Kaaterskill Falls Read Free Page B

under her breath. She is not tall, only five foot six, but she holds herself straight. In the way she holds herself, in the way she moves, she has a kind of athletic grace. She is slender, although she has five children. She grew up early, marrying young, having her first child at twenty-one. Still, at thirty-four, she is excitable, eager to speak, and quick to laugh. She is, more than anything, curious, delighted by paradoxes, odd characters, anything out of the ordinary. She looks forward every year to Kaaterskill and the people there: Andras Melish and his South American wife; Professor Cecil Birnbaum; the Curtises with their tomboy daughter, Pammy; the Landauer family, Lubavichers from Crown Heights. In the summers she can see these friends again, and they are both exotic and familiar, like distant relatives.
    Both Brocha and Sorah are asleep by the time Isaac comes home from services, and so Elizabeth and Isaac sit down for blintzes with the older girls. Twelve-year-old Chani looks most like her mother, with her fair skin and hazel eyes. She has Elizabeth’s black hair, though a stranger wouldn’t know. All Elizabeth’s sheitels are auburn. She’d always loved auburn hair, and so when she married and had to cut hers short she decided she might as well become auburn haired. She bought auburn wigs in different styles: pageboy, straight, short, and wavy. Most often in Kaaterskill she wears a kerchief over her hair, but she brings the sheitels up, and keeps them on the top shelf of her closet on faceless white Styrofoam heads.
    Next to Chani at the table, Malki eats her blintzes without sour cream or jam. Ever since she could talk it was always “plain,
plain”
for her food. No jam on blintzes, no gravy on her meat, no mustard on her salami sandwiches. She’s a solemn girl: light brown hair, brown eyes, a little wall-eyed even. A quiet child, not a biker like Chani or a tree climber like chattering nine-year-old Ruchel. Ruchel’s legs are scratched from her expeditions climbing birches. She comes home covered with mud. She and Sorah and Pam Curtis with her red wagon seem to be dredging Bramble Creek behind the Birnbaum place.
    “Daddy,” Ruchel says now, “you know down there at the creek?”
    “Yes.”
    “The blackberries down there are the biggest ones I’ve ever seen in my life. But Mr. King came out with his
dog.”
    Elizabeth laughs. “You mean his poodle?”
    Ruchel keeps talking. “He said we were trespassing on his property and we had to get off. But he doesn’t own the creek, and I was standing in the creek.”
    “But the bushes belong to him,” Elizabeth points out. “You shouldn’t pick from his bushes.”
    “He’s a Norka,” Ruchel says oddly. She’s been reading the
Red Fairy Tale Book.
    “He’s a real estate developer,” Isaac says. “Do you know what else he owns? He owns this house.”
    Ruchel dismisses this. “I don’t believe you.”
    “When we went up to the lake I squashed the tire on my bike,” says Chani.
    “Sh. We’ll talk about it later,” Isaac tells her. Drowsily he leans back in his chair. Across from him Malki cuts her blintz and Ruchel chatters about bicycle pumps.
    “Cecil Birnbaum brought his wife up,” Elizabeth tells Isaac. Cecil is the Brooklyn College professor who summers across the street. “And do you remember Regina from Los Angeles?”
    “Cecil’s sister.”
    “She came up for the week. She’s having a wedding reception for Cecil and Beatrix tomorrow. His wife’s name is Beatrix.”
    “Cecil and Beatrix Birnbaum,” Isaac says, trying out the names.
    “Yes. I said we’d come.”
    “We’ll see,” says Isaac. He can barely keep his eyes open.
    Isaac goes to bed right after dinner, and Elizabeth tucks in the children and washes the dishes alone. The candles are burning down in the little silver travel candlesticks. Elizabeth wipes the crumbs off the counter and then walks out onto the front porch stacked with bicycles. The house, small and