by Tom Perrotta
“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.”
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�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.
MARY GAITSKILL
The Other Place
FROM The New Yorker
MY SON, Douglas, loves to play with toy guns. He is thirteen. He loves video games in which people get killed. He loves violence on TV, especially if it’s funny. How did this happen? The way everything does, of course. One thing follows another, naturally.
Naturally, he looks like me: shorter than average, with a fine build, hazel eyes, and light brown hair. Like me, he has a speech impediment and a condition called “essential tremor” that causes involuntary hand movements, which make him look more fragile than he is. He hates reading, but he is bright. He is interested in crows because he heard on a nature show that they are one of the only species that are more intelligent than they need to be to survive. He does beautiful, precise drawings of crows.
Mostly, though, he draws pictures of men holding guns. Or men hanging from nooses. Or men cutting up other men with chainsaws—in these pictures there are no faces, just figures holding chainsaws and figures being cut in two, with blood spraying out.
My wife, Marla, says that this is fine, as long as we balance it out with other things—dinners as a family, discussions of current events, playing sports, exposure to art and nature. But I don’t know. Douglas and I were sitting together in the living room last week, half watching the TV and checking email, when an advertisement from a movie flashed across the screen: it was called Captivity and it showed a terrified blond girl clinging to the bars of a cage, a tear running down her face. Doug didn’t speak or move. But I could feel his fascination, the suddenly deepening quality of it. I don’t doubt he could feel mine. We sat there and felt it together.
And then she was there, the woman in the car. In the room with my son, her black hair, her hard laugh, the wrinkled skin under her hard eyes, the sudden blood filling the white of her blue eye. There was excited music on the TV and then the ad ended. My son’s attention went elsewhere; she lingered.
When I was a kid, I liked walking through neighborhoods alone, looking at houses, seeing what people did to make them homes: the gardens, the statuary, the potted plants, the wind chimes. Late at night, if I couldn’t sleep, I would sometimes slip out my bedroom window and just spend an hour or so walking around by myself. I loved it, especially in late spring, when it was starting to be warm and there were night sounds; crickets, certain birds, the whirring of bats, the occasional whooshing car, some lonely person’s TV. I loved the mysterious darkness of trees, the way they moved against the sky if there was wind—big and heavy movements, but delicate too, in all the subtle, reactive leaves. In that soft, blurry weather, people slept with their windows open; it was a small town and they weren’t afraid. Some houses—I’m thinking of two houses in particular, where the Legges and the Myers lived, respectively—I would actually hang around in their yards late at night. Once when I was sitting on the Legges’ front porch, thinking about stealing a piece of their garden statuary, their cat came and sat with me. I petted him, and when I got up and went for the statuary, he followed me with his tail up. Their statues were elves, not corny, cute elves, but sinister, wicked-looking elves, and I had thought that one would look good in my room. But they were too heavy, and so I just moved them around the yard.
I did things like that, dumb pranks that could only irritate those that noticed them. Rearranging statuary, leaving weird stuff in mailboxes, looking into windows to see where the family had dinner or left their personal things lying around—or, in the case of the Legges, where their daughter, Jenna, slept. She was on the ground floor, her bed so close to the window that I could watch her chest rise and fall the way I watched the grass on their lawn stirring in the wind. The worst thing I did, probably, was putting a giant marble in the Myers’ gas tank, which could’ve really have caused a problem if it had rolled over the gas hole while one of the Myers was driving on the highway, but I guess it never did.
Mostly, though, I wasn’t interested in causing that kind of problem. I just wanted to sit and watch, to touch other people’s things, to drink in their lives. I suspect that it’s some version of these same impulses that makes me the most successful real estate agent in the Hudson Valley now: the ability to know what physical objects and surroundings will most please a person’s sense of identity and make him feel at home.
I wish that Doug had this sensitivity to the physical world, and the ability to drink from it. I’ve tried different things with him; I used to throw the ball with him out in the yard, but he got tired of that; he hates hiking and likes biking only if he has to get someplace. What’s working now a little bit is fishing; fly-fishing hip deep in the Hudson. An ideal picture of normal childhood.
I believe I had a normal childhood. But you have to go pretty far afield to find something people would call abnormal now these days. My parents were divorced, and then my mother had boyfriends—but this was true of about half the kids I knew. She and my father fought, in the house when they were together, and they went on fighting, on the phone, after they were separated—loud, screaming fights sometimes. I didn’t love it, but I understood it; people fight. I was never afraid that he was going to hurt her, or me. I had nightmares occasionally, in which he turned into a murderer and came after me, chasing me, getting closer, until I fell down, not able to make my legs move right. But I’ve read that this is one of those primitive fears that everybody secretly has; it bears little relation to what actually happens.
What actually happened: he forced me to play golf with him for hours when I visited on Saturday, even though it seemed only to make him miserable. He’d curse himself if he missed a shot and then that would make him miss another one and he would curse himself more. He’d whisper, “Oh, God,” and wipe his face if anything went wrong, or even if it didn’t, as if just being there was an ordeal. He’d make these noises sometimes, these painful grunts when he picked up the sack of clubs, and these noises put me on edge and even disgusted me.
Though now, of course, I see it differently. I remembered those Saturdays when I was first teaching Doug how to cast, out in the back yard. I wasn’t much good myself yet, and I got tangled up in the bushes a couple of time
s. I could feel the boy’s flashing impatience; I felt my age too. And then we went to work disentangling and he came closer to help me. We linked in concentration, and it occurred to me that the delicacy of the line and the fine movements needed to free it appealed to him the way drawing appealed to him, because of their beauty and precision.
Besides, he was a natural. When it was his turn to try, he kept his wrist stiff and gave the air a perfect little punch and zip—great cast. The next time, he got tangled up, but he was speedy about getting unstuck so he could do it again. Even when the tremor acted up. Even when I lectured him on the laws of physics. It was a good day.
There is one not-normal thing you could point to in my childhood, which is that my mother, earlier in her life, before I was born, had occasionally worked as a prostitute. But I don’t think that counts because I didn’t know about it as a child. I didn’t learn about it until six years ago when I was thirty-eight and my mother was sick with a strain of flu that had killed a lot of people, most of them around her age. She was in the hospital and she was feverish and thought she was dying. She held my hand as she told me, her eyes sad half-moons, her lips still full and provocative. She said she wanted me to know because she thought it might help me to understand some of the terrible things I heard my father say to her—things I mostly hadn’t even listened to. “It wasn’t anything really bad,” she said. “I just needed the money sometimes, between jobs. It’s not like I was a drug addict—it was just hard to make it in Manhattan. I only worked for good escort places, I never had a pimp or went out on the street. I never did anything perverted—I didn’t have to. I was beautiful. They’d just pay to be with me.”