Was this what he meant, this principal?
But.
“So, let’s go take a look at the campus,” he said. Our daughter was escorted by a smiling young woman, Ruth, off to classes. We would meet at the chapel in an hour. We walked around the campus. It was luxurious with sun. It was as though this brightness had been ordered from a catalogue. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood. We walked, the four of us—me, my husband, the principal, and the invisible one. Or two. What about Jesus’s father, then? Where was he in all of this? How many divine figures walked with us, loving us or not loving us, helping us or abandoning us?
The principal regarded me. He appeared to be full of love, but a love that got a little ragged by the middle of the afternoon. He checked his watch.
“How did you get into this line of work?” I asked the principal.
“My parents,” he said. “I was a missionary kid. They took me to India, Kenya, Guatemala, I helped them build schools. My mother died when I was ten, my father and my sisters and I moved around, building houses for the poor, Jesus was there for me. He was there for me in the middle of the night, I felt him with me.”
He stood beside us, a dark figure against the sun.
“You can peek in the classrooms. We will meet at the chapel in an hour.”
He hurried off. We walked through the campus blanched with light. We peeked into a gym class, and the gym teacher was saying, “Run as fast as you can, run with these great bodies that God gave you!” and the math teacher was saying, “Jesus divided by what equals love?” and the art teacher was pinning up drawings of the Christmas star, the baby looking beatific beneath it.
We stood under the sky, a fragile blue tarp; beneath it, we felt almost invisible. Most people were invisible to other people, except when others saw them and wanted to harm them. The students rushed past us, going to their classes. I felt sorry for them and also envious, for their innocence, for their misunderstanding of what the world could be.
“How did we end up here?” my husband said, looking slightly haunted by the discussion in the math classroom.
How did anyone end up anywhere? I just wanted an answer. Worse, I had none. His brown hair was sticking up a little, and I smoothed it down. We huddled close together, though it did not feel cold outside. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“Will she choose Christ?” he asked, wondering.
I shuddered. What a thought. What would this mean? Everyone did seem content, perhaps scarily so. The teachers, the students, united, aglow. Maybe we were being unfair. This wasn’t conversion through torture, beatings, etc. It was an offering through niceness, through a promise. The feeling of love, at first wanting to pull the person over you like a glove.
But.
An alarm sounded. The students poured out of the buildings into the main quad. We saw our daughter walking with a couple of kids, a boy and girl, chatting.
“She looks happy,” said my husband.
Our daughter waved to us and then ignored us.
The bells chimed; it was time for chapel. If our daughter came here, she would have to come to the chapel each week. We went in and found a seat. We were here as witnesses, that was all. We wanted to feel a love that would protect us all. The students filed into an enormous auditorium. It was an assembly. Our daughter sat with members of her grade.
“Today we’re not having our regular service,” said the principal. “We have some personal testimonies by members of our school community.”
There was a guitar, of course, and songs about Our Father. There was swaying. I noticed a few students texting, which made me love them.
Jason, a junior, stood onstage and talked about his upcoming surgery. He was going to have the scoliosis in his back corrected. He glowed in a yellow spotlight. “I was at the doctor’s office and I found out all the risks of the surgery. I have to say, I was scared. Reading the risks, it said that I could possibly be paralyzed or die.”
He was slight, and his voice cracked. His braces glinted in the light. His fear was a bright, cold ball in my heart.
“I was so scared, I didn’t know what would happen. And then I felt Jesus’s presence beside me. I was full of peace. I knew he was there for me.” His voice swelled, rich, sonorous, as though he were in a play. It was a voice that trumpeted certainty, peace.
There was applause.
There was more singing. I felt a headache coming on, along the back of my neck, and a sharp, sudden cramp in my foot. I could barely stand. I put a hand on my husband’s shoulder, and he looked at me, and I was surprised that there were tears in his eyes, too, and I was shaking out my foot, which felt like a club. I was being transformed into a freak for Jesus to heal, just by being around all this.
I had to get out.
I turned and limped out, pushing open the chapel doors, limped into the jabbing white light of the world. My husband and daughter were still inside. How long could they listen to this? What did they feel about this? What were they going to do?
I stood in the glare. It was so quiet out on the lawn, the machinery of cicadas, while inside there was singing.
I stood alone on the lawn, waiting for who would come out the doors. Would it be the principal? Jesus himself? It could be anyone. I felt like running, but from whom? To whom? There was no car zooming toward me this time; there were just the cicadas. I limped around. The arch of my foot was shot through with pain.
The doors opened; my husband walked out. Inside the chapel, the singing shuddered and rolled. I was standing by a tree, shaking out my foot.
He walked toward me and took my foot. He squeezed it, gently. “Harder,” I said. He squeezed it more. The cramp began to subside. We looked at each other with relief; we were here, we knew each other, even if we didn’t know how to maneuver around life, what was around us. We knew the unholy goldenness in our hearts.
My foot was better. I could stand on it now. And then, through the swarm of students leaving the chapel, came our child. Walking beside another girl. They laughed together. The other girl raised a hand, in a casual gesture of alliance, and vanished.
Our daughter rushed toward us, quickly, stepping so lightly across the lawn.
She nodded when she saw us, enough to just acknowledge us without being caught. We all walked, sort of together, from the crowd.
“What do you think?” I asked her, wondering what she had found here.
She kicked the grass a bit, watching the other kids.
“The kids are nice,” she said. “But.”
“But what?”
“Why were all the kids crying? I was standing there and everyone around me was crying.”
“Maybe they’re sad,” I said.
With this reasoning—perhaps everyone was sad. We all walked together, the three of us, out the gates of the campus, back to the regular world, which awaited us, bubbling, lurking.
“There is that girl at the other school,” she said. “She sat next to me once. Julie.”
“Who’s she?”
“From Singapore. She gave me some potato chips. And a piece of gum.”
She dug into her pocket and brought out a couple of pieces of gum. Doublemint.
“You want some?”
She kindly handed us some gum. We all started chewing. We stood before her like disciples. We were, in fact, disciples of her, our child. We were disciples of each other, of our fingertips and eyelashes and hair, gazing at the long shadows we made under the hot glare of the sky.
We didn’t know what would happen. We didn’t know if Julie would be a friend or not. We didn’t know who around us would be good. We walked out of the Jesus school, away from the principal, the nice kids, the love we were rejecting. It may have worked for them. It may have been their salvation. There were different realities, that’s for sure. But we walked back toward our bruised, strange world instead, the three of us, away from Jesus’s desire to love us. We had this instead, each other, our raw diamond-l
ike somethingness. The air was warm above our scalps. We could smell our minty breath, hear the scrape of our shoes against the gravel parking lot. I walked with them, listening to us.
The Cell Phones
The rabbi told us, as he always did, to turn off our cell phones before he began the service. So I pressed that button on the side of the phone and saw its long face go dark. I was ready to reform, after all. It was, again, Rosh Hashanah. It was the beginning of the New Year, which meant that it was time to contemplate my various failings and imagine how to become a better person. I stood at the cusp of the year, surrounded by other members of Beth-Em Synagogue, everyone clad in their suits and fine dresses and pumps and satin yarmulkes. How elegant we all looked, how shimmery and crisp and presentable. The scents of rose and orange drifted through the air. It seemed that all of us had taken special care dressing this year. We were shoulder to shoulder, we knew each other and we didn’t, and inside, everyone was grimy in a precise, individual way.
We all peered into the ark, its tall oak doors now open. The sheer white curtains floated lightly over the Torahs, adorned in their crimson velvet cases; they looked as though they were ready to go to an expensive restaurant or a wedding. The cantor’s voice soared as he sung the deep notes of “Avinu Malkeinu,” all of us bowing slightly before the ark, trying to appear humble, or concerned, assuming the blank and philosophical expressions particular to the High Holy Days. The other congregants were so focused I envied them. There was the temple secretary, Chaya Weiss, skilled at silence while voices argued over her; her eyes were closed and her eyelid twitched as she, perhaps, viewed her transgressions, whatever they were. There was Max Lowenstein, ten years old and wriggly; he was still for a moment, chin lifted, hands by his sides, as though at a military parade. And there was Gina Gordon, twelve, standing very straight in three-inch heels, glancing, with veiled interest, at everyone from her new height. Everyone appeared to be closer to imagining their better selves. I was trying, too, to imagine this, but my mind kept swerving the wrong way.
I considered the catalogue of my personal failures. There was the time I snapped at the cashier at the supermarket when she refused to give me a student discount even though I was not a student; there was the fact that I never returned the cashmere sweater that Mara Stein loaned me because I found it soft and comforting in a way I could not release. There was the moment I swooped in and stole a parking place from Stan Tamkin, whose truck was adorned with the worst bumper stickers, and who was sitting, unfortunately, just a few rows away from me. There was the time I yelled at those who had done nothing really and were just in the way of my anger, and there were the many times I woke up, read the newspaper, and felt like a pancake of defeat. I closed my eyes and tried to see myself as different. I wished I could move through this bruised, shoddy world like a giant, in a way that was grand and brave and perhaps even helpful, but whenever I tried to imagine this version of myself, my mind slammed shut. I was a dwarf of bitterness. And I was not able to access this better self, no, for I was mired in my own personal grievances.
I wanted. I wanted everything I shouldn’t; I wanted a load of cash and a Jacuzzi tub in our bathroom and everyone to stop yelling and I wanted everyone in this nation to shut up and listen to me. Why couldn’t everyone just listen to me? I wanted sometimes to escape to another life and I wanted to freeze time so my children and husband would always be who they were at certain perfect moments and I wanted my family and friends to appreciate the love I wanted to lavish on them, but everyone kind of preferred their own sort of love, which was their choice, naturally, but it sometimes made me sad. I wanted my parents and an aunt and some friends who were dead to be alive again, and I could not get accustomed to, and even bitterly resented, their deadness. I wanted my brother to stop being mad because I had taken the best chandelier out of our parents’ dining room. I wanted the cats to stop napping and clean up the house. I wanted to eat ten Entenmann’s coffee cakes and not gain a pound. I wanted to climb back into my mother and try again to be born. I wanted to go completely deaf when some people were talking, and I wanted others to simply vanish. I wanted to ram my car into the minivan of Angela Price, whose son bullied mine.
I wanted, how I wanted to grab hold of and repair my broken nation, before it slipped away and vanished.
I looked at the congregants standing around me. They all gazed at the ark, faces slowly starting to open. Everyone appeared to be reasonably alert. I did not know what any of them wanted from themselves, or from our nation. But I knew what I did.
I wanted a nation in which our leaders never lied and were elected to office because of their love for and adherence to the truth. I wanted a nation where, if people got sick, they would be cared for, swiftly, tenderly, and the only concern would be that they would get well. I wanted a nation that did not conjure suspicion about entire groups of people, and did not assault or kill them, a nation where everyone could look each other, kindly, in the eye and say hello. I wanted a nation that did not just roll around, naked and panting, in piles of money, and where people who held fistfuls of it were actually able to say, “Here! You have some, too.” I wanted a nation that did not order those who wanted to be here to just get out, go away, and brutally cart them off, but instead welcomed them, and learned and kindly said all their names. I wanted a nation where women could stroll leisurely through dark parking lots, city streets, everywhere, and never look behind them because they would never have any fear. I wanted a nation where a person could go to school or shopping or wherever and never worry about whether it was smarter to dive under a chair or run. I wanted a nation where people did not view one another as zombies because they were not zombies, because they wanted the best not just for themselves but also for each other. I wanted a nation where people loved one another, even strangers, because they had that much feeling inside of them, because they were that alive.
I sort of wanted to repent but really I wanted others to repent. I wanted the whole damn world to repent, to stop behaving terribly, and just, for once, be good.
Then a cell phone started to ring.
It was a cheery, slightly irritating tune, the unmistakable melody of a device that wanted you to grab it and make it stop playing. I thought, what idiot left his cell phone on, and looked around, and then, I realized with a jab of horror that the melody was coming from somewhere around my feet.
The ringing phone was mine.
I grabbed my bag. How could my phone be on? I had turned it off. We were in the middle of services! I was not this dumb. My hands were shaking, and I fumbled with the phone, forgetting how to turn it off. The damn thing kept ringing. My hands were as clumsy as enormous mitts, and somehow could not figure out how to silence the phone, so, instead, I answered it.
“Marry me,” said a stranger’s voice.
The members standing in the pew behind me glared. The cantor’s voice soared, grand, through the room.
“Uh, wrong number,” I whispered.
“Please. You know I’d be good,” said the voice.
I was trembling. Everyone in the congregation knew the phone belonged to me. They were concentrating very intently on their holiness—oh the pure focus of their blank faces!—and I had interrupted them.
“Stop!” I said, and hung up. I pressed the button on the side, the Power button, so the phone would turn off and I could get back to my quest for a higher self.
The phone rang again.
What the hell? The phone was off. Seriously. Now the cantor was looking, none too happily, at me.
I answered it. “Yes?” I whispered.
“I’m calling about the job,” said a woman, sounding nervous.
“There’s no job,” I hissed.
“But I need it!” she said. “Please! Give it to me! Now!”
I hung up.
I looked around. The activity by the ark had ceased. There was no pretense of worship anymore.
I shrank to a puddle of shame. Happy Rosh Has
hanah from me, the idiot whose cell phone had gone off. Twice.
“Honey, don’t you know how to turn your phone off?” asked Eva, whose husband died a year ago.
I held out the phone, as evidence. Eva’s best friend, Harriett, who ran a catering business, sat beside her; skeptically, she eyed the phone.
“Apparently, she does not,” Harriet murmured to Eva.
“It’s off!” I said. “I swear!”
I could feel everyone staring at me. How had I been so thoughtless, so careless? Didn’t I see how others were trying to better themselves? Why couldn’t I? Did I want to? Or was I, perhaps, a saboteur of others’ desire to improve?
Another phone rang.
But this time it wasn’t mine. Thank all gods everywhere. Everyone looked around. Another tinny melody erupted across the room. A woman gasped and rummaged through her purse. She brought it out, the phone happily ringing away.
“It was off!” she cried. But she answered it. On speaker.
“I got a bad diagnosis,” a man’s voice said. “I’ve got to quit my job. And hire someone to take my place. But to hell with it! I won’t—”
Another phone rang. Then another. The rabbi and cantor, the temple president, various high-ranking members stood bewildered, suddenly ineffectual in the presence of these spirited ring tones. All the phones were going off at once, and the entire congregation seemed to be scrambling through their purses and pockets, pulling out their phones and answering them.
My phone was ringing again, too. Each time I shut it off, it burst into its fierce song. Each time it rang, a person wanted something. Urgently. Or they were going to act.
“If the elevator keeps breaking I’m suing the building. Now.”
“If you tweet those photos of yourself I swear I will take your phone and smash it against the wall—”
“Stop,” I kept saying, and snapping my phone off. Would they just shut up already? Who wanted to hear the world’s complaints? The world was mad, as in disappointed, humiliated, hurt, resentful, confused, lost, and everyone had personal solutions to this, most of which were inadvisable. They were human, most solutions were inadvisable. All of the congregants were answering their phones and going pale. No one was listening to the calls but instead, everyone was annoyed and confused by the rush of the ring tones. But the calls kept coming, on and on, and the pleas became more high-pitched and urgent. The cell phones sang and bleeped and whirred and filled the sanctuary with an unholy ruckus, and no one knew what to do.
The New Order Page 20
