by Tom Perrotta
“When Shoshana said we drink to get through the days,” Mark says, “she was kidding about the drinking.”
“We don’t drink much,” Shoshana says.
“It’s smoking that she means,” he says.
“We still get high,” Shoshana says. “I mean, all the time.”
“Hasidim!” Deb screams. “You’re not allowed!”
“Everyone does in Israel. It’s like the sixties there,” Mark says. “It’s the highest country in the world. Worse than Holland and India and Thailand put together. Worse than anywhere, even Argentina—though they may have us tied.”
“Well, maybe that’s why the kids aren’t interested in alcohol,” I say.
“Do you want to get high now?” Deb says. And we all three look at her. Me, with surprise. And those two with straight longing.
“We didn’t bring,” Shoshana says. “Though it’s pretty rare anyone at customs peeks under the wig.”
“Maybe you guys can find your way into the glaucoma underground over at Carmel Lake,” I say. “I’m sure that place is rife with it.”
“That’s funny,” Mark says.
“I’m funny,” I say, now that we’re all getting on.
“We’ve got pot,” Deb says.
“We do?” I say. “I don’t think we do.”
Deb looks at me and bites at the cuticle on her pinkie.
“You’re not secretly getting high all these years?” I say. I really don’t feel well at all.
“Our son,” Deb says. “He has pot.”
“Our son?”
“Trevor,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “I know which one.”
It’s a lot for one day, that kind of news. And it feels to me a lot like betrayal. Like my wife’s old secret and my son’s new secret are bound up together, and I’ve somehow been wronged. Also, I’m not one to recover quickly from any kind of slight from Deb—not when there are people around. I really need to talk stuff out. Some time alone, even five minutes, would fix it. But it’s super apparent that Deb doesn’t need any time alone with me. She doesn’t seem troubled at all. What she seems is focused. She’s busy at the counter, using a paper tampon wrapper to roll a joint.
“It’s an emergency-preparedness method we came up with in high school,” Shoshana says. “The things teenage girls will do when they’re desperate.”
“Do you remember that nice boy that we used to smoke in front of?” Deb says. “He’d just watch us. There’d be six or seven of us in a circle, girls and boys not touching—we were so religious. Isn’t that crazy?” Deb is talking to me, as Shoshana and Mark don’t think it’s crazy at all. “The only place we touched was passing the joint, at the thumbs. And this boy, we had a nickname for him.”
“Passover!” Shoshana yells.
“Yes,” Deb says, “that’s it. All we ever called him was Passover. Because every time the joint got to him he’d just pass it over to the next one of us. Passover Rand.”
Shoshana takes the joint and lights it with a match, sucking deep. “It’s a miracle when I remember anything these days,” she says. “After my first was born, I forgot half of everything I knew. And then half again with each one after. Just last night, I woke up in a panic. I couldn’t remember if there were fifty-two cards in a deck or fifty-two weeks in a year. The recall errors—I’m up all night worrying over them, just waiting for the Alzheimer’s to kick in.”
“It’s not that bad,” Mark tells her. “It’s only everyone on one side of your family that has it.”
“That’s true,” she says, passing her husband the joint. “The other side is blessed only with dementia. Anyway, which is it? Weeks or cards?”
“Same, same,” Mark says, taking a hit.
When it’s Deb’s turn, she holds the joint and looks at me, like I’m supposed to nod or give her permission in some husbandly anxiety-absolving way. But instead of saying, “Go ahead,” I pretty much bark at Deb. “When were you going to tell me about our son?”
At that, Deb takes a long hit, holding it deep, like an old pro.
“Really, Deb. How could you not tell me you knew?”
Deb walks over and hands me the joint. She blows the smoke in my face, not aggressive, just blowing.
“I’ve only known five days,” she says. “I was going to tell you. I just wasn’t sure how, or if I should talk to Trevy first, maybe give him a chance,” she says.
“A chance to what?” I ask.
“To let him keep it as a secret between us. To let him know he could have my trust if he promised to stop.”
“But he’s the son,” I say. “I’m the father. Even if it’s a secret with him, it should be a double secret between me and you. I should always get to know—even if I pretend not to know—any secret with him.”
“Do that double part again,” Mark says. But I ignore him.
“That’s how it’s always been,” I say to Deb. And, because I’m desperate and unsure, I follow it up with “Hasn’t it?”
I mean, we really trust each other, Deb and I. And I can’t remember feeling like so much has hung on one question in a long time. I’m trying to read her face, and something complex is going on, some formulation. And then she sits right there on the floor, at my feet.
“Oh, my God,” she says. “I’m so fucking high. Like instantly. Like, like,” and then she starts laughing. “Like, Mike,” she says. “Like, kike,” she says, turning completely serious. “Oh, my God, I’m really messed up.”
“We should have warned you,” Shoshana says.
As she says this, I’m holding my first hit in, and already trying to fight off the paranoia that comes rushing behind that statement.
“Warned us what?” I say, my voice high, and the smoke still sweet in my nose.
“This isn’t your father’s marijuana,” Mark says. “The THC levels. One hit of this new hydroponic stuff, it’s like if maybe you smoked a pound of the stuff we had when we were kids.”
“I feel it,” I say. And I do. I sit down with Deb on the floor and take her hands. I feel nice. Though I’m not sure if I thought that or said it, so I try it again, making sure it’s out loud. “I feel nice,” I say.
“I found the pot in the laundry hamper,” Deb says. “Leave it to a teenage boy to think that’s the best place to hide something. His clean clothes show up folded in his room, and it never occurs to him that someone empties that hamper. To him, it’s the loneliest, most forgotten space in the world. Point is I found an Altoids tin at the bottom, stuffed full.” Deb gives my hands a squeeze. “Are we good now?”
“We’re good,” I say. And it feels like we’re a team again, like it’s us against them. Because Deb says, “Are you sure you guys are allowed to smoke pot that comes out of a tin that held non-kosher candy? I really don’t know if that’s okay.” And it’s just exactly the kind of thing I’m thinking.
“First of all, we’re not eating it. We’re smoking it,” Shoshana says. “And even so, it’s cold contact, so it’s probably all right either way.”
“‘Cold contact’?” I say.
“It’s a thing,” Shoshana says. “Just forget about it and get up off the floor. Chop-chop.” And they each offer us a hand and get us standing. “Come, sit back at the table,” Shoshana says.
“I’ll tell you,” Mark says. “That’s got to be the number-one most annoying thing about being Hasidic in the outside world. Worse than the rude stuff that gets said is the constant policing by civilians. Everywhere we go, people are checking on us. Ready to make some sort of liturgical citizen’s arrest.”
“Strangers!” Shoshana says. “Just the other day, on the way in from the airport. Yuri pulled into a McDonald’s to pee, and some guy in a trucker hat came up to him as he went in and said, ‘You allowed to go in there, brother?’ Just like that.”
“Not true!” Deb says.
“It’s not that I don’t see the fun in that,” Mark says. “The allure. You know, we’ve got Mormons in Jerusalem. They’v
e got a base there. A seminary. The rule is—the deal with the government—they can have their place, but they can’t do outreach. No proselytizing. Anyway, I do some business with one of their guys.”
“From Utah?” Deb says.
“From Idaho. His name is Jebediah, for real—do you believe it?”
“No, Yerucham and Shoshana,” I say. “Jebediah is a very strange name.” Mark rolls his eyes at that, handing me what’s left of the joint. Without even asking, he gets up and gets the tin and reaches into his wife’s purse for another tampon. And I’m a little less comfortable with this than with the white bread, with a guest coming into the house and smoking up all our son’s pot. Deb must be thinking something similar, as she says, “After this story, I’m going to text Trev and make sure he’s not coming back anytime soon.”
“So when Jeb’s at our house,” Mark says, “when he comes by to eat and pours himself a Coke, I do that same religious-police thing. I can’t resist. I say, ‘Hey, Jeb, you allowed to have that?’ People don’t mind breaking their own rules, but they’re real strict about someone else’s.”
“So are they allowed to have Coke?” Deb says.
“I don’t know,” Mark says. “All Jeb ever says back is ‘You’re thinking of coffee, and mind your own business, either way.’”
And then my Deb. She just can’t help herself. “You heard about the scandal? The Mormons going through the Holocaust list.”
“Like in Dead Souls,” I say, explaining. “Like in the Gogol book, but real.”
“Do you think we read that?” Mark says. “As Hasidim, or before?”
“They took the records of the dead,” Deb says, “and they started running through them. They took these people who died as Jews and started converting them into Mormons. Converting the six million against their will.”
“And this is what keeps an American Jew up at night?” Mark says.
“What does that mean?” Deb says.
“It means—” Mark says.
But Shoshana interrupts him. “Don’t tell them what it means, Yuri. Just leave it unmeant.”
“We can handle it,” I say. “We are interested, even, in handling it.”
“Your son, he seems like a nice boy.”
“Do not talk about their son,” Shoshana says.
“Do not talk about our son,” Deb says. This time I reach across and lay a hand on her elbow.
“Talk,” I say.
“He does not,” Mark says, “seem Jewish to me.”
“How can you say that?” Deb says. “What is wrong with you?” But Deb’s upset draws less attention than my response. I’m laughing so hard that everyone turns toward me.
“What?” Mark says.
“Jewish to you?” I say. “The hat, the beard, the blocky shoes. A lot of pressure, I’d venture, to look Jewish to you. Like, say, maybe Ozzy Osbourne, or the guys from Kiss, like them telling Paul Simon, ‘You do not look like a musician to me.’”
“It is not about the outfit,” Mark says. “It’s about building life in a vacuum. Do you know what I saw on the drive over here? Supermarket, supermarket, adult bookstore, supermarket, supermarket, firing range.”
“Floridians do like their guns and porn,” I say. “And their supermarkets.”
“What I’m trying to say, whether you want to take it seriously or not, is that you can’t build Judaism only on the foundation of one terrible crime,” Mark says. “It’s about this obsession with the Holocaust as a necessary sign of identity. As your only educational tool. Because for the children there is no connection otherwise. Nothing Jewish that binds.”
“Wow, that’s offensive,” Deb says. “And closed-minded. There is such a thing as Jewish culture. One can live a culturally rich life.”
“Not if it’s supposed to be a Jewish life. Judaism is a religion. And with religion comes ritual. Culture is nothing. Culture is some construction of the modern world. It is not fixed; it is ever changing, and a weak way to bind generations. It’s like taking two pieces of metal, and instead of making a nice weld you hold them together with glue.”
“What does that even mean?” Deb says. “Practically.”
Mark raises a finger to make his point, to educate. “In Jerusalem we don’t need to busy ourselves with symbolic efforts to keep our memories in place. Because we live exactly as our parents lived before the war. And this serves us in all things, in our relationships too, in our marriages and parenting.”
“Are you saying your marriage is better than ours?” Deb says. “Really? Just because of the rules you live by?”
“I’m saying your husband would not have the long face, worried his wife is keeping secrets. And your son, he would not get into the business of smoking without first coming to you. Because the relationships, they are defined. They are clear.”
“Because they are welded together,” I say, “and not glued.”
“Yes,” he says. “And I bet Shoshana agrees.” But Shoshana is distracted. She is working carefully with an apple and a knife. She is making a little apple pipe, all the tampons gone.
“Did your daughters?” Deb says. “If they tell you everything, did they come to you first, before they smoked?”
“Our daughters do not have the taint of the world we grew up in. They have no interest in such things.”
“So you think,” I say.
“So I know,” he says. “Our concerns are different, our worries.”
“Let’s hear ’em,” Deb says.
“Let’s not,” Shoshana says. “Honestly, we’re drunk, we’re high, we are having a lovely reunion.”
“Every time you tell him not to talk,” I say, “it makes me want to hear what he’s got to say even more.”
“Our concern,” Mark says, “is not the past Holocaust. It is the current one. The one that takes more than fifty percent of the Jews of this generation. Our concern is intermarriage. It’s the Holocaust that’s happening now. You don’t need to be worrying about some Mormons doing hocus-pocus on the murdered six million. You need to worry that your son marries a Jew.”
“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,” De
b 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.”