One difficult, dying old man with no one for company had turned two previous non-Christian aides off with his endless, fervent proselytizing, but Aunt Tawnie stayed and listened and questioned. As he weakened, he talked more about his own life. His father was unknown; his mother hadn’t cared for him. He had no siblings, he had had two divorces and his son was estranged. He was afraid of the afterlife being another lonely world with no familiar faces, and he wanted Aunt Tawnie to find Jesus so that he might see her there. It was not truly about Jews and atheists going to hell, but a lifetime of loneliness speaking. His last words were Jesus loves you to Aunt Tawnie, and she said thank you. Hospice was a grace, a way for her to live with one eye ever trained for the light.
After the last bell rang to finish off school for the year, Elania left Cloudy Valley High for the community center in Blue Hill. She was thinking of darkness while holding the box of religious decorations in her lap. The Hanukkah table she set up at the winter party was small for a reason. It made a striking impression on some partygoers year after year, the wealth of the Christmas area compared to the relatively sparse one for Hanukkah. A few were made uncomfortable by it, like Hanukkah was being shirked. But Elania did it deliberately: a small table covered with a white tablecloth, holding a menorah at the center and surrounded with gelt and dreidels, basic information about what the holiday meant pinned down with a jar of oil. This wasn’t a competition with Christmas, or the Jewish version of it, and the way the holidays were strung side-by-side like they were different flavors of icing on the same kind of cupcake was wrong.
It was a small potatoes holiday, and in their family, it wasn’t a gift-grab. They didn’t do a present for each of the eight nights, only a small one on the first and a larger one on the last, with a variety of family activities on the nights in between. Elania had gotten a gift certificate to the mall from her parents and sticky pictures from her brothers as her small gifts, a laptop for her big one. That stunned her. Her parents, grandparents, and Aunt Tawnie had all gone in for it, a fifteen-inch spanking new laptop and a printer to boot. Dad wrote a card like he did every year, this one about how proud she made him with her search for scholarships, grabbing the bull by the horns and charging forward into a difficult task. That was the response of a mature, driven young woman, and he was proud to say that she was his daughter.
It was practically a second part-time job for Elania, who had received $750 for two writing contests. Five hundred dollars from the Fraber Corporation for her essay on Welcome Mat, which took third place, and first place from the feminist organization Wave for her essay on the new intersection of honor killings, slut shaming, and Sombra C. That was becoming a problem in some religious communities, people using Sombra C diagnoses as proof that their unmarried daughters had had sex, and murdering them to save face. Wave was smaller than Fraber and so was the prize, only $250, but Elania was thrilled. She had essays and applications and teacher recommendations out at a dozen places. Pewter was looking more and more manageable, if she got in, if she still deserved to go.
Catholics had it easy, from what little she knew of their faith. You did something wrong and went to confession, the priest gave you prayers to recite for penance and absolved you of sin. It was magic, like Santa was magic, like the Christian Jesus was magic instead of a normal, mortal man with some beautiful ideas about love and service. Magic was easier than the thickets of ethics and guilt, the slow process of parsing how something had gone wrong, what part in it you played, and how to make amends.
Zaley was unusually talkative while everyone ate pizza and decorated for hours, and Elania unusually quiet. Lights were strung from hooks, and a garland twined around the rail that ran along the big windows. Outside, candy cane path lights were pushed into the turf. Quinn fiddled with her personal music equipment, sending sporadic bursts of tunes through the room. The chairs were divvied up around the tables. Someone discovered that the double doors to the rest of the building were unlocked and called out about it. Zaley made him come back and pull the curtain over the doors. They had only rented this room with its attached restrooms, and the rules were strict that any messing around lost them the privilege of renting here. The caretaker must have overlooked them while locking up the rest of the building.
Micah hung Santa lanterns, plastic snowflakes, and a disco ball while balanced precariously on the rung of the ladder one wasn’t supposed to stand upon. It was growing dark and the path lights made a sweet, welcoming touch to the party. The weather was so windy that two were blown over, and Zaley ran outside to set them deeper in the soil. Usually Elania was more involved in this, but she had to think.
She had made a mess in fifth period government. Her voice was one of many clamoring that no one wanted to see the Broadway classic Zombified the Musical, and a stack of referrals punched into the air in reply. God forgive her, she chose Pewter over her integrity. She could not get a referral now, weeks from the due date of her application! They were taking a car trip to the school in January for a prospective student tour, Elania and Mom together while Dad cared for the boys at home. So she quieted while the movie played, her stomach churning as she looked at her gripped hands. Micah and Zaley had gotten stuck with zombie cartoons in second period, the former untroubled by them and the latter reading and ignoring the screen.
Through the afternoon, Elania had stared at the Pewter sticker on her binder. It was fine. It did not matter. It was just a dumb movie in a bad class with a teacher she detested, and she should put it aside and think of other things. But it did matter, and she did this right after Hanukkah of all times. Her father only nights ago sat on the recliner in a crowd of boys, reading a children’s book once belonging to her about the bravery of the Jews who would not renounce their faith to worship Greek gods. She had loved that story as a little girl. How easy it would have been to fake it for safety, keep what was real in their hearts and go through the motions with their bodies, but they said no. They rejected this injustice, demanded their differences be respected, and they’d go to the furthest lengths to fight for that right. Long ago, Elania sat on her father’s lap and heard the same story of the Maccabees. Apparently, she hadn’t taken it to heart.
Confession, prayers, forgiveness. It was so simple.
Ironic that she had done this in the hopes of securing a position at a school in which all of its students would have walked out of Mr. Dayze’s room in indignation at his gross insensitivity. A zombie movie in the storm of Sombra C? He could not have done anything more offensive had he tried. Pewter students would have marched en masse to their dean and put a stop to it. But Elania put herself before her community, and this was not a principle of Pewter’s, or of Judaism. She chose safety and lost respect for herself.
Where was the light in this darkness?
Better to have had the referral on her record, to explain it on her application and pray for the best. She had ached to think the explanation wouldn’t be enough. To lose those archways, the handsome fellows talking on a marble bench with books between them, the promise of this place receding to nothing . . . and all over a fool named Mr. Dayze. Yet why would she want to go to a school that dismissed her for such a reason?
“Is everything okay with you?” Zaley said as the doors opened.
“I’m okay,” Elania said with a forced smile. She was better than what she had done today.
“You’re not,” said Zaley. Her mood was bright for the start of a vacation, when usually at the advent of any holiday she looked to Elania like she was in the throes of a subtle depression. Yet now she was aglow with joy. She had curled her hair and put in twinkling red bulbs for earrings, queerly and beautifully vivacious. Hugging Elania, she leaned back and gripped her shoulders. “Don’t be sad! Don’t you know what a brilliant life you’re going to have? I bet you’ll have a world-famous movie column or something, and everyone will know your name.”
“You’re happy tonight,” Elania commented in bewilderment, since Zaley was rarely so open and effusive.<
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“Because everything is so beautiful,” Zaley said simply, and turned away to greet the first arrivals to the party.
Elania’s phone rang. It was Mom’s number with Cormac on the other end, wanting to know if Santa Claus was coming to her party. Christmas envy had passed Elania by at his age, and the other boys weren’t affected that much. Cormac was, asking over and over why they didn’t have a tree, why Santa skipped their house, why he had to be Jewish when his friends weren’t. When Elania explained that Santa Claus wasn’t coming to her party, he said in disappointment, “But you’ve been so good, Lani! Even if Santa isn’t real, he should still come.”
She smiled at his mixed-up way of looking at the world and slipped under the curtain. Pushing at the unlocked doors, she let herself out into the hallway. It was too hard to hear him over the chatter of voices and the music. They weren’t supposed to be in here, but it would only take a minute and she wouldn’t wander. Closed doors stretched down the dim hallway to more double doors at the far end. Those were chained shut and padlocked. As the noise muted, Elania said, “Which part of Christmas sounds so fun to you, Cormac?”
“The music.”
“We had a music night for Hanukkah, remember?” It had also been the night the boys shoved a dreidel down the kitchen sink and turned on the garbage disposal. Then they loaded their toy trebuchet with gelt and pelted Mom with it. She cut music night short and sent them to bed early.
Wistfully, Cormac said, “And the trees with all the different kinds of ornaments. They’re pretty.”
“Yes, they are.”
“And the lights on the houses are cool! Percy says Jews can’t like them. We aren’t allowed.”
“It’s okay to like the lights. I like them, too.”
“Dad says he’ll drive me around to see them tomorrow night. You want to see them with us? You can come even though it’s only Dad-Cormac night.”
“I’d love to come. Cormac, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you in the morning, okay? I won’t get back until after you’re in bed.”
“And maybe we’ll stop and get ice cream?” Cormac asked hopefully.
“Maybe. Hey, Cormac? If you did something wrong, what would you do?”
“I would say SORRY!” her little brother yelled in her ear, and hung up. She returned to the party and made sure the curtain was over the doors.
In the short time she’d been gone, people had flooded into the party with trays of brownies and other treats, liters of soda, gifts for the white elephant exchange. Stationed at the doors to check school IDs with one of the parent volunteers, Zaley deftly sent the newcomers with food to one table, beverages to another, and presents to the tree. Elania wondered if she was drinking. Some people were surreptitiously tipping tiny bottles into their cups of punch as they sat for snacks or danced a little by the speakers.
The Sombra C students had claimed a table, a pile of cookies at the center, and a fourth person was sitting with them and eating from the same plate. To Elania, that was a flicker of light in the darkness consuming the world this year, this table eliminating the divide between the infected and uninfected.
She chatted and laughed and welcomed a boy to gelt, she shook her head ruefully when Hanna asked how she could stand seeing Austin dance with other girls. This bearding had to stop. They didn’t act well enough to pull it off. Their monthly movie and dinner date was fun and Austin’s perspective always added to her reviews since he noticed things that she did not. But the lying was tiresome. She knew why he needed the beard, and it had been easy to get talked into doing it. You could tell he was gay somehow, if you were looking for it. It was in the curve of his wrists, his hips, the slightest, most subtle difference between him and a straight guy. It was more prominent when he danced. No one thought much of it since he had a girlfriend, they thought even less of it since he had a girlfriend and played around on the side (or right in his girlfriend’s face, telling everyone that he had serious balls), so the vague femininity in his dance style was just attributed to Austin playing gay and it made them laugh. Other gay guys on campus didn’t have those tells in their body language, yet Austin did. He could only be himself by lying. Let him do it with Micah, even if his mom ribbed him for coming home with a white girl. They only had a semester left until graduation anyway and he’d be off to college.
The count was two hundred guests, a better showing than last year. The room was bright with noise and excitement. Little of it reached Elania. How did one make amends when one didn’t even know who had been wronged? Who was owed the sorry? (Or the earsplitting SORRY, as Cormac would have delivered it.) No one with Sombra C was in the classroom to be offended; no one had family with Sombra C that Elania knew about. But that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t okay to use the word kike so long as no Jews were in the room to hear. Mr. Dayze did something offensive on a human level, and she had been complicit. That was the wrong. If she took no stand there, then when did she? Just when it was comfortable for her?
The gift exchange kicked off with Zaley and Austin delivering a sweet speech about President Wu and his wife, and then the first present. That was for DeAngelo, who received a ghastly cat clock. A manic smile beamed on the feline’s face, and the hands telling time were tabby tails. Everybody clapped, those that weren’t dancing or scarfing down cookies at the tables. More ribbons were untied and wrapping paper torn, revelations held up in edible underwear, creepy jacket hooks shaped like crooked fingers, an ancient umbrella stroller, a gift bag full of random items from Rubenz, and a joke book about menopause. Elania wanted to laugh and shout with the rest, yet couldn’t bring herself to join in.
Taking a chair in the corner, she tapped on her phone to type notes. Her attention wasn’t going to be on the party until she resolved this issue in some way. It was her community at Cloudy Valley High wronged by her actions, and it was to them she had to apologize. A letter to the editor of the paper, not to shame herself but to acknowledge that she made a mistake. Mr. Dayze would stay unnamed. The purpose of the letter wasn’t to call him out, and anyone who was curious could find out easily.
The party went on around her, the gift exchange wrapped up, and something struck her ankle as she finished the last note to be fleshed out later. Calm filled her to have this decided and underway. Now she could relax. She looked over to see the stroller, which Austin rammed into her ankle again. A doll was plopped in the seat, fat plastic legs jutting out stiffly from a training toilet. Her shirt was wrinkled up, obscuring the lettering on it.
“Excuse me!” Micah roared at Austin’s side. “Can’t you see we’re trying to get through?”
“Some people are so rude!” Austin gasped.
“Where’s your shirt?” Elania asked, as his chest was bare. She should not have asked, as the doll was scooped from the stroller and pressed to Austin’s nipple to feed. The toilet was still attached to her bare bottom. Austin and Micah giggled, faint alcohol fumes on their breath. His shirt was partially tucked down the back of his jeans, the rest of it protruding over the seat of his pants and flapping when he turned.
“Diapers aren’t eco-friendly, so we had a toilet surgically attached to our daughter,” Micah said with utmost haughtiness as the doll was resettled into the stroller.
“It was my white elephant gift,” Austin said.
“Just darling. And her name is?” Elania asked.
“It says Chloe Goes Pee-Pee on her shirt,” Austin said. “It’s so convenient having the toilet always there. We’ve attached our son Timmy Takes a Tinkle to a urinal.” And away they went to ram into other ankles on the dance floor, scolding people for swearing and dirty dancing when a child was present.
Elania visited the snack table. With a wave, Shelly called for her to sit at the table with the Sombra Cs, and Elania thought it might be rude to refuse. Especially when their fourth person had gone off, leaving them alone. She joined them with her snowflake cookies and gestured in offering. The girls were full and Trevor shook his head, since Zyllevir arrested h
is infection but made him nauseous for days after each fresh pill.
“It’s a proven weight loss method,” he said over his water, which was all that his stomach would tolerate. Shelly had loosened her scarf in the warm room and Trevor taken off his entirely. Janie’s stamp couldn’t be seen through her red hair, left loose to her waist. Outside it was fully dark, and sweeps of cold air came in every time the doors opened. Corbin arrived on one of these gusts, dressed far too finely in a suit while everyone else was in jeans.
He came to the table when they shouted his name. Over the thumps of a rock song, Elania said, “How was South Haven?”
“Oh my God!” he yelled, in an unwitting imitation of Sally. “They’re standing around talking about what losers we are here, and we have more people at this party than they have at that one. The volunteers are patrolling the dance floor with flashlights to shine on people grinding, and Nathaniel lit up a cigarette right there at a table and got booted. Idiot.”
Shelly laughed. “Tamara is totally blaming Welcome Mat for ticket sales being down this year at South Haven, I heard her bitching about it in math. But it’s fifty bucks for the ticket and a bunch more for the outfit, half of them rent limos and we don’t all have that, sorry.”
“Yeah,” Janie agreed. “The three hundred I’d fork over to afford it is stuck too high in my ass to reach.”
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 25
