Free An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer

choice. And so I chose my religion to be whatever my father would answer questions about: science, history, my future.
    My mother broke into my thoughts. “Remember, Naomi, as you learn to fix all those hearts. Remember where they’ve been before they got to you. Medical science will tell you that a life ends when the brain has died. But the Halacha insists that as long as a person’s heart is beating, she is alive. Sometimes, the doctors aren’t always right.” She reached over and held my wrist, covering the bracelet, closing her eyes at the same time. After a while I asked her if she was awake and she didn’t answer. I slipped my hand out from under hers, got up, and walked quietly toward the door.
    “Naomi,” she said to the wall, “close the door on your way out.”
    I can recognize now that not only was that the most she had ever spoken about herself since I had known her, it was the most she would ever tell me. I wonder if something about my father’s illness had brought out something different in her, too, but if it did, it soon retreated. And at the time I don’t remember wondering over anything she had told me, despite the fact that in one brief conversation she had managed to mention her family, God, and medicine. I just drank her in, always optimistic there might one day be more, confident the future would have what the present couldn’t hold.
    T he next day I went back to my window. The wind picked up, but it stayed sunny, the trees light-filled and bent. I felt a huge sense of possibility about the day, and it wasn’t just the unexpected glimpse my mother had given me into what I most wanted to see. I think I already sensed how important Teddy could be to me, though we hadn’t known each other long. I dozed, on and off, waiting.
    Teddy was back in the yard before dinner. I jumped off the seat at my window and ran downstairs, fearing he would disappear if I didn’t get there fast enough. The wind slammed the door hard behind me and I knew my father would have come out to yell at me if he’d heard it, that my mother wouldn’t have heard, or would let it go. We met in the middle of the yard. He looked tired and frantic.
    “Listen,” he said, looking over his shoulder, “I definitely think we should get married.” He looked behind him again. The day had been scrubbed clean from his face. “But my mother doesn’t like you.”
    “Why?” I asked, biting my nails. My teeth worked the fine pieces of dirt, giving them something to do. The back of his house looked back at us, a jumble of indiscernible shades of gray, the eyes of occlusion.
    “You’re not Jewish,” he explained patiently.
    “But I am!” I nearly hollered.
    “But your mom isn’t,” he countered. The wind was lifting the hair off my head and his; it seemed we might fly away.
    “She is!” I exclaimed. My mother, who never asked for a place in things, had wanted this place. It made me furious beyond all reason to think anyone would take it from her.
    “But she wasn’t born that way, right?”
    I glared at him. “Doesn’t matter.”
    He shook his head, dismissing my objection as irrelevant. “My mom doesn’t really understand,” he admitted, or lied, leaning forward. His breath was fragrant, like peanut butter, and a little sour, like milk. When he looked at me his eyes were the liquid amber they became when he was excited or angry. When he was furious, they were flat, almost gray, like cement. He had the coloring of a redhead, with long, light-brown lashes and freckles, though his hair was a dull, ashy blond. It almost always looked dingy, and it smelled wonderful. “We need to do something to make her like you,” he said. The wind flew up my shirt, as cold as the sun was bright. I shivered. He grabbed my hand.
    “I saw this a few months ago,” he began. “She likes this TV show where grown-ups fight and kiss a lot. She usually yells at them in Yiddish, but this one guy, who I think was supposed to marry someone