As promised, Albina gave Tikvah, her father, and the bochur a tour of Al-Saigh 11B. She explained about the lounge with its kitchen and about the lack of vending machines and 7/3  or twenty meal plans. The bochur was impressed. If Mr. Goldberg's translation was to be believed this was twenty times more luxurious than most ysehivot.

Albina explained that adequately feeding middle schoolers was a necessity not a luxury. Itzi was also impressed that girls slept two to a room. "They need places to put their stuff," Albina offered. "Also there is security in having a door that locks."

"And their drawings are all over their walls," Itzi commented in Yiddish.

"A lot of girls like to make art,"Albina explained.

Then after Albina showed Itzi and Mr. Goldberg the plastic container of ice cream, the reused soda bottles of beverages, and the pantry boxes and bowls, she gathered up a plastic bag of cookies and a shopping bag of fruit and a half gallon bottle of lemonade and brought it back to the thirteenth floor.  "Your daughter checks hecshers on the cookie boxes," Albina told Mr. Goldberg.

"It's not holov Israel," explained Mr. Goldberg who politely refused the food. Meanwhile, hungry kids began to crowd around the table and it was time to coach a long string of clapping games. Homework time was over and Tikvah was not going to dance socially in front of her father and neither she nor Corianne had much interest in laser tag or rubber stamping. Games on Saturday night meant about fifty kids  and several circles going. Other Suite Advisors had their own expertise in schoolyard games and the games went on until after midnight. By then the food was gone and the children tired.

"I'm not getting up for shachris, in the morning," Itzi complained in Yiddish. Mr. Goldberg almost forgot to translate.

Albina asked another Suite Advisor to watch her kids while she took Tikvah downstairs to say goodbye to her father. This was that moment all over again. When Albina took Tikvah's hand, the girl did not dislodge it. They walked out into the cold wet night. Itzi complained about the rain. Tikvah and Albina said nothing.

"Want to do this again next week. There's only so many shopping trips to White Plains I can stand."

"What happens when these children grow up?" asked Mr. Goldberg.

"They remember the games just like I did," answered Albina.

"I love you tati!" Tikvah cried out.

Mr. Goldberg blinked.Tikvah squeezed Albina's hand hard. "איצט איז די צייט," Mr.Goldberg said.

"Now is not the time!" Tikvah switched to English. "We're not going to get in trouble with the police again."

Albina reflected after Mr. Goldberg and Itzy drove away, that the second time was easier than the first. "I'm all wet," sighed Tikvah when she and Albina got inside.

"You're not made of spun sugar," Albina answered.

"My mother used to say that."

"She probably still does."

"Do you want me to go back to her?" Tikvah asked.

"Do you want to?"

"Not the way she is now. I want...freedom of religion," Tikvah selected the words carefully. "I want not to get in trouble with the police too," Tikvah added.

"Knowing what one wants," thought Albina "is half the battle."

Albina counted six pink dots among the sea of green ones crowding the Cerni-Al-Saigh  penthouse. One of those dots was Tikvah who was doing homework in the large study lounge along with her roommate. Homework to kill time was a good idea.

Albina picked up her phone and dialed Tikvah's father. He answered her in flawless, American English as usual.

"Yes, what do you want?"

"I'd like an ETA." He'd know what that was though he might have to jog his memory, or would he?

"I'm stuck in traffic in Tarrytown. I forget how built up Westchester is."

"OK, can we talk?"

"If you want."

"Good, I'm sending you a gate code. It's 0-9-5-6-6. You'll say those numbers when you press the button on the gate, and it will open. Then you need to drive to Cerny-Al-Saigh. You drive through Parking Lot A, that's the lot below the academic quad, past Rapinoe-McConolly-Brinker, that's our gym. There are six high rise dormitories, side by side in two rows of three.The last dormitory on the right is Cerny-Al-Saigh. I'll be on the ground floor to let you in, and we'll ride the elevator to the thirteenth floor where the station party is. You'll get a tour and we do have kosher food."

"I'm not hungry."

"Fine, then don't eat. I'll be seeing you in half an hour. Call my number if you don't see me." Albina checked her laptop again and slipped her phone back into her purse. She came out of the lounge and found an aimless group of girls. There was time for a round of Dumb Dumb Dodo and Ms. Lucie with the curse words left i, followed by Kadie coaching nerf kickball and a chance to do door duty for Tikvah.

Tikvah and Corianne of course skipped the Chinese jump rope game and kickball. Jetta and Shayla went to do rubber stamping with Athena, the Suite Advisor with the tortoise shell headband and a taste for lingering over coffee.

Albina thought about Athena as she took the elevator to the ground floor and began the lonely vigil by the Cerni-Al-Saigh entrance. She hated waiting. She counseled patience to herself, but she still hated waiting. It seemed to be forever, but her phone told her it was twelve long minutes, and Abraham Goldberg, Tikvah's father drove like a person finding his way and not making much success over it, but he found Cerni-Al-Saigh, and even secured a parking space. He and a buchur, one who was positively round and wore thick glasses, walked slowly up the path. Albina wondered if they were wearing the same suits they had worn the previous Sunday. The buchur looked like he had slept in his.

"Welcome to Kotiah-Yovanovitch," Albina smiled her speech. "I'm so glad you came."

"ברוכים הבאים צו קאָטיאַה-יאָוואַנאָוויטש. איך בין אַזוי צופרידן איר געקומען," translated Mr. Goldberg.

איז די דאַמע ייִדיש?" the buchur asked.

"My friend would like to know if you are Jewish," explained Mr. Goldberg.

"I'm Jewish but not Orthodox," replied Albina as the elevator reached the thirteenth floor. No one got on because nearly all the kids were upstairs already.

Mr. Goldberg translated and Albina began her tour. "Welcome to culture shock 101," she thought. "Now outside you saw this was a very tall building. It's tall because all the fifth graders live here. There are forty eight kids on a floor and twelve floors of them. That comes out to about six hundred kids. Now when you have dormitories, or residence hall, if you build them as dormitories, and don't retrofit an old house, you include common space. That's where the commons and penthouses come in. Even grades have a commons on the first floor. Odd grades have a penthouse on the thirteenth floor."

That gave Mr. Goldberg a lot to translate.

"קוק בייַ אַז פֿענצטער!" exclaimed the buchur pointing up to the top of the atrium.

"Itzi is impressed by the skylight," Mr. Goldberg explained.

"We call a room like this an atrium," Albina decided to build Itzi's English vocabulary.

"Now all of this looks very fancy, but that's mostly because it is new. This school was built less than ten years ago. If you look at the furnishings, they are typical dormitory and classroom furnishings. There are no fancy artworks, or wallpaper. It's nice because it is purpose-built. Mostly though it's just empty space...."

"וואס איז דאס!" exclaimed Itzi pointing to kids playing Twister.

Albina explained about games. Kids needed games as well as school, even if school included electives. Albina realized she would have to explain about electives too. When general courses were the only kind offered, as opposed to general and religious studies, there was time for Team Project and electives. Electives were another kind of general education when you thought about it, and general education for ten year olds was important. Albina wondered if she should have shown Itzi and Mr. Goldberg the social dance lessons followed by actual social dancing and the handicraft area. She decided, however, that they weren't here to cultureshock Itzi, so she opened the study lounge door and poked in her head. She only had to say two words: "He's here."

There were two scrapers in the south art room. Marion said a prayer as she stretched the orange. translucent film over the design masking taped to a piece of cardboard. She was making a negative of that design that would create positive holes. The design La Legion d'Honneur Francaise voted on required three screenings onto colored poster board. They had worked diligently to get supplies.

A girl called Irina had done all the talking. Irina  who had short curly hair and glasses with green frames looked vaguely familiar. "I swear I saw you somewhere else before we showed up at Legion d'Honneur meetings."

"I don't know where..." Irina replied. She was in eleventh grade so it couldn't have been in any classes, and besides her electives were in the usual 3pm slot, not the alternate slot like Marion's.

"Did you go on a historical trip to White Plains?" Marion ventured.

"The only trip I went on was the Metropolitan Museum of art and that stupid bagel restaurant. I swear those Suite Advisors and teachers want to make us blow up like balloons."

"I liked the bagel restaurant."

"You're young yet...I'm sorry."

Irina and the art teacher who did not want material wasted, watched Marion like a hawk as she taped some scrap wax material to a small piece of cardboard and then took a scraping tool and carefully removed some small patches. "I guess you know how to do this," Irina replied.

"It's not rocket science. It's just scraping wax," Marion answered.

It was an escape from school work, but it was an important extracurricular, and other high school kids managed with them, so she could too. Back in her private day school in Texas, scraping silk screen wax had been an odd kind of fun. There were also black and white scrape boards used to make white on black designs. Marion wondered if they had such things at Kotiah-Yovanovitch.

Scraping silk screen wax was also an escape from wondering and worrying. The mail took seven days to make a round trip. They did not call it snail mail for nothing. It was back to the days of the pony express or horse and buggy. The Wells Fargo stage coach rumbled over the plains instead of the armored car heading down the highway or the airplane crossing the sky. The ship was probably rotting at some slimy police dock. Mom and dad might or might not write back. She had sent off a second round of letters. Letters every three days would mean more letters. "I will lead by example."

"Want me to put on Spotify?" Irina asked from far away. Marion agreed. She had enough music in her head, but perhaps Irina had a carefree life.

"At least I have a roommate who is a good example," thought Marion. She needed to spend more leisure with Zia, though they would swim this afternoon. Zia was serious about learning to swim. You had to consider that important when you thought about it.

As for Marion, she was not sure what she would do if her parents did not write back. She'd probably become a total pest and bother the lawyer for news on them. "Don't run away mom and dad," Marion told her parents in her mind. "Hang in there. It's just a few months, and yes a few months is fucking forever."

"Do you think coffee oreos will wake me up?" Tikvah asked Albina, the mora.

"They probably just have coffee flavor in them," Albina told Tikvah. Tikvah ate three cookies drank some milk, wiped her face and headed out with her pass hanging from her neck along with her D-Card. She walked to Singer-Provine and joined the Orthodox shul walkers and Dr. Zafran.

They made small talk as they walked through the wealthy, sleepy world. As the houses gave way to apartments and a few offices  Dr. Zafran told Tikvah: "If the class doesn't do it for you, come into the main service. If your Hebrew is not fantastic, you can pray and read Torah in English. I suspect you're a pretty good reader." Tikvah smiled because she detected a compliment in Dr. Zafran's words.

"I'm supposed to get something out of it," Tikvah remembered Dr. Zafran's words last week.  Then she remembered trying to pray from her all Hebrew siddur in Brooklyn and feeling the words dissolve into meaningless sounds. In English, the words made sense and if they made sense....but praying in English was not the same as lashon kodesh. On the other hand, understanding at all, meant she could pray. She thought of Daniel in Tanach, refusing to eat the King's royal food and insisting on beans. Tikvah guessed that Daniel did not inspect the pots in which they were cooked, and store bought, packaged cookies, and peanut butter and jelly were not invented in those days. She got it.

She got it, and put it to work. She lasted through half the fourth and fifth grade class, then sat with a girl in a teal colored skirt, a high school girl who looked very grownup and smelled of lemony perfume. Tikvah wondered whether lemony perfume prayed in Hebrew or English.

On the way back from Young Israel of White Plains in the middle of a warm, sticky, September afternoon, lemony perfume got into a discussion about how difficult it was to pray from a siddur. "...I mean," she said "It's one size fits all. That never works." Tikvah thought about her tight tights. She had new tights coming. They would be here for Rosh HaShannah.

"I mean half that stuff doesn't apply to me. Some of it says the sun goes around the earth, and yes I know that's poetry. Other things like praying for light....we can't see the stars due to light pollution. It is dark nights we need."

"People pay good money for black out curtains," another girl chimed in. Tikvah wondered at the argument. She knew that light was a supernatural, spiritual concept, but light pollution was a thing too.

"You want some help with this?" asked Dr. Zafran. "Or are you just unloading."

"Unloading," said black out curtains.

"Depends what the help is," lemony perfume replied.

"Well, you can stop reading the siddur at any time and pray your free style prayer, just talk to God. Tell Him what you need."

"What about counting your blessings?" asked lemony perfume.

"That's a great idea."

"Excuse me, but you're not a Rav," Tikvah spoke up.

"I know that, but I'm a social studies teacher. I'm an educated man and I help students learn and understand. "

"So davening is like going to school?"

"Religion is a humanity like English and foreign language. It's good to understand what you say when you pray. Prayer helps you find meaning in life."

"I already have meaning. I'm a Jew," Tikvah replied, her face feeling hot.

"Now you need to explore what being a  Jew means." This was surprisingly nimble, adult trickery talk.

"It means I have a neshama."

"Define neshama Tikvah."

"A special kind of soul."

"The deluxe version."

"If you're mot making fun of me yes...I'm sorry."

"For what."

"I accused you of making fun of me."

"I used an informal definition on purpose, but not to make fun of you, but you said yes."

"What does that special soul do for you."

"It means I need to learn from the Torah, even if, well I have to learn so I'll know how to behave so one day when I have kids I can teach them. Also, if I'm out in the secular world, I have to fight to keep my faith, not mean fighting or arguing, but a lot of saying no, and deciding what to wear, and knowing HaShem is watching and not forgetting that."

"So God gave you a special job..."

"Yes. I want to keep doing that. I didn't.... I didn't decide to give it up. My mom did. I know that's lashon hara."

"Not the way you said it. I think you're OK."

"Sometimes the only thing you can do is put in the work, understand?"

"I'm supposed to have free will and autonomy."

"What's autonomy, Tikvah?"

"Deciding what I want for myself and getting it."

"That's right. And does autonomy and free will have to be a hundred percent?"

There was an uncomfortable silence. "No," Tikvah finally said. "What percentage do you think I have?"

"At what percentage does free will disappear?" asked a boy who was short, squat, and wore  a yarmulke the color of faded blue jeans.

"I think that's a judgement call," Dr. Zafran replied.

"Where do you judge it?"

"I think it depends upon the situation. If you want to eat glatt kosher in the dining hall, you will starve. If you want to avoid meat and milk together, or pork, or shellfish  and crustaceans, you can do that , so in the dining hall you have maybe fifteen percent free will, which is much better than zero. If you want to dress tznius and you're female, you can wear a midcalf skirt and in Tikvah's case tights. Tikvah when it comes to tznius you have a hundred percent free will."

"Unless I go swimming."

"Do you swim."

"I'm in beginner aquatics and swimming is co-ed."

"How do you feel about that."

"Nobody looks at me like I'm naked, so it's OK. It wouldn't be OK in New Square."

"Is that where you are from?"

"I lived there until January of fourth grade."

"And then..."

"My mom moved my brother and me to Brooklyn."

"Did your mother stop being Orthodox?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry Tikvah, but my parents did not raise me Orthodox either."

"You had free will and autonomy."

"So do you."

"This is the first weekend with a lot of visitation," Albina chirped as Nelia and Lianne pushed together the tables and the other girls stood around supervising. That means two of you can't vote for activities because you'll be with your parents all day Saturday and Sunday. Corianne wondered who the lucky girls were. She knew it was not her roommate, because her father only had supervised visitation, due to a really, ugly divorce, the kind that would have made Corianne's mother's hairs stand on end.

"What about me?" asked Tikvah.

"Your father is coming to station party around 9pm on Saturday night, so you can still vote."

"Is that fair?" Lianne a short girl with curly brown hair cut fairly short, but grown out full asked.

"It is because you won't be here to do the activities," replied Albina. "So start thinking activities while you get supper. We'll discuss and vote over our food."



LBD Dinner 9/11/20

Main Line
Irish Stew
Tomato Basil Chicken
Pacific Cod Supremes
Chili Relenos
White Rice
Lima Beans


Cold Bar
Spinach Raisin Salad
Carrot Money Salad
Canned Pineapple
Fresh Fruit
Assorted Baked Desserts

Specialty Station 1 -- Quick Bread Bar
Dill and Cheddar Bread
Banana Bread

Specialty Station 2 -- Deep Fried Delites
Mozzarella Sticks
Fried Okra

T.G.I.F.!!!!


Tikvah decided the last line of the menu on the easel was a chilul HaShem. Still Friday was the end of the school and work week, which was why Albina had made them all fetch the pantry box after doing homework in the lounge.

As for the menu itself, she could deduce that Irish stew was made with red meat, either beef or pork. Cod was a fish, and chicken was poultry, so Chili Relenos was meatless and probably spicy. Quick breads were bread, so they might be OK.

"Your beans are gone," Tikvah told Corianne.

"They're still on the salad bar, just no more tofu."

"What are you going to get?"

"Cod Supremes." It was an easy answer. Tikvah envied Corianne as she slunk off to make a peanut butter and strawberry preserve sandwich. She checked the junk food bar and found oreos with coffee filling among the endless varieties of boxed and bagged snacks on the high shelf accessible with a thoughtfully placed step stool. She got her milk and headed to the mora Albina's table. Corianne had cod supremes, rice, lima beans, some kind of carrot salad from the cold bar, a peace of peach pie and a tall glass of brown soda. Tikvah had extra cookies to make up for the lack of side dishes. "A good mother supplies cookies," she told herself. "A good mother also cares what her kids eat," she added mentally.

Albina was a mora, not a mother. At the moment the Suite Advisor was holding forth on how parental visitation worked and how you had to set up the app to allow it. You still had to have your phone with you. None of this of course applied to Tikvah unless her mother arrived on campus and wanted to take her somewhere, but where.... Her mother had not mentioned coming to visit in two weeks, and this was going to be her father's second visit in a week. Tikvah wondered if her mother had washed her hands of her.

The only consolation (And yes that was a wonderful word) was that Corianne's parents did not visit either. Corianne's mother was in the United Arab Emirates and her father was in Indiana. That was too far to drive more than a couple of times a year, and flying was expensive. Corianne was just unlucky, Tikvah decided, as she pushed thoughts of her mother out of her head.