Two Pockets - Barry Rachin (the reading list txt) 📗

/> Mark, who was becoming accustomed to the girl’s eccentric mannerisms shrugged. “Why do your parents dress like they’re living in the Middle Ages?” They were a mile from home, pulled up at a traffic light.
“We’re Hasidic Jews. The Eastern European tradition goes back to two hundred years.”
Which tells me nothing.”
Miriam stared out the passenger side window for the longest time before replying “According to Hasidic tradition, everyone must have two pockets, so they can reach into the one or the other, according to need.” Mark flipped his directional on as they neared Hathaway Street. “In the right pocket are to be the words: ‘For my sake was the world created,’ and in the left: ‘I am dust and ashes.’”
The truck pulled up in front of the slate blue house with the shutters. “See you tomorrow, Miriam Applebaum.”

* * * * *

Three months passed. Bit by bit, Miriam learned construction. Not that she was anything more than a carpenters helper, rank novice, gofer - go for this, go for that - or fledgling apprentice. Still, she got up every day, and, even when her back ached, hauled her weary carcass off to work.
At first her father showed no interest one way or the other in his daughter’s aberration. To his way of thinking, that’s all it was – a fleeting mental derangement. The Goyim weren’t necessarily bad or misguided; they just did things differently. Religious Jews led perfectly sensible lives. Nice Jewish girls didn’t pound nails. They didn’t work in blue collar trades, building homes for people who worshiped several gods at once and had spent the last two thousand years tormenting God’s Chosen People.
But by the third week of the second month, Morris Applebaum had seen enough. “Meshugenah! What is this craziness?”
Miriam had just returned from work. She unbuckled her leather carpenter’s tool belt and let it fall on the floor next to the bed. “We finished the senior center today,” she said ignoring his belittling tone. “Tomorrow we start renovating that mill complex over by the YMCA. High-end luxury condos—that’s what the developer wants.”
“And this is a job for a nice Jewish girl? Nothing good can come of it.” Rolling his eyes, Morris Applebaum began pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind his back. Miriam momentarily drifted into the bathroom where she stripped her clothes off down to her underwear. Pulling a bathrobe over her limbs she returned to the bedroom. “Fifteen pounds,” she said. “I lost fifteen pounds since I started this job, and I never felt so healthy in my life.”
“You know what you are?” The father suddenly wheeled around waving a finger menacingly in the air. “You’re a Babel. An Isaac Babel!”
“Gotenu! Bite your tongue to say such a thing!” Miriam’s mother was standing in the doorway. The large-bone woman placed a trembling hand over her mouth. “Isaac Babel was no better than a traitor,… a Molotov-cocktail-throwing Jew who joined the Cossacks, the very people who persecuted our race. How could you say such a thing?”
You’re a Babel. An Isaac Babel! Miriam understood perfectly well what Morris. Applebaum meant by the outlandish remark. Isaac Babel was a haskelah Jew, an enlightened soul equally comfortable among Bolshevik rabble rousers as mystical Jews. His stature as a great writer only complicated matters. Hero, traitor, lunatic, visionary, political agitator, heretic, prophet – how one understood the anomaly that was Isaac Babel depended as much on one’s personal biases as what side of the bed he woke up on.
Mr. Applebaum threw both hands up in an attitude of despair and rushed from the room almost knocking his wife down in the bargain. When he was gone, she slumped down on the bed next to her daughter, took Miriam’s hand and kissed it. Then she turned the palm over. “Your beautiful fingers are covered with calluses.”
“From honest labor.” In the yard adjoining their property, a lawnmower fired up. Miriam retrieved her framing hammer from where she abandoned it in near the closet. “Kenny, the man who does all the fancy work, showed me how to properly set nails.” She raised the shank chest high. “Your arm is just an extension of the tool.” She snapped her wrist and let the head of the hammer fall in a broad sweeping arc, striking an imaginary nail dead center. “I can set a sixteen-penny framing nail in three strokes. No wasted effort. Perhaps it’s not as impressive as studying the midrash but still it’s an accomplishment of sorts.”
Miriam’s mother kissed her cheek and sighed. “What we have here,” she waved a hand fitfully in the air, “it’s not enough for you?”
“I’m going to take my shower now,” Miriam replied evasively.
Before she reached the doorway, her mother said, “In a fit of anger, your father compares you to Isaac Babel.” The older woman spoke in a confidential tone so the words wouldn’t carry beyond the threshold. “But deep down, in his heart-of-hearts, you’re the ben h’bachoor.”
“The first-born son,” Miriam translated from the Hebrew. The tacit implication was both flattering and unsettling. The first-born son inherited the father’s fortunes; he honored and preserved his family’s good name. Saul, the religious zealot and sexual glutton, was not up to the task. Wrong man for the job. Miriam was the new ben ha’bachoor – by default, the Applebaum dynasty’s heir apparent.
Her father could rage about the house, muttering to himself, arms flailing like a madman, but squirreled away behind the fierce eyes and bushy eyebrows was an inchoate fear. The fear of losing his beloved Miri, the indisputable ben habachoor. Mr. Applebaum followed all the precepts of his religion. He recited his prayers, never straying from Hasidic custom. When he crawled out of bed in the morning, the stoop-shouldered man carried the added burden of two thousand years of Jewish tradition on his portly frame. But not one word in the many dozens of frayed books that lined his study taught the devout seeker of eternal truths how to love his wayward daughter with moderation.
“Any news from the Shadchun?
“Your father met with Mr. Gorelnik on Tuesday and they discussed certain possibilities.”
“What about the daughter’s feelings?”
“Things haven’t progressed that far yet.”
Miriam lowered her voice. “What Saul does with the Russian girls isn’t right – not for Jew or gentile. Some of those girls are here without work permits or proper visas. If someone abuses them, they have no place to turn.”
“Once your brother is engaged to the Gorelnik girl,” her mother replied nervously, “all that ugliness will all be in the past.”
Miriam laughed abruptly making an unfeminine snorting sound through her nose. “The past has consequences that can come back to haunt you.”

* * * * *

Since graduating high school, Miriam noted a creeping malaise among her friends. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen. But waiting for what? For the moshiach, the messiah, to come the first time? The ‘other one’, according Mr. Applebaum was a well-intentioned, if somewhat misguided, false prophet.
Her best friend, Mitzi, was waiting – waiting to find a husband and begin raising a family. Mitzi’s brother, Yossi, attended Brandeis. He returned from the prestigious college with a bachelor’s degree in nothing-in-particular. After loafing about the house for the better part of a year, the boy went to work in his uncle’s delicatessen cooking brisket, corned beef and tongue. And waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting to figure out what to do with the rest of his miserable, well-educated existence on planet earth.
Of course, Miriam’s brother, Saul, didn’t suffer from any such existential ennui. On Saturday evening, she spied him prancing about the house in a freshly ironed shirt, his frizzy hair blow dried, and cheeks reeking of St. Johns Bay Rum cologne. He favored the fragrance with West Indian lime that left a cloying trail of pungent citrus odors in every room he passed through. “Where’re you going all dolled up?”
Saul was preening in front of the bathroom mirror. With a pair of pointed scissors, he snipped a few errant hairs– his beard was still a work in progress - from the side of his chin. “No place special.” Pulling a billfold from his back pocket, her brother took silent inventory of his finances.
“Must be a heavy date,” Miriam said in a goading tone.
Flashing her a dirty look, he bolted for the front door.
Did he have to call ahead, Miriam wondered, to let the Russian whores know that the rabbinical student, Saul Applebaum, was on his way? Slathered in St. Johns Bay Rum with a hint of lime and horny as hell, God’s anointed messenger would be arriving shortly.

Later that night as she lay under the covers, Miriam felt like a dry leaf in late October. Waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. For what? To fall. To fall and, perhaps, be caught in a frigid updraft of autumnal air. No more malaise. A new life. A new beginning. Which was not to say that Miriam would ever turn her back on her faith. Once a Jew, a Jew for life. But a Jew with a myriad of options. Just as the Sephardic Jews in Medieval Spain learned from the Moslem invaders to cross-pollinate their Cabalist theology with Sufi metaphysics, so too would Miriam Applebaum, the carpenter’s helper, find a way to pass cleanly through the eye of the needle.

* * * * *

On Saturday afternoon, Miriam walked over to Mark’s house, where she found him in the driveway hosing down the truck. “I want my own circular saw.” Over the past few months she had been borrowing a reconditioned Ryobi model that the crew used for odds and ends.
Mark ran a soapy sponge over the tires and muddy hubcaps. “They got a real nice seven-and-a-quarter inch Rigid over at Home Depot for a little over a hundred with discount if we put it on the company account.” He rinsed the wheels off and carried the bucket of soapy water around to the opposite side of the truck. “That’s worm drive, not traditional.”
“Worm drive?” Miriam repeated.
“The motor housing runs parallel with the saw blade and uses gears to increase torque,” Mark explained, “so it’s better suited for the type of heavy-duty construction we do.”
“How soon could I get it?”
He came out from behind the truck, tossing what remained of the soap out across the lawn. “Let me clean up and we’ll take a drive over there right now.”

At Home Depot they went directly to the tool department. “The handle feels a bit strange.” With the fingers of her right hand wrapped around the grip, Miriam hoisted the tool up in the air and made several passes over an imaginary sheet of half-inch plywood.
“Once you get use to it, you won’t feel comfortable with anything else.” He grabbed a carbide-tipped, Freud blade off the display rack. “You’ll want a decent blade to compliment the new saw. My treat.”
After paying for the tools, they went to Friendlies for coffee and dessert. “My father’s unhappy with my choice of careers.”
“Can’t imagine he would be.”
“He called me a modern-day Isaac Babel.” Mark stared at her blankly. “A turn-of-the-century, Russian Jew,” she explained the obscure reference, “who ran off and joined the Red cavalry.” “Babel was on familiar terms with rabbis, thieves, Cossacks, religious mystics, anti-Semites and murderers. Being a traditional, goody-two-shoes Jew was never enough.”
“So, what happened him?”
“Under Stalin’s reign of terror, Babel was arrested by the Soviet secret police, tortured and executed.”
Mark shook his head in disbelief. “Just what I like - a story with a happy ending.”
“Yesterday in the late afternoon,” Miriam’s mind scurried off in another direction, “Tom was hanging sheet rock in the vestibule.”