Hush by Judy Brown, Eishes Chayil Page B

that week. We pretended to do homework, played teacher, house, and pirates, and took turns scratching each other’s backs at night. Devory’s mother wasn’t strict like mine was, and she let us stay up until almost nine o’clock every night. Only one night did she punish us. Instead of studying for a math quiz, we scared the twins, whooshing and whooping around them in circles, covered with white linen as if we were ghosts.
    The twins cried, we laughed, and her mother scolded us right into bed at seven. Devory got a hundred on the math test anyway. I got a seventy-five. We both scribbled up the test papers with red and blue marker and then folded them into planes and flew them straight out the window. Her mother called us “double mission impossible” a few times, but then she just laughed and said, well, at least it’s only for a week.
    We had only one argument, on Monday night when I spelled the word ridiculous incorrectly on a homework assignment. I looked it up in Devory’s dictionary, but when I saw how they spelled it, I scrunched my nose and told Devory that her dictionary spelled “ridiculous” in the most ridiculous way and that was not the way you spelled it. Ridiculous, I informed her, was spelled r-e-e-d-i-c-u-l-i-s and they got it all mixed up. Devory said it couldn’t be.
    “The dictionary can’t spell anything wrong,” she countered. “That’s why it’s a dictionary.”
    I said that I didn’t care what the dictionary said. I was going to spell “reediculis” the right way, and with a newly sharpened pencil I did just that.
    My mother called on Tuesday evening from the hotel in Israel and told me that she would buy me earrings as a present. She wanted to know how much I missed her, and though I didn’t miss her at all I did want the earrings. So I said that I couldn’t wait till she came home on Monday. Then I ran upstairs to tell Devory about my new earrings. Devory’s room was small and crowded, with mismatched closets lining the wall and other old furniture from her grandmother’s house. There were two wooden bunk beds in the middle of the room that were so low, we would swing ourselves onto the top bunk and pretend we were climbing the rigs of a ship. There was a high-riser over by the wall, where I slept, while Devory hopped from my bed to hers. The twins and the baby slept in the next room, and in the middle of the night I would hear Devory’s mother and father cooing the crying baby back to sleep, while Devory, her limbs sprawled widely over the bed, slept right through it.
    Devory used to share her bedroom with Miriam, Shmuli, Leah’la, and Tzvi. But now we had the room all to ourselves, because Shmuli moved into his yeshiva dorm after his Bar Mitzvah and Miriam had recently moved into the storage room in the basement with Leah’la. They had painted the tiny room white, put up a big “Teenage Zone—DO NOT ENTER” sign on the door, and nobody dared violate the warning except their mother when she did the laundry. Tzvi had also wanted his own room, and proposed moving into the backyard shed. His mother refused, and he ended up sleeping on the couch in the dining room. At nine p.m. he would claim property rights to the dining room until the morning. He would hang a cover over the doorway, and anyone who entered without permission would be blasted with a cup of water placed strategically over the upper ledge.
    One night we heard an angry shout from downstairs. Devory’s father had pushed the cover aside and entered the dining room. That was the last cup of water Tzvi ever put anywhere. Devory’s father was different from mine. He was taller, his eyes were a dark blue like Devory’s, his beard was darker and longer, and he was hardly home, even at night. Sometimes he came home after we ate supper, but he never stayed. Devory’s mother would pack the food into little plastic containers and he would take it to shul , where he would study Torah until ten thirty. Every evening