Washing the Dead by Michelle Brafman Read Free Book Online Page B

9 a.m. We will perform her tahara.
    Rivkah Schine
    The news was a sucker punch to the heart. Mrs. Kessler. She materialized in the way the newly dead do. I am five, and she is celebrating her first Shabbos at our shul. I stare at her long braid throughout services, and afterward, during the lunch, I spear a gefilte fish ball with a toothpick and give it to her. She accepts my offering. Later I learn that she hates fish.
    I read the letter again. What was a tahara? The word floated over me like the name of the Alfred Hitchcock movie I couldn’t recall the last time Sam and I played Trivial Pursuit. What was the name of that damn movie?
    I flipped on my laptop and typed in “tahara.” Google sent me straight to a Jewish funerals site. “The tahara is the sacred and secret Jewish burial rite of washing and shrouding the dead and is the highest and purest act of loving kindness.” Vertigo . The Hitchcock movie came to me, creating a dizzying surge in my brain. I tried to imagine the rebbetzin and myself pouring water over Mrs. Kessler, but I could picture neither the rebbetzin through my adult eyes nor a dead Mrs. Kessler.
    I stowed the envelope in the drawer of my nightstand and went downstairs, pausing for a moment in the kitchen. Through the silvery mesh of the screen door, I stared at Sam’s silhouette, his trim body held in repose, his full head of salt-and-pepper hair, his strong cheekbones.
    “Barbara?” Sam called. “Are you there?”
    “I’m here.” Tahara. Tahara. I couldn’t wait for the house to quiet so I could Google the word again in peace.
    I could hear Lili’s friends leaving. I bade them goodbye, and Sam gave Lili a piggyback ride up the steps. It felt good to hear her giggle. Sam and I fell into bed and held each other. “She’s going to be okay, Barbara,” he whispered into my hair. He said these words at the beginning of every crisis.
    I waited for his breathing to grow regular, then untangled myself from his warm body and went downstairs. I rarely kept any big news from Sam.
    I sat in the dark at my tiny desk, I needed to think this tahara thing through carefully, alone. The Schines had erased my mother’s existence and by default, mine. I was nineteen. The whole shul found out about my mother and the Shabbos goy, which meant I lost Tzippy, the Schines, and Mrs. Kessler all at once. I never thanked Mrs. Kessler for keeping me company during my mother’s affair and shining a bright light on my professional path. She knew that teaching preschool was my calling before I did. But it was more than that—my work had served as an oasis from the disruption in my childhood, and grounded me enough as an adult to make and sustain a brand-new life with Sam. In exchange, I’d squandered her love, closing myself off to her for all these years, years when I could have visited her and exchanged notes about our students. She could have remained a mentor, and maybe I could have become her friend.
    Mrs. Kessler was the only person who could draw me back to the Schines’ shul. And the rebbetzin knew it, in the way she’d known to arrange for me to volunteer for Mrs. Kessler in the first place. Despite how busy she was with the shul and raising her kids, she made time to look deep inside all of us and find what we needed and wanted most, which she’d shrewdly match with a specific Jewish custom or job in the shul. Worshiping the rebbetzin was a hard habit to break, but I’d done it. Or had I?
    It didn’t matter right now. I would put my feelings toward the rebbetzin aside and perform Mrs. Kessler’s tahara. According to my Google research, the tahara is the purest possible act of kindness because the recipient can never pay you back. I wanted togive Mrs. Kessler this pure love. I owed it to her.
    The next morning, I woke up early and phoned Theresa, my teaching assistant, to tell her that I’d have to miss our prep day because of Lili’s injury and that she’d have to set up the classroom alone.