Read Online Washing the Dead by Michelle Brafman - Free Book Online

in my arms and distract him with a cookie. I couldn’t tell if he remembered me. How could he? He was barely a toddler when I left the community. Even now he might be ignorant of the shame my mother had brought upon the shul, or maybe he knew of my family’s shanda and didn’t see me as damaged goods but simply as a person who belonged to the burial society.
    The rebbetzin walked over to Yossi. Men and women were not allowed to touch unless they were married, so she couldn’t hug him, but her mere arrival seemed to relax him. The rebbetzin motioned the three women to go ahead, and they responded as if they were used to taking her cues. She remained at Yossi’s side as I followed the Chevra members down a long carpeted corridor to the steps leading to the basement. An older man in a rumpled suit and yarmulke sat slouched on a comfortable chair in front of the door, reciting psalms from a prayer book on his lap. He was the shomer, and so it was his job to sit with the body.
    Before we entered the preparation room, Aviva touched my arm. “Are you ready?”
    “I think so.”
    The room was cold and quiet. The floor tiles were white and freshly scrubbed. A table lined with nail polish remover and canisters brimming with Q-tips, cotton balls, and toothpicks sat on our side of the curtain. The empty pine casket lay open near the window, waiting for Mrs. Kessler.
    The rebbetzin joined us. In silence, we washed our hands, pouring a cup of water alternately over each one. We put onrubber gloves and aprons similar to the ones I wore to paint with my students. Everyone else approached Mrs. Kessler, but I stayed behind. Although I’d never smelled death, I recognized the scent, acrid and fishy at the same time. A curtain surrounded Mrs. Kessler’s body, yet the cloth did not spare me from feeling her absence. It filled the room.
    A sick hollowness was growing inside me. The rebbetzin turned around, and the compassion on her face loosened a brick in the wall I’d constructed between us. I stalled by fiddling with the string on my apron, knowing that she’d wait until I was ready. I’d never be ready. I looked up at her, and she gently pulled back the curtain. I walked toward Mrs. Kessler’s body, covered with a sheet and stretched out on a porcelain bed with a drain that emptied into a sink at the foot.
    I glanced toward the rebbetzin, who lifted the sheet from Mrs. Kessler’s face. I shut my eyes for a few seconds before I looked. I recognized her cheekbones, her strong jaw and nose, but the muscles surrounding them had slackened. She looked asleep, but not in a way that suggested a nap or even a coma. I beckoned her spirit as I had done last night, but Mrs. Kessler was dead. This fact clanked against the floor of my heart. A pressure formed behind my eyes.
    Mrs. Kessler was gone. Gone. Gone.
    Gone. I am six years old, and I am sitting across the table from my mother, eating my after-school snack and watching her smoke. I spread peanut butter on my apple with a paring knife, wondering why she hasn’t noticed that I’m using it or that I’ve lost my front tooth. She is looking through me. We’re sitting so close that I can see her eyelashes, thicker than my doll Cassandra’s, but she cannot see me. This is the first disappearance that I remember, but I now know that her leaving was gradual, an accretion of tiny moments that led to her affair and her slow exit from our lives. You don’t just up and walk out on a family without preparing properly. After I’ve eaten most of my apple, she returns to herself and tells me to please put down that sharp knife. Later shesneaks into my bedroom and puts a quarter under my pillow, and the next morning I pretend I didn’t see her and that I still believe in the Tooth Fairy. I do, and I don’t. She is my fairy, sometimes make-believe, but still mostly bearing treasures.
    Now I was left to mourn both Mrs. Kessler and the hole she had filled for me. My mother was that hole, scary and