“Ah,” Ima sighed with relief. “Is that all? Of course she can bring Avital. This is what you had to break to me so gently? I thought you were going to tell me she wants to bring a pet snake, or a leopard cub or something.”

I asked no more questions and hurried back to let Batya know it was okay. Half an hour later she and I were lounging on the sofa bed in my room, with the plate of squooshies Ima sent in, chatting about the big assembly we’d had that day. All the sixth-grade classes in town had gathered in one auditorium for a special program.

My little sisters took charge of Avital, and soon they were all busy building a Duplo castle. There was an awkward moment, because at first Suri didn’t remember that Avital was her cousin, and Batya didn’t understand how that could be. “Don’t you guys see each other?” she asked.

I smoothly shifted the subject back to the school assembly.

“The program was amazing,” Batya said, closing her eyes to savor the memory. “Remember when Nira Meiri’s daughter got up on the stage and sang with her at the end?”

“And when she told us about how she was in the hospital all alone…”

“I bet we could do something like that when we’re older,” Batya said eagerly. “We’ll get up on a stage and tell people our stories and wow them all, and they’ll all talk about how inspiring it was.”

“But what stories will we tell them?” I took a squooshie from the plate. “I don’t have any dramatic problems to talk about. Neither do you.”

Batya took a sheet of paper from my desk and rolled it, pretending it was a microphone. “From a very early age, I couldn’t hear at all,” she said dramatically.

“Of course you can hear. How are you talking with me now?”

“My parents were desperate. They took me from one doctor to another,” she continued. “Umm, let me think… what else can I say?”

“Tell them about your struggles,” I said, laughing. “Your challenges.”

“But I don’t have any struggles!” she said, getting frustrated. Then, in a voice full of pathos: “Oh, how I struggle to put two magnets on my head every morning! Without them, I wouldn’t hear the chirping of the birds in the trees…”

“Hahahaha!” Now I was really laughing hard.

“What, don’t I move you to tears?”

“Tears of laughter, Batya.”

“But we’re supposed to be onstage together, Tovi. Now it’s your turn to talk about the path you forged in life.”

“The path… the path I forged…” I crinkled my forehead, thinking hard. “My mother would buy me beautiful, wide hairbands… to hide the place where my ear should have been. They were so pretty, the other girls in school wanted them, too.”

“Wow, that’s some path you forged,” said Batya. “But Tovi, you have to tell them about a real struggle, otherwise nobody will spend money on tickets for our inspiring event.”

Try as we did, we couldn’t come up with any really inspirational struggles.

“Even if I end up not getting my surgery,” I said, “it still won’t be a real struggle. What will I say? That one time my battery went dead in the middle of class, and I changed it quietly without the teacher even noticing?”

“And I’ll say that I use special waterproof shields for my processor when I go swimming.”

“I’ll say that one time I couldn’t find a green hairband in the shade I wanted, so I bought a purple one instead.”

“Nobody’s going to buy any tickets to hear about us,” Batya predicted gloomily. “We’re just a couple of boring girls who think we’re inspiring.”

And on that melancholy note, we joined the group playing on the rug. Later, after Batya left, I desperately needed to ask Ima about what she’d said before. If Batya’s family was really so nice, a real upstanding family like Ima said, then how could it be that they allowed her to go to Dudi’s house?

Abba answered me. “Every good family is special in its own way, Tovi.”

• ••

Dudi picks up the phone and doesn’t say hello. Instead, Nechami hears him singing, very softly.

“Oyfn pripetchik brent a fayerl, Un in shtub iz heys…”

He must be putting Avital to bed, and Yaffa’le was probably out now — she has classes a few nights a week.

“Un der rebbi lernt kleine kinderlach, dem alef beis.”

His voice is deep, warm. Nechami loves that old song. She loves it that her brother chooses, despite everything, to put his little girl to sleep like this — with a fire burning warm, and a rebbi teaching alef beis. “Should I call back later?” she asks.

“Zogtshe, kinderlach,” he sings, making up his own lyrics now. “Zogtshe shvester zogt. Ich her yeder vort — Speak, sister, speak, I hear every word.”

Nechami laughs. Her spoiled little niece won’t allow her parents to talk on the phone while they’re sitting by her bed. Only singing is allowed. “Did you know that Chaya is out now meeting Shpinder?” she says. “Well, you can’t answer me now, so I’ll tell you.”

“Zogt zhe nokh ah mol un take nokh ah mol,” he sings. (Say it again, and one more time.)

“I don’t know when Abba and Ima even met the parents. I’m afraid they may have pressured her to say yes to this shidduch, and maybe it’s going to be hard for her to be married to him. She’s not really sure she wants that kind of life.”

“That’s not true, Nechami,” Dudi says, forgetting to sing.

“Abba! Sing!” Avital protests drowsily.

There’s no way they can talk this out now, not like this. “Sorry, I see I called at the wrong time,” Nechami says. “Call me back after she falls asleep.”

She slips out of the door of her apartment. Maybe she’ll go downstairs to her office and work on the computer for a bit. Maybe she’ll find some respite there, a distraction from the disturbing thoughts about Chaya’s terrible mistake. But how can she find any peace of mind when out there in the moonlight sits Ruti, her new neighbor. The invader.

“Shalom,” Ruti greets her happily. “Superposition is always parallel. With a dash of bergamot.”

“Right, a dash of bergamot,” Nechami affirms, nodding agreeably. Whatever in the world, she wonders but doesn’t say.

“Right, isn’t it?” Ruti is glowing. So glad to talk with someone who gets it.

“For sure,” says Nechami, the words sticking in her throat. She escapes to her office.

Safe inside her little haven, she turns on the computer and opens her imaging program. What was it Gunter said was most urgent? She can’t remember. She opens her email to reread the message:

“Hi, Nechami. Attached are the sketches of the building we spoke about. We need the exterior view ASAP, and the interior after that.”

She opens the sketches and starts copying objects into her workspace. Don’t think, just work, she tells herself. Even when Dudi calls back and starts with his endless analogies. “When you’re riding in a car, Nechami, what do the trees do?”

“They just stand there, of course, on the side of the road.”

“But what does it look like they’re doing, from your point of view in the moving car?”

“It looks like they’re moving backward.”

“And the car seems to be staying in one place, right? You don’t see any of it moving.”

She gives a slightly weary sigh. “And all this means that…”

“There are fictitious forces, Nechami, pseudo forces that appear to be acting from your point of view, as an observer in motion. An objective observer, looking at the whole scene, would see it differently.”

“Dudi, skip the mashal and just tell me what you want to say.”

“It might be a little… you might not enjoy hearing it. But I was talking with Yoeli, and he agreed with me. And so did Yaffa’le.”

“You all agreed about what?”

“That you married a masmid and those first years were hard for you, and now you’re projecting all that onto our little sister. Excuse the chutzpah, but I only came out and said it because you asked me to.”

A tremendous chutzpah indeed, and Nechami can’t excuse it that easily — especially the fact that they’ve obviously all been talking about her behind her back. The hypothetical car Dudi claims she’s riding in has just crashed. But she’s not in a car, she’s been on another sort of journey for 16 years — a journey none of her siblings can even begin to comprehend.

“Chaya wants to get engaged,” Dudi says simply. “She wants to become, and is perfectly capable of becoming, the wife of a talmid chacham. She’s working and making nice money. She’s an amazing, strong, intelligent, and highly principled girl. She can do it, and she wants to do it.”

“But she was terrified!” Nechami protests weakly.

“Yes,” Dudi agrees. “She was definitely nervous. She was like a hiker about to start an extreme wilderness trail, suddenly getting cold feet and saying to the rest of the group, ‘Hey, maybe this isn’t such a great idea. How about we take an easier path?’ But you know people like that, don’t you? And you know that really, they want their friends to tell them, ‘Come on, don’t cop out now, when you’re so close to your dream. Just put one foot in front of the other. You can do it, and you’re going to love it.’ ”

Her considerate brother doesn’t say what she’s supposedly projecting onto Chaya. Nechami ends the call.

She sees at least four missed calls from the kids upstairs; probably they want to know where the blue pajamas are and where’s the notebook they need for tomorrow. But that’s a good sign; it means they finally found the cordless phone, and it even works.

Outside, a cold Kislev rain is falling. On her computer desk is a volume of Chazon Ish on Kodshim. Shua left it there this morning, alongside his trademark coffee-mug ring.

Lernt, kinder, hot nit moyre,

Yeder onheyb iz shver;

Gliklekh der vos hot gelernt Toyre,

Tsi darf der mensch nokh mer?

(Learn, children, have no fear,

Every beginning is hard

Fortunate is one who’s learned Torah —

What more does a person need?)

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 862)