by Sigal Samuel
Part Three
SAMARA
A tower of casseroles teetered on the edge of the sink, their aluminum foil pans glinting in the sunlight. I reached out a hand to steady them, then grabbed the counter and steadied myself.
The doorbell rang. I walked past the kitchen island, piled high with deli meats and specialty salads, fruits and chocolates, through the sea of people who had brought these trays and platters and baskets, and who were now clutching me by the wrists, murmuring traditional blessings. May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
Opening the door, I just had time to see a miserable-looking Jenny sandwiched between her parents before Judy fell upon me with a hug that choked the air from my lungs.
“Samara!” she cried, very close to my ear. “I’m so, so sorry. Your dad was such a good man. Such a good man. I just couldn’t believe it when I heard. If there’s anything you need—”
“She needs air, Mom!” Jenny said, pulling Judy off me. I shot her a grateful look.
A solemn Ira held out an offering and said, “This here is for you and Lev.”
A casserole. “Thank you,” I said. “That’s very kind.”
“The least we could do,” he said sadly. “How are you two holding up?”
At that moment, Lev appeared at my elbow. Judy now fell upon him, exclaiming over the beautiful eulogy he’d given, and her praise saved me from having to answer Ira’s question.
Behind Lev, Alex stood looking inconsolable, as if the man we’d buried an hour ago had been his father, not mine. As I raised my hand to give him a small wave, Jenny grabbed it, thinking I’d reached out for her. She led me into a corner of the living room and leaned in to kiss my mouth, then remembered where we were and pecked me on the cheek instead.
“Sorry about my mom and dad,” Jenny said, taking the casserole from my hands. “I’ll put this in the kitchen for you. Have you eaten anything? Can I warm a bit of this up for you?”
I nodded, because it was easier than forming the words I’m not hungry. She turned and wove her way through the crowd.
Someone touched me on the shoulder.
“Sama—” Mr. Glassman said. Before his mouth could fully form my name, his wife shuffled up behind him, leaning heavily on her cane and murmuring, “If it is not true that p if and only if q then either we derive p and not q or we derive not p and q, and therefore . . .” When she reached me, she took my arm—whether to stabilize herself or comfort me was unclear—and gazed at me with such profound sympathy that I worried I, and not she, might fall over.
“Mrs. Glassman, hi, you really didn’t have to come, I know you haven’t been feeling—”
The ancient woman made pshawing motions with her free hand.
Mr. Glassman said, with a tight smile, “My wife is doing very well, thank God. Already she is mostly recovered from the stroke, you see? The only thing is, she forgets sometimes to take her pill in the afternoon . . .”
Mrs. Glassman reached a trembling hand into her purse, retrieved a pill bottle, and shook a pill into her palm. “Samara, neshomeleh, you have for me some water maybe?”
“Of course, I’ll bring you a glass—” I said. Mr. Glassman reached out an arm to stop me, keep me there, tell me something—but I cut him off with “I’ll be right back” and hurried off.
In the kitchen, Jenny was placing a gigantic serving of casserole in the microwave. I filled a glass with water and was just about to dredge up the energy to tell her that I’d lost my appetite when Lev came up behind me and said, “There’s someone in front of the house.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. She looks kind of familiar, but I don’t know. Can you come see?”
I asked Jenny if she would take the glass of water to Mrs. Glassman. She headed off in search of the tiny woman while I followed Lev to the living room windows.
“See?” He pointed. “That woman in the silver car?”
I nodded.
“Who is she?”
I shrugged.
“She was at the funeral, too. Why is she just sitting there? Why doesn’t she come in?”
I said nothing. I’d recognized her instantly: my father’s lover. An hour ago, she had shown up at the graveyard, pacing the periphery of the crowd. Throughout the burial, her shadowy presence hovered at the edge of my vision, a wretched someone in a black dress who didn’t say a word to anyone, but whose silence screamed sadness, whose body radiated loss.
I didn’t have the heart to explain who she was to Lev.
Luckily, I didn’t have to. As if she sensed we were watching her, she turned her key in the ignition and drove off. My chest felt tight.
“Are you okay?” Lev asked. “Did you know her, or what?”
“I—”
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I whipped around.
“Samara,” Mr. Glassman said, “I was hoping to talk to you, if you have a minute? Just a minute? I wanted to—”
“But if p and q, then not q or r, so we can assume either not p and q or not q or r . . .”
“To return something to you and also ask if you may be able to help with—”
“I—” I said, looking around wildly.
My eyes landed on Alex. He must have seen the panic in my face, because he came toward me and said, “Sorry to interrupt, but can I borrow you for a second, Samara?” and, before anyone had a chance to object, he was leading me down the hall.
“You looked kind of trapped back there,” he whispered as we came to a stop in front of the study. “Lev and I can handle the food and everything, if you want to escape for a minute?”
I nodded at him—full of gratitude, but too breathless to say thanks—and ducked inside. The door clicked shut behind me.
I leaned against it and surveyed the room. There was the majestic desk I’d marveled at as a child, the thick shag of the carpet I’d played on while Dad studied, the endless rows of books along whose spines I’d trailed a reverent fingertip. Dust motes spun lazily through the air. Tears surged up my throat. This was the first time I’d been in here since—
On his desk, books were scattered across the blotter. The books he was reading right before he died. When he collapsed in the street, his last thoughts had probably been of them.
A wild and terrifying anger ripped through me—after so many years of leaving us alone, he’d gone and left us alone again, really alone this time, and forever—and all because he insisted on running! Even after the heart attack, even after the doctor’s warnings. Had he stopped for one second to consider what it would do to us if he died? No. He cared about running, so he ran. It was suicide—literally that’s what this was—so why wasn’t anyone calling it that? And why had I clung to a childhood grudge instead of trying to warn him, stop him, talk to him—
My hands began to shake. Eyes stinging, I paced the room. No, I thought. Don’t cry. Not with everyone out there. If you let yourself go now, how will you pull yourself together?
I reached for a tissue from the giant box on the desk, and there it was.
A manuscript lying on a pile of term papers.
Something out of Nothing, the title page said, by David Meyer. I flipped to the next page and found a drawing of the Tree of Life.
I flipped the page again and read the dedication.
For my daughter.
I froze, then read it again. And again. And again. For my daughter.
Then somebody knocked and Jenny’s voice called, “Samara?”
I hid the papers behind my back just as she opened the door.
“What?” My voice boomeranged around the room, ramming me right between the eyes.
“Alex told me you were in here,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Are you coming? I warmed up that casserole for you.”
“Casserole?”
“Yeah—the one my parents brought?”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. I’ll be right there.”
She smiled softly and turned away, leaving the door ajar. I waited a few moments, then hurried to the front closet, stuffed the sheaf of papers into my backpack, and zipped it up tight.
I heard quick, shuffling footsteps out on the stoop and took a deep breath to brace myself against a fresh onslaught of casseroles, or deli meats, or other unwanted offerings. But by the time I opened the door, whoever it was had already gone.
I stared down at the welcome mat and tears sprang to my eyes.
There, unaccompanied by a note or card, sat a perfect yellow lemon.
Over the next week, I paged through the manuscript whenever I had a moment to myself. Which wasn’t often: the day after the funeral, I had packed my bags, taken the bus from the house in Mile End, and moved back into the Plateau apartment I shared with Jenny. I couldn’t stand to be in the house a second longer, couldn’t stand Lev’s sad gaze following me up and down the halls. But now I had Jenny’s gaze trailing me around our much smaller apartment.
Worse, school had started up again. It was the first week of September and the last year of my undergraduate career. I was enrolled in five courses: Literary Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Materiality and Sociology of the Text, a Milton seminar, and (at Jenny’s urging) a 300-level art history course called The Female Body in Postmodern Visual Culture. I couldn’t bring myself to care about any of them.
The theory class was the worst. Professor Zimmerman spent exactly two minutes going over the syllabus—it ranged ambitiously from Plato to Foucault—then spent the next twenty-five minutes reading aloud from Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author. “‘In precisely this way,’” he declaimed in his reedy voice, “‘literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a “secret,” an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.’”
I glanced around the class in search of the mutual eye-rolling this bullshit deserved. Instead I found thirty heads nodding solemnly and in unison.
Finally, with five minutes to spare, Zimmerman looked up from his Norton anthology and asked what we thought. A preppy student I recognized from my philosophy elective last semester raised his hand and said in a loud, confident voice, “It makes total sense. Everyone knows that a book is just a tissue of signs and there isn’t actually any objective meaning to it. Like, the whole modern notion of the Author as this thing that decides the meaning of a text—it’s just such obvious bogus.”
“Yeah,” added a ponytailed girl to his left, “I mean it’s just an outdated concept, right? Like the whole idea of God? Because, fixed meaning, that’s basically what religion is all about.”
“Very good,” Zimmerman said. “As Barthes explains, reading a text is not about finding a single, objective, ‘theological’ meaning—the message of the Author-God—lying beneath the surface. On the contrary, it’s about carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning, which—”
But class time was over, and the rest of Zimmerman’s sermon was drowned out by the sounds of thirty chairs scraping backward on worn linoleum. Students shuffled, robot-like, to their next classes.
Outside Moyse Hall, I pressed my forehead against a cold stone pillar and squeezed my eyes shut. The harsh fluorescents had imprinted themselves on my retinas and I could see dashes of white light, like the dividing lines on a road. The voices in the lecture hall had crammed my skull with noise. An angry ache gnawed at my gut. All those nodding heads, those eager faces. How could they get so excited about such stupid ideas? What was so wrong with meaning? Why should we view a refusal to fix it as “an activity that is truly revolutionary”? If Barthes really thought a text gave him nothing, the revolutionary thing would be to make something out of it. I opened my eyes and walked as quickly as I could away from campus, toward the Plateau.
Hannah looked up as I came into the café, a huge smile spreading across her face. “Hey!” she cried from behind the counter, putting down her dish towel to pour me a cup of coffee. “How was your first week of class?”
“Terrible,” I said, taking the drink with a grateful, tired grin.
Hannah had been slipping me free coffee since she first started working at Two Moons Café back in our first semester at McGill. We’d been assigned to the same room in one of the on-campus dorms, and we’d quickly become friends, despite—or maybe because of—our opposite personalities. Born and raised in Vancouver, Hannah had never even left the West Coast until a week before school started. Her hippie parents believed in the gospel of urban farming and organic food, and the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Hannah had spent her teenage years helping them tend their plot in the local community garden, tagging along to Ashtanga yoga classes and developing an interest in Reiki. With tattoos on her arms and feathers in her blond hair, she was the most balanced human being I knew—and also the most talkative. After the funeral, she was the person I most wanted to hang out with. Her laughing eyes and simple chatter put me at ease; they made it possible for me to say nothing without being rude, and nothing was exactly what I wanted to say.
Surrounded by the free spirits and flower children who typically populated this café, we spent a few minutes talking about my new English classes and her political science ones. Then I excused myself, saying I already had a bunch of reading to do. This was technically true, even if it wasn’t exactly the type of reading I knew she was imagining. She waved me toward my favorite table by the window.
I pulled my backpack onto my lap and took out my dad’s manuscript. I never looked at it at home, knowing that if Jenny saw it, she’d dish out a look so compassionate, so concerned, it would only make me feel worse. Here, I was free from the burden of other people’s sympathy. I flipped to the first chapter and read:
ANI, the first vessel on the Tree of Life, is considered feminine. This is because, within the kabbalistic framework, the masculine bestows and the feminine receives. Given her position at the bottom of the Tree, Ani receives divine light from the vessels above her, but cannot emit her own. For this reason, she is associated with the moon, the orb that reflects the light of others.
I frowned. “The feminine receives”? The less-than-enlightened perspective on gender relations annoyed me, but I kept going.
The most evocative image associated with Ani is that of “the beautiful maiden without eyes.” Medieval sages believed that the eyes emitted rays of light, which landed upon objects, producing vision. To be without eyes, then, was to be without the ability to emit one’s own light. This applied wonderfully to Ani, always the receptacle for divine light but never the progenitor.
“Evocative”? “Wonderfully”? Since when had my dad been able to appreciate the beauty of a religious idea? This from the man who had told me a bat mitzvah was just a worn-out tradition, who had called Mr. Katz “delusional” when a mystical tree rose up on his front lawn? Now my father decided to get it? Half-angry, half-suspicious, I flipped to the next page. There, crouching at the foot of a margin, was a hand-scribbled note:
Ani as shortcut to Ayin? (Cf. “crown.”) Dangerous if I jump from first to last? Skipping steps: check Lurianic, Hasidic sources for precedent.
My gaze zeroed in on one word at the note’s center, that fulcrum from which all other words slid off into invisibility: I. The most abhorred word in academia. The forbidden personal pronoun. What if this hadn’t just been academic for him; what if it had been personal, and he was actually engaged in the famously dangerous business of climbing the Tree of Life? And not only that, but looking for shortcuts to boot!
I jammed the manuscript into my backpack, said good-bye to Hannah, and left the café. But instead of going straight home, I stopped in at the public library. At the back of the special collections area, I walked through the stacks, letting my index finger trail along the spines, which was this thing I did sometimes. The air wa
s thick and musty, and on the shelves were rows and rows of crumbling books. I didn’t pick them up, I didn’t open them, but I let their scents wash over me. Then I left the library and went home.
While I was out, Jenny had found a new job. And a new friend. The new friend had found her the new job.
“Her name’s Kyle,” Jenny said as I hung up my jacket.
“Kyle?”
“Yeah. She lives right across from The Word, and she’s in her last year of undergrad, she’s studying design? And she said that a bunch of her friends are in this art collective, they meet on weekends and stuff, and they’re looking for a model. You know, like to sit for them?”
“I know what a model is.”
“Yeah. So, what do you think? They’re students, so they don’t have a lot of cash, but Kyle said she could pay me like—”
“Wait, she’s going to be there?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I thought she was studying design.”
“Well, yeah, but she likes to paint on the side.”
My phone beeped. I took it out of my pocket and found a text from Lev. I know we weren’t that close, but I still miss him, you know?
“So what do you think?” Jenny said.
I switched off my phone. “About what?”
“The job.”
“Well, it beats bagging groceries.”
“That’s what Kyle said!”
“What?”
“That it beats bagging groceries! That’s what she does—that’s where I met her—at the grocery store.” Jenny looked triumphant, delighted, as she added, “And maybe with the extra money we can fix the place up a bit.”
I flopped onto the couch. It was true that our small but beautiful apartment was still barely furnished, even though we’d moved in together two years ago. Because she’d just graduated from her arts certificate program and I was still a student, we didn’t own much of anything; what we had was a kitchen table, a lamp, a bed, a clock radio, mismatched dishes, two chairs, books, an easel, and about seven thousand tubes of paint. The entire floor of the apartment was made up of black and white square tiles. As a result, I sometimes felt like we were living inside a chess game, one in which very few pieces remained.
