Serena wanted the others to go on and on. She leaned forward, clutching her arms, the inside of her throat hot; she thought she could see inside them, briefly. She wanted to see inside everyone in the world. What they were telling her was so slight, a small sliver of their lives, but she sat, rapt, listening to all of it.
She remembered how it felt to sit beside her father in the garage and look at the trains. She remembered the way the sunlight fell, pale, unearthly, through a crack in the roof, gilding the faded green Astroturf on the train table. She remembered sitting beside him while he stared at the trains. He sat regarding the table, the particular arrangement he had set up there that day. She was going to help him. She waited for him to ask her what she thought, for she always had ideas. The table gleamed with its tracks and towns, but really she was trying to absorb every element of him — the way he leaned toward the table, thinking, the grayish grizzle on his cheek, the way he tapped his fingers together, the way he picked up a bridge and put it down. She sat, primly, beside him, but what was inside her was wild; she did not know what to do with her love for him. That was the final allegation, the first one, truly, in everyone’s lives: the fact that you sat beside your father and loved him so deeply and wildly you felt your arms, your body, become light, and you wanted to pass into him, under his skin, or you wanted him to become you — but he sat there, looking at his trains, and you knew he would die someday and leave you here, on this earth, without him. And here you were, saddled with this feeling. You held a love so deep it shamed you. You knew this: A parent put you on earth to someday leave you, that you and your father, your mother and sister and husband and children, inhabited the same island of time so briefly on earth. You knew this, and you sat there, wanting to be superior to this fact, to stop time, to keep the two of you together, in this quiet room, but your father seemed to know nothing of this, casually moving a few Styrofoam rocks, or worse, did not seem to care, and even had the gall to ask, seriously, “Do you think all the rocks look fake?” You wanted to tell him the right thing. Yes, the rocks looked fake. The entire train setup looked fake. That ’s why you liked to look at the miniature houses and trees and the tiny, almost imperceptible people, the misperception that you were superior to it all, merely because you were bigger and alive, breathing. He did not know that you were already trying to figure out how to keep him from dying, to break into his body, his thoughts, like a thief, to do everything — to fix his sadness that happened before you were born that you were supposed to be the solution to, somehow. You were supposed to be the solution with your office and your title and all the money you were supposed to make. But you were not. You just watched him pick up the rocks and move them around as you sat beside him in that musty garage, and you tried to match your breath with his.
You sat beside your father, separate, unable to save him, and you sat beside Dan and Zeb and Rachel, and you sat beside your mother and Dawn and the rabbi and Forrest and Betty and Norman, and it was this, the fact that a person sat beside you, that you did not know all of his thoughts, that they were not all ones that you wanted to know, that they could be ones that you hated, that made it impossible to talk to Forrest, that it made it impossible for the rabbi to know how to speak. It was the great curse on all of us, the fact that we did not know each other’s thoughts. It was the way everyone knew nothing about anyone else.
But it also enabled love. It was this, the fact that another person lived in a different space and time than you — that no one was you — that created this purpose; it made it possible to love someone else. You were not your father. You were not him, and you were not your mother or sister or husband or child or anyone else, and that was the great loneliness that divided everyone, but it was also the great purpose, for the drive to be close to him, to know him, to possess him but briefly would be the engine that drove you to him and to everyone you loved. It was the invisible route you each traveled, day by day, and it was what made you sit beside your father while he stared at his train table, what made you stand outside of the school, waiting for your children to run out so you could gather them in your arms, what made you lean toward your husband’s lips in the middle of the night, to kiss him and to hear him whisper something he wanted only to share with you. There were so many small, mysterious ways to try to break through yourself, to try to know and love another. It was perhaps why everyone gathered at this Temple, or a church, or any place that tried to be holy — perhaps they were all simply praying to know another person, to take a step from the empty room that contained their own roaring, to step out of their own room for the rare privilege of meeting someone else.
There was a burning in Serena’s lungs, but it was not simply loneliness. It did not have to be just that. It was also this: It was freedom. It was freedom to feel, to be, to love.
“Serena,” said Betty, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We haven’t heard from you yet. Go on up.”
Serena sat, frozen for a moment. The stiff velvet of the pew pressed against her back. Then, slowly, she stood up and made her way to the podium. She looked at the eleven people. They had all clustered in the first couple of rows; they wanted to be near each other.
She did not know what was going to happen next. But neither did anyone; they were all linked, inextricably, by this, this endless and eternal not knowing, as they walked across this small, lighted room and out the door to their lives.
“I’m not sure what I want to say,” she said.
“Just something,” said Betty.
There was a beauty to their faces as they patiently waited to hear something about her. The congregants looked at her, waiting.
And then she spoke.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank a few people who helped me in the journey writing this book. First, with endless gratitude, to my parents, Meri and David Bender, for their love and support and openness, and to my sisters, Suzanne and Aimee Bender, for their love and wisdom and good pep talks at crucial times. Also to my cousins, Natalie Plachte and Michelle Plachte-Zuieback, for their warmth and support. To my agents Eric Simonoff and Claudia Ballard for their belief in this book and for patiently shepherding it to a good home; and to my editor Dan Smetanka and the crew at Counterpoint Press for wonderful, uplifting enthusiasm and care in bringing this book to publication.
A big thank you to my friends who listened, read, and helped along the way: Margaret Mittelbach, Jenny Schaffer, Jennie Litt, Katherine Wessling, Timothy Bush, Hope Edelman, Irene Connelly, Paul Lis-icky, Deborah Lott, Eric Wilson, Rebecca Larner, Sandy Brown, and to my mother-in-law, Frances Silverglate, for careful and helpful reading. To everyone at UNCW, and especially Rebecca Lee, Dana Sachs, Nina de Gramont, David Gessner, Virginia Holman, Wendy Brenner, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Clyde Edgerton, Sarah Messer, Sheri Malman, and Emily Smith, for friendship and support at crucial moments. And thank you to Tom Grimes, Edith Pearlman, and Craig Nova for their generosity.
And, finally, to my son, Jonah, and my daughter, Maia, two beautiful gifts, whose presence enriches and instructs me every day. And, of course, to Robert, for the theory of the saint, the general, and the soldier, for being my partner in the factory of odd thoughts, and for, really, everything and more.
Copyright © 2013 Karen E. Bender
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
eISBN : 978-1-619-02145-7
1. Marriage — Fiction. 2. Families — Religious aspects — Fiction. 3. Belonging
(Social psychology) — Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.E53849T69 2013
813’.54 — dc23
COUNTERPOINT
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A Town of Empty Rooms Page 31