Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  “It’s a ram’s horn, Rebecca. You couldn’t break it if you tried. It survived annexation, the ghetto, the camps, the purges, forced marches, the weight of history, and found its way across the sea to the mantel of a privileged lowercase-J Jew here in Brooklyn. Take a town by strategy or force, salt the land underneath, but history not only survives, it roars to be heard.” She covered her ears in time as he blew on it again, louder than before.

  “L’shana tovah!” comes from my mother. Her voice, loud and cheerful. A boisterous code, bellowed to separate and unify, like a gate between those who belong and their tagalong guests.

  Now seemed as good a time as any, so I put down the bowl I had been drying, strode into the living room, and took Rebecca’s hand. “We came here to make an announcement.” My mother turned, ashen, still elbow deep in soapy dishwater. My father laid the shofar back into its place, then faced us, reared himself up to his full height. He’s shorter than I am, but he wears his dignity like a well-cut suit. He made the trains run on time, dammit, and nothing I say could cow him.

  “Not now,” Rebecca said under her breath.

  “If not now, when?”

  “Yes, Michael, if not now, then when?” my father seconded. “Tell us your news.”

  “Rebecca and I are engaged.”

  My parents share a look, don’t even bother with subtlety. My mother finally dries off her forearms, comes and takes my father’s arm. Now it’s two united fronts, weather patterns clashing in the living room. I expect my mother to get loud from word one, my father to speak hyperbolically or tell some long-winded parable about our family’s time fleeing west, but they both surprise me. A calm seems to waft off them, and even Rebecca loosens her claw grip on my hand.

  This is what the money has bought them, I realize. They kept the same house, the same cheap car and threadbare appliances, all the familiar rattles and leaks to remind them that this is their home, from which they will not be moved. When they put the money in the bank, they were buying peace of mind. What could be more random than your family being slaughtered as enemies of the state, even the children? What could be more random than investing in a stock that pays you more in a year than you earned in a lifetime of hard work? When everything is so chaotic, what’s the real harm of having your son marry goyim? My mother shrugged a bit, perhaps reconciling herself to the thought that Rebecca’s heritage translates to a lower risk for Tay-Sachs and all the other illnesses that target Jews like purse snatchers.

  Man makes plan, and God laughs. They’d stitch a sampler of that and hang it on the wall were that not such a gentile thing to do.

  “If this is the woman our son is to marry, why have we not met her before tonight?” My father speaks evenly when he’s struggling to maintain control. I’ve heard this voice with incompetent waiters and cabdrivers who can’t find their way to Midwood.

  “Rebecca isn’t Jewish.”

  “Yes. That much we can tell.”

  “I didn’t think you’d approve.”

  “That’s not giving us much credit.”

  “Still. I wanted to wait until we were certain. I love Rebecca McMahon.” My voice stumbles over her last name, adding a hitched syllable that causes her to flinch. “And she is going to be my family. It’s important to me that you both also want to be a part of this family, and welcome her into ours, but it’s not necessary. I’m going to marry her regardless.”

  My parents consider my speech, whether it was respectful or coherent, and Rebecca gives my palm a double squeeze, a small show of appreciation for whatever it is I just said.

  My father takes a deep breath. He looks at us both, and then smiles kindly at Rebecca. My dad has a gentle smile. Mine is two shades too wolfish; I hope it softens with age and I inherit his later in life. “I can’t speak for your mother,” he begins, “but if you give me time, and perhaps indulge me a stupid question or an indelicate statement or two, I can put my son’s happiness over my God and welcome his wife into my family.”

  “He can speak for me.” My mother sighs.

  Six months later, my mother bought Rebecca silicone baking sheets, rolled up and wrapped in Christmas-themed wrapping paper. Santa and reindeer, red and green, no mistaking it for happy holidays. My parents opened up our family to a small external influence, a person who knew all of the verses of “Silent Night” and could make eggnog from scratch.

  Not that it mattered. We got married in City Hall, with a clerk as our only witness and photographer. Our choice, to make that day solely about us. My father, with all of his money, went to the corner store and bought another eight-by-ten gilt frame, and my mother stuck it on the mantel, me and Rebecca, arm in arm, at the far end, the first thing that would fall off if someone were to bump into it, while vacuuming, say.

  Once I made that announcement, I was marrying Rebecca. Good as signing the papers and twisting the ring onto her finger. I would rise and fall with her, for the rest of our lives. That was the plan. That was always the best-laid plan.

  *

  • • •

  I’m back home, standing outside, staring up.

  When I get upstairs Rebecca has laid a suitcase out on our bedroom floor. It’s wide-open but empty. She comes out of the bathroom with her hair tied back, her face freshly washed and rosy. She wraps a spindly hand around the back of my neck and draws me in for a long kiss. “I love you,” she says, the instant we break, absent her triumphant smirk.

  “Going somewhere?”

  “I know that you two have a relationship that you shouldn’t. If it’s just sex, I can understand that.” She composes herself, inhales and exhales like an actress in the wings. She locates her center while I watch, wide-eyed and anxious. “You look at my saggy breasts and wobbly arms and giant ass and you’re turned off. I’m turned off, Michael. I think I’m disgusting.”

  “That’s not what this is.”

  “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” She burrows her nails into her scalp. “A baby came out of me, and my body disgusts me. That’s what I think about when I think about my own body, so I can only imagine how you must look at it. Maybe Jenny just snapped back a little more quickly. So if you two are just fucking, I can understand that. That makes sense to me. I can explain that to myself.”

  I sit down. Rebecca doesn’t.

  “If it’s something deeper than that, I can make sense of that too. Is this an emotional affair? Do those even exist? Do you even like cookies?” She pauses. “Not rhetorical. Do you even like cookies?”

  “I like your cookies.”

  Rebecca laughs mirthlessly. “I applaud you, Michael. Falling in love with another woman and I can’t even say I feel neglected. You’re a good dad to Jackson, you’re attentive to me. Living two lives agrees with you.”

  I raise my voice to protest, “I’m not living two lives.”

  “Oh, just shut up. I am not done with you. If this is something else entirely, if I’ve completely misread the past months, then it’s still something, and I’m grateful you’ve at least been discreet and not shoved my nose in it. I wonder if Paul can’t say the same. Every little niggling thought I’ve had I’ve brushed off as my own paranoia. Until tonight. You made it easy for me to think I’m just being a silly, jealous woman.”

  “If this is how you’ve felt, why can’t you keep feeling this way?” I don’t mean to sound flip when I ask this, but Rebecca takes my question like a cold slap.

  “The problem”—she recoils—“is that I can’t explain this to Jackson. For all I know, I’m now in an open marriage. You’ve dragged me into something, and now, what, I get you when you’re not with her? I’m the South Brooklyn wife?”

  “That’s not what this is,” I repeat.

  “Shut up! I didn’t sign Jackson up for an open family. We didn’t bring him into this so that he could navigate your needs, your wants.”

  “Please don’t bring Jackson into this.”

  She shakes her head, banishing an ugly thought. “I’m going to bed. You can join me a
nd we can discuss this further in the morning. Or you can pack and leave. And yes, it is an either-me-or-her choice you face, so whatever this is that you don’t have the balls to acknowledge, there are going to be consequences either way.”

  This is where I could eloquently lay out the grand design of a semiopen relationship, monogamy an unrealistic concept, a village raising a child, our needs met in full, all of us, happier than we were before, continuing on, growing.

  The words mash together in my head. So when I open my mouth, instead I admit, “I don’t know what it is.”

  And Rebecca shakes her head at me slowly, in sheer revulsion. “Then I have even less respect for you than I did five minutes ago.”

  Rebecca climbs into bed, pulls the covers over herself, sets an alarm, and turns away from me. It’s as final a punctuation mark to her ultimatum as she can deliver. When she hears me throw some T-shirts into the suitcase, she starts to sob quietly. “I’m going to sleep at the shop,” I say. We have a cot folded up against the wall. Tony uses it when he needs to work long nights firing pottery. He won’t mind if I crash on it. A few pairs of socks, some underwear. It’s not until I have to press down on the top of the suitcase to get it to zip back up that I realize I’ve packed for longer than a short stay next to the table saw. I don’t kiss Rebecca good-bye, because that feels intensely cruel. But I do slip into Jackson’s room and kiss my sleeping son. I stand over his crib, try to read his future in the tea leaves of an unlined face.

  Someday, Jackson, you’re going to be in your thirties, and you’re going to realize that your life is essentially done being built and now all you can do is live inside of it or raze it and hope to find greater satisfaction in the rebuilding. You’re the untouchable structure to me. You’re the landmark I will protect from the bulldozer and the wrecking ball. Right now you’re too young to realize this, but when you are old enough, someday, I hope at least a small part of you forgives, or at least understands.

  Then I carry my suitcase out the door, past my shop, back across the expressway.

  Paul Fenniger

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  3:12 PM

  I’m moderately more lucid than I was before. Ten minutes ago I saw black spots as big as cicadas floating before my eyes—I tried to swat a few of them away before realizing they followed me wherever I looked. Now I see clearly, if through the sweaty haze of this still sweltering day. Memories of the tunnel feel as if they happened yesterday, or last week. My connection to them is tenuous at best.

  At Meserole Avenue it finally clicks for me that I’m back on my street. I’m back on Franklin Street, where Jenny and I live. I’m almost home. I have the apartment keys in my pocket, but I’ll ring the buzzer. I’ll press my ear against the door and listen for footsteps, and when she opens it and sees that I’m still alive, that I’m okay, that I came back to her as soon as I could, I’ll know that we’re stitched back together, that I’m still her everyday.

  I reach the park across from my house, see if I can spot her in the window, maybe looking for me, waiting for my return. My head goes light again, flutters, and then the sensation passes. My legs go liquid before resetting themselves beneath me. That’s when I look left, as I lurch and catch myself on the sycamore tree across the street from the apartment. That’s when I see a figure walking toward me, walking toward my house with the same heat-exhausted gait. And he looks familiar. In my fug, I try to place where I’ve seen Michael Gould before.

  Michael Gould

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  3:16 PM

  Is he here to fight me?

  Paul and I stand a block apart, staring at each other. I’m unsteady on my feet, hazy-headed—even my teeth feel wobbly. If I am not currently in the throes of sunstroke, I may be a superhero.

  Paul, on the other hand, drifts side to side, punch-drunk, completely bare from the waist up but business casual from the waist down: sensible slacks and outlet mall Eccos. Shirtless and glistening, he looks like a cover model for a Harlequin office romance. It makes no sense for him to be coming from inside the apartment, he didn’t put on half an outfit to meet me in the middle of Franklin Street.

  If I have to fight this man, the strategy will be to aim for the balls, early and often. I’m too exhausted to grapple. We approach each other slowly, cautiously.

  “Fancy seeing you here.” I give him my jauntiest smile. He’s looking at me horrified; I assume because my raspberry-shaded face peels before his eyes.

  “Where are you coming from?” His voice slurs the question.

  “Hither and yon. You?”

  “The tunnel. What happened?”

  We both turn to the city, to the same plumes of smoke, to the same unanswered questions. “Terrorism,” I answer simply.

  “Jesus. What happened?”

  “I’m guessing a subway bombing.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Do you?”

  Paul shakes his head and sits down. He’s here, but not entirely. I hunker down next to him—it feels magnificent to sit, stabbing pain the entire way down and then pure relief. We lean against a spiked iron fence, the border cage of the playground, our feet digging into chipped dirt and our asses sore on stone bricks, under the barest shade. He turns to me, squinting dumbly. “Do you want a beer?”

  “Now?”

  He points down the block. “Get a couple from that bodega and sit here.”

  I count the money in my wallet. Paul lays a twenty across my wrist. “Gemme one.” He smiles.

  In the bodega, I grab two beers, two Xtreme grape electrolyte drinks, and three Clif Bars to tide me over. The electricity works, so I open the fridge door and stand before the mist of Freon until the clerk yells at me. Paul still waits under the sycamore tree in front of the park, gazing up at the apartment, breathing steadily. His hands lay limp across his lap. I twist the top off his beer and hand it to him with the coins of his change. If he notices, he doesn’t comment, merely shoves it into his pocket.

  He holds up his bottle. “What are we toasting to?” I ask. I expect a platitude like We’re alive, some reference to having survived whatever is going on. I’d even accept some crazy connective tissue, toasting To Jenny, two teenagers at the end of summer camp raising a glass to their unrequited collective crush. Paul surprises me by winking, actually winking, as if he knows and I know what we’re toasting to and it need not be spoken aloud. We bump bottles and sip. The beer hits my tongue cold and sour and perfect. I tear open a Clif Bar, offering some to Paul. He takes it gratefully, and we eat like animals to avoid getting drunk off a thimble’s worth of watery beer.

  He presses the bottle to his throat, sighs appreciation for the small mercies of the day. I’m sure a part of him thinks he will walk across the street and shower, change into fresh clothes, sit across from the air conditioner while Jenny frets over the news. It’s not going to happen. He’s not coming back into her life; she said as much. He can grab a change of clothes, but this isn’t his stop anymore.

  If it comes down to a fight, an actual fight, I’d imagine he would win. Even in his kittenish state. He’s larger, and with his shirt off I can confirm that he is more defined than I am, that he has muscle tone from more than carrying table legs to a truck. My New York upbringing somehow didn’t include enough formative playground scraps. Somewhere my father failed in not enabling me to get my ass kicked by a series of kids in Midwood so that I could someday be battle-hardened enough to beat up a Wisconsin farm boy trying to steal back his wife.

  “You know Jenny and I have been fucking.” The words leave my lips and I brace myself for him to lunge at me, but he sits still, facing forward, no sign of emotion.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Since last August.”

  His face doesn’t even twitch. He pulls off his bottle. “I don’t believe you,” he repeats stoically.

  “I came up with a nickname for you. Cuck Fenn. Like Huck Finn. Get it? Jenny laughs when I call you that.”


  “It’s pretty creative.”

  “And I told her I was amazed that you could get her pregnant in the first place, because all evidence tells me you have no balls.”

  That elicits teeth, whether a smile, a grimace, or a misshapen sneer I can’t tell, but the line has been crossed, and now we can at least get down to what needs to happen. One of us needs to be victorious. Jenny needs one of us vanquished. Even if he breaks a beer bottle over my head, it’ll still be cold comfort on a hot day when he has to keep walking. But he laughs softly. “You know some good one-liners, Michael.”

  “I know you like pictures. I can get you pictures next time. Or we can just ask Jenny if you want. She’ll tell you.”

  “Let’s finish our beers first.”

  “I’m not the first person she’s cheated on you with. There have been at least four others. She told me that, which means there could be plenty of others she’s not telling either of us about.”

  “So. You. Say.”

  “I’m in love with her too,” I admit. He nods.

  “Now that I believe completely.”

  His joyous face widens, smile stretched beatifically ear to ear. He looks like a saint in the throes of ecstasy, but it’s not until he lifts his hand to wave that I understand why. I follow his adoring gaze to the window of the apartment, where Jenny has appeared, looking down upon us across the street, smiling right back.

  Paul Fenniger

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  3:16 PM

  Why is Michael wearing face paint?

  I had readied myself to shuffle my way across Franklin Street and ring the bell. I’d stand strong and upright before Jenny. Shirtless, but that’s okay. At the other end of my block, I spy my first hallucination of the day: Michael, striding toward me. His clothes hang ragged from his body, sweat stained and matted. Where has he come from? He’s not coming from Red Hook, not from that direction. I’m lucid enough to grasp that. Did he go out to get lunch and wander in from the apocalypse? Has he been across the river, a survivor of whatever calamity befell Manhattan?