A Town of Empty Rooms Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  To Robert, Jonah and Maia

  With love

  Part One

  Chapter One

  SHE DID NOT INTEND TO steal anything that day. Serena Hirsch was walking through midtown Manhattan on her lunch break; it was one week since her father had died, and it was her first day back at work. It was a bright April afternoon, and people were gathered in loose, happy groups outside, sitting on concrete walls and benches, turning faces to the cool pale light. Others seemed relieved, released from the confines of winter, certain of the damp promise of spring. Serena walked with the crowd marching down the sidewalk, hoping she would feel she was one of them again, but now the clear sunlight, the blaring cabs, and the groups gathered on the sidewalks all seemed to exist in some world that she did not inhabit. Her father was not part of this world anymore, and now, just back from burying him, she did not know how she belonged to it as well.

  She watched people head down the sidewalks, clutching crisp bags from Saks, and she turned into the store. Customers walked politely through the golden, unearthly light. Everything seemed carefully arranged so as to create longing. Her own parents, middle class and both bitter and hopeful about it, had always viewed Saks with a kind of defensive disdain. “Thieves,” her mother had said. “How much are these things worth? Look at the markdowns during a sale.” It made the store seem perplexing and a little unsavory when Serena was a child, even as she admired the silk-sheathed mannequins, frozen in air, as she walked by the glass cases that held silver lipsticks that gleamed in white spotlights.

  Sales. There was the theater of customers looking, buying; of salespeople coaxing; of the warm hum of life. There was the bustle of salesgirls tenderly applying makeup to customers’ faces; there were the walls thick with leather purses. She walked. Customers leaned over glass cases and gazed at the watches, scarves, jewelry, inside. Serena felt as though her body were walking by all of this, without her. “Our new Pearlessence lip liner is just right for you!” a woman said to Serena with great confidence. She was surprised the salesgirls were talking to her; their chipper greetings, their assurance, made her feel somehow released from commerce’s usual rules.

  She stopped in Fine Jewelry. Her father had liked this section, for he could point out appropriate jewelry that one could store for future pawning. He was not interested in how a diamond necklace might be purchased for a fancy outfit but in how it could be slipped into a pocket and carried to another country to be sold if America fell apart. This could, in his mind, happen at any moment. Once, when she was eleven, he leaned over the glass case and chatted, for a half hour, with a salesgirl. Serena remembered her name: Kathy. She held out a diamond bracelet, $1,298. “How would you rate the color and symmetry on this one?” he asked, in great seriousness, though he really had no intention of buying anything. “Will it hold its value more than this ring?” Kathy discussed clarity and depth. Serena’s father listened intently and then suddenly said, “Thank you,” and headed off. Serena hurried after him, feeling a little bad for the salesgirl, but the briskness of his walk told her that he was embarrassed and didn’t want the salesgirl to know that he couldn’t afford to buy the item. “You,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder, “you will be able to buy these things, and save them, and you will know when to leave.”

  She wondered what he would want her to buy today. It made her feel better, purposeful, to imagine this. There were bracelets and earrings and necklaces, the white diamonds, rubies, sapphires, unearthly, the hard, clear stones aglow in the pure light. She stopped and looked at them, all set out on wrinkled squares of black velvet.

  “That’s a beauty,” said the salesgirl. “Do you want to try it on?”

  The silver bracelet was extremely smooth around her wrist. Serena touched the clear hard surface of the diamond. Its solidness was shocking, seemed the weight of all good things on earth; she wanted it. She leaned against the case trying to seem casual, as though she was the sort of person who, in fact, purchased these objects. The bracelet’s price tag said $890. This price made her dizzy.

  “Is this the price?” she asked, as though there could be another one.

  The salesgirl nodded.

  “It’s beautiful,” Serena said.

  At a certain point, standing here, she would be a potential consumer to be flattered, and at another point she would be a loiterer, and at another point, not too much farther along, the nice salesgirl would call security on her. Suddenly, Serena was aware, as she was aware of the fragility between life and death, the fine line between civility and criminality, as thin as the silvery threads on a spiderweb. Serena wanted the bracelet. Her mouth was dry. She was alive, and her father was not. She had not been ready for this wall to come down between them — as if anyone was ever ready — but she was also thinking about the fact that she had not brought him the success he had wanted for her, and their last phone conversation had, in fact, involved his threatening to call her superior to demand that she be given a raise. What could she offer him? She was trembling; she wanted to give this bracelet to him, wherever he was, hand it to him and say: “Here. Let’s go.”

  She would buy it.

  Lightly, casually, she handed the company credit card to the salesgirl. “Here,” she said. What was she doing? It seemed that the walls were vanishing, that they were melting away like butter. She felt almost as though she were falling backwards, but she was only standing still. The air was soft, unreal with notes of vanilla, rose, and lemon from the fragrance counter. The girl innocently swiped the card. It was approved. The girl smiled, approving of her. She put the bracelet into a box and then into a stiff fragrant Saks bag with silver tissue flaring up the sides.

  “Thank you very much,” the girl said.

  Serena was startled at herself, embarrassed; she was about to tell the girl that this was a mistake, that she was not the sort of person who could afford this, but that fact was so deeply shaming there seemed no other choice than to walk out. Her throat tightened as she strode toward the door, and she closed her eyes, not knowing what would happen when she left with the bracelet. She stood on the crowded sidewalk, in the sunlight, blinking, her heart enormous.

  IT TOOK HER THREE DAYS to rack up eight thousand dollars on the company card. She went into Saks again, Tiffany’s, Bendel’s, and she asked the salesgirls about the symmetry and clarity of the diamonds, tried to imagine what would be best to transport. “Something for a new outfit?” a salesgirl, Tania, asked her, and the disconnect between this assumption and her purchase was so profound that she bought a bracelet and a ruby ring, too. She walked out, her heart in her mouth, surprised each time the card swiped, but it made her feel better to leave with these items, made her, oddly, feel as though she was being good. Her father had been worried about the nation. It was late 2002, he had been outraged about Bush, his disregard for rules, and he h
ad told her to prepare to go to another country if Bush started expanding the Patriot Act — she was, she told herself, buying diamonds to pack away to sell, the way her father wished his family had done. Plus, Earl Morton owed her, after that terrible health insurance plan, after not covering dental, for god’s sake, after taking her ideas and not giving her credit, after asking her to pick up coffee again and again. He had laughed at her request for dental coverage one time too many; he had demanded she come back to work three weeks after giving birth; she had staggered back, leaking milk, so tired she was nauseous, missing her infants so deeply her skin ached. “It’s America,” he said, tipping back in his chair, smiling as she held a clipboard against her chest, trying to keep the cotton nursing pads from slipping out of her shirt. “We all have to contribute.”

  Now he was contributing. To her.

  Her father had been overjoyed that she was at Pepsi, a Fortune 500 corporation, as though that implied that she would somehow absorb the riches that they created, but she spent the better part of her conversations with her father trying to make up what she actually did. Her father had ideas. “Pepsi should invent a juice drink with no calories,” he said. “Healthy. Tell them.” He only bought Pepsi products, and in large quantities, as though that would somehow increase her stature at the organization. She remembered him sitting in his garage, staring at his model train landscapes. Once he had started a landscape that was intended to show a large Pepsi plant and trains that would leave it, bringing bottles of soft drinks to the cities beyond. He had searched far to find the tiny plastic bottles that would fill the trucks; he found plain ones and carefully dotted the Pepsi colors on the caps; in the window of a large office building, he put a tiny brown-haired figure, looking out the window, gesturing masterfully to the outside world. “That is you,” he said, proudly, and she went home and wept.

  She hoped that no one would notice. Perhaps the money she spent would fade into the coffers of Pepsi, into the supply budget, the travel budget. She had seen the travel receipts, the first-class airfare, the lunches at Le Cirque and the Four Seasons; she saw the fruit baskets, the golf clubs that her boss Earl Morton sent to associates for the holidays, and this was okay while she and Dan had a fight every time the insurance co-pay went up? A part of her could not believe that accounting would notice. She marked it down: Morton: Travel Expense.

  During her childhood, her father was up at the first light, sitting at the table, flipping pages of the Los Angeles Times, but not reading it, as though trying to emulate what a regular person would do in the morning. He was searching for stories on Nixon, on the cover-up. “Republican fascists,” he muttered. Days when he found something particularly egregious, he brought out something from his bathrobe pocket — a surprisingly valuable silver key chain, or a 24k gold link chain. He kept something valuable on his person at all times.

  “Keep something with you that you can sell,” he told her once, when she was nine, when she wandered, sleepy, into the quiet dawn of the kitchen.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Just in case. Good to have it. So you can sell it and move.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “You never know,” he said. “Remember. When things are falling apart around you, be ready to go.”

  When she had received twenty S-chain gold necklaces for her Bat Mitzvah, the delicate offerings from teenage girls who had all purchased them at the same jewelry store in Westwood Village, he bought her a special jewelry box where she could keep them. She had wanted something with a ballerina, with lavender adolescent froufrou, but her father proudly presented her with a jewelry box that was a small, armored safe.

  One day he drove her around to identify pawnshops in the Los Angeles area. He had familiarized himself with them, the ones that paid the best prices, the ones with the friendliest proprietors, and she sat in his car as he drove them by the storefronts that announced, in enormous letters: CASH NOW! WE TAKE GOLD, SILVER , STUDENT LOAN CHECKS, INCOME TAX REFUNDS! INSTA-CASH HERE!

  “You’re the oldest,” he said, “so you should know this. This is my advice.”

  She was proud that she was getting this advice, that she was deemed worthy of it, but she looked at the stores, shabby, with enormous, overly enthusiastic signs, and she shuddered.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” she said.

  “Good point. On a regular day, don’t. But think ahead of the pack. Be a wolf, honey, not a sheep.”

  “How do you know who’s who?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “A wolf. Or a sheep.”

  He scratched his neck, which was pink and spackled; he never wore sunscreen, as though believing himself immune to the effects of the sun. Her father and his family had left Germany in 1936, not long before the rest of their relatives had been herded off and sent to the camps, and he had a particularly fierce awareness of the preciousness of life. He stocked antiviral medication and antibiotics in preparation for future epidemics, once cancelled her seat for a flight she was booked on because he had heard about thunderstorms in the flight path — she had not found out about the cancellation until she was standing in the check-in line. He wept aloud at newspaper stories of untimely death — the teenager who was shot by the police, the mother who drove the wrong way down a one-way street and was killed. As a child, she often found him at the kitchen table, the newspaper neatly folded beside himself, a Kleenex crumpled in his hand. “Don’t look,” he said, his eyes red, as he tried to pour her some cereal. “It’s something bad.”

  It was a fresh, bright morning in Los Angeles, and a few young women were jogging, faces gleaming with sweat. “Don’t trust her,” he said, pointing to one blonde girl smiling to the music playing in her ears.

  “Why?”

  “Sheep don’t have their eyes open. You can have your eyes open. You can lead the way.”

  She was nine years old. How did anyone know how to lead the way? He claimed to have known, when he was three years younger than she wa then, of the end of his world. He had told his parents, who had not wanted to leave, that they had to leave Berlin in 1936, and finally they had listened to him. If everyone has one age, one moment, in which they are stuck and that shapes them forever, it was this time for her father. It was his bravest moment. She sat with him in the car, the blue vinyl warm on her back, and she cared mostly that he had decided to impart to her this information.

  “Serena,” he said. “I trust you. You’ll know what to do.”

  Here, at forty, she strolled absurdly down Fifth Avenue. She imagined where she and her family could go. Quebec. Israel. Japan. Really, she wanted to go where he was, she wanted to talk to him one last time; she looked at the phone, waiting for it to ring. And later, when the security guards showed up at her office, when the lawyers hammered out a deal, when they asked why she had done this, for she had never done it before and did not think she would again, she did not know how to tell them how natural and free it felt, buying up the world with fake money; she could not explain how it felt like a final conversation with her father, like a deep and uncontrollable act of love.

  THREE MONTHS LATER, AFTER WORD had gotten out about her and she was unable to find a job in marketing at any corporation in New York, after the lawyers’ fees depleted all their finances, she and her husband Dan hurled their resumes all over the nation and took the one job that was offered; it was to Dan. They piled everything into a U-Haul and drove six hundred miles to Waring, North Carolina.

  The first month, Serena found herself, consistently, embarrassingly, getting lost. She had not yet found a job, so she was trying to get to know the city of Waring with their children — Zeb, five, and Rachel, three — toting them to playgrounds, parks, but she was having trouble negotiating the streets. Her heart marching, she hunched over the steering wheel so that they would not see her trembling hands. Waring was the kind of town where people seemed to wash up when their luck grew thin, a place that people picked off a map at a moment when the creditors we
re closing in or the divorce papers were filed. She drove down the main drag of the city, a former port in the Civil War, where one now noticed a longing for bargain electronic equipment, discount shoes, and cheap burgers. Marble antebellum mansions now stood deified as museums, and placards outside the churches declared, without irony: If God Is Your Co-Pilot, Switch Seats ; Democracy Is Nice, but the King Is Coming; Choose Your Future: Smoking or Non-Smoking? She tried to find the best route home.

  They did not know anyone here. It was a city of pickup trucks perched on tires the size of inner tubes, of SUVs humming along ribbons of asphalt. There were the billboards by the highway: Honesty, Caring, Responsibility, Faith, as though the simple declaration of these traits on the wall would cause them to be absorbed by the people driving by; she passed Jesus says: I will make my home with you; Free Coffee: Everlasting Life; Don’t Be So Open-Minded: Your Brains Will Fall Out. The purpose behind them all was so puzzling that she actually missed the half-naked underwear models looming over any given corner in Manhattan.

  ONE DAY SERENA WAS COMING back from the supermarket, made a wrong turn by a church placard which held the distracting message His Blood’s For You, and ended up in a web of streets that wound through a development with no trees, the sky an impassive, enormous blue. The houses appeared to have been built all at once, with five different design plans, the streets were unnamed, identifiable only to those who understood some private code, and she felt herself become afraid. The world seemed the consistency of paper, first from her father’s abrupt death, and then from the incidents with the credit cards — everyone had asked her over and over what she had been thinking, and, really, there had been no thought at all. She had been borne on a wave of feeling, a desire to be close to him in this new, shocking state of who he was. The action had revealed some tawdriness in her, and she did not know what would happen next. The children still saw her as good, and she wanted to do right for them, but she still could not find her way through these streets. “Hold on, hold on,” she murmured to the children, handing them handfuls of cheese goldfish as they sat in the back, innocent and cantankerous and hungry. She swung the car onto a side street and then back onto a main road and onto Tenth; she knew that if she called Dan, he would not want to hear from her, knew that in a moment the goldfish she was handing to the backseat would be rejected, and she was afraid of herself, of her children’s imminent outrage, of the sheer and surprising number of Bojangles’ and Hardee’s, and of the fact that anyone in the world could, at any moment, disappear.