“Yes, Tiffany?” asked Tom.
“I move that we end the rabbi’s contract,” she said, softly.
They all sat and listened to that.
“I second,” said Betty.
“All in favor,” said Tom. “Raise hands.”
Everyone but Tom and Norman slowly raised their hands. Serena felt her hand rising, and it was in the air. There were ten hands in the air.
They had decided.
“The board has voted to end Temple Shalom’s contract with Rabbi Golden,” said Tom. The room was stale, devoid of air.
“Now what?” asked Marty.
“This is not a day we feel like celebrating,” said Tom. He rubbed his eyes with his hand.
They made plans to meet again to assign service duties and write an advertisement for a new rabbi. Tom adjourned the meeting, and they all slowly made their way outside. The air was cold, and the thick, heavy branches of the magnolia trees moved slowly in the wind, which had the low roar of an engine. The tin-colored clouds fled quickly across the black sky.
“Do you think we’ll have a Temple?” asked Tiffany, her voice shaky. “Is everyone going to leave?”
They stood on the chilly corner, looking at the large, white walls of the churches across the street. They all wanted the same thing — they wanted a place to go to, a place that would welcome them as they tried to maneuver across their own crooked passages.
“We will be fine,” said Betty, clapping hands on their shoulders.
“How?” Serena asked Betty. “And what about him?”
Betty paused. She didn’t answer. They stood on the corner, and the cars streamed by them, metal and rubber rattling.
Chapter Twenty-One
ON DECEMBER 13, NORMAN SENT the word to the congregation about the firing of the rabbi through an email, to be followed by an official letter. He did not, in the group email, describe the details of the meeting. But word had leaked out. Almost instantly, the responses began:From: Seymour Carmel
Subject: The Final Insult
It is not enough that the rogue board has decided to unseat
the greatest rabbi we have known. It is not enough that they
are dismissing him as of yesterday. It is not enough. It is not
enough, may I add, that the people who made the motions
were A) Not a real Jew, and B) A vengeful woman. Who, may
I ask, would want to do this to our congregation? May I ask?
From: Lillian Hoffman
Subject: Rabbi
Thank you.
That night, she dreamed of her father for the first time since he died. He was running down the street, wearing a gray suit. He was running from something, and then he was floating over the sidewalk as though he were swimming, using his arms to move himself through the air. She was chasing him, and he turned a corner each moment that she could reach forward, touch his shoe, and she felt herself running too, a familiar action, as though this was all she had ever done, running for something just ahead of her, and then she felt his presence in front of her, his smell, the smell of craft glue and hospital sanitizer and cigars, and she could sense him so fully that she felt a great pain diminish in her. She leapt forward, but he was not there.
When she woke up and understood again his absence, the disappointment was so immense she briefly could not breathe.
FORREST SEEMED TO HAVE VANISHED after his visit to their house. He was spending a great deal of time in his shed. Serena heard a great, determined hammering there, the piercing cry of the electric saw; it was like he was building several dining room sets or constructing shelves for a home library. Two days later, he brought out a large, five- by six-foot wooden sign and planted it on his front lawn. It said, in letters made with blue paint, “Behold my servant whom I have chosen.” Matthew: 12:18. There were yellow rays radiating from the letters.
Through all of this, there was still the daily routine of elementary school. She did not want to drop Zeb off at school after Forrest’s meeting, even though it had not been sanctioned by the school; there had been many parental faces that had been familiar there. She looked for them. She walked beside her son, who was cheerfully muttering about YuGiOh cards and raising a small hand to wave at the children in his class, and some of them waved back, all of them marching ahead to their own particular ideologies. Who would the children become? The other parents walked in, polite, dropping off their children, but they were all, in some way, wary. The smiling cutout snowflakes and mittens and the jolly exclamation “Why We Love Winter!” on the corkboards lining the hallways seemed to hold an even deeper significance — to find some sort of common ground among the population here, to somehow help everyone realize that on some level, they were able to feel the same things.
Some of the parents who had attended the Christmas meeting looked at her and then quickly looked away. The mother who had expressed outrage at the idea that she had ever been related to a monkey was now tenderly untangling a knot in her daughter’s Hello Kitty shoelaces. The mother looked up at Serena and squinted as though she was trying to recognize her. Apparently, she couldn’t remember.
“How y’all doing,” said the mother absently; she struggled with her daughter’s knotted shoelace.
The teacher’s assistant, Miss LaChawn, a young woman with a fountain of brown braids and fingernails decorated with tiny, elaborate gold roses, had the charming tendency of stopping parents with an effusive bulletin about some small accomplishment their child made that day. Serena also noticed that she always wore a delicate cross around her neck. Miss LaChawn touched her arm. “Did you see them?” she said, in a hushed voice.
“What?”
“His R’s. In his notebook last night. Works of art. I tell you.”
“Yes,” she said, trying to remember. His R’s. As civilization crumbled. “Yes,” she said, grateful to Miss LaChawn, her enthusiasm for this, for literacy.
“All of the students. You should see. The mastery of the R’s. It makes my heart sing to see them.”
“Thank you,” she said. Miss LaChawn was now looking at her with a bit more interest.
“I saw you,” she said.
“Where?”
“At that meeting,” she said. “The Christmas one.”
“Oh,” said Serena.
“It was an interesting presentation,” she said. “I’ll say, enlightening. I’ll admit, I for one am for more Christmas. I’m for as much joy as we can bring these children.” She looked nervous. “But I wanted to ask you,” she said, “if you could bring some of those dreidels in for the class. I’ve never seen one.” She smiled shyly. “It’s heartbreak — I mean, heartwarming to see children talk about . . . their home lives.” She smiled. “I’ve never known anyone who celebrated anything else.”
“Okay,” Serena said. “How many in class?”
“Twenty-two,” said Miss LaChawn. “Thank you.”
AFTER THE NIGHT DAN HAD vanished, the night they had fought and pushed past the roaring in their own heads, Serena found they were polite with each other, careful; both were aware that they were visitors in this marriage, and, perhaps, that marriage was in some ways a form of theater, that each one had made a decision to act as a husband or wife. She crawled into bed with him again, and there was the feeling of his skin against hers, that sensation of cherishing, a tide rising in her chest. He had admitted something to her, his sorrow for his dead brother, and she felt she had gained admission to some deeper part of his heart. She held herself awake, watching his dark eyelashes while he slept; the house was silent but for the creaks in the siding and the sound of his breath, then the sound of hers, beside him. She ached to press herself into his skin, wholly, to inhabit him, and she wondered if she loved him because he gave her a way to fall out of herself, if that was the reason anyone loved anyone, for that brief detour out of one’s skin.
Dan was also watching her. Her face, as she slept, was unbearably sweet to him; it was a relief to be able to look at it, to have her
beside him again. He was embarrassed that he had driven off the night that Forrest visited them, but he had not known how to stop himself. Forrest’s words kept shouting through his head. He kept thinking of Zeb running with the other scouts and then as no longer part of the group, for no other reason but that Forrest didn’t want him to be, and he kept seeing that night over in his mind, at odd moments, when he was talking to clients, when he was waiting at a stoplight, when he was tucking Zeb in — he thought of Forrest ’s pleased face, and Dan’s entire body started to burn. In his mind, he was telling Forrest the things he hadn’t: Fuck off; Don’t do this to my son; Think what you’re doing; I didn’t cheat, stop thinking that I did; I wanted to make things easy for my son; Don’t do this to him.
Dan got into his car and went to work, and nothing made the searing disappear. It had the distinct quality of pain, and he wanted to be rid of it. That night, he stood in their bedroom, looking out the window at the dark yard, theirs and Forrest’s, separated by the thin wire fence, and he could not bear it.
“I want to do something,” he said. She knew what he meant, just looking at him.
“We can’t just sit here,” he said. “How are we supposed to sit here? After what he did.”
“What do you want to do?”
He swallowed. “Come with me.”
They walked in their thin clothes into the backyard. It was the first time they had been alone together, with some shared purpose, in months, and now, instead of going to get a meal or see a movie, they were going to take revenge on the Boy Scout troop leader. Serena could barely see Dan in the dark. The grass crunched, crisp, frosty, under their feet; the dry leaves sounded like the ocean. Dan felt invisible; it was a great, powerful feeling. They stood at the edge of the yard, by Forrest ’s fence. The dogs were in the house, and the yard was silent.
She stood in the darkness, and she had to admit: There was something pure and thrilling about standing here, wanting to do something to make Forrest feel as they had.
Serena shivered. Dan was pacing back and forth. His hands were trembling; he was staring across the yard. There was something in his expression that she had never seen before — it was in his eyebrows, the curve of his lip. He could not control how he felt; it made him look helpless.
She followed his gaze, which was directed at Forrest’s shed. It was completed now, a tidy two-story building, a pale tin roof gleaming in the moonlight.
He knelt and picked up a branch; he threw it over the fence. It soared and landed. He picked up another. Then he hopped the fence. He crept around to the back of the shed, tapping the branch against his hand. She hopped the fence, too. Dan walked around the shed, clutching the branch. He lifted the branch and whacked it against the shed. Once. There was a hollow thump. She picked one up and hit it, too. The shed. The shed that had required a prayer. An icy fear dissolved to giddiness. Thunk. The dogs. Nothing. No one was stopping them. The shed echoed like a tin pan when they hit it, but it did not dent; it was like a drum, echoing a sad, helpless song. Serena’s arm muscles tensed, the sky above was velvet black and scattered with stars; her breath floated, dragonlike, silver, in the air. Fear and excitement gathered, light, under her ribs. Dan’s arm reached back, and whack — there was a glistening crack, ringing — a window shattered.
“Shit,” he said, looking surprised. Glass glittered onto the grass. Dan turned and hopped the fence, with Serena following him. They ducked and ran back into the house. A dog began to bark.
Dan slammed the back door and they stood, breathing hard. His face was flushed. She looked onto the kitchen floor; glass had cut his hand, and blood was streaming down it. Serena grabbed hold of his forearm.
“Are you okay?” she asked. Drops of blood were falling onto the linoleum.
“I think,” he said. She grabbed a dish towel and wrapped his hand in it.
“Is it bad?” she asked. “Does it hurt? Let me see.”
He held out his hand. It was not a large cut, but it was deep, and blood quickly soaked the towel. They stood, looking at each other. Her cheeks were cold.
The smell of fresh pine was sharp on her hands. She washed them. They had broken a window; she could hear the shattering in her mind, the strange sound now attached to them, their actions.
“I could have knocked the whole thing down,” he said, his tone glad and pained and wondering. “I could have done it, you know, I wanted to just hit it down. I could have just beat the whole damn thing into a pile. Not just that — his house. I could take a bat to the goddamn neighborhood — ”
“Okay, okay,” she said, alert to something in his tone. “Stop.” She was ashamed, all at once, that they had done this, that they had leapt the fence and broken Forrest’s window. How easy it had felt, how light, in a way, to try to answer him for what he had done. But — what had — what was Forrest going to do? She took another dish towel and wrapped it around her husband’s hand. The peach-colored fabric, decorated with lemons, reddened.
THE NEXT MORNING, SHE LOOKED outside to see if she could detect traces of their visit, but the yards appeared the same, the sparse grass like cold flat straw, the leaves scattered across the dirt. She could see the window that Dan had broken. It was startling: The building had been injured. Dan was dressed and clutching his coffee by 7:30 AM; the children shrugged on their jackets and marched out into the chilled winter air.
When she returned from dropping the children off at school, she went into her yard to pick up Zeb’s sweater, which he had left there. As she walked back, she saw Forrest slowly circling his shed. Her throat was empty, light. She watched him walk, the dogs beside him, tails bouncing.
Forrest stood, clutching one of his saws. His eyes flickered on her and stopped.
“Vandals,” he said. The word pierced the air. “Did you see this?” His face was red and flushed; he looked deeply old. “I come out this morning, and what do I see? This window? How did this happen?”
She swallowed.
“Maybe a tree,” she said, watching him.
He looked up; there were other trees stretching around the yard, but none had been as close as hers had been. His eyes fluttered. “Someone broke my window,” he said. “Help me clean it up. That ’s the neighborly thing to do.”
She stared at him. It was as though he was not talking to her anymore, but to some ghostly representative of her — as though that was all he had spoken to ever, she now understood.
“Forrest,” she said, “maybe I would help you . . . but why would I want to . . . after what you said to us?”
His eyebrows lifted.
“Do you remember what you said?” she asked.
He stood, whistled a moment. The tune was not discernible.
“Me?” he asked.
“You,” she said.
A smile flashed across his face, a child’s smile, then vanished as though the wind blew it off. He put his hands into his pockets and took them out, placed them on the wire fence.
“You kicked my son out of Scouts, Forrest,” she said. Her voice was strangely cool; she listened to it like remote music. “For no reason. Just because you wanted to.”
He looked at his hands, and she saw his shoulders shrug. “I had my reasons — ”
“You made them up! You just wanted us out. You did this to a child,” she said. The sky was gray and blank.
His eyelid twitched. “No, I didn’t,” he said.
“Yes. You did.”
“Stop saying that,” he said. “I love children. Don’t you see them watching me every week? They love me.” He stepped closer to the fence. “They love me because I’m the best scout leader in the county. The state. Maybe the nation.”
“But — ” she said.
“I’ve been through some hardships in my life, but I got over it. You wouldn’t know. I survived things that would destroy you. I never complained! People love me. I love God, my country, my neighborhood. But then things got — well. You move in, and my trusted pecan tree, which had produced pecans re
liably for twenty-two years, suddenly stops. Coincidence? Maybe not. You move in, and my grandson Dawson loses the Pinewood Derby after we tested that car for five hours last weekend. Coincidence? Maybe not.” His hands gripped the fence. “You move in, and they change Christmas break to winter break. You move in, and — ” his words tumbled over each other, “my wife has a heart attack, my wife who was fine until you moved in, and then I’m sitting beside her in the hospital, wondering if she’ll wake up the next day and — ”
“Forrest!” she said. “Look. I don’t know why any of that happened. But it wasn’t us, for god’s sake — ”
“Then what?” he yelled. “What?”
They looked at each other, the sky hard and gray, a flat roof stretching over them; the ground was thin, a mere shell, under her feet.
“I don’t know!” she said. “How does anyone know? But I know that you kicked him out — I know that much.”
He flinched. “Stop,” he yelled, his voice raw. His face held confusion so vast it erased everything else. The wire fence stood, flimsy, between them.
His expression crumpled as if he did not know what to say next. Forrest stumbled back suddenly, jerked by an invisible hand; his face was bright red, and she could see a dark shadow of sweat under his shirt. A sound like a laugh and a cry fell out of him. It was the first time she had ever seen him speechless. Forrest scanned the yard, looking at the shed, the clouds, the trees, his hands open, trembling. He was looking at what was leaning against his shed. There was a saw, a pair of pruning shears, and a gun.
It was a hunting rifle, which she had seen in his shed, and which he had brought out today; there was a rag beside it. He grabbed the gun.
She stepped back, first slowly, then more quickly.
A Town of Empty Rooms Page 28
