It wasn’t that he had anything against Dara. To the contrary, he thought she was a very good influence—I’d heard him say so in just those words (not like Rusty’s layabout bum of a big brother, seemed to be the implication). It was the presumption he objected to, his in-laws inviting somebody to dinner in his house!
Dara, smart girl, went off to find Rusty, who was out on the back deck again.
“It’s good that Rusty has such a nice little friend,” my grandmother said to me.
“His little friend is not so little,” my grandfather said. I couldn’t help but laugh. It was true. Dara was seventeen, a looker even though she dressed down. Or maybe that was just when she came over to our house. I tried to imagine what she’d look like primed for a night on the town. The kids, I had been told, made a popular hangout of the Sonic Burger down Hillsborough Road, where they’d all meet up after the school football games.
Okay, so maybe some things were different from Miami.
“Does Rusty date that girl?” my grandmother asked.
“No,” my mother said. “Or—well I don’t know exactly, but don’t bring it up with him, okay?”
“If Rusty doesn’t date that nice girl,” my grandmother said, turning to me, “then you should ask her on a date.”
“Grandma, she’s like a kid.”
“I was engaged to be married at her age,” my grandmother said. “And by the time I was your age I had already given birth to your uncle Steve.” My father shook his head. His brother-in-law’s wife is a crazy goy bitch and we don’t talk to either of them anymore.
“It was a different world,” my mother said to her mother.
“A nice Jewish girl comes to a house with two eligible young men and can’t get herself so much as asked on a date.”
“Daniel doesn’t need to date his brother’s friends,” my mother said, “and Rusty’s life is complicated enough as it is.”
“Why is his life so complicated, I want to know?” my father interjected. “He goes to school, he has his friend, he smokes those damn cigarettes just to make me crazy. He doesn’t even get all A’s. His life is cake and pie.”
“He got one B,” my mother said, “and it was in phys ed.”
“Those damn cigarettes—” my father said. Mom just shook her head.
My father was in high school when his parents moved him from some Long Island suburb of no particular distinction to a sunnier, if equally indistinct, suburb of Miami. He should have been glad to escape the fate of that life, but you know how it is—his friends, the places he knew, a girl probably, all his baseball cards. He lost everything, and swore to himself to hate the new state, city, school, life. But couldn’t. He loved South Florida, almost right off the bat. He met my mother there, started his family, and was even heard to say that it was where he expected to die. But none of that love and happiness enabled him to forgive his own parents for the trauma that made it all possible. Whatever he finally fell out with my grandfather over, I know it was really over this.
One thing my father always swore: he would never do to his children what his parents did to him. But then God, who they say works in His own ways and who can be so cruel, made it so the trauma had to be passed down like a rite of passage. Whether or not Rusty ever forgives him, our father will never forgive himself. Nobody ever tried harder than that man, but some things are just beyond control, like if Abraham had had to go through with the sacrifice of Isaac, but somehow Isaac lived, and then when it was time God made Isaac put the knife to Jacob.
Even my mother’s parents know to withhold comment on the thick air-freshener atmosphere, that fake-clean floral stench, that reek of grasping for control. They kvetch about everything, but never that.
Smells are the easiest to get used to anyway. After a few minutes you hardly even notice. If you’re out of the house for a while, okay, it hits pretty hard when you come back in. But you just wait.
“What a place Germany was,” my grandfather said, gesturing with his fork—not so much stabbing as nudging the space in front of him.
“You’re flicking brisket juice,” my grandmother scolded. He put the fork down.
Grandpa favored baby blue golf shirts and ran his left hand over his bald, liver-spotted head when he was feeling wistful. “Such culture,” he said. “And even with the war on there was plenty of time. I used to know quite a bit of the native tongue. Very much like Yiddish, German. I couldn’t read Goethe, maybe, but who wants to read Goethe? I could order dinner, I could ask directions. What else could I have wanted?”
“To read Nietzsche?” I said. “Or listen to Mozart in the original?” My grandfather loves opera so I figured I could force an ally out of him.
“Jew-hating bastards—the both of them,” my grandmother said. Her thing was heavy necklaces and doing her hair up with spray. It was retirement condo chic and they had taken to it as well as other kinds of Jews took to yarmulkes, black coats.
“How would you know?” I asked.
“I know what I know,” she said.
“He’s like this,” my father said. “Always siding with the Jew-haters.”
“Dara,” my mother cut in, “are you looking forward to the new school year?”
“I’m going to spend a quarter in Israel,” Dara said. All the grown-ups at the table went ooh.
“It’s very lovely there,” my grandmother said. “We’ve been a number of times.”
“You’re going to learn so much,” my father said.
“Very modern,” my grandfather said. “All the amenities. Not like some of the places we’ve been to.” He glared, half-kidding half-serious, at his wife. She liked to travel to exotic places on senior discount tours. When they would get back, Grandpa would start his recollection of the trip by saying, Now, when I was a soldier fighting Hitler in the Second World War, I thought the living was rough, but let me tell you…
“Israel,” I said. It was too easy, it was totally pointless, and I was going to do it anyway. “Try not to get blown up by an insurgent.”
“THEY’RE NOT INSURGENTS THEY’RE FANATICS!” my father said.
“They can be both,” I said.
“MURDERERS,” my father said.
“They can even be all three,” I said.
“Please,” my mother said.
“Okay,” Rusty said. “We’re leaving the table now.”
“You may be excused,” my mother said.
“It wasn’t a question,” Rusty said.
“Thanks for dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Kessler,” Dara said.
“What a shame,” my grandfather said. “A boy who can’t respect his own heritage.”
“I’m twenty-three,” I said.
“And after everything you fought for,” my father said. “In the war.”
“The things I saw,” my grandfather said. “Things I couldn’t even tell you.”
I happen to know that my grandfather never saw any combat, or liberated any camps. He was part of a company that mostly ran supplies from one base to another. The only time he even fired his ser vice rifle was when he happened upon a poor, war-burdened peasant family in some rural area and took down a deer with one perfect shot. And the peasant family was so thankful and had plenty to eat and hugged him and wished him good luck and he never had to fire the gun again.
Come to think of it, that might have been my other grandfather’s story. They were both enlisted men. But how hard is that to picture? These crabby old Jews with their hiked-up pants and endless kvetching. And one of them I haven’t laid eyes on in how many years? These guys, I’m supposed to believe, won a war.
I’m not a bad son. Only prodigal. I know they fought and served, I just can’t picture it. You know? My dad, now him I can picture—I’ve seen the pictures. Vietnam? Student deferment. Like a good Jewish boy? Yeah, with the hair down to his ass and the leather vest. Like you wouldn’t believe. Imagine what his mother, the Polish immigrant, must have said.
It got late. The parents and grandparents went to be
d. So, I decided, what better time to bond with the brother? I knocked on his bedroom door. Turned out Dara was still hanging around. Well, what the heck? Bond with her, too.
I filched a bottle of scotch from my parents’ liquor cabinet and brought it upstairs, but they turned up their noses, so I brought them down to help choose. Vodka they were happy with. Don’t ask me why. “Maybe it’s the Russian blood,” I said, as we walked with our fixed drinks out of the kitchen, through the living room, out to the deck.
“Huh?” Rusty said.
“The Russian in us. On Dad’s side. Grandpa was born in Odessa, I think. Or his parents were. Somebody came over.” We raised our glasses and drank. Rusty lit a cigarette.
It got really late. The deck chairs were dusted with that grayish outdoorsy shmutz they get, so we were sitting on the deck itself, our backs against the quiet house. We stared into that country darkness. Rusty kept stubbing his smokes out on the deck; really grinding them in. One after another after another. I kept waiting for the drinks to loosen him enough that he’d spill his guts, his secret hopes, something I could bond with, but he only looked off into the night or down at the pile of butts, which he’d arranged in a tiny pyramid.
“That’s, uh, pretty cool,” I said.
“That’s gross,” Dara said.
“You know what?” Rusty said. “I’m going to bed.”
“I love you—bro,” I said.
“Yeah, well.” My brother went inside. Christ, he could be a pill sometimes. I thought it was damn decent of Dara to wait a few courtesy minutes before taking her leave. We shared a little silence, during which I turned the words “good Southern breeding” over and over in my mind, as if they were a little gem I was inspecting. But then I noticed that she still didn’t seem to be going anywhere. And had she slid closer?
“So it’s, uh, pretty cool that you’re still here, uh, hanging out with me,” I said.
“I don’t want to die a virgin,” Dara said, eyes on her drink.
Ahh shit, I thought. Loosened the wrong one.
“Like if I did get blown up on a bus or something. I’d have never even known what it was like.”
“You’re a virgin?”
“Does that surprise you?”
I didn’t have an answer to that question.
“What about my brother?” I asked.
“Oh come on, he’s like my best friend,” she said. That had actually been my point. If you can’t sublimate your fear of mortality into sex with your best friend, what’s it there for?
“And there’s no other guy at your school?” I said.
“Lose it to a goy?” she said, almost too bewildered by the suggestion to be dismayed by the prospect. Another silence ensued.
“You’re not going to get killed in a terrorist bombing,” I said, finally.
“You don’t have to bullshit me,” she said. “I know what you think of Israel.”
“That a fact?”
“Russ told me how you hate their government.”
“Well, to be fair,” I said. “I hate every government, I guess, but why hate, say, the French government? I don’t even know any French. I hate the government of the United States because it’s mine, and so I can. And I hate the government of Israel because I’m a Jew, so I can do that too. Hating the government is every citizen’s duty.”
“You don’t hate them because they deserve it?” she asked.
“Oh, they deserve it,” I said. “But that’s sort of not even the point.”
The syrupy cloy was fresh all over again when we stepped inside, and lightly sickened my drunk. I took a deep breath and held it; the air filled my lungs and burned there. A strong hit of good Jewish guilt. I was conscious of the muted noise we made, shuffling across the carpet, the creak of the stairs, but these little sounds—it was becoming clear—weren’t going to wake anybody up. It’s hard to be at ease in a new place. Home is not the place you own, or even where you go back to. Home is the place whose exigencies you most fully comprehend and can account for. I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark. This was Dara’s house more than it was mine. She knew it better, and no reason why she shouldn’t. After all, she’d spent more time here than I had, or would.
I thought back on our family’s old house in Miami, how Dad used to set the burglar alarm before he went to bed. I’d come home late and it would make a long low beep when I opened the door, then I’d have twenty-five seconds to get to the keypad and punch in the code or the siren went off. My brother maybe couldn’t admit it yet, but he had to see that some things were better here.
I heard the low flush of a toilet, followed by the still-softer sound of water in the basin of the sink. There was brightness at the end of the hall, then darkness once more. Dara was one moving shadow in a sea of them, barely distinct against the deep blue of my bedroom door, which she had shut softly behind herself. She stood still a moment, in the gloom, then slid into focus as she crossed the room. By the time she reached me she was a girl again.
THE JEALOUSY OF ANGELS
I’d been working at the plant awhile and had hit a kind of rough patch, but there were also good things, like my girl June, and I kept telling myself that it would be all worth it. We were going to make it big, her and me.
Then these angels came, a whole band or regiment or whatever it is they’ve got up there. The angels said June’s beauty was unsurpassed by any human ever before or after, which of course I told them I already knew. They didn’t seem impressed. Thought they were better than me—it was obvious. Then they said she was too beautiful to even live and that they would take her life. I told them I thought that was some bullshit.
The Archangel Gabriel related the following:
And God so loved the world, that He gave unto them His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall live forever and never die. This made the angels cry in jealousy. And sob, their faces hidden, their angelic voices muffled by the sleeves of their dampening robes. In the absence of their interminable praise-songs it was suddenly clear just how drafty and solemn the high-arched domes of the Heavenly Vault had been built, footsteps and shuffling wings echoed creepily, and the balustrades—gilded and with their Roman columns—suddenly seemed gaudy and more than a little bit lame. This suddenness was contradictory to what Augustine had written about the eternal unchanging nature of God and the old saint, filled with shame, stalked to the far reach of some gray cloudbank where he sulked and remembered how it had been back in the good old days when the Church first aligned with Empire. So a meeting was called, handbills passed out, an ad hoc committee formed to facilitate. Eventually, an agreement with management was reached. The angels would return to their singing and to watching over humans—with a thirteen and a half percent increase in pay and six extra vacation days per annum (the proceedings were conducted partially in Latin, for nostalgic reasons). As well, the angels’ union would draft a team of seven (naturally, this being the Number of God) from their membership, and these would go down to earth and take away the most beautiful of all God’s beloved humans and that token gesture—it was decided—would reset the balance in the question of who God loved best and then all business as usual could continue for all time, until the inevitable and imminent Apocalypse that is like a slow train coming from a short ways off.
Gabriel made an elaborate, sort of swishy gesture which I took to mean he was finished. Michael was stroking June’s hair and sniffing behind her neck. He had big fluffy white wings and tiny little white fangs, which I said I thought was odd but Gabriel said all angels have them. In the far corner of my living room, Satan the One They Call Deceiver had appeared. He had his red arms folded over his red chest, and commented that if the union had been so powerful in his day he might have never left the industry. Then they killed June with their angel powers and her soul poured like holy smoke from out the top of her head and some underling whipped out this contraption like a wet/dry vac and sucked her soul into the holding tank, where it would wait until they
got back to Heaven where June would be one with God. The wailing of her spirit grew faint as they passed through the ceiling of the apartment and then the roof of the apartment building. They left her corpse behind and I didn’t know what to make of that or what to do with it. I put on the TV.
Satan asked would I mind if he stuck around and watched the news.
A baby had been miraculously saved after falling five stories, when the back doors of a pillow truck burst open at just the right time.
An old Hassidic widow about to lose her home to the bank had discovered, beneath a floorboard, seven hundred thousand dollars in Nazi gold.
The angels, it seemed, were already back on the clock.
The news went to commercial. “Big business, big unions,” Satan said, “it doesn’t matter. They just want to keep the wheels turning. Screw whoever. What about the guy who invested in all those pillows? Or the descendants of those Nazis? Don’t they get theirs?”
“Or me,” I said, “and June! Don’t we get ours?”
“You can fill out a complaint form,” Satan said. “It’ll take ’em a while to process it, always does. And it’s a pain in the ass. They really put you through…” He kind of trailed off.
“Forget it,” I said. “I’ve got enough trouble showing up for work on time.”
“That’s always how it is,” Satan said. “They keep your days filled with the piddling shit so you don’t have the time or the heart to go after the big stuff.”
“I’m trying to watch TV,” I said. “You want a beer?”
And he said okay, and we watched TV, and that was it. God signed a big contract, the angels stole my girlfriend. You cannot petition the Lord with prayer. Me and Satan split a six-pack of Harp. You’d think the whole business at least made me glad to know Heaven was real and that I would see June again there in that city of gold where the roses never fade. But honestly, knowing the truth was no comfort at all. Narrow gate and all that. Like I said, the angels in their fervor had left me to deal with June’s body. You think a guy like me knows how to make that sort of problem go away? Who do you think stuck around and offered to help?
Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever Page 5