Baumsteins
by Alicia Oltuski
In his room, Danny Baumstein covered with his thumb all but the first two lines in the section of Talmud for which he was responsible. They’d started giving exams almost weekly at the Academy. In the middle of the section stood a passage of Torah, waiting to be referenced, placed, justified. How does the context of this passage in the Torah tie in with what Abayei (some rabbis were called rabbi and some had only a first name, like Madonna) is trying to argue here? They were almost as bad as James Joyce of English class, saluting a series of authors, languages, countries, times.
Now he was reading about Deborah, who immodestly praised herself in song. “The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I Deborah arose, that I arose…” And this, said the Talmud, was wrong of her. And for this, Danny had to turn to Judges to find out what exactly had ceased, but instead, he wondered about his sister, Shira. If, in Yeshiva, she was also flipping around in similar pages. Shira had been sent to Yeshiva over two years ago now, and returned for only the highest of the holidays. It was, in a way, the equivalent of being sent to military school. Only you were pushed to the limit spiritually rather than physically. Physically, most of them couldn’t even hold out for chin ups. Though maybe his sister, who had done track at the JCC, who in many ways did not belong in the Yeshiva with a separate building for the girls, divided down the middle into pious and those in need of correction, might have been able to hold herself up long enough for an attractive boy to see. The Baumsteins had visited for a family day earlier in the year, and Danny could say with almost certainty which girls were there because they wanted to be and which were there precisely because they didn’t.
His father, Eliot, had taken a day off for the event, had allowed Danny and Abie to skip a day of the Academy, and they had driven. Only their mother and wife, Mae couldn’t make it. She had to stay at the deli, which the family owned. For the occasion, she had moved up from behind the kitchen in their back office, to the counter where Eliot usually sat overseeing. It was the kind of deli that people ripped off in subtle ways. They sat at its tables without purchasing anything, they came in the back door, used their outlets, grabbed a handful from the napkin dispenser, and exited, blowing their noses.
The Yeshiva set up tables and chairs for a lavish brunch for all the parents and siblings. Some of the boarder host families were also invited, from the local Baltimore area. Danny poked Shira when hers introduced themselves, a heavily dressed clan, whose children’s names got more and more biblical down the birth order. Shira smiled tinily. Then, she—the one who was arbitrarily in the position of holding all of these people, these two families together—said to all of them, “You could sit here,” though there was no confusion as to where they would be sitting.
Her eyebrows had gotten thinner, Danny saw when they’d all sat down. Other than that, nothing in her appearance had changed, though she was much quieter than she’d ever been. On the way home, Eliot said, “I feel good about all this and the comment just hung in the air, because May at whom it would have been directed was not there to receive it and maybe respond. It reminded Danny of the Rosh Hashanah they’d all gotten in a fight. He forgot what about, but at the end of the first day, Shira had refused to go to the creek they went to Every year with the community to throw their sins away in the form of bread and they’d all stayed home, instead flushing half-stale bits of challah down the toilet, which was allowed since it was also a moving body of water. They’d had to say the blessing outside in the hallway. “May this whole thing be included in our tactic,” Eliot had said. Then too, he’d gotten no response.
In his room, Danny closed the Talmud and all by extension all the books of holy order that were implied in its pages. He went online and checked the away message of everyone on his list, including a girl from his grade, Atara, whose screen name he had only obtained by mistake, by overhearing it. One night, out of boredom, he’d added her to his buddy list. After all, she could not see. It was much like real life. The people whom you considered important, who were on your list, rarely knew they were, and you were certainly not on theirs. On occasion, he checked her away message, which always held on it not the slightest clue to what actually had pulled her away. Usually, she posted quotes, from famous people or friends, or sometimes just circular, impossible ridicules of reasons she may be away from her computer. “Your mom,” it said tonight, which must have been the most ridiculous of all, for if there were two people other than Atara and Danny for whom togetherness, association would have most inconceivable, it would be Atara and his mother, monosyllabic in essence, sitting all day beyond the visible zone region of the Baumstein’s Deli counter. Her name itself was the beginning of a question, an appeal for permission, like they had been trained to do in elementary school to go to the bathroom. “May I?” Danny asked when he felt his bladder fill, and already, he had invoked his mother.
Mae Baumstein sat in the back of the restaurant, crunching on ice cubes. She was a sufferer of Pica, even before her three pregnancies, so she was never very interested in the food that was served in her restaurant but was contented chewing on a piece of ice she mechanically took from a cup full of it, replenished by the boy at the counter, a service gratis for the wife of the owner. She leaned back with the paper Cola cup in her hand, already rough around the rim, the soft parts of her back poking through the barred posterior of her chair.
At the store, she could already feel the nice taste of grilled garlic from the hard salami turn into its aftertaste, its bad breathness that she would have to hide behind her hand. The way she did this was to breathe through her nose while listening, and to look away while talking.
But in the back, where she sat, she had to do neither. Mae could drown out the sounds of their few customers and the staff, all these teenagers they’d hired, for that was the standard in this town. They worked in the pizza shop and the bakery and so they worked at Baumstein’s, though fewer in number, for it was a less social place. Why, she couldn’t understand - kids loved meat, especially Jewish kids because it was a rare commodity, their store an oasis in a desert of nonkosher delights. But it was like that, nonetheless. Even her sons made rare appearances in the store, unless they were asked to come (often, she used it as a meeting place, if she was to take them downtown on errands or if they were going out for dinner for one of their birthdays.)
There had been more of them there when Shira was in town. She’d come with her friends, boys and girls, and they would all eat and talk and lounge at the tables, coming up for this cold cut or that, and Mae would give them “samples,” knowing full well they couldn’t afford to dole out slices and slices as though these slices were not coming from a solid tube of wrapped ware for which she and Eliot had paid. But it was easy to forget the whole for all the centimeter-wide wedges, popular with the boys especially, and Shira knew this.
Now Shira was gone. He had sent their daughter away. He had sent her away with her magazines and her thousand hair rubber bands, the ones that used to camouflage into their carpet and get stuck in the drain, causing miniature floods, little disturbances to show that she was still there. Only without her boys, those gawky piles of jean or khaki, who used to stop by and mumble hello to the parents and, if the parents were around to hear, then also to the brothers. And those, those, Mae wanted to ask, were the ones whom you let kick our Shira out of the house, essentially? We didn’t kick her out, Eliot would say. Rather, it is a place for her to focus a little, to learn who she is before she gives herself away as something she isn’t. Or some like turn of phrase you couldn’t argue with, it was so circular. I know she hasn’t actually given herself away, Mae would have also told him. I know her well enough to know she has probably put limits on the excavations, hormones or no hormones.
At that family’s house in Baltimore, she’d known for certain, had to stop herself from shouting it out in front of everyone, in front of Danny and Abie and the five children. By the end of the day, after they’d all sat together in the Sterling’s Shabbat-centric dining room, Mae had calmed herself down by thinking that they were, nevertheless, the parents of children.
Occasionally, in the two years she was there, Shira would meet her mother in neutral places. Sometimes, a shopping mall in Alexandria, where they’d hunt for skirts that both satisfied the Yeshiva’s criteria and gave hope to the prospects of legs somewhere underneath.
Some of the kids still came into Baumstein’s, and Mae watched them, as though through the negative space she might yet see her daughter. She watched their appetites and their jokes and their bodies. In the past two months, a new bra had come out in the lingerie chain, so that the breast shapes of all the girls in his school were suddenly uniform, as though they’d been remodeled.
He went to visit her. On family day, that first year. No, Mae had said. I will not come along to see her in rows and rows of skirted, double and triply sweatshirted girls, and so he had said, fine, then man the store and she did, though it was difficult to ask, “How much turkey breast?” Nobody knew how hard it was to sound vendor-happy and be efficient at the same time. She was also a little scared of the slicer, scared that she would slip and slit her wrists or something and her customers would have to jump over the counter, like they’d jump into a convertible—one hand on the base to pivot—and rescue her from herself. No, the meat, silly Mae, not yourself, someone would say to her when it was clear she wouldn’t die, and she’d have to pretend to laugh and maybe they would let her back into the backroom and the whole community would forget about it. This is what happened in her mind—worst case scenarios rose, boiled over, and then rectified themselves. She was slandered but acquitted.
The slicer was something her husband had purchased, a power tool that became the center of their profession, like a delivery truck. They had grown to know its failings and preferences, its overcompensations (stop a second before you think you need to, like those rotating light games at indoor amusement parks, the tickets will come if you only know when to stop.) They knew when to take its groans seriously and when to just keep coaxing it back and forth, like an overtired baby.
By the end of the day, Mae had everything tallied up in her journalist’s notebook on her desk by the office. She hardly gave out slices for free anymore so the numbers added up easily, and at home, too, the bathtub didn’t clog with rainbow twists of rubber band that needed to be fished out of the drain. The water ran down without a hitch, and Mae was reminded of the time they’d done tashlich in the toilet, flushing their sins down the bowl. Well, at least it was all their shit together.
The Deborah appeared on the test. What was Deborah the Prophet criticized for? Don’t you mean For what was Deborah criticized? thought Danny. But of the many things that intersected, Talmud and English were not one of them. Rabbi Libin was not responsible for sentence structure. Danny thought of Deborah, singing about herself. When he imagined her, she looked like Atara Rubin, only in robes rather than the cap sleeved tshirts she wore.
He was still thinking about Deborah at the deli, when he came to help out after school. What they did when the money fell short was they took out all of the high school staff from the deli, the scantily paid teenagers who stopped by in the summer and, for those who actually needed the money, in the winter too, and employed the Baumstein children, instead, at least those who were still left in the Kemp Mill area. Danny and Abey started coming in after school and, for the first time since the deli had moved to the same plaza as the kosher bakery and the Judaica store, Mae Baumstein took orders full time, asking people what they wanted and how much, then translating their desires into guesstimated portions on the slicer.
His mother was happy to give over the counter job as soon as the boys got in from school. As Danny opened the door, he saw his mother already gathering the red plastic wrapping she’d pealed off the deli to get to the next piece of meat. When Danny was little, he used to like it, asked if he could eat it. The one on cheese you could eat, the one on meat, you had to cut off and leave on your plate. The swirls of plastic looked cryptic, containing fractions of letters that you couldn’t put together, with only a centimeter or two. In whole, the looked like nothing special. Empire Bologna, it said, clear and out there for everyone to read.
The next question he hadn’t gotten that day on the test. What did Deborah own in Jericho, Ramah, Beth-El, and Tur Malka? The answer, he found out later, was palm trees, orchards, oil-producing olives, and white earth. It was all about products, goods. Now, looking down at the open end of the display case of meats, he wondered how good their quality and service and array really were, as his parents had written up on the awning, almost overkill. Quality-Service-Selection-Freshness, it said in green, an extension of Baumstein’s Deli (Meat). He thought of Atara eating their cold cuts with her family on Shabbat, not for Friday night dinner, but as a mini meal or snack on Saturday afternoon, when everyone was saturated from last night’s dinner and the kiddush in shul, before she had friends over, and they thought up away messages for her to post, though it probably didn’t happen that way. She probably just thought of them, a millisecond before she dashed away from her desk to tend to other things. “Naked Frisbee,” she thought and typed up – one motion – as she was already halfway out of her swivel chair. Though it was clear that Atara had never, would never go play naked Frisbee with anyone, and that made it even better.
Even though it was his last name, the name Baumstein’s seemed strange, Danny thought. The name itself was strange, a combination of two suffixes, ity-ness it may as well have been. In the yearbook last spring, two seniors had dedicated a page to creating the longest Jewish last name and Baumstein had been wedged somewhere in there, a private joke for all to see, if they took the time to read the forty lines of Eastern European syllables. He’d once heard that her last name meant tree, stone in another language, as though some twisted game of rock paper scissor shoot had ended with her ancestor as loser.
Before Danny had looked over that day’s supply of deli, Shira’s old friend, Gabi Reich walked in, wearing pants. She still went to the Academy, though Danny hardly saw her. As a senior, her time in school was lessening daily. The school was weaning its students from it, though they hardly needed to be weaned. Gabi was by herself, wearing pants and an Academy sweatshirt, something ugly that only looked good on girls. She was one of those people whom you could never tell how religious she was and she knew it. Even the program she’d chosen next year, for her year in Israel, gave no clue as to what her orientation was.
“Hey Danny,” she said, slightly out of breath. He remembered now that Gabi had always seemed out of breath, as though, in talking, she put out more effort that she was actually comfortable with.
“Long time no see!”
“Yeah. How are you?”
“Good. Hungry. But I’m sure you’ll take care of that.” He smiled, and busied himself with the display table.
“I like you in gloves.” She laughed a little. “Alright. Um, can I get a half – no three quarters pound of smoked turkey?”
“Sure thing.” He took out the almost whole block and set it on the cutter, stopping a little before he thought it was right. He put the package on the scale and the numbers lit up for both of them to see, for her on the other side of the counter, a digital interpretation. “Wow,” she said. “Right on.” He handed her the plastic bag with the perfect amount of deli in it and felt himself harden, though he couldn’t tell for whom—Gabi, Atara, or Deborah. All of them, perhaps, collectively.
In the very front of the store, in another zone of loudspeaker music entirely, Danny’s father rummaged in the refrigerated section, covered by strips of transparent fabric, like a sliced shower curtain. He stuck his arm through and sometimes got caught on his way out. It was not quite clear what he was doing, and he finished soon enough, coming over to the meat counter to pick some modest piles of deli for Shabbat, without weighing them, a freedom he didn’t seem to enjoy particularly.
Nobody came in after five. Everything had settled down, the wordless Hebrew tunes on the loudspeaker, his pants. Even the edges of the sticks of meat lay undisturbed, though nobody could have known that these pieces would have been the last to be cut for the day, that these surfaces would be the end of this day, the beginning of next.
Danny used to think they would never want with a deli, that it was enough to last them a lifetime. They could eat their meat, all of it if need be. But he understood now, that what you really needed was other people to want your product, because slowly, as you got older, the lure of turkey bologna and seasoned brisket was not enough.
“Pass me a bag?” Eliot said to Danny, plopping in a serving of pastrami. And, though it was ridiculous, this always felt to Danny like they were stealing.
On Shabbat, Mae laid out the deli on a platter and the family served themselves. What was fresh meat to everyone else (and it was, usually) was leftovers to the Baumsteins.
“Anyone want to say something?” Eliot asked the boys, meaning, did they want to share an idea of Torah to bring meaning to the meal.
“It’s Moshe’s birthday and the day he died,” volunteered Abey. They had said this in Danny’s classroom at the Academy, also. “Do you know what day it is today?” they had asked in school every year. The students mentally reviewed the Hebrew calendar. Had they missed a minor fast? No, said the teacher, it was Moses’ birth and death date. They always sprung this on them, never told them the day before, to prepare them, maybe even to allow the students to adopt a certain degree of appropriate reflection. No, they used it always as a sign of how far away they’d come from everything holy, that nobody knew. The teachers shook their heads, then started quietly in on the strange man who was praised or punished in approximately three quarters of the bible.
After dinner, Eliot and Mae stayed in the living room to read, and the boys went upstairs. On Shabbat, they slept in marathon quantities. But in his room, Danny stuffed a shirt or towel underneath his door, so that the flickers of light from the television, increased by multiples in the video game graphics, did not seep into the hallway, where his parents or brother might see it. The volume he would forego.
Danny had always liked the side items of these games, the landscapes behind the attackers, the bystanders in convenience shops, holding on tight to their nearly purchased bottles of beer and milk. He expected one of them to take a swig, while he shot up the perps standing yards away from them. In Talmud, after the meticulous section on execution, the four types of courtly deaths, the rabbis had noted that, all this said, a Beit Din that executed one person in seventy years was considered a bloody Beit Din. In other words, they didn’t even follow through on their carefully allotted retribution. Danny followed through in Busted, socking it to drug dealers all over town, though granted, the town was probably New York. Busted was a game about law but not-law. In his room, he enforced. But at the same time, like the Beit Din, he contained himself. He tried hard to check the force of his fingers pressing down on the controls—the multipurpose knobs which in some games meant jump, in others kick the shit out of. He tried to remember, even as he enforced, looked his victim square in the eye, that the closer he got to blowing his brains out, the closer he got to Yeshiva.
On Fridays, for desert, they actually served the pareve cookies from Shira’s family’s deli, as though they had followed her all the way to Baltimore. The lace cookies glistened with their melted sugar coating, half dipped in milkless chocolate. Fancy cookies they were called, but Shira had known even then, even in Kemp Mill three years ago, that anything which called itself fancy was, by definition, not. On their boxes it said Baumstein’s…Do You Like What You See? We Cater.
At Shira and Arielle’s table were two boys who had clearly drunk the Kool-Aid. tried to recover part of a Shlomo Carlebach version of the blessing. These were the same people who often traded stories about “Shlomo” staying on the phone for hours long distance, with people who were contemplating suicide, but instead, had thought to call him. The stories always ended with the rabbi convincing the lost soul to seek the big plunge against the bigger plunge and the lonely men and women went on their ways, starting large families, with Shlomo tunes gracing their Shabbat meals and brains for the rest of their days, like a soundtrack. Amen.
Shira wanted to say to them, “Stop talking about him. You’ve never even met him.” But she couldn’t, for the craze was widespread and here, in this dining hall with these people, she was in the minority. Also, she didn’t quite trust herself when she was high, as though one of the boys in his oversized sweater would lean over the table and say, “Let me have a look at you,” pulling open a dilated eye.
In Arielle’s room, Shira opened the first dresser drawer and from it, she took out a torn page of magazine, spritzed by a sample of perfume. She rubbed the scrap over her neck and wrists. “I like to get the most out of my magazines,” she said to Arielle. Unlike the deodorized hairspray or air freshener that graced her room and sheets after a joint, sometimes even just antiperspirant spray (as though her bed had suddenly developed sweat glands), this was just for her.
“Where was Jon?” Shira asked.
“Don’t worry. He’ll come.” Arielle took the strip and recycled it on her own skin. She reached over her back, and tucked the straps of her tank top into the straps of her bra, to keep the shirt from falling.
“We’ll call them if they don’t come?” Shira whisper-asked, slightly more desperate than she had meant to sound.
“Sure.”
Shira lay down her bag under Arielle’s desk. She stayed over every other Friday night. The Shabbats she wasn’t there, the Sterlings invited a relative from New Jersey.
“What’s that?”
“It’s history. I told the Sterlings we were studying after Shabbos.”
“Well here’s to the daughters of the revolution,” Arielle said and lit a cigarette. When Jon and Leslie got there, they shared lawn chairs.
“Santa’s here,” said Leslie, opening his bag, and brought out a six pack of beer with two of them missing, the two empty holes widened for where the bottles had been taken out, and Shira wondered if the boys had gotten bored waiting and had pregamed.
Later in the night, Arielle would lend them her bed, with its floral sheets. Shira would take her rubber band from her hair and move it to her wrist where it would be forgotten until her face wash. Then she would close her eyes and pull him on top of her, and imagine that his name was John with an h.
All Shira had to do was approach it, and Jon’s penis budged, as though nodding to acknowledge her presence. He smiled at her. “Shabbat Shalom.”
On Saturday night, they went to the Hopkins campus. Jon didn’t come, though it was he who had heard of the party, from his SAT tutor. By the time they spotted Rajid, he was drunk. “Have a great time,” he kept saying.
From the middle of the room, a boy in a hooded sweatshirt approached them, and asked, “Are you girls enjoying yourselves?” as though he was a waiter, checking up on his table, asking “Is everything alright here?” though it was quite clear that everything was alright, or everything was not alright, but that he could do nothing to change it either way.
Ray was a dental student who’d come all the way from Arizona to tend to low-income mouths. “People think of it as a non-emergency. But think of it this way; when your teeth are messed up, your whole jaw is misaligned.” Shira did think about it. She thought about her mother, who grinded her teeth at night. You could see where one upper tooth coincided with the wrong lower one, like first time line dancers.
“So, Shira,” he said, proud to have gotten her name, as though stating it was enough. He smiled. He never asked what she was majoring in, or where she lived and maybe, Shira thought, he really did not know that she had ventured over from the Yeshiva high school dormitory, or from some high school dormitory, for who knew about Yeshiva, where they wore skirts to house a family? On the other side of the room, Arielle had leaned against the corner of the wall, lined her spine up with the edge, and was giving herself a massage.
“You know what’s bad about being a dentist?” he suddenly said. “I don’t like to kiss anymore. I find some mouths really rotten. Not all, but some are. I’ve gotten pickier.” Shira had never met a boy opposed to any kind of touching, except for religious reasons. But Ray was not a boy. He was two whole life stages ahead of her, she thought above her alcohol. There were other things she wanted to know. She wanted to ask him are our dentists genuine, and were there no poor people in Arizona to align, and what was it like to leave home without being asked to? But instead, she just pulled back her lip, opened her mouth, and asked, louder than the current song, “Do you like what you see?”