Separating Two Threads

As soon as Esther entered the building, she headed to the seventh floor. She stood in the lobby, waiting for the Sabbath elevator to open. She wore all black; a skirt to her ankles, a long-sleeved shirt, a scarf tied around her head. A woman got into the second elevator, there were two, and asked if Esther wanted to get in. She shook her head and pointed, “No, I am waiting for this one.”

The elevator opened and Esther stepped in. It stopped on every floor so she had ample time to reach into her canvas bag with New Yorker written on it in large black letters and find the keys. She got out, turned right, and walked past the small American flag someone had put on the glass ledge across from the elevator bank. She knocked on the door to K703 even though she knew no one was home. That no one lived here anymore. She could smell a faint odor from her body, a sweet onion scent. It was July and humid. 

There are many things that Esther is forbidden from doing on Saturdays. She should not press the elevator button. She didn’t. She should not drive. She doesn’t have a car. She should not gather wood. She should not sort, grind, knead, bake, dye or spin wool; she should not warp for the purpose of weaving. She should not separate two threads. 

Esther knows she is a “bad Jew,” as her Orthodox mother had often called her, only partly teasing. She wants to be better. Traveling on the Sabbath to get to this apartment building in the Lower East Side was forbidden but she had no choice. The building’s management company had sent her a patiently worded letter with an urgent message: she must now clear out her mother’s apartment. They respected the thirty days of shloshim, mourning, and gave Esther an extra month’s grace period. Ruth Friedman had lived in that apartment for twenty-four years, so they knew that clearing it out would take time. They wrote this, and more, in the letter. We understand your loss, they sympathized. Your mother was a respected member of our community, they reminisced. But we must get the apartment renovated and rented as soon as possible, they explained. We would prefer to resolve this amicably and not resort to formal eviction proceedings, they threatened. 

The apartment was dark. The last time Esther was here, she’d closed the shades on the south-facing windows. Despite this, the air was stifling. There was a faint odor of cat litter, clay mixed with urine, though Coco had died sixteen years before, when Esther was twenty-two. Ruth, Esther, and Coco had moved into this one-bedroom post-war apartment together after Esther’s father died of pancreatic cancer when she was fourteen. She and her mother had shared a bed for seven years; Esther did not find this bothersome and knew this was all her mother could afford. Ruth worked as a teacher’s aide at Mazel Day, an Orthodox pre-school on the west side. She rode the M14A crosstown bus every morning, walking the remaining five blocks south from 14^th street to the red brick building where she worked. After Esther graduated from college, she left her mother and moved in with a friend in Astoria, Queens, though she visited her mother often. They were close. Esther’s lackluster faith was a regular topic of conversation. “What will you come to?” Ruth would ask. “You seem lost.”

In fact, it was Ruth who would get lost. One afternoon, Mazel Day’s Head of School called Esther to report that her mother had not shown up that morning. Ruth was not answering her phone; it went to voicemail. When Ruth did not come home that evening, Esther called the police. They found her wandering the High Line, thirteen blocks, less than a mile north of Mazel Day, but a serious detour for a woman whose entire life had been contained below 14^th Street. The police brought Ruth home. Esther was waiting for her in K703.

“What is going on? Everyone was worried about you, Mama!” 

“Why?”

“You haven’t been to work!” 

Ruth did not remember this. There is much she didn’t remember, though she recognized her daughter.

“Where am I, Estie? I don’t know where I am.”

*

Ruth’s mind came undone quickly. It was not the gradual decline that Esther read about on the Facebook Dementia Caregivers Support Group that she joined. People wrote about the slow uncoupling of their loved ones (they always shortened ”loved ones” to LO in their posts) from reality, and the gradual progression from functioning to infantile. They fumed and whined together; they grieved the small daily losses and collectively lamented what “this horrible disease” had done to them and their families. Ruth was now just a child in her understanding, but functional enough in her daily routines if they were kept to a minimum. Esther cobbled together care, between her mother’s friends and herself, who did not move in but stopped by every day after her work at a nearby community center, to make sure the stove had been turned off, to throw away food rotting in the refrigerator, and eventually to hire a hospice nurse.

“You’re so young and beautiful,” her mother said. “At sixteen, you have the whole world ahead of you. But don’t forget that you must live your life as an honor to Hashem.” Esther was thirty-eight. 

*

Esther decided to start with the bedside table. She was not sentimental; she had a large black garbage bag next to her. She struggled to open the drawer. It was stuffed with wadded tissues, each pulled singly from one of the many Kleenex boxes strewn around the apartment. She threw them away, and spent much of this Sabbath ridding her mother’s apartment of the debris she’d collected. Ruth had been neat, and had believed that cleanliness was a way to purify her dwelling in honor of God. Now there were papers haphazardly stacked under a desk, unopened bills from places that Ruth had stopped being able to decipher. Which is a gas bill? Which is electricity? There were balls of dust in the corners, stains in the toilet. Even with regular visits, Esther had not been able to keep up with it all, so she’d arranged for a house cleaner to come into the apartment. “I know how to keep a clean home!” Ruth said to this cleaner, called the woman a “fat whore,” and sent her away. Esther was surprised that her mother even knew the word whore. She had never heard her curse. But she learned from Facebook that this, and other transgressions, were common with dementia.

*

One time when Esther was visiting, her mother held up a key, looking at it with a a furrow between her brows. “What is this?” she asked.  

“It’s a key, Mama.”

“What is it for?”

“It opens locks. It’s probably to the front door.”

Esther walked to the hall and tried the key. It did not fit; it was much too small for the large locks the management company had installed to make residents feel secure after a break-in on the second floor several years before. Esther was about to throw it away, but attached it to her key chain instead.

When Esther rejoined her mother in the living room, Ruth greeted her as if she had just arrived. 

“I’ve been waiting for you for days! You never visit me.” 

“Mama, I’ve been with you all afternoon,” Esther said, as she took her mother’s small hand in her own. 

*

Esther opened the closet in the bedroom. She pulled at clothes: identical black skirts much like what Esther herself wore. These clothes had stopped fitting her mother. Her frame had shrunk as her body shut down. Ruth wore a flimsy nightgown and slippers most days during her last months, rarely changing clothes unless Esther cajoled her into taking a shower. The Real Ruth, as Esther referred to her when explaining the situation to friends, would never have tolerated any of this. She’d been meticulous in how she dressed and would have laughed with incredulity if you’d told her that one day her daughter would have to help her into the shower, wash her body, and change her diaper. Esther wondered where God was now, but never vocalized this doubt, scared that her own struggle to believe after her father’s death might have been the cause of her mother’s illness.

In the right corner shelf, next to the cloth napkins that her mother had ironed and folded several years before, Esther found a box she had never before seen. It was made of wood and looked like it held jewelry, but Ruth had only ever worn the gold band that Esther’s father had put on her finger when they married. When Ruth’s fingers shrank too much to keep it in place, Esther took the ring to her apartment. It was one of the few mementos she would keep.

Esther tried to open the box but it was locked. She got a step ladder and reached up to the shelf. There was dust and the dried carcass of a long-dead water bug, but no key. As she stepped down, she remembered the key she’d attached to her chain several months before. She put the box on her mother’s bed, and got the key. It slipped in easily. She delicately turned it to the right and opened the top. Inside was a mezuzah. It was about six inches long and had a sterling silver base that was decorated with colorful topaz stones in various shades of blue, from pale to deep aqua. There was a price tag still tied to it. Her mother had paid $131.95 for this ornate object, so unlike the plain pewter one she’d affixed to the door frame of K703 when she and her daughter moved in.

*

There are many things that Esther is forbidden from doing on Saturdays. She should not extract or winnow. She should not sort or purify. She should not unravel. On this Sabbath, Esther took on the subway with her to her apartment in another borough the beautiful mezuzah that her dead mother had locked in a jewelry box. Esther glued it to her front door frame as a reminder of her mother. She glued it there to demonstrate that — like her mother, the Real Ruth, once had — she understands that she has an obligation to God.