The New Order Page 21

  “Rabbi, how do we make it stop?”

  The rabbi gazed, bewildered, upon all of us. He clearly didn’t know. My phone rang again.

  “My dog ran away,” a woman said. “I don’t want to leave the house.”

  I was about to hang up, but this time, the phone trembled, living, warm, in my hand. There was a feeling in her voice that I understood. A sadness. The most human sound in the world. I understood this more than any words. So I did not turn off the phone.

  “I know,” I said. “Sometimes, I feel the same way.”

  I waited. There was the sound of a human breathing.

  “Thank you,” said the voice, and hung up.

  The phone shuddered in my palm. And then it was off. It seemed to be off. I almost wanted to call her and continue the discussion, but I did not.

  Then I heard, very clearly, the voice inside the phone of Frieda Sonnenbaum, who was standing beside me. In her phone, a man said, “and for the last year George, my son, started drinking, and he won’t talk to me. My son. I drove him across the whole state of North Carolina for his basketball games when he was a kid, and he was an honors student in college and he drove drunk to our house and we started meetings but I just want to drive to his apartment, grab the bottles of liquor, and empty them into the street . . .”

  This man was upset. Of course he was, but I heard something else in his voice, too. I grabbed Frieda’s phone. She was a real estate agent, and not one who relinquished her phone easily. But this time she did.

  “It’s hard,” I said. “I know. It is.”

  There was silence.

  “Yep,” said the man, and hung up. Frieda stared at me. I gently placed the quiet phone in her hand.

  The phones exploded into sound, over and over, in the room until this. Until the person who answered the phone did not tell the one on the other end to stop. The phones were adamant, ferocious for attention, their rings shrieking so that it felt as though they would reside forever in the air, but as soon as we said something to the person on the other end, anything but “stop,” the phones ceased their ringing. One by one, the ringing vanished and after a few minutes, finally all the cell phones in the temple were silent.

  The silence in the room seemed new, it seemed enormous. The congregation looked a bit shaken. My ears felt a bit tender from all the buzzing. I was depleted. But now, the air was pure as glass. In this silence, I felt I could hear everything. Or I could try, perhaps, to listen.

  We stood in front of the rabbi, who gazed at all of us, pleased.

  “We are all ready now?” he asked us.

  We were. I think we were ready. There was so much that all of us needed to fix. The world was still hot and despairing and full of pain, and I wasn’t a giant at all, but I wasn’t dust, either. I was trying to be a hopeful resident of the world. I stood with my fellow congregants in the room, feeling their presence beside me. We were all paying attention now, our minds unfastened. We looked to the new year. Here it was.

  “All right then,” the rabbi said. “Let’s begin.”

  Acknowledgments

  As always, with special appreciation to the wondrous team at Counterpoint: to my essential, visionary editor Dan Smetanka, and the tireless publicist extraordinaire Megan Fishmann. To my agent, Maria Massie, for wonderful, nourishing support. With many thanks to Hollins University for giving me a place to write and teach, for that essential support. To Paula Whyman for creating Scoundrel Time, that artistic outlet that has been a comfort. To the following beloveds: David and Meri Bender; my sisters, Suzanne and Aimee; my cousins Natalie and Shelley; Frances Silverglate, Perrin Siegel, Sean Siegel, warriors for justice, all. To dearest Margaret Mittelbach, Jennie Litt, Tim Bush, Katherine Wessling, Amy Feldman, Dana Sachs, Jenny Shaffer, Bill McGarvey, Eric Wilson, Malena Morling, David McGlynn, Peter Trachtenberg, Elizabeth Cohen, and Don Baker, for being there, and for reading, always. And with so much love to my dear partner in everything, Robert, who said, always, to keep going; and, with endless love and pride, to Jonah and Maia, who learned, quickly, how to march.

  “The Cell Phone” was published in a different form as “The Cell Phone That Would Not Stop Ringing During High Holy Day Services” in The Saranac Review, Fall 2015. “The Good Mothers in the Parking Lot” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Scoundrel Time.

  KAREN E. BENDER is the author of Refund, a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction, short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and long-listed for the Story Prize. She is also the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. She has won grants from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the NEA, and is fiction editor for the literary journal Scoundrel Time. She is the Visiting Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University, and lives in Virginia with her husband, the author Robert Anthony Siegel, and their family. Find out more at karenebender.com.