The New Order
ALSO BY KAREN E. BENDER
Refund
A Town of Empty Rooms
Like Normal People
THE NEW ORDER
Copyright © 2018 by Karen E. Bender
First hardcover edition: 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bender, Karen E.
Title: The new order : stories / Karen E. Bender.
Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California :
Counterpoint, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017448 | ISBN 9781640090996 | eISBN 9781640091009
Classification: LCC PS3552.E53849 A6 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017448
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
To Robert, Jonah, and Maia, with love
Contents
Where to Hide in a Synagogue
The Elevator
Three Interviews
The New Order
The Good Mothers in the Parking Lot
Mrs. America
This Is Who You Are
The Pilot’s Instructions
The Department of Happiness and Reimbursement
On a Scale of One to Ten
The Cell Phones
Acknowledgments
The New Order
Where to Hide in a Synagogue
Everyone agreed on the name: the Advisory Board for Safety and Well-Being. The committee would be composed of me and Eva Silverman, and today we would walk through the synagogue, discussing strategies to help temple members in the event of an attack. Together, we would come up with a list of suggestions and write a preliminary report.
It was a clear day in early October, and though the air still held the faint heat of summer, I thought I could feel the underbreath of chill in the air. We lived in North Carolina; Charlottesville was four hours away. I arrived at Beth-Em synagogue fifteen minutes early; I did not wait in front of the synagogue, for a reason I did not want to explain but that felt entirely right. I walked to the entrance of the sanctuary, but did not stay there long, and then I wandered into the parking lot. I have belonged to this synagogue for thirty-five years. My shoulders braced a little as the cars rushed past me, and I wondered, as they drove by, what the drivers were looking for, what they would see.
I waited for Eva to arrive. We had not seen each other in recent months. Thirty-five years ago, we met at the park, shortly after our family moved here from the Northeast. It was Sunday morning, which meant everyone in the town fled to church; the playground in the lush green park near our house was so empty, that first Sunday, I thought the whole town had fallen ill. My husband was away for work for the second weekend that month. The park was silent and the wet grass shone. As I helped my daughter, Adina, down the slide, I saw Eva walk up with her son, Jacob. I was so relieved to see another person. We gazed at each other, evaluating. It seemed, in that large, leafy park, we were the only people in the world.
“Hi,” she said, her voice bright as aluminum; I examined her, trying to decide if she resembled my cousins or not. She sat on the bench beside me and glanced at the toys in my stroller. She spotted a plush blue star that said “Shalom” in Hebrew, a toy from a relative that I generally tried to hide. She smiled. “You’re skipping church, honey,” she said.
“Well, I believe you are, too,” I said.
We have been friends for thirty-five years.
We were mothers together. We spent time in the playground watching Adina and Jacob, and we sat for many hours at her kitchen table. We discussed the shoddy curriculum of the temple Hebrew school, the lack of participation in the annual Purim carnival (except for a few members who did everything, like us). When she tried, for three years, to work toward a degree in nursing, I held up flash cards for her biology classes, and she attempted to answer them. She advised me to start my catering business, and she was my first client, bravely hosting a bridal shower for Cara Abrams so that I would have a job. We kept a biweekly date on the treadmill at the Y after my divorce, walking with great urgency toward nothing; it seemed, striding down that moving black mat, that we covered miles. We celebrated our fortieth, fiftieth, sixtieth birthdays together, ordering the crème brûlée at a nice French restaurant in Raleigh; we vowed to do so every decade as long as we could lift a spoon. And, a year ago, we stood together reciting the Kaddish for her husband.
I was the first person she informed, after her family members. His death was a shock to the entire congregation. I always admired the fact that she and Al had been married for forty-one years. After his death, I picked her up at her house each Friday night, Eva sitting, frozen, staring at the TV, and I drove her to services. I said the prayer for the dead for her when she stood up alone, those first weeks, when her grief was so unwieldy she was unable to form the words.
Now I saw Eva come around the corner. We hadn’t spoken very much in the last year. After Al’s death, she flew to Miami to stay with her son for a couple months, but when she returned, I called frequently to check in on her but she often did not return my calls.
I missed her and wondered how she was. I was eager to hear her suggestions for the Advisory Board for Safety and Well-Being, and I hoped that working together, we could reconnect.
My heart lifted when I saw her.
“Eva,” I said. There she was, dressed as always in a Kim Rogers suit from Belk’s. I reached out to hug her and she let me; there was the familiar softness of her shoulders.
“Hi, honey,” she said. Her voice was both bright and hoarse; it sounded as if it were holding up a roof. “Good to see you! How are you?”
She always leaned on the word “you” so that it felt like an embrace. But now the you was just a you. It sat between us like a broken plate.
“I’m okay,” I said, carefully. “But how are you?”
“I am—” she said. “I’m here.”
“I’ve been—” I did not know what to say. “Thinking of you. Where have you been these days?”
I tried to hug her again, but she did not embrace me this time. All friendships have their own contract, and for over thirty years our friendship was built on the understanding that we could comfort each other. We were important to each other in this way.
“Harriett, honey, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m all right. One day at a time. Trying to stay busy. I may go on a cruise. Maybe to Jamaica—with Arlene Johnson, she likes them too.”
“I don’t know her,” I said, trying to understand. I had never been on a cruise. “But that sounds very nice.”
She nodded. “Peaceful,” she said, softly. I felt an ache of sadness for her, for Al, for his absence. I didn’t quite understand why she chose to go on a cruise, and, more to the point, I didn’t know why she hadn’t asked me. But I was glad to see her, and the board was waiting for our suggestions.
“All right then,” she said. “Let’s begin.”
We walked into the entrance of the synagogue. The foyer contained three potted palm trees, a framed photo of the first rabbi from seventy years ago, and a glass case, about five feet tall, containing some candlesticks and mezuzahs from the gift shop. I had no background in security, but I tried to think of the space in an objective, technical way. Our first scenario, I thought, was to imagine what would happen if someone ran into the temple holding a gun.
I didn’t have a gun, so I held up my ballpoint pen.
“I’m coming in,” I said. “Go. Run.”
Eva’s face flinched; she stood there, confused.
“I’m standing here, shooting!” I said, sharply. “Go!”
Eva began to walk, with little quick steps, toward the exit. Her two-inch heels kept her from getting anywhere very fast.
“Too late,” I said. “Bang. I’ve already shot you.”
Eva stumbled slightly, and her left shoe fell off. She grasped a doorjamb and pushed her foot back into her shoe. We would all be dead, probably within seconds, if anyone entered the synagogue with a gun. This was obvious. This idea entered my mind as a fact, but felt remote, like someone else’s thought.
“I don’t know what to suggest,” I said.
She finished squeezing the shoe onto her foot.
“Don’t wear heels to services anymore,” said Eva.
I didn’t understand.
“In case you need to run,” she said.
I wrote this down. We needed to add some clarification. No heels to services. Sneakers were now the recommended footwear for the synagogue. Or congregants could wear shoes they could discard in case they needed to move fast.
We walked into the sanctuary. It was an open room, with nothing to obstruct a shooter, except perhaps the brass chandelier imported from Eastern Europe, which was suspended from the center of the room. It was about two p.m., the hour the room contained the most light; I watched as the sun rushed through the stained-glass windows on the left side, pale red, yellow, and blue squares glowing on the maroon carpeted floor. There were twenty pews made of dark polished wood facing the bima. On the bima, the raised area in front of the synagogue, was the lectern where the rabbi stood and behind that, the large wooden doors of the ark. The sanctuary had been recently renovated, and the walls were the color of cream. I took a deep breath. The room was empty and the air was still as glass.
“So,” I said, “where are the safest places to sit?”
We considered. The front row, on the right side, first two rows, we thought, might be a reasonable choice if the attacker had a gun because it was possible (if you had no physical limitations) to reach the exit in nine steps. This was the number of steps that a child required; an adult could make it in fewer.
“So who gets these seats?” I asked Eva.
Should these seats go to the most elderly members, such as Ruth Mankowicz, ninety-two, who would, frankly, have to be lifted out because she would block traffic with her walker?
“The children,” she suggested.
This was smart. No one could voice opposition to saving the children. But. Which ones?
“The children under age twelve, and the Youth Group behind them so that they can have help getting out?” I suggested.
But this would include Max Lowenstein, who was ten and feared by the Hebrew school teachers, for at about four p.m. the levels of his ADD medicine would start to dip. And Gina Gordon, who was twelve, and had mastered a general demeanor of caustic pity; I didn’t know if she would help others or just bolt.
And then my thoughts turned toward the adults. Frieda Sonnenbaum, president of the Ladies Concordia Society, a successful real estate agent who wanted to be first in line for everything, so her velocity in reaching the exit would not be in doubt. But I wondered about her helpfulness, for she never called Eva when her husband was in the ICU. Mara Stein had, a few decades ago, told my teenage daughter she could not babysit her children anymore after Adina, among other things, started smoking and cursed loudly in front of the Sunday school a few times. And not even the worst words, in my opinion. Mara said Adina would not be a good role model for her children. I never forgot this. No seat for her.
I thought of the faces of various members of the congregation, which members I wanted to live and who I felt less committed to, and I did not want to make any of these decisions. “How can we recommend who will sit in these seats?” I asked Eva. She, too, seemed alarmed by this idea.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s like the exit rows in an airplane? If you sit in these seats, and something happens, are you willing and able to perform these tasks?”
We looked at each other, considering.
“And if they say no?” I asked.
She folded her arms. “If they cannot promise to help, then they have to sit farther from the exit,” she said.
We agreed that we were unable to recommend who should have the seats closest to the exit at services. As of now, we recommended that the temple policy for service seating should remain as it has always been: first come, first served.
Our footsteps made almost no sound as we walked across the sanctuary. I was aware of all the doors—two in the back, the side exit. Unease was spreading inside me, a dark, fluttery lake. I imagined how many steps a shooter would take, running in, and how many steps I would take, rushing toward Eva and pushing her to the floor. I knew I would protect her.
As I watched Eva walk around the room, I remembered all the time we had spent at her kitchen table. Many of those hours were spent studying with her; she tried to finish the prerequisites to transfer to the university for a nursing degree. She wanted to be an OB nurse; this was her dream for many years. “Two more tests,” I told her, “you can do it.” At first she cried and told me she didn’t know why she could never complete her courses, as she believed she would be an effective nurse; but when she sat down with the tests her mind just went blank. After a few attempts, she stopped trying. Her husband, Al, was a successful pediatrician. She said she wanted to be there for her children, Jacob and Anna; work would take her away from that.
I didn’t believe her, but I pretended I did, as I could tell she wanted me to. It was the silent conspiracy of agreement that sometimes happened between friends. It was impossible, sometimes, to know what resided inside other people, even if you believed you knew them well. For three years, she tried to become a nurse, and then she never talked about it again.
I remember how she coached me on my business. She liked coming up with names: “A Thyme to Celebrate,” or “Pepper and Spice,” and suggesting what I should cook. She was the first to hire me, and I was grateful, and she was excellent at spreading the word. She had many ideas for advertising, and I understood that she wanted to be part of it, the way people often want to inhabit a friend’s success. I found clients on my own, and I became known for my hors d’oeuvres and my cupcakes, and I remember when Eva asked me to cater a fund-raiser for a charity one Valentine’s Day and I had to say no because I was already booked.
But I remember mostly when she sat with me when my husband left. He had become very businesslike to me during that last year; he was remote because he now loved an executive assistant in Ohio. One night, he described to me what he thought our family was, an uninhabited sheet of ice; he described it in great, considered detail, this empty and glacial landscape. It sounded awful, and I did not recognize it, but it was true for him. When he was in Ohio, he said, the landscape was different, palm trees everywhere and he could feel the sun on his arms. This was puzzling because I knew there were no palm trees in Ohio. He told me this on a night when I was going to make dinner for him and Eva and Al. I was going to make brisket and then finish the pink cupcakes for the baby shower I was catering the next day.
I canceled the dinner. Eva still came over. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at the forty cupcakes I was supposed to decorate. My mind was a heavy, we
t bag of sand. But Eva posed beside the cupcakes, the pink icing, and the silver candies to decorate them and said, “Do this.” My hands iced the cupcakes and arranged the candies and she helped me carry them to the baby shower and through a stunning act of theater, I arranged the cupcakes on a tray, I passed them out to the guests, I assumed the persona of a caterer. I also assumed the persona of a mother. I fooled everyone. I was a person who got through one day and the next.
For a couple years after that, now alone, I wondered each morning as I woke up if today would be the day I dissolved. I did not know if I had been told that this was the proper response to great sorrow, or if my body would actually vanish in some way, though I was still, evidently, here. I did not know the form this dissolution would take, or if it would be sudden and violent, but each day I awoke, expecting it.
After some time this fear subsided, but I felt sure it had slipped somewhere else. Was it inside my body, my fingers, my arms? Was it in the back of the closet, in a cardboard box? And when it rose up, one day, what would it do to me? My daughter grew up; I loved other men; I was one of North Carolina’s Women to Watch of 2001 and honored at a luncheon; I was on the board of the temple. But still, sometimes I woke up, and I waited.
We continued our survey of the synagogue. We wanted to be thorough and there were many sections to appraise. The left side of the bima was farther from the exit (the only other one being the wide doors we came through in the back) so the number of steps to that exit was about twelve, plus the route was blocked somewhat by the flower arrangement, which could be either hazardous or useful—it could cause a congregant to trip and be murdered or one person could hide behind a sizable arrangement. We could also encourage arrangements with thorns, as a measure of defense.
We walked through the center aisle, between the rows of pews.
The pews were benches constructed of cedar, with a back that was about four inches thick, and a seat, which was about two inches thick. I ran my hand along the tops of the pews, which were cool and solid, thick as doors; they seemed promising. They also had cushions on them, and Eva measured one with her hands—the cushions, filled with foam, were about two inches thick.
The New Order Page 1
