Chapter 14: Ely

14

ELY

Sunday, I take my camera into Manhattan.

In the late afternoon the light is perfect, golden and filtering down between the buildings like molten amber. I walk through Greenwich Village, all the winding streets I used to explore in secret. Not because the Village was in any way forbidden to Chabad kids, but because I worried that if anyone saw me here, they might see the truth—that I belonged here, in front of Stonewall kissing a girl with glitter in her hair, far more than I had ever belonged in Crown Heights.

I trail my fingers along a wrought-iron fence and turn my face toward the sky, toward the silhouettes of the rooftops against blue. I take a photo of a man on a balcony leaning against the railing with a cigarette dangling from his fingertips. He’s in a white shirt, barefoot; another man behind him slides a hand up his spine and kisses the nape of his neck.

I capture that moment, just as I capture the girl in the bubble-gum-colored dress smiling at her phone as she nearly walks into traffic; the children coloring with chalk on the corner, tracing rainbows into concrete; the tattooed old woman on a café patio scowling at the newspaper and tearing her croissant to pieces.

This is the kind of day I used to dream about back when I was a teen. Nowhere to be, no one expecting me home. Just me and my camera and the city opening up before me like a map.

I’ll see Wyatt tomorrow. But this space stretching out between yesterday and then feels infinite. I wish I had just texted him and asked him to meet me today too. Then again, that probably wouldn’t be fair considering he lives all the way out in Bushwick.

But it’d be nice to stroll by his side, his warm hand finding mine and his low voice narrating the architecture around us—because in this fantasy world, of course Wyatt knows about architecture. Knowing about architecture is hot.

I wander out of the West Village and head east, meandering past NYU and Parker—apparently I can never stay that far away, as if the school has its own magnetic pull—with no particular destination in mind. At least, not consciously. But when I find myself on Broadway staring up at the red flag of the Strand Book Store, I know exactly why I’m here.

My mother and I had this tradition. We used to come here together every Sunday afternoon, after I got out of my Bnos Menachem weekend classes. She’d give me a crisp twenty-dollar bill and tell me I could buy whatever I liked. Naturally, I tended to treat the Strand more like a library than a store—I’d spend hours curled up in a corner reading until my mother would finally come get me, her own books in one of those plastic baskets slung over her arm, and make me pay for the book instead of devouring it for free.

It didn’t occur to me as a child, but it occurs to me now how impressive my mother was. How much love she had—how even with all those children she would still carve out time to spend with each of us. Me and the bookstore, Dvora and her obsession with geology. My mother had whole universes she built with each of us, castles that belonged to Ima and me alone.

The sense memory of being here punches right into my gut. And all at once I’m twelve years old again, effervescent with excitement, mind jumbling between options: Will I get another fantasy? A romance? Or maybe one of those photography books with glossy pages and an editor’s interpretation of each picture’s meaning typed in clean Baskerville font.

I can’t help myself, of course; I go in.

From the moment you enter the Strand, it’s overwhelming. The ground floor doesn’t just have more books than anyone could read in a lifetime. It also has T-shirts and postcards and tote bags and stickers and enamel pins and all other kinds of nonsense that no one actually needs but that you’ll still drop a cool fifteen bucks on. There are more rooms upstairs: young adult, art, nonfiction, rare books. But I like the stacks in the back of the first floor, where they keep all the used books. I like the way they feel in my hands, like old paper wilted by spilled tea. I like finding the little scribbled notes in the margins. All evidence of books well read and well loved.

I choose an aisle at random and peruse the spines. There’s a ragged copy of Sabriel by Garth Nix that I find hard to resist. When I open to the title page, I see that someone has written: Property of Dara Shirazi, return to owner. I bury my nose in the open pages and breathe in; it smells like cigarettes and someone else’s life.

I’m tempted to buy it, but I don’t really have room in my tiny coat closet of a bedroom. So I return the book to the shelf and move down the rest of the aisle and into the next. That’s where I suddenly stop short, all the air crushed from my lungs.

It might have been nearly a decade, but I’d still recognize her anywhere. The knowledge is stitched into my blood and bone.

My mother looks the same at fifty as she looked in her early thirties. She even wears the same sheitel, a straight-haired wig that is modestly cut just below her chin.

Even as quickly as I turn my back, hiding my face, I can’t help worrying that she saw me.

And if she saw me…

If she saw me, would she even say anything? Or would she turn and walk briskly away, as if I were nothing and no one—as if I were anyone but the little girl who sat next to her other children at Passover, eating matzo and getting crumbs all over the floor? She loved me once upon a time, back when I was just a chubby thing making friendship bracelets with Chaya Mushka Levy and reciting my prayers in a thin, high-pitched child voice. Then, of course, it all went wrong. If she doesn’t recognize the face of her little girl, she will certainly recognize the teenager I became. The heretic daughter who dragged that sweet, innocent version of her little girl off the derech. The teenager she used to find nodding off over her half-finished homework. Who stole money from her mother’s purse and, when she got caught, screamed at everyone and threatened to slit her own throat with a kitchen knife if anyone tried to take the heroin she held crushed in her fist.

I can’t stay here.

I slip out of the aisle and dart through the stacks, heading for the front door so fast I half worry someone will stop me and accuse me of stealing. When I burst out onto the sidewalk, it feels like I’m finally able to take a breath after being trapped underwater. I grab on to one of the used-book carts out front and hold on for balance as I try to exhale, exhale, just relax.

But the memories are too thick, too hot. They rise up like magma. They overtake me.

NINE YEARS AGO

Rosh Hashanah was, to me, the pinnacle of fall.

Maybe in the rest of the city, fall was pumpkin spice lattes and UGG boots and tossing leaves in the air in Central Park, but for me it was cleaning honey off my sisters’ sticky faces and the crisp bite of a Gala apple and the sound of the shofar blowing. My mother would make honey cake that filled the air of our apartment with a rich scent that clung to your hair and coat. School was out and so the streets were full of kids running wild, shrieking as they darted between the more orderly sidewalk procession of scholars and strollers.

Chaya was over again, hiding from her father, who always got in a bad mood around the High Holidays. We’d taken some Percocets up in my bedroom and were sitting down at the kitchen table slicing apples for my mother and fighting not to nod off. I cut too hard at my apple and the knife grazed my thumb instead, spraying a little bouquet of blood across my skin.

My sister Dvora glared at us from across the table, where she was elbow-deep kneading challah dough. Always a bucket of cold water, Dvora was. Chaya and I couldn’t even enjoy our secret without Dvora there to remind us that the things we did in private weren’t that secret at all.

My mother had appeared in the kitchen doorway, half-dressed for that night’s Erev Rosh Hashanah festivities. Her hair was covered by a messily tied tichel, not the shiny wig she would typically wear around guests like Chaya.

My stomach immediately twisted in on itself. Because, yes, I’d seen Bubbe’s pearls. I’d last seen them on the pawnbroker’s glass counter as he peered at them through a loupe to examine their quality. That $400 had gone to financing the Percocet swimming in my and Chaya’s veins.

I dropped my gaze to my apples, but too late; I’d already caught the accusatory glance Dvora had sent my way. Even Chaya shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Because it was that obvious where Bubbe’s pearls had ended up.

Thank Hashem for Malka and her naïveté. The truth hadn’t even occurred to her. I guess she still saw me as a child, too innocent to do any intentional wrong. The four years between us might as well have been an ocean.

I shook my head and reached for a fresh apple. It was difficult to feel guilt, or shame, or any negative emotion really on opiates—but right then, somehow, I managed it.

I jumped at the first opportunity to get out of the apartment that afternoon, insisting that I walk Chaya Mushka back to her house, even though the Levys lived just two blocks over. Chaya nudged me with her elbow as soon as we were out in the chilly late-September air, her brows knotted together. “You did it, right?”

She was right, of course. “What am I supposed to do? I have to try. I can beg him for mercy. I’ll promise to pay him back with interest in two weeks. It’s a holiday.”

Right again. Particularly since it wasn’t like my word was worth much. “Fuck,” I muttered, and beside me Chaya just sighed.

I considered it, of course. I entertained the idea of just…stealing the $400 out of Chaya’s dad’s wallet. He always kept it in his coat pocket, hung up on the rack next to the front door. It would have been easy. Chaya took money from there all the time.

But I also knew what he’d do to Chaya once he realized the cash was gone, and I couldn’t justify being responsible for those bruises. Not even for my grandmother’s pearl necklace.

My brain drew the stupidest ethical lines sometimes. Because if I were such a good fucking person, I wouldn’t have stolen the pearls to start with. Even when Chaya stole the money from her dad herself, it was still my fault, ultimately.

After all, I was the one who’d dragged Chaya down into this hell in the first place.