“Leave her with me,” he said to her mom, who left the house shortly thereafter with Mo and Jacob to take them trick-or-treating.
Edith sulked in her room, where she took a pair of scissors to the costume and shredded it, stashing it in her closet so that her mom would naturally find it. She paced the carpet, fingers balled into fists, muttering under her breath what she would do to her mom if indeed Edith had been a real witch—turn her into a zombie; make her do her every bidding, from Edith’s homework to her stupid chores; set her on fire and watch her skin melt away until she was nothing but bones, which Edith would grind up to use in all kinds of potions against her enemies, all the kids who taunted her for having red hair, for being Jewish—one potion to blind them, another to cleave their tongues and make them sprout horns, as they often accused her of having. A potion to help them see clearly that the Jews had nothing to do with killing Christ or with murdering babies to drain them of blood for making matzo. How dumb and gullible these enemies of hers were! She blamed it all on her mom, who’d volunteered to educate her class on Judaism, although she wasn’t a true-blooded Jew, merely a convert, and not a particularly good one at that—she knew only a little Hebrew, enough to get by, at least enough to join in the recitation of the Kiddush, the Sabbath blessings over the wine, the bread, and the candles, though it was usually Edith who liked to do the prayers to impress her daddy. She was his Bride of the Sabbath, he said, which made her extraordinarily happy, happier still to know that she showed up her mom.
It was getting dark out when her dad knocked on her door and asked Edith if she wouldn’t mind helping him with an important task. They went down to the den. “I don’t know about you, but I like it when it’s just you and me,” he said, patting the seat beside him. “What a stupid costume your mom picked out for you. She can be an idiot sometimes, can’t she?” Hearing this made her feel closer to him while at the same time it also made her feel crummy and want to hit him, because she didn’t think it was a nice thing for him to say about his wife.
“It…it wasn’t that bad, I guess,” Edith said, sitting down beside him.
“What I mean is, if anyone’s a witch, it’s her, not you,” he said. “I look at your mom sometimes and think she must have cast a spell on me, because I just don’t think she deserves me. Does that make sense?” Edith said that it did, although it didn’t, not at all. “You know what? It’s good you didn’t put that costume on because then you would’ve ended up just like her. Promise me you won’t tell her I told you, but late at night when she thinks we’re all asleep, she reaches into the back of her closet, past her dresses and shoes, where she keeps her own witch’s outfit, and she puts it on, grabs her broomstick, and flies all over town, turning girls and boys into snakes and frogs.”
“Daddy, it’s not nice to lie,” Edith said sternly, although she was giggling, which hid her discomfort and belied her fright, for what little girl wanted to hear about her mom being a bona fide witch?
“What makes you think I’m telling a lie?” he asked as he handed her the remote control, then lifted up the pillow to reveal a bowl of candy corn nestled in his lap. Edith grinned and reached into the bowl, grabbing a handful of candy corn, then aimed the remote at the TV, filling the screen with It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. “Before we watch it, you have to promise me you’ll never go snooping in your mom’s closet. If she ever found out I told you who she truly is, she’d be incredibly angry at your daddy and banish me to some deserted island, where I’d have to live all alone and never see you again. You wouldn’t want that, would you, Edith?” No, she wouldn’t want anything like that. “Then be my good girl and keep Mommy’s secret.” She said that she would forever and ever, until death did them part. “Thank you, Eddie,” her dad said, invoking his pet name for her, which he did sometimes when he was being supersweet.
Eddie. How long it had been since she’d thought twice about that night, thought twice about that absurd nickname. Eddie. As if she were a boy, as if she had ever needed another reason to hate herself and her place in the world—a boy’s name, not a girl’s, a complete disregard for who she was, his daughter, not his son, and how she’d once loved hearing him use it, though today, for whatever reason, it had sounded different to her, passing forcibly from his lips without the hint of warmth, as if he were passing a kidney stone instead. She recalled how she’d come home for the holidays after her first semester at Harvard and finally found the courage to ask her dad to stop masculinizing her and calling her Eddie, especially in front of a boyfriend she might bring home. He’d stared at her as if she’d just swatted him across the face. “You going to give me a lecture on that women’s lib crap like your mom used to?” he asked. “I thought you were better and more evolved than that. I thought you and I had a deal.” His response surprised her, for she’d had no idea the deal had come with strings. “Speaking of boyfriends, your mom and I were beginning to worry you might like carpet munching instead.”
“Funny, because Mo and I were thinking the exact opposite of you,” she said, leaving Jacob out of it, because he still lived at home.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“Nothing, Daddy,” she said. “It doesn’t mean a thing. Forget I said anything.”
On some level, she had to laugh at him, at the way he barreled and caromed and careened his way through the world, bouncing off its sharp edges, never admitting any wrongdoing or that he was bleeding from the gashes those sharp edges left in his sides. In this way, his only daughter felt extremely sorry for him, seeing him as just another old man terrified of losing his wife. She adored her mom, though she had awakened to this slowly, after she’d moved out of the house and began to open up to her friends about her home life. How her dad had spoken so hostilely to her mom and to her brothers, how he had always seemed to favor her, Edith, over them. “He doted on me,” she’d once proudly announced to her freshman roommate. Yet the more she spoke about her childhood, relaying both good and bad memories, the more she began to wonder about the sincerity of her dad’s adoration.
There were months during her freshman year, she remembered, when she found herself unexpectedly missing her mother. She would call home, cringing whenever her father answered, yet she spoke to him anyway, pleasantly if hurriedly, before asking him to pass the phone to her mom, whom now, from a distance, she’d begun to see as a warm and sympathetic ear. She felt robbed, she told Elias later on one of their first dates, resenting her dad for stealing her mom away from her, for feeding Edith’s fears and corrupting what might have been an easy, natural friendship and love between mother and daughter. Edith couldn’t blame him entirely, though, for had she not loved him nearly as much, she might not have been as easily persuaded to turn her mom into such a sinister presence.
Edith was not Mo or Jacob, both of whom had an indefatigable reservoir of love for their mother. Yet in the waning hours and days of her mom’s life, Edith thought that her being there for Passover might act as a palliative for her mom, a way for Edith to make up for mishandling her girlhood. More than anything, though, being around her family again only brought to light what she’d feared for years—that she’d chosen the wrong parent to love and emulate.
That said, Edith still found it hard not to begrudge her mom some of the mistakes she’d made in her own life and was glad not to have inherited her mom’s one seemingly tragic flaw—a dogged pleasantness that clouded her ability to see things clearly, for unlike Edith her mom found the good in everyone and in all situations, no matter how awful both were. She’d had one defining moment to turn that same doting pleasantness inward, to alter the terrain of the future, if not for herself, then for her brood, her boys specifically, yet on that ill-fated road trip, which ended at Point Dume, she climbed right back into the car and Edith had known instinctively that nothing would come of any of it. She knew her mom loved her dad, but even more than that, she knew her mom could not possibly give up her creature comforts or the pride she took in being a
doctor’s wife. So her dad would stay, he would be forgiven, and the pleasant walls of her mom’s pleasant life would go up again, protecting her from him. Her mom had done her best to build this wall around them, her children, as well, yet with far less success, Edith thought, though the thought wasn’t bitter, just bittersweet.
She gently dragged her suitcase to the door of the guest room, this suitcase that matched the one sitting on top of the low-slung bureau in the corner, the same model of suitcase Mo also owned and had stashed in the attic—matching luggage, a present to them all from their parents on Chanukah a few years ago. And before she knew what she was doing, Edith switched the suitcases out, leaving hers and taking Jacob’s, a practical joke she knew he’d find amusing. Besides, the room ought to have been hers. She still wasn’t convinced Mo hadn’t given Jacob preferential treatment, which shouldn’t have bothered her but did, for it meant that she’d have to bunk with her parents, just like she had to do when they went on those regrettable car trips, Mo and Jacob getting to share a room while she’d been stuck on a cot or a sofa. Look, Invisible Girl to the rescue again, she thought, grabbing from her suitcase the dress and heels she was going to wear to Pomona, then zipping it back up.
She rolled Jacob’s suitcase, which was far lighter than hers, across the floor and carried it down the stairs, almost crashing into a tall, thin, blond mustachioed hipster wearing cut-off jeans, a tight, sky-blue T-shirt that said APPLEBEE’S OR BUST across it, red suspenders, and lace-up black Doc Martens, looking very much as if he’d just stepped out of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, circa 1973 or 2013, she couldn’t tell the difference anymore. He was eating a croissant while simultaneously reading a book, which he held up to his face and didn’t see Edith, who had to sidestep out of his way. He seemed to be in a hurry to get upstairs and away from Jacob, who was in hot pursuit.
“So that’s it? The great statesman, Dietrich Krause, has spoken and there’s nothing else to be said?” he said, pausing momentarily to hug her before following his friend up the stairs and out of sight.
Edith rolled the suitcase into the guest room and left it—wouldn’t you just know?—beside the rollaway, already set up, imagining the fun she’d have trying to get to sleep, with her mom in the bed suffocating to death and her dad alternating between farting and snoring. She wished for Ephraim, that she’d asked him to come with her, envying Jacob his friend, though not envying the friend’s mustache, which she found laughable. That, and his suspenders, but perhaps those were fashionable in Berlin as well? And what was with his forehead and that reddish welt? A zit he tried to cover up?
She knew nothing about fashion except for what she saw of it in Atlanta, which wasn’t all that impressive. In the beginning, Edith tried her best to find all that was beautiful and interesting about her home, yet somewhere around year four, she realized she wasn’t quite cut out to live in the south and certainly not in Atlanta, which, she came to understand, was nothing more than a fraternity- and sorority-infested overgrown beach town without the beach. Sometimes, though, she wondered if her real issue stemmed not from the place but with how she had been welcomed at Emory; even now, as she stepped out of the room, which smelled oddly of camphor and smelly socks, she thought about Jocelyn and the boxes. Jocelyn with her curly white chin hairs and obsession with The Lord of the Rings, with the odd assortment of moles on her face, who was not a lesbian, as Edith had assumed, but married to an actual man, not an imaginary one, as Edith had also assumed, who had been born sitting at her desk and was the true heart and soul of the ethics and religion department. The same Jocelyn who congratulated her in an email when she’d gotten the position at Emory, then had no recollection of who Edith was, even after she wandered into Jocelyn’s office and announced herself, having just driven all the way from D.C., freshly married and ready to rumble. Granted, it was the end of summer and three months had gone by between that welcome email and her arrival, but still Edith found herself having to explain who she was all over again, until Jocelyn finally put it all together, the naked bulb of her face lighting up momentarily with recognition before darkening again and burning out completely.
“Then those must belong to you,” she said, pointing at the eight boxes, which were stacked in the middle of the small, cramped room. “I’ll have them delivered to your office lickety-split.”
“And by lickety-split, she meant two weeks later, which was fine because Elias and I went to visit my folks in Dallas,” she had told Ephraim last night on the way home from an Emory function to which he had escorted her.
“She seemed nice,” he’d said. “I was expecting—”
“The bride of Godzilla?” Edith had asked. “No, she’s quite affable. Just not to me.” She proceeded to tell him about that late-August afternoon, when, for the first time, she unlocked her office, which they’d painted in the meantime, about the sunlight spilling through the window onto the boxes, about how they’d been arranged in four stacks of two and how horrified she was to find that someone had covered one of the boxes with swastikas and graffiti—GO HOME JEW CUNT. GAS ALL KIKES. ADDRESS UNKNOWN: RETURN TO HITLER…“I reported it to the head of the department, who apologized profusely and contacted the president of the university, who contacted campus security. Nothing was ever resolved and no one was ever caught, of course. Don’t ask me why, but I always suspected Jocelyn. She’s the only one who had direct access to my boxes. And, yes, before you start defending her, I’m well aware that any number of people could have done it, from the UPS guy to the campus movers, but that just seems like a stretch. I know I shouldn’t have said anything to anybody, but I was new and foolish and told a couple of people over drinks that I thought Jocelyn had done it. Anyway, it was a stupid, rash thing to accuse her of, though I still think she did it.”
She never told her parents, especially not her dad, about the incident, because she knew exactly what he would have said. He’d been quite vocal against her taking the job at Emory in the first place—her dad, whose one big dream, she knew, had been to become a dentist and who’d attended Emory University dental school but had flunked out his first semester, although he’d never not made a passing grade in his life. Julian blamed Emory’s history of anti-Semitism—in the ’60s, Emory had designated prospective dental-school applicants as Caucasian, Jew, or other and judged them accordingly—though Jacob preferred to believe that rather than flunking out for being a Jew, Julian had flunked out merely because he couldn’t hack it. “They’re just lucky I never liked sticking my fingers into other people’s mouths,” her dad had said, “or else I’d sue the hell out of the momzers. You can take that job, but don’t come crying to me when something happens. Caveat emptor, Eddie. Caveat emptor.”
It was with an incredibly heavy heart that Edith had found herself the victim of the same kind of anti-Semitic sentiment that had ousted her dad and led him to what he claimed was a far more suitable and fulfilling profession in respiratory physiology. The irony of this still left her brothers cold, that he’d spent his entire life studying the mechanics of breathing only to have a wife who couldn’t. Her brothers also noted the coincidence of this and pondered the root of their mom’s illness, which the doctors said was idiopathic, its origin both uncertain and unclear. Jacob took Edith down a terribly uncomfortable road, saying all sorts of damning things about their dad and what might have led to their mom’s ruined state. “He may not be directly responsible, but you can’t rule out his peripheral involvement,” he said the last time they’d all spoken.
“What are you saying? That he’s somehow the cause of it?” she asked. She was sitting in her office at school, the door closed, the lights off, the campus emptied by spring break, going over and over the conversation she’d had with the head of the department about a certain midwestern boy and former student of hers, who was still demanding Edith change his grade and had moved forward in his sexual harassment suit. “If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, I think I can’t hear any more of it. I won’t hea
r any more of it, actually.” She nearly hung up before Mo cut in.
“Look, I wasn’t going to mention this, but I guess, well, I guess it’s time I did,” he said. Then he told them a story so utterly outlandish it made even Jacob, the consummate cynic among them, guffaw in disbelief. “You can laugh all you want, but it’s totally true. That’s what the old man said to me. I have no reason to lie to either of you.”
“You realize what you’re doing, don’t you?” Edith asked, perusing her email history with said former student, wincing at the boy’s tetchy, disrespectful replies to her quite assured, quite reasonable explanations as to why she could not change his grade. “You’re fishing. You’re inventing reasons and filling them with false meaning as a way to justify killing him. So he was mean and nasty. So he treated Ma with disdain. That’s always been her problem, not ours, as far as I see it. No, I’m sorry, but wishing him dead and making it happen are two totally different things. Unless, of course, your motives aren’t as noble as you claim.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean, Thistle?” Jacob barked. From his tone, it was all too clear and frightening that she’d struck pay dirt.
“Have you even considered the fact that Ma’s health won’t suddenly and miraculously improve just because he’s gone? Or that killing him might even kill her faster? You keep talking about her quality of life, but from where I’m sitting, she has everything she wants and needs.”
“Except the most important thing,” Jacob argued.
“You mean love,” Mo added, his voice tiny, breakable.
“You think he’s taking care of her because he loves her, Thistle? Even you can’t be that naive or that blind,” Jacob spat. “And if what Mo said is true, he’s only taking care of her because he doesn’t see any way out of it but through, and because he knows that if he doesn’t take care of her, he’ll lose his hold on her and her money.”
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