Shared Space: Chapter 5
“Wow. That’s pretty nasty. Whatever, I’m very excited about your father’s plan; sorry you can’t see my enthusiasm” It was quiet, then
“Wagner calls the guys who live here ‘sports jackets,’ ” Kivi said, looking out the window at the Summit sign and snorting.
“I don’t get it.” Malky looked genuinely perplexed.
“You know, they’re all like, so excited about going to work, all briefcases and cool jackets and ‘Should my work name be Kevin or something cool, like Jared?’ and ‘Look at me, I’m so balabatish.’ You know what I mean?”
“No, I really don’t.” Malky stood up. She wasn’t generally one for confrontation, but Kivi could see a storm brewing.
“I need to ask you something, Kivi,” she said. “You came home last night and seemed so optimistic. Aryeh will help you find your footing, it was all so exciting. You were going to do your own thing, and have my family’s backing, right? So what happened? Why are you all negative now?”
Kivi hesitated, unsure if he should tell her what he’d explained to Wagner.
He’d told Wagner about Uncle Nochum, Benjy Halb’s younger brother.
Kivi knew that his father-in-law had started in real estate with Zeidy’s help. Zeidy Halb had bought a small building in the garment district years earlier, and when Benjy joined his father’s textile business, he’d seen more opportunity in the property than in polyester pants and zip-up sweaters.
Benjy had persuaded his father to allow him to develop the space, tearing down walls, adding floors, bringing in new tenants, and never looking back. Uncle Nochum had joined the business a few years later. Unlike Benjy, he’d never really gotten the hang of real estate and wished they were still manufacturing dry goods, maintaining that polyester was coming back in style any day now.
The clothing business had long since closed and Zeidy had happily retired to a life of daf yomi and l’chayim after Shacharis and chess and the shuffle up and down the block he called exercise. Uncle Nochum told his children he was a full partner in Halb, but Kivi caught the tightness in his father-in-law’s face when the topic came up.
He remembered returning to his in-laws’ home after Nochum’s daughter’s chasunah, and listening to them discuss the elaborate wedding.
“I mean, we didn’t even serve lamb chops at Malky’s wedding, and he feels it’s appropriate?” Benjy Halb said.
“Ha,” Naomi said, “of course he does. He’s been telling the shadchanim and mechutanim and anyone else who will listen that he’s your partner, so he has to. You don’t.”
Benjy had given her a look that meant some conversations were better conducted in private and they’d left the living room.
Kivi had described the scene to Wagner and said, “Look, I don’t want to be that guy in the family, waiting for handouts and my share of a pie that was made somewhere else. Aryeh has married kids, Shimmy has married kids, they’re all going to be around soon and then I’ll be Uncle Nochum. I wanted my shver to make me part of the action, not to give me a tutor and a few dollars.”
Kivi wanted to share this with Malky, but he had a feeling she wasn’t ready to hear it. She was too excited about him going off to work with her brother and brother-in-law, too eager to join the vaunted club with her siblings, to be part of “The men have a dinner meeting in the city,” or “Could you believe they had to fly off to see a property in Colorado today, of all days?”
He was still deciding if he should confide in her when she pursed her lips, no longer trying to hide her anger.
“What?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you what. We moved back to America, kollel is done, yeshivah is done. I feel like you need to change your mindset, get more serious. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be a ben Torah, but you need to stop talking like Wagner, or maybe even talking to Wagner. He’s such a yeshivishe know-it-all.”
He hadn’t seen this coming. “Whoa. Malky. He’s my friend. For many years. And he’s a great friend and great chavrusa. You don’t even know him.”
She wasn’t backing down. “I know enough to be sure that he’s keeping you immature, especially about how things really work.”
How things really work. The words sat there, the meaning clear to both of them. They made Kivi think of an old Purim story tape he’d listened to as a child — with Vashti haughtily telling Achshveirosh, “You’re just my father’s stable boy.”
Malky was a nice person. She didn’t usually rub his face in the fact that they’d been raised differently, but sometimes it came through. When they’d all flown to Niagara Falls on Chol Hamoed, he’d made Malky stop so they could take a picture as they walked up the stairs to the private plane; he hadn’t noticed that none of her siblings had made anything more of it than a regular flight. (Tatty had a special deal, it was a business thing, and the plane had to get back to Canada anyhow, Mommy had explained. The usual.) Later, Malky had smiled when seeing the picture and said, “You’re so zis Kivi, everything is exciting to you.”
Now, she wore the same superior look.
“This isn’t a yeshivah dormitory conversation,” she said. “My father isn’t a fool. He knows business and he knows you and he wants what’s best for you. I don’t want you held back by Wagner.”
He slumped back on the couch. “Wow. That’s pretty nasty. Whatever, I’m very excited about your father’s plan; sorry you can’t see my enthusiasm.”
It was quiet, then, and Malky said she was going to check if the baby had woken up from her nap.
******
Kivi decided to go out to learn, because there was no real schedule yet. As he walked to the Summit shul, (Wagner had laughed and said, “They probably have a whole bookshelf of seforim on the halachos of kiddush Hashem in the workplace and dina d’malchusa dina and all that stuff, why learn anything else, right?”) Kivi wondered if Malky had a point. Did she even have a right to do that, to go after his friends?
He remembered her friend Dassy in Eretz Yisrael, who was always bugging Malky to go out and then saying, “Oh, I forgot my credit card, I feel so dumb,” until she stopped saying even that and it had been official that Malky would pay for all of them, the whole Sorotzkin eating salad and sipping iced coffee on the Halb card. Malky hadn’t minded, and when Kivi had asked, “Doesn’t that make you feel used? Like you’re just their sponsor?” Malky had gotten upset at him and said he had no right to talk about her friends, that her friends were her business. So why wasn’t Wagner his business?
And as Kivi swung open the door to the Summit shul and headed to the seforim shelf, he had one more thought. Maybe his comment had bothered Malky not because it insulted her friend, but because it cut straight to her core. If she was going to start evaluating every relationship she had for authenticity, then which would survive? What would she be left with?
He opened a Gemara, feeling unhappy. He knew that he was wrong, but he wasn’t sure why.
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 710)
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