You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  After David goes back to work, Howard and I will walk leisurely north hand in hand on Sixth Avenue. I will tilt my head at the images in a Neil Folberg exhibit in the International Center of Photography.

  Howard reads David’s articles and looks agonized. Howard says to David: Israel is a spectacular disaster. They mourn this together. We have met, Howard and I, a few of the founders who arrived to build a country of fraternity. We watch them survey the devastation of their dreams, poisoned by religion, riven by divisions among its people. And its failure is so pedestrian. Israel is now what it was never meant to be, a country like all the others, but it is worse because it is crippled by the weight of its failure, which hangs over it, invisible but deadly, something nations not crafted from dreams will never know.

  That is what Howard thinks.

  I think something very different. Even if I do not say it because, before, it never needed to be said.

  What I think, what I have always thought, is this: The dream itself is poison. The country has a poisoned soul, an ideology of xenophobia that has traveled forward five thousand years like an unkillable ancient virus. A group of Middle Eastern nomadic tribes-men created a self-made pass through the terror and uncertainty of life by thinking up a god of segregation. Self and Non-Self. A cultural immunological system of breathtaking strength. A higher moral standard that axiomatically means for everyone outside the tribe a moral standard that is lower.

  That is what I think.

  The Ashkenazic elites abhor the Orthodox, loathe the Extreme Right, wince at the pervasiveness and politics of the military, denigrate the Sephardim, belittle the immigrants, and see themselves as a tiny bastion of civilization pressed on all sides by the fetid breath of medieval, irrational, superstitious hordes who reek of body odor, who know nothing of the Enlightened mind, who are clannish and inbred and practice a nepotistic theocratic totalitarianism. I agree. But. Howard once overheard Shimon Peres, the Ashkenaz, the educated, the secular, bitterly complaining that the Orthodox hate the Arabs, who surround them. And they hate that the Arabs surround them. But by God, said Peres, at least they—he meant the Orthodox—were surrounded by people exactly like themselves.

  What, said Peres, what about us?

  I remember Howard sympathizing with Peres. What about us, he and his friends lamented to each other, the nonfanatic Jews?

  But I had been watching them for years, these friends of Howard’s, and I had noticed that, like characters that Nancy Franklin observed in an Arthur Miller play, they had no ability to see themselves. It hardly took much effort, my noticing it. For example, it would go, year after year, basically like this.

  It was afternoon. We had dovetailed with David, there reporting, and together were walking along a path at Hebrew University. David and Howard were hunched over, listening intently to Danny Ruben-stein, the liberal, the intellectual, the writer on Arab-Israeli affairs. Danny inhabits the ever-thinning strip of coastal Israel that is the secular state, giving way gradually to the Middle Eastern, Oriental state, the theocracy. He shook his head. “For people like me and my friends, it’s almost the end of the world. This new wave of immigrants—people holding values utterly not our own. We were brought up to work, and the new people, especially the ultra-Orthodox, don’t give a shit about work. They’re like the goddamn Moral Majority.”

  He was fiercely angry. He was already mourning the future. Next to him, Avishai Margalit, who taught philosophy, murmured, “It turns out that we, the secular community, are the dinosaurs: It’s the end of a species.”

  Danny insisted to Howard, “The ultra-Orthodox don’t respect us. They don’t serve in the army, they don’t care that we die.” He choked on the insult. “They treat us with such contempt, like—” He was looking for a sufficiently disturbing image. It was getting late. The sun was a burning sheet dying in the sky. Some students walked past. Danny, the secular, the enlightened, found his sufficiently disturbing image. “They treat us as if we were goyim,” he said. He was staring darkly at an invisible point in the distance, pondering this horror.

  The students clanged a door behind us. Involuntarily I glanced right for an instant. David, apparently, had noticed nothing at all. I thought: OK, now I just have to move my eyes slightly left toward Howard. He will indicate to me that he has caught this, that he hears what it means. I moved my eyes. Howard was staring into the hot, dry air, contemplating the fact that Jews could treat other Jews as if they were goyim. (The word, spoken with the usual disgust.) After a moment I moved my eyes back to nothing.

  Avishai had understood. But what could he do?

  DRESSED FOR WORK, HOWARD WALKS down the hall. He passes Sam’s door without stopping. He makes no sound, no whistling today. I hear the kitchen door open and his car keys fading outside.

  Evening, he is still gone. He doesn’t call. He arrives home at 11:28 P.M. and drops the keys quietly on the table in the hallway where he also leaves books and files for the office.

  In the morning, when he has left and the keys are gone again, there is a flier that wasn’t there the previous evening. He hasn’t hidden it. He hasn’t not hidden it. The address is a temple in Los Angeles. I see “Ba’al Teshuva” and after that the translation, “Returned to Faithfulness.” Next to the flier there is an envelope with an Israeli stamp addressed to Howard. The letter that was inside it is laid neatly open and squared with the papers. I don’t know the handwriting.

  I pick it up. It is a letter from Avital Sharansky. “Dear Howard,” she writes, and then there is a sentence or two about his health, and her health, and how was his son, Sam? And a reference to David and the movie project. And then, “I hope that you—and all the American Jews—will save yourselves and come to Israel. There is no life there. This is just who I am, but I just feel that way, in the sense of all the assimilation. You are not living fully. I have had the experience of not being in Israel, Howard, and I know that by your not being here you lose something of yourself. It’s not real life, it’s just spending time. It might be luxurious, it might even be interesting, but you must understand that real life is when you have your own place and you are with your own people and you have your own way of life and are not worried that your children will become something else.”

  Then a final paragraph that reads, in entirety: “Please, Howard, I don’t want to offend you. It’s just one Israeli housewife’s opinion.”

  Howard, of course, is worried about exactly this. About the son who has already become something else. Who, without Howard’s having perhaps given it quite the thought he should have two decades ago (although they warned him), was born something else. He hadn’t listened to them then. He is listening now.

  THIS I HEAR ABOUT AFTER the fact.

  They are in one of the studio’s marketing offices. The immensely proud DP is unveiling the movie’s poster; with a small handheld camera he’d surprised the star in her underwear between takes, and the studio has, contrary to expectations, built the entire marketing campaign on that shot.

  “Ta da!” says the associate producer.

  “Whoa,” says a development executive as someone whistles. “What’s your MPA?”

  “NC–17,” says the marketer loudly.

  The associate producer doesn’t appreciate the joke. “It’s an R movie,” she assures the exec. “We got an R.”

  Howard mutters something.

  “What, Howie?” asks the exec, turning.

  “Kids see this thing,” says Howard of the poster. “Children and women. Respectable women see this thing,” he says.

  Everyone waits for the punch line. They lean forward infinitesimally.

  “How about some fucking modesty,” Howard says, glaring at the photo. “She’s completely uncovered.” He averts his eyes.

  The development exec is still waiting for the punch line. The DP and the associate producer glance at each other.

  I WALK INTO THE KITCHEN and retrieve an orange for breakfast. Saturday morning. I am going to play tennis with a fr
iend. I am holding yet another phone message from Mark Siegal. Jus tin has written a single word: “When?!” When indeed. I still don’t feel comfortable jumping into this until I get Howard’s take on the screenplay. I am wondering for the nth time if this is just silly when, from my position in the kitchen, I see Denise and José standing outside. They are having some sort of hushed discussion. When they spot me, they instantly suspend it. José squints at the garden as if surveying something. Denise folds her arms and scowls distractedly. It’s then that I hear Consuela crying in the driveway.

  I call to cancel the tennis and change my clothes.

  In the car, I get the full story. José and Sam sit in back. We take the Hollywood Freeway to the Santa Ana Freeway, going to Pico Rivera. Consuela is sitting next to me, directing and explaining. José interrupts her every so often to clarify or stress a point she might be softening. Her younger sister came up from Guadalajara five months ago (this I knew) with her five children (this I didn’t). She came with a man who is not her husband but who lives with her and who may or may not have fathered the fifth child. They found a bungalow in Pico Rivera, which is near Downey, which is where Consuela lives. The man found work and was paying the bills. But Consuela rarely saw Susannah in Pico. Susannah always came to her house (there was a relatively convenient bus). Everything was fine.

  Consuela got the address from a friend, secretly—it was to be a surprise—and bought a present for Pepina, since it was her eighth birthday. She discovered a house that was filthy, the children were filthy, they were unfed, and all of this because her sister was sick. The man, it turned out, was disappearing for weeks at a time—no, he had not found work, no, he was paying no bills, there was back rent since May. Since April, said José from the backseat. Consuela corrected herself.

  She is scanning the row of sagging houses, trying to locate Susannah’s. She says apologetically, “I’ve never come from this direction.”

  The man wasn’t violent, exactly. (Consuela and José debate some thing, but I am missing the vocabulary or else it is slang. Consuela puts her face in her hands.) “There was,” says José directly to me, “a question of sexual behavior with the children.”

  I see.

  Consuela’s voice is ragged from crying. Direct me, I say gently. She points, wordless. We pull up outside a dilapidated, old Los Angeles wood bungalow.

  Inside it is dark and it stinks. The children, from five to thirteen, stare at us. Consuela’s sister lies on the ratty sofa. I ask if the electricity and water work. They do. Right. Here we go.

  The car keys and three hundred dollars to Sam for cleaning products, trash bags, lightbulbs, toilet paper, rags from the tienda. José will go with him. Sam, keep the doors locked, park in front, you stay in the car and wait. The two littlest girls’ dresses are not only grimy, they look bloodstained. I take each child into a bedroom, which is horrendous, and with Consuela’s help get their clothes off and examine their skin and genitals carefully. One has scabies; two others, crabs.

  I wash my hands (I finally find soap), then get my phone out of my purse and call Dr. Zimmer. “Doctor’s office.” It’s Anne Rosenbaum, I need to speak to David immediately, please. (David, who is almost seventy, was Sam’s pediatrician.) While I’m holding, I start telling José and Sam what we need to get rid of: the sofa (lice infested), the giant, filthy unidentifiable wooden thing sitting in the main room, three of the four chairs (the fourth will do), and—David comes on sharply: “Anne, where are you?” I explain what I need. I can hear him uncapping a pen. “It’s irregular.”

  I say nothing. Which he expects.

  “Where do you want me to call in the prescription?”

  I ask Susannah for the nearest drugstore. She remains silent. Consuela blows up at her, most of which I again miss. We fix on a drugstore, and I give the address to David. Sam is watching me very closely. I catch his eye. He’s wearing an expression I’ve never seen. I describe Susannah’s symptoms on the phone. David stops me, asks about her diet. I ask Susannah. When she prevaricates, I have Consuela leave the room and then question her rather sharply, translating her responses into the phone. “Oh hell,” he sighs, “it’s probably 90 percent malnutrition.” He adds a dietary supplement for Susannah and we hang up. Consuela leaves with Sam. Sam, you have your credit card?

  “Yeah,” he says. “Tienes la lista?” he asks Consuela. She nods, gripping it. “Vamanos,” he says.

  By the time they come back, José, with the children’s help, has moved the sofa and chairs out and is dismembering the wooden thing with a crowbar. Consuela and Sam have stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken. The children fall upon the food like rats. We stand there, watching. This is the most disturbing sight so far. My lips are pursed. I tap my manicured fingernails on the tabletop.

  I think about the next gubernatorial race. I mentally run through some things to talk to Howard about.

  When they are sated—Susannah has been made to eat something and is feeling better—I put on latex gloves, hand pairs to Consuela, José, and Sam, and we strip the children, the sheets, the bedding, and the towels. We put what is in decent shape in plastic bags and the rest in the trash. We put all the kids into the shower at once. The oldest, a boy, will not cooperate. Sam gets down on one knee, talks to him face-to-face. I hear a man’s quiet tone of voice. Eventually the boy obeys. While I use the Kwell on them—the gloves catch their skin, but they are brave about it, and I tell them so—José drives the bedding to a Laundromat. Very hot water, lots of detergent, and a strong shot of bleach. When I go into the living room, Susannah is up and has started scrubbing the floors. There is soap everywhere. She looks visibly better. The house smells of lemon and Clorox. Consuela opens plastic packages of new sheets, towels, underwear, T-shirts and cotton shorts and plastic flip-flops. Later she will take them to Payless for shoes. José is sweeping. I start ripping down the dark, dingy curtains. Home Depot has cheap, white paper shades that will look nice.

  At four o’clock I check my watch. I write a check for the back rent and the coming month and hand it to Susannah. (Usted tiene un conto banquario? I ask, and she nods.) I give Consuela some more money and leave her there with instructions that she spend tomorrow here. She will look into the school situation. José is staying the night as well. Next Saturday he will bring the boy to our house, where Sam has told him there is a basketball net over the driveway. As we drive off, the children wave, including the boy. Sam waves back.

  My son drives, putting us on the 10. I feel almost narcotized by the effects of the day. Sam is staring a bit glassily. Stunned.

  Sam, I say. Listen: Italian words that do not exist in English: scaramanzia, allappare (la bocca), freddoloso. (I just love that one.) He thinks about them. I can see him focus. Almost imperceptibly, Sam smiles.

  I am furious with Consuela. I never tell her, of course; it is simply part of catharsis: why she didn’t tell me till now, why she felt she had to keep it secret, the overall tragic state of the human condition, et cetera. When she arrives on Tuesday morning, she comes and finds me in the bedroom and we sit on the bed and cry together.

  Howard appears at my elbow. I startle, then scrunch over a bit on the lounge. I put my lemonade down in the pebbles beside the tall grass, and after an instant of some sort of thought, he sits down next to me. “He was very impressed,” he says. I find his tone ambiguous.

  Did you talk to him?

  He doesn’t say anything for a moment. “I overheard him,” he says. “On the phone.”

  Oh.

  “He said you were, and I quote, ‘totally defiant.’”

  Strange word.

  It is warm in the afternoon sun.

  He gives a brief laugh. “This was authentic teenage ‘Whoa, didn’t know she had it in her.’”

  Then he didn’t know me, I say.

  “He does now,” says Howard. He thinks of something. “When her kid comes over to play basketball with Sam, Justin and I could go two-on-two.”

  Better not overwhelm him t
he first time, I say.

  Howard hadn’t thought about that.

  He stands up to go. I say to him, You should have seen the way Sam dealt with things. He was wonderfully mature. Really fatherlike to those kids. You know, I didn’t know him, either.

  I say, maybe a bit too eagerly, Howard, why don’t you talk about it with him?

  For the past four weeks, Howard has been remarkably distant.

  I’ve spoken loudly, so he can hear. He’s walking toward the house. “Sure,” he says, vaguely, back over his shoulder.

  Howard is gone that night. I don’t know where. When he comes back the clock reads 11:27 P.M.

  I GET UP JUST BEFORE seven, brush my teeth and shower, then go to my office and sit down at the computer.

  Justin has taught me how to sign in to annerosenbaum.com and how to navigate. (Never, I had said to him, our chairs scrunched together before the screen while he walked me through it as one would a child, Never in a million years. “Your password goes here,” he’d continued patiently.)

  I had created a Thomas Hardy thread, and Albert Brooks has become quite competitive over—“So predictable,” Howard said to Jake Bloom—Jude the Obscure. Albert is adamant that Hardy is saying religion just comes from interpreting misfortune as divine intervention, but Grant Heslov is insisting that anyone with a brain could see the novel is primarily condemning social determinism and class structure.

  I read over Albert’s post. There are already eight replies on the Hardy thread. Some nice work. I post some replies of my own. As I’m working on it, I forget the other things going on. I love this.