A Town of Empty Rooms

by Karen E. Bender

  IT WAS A PURE, GLORIOUS day in mid-October, and Serena watched Zeb and Rachel toss rocks toward the pine tree. Each rock flew through the air and chipped off a small piece of bark. They had the cavalier, crooked aim of small children. The rocks were small. They flew toward the tree. One. Two.

  A rock flew over to Forrest’s side of the fence.

  The three of them stood and watched the rock slowly arc through the air.

  “Oh, no,” Rachel said with an utter calm, as though she had predicted this all along.

  The rock flew through the blue sky and fell into Forrest’s bed of Gerbera daisies.

  Serena hoped, for a moment, that he had not seen anything, but that was absurd. That was his job, to notice and address injury done to him. He was hammering away at his shed but had taken note of everything — the way the child threw the rock, the speed with which it tumbled through the air, the spot where it landed. She thought she heard him cough, and then she thought she saw him nod at the dogs.

  Did he nod at the dogs? Or did he just look at them? What did they sense from him, so that they felt suddenly unrestrained? In a single, floating leap, they were over the fence.

  SERENA COULD SMELL THE DOGS. They smelled dark and wet, and one of them bounded toward Zeb. She heard a high-pitched shriek from Zeb; he was trying to run, a spastic crooked run, and the dog ran around him, its tail whipping against his arm, and then ran off. She lunged toward Zeb, grabbed him by the hand, and hoisted Rachel under her armpit, like a football, and ran to the house. The dogs were barking, as though they were shouting, the sound so loud she could feel it vibrate in her throat, and she felt wetness, a dog’s tongue, on the backs of her legs. “Stop,” she called to them, but they did not. She heard the guttural growling in their throats, and Forrest did not call them. She and the children were at the door. She grabbed the knob, her hand shaking, pushed the children inside, and shut the door. Forrest stood there, watching.

  “Get your dogs!” she screamed.

  He whistled. The dogs turned and leapt back onto his side of the yard.

  She closed the door to the house, the children inside, and ran down to the fence. “What the hell was that?” she said.

  “They were playing.”

  “They were not.”

  “How’s Zeb going to get his animal care badge if you don’t understand dogs?” He had his arm around a dog and was scratching its furry neck. He had a talent for making himself resemble a Hallmark portrait. “Man’s best friend. Dogs play.”

  “No. No.” She was shaking. “Tell the truth, Forrest. You wanted them to scare us.”

  The dogs’ tails bounced in the air; suddenly, they were transformed back into pets. She stepped away from the fence. He was petting his dog. It whimpered and rubbed against him.

  “Dogs play,” he said, and went into his house.

  SHE RETURNED, TREMBLING, TO HER house. The children’s faces were damp with fear and a kind of outraged excitement. “They would have chewed off our legs first,” said Zeb. “After they ate them, they would eat our arms.”

  “They would eat our heads,” said his sister.

  They looked at her to check the validity of these statements; Serena took a breath. She cleared her throat a few times, pretending to cough, as she was afraid to hear how she would sound, and when she spoke, it was a cool voice, utterly false. “Enough,” said Serena. “We’re fine. Let’s go — get dinner. Let ’s get out.”

  She drove down the streets until the children shrieked with joy at the radiant yellow sign for Golden Corral’s all-you-can-eat buffet. The expanse of food, the pretense of order, was calming. Everyone here was just interested in shoveling as much fried okra or pot roast or corn bread as possible onto a plate. She was grateful for it, the feeling of distraction and abundance. Mostly, the children made repeated visits to the dessert buffet. The desserts were set out on glass shelves, lit up: brownies with icing dark and artificial as an oil slick, whipped cream rising in buoyant waves off the banana pudding.

  “I want to come here for my birthday,” said Rachel, “and I want them to call my name.”

  She looked at them, scooping up whipped cream with their spoons, their faces dazed with the pleasure of sugar. She remembered the moment she and Dan had brought Zeb into their home, and then Rachel, the understanding that they were to create the world for them, and here they had ended up in this strange town living beside this awful man. They had ended up here because of her sorrow, her impulses, and she did not know how to begin to solve this. They kept eating. The children finished one round of desserts, had another, and returned to discussing the chase, trying to figure out what had happened, until they were all suddenly exhausted.

  Later, when she was putting them to bed, Zeb threw his thin arms around her neck. “I want to move,” he said.

  DAN WALKED UP TO THE house at eight, his jacket clinging to him, his shirt damp; he had been in two meetings in a row and had not had a chance to eat. He was hungry. The house was silent, the lights off, as though no one was inside it. When he opened the door, the room was silent; the children were already asleep. Serena was sitting at the kitchen table, the light gray in the room.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, taking his jacket off and hanging it on a chair.

  She looked at him; her face was animated, intent. She had been waiting.

  “He sent the dogs to attack.”

  He had hoped merely for a plate of spaghetti.

  “What?”

  “We were playing, and a rock accidentally fell into Forrest’s yard. They were barking at us for days and then — ”

  He sank into the chair beside her. It was cheap, and the metal rods dug into his back.

  “Forrest? What?”

  “They leapt over the fence. They chased us to the house — ”

  “What?” The words felt disembodied, unnatural, in the room. He heard himself asking, “Did the dogs bite anyone?”

  “Almost,” she said. “They wanted to — ”

  He stared at her. The dogs. What was she talking about? He had not heard them barking. He got up suddenly and went into the bedroom to look at the children; they were asleep, their faces smooth, untroubled — nothing appeared to be wrong. Something in his chest contracted; he could not take on another strain. Was she making this up? She had lied to him that week when she was buying the jewelry, lied for the first time in their marriage — that lie had disoriented him so that he had forgotten to attend Rachel’s sing-along at the preschool, forgotten to pick up Zeb at a child’s house; he couldn’t keep track of anything, suddenly. Couldn’t she see how her actions had destroyed his sense of the structure of the world? Now she appeared to be herself, sitting in the dark light of the kitchen, but could Forrest really have sent dogs over the fence? Anxiety coursed through him, staticky, and he could not help thinking what this would mean for them, for him. What would that mean for them, now that they had tried to finally set up a home?

  He swallowed and said the one thing that would make sense to him.

  “It was a mistake.”

  She was still, looking at him.

  “Dan. You’re not looking. It happened. It’s true — ”

  There were so many ways one could look at the world. You could look at the waterfront at Wayne Beach, Virginia, and say it was a ruined old port, or you could say it was beautiful — perhaps authentic. You could walk into the dusty rooms of Mrs. Donna Hayworth’s McDonald’s Happy Meal collection in Davenport, Iowa, and see it as a collection of commercial trash, or you could see it as a careful preservation of items she loved. You could look at your mother, tearful whenever you opened your mouth, and think she was disappointed by you, or you could pretend she was thinking of something else. You could believe your father was fleeing you when his car roared out of the garage with the woman who was not your mother, or you could believe he was maybe giving a stranger a ride home. You could decide whatever you wanted; that gave you power. Dan stood up. The dogs were just pets, and you could get along
with anyone. He wanted to believe this.

  “I’ll test it,” he said.

  Serena’s eyelids flickered. “What kind of test?”

  “Maybe they were trying to play,” said Dan. “I’m going to test it. I’ll go see what they do.” He opened the door into the cool night.

  He stepped into the darkness, among the softly rotting smell of the white onion flowers that appeared on the dry grass like foam on an ocean. Dried sycamore leaves roared under his feet. The dogs trotted on the other side of the fence; they were pale, muscular. Their tails lifted, and their breath rumbled. Dan’s feet were light. He marched over to the fence. “Here,” said Dan, snapping his fingers. The dogs stood on their hind legs, watchful, their red tongues slick. He stepped closer.

  Forrest’s house sat perhaps twenty feet from him; the kitchen lights burned yellow inside. Were Forrest and his wife leaning toward each other, having a similar discussion about them? What did Forrest and Evelyn see in the way Dan and Serena looked at each other, the air between their faces? Suddenly, he wanted an answer. The dogs stood, muscular tails afloat. Dan took a deep breath. “Miss. Is. Sipp. I,” he whispered, slowly.

  The dogs waited, muscles twitching beneath their fur.

  Dan stood, a tired, worn man in his office suit, arms dangling, while the animals stared at him with sweet, glassy eyes. Something unbuckled in his chest. He reached over the fence and put his hand on the bigger dog’s head. It whimpered, and he felt its skull press up into his hand. The dog looked at him, tail wagging.

  “Be good,” he whispered to the dogs.

  Chapter Nine

  SERENA WATCHED THE RABBI MOVE around the office; he wandered in and out of rooms, as if about to utter a proclamation, then he retreated back to his office. When his door was shut, she heard him on his phone, talking rapidly. He was making plans.

  He opened the door.

  “Serena Hirsch. How are you?”

  “All right,” she said, though she was not.

  “Come on in!” His voice was suddenly hearty, friendly.

  She walked in, now wary, and sat at the chair by his desk.

  “I want to ask you,” he said, leaning forward at his desk. His hands were carefully clasped. He inhabited a posture, an expression, that was perfect in its erasure of him and in its acknowledgement of the listener’s anguish; he was a cup ready to receive what she would pour into it. “You’re upset about something. I’ve noticed, Serena,” he said. “The last week.”

  He had a talent for looking at the person in front of him as though he was surprised by their originality and goodness.

  “You know,” she said. “What I told you. My father — ”

  “Of course,” he said. “But there’s something more.” He pressed his palms together. “Can I help?”

  She looked at him; someone, finally, had noticed. She had carried the argument with Forrest, and Dan’s disbelief, around with her for the last few days. The rabbi spent his time attuned to the sorrow of others, but his eyes were open. He had noticed something that no one else had.

  “Our neighbors hate us,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I think because we’re Jews.”

  This wasn’t exactly true; she just suspected something like it. “He asked me to cut a tree down, and I wouldn’t, and now he’s trained the dogs to bark at me. Just at me and the children, not at my husband. Then the dogs jumped over the fence — ”

  The rabbi tilted back in his chair and looked at her. He nodded. “How has he shown he hates Jews?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s always asking us to go to church. I can’t say it definitely. I just sense it. You need to help me,” she said. “He won’t talk to me. Dan won’t believe me — ” she could not stop herself, but here she went, and it felt like a sweet relief to tell someone. “He says it’s me. But it’s not. Forrest told the dogs to bark at us.”

  Her armpits felt damp; she was both glad and appalled that she had said this, that she had revealed this awful rift between her and her husband, to the rabbi, who was, after all, a stranger.

  He got out a pencil. “Well,” said Rabbi Golden, sitting up. “We can’t have that. What is his name?”

  He wrote it down. The ordinary quality of the action, the simple taking down of names and addresses, soothed her; it was like she was filing a police report.

  “You’ll be happy to know I’m an expert at this. Team building, shall we say. I’ve done it in Ohio. Germany. Kuwait. Albuquerque. I come, I conquer!”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “What does he like?”

  “He likes Boy Scouts. He also likes to steal materials and build a shed with it.”

  “What else?”

  “He raises maple saplings. He gives them away.”

  The rabbi noted this on his pad.

  “When is he home?” asked the rabbi.

  “All the time.”

  She was aware of the peculiar slowness of time in this room; time was pooling, like caramel, and they were trapped in it, soft and golden, as though all one craved from another person was the slowing down of one moment to the next. He had listened to her, with the simplicity of complete attention; it was a gift. She sat, nervous, not wanting to leave. Rabbi Golden, hands behind his head, his voice rich, warm, said, “Four o’clock tomorrow. Be home, Serena Hirsch. We’ll take care of this, you and me. Watch.”

  A LITTLE BEFORE FOUR, SHE set the children in front of the TV and picked a window where Forrest would not be able to see her. Forrest was raking some leaves in his front yard. The garden around Forrest was raked, the pansies potted, stone birds and dwarves placed there to an elaborately cute effect. It could have been the entrance to Snow White’s cottage. There was nothing that had not been trimmed, controlled, mowed, fertilized, transplanted, and contained. Serena’s family’s yard was, comparatively, a wreck: bushes spread out, unchecked; the lawn sprouted up, weedy, ragged. There was a competitive nature to the gardening, a battle that Serena’s family was clearly losing.

  She had had it with talking to Forrest. She wondered how he would respond to someone else. At four, the rabbi parked his car at the other end of the block and began to walk toward Forrest’s home. He was wearing a suit, dressed for official business on par with a wedding or funeral. The blue shadows of the autumn afternoon stretched out on the white sidewalk.

  “Sir,” said the rabbi, “the word in the neighborhood is that you raise some beautiful maple saplings. Are they for sale?”

  The rabbi had almost perfected a drawl, a rhythm of speaking similar to Forrest Sanders’s own. Forrest stopped raking.

  “I do raise some saplings,” said Forrest Sanders.

  The two men stood in the low afternoon light.

  “Let me introduce myself. Rabbi Josh Golden.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Rabbi Josh Golden.” The rabbi held out his hand.

  She saw Forrest studying his yarmulke. She did not know if he even knew what the word rabbi meant. What Forrest did detect was the flattery. His hand rose up and shook the rabbi’s.

  “Forrest Sanders. Well, Mister Josh, those are my babies. I can show you the beauts.” Forrest Sanders took the rabbi to the side of the house. She watched the two men walk beside the house — the rabbi trying to control his brisk stride, Forrest ambling by, observing him. The rabbi had mastered the art of imitation, of matching the physical style of whoever was beside him.

  “How much do you want for one?” asked Rabbi Golden.

  “I don’t usually charge,” said Forrest Sanders, smiling.

  “That’s a crime! I’ll give you twenty dollars,” said the rabbi.

  Forrest slowly lifted his hand and scratched his head. “You always pay for what you want?” he asked.

  Rabbi Golden smiled, a pained smile. “I want to honor the work you have done,” he said, sounding a little tense.

  “What’s the name of your church?” Forrest asked the rabbi.

  “I don’t lead a chur
ch. I lead the Temple. Temple Shalom,” said the rabbi. “My first pulpit. Got here from San Diego. Before that I was with the forces in Kuwait, Korea, Camp Lejeune.”

  “Marines?” asked Forrest, also attuned to this form of authority.

  “Army chaplain,” said the rabbi.

  “Sir,” said Forrest Sanders, “Army chaplain. What is your opinion of that tree?”

  Serena thought she could see the rabbi’s shoulders relax at the fact that the stranger acknowledged if not his religion, then his rank as a spiritual leader. It seemed that Forrest was deeply trained to honor that role.

  “Which tree?” asked the rabbi.

  “That tree in their yard. It’s going to fall.”

  Serena watched as Forrest walked toward their pine tree. Forrest was convinced of the hostility of the tree, as though the tree itself had reached out and slapped him.

  Rabbi Golden surveyed the tree. “I don’t think it will fall.”

  “Look,” said Forrest Sanders. “Close. One good hurricane, another Hazel, and kaboom! It’s going to fall and destroy my shed!” He paused. “Guess how much it cost to make it?”

  “Tell me.”

  Forrest put his hands on his hips and said, “Twenty-three dollars and forty-seven cents.”

  “No!”

  “I find things. In the street. In Dumpsters. I have an eye.” He paused. “Twenty-three dollars and thousands of hours. Of dedication.”

  “Have you read Deuteronomy, chapter 20?” asked the rabbi.

  “Certainly,” said Forrest, crossing his arms.

  “Do not destroy or waste,” said the rabbi. “I see it as this — the way of the righteous is that nothing should be lost to the world.”