Zeb and Rachel tossed the leaves into a large, round pile. They crumpled large, crinkled handfuls of leaves in their hands. It was all they wanted to do. The pile swelled. The children ran into the pile of leaves, picked them up, and threw them, the leaves floating into the air.
DAN SAT IN HIS OFFICE in front of his computer. He was supposed to edit some copy about the Azalea Maze, but the words kept jumping in front of his eyes; all he could think of was Forrest. Dan rubbed his hands over his face. What had happened? He wondered if he had brought this on when he walked into the headquarters of the Boy Scouts that morning, had brought it on when he shook hands with Forrest, when he laughed with him. What had he missed? Or was it not him at all — how could he have known what Forrest would become? He remembered also how he couldn’t stop himself from picking up the stick, there was a terrible purpose in his arm, his body — he remembered just the sensation he had when he stepped into Forrest’s yard, the hope that some awful pressure in himself would be released.
He stared at the words on the screen: The Azalea Maze is a secret path to wonder.
Everything seemed like bullshit; it was a troubling idea.
He shut off his computer and got into his car. The steering wheel was already slick with sweat from his bare hand. The sky was growing dark, and the electric signs on the chain stores glowed against the deepening blue.
Dan ended up at the Azalea Maze. He walked inside, among the hedges, the damp shrubbery surrounding him, big, sharp walls of green. Dan walked quickly. He was forty years old, and he was unable to tell who was real. He brushed the sharp green leaves with his fingertips, wanting to feel the hardness of the leaves on his skin. The air was cold and bitter and green. What had he even known about his brother, his father, his wife, his neighbor? His neighbor, whom he had trusted, had even liked, had done something cruel to his son, and in his bewilderment, Dan had found himself breaking a window on the man’s shed. He had thought he understood how to interpret a smile, a handshake, an invitation — it all seemed so easy. Now it was as though his mind were a crumpled ball; this was not familiar. He did not even know himself.
What was familiar was this — the idea of his walking in, standing in front of a small, hopeless group, telling them how to promote their small virtues; what was familiar was the idea of his bringing Waring to greatness. He could see the entrance to the town, the steel gateway that would be erected, Welcome to Waring; he saw the lines of people waiting to be invited inside the town. How everyone loved this, the idea that any place could be simple, admirable, and could welcome them. How he wanted to walk into a place where everyone knew who he was, who waved at him, who murmured his name. Dan Shine.
The green leaves were highlighted by spotlights, carving white patches into the radiant blue. The gardens were scheduled to close in half an hour. The soles of his feet were cold, light. He did not feel like escaping because now he understood that there was nowhere to go. There was only the blunt certainty of himself, his possession of his own consciousness. He did not want to feel; he had never wanted, truly, to feel, the moment he saw his father in the garage, the moment he heard about the death of his brother, the moment Serena became a thief, the moment Forrest had walked into their house to kick them out of the Scouts. Was this what others held, this wildness inside themselves? How did anyone know what to do with it? He envied the bravery of others in managing their feelings, the chaos that came with being human. His feelings were a cold wave rising up in him; he did not know what else he contained that would come out, did not know how this wave could subsume him. He stopped, the tiny spotlights illuminating the sharp green leaves around him; he understood, for the first time, what had driven his wife when she walked into Saks.
WHEN HE CAME HOME, HE trotted through the regular motions of dinner, baths, tucking in the children. He felt that she was watching him, that she sensed his dislocation; he wanted to tell her something deeper, even, than love — that he believed he understood what she had felt the day when she walked, bereft, down the streets of Manhattan.
How simple it seemed. But what would she think of him if he said this? He believed she loved him for that ability he had to walk into a room and say hello to anyone, to remake a lonely town into something glorious — not for this Dan Shine, who stumbled, bewildered, through the Azalea Maze and couldn’t, for god’s sake, even come up with a good term to promote it. No, she would not want to know him, the person who wandered, lost, afraid, through the azalea bushes; he did not want to destroy her perception of the person whom she had chosen to love.
He read the children a story in their room, tucked them in, while she cleaned up the kitchen. Then he walked through the house toward her. She was wiping off the kitchen table. He leaned against the doorway, aware of the wide splay of his shoulders, the fragile pressure of his shoulder against the door.
“I want to tell you something,” he tried.
She stopped; she heard something urgent in his voice.
“What?” she asked.
When they had first met, he had been baffled by and how he had admired how she could perceive everything with such precision and clarity — how generous, he thought, she was to love him. She sat in the yellow light of the kitchen, her eyes set on him, alert, waiting. He wanted to tell her that he thought he understood her, and he did not know how to start.
AT SEVEN FORTY-FIVE, SHE DROVE through the darkness, past the churches and cheap motels, past the colorful radiance of the fast food signs, past the proclamations to the drivers: God Answers Knee Mail; Pray for Our Troops; Welcome, Colgate Sales Conference; Brush up on Your Bible to Avoid Truth Decay; Congratulations, Jeanette Wilson, on her new baby boy!; Stop Domestic Abuse! It Happens Once Every Ten Minutes. She thought of the first time she had driven down these streets, how quickly she had gotten lost in them. If You Don’t Believe in Hell, You Better Be Right!; Welcome, Class of 1983 Waring High. She remembered her hands clutching the steering wheel, the car moving forward into the blanched hot day, the sense that the street that held Bojangles’ was identical to the one with Chick-fil-A and Walmart and McDonald’s — it did not really matter where she turned, for she did not think she would belong.
But now she believed that she was not alone in this — for she understood that no one felt that they quite belonged to the world. She thought of the rabbi, bending toward the congregants at the oneg, listening to their sorrows and then shouting at them from the bima; she thought of Forrest losing the Pinewood Derby, distributing his flyers promoting the Christian nation after the ambulance took his wife from his house; she thought of Zeb screaming as she walked him into school and Rachel screaming in accompaniment; she thought of Dan, wearing his Boy Scouts uniform proudly, and the desolation in his face when Forrest told them to get out. She thought of Betty and Tiffany and Norman and Dawn and her mother and father, and all of their crooked yearnings, and she thought of the weight of that diamond bracelet in her hand.
Everyone lived in the empty rooms of their own longing, wrangling with their own versions of love and grief; sometimes, if they were lucky, they stepped out of their rooms to meet another person, to try, for a moment, to live in the precious room of another. In time, they all were gone. Serena drove, reading the signs that shone in the night: Go, Oakdale High Cheerleaders, to the 14th Annual Golden Cup Championship in Jacksonville! Go, Go, Go!; Don’t Wait! Lose Weight with Jenny Craig Now!!; Choose Your Future: Smoking or Non? She felt the presence of the cars floating beside her, the strangers driving, and she felt a hint of lightness, the hope that they were all united, somehow, in the perilous beauty of this journey. Serena leaned into the steering wheel, watching the glowing lines that measured out each lane.
Serena opened the doors to the synagogue. She was the first one to arrive, and the other board members soon assembled at the front. They each had a job: Betty would light the candles, Serena would lead the Sh’ma, Sophie and Marty would carry the Torahs.
“Do you think anyone will come?” asked Tiffany, hopefully
.
“Look at how many came last week,” said Tom.
“Maybe we don’t want everyone to come,” said Norman. They laughed uneasily.
They all sat facing the bima, but most of them turned at any sound, looking at the door with eagerness; it was ten to eight, and no one was there.
Then the door opened. They all turned to look.
It was Henriette and Herman Schwartz. The cries of welcome echoed through the room. Then there were others. There was Lillian, who had spoken of her granddaughter who had died before the Olympics. There was Seymour Carmel, loping in slowly, wearing one of his fanciest suits, one embellished with gold braid. Six members came for services.
There were twelve of them total, including the six who had come to run the service. They all sat together in the first two rows. It was eight o’clock.
The pulpit was empty. It was as though all of this — the meetings, the emails, the debates — had all been meant to keep this moment at bay, and no one had wanted to see this, the simple wooden podium, the sight of the microphone stretching up into air.
No one moved.
There was a rustling; Betty stood up. She walked silently to the bima. She lit a match and touched it to the tops of the two slender white candles. The flames took and flickered; they stretched upward like white taffy. They burned, a clear white shuddering in the dim sanctuary.
The six went through the service, each of them with their tasks. Serena tried to sense how the congregants who had come were viewing the enterprise, if they thought this was a serviceable Shabbat or not. But there was no protest, there was merely a quiet as they went through the prayers, the sense they were all part of some machinery, the pure engine that was the Shabbat service. It was designed, she thought, to keep them moving. She was aware of the sharp physical presence of the other members, all of them packed together, the heat of their bodies; Betty’s sage-scented hair conditioner and the wintergreen Tums that Tom held in his mouth and the glimmering of Henriette’s silvery hose and the way that Florence mispronounced “ha-olam” as “o’halam,” and the way that Tiffany held herself especially straight when reading the Hebrew and the way that Marty coughed wetly before he started a prayer. She did not want to be fooled by their similarity to her, in muttering through these prayers, and she wondered why she was murmuring the prayers at all; it was the way any family fooled you, father, mother, sister, husband, child, that they were like you simply because they lived with you, because you woke up with them and ate food off the same plates and kissed them goodbye, and because you had all pledged, somehow, by virtue of blood or choice, that you would care for each other, that you owned each other in some damp and precious way. It was the same trick. But she stood by Betty and Henriette and Tiffany and Norman and Marty and Tom and the rest, all of them left here, in this dim room, to their lives, and she was glad for their presence.
It was 8:25 PM, time for the sermon. Betty went to the podium. “Tonight, instead of a sermon, we’re all going to share something now,” she said. “ Something we want to offer to the rest of us. It’s open. Something important to you.” Betty paused. “Or whatever you want to say.”
Lillian was first. She came up and gripped the sides of the lectern tightly. Then she put on her glasses and peered over the top rims. “Thank you for having me,” she said. “I know the last story I shared was a sad one.” She looked down for a moment. “Now I would like to share a different sort of story. About my mother,” she said. “My greatest influence. Little Rosie from Hester Street. Endured terrible poverty growing up. Her mother had made hats for the czar and died when she was ten. She had the biggest heart. Would invite anyone, Jew or Gentile, in for Shabbat. Made mitzvah balls as big as bowling balls, light as air.” Laughter. “I kid you not. I wish she were here today.” Lillian’s face blanched for a moment. “But the story I want to tell you is about when she let me skip Rosh Hashanah dinner. I was part of the chorus at my high school. We had a performance that night. We were living in New Hampshire at the time, and the nearest temple was two hours away. We had to go to services the whole day and have a big dinner after, and I asked her if we could skip dinner so I could perform my solo. She said, ‘Ask the rabbi.’ He was not the friendliest man, so I said no. I said, ‘Mom, this is my gift. Please. How will they do this without me?’ It pained her, I know, but she said yes. We drove back at probably eighty miles an hour. I rushed in. My mother put her best shawl on my shoulders. It was going to get wet. ‘Do a great job,’ she said. I got up there, sang, and it was one of the best Rosh Hashanahs of my life. Thanks to my mom.”
The members were not sure what to do; they all clapped.
Lillian returned to her seat, and Betty walked up to the podium. “My story has to do with my brother,” she said. “Many of you don’t even know I have a brother. I did. He was three years older than me. He got polio when I was fourteen. He was a beautiful artist. Watercolors. He loved Sargent. My mother would get him dot-to-dot painting sets, and he would make them look like the real thing. You could have put them in a museum. He kept painting when he was sick, until he couldn’t. After my brother died, my parents stopped going to Temple. They just stopped. We celebrated nothing. Not Chanukah, not Christmas, nothing. This was in the South in the 1950s. For three years, I wasn’t Jewish, Christian, anything. Then one day, my father found another painting my brother had done. My mother was cleaning out his closet. It took her three years to get to this job. His room had been shut all that time. She found this.” She held up a watercolor picture. “We all thought he had painted a picture of our town.” Betty paused; her voice was quiet. “It was the last view we had of his world. Dated two months before he died.”
She held up the photo of the painting. It was a perfectly ordinary watercolor. A sunset cast a gold light over the entire town.
“Thank you,” said Betty. “I will pass this around for all of you to look at.”
Norman was next; he came up to the podium and looked out with great solemnity and delight. “I am glad to welcome all of you to these services,” he said. “I would like to remind you of the other battles that have been fought. In 1972, the Finance Committee fought the Beautification Committee when they wanted funds to commission the new covers for the Torahs. I was, I will admit, on the side of the Finance Committee, because a pressing need was the care and repair of the basement after a hurricane, and the fear of killer mold, but the Torah beautifiers won, and we put off the basement repair for another year. And here are the Torah covers, still in service. Then in 1979, the Membership Committee had a question about admitting non-Jewish spouses who had not converted. Should we only admit the Jewish spouse to the Temple? Needless to say, this caused quite a ruckus. I took the side against the Membership Committee and with an open heart wanted to admit all members and spouses, as long as they vowed to support and fund their children’s Jewish education. I’m happy to report that we agreed to admit the non-Jewish spouses, and that we welcome all supporters of the Jewish faith to our doors.” His face was a little ashen; he clung to the podium. “I have been here thirty-seven years,” said Norman. “I just want to say that battles are fought and then they are done.”
He had just heard from the doctor. He would have six months of chemo. He looked out at the members, and he wanted them to know what he had done.
They each went up to the podium. Seymour Carmel ascended the stairs slowly, carrying a large box. He brought out a plastic tray and tilted it toward them; it was filled with compartments, each containing a single, suspended coin. “I would like to show you all my collection of Israeli coins. I collected these with my father. He was a hero in World War Two. He was one of the liberators in Buchenwald. He was gone two years when I was a boy. I watched the newsreels in the Brooklyn movie theaters and tried to see him in them, but I never did. Then he went to Israel and got their first coin and brought it to me. It was the first time I met him. I was eight years old. ‘Here you go, bucko,’ he said. ‘Freedom. If the U.S. of A. tries to kick us out,
this is where we will always be able to go.’ Two months later, he left my mother. He moved from Brooklyn to Morristown, New Jersey, with a waitress he met when he was having lunch at a diner, and he divorced my mother, and that was that. My mother pretended he was dead. She said the Kaddish for him each Friday night. She went to work teaching kindergarten, and woe to those students, let me tell you.” Seymour stopped for a moment and closed his eyes. Then he opened them, his hand on the box of coins. “It was hard to pretend he was dead when he sent money, which he did. Each month. He sent me coins. Sometimes, once a month, he met me in a baseball field and threw some balls with me and gave me these coins. He was not dead. He was alive. He lived somewhere else. I looked forward to those days he would come see me. I waited for them. I didn’t really care about the coins. He died when I was in college, and then I started collecting more of these coins. Did you know that I have the most complete collection of Israeli coins in the United States?” His voice cracked slightly. Seymour walked slowly around the congregants, holding out the plastic box. The coins were suspended in plastic boxes, floating in the small squares of air.
Tiffany unfolded a portable plastic dance floor and set it on the bima. “I want to share what got me through my childhood,” she said. She tapped a beat on the floor; a clacking sound rang through the synagogue. “I was the champion tap dancer of Elizabeth, New Jersey,” she said. She rubbed her leg. “A little rusty now. But when I was good, I was really good. I was in the background of Cabaret. The movie. You can see me in one of the frames. I tap-danced because I wanted to do something loud. My house was quiet. It was always quiet. My mother didn’t want to get out of her room. I was always in the kitchen, practicing. I could copy ‘Singing in the Rain’ at age eight.” She stood, beaming at the group, tapping a refrain from “Singing in the Rain” onto the plastic square; the sound of the heels rattled through the high ceiling of the synagogue. When she finished, she bowed deeply.
A Town of Empty Rooms Page 30