The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

  The next debate was at the Hilton in Raleigh. When she arrived, the crew in the limo grew quiet at what they saw; five television vans, from stations local and far away, and a fresh tide of reporters breaking over the sidewalk as the limo approached. They were here for the candidates, for Mr. Massoud and for her.

  “Showtime,” said Peyton, helping her out.

  There was the liberal media, rushing forward, her advisors holding out arms to block them, trim young women who lunged at her with microphones and asked: What did you mean? Are you exploiting Americans’ fear of citizens from the Middle East to win? Why did you let North Carolina voters believe he was engaging in bestiality?

  “Ms. Forrest didn’t say it, Mr. Massoud did,” called one of her advisors to the reporters.

  The advisors guided her inside and gasped. The room was packed with people waiting for them, the bitter scent of close bodies in the air.

  She and Mr. Massoud took their places at their lecterns. When she shook hands with him before they started, he gripped her hand even more firmly than usual, and she could feel his heartbeat in his palm, and then he released it quickly, as though he could not bear to touch her.

  She saw the taut faces of some of the audience; the air in the room was hot.

  First question: How would they create jobs in the state? Mr. Massoud first. But when he spoke, a couple of men near the front interrupted him.

  “Answer this!” they called. “Do you sleep with dogs?”

  Mr. Massoud held up his palm as he often did when people asked him aggrieved questions, as though patting their heads. His forehead was damp. “Do you have pets?” he asked. “We do. A collie named Fluffy. Our daughter named her. She sleeps at the foot of our bed. Would you like to see a picture?” He held up a Christmas photo of his family surrounding a golden collie. Each of them wore a red bow affixed to their outfit; the collie had one on his collar. Some audience members applauded, heartily, as though this photo told them everything they needed to know.

  Carol stared. Why had her campaign not thought of this? Would anyone in her family but Angel have willingly worn a bow? She did not have a photo available.

  Mr. Massoud asked, “Ms. Forrest. Do you have any photos of your family you would like to share?”

  It was a brilliant move. Why would she have a photo on her? Did he know? Did his campaign know about Mary Grace?

  He had the innocent face of an accountant, blank as a lake.

  “Not with me,” she said. “But don’t mess with me, Mr. Massoud.” She heard her prim, outraged voice ring throughout the room, a voice she conjured simply for the debates. “I know who you are.”

  A roar swelled from the crowd, a confused half laugh, half shout. It was so loud she felt the laughter shuddering in her feet. What was the sound coming from the crowd? Was it agreement, appreciation, would it make her win? There was applause, the sound was more than a laugh—it seemed like it arose from a howling animal. She noticed a couple of men moving toward the stage. The expression on their faces was reptilian and intent. She smiled at the audience and then one of the men barked and threw an object. It flew over the stage and hit Mr. Massoud.

  Glass shattered; it was a bottle. He shouted and fell down; she saw he was bleeding.

  The actions in the room changed. There was no more debate. There were policemen, shouting and rushing toward Mr. Massoud, and two hurling themselves off the stage into the audience. The people in the crowd boiling, a couple of men turning to hit one another. Mr. Massoud’s wife, clad in a cream-colored suit, ran up to the stage and knelt by him; there were stains of blood on her suit. She had seen Mrs. Massoud backstage an hour ago in that suit, carefully eating a potato chip so as not to get crumbs on it.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” she heard Peyton say, sharply, and then someone said, “Get her out of here.” The doors of the hotel flung open, and she was walking, guided by Peyton and a police officer, outside, and she was being put inside the limo, the vinyl cool behind her back, and the car was driving off.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  She was alone in the limo. It pulled away from the Hilton. Where were Harris, Peyton, the rest? The driver was talking to his radio. “Heading to I-40.”

  “What is happening?” she asked.

  “They said to drive you out of there,” said the driver. He paused. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  It was strangely easy to say this.

  “Lots of police,” said the driver.

  “There was a bottle,” she said. Did someone actually throw it at him? Did it slip out of someone’s hand?

  “What happened?”

  She paused. “Mr. Massoud had a bottle land on him.”

  The driver coughed. “It landed on him?”

  “Yes.”

  She met his eyes in the rearview mirror and looked away.

  “Well, damn,” he said. “How’d it land on him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Her cell phone buzzed. It was Mary Grace. She answered it. She heard a deep, shuddering sigh.

  The limo passed other hotels, a mall with a Bed Bath & Beyond, a Costco, parking lots. Carol believed she had passed this scenery on the campaign trail, but she wasn’t sure. There was the flat sound of nothing inside the limo, she heard nothing, and she was supposed to be hearing applause, but instead there was just the rush of the wheels against the earth.

  “I saw the debate,” said Mary Grace, softly.

  She was, for a moment, flattered. “You did! What did you think—”

  “I heard what you said.”

  Mary Grace’s voice was husky. Carol was confused; she realized that Mary Grace had been crying.

  “I simply repeated his own words—” said Carol.

  “Stop running,” said her daughter, firmly. “Now.”

  The way she said it, Carol thought she meant running from what? “No,” Carol said. “I will never drop out. I don’t want—”

  She listened to Mary Grace’s breath; she was still crying.

  “Mary Grace?” Carol asked.

  “Look at Twitter,” said Mary Grace.

  “What do you mean?” asked Carol, alarmed. “What?”

  “Look at it. Now.” Mary Grace hung up.

  The world was melting and Carol did not know how to stop it.

  She clicked on Twitter. What should she search for? She scanned the search feed and saw a column: Trending. There was #ForrestMassoudDebate and #CutDowntheForrest and #Dogfest and #MaryGracePhotos. She saw a name retweeted, @CarolForrest’sDaughter, and there was her daughter, naked, and there was her face.

  In the moment that Carol stared at her phone, trying to push the buttons that would erase this, everything, but would not, before she saw the Twitter account that held the naked pictures of Mary Grace, sent all over the world, before Carol heard her cell phone begin to buzz, over and over, before she felt herself begin to fall, she thought this: that the advisors in the limo were the ones who had understood her most of all, that in all of the long days inside that car with them, the constant low, sourness of their breath, they had known everything about her, and they had believed in this simple fact—that she could save their country, that Mrs. America was good. She could not explain to her daughter that America needed her, Carol Forrest. It was the thought that calmed her when she could not ask her husband to come home, when she could not comfort her son, when she had come upon her mother weeping in the dark, when she did not know what to say to her daughter. She sat in the limo, alone, looking out the tinted windows, at the stands of pine. She did not know how to convince her daughter this was the only thing that was true in this world, that this was the one fact she understood—that the advisors and the voters in the audience were correct, that she was Mrs. America, and that she, Carol Forrest, was not like everyone else.

  This Is Who You Are

  My preferred seat in Hebrew school was by the window, and
when I was restless, which was often, I looked outside. There were the Santa Monica Mountains, gauzy with chaparral, sloping down to the basketball court like an enormous, wrinkled rug. Once, I saw a coyote trot down the mountain. Another time I watched the way a blue shadow from a eucalyptus tree stretched slowly across the brown lawn. As the afternoon wore on, I sometimes tried to imagine what it would be like to be something out there: the coyote, the shadow, the mountain. But that afternoon I only saw Ava, the temple secretary, running from the front office, hurrying toward our classroom, toward us.

  The sight of Ava moving at all was startling—Ava was usually seated, like a statue, at the front desk of Temple Shalom, and no one ever saw her run. She was a solid woman around sixty, with one arthritic foot, and she hurtled unevenly down the concrete path from the temple to the classrooms. When she stumbled in, breathing hard, she regarded us with a new and wary expression, as though we were all made of ice and about to melt. Then she whispered something to our teacher, Darlene, who looked at her and then us and said, sharply, “School is dismissed.”

  We had been practicing the V’ahavta, which Darlene, a student of Judaic studies at UCLA, taught by timing it, meaning that she went around the room with a stopwatch while we tumbled through the ancient words of the prayer. Aaron Hochman read it in fifty-seven seconds. Marjorie Silver read it in sixty-six. I was waiting for my turn, for I had practiced and could let that prayer rip off my tongue within fifty.

  When class was dismissed, cheers flowered through the room. It sounded like the Dodgers had won, though they were not playing that day. Aaron stood up on his seat and leapt off, pumping his fist in the air. We gathered up our backpacks; Ava rushed out of the room. I wondered why Ava was leaving so quickly, and when I identified the sound she made as she left, I knew—she did not want us to see her cry.

  Darlene looked at us.

  “Stop laughing,” Darlene said.

  Darlene marched us to the parking lot of Temple Shalom, a large concrete synagogue near the 405 freeway. Seventeen of us made a ragged line, not knowing whether to celebrate or what. It was the middle of May, 1974. The air was lukewarm and still, but the day now felt somehow fragile, a balloon that was about to pop.

  Rabbi Golden joined us in the parking lot. I watched his face carefully, for he was pronouncing his words in a slow and measured way. What he said was not what I expected. He told us that there had been a massacre.

  He pronounced the word flatly, but we could hear a tiny tremble in his voice.

  “Where?”

  “Ma’alot,” he said.

  Where was that? Was it in the Valley?

  “In Israel.”

  That was far away.

  “Terrorists slaughtered children in a school.”

  The rabbi walked back and forth in front of the carpool pickup zone, looking at the scrubby beige hills. We let this news settle on us and then asked,

  Why are we going home?

  Someone called the religious school director at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. They said they hated Jews.

  This was, in my opinion, weirdly funny. Someone muttered to a director at another temple that they hated Jews and then we were freed from Hebrew school an hour early? We had lucked out. This development was a peculiar mutation of the general discontent floating through the classroom—that our parents forced us to come here, that the sight of Darlene holding up flash cards of aleph, bet, gimel, etc., sometimes made our minds disintegrate with boredom; it was why I liked to stare out the window of the classroom, imagining myself as anything else. Class was from four to six, and though we did not really understand the concept of lost time, we sometimes had the palpable sense that two hours of our lives, two shiny and delicious hours, had vanished. Forever. The cloud of resentment was usually turned toward Darlene, who regarded us with a leaden air of disappointment at our focus on that day’s snack options as opposed to our role, just thirty years removed from the Holocaust, to protect World Jewry.

  We glanced at one another, silent. Jessica Silverman started crying, instantly, authentically, which annoyed us; she was clearly pandering, or worse, she knew, more precisely, what to feel.

  The mothers were driving up in their station wagons as though they had all been waiting, engines running, in some alternate parking lot for this precise moment, each rattling noisily over the speed bump.

  “We’re all fine,” said the rabbi, leaning into each car. He looked around. But what did this mean? A distant coyote yowled, a thin wail. There was the dry, sweet smell of desert, of vanilla, in the air. My mother was talking and I heard this: They threw a grenade at a group of girls in the corner. A grenade blew the girls to shreds. My mother had been taking my sister to the doctor that afternoon, as my sister had recently developed problems breathing. The doctors put forth various theories on what it could be; asthma, allergies, or something else. My mother recently went to half-time at her job as a guidance counselor at LAUSD to drive my sister to her appointments; she wanted to figure out what was wrong so she could get back to working full-time again. My sister, Diane, was an accomplished ballet dancer who could do fifty fouetté turns at a time, her leg whipping around, like a machine, while she remained perfectly centered; her body had always worked for her.

  Now I lay in bed, listening to my sister breathing beside me, listening to the crinkling in her chest. I thought of the girls in Ma’alot going to school that day, thinking it would be just a regular day. I imagined them walking into their classroom, finding their usual seats, putting their lunches in a cubby. I remembered the way the rabbi walked back and forth in the gray lake of the parking lot, scanning the empty sky.

  Apart from Hebrew school twice a week, I went to Thomas Jefferson Junior High, a large public school in West Los Angeles. The members of our Hebrew school class were scattered across other schools in Beverly Hills, Encino, Sherman Oaks, Westwood, Culver City; only Aaron and Marjorie attended Thomas Jefferson Junior High, and though we raised a hand to each other in the hallways, we did not seek each other out. We knew each other in the temple classroom, trying to pronounce the prayers, and this seemed too intimate in Jefferson Junior High’s hard glaring light.

  Jefferson Junior High was a collection of squat, stucco buildings, the low walls lacy with bougainvillea’s magenta petals, but when I walked into a classroom, the flat gray fluorescent light made me feel like I was entering a jail. The air was stale with the end of our childhoods.

  The day after we were sent home after Ma’alot, I sat down to lunch with the girls in my group: Hannah Stein, Laila Dixon, Jennifer Nakamura, and Audra Jefferson. We had worked on an arduous project of A Tale of Two Cities in English, received an A, and that felt, at the time, like a bond. I knew that our lunch discussion would not refer to Ma’alot. The only one who might know about Ma’alot in the group was Hannah, whose parents had been children in Treblinka and whose mother had a purple number tattooed on her arm. Hannah had a mass of red hair that she tied back in a ponytail, and her primary fashion statement involved tubes of lip gloss—root beer, 7-Up, chocolate mint—which she wore on a string around her neck. Her main goal in life appeared to be getting a better grade than me in all subjects. She would want to claim superior ownership over the attack, citing more details, perhaps, making my own knowledge of the attack minor and stupid, so I didn’t want to discuss it around her.

  Laila Dixon was the tallest, not religious but vaguely Christian. Her parents hailed from the Ivy League Back East, and they had recently gotten divorced. Laila smelled of coconut and, indistinctly, like a woman; she had long pale hair she twisted into formless shapes when she spoke. Her hair seemed to be its own living entity, with great authority, and her behavior somehow directed the opinions of the others. There was the day when she arrived at the table wearing a white puka shell necklace, and then, in a couple of weeks, the others were also wearing white puka shell necklaces, in an action of rare agreement; Laila’s power over the group was to present us with solutions for our bew
ilderment, and our gratitude to her was that we would follow her.

  Also in our group was Jennifer Nakamura, whose parents had been in the internment camps, who was second violin in the school orchestra, never quite first, and who never ate the carefully composed seaweed salads and sushi her mother made for her lunch, a sort of impassioned strike that her mother did not see. She sprayed Sun-In in her long, dark hair; we all used Sun-In to adjust the color of our hair, with varying degrees of success.

  Audra Jefferson lived in Baldwin Hills and attended the same ballet school my sister did in Culver City; her brown hair was usually organized into a bun, with combs of alternating silk flowers—roses, lilac, lilies—set into her hair. She traveled to school via the PWT busing system. Our school was, even with a third of the students riding buses forty-five minutes every morning, clearly segregated, with most of the black students gathering in the right quadrangle of the cafeteria, the drill team all black and the cheerleaders almost all white. No one asked why this was.

  We recognized in ourselves, in our smallness in this huge, raucous cafeteria, the hot desire to win. It also felt as though we had slid through some escape chute and shot past various terrible historic events to land in this cafeteria, with its lacy magnolia bushes and peacock-like birds of paradise flowers. The elephant ferns shone like butter icing.

  It was almost the end of the school year. We were dreading the announcements of the Annual Poll in the school yearbook. There were the general categories, which none of us would win, such as “Prettiest” or “Most Resembles Farrah Fawcett” or “Best Laugh” or, hopefully, not “Best Butt.” Hannah and I didn’t want to win “Best Nose,” which unfailingly (and meanly) went to a Jewish student, and I found myself staring in the mirror, examining myself, wondering if I would be singled out for this, which would be a humiliation I did not think I could bear. Jennifer wanted to win “Best Cartwheel,” as she had been taking gymnastics and sometimes showed us her cartwheels and round-offs after lunch, but this award invariably went to the cheerleaders. Audra was afraid of getting “Roberta Flack twin,” for it embarrassed her to be compared to such sultriness, though we all sometimes murmured, giggling, the lyrics to “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” lines that seemed to contain a code for something unnameable but held a great and unwieldy hope.