The Orchard

by David Hopen

  “I’m leaving,” I repeated. I rooted my feet to the asphalt, taking myself out of motion.

  “Shkoyach, you made that clear.” Shimon, dripping with sweat, wiped the back of his hand across his face. “Library?”

  “I’m leaving Brooklyn.”

  “Leaving Brooklyn?” echoed Reuven.

  Shimon frowned. “What does that mean you’re leaving Brooklyn?”

  “I’m moving,” I said. “Away.”

  “To the city?” Mordechai asked, dark eyes aglow.

  “Why davka Manhattan?” Shimon was a skilled Torah student, but his habit of reframing everything as a Talmudic question was grating. “Your father wants you to learn in that yeshiva?”

  My hands gripped rusting metal. “Which yeshiva?”

  “On the Upper West Side. For kids who aren’t serious about Torah.” After a pause: “You aren’t serious about Torah.”

  I allowed myself, briefly, to exit my present conversation, to visualize the school and the streets and the neighborhood and the city around me, to meld the clamor of traffic and children and animals and Gemara and crying and laughing and singing and praying into one simple unit of sound, a single emission, to grasp it and, in the palm of my hand, crush it into silence. I waited, I counted to five, and then I relaxed my fist, permitting all noise to untangle back into clarity. “I’m moving to Florida.”

  “Florida?” All three looked flushed with shock. “What’s in Florida?”

  Shimon tried coming to a halt, nearly falling out of his swing. “There aren’t yeshivas in Florida.”

  “Of course there are,” Reuven said defensively. “My cousin lives there.”

  “They have beaches,” Mordechai said quietly. “Beautiful beaches.”

  “I’ve never been to the beach,” Shimon said. “My father says beaches aren’t . . . shayich.”

  “My father got a job there,” I said, stony-faced.

  “But he already has a job.”

  I felt, all at once, emotionally bludgeoned. For stability, I envisioned myself as one of Fitzgerald’s characters—neurasthenic, desirous, self-enclosed—for whom unhappiness somehow deepens nobility. The thought was less redemptive than anticipated. “And now he has a new one.”

  “Well,” Reuven said, scrunching his face in thought, “when do you leave?”

  “August.”

  “Wow,” Shimon said plainly. He sucked his breath melodramatically. We stood awkwardly for a bit, nobody saying much, save for Shimon whispering “wow” every so often.

  “Will there be girls in your new school?” Reuven finally asked, delicately, shifting uncomfortably on his feet.

  I nodded.

  Shimon looked fairly appalled. Reuven gave a conflicted smile, unsure how to react. Mordechai, most experienced among us—rumor had it he was secretly dating the daughter of Rabbi Morgan, our seventh-grade rabbi, though I was skeptical about that whole affair—clapped my back.

  “You’re lucky, Ari Eden.” His eyes narrowed. “Most of us will never get out of here.”

  * * *

  MY LAST MONTHS IN BROOKLYN dissolved at a terrific pace. There was a flurry of packing, everything we owned—quite little—stuffed into boxes and trucks. There were solitary walks through my neighborhood. There were things I left behind: torn basketball sneakers I’d worn to death, forgotten birthday letters, discolored Parsha cards I’d won in school raffles. At the end of my days in Brooklyn, I stood in my bare bedroom, staring at my mirror, watching seventeen years fade: the furniture gone, the rooms emptied, everything whitewashed. A general sense of melancholy hit me for the first time since my parents announced the move. Leaving didn’t make me sad; on the contrary, the exhilarating prospect of trading my dreary, uneventful life for something new was, at long last, within reach. What was saddening was the realization that, in time, we stand in emptied houses to learn we’ve never made a mark.

  * * *

  ON MY FINAL DAY IN Brooklyn, Shimon and I biked to Brooklyn Bridge Park, only a few miles from where we lived. Mostly we rode in silence, stopping occasionally for water or rest. It was late afternoon when we arrived, the sun retreating into the water, the sky a brilliant violet, a trace of summer in the air.

  “Well,” Shimon said, drenched helplessly, mopping himself with a towel. “This is it.” He wrapped the towel over his head. “Can I ask a question?”

  “Go for it.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “To leave?” A sailboat moved across the water. The hull seesawed gently with the wind. I felt an inexplicable sense of vicarious seasickness. “No. I want to start over.”

  “Know how long we’ve known each other?”

  “Since nursery.”

  He gave up drying himself. “And you’d say I’m your best friend, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said slowly, “I guess I would.”

  “I was thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  His hands were deep in his payot. “Saying farewell to a sefer is easy.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You finish a sefer and then you say Hadran Alakh. We will return to you, and you will return to us.”

  “Or you bury it.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, “if it’s destroyed.”

  “So your point is that you’re more attached to a sefer than you are to me?”

  “No,” he said noncommittally. “My point is that with a sefer, you know what to do. You know you’ll see that Torah again.”

  “But with me—”

  He shrugged.

  I gazed empty-eyed at the water, made dim and silvery by twilight. “I see.”

  “Like, it’s hard to say goodbye, but it’s also not that hard,” he pressed. “I don’t know. I mean, you’re not that sad yourself about it, are you?”

  Aryeh Eden, I thought. Rav Glick’s shiur. Torah Temimah. Borough Park. Brooklyn. New York. United States. Olam HaZeh. The Universe.

  “No,” I said, feeling a conspicuous lack of shame admitting this.

  “Maybe because most things seem sad with you.” Shimon’s cheeks flushed. I felt overwhelmed with desire to be away, to slink into dusk and never see him again.

  “Think you’ll come back?” he asked eventually, breaking the silence snaking between us. In the years since, I’ve thought a lot about what this meant. Brooklyn? Our friendship? Religiosity? It didn’t matter. They were all tied up in each other, they all meant the same thing.

  “No,” I told him. “I don’t suppose I will.”

  We stayed a while longer, watching night plunge upon the bridge, and then retrieved our bikes. We rode the entire way home in deference to a larger silence. When we turned on to our street, we parted with a wave.

  I’ve seen Shimon only once since.

  * * *

  THE FIRST THING ABOUT FLORIDA was the heat, which blasted us the moment the automated airport doors slid open, leading us outside into exhaust fumes and fever-searing sunlight. Within minutes of waiting for a cab, my clothing clung to my skin. Like a good Brooklyn boy, I had worn a white button-down, tucked into dark, formless pants, with the white strings of my tzitzit dancing at my knees. I felt like Shimon, sweating, sweating.

  It was a quick drive to our neighborhood. We were restless to see the new house, and my mother urged our driver, who offered broken English and mistaken turns, to go faster. For the last several weeks all I’d heard from her was how jaw-dropping Zion Hills was: immaculate homes, filled with doctors and lawyers and bankers—“professionals,” my mother called them, relics of a life before my father. Still, I was floored seeing it in person, the multistoried houses, the golf course, the sports cars parked lazily in paved driveways.

  My mother drew down the window and pointed. “That’s the high school!” Torah Temimah had been tiny and utterly run-down, a two-story building with cracks in the pavement, perpetually overflowing toilets, unpainted walls adorned with mold and five and a half classrooms, half because, weather permitting, freshman year shuirs were held o
n the porch, overlooking the parking lot. This school, in stark contrast, was titanic. The building looked a good five stories high and was surrounded by basketball hoops, full-length verdant soccer fields, clay tennis courts. “Breathtaking, isn’t it?” My mother had her face against the window. Her voice carried with unfamiliar exuberance.

  “Not exactly haymish,” my father said under his breath, less awestruck. He turned his attention to one of the far-off fields, where shirtless soccer players jostled in pursuit of the ball. “Looks like a goyishe prep school.”

  Eventually, after several trips down the wrong cul-de-sacs, our driver found Milton Drive. We pulled onto the street and drove slowly, looking for number 599. “There,” my mother motioned. And then, seeing our driver’s eyes widen: “Not the gigantic one, I’m afraid. The one on the right.”

  Our neighbor directly across the street, the house at 598, was indeed gigantic: a red-bricked, vaguely Tudor mansion, built on a double lot, with large, stained-glass windows, a balcony overlooking the driveway, a three-car garage and four cars. I didn’t know much about cars, but I knew one was an Audi.

  “Goodness,” my mother said, “that backyard.”

  I caught only a glimpse of what seemed to be an Olympic-size pool, since my father decided we’d marveled enough at our neighbor (“a house is a house: what do you do with so many rooms?”) and urged our driver to pull into our more humble abode.

  That our neighbor towered over us did not lessen my excitement. I felt an immediate surge of attachment to our new house: single-storied, cozy, considerably larger than what we’d ever had before. We had weather-beaten pavement in our driveway, slightly brown grass baking in the heat, two palm trees out front and, I was delighted to discover, a small pool out back, the perimeter of which was overrun by tiny, leucistic lizards.

  “What do you think, Ari?” my mother asked nervously after we unloaded the car and loitered in our driveway.

  “It’s great,” I said, and I meant it. For the first time for as long as I could remember, I felt overwhelmed with fluid happiness, overjoyed at the distance separating me from my old life.

  * * *

  WE WERE SITTING IN OUR living room that evening, after a makeshift dinner of scrambled eggs and several hours unloading boxes, moving furniture, transferring miscellaneous items from one side of the room to the other and back. I was reviewing a page of Talmud with my father when our landline rang. My mother answered; I heard her give loud, exaggerated laughs. Foreign sounds to me.

  “Our neighbors,” my mother said, bustling in from the kitchen. “From the house across the street. Cynthia and Eddie Harris—they sound lovely.”

  My father stared blankly. “What’d they want?”

  “They’ve invited us to a barbecue tomorrow.”

  My father’s finger held our place in the Gemara. Damages caused by oxen or by mav’eh are caused by a living spirit. Fire has no living spirit. “And what’d you tell them?”

  She looked rosy-cheeked. “That we’d be delighted, of course.”

  He nodded slightly, returning his attention to the Talmud. Without another word, we resumed learning.

  * * *

  THE BARBECUE WAS ON a sun-dazzled afternoon. Even in the oppressive Florida heat we dressed as we always did: my father and I in black and white, my mother tzniut in her long sleeves, though I noticed she donned a new floral dress for the occasion.

  Timidly, we rang the doorbell and waited for several minutes, admiring the flagstone steps and double-hinged oak doors, my mother elated at the prospect of a social life, my father looking as if he’d prefer to be anywhere else. Eventually, when no one answered, we made our way around the side of the mansion, following the sound of laughter. We opened an iron gate and let ourselves into the party.

  Horror washed over my father’s face as he surveyed the backyard. Wives in short, colorful sundresses, Chardonnay in hand. Men in Burberry polos, gripping beers. Teenage boys and girls thrashing together in the pool, a cardinal sin in our former lives. Dazzlingly alien sights: wealth, charm, hysteria. My stomach turned uneasily.

  “Hello, there,” a hearty voice boomed behind us. A thick man in a crisp white polo clapped my father on the back, startling him. “You must be the Edens!” Ever so slightly, my father stole a look at the top of the man’s gelled hair. No yarmulke. The man extended a beefy hand. “Our new neighbors! You guys know how excited we’ve been to meet you? Wasn’t too much love lost with the people who used to own your house. I mean, nice people, I guess, but kept to themselves too much. We needed new friends.” He squinted, his eyes sweeping the backyard—incidentally the most impressive backyard I’d ever seen: an enormous pool, a marble bathhouse, a Jacuzzi and bar, a fence bordering a picturesque golf course—and shrugged. “I don’t know where Cynthia went off, she must be inside. Come, I’ll bring you in to meet her. Eddie Harris, by the way. Real pleasure.”

  My father gave a thin smile, his hand comically small in Eddie’s. “Yaakov Eden.”

  “Thanks for coming, Yaakov,” Eddie said, before offering his hand to my mother.

  An awful moment followed, my mother staring blankly, caught between the social necessity of extending her hand and our strict custom of refraining from touching non-family members of the opposite gender. I winced, but Eddie realized his mistake quickly and holstered his handshake. “Shit, my apologies!” he barked. “I didn’t realize, excuse my idiocy . . .”

  “No, no,” my mother soothed, red-cheeked with embarrassment. “Please, not to worry.” My father assumed the face one might adopt when passing a kidney stone, but Eddie and my mother both gave awkward smiles. “I’m Leah.”

  This would have been considerably more painful, perhaps unsalvageable, with someone else. Yet Eddie released a sonic laugh, diffusing any tension. “Don’t mind me, I’m just a shmuck. Most people here aren’t terribly strict about, er, what do you call it? Shomer negiah, right, that kind of thing. Between us, maybe they ought to be, I’ll show you one couple in particular over there, plenty of rumors, though who am I to judge? So, yeah, that whole no-touching thing isn’t really on my radar. But Cynthia’ll kill me when she hears.” After his laughter, Eddie rested his eyes on me. “And your name, sport?” He had quite the handshake.

  “Aryeh.”

  “No kidding. That was my old man’s name.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “A bona fide tzadik.” He paused, sending thoughts heavenward. “I think you would’ve liked him,” he mumbled to my father.

  My father nodded courteously, unconvinced.

  He turned back to me. “And how old are you, bud?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen? So you’re a junior or senior?”

  “Senior.”

  “Nice. And you’ll be at the yeshiva in Sunny Isles, I assume? They’re pretty serious folks, let me tell you. I hear they hold mishmar three times a week.”

  “I’ll be at Kol Neshama, actually.”

  “That other place was much too far of a drive,” my mother said. “Plus, we’re told Kol Neshama is, well, a superior education.”

  “Wow, you’re going to the old Voice of the Soul Academy? Who would’ve thought?” He grinned boyishly. “You’ve really got to meet my son, you’re in the same class.” He turned animatedly to my parents. “How great is this?”

  They returned his grin politely.

  “Noah Harris!” he hollered toward the pool. “Where the heck are you, kid?”

  From the water emerged a tall boy with green eyes, long blond locks, an exact replica of his father’s smile and an almost excessive collection of shoulder and abdominal muscles. It was obvious he was an athlete. “Nice to meet you all,” he said, slinging a towel over his shoulders. “I’d shake your hands but I’m sopping.”

  “Easy on the shaking,” Eddie said, winking at my mother. “Noah, Ari here will be in your grade at the Academy.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yaakov, Leah, what do you say we fix you both stiff drink
s, yes? These two don’t need us breathing down their necks.” Eddie slapped my back playfully. “Yaak, you like cigars? No? Well, you do kind of look like a man I could turn into a lover of single malt. I’ve got the perfect thing for you to try. Noah, grab Ari a beer, will you, or a hot dog if he wants? Don’t worry, everything’s kosher.” With that, his large hands took hold of my father, while carefully avoiding contact with my mother, and steered them away.

  Noah watched them leave. His arms appeared to flex involuntarily, despite the fact that they hung at ease at his sides. I wondered what it would be like to have such a problem. “Say your name was Ari?”

  “Aryeh,” I said. Then, kicking myself: “Ari for short.”

  “And you moved from—?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “Dope. I have friends on Long Island. Know anybody there?”

  “Some,” I said noncommittally, certain we’d have zero mutual friends.

  “I went to camp with Benji Wertheimer. Know him?” he asked, hopeful for conversation. “No? Fantastic point guard.”

  I shook my head.

  “What about Efrem Stern? Okay, Naomi Spitz? Shira Haar? She’s from Kings Point. Everyone knows her, throws Hamptons parties, she’s super pretty?” He laughed. “Don’t tell my girlfriend I said that,” he said confidentially, pointing back toward the pool.

  “No, I, uh—I won’t.”

  “Where’d you go to school?”

  “Torah Temimah.”

  “Torah Temimah?”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling small.

  “Never heard of it. New school?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “One of those frum places, then. The shtetl. We talking black hats?”

  Just how out of place I was dawned on me. To Noah, whose life, I suspected, involved athletic glory, beach houses, summer parties, I was some staid rabbinical student who had wandered comically into the wrong world, or at least the wrong backyard. And I was not unaccustomed to living as a stranger. I was a stranger in my previous existence, but one who understood that the rules governing each detail of life—how to marry, how to think, how to tie my shoes—were prescribed, always, by an aspirational morality. Standing before Noah, I was a different breed of stranger, someone attempting to hide in plain sight without any understanding of the overarching rules. Camouflaging here, I realized then, would be harder even than in Brooklyn. “Yes,” I said, itching to leave. “Pretty much.”