by Sharon Heath
Her mention of Holies brought an entirely different image to mind: Dhani throwing Easter egg dye at me as I whirled and twirled in our own impromptu enactment of the Hindu holiday Holi, which was rudely interrupted by Father coming out of the house to chew on Dhani’s lips and trace his rubbery hand over her bulging belly, terrifying me by teasing her that he wanted to eat her baby.
Except he’d called it “our baby.”
I reminded myself that he’d been wrong about that one, as he’d been wrong about so much else. I felt a little guilty recalling what a creep Father had been, especially since we were here to learn more about the container of the tablet that enjoined the whole world to honor its mothers and fathers. But there was no way around it. Outside of the few months following Father’s loss of his mind and before he’d regained it—seeming for a time to like nothing better than to play horsies with me in his living room and make silly jokes about Sister Flatulencia’s farts—he hadn’t behaved particularly honorably. It wasn’t just the shady transactions between him and baby clothes’ wholesaler Leland Du Ray when he was senator (causing him, ultimately, to be ousted from office), nor the hypocrisy of him hating having children underfoot when he was always parading before the press all the unwanted babies he’d saved, nor his pincer grips and disownings when he didn’t like what I was doing. No, what sealed the dishonorable deal was Father’s using my declining grandfather’s name in such a humiliating way in his “pro-life” speeches. Not to mention his attacks on C-Voids and P.D. as the products of what he liked to call his daughter’s “twisted, autistic mind.”
Sammie gave me a barely perceptible jab with her elbow, and I pulled my mind away from what I’d already known could be a particularly circular set of ruminations. Hatred is like that—a hostage-taker of perfectly good mental energy.
I could see that Rabbi Goldenrod was warming to her story. Her almost Asian-cast, dark brown eyes were luminous, and two daubs of pink had sprung up on her pale cheeks. She gestured toward the head of the room, with its broad blue and green pillars like giant candles on either side of the altar. “Actually, it’s a little synchronistic that we ended up in this Sanctuary, since the Ark was used as a kind of moveable sanctuary that miraculously provided safety to our people, particularly during the Exodus, when it was carried into the bed of the River Jordan and opened the path to freedom.”
I was used to religious lectures. In Father’s house, they were a daily event. But Rabbi Goldenrod’s obvious enthusiasm for her topic was coupled with an endearing humility. She gave me a little smile, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking, and put a hand to her heart. “Forgive me. I do get carried away. But when I think about what it takes to win freedom—in any time, for any people—when the powers-that-be are dead set on holding what they’ve got, the image of the Ark as a container of hope and action for the human spirit just takes my breath away.”
I found myself holding my own breath, too, realizing I was sitting next to a truly religious person. Everyone I’d ever met who’d announced themselves as believers had seemed a little off-kilter, all too happy to dismiss those who thought differently as either clueless or evil. I didn’t count Sister Flatulencia, who’d become disaffected from the Roman Catholic Church after her nervous breakdown, or Aadita, who’d reminded me more than once that Buddhism wasn’t a religion in the common sense of the word.
Rabbi Goldenrod was a believer. Yet somehow, when she expressed the tenets of her faith, I didn’t feel like some worm, liable to spoil the perfect roundness of her apple.
Confirming my suspicion that she was psychic, she remarked, “I like to let my mind flow over the images like a meditation. Wherever your thoughts take you is where God wants you to go.” Maybe Rabbi Goldenrod was secretly a Jewdist, like Sammie. “Most people think of the Ark as a container for Mosaic Law—the basis of all law, you know, in the western world. But the Ark was also said to contain Aaron’s rod.”
Sammie and I exchanged a glance, and I had to work to stifle an incipient snort. We’d discovered Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover when she was twelve and I thirteen and, while Lawrence’s quaint reference to Mellors’ and Connie’s genitals as John Thomas and Lady Jane made us giggle at the time, I think we shared a similar hunger for an eroticism sweeter and more personal than our era’s Internet porn and sexting. I’d ended up using my own inner images of the wedding of John Thomas and Lady Jane to set off innumerable mini-explosions in my tweeter, so I wasn’t too surprised when Sammie excitedly brought over a copy of Aaron’s Rod a few weeks later on the assumption that the title referred to a plethora of phallic scenes. Disappointed, we were forced to make up our own, ones that were informed by images from Internet porn, but the thrill was never the same as when Connie fashioned a garland of flowers for Mellors’ bulging member.
This time, I was the one to jab Sammie with an elbow before turning back to listen to the rabbi.
“Aaron’s rod is an example of the power of the Large Force, which is how I personally think of God. In the story of the exodus of my people from the oppression they endured in Egypt, God instructed Aaron and Moses to use their magical rods to persuade the pharaoh to free them. The pharaoh was so set on holding onto his own power that he didn’t even budge after Aaron’s rod made snakes of his guards, then became an even larger snake that swallowed all those smaller ones. So, what does God do? He visits ten plagues upon Egypt. Not so nice, but there it is. Ten of them, each worse than the one before.” She started ticking them off on her fingers: “Blood, frogs, flies, livestock death, boils, hail, locusts, darkness .... Wait, that should be nine. What have I forgotten?”
We sat for a moment. I sensed some shifting movement down the row and saw Jacob open his mouth and then close it.
The colored pillars at the head of the sanctuary reminded me of the blue and green striped shirt I’d bought for Assefa before he’d left for Addis Ababa. He’d objected to me spending unnecessary money on him when he could hardly return the favor on his meager intern fellowship, but I didn’t care. I would have been happy to dress him in a brand new wardrobe every day.
My reverie was broken by a sudden exclamation by Rabbi Goldenrod. “Lice! Of course I’d forget lice. Between you and me, we had a lousy bout of it this past season in the nursery school. It’s been making the rounds on the Westside for over a year, and we thought we’d escaped it, but it got us in the end. All of us, including the adults. Frankly, it is a bit of a plague. Have you ever had to comb a head of frizzy hair like mine with a nit comb?”
Within seconds, I was back in Father’s house in Main Line. After shampooing my hair in the worst-smelling soap known to mankind, Nana had sat me down between her voluminous thighs at the edge of my bed, where she jerked a comb again and again through my tangled hair, whistling the opening tune to I Dream of Jeannie and snatching my hand away from my belly every time it tried to sidle down for a pinch or two. I’d tried concentrating on my Laura Ashley wallpaper, with its floral pompoms in soothing tones of duck egg and cream. I kept attempting to count the number of flowers on the wall, but each time Nana gave a particularly hard yank, I’d lose track and have to start all over again. Being a sort of aficionado of pain, it wasn’t the pulling that made me want to pinch, but the noxious smell the shampoo left in my nostrils. It was worse than Jillily’s sickly-sweet diarrhea poops, worse than Sister Flatulencia’s silent but deadlies, worse than anything I could remember to this day, save perhaps the poison gun Ignacio had aimed, just before we became friends, at my favorite weed.
I sneaked a quick glance at the rabbi’s hair, its light honey color anomalous for someone with such dark eyes. Though a good deal finer than Assefa’s coarse coils, her curls were pretty tight. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to try to comb through hair like that, when even my own straight locks had been no picnic for Nana. Though I’m sure it hadn’t helped that I had such an oddly shaped head.
“No,” I said to Rabbi Goldenrod, “I never did.”
She made what Jacob liked to refe
r to as an oy oy oy face. “I hope you never do. But what are lice compared to the tenth plague? Killing all the Egyptians’ first born—every one of them—from livestock to the pharaoh’s own child?” She gave a little shudder.
Which must have been my cue to display my own abominable lack of tact. “Don’t you think that was a little severe? Making so many innocent babies suffer? No wonder we have terrorists, if God’s like that.” As soon as the words came out, I blushed. I suppose it could have been worse. I could have cited other religiously motivated atrocities, such as the destruction of the Twin Towers or even the Israelis’ bombing of Gaza. That would have gone over with a bang. But I was actually thinking of the Ethiopians—in particular, of Medr, whose wife was brutally murdered in one of the myriad miseries his country had been subjected to. No wonder his countrymen and women wanted to keep their hands on the Ark. Maybe they figured that God owed them.
But the rabbi had leapt ahead. “I know how you feel, Fleur. Actually I’ve always thought of Aaron’s rod as epitomizing the two sides of life, which is really what God is about, isn’t it? Life. Sprouting sweet almonds on one side and bitter ones on the other.”
That didn’t settle me down much, but I was grateful for her lack of defensiveness. “The other thing about the Ark,” she continued,—“and this is why I admire your fiancé’s father for attempting to chronicle one of its many stories—is that it’s been shrouded, quite literally, in mystery. It was always supposed to be wrapped in a veil and blue cloth—remember how the tablets themselves were made of blue stone?—and any approach to it would have to be accompanied by protective rituals.”
If that were true, what to make of the stories Achamyalesh had told of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church parading the Ark through the streets of Aksum from time to time? How would they be able to do it without being stricken dead, or at least have some godawful plague visited upon them?
Then again, maybe they had.
I wasn’t much surprised when Sammie and Jacob had one of their humdingers right after we said our thank yous to Rabbi Goldenrod. The rabbi had apologized for not having much to add to what we already knew, but that hadn’t kept Sammie from commenting as soon as we crossed the street to our parking spot in front of the Jung Institute, “Well, you know I like her a lot, but that really was a waste of time.”
Buckling my seat belt, I saw Jacob look at her as if she’d decreed the death of his people’s first born.
“What?” she demanded, defensive.
He didn’t bother to reply. The black turn of his mood was palpable. He turned on the engine, and our car pulled away from the curb with a screech. An Audi coming up along our left side swerved to avoid a collision and blasted us with its horn. Sammie gasped, and shouted, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Jacob?”
Jacob bested her one, pounding the steering wheel as his eyes shot bullets. “Who the fuck do you think you are, Sammie? Miriam Goldenrod took time for us. She’s one of the busiest women in the city. She’s an authentically great human being—rabbi of a major congregation, writer, organizer of three different social outreach programs, member of a national task force on earth-justice, working on a documentary about the commonalities between Jews and Muslims.”
“You don’t have to quote me her fucking vita. I respect the woman already. I bloody well like her. All I’m saying is that she didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.”
If they kept this up, I was going to have to keep a new journal listing all the times they uttered the word “fuck” during their arguments. Jacob pulled over to the curb as soon as he came to Overland. Cars started piling up behind us on the narrow street.
His shouting was actually louder than their honking. “What she told us is that this trip of Achamyalesh’s is bogus. There’s no Ark in Ethiopia. There’s just a bunch of fucked-over, impoverished people trying to salve their self-respect by pretending they own the greatest treasure of the world. Sort of like a cab driver creating no end of havoc by tootling off to no-man’s-land and getting himself lost on a fool’s errand.”
I must say, Sammie wasn’t the only one who was offended by Jacob’s diatribe. Adam had taught me that people said things when they were angry that they didn’t really mean. Which had helped a little with Father when he started his Cackler group to undermine my discovery of C-Voids. Until I realized that Father really did mean all the nasty things he’d said about me.
If I felt angry on behalf of Achamyalesh, I felt awful for Sammie. All I could see was the back of her head, her dark hair caught up in two silver butterfly clips peeking over the tops of her ears. Her hair was so shiny. She sat, silent and immobile, and I could only imagine what was going on in her head.
The clamor of the cars behind us increased and even a homeless man on the sidewalk shouted for us to get moving—what he actually said was, “How’m I s’posed to get my cart across this street with you fucking up traffic, assholes?” I guess it finally got through to Jacob. He started up the car again.
But before he could pick up speed, Sammie undid her seatbelt, opened her door, and jumped out, thank God without a stumble. I’d broken out in a sweat. “Thank you, Jesus,” I muttered under my breath.
I caught a quick glimpse of her standing on the sidewalk, her face ashen, her eyes unseeing, before we moved beyond her—the car door still open—and up toward Olympic Boulevard.
“Let me out,” I demanded. Jacob didn’t bother to respond. The backs of his ears were as red as a Darcey Bussell rose. What to do? The car was moving just a bit faster now, and I didn’t fancy making a leap myself.
Jacob kept going. Had he even heard me? But then he signaled, made a right turn onto Olympic in front of a barreling line of traffic, and stopped the car. Again, we were treated to a cacophony of horns. The guy was becoming a one-man traffic jam. I slid out without a word.
Rushing back on Pelham Avenue in the direction of the spot where we’d left Sammie, I pulled out my cell, but she wasn’t answering. Trying to run in this heat was hell, and me wearing my two-inch black pumps made me feel and—I was sure—look ridiculous.
I stopped to pull off the shoes and stuff them into my purse. Just ahead was a group of people in front of a well-groomed Spanish-style house. They’d spread out a Pendleton style blanket on the lawn, and a woman was bouncing a pink-pajamaed baby on her shoulder with such enthusiasm that she didn’t seem to notice that her efforts were only exacerbating the infant’s unhappy squealing. One of the young men in the group said to the others, “Don’t ever offer to babysit your own child,” and they all burst into laughter.
“I don’t get it,” I muttered to myself as I ran, my bare feet registering every dry leaf, every crack in the sidewalk. Each pebble and twig felt like broken glass.
When I finally reached Sammie I was completely out of breath. She fell into my arms and wept. Really, there wasn’t much to be said. Only she could determine whether Jacob’s intelligence and wit were sufficient compensation for these rages that seemed to be part of his package deal.
We called a cab, and when we arrived at Rose Villa I insisted on paying the exorbitant fare, knowing that the particular cabbie Jacob had defamed would never have charged fifty-five dollars to deliver a palpably distraught woman and her friend home.
Chapter Seven
Fleur
I LEFT SAMMIE crying on her bed. I hated going, but I knew she’d reached the point where it was no longer useful to be comforted. She needed to fall into her misery, roll around with it in her bed, mine each vein of self-blame for having put up with Jacob’s rage, probably throwing in for good measure some extra grief over the loss of her father and a little disgust for her willingness to trade her precious fine art for art history to make things work with this kind of a man.
It had taken me two decades to recognize that falling into hell was actually necessary from time to time. Its scorched-earth policy seemed to clear the way for new incarnations of ourselves. I had to leave my friend to her abyss.
&nb
sp; Besides, Mother would kill me if I weren’t home in time for our Christmas Eve dinner. Even after her impromptu birthday bash for me, it was still our ritual. This would be our first Christmas Eve without Nana and Fayga. I couldn’t afford to dwell on the fact too long lest I disappear into the void once and for all, but homage had to be paid to the woman whose fierce attentions had kept me going in the early years when Father seemed like he wanted to squash me like a bug.
When Mother, Sister Flatulencia, Cesar, and I sat down at Mother’s perfectly laid table, Nana’s absence was a haunting presence. But we tried. Inspired by Gwennie, Mother had prepared a nut roast all by herself, and I have to say it was pretty good, despite the fact that Cesar claimed she was ruining Christmas by feeding us birdseed. He ran to his room, slamming the door as dramatically as a thirteen-year-old girl. Mother wrung her hands, muttering, “Oh, dear, and I thought the Ritalin was working.”
Muttering, “It’s not the Ritalin, the child’s suffering from loss,” Sister Flatulencia hurried from the room to calm him. Ever since the accident, it seemed as though she was coping with her own grief by trying to fill Nana’s clomping, triple-C-width shoes. Mother and I both breathed audible sighs of relief when she was able to persuade the boy to return with the promise of an extra slice of Vanille Bakery’s sinful Bouche de Noel.
Despite it all, it was sweet spending time with Mother at Christmas. I imagined that what I saw in her sparkly-eyed enthusiasm over her ten-foot tree (done up this year like a fairy princess, with white ornaments, silver bubble lights, and perfect white and silver satin bows) was the innocent little girl she’d once been, much loved by my grandfather and the grandmother who’d died before I was born. I’d seen glimpses of that girl from time to time, like when she tended her Austins or spoke of a particularly moving children’s book—her favorite (and mine) still being Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.
But mostly what she let show of herself was the post-apocalyptic woman, the one who’d endured the constant shaming of a sadistic husband following her unwanted conception of yours truly at the age of sixteen. Not to mention what she now called her “lost years,” which pretty much coincided with my own childhood, where she languished in a bewildering (for me, anyway) intermittency of alcoholic stupor. She’d come out of her prison eventually, left Father, become an active member of AA, supported her odd duck of a daughter after the Nobel debacle, tolerated the intolerable loss of Nana, taken on the challenge of raising Cesar, gotten well-deserved promotions at the library, and become the unofficial Washington lobbyist for the recovery community. But rarely did the wide-open wonder of the child she’d once been find its way to peek through.