The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  "I didn't know that," her husband said, reading a different section.

  "What's that?"

  "Get was the term for the segregation of man and woman, and that this may be where the word ghetto comes from."

  She refocused. It was uncanny: every paragraph was filled with information vague enough to be uninteresting and precise enough to be soporific. She tried again, engaging in a little contest with herself to see how long she could hang in there: "The Italian minhag is also known as minhag Kahal Italiani. Its origins are closest to the land of Israel as are the German and the Romaniote Greek liturgy as well as an ancient French rite that oh my god oh my god boring boring boring."

  She turned to the middle of the room, where a glass display case as high as her belly contained a thick old medieval Pentateuco. A book; it had that going for it, at least. Her husband was now across the room, and she joined him in his study of an old map of the city, done in the quaintly incompetent medieval cartographic style. He moved on, and she followed him to a piecrust-colored tombstone with a menorah on it. Next to it was a large glassed-in display of "The Jewish Home." Inside this was a table freighted with carafes, candleholders, menorahs, dreidels, a platter with what was possibly a real piece of bread on it, a dish of salt, a tiny clasped-shut book. She stood there looking at all these items, trying hard to be fascinated, or at least invested. She failed miserably and walked on past a reconstructed dowry, which really did not interest her. She resented not being able to tell him how bored she was. She was interested in the traditions, she thought, sort of, but not in the objects themselves. How could this be? She wondered if her husband might not in fact have a point. What were such traditions without the tent pegs of religious belief keeping them in place?

  Soon they were called and met their guide back in the lobby. His name was David, pronounced Da-veed. He had short brown hair, the hawkish Roman nose that had no Jewish or Gentilic preference, perfect pink ears, hydraulically sincere eyebrows, small, catlike teeth, and a weirdly furrowed brow for someone so young. They joined the ten other English-speaking tourists who had already gathered around David, only two of whom looked American: a blinking, sport-coated father and his exquisitely manqué son, who wore cargo pants and a maroon Roma soccer jersey. They were from one of the overfed states, it looked like.

  "Please don't take pictures," David began, "inside or outside. Yarmulkes are provided for the men to cover their heads. Women must cover their shoulders as well." With a smile he handed a shawl to an Asian woman old enough to know that her pink Hello Kitty tank top was one hundred percent unacceptable. The men then fished yarmulkes from a basket that David held out to them. Her husband looked at his with a chuckle and plopped it on his head with good-sport disdain. It looked even sillier on him than she was expecting. David proceeded to escort his troupe downstairs into the building's basement Sephardic synagogue, a room as colorful as a detonated rainbow. They sat in the first two rows of the uncomfortable wooden pews while David stood and waited in the middle of the synagogue.

  "So we begin," David began, "our guided tour about the history of our community, which is unique among all the Jews of the West, including the United States. The Ashkenazi-Sephardic distinction does not entirely apply to our community." David spoke on, but she looked around, listening with a sonarlike part of her brain, hearing outlines and occasional distinctions, nothing more.

  The altar was draped with bright blue, gold-tasseled rugs. Another rug with a gold menorah sewn onto its face was hung on the wall directly across from the altar. The thrones were cast of mottled red marble, their seats covered with thin red cushions. She had a vague sense that one of the thrones was where the Talmud was read during worship. No. All wrong. It was not an altar but a bema, and it faced east; it was also where the Torah, not the Talmud, was read. The thrones were where the Torah was kept. She actually had to stop herself from laughing. Years of Hebrew school and her husband doubtlessly knew more about Judaic ritual than she did. She tried to figure out which of her fellow tourists were Jewish and which were not, an impulse she would have found unforgivable in anyone but herself.

  David was now taking questions. "Jews lived in the Ghetto for three hundred years," he told the Asian woman. "We Italian Jews also became the only Jewish community to be put back in a ghetto after being emancipated in 1798. We had to remain there until 1860, and this was long after almost all other members of European Jewry had been granted full legal rights. Florentine Jews suffered the same fate, earning their emancipation in 1808 but being returned to the ghetto in 1815."

  Someone then asked about a gated area behind the pews. "That," David said, "is where women sit." Several hands instantly shot up. David laughed and, without calling on anyone, explained the religious reasons for this. That was when she noticed her husband slip off his yarmulke and search around his immediate area with the finicky distaste of someone working out where to stash a plug of chewed gum. He finally gave up and orphaned his yarmulke on the empty seat next to him.

  She elbowed him. "Come on," she whispered. "Put it back on."

  He whispered back: "Fuck that. They segregate the sexes? Fuck. That."

  "I'm glad," she said, still whispering, "that you've found something to be angry about. But this is an Orthodox synagogue."

  "I can't be angry?" He was no longer whispering.

  "No, you can. What you're not allowed to be is surprised."

  As they were leaving, the stout American father took a picture. David rushed over to him with frantically though still politely waving hands. "No photos, please. For security purposes."

  The man said, "I'm just taking one of the rug here."

  David smiled in what she recognized as tourist-honed, yeah-it-IS-crazy ingratiation. "Our synagogue was once attacked, by terrorists, and so security is important to us. Please understand."

  The man's mouth opened. "When was the synagogue attacked?"

  "In 1982."

  Her husband burst out laughing.

  "Security is important to us," David said to the man in a loud, dislocated voice she knew was directed at her husband. "Upstairs in the Orthodox synagogue you can see for yourself our broken windows. Those were shattered in the attack, and we have never repaired them to remind us of what happened here."

  "Was it Muslims?" the man wanted to know.

  David smiled. "Let's go upstairs to the Orthodox synagogue."

  The trip took them briefly outside. Their feet made wet splashing noises on the gravel walkway that led to the Orthodox synagogue's wooden doors, which David held open for everyone, nodding in identical welcome at each person as he or she passed. Inside were dozens of rows of wooden pews, the baker's-chocolate-colored joinery of which was truly lovely. David allowed them all a few moments to walk around and explore. She saw that many individual seats were affixed with little gold plaques bearing the name of the worshipper for whom they were reserved. She then noted that the entirety of the synagogue's first row was labeled EX DEPORTATO. She did not need any Italian to know who sat there and why. She looked up into the square dome, filled with a sparkling airborne cathedral of sunlight. And there they were—the synagogue's broken windows, through which shoots of bamboo-colored light beamed.

  David began his tour. The synagogue was inaugurated in 1904. The columns were hewn from some rare marble, the name of which she neglected to catch. From the black candelabras and chandeliers to the boiled-milk marble, you could see that the synagogue's Christian architects had worked in what was called the Syrio-Babylonian style.

  "And where do the women sit?" one of the other tourists, a small, bespectacled woman with a round face, asked. She looked the woman over: yellow smoker's fingers, trembling hamster nose, an intense grudge-seeking manner about her.

  "Women," David answered, "can sit upstairs, behind the gate, if there's room."

  "If there's room," her husband echoed loud enough for David to hear.

  David looked at him and was about to answer when he noticed that her husband
was no longer wearing his yarmulke. That their exchange would now be one of regulation rather than confrontation seemed to relax David. "Excuse me, sir—there are yarmulkes in back." He moved on to answer another question, but her husband did not budge. She felt her face grow warm as the rest of her body chilled like a licked finger raised into the wind. David looked back to her husband a minute later and, still smiling, said, "Sir, please help yourself to a yarmulke in back."

  She said her husband's name and gently pushed him rearward, toward the yarmulke basket. Her hands were on his chest, and she realized he had never buttoned up his shirt. He still refused to move; she felt as though she were pushing one of the synagogue's thick marble columns.

  They now had the full interest of the tour group. With a kind of herd-animal practicality, she found herself stepping away from her husband. She had felt their eyes picking holes in him, in her, in them. Remarkable: after putting only a few feet between her and her husband, no one was looking at her anymore. She was ashamed by her own relief.

  "Sir," David said again. There was no need to say anything else.

  Watching her husband prepare for an argument was similar to watching a boxer throw off his robe. She knew what was coming but was still not fully prepared for the brazen impudence of what he said, or the sneering pride with which he said it: "So I'm not going to wear a yarmulke."

  David blinked. She wondered if anything like this had happened to him before.

  "Sir, you must cover your head."

  Her husband answered in the same cruel voice he had used two nights ago to disparage her book. "And what's going to happen to me if I don't?"

  She had the sense of watching someone fall down a flight of stairs in slow motion and noting the various stages of injury.

  David was no longer smiling. "You will have to leave." His voice was tight; each word had a small, cold exactness.

  One member of the group, an Englishman no older than twenty-five who was wearing a red Che Guevara T-shirt, said, "Christ, mate—cover your fucking head."

  "Why should he?" This was the short, yellow-fingered woman.

  "Out of respect," the young Englishman said.

  It was to this young prole that her husband now turned. "I would happily cover my head if this synagogue allowed women to sit with men. It doesn't. I don't respect that or the god our friend David here thinks tells him this is right, so why should I cover my head?"

  Her hand leapt up and landed with an open-palmed smack against her forehead. She said his name again, and again.

  "Sir," David said. "This is our place of worship and community. You are here as our guest. If you don't cover your head, I will have to ask you to leave."

  Her husband grinned as though this were exactly the argument he had been waiting for David to mount. "You charged me seven euros to come into your place of worship, so I think you kind of lose the right to tell me what I can or cannot wear while I'm in here."

  "How does that work?" This was the American father in the sport coat. The man's son, she saw, was laughing.

  David sighed and withdrew from his pocket a cellular phone. He speed-dialed, spoke a few words in Italian, then snapped shut the phone—a harsh, guillotine sound. He contemplated her husband now as though from a great height. "You will be escorted from this synagogue if you refuse to cover your head."

  Her husband's smile was a fragment from some former, exploded confidence. "You're throwing me out of the synagogue."

  David nodded. "You will be escorted from this synagogue if you—"

  "Get rid of this douche bag!" The boy who a moment ago had been laughing said this. In fact, he was still laughing, which made her husband's stand seem, at that moment, even more ludicrous. "Dude, like what is the matter with you?"

  Her husband said nothing while his eyes wandered from one member of their group to another. He avoided her and David, which she hopefully took as an indication that he was about to apologize. Instead he told the group, with great gravity, "Social justice isn't just about hating George Bush."

  The bald man in the pink sweater emerged from a room adjacent to the bema and began to walk toward her husband. At this her husband turned to her in something close to lip-licking panic. Not that he was being forcefully removed from a place of worship—she knew he would tell this story, with certain redactions, for years—but rather at the thought of everything else that had been set into motion here.

  The man in the pink sweater was upon him. His lips were wet in a way that made her wonder if his lunch had just been interrupted. The man looked at her husband, then at her, and then back at her husband. "We leave now," he said, relying, for the moment, on his presence as reason enough to leave. Her husband refused to look at the man. Instead he shook his head and muttered, "I paid my seven euros. I'm seeing the synagogue. Not leaving." The man in the pink sweater, who seemed both covetous of and frightened by the opportunity to use force, was then summoned by David. They spoke in hushed, spiralingly fast Italian. David's opinion, whatever that might be, seemed to win the day. The man in the pink sweater shook his head while David made another phone call. Soon enough, the hatless police officer from the corner cubicle outside entered the synagogue—and, oddly, crossed himself.

  At the sound of the door opening, her husband turned. At the sight of the approaching, expressionless officer, he sighed. "Come on," he said to her. His tone was light; she could nearly hear his mind rearranging what had just happened into nothing more than an amusing misunderstanding. "Let's get thrown out of the synagogue together at least."

  He stuck out his hand: his old trick. She took the hand and walked with him past the officer. As the box of daylight at the end of the synagogue aisle grew larger and brighter, she was surprised by how quiet it was—and she knew this, this sound, this sound of different hopes collapsing, of separate divinities forming, of exclusion, of closed doors, of one story's end.

  Out of Body

  Jennifer Egan

  FROM Tin House

  YOUR FRIENDS ARE PRETENDING to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it. Drew says he's going straight to law school. After practicing a while, he'll run for state senator. Then U.S. senator. Eventually, president. He lays all this out the way you'd say, "After Modern Chinese Painting I'll go to the gym, then work in Bobst until dinner," if you even made plans anymore, which you don't—if you were even in school anymore, which you aren't, although that's supposedly temporary.

  You look at Drew through layers of hash smoke floating in the sun. He's leaning back on the futon couch, his arm around Sasha. He's got a big, hey-come-on-in face and a head of dark hair, and he's built—not with weight-room muscle like yours, but in a basic animal way that must come from all that swimming he does.

  "Just don't try and say you didn't inhale," you tell him.

  Everyone laughs except Bix, who's at his computer, and you feel like a funny guy for maybe half a second, until it occurs to you that they probably only laughed because they could see you were trying to be funny, and they're afraid you'll jump out the window onto East Seventh Street if you fail even at something so small.

  Drew takes a long hit. You hear the smoke creak in his chest. He hands the pipe to Sasha, who passes it to Lizzie without smoking any.

  "I promise, Rob," Drew croaks at you, holding in smoke, "if anyone asks, I'll tell them the hash I smoked with Robert Freeman Junior was excellent."

  Was that "Junior" mocking? The hash is not working out as planned: you're just as paranoid as with pot. You decide, no, Drew doesn't mock. Drew is a believer—last fall, he was one of the die-hards passing out leaflets in Washington Square and registering students to vote. After he and Sasha got together, you started helping him—mostly with the jocks, because you know how to talk to them. Coach Freeman, aka your pop, calls Drew's type "woodsy." They're loners, Pop says—skiers, woodchoppers—not team players. But you know all about teams; you can talk to people on teams (only Sasha knows you picked NYU because it hasn't had a football t
eam in thirty years). On your best day you registered twelve team-playing Democrats, prompting Drew to exclaim, when you gave him the paperwork, "You've got the touch, Rob." But you never registered yourself, that was the thing, and the longer you waited, the more ashamed of this you got. Then it was too late. Even Sasha, who knows all your secrets, has no idea that you never cast a vote for Bill Clinton.

  Drew leans over and gives Sasha a wet kiss, and you can tell the hash is getting him horny because you feel it too—it makes your teeth ache in a way that will only let up if you hit someone or get hit. In high school you'd get in fights when you felt like this, but no one will fight with you now—the fact that you hacked open your wrists with a box cutter three months ago and nearly bled to death seems to be a deterrent. It functions like a force field, paralyzing everyone in range with an encouraging smile on their lips. You want to hold up a mirror and ask, How exactly are those smiles supposed to help me?

  "No one smokes hash and becomes president, Drew," you say. "It'll never happen."

  "This is my period of youthful experimentation," he says, with a sincerity that would be laughable in a person who wasn't from Wisconsin. "Besides," he says, "who's going to tell them?

  "I am," you say.

  "I love you too, Rob," Drew says, laughing.

  Who said I loved you? you almost ask.

  Drew lifts Sasha's hair and twists it into a rope. He kisses the skin under her jaw. You stand up, seething. Bix and Lizzie's apartment is tiny, like a dollhouse, full of plants and the smell of plants (wet and planty), because Lizzie loves plants. The walls are covered with Bix's collection of Last Judgment posters—naked, babyish humans getting separated into good and bad, the good ones rising into green fields and golden light, the bad ones vanishing into mouths of monsters. The window is wide open, and you climb onto the fire escape. The March cold crackles your sinuses.