The Window That Stopped Waving

Chapter 1The Curtain

For as long as Gitty Weiss could remember, Mrs. Feder had waved at her.

Every school morning, at exactly 7:40, Gitty came out the front door of the building with her green backpack. She looked up at the second-floor window across the courtyard, and there was Mrs. Feder in her blue housecoat, with her gray tichel tied neatly and one hand lifted. Gitty waved back. That was all. Nobody had ever planned it, and neither of them had ever said a word about it.

Gitty did not think about the wave. It was like the sound of the bus, or the smell of the bakery on the corner. It was just part of the morning.

On Monday, the curtain was closed.

Gitty slowed down at the courtyard gate and looked up. The window was shut tight, with the pale yellow curtain pulled all the way across. Maybe Mrs. Feder was sleeping late. Maybe she was cleaning. Gitty shrugged and walked to the bus.

On Tuesday, the curtain was still closed.

On Wednesday, Gitty stopped at the gate and stared up for a full minute until a boy bumped into her backpack and said, "Are you going or not?" She went. But all through her first class, she had a small, strange, hollow feeling, like a missing tooth her tongue kept finding.

It was only a wave. She knew that. But a wave that stops has to stop for a reason, and a reason is the kind of thing a person can't help hunting for.

Chapter 2Evidence

By Wednesday night, Gitty had a list.

She was good at lists. She kept them in the back of her math notebook, in her small, squared-off handwriting. This one was titled, in capital letters, "WHAT I KNOW."

One: the curtain was closed three days in a row.

Two: on Sunday, there were two newspapers on Mrs. Feder's doormat, and on Tuesday, there were four.

Three: Tuesday afternoon, a tall woman Gitty had never seen carried a small suitcase up the stairs to the second floor.

Four: last Thursday, Gitty's little brother Yanky had kicked a ball across the courtyard, and it had landed on the low courtyard wall below Mrs. Feder's window and knocked over a pot of red geraniums that sat there.

Five: Mrs. Feder was angry about it.

She stopped writing at number five and looked at it for a long time.

It had been an accident. Yanky had run to pick up the ball and set the flowerpot upright, and the soil had spilled, and nobody had thought about it again. But now, in the quiet of her bedroom, number four seemed to shift in the lamplight and grow.

What if Mrs. Feder had seen? What if she had watched the whole thing from behind that curtain, and had been angry ever since? What if the geraniums were special, a gift from someone, or something she had grown for years? What if the closed curtain was her way of saying, "I am not speaking to your family"?

The more Gitty thought about it, the more everything fit. The curtain, the silence, the timing. Even the strange woman with the suitcase, who might be a relative come to help Mrs. Feder through her upset.

It did not occur to Gitty that every piece of her theory was only a guess that happened to fit the others. She only knew that when the pieces slid together, it felt like finding the answer.

She underlined number four twice, and the heavy feeling in her stomach settled down into certainty.

Chapter 3The Apology

On Thursday morning, Gitty got up early and asked Yanky if he wanted to chip in, and when he said yes, carried his allowance, plus her own, to the corner store. She bought the best pot of red geraniums they had, with fat buds and dark green leaves. It cost eleven dollars and forty cents, which was more than she had ever spent on anything that wasn't a book.

She wrote a note on a folded index card: "Dear Mrs. Feder, We are very sorry about the flowerpot. Please forgive my brother. It was an accident. We replaced the flowers. Gitty Weiss, from across the courtyard."

She propped the pot on the mat in front of Mrs. Feder's door and slid the card under the leaves. Her heart was pounding. She felt brave and a little sick, both at once.

That afternoon, she checked the doormat. The pot was still there. So was the card, untouched. The papers had grown to six.

On Friday, the pot was gone. Gitty's chest filled with relief, and for exactly one hour, she believed it was over.

Then she came home from school and saw the geraniums on the courtyard wall near the garbage bins, with the card still tucked inside. Someone had moved them out of the hallway and left them in the sun. The curtain upstairs was closed.

Gitty stood very still. She felt as if she had been slapped, though no one had touched her. Mrs. Feder was so angry she would not even take an apology. She had put the flowers out with the trash.

She went up the stairs to her apartment, closed her bedroom door, and sat on the floor with her back to the bed. She was so upset she forgot to be careful about her face, and when her older brother Avi knocked and stuck his head in, he stopped short.

"Whoa," he said. "Who died?"

"Nobody," Gitty said, wiping her nose. "Mrs. Feder hates us."

Chapter 4What She Actually Knew

Avi was sixteen and home from yeshiva for Shabbos. He was a head taller than he'd been in the summer, and he had the habit of folding himself onto the floor like a lawn chair. He did that now, listening to her whole account without interrupting once.

When she finished, he picked up the math notebook and read the list.

"Okay," he said. "Can I tell you what my rebbe says? Every time a boy comes to him with a big theory about what somebody else is thinking, he asks the same three questions."

"What questions?"

"Is it really true? What else could be going on? And what would you tell a friend who was sure about it?"

Gitty rolled her eyes. "That's so easy to say."

"I know. It's annoying. Do it anyway." Avi turned the notebook toward her. "Question one. Which of these are things you saw, and which are things you decided?"

Gitty looked at the page. The curtain was a thing she saw. The newspapers were a thing she saw. The woman with the suitcase was a thing she saw. The flowerpot had really fallen. Everything else, the anger, the silence, the throwing away of the geraniums, was only an idea.

"Okay," she said slowly. "I never actually saw her see the pot."

"Right. Question two. What else could be going on? Give me three."

It took a while. "She could be sick," Gitty said. "She could be away. The woman with the suitcase could be her daughter. She could have a visitor, and she's just being private."

"Any of those sound possible?"

Gitty's mouth went dry. She had spent three days building one story in which she was the cause of everything. She had never once stopped to ask whether the world might be a little bigger than she was.

"All of them," she whispered.

"And question three. If your friend Rivka came to you and said what you just said, what would you say to her?"

Gitty almost smiled. "I'd tell her to stop guessing and go knock."

"So," said Avi, unfolding himself from the floor, "go knock."

Chapter 5The Knock

It was not as easy as it sounded.

Gitty did not want to go alone. She asked her mother, who was setting the Shabbos table, if she could come with her to Mrs. Feder's. Her mother listened to the whole story, put down the napkins, and said, "I'm glad you asked."

"I should have asked on Monday," said Gitty.

"Maybe. But you asked now."

They climbed the stairs together. The geraniums were still on the courtyard wall. Gitty's mother stopped to pick them up and brought them along. When they got to the second floor, Gitty knocked, very softly.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the door opened, and the tall woman with the suitcase stood there, holding a dish towel.

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry to bother you," said Gitty's mother. "I'm Mrs. Weiss, from across the courtyard. This is my daughter Gitty. We've been wondering about Mrs. Feder."

The woman's face softened. "Oh, you must be the girl with the green backpack."

Gitty's mouth fell open.

"I'm Mrs. Feder's daughter," the woman said. "Please come in for one minute. I'll tell you." She stepped back into the narrow hallway. "Last Friday afternoon, my mother fell in the bathroom and broke her hip. They kept her in the hospital until Tuesday. Now she's in a rehabilitation place near here for one more week, and then she comes home. I flew in on Tuesday to get the apartment ready and gather her things. I meant to collect the mail, but I haven't had a minute."

"Oh," said Gitty. It was the only word she had left.

"I'm sorry about the curtain," Mrs. Feder's daughter went on. "I left it closed to keep the heat out. And all those newspapers! I only noticed them today. I've been so busy I forgot to cancel." She stopped. Her eyes had gone to the geraniums in Gitty's mother's arms. "What are these?"

Gitty's face burned. She could barely get the sentence out. "My brother knocked over her flowerpot last week. I thought maybe she was angry. I left these as an apology. And I thought, when I saw them downstairs..."

"Downstairs?" The woman looked puzzled, and then she began to laugh. "Oh, those were by my mother's door? I put them on the wall so they would get sun! They were going to droop in the hallway. I was going to bring them in again tonight." She wiped her eyes. "Dear, my mother has not been angry at anyone in her whole life. But she will want to hear about this."

Chapter 6Seven Forty

The next Thursday, Mrs. Feder came home.

Gitty knew because she had been watching the courtyard from her kitchen window all week, the way you watch for a late bus. At four in the afternoon, a van pulled up. Two men helped a small figure in a blue housecoat into a wheelchair. Mrs. Feder's daughter carried the bag. And Mrs. Feder, in her chair, looked up at the second floor, and then looked across the courtyard, and then found Gitty's kitchen window.

She lifted one hand.

Gitty lifted both of hers.

The next morning, at exactly 7:40, Gitty came out of the building with her green backpack. She had made a sign the night before. It was a long strip of white cardboard, and she had painted three words on it in thick red letters. Then she had added a small drawing of a pot of geraniums, which she thought looked suspiciously like a lumpy tomato.

She looked up at the window across the courtyard.

The curtain was open. Mrs. Feder was sitting in her wheelchair in the sunshine, with a shawl around her shoulders, and the real pot of red geraniums was on the sill beside her. She was holding her own piece of paper.

It was a page torn from a notebook. In shaky blue pen it said, "Good morning, Gitty."

Gitty held up her sign. It said, "I'M SO GLAD."

Mrs. Feder laughed, though Gitty couldn't hear it, and waved with her whole arm.

All day Gitty carried the morning with her, the wave, the sign, and the geraniums in the window. She thought about her list. She thought about how sure she had been, and how every piece had fit, and how none of it had been true. She had not been wrong because she was foolish. She had been wrong because a worry can sound exactly like a fact, and the only way to tell the difference is to look, and to ask.

That night, she opened her math notebook to the page headed WHAT I KNOW. Under number five, she crossed out the word "angry." Beside it she wrote, in her small, squared-off handwriting, "Ask before you decide."

Then she added a new line at the bottom, and she was surprised how much she meant it.

"Wave back."