Even Unintentional Sins Pinch

When I’m on vacation, not only does my physical self go off-duty, but my mind also takes off. This means that while visiting relatives in America a few summers back, it was hard to carry my children’s dishes to the sink, and hard to put their dirty clothes into my mother’s washing machine. Thinking, also, was not my style--a disappointment because my opinions as an Israeli citizen were occasionally solicited on Israel’s “unwillingness to join the peace process.” When neighbors would ask, “What do you think of James Baker?” I’d say something like, “Dresses well but a little bit bald.”

So on our day with Aunt Sophie at her Long Island apartment, perhaps she should have known better than to remark that someone should help the lifeguard keep an eye on my children in the swimming pool. Sophie had always been one of the great dynamic anchors of our family, the revered matriarch on whose tireless energy we all depended. Around her, anyone’s sense of responsibility could wilt. With hindsight, I realize why she thought that I, their mother, should assume the poolside duty. But at the time, a photograph album on Sophie’s coffee table caught my attention just as I was about to get up off the couch. What an amazingly interesting album! Sophie and Sam’s engagement, my cousin Michael as a little boy in summer camp, my father as a 2-year-old. I was just about to go out to check on the kids, but Sophie was already returning from the pool. Good, I thought, everything’s OK. I and the album stayed on the couch.

Then there was that incident with the key. All of us were getting ready to visit Michael and his family, and everyone had gone out to the car except me. I had my purse, I had the children’s sweaters. I looked around, shut the door and proceeded to the parking lot.

Sophie, who’d been loading the car, turned toward me. Her face fell. “You shut the door?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I didn’t take out my stuff yet! My purse is inside!”

For the next hour, the children and I sat on the curb and melted in the sun as Sophie walked around searching for the manager. I remember how she looked: in her late 70s, walking with strain, hands on hips, lips pressed together, squinting in the glare (her post-cataract-operation sunglasses were in the house.) “I’m sorry,” I told her on one of her trips around the building. She waved a hand. “Can I help?” I offered the next time she came around. She shook her head distractedly. She really should try to make me feel better, I thought. How was I to know the door locks by itself?

At Michael’s house that evening, I decided for the sake of our relationship to come clean. “You know, Sophie, when I apologized for locking us out, I wish you’d been more forthcoming about accepting my apology. I did feel terrible.” She took her hands out of the dishwater and rested them on the edge of the sink. “Sarah,” she said, her brown eyes locking gently with mine. “It wasn’t the key so much. It was the way you just assumed someone else could watch the children when they were in the pool.”

“Oh,” I replied. “I see. I am sorry.”

She smiled. Then she died. Not on the spot, of course, and I wouldn’t suggest it had anything to do with the strain of that afternoon. But that was the last time I saw Aunt Sophie. My mother called a few days after our return to Jerusalem with the news that Sophie had died of a heart attack that Friday night.

For the sin we committed in thy sight unintentionally, reads the Yom Kippur prayer.

For the sin we committed in thy sight willfully or by mistake.

For the sin we committed in thy sight by casting off responsibility.

I didn’t do anything that terrible. I was so tired, and it was my vacation, after all. How was I to know about the door? It was an innocent mistake, it could happen to anyone. And she did accept my apology.

But it’s me who’s been getting pinched ever since with this belated understanding: In a world in which all things except memories are secretly fragile and shockingly temporary, there is no such thing as being on vacation. I’m the one who replays that mental movie of Sophie in her pink shirt on the green lawn, eyes downcast, eternally walking toward me from the pool. It’s I who must live with the image--more precise than in any photo album--of Aunt Sophie circling that condominium again and again, perplexed, squinting into the heat of a July afternoon.