It was a damp, gray day, smelling like fallen leaves and decaying earth. We were standing in a thicket of brambles behind our school. Our teacher was unhappy - she had planned a science lesson, but we’d all gotten tangled in pricker-vines sticking to our socks and dresses and pants legs. We were getting stuck faster than our teacher could unstick us. Hitchhikers were stabbing my ankles through my socks.
A lady came out of the school, walked over to us and whispered to the teacher, then took my hand and led me to the principal’s office. It was hard to walk covered with hitchhikers. I was surprised to find my little sister in the office, sitting on a bench.
Mrs. Boyarsky was there too. She had come to drive us home in her car. We didn’t know why and were too scared to ask.
Mrs. Boyarsky was our scary next door neighbor. She had a loud voice, a Hungarian accent, and mile-high orange hair. We had heard that Hungarians all have fire-colored hair like this, because Hungarians have fiery tempers. Mrs. Boyarsky also had creepy blue numbers tattooed on her wrist that she got at a concentration camp called Aushwitz. Lots of kids’ parents in our neighborhood had blue numbers. We heard stories about the concentration camps, and Dr. Josef Mengele the Angel of Death with his medical experiments, and Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, and Rudolf Höss. These names were familiar to us, they were the boogeymen in our childhood nightmares.
My father had disdain for Mr. Boyarsky who was an accountant, a lowly profession according to my father. But my father absolutely hated Mrs. Boyarsky. Just the mention of her would make him red-faced mad. We never knew why he hated Mrs. Boyarsky, but we never wondered about it, because so much of life went unexplained. Maybe she scared him because she was very Jewish, and in those years my parents were busy convincing themselves that they were cultured New England WASPS. Whatever the reason, my parents weren’t on speaking terms with the Boyarskys, even though the Boyarsky girls were the same ages as my little sister and me and the four of us played together every day after school.
Mrs. Boyarsky pulled into her driveway, walked us into their house, and up the stairs to Andrea and Karen’s bedrooms. This was all so strange. We didn’t know why we had been brought there with no explanation. We had never been inside the Boyarsky house, even though our two houses were so close to each other we could see into Karen’s bedroom from my parents' bedroom window.
These bedrooms were so different from ours! They were pink! Fluffy pink rugs, ruffled curtains tied with ribbons, stuffed animals, dolls with long blonde hair, big pink mirrors…all things that my father hated and was loudly against on moral grounds, things that were expressly forbidden in our house.
The Boyarsky house smelled, too. It smelled like my grandmother’s house in Philadelphia - my father’s mother, whose house always smelled like food. I had a feeling my father would hate this smell.
It was dinner time. Strange and creepy. Who would have known that Andrea and Karen lived like this! Dinner was formal and quiet, nothing like our house which was loud to put it mildly, even in those days when there were still only three of us kids since my two youngest sisters hadn’t been born yet. One time my Uncle Herb was visiting for dinner and shocked us all by suddenly slamming his hand on the table, rattling the plates and dishes, yelling about the "decibel level," and storming out of the kitchen in a fury. Dinner at our house always had something going on.
But this dinner at the Boyarsky’s was nothing like that. We were in the dining room, first of all, not in the kitchen like at our house. And the table was covered with a white tablecloth and all kinds of things, like it was a holiday. My sister and I sat stiffly next to each other in awkward silence, in tall chairs, feeling very small.
Mr. and Mrs. Boyarsky were upset that we didn’t know it was Friday night and “Erev Shabbat” - the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath. We had no idea.
In our house we celebrated only two Jewish holidays: Passover, when we had a seder where relatives came and there were lots of kids and noise and fun; and Hanukkah when we got loads of presents for eight days, we played games like rolling hazelenuts on the floor like marbles, we gambled with M&Ms using little roulette wheels and dreidels, and we sang rounds and harmonies with my father. Best of all, my father gave us a history lesson in the form of mesmerizing and dramatic stories of Ancient Judea, Judah Maccabee and his five brave sons, Hannah and her seven sons, and the brave fighters who battled against Syrian and Greek oppression, and fought for the freedom to observe Jewish faith, laws, and traditions, and to remain in their native land.
But we knew nothing about “Shabbat” and had never seen the Friday night ritual.
We watched as Mrs. Boyarsky put a white scarf on her head, covered her eyes, and lit two candles while singing in Hebrew. Then Mr. Boyarsky lifted a metal cup like the one our father used at our Passover seders, and Mrs. Boyarsky, Andrea, and Karen all held up their cups, so we lifted ours too. Mr. Boyarsky sang the same blessing our father sang at Passover. We all took a sip of wine. Grape juice.
Mrs. Boyarsky pointed to bowls filled with water beside our silverware, telling us to dip our hands. Everybody dipped their hands in the water, and Mrs. Boyarsky passed around a little towel, singing in Hebrew again.
Then she pulled off a piece of a big, shiny, braided bread (we knew this was “Challah” and had it sometimes in our house), sang again in Hebrew and everybody (but us) sang quietly with her. She passed the bread around the table and we each pulled off a piece.
The food was strange. My sister and I didn’t say a thing. After dessert, Mr. Boyarsky held up a piece of bread and sang another blessing.
Then Mrs. Boyarsky walked us to our house next door, said good night, and left us standing outside on the doorstep.
We opened the door and went in.
We could hear my mother crying in her bedroom upstairs.
My father was pale greenish and scary looking.
He told us that our little brother Jefferson was dead.
He said this is the last time we will speak of this.
You will never speak his name again. Do you understand? Jefferson will be erased from all memory. You never had a brother. Jefferson never existed. Do you understand?
We didn’t understand.
The next day, and for a week after, strangers came to our house dressed in black. They sat in our living room, the sunken room two steps down from our front hall, the one room in our house that we weren’t allowed to go in, that no one ever went in, ever. They told us this is called “sitting shiva.” For a week a stream of visitors came to our house and our living room was full of strange people wiping their eyes, talking in low voices and looking mean. My mother looked frightened and lost, like a ghost. It was all scary and confusing.
Then my sister and I were stuffed into a smelly green car. I was sure I'd throw up all over the shiny red vinyl seat. Car rides always made me vomit, and I felt queasy already.
We had to stay with our four boy cousins in Boston. They were loud, agressive, and scary. Then we were driven to Philadelphia to stay with other cousins. They were quiet, serious, and unfriendly. Then we went to stay with our grandparents in Atlantic City. I loved my grandparents and I loved Atlantic City, the beach, and the boardwalk.
After what felt like a long time we were finally driven back home, and sent to school as if nothing had happened.
Except that we never saw my mother anymore because she locked herself in her bedroom all day, only coming out to cook dinner behind a closed kitchen door. She’d call us up to eat and disappear again before we could see her.
My father got home later and later, eating his dinner alone.
Something had happened. Something sinister had happened, and it had come between my parents. There was some unspeakable secret they were hiding from us, and from the world, and it followed them everywhere, hovering in the space between them, almost visible. My parents didn’t speak to each other.
A few years later, my mom had another baby, a girl, making us three sisters. Then she had one more, and we were four daughters.
The years passed and our dinner table beame noisy and chaotic again. As if four girls weren’t enough, my sisters always had a few friends over, all of the girls crammed on top of each other on the bench that surrounded our kitchen table. Dinner was loud - it was a competition to see who could get my father’s attention by telling the funniest story of the day, or the dumbest thing some teacher had said, or the most colorful or preposterous character we’d met. Dinner was raucous, a lot of laughing - the neighbor kids loved eating over. My mother rarely sat down, standing nearby to replenish big serving bowls of food and cartons of milk as needed.
On the surface things felt normal again. We acted like things had returned to normal. Like the Unspeakable Thing had never happened. But my family was never the same again. The rift between my parents was as wide as the Atlantic Ocean and it never healed, it pulled us under, it drowned us under the oppressive weight of unspoken sadness, long after we’d forgotten where the sadness came from or what life had been like before it.
I loved acting as a child (I still do), and acted in as many plays as I could find. For many years, even into adulthood, I had a trick I’d use to make myself cry on stage. I felt guilty about using my secret trick, like I had an unfair advantage. My trick was to think of my brother, repeating the forbidden name “Jefferson” silently to myself. This would always make me cry.
I had been very close to my baby brother. I taught him to say his first words, and I held his little hands and taught him to take his first steps.
I’ve never stopped missing him.