The Usual Suspects

When a person lives in one place for a long time, as I have, she meets most of the strange and interesting people in the area. This was especially true because I used to ride the bus because I didn't drive. When my son was about 4 or 5, we rode the bus everywhere, spending hours sometimes on the bus. I would shlep home bags of groceries and other junk, pulling along a reluctant and often sleepy child to boot. That was why we used a stroller much longer than most people usually do. It made a handy place to put all those packages, but then I had to carry it on and off the bus.

One of those times, I met an elderly Russian-Jewish woman. She was dressed in typical Babushka garb--a skirt that swept her ankles, long sleeves, and a head-covering, often the metonymous head scarf (she was Orthodox, naturally). She pinched my son's cheek and asked if we went to shul, and whether he was going to have a bar mitzvah, though that would have been a long way off at that time. And somehow it came up that he was born without a foreskin, a sure sign he was either an angel or the budding mashiach (messiah) in her view. In her heavy accent, she would tell me about the pogroms she had lived through in Russia, and how she had come to the U.S. My Russian was nowhere near good enough for me to tell her to speak to me in Russian, and her English was barely servicable, so we limped along, with neither one of us probably understanding more than one word in 3.
As long as I would ride the buses, I would run into her on a regular basis, usually on Friday afternoons, when she was on her way to synagogue. Strictly speaking, she was not supposed to ride on Shabbos, but she said that the Rebbe had given her special dispensation because of her age and because she lived too far away to walk to services.
But actually, she was a mighty walker, this woman who had to have been at least in her late 80s at that time, and older as the years went on. The last time I saw her, I was already driving. It was August, and one of those extremely hot and humid days when no one probably ought to be out walking a distance, especially an elderly person wheeling a folding grocery cart. But there she was, on her way up the street to Ralphs. She had at least three blocks to go, so I stopped and asked if she would like a ride.
At first she looked at me suspiciously, but then slid in, folding her cart across her lap, an awkward burden that took up most of the space in the passenger seat. She told me she liked to walk, that Americans were weak, and that she never listened to her daughter's pleas to take a ride wherever she wanted to go. I decided then to stay with her in the store and bring her home afterwards, and all the while she spoke to me about how we Americans should not be so foolish to believe what our government was telling us, and particularly how Jews could never trust the people in power, who would always want us dead, in her view.
Somewhere between the produce aisle and the checkout stand, she collapsed, and I called in the store's management to help (it was before I had a cell phone). But she looked at me with pity. "Don't you know," she warned me, "you can never show your weakness, or they will kill you." I tried to assure her that this was the U.S., not Russia, that it was safe, more than safe, necessary, to call 911 and go to the hospital. That I would call the Rebbe or whomever she wished to assure her of this. But she insisted on going home, so I packed her back in the car with an icebag on her forehead, and took her to her daughter, who sighed and said that this was what she lived with. Her mother was stronger and more stubborn than she was, this woman who was probably the age I am now at that time. She told me how superstitious and paranoid her mother was, how strange her ways were. It was clear that the daughter was completely exhausted and exasperated, in a way that I can now fully appreciate.
Years passed, and I saw no more of the elderly woman or of her daughter. I am sure that the old woman is dead, but every time I pass the corner where I picked her up that hot August day, particularly at night, I can pick out her bent-over figure on the corner, waving a withered hand.