Shopping–A memoir excerpt

An excerpt from a memoir that I worked on for many months in 2015. I abandoned the project when I ran out of steam, and I have no plans as of now to pick it up again. But I hope you’ll enjoy reading these pages. Thank you for your support.

I spent Shabbos at home in knots, knowing that the groom’s side, the Vizels, wanted to come see me Saturday night. The phone rang after two stars were out and Shabbos was over, and the display read Brach, Joel. I still remembered the number from the days when Mrs. Brach’s information showed up regularly on the incoming call log, when I was that troublesome eighth grade student and my mother’s headache. My heart pounded with the same acceleration, the fear that adults were discussing me and deciding my fate while I only had my wild imagination to fill in the blanks.

I stood in the dark kitchen near the dirty crockpot and listened to hear if my mother would answer the call. She was singing. She sang sweetly, like a bird, like a cantor’s daughter, like someone whose gentle voice could make everything alright.

Dear God you are-

The one who gives us energy.

Give your beloved children,

Also health and energy.

To charm and to charity,

To wealth and to respect,

To sons, to life, to food and to prosperity.

To god’s protection of all Jews

And we sing amen.

I took the cordless to her as she wrapped my sister in a bath towel and pressed it on her shoulder, a hands-free nook she had mastered many babies ago. When she said good bye into the receiver, I looked at her expectantly.

She glanced around to be sure none of the other children could overhear.

“The Vizel family just left Williamsburg.”

“Okay?”

“They will be in Walmart in two hours. We have to be there then so they can look at you.” She put a pair of red booties onto my sister’s feet and released her onto the floor. “What are you wearing?”

I said I’d put on my expensive Eugene Klein suit with the mint green mock turtleneck, my three quarter baby llama coat over it. It was not too frumpy, not too fancy. My mother picked up my chin and said, “We’ll put a little blush on your cheeks too.”

We drove in silence. My father was at the minivan wheel, only there to drive us. He called himself “the chauffeur,” because women did not drive. The windows of the village streets were lit like fireflies buzzing with the energy of a new week. We passed the familiar intersection of Satmar Drive and Orshava Court.

“You hear, Mommy?” My father made a right on Bakertown and we left the well-lit streets of the village. “I met Reb Heynuch, the yeshiva principal, in the synagogue today. He said the Vizel boy has a good head. Good, good head.”

My mother and I climbed out of the car at Walmart. She looped her arm through mine, and we hurried into the warm hullabaloo of Saturday night at the department store.

“There are Jews everywhere.” She said to me. She looked to the bearded Hasidim at the register, their bewigged wives emptying toys from the cart, women at the clothing section. “Let’s go somewhere where they won’t see us.”

We walked until my mother stopped, craned her head in every direction and felt assured. “Here.” We were in the section of laundry detergents. “I’m going to call Mrs. Brach. I’ll tell her where we are. Let’s wait.”

I had the urge to pace, but I made myself stand still and stare down the products, tried to look like the kind of future wife who knew to use Tide with Bleach for his shirts, OxyClean for the stains on the collar, Downy to keep our linen set airy and clean.

My mother mumbled into my ear, “The Missus Vizel is coming. Stand straight.”

I looked straight ahead. My mother muttered updates. “I see the Missus brought someone; probably a daughter-in-law for a second opinion.”

I saw red bottles with blue stripes, but from the corner of my eye I saw black, two figures and a wagon idling by and then passing me from the other side. All the bottles began to blur into one giant red detergent for some super-wife.

“Let’s go.” My mother suddenly patted my back.

“They left?” I was afraid to look around.

“Yes.”

I breathed again, and let my shoulders fall. The aisles were empty, as if I’d dreamed it all.

“Now what?” I asked, since I’d been looked at by the Missus and her shopping expert.

“They’ll give the answer to the matchmaker. You forget about it. You don’t worry.”

Mrs. Brach’s answer came quickly, on the big flip phone, while my father was helping us unload our shopping bags into the car in the big, dark parking lot.

“Shoyn. May it be in a lucky hour. They said yes.” She spoke to my father, who looked at her with undisguised anticipation. “We need to run blood work for degenerative diseases and God willing, if everything will be okay, they say the meeting can be tomorrow night.”

The meeting was at the home of Chana Pessy, my sister four years above me and my de facto authority on all things marriage. She often invited me over to try the gourmet food she was learning to cook for her husband, and then I’d stay a while to shmooze, because it was easy to talk to her about anything, especially the dreamy promise of marriage.

She scrubbed her house for the occasion as if she was privy to the highest honor. When my parents and I arrived, her children were gone. The foyer was lit and airy. The floor shone with Murphy Oil Soap. As in all Hasidic homes in the village, it was absolutely clutter free—not a cupboard without a door, not a shelf with an extra chachke. I had the impulse to leave my shoes at the welcome mat, but I stayed lifted up by my thin, high heels. I almost stood as tall as my parents.

Chana Pessy put on her coat in a hurry to leave. For a moment after she left, my parents and I were alone. Then she returned in her pink turban and flushed cheeks. She hugged me.

“You’re so big.” She squeezed my hands, the excitement evident in her too-tight grip. “Just talk to him! Don’t worry, just talk to him!”

My mother walked her to the door. “They’ll be here any minute. Go already.”

She said a reluctant farewell. “Don’t be shy!”

As we waited, my father paced, and my mother and I sat like ladies. “Don’t be so nervous.” she whispered.

A middle-aged couple knocked and walked in a few minutes later, without the son. I thought they were strikingly forgettable, a prototype of silver beard on him, wavy black wig on her, with a tall hat on his head and a small one on hers, like any other couple on the street. The woman carried a strange bulging shopping bag besides her purse, her only distinguishing physical feature.

“Hello, hello.” they nodded. My parents pulled out chairs for them and everyone sat, I near my mother, across the shopping bag lady. I said “Hello-hello” too.

“Nee, Freidy. Vus machstu? How are you?” The woman’s voice was loud, and she spoke with the cluttered gutturals of a heavy Israeli accent. She was not of European descent like us. We Hungarians were reputably self-restrained; we did not know flamboyant confrontation, and we were diet and designer label obsessed, everything Israelis were known to be the opposite of.

I smiled and said “Thank god. Everything is good.”

My father told the man who our great grandparents were in Europe, and the couple spoke about their lineage. I watched the men’s mouths move inside their beards, while the lady laughed more loudly than any woman I knew ever did. I didn’t follow the conversation, either because I was not well versed on pre-war shtetls or because I was too overwhelmed to follow a single line of thought.

“Nu?” the lady asked after a while. “Can we go on?”

My mother translated to me. “They’ll call the boy now for the date.”

“You callt him?” the Missus asked her husband.

“Yes, yes, he’s coming.”

“Nu, where is he?” she parted the blinds.

“He’ll be here. He’ll be here. Not to worry.”

“Call him again. Where is he already?” she worked the shades, as if it would hasten his taxi. My parents and I sat in our seats and watched them.

“Nu, what’s taking him so long! Ten, let me call him again.”

My mother looked at me with wide eyes that said: Oy. Israelis.

“He’s here!” they both cried.

I was suddenly the only one seated. My chair faced the large open doorway to the foyer. A young boy appeared, much shorter than my father, his tanned face wide and dark, framed by a hint of even darker beard and thick, looping sidecurls. He waited for the adults to leave before he came in. His parents whispered something into his ears, and he listened with his eyes cast down.

They sent him in.

For a second he raised his eyes at me, and looked at me through the most pious frames, his eyeballs huge in the thick plastic squares around them. He looked so farchanyukt. Farchanyukt, the pejorative for budding zealots, for people who wore those glasses, who didn’t know how to bring religion down to this world, but instead floated in some kind of alternative world of OCD observance. Even my father wore thinner frames. I, more than any of the girls I knew, was terrified of the farchanyukt, with their righteous authority to criticize the world.

Farchanyukt boys looked anywhere but at girls. They never spoke to girls. They crossed the street to avoid being too close. I’d never spoken to a boy, and definitely not one like this.

“A gitn.” the boy murmured, eyes on the floor.

I nodded at him, smiled to soften things.

He pulled his chair out, folded his buttoned long coat up, sat down, tucked himself in. He smiled only a half quiver with closed lips he’d just run his tongue over.

“Where do you work?” he asked as per the script. “You… you work?”

It sounded like he needed to clear his throat.

“Yes, yes, I do.” How many times had I imagined answering this question? I never expected it with a chanyuk. So sheltered. So shaky. “I work in insurance.” I said and added after an awkward silence. “I do insurance, you know what that is?” I could tell from his black glasses and spindly frame and long sidecurls that he wouldn’t know.

“Ah. Insurance.” he fiddled with his hands. “Sectary?”

“Yes. Yes. So you know insurance?”

“I think.” he smiled shyly. Our eyes collided for a second, and I felt like I’d gone down the steepest dip on the roller coaster. “I know life insurance, from Gah-deean?”

“No, it’s medical insurance, group medical insurance. If you don’t have Medicaid then you may have the kind of insurance we sell.”

“Ah.” his finger ran over his other nail. “I have this Uxfeard. That?”

It was Oxford, not Uxfeard. Neither his glasses nor his insurance enunciation fit the image I’d devised and perfected in my subconscious knowledge of what my mate would be like, from a perfectly pious, respectable family, with a hint of worldliness. No bum, no zealot—a braided mix, like me. I thought he’d wink and say, “Oh, Oxford. Yeah, girl, they got one fine open-gated-Freedom-network-PPO. Good stuff.” and I’d cross my legs and say, “You bet.”

Instead he was swallowing hard and saying nothing.

I tried to make more conversation.

“Are you in yeshiva in the village?”

“Yes, yes. I stay at my sister-in-law’s house.”

“Ah. Good.”

He tried to say something. He looked up, as if he had had a thought. “She cooks really well. My sister-in-law.”

My leg was shaking in my square pumps under the table.

“I’m really happy there.”

“Ah. Good! Good!”

I was so afraid of saying the wrong thing; these nose-in-godly-stuff people made me so nervous that I found it hard to carry on the conversation.

My mother knocked on the wall to get our attention. Her eyes glowed. “Nu, you children talked enough?”

He nodded, smiled a handsome half smile, got up, and I followed. His parents gestured to the baby boy’s room with the light blue gingham curtains and linen, and the three of them locked themselves inside. After we watched their door close, my parents walked into the playroom, and we closed the door too. We were surrounded by yellow containers of legos, wooden trains, my nephew’s kindergarten art.

It sunk in, that bitter disappointment. He wasn’t what I had fashioned in my plans at all. It was clear that he wasn’t someone I could convince to taste the forbidden fruit of a movie, a book, a newspaper, someone who would break rules a little in the privacy of our homes.

“Sweet boy, right?” my father beamed, his red beard already showing signs of gray above me.

I wanted to agree, but I felt like curling up in a long depression. “I don’t know.”

My father looked crushed. “What’s the matter? He’s sweet, no? You want this match, right?”

I wanted to say no, he is not sweet, but I thought also of Nessy Schnitzer, three years older than me. There were rumors that after she had met a boy, she said she didn’t want him. How painfully she had embarrassed him! How terribly she had shamed another person. Worse than sinning against God, we stressed the Talmudic proverb, was sinning against our fellow friend. Worse than so many sins, is shaming a boy by saying no.

I told myself to be brave. Do the right thing. Have a golden heart.

I would not shame him.

“Okay” I told my father. “Okay, I want it.”

“That’s it, okay?”

“No, I said yes.”

He sighed. The Vizels were waiting outside, and my grandmother was already on the bus from Williamsburg for tonight’s festivities.

We left the playroom. The older men nodded to each other in the foyer. Yes.

“Mazel tov! Let’s call the matchmaker!” the shopping bag lady exclaimed.

Moshe Arye stood at the other end of the hallway. Our eyes met. One corner of his lips turned up in a smile, and I smiled back.