Even with my modicum of Hebrew I
can read the sign in the pharmacy. It says “Medicines only. No food may be stored
in this refrigerator.” So I understand what’s happening when Irit, my
pharmacist, replies to a scolding voice from the inner office, “It’s fine
Grandfather,” she says. The voice roars, “No it’s not fine. Please come here
and bring it with you.”
Irit fishes out something from
the fridge, nods to Esther, her assistant, and crosses into the voice’s
lair. A freckled hand reaches out and takes the lunch pail from Irit’s
hand in his pinky. The pail is white, afloat in pink balloons, and features at
its center a ta-da sketch of a kitten wearing a stupefying hair bow. There’s an
interjection Israelis use when a difficult problem is before them. Grandpa
Inspector has to make a case for the danger, in an orderly pharmacy, of the
staff confusing Hello Kitty with refrigerated ampicillin. In a tired bass, the
inspector intones, y-y-y-y-y-y.
Esther comes to where I’m
waiting with my prescription. Though there’s a line behind me, she reaches
across the counter and takes my hand, “I haven’t seen you all summer. How are
you?”
Esther is a widow. Her eyes
do not look worried at the inspector’s reprimand, they look, as always, sad. We
schmooze until she asks me what I’m doing for Shabbat. When I tell her I’ll be
home with my cat her eyes get sadder. “Irit” she calls to the pharmacist.
Esther commutes in from a nearby town but Irit lives in my village. Esther
rattles to Irit in Hebrew; both women shake their heads: Shabbat, alone? This
cannot be permitted. Irit presses me to join her and her family. When I decline,
her eyes become as sad as Esther’s.
The people in line behind me make
none of the can you believe this? noises heard in New York; they
wait. Esther has been watching out for me since my aliya, since I
moved to Israel.
In the supermarket I find
myself picking over grapes with a woman who was in line in the pharmacy. She
asks me, “Are we shopping together today?” and I laugh. There are a lot of men
shopping alone this morning, many with small kids. In my grocery in Brooklyn
getting stuck behind a man and his shopping cart in a narrow aisle was
nerve-wracking. At the rice he’d call his wife to ask brown or white and
then again to ask instant or regular. By his umpteenth call at the
yogurt section I’d be shouting into my megaphoned mitts, “Take six
plain and six with the candy on top and go.”
Here the man in front of me
has a toddler over his shoulder, another in his cart, and is decisive in his
choices. When I reach the dairy section I see a stockman plop a yarmulke on his
head, hand out white booklets to his co-workers, and take a count. There are
nine guys; they lack a tenth for mincha, the afternoon service. The
father takes in the scene, adds the shouldered kid to his shopping cart, and
accepts a booklet. With his two kids quiet and amazed and the other guys ready,
he turns his back on Dairy Products for mincha.
My last stop is the pizza
place. I’ve heard more Hebrew today than usual in my Anglo village. I decide to
ditch English. I order two quanta of pizza with mushrooms which must
able to walk with me to my house. The fat pizza guy leans forward on
his beefy arms. “Madam,” he asks, “Do you want your escorts hot, or cold?”
Walking uphill towards my
apartment with my greasy escorts and my grapes, I wait until the delta between
overhead sound and vision converge. It is no passenger plane, no Jet Blue,
above me. As the crow flies, I’m the same distance from Damascus Syria as my
home in Brooklyn was from the state capital at Albany, a gorgeous drive up the
Taconic State Parkway. When the Taconic opened out of its twists, I wanted to
drive north for the rest of my life; past the border, past the latitudes of
Canadian cities, up, straight up, to Hudson Bay, to meet polar bears.
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