On the night that Yom Kippur began, my older sister, who rebelled against anything Jewish and flew into fits of rage whenever our mother tried to tame either her manners or her wild, kinky hair, ran away. It was a mild evening in early October and she couldn’t have gone far. Where could she go? We lived fairly far out in the countryside, and though that countryside was rapidly diminishing under bulldozers, its fields turning into the raw red muddy earth that was the precursor to rows of new, large brick houses, we barely had any neighbors, and those neighbors we did have were far-flung, not a part of our circle, slightly forbidding even, with their mild blue eyes and Harvard-educated accents, their walls hung with framed oil portraits of their ancestors. We, Jews, were the interlopers, new people. Though we weren’t harassed or even particularly noted, we ourselves knew we were different, strange, not quite on the mark. Which was why our father was building The New House, on acreage that he’d bought years earlier, as an investment, acreage he at first had planned to sell but instead held onto, planning for the day that he would have saved enough money to build the house of his dreams, the one that matched the new self that he also hoped to create, that he was in the midst of creating, that was the reason why we lived in a drafty and isolated house the Virginia countryside rather than in the city, or even the suburbs, near other Jews, to begin with: we were to be rough and tumble, children who climbed trees and swam in ponds, but also, like our father, book-driven, ambitious, intellectual.
When our father discovered my sister’s absence, he stood there, in the hallway, shaking with rage, getting white in the face, and clenching and then unclenching his fists. “On the holiest night in the year!” he muttered, as if each syllable were a shard of glass. He never raised his voice let alone his hand, though he did, on occasion, slap us on our rear ends, more for effect than for the sting of it, but his fury was terrifying anyhow. His pale green eyes fell first on me---I was dressed in a pleated skirt matched with a new white blouse with puffy sleeves, with dark blue leather shoes with kitten heels, my first real grown-up shoes—and then on my brother and sister as he asked each of us in turn if we knew where our sister was, had she said anything. She hadn’t. We didn’t know. But we did know what our father also knew, that for days she’d been threatening to run away if he made her attend synagogue services on Yom Kippur: she hated services. They bored her. Moreover, she was a junior in high school, with too many important things she was studying, things she couldn’t miss without fear of falling behind--which was ridiculous, we all knew it was, and yet when she made the argument, her voice growing harder and harder as her face grew redder and redder, it made a certain kind of sense, because alone among the four of us, my sister was slated for great and glorious success, for the same kind of academic stardom, in fact, that had propelled our father from the lesser neighborhoods of Jewish Queens, (in his case, a shabby street of bungalows in Rego Park) to, well, us. Us as we now stood, arrayed before him, in our synagogue clothes, with the late afternoon sun slanting in through the tall windows of our house in Virginia, with our dog, an elderly English Setter named Horatio, wagging his tail vapidly, the way he did when there was a storm approaching. But there was no storm approaching: the afternoon was clear, the colors of early autumn vibrant, the sun warm on our backs.
“We’ll just go without her, then,” our father finally said.
“You go,” our mother said. “I’m calling the police.”
“No,” our father said. “Susan is in no danger. She’ll come home of her own accord.”
Our mother, herself dressed in an outfit she’d recently bought for the occasion, a linen suit that flattered her athletic shape and showed her strong, tan legs, began to walk towards the phone that sat in our front hall on an antique chest of drawers. The chest of drawers was from England, and both my parents were very proud of it. But our father restrained her and, using his professional voice, his lawyer’s voice, the one that argued cases in courtrooms all over the country and which he deployed when talking to senators and judges and the other important people in Washington who made up his daily round, told her that under no circumstances would he permit her to call the police in on a matter as silly as Susan’s having run away.
“But she’ll be eaten alive by the mosquitos,” our mother pointed out.
“Then she’ll learn her lesson, won’t she?” our father said before herding his three remaining children, me first, into the car. There was a terrible moment when our mother, otherwise unmoving, flinched under our father’s pale gaze. He looked back at her twice, both times standing stock still, but letting his eyes fall on her, as if the effect of those twin beams would, on their own accord, force her to join us. It was the second time that she flinched.
I don’t remember anything about synagogue that night other than what I remember, in general, about synagogue on all the other days and nights that our father made us go with him, usually to the Orthodox synagogue in downtown Washington that he preferred. To wit: the service was endless, it was boring, none of us other than our father knew so much as a dot of Hebrew, and though there were English translations on the facing pages, the prayer book was incomprehensible to me, and in any event, I couldn’t make myself interested in endless, repetitive prayers that, one after the next, extolled God’s greatness in unceasingly overblown terms. And why would God need us to tell Him how Great he was, anyhow? Didn’t He already know that? And why, if He was God, would He care? But whenever I took these questions to my father, he said the same thing: “Prayer isn’t for God. It’s for us." Which also made no sense, because if prayer was for us—which I understood to mean for human beings—then why wouldn’t it suffice to pray to God privately, the way people did in books, and the way I myself occasionally did? True, my own prayers were hardly elevated: on the whole I prayed for things like reasonably good grades and that my mother, whom I loved more than anyone else on earth, not be struck down by lightening or a falling tree branch or cancer or a violent man with a knife (you can see how my imagination, lit with a lurid kind of fever, was in a constant state of fear, a constant anxiety based on the possibility of disaster) but they were heartfelt nonetheless. Unlike the droning dirge of the synagogue chant; the moaning; the swaying; and the terrible, tuneless music.
On second thought, I do have some memory from that night. The first had to do with the place itself, and the fact that, as girls, my sister and I could not sit with our father and brother. They sat downstairs, near the raised bima, under the gaze of the rabbi. My sister—she was five years behind me in school, and still quite a little girl—and I were up in the women’s galleries, behind a scrolled iron gate through which you could look down on the proceedings below. Not that there was much in the way of that, much in the way of praying, or pretending to pray, at all. Instead, the women seated on the benches in the gallery around us talked quietly among themselves, sometimes bursting out into a surprised or delighted “You don’t say!” or even a giggle, before lowering their voices again, passing news from one to the next behind their unfurled hands. I heard one of them say: “Ira needs to have his head examined, is what Ira needs. Poor Doris…" and the other say in return: “Well, if I were Doris, I’d be looking for the best divorce lawyer in town.”
Gossip intrigued me. In fact, had I followed my own inclinations, had I not been taught some semblance of manners, I might have leaned in closer, to listen. Instead I passed the time thumb-wrestling with my little sister, who didn’t seem interested in the women’s gossip around us, or in much of anything other than getting through the endless evening, and what might be waiting for us at the end of it.
“Do you think Dad will punish her?” she said quietly, as if merely asking the question made whatever punishment Dad planned on meting out that much more severe.
“Probably.”
“What will he do?”
“I don’t know."
All four of us dreaded our father’s punishments, but not because they hurt, or were even particularly severe, but rather, because of the sting of humiliation, of shame, that came with them. Once, when I’d called my brother a fart, my father dragged me by the elbow to the sofa in play-room, flipped me onto my back, and washed my mouth out with soap. Another time, when he caught me with my brother’s Playboy Magazine, he made me scrub out the toilet. But even in the absence of an actual punishment, merely being on the receiving end of his gaze was enough to let you know how disgusting you were, how you needed to be put in place.
My mother explained that Dad never yelled or hit because his father, an anxious, Old World, Orthodox Jew, had spluttered and raged, all but foaming at the mouth, whenever any of his children had upset him, which apparently was often. My grandfather, Mom said, had been a compulsive worrier, the kind who checked the locks a half dozen times, and couldn’t sleep at night worrying about whether his savings would be safe at the bank, after what had happened in Nazi Germany, and even before that, during the inflationary years between the wars---well, Mom said, he worried. He worried himself right into an ulcer, that’s how much he worried, because even though he’d landed America, where he’d been lucky to have a decent job, a safe job, the job he’d kept until he’d retired during my own childhood, as a foreman at a printing press, the uncertainties of his own childhood haunted him. All that, though, was for me the stuff of myth, things that had happened back in Rego Park, where the row houses were stuck together like melting squares of chocolate, and summer nights were always sticky with heat, lit up with cigarettes, dirty with exhaust fumes, with things floating over the East River, with boys and girls who spoke too loudly and danced too wildly and would never amount to anything, not to mention the neighbors, their fights, their private bedroom activities, their screaming babies.
.…whereas, Mom would say, our father had gotten himself up and out, all those brains of his, that amazing, focused, hard intelligence, first college, then law school, and then rather than return to New York he’d decided to make his life here, in the nation’s capital, to start his adult and professional life without the sting or taint of pull or even the nostalgia for his own history, an idealistic young lawyer among other idealistic young lawyers, seeking to serve and to do right—hence the hours he put in, his decision to move his young family to the countryside, and why, now, he and Mom were building The New House.
The New House! Even now, when I think of it, I’m filled with a kind of yearning, hopeful giddiness: how we’d pore over the architectural plans, and then, as the contractor broke ground, the visits we made, inspecting the newly poured foundation, then walking through the fragrant framing, stepping into the plywood-clad enclosure of my own future room. And all of it, all those glorious high-ceilinged light-drenched rooms—it was all one story, and would have huge floor-to-ceiling windows and hard-wood floors—was surrounded by woods, fields, thickets of Mountain Laurel, stands of River Birch, the mudflats along the river rippled with Skunk Cabbage, Bloodroot, Aster.
The other memory that stays with me was of how hungry I was, even though before we’d headed to synagogue we’d had a large meal. But that Yom Kippur, for the first time, I was old enough to fast. My little sister and I rose, then we sat; then we rose; then we sat. The women around us swayed and dipped over their prayer books, then sat and whispered. By ten or so, the service was over, and my sister and I shuffled downstairs with all the other girls and women to meet our father and brother on the front steps of the synagogue, and from there, to the car, parked a several blocks away. It was a wrinkle, an inconsistency, that as a child I wasn’t aware of: that religious Jews don’t drive on holy days, including, of course, Yom Kippur. Our father explained that he didn’t want to offend anyone by driving right up to the synagogue to let us off: that’s why we had to walk. We didn’t question it. Like everything else our father said or did, it was just the way it was.
On the way back, my little sister got to sit up front, the privileged spot, with Dad. My brother and I sat behind, and as the car slid over the Potomac, he pinched me, hard, on my left nipple. He did that sometimes: pinch or punch me, but usually when the grownups were elsewhere, when it was just the two of us, but he’d never touched me there before. And boy oh boy, did it hurt. It hurt so much I screamed. Dad told me to quiet down—it was Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the year—and when I opened my mouth to protest, to tell what happened, he shut me down, said that I needed to work things out with my brother, and that in any case, I was exaggerating. But I wasn’t exaggerating. I knew I wasn’t exaggerating. “I am not!” I yelled as tears backed up my throat and clogged my nostrils with mucus. “Want to see?"
“That’s enough,” Dad said, and a moment later, he pulled the car over, the way he did when we didn’t obey. He didn’t start driving again until there was silence.
At home, Mom was frantic. She’d called everyone she could think of, the old neighbors, the new neighbors—those she knew on the long winding road on which the new house was being constructed—even the parents of some of Susan’s classmates at the private school she attended. No one had seen her. Then, falling into panicky sobs, she turned to our father and said: “If she’s not back in one hour, I’m going out to look for her.”
“I can’t stop you,” our father said.
“I’m going now!” she said.
“I don’t think you should.”
“This is our daughter we’re talking about!”
“Exactly.”
Mom grabbed her car keys and her pocketbook and, nearly catapulting herself behind the wheel, yelled for me to come with her, the way she did sometimes when she didn’t want to be alone. Not that my presence could have given her much in the way of comfort: I was too afraid to say much of anything, and even if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have known what to say. Don’t worry, she’ll be fine seemed stupid given that she was exactly out there, in the woods with their ceaseless late-summer chirping and humming noises, with their snakes and frogs and bats and, who knew what, or who, else? There were bad men in the woods, bad men who made you look at their penises, who sometimes made you touch them. We’d been warned against exactly such a bad man some years earlier when a girl whose house was two or three hills beyond our own had come across him, a man in the woods, a man using the path that connected River Lane to Millstone Road, we all used it sometimes, a shortcut.
“Oh God,” my mother now said. “Oh my God.”
I began to cry. Not for Susan, though, or even for Mom. I was crying for myself, for my bruised nipple, and for the punishment that I sensed was in store for me—why, or when, I didn’t know. But it gnawed on me, this sense of coming pain, of future humiliation, so much so that I forgot to tell Mom about what my brother had done, and how Dad had dismissed my complaints, telling me not to be such an actress, that I was worse than Sarah Bernhardt.
We drove around and around, up the Pike, past my sister’s friend who lived on the other side of the creek (hers was one of the houses you could cut through the woods to get to), up and down the empty streets of the half-built development that was soon to be encroaching on the quiet of our own quiet house, the funny, oddly-designed, drafty house perched at the top of an impossibly steep driveway that we children loved to sled down, during those winters when there was enough snow. The house we would soon to leaving, selling to someone else. The “For Sale” sign had not yet gone up—my parents were waiting until the following spring—but already they were talking to realtors, thinking about moving vans and boxes. And we were all making plans—for new furnishings, for curtains and wall paper and throw rugs. My own room was to be decorated in shades of pale white and deep yellow, with slashes of brown. Just a week earlier, Mom had taken me with her to the paint store, where we’d stared at fabric and wallpaper books for hours. Now she said: “What if she’s dead?”
“She isn’t dead,” I said.
“But what if she is?”
“She isn’t.”
And I really didn’t think she was—dead, that is, or even in danger, though I did think she was crazy, risking not only our father’s wrath but also a full night spent in the woods, where if she was lucky she’d find a comfortable enough place, perhaps on mosses, to spend the night — and had she even thought far enough ahead to pack a blanket or a sleeping bag? Knowing my sister, the answer was “no." Knowing my sister, she hadn’t even taken a change of clothes, or a book, or a flashlight.
But I was wrong. When we found her, about an hour later, curled up on the poured concrete floor of what was to be her room in the New House, she had with her a lantern, canteen, pillow, sleeping bag, and her bookbag, packed with the books she’d need for school the next day, a change of clothes, and a hairbrush. There was still no running water in the New House, no plumbing at all, but when we found her there, reading by the light of a lantern she’s scurried up among our brother’s Boy Scout things, she merely said that she could go in the woods. “I don’t think the squirrels care,” she said.
I don’t know what transpired that night between our parents, only that by the time we got home, the house was dark and everyone was asleep. Mom cried with relief all the way home, and then made Susan take a shower. She’d been right about one thing: Susan was covered with mosquito bites, which were already angry and red. Susan let Mom put her back to bed, promising that she wouldn’t run away again, or at least not unless Dad made her go to synagogue, which, she said, she loathed. “I don’t believe in God, nor in organized religion,” she said, her voice tinged with irony. “And I can’t miss school.”
She didn’t miss school, either, because in the end, Dad agreed that it would be better to allow Susan to go to school than to risk her running away again, either that or what was the more likely scenario, namely, that she’d throw a fit in the middle of the prayer service, and stomp out. In any event, that day, the following day, the Day of Atonement itself, the rest of us went back to synagogue, where I fasted all day, and then into the night, and then into the next day too, fasting and fasting, growing sleepier and sleepier, until it all seemed like a dream.
Jennifer Anne Moses is a multigenre author whose many books include Tales from My Closet, Visiting Hours, and Bagels and Grits. Her journalism and essays have appeared frequently in Time magazine, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other publications.