A Town of Empty Rooms Page 12

  “Why that tree and not my shed?”

  “The Torah specifically tells us not to cut down trees,” said the rabbi. “Especially in times of warfare.” He cleared his throat. “Allow me to buy this sapling,” said Rabbi Golden, taking out his wallet. “Twenty-three dollars and forty-seven cents. You can say your building’s all paid for.”

  “Pray for it,” said Forrest Sanders. “Pray for my shed.”

  Rabbi Golden’s face darkened briefly at this request, and Serena was afraid that he would say something that was not at all a prayer, but then he bowed his head, clasped his hands, and said something quietly under his breath. He stood with, she thought, an exaggerated piety, as though mocking Forrest’s request, as though his job also meant being a puppet to give voice to people’s petty concerns, and he was tired of this. It was not just Forrest; it was all of them.

  Forrest eyed him, waiting.

  “Well,” said Forrest Sanders. “Hope it works.” He held out his hand for the money.

  Rabbi Golden counted the money into it. Forrest Sanders’s hand closed around it. His dogs circled around him, their pink tongues hanging out. The rabbi picked the sapling up, in its tiny tub. “Good luck, sir,” the rabbi said, “with your shed and your saplings.” He went to his car and drove off.

  Three minutes later, her phone rang.

  “Did you hear that?” the rabbi said, cackling into his cell phone. “He asked me to pray for the shed!”

  “What did you say?”

  “I don’t even know,” said the rabbi. “That’s the first time I’ve prayed for a shed,” he said. “The prayer did it. Not even buying the tree.” He paused. “Give it half an hour,” he said. “Then go in your yard. The dogs won’t bother you.”

  He clicked off.

  She stood in her kitchen, holding the phone. In half an hour, she opened the door to the backyard and stepped outside. Forrest Sanders was now opportunistically moving more of his saplings to the front. He was whistling. The dogs trotted around his yard, tails up; they looked at her.

  She walked a slow circle around her yard. She kept walking through the yard, pretending to check the flowers. The yard had a ragged, tangled beauty to it, which she had not noticed for the last two weeks: the orange froth of lantana, the sweet musk of the gardenia, the pure scent of honey in the air.

  There was nothing — silence.

  SHE DID NOT TELL ANYONE about how the rabbi had helped her. She kept it secret, though he had not told her to — in fact, he would probably have been pleased if she had trumpeted this unique use of the Rabbi’s Discretionary Fund. But keeping it secret lent it a greater significance and allowed her to turn it around in her mind and make it whatever she wanted it to be. Dan, her husband, had not believed her, and the rabbi had; it was a simple thing, this trust, but it held enormous weight. She went through the motions of her day — fed the children, bathed them, sat by their doors as they fell asleep. At night, she lay far from Dan in bed as they dug paths into their own separate dreams; she closed her eyes and thought of the way the rabbi stood beside Forrest, the way he stood, in his worn navy suit, to pray for the shed. She wanted to reach forward, take his hand, and lead him into her house. She would tell him her plans for the Southeastern North Carolina Jewish Community Center, or for the rest of the years of her life. It was time to leave the South; it was time to leave America; she wanted to go where anyone was safe from their own thoughts, from the bruised nature of love, from the unpredictable nature of death, from the fear — of her husband, of her children, of her family, of herself — that made her sit up in the middle of the night. Her aloneness felt utter and complete, the world retreating from her. But the rabbi would sit at her kitchen table, listening; she could picture him, with great clarity, sitting there, leaning back, alert and languorous, an arm stretched over a chair.

  Finally, his hand would grab hers. She would feel it, his warm, attentive fingers against hers, the steady pulse of her heart in her palm. He would lean toward her and she would feel his lips against hers, urgent, wanting something of her, too, her skin alive, his cheek soft, melting. She was tired of the confines of her own body, her own worn sorrow; now she wanted to fall into him. He would pick her up, gently, and carry her away, their hands finding each other, and there she would be, in the temporary harbor of another person, and she would have that most precious feeling — that the only place in the world where she wanted to be was here.

  DAN KEPT THINKING ABOUT THE dogs. They roamed around Forrest’s yard, strong, light, as though trotting across clouds, and they gazed at him with a blank, eager expression; they did not bark. Serena was wrong; she had imagined the dogs’ jumping the fence, or misinterpreted it, and this thought dismayed him. He had spoken briefly to Forrest, asked him if his dogs were jumping the fence, and Forrest acted surprised at the entire idea of it. “These are good dogs,” he said, scratching one. “You just have to give them respect.”

  Dan stopped his car at a red light. He was across the street from Temple Shalom, and he noticed the rabbi getting out of his car. The rabbi walked with a slim, liquid grace to the door of Temple Shalom. It occurred to Dan that his wife worked with this man every day.

  His fingers gripped the vinyl steering wheel to bolster himself against the familiar sense of disorder.

  Dan did not want to go to work. He turned the wheel and headed toward the freeway. He drove up the overpass, and for one, two, three exits, he was on the freeway, heading west. The other cars floated by him, and he drove with them, joined in a mysterious race, heading out of town, somewhere, the air a swath along his car. He wanted to understand Serena — was that so much to ask? He wanted to know why she had so casually handed over someone else’s credit card, what she had been thinking. How could you be married to someone and not know what was going through her mind? He was beginning to fear that when he drove home she would not be there, that he would walk through the door to an empty house. Hadn’t she said something about being ready to leave? He had lived, most of his life, distrustful of what might happen next, and she was who he knew, whom he came home to and believed would be there, even when she was not, even when she was at her desk at work. He had never truly trusted anyone before. There was a heat in his throat, an awful, uncontrollable heat, and the sadness surprised him — he had not allowed himself to feel it the last few months. There had been too much to do, to plan, to move. He had been skating on the surface of this heat, and it could be bottomless. Now he gripped the steering wheel, and he did not want to feel this dark pulling inside of him — it gave him the troubling sensation that he did not know what he would do next. He drove for ten minutes, feeling the speed of the car in his jaw, his heart thrumming, frantic, before he turned to the off ramp and headed to work. He had an idea how to fix what had gone wrong.

  THE NEXT DAY, SERENA WAS scheduled to work at the Temple office the whole day; the Xerox machine had taken this moment to collapse, and Georgia sounded like a hostage who needed release. Dan did not seem annoyed when Serena asked him to pick up the children; he said he would take a day off because there was something he wanted to take care of around the house.

  When she got home, at dusk, there was an enormous flatbed truck parked in front of the house. In it was a wood chipper, which roared, hoarse, and in its maw spun pieces of tree limb, reduced to dust. She stopped, wondering who was getting work done on the house. Then she saw the tree pieces were being taken from her backyard.

  She rushed into the yard. The tall pine tree had been cut down. Its trunk was sliced into round pieces like slabs of an enormous hotdog. In its place was a terrible abundance of emptiness, sky. The whole yard held the sharp tang of pine. A pile of branches sat by the wood chipper, the green needles extending like tufts of fur. She stood, frozen.

  “Who told you to do this?” she asked one of the workers. He pointed across the yard. At Dan.

  He was standing by the door of the house, watching the tree being dismantled. The children were sitting beside him, watching with
a kind of excited interest; they seemed to have forgotten the argument over the tree and were absorbed in the complicated ceremony of its being taken apart. Serena started running; she flew across the yard to him and grabbed his arm.

  Her voice cracked. “What did you do?”

  He blinked; she thought he looked surprised at her reaction. “Let’s talk over here,” he said.

  They walked to the side of the yard.

  “Why did you do this, Dan? Why did you cut it down?” she said.

  He looked at the ground and stroked his face with his hand. The odor of pine was so strong she could taste it, bitter, on her tongue.

  “And how much did this cost?” she asked. “Aren’t we supposed to be trying to save some money?”

  He glanced at her, then away.

  “I got a good deal on it,” he said.

  She shuddered and stepped away from him. “I don’t believe this,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “We need — I wanted to get along with our neighbors,” he said. “We don’t need this trouble. Now we can all get along.”

  “But it was a beautiful tree!”

  He paused and looked over at Forrest’s yard. It was, for once, empty.

  “He didn’t like it. Maybe it would have fallen. Did we want that on us? Maybe he was right — ”

  “The tree was fine. I liked it! Why do you care what he thinks over what I do?”

  He stepped back into the blue dusk and laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You haven’t asked me about very much.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What do you think?”

  She looked at him — he was still thinking about Saks, the card, all that had happened in New York.

  The workmen, arms full of slender tree branches, elbowed around them. Dan looked over her head, at a distant point, then back at her.

  “It ruined us. Serena. Stop and think for a moment. It did.” He wanted to say, I don’t know who you are, but it would make him sound like an idiot. He could not say this aloud.

  She stood on the dry yellow grass, surrounded by the mangle of tree limbs, staring at him.

  “You didn’t have to steal from them.”

  “It wasn’t — ” She did not know how to tell him how separate the world had felt, how she did not feel alive, or real, when she walked into that glittering store, how something had been stolen from her, how she didn’t even want the jewelry, really, but instead wanted something they could not sell.

  “Why did you do it? Just tell me.”

  She looked away. How could she express it? She could not think of the correct words. “Some of us make mistakes . . . we aren’t so able to — ”

  “I don’t know why you did it!” he said. All of his breath emptied out of his body. “I don’t know why you couldn’t have stopped.”

  Her face was hot, and something invisible fractured in her feelings toward him. Turning, she rushed toward the house. Stop? What could she stop? Perhaps that was the harshest loss that had come from the action — not that she had been fired, not that they had gone into debt and had to move, but that she could not explain her loneliness to Dan at that moment, that she could not explain her sense that something deep, irreplaceable, had been robbed from her. Now she stood, looking at the tree being taken apart, the branches sawed off, the trunk chopped into circles. It had been a beautiful tree. It was startling how quickly it became a dead pile of wood. She had never felt so separate from her husband. The shriek of the woodcutter was loud, guttural; she stood, frozen, and listened to it.

  THE NEXT EVENING WAS THE last October meeting of the board. Serena left the house, clutching her briefcase; she wanted to look crisp, knowledgeable, because she had not been able to sleep the night before. She could not bear to look at the tree stump, to think about what the tree’s absence said about anything; when she did see the splintery stump in the backyard, she felt the low, sharp sting of shame.

  She was grateful now for the various elements of order — foldout card table, the gray flickering lights, the voices of the other board members — but she was not really paying attention to the business of the evening, the complaints about the High Holy Days ticket distribution, some new zoning issues with the land for the Jewish cemetery. The coffee cake flew off the plate. Everyone seemed starving.

  She did not notice that Betty was holding a folder that she repeatedly reached into and shuffled papers inside, and she did not notice that Norman was tapping his fingers whenever Betty made a statement, clearing his throat loudly as though trying to erase her words.

  What Serena did notice was the way that Tom suddenly wanted to end the meeting. “Well,” he said, briskly. “No more business? Then we’re done.”

  “Tom,” said Betty. “We are not done.”

  Norman coughed, sharply.

  Tom’s face flickered. “I don’t know why you’re pushing this, Betty — ”

  Betty’s voice was louder. “I’m pushing it, Tom, because it’s true.”

  Tom cleared his throat; he opened his mouth. “I — we need to have a special meeting.” He closed his eyes briefly and then gazed out at them. He did not say anything more. Instead, he passed out a pale blue flyer. It said, Special meeting next week. 7:00 PM, November 6, Social Hall. There have been some allegations against Rabbi Golden.

  Serena stared at the words. She thought, suddenly, that the allegations were about her, that the rabbi had been caught calling her, late at night, but then she realized, of course, that she had been calling him. She sat very straight, hands clasped politely in front of her, and glanced around the table, imagining they all could see through to her pacing at night, her strange, frantic dialing, her need to hear his voice. She had stalked him; that was what they would tell her, and this time there would be no lawyers. But then she understood that no one at this table could see this, and that the allegations had landed on him.

  “A Zip file will be sent to all of you,” said Betty, solemnly. “In the coming week. We will address all issues, in full, at the next meeting.”

  “Meeting adjourned,” said Tom. “Shalom!” He darted out.

  The board members glanced at each other; the meeting had devolved into something unexpected, wholly new. Serena rushed out the door toward Tom, who was scuttling quickly down the dark street. “Tom!” she said. “What is going on?”

  A pickup truck rumbled by, a heavy bass drumbeat shuddering through the air. “We will discuss everything at the meeting next week.”

  He turned to walk away, and she stepped up to him. “Now, Tom.”

  Tom looked at her, and she noticed a new expression in his eyes: fear. “People are bored,” he said. “Or perhaps they are frustrated by other world events, the situation in Israel. . . . Serena. What would compel a person to attack another good person for no logical reason? Perhaps the members of our congregation who dislike our great rabbi, my friend, secretly hate Jews. The blossoming of a Jewish institution.” He gestured toward the enormous buildings across the street, buildings with the size and heft of cruise ships. “Or think. What would the Baptists, or the Methodists, the Catholics, gain if we, the Jewish people, were at war with each other?”

  “What are you saying?”

  He leaned toward her. “Are we puppets of other people’s hatred? Why is brother taking up arms against brother? We have to protect him,” he said, and lifted his fist. “Right?”

  They were in the parking lot beside the Temple, standing in the pools of the orange light from the lampposts. The orange light falling onto their faces made them look not human but alien. The smell of barbecue rolled off someone’s yard, and Serena tasted ash in her mouth.

  “Yes,” she said.

  She got into the car and drove home. It wasn’t late, but the road had already emptied, and no one was here; the street was hazy and radiant with the lights from the McDonald’s, Bojangles’, Hardee’s, signs, a lonely nation under the night sky. There were signs from the restaurants and chur
ches set out for the drivers to read: BOGO Monster Bacon Cheeseburgers Today Only!; Call 986-3728 for Free Pool Installation Estimates; Five minutes after you die you’ll know how you should have lived.

  The paper announcing the allegations against the rabbi lay on the seat beside her. She touched it, as though somehow the thin physical fact of the paper would bring her closer to him.

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  SERENA’S FATHER ALWAYS TRIED TO be home from the emergency room at Northridge General Hospital in time for dinner. He didn’t always make it; the car crash, drug overdose, and bullet wound victims who flew through the electric doors of Northridge General tended to pile up late in the day, so her mother set the table at six, and by six thirty, Serena and her mother and sister would start. But a part of Serena would always be waiting for him, as she tried to plan what she would say to him at dinner that night.

  Aaron had pleaded with his parents to leave Germany when he was six; they left just before his aunts and uncles were herded on trains and vanished. He had tumbled through his life in America wondering what had happened, why they had chosen that moment to listen, and what was the extent or limit of his own power. He had become a nurse in the emergency room to accommodate the constant thrumming of his own heart. Now, every day he rushed toward stretchers holding patients whose hearts had stopped, whose necks had broken, whose intestines had been stabbed, whose skin glistened with shards of glass; some recovered, many died. He could never get over the arbitrary nature of suffering in any form; it terrified him, and when he got home he wanted to shield his daughters from all of it.

  He whisked in while they were in the middle of dinner, each night a little surprised that they were all merely sitting around the dinner table, healthy and alive. Serena and Dawn looked up at him and told him what they had done that day. “Quick,” he said, “what happened to my girls today? What did you win? Serena? Go on. Tell me.”