Shifra gets a package from her mother in the States. Some makeup an old moldy paperback about Yiddishe cooking that was supposed to be funny but is totally not sheet music with the chords of a song she used to play and the newest bestseller her closest friend from high school had just written.
Shifra hadn’t seen Dori in years 30 to be exact but somehow Shifra’s mother thinks this will wake her daughter up out of her crazy Jewish slumber that her mother calls “the lobotomy.”
This was supposed to be you! screams her mother’s between-the-lines message. It’s a kind of plain book; the book flap explaining the theme something about a little girl. On the other flap in back is a picture Dori who basically looks exactly the same only there’s a little bit of a faraway not-so-glittery look in her eye like somewhere along the way a light was snuffed out.
The last thing Shifra remembered about Dori was Dori’s father’s funeral and Dori’s mother her right leg in traction in some private room in a downtown Manhattanhospital. Novels and glossy magazines spread across her bed and Dori’s mother looking as she always did like she was in the middle of the New York Times crossword puzzle over cups of coffee at her sunlit kitchen table on leisurely Sunday mornings.
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