by Lore Segal
First to get on is the woman with the bulging bag over her arm. She swipes the ATM card with her right hand, talking the while into the cell phone she holds in her left. “That’s way outside the parameter, which is what I gave you right up front.” She has moved into the window seat saying, “Make me a price I can live with.”
The passenger who has got on behind her is young, or has been young till very recently. He frowns. He, too, talks into his phone. And so does the older man who pulls himself up the steps with such sudden urgency it has brought him up too close behind the frowning younger man.
An older man is not as old as an old man, so he ought not to be taking one of the three seats reserved, if needed, for the elderly. If he’s handicapped, it’s by desperation, the despair of not making himself understood. “When I say politics,” he says to his cell phone, “I’m not talking about what goes on in Albany, what goes on in Washington…” His voice is louder than he may be aware.
The younger man, on the other hand, appears to be trying to speak sub rosa, as if, perhaps, he might have preferred to not be speaking. He, as I said, is frowning: “Next week? No way. Didn’t we say March, some day in spring, when moving would be easier,” he says. He has slipped into a seat on the right of the row in which the woman by the window holds her bag, which appears to be full of little packages, on her lap.
If this woman glanced out she would see the greenest mid-summer behind Central Park’s low retaining wall. She is saying, “But we need it to cover. I gave you the measurements. Do you have my measurements there?”
The man who should not be sitting in the seat reserved for the elderly or handicapped says, “I’m talking about a whole range of behavior. Why? I mean why can’t I say ‘political’?”
The woman in the window seat says, “Yes, well, but we need it to cover like it’s been there always, or we might as well stick with what there is there now.”
The younger man might have forgotten that he doesn’t want anyone, particularly the person with whom he is talking, to hear what he is saying. “Did we or did we not say March?” comes out, a crescendo.
“I mean, so long as I define what I mean by political…”
“Who said anything about weather? We agreed, is what I’m saying!”
“Not at that price.”
“Why can’t a defined term be modified, I mean…”
In the back of the bus a cell phone plays “White Christmas.” The young girl says, “This page. Basically what we did yesterday. No, I don’t. I don’t even have Murray’s number.”
“But I have a table! I dine at it, so it’s a dining table.”
“Yes, well…Well sure, if you make me a price I can live with.”
“I mean in the sense of proliferate…”
“But I like my bed. How should I know what you should do with…”
“Start on this page. Murray wasn’t even there, yesterday. Basically what we did in class yesterday…”
“Well, no, so long as it covers the area and looks like it’s always been there…”
“Proliferate in the sense of branching out, of reaching out, I mean…”
“You’ll have till March to figure out what you can…”
“What do you mean, you don’t know what I mean when I’m saying…”
“If you come down on the price, within the parameter that I gave you up front.”
“Basically,” the school girl says.
“Back off!” is what the frowning, younger man says as the bus comes to a stop on 5th Avenue, which is where I get off.
GOING TO HELL
Came a day when Nancy sat down at the computer to create two columns, one of the things Ann would like and the other of things she thought Jenny might want. The message she left on both their phones said, “Sorry, but I’ve forgotten, again! How does one make columns? One of you, come and show me, I’m sorry!”
In the meantime Nancy started to clear out a long life’s accumulation of the things no one was going to want: She paged at random through the stacks of New Yorkers she hadn’t discontinued after it got too hard to read except on the e-reader. Nancy laughed at the two columns of cartoon people waiting to enter two heavenly gates. Over the left one was written “Ten Sins or Less.”
* * *
—
The old woman took off her glasses to think: Sins. We don’t do “sins” these days and yet she remembered one—not a biggie for sure, she could have come up with bigger—that she had never stopped regretting. And she counted—yes, there were the things she had done well, done well enough.
* * *
—
When Jenny let herself in, her mother was asleep on her chair, which annoyed her because she had allowed three quarters of an hour, an hour at most, for yet another of Mom’s computer flaps. Jenny walked into the kitchen. Was it to get herself a glass of water or to give her heart time to understand the odd slant of her mother’s head. Jenny called Ann. “Mom’s gone.”
“At this time of the night! What do you mean?” Ann said. “Gone where?”
* * *
—
Nancy, traveling in another time and space, had joined the end of the column—it was a single column of people, looking as if they had been done by the same cartoonist, lining up to enter the Last Gate. And sitting at a regular desk, old Peter, bearded, in a modified toga.
When her turn came, Nancy was surprised that he knew who she was. “Altman, Nancy. You’re good to come in.”
“Is this the right entrance?” Nancy asked him. “I’m Jewish.”
“We’ve simplified the process,” said Peter. “All you need is to reset your password.”
“But that’s what I never know how to do!” wailed poor Nancy looking round at all the people waiting behind her. “I’m sorry, but this is going to take me forever!”
Peter smiled.
“Listen,” said Nancy. “Why don’t I just go to hell? I won’t need a password, will I?
“No,” said Peter, “no, you won’t, but you are not going to like it.”
Nancy said, “Oh, for goodness sake, do you think we still believe in the fire, the brimstone, and the ribbed ice, the whirlwinds and devils with pitchforks?”
Peter had been on duty for over two millennia, and was not going to argue with Nancy. “Next,” he said.
* * *
—
So Nancy went to hell. A small she-devil in casual wear—no pitchfork—greeted her and opened a door into a space with computers ranged in parallel rows the ends of which must be meeting out of sight in infinity.
“Sit down,” said the devil pointing to a desk without a soul sitting at it. “You press the button to start your clock.”
Nancy pushed the button and watched the small bulbs light up—one, two, three, four, five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen seconds, until all sixty bulbs glowed red, went out, and started over.
“Your first minute of eternity,” said the devil.
The phone was ringing. Nancy picked up. “They’ve put me on hold,” she said, but the devil had gone to let the next soul in.
NOAH’S DAUGHTER
There is a kind of book in which the clever child protagonist is destined to become a writer, the author, in fact, of the story in which the child is the protagonist. David Copperfield is such a child, but not infrequently it’s a girl. The Bible does not say that besides his three boys, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, Noah had a daughter who would have been a writer had she not lived before the invention of writing. It was several generations before scribes like Ezra set down the stories that had been told by authors like Noah’s daughter.
There are people, of course, who believe that the author was God, who (as it says in the stories) had made the people. Male and female created he them and commanded that they be fruitful and multiply, and the women conceived and bore men and, of course, women, but they, except for Eve and a couple of others, did not get to have names. Noah’s wife was called Noah’s wife, and the wives of Noah’s sons w
ere called the wives of Noah’s sons. Noah’s daughter, we take it, was called Noah’s daughter.
* * *
—
“The men were off before sunup,” Noah’s wife said to the four younger women. She was looking through the tent’s opening and could see Noah, Shem, and Japheth some way down the hill, cutting lengths of gopher wood for the third of the ark’s three floors; Ham had gone to fetch the pitch with which to pitch it within and without. “I don’t know why he has to get the boys up so early.”
“Don’t you?” said Noah’s daughter. She happened to have been born with the talent to observe and to connect, along with the writer’s tendency to seesaw between self-congratulation and self-deprecation. “Father is the kind of man who thinks if anything can go wrong, it will, so when God says he is going to make a flood, Father takes to it like a duck to water.”
“Go and start the fire,” replied her mother. “When the sun stands overhead, the men will be in for their lunch.”
“Why can’t Ham’s wife do it?” said Noah’s daughter, and Ham’s wife said, “Why can’t you?”
“Because I’m in the middle of something,” Noah’s daughter said. “I’m working on a prayer—more like a memo—to God. I’m developing the argument against the flood.”
“We have been hearing about this memo every day for a week,” Shem’s wife said.
“Why do you think God needs your prayer to be so perfect?” asked Japheth’s wife.
“Perfect is not the point. It’s that I myself don’t know what I’m saying until the right word is in the right place.”
“All right, all right!” Noah’s wife said. “One of you wash the gourds, one of you knead the dough, and someone start the fire. And you go finish your memo.”
The reason this memo was taking so fatally long had to do with her modus laborandi, over which Noah’s daughter had little control. She could never help going back to the beginning to cut any word that a sentence would be clearer, sharper, better without. It troubled her to think that she might bore the Lord who, after all, had the whole world in his hand. She was always challenging every word to hit the nail on, instead of next to, the head. And she was searching for the tone that would startle God’s attention without getting him angry. This is what she had got down on the tablets of her mind so far:
Dear God, I wonder if you have ever never asked yourself why whether the Flood might not be such a good idea might be a really bad idea might be useless not be useful.
The memo was fated not to get done that afternoon. It was one of those days when Noah’s daughter might have preferred chopping wood to words. “Maybe I need to get out and do some more research,” she told her mother.
Passing the ark, she called up to her father and brothers who were getting the side door set in the upper deck. “I’m going over to Great Grandfather Methuselah’s.”
“I have been warning everybody that the Lord will bring a flood to destroy both man and beast, and the creeping things, and the fowls of the air,” Noah called down to her. “If Great Grandfather has not got started on his ark, it is going to be too late.”
The widow woman who lived in the next tent was putting her washing out to dry over the back hedge. Noah’s daughter reminded her about the coming flood. The widow hoped the rains would hold off till tomorrow. Seven sons, she said, was a lot of laundry.
To Abner, standing among his flock of sheep, Noah’s daughter also mentioned the Lord’s drowning man, beast, creeping things, and the fowls of the air. Abner said he was thinking of moving his animals up to higher ground.
* * *
—
Noah’s daughter liked to drop in on her Great Grandfather Methuselah. His conversation, at age 969, was more congenial to her than that of her immediate family.
“I’ve been thinking,” she told him.
“Again!” said he fondly. “Have you got any new stories to tell me?”
“I’m thinking of writing the one about my father, Noah. Why is he the only human of all mankind to be building an ark?”
“Because he is a righteous man in his generation,” said Methuselah. “For your father, listening and obeying are synonymous. If God says to Noah, ‘Go and make an ark out of gopher wood,’ Noah goes and makes an ark out of gopher wood.”
“Yes, and what exactly is the rest of mankind saying to itself?”
“Mankind, you mean, like me?”
That was what Noah’s daughter meant. It is interesting that she should have been puzzling over human passivity in the face of imminent catastrophe at a time when most instances had not yet occurred. Generations would pass before Lot’s sons-in-law, warned about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, would fail to get their families out of town; two and half millennia later, the Jews of Europe were not going to leave while it was still possible.
“Habit?” suggested Methuselah. “It’s easier to continue doing what you are doing than to consider changing. My tent is nothing to boast about, but I love my bed. No postdiluvian straw would arrange itself under my back in just the right way.”
“I know what you mean,” said Noah’s daughter. She worried that she would never find any other place that suited her so well as her corner of the tent where, six mornings out of the seven, she sat and worked on her stories.
“I may not look forward to nudging yet another sacrifice up to the high place for another burnt offering—and always with the same people!” went on Methuselah. “But we prefer the hills we know than to climb others that we know not of.”
“That is a truth!” said Noah’s daughter with that little thrill of recognition.
“And then,” continued Methuselah, “we tell ourselves that it may not be all that serious. I’ve fixed—that is, I’m going to fix—the stakes that hold my tent in the ground, and then I’ll sit tight and wait it out. I mean, how bad can it be? The augurs are always telling us there’s going to be this weather and that weather and afterward it is no such thing. And anyway, how would I even know how to build myself a live-in ark?”
“Neither did Father, until the Almighty specified the dimensions: three hundred cubits in length by fifty by thirty, with a window above, the door set in the side, and a second and third deck that will house all flesh to keep each kind alive.” And lowering her voice, she said she hoped it wouldn’t occur to God that the flood was not going to affect anything that swiMs. “Where in the ark would Father fit a tank to accommodate a male and female leviathan?”
It has been said that Noah’s daughter was an observant girl. She could see that in spite of his protestations, the dear, ancient man was afraid; he had the look of one staring into the end times. “Fear not, Great Grandfather,” she said to him. “I’m going home to finish my memo to the Lord. There isn’t going to be a flood.”
Whether it was her reassurance, or because the human mind is not capable of sustained terror, old Methuselah looked up, his smile a little sickly, and said, “You do that. You go home and finish your memo before it starts raining.”
* * *
—
But the small rain had started by the time Noah’s daughter reached the parental tent. She stepped over a great puddle and stood a while to watch the animals assembled at the ark’s entrance begin to arrange themselves into what looked like an endless line of two-by-twos—a good thing they were used to being rained on.
Then she went inside the tent and got to work, going all the way back—she couldn’t help it—to the opening salutation:
Dear God, I wonder if you have never asked yourself why making the a Flood might turn out to be useless. I can sympathize with the temptation to drown everybody and everything (except the fish), the lot of us, and to start over from scratch, but how will this solve the problem of man’s evil?
She heard—she could feel—the rain drumming on the tent over her head. It was really coming down. At this juncture (a marvel, surely, considering that written language had yet to be invented), Noah’s daughter came up with the idea that was to
change future usage. She started over from the beginning, employing the upper case for all pronouns referring to the Lord, before continuing:
That You are Your preserving one male and one female of each species (including my father and my mother) means that You are going to will-mean to restart the earth without having to redesign everybody from scratch.
The tent rattled with gust after gust and she went to stand at the opening. There were so many new puddles. Noah’s daughter watched the stately rocking motion of two noble elephant behinds disappear into the ark, followed by the crowd of cattle—such a lot of ears, a forest of legs. There went the white tails of a pair of jackrabbits, skittering under the hindmost billy goat, to avoid having to queue up in the rain.
Noah’s daughter knew that she needed to get her memo finished in a hurry, and now she knew what she wanted to say:
What I don’t see is why Why do You think that mankind after the Flood will be any different from better than mankind before the Flood? My Father is really righteous, and Shem and Japheth are nice good men, but my brother Ham—I don’t want to snitch, but I’ve seen him do stuff things…God, You know. The thing is that I mean that You won’t be starting over from scratch.
Noah’s daughter thought she heard her mother shouting, but it was the voice of the widow woman hollering the names, one after the other, of her seven sons, while, body bent, her arms outstretched before her, she chased a white tunic that looked to be swimming away and getting farther and farther downriver where there had been no river. The water cataracting from the higher ground brought a sheep wheeling heels over head, and a second and a third, tumbling over and over, and Abner trying to find his feet, swallowing the water that was swallowing him.
* * *