DISOWNED by Gabriella Murray Page B

she is still fundamentally alone.
    After two months or so have passed in this manner, Moshe stops her on the street one day as she is coming home from school.
    Rivkah will not look at him. She hardly sees him anymore anyway. Most of the time he is with Helen, the new woman he is planning to marry.
       "Rivkah. Stop a minute."
      She stops, stands there, and looks to the side.
       "This not speaking, Rivkah, is a great sin."
       In a way now, he seems foolish.
       "You are not allowed to afflict yourself, or separate yourself from other people."
    Allowed, not allowed. Silly.
    "You must accept whatever God sends you. He has sent our people much worse things than this."
    Rivkah’s silence begins to agitate him.
    "What would your grandmother say about this?"
    She scrapes the pavement with the bottom of her foot.
    "Do you want to see your Uncle Reb Bershky?" Moshe's voice takes on an odd, pleading tone.
       Inside, she starts laughing.
       "Answer me."
       Her laughing grows darker. 
       Moshe's hands start to tremble. "You're wrong not to answer! You're wrong not to speak! What are you thinking of in those wild eyes?"
      **
       "She'll speak when she's ready," Rivkah hears Moshe tells Molly later that afternoon. "And when she does, God help us. Who knows what she'll say?"
       "I don't know if God helps us, papa," Molly whimpers in reply.
       "In your condition you speak like this?"
       Molly is a full nine months pregnant now. The new baby is expected at any moment.
       "You speak like this before the birth? What kind of baby will you have?"
       "A special baby," she answers more strongly. "I'm carrying mamma's name."
    ***
    Before the baby is born Henry finds a new house for his family. It is a house in a different neighborhood, three miles away from Borough Park. Here the Jews are assimilated and there are even Italians living on the very same block.
    The night they move in Molly goes into labor. About an hour before her contractions stat, Rivkah opens her mouth and starts to speak again.
    Henry looks up and starts to cry. He sits there crying for a very long time. "Any hour your mother will be in labor, and thank God, Rivkah, thank God, you've also come back to us now."
      A baby brother is born at two o'clock the next morning in Coney Island Hospital, on the full moon in January, in the middle of a fresh snow.
       "A fresh start for all of us," Henry says, "we'll be a real family now."
    "Maybe," Rivkah whispers.
       "For years your mother and I tried and tried for another child. Now it happens, of all times. It's going to be different for us, Bekkie. He'll be my own son right from the beginning. We're in our own house. We'll be our own family. We'll never see the old neighborhood again."
     
     
     

 
    CHAPTER 9
     
     
    Now Henry, Molly, Rivkah and the baby, all live together in a house on a tree lined block in a section of Brooklyn where no one has ever learned what it means to be a real Jew. A new era has begun.
     The high school Rivkah goes to feels like a decompression chamber. Located in the heart of Brooklyn, and filled with people she has never known, slowly she descends into a world of games, clubs, parties, drinks and smoke. Here the girls wear lipstick, curl their hair, flirt, and join sororities. They become cheer leaders, twirl batons, and loudly cheer. What are they cheering for? Rivkah has no idea.
       Little by little Rivkah's skirts grow shorter, her hair grows longer and her mind wanders here and there.Most of the girls at school wear bright club jackets proudly and one day Rivkah too, is actually invited to wear one too.
    "How about joining the Pink Ladies?" they ask her.
       Rivkah declines. 
    "And what's wrong with the Pink Ladies?" Henry demands. "You think you're better than those Pink Ladies?"
       "It's not that."
       "What is it?"
    "I don't belong with them," she answers quietly. "Not one of them had a grandmother like