A Town of Empty Rooms Read online

  “I had a Jewish friend once,” she said. “My best friend, third grade. She was Jewish. I’m not. I consider it — a privilege.” She coughed. “We’ve come a far way, don’t ya think? Excused. Have a good day.”

  At 2:00 PM, the rabbi took a small, ragged band of children to the river for the Tashlich service — they would be writing down things they wanted to change about themselves on (biodegradable) rice paper and releasing it into the river. The parents were wearily trying to throw out suggestions about what the children might want to improve in the coming year, and the children were ignoring them.

  “How about not tormenting your brother?” said one mother.

  “How about not leaving the room a total mess?” said another.

  The children’s responses were beautiful in their innocent greed.

  “I want long hair,” said a tiny girl who had a pixie cut.

  “I want a new Nintendo,” said a boy, eyeing those of the other boys who had snuck them in. “Red.”

  They reached the wide gray river in which they would throw their sins. The rank smell of fish, industry, and gasoline rose into the air. The rabbi swooped into the cloud of children. They had all been dressed formally, the girls in princess dresses, the boys in button down shirts; they had no idea why they were here.

  “How do any of you feel connected to God?” he asked them. No one had an answer to this. He rubbed his forehead. “Okay. How do you feel when you are connected to people?” he tried.

  “Like Siamese twins?” asked one girl.

  “God is nice. He made us. You know, Adam and Eve? Duh. So he made us,” said another girl.

  “He made me?” asked Zeb.

  “Okay, how do you feel when a friend’s mad at you?” asked the rabbi. “Or how do you feel when you’re disconnected?”

  “Like, say I’m talking on the phone to someone,” said a boy, “and there’s a thunderstorm and I’m having an important discussion where I’m telling them some Nintendo cheats, and then suddenly the power goes out and boom — ”

  “Right,” said the rabbi, looking a little lost.

  They all stood, overlooking the gray river, which swept by, currents cutting through the water like long, graceful sashes.

  “Serena,” said the rabbi. “Do me a favor. Turn around. Link arms.” Suddenly, she was back-to-back with the rabbi, feeling the back of his torso pressing against hers; they were locking elbows. “Okay. Move.” He tried to walk forward, and she tried to walk the opposite way; they were frozen, struggling. She felt the ripple of his muscles in his back, the ridge of his spine; it was too close, suddenly. She held her breath, glad she was linked with him, and afraid the others would see her gladness. The kids shrieked, laughing.

  “Watch!” The rabbi called. “Can we move this way? What happens? Are we stuck?”

  “Jump!”

  “Move to the side!”

  They tried to follow the kids’ orders; they were really stuck. He was strong. So was she. Suddenly it occurred to her that he had somehow chosen her, that he also wanted to feel this confinement.

  But he was clever; he changed the subject. “If you feel too many rules from God, if you feel too stifled, if you can’t really be your best self, then you and God are like this.”

  “Kids,” she said. “Watch what happens now.”

  She slipped her arms out from his and jumped free; they both fell forward. “Kids!” said the rabbi. “Use your best selves. You can get rid of your bad twin and find your good self. Now let’s think about what we want to throw into the river.” He started passing out pencils and rice paper. She stood, a little far away, looking at the children, reaching up and grabbing the pencils, writing down the things they wanted to throw away.

  THAT NIGHT, AROUND 7:30 PM , there was a knock at the door; it was Brittany, a fifteen-year-old who lived across the street. Dan held the door open, puzzled.

  “Yes?” asked Dan.

  “I’m scheduled to babysit,” said Brittany.

  “For us?”

  “Come on in,” Serena said to the babysitter. Serena was wearing a black silk dress and coat as though they were going out.

  “Where are you going?” asked Dan.

  Serena looked at him. “I thought we might go to services,” she announced brightly.

  “We?” he asked.

  “It’s Rosh Hashanah,” she said.

  “So?”

  “Why don’t you come with me — ”

  He rubbed his face. “Come on, Serena,” he said. “I’m busy. No.”

  He was surprised that she seemed to dim at this. “Please,” she said.

  They stood in the doorway, the babysitter shifting from foot to foot, smiling, but also aghast. She had signed on for her $5 an hour, and she did not want to see this display of marital discord. Serena wanted him to come. It was Rosh Hashanah, the start of the New Year — there was a logic to that, in a way. They could just decide it was time to start over. Perhaps they could pretend that they were as they had been, as they thought they would always be.

  Dan looked away. He did not want to go; he did not want to admit to her how he dreaded the feeling he would get in the Temple. It made no sense to him, first off, the muttering in Hebrew, the marching around with the Torah, the standing up and sitting down for no apparent reason. But mostly he feared the sensation that others were part of this, of this and of everything, and he never would be, and, secretly, that his wife was solidly part of this, had figured all this out. It was one reason that he had been drawn to her — her assumption that she belonged in her family, that she belonged here, even at Pepsi, even if they didn’t appreciate her — but marrying her didn’t mean that he absorbed this quality; he was merely spectator to it. Now he felt left out and sometimes, embarrassingly, competitive. How could he feel competitive over the Temple, of all places! It was not a feeling one was supposed to have in a marriage, he thought. But there it was.

  “It’s the New Year,” she said, and she seemed so intent, and she sparkled in a way that caught at his heart, for she looked beautiful and nostalgic, and the babysitter stood there, polite, shaming them into an outing. He threw on a jacket and they left.

  They rode together in the car. It felt strange to be going somewhere formally dressed, as though they had been hurled into civility. She had purchased this dress seven years ago, off the sales rack at Macy’s, a black sheath with glimmering threads thrown in. Dan was wearing the navy jacket he had always worn to corporate parties. The radiant purple dusk spread out across the city; it was as though they were impersonating themselves in an earlier life.

  The car was quiet. “You look nice,” he said, as though they were on a first date. Perhaps, in a way, they were.

  “You, too,” she said.

  Serena wanted to sit in a pew near the front. Dan turned this down, as he felt his reluctance was naked, so they settled on the fourth row from the front. The day’s dying light fell through the stained glass windows, creating radiant colored squares on the floor. The congregants stepped through the translucent light gently, as though through pools of water. There was the melodic engine of the almost hundred-year-old organ rolling, heavy, through the room.

  Dan watched her expression when the rabbi strode up onto the pulpit. He was wearing an almost blinding white suit, the sort of suit that advertised purity so slavishly it seemed ridiculous, fraudulent. Clearly, he had consulted no one on this. He noticed that Serena was watching the rabbi intently. The light through the windows was darkening. The rabbi looked at the congregation arranged in front of him, his face suddenly, brilliantly, awake.

  The rabbi stood on the bima. He gazed out at all of them. Showtime.

  “L’shanah tovah,” he said.

  When he turned to face the Ark, he lifted his arms to indicate that the congregants were to rise, his arms coming up with a slow stateliness; it seemed that wings were rising from his back. It was a gesture of the deepest confidence, that he knew the others would follow him, but, more, that he beli
eved that his role was to be followed.

  He turned and, clutching the Torah by its wooden handles, held the scroll up before all of them. It was heavy, but his arms did not tremble. The gesture threw her back, fully, to her childhood, and her eyes filled with tears. She had sat with her father, watching the rabbi of their Los Angeles temple lift the Torah; that moment was gone, vanished — there was no way to recover it. The service, the sight of the sanctuary, was a trick; it was a way to remember him, and it was like a hall of mirrors, distorting the air. She missed her mother and sister, who lived in Los Angeles and whom she had not seen since the funeral. She touched her eyes, embarrassed. Dan noticed her crying. He put his hand in his pocket and lifted out a Kleenex. She took it.

  Serena watched Rabbi Golden lower the Torah onto the lectern. She watched his hands grip the brown handles, watched his arms tense under his suit. “This is our covenant,” he said. “This is what has bound us for five thousand years.”

  The rabbi gazed out at the congregants all standing in the sanctuary; it was as though he understood all of them.

  Chapter Eight

  SHE TRIED TO KEEP HER children from going into Forrest Sanders’s yard, but it felt impossible; the three-foot-high chain-link fence could be hopped in a moment. And Forrest wanted to talk to them. After his initial enthusiasm, his attempt to advertise himself as a decent man, Forrest seemed intent on one activity: lending her things. He kept an eye on their backyard to gauge what she needed. When her yard filled with leaves, he loaned her his rake and green plastic tub; when a branch was dangling off her azalea bush, he showed her how to use his garden clippers to take it off. She took the sharp things offered over the fence, thanked him, returned the tools, and hoped that would comfort him. She did not understand why he constantly tried to lend her things until she realized he wanted to incur a debt.

  One afternoon, he waved to her. “Can you spare a moment?”

  He was artfully posed with a hammer against his hip.

  “Well, Miss Serena,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to ask you a favor.” He pointed to the tall, grand pine standing in her yard. “Take a look at your tree.”

  She looked up at the pine tree towering into the blue sky. It reminded her of a tree that had grown in her parents’ backyard — that was not a pine, but a tall, strange palm that swung over their own small stucco house — that tree, too, had been startling in its grandeur. Sometimes now, in the evenings, she came outside and sat under the pine tree, looked up at the way its branches stretched out against the dark sky. They had a small, broken house, but that tree rose and rose out of the sparse grass of the yard, perhaps fifty feet high into the white morning mist.

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “It’s leaning. During a hurricane, it could fall on my shed. Smash it.”

  She stepped back and examined the tree, its green needles hard against the bright blue air. The tree shot up into the sky, perfectly straight.

  “I don’t think it will,” she said, slowly.

  “You need to cut it down,” he said.

  An insistence in his voice, an assumption that she should listen and obey him, made her mind slam shut. She tried the folksy, wheedling tone he had assumed a moment before. “Mister Forrest, sir, it looks like a nice tree to me.”

  He was not fooled. In fact, this attempt at banter galled him; he knew what she was doing.

  “I don’t want to say this, but — ” he laughed.

  “What?”

  “Y’all want to destroy my shed,” he said, in an almost cheerful voice.

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “I really don’t.”

  The air suddenly was perfectly clear, the sky a deeper, closer blue, and Forrest himself so precise and white-haired he resembled a doll. Her heart began to march.

  “Why,” she asked, trembling, “would I want to destroy your shed?”

  “You tell me,” he said. “You tell me why you don’t want to think about me. This is my shed. I worked on it for months. Years. It cost me almost nothing. You don’t know what the hurricanes do here.”

  She took a deep breath. She walked over to the tree and banged it with her hand. Then she faced him. “I’m not cutting down the tree,” she said.

  He blinked and stepped back from the fence. She was aware that it was a flimsy wire fence, no protection against anything.

  “Well,” he said, and reddened. “Well, Miss Serena. Are you sure about this?”

  She paused. “I’m not cutting it down,” she said.

  “Then I’m sorry to say that you just lost the best neighbor you ever had.”

  These words had the ringing, solemn tone of a statement that had been made before.

  “What?” she asked, stepping back.

  “You don’t care about my property. You want to see it smashed. Ruined! Gone!”

  “I do not!” she said. Her hands were shaking; he saw this and smiled.

  “Then cut it down,” he said. He looked more animated than she had ever seen him. It was as though he had deciphered the nature of humanity — that everyone was out to take down his shed, and then him — and he had finally found some clarity! “Until you can do that, stay away. Keep the kids off my property.” He snapped his fingers at his dogs. They looked up and barked, as though they were aware of a sound neither of the humans could hear.

  “Come on, boys,” he said, sweetly, to his dogs. He turned around and went into his house.

  SHE HELD THE DISCUSSION IN her head the rest of the day, reliving it over and over, a banal, hopeless type of rehearsing — it was as though Forrest would utter something new in it the fifteenth time she went over it, or she would have figured out the right thing to say, or she would shoot him down with the perfectly phrased retort that would make him step back and say, “Yes, what was I thinking? Leave the tree alone.” Perhaps she could have been calm or jokey or beguiling or authoritative or anything else, but she could not decide upon any other way she could have responded. She didn’t know what made him so mad about it. But she did not want to cut down the tree.

  She knew what Dan would say when she told him, and so announced it quickly, almost blasé, when he was brushing his teeth — by the way, Forrest had told her they were not on speaking terms and they were supposed to stay off his property.

  He dropped his toothbrush. “No. He didn’t say that.”

  “Yes, in fact, he did.”

  “Was he kidding?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  He blinked; he looked bereft for a moment, as though his careful idea that everything could work out, everything could be simple, was ruined.

  “What did you do?” he asked. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe it could fall on them and then — ”

  “The tree’s fine. Look at it. Something else is going on. I don’t know what — ”

  “I’ll tell him we’ll think about it.”

  “But we’re not going to — ”

  He stood, staring at the curved porcelain basin. He seemed to be contemplating something deep; then he said, in a flat, knifelike voice, “What if this gets Zeb kicked out of Scouts?”

  “Why should this get us kicked out of anything?”

  “This is not how you deal with people,” he said crisply. “We have to fix this now.”

  The next morning, he went to talk to Forrest. He came back a little pale. “He said he made a nice and friendly request and that down here people think about each other.”

  “Really? They do that? Cut down trees for no reason?”

  They looked at each other.

  “We need to do the right thing,” he said.

  The houses sat side by side across the wire fence; she told the children that they should keep a distance from Forrest. “Let’s not go over to his house anymore,” she said. “He’s in a bad, uh, mood.” They had seen the discussion, the fragility of the adult masks in the chilled fall afternoon; now they were interested in knowing the precise boundaries of engagement.

  “But he’
s nice at Scouts,” said Zeb.

  “Well, I bet he will be nice there. Just be careful.”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, eating breakfast cereal, and she was telling them that another human was dangerous; they nodded and absorbed this, and it was suddenly deeply sad.

  Whenever Serena went into the backyard, whenever she backed the car out of the driveway, the two muscular, wolflike Akitas began to bark. They pressed up against the low wire fence, their mouths wet and black. “Shh,” she said to the dogs, trying to soothe them, even once secretly slipping them a piece of bologna, but they continued, and she saw Forrest Sanders in his shed, chopping some wood, letting them.

  She looked up articles on the Internet — How do you tell if a tree might fall? She printed out photos of trees that appeared dangerous, none of which resembled the pine, and left them in his mailbox. Zeb tried to make friends with the dogs. “Here, boy,” he said, approaching them, absurdly, beautifully hopeful. He tried to whistle, a low, moist breath. The dogs stood up, paws on the fence, their barks puncturing the air. Rachel ran away from them, her hands over her ears. Worried they would hurt her flowers, the girl spread Kleenex over some of them so that they would not hear.

  At the Scout meetings, Forrest’s enthusiasm for the other scouts’ achievements seemed to be knocked up a notch. “Would you all believe that Carson McNulty collected eighteen different leaves on his nature walk last week! Let’s all give him a big hand!” She believed that he was taking a circuitous route in the church social hall, walking a wide circle away from them, with Dan following him, carrying various ceremonial doodads. During a meeting, Forrest posed in his beige uniform, pale and worn out over the years but lavishly adorned with badges. He walked grandly through the expanse of boys, as though they were awaiting his opinions on their projects, badge progress, necktie knots. In actuality, Serena noticed, the boys and fathers did not really talk to him; they nodded and smiled when he came by, and occasionally asked him questions from the Cub Handbook, but they were all involved in their own projects, and the conversations quickly melted away. Forrest was trying — he thrust himself into conversation after conversation, with plenty of backslapping and high-fives to the boys. She watched him circle the room, and in his walk there was the floating intensity of a hawk, a bright hunger in his eyes. He smiled at Zeb at the meetings, and he gave extensive instructions to Dan, who was helping to organize the loud, chaotic pack of boys, but Forrest did not acknowledge her at all.