Photo from www.dailypainters.com
As Mashi made her way down the vegetable aisle, the smell of half rotten garlic and wilting cilantro filled her nostrils. The prices at Ginnetti’s Fruit Market were the lowest in the city, but you really had to pick through the selections to find the fresh stuff. Mashi was distracted by a display of brightly colored yellow peppers. One of these would make such a nice addition to her Shabbos salad. She picked up a shiny pepper and checked the price on the vegetable bin. $2.49 per pepper! This was above her budget.
Mashi thought for a moment about the Shabbos that awaited her. She would light candles in her small apartment, her mouth filled with unanswered prayers, and sit down to a table set for one. Instead of a baritone voice leading a family in the songs of Shalom Aleichim or Aishet Chayil, only her lone soprano would croon out the tunes to an empty room.
There would be no children to bless, no foreheads to kiss, and no calls for everyone to settle down and pay attention to Tatty’s kiddush. Instead of responding “Amen” to the blessing over the wine, Mashi would perform the unwanted task herself, feeling as if she was stealing someone else’s job. She would wash Netilat Yadaim, make HaMotzi, and tuck into her simple meal, trying to be thankful that Hashem provided her with the means to make yet another Shabbos.
“L’kavod Shabbos kodesh.” Mashi thought, as she put the yellow pepper in her cart. Anything that could possibly brighten another lonely Shabbos was worth an extra dollar or two.
As Mashi trudged home with her plastic shopping bags hanging off of her pinched wrists, she thought once again about her dilemma.
“I need an answer, Mashi.” her cousin Rena had said that morning. “Mrs. Mendelsberg isn’t going to wait forever. She already has other prospects lined up for this guy. What do you have to lose?”
It wasn’t often that Mashi was redt a shidduch anymore. At forty nine, her childbearing years were most likely behind her. The only hope she had for a family now was through stepchildren. Pinchus Sirkin certainly could provide her with stepchildren. A widower with seven kids, five of whom still lived at home, fifty seven year old Pinchus was in the market for a new wife.
Walking down the street, Mashi stepped through the slush, and winced against the chilly air. She came up behind an elderly couple and imagined them to be two waddling penguins, like the kind she had seen on a trip to the aquarium with her nieces and nephews. She’d read on one of the signs that penguins mate for life. Mashi wished she were a penguin.
How easy it would be to know her place in this world if she had been born a penguin! She would hatch from an egg in Antarctica and be nurtured by a mother bound to her through hard-wired instinct. She would have no other cares but learning to swim, fish, and stay away from obvious predators. She and her eventual mate would meet on an ice sheet and immediately recognize each other by smell, sight, and sound. They would remain together forever, raising a new generation of chicks.
Mashi attempted to balance her bags and dig out her house keys from her pocket with gloved hands. After several failed attempts, she bit off her right glove at the finger, and grabbed the keys. The glove still dangling from her teeth, Mashi imagined her hand as a crystallized ice sculpture, gracefully frozen in the pose of inserting a key into a door lock. The cold broke her reverie, and she quickly turned the lock and went inside the musty stairwell.
Mustard shag carpet graced the staircase and landings of the three flat building. Mashi trudged up past the strollers, scooters, and a large tub of old sidewalk chalk left out by her neighbors. On her way up she heard the muffled sounds of a toddler’s tantrum, a man’s deep voice singing “I’m Big Gedalia Goomber,” and a wheezy vacuum whose whine rose and fell with each back and forth across an unseen welcome mat.
At the third floor landing, Mashi put her bags down and removed her boots. She slid her feet into her house slippers and unlocked the door to her apartment. Bringing the groceries into her tiny kitchen, she was taken back twenty years. Standing in the same spot, Mashi’s mother unpacked the Pesach goods dropped off by the gemach. Putting away cartons of eggs, cheese, milk, and yogurt, Mashi’s mother bent over the refrigerator, straining the buttons on her floral housecoat.
“Mashi!” her mother hollered. “Where are you? I need you!”
Mashi shuffled down the hallway and braced herself. Mommy was always tense before Pesach, and they had spent the last few weeks getting the house and kitchen scoured and scrubbed in preparation for the Pesach food delivery. Finally, everything was cleaned, covered, and kosher enough not to render the holiday food chometz. The next stage of their preparations were about to begin with the sorting and storing of the Pesach food and finally, the cooking and baking.
“I need you to shlep the boxes of potatoes and oranges to the pantry. I can’t do it with my back.” Mommy said.
Mashi bent down to lift the box of potatoes, but found it to be too heavy. She started to drag the box across the floor.
“Stop!” Mommy screamed in horror. “Look at that trail of chometz that’s coming from the box! You’re dragging chometz across the floor that we just cleaned! Come here! Take these newspapers and line the bottom of the pantry. Take them!”
Mashi took a stack of papers and laid them in overlapping rectangles on the floor of the pantry. She then hoisted the box of potatoes a few inches above the ground and hobbled, ape-like, over to the pantry and banged the box down.
“Careful!” Mommy yelled. “Now take this towel and clean up the streaks off the floor.”
As Mashi got down on her hands and knees, she heard her mother mutter, “So stupid!”
“You’re twenty nine years old, and don’t know how to make Pesach? Nu, I never showed you? Don’t say I didn’t teach you. How are you going to make a kosher home if you can’t make a Pesach?” Mommy asked.
Mashi kept her head down and her hands wiping. “I’m sorry, Mommy. I didn’t know the box was dirty underneath.”
Mommy sighed and placed a large pot underneath the running faucet. “Tell me, what happened with the accountant? Are you going to go out with him again?”
Mashi had gone on a date with a bookkeeper the night before. Ari didn’t actually have an accounting degree, but he worked keeping track of expenses at his uncle’s shoe factory. He actually had more interest in making shoes, than counting up how much it cost to make them and how much other people paid to buy them. However, the factory workers were all non-Jews. Ari’s uncle said it was beneath him to work on the factory floor. Bookkeeping was a respectable parnassah.
Ari had spent a long time asking Mashi about her shoes. Where she bought them, how much she paid. With pride, he told her about the materials they were made from – leather uppers and manmade soles (which was bad). The soles were attached with machine stitching and glue (also bad) instead of being hand sewn. He told her that they were made in China (from bad to worse) instead of Italy (the best place for a shoe to be made).
“I think Ari was more interested in my shoes than he was in me, Mommy.”
“What are you talking about? A man talks about his work. A woman listens and makes him feel important. That’s a wife’s job, to listen about his day! To take an interest! I hope you took an interest? Did you act interested? Did you ask him questions about his job?” Mommy looked worried.
“I tried to ask him questions. To be honest, I just don’t care that much about shoes, Ma.” Mashi knew what was coming next. The anger, the disappointment, the rebuke.
“Who cares about the shoes? It’s not about the shoes! You don’t need to like shoes! You need to like him! He needs to like you! You pretend to like shoes so he will like you! Do you like being alone? Do you like living with your mother until I’m no longer around? Do you like the idea of never having your own home, your own children? Is that what you like?!!!” Mommy yelled. Her short gray wig was slightly twisted around her head, lending her the look of a flustered British barrister.
Mashi could feel tears threatening to surface. She was caught between a rock and a hard place. Ari could be her ticket out of this prison cell, but his ticket led straight into another confine. At least this cage was familiar.
“Zeeskeit,” Mommy began. This was never a good sign. “Ever since Tatty was niftar, God rest his soul, my one wish before I join him is that you find your bashert. I can’t rest easy until I know you are taken care of. You were such a devoted daughter to Tatty, and I know he is watching and waiting from above until he can be at your chasana. Have no doubt, he’ll be there on that special day! Don’t you want that day to come sooner rather than later? If you wait too long, both of us will be malachim at your wedding. I’m sure you want me to be there in body and not just spirit?”
For the next eighteen years, Mashi’s mother made similar speeches after each failed shidduch, until her actual death two years ago. If Mashi ever married, Mommy and Tatty would now both be relegated to the ghostly guest registry populated by her ancestors.
As Mashi put away her groceries and began to assemble ingredients for her Shabbos meal, she knew she had let her parents down. This lonely life wasn’t what they had wanted for her. It wasn’t what she wanted for herself either, but she knew from living all those years with her mother, that one can live with another and still feel alone.
“Fairy tales.” Mashi thought. “I’ve been holding on to fantasies and fairy tales.”
Drying her hands on a dish towel, Mashi left her lettuce to soak, and the cucumber lying in a bed of its own peels.
“Hello, Rena?” Mashi said into the phone. “Yes, I’ve decided to let Mrs. Mendelsberg know that I’d like to meet Pinchus. It’s only one date, right?”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying!” exclaimed Rena. “I’m so pleased! You won’t regret it. Mrs. Mendelsberg says that Pinchus is such an aidel man, such a caring father. That’s how you know a good man – by how he is with his kids. He’s very good with his children. You know he’ll be a good Tatty because he’s already proven himself!”
“That’s a good sign, I suppose.” said Mashi. “Anyway, have a good Shabbos. Call me after you reach her and let me know what’s next.”
Hanging up, Mashi went back to the cutting board. She sliced into the yellow pepper, and inhaled the subtle aroma. She ran her right thumb across the inside flesh and scraped the seeds into the garbage bin with her nail. She bathed the two halves of the seeded pepper under the warm spray of the faucet. Mashi diced the golden vegetable into the finest mince she could manage. She gathered every last piece into the salad bowl, not wanting to waste a precious morsel. Somehow, Mashi had the feeling that this would be her last yellow pepper for awhile. She would enjoy every bite that night, l’kavod Shabbos kodesh.
