by Lorrie Moore
“Oh, my God,” Deb says. “Are you calling intermarriage a Holocaust?”
“You ask my feeling, that’s my feeling. But this, no, it does not exactly apply to you, except in the example you set for the boy. Because you’re Jewish, your son, he is as Jewish as me. No more, no less.”
“I went to yeshiva too, Born-Again Harry! You don’t need to explain the rules to me.”
“Did you just call me ‘Born-Again Harry’?” Mark asks.
“I did,” Deb says. And she and he, they start to laugh at that. They think “Born-Again Harry” is the funniest thing they’ve heard in a while. And Shoshana laughs, and then I laugh, because laughter is infectious—and it is doubly so when you’re high.
“You don’t really think our family, my lovely, beautiful son, is headed for a Holocaust, do you?” Deb says. “Because that would really cast a pall on this beautiful day.”
“No, I don’t,” Mark says. “It’s a lovely house and a lovely family, a beautiful home that you’ve made for that strapping young man. You’re a real balabusta,” Mark says.
“That makes me happy,” Deb says. And she tilts her head nearly ninety degrees to show her happy, sweet smile. “Can I hug you? I’d really like to give you a hug.”
“No,” Mark says, though he says it really politely. “But you can hug my wife. How about that?”
“That’s a great idea,” Deb says. Shoshana gets up and hands the loaded apple to me, and I smoke from the apple as the two women hug a tight, deep, dancing-back-and-forth hug, tilting this way and that, so, once again, I’m afraid they might fall.
“It is a beautiful day,” I say.
“It is,” Mark says. And both of us look out the window, and both of us watch the perfect clouds in a perfect sky, so that we’re both staring out as the sky suddenly darkens. It is a change so abrupt that the ladies undo their hug to watch.
“It’s like that here,” Deb says. And the clouds open up and torrential tropical rain drops straight down, battering. It is loud against the roof, and loud against the windows, and the fronds of the palm trees bend, and the floaties in the pool jump as the water boils.
Shoshana goes to the window. And Mark passes Deb the apple and goes to the window. “Really, it’s always like this here?” Shoshana says.
“Sure,” I say. “Every day. Stops as quick as it starts.”
And both of them have their hands pressed up against the window. And they stay like that for some time, and when Mark turns around, harsh guy, tough guy, we see that he is weeping.
“You do not know,” he says. “I forget what it’s like to live in a place rich with water. This is a blessing above all others.”
“If you had what we had,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, wiping his eyes.
“Can we go out?” Shoshana says. “In the rain?”
“Of course,” Deb says. Then Shoshana tells me to close my eyes. Only me. And I swear I think she’s going to be stark naked when she calls, “Open up.”
She’s taken off her wig is all, and she’s wearing one of Trev’s baseball caps in its place.
“I’ve only got the one wig this trip,” she says. “If Trev won’t mind.”
“He won’t mind,” Deb says. And this is how the four of us find ourselves in the back yard, on a searingly hot day, getting pounded by all this cool, cool rain. It’s just about the best feeling in the world. And, I have to say, Shoshana looks twenty years younger in that hat.
We do not talk in the rain. We are too busy frolicking and laughing and jumping around. And that’s how it happens that I’m holding Mark’s hand and sort of dancing, and Deb is holding Shoshana’s hand, and they’re doing their own kind of jig. And when I take Deb’s hand, though neither Mark nor Shoshana is touching the other, somehow we’ve formed a broken circle. We’ve started dancing our own kind of hora in the rain.
It is the silliest and freest and most glorious I can remember feeling in years. Who would think that’s what I’d be saying with these strict, suffocatingly austere people visiting our house? And then my Deb, my love, once again she is thinking what I’m thinking, and she says, face up into the rain, all of us spinning, “Are you sure this is okay, Shoshana? That it’s not mixed dancing? I don’t want anyone feeling bad after.”
“We’ll be just fine,” Shoshana says. “We will live with the consequences.” The question slows us, and stops us, though no one has yet let go.
“It’s like the old joke,” I say. Without waiting for anyone to ask which one, I say, “Why don’t Hasidim have sex standing up?”
“Why?” Shoshana says.
“Because it might lead to mixed dancing.”
Deb and Shoshana pretend to be horrified as we let go of hands, as we recognize that the moment is over, the rain disappearing as quickly as it came. Mark stands there staring into the sky, lips pressed tight. “That joke is very, very old,” he says. “And mixed dancing makes me think of mixed nuts, and mixed grill, and insalata mista. The sound of ‘mixed dancing’ has made me wildly hungry. And I’m going to panic if the only kosher thing in the house is that loaf of bleached American bread.”
“You have the munchies,” I say.
“Diagnosis correct,” he says.
Deb starts clapping at that, tiny claps, her hands held to her chest in prayer. She says to him, absolutely beaming, “You will not even believe what riches await.”
The four of us stand in the pantry, soaking wet, hunting through the shelves and dripping on the floor. “Have you ever seen such a pantry?” Shoshana says, reaching her arms out. “It’s gigantic.” It is indeed large, and it is indeed stocked, an enormous amount of food, and an enormous selection of sweets, befitting a home that is often host to a swarm of teenage boys.
“Are you expecting a nuclear winter?” Shoshana says.
“I’ll tell you what she’s expecting,” I say. “You want to know how Holocaust-obsessed she really is? I mean, to what degree?”
“To no degree,” Deb says. “We are done with the Holocaust.”
“Tell us,” Shoshana says.
“She’s always plotting our secret hiding place,” I say.
“No kidding,” Shoshana says.
“Like, look at this. At the pantry, with a bathroom next to it, and the door to the garage. If you sealed it all up—like put drywall at the entrance to the den—you’d never suspect. If you covered that door inside the garage up good with, I don’t know—if you hung your tools in front of it and hid hinges behind, maybe leaned the bikes and the mower against it, you’d have this closed area, with running water and a toilet and all this food. I mean, if someone sneaked into the garage to replenish things, you could rent out the house. Put in another family without their having any idea.”
“Oh, my God,” Shoshana says. “My short-term memory may be gone from having all those children—”
“And from the smoking,” I say.
“And from that too. But I remember from when we were kids,” Shoshana says, turning to Deb. “You were always getting me to play games like that. To pick out spaces. And even worse, even darker—”
“Don’t,” Deb says.
“I know what you’re going to say,” I tell her, and I’m honestly excited. “The game, yes? She played that crazy game with you?”
“No,” Deb says. “Enough. Let it go.”
And Mark—who is utterly absorbed in studying kosher certifications, who is tearing through hundred-calorie snack packs and eating handfuls of roasted peanuts, and who has said nothing since we entered the pantry except “What’s a Fig Newman?”—he stops and says, “I want to play this game.”
“It’s not a game,” Deb says.
And I’m happy to hear her say that, as it’s just what I’ve been trying to get her to admit for years. That it’s not a game. That it’s dead serious, and a kind of preparation, and an active pathology that I prefer not to indulge.
“It’s the Anne Frank game,” Shoshana says. “Right?”
Seeing how upset my wife is, I do my best to defend her. I say, “No, it’s not a game. It’s just what we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank.”
“How do we play this non-game?” Mark says. “What do we do?”
“It’s the Righteous Gentile game,” Shoshana says.
“It’s Who Will Hide Me?” I say.
“In the event of a second Holocaust,” Deb says, giving in. “It’s a serious exploration, a thought experiment that we engage in.”
“That you play,” Shoshana says.
“That, in the event of an American Holocaust, we sometimes talk about which of our Christian friends would hide us.”
“I don’t get it,” Mark says.
“Of course you do,” Shoshana says. “It’s like this. If there was a Shoah, if it happened again—say we were in Jerusalem, and it’s 1941 and the Grand Mufti got his way, what would Jebediah do?”
“What could he do?” Mark says.
“He could hide us. He could risk his life and his family’s and everyone’s around him. That’s what the game is: would he—for real—would he do that for you?”
“He’d be good for that, a Mormon,” Mark says. “Forget this pantry. They have to keep a year of food stored in case of the Rapture, or something like that. Water too. A year of supplies. Or maybe it’s that they have sex through a sheet. No, wait. I think that’s supposed to be us.”
“All right,” Deb says. “Let’s not play. Really, let’s go back to the kitchen. I can order in from the glatt kosher place. We can eat outside, have a real dinner and not just junk.”
“No, no,” Mark says. “I’ll play. I’ll take it seriously.”
“So would the guy hide you?” I say.
“The kids too?” Mark says. “I’m supposed to pretend that in Jerusalem he’s got a hidden motel or something where he can put the twelve of us?”
“Yes,” Shoshana says. “In their seminary or something. Sure.”
Mark thinks about this for a long, long time. He eats Fig Newmans and considers, and you can tell that he’s taking it seriously—serious to the extreme.
“Yes,” Mark says, looking choked up. “Jeb would do that for us. He would risk it all.”
Shoshana nods. “Now you go,” she says to us. “You take a turn.”
“But we don’t know any of the same people anymore,” Deb says. “We usually just talk about the neighbors.”
“Our across-the-street neighbors,” I tell them. “They’re the perfect example. Because the husband, Mitch, he would hide us. I know it. He’d lay down his life for what’s right. But that wife of his.”
“Yes,” Deb says. “Mitch would hide us, but Gloria, she’d buckle. When he was at work one day, she’d turn us in.”
“You could play against yourselves,” Shoshana says. “What if one of you wasn’t Jewish? Would you hide the other?”
“I’ll do it,” I say. “I’ll be the Gentile, because I could pass best. A grown woman with an ankle-length denim skirt in her closet—they’d catch you in a flash.”
“Fine,” Deb says. And I stand up straight, put my shoulders back, like maybe I’m in a lineup. I stand there with my chin raised so my wife can study me. So she can decide if her husband really has what it takes. Would I have the strength, would I care enough—and it is not a light question, not a throwaway question—to risk my life to save her and our son?
Deb stares, and Deb smiles, and gives me a little push to my chest. “Of course he would,” Deb says. She takes the half stride that’s between us and gives me a tight hug that she doesn’t release. “Now you,” Deb says. “You and Yuri go.”
“How does that even make sense?” Mark says. “Even for imagining.”
“Sh-h-h,” Shoshana says. “Just stand over there and be a good Gentile while I look.”
“But if I weren’t Jewish I wouldn’t be me.”
“That’s for sure,” I say.
“He agrees,” Mark says. “We wouldn’t even be married. We wouldn’t have kids.”
“Of course you can imagine it,” Shoshana says. “Look,” she says, and goes over and closes the pantry door. “Here we are, caught in South Florida for the second Holocaust. You’re not Jewish, and you’ve got the three of us hiding in your pantry.”
“But look at me!” he says.
“I’ve got a fix,” I say. “You’re a background singer for ZZ Top. You know that band?”
Deb lets go of me so she can give my arm a slap.
“Really,” Shoshana says. “Look at the three of us like it’s your house and we’re your charges, locked up in this room.”
“And what’re you going to do while I do that?” Mark says.
“I’m going to look at you looking at us. I’m going to imagine.”
“Okay,” he says. “Nu, get to it. I will stand, you imagine.”
And that’s what we do, the four of us. We stand there playing our roles, and we really get into it. I can see Deb seeing him, and him seeing us, and Shoshana just staring at her husband.
We stand there so long I can’t tell how much time has passed, though the light changes ever so slightly—the sun outside again dimming—in the crack under the pantry door.
“So would I hide you?” he says. And for the first time that day he reaches out, as my Deb would, and puts his hand to his wife’s hand. “Would I, Shoshi?”
And you can tell that Shoshana is thinking of her kids, though that’s not part of the scenario. You can tell that she’s changed part of the imagining. And she says, after a pause, yes, but she’s not laughing. She says yes, but to him it sounds as it does to us, so that he is now asking and asking. But wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I hide you? Even if it was life and death—if it would spare you, and they’d kill me alone for doing it? Wouldn’t I?
Shoshana pulls back her hand.
She does not say it. And he does not say it. And of the four of us no one will say what cannot be said—that this wife believes her husband would not hide her. What to do? What will come of it? And so we stand like that, the four of us trapped in that pantry. Afraid to open the door and let out what we’ve locked inside.
2012
JULIE OTSUKA
Diem Perdidi
from Granta
JULIE OTSUKA was born in 1962 and raised in California. She studied art at Yale and began a career as a painter before writing fiction. She received her MFA from Columbia.
Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, tells the story of the internment of a Japanese American family. She is also the author of The Buddha in the Attic.
Otsuka is a recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Asian American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, France’s Prix Femina Étranger, an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A critic in Granta likened her writing to “a kind of hypnosis or meditation” due to the rhythmic and repetitive sentence structure.
Julie Otsuka lives in New York City.
★
SHE REMEMBERS HER name. She remembers the name of the president. She remembers the name of the president’s dog. She remembers what city she lives in. And on which street. And in which house. The one with the big olive tree where the road takes a turn. She remembers what year it is. She remembers the season. She remembers the day on which you were born. She remembers the daughter who was born before you—She had your father’s nose, that was the first thing I noticed about her—but she does not remember that daughter’s name. She remembers the name of the man she did not marry—Frank—and she keeps his letters in a drawer by her bed. She remembers that you once had a husband, but she refuses to remember your ex-husband’s name. That man, she calls him.
She does not remember how she got the bruises on her arms or going for a walk with you earlier this morning. She does not remember bending over, during that walk, and plucking a flower from a neighbor’s front yard and slipping it into her hair. Maybe your father will kiss me now. She does not
remember what she ate for dinner last night, or when she last took her medicine. She does not remember to drink enough water. She does not remember to comb her hair.
She remembers the rows of dried persimmons that once hung from the eaves of her mother’s house in Berkeley. They were the most beautiful shade of orange. She remembers that your father loves peaches. She remembers that every Sunday morning, at ten, he takes her for a drive down to the sea in the brown car. She remembers that every evening, right before the eight o’clock news, he sets out two fortune cookies on a paper plate and announces to her that they are having a party. She remembers that on Mondays he comes home from the college at four, and if he is even five minutes late she goes out to the gate and begins to wait for him. She remembers which bedroom is hers and which is his. She remembers that the bedroom that is now hers was once yours. She remembers that it wasn’t always like this.
She remembers the first line of the song “How High the Moon.” She remembers the Pledge of Allegiance. She remembers her Social Security number. She remembers her best friend Jean’s telephone number even though Jean has been dead for six years. She remembers that Margaret is dead. She remembers that Betty is dead. She remembers that Grace has stopped calling. She remembers that her own mother died nine years ago, while spading the soil in her garden, and she misses her more and more every day. It doesn’t go away. She remembers the number assigned to her family by the government right after the start of the war: 13611. She remembers being sent away to the desert with her mother and brother during the fifth month of that war and taking her first ride on a train. She remembers the day they came home: September 9, 1945. She remembers the sound of the wind hissing through the sagebrush. She remembers the scorpions and red ants. She remembers the taste of dust.
