“The Torah tells us . . .” I’m not really listening to Rabbi. I am readying my own argument. The beauty of the Torah is that you can always find what you need to win an argument.

I toss my hair so my curls bounce on my shoulder, shiny as a shampoo commercial. My hair is just like my aunt’s and she calls it my crowning glory. When I read Anne of Green Gables, I never understood why Anne wasn’t delighted to be a redhead. I love being the only redhead in my class. “A cardinal among the wrens,” people say. They think they’re saying it out of my hearing. I am the tallest, too, and the first to start getting a shape. It’s my plan to take my birthday money from my grandmother and buy a bra.

It’s a secret mission, of course. My mother would never approve. But once I smuggle the bra into the house, what can she do? A bra can’t be returned to the store after you wear it and my mother would never throw away a piece of clothing. We have lots of money, but my mother is frugal. She makes homemade brandy from cherries, darns our socks. I’m more like my aunt, the one they call the spendthrift.

Rabbi drones on and on about modesty, tzniut. “We must always remember that while the pursuit of knowledge is laudable, it is not to be used for show. Or as a weapon to make others do what we want.”

Hmmm. I have noticed that while boys are praised for using their knowledge exactly like a weapon, girls are not. I am always being told to listen, not to interrupt. Two years ago, assigned an essay on my future life, I wrote that I wanted to be an opera singer or a rabbi. They told me a girl can never be a rabbi, or even a cantor. They gave me the same speech about modesty, tzniut. If I had a dollar for every time someone quoted “All is vanity” to me, I could buy five new bras, one for each school day. Modesty is for people who aren’t lucky enough to have things about which to be conceited.

I can’t wait to come to school in my white blouse, sheer enough that the other girls will see I have proper straps, not an undershirt. I’m going to buy a Vassarette bra because they’re the best, I saw the ads when I sneak-read Seventeen magazine at the drugstore. I’ll button my cardigan over my shirt so my mother doesn’t know what I’m doing.

I have been planning this shopping trip for days. First, I tell a convincing lie to the mother who drives carpool this afternoon. The underwear store is next to a pet store, so I tell Mrs. Finkelstein that my brother’s fish needs fish food and she can let me off there. She frets—she is supposed to take me to the door—but my house is only two blocks away and we are within the eruv. The days are getting longer, but it’s still cold and today is particularly nasty, with a wet rain, hard as pebbles. She wants to get home, too, and I’m the last girl to be dropped off. There is no parking space—there are never parking spaces along this block—so she makes me promise to go straight home.

I make that pledge easily, no need to cross my fingers. What is “straight home,” after all? I can’t get home without walking past the lingerie store.

Aware that Mrs. Finkelstein is watching, I push my way into the pet store, which smells horrible. It is the most boring kind of pet store, all fish and turtles and snakes, nothing with fur. Fur. I’m going to get a fur coat when I turn eighteen. My grandparents, who own a fur store, have promised me this. But I want it sooner, maybe at age sixteen. That’s still five years away, a whole new decade. I want a fur. I want a ring like my mother’s, with a big green stone that my mother says isn’t an emerald, but I think it must be. I want glittery earrings. I want to marry a rich man or make a lot of money on my own so I can have whatever I want, when I want it.

But, right now, I want a Vassarette bra, preferably in pink.

“Can I help you?” A man’s voice, coming from the back of the pet shop. I am pretending to inspect the snakes in the glass boxes in the front of the store, but I am really trying to keep watch through the dusty window, making sure that Mrs. Finkelstein’s car has pulled away and gone through the light.

“No,” I say, using what my family calls my duchess airs. “I’m just looking.”

The man is skinny and pale, with orange hair and red-rimmed eyes. If a cold could be a person, it would look like this man. His eyes remind me of white mice, not that this shop sells anything as cuddly as mice. He has a sniffle and poor posture.

“You’re a redhead,” he says. “Like me.”

No, I’m not. No, he’s not. He’s an orange head. I turn my back to him.

“Do you want a snake? Or maybe a pair of little turtles?”

“I’ll tell you if I see anything I want. A person can walk around a store and look at things.”

“But some of our fish require special tanks, and you can’t put just any two fish together—”

“I’ll tell you if I need you,” I say. I don’t want to talk to a man who works in a dirty, smelly store. An orange-headed man who thinks he can tell me, Tessie Fine, with ten dollars in my pocket, what I am allowed to do. My aunt doesn’t let shopkeepers speak to her this way. I’ve seen her in Hutzler’s, when the salesladies try to spray her with perfume. “Darling,” she says, drawing out the r-sound, “I wear only Joy.” The customer is always right.

“Okay, but you can’t go around just touching things . . .”

I don’t want to touch anything here, but he can’t tell me what to do.

“It’s a free country.” I stamp my foot. I like the sound of my metal-capped heels on the wood floor.

“Don’t do that,” the man says, making a face as if the sound is painful to him.

“You can’t tell me what to do.” I stamp my foot. It is a glorious sound. I stamp and I stamp and I stamp and I—

March 1966

March 1966

“Is there anything more annoying than not getting to do something you never wanted to do in the first place?”

Maddie was trying to make a joke on herself, an observation about the eternal push-and-pull between mothers and daughters.

But Judith Weinstein must have thought this a profound inquiry, worthy of a thoughtful answer, for she did not reply right away. Maddie could not see Judith’s face—they were working their way down a narrow path, with Maddie leading the way—but Judith, when she finally answered, sounded like someone who yearned to be agreeable, even if she didn’t quite agree.

“It is frustrating that we made the effort and they wouldn’t let us help. But they didn’t stop us, did they?”

Her voice was as wobbly as their footing. Judith probably thought Maddie was insane, following these old trails through the arboretum, darkness encroaching. How had they ended up here?

Because her mother had called her that morning, as she had every morning at nine since Maddie’s phone was installed, and it never occurred to Maddie not to pick up. It was the one thing that was the same about her old and new lives, the daily call from her mother.

“Maddie, have you heard about Tessie Fine?”

“Of course, Mother. I’m on Cathedral Street, not in Siberia. We get the same newspapers. I listen to WBAL.”

Maddie’s mother had made a small but distinct “Pffft.” This meant she disagreed with Maddie’s facts but couldn’t be bothered to argue. She also seemed to shudder reflexively at the mere mention of “Cathedral,” as if the street name was an affront. She’d have been more horrified if she realized that Maddie’s apartment, while on the Mulberry side of the building, actually overlooked the cathedral.

“It’s been two days. Our synagogue has been sending volunteers. You meet up at the parking lot, then go in pairs . . .”

The “you” was specific, not general. Maddie’s mother, Tattie Morgenstern—some strange childhood bastardization of Harriet that she refused to stop using—was telling Maddie that she would go to the parking lot, she would be paired up, she would walk an assigned route in the ever-expanding perimeter around the tropical fish store where Tessie Fine was last seen.

Baltimore had been aflame with the story. Tessie Fine, so pretty, so young. She had told the mother who dropped her off that she was going to buy food for her brother’s fish. But her brother had no fish. The man in the store said she had walked in but left five minutes later without buying anything. He said she had been rude to him. Family and friends said, with evident admiration, “Yes, that’s our Tessie.”