Shulamis
Velvel has asked his neighbor Shulamis Rosner to think of ways to resolve his massive debt.
Velvel was a good neighbor, Shulamis reflected as she sipped her cup of chamomile tea. But boy, he could be truly exasperating in his infantile expectation that the women in his life take care of him! Look at poor Zahava! She’d been doing most of the shopping and cooking for him, not to mention serving as his date at dinners and simchas, and yet he didn’t seem to be exerting himself in the way the father of a 29-year-old girl ought to be to find her a shidduch. Sure, he had gone with her once to Chaya Lowy, the neighborhood’s most successful shadchan, and left her resume. But he seemed to expect the calls to magically come in, which was so painfully, obviously, not happening. They didn’t call it a shidduch crisis for nothing! Velvel should have been on the phone day and night advocating for his daughter!
And Zahava should have gone quickly, even allowing for a certain delay as she recovered from the loss of her mother and her father’s regrettable tendency to cast away every resume as unworthy of the Elman name. Zahava was a lovely girl, tall and blue-eyed with a mane of shiny blond hair—she’d been fortunate to inherit her father’s looks, if less of his natural charisma. The loss of her mother, the resulting extra responsibilities, and the failure to find a shidduch had hardened her, leaving her cold, brittle, and as lonely as an ice princess in a castle of snow.
Shulamis smiled in spite of herself, reflecting that Zahava and Chani were like the sisters in that Disney movie her granddaughters were obsessed with: Chani was like the younger, pert, affectionate sister who was constantly rebuffed by the ice-princess older sister, who locked herself away in her palace of ice and made everyone else stay away. Heavens, they even looked like those cartoon characters, Zahava with her fair hair and blue eyes, and Chani with brown hair (although Chani’s eyes were also blue). And they were orphaned just like the fairy tale princesses, their one remaining parent effectively absent where shidduchim were concerned.
Zahava’s private, locked-up grief and frustration seemed to keep her from reaching out to her sisters, who might have provided support. Mindy, of course, was married and in a different stage, raising little children, but it really was a shame that Zahava had shut out Chani so much – Chani, who had also struggled with grief over the loss of her mother, and with having trouble finding a shidduch, and who took after their mother so much in looks, intelligence, and refinement of character.
Shulamis freely and guiltlessly favored Chani over her sisters. “The girl has a heart of gold and a brain to match,” she told the rare person who called for a shidduch reference. What a shame she was also still looking for her bashert while her younger sister, who was considerably less endowed in the way of brains and beauty, had already found a nice boy. Of the three girls, she never would have expected Mindy to go first – the girl was high-strung, something of a drama queen, and to be honest, had always been something of whiner. But her husband, Chezky, was a good-natured boy who let Mindy’s frequent crises roll off him like rain, seeming to enjoy playing the knight in shining armor to her helpless, overwhelmed damsel in distress.
Chani, by contrast, was quietly competent – so quiet, in fact, she was effectively invisible to the rest of her family. Funny how she could live in the same house with her family while inhabiting a completely different planet. Velvel was in la-la land, pretending to be a gentleman of leisure whose interests centered around social events and men’s clubs, while Zahava went about planning other people’s parties while masking a grim, desperate determination to one day herself be the star of an engagement celebration. Chani had a depth the others lacked, but she’d long given up on anybody valuing her opinion or being interested in her latest favorite book or tales from the social work trenches. Shulamis was the only one with whom she could share her literary interests; in fact, Chani had even shyly asked her to critique a story she’d written that she hoped to submit to a magazine (which was quite good, Shulamis thought, although it was predictably centered on the struggles of a single girl). Velvel ought to get on the horn and advocate more loudly for a shidduch for Chani as well.
Shulamis suspected Chani still harbored regrets over that broken shidduch years ago – oh, she must have been about 19 – with that Weinberg boy. But that boy was so clearly not right for her! She’d come back from seminary at BJJ looking for a serious learner, and word got out that this boy came from a rather unconventional background (his parents were baalei teshuva and sounded a little eccentric, the dad a high school teacher and the mom a granola-eating art therapist). The boy had stated he would probably leave yeshiva after a year or so because his parents were chronically strapped for money and had taught him that he’d have to make his own way in the world. Yes, he was by all accounts a brilliant boy with sterling middos, but Velvel simply couldn’t countenance marrying his daughter – a descendent of Rav Elimelech Shraga Feivel and the daughter of a prestigious family! – to a nobody who didn’t have two cents to rub together.
Shulamis herself was not a snob with respect to money or yichus. Her parents, may they rest in peace, had been Holocaust survivors who arrived in the U.S. with less than two cents and a huge balance sheets of family losses. It was only because she’d had the good fortune to marry a boy with a good head, who rose to the top of a corporate insurance company, that she’d escaped the poverty of her parents’ dark, dismal two-bedroom apartment in Boro Park. But Shulamis was discriminating where Torah was concerned. Chani, at least at age 19, had wanted and deserved a boy who would become a rosh yeshiva, and the Weinberg boy was clearly not on the long-term kollel program.
“How the years change things!” she mused. “At this point, let Chani just find a nice boy she liked, be it working or learning. She’s already 27!”
As she got up to close the Schumacher draperies of her front windows, she saw the lights in the Elman living room go out across the street. Guess they were all headed up to bed by now. Velvel had mentioned that he could call his accountant for advice on his debt situation. Let him call Izzy Shapiro! Izzy was much better equipped to advise than she was. In the meantime, she still had a lesson to review for tomorrow. Her 12th graders were struggling to plow through Pride and Prejudice, and these days it seemed the simplest ideas went straight over their heads. She had a sneaking suspicion that the ones who actually seemed to get it had simply watched one of the film versions on the sly. (Hard to blame them, she thought with a smile. Shulamis secretly adored the BBC adaptation herself.)
(To be continued)
