When Elias himself got home that night, she met him at the door with a glass of wine. She served him his favorite meal—beef brisket with roasted fingerling potatoes, an iceberg salad running with Italian dressing—then cleared the table, made a pot of coffee, and set his favorite dessert—a platter of homemade lemon bars, her mom’s recipe—in front of him. Beside herself with fury, everything around her gave off an intense, white-hot radiance, including Elias, who reached for the tin of powdered sugar, although she’d given the bars an ample dusting already. She let him dust his sizable portion even further before saying, “Were you ever planning on telling me about the addition?”
“Were you ever planning on telling me about Sheik?” he said, biting into the bar and chewing, his face instantly falling and losing its satisfied smile. She had absolutely no idea how he’d come to hear about Sheik, for she’d been more than careful about never mentioning him to any of her friends, much less anyone she and Elias had in common. Besides, she hadn’t been in touch with Sheik in ages, and neither were there any paper or email trails, phone records, nor anything to have made her husband suspicious. “Are you sure you followed the recipe? This tastes…funny,” he said, downing the first bar and taking another.
“To the letter,” she said, eyeing the tin, which held a blend of powdered sugar and the finely ground-up stone that had once been her precious patio. “Maybe you just need more sugar.”
Now, taking Pandora’s advice to stay off the 405, Edith maneuvered the van onto Lincoln Boulevard, thinking about that night again, about ultimately conceding to Elias, who wore her down to a nub, interrogating her about Sheik, until she finally gave in, more out of exhaustion than resignation, and only after she made him promise never to bring up Sheik again. She let him build his addition, which, when completed, was supposed to house his vast movie collection. It was also supposed to serve as a screening room, replete with comfortable sofas and chairs, the movies projected onto a screen by an old-fashioned projector, which was to be mounted directly into the wall and operated by Elias himself, who, in a former life, had been a projectionist. That, and a veritable huckster, she thought, recalling how the plans for the addition never quite materialized. It turned out that Elias had other ideas for it, chiefly to turn the room into a new master bedroom, opening the original master up “to interpretation,” he said.
“By interpretation, you mean a nursery.”
“We are the only childless couple on the block. But don’t worry, Edith. I know that children aren’t in my future, not so long as you and I are married.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, surprised, for they’d had this discussion so many times that Edith wondered if perhaps there might be something wrong with Elias’s memory. “I like children, Elias, and if the world weren’t so overpopulated, I might even think about having one, but I just…can’t compromise myself like that ethically. I thought you understood.”
“When you say stuff like that, you know what I hear? I hear good old-fashioned fear. That’s what I hear. It’s our biological imperative to repopulate the race.”
“Jews aren’t a race,” she pointed out sternly. “It’s that kind of thinking that ended in the murder of millions, don’t forget.”
“Why are you keeping such a stranglehold on your ovaries? Don’t you love me? Don’t I deserve a bundle of naches?”
Upon hearing her own husband invoke the same heavy, guilt-laden sentiment that her dad had used on her mom, who had not wanted a third child, Edith didn’t break down into tears or throw one of her tantrums. Instead, she just smiled, surprising even herself, just as she had when she’d ground up the cement and added it to the powdered sugar. A big, fat, toothy smile, a Jacobson special, the kind of smile she had been forced to put on when they had gone to sit for family portraits at Sears, a smile so full of false hope and good cheer that it nearly cracked her face in half to make it. She smiled at Elias, this man who, in increments so small and steady she hadn’t even noticed, had turned into her dad, though of course it wasn’t Elias who had turned into him but Edith who had turned into her mom, although she didn’t recognize it at the time.
She recalled that day again, breaking out into a smile she’d only reserved for that most discomfiting family occasion, when her dad nitpicked them all to death—belittling her mom for her too red lipstick, Jacob for the irregular part in his hair, Mo for his poor choice in suits, and Edith for her weight, which he said ought to have embarrassed her the way it embarrassed him. Then taking it a step further, actually apologizing to the photographer for his daughter, “whom you might not be able to fit all of in the frame,” he said, laughing. One moment out of a lifetime, yet how this moment informed the rest of her childhood, how she grew into the kind of girl who ate her feelings, then into the kind of woman who starved that little girl to death.
Elias, who was cleverer than her dad, however, rarely threatened her, which was why his threat that night was so disconcerting, as if her dad were speaking through him, reaching out through the vast distance that separated them. She could almost feel his fingers around her throat, his hot breath in her ear, scolding her again for not giving Elias a child.
No, Elias was nothing like her dad, for he never raised his voice or insulted her cooking or called her a stupid, dumb cunt. Instead, he simply took things from her—first the backyard, then the addition itself, which she ended up ceding to him rather than arguing over its purpose, then her car, because his just stopped running one day—until Edith sank into a definitive privation, both physically and spiritually. She walked the three miles to and from teaching her classes at Emory, telling herself it was good exercise, that he was doing her a favor, and she avoided the addition, which, instead of becoming the new master bedroom or even a screening room, he had turned into a shrine to and storehouse for his Star Wars collectibles and memorabilia. It was the brightest and cheeriest room in the house and he covered the multiple windows with heavy curtains to keep the sun from bleaching his posters and vandalized the beautiful cedar-paneled walls with oversize display cabinets for his figurines and accessories: the Millennium Falcon, TIE- and X-Wing Fighters, Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer, and Jabba the Hutt’s Sail Barge. From the ceiling, he hung a light in the shape of a Death Star and laid down a strange sort of spongy, rubbery flooring over the hardwood meant to imitate the mouth of the Exogorth into which the Millennium Falcon had flown. It was his room, and she let him do with it as he pleased, giving this to him because he was hers and she his—because, contrary to what her dad might think of her, she had enough love and compassion inside her for an entire household of his needy, imaginary grandchildren and for her one real, honest-to-goodness husband.
Lincoln Boulevard became the Pacific Coast Highway and Edith took it, following the coastline with its fantastical lines and curling motions, rolling out to her left, the water glistening like spun sugar under the sun. Another typically beautiful day in L.A. and her heart quickened a little at the thought of the talk she was to give later that afternoon at Pomona, then the reception to follow at which she would mingle with some of her field’s leading luminaries, all of them gathering on this Good Friday to discuss the future of ethics and its role in the academy and the world. She drove from memory and took a right onto Topanga Canyon Boulevard, thinking about the last time she’d made this drive—just last year when she visited Mo and Pandora during her spring break.
By then, the reality show had already been canceled, which meant no more waivers to sign, no more worrying about how she looked every minute, and, most wonderful of all, no more irritating cameramen hovering around, waiting to catch her in an indecent act, saying or doing the wrong thing for all of America to see, judge, and comment upon. She had not liked having to involve herself in this whimsy of her brother’s, his desperate attempt to resuscitate his unresponsive career, but to see her beloved nephews she’d had no other choice. She was happy when the show finally got canceled and told Mo as much, which pissed him off and produced
a few days of pouting and bad blood. It wasn’t that she begrudged him his desire to remain relevant as an actor, but she did begrudge him and Pandora their avaricious, pathological need to rub what they had in her face. And not just in her face but also in America’s, in all the faces of all those people who were less fortunate, unhappily married, sadly childless, and wholly discontented with their lives. Family wasn’t everything, as she had come to learn, and besides, she had to question her brother’s motives even further, wondering how ethical it was to put his kids on display and open them up to heartbreaking criticism from other kids and what she had feared most, bone- and soul-crushing anti-Semitism—the vandalized mezuzah, the swastikas sprayed across the trips’ lockers, the death threats.
It was back, this inevitable wave of intolerance for and hatred of the Jews. Yet this time it seemed all the more malevolent, for it came with a modern-day historical precedent, a cautionary tale, something to point to and to say, Kill the Jews again, and this time the world dies with them. No, this morning’s episode was not her first time at the anti-Semitic rodeo, and she knew with sadness that it would not be her last. What she did know was that they were no longer safe anywhere, not even here in the United States, and this was yet another reason she was happy for the demise of The JacobSONS. Why give evil a map to your house, open the door, and invite it in for football and beer?
She admired and envied Jacob his tenacity and fortitude to remain off camera, a Jacobson glyph, the veritable Herculean strength it had taken him to say no to Mo and by extension to their dad, who spoke unflatteringly about Jacob on camera, dismissing him as “our wayward third-born.” Their dad took it as a great, smiting slight, Jacob’s glaring absence reflecting poorly on the family and, worse, on him as a father. She hoped for Jacob’s sake that he’d never seen any of those episodes.
Out of all of them, Edith respected her little brother the most, for he was his own person, the world and everyone in it be damned. She was thrilled he’d brought Dietrich and that she’d be able to meet him at last, though she had to wonder if Jacob wasn’t in over his head just a little. It couldn’t have been easy living in Berlin among the Germans these days, and if what he had told her about the Krause family were true, then she wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to stay quiet. She understood his impulse to bring Dietrich along, yet she also worried that bringing him along might cause undue tension.
Edith’s phone gonged again: another Scrabble notification from TBS1946, who had made his move, playing ABOUT for thirty-eight points. She was falling behind, which wouldn’t have bothered her as much as it did were it not for the old, heretofore forgotten competitiveness that it stirred in her, the likes of which she hadn’t experienced in ages. It was undeniable and crept up on her, just as her feelings for Sheik had crept up on her when they’d both been grad students, she at Georgetown, he at George Mason, where he was getting his MFA in creative writing. They lived only a few blocks apart—he and his wife in a brownstone on Swann Street, she with a roommate on 14th and T Streets in a moldy, dimly lit two-bedroom basement apartment—and had met because his wife had responded to the ad she’d placed in the Washington City Paper: Experienced dog walker for hire! Edith had a soft spot for dogs and anyone who owned and loved man’s furry best friend. It was a perfect way for her to earn some extra cash while she put herself through school, she told Sheik’s wife in the couple’s backyard, where she and Edith sat under a blossoming cherry tree, while Tatiana and Sheik’s toddler played in his little sandbox and Edith got acquainted with the three black pugs, Ernie, Trudy, and Frank, named for Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald.
“I would have named them Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, but I didn’t have the chance,” Tatiana said, laughing. “It’s okay. They’re Sheik’s dogs. They just inherited me.”
“Oh, no, they’re lovely names,” Edith said, thinking of her grandparents while she scratched the dogs’ ears, the pugs snorting with pleasure. “My grandparents had a little gray poodle named Tikkun. My aunt Shana named her,” and for the first time in ages, she thought about this aunt of hers whom she’d never met, who’d died six days before Mo was born. “She was the apple of my grandparents’ eyes.”
“I’m sure she was,” Tatiana replied, though Edith had been referring to Shana, dead at twenty-three, when she and her fiancé got into a head-on collision that threw her through the windshield. She hadn’t died instantly, though, according to Edith’s dad, who never spoke about her, but suffered an aneurysm ten days later. So for ten days the family swelled with hope, for Shana seemed to be making a full recovery, her broken clavicle aside. She had been walking around without knowing what was coming. “Sheik should be home from soccer soon. He coaches an inner-city league for boys in Southwest, near the Navy Yard.”
This impressed Edith, for when she had accepted Georgetown’s offer and begun looking for an apartment in earnest, one of her fellow colleagues had suggested that she stay out of D.C.’s other three quadrants—SW, SE, NE—and settle only in NW, or in Georgetown proper. She had taken his advice and settled in NW, though her neighborhood back then—the U Street Corridor—was just beginning to gentrify and was still pretty sketchy, a mash-up of immigrants and working class living beside the more affluent. She never once felt unsafe, though, for she had Dupont Circle within walking and biking distance and the Jewish Community Center, where she volunteered some of her time, just seven minutes away.
She liked D.C., catching the Capitol in the distance on rainy nights, the monuments rising into the night sky, the vast greenery of Rock Creek Park, the winding Potomac River, and how easy it was to get around on the space-age Metro, which went virtually everywhere she needed or wanted to go, except, of course, to Georgetown, which didn’t actually bother her because she was close enough to bike it. She had no need for a car and had sold hers the second she could, happy to liberate herself from her dependency on oil and do her tiny part for the environment. She loved her bike and went everywhere on it, even in the rain and snow, and found herself on more than one occasion marveling at the centrifugal forces that caught her in one of the city’s many looping traffic circles and spat her out, surprising her by redirecting her course. She was twenty-two, a year younger than her aunt had been when she’d died, and chock-full of curiosity, though even back then she had moments of extreme doubt and darkness, when bits of days fell away into nothing and she couldn’t pull herself out of bed. These episodes were rare and didn’t last long, not hard to shrug off when put into context—the pressures of her studies, to excel and achieve and forge a name for herself within the academy, and compounding all of this the added pressure of spinning the straw of acquaintanceship into the golden fibers of friendship, of finding an appropriate mate, of making her parents proud. And also—not to fall into old patterns of bad behavior, not to binge-eat, then starve herself, not to get into a cycle of privation and excess, but to toe a moderate line between the two. To live an ethical life on all levels, to become a new voice of reason and courage and to root out the older, wearier voices of irrationality and fear—this was her most solemn vow, and her most chief concern.
Edith and Tatiana finished up their business, Edith agreeing to walk the dogs three times a week, then Tatiana showed her to the front door, saying she’d be in touch to finalize the arrangements and to hand over the key to the house. Edith stepped out the door and was making her way down the stoop when a tall, darkly handsome man with long, tan limbs, dressed in soccer gear and clutching a soccer ball, appeared on the sidewalk. He had thick dreadlocks falling from his head and down his angular, square face. He was a few years older than she, and she knew without having to be told that this was Sheik Cohen, husband of Tatiana and father of both the toddler and the pugs—but even so, she pretended surprise when he offered his hand and said, “I’m Sheik. You must be Edith,” his thick, muscular arms wrapped around the ball, his head cocked at an angle, which made it look as if the dreadlocks, suddenly too heavy to bear, were dragging it down.
“
Pleased to meet you,” she said, blushing, turning away from him before he saw the lust in her eyes. “You have a lovely home.”
“Thanks,” he replied. “So what did you think of our three canine kids? Quite a handful, huh.”
She spun around to respond just as he was moving past her up the stoop, and her elbow accidentally collided with his mouth, the ball falling out of his arms and bouncing away. Without looking, she sprang after it, paying no attention to traffic, which came to a screeching stop a few inches from where she was standing in the middle of the street. Swann Street, which was her favorite street in all of D.C., she told Sheik later, after she stopped shaking, returned the ball, and apologized again for bloodying his lip.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll just tell Tatiana I dove for the ball and stopped the other team from scoring.”
“I’d definitely appreciate that. I wouldn’t want her to hate me,” she said. “By the way, did you win?”
“We always win,” he said, smiling, his straight, white teeth smeared pink with blood.
After they said good-bye, Edith crossed the street but did not leave right away. She lingered on the sidewalk, feeling dizzy and ensorcelled, aglow with the irradiation of a thousand different emotions, a flux of light and dark, warmth and cold, hatred and love, sorrow and joy, all of these allying and waging war within her simultaneously. She’d never experienced anything like it, as if the gentle hand of God and the spindly finger of death had touched her at once. And even as she finally roused herself and departed, leaving her place behind the tree and heading for home, she understood that all of this had more to do with Tatiana and less to do with Sheik, whose dogs, she now understood, she would not be walking, although she could have definitely used the money.
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