How did one gauge the invisible disturbances in others’ feelings toward you? We went about our days. We liked some people while others annoyed us; they sometimes liked us and sometimes did not. My workplace was a shimmering combination of Americans, a semi-motley group, mostly Christian, a couple other Jews, a couple atheists, all of us trying to get ahead, but trying (mostly) to be polite about it, standing in line at the coffeemaker, placing little candies on desks during the holidays, etc.
My husband and I walked beside each other under a hard blue sky, trying to go forward, listening to the lovely, soft scrape of our feet against the ground.
Then, one evening after work, I was walking through the parking lot of our office. It was seven p.m. and the lot was an empty plain of dusky light. I was working with my new assistant, Jane, who had been with the company for just a month. It was her first job, and she, the niece of the president of the company, won it over seventy-two other candidates. We were all expected to welcome her. Her personality was as sweet as a plum. She had glossy hair that she wore styled up, like the wife of an astronaut. She was a little slow to finish her work. Earlier today, I had told her to rewrite part of a report. I said this in the most polite way one could when she had left out several important (and essential) facts, but she looked at me and blinked quickly, as though night had descended and I had suddenly become difficult to see.
I strode across the parking lot. Jane was sitting in her car. Suddenly, she backed out and started driving, her Prius heading fast, the wheels screaming. I stood, for a moment, watching the car come toward me. I thought, casually, that she should turn the wheel of the car. The headlights gave off a starry haze. A weirdly legalistic thought lodged in my head: as the pedestrian, I had the right-of-way. But then the car sped up, with a guttural sound, and I jumped out of the way.
Jane drove on, yelling “Move!” out the window. I was sprawled on the ground, breathing hard, like an animal, as though my breath understood something that I did not. My heart was a war. My hands peeled off the asphalt, skin crackling, my palms scraped with blood and gravel. Jane zoomed off to other activities.
What had happened, what?
I got into my car and it tumbled down the dark streets. There was even a little blood on the steering wheel, when I parked the car and released my hand.
I got home and saw that the trash cans were still on the curb. I brought them in and then I informed my husband what had happened.
“She did what?”
“She tried to run me down. In her Prius. Then she drove off.”
I held out my hands, pink and scraped. He brought a damp towel over and cleaned them, very gently. He was shocked.
“Were there witnesses?”
“No.”
“Security cameras?”
“No.”
I was still confused; had this happened? It was so sudden and unexpected. That was the thing about violence—you never had time to prepare. You only thought of a good response much later. Did she really want to hit me? Or had she, perhaps, just wanted to get home? I wanted to make excuses for her, for the situation. Plus, there was that report she was supposed to correct. What would her response be if I made another helpful criticism? A grenade?
We stood in a dimly lit cage of confusion and fear.
“Did this really happen?” he asked.
I was affronted by his question; he didn’t believe me. Then again, neither did I. It was so much simpler to believe that nothing happened. I wanted to believe in the boring moment before she drove toward me, the moment I was just walking across the parking lot, the moment I was just heading to my car to go home.
We lay in bed. The floor remained still, as always, as the earth whizzed, on its stubborn, lonely track, through the air.
First thing the next day, I marched upstairs and told my supervisor, who flinched and sent me up to Floor Eight. I told the person on Floor Eight that Jane had tried to run me down in her Prius. But my voice trembled, for even I did not quite believe it. She was the president’s niece. She had that title. And no one had seen this but me.
Jane came into work, seeming refreshed by her night’s sleep, wearing a crisp new blouse with, bizarrely, a bow. She was friendly to all, even me. I watched her carefully at work. It was as though nothing happened. The friendliness filled me with doubt. Had this happened in my dreams? But my palms were all I had to show, still raw from the parking lot. “Tell us if it happens again,” the vice president said.
I was forty-seven, which meant sometimes I wanted to roll the world up like a ball and crush it. By this age, I had seen enough friends and family die, crumple, ascend, change political parties, decorate their homes so horribly you thought they had gone insane. There was the general sense that things were as sturdy as a piece of wet paper. But this was new. I had trouble concentrating. I did not want to walk by myself to the parking lot, which put me in a bad mood. And then there were the strange calls to our house.
“Run,” the voice said. “Run.”
Who was saying this?
Click.
Was this a threat? Who was telling us to run?
The next time, I shouted into the phone. “Who are you? Why are you saying this?”
“You know what to do.”
It was Jane, maybe talking through a scarf.
“I’m telling your uncle!” I said. “Stop!”
My husband and I walked around, afraid. We told the police. They said walk more quickly across the parking lot. This was their advice? If there was no evidence, they sighed, there was nothing they could do. Jane was chatty as could be in the office; she told funny stories about her Chihuahua and everyone laughed. Sunlight poured through the office windows.
The office park remained encased in its veneer of normalcy, but the difference between what one saw and what one knew made the world appear warped, perceived through a glass paperweight. It made me afraid.
Fear did not make one a more noble or understanding person. My husband and I began to find fault with each other. Why didn’t you take out the garbage? Why did you eat that blueberry yogurt? Why did you buy that Osterizer when you had two cavities filled last month? At night, I related what Jane had done that day, which was always puzzlingly ordinary. Sometimes, she had trouble using the stapler. She changed her fingernail polish from beige to gold. There was nothing to be learned from any of this. Streetlights turned yellow to red, planes blew across the sky, strangers in dark corners kissed or lunged at one another with knives.
We clutched each other at night, arms wrapped tightly around the crinkly bags that were our bodies. We tried, softly, to climb into the dim, sweet recesses of each other. But we did not know if we could protect each other from the strange, violent tremors in the world.
Really, we just had to get out of there.
So I quit.
I looked for a new job. I looked and looked and looked and finally there was this. A company that took me on. Here, they said, here is a good salary. They wanted to ship us off to another nation, across the shining Pacific.
Okay, we thought. A new future! A gift.
But we had a daughter. One child. And she was concerned. What would it be like?
“I’ll miss Donna’s birthday,” she said. “She’s having a laser tag go-kart birthday!”
There was the soddenness of irreversible loss. But we had to say yes to this assignment. It was good money. It was a door. How could you not go through a door when it was offered?
“Say I’ll be invited to birthdays,” she said. “Promise.”
“Promise,” we said.
“Okay,” she said, standing up straight, tucking her shirt in, “okay.”
So this new job was just a job, in a growing city, in Asia. It was another continent—another language, different behavior at stoplights. But here, no one tried to run me down. We had an apartment at the top of a large granite building. We walked the streets, awash with color, by the huge malls, twelve floors of pu
rses and jackets and shoes, the fierce neon of a small nation wanting people to notice it, bringing in companies, selling things, flying us here.
At first, all was well. Our daughter was excited, she tried squid on a stick, she learned to order bubble tea in Chinese. People on the bus gazed at her, called her piaoliang, beautiful. Coworkers took us to eat dumplings.
But there was a problem, how could we not know there would be a problem.
The students at the lauded international school were a group of hoodlums from around the world. Our daughter walked through the doors of this beautiful international academy and global harmony went to hell. The daughters of business moguls from China, Thailand, India, Korea, England, Italy, Lebanon, Germany, Russia, Australia. Even Las Vegas. At first, gestures of alliance. A loaned bottle of nail polish. A meet-up at the mall. Then, a general revolt across all countries. It was not clear what went wrong.
Our daughter said she couldn’t find the girls in her class during lunch. They sat in class, hair pulled back in ponytails, well behaved, crisply taking notes. What could go wrong? At lunch, at recess, they vanished. Every damn country in her grade. Even Las Vegas.
Where were they?
They weren’t telling her.
Someone, on a regular basis, started stealing her lunch. It vanished, the remains left on the cafeteria table. Empty wrappers. They ate everything. She came home sad and starving.
We had numerous stern, unproductive conferences with the headmaster of the school.
“Do something,” we said to the headmaster. “Can’t you do something? Stop this.”
He proved himself incapable of controlling any nation in the world. Our daughter kept her lunch zipped up in her backpack all day, reaching inside to make sure it was there. Sometimes it was, sometimes she left her desk for a moment and it was not.
We sat around the table at night, our daughter hungry, head in her hands.
So this was what happened to our new start. We gripped the edges of the kitchen table as though it would tip and throw us overboard at any moment. Our daughter sobbed. I never prayed, I was not that type, the night swelling, dark, outside the windows. It seemed we had missed some lesson, or perhaps just had a bout of bad luck, but there was the terrible sense that our hands were useless. They dangled at the ends of our arms. We could not bend the world to anything we wanted. I looked into the night sky, and thought, How do we help her? Or ourselves, Adonai? What do we do?
So Adonai, or someone (actually me), said, let’s see if we can find another school. And this evangelical school was the only other school that taught in English and had a spot open.
So here we were, walking into the Jesus school, across the shining, well-trimmed, extremely clean campus. We were lost, in a way; we did not know what we would find. Our fear kept us separate; we did not hold hands. Our daughter walked in front of us, looking at everything with hopeful interest. We walked in our clothes that we hoped would convince them. Not our best shoes. My husband in a slightly worn jacket. We had done this as a strategic measure. It looked a little as though we had blown here, pieces of trash off the surface of the world.
The principal was named Mr. Adams. He was tall and bald and his face looked like it had been molded out of pink clay. His lips were large and lush and somehow beautiful. His eyes were bright. It was a steady, unnerving brightness, as though he had a furnace inside his head.
“Sit however you want,” he said.
There were two couches. Was this a test? How should we sit? What would he learn about us from our choices? We need to make a good impression on him, on Jesus, on whoever decided admissions. We decided to sit beside each other, to approximate a unified front.
“Nice school,” I said. “Great facilities—”
“Thank you,” he said.
He looked at me, those eyes blazing.
“Why are you here?” he asked our daughter.
“I’m here because kids at the other school steal my lunch,” she said.
We are here, I wanted to say, because we failed. Because here was the child, the dear one we were entrusted to protect.
“What are your favorite subjects?” the principal asked our daughter.
“Latin.”
Latin! Smart answer. Was this strategic?
“Anything else?”
“I like math,” she said.
The principal sat forward as though someone had kicked him.
“You know this is a Christian school,” he said.
We all startled, as though surprised by this, though, of course, it was true.
“What do you think about that?” he asked.
What were we supposed to say? We wanted him to save us, but not in the way he was thinking. We sat, aggressively having no thoughts, or not the ones that were perhaps required.
We were here because we wanted something small but essential. A community that would be nice to our child, to us. But the truth was that we, as Jews in a mostly Christian city, had spent years telling people who invited us to church, no. No, we don’t believe in Jesus. He was a nice man, that’s it. Shema yisrael adonai elohaynu, blah, blah. One god, they’re all the same. Repair the world, help the poor, the victims of genocide, don’t let the Holocaust happen again. No forcing anyone to believe what you do. That basically summed up our theology. We had relatives who had fled pogroms, concentration camps; we had the candelabra passed down from a tenement in Brooklyn to a suburb in Ohio. We had read some of the Torah, sort of; we could stumble through a few prayers. But we felt we were Jews in some basic way; we knew we were not something else.
“Uh, nothing,” our daughter said. “There’s a cross in the front.” She paused. “It’s really big.”
We heard how she said that, really big, as though she found that perplexing.
The principal took a breath.
“I know that the cross might seem strange to people,” he said. “What happened there. But to us the cross is a beautiful and endearing symbol.”
His eyes got brighter; they were almost teary.
“What our school and our teachers want to share is their relationship with Christ,” he said. “Not what kind of Christmas tree you have, or baptism, or what have you, but our deep relationship with God, which we want to share. Head, heart, hands.”
He tapped his head, heart, and held out his hands. He said this in deep, kind tones. He was in love, it was clear. He actually glowed with it. And he wanted to share it. How nice that seemed! How generous!
The room felt close, stuffy, full of this invisible love. I had just wanted a safer school for our daughter, some friends she could sit with, and a lunch that no one would steal; I had not expected this offer. It was suddenly a little hard to breathe. It felt like a million Jesuses were surrounding me, pressing against me. I sat up and took a deep breath from the bottom of my lungs.
My husband sat beside me, and I was frustrated by our grubby humanness, the way neither he nor I had been able to fix things, the situation with Jane or now this with the lunches. The world cleverly slipped through whatever walls we nailed up.
Last night, my husband and I had had sex the way you do when you feel you have been idiots, wondering how we had found ourselves in this new nation, what we had done wrong. But we had grabbed arms and legs as though trying to break each other apart, to find some bigger clarity better than both of us. The Jesus of sex. Was that our Jesus? What did the principal mean? Did he ever think of Jesus when he had sex and was that weird or considered correct?
“What do you mean?” I asked the principal.
“You can’t explain it,” he said. “The teachers just share what they have felt. Jesus has meant so much to me. He has helped me, he is there for me always, he fills me up.”
I envied his certainty, but was also wary of it.
“So,” he said, looking at us. “We’ve heard you are—Jewish?”
This was true.
“On a scale of one to ten, what kind o
f Jew are you?”
Silence. He asked this with a kind of sweet curiosity.
“That’s a hard question,” said my husband.
The principal leaned forward. “Why?”
“I don’t know any prayers,” he said.
I didn’t know so many either. This was just sad. God wasn’t even mentioned. We had few thoughts on God, to be honest. We did eat matzoh on Passover, that was one thing. Though we also sometimes cheated with bread. Our faith was perhaps hard to describe, but we knew that it was not this other thing.
“Sometimes when I stand up with everyone and hear the music,” I said, “I feel a little weepy.”
The principal perked up, as though he knew me. Weepy, a bond. We both loved that bigger, generous idea of love, that was true. A great hand that we could all just step into, which could wipe away anything else. What did this mean for the principal and me? Did we love each other, maybe? It felt like there were too many people in the room, the three of us, Jesus, and what have you. It was too much love, too confusing. Wasn’t his wife jealous of this extra person? I shivered.
It was wonderful to be loved. Who could argue with that? Who wouldn’t want a large hand to hold you when someone tried to run you over in the employee parking lot or when you received strange calls in the night or when you wanted to throttle all the girls who stole your child’s lunch?
I looked around and wondered: Why were we all so ridiculous? How did other people know how to be loved? How did they not almost get run over by someone in the office or have their lunch stolen at school, how did they know what to say to each other when they were afraid, parent to child, husband to wife? Was there a word, whispered in the dark, which would calm us? Was it a word we didn’t know and Jesus did?
The New Order Page 19