by Tara Ison
“Couple of years ago.”
“Sort of a . . .” she is about to say midlife crisis, but stops herself, “. . . spiritual awakening?”
“I had stuff to figure out. Think about.”
“Looking for answers?”
“Looking for questions.” He smiles, nods at a young couple pushing a stroller. “Shabbat Shalom,” he tells them, and they smile, murmur back: “Chag Sameach.”
“See, that’s nice,” he says quietly to Sarah. “All the young people living here now. They’re moving back and settling down, starting their own families. We got all these kids growing up here together, the Jewish kids, the Irish and the Hispanic and black kids, they’re all out on the playground. The old people, they sit and watch. Everyone going to shul or church on Sunday morning. A real community. It’s beautiful. It’s got this energy, you know? When people come together like that.”
“It’s so different from where I grew up. Nobody talked to anybody. Everybody just drives around in their car.”
“So, this is good for you, yeah?”
“Oh sure,” she says. “You can really feel the energy here. Like you said.
He nods. She doesn’t know what else to say. They walk in silence, as she feels the fog limpen her hair.
ITZAK LOOKS LIKE an Old World photograph of someone’s dead great-grandfather, in blacks and beiges, elaborately yarmulke’d, with sepia-tinted teeth and long gray beard wispy as a cirrus cloud. The house is decorated with Judaica. Sarah expects his wife to be shrouded and bewigged and haggard from childbearing, but Darlene is trimly dressed in a sleeveless blouse and slacks, with her own curly bobbed hair. Their teenage son Jonah is wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, and joke-pleads with his father about the promise of a new videogame; their daughter Gwen, skinny and miniskirted, her right ear triple-pierced, is a freshman at NYU, studying psychology. They invite Sarah to sit in the place of honor and she readies herself, steels herself for the endless and obligatory ritual—Why matzoh? Why bitter herbs? Why do we recline?—but there is no wine-stained Haggadah in sight, no painstaking array of bitter herbs and chopped apple-and-nuts; the family simply sings in Hebrew one quick and ebullient prayer she doesn’t know, and Itzak announces That’s it, everybody, let’s eat!
Everyone troops happily to the kitchen sink to wash their hands. Back at the table Itzak passes her a plate of matzoh and she readies herself again, for the hurrying-from-bondage-and-Pharaoh’s-troops lecture (lamb’s blood smeared on doors, gross), the ten plagues that always creeped her out as a child (pestilence, boils, locusts, darkness and tragedy and despair to be visited upon their house at any moment), but Itzak’s discussion of matzoh is Freudian: The unleavened bread, he says, symbolizes the suppression of human ego. Risen bread, puffed up with yeast and air, shows the swelling of ego, the human soul presumptuous before God. Gwen proclaims all religious ecstasy—any type of religious faith, she argues, actually—to be merely a form of psychological repression if not outright delusion, which Jonah—apparently planning on rabbinical school—takes good-natured issue with, and as the debate continues and floats over her head and beyond her, Sarah quickly drinks down the glass of kosher wine Itzak has poured for her—an exception to the rule, but she’s never tasted kosher wine, is curious, although there is no discernible difference in taste from regular wine, she thinks—then is too embarrassed to ask for more. Always plenty of wine, at home, at least. The Kiddush, the blessing of the wine, fill that cup again, by all means.
Marty ignores her during dinner, listens nodding to the family’s textbook-and-Torah-peppered deliberations, and cracks the matzoh in his teeth. Darlene finally brings out a macaroon-ringed platter of fruit for dessert but before the last of the pineapple is tugged from its husk, Marty wanders from the table. Sarah feels confused, then resentful, unsure whether she should remain with her hosts, or follow. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom.
She finds him on the living room couch, reading in Newsday about a Texas couple on death row, both about to be executed for killing their two children.
“Ah, family life,” she says brightly. He frowns a little at her and she realizes he thinks she’s being snide about his friends. “No, that family,” she adds, tapping the headline.
“Yeah, look at that. Terrible. What about you?” He puts the paper aside.
“My family? No, we haven’t killed each other yet,” she says.
He looks at her, not seeming to get the joke. “Yeah? That’s it?”
“Well, it’s just my parents. My family. They’re in San Diego.”
He nods.
“Actually,” she says, “well, I had a younger brother. But he died.”
He blinks at her. “Wow.”
“Yeah. When he was really little.”
“What happened?”
“Meningitis. He was almost four.”
“Oh, man. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. His name was Aaron. But it was a long time ago, so . . .” Butter blond hair, toddler diapers, sticky hands. Smiling parents. She clears her throat. “I hardly even remember him.” Baby clothes in blues: robin’s egg, turquoise, cerulean sky.
“That’s terrible. A terrible thing for parents.”
“I know.” She nods.
“’Cause that’s really just, it, you know? Family, kids. Why we do any of it. That’s what keeps us going.” He tilts his head toward the dining room. “Like in there. Beautiful.”
“Yeah.” I could go back and eat pineapple, she thinks. I could just go home. Her eye catches Itzak, in the dining room, setting out a bottle of brandy and several tiny glasses. It will look bad if she suddenly rushes back in there, now. “So, for something like that,” she asks, tapping the newspaper again, “where do you stand?” She sits deliberately at the other end of the sofa.
“Stand on what?”
“The death penalty. Eye for an eye? Blood atonement?”
He ponders for her, scratching at his black knit cap. “I guess you could argue either side, you know?”
“Just keep questioning, right?”
“Yeah. That’s the thing.”
“I thought you’d have a strong opinion about it. Either way. You know, vengeful God, benevolent God . . .”
He shrugs. “Whatever.”
“You say that a lot. ‘Whatever.’”
“I do?”
“It’s so dismissive.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like you’re not only wiping out what you’ve just said, you’re erasing anything the other person said, too. You’re dismissing any connection. Like, ‘why bother?’” She demonstrates, contemptuously, dismissively waving a hand. “Whatever.”
“Huh. You’re right.”
“Not that I took it personally,” she says, realizing how in saying that she is exhibiting exactly the opposite.
“No, thank you. This is good you’re telling me this. You’re very insightful.”
She suddenly feels ridiculous. She looks away from him and picks up a book tucked in the cushion gap of the sofa: The Torah Anthology. She opens it to the middle and focuses on rituals for purifying the leprosy of the soul, trying to convey that he should return to his newspaper and do the same. He continues to study her. She wonders what his head is like under the knit cap—thready hair, bald scalp, scars, freckles? She wonders how old he is. He must be around Julius’s age, she figures, if they were teenage buddies. She has a sudden, mean urge to discuss prostate cancer.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“What?”
“That.” He points to her right hand turning a page. “That.”
“Oh,” she says. “That. It’s nothing.” She sets the paper down, covers with her left hand the crescent ridge of scar embracing her right thumb joint. “Nothing. Old kitchen accident. I was cutting a bagel.” She thinks this is funny, but again he doesn’t seem to get the joke. “People don’t usually notice it,” she tells him. “It isn’t very noticeable.” She smoothes down the long sleeves of he
r blouse, crosses her arms.
“How did your painting go today?” he asks.
She shrugs. “Bad day.”
“What’s a bad day?”
“Not getting any work done. I just wandered around. Ate some strawberries. Wasted time.”
“Why is that a waste?”
“Well, this is such a big opportunity. Being here. Having all this time to myself, this whole summer to focus on my work, no job or anything. And, you know, tick tick tick. I shouldn’t just be . . . strolling around. I mean, my parents rely on me a lot, and I’m not there. I’m here, just doing the melancholy-artist-on-the-beach thing. I am a strolling, wandering cliché.” He nods at her, but it is thoughtful nodding, not affirming. “I might as well be at home,” she adds. “If I’m not going to be more . . . oh, I don’t know.”
“You worry about them. You take care of them. That’s nice.”
“I try. I do what I can. It’s not like they need nursing care, anything like that. Although my dad doesn’t like my mom driving anymore, so I’m sort of on call when she has errands or something. And he doesn’t eat like he’s supposed to, with his heart, we’re always arguing about his food. I do their bills and stuff. But they’re pretty self-sufficient. They’re doing fine. I would never have left them alone to come here, otherwise.”
“Yeah, sure.” His face is thoughtful, and she feels a rush of guilt. He must think she’s terrible, abandoning her parents this way.
“And I made sure they had phone numbers to call if they need any help. I’m sure they’ll be fine. There’s a Jewish Family Services they can call. And they have neighbors. But they won’t. I mean, they like it when I’m there to do stuff. They’re used to how I do stuff for them. As opposed to some stranger coming in to help.”
“That’s beautiful.”
“Well, I do my best. They’re my parents.” She shrugs again. “What’re you going to do, right?”
“But there’s stuff you need to do for you now.”
“I guess.”
“Your stuff’s important. You got this big exhibit happening, you’re going out in the world with all that.”
She nods, surprised he remembered.
“The problem,” he says, “is that you are way too hard on yourself.”
“No,” she says. “The problem is I am not nearly hard enough on myself.” She has said this before, to many people, and it is meant to be charmingly self-abnegating, said with a meek smile. But the fresh-cut truth of it stings unexpectedly. Her jaw suddenly feels unhinged in its joints; she realizes, mortified, that she is about to cry. She clenches her teeth.
“Why did that upset you?” he asks gently.
“I’m not upset,” she says. Itzak should call us back into the dining room, she thinks. He should be offering brandy to his guests.
“Give yourself time. Okay, yeah, so it’s cliché, I know, but it’s like an oyster.” He holds up his hands to form an oyster. “It has to start with that tiny speck of sand inside, right? It starts with practically nothing. Then layers and layers, growing a pearl. It takes time. You have to allow yourself that.”
“Did you know that oysters are hermaphroditic?” she asks.
“Huh. No, I didn’t know that.” He seems amused, at last. “I don’t eat oysters. You ever do acid?” he asks.
“I don’t like hallucinogenics.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want my brain getting away from me like that. Running loose in the store.”
“We’re more than our rational mind. That’s not all we are.”
“Ah. The ‘soul,’ right? The divine spark? Breath of God.”
“Yeah, that’s what’s great about tripping. You get there. That pure place. You strip away that layer of intellect, that conscious wall you build around yourself. It’s like peeling the scum off pudding, you get at the good stuff, where it’s all messy and warm. Where it’s real.”
“I bet you’ve done a lot of acid,” she says, smiling.
“Why do you think that?”
“You’re a musician.”
“Maybe. Acid, hash, mushrooms. I like mushrooms. Hey,” he says, waving a hand—he is about to end with whatever, but he sees her smiling, and stops. “Sure,” he says instead. “I’ve done my share.”
“Is it hard to find kosher acid?” she asks, and he finally smiles back.
“There’s lots of kinds of Jews,” he says. “Like this, here. I didn’t want you to miss Pesach.”
“Thanks,” she says. “This one was definitely different.” She glances at the crescent scar on her hand, folds her hands away in her lap. Why is this night different from any other? she thinks.
“You do the whole thing, at home? With your family?”
“Oh, sure. Well, when I was little. It’d be crazy for weeks. I mean, happy-crazy, you know. We aren’t very religious, but still. It was a big production. Everyone had their own job to do, all of us . . .” Her mother, chopping the apples. Boiling a chicken. The smell of silver polish, a hot iron steaming the afikomen cloth. Her mother promising a spoonful of honey if Sarah will try, just try, the homemade chopped liver, Show your brother what a big girl his sister is, then she is chuckling, laughing, as Sarah pretends to choke, to gag, to writhe dyingly on the floor. All right, here’s your honey, honey! Now you go set the table, Sarah Bernhardt! Her father is presiding at dinner, slicing the brisket, he is joke-threatening they’ll do the whole service Word for Hebrew word if everyone doesn’t stop laughing! while joke-sneaking bits of meat from the platter, stuffing his mouth with big gobbling noises to make everyone laugh even more. This year is special, this year she is prompting her little brother on the Four Questions, Why is this night different from any other?, it’s his turn now, he is just old enough, Aaron, the youngest child, and he is giggling, delighted with the new role, all the big responsibility. Everyone is so proud of him, clapping. She hides the afikomen matzoh for him, under the stuffed panda pillow on his bed to make it easy, there it is, He found it, give Aaron the prize, Daddy! All of them applauding, celebrating, together.
“We all did it together,” she says. “The big whole family thing, yeah.”
“That’s nice. Tradition.”
“Not really. I mean, it didn’t have time to be tradition. To become that. Because then Aaron died. You know, my little brother?” He nods solemnly. “And afterward, that first year, my parents weren’t doing very well. My dad was working a lot, all the time. Or playing golf. And my mom slept half the day, then she’d get up and have these terrible headaches and go right back to bed. And the TV was always on, like this white humming noise always in the background, they’d just sit there facing it every night for hours. I don’t think they were even watching, or listening. Just zoned out. Not talking. I’m sure it was a coping thing, you know?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I mean, now I can look back and understand. They were depressed. They were devastated. That kind of grief. It broke them. But when you’re a little kid, and your parents just go zombie, right? What do you do? So that first Passover after Aaron died, I realized it wasn’t going to happen, you know, because why bother? That’s what my dad kept saying, about everything. ‘Why even bother?’ So I got the idea I’d do it. I’d do the whole thing, surprise them, you know? Make them feel better.”
“That was sweet of you.”
“Right, like a seder’s going to make up for everything.” She laughs. “So I made the soup, which means I ‘doctored up’ some broth from a can. And I got that gefilte fish in the jar with the jelly and that bright pink horseradish and I bought one of those ready-roasted chickens in the bag and got out the silver and set the table, the whole thing. I wanted it to be perfect. My friend Emily’s mom Leah, you know, one of Nana Pearl’s daughters?”
“Yeah.”
“She took me to the store for all the stuff. And she even bought the wine for me, and I did the whole service, with all the prayers and courses. And I drew a special Passover picture of us. ‘Our Fami
ly Seder.’ To go on the fridge. I had this huge megabox of crayons, you know, a dozen shades of every color?” Burgundy, scarlet, crimson, cerise. “I really went to town on that drawing. Jewish iconography and everything.” Waxy lamb’s blood scribbled on the door. Fool the Angel of Death that way, or was that Pharaoh’s troops? Pass over this house, spare the first-born son.
“They must’ve loved all that.”
“It was pretty awful, actually.” She sees her mother, numbly drinking the wine, her father’s eyes on some muted game on the television over her head. She hears herself reading from the Haggadah, the sound of her own thin little voice in the quiet, quiet room.
Why is this night different from any other night?
Back to being her turn again, her job. The youngest child, only child.
“It was so awful. I oversalted the soup, I even burned the chicken trying to heat it up. The kitchen was full of smoke, that dark gray burn smoke, you could smell it all through dinner. You could smell it for days.”
Locusts, pestilence. Darkness visited upon the house.
“I bet they didn’t care about that,” he says, gently.
“And my mom, when she saw the drawing, she just started to cry. And then my dad’s face . . . I’d drawn the three of us. The Mommy, the Daddy, and me”—Mommy, Daddy, come see, come look—“all holding hands. Just us three. Big mistake. In hindsight.”
She remembers clearing the dishes, leaving her mother and father in their weeping and silence at the dining room table, throwing the half-eaten food in the kitchen trash. She remembers throwing her drawing in after, dumping the garish, uneaten horseradish on top of all the crayoned shine. She remembers cleaning everything up, standing at the sink and washing dishes, rinsing out the soup can, everything soapy, slippery, gripping the can hard, remembers the jagged lip of the metal lid making its quick crescent slice, the well of blood into the gray dishwater, a sudden rich cloud of red brightening it all up.
Lamb’s blood, the small sacrifice. She stands, watching, opens her mouth to cry, to call her mother or father to help, Mommy, Daddy, come see, come look, I need you, but then doesn’t. Mommy, Daddy, help me, it hurts. She just stands there, quiet, still, watches the pretty red blossom and float until her mother comes in to pour herself the last of the wine and sees, says What did you do to yourself, Sarah? Go, go get yourself a Band-Aid, go on. A ridge of scar tissue, now, crudely healed. They should have taken me for stitches, she thinks. Why didn’t they take me for stitches?
