The Mezuzah Eaters

The last time Aviva Zwetschkenstiel owned a mezuzah was when she had slid a matchbox-sized one right up her long-sleeved admiral blue hoodie as she strolled down the open-air markets in Jerusalem. She had purposefully distanced herself from her peers. Eight days later, she found her mother throwing lavender seeds around the garden, and handed her the mezuzah with a slight grin.

“Thank you! It’s exactly what I wanted,” screeched her mother, and then in a single motion, she flipped it over to whack the Hebrew letter shin against her palm, picked out the klaf with her lengthy ruby nails, crumpled it, then swallowed the scroll whole.

Aviva did not ask any questions. Though astonished, she could not think of a single word to say or ask. She looked into her mother’s eyes. They were darting from the doorframe to the mezuzah casing made up of tiny shards of sea glass, to the sky. 

Aviva had not thought about the mezuzah incident until ten days after her mother was found in an icy cold ground floor apartment, 6 miles away from her own home, on a mattress with no sheet, frame, or pillows. No lock was kept on the door, dog feces scattered near the entranceway, and remnants of people surviving— not quite living— a stovetop with a few scratched pans on top, coffee mugs chipped with rings of tea stains on them and half of an acoustic guitar shoved beneath the torn mustard sofa. The whole place smelled of cigarette ash and wet mud. Her mother’s body, slightly gray and covered in turmeric-tinted vomit was the only thing left in the bedroom; large ceiling-to-floor mirrors in the living room were cracked. 

Over the next week, Aviva was able to maintain a daily shower and comb her hair. Everything else fell to the wayside— no lip tint, oatmeal with fruit, morning emojis sent to her crush, or school attendance. 

Her mother had always kept nuggets of greenery tucked away in the secret drawers of jewelry boxes, or seemingly minuscule baggies of white powder in makeup bags. Aviva simply knew that occasionally her mother was okay, and then she wasn’t. She didn’t know that the substance changed, or got worse, so she registered her mother’s health by absence. If her mom was not home for a few days, it meant she was doing harder stuff, if the house had a few people hanging out, it meant she was just smoking or drinking, if her father slept on their worn-out hickory sofa with a single fleece blanket draped over most of him, but not all of him, then it meant a comedown. 

 It just wasn’t talked about—entrepreneurs, school admissions, types of cars, cellphones—that sort of stuff was mentioned; this situation was inconvenient. A cloud that covered the sun on a beach day, annoying but not permanent, something that would pass if you squinted your eyes long enough or pretended it did not exist. It is why her grandparents had helped pay for Yael’s rehab in her 20s but never addressed it. Aviva’s grandfather— Yael’s father— wanted to talk about a television show, or how to improve a financial situation, not the holes, that were inconvenient.  

By the time the skin began to scab over slightly, Yael was back at home, playing mother, proudly scouring for two identical nails in her toolbox.

“I wrote the prayer out myself, to put back inside the mezuzah Vivvy, it says Shema Yisrael: Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad: Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

Aviva looked at her mother’s curly writing, clear and cutesy. 

Her mother measured the door frame and marked off three sections so that the mezuzah sat towards the lower part of the top third of the doorframe. 

Her mother continued to talk to herself, but to slightly acknowledge that Aviva was listening. “I can’t remember if it slants towards the opening, or away.”  

“Slants towards the room people go into, Ma.” 

At that moment, her mother was sober because she was able to measure. If she would have been high, she would have flailed her arms in the air, let out a great cackle, and said— “Hashem didn’t measure the distance between the sky and the sea, so why should I!” Then proceed to crumple up her tape measure into a ball and stomp on it wildly, encouraging Aviva to join in. And sometimes she would.  

Aviva liked when her mom was doing well, but she would not dare admit to anyone publicly that her mom was much more bearable in the midst of a high. A clear memory of her mother, dressed in pine green spandex, with a crochet sweater covered in squares of bright colors filled in with daisies. Her hair was in a loose braid, and her car keys dangling from her palm. There were fuzzy ball keychains, small yellow smiley faces, and a chunky red heart that had “Mommy” painted on it attached to only two keys—one for the front entrance of the house and one for her car. Once again, Aviva had walked into the suffocating office as her mother boldly whipped up a tragic tale, time and time again to the secretary about an imaginary auntie who lived 14 miles outside of Orlando. 

“You should have heard her, Lorna. I tell you, she’s at the end of her rope. It’s this time. It’s this time if we don’t get there. Do you think we can help her? If we go down there?” 

The poor secretary, Lorna was as sweet as she was gullible, in her early 60s, enamored with her grandchildren, but didn’t have the type of daughter who would ask her to watch her kids or anything like that. Her glasses were slightly the wrong prescription, and her sweaters were always too bright or too pastel. Lorna did have perfect cursive handwriting; she also knew that Aviva’s mother was lying, though she never let on. 

“I am just not sure Mrs. Zwetschkenstiel. I had a cousin who struggled like that. You know what’s best, I do believe.”

Aviva’s mother continued for further dramatics, “And Yosef, he is away on business so I’ve got to take little Vivvy with me. Pass me all her homework. Tell those brilliant goddess teachers she will do some in the car, some on the way home, some while in the waiting room. All of it, lots of it!” 

Aviva at this point had to stifle her giggles by putting her hands over her face and squeezing her own cheeks. 

The secretary lifted her glasses and the wrinkles in her forehead creased as her eyes lifted to each up-and-down vibrato of Yael’s story. Within two hours, Aviva and her mother were sitting in a teacup in the heat of Disney World, spinning and making origami cranes out of homework assignments. 

The comedowns were always different. Days of her mother on her back, with the curtains, pulled down in her bedroom, refusing to even use the side table lamp. Yael would stub her toe on bulky scrap wood door stoppers, walls, and anything that she couldn’t remember in the layout of the apartment when she needed to finally get up and use the bathroom. She hated the light during a comedown. This led to her sleeping in until ten in the morning, napping from three until midnight, and then repeating the process. If she was bored of this cycle, she would smoke something, or inject something. She could complete daily tasks in this state, after a break, and sure enough, there she would be hanging out the washing to dry as Aviva got home from school, telling her daughter that “dryers took up energy and didn’t give the clothes the smell of the air.”  

“Sacred air! Beautiful air! We must respect it. Should we kiss it? Should we kiss the air?” screeched her mother in a toddler-like excitement. 

Aviva loved when her mother called things sacred, it stirred something in her. Both of them would proceed to collect all the leaves with a rain-damaged broom, blast Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club album from the sunroom to the garden and not bother to scoop any of the leaves into a bag. They only swept to create mountains of crackly dry pecan, orange, and gradient lime green leaves to jump in and out of.

The only time Aviva could distinctly visualize her mother in the process of getting high or drunk was when she was three years old. She was wearing a lavender dress, and her mother was wearing lavender. The only difference Aviva can recall is that her mother had a can permanently in her hand that night. Wrapped in the veiny arms of her mom, she laughed as she was swung around in circles, and felt dizzy. Her mother’s glittery eyeshadow rubbed against her own toddler face, and her mother's tears had been transferred to her cheek. Her mother was singing Portuguese to Cartola’s “Preciso Me Encontrar” but it was not the song being played. The rest of the room was enraptured by the Jewish folk song, Hava Nagila as the bride and groom were lifted into the air on chairs. The man and woman whom she did not recognize, and never remembered who they were, pulled at a hand-embroidered handkerchief between the two of them.

She remembered the can of alcohol felt at once cold and clammy against her chubby arm when it brushed alongside her. A plane flew overhead, and seagulls screeched. It was the last day of sitting shiva, a Friday morning, and after today all these people who she barely knew, and who circled like pigeons around plates of bagels with chunky cream cheese, chives, and lox thinly cut, all paid for by her grandparents would soon be gone forever from her life.

In hopes that the warmness of a coffee would lift her appetite or help it subside, she began to boil water. The ground was soaked from last night’s rain. She couldn't remember when she had showered, or brushed her teeth, or combed her hair.

Her mother did not "believe" in microwaves so by seven years old she had learned how to navigate the stovetop— remove a small pan from the cupboards, boil water, a few scoops of ground coffee into the french press, add the boiled water, press down. Wait. She then cut open a stale croissant that her father had picked up from the discount shelves of the grocery store. In the middle of the jaggedly cut pastry, she scooped a battery-sized chunk of butter into it along with a handful of dark chocolate chips.

While the croissant was warming on the top shelf of the oven, she walked past the hallway's entrance. Paused. Slightly kicked the wooden doorstop so that it would fall behind the door. Aviva clicked a small lock downwards, and the door opened. She calmly tore the mezuzah off the door frame. She brought the entire mezuzah back into the kitchen, where the croissant already smelt slightly burnt. She ignored the far too toasted smell and proceeded to pull out the scroll from the mezuzah. Aviva saw her mother's handwritten Shema prayer, smudged and beautifully written on a yellow post-it note. She turned off the hob and the oven knobs, then pulled the sleeve of her sweatshirt past her fingertips to quickly pull out the tray with the croissant resting atop. She placed the paper scroll from the mezuzah in between the chocolatey butter and pastry. She bit down, chewed all of it, and gulped down some of the black coffee. Aviva wiped the remnants off her lips, and then off the countertop into a paper towel with small designs of lemon and limes, and small indents. What a waste of time and ink, she thought to herself. Who in the hell feels it necessary to put lemon drawings on paper towels.   

Before she realized what was happening, before she could hide downstairs or lock the doors, three women began to ascend the brick staircase that led into the sunroom. She hadn’t noticed them watching her. 

The three women were all harsh in the face with filled-in eyebrows. They must have been related, at least two of them, because they had a familiarity, and a dislike for each other, that only family can bring. The three women went on to chuckle about the dingy rug and unfashionable cabinets. 

As they were leaving, the middle-aged woman, with the darkest eyebrows, handed Aviva something wrapped in butcher paper. “Your mom wanted me to give you this, love,” she declared with a grin. She handed Aviva something wrapped in butcher paper.

And knowing that Aviva would be too dumbfounded to say anything she didn’t respond.

Once the ink had digested, and her stomach settled, she rummaged through her mother’s closet and to the right of the shoe rack, Aviva spotted her mother’s toolbox. It was in fact her mother’s toolbox as her father never used tools, only paid people to do that for him. Her mom had an affinity for bolts, wrenches, and nails—she put together Aviva’s bed and hung up paintings, frames, and little projects, like adding a shelf or shadow box to the wall when she was in a good mood. Aviva lifted the layer of the toolbox and found two somewhat matching nails, at least in size, alongside a baggy of a tar-looking substance.

She walked over to the kitchen where she had left the mezuzah. and tucked the new scroll from the flimsy butcher paper inside alongside the little baggy. Aviva placed the mezuzah in a slanted fashion and hammered furiously into the door frame until some of it chipped away.