The Jewish Daughter Diaries by Rachel Ament Read Free Book Online

“You two can walk to get some ice cream,” she had said, and we did, while I seethed. There was the infuriating rule that I was not allowed to get up before 7:00 a.m. on weekdays, a policy intended to limit my primping time since a girl shouldn’t beautify for school.
    Then there was one of our longest-running conflicts: temple attire. No matter what I put on, she had a problem with it. She could either see my cleavage or my shoulders, or the outfit was too short or too see-through, or she could detect “outlines” of body parts, like thighs. These crazy-making standoffs would often end with me whipping a pair of tights down the stairs and screaming, “ This is how I look. Deal with it! ”
    I hated the way she was always covering me up, putting me away. She seemed to think my body was hers, that it was an actual extension of her own, and one day she articulated as much. I’d wanted to get my belly button pierced, and she forbade it on the grounds that it was trashy. Plus, my belly button was made from her body so it belonged to her and she was the boss of it, so, sorry, no, case closed.
    And then came the saga of the torso.
    â€¢ • •
    It was a few years later, early in another steamy summer, when a chilling crime took place in Boston. A twenty-year-old Swedish woman who’d come to work as an au pair went missing from a downtown nightclub only to be found hours later—the torso part of her only—in a nearby Dumpster. A homeless guy discovered her. So, shock waves. It was a really big deal. The story was discussed at dinner tables: ours, neighbors’, everyone’s. Torso. Can you believe it? Au pair. Torso.
    To my friends and me, the story was shocking, but distantly so. We talked about it like it was a compelling episode of Cold Case . The crime seemed so gruesome as to be ludicrous, so abstract as to be almost silly. It would never happen to us. Plus there was the word itself, “torso,” which caused stirrings of nervous laughter. “Torso” is not used often in regular daily life, but suddenly it was being uttered willy-nilly, everywhere. Torso torso torso.
    To my mom, though, this was it. This was the thing. Her looming but vague fears had suddenly been made concrete by a news event that painted a literal picture and tossed it in her lap. It was the story of a Good Girl who had showered and dressed and gotten on the T, maybe talked with strangers, maybe danced with strangers, maybe had a drink, and then had her body destroyed. It didn’t matter that this woman was a responsible person, or that she was just visiting town. It didn’t matter that she was working for a nice family in the suburbs, or that she had planned a creative and enriching activity for the kids for the following day. This crime was a reminder that intentions don’t matter. The world and the people within it can be hostile, and our fragile bodies don’t always make it through intact.
    My mom never actually said the words “I told you so,” but, yeah, she told me so. If there was ever a time when she might have been tempted to lock me up in the attic, it was then. But she didn’t. Instead, we—and life—kept on. I went to college and came home for holidays and summers.
    And, over time, a strange and very unexpected thing happened. This grisly, sobering news event—which, in our home, was now referred to simply as “torso”—made things better between us. Mostly, what it did was give us some common language, a semi-silly shorthand. “Torso” gave us a name for our push and pull, a name for the I’m-this-way-and-she’s-that-way thing that had always flustered us so, a name for the mother-daughter standoff that had begun with the Summer of Lycra and was still in full force. Now that we had a label for it, the tension was lightened, a channel ever so slightly opened.
    This meant that when I was seventeen and went to