors. In the mirror, she looks to herself as boring as old Nathan. Tall, skinny, drab, with retainers. In black and white. Lisa has been living here a month now. It’s the first Sukkot she’s ever helped to build and eat in a sukkah, the temporary shelter. Everyone on the street built a sukkah! This was the first time she’s ever heard Aunt Ruthie laugh and laugh. Those are the only good things about living here. Her dad was still with her for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; then, before Sukkot, checked himself into McLean’s Hospital for a “workup .” Every day she takes a long subway ride from Brookline to her school in Cambridge. That was the deal; she agreed to come only if she didn’t have to go to|18| a Jewish day school where everybody knew lots of Hebrew and she knew just a little, where everybody was completely used to Jewish customs and she wasn’t. Sure, they always lit candles for Shabbat, she and Dad, and Mom before the accident, and yes, she was studying for her belated Bat Mitzvah. But she didn’t know much. And then—forget those vain things—silly worries, really—what about friends? Friends were the chief thing. There’s Sophie, there’s Annie. She’d been afraid kids at Somerset would give her a hard time—with her father gone off the deep end. But they didn’t. It’s kept her sane, her school. Black and white. A long row of pearl buttons. Her hair is tied back neatly. It’s such a severe look that, catching sight of it in the mirror, she almost giggles. She mugs seriousness into the mirror. Nobody’s ordering her not to dress up in colors. But she feels that today a sober look is called for. A Decorum Costume. Black and white in the mirror. So absolutely boring, the way she looks. To soften the look she puts on her mother’s string of pearls. Still—all black and white. It reminds her of when Ruthie takes her to synagogue—the sea of men’s striped black and white full-body talises she can look down on from the women’s balcony through a gap in the screen, the mechitsa. Barely attending to the distant service, she watches the sea of men in black and white shift and flow. Aunt Ruthie’s lips move with her prayers; she doesn’t stay with the service but is on her own page. Some of the women huddle and laugh together; Ruthie swivels to give them a quick, severe look. Lisa has the impulse to “accidentally” yank off Ruthie’s helmet wig. She doesn’t. She peeks down through the gap at the rabbi and the other men up on the bima—the bima is not a low platform at the end of the sanctuary—what she’s used to—but a high stage with a railing , set in the middle of the high-ceilinged room. Only the ark is at the end. Most of the men, what she can see of them, are bearded; it’s hard to see anything but talises, striped black and white. It’s Sunday. After brunch Leo drives her out to Belmont in the Chrysler minivan. The car feels so huge for just the two of them. He asks her about what girls her age are listening to—what music. She| 235 Mitzvah Man [3.144.230.82] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 01:59...
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