by Zoe Chant
“Sparrows!” Granny exclaimed. “I do like that! But I think a bunch of women chatting sounds more like sparrows than the tiles. How about . . .”
She eagerly began to throw various terms at him, demanding the correct pronunciation and the meaning. Mom looked from one to the other as if watching a tennis match. Doris smothered a grin, certain that she would later strut this new information before the other women at the synagogue.
Doris stood beside Joey, so close their shoulders nearly touched, and let herself enjoy his proximity as she relished how he’d managed to defuse the Titans.
Was it weird to find the soft sound of a man’s breathing attractive? Probably. But nobody was ever going to find out how the shape of his shoulders under his shirt, the unruly lock of blond hair on his forehead, the light grace of his hands all made her heat up in that place below her bellybutton that, until she met Joey, she’d never really believed existed.
She could enjoy not only his proximity, but how easily he made friends, bringing everybody into the conversation. She was safe, surrounded by her family. Nobody would ever know about this adolescent crush blooming in spite of her intention to be practical—nearly fifty years after everybody else fumbled through such things.
Everyone except her.
ELEVEN
JOEY
Joey drank more coffee than he liked, but he’d had less than four hours of sleep in two and a half days. Had he been asked, he would not have chosen to meet Doris’s family under such circumstances.
But no one had asked. Joey worked hard to find common ground with such a fascinating variety of people. When he won a smile from Elva, Doris’s mother, his reward was seeing Doris’s shoulders drop another notch.
Finally Elva shooed them out of the kitchen and into the den to continue their language lessons, while she and Sylvia planned a meal. The teens still sat over by the fire, the older people at the other end of the den. Jacob, Doris’s father, bent over a game of chess with Xi Yong.
Granny Z plopped down into the second wing chair near the chess game. She watched the chess game as she quizzed Joey about random vocabulary, once she’d exhausted mahjong terms, (“And what’s the word for . . . fish?”) until the phone rang from the other room.
“Not again,” Marrit drawled in a put-upon voice. Her cynical front hid what Joey sensed was a curiously fragile interior.
“Let me, let me,” Granny Z declared, rocking herself out of her chair to step into the little alcove off the den, where a rotary-dial phone lived by itself.
“It’s just going to be some phone scam or telemarketer,” Marrit protested, rolling her eyes in a long-suffering manner. “Nobody else would call this number except one of us, and we’re all here!”
“I love playing with those phone snake-oil persons,” Granny Z declared. “So far today I’ve been promised a new mortgage, and assured that my student loans would be dealt with if I called a number. Once a fellow told me that there was a complaint against me at the FBI, and he just needed to verify my personal information to insure my security. That was quite exciting!”
She picked up the phone and said in a quavering voice, “Hello?” Then her face brightened. “Oh, yes! I remember you, indeed I do. Didn’t you call yesterday? What’s that . . . well, I like you, too, young man. Such pleasant manners. Well, thank you, that is very caring of you, very caring indeed. I agree, I would hate fraud to be committed against my social security number. Or is it supposed to be with it, not against it? You tell me.”
“Does she do this a lot?” Joey murmured to Marrit.
The teenager rolled her eyes again. “All the time. It’s one of her favorite games.”
“—Yes, young man I do understand urgency, I truly do—why, the most urgent night I remember was the night I was attending an opera at the Shrine Auditorium, and my first child . . . Beg pardon? No, no, I remember your urgency, I was just telling you my story about my urgency, since as you said, you and I are friends. So, the Shrine, which was quite the bee’s knees in those days—pardon? Oh, I am sorry. I understand you have many calls to make, saving others from terrible fraud! . . .What? No, I have my social security card kept in a very safe place . . .oh, drat. He hung up again. Such a shame.”
Joey grinned to himself. He liked her.
Xi Yong caught Joey’s gaze from across the room. The qilin shifter’s voice spoke to Joey on the mythic plane. What next with our mission?
The red dragon won’t fly in this weather, nor will his followers venture onto the roads. As soon as the storm lifts, we must begin a watch over the gate.
I will take the first watch, Xi Yong said. I find tranquility in newly fallen snow, and you know the cold is nothing to me.
Joey agreed, determined to do what he could to ease the conflicted atmosphere he sensed, both for the sakes of the people themselves, and for his mate, whose tension reached him all the way from the kitchen. But he could not interfere unasked. This was her territory.
His fox, quiescent until now, stirred at that, but Joey said, We’ll wait until she’s ready to choose us.
A door banged, and two small children ran in. Joey found himself stared at by two pair of wide brown eyes in round faces.
“Do you play Legos?” asked the older child in a serious voice.
Joey looked down, and discovered a Legos box next to his foot. “I love to play Legos.”
The boy’s expression cleared. “We have to have a grownup when we play.”
“Well, I’m right here. I can be your grownup.” He opened the box, as the smaller one grinned in delight, and smacked her chest with a small dimpled hand. “I Pink!”
“Hi, Pink,” Joey said. “You can call me Uncle Joey, if you like. A lot of my students do. What’s your name?” he asked the older kid.
Pink stuck her arm out toward her brother. “Won!”
“Lon,” Lon said in a mild voice. “I’m Lon.”
“Well, Lon, Pink. What shall we build?”
He expected the smaller one to make a mess but if anything she was more meticulous than Lon as she slowly, frowning in concentration, fitted three pieces together.
“Wed,” she demanded, holding out her hand like a surgeon requesting a scalpel. Lon separated out a few the red ones for his sister before he began building his own structure.
Joey had dealt with enough small children to know that his part was not to take over with his greater skills so much as to comment and encourage their own building. As he searched for more reds, he said, “What are you making?”
Lon looked up with a brief smile. “A spider house.”
“Spider house?”
“Not real spiders,” Lon explained as he worked. “These spiders.” He curled his fingers, then pounced them about on the floor. “In the car, Uncle Isidor plays spiders with us. This one is a pouncer.” His hand sprang up and down, landing on fingertips. “This one is a pointer.” His forefinger poked forward. “This one is a crab.” His fingers bent, knuckles to the floor as his hand skittered sideways, then he flashed a gap-toothed grin. “Crabs are crabby.”
Pink looked up long enough to say, “Pointer is nice. Pinchy is mean.”
Lon went on to explain the personalities of hand critters, as Pink occasionally added a word in. Isidor was clearly either very used to kids or very thoughtful, inventing an elaborate game with fingers that could entertain kids on long drives.
The Lego building ended abruptly when Granny Z emerged from the kitchen. “There you are, little ones! While the bread is baking, it’s time for that story I promised you yesterday.”
Lon jumped up, and his sister did, too. But then Lon looked down. “We got to put the Legos away, or they go in time out.”
“I can help,” Joey said, and his reward was another gap-toothed smile.
With Joey’s help, the Legos were restored to their box in half a minute, after which Granny Z said, “Come into my room. I’ve still got some Hamantaschen. You can finish eating them while I tell you the story of brave Queen Es
ther, as it’s written in the megillah—the scroll—of Esther. Then we’ll play some games!”
Pink tugged Joey’s hand. “You come.”
Joey followed the children into a small room. The elderly grandmother sat in a rocker, and the two children dropped onto a brightly colored patchwork rug. Joey say beside them, reminded of sitting on a mat at his grandmother’s in China, when he was small.
Granny Z’s voice began in the cadence of storytellers. “Once a very, very long time ago, there was a very important king named Ahashverosh.”
“Did he wear a crown?” Lon asked.
“Oh, yes. And when we dress up for Purim, sometimes people dress like that king, with a crown, and a cape, and a scepter.”
“Oh.”
“He wanted a queen who would be good to the people, and he met Esther, a Jewish woman. He fell in love and made her the new queen . . .”
As her voice went on, Joey imagined what Doris must have looked like, sitting at Granny Z’s feet and listening to this same story.
“ . . . and when Queen Esther learned that Haman, who was supposed to help the king, was plotting to kill all the Jews, she realized that she had to stop him.”
“Did she fight him?” Lon asked. “Like Wonder Woman?”
“No, she didn’t have powers like Wonder Woman,” Granny Z said. “But she was very smart, and her Uncle Mordecai had raised her to be brave. So she went into the king’s throne room, though she wasn’t supposed to, and warned him about Haman's evil plan.”
“What did he do?”
With relish, Granny Z said, “He had Haman hanged on the same gallows he’d built for the Jews!”
When the kids looked puzzled, either by the word “gallows” or by imagining Haman dangling in a closet, she explained, “He gave Haman the same punishment that he’d plotted to give Queen Esther’s people. So now we celebrate the day they were saved! On Purim, the kids play games and wear costumes and put on plays, and the grownups are supposed to get so fershnikit that they can’t tell Mordecai from Haman.” She shook all over with laughter.
Lon’s eyes were huge. “What’s fershen king?”
Granny Z said, “Fershnikit is in another language, called Yiddish. And it means drinking so much grownups get very, very silly.”
Pink stuck out her bottom lip. “I not silly.”
“No, you’re not,” Granny Z said. “We can add some things to your costumes, if you would like to be Queen Esther or the king or Uncle Mordecai. And I’ll teach you the very same games your Aunt Nicola and Uncle Isidor played when they were little. And so did Aunt Doris and Aunt Sylvia.”
Granny Z winked at Joey, who rose and silently left the children with Granny Z. He found Doris hovering outside, looking nervous.
“Granny Z is teaching them Purim games,” he said. “She’s a wonderful storyteller. So. What can you tell me about traditional Purim dishes?”
The moment he mentioned food, the stress cleared from Doris’s face. “We’ll begin dinner with Granny Z’s challah—that’s a traditional sweet bread. My mother is making my other grandmother’s Esther soup—it’s bean soup made with carrots and kale, with poppy seed toast . . .”
Joey listened closely, aware of how Doris relaxed and even became enthusiastic when talking about food. She was so very wary in purely social situations, but discussions of cuisine brought out her sensual side in a way that he appreciated very much—and hoped to see more of.
She finished, “But when I say ‘tradition’ you should realize that there are a lot of traditions and we borrow pretty freely from them all. Like the recipes that come from Persia, Eastern Europe, and so on. Our family tradition has changed over the years. We usually gather in the kitchen, which is the largest room, putting both tables together . . .”
Her eyes slid away, and she added hastily, “And when we were kids, we used to act out the Purim story. Sylvia stopped wanting to do it when we got older.”
“Don’t the younger generation carry on the tradition?” Joey asked.
“Nicola would probably like to, but, well, you met Marrit. So we’ll do dinner buffet style, but I’m sure Nicola and Granny Z will bring out all the old games for the kids.”
Joey, had seen a flash of the old tension, and tried to smooth the moment by saying, “And the adults will work on getting fershnikit?”
Joey’s reward was a grin from Doris. “We will indeed.”
“Should we try to make costumes?”
“You don’t have to. My dad sometimes gets out his old King crown, and some years it’s his old Mordecai tunic—made out of a bathrobe. My mom and Sylvia might put on their outfits, or might not. So there’s no pressure. Purim is all about relaxing and having fun, sharing food and laughter.”
“Dor-is!” came a call from the kitchen. “The oven dinger went off, and I can’t be everywhere at once!”
“Excuse me,” Doris said.
Joey said, “Go right ahead. I want to see if there’s another chess match going on.”
Doris’s face cleared, and she moved away.
Joey stepped back, his reward a glimpse of her straight shoulders and her charmingly round form as she walked toward the kitchen. She moved so neatly, yet could change into someone else in the blink of an eye. He still remembered Oona, on Bird’s terrace.
What a remarkable woman his mate was!
Doris was in and out several more times, during which Joey tried to stay out of the way. Because he often was ducking aside as people went to and fro, he couldn’t help but notice the folding table stashed in the alcove beyond the phone. That, added to the prep table in the center of the kitchen, would surely seat everyone. At least, everyone he’d either met or heard of, so far.
He hadn’t met Brad face to face. And the man the kids called Uncle Isidor was also unmet—apparently in charge of the kids in a back room somewhere, though Joey suspected he might be avoiding the rest of the family. But there didn’t seem to be any others. He was very good at estimating how many people he could fit into a room after years of hosting gatherings, and he knew it would be tight, but they all could fit. So why weren’t they all eating together?
He stood by the folding table for a while, in case Doris was sent to fetch it. But no one came, and presently Doris appeared, wearing a long, loose costume that looked vaguely Biblical. “Come and fill your plates, everybody!”
The wind howled around the eaves while people filed through the kitchen, loading their plates and then going off in different directions.
The children reappeared in the den wearing their superhero costumes, which had been adapted with scraps of fabric and bits of string—Lon earnestly said he was Mordecai the Hero, and little Pink patted her round tummy and announced, “Keen.”
“That’s Queen,” her brother whispered. “Queen Es-dur.”
“Keen-es-der,” said Pink obediently.
A tall young woman with brown curls flapping on her back and Sylvia’s wide brown eyes, wearing a costume made up of floating scarves and spangles, followed them. That must be Nicola. A fixed and desperate smile tightened her face. Despite Doris’s whispered, “It’s okay, the kids are doing great,” she led the children away, whispering, “We’re playing Purim games in the back room. The kids can be loud and jump around if they want to.”
And she vanished, kids in tow.
Joey wished he could help—he sensed tension in Doris as well as her niece. Doris clearly served as anchor in her quiet way, but anchors are weighty. He had to sit by and watch her running back and forth, but finally she came to him, and gave him a quick grin. “I realize your young niece and nephew probably are disappointed not to be camping, but I’m so glad they were with you.”
It hurt Joey to hide the truth from his mate, but now was not the time. He forced himself to say, “There will be other opportunities.” Even that felt like a lie.
Doris leaned toward him, her mind clearly on other things. “Ever since my niece hit high school, she leaves the table the minute she can, and ret
reats to the back room to watch horror flicks, like a hibernating bear. But when I checked just now to see if she needed anything, she and the twins were playing Twister and laughing up a storm.”
“Already fershnikit?” Joey asked, wiggling his brows.
Doris laughed, a happy sound. Then her brow creased. “Is it all right?”
“They’re not driving, and they know when to stop. I’m glad they’re having fun.”
Her face cleared, and he was glad to see her finally sit down with a plate on her knees as she joined him, Xi Yong, Doris’s parents, Sylvia (lovely in a costume that evoked ancient Persia), and Granny Z regal in a black gown and tiara. Things were a little stiff at first. But plates of delicious food and especially the Queen Esther Cocktail (rose, vermouth, and orange juice), soon turned the evening merry.
The kitchen door swung to and fro as people helped themselves to seconds. Joey glimpsed Elva loading seconds onto plates held by a small Queen Esther and Mordecai in a curiously furtive manner. But then Elva reappeared without the children, and resumed her seat as if nothing had happened, while Granny Z detailed her triumph over the scam caller.
The conversation shifted to the plays Doris and Sylvia had put on as children, Elva recollecting them fondly. Sylvia took over, dramatically relating the history of the plays, embellished with details as her cheeks got rosier. Joey noticed that in those plays she invariably played Esther, while Doris took the other roles, including the male ones.
Xi Yong smiled, listening with his eyes half shut, and Joey wondered how much of the pleasant party atmosphere was due to his qilin influence.
The appearance of dessert caused a general movement. The teenagers reappeared, apparently ravenous though dinner had been only an hour or ago. Drunk Twister had clearly burned calories, he thought, laughing to himself.