Just like old times, she mused without rancor, for enough time had passed for her to think of him fondly. Elias had shown her who he was fairly early in their relationship, small things that should have tipped her off that it would all end badly. She thought back to that tiff they’d had over Star Wars, which just kept escalating out of control: It started with episodes I, II, III, Elias claiming they outshone episodes IV, V, and VI, whereas she maintained the originals not only outclassed the prequels but put the sequels to shame as well, calling George Lucas a hack and a sellout. This was too much for the sensitive future professor of film to handle, and he stormed out of the apartment, got into his horrid lime-green Karmann Ghia, and drove away, returning a few days later to take his clothes back to his efficiency apartment, which was closer to American University, where he was getting a PhD in film theory. They remained separated for a few months, before one day he magically reappeared, showing up to her office at Georgetown with a canister of See’s kosher toffees. And that was that, or almost that, for he’d also boxed up all of his Star Wars collectibles, not to sell them, never that, but to keep them out of her sight, although she’d never asked him to do anything of the kind. It made her feel inordinately sad and guilty—that he’d assumed she picked a fight with him over a bunch of stupid movie prequels and sequels, when the truth of the matter was, she knew now, that it had had to do with her subliminal discomfort at Elias’s friendship with her dad, which had bloomed even as they’d first started dating in D.C. Julian had claimed that he didn’t mind Elias being a Presbyterian so long as he didn’t start genuflecting in front of him, though he was undeniably delighted when D.C. Elias (as he called him, Edith knew, not for his city of residence but because the D stood for Decaf and the C for Christian, an abbreviation her dad used for anyone of the Presbyterian faith) proposed and decided to give up Christ “for her,” although she hadn’t asked him to do that, either.
The shuttle lurched and then stopped abruptly, the force of which unsettled her and shoved her into the elderly gentleman sitting beside her, who muttered, “Stupid kike bitch,” under his breath, that is, if she heard him correctly.
Shocked and humiliated, she let out a gasp, reaching absently for the serpentine gold chain on which dangled a pendant in the shape of a chai, a present to herself that she bought with some of her bat-mitzvah money, a pendulum of precious stones—the het of pavé amethysts, the yud of pavé emeralds. It swung just above her ample décolletage, and she caught it in her fist in midswing, clutching it tightly as if it were a talisman to ward off any further attacks and muttering an apology under her own breath, then instantly hating herself for it. On the verge of tears, she got up and hurried to a seat in the back, her heart racing, hating herself even more for giving the old geezer the satisfaction of making her move, when, if the world were actually working properly, he would have been put off by the side of the road and made to walk to his destination, which, she hoped, was someplace in the lower intestines of hell. The horrible de rigueur etiquette of civilized society kept Edith from causing a fuss, though that’s exactly what she wanted to do—she wanted to stand up to him, to become someone else, someone less afraid of what people thought of her, and to shed this thin skin of hers and grow another, a beautiful, waterproof hide, resilient when the rains of spring or the rains of shit came down upon her.
Instead, she sat silently in her seat, recalling the first time someone—one of her classmates in the sixth grade, a fat little bitch named Libby Ann McKenzie had called her a dirty Jew, back before it was a thing again. She wanted to ask the man in the front why he hated her when he knew nothing about her, other than that she’d bumped into him and that she was obviously Jewish and even more obviously a female. Where did the hate come from? She approached the question both as someone who’d experienced a wide range of prejudice—currently, she was in the throes of an unending sexual harassment suit in which she had been falsely accused—and as a professor of ethics. If she had to guess, she thought she probably approached all of her problems like this, first as an ethicist, then as a woman, which made sense because she specialized in the gender of ethics. How someone dealt with the issue of right or wrong was built into the genetic code, she believed. Either we were born with it or we weren’t. She loved puzzling out the tougher questions, where gender and ethics met and the lines between them blurred. This was her arena and in it she flourished. Yet it was impossible to hand someone like the walking cadaver in the bow tie a list of her accomplishments and expect him to recant and apologize, awaken to his inhumanity, when he so clearly hated her a priori.
The shuttle lumbered up to the squat, putty-colored rental car building and she and her suitcase dismounted, the driver wishing her a pleasant stay in sunny (droughty, Jew-hating) Los Angeles. A few people, having just returned rentals, flowed around her, climbing into the shuttle and taking their seats.
Yet Edith wasn’t aware of them, or of anything else for that matter, so fascinated and horrified was she by the elderly gentleman in the bow tie with whom she was having a staring contest. She wanted to remember him, for there he was, the face of the new anti-Semitism, an innocent-looking, well-groomed older man dressed handsomely in a business suit, who no doubt was on his way to pick up a luxury car, a convertible Mercedes coupe, to drive it to his rented beach house in Malibu, the top down the whole way. Was it terrible of her to wish a melanoma on his house? As they continued to stare at each other, she watched in absolute horror as he gave her the thumbs-up, then extended his index finger, fashioning himself a gun, bringing his thumb down and pretending to shoot her dead. No one else on the shuttle seemed to register this exchange, and the man grinned in self-satisfaction. Edith removed her sunglasses, propping them up in her untamed auburn curls, then lifted her own hands and shot him the bird, which to Edith was as far as she could go without coming apart completely.
When the shuttle finally drove off, carrying the hateful old codger with it, Edith watched it, quaking with anger, hurt, humiliation, and a tiny, wilting joy for having stuck up for herself, even if it were only the most minor and fleeting of victories and left her hollowed out and chagrined. Hadn’t she taught her students better? Hadn’t she carped about detachment and disengagement, about when to turn one’s back on the evils that men did and when to acknowledge them?
“The high road must be a reward in and of itself,” she told them year in and year out, until it lost all meaning and even she began to tire of hearing herself say it. “Act with Kantian goodwill, and you can never go wrong”—except that Kant was a rabid anti-Semite, as some of her Jewish students pointed out, so why should they trust him? Which of course led them down the rabbit hole into the murky, claustrophobic catacombs of man versus his ethics, man versus his philosophy.
Edith left her suitcase by the door and hesitantly approached the counter, where a buxom young woman with frizzy red hair and a glinting gold Star of David dangling from her neck said, “Hi, I’m Edith. How can I help you today?”
“Edith Plunkett reporting for duty,” she replied, marveling that the girl seemed like a clone of her own younger self, while she tapped on her keyboard, keeping her eyes locked on the screen, clearly uncomfortable with Edith’s staring.
“I can’t seem to locate you in our system,” the girl said. “Are you sure you have a reservation with us today?”
“Positive,” Edith said, though she wasn’t positive at all. “It went through Jocelyn, our department admin.”
“Do you have a confirmation email handy by any chance?” the girl asked, just as sweet as Edith had not been at that age.
Edith rummaged through her purse and retrieved her iPhone, which was still set to airplane mode. The moment she flipped the little digital button to off, the phone began to vibrate and light up like a disco as one text message, email, and voicemail after another was magically downloaded from the ether. She had to admit that Jacob had been right when he’d suggested she switch to the superfast, supersleek iPhone, which she looked upon wit
h reverence as she did all things electronic and technical and well beyond her ken. Every time she used her phone it was like Chanukah all over again. After a second or two of scrounging and scrolling through her Emory email account, she finally came upon the errant message, which Jocelyn had forwarded to her and was dated last month.
“Oh, I see what happened. It looks like you did have a reservation with us, but it was for yesterday, which is why I couldn’t find you. The system wipes itself clean every twenty-four hours,” explained the girl to a horrified, perturbed Edith. “And of course our entire fleet is out,” she added, “or else I could fix this problem for you immediately and get you into a car.”
“I know this has nothing to do with you,” Edith said, trying her best to stay composed, although with every passing second she was growing more and more unsure of herself, the ice-cold hands of panic and doubt pressing down upon her chest, “but I don’t think Jocelyn made an accidental mistake with the dates, because Jocelyn never makes accidental mistakes with anything. I think she made a purposeful mistake, and I say this only because she and I have never gotten along, not after the incident with the boxes.” And though Edith knew she was rambling, she couldn’t help herself, not even when the people in line behind her began to grow irritable. “I’m on my way to the Valley to visit my parents. My mother’s dying,” she said, knowing how it sounded but saying it anyway. “So is there anything, anything at all you can do for me? Please?”
“I’m so sorry to hear about your mother,” the girl said. “If you’d like to wait, I think I’ll have a return in about half an hour,” and she gestured to the next person in line, who, impatient and with nostrils flared, stepped up beside Edith. “I’m going to have to ask you to have a seat now, ma’am,” she added, suddenly shuttered, cold and efficient with the power of her office.
Edith walked away and slumped down on one of the lumpy vinyl sofas, scrutinizing the girl from behind her dark lenses. It wasn’t her tone so much as her refusal to recognize herself in the obvious features they shared that Edith took umbrage at. How often did you have a chance to meet yourself? For a moment, Edith’s childlessness weighed heavily upon her, until she remembered that Mo was always cranky and tired and that her sister-in-law had had to get a tummy tuck and had once confided to Edith that she’d just as soon never have sex again than experience the wonderful world of morning sickness and preeclampsia. Besides, Edith had learned long ago not to miss what she would never have. She’d been down that road with Elias, and it had only led to the miserable dead end of divorce. The resemblance was just too striking to disregard, yet disregard it she did, for the Jewish girl who rented cars had no use for the Jewish woman who desperately needed one. At least this was the way it seemed to Edith, for every time she tried to get the girl’s attention she dropped her eyes to the computer, ignoring her.
Fine. You just be that way, Edith thought, her phone pinging or ponging, dinging or donging, whatever the proper word was for the sound it just made, Edith doing her best to describe it approximately and finally settling on gonging, a single gong that raised absolutely no eyebrows, because everyone in the place had his or her face in his or her phone. The gong turned out to be a nudge from the Scrabble app, which she’d downloaded just that morning. The other player, TBS1946, wanted her to take her turn. She’d accepted the game while waiting at her gate in the Atlanta airport and had completely forgotten about it. She looked cursorily at her tiles, then at the open board. She was just about to play EMU, for sixteen points, when she glanced up to see the girl motioning to her.
“Okay, Mrs. Plunkett, you’re all set,” she said. “I’ve been authorized by my home office to upgrade you at no extra cost. I have you in a Chevrolet Express, returning Monday morning. Is that right? I’m going to have one of my associates rinse the van off and bring it around to you.”
“I’m sorry. Did you just say van?” Edith asked.
“It’s either that or you’ll have to wait another six hours,” the girl replied. “You can always check in with us tomorrow to see if the fleet’s been replenished.” Upon hearing the word fleet again, Edith imagined an empty, expansive hangar that once contained hundreds of fighter jets, not compact cars, economies, or SUVs, the renters of them not drivers but pilots, all of them conscripted and headed off to war.
“Bombs away,” Edith said, turning away from her would-be daughter, who called out to the next customer.
Outside, Edith texted Mo that she was on her way, ignoring his reply, “Pandora says to stay off the 405.” As if she didn’t know that already. Then she opened up the Scrabble app and played EMU, which connected with the S in TBS1946’s previous word, SORRY. She loved the idea of connecting with someone in Phnom Penh or Shanghai or Paris, places she’d never been and still dreamed of going to. Mainly, though, she dreamed of traveling through the next few days with as little turbulence as possible, of talking Jacob and Mo out of making an irreversible, irreconcilable, and unconscionable mistake. She couldn’t deny them their hatred of their dad any more than they could deny her the love she felt for him, and a part of her also understood that they’d gotten the worst of it, these handsome, devoted brothers of hers. They hadn’t deserved any of it, not his cruelty or his threats, his taunting or his mean-spiritedness. He was sick and that was how his sickness had manifested itself, she’d explained to them. If anyone was to blame, it was their mom, Edith thought, their docile, people-pleasing mom, who never stood up for herself or her children. Even now, she imagined the way things were going to go once she arrived at Mo’s, how Edith would take over for her mom, smoothing out the fights that were sure to erupt among the three Jacobson men. The roles had been played out so often that she, in some strange way, almost looked forward to stepping back into her own part. It’d been so long since they’d all been together in one place, since anyone besides her students and her fly-by-night, unmemorable lovers needed anything more than a mere sliver of her, that she luxuriated in the idea of falling back into the familial breast, however battered and bloody it was. And it was battered and bloody and it came now with the menace of death, which hung over her just as the utterly absurd notion of Elias again hung over her. She had heard that he’d left Atlanta for a position at USC, although they hadn’t had any communication in ages. Elias, whose favorite Jewish holiday was Pesach, Elias, who’d given up the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to marry her, then became the worst kind of convert, a rampant, rampaging Orthodox Jew. Of course, as these things went, the more avidly observant he became, the less she took him or any of it too seriously. Which was her mistake, not his, she realized, as a huge white van the size of a short bus pulled up and stopped, the associate hopping out and handing a mortified Edith a clipboard on which was attached the contract, which she reluctantly signed.
Then she was standing at the door, peering up at the dashboard and steering column and wondering how she was going to climb in and out, when he reappeared with a small yellow footstool, which he set down in front of her.
“You go up,” he said, acting out a demonstration for her.
“Yes, I go up,” she said, thanking him. Even after he disappeared around the corner, though, she continued to waver, doubt turning to insecurity and insecurity into paralysis. She’d never driven a cargo van, which was basically what it was, the enormity of the thing terrifying her. It wasn’t just a gas-guzzling behemoth, it was also the kind of van kidnappers and murderers drove around in, searching for their next victim. “Up, Edith, go up,” she said, putting one foot on the footstool, then the other, then one foot inside the van, hefting herself onto the seat while the associate set her suitcase in the cargo hold and slid the door shut. Edith thanked him, gave him a few wrinkled dollar bills, then strapped the seat belt around her five-foot-eight, one-hundred-sixty-pound frame, said a little prayer, put the van in drive, and off she went.
Instead of leaving the parking lot, she circled for a while, getting used to handling 5,500 pounds of steel and glass. It weighed more than three
times what her tiny Smart car did and driving it felt like a giant betrayal, a blemish upon her own ethical standards. She was having a hard time reconciling her choice in rentals with what was happening in the world—a gallon of gas cost six dollars, water a scarcity, not just in California but in many areas across the United States, temperatures in Atlanta hovering around 104 degrees in the summer, carbon emissions continuing to slow, but nowhere near enough. Oh, the shame and hypocrisy of it all, even as she had lectured her students, future robber barons, capitalists, and financiers, on the advantages of living a civic-minded, conscientious life. The world was damaged and in extreme pain and here was Edith in a gas-guzzling van, part of the problem rather than the solution.
She drove with care, observing speed limits and stopping at yellow lights, pissing off the drivers behind her who leaned on their horns or pulled around her, flipping her off. Having lived in Atlanta for years, she’d gotten used to the slower paces, even liked and appreciated them, and didn’t mind poking along behind a Sunday driver doing ten miles under the limit. The traffic in Atlanta proper could also be gruesome, but since Edith lived ITP, Inside the Perimeter, rather than OTP, Outside the Perimeter, the perimeter being that most-hated of roads, Interstate 285, she rarely was bothered by it. Until their divorce, she and Elias had lived in North Druid Hills, only a couple of miles from the Emory campus, and could walk to work, but really they had bought the house for Elias, who wanted to be near Congregation Beth Jacob and around the other Frum. Edith did not take to the enclave, which, she told her brothers, was dreary and drab, though she told her mom and dad it was peaceful and charming, the house a real gem. The three-bedroom split-level was not a real gem, but a real money pit. Yet Edith, who was still devoted to Elias back then, let him sink as much of their savings as he wanted into refurbishing it. She said nothing until one afternoon, six months after they’d moved into it, when she came home to find a bulldozer ripping up the patio and the well-tended flowering backyard, her one true solace in a world of frumpy women in wigs and podgy men in black frocks with long, untended beards.
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