A Town of Empty Rooms Read online

  Now she watched him move through the kitchen, briskly making a sandwich, throwing himself into the appearance of order, when they both knew there was none. He played with the children after breakfast, swinging them up around himself for a few minutes; he approached them like a hostage who paid tribute to his captor by doing animal imitations. She was grateful for the chaos of the morning, for the way the children filled the room, like smoke that prevented the parents from seeing each other. Now she watched Dan load Zeb and Rachel onto his back, ride like a horse across the floor, pretend to be a chimp, a lion, stirring them into a froth of excitement. It was almost time to go. “Mommy, ride now!” Zeb shouted.

  Serena was rinsing the dishes. She saw Dan on all fours, Zeb jumping up and down. Dan lowered his head in a gesture of parental abdication. His shoulder twitched.

  “Mommy, ride the horse!”

  Dan slowly stood up and shook out his arms. The children thought this was hilarious, the idea of reducing their parents to workhorse and rider, but they sensed something — that Dan was playing with them out of love but also, perhaps, to avoid her.

  “This is just a kids’ game,” said Dan. “Got to go!” He stood up, grabbed his lunch off the table. “Got to go,” he said again. His voice was almost apologetic. He looked at her and stopped.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Well,” he said.

  She wondered if he was going to offer her a ride on the horsie and, if so, if this was progress.

  “Can you pick up some milk?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “One percent, not whole. You got whole last time.”

  “Got it.” She paused. “Anything else?”

  “No,” he said. “We just can’t run out of milk.” He seemed a bit too determined about this.

  “That would be bad,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. He looked at her, as though embarrassed, like he wanted to add something to this, but he picked up his briefcase. “Bye,” he said.

  The children rushed to the door like a tide. Serena opened the back door, and they ran into their yard, a square of dirt with grass like thinning hair and one impossibly tall green pine tree. They all drifted toward the tree; it was the one beautiful part of the yard, and its branches reached up like human arms making a plea. Serena began to pick up the pinecones scattered below it, and Zeb and Rachel gathered sticks and began to decorate the tree with them. The neighborhood had once been a pine forest, and the tree was one of the few remnants of it. They stood near the tree and she scanned the other yards, wondering who the other people were around them.

  THE THIRD WEEK OF AUGUST was Zeb’s first day of kindergarten. The school was a neat, stolid public school with the low-slung beige shabbiness of a community college. The dark hallways held the subdued patriotism and despair of any public institution, the corkboards displayed the cheerful propaganda of school: Dream and You Will Become! You Can’t Achieve Unless You Try! There was the astringent smell of fresh paint. The children, Tyler and Shakira and Juan and Mary Grace and the others, were escorted by their parents, often startlingly young, to their seats. There was the remarkable spectacle of the populace, with nothing in common except for their occupying the same precise developmental stage, a situation one finds a few times in life: nursing a newborn in a hospital, watching toddlers in a playground, moving into a college dorm. The parents tended to say hello and then shy away from each other as though supremely aware of how their lives had deposited them at different places in terms of economy, happiness, love; they did not know how they had ended up in these places, whom they should thank, or, more frequently, whom they should blame. The senior teacher, a slight, redheaded woman who Serena thought looked about sixteen, stood in front of the classroom, smiling wanly, as though already predicting this blame; her assistant, Miss LaChawn, shook each parent’s hand firmly as though welcoming them to a company. The children, not yet sorted or labeled, found seats sized for fairies.

  The senior teacher, Miss Donna, was dressed in a business suit, as though borrowing the adornments of the corporate world would defuse this morning of its high emotion. She had an air of embattlement about her, as if she expected the children or parents to stage a coup. The room was filled with elaborate behavior charts, of colored sticks in pockets with the children’s names, boxes where children’s names would be written if they had not done their homework. Homework? “If you don’t turn in your homework, you get a silent lunch!” she exclaimed. The children fidgeted, picked their noses.

  “This year we’ll learn about insects, weather, and the holidays,” she said. “We’ll learn about Christmas around the world.”

  Serena stepped forward to address this last point and then stopped. When the bell rang, she was the only parent left. She felt unable to leave the room. She stood in the corner, clutching Rachel’s hand. Miss Donna looked at her with trepidation. “Run along now,” she said, smiling. “We’ll see you at two thirty!”

  Zeb looked up at her with his dark eyes, then he looked down again. Miss LaChawn smiled at him, waiting; Serena squeezed her daughter’s hand and ducked out. She lurked around outside the school for a while, standing guard. There was a police car parked at the front of the school. The officer was watching her.

  “Any problem, ma’am?” he asked.

  “I have a child in there,” she said.

  He nodded. He was chewing gum and flipping through a copy of People.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “First day of school,” he said. “You never know. Always good to have an extra pair of eyes.”

  “You never know what?” she asked, trying to stand upright.

  “Nothing,” he said. He chewed his gum thoughtfully. “Go home.”

  THAT NIGHT, SERENA DREAMED ABOUT the rabbi. She was sitting at a pew in the synagogue; the light was dim, and the room was shabby but had, in the antique light, the ashen majesty of a castle. She heard him come up behind her. “Serena,” he said. She knew it was him without looking; she was surrounded by the sweet and dark odor of a swamp. “Hold still,” he said, and he put his hands on her hair. He began to stroke it; he was trying to braid it. She felt each finger stroke her hair, as though he understood how to touch every cell in her body. His smooth, clean fingers brushed against her scalp. It was almost too much to feel each finger against her skin, as though if one of them pressed too hard she would explode. “Look,” he said, and she felt like the inside of a mountain, the foam on a sea, the dampness underneath clouds in the sky. She wanted to be surrounded by and to surround him; his fingers worked carefully until he had finished, occasionally brushing her neck. She had never been touched in this particular way, with this miraculous softness, this attentiveness. “There,” he said, in his low, sweet voice. It was as though she were now ready for some important event, and she reached back, touched her neck, her hair, lightly with her fingers, tried to feel the braid there, to see how he had arranged her hair. Her skin was cool, alive, but she could not feel any difference, and when she turned around, he was gone.

  She awoke. Her husband slept beside her, and even in his physicality, the soft avocado muscles in his shoulders, the brown skin of his arms, there was the disorienting sense that he was an intruder. She was sweating, her heart was racing, and she felt somehow ashamed; she stumbled out of bed and into the living room. The air conditioning worked badly, and the air was thick as cream on her arms. She opened a window and looked out on the dark street. The scent of the magnolia and honeysuckle filled the room, and, all at once, it held the fragrance of honey. The sweetness of the air saddened her. The trees swayed in the soft blue wind. She held the edge of the windowsill and, slowly, she breathed.

  SHE WENT BACK TO THE Temple — a few days after she had had the dream about the rabbi, for she had wanted it to fade — and sat on a wall outside, looking at it. She felt foolish sitting there, for she had never liked going to Temple, but she had a sense that once she walked in, she would be, in some way, forgiven.

>   She thought of the last conversation she had had with her father. There had been three calls from him that morning. He had wanted to know why she wasn’t demanding more money from her employer. “What are you getting? You’re worth more than that paltry sum they’re paying you.” He was touchingly wounded by the concept of the world’s lack of wonder for his children; less touchingly, he planned to correct it.

  “I’m actually making a good amount for a speechwriter,” she said. She had lied to him for fifteen years, sitting in the gray-lit cubicle at Pepsi, pretending that she was a successful speechwriter. She had, admittedly, written a couple good lines: Ladies and gentlemen. I submit that you are the most computer-literate generation that has lived in this country. And you are about to become the lucky few who are going to take the next step. Or: We do not see the glass half-full. We are going to fill the glass! Or: Our finish line is every line we step!

  Her father had thought the fact that she was working for a big corporation meant that she would instantly have money, a lot of money, which would ensure safety through any national crisis, strife, impending war. He liked the fact that she was permitted to carry her boss Earl Morton’s credit card, as though this implied her high ranking there; the fact was that she was allowed to hold onto it to occasionally pick up his coffee or a gift for his kids. She had been surprised, ten years before, when she had been hired as an assistant to the speechwriting team, and was elated when her boss, Earl Morton, promoted her soon thereafter. But while they used her blather to inspire the sales force, they were not raising her pay, and while others in her group got lavish promotions, rose to accompany the executives on their journeys to Paris, to conferences in Rome, she did not. Earl Morton used just enough of her material to make her feel she was contributing, raised her pay once, to give her hopes that it could happen again, but otherwise he ignored her efforts. And the time she had sent out her resumes to other companies, the city was sliding into recession, and the opportunities for her skills had dried up.

  Her sister Dawn bounded forward, holding fundraisers for Oxfam, for the United Way, to combat global hunger; she posed on red carpets with celebrities, smiling steadily into cameras. How had they become so different? Dawn had absorbed their father’s adaptability; Dawn, somehow, knew how to get out and use the world. Serena didn’t know what she was doing wrong. Was it the wrong job or the wrong employer? How did anyone know how to create luck? She went in each day and sat at her desk writing impassioned speeches, while Earl Morton used her ideas and didn’t pay her more; she sat in her cubicle, imagining that she was somewhere else.

  “How much are you making?” he asked, softly; it was a question that came up too often.

  “Fifty.” She paused, inflating it. “Thousand.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “I think it’s pretty good.” She bit her lip.

  “The fools. You should be getting two hundred. Ask,” he said, and hung up.

  The second call was two hours later. “I have good news,” he said. “Dawn met Angelina Jolie. They were raising money for a Ugandan orphanage. She said she was very nice. They may get together with the kids.”

  “Great, Dad.”

  His voice always assumed a deep, theatrical pride when he discussed Dawn, as though someone else was listening. “She showed me a picture. Arm in arm. They’re flying the orphans out. What are you doing? Did you ask?”

  “No.”

  “By four o’clock, you’re asking. One hundred thousand. No less. They’re robbing you.”

  “No.”

  “What are you waiting for? The clock is ticking — ”

  “Dad. This is not how it ’s done.”

  “I’ll call for you — ”

  “Dad!” Her voice cracked, like a fifteen-year-old’s. The vice president of marketing looked over at her and laughed.

  “I’m calling,” he said, haughtily. “His number is 839-0958.”

  Amazingly, he had it right. He was good.

  “Dad. Let’s not talk about me for a sec. Tell me about your trains.” Though he was always creating elaborate sets of distant cities, right before he finished his creations, he would dismantle them. “How’s Paris?”

  “I can’t find a good Eiffel Tower.”

  This she could help with. “I could look online for one . . . is there a type you want?”

  “I’ll find it. Now ask. Or I’m calling your supervisor. Honey. Believe!”

  “Dad, please!” She hung up and then stared at the phone, aghast; she had never hung up on her father before. But she did not call back when he phoned the next time.

  The caller ID said his name: Aaron Hirsch. The call had come at 2:00 PM. Later, she pressed the button over and over but could not access the message; he had died at four.

  NOW SHE SAT ON A low brick wall that marked the compound of the First Baptist Church of Waring across the street from the Temple, which had been erected in 1902. The building seemed slanted just slightly, and there was a crack in the stucco on the left side. The building had the brushed, antiquated look of a Disneyland castle, as though the stucco on the outside had been redone recently and in haste.

  She pushed open the door and walked down the stairs to the office, a tiny room with half-opened cardboard boxes. There was the sour odor of old coffee and copier fluid. The only person in the room was a small, distraught-looking woman who stood before a large Xerox machine, the copier light flashing green repeatedly on her face.

  “What do you want?” said the secretary, flatly.

  It was not stated with malice, just as a point of order. She was a squat, sharp-eyed woman with a froth of gray hair who had the job of controlling the concrete in an institution that prized the invisible and metaphoric.

  “Uh. When does religious school start?” Serena asked.

  “You have to join first,” said the woman. She handed her a membership form. “Rates are $700 per year.”

  “Seven hundred?”

  “We like you to use black ink,” said the secretary. “The copier can read it better.” She said it wearily, as though her travails with the copier were a long and arduous romance in which she had ruefully adopted the role of appeaser. She handed her that form as though Serena had said yes.

  Serena sat down, clutching the form. “I don’t know my Hebrew name,” she said.

  The secretary approached the copier and slapped pieces of paper onto it.

  “Make one up. You’re number 127. That’ll make him happy. We just lost one, Saul Huffenberg. He died last night. Not that he was such a prize. Always thinking I took his check. Meaning stole. I misfiled it. He blamed me. They all did. Kick Georgia! I hear things. I didn’t cry when Harold Levitt passed away, or Joanna Schwartzman. I didn’t want this job. It was Trey, my husband, who died after twenty-eight years of marriage. I thought I was getting a retirement community in Florida, and instead I get this Xerox machine.”

  She heard footsteps on the hardwood floor before she saw him; the footsteps sounded like someone running.

  “Serena Hirsch?” said Rabbi Golden. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  He had remembered her name. She stood up, as though before a dignitary. He lunged in, grasped her hand, and shook it. He laughed, as though she had said something funny. His grip was fierce, and it felt to Serena like he was not shaking her hand as much as clinging to a rope. “Finally, Georgia!” he said to the secretary, who had returned furiously to Xeroxing. “She’s here! What did I say?”

  He seemed more pleased with his prediction of her arrival than with her actual presence; he swerved around the office, gathering rubber bands, paper clips. He turned around and looked at Serena. “Come in,” he said.

  His office was full of half-filled boxes; it looked like a photo gallery. There were photos of the rabbi in military gear and a yarmulke, standing by a tank in Bosnia; on the steps of a synagogue in Akron; shaking hands with Jimmy Carter at a Habitat for Humanity event. He was posed with groups of Jews, military and civilian, by nati
onal landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the Wailing Wall.

  She perched on the edge of the chair in front of his desk. He had the complex innocence of someone who had been included in another’s internal life — perhaps many — and seemed unaware of it; he immediately busied himself with shuffling a variety of papers, as though her function was simply to wait. She glanced at his hands; his fingers were slim, and his fingernails were very short and slightly uneven, as though they had been chewed. “Hadassah needs bodies,” he said. “Now.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Caring Committee needs someone to drive the elderly to services. Darlene Green needs someone to coordinate the Passover candy fundraiser. How about it?”

  “I’m sure I can be of use to the Temple,” she said, trying to figure out how to avoid these particular activities. She did not want to actually do anything. Now that she was in his office, she just wanted to sit there; she felt safe there, included for no good reason, and she wanted to stay for a moment with him.

  “What are your talents?” he asked.

  She sat up. “I was, uh, a top speechwriter for Pepsi. In New York — ”

  Why was she saying this? She stopped.

  “Maybe you could write the Temple Bulletin,” he said, tapping his pen against his desk.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know. Writing the birthdays, whose anniversary it is, what Hadassah did last month, what the religious school’s up to.”

  “Aha.”

  “It would be good for a journalist! You have expertise.”

  “Well,” she said. “I’m not exactly a journalist — ”

  “All right, then,” he said, shuffling some paper.

  He was sitting half out of his chair; his forehead glowed, as though lit by something hot within. He flashed that smile again, that brilliant light.

  “You look busy,” she said.