Chani
Recap from last week: Avraham and Shiffy Krauss try to persuade Effi to look into shidduchim after spending Shabbos lunch with the Moskowitz family. On Sunday morning, Effi is startled to run into Chani at Chezky’s house, and they pretend not to know each other.
The next week flew by fast, and the following Shabbos was hot, cloudy, and quiet. Pinny’s dislocated arm and bruised back were much better now, although he was still prohibited from climbing and running. Mindy invited her neighbor Blimi to come for lunch with her husband and three-year-old twin girls, who played nicely with the boys, tempering their wildness with little-girl preferences for playing house and school.
But once Shabbos ended, a June Sunday in Brooklyn was just a blank page waiting to be written in. Mindy, despite her pregnancy and neurasthenic complaints of headaches and fatigue, was equally, improbably prone to sudden bursts of energy. She woke up Sunday morning raring to go, encouraged by the sunny skies and low humidity.
When Chani came downstairs, she found Mindy outfitted in running shoes, a jersey skirt with a tee shirt, and a bandanna tichel over the dark hair she alone had inherited from their mother. “I spoke with my sisters-in-law an hour ago,” she announced as Chani, still a little bleary-eyed from reading into the wee hours, made a beeline for the coffeepot. “I absolutely need to work off all that food we ate yesterday, and it’s gorgeous out. My mother-in-law can watch the boys in another hour and we’re all going to walk down to Marine Park and go around the track. You’ll come, okay? I don’t want to be all alone with Hennie and Lieba. They can be boring by themselves.”
Marine Park was a huge green expanse with a track, exercise and sports terrains, and pedal carts. Chani took a long draw of her coffee and eased into a chair at the kitchen table. “Sure, why not?” she shrugged, observing Pinny and Shloimie lining up cars across the living room floor. “It’ll be good to get out and move.” Sad to say, she had no other plans outside of catching up on her interminable progress notes and reading ahead for another course.
“That’s great!” Mindy said. “Chezky wants to go play basketball with Effi and a couple of his other friends after his shiur, so we’d be on our own anyway.”
An hour later, a shower and tefillah behind her, Chani donned sneakers and a polo shirt and gathered her hair into a ponytail. Mindy brought her little darlings down the block to her mother-in-law, who had promised them a trip to a park with sprinklers. Mindy came back for Chani with Hennie and Lieba in tow, fairly crackling with energy.
They took off down the balmy, leafy streets in the direction of Marine Park, a 15-minute walk, keeping up a rapid enough pace to pretend they were exercising instead of just walking and schmoozing. The Moskowitz sisters lost no time gushing again about Mr. Krauss’s brother Effi, last week’s Shabbos guest.
“He was sooo nice, so classy!” Lieba crooned.
“It was so interesting hearing how the two brothers built up a whole enterprise by themselves!” Hennie marveled. “They must be geniuses! I couldn’t imagine doing something like that.”
“My bosses started small,” said Lieba, who worked in a real estate office. “Sometimes things just take off. But can you imagine having so much money?”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” Hennie said. “Slow down a little, will you?” Their pace had gotten a little too fast for Hennie, who was a tall, somewhat zaftig girl who was more of a reader than an athlete.
“I’d know what to do with it!” Lieba said merrily. Smaller and trimmer, she had no trouble maintaining a brisk pace. “For starters, I’d buy a nice car and a new wardrobe, I’m so sick of my clothes. I’d get an apartment in Florida and redecorate my parents’ house!”
Chani and Mindy exchanged a glance, silently communicating, “I’d get my dysfunctional family out of debt and back into their own house!” But Mindy only said, “I’d get a bigger house, for sure!”
“What about you, Chani?” Lieba chirped.
Chani shrugged. “I don’t need so much,” she said. “But maybe I could buy myself a husband?”
“Totally!” crowed Hennie and Lieba.
They crossed the final avenue before the park and walked a path to the track, where they did an energetic quarter-mile lap. As they veered off the track to rest, lo and behold, they spied Chezky, his friend Dov, Effi, and a few other men playing basketball in one of the nearby courts. “There they are!” Lieba squealed. “Don’t they look cute on the court!”
“Lieba,” Hennie reproved. “Don’t you dare go running after them!”
“Give me a break,” Lieba said. “I’m not that inappropriate!”
But Mindy walked over to greet her husband. It seemed the game was just breaking up anyway, and Chezky came over to speak to her. The girls sat down on some benches while Effi and Dov walked off the court and onto a stretch of lawn nearby to glug down water and wipe their faces with towels.
Chani’s foot was starting to hurt. Was she developing a blister on one side? She got up from the bench and walked a few tentative steps to locate where the pain was coming from. She hobbled to a large tree behind the bench, leaning against it to reposition her sock to cushion the skin. From her position half-hidden behind the tree, she had a discreet view of Effi and Dov standing nearby chatting, and was likewise in hearing range of Hennie and Lieba, lounging on their bench.
At the basketball court, Mindy was apparently letting forth at her husband for some unknown reason, as her sisters-in-law observed from a distance. “What did poor Chezky do this time?” Chani heard Hennie sigh, pulling an elastic out of her hair and redoing her dirty-blonde ponytail. “Seems like she’s always giving him a hard time about something.”
“I know. I wish he’d married Chani instead of Mindy!” Lieba said with a pout. “She’s so much nicer. She’s prettier too.”
“I think Chani’s the prettiest of the three of them,” Hennie pronounced. “Zahava has height and that mane of blond hair, but her face is kind of long and so’s her nose. And she’s not very friendly.” She scrunched her feet up against her chest. “But you know Chani was brought up for Chezky, right? And they said no?”
Chani looked up and saw that Effi had stopped paying attention to his conversation with Dov. He too seemed to suddenly be straining to listen in to the Moskowitz girls’ conversation, and as the girls made no effort to keep their voices down, the sound traveled easily across the lawn.
“Why did they say no?” Lieba said. “Was it Chani or her father?”
“I think it was Mrs. Rosner, that neighbor who was so close to their mother,” Lieba said. “I think she thinks nobody’s good enough for Chani! And here’s the proof, Chani still isn’t married!”
Hennie frowned. “Maybe Chani should start standing up for herself,” she said.
“Totally! Chani is way too nice. It’s nice to be a tzadeikes and all that, but she doesn’t say no to people when she should sometimes. Just look at the way Mindy uses her as her babysitter all the time. It’s abuse! She’s allowed to have her own life once in a while!”
Chani hoped no one could see her behind the tree. But she saw that Effi was listening carefully to every word the girls said.
Hennie answered Lieba, “You’re right. A person definitely has to acquire a little backbone.”
Chani wanted to yell, “I can have backbone! You’ve never seen me at work! You should have seen me fighting last week to keep Chavi Burstein out of foster care!” But then Mindy and Chezky were walking over, their dispute apparently over, and the conversation abruptly ceased.
To be continued.