A Town of Empty Rooms Read online

  Ryan’s mother was a blankly cheerful woman whose main project seemed to be maintaining silence; Ryan was the oldest of four, and she was constantly bent over, stuffing a pacifier into someone’s mouth. When Serena offered to have Ryan over, she nodded, abruptly, “Sure. Sure. Take him. Please.”

  Ryan was a gigantic, garrulous six-year-old whose head was full of numbers and rankings. She listened to his conversation with Zeb in the backseat:

  “What’s your favorite hockey team?” Ryan asked.

  “What’s yours?” asked Zeb.

  “Oilers. Who’s your favorite basketball player?”

  There was silence. “Who?” Zeb asked.

  “Michael Jordan.” He paused. “How fast can you run fifty yards?”

  “Five seconds,” blurted Zeb.

  “I can do three.”

  Ryan’s mind was wrapped around one consuming task: to rank the world and to come out on top. Zeb was smaller, lithe, but less brutally athletic, and his relationship with Ryan’s quest for superiority was to try to absorb it. If he could not be Ryan, he could borrow him. Ryan competed in terms of his reading level in school; his height, weight; the statistics of the Oilers, his favorite hockey team; the Braves, his favorite baseball team; the exact size, to the inch, of his father’s plasma TV screen. He had a demeanor that switched by the minute, both slaphappy and aggrieved, as though trying to figure out which persona lent him the best advantage. Zeb owned a large and complex collection of YuGiOh cards — that was part of what, it seemed, Ryan liked about him, besides his devotion. “I have 328 YuGiOh cards,” Zeb said with a beautiful confidence. “And many power cards.”

  Ryan was quiet. “I want to see,” he said.

  How did you pave the world for your child? Perhaps the route was through other children. Serena watched them sit in his room, whispering over the shoebox of cards. Then she watched Ryan toss a football to Zeb outside. Ryan came over and lifted Zeb’s arm, and her son beamed. Ryan was now his escort into kindergarten, his guide to the world.

  She drove Ryan back to his house. The boys ran inside. Ryan’s mother stood, dazed, among the wreckage of the toddlers, one of whom lurched around slurping a can of Diet Coke. The house was modest, dusty, and sparsely furnished except for the living room, where the biggest flat-screen TV Serena had ever seen took over most of a wall. The rest of the room was arranged in homage to this screen. “Ryan’s dad is a big football fan,” she said. “After church, this is where we live on Sunday.” She paused. “And during the week.”

  Ryan and Zeb bounded into the living room. “Did you see our screen?” asked Ryan. “It’s the biggest in Waring.” He stood, on tiptoes, trying to touch the top.

  When they left, Serena asked her son, “Did you have a good time?”

  “Yes.” He paused. “He has a big TV.”

  “He does,” she said.

  “I know who created the world,” Zeb said.

  “Who?” she said.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “No,” she said, quickly, “It was the Big Bang. This is proven. There were a lot of gases swirling around, and then they went bang, and there were all the planets, then Earth and everything.”

  “How loud was it?”

  “I don’t know. Loud.” This appeared to be a selling point, so she added, “Really loud.”

  “Who made it happen?”

  Was this the purpose of any theology? To answer the unanswerable from five-year-olds?

  “I don’t know. It just happened.”

  He looked out the window. She glanced at the back of his head, the full head of brown curls.

  “Maybe Jesus made it happen.”

  “No,” she said, sharply. “Jesus wasn’t born then. Besides, he wasn’t the son of God. He was — uh, just a man. A very nice man.”

  “Ryan said his mother would get him ten packs of YuGiOh cards. Now he has more than me. He won six games of kickball and I won zero.” His face was slack with envy. “Jesus gave Ryan more YuGiOh cards than me. I want another pack of YuGiOh cards,” he said. “I want Obelisk the Tormentor. Then I will be the champion of everyone.”

  She heard the silvery yearning in his voice, the desire for mastery. “Of course,” she said, and reached over and held his hand.

  THERE WAS, WHEN A MARRIAGE was good, a deep romance to lying beside a spouse in bed. There was a comfort in the sameness of this body beside you, of knowing the precise softness and hardness of these legs, this cheek, of feeling these arms around you in the dark, of knowing the different ways you could touch each other and the effects it would have, of knowing what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t and then did, of knowing that you each remembered the other when you were younger, more beautiful, and could, in some ways, locate that in a way no one else could, of feeling the other’s arms around your shoulders, of feeling fingers against skin, of knowing the two of you were located somewhere that seemed, briefly, safe.

  And there was, when a marriage was not good, an awareness of the brevity of one’s life when lying in bed beside a person who was angry at you. There was the lonely feeling of staring at a naked back, of wanting to reach for the other but being afraid that you would be turned down, of feeling, beside the beloved, the startling sensation of being alone. Serena lay beside Dan and often she could not sleep.

  Sometimes she got out of bed, walked around the bluish living room. She sat on the couch and stared into the darkness; sometimes she felt as though she would disappear.

  In the morning, she took Zeb to school and Rachel to a playground across the street, and then she headed to the Temple office. She could make calls for the Ladies Concordia Luncheon, or make flyers for the Religious School Picnic, or organize the bus to take a group to see a Chagall exhibit in Raleigh. The office was a place to go; it was a little bit of money. Her mother and sister would laugh at this, her father would have told her to ask for $100 an hour or quit, but no one else was hiring her at the moment, so this was what she would do for now. She sat with Georgia and listened to who had paid their dues and who was late again; she shuffled through the requests mailed in for relatives to be mentioned in the weekly Yahrzeit; she got through her day.

  Serena did not want to admit the other reason she was there: She wanted to see the rabbi. It was not a thought she held consciously; it was a thought that shimmered, alive, under her skin. When she got out of her car to enter the synagogue, she was aware of the presence of his dented orange Buick, whether it had gotten there before she did, or not. She measured time by his schedule; she knew that he came in at nine fifteen, that he returned his phone calls the first hour, that he rushed out to visit the ailing at eleven. She attended to the day’s work but was aware of his movements in the unknowing but supremely knowing way of planetary bodies, as a planet making a slow orbit around a sun. There was a pleasure in this, this waiting; it gave a shape to her longing.

  Once he stopped her and held out his calendar. “Look at all this,” he said. “They all want me.” At 8:00 AM, he had to go to the hospital to visit Gloria Steinway, who had a broken hip, and Morris Schwartz, in a coma; at 10:00 AM — if Morris had not died, for, if so, the rabbi had to tend to his family — he had Torah study, at noon a meeting with the Ladies Concordia, at 12:30 PM a meeting with the Cemetery Committee to look into a new plot of land to house (in the future) the growing population of aging Jews, at 2:00 PM a meeting with Jennifer Gold and her fiancé, Colin McHenry, a lapsed Catholic, to talk about the road to conversion, at 3:00 PM a meeting with Josh Hofstein to practice the prayers for his Bar Mitzvah, at 4:00 PM a pause to sign birthday cards for everyone with a birthday this month. “Look at this,” he said. “Look at all of these clowns. Josh Hofstein. His parents forget to up his dose of Ritalin before he comes in. They want me to speed up his Bar Mitzvah process. Teach him everything in six months. Insta-Mitzvah. What can I say? Can I say no?” He sighed, sharply. “Sadie Straun calls me every night to remind me to pray for her hip. At 2:00 AM sometimes. You wouldn’t believe how ma
ny calls I get then.” When he was not wearing sunglasses, his eyes had deep gray shadows underneath.

  She did not tell him that some of the late night calls had been from her. She called the phone company to change the caller ID on her phone to read Out of Area. One night, pacing the living room, her breath shallow in her chest, she went to the phone, picked it up, and called the rabbi.

  She was perfectly still when he picked up.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  She barely breathed.

  “Morris?” he said.

  She said nothing. The moment was full, brimming as a raindrop.

  “Morris?” he said. “I can talk to you later.” He slammed down the phone.

  It was Morris only once. Then it was Audrey. Sadie. Simon. There were apparently many of them bothering the rabbi in the middle of the night. It was as though they were involved in a large and secret conversation. She tried to imagine them all across the county, sitting in the darkness, sad, afraid, ear to the phone, waiting for the rabbi to say something to them.

  “Hello,” the rabbi said, and this in itself was somehow enough.

  SHE PRETENDED TO IGNORE HIM while he bustled around the office, but she was aware of him. He smelled of cheap aftershave, an astringent tonic that had undertones of a swamp — when he walked by, it opened your eyes. His corporeal presence, the way he flew through the office, was startling; she thought of the dazed huskiness of his voice when he said hello in the middle of the night, as though they had woken up together; there was his invisibility, in all of its strangeness and glamour; there was the vivid ghostly presence of his arms in the dark, the way she imagined they would feel if she touched them, the curiously magnificent presence of the imagined over the physical, the living.

  Now, here he was, in the office. Her midnight calls embarrassed her in daylight. Perhaps she could ask him a question that would establish her as a person who was more normal, less desperate, than she actually felt. One day, after her son’s discussion with Ryan, she knocked on his door; she had something to ask.

  “Come in,” he called.

  His office gleamed with a violet light, as though all the lights were about to go out. Georgia had offered to get him new bulbs, but he refused. He seemed to prefer working in this darkness, as though he liked having others squint to see him. She sat down.

  “How did the world begin?” she asked.

  He looked up and put down his pen.

  “My son thinks Jesus did it,” she said. “His friend told him. He’s not a good friend, but he’s his only friend. He helps him walk into school. I want to know about another version so Zeb can say something back.”

  The rabbi laughed. It was a beautiful, mocking laugh. “Listen to these words: Let there be light.” He sat up in the dimness of his office. “What is better than that? What is light? You don’t see it. It reflects off people, things. We don’t see it but it’s there. Look!” He raised the blinds on his window — the pale sun gilded the air. “Where is it coming from? We’re all stardust. It’s everywhere, but we don’t know it’s there.” He crossed his arms.

  “But who said, ‘Let there be light’?” she asked.

  “No one said it,” he said. “No one was around to see it, so no one really knows what happened. But you know what’s here now?”

  “What is here now?” she asked.

  He blinked. “Look around you,” he said. “It’s all a miracle. God is in your heart, your face, your arms, in everything you do. Look in the mirror and you see your mother, your father — you carry them everywhere with you; your father lives still in your memory, your heart, Serena.” Her throat tightened; again, he acknowledged what she was thinking. “And the parts that are not from your mother and father, the parts you can’t identify, they are from God.” He was talking faster, walking back and forth. “Listen. I was an orphan. At three years old. I didn’t remember my parents’ faces. I looked in the mirror and I touched my nose, my cheeks, thinking, Where did this come from? Who am I? I was no one. I was floating. You know what? I am God, Serena Hirsch.” He paused. “No. That does not sound right — God is me.”

  He stood, grinning slightly, in the swath of sunlight on the floor. “Well,” he said. “More later.” He clapped his hands together. “Just tell him this,” said the rabbi. “BC, Before the Common Era. But some people also call it Before Christ. Before! That means it didn’t come first. The Sunday School teachers at these churches are sometimes confused.”

  “Okay,” she said, relieved for this tactic. “Thanks.”

  “I want to ask you something,” he said, and smiled.

  She froze. She tried to analyze his tone.

  “We have an opening on the board,” he said. “Darlene Braunstein is dropping out.”

  “Why?”

  “They stopped paying their dues. Not even the fifteen dollars a month that they promised. My services are not free. They are, but they are not. Fifteen dollars and he owns a Toyota dealership!”

  “They were paying fifteen dollars a month?” she asked, surprised.

  “Correction. They were not paying fifteen dollars a month. They were — ” he caught his breath. “I see it in you! Leadership qualities.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Say yes,” he said.

  SHE RECEIVED A CALL FROM Norman that night. “Would you like to join the board?”

  “What do I need to do?”

  “Are you alive?” asked Norman.

  She paused.

  “I heard a breath,” said Norman. “Tell me I heard a breath.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You qualify. Show up tomorrow night. Social Hall, 7:00 PM,” he said, and he hung up.

  SHE WAS ODDLY HAPPY ABOUT it. The Temple Board. Her announcement to her family that she was going to be part of the Board of Directors of Temple Shalom was met with a huge and crushing indifference. “Does it pay?” Dan asked, a pointless question — he knew it did not. So what? Her father had been enamored of titles; she wanted to tell him this, even if he would not hear. It was a position on the Board of Directors; she would help lead the congregation. It felt like an important, useful thing to do; plus, there was the happy fact that, here, no one knew what she had done.

  Betty Blumenthal noticed Serena coming into the meeting. The new girl had, touchingly, outfitted herself in a business suit and came in clutching a clipboard; she looked as though she were walking into a law firm instead of the sweaty and desperate volunteer effort that was the Temple Board. Betty was relieved to see this, for she hoped it distinguished Serena from the others whom she had been working with here — Norman, Tom, Tiffany; none of them held the vision for the Temple that she did. Betty had belonged to the Temple since she was a child, longer than anyone here — she had been a member for fifty-six years. She had been the first female Bat Mitzvah, the first woman president; the Temple had evolved because of her. She was a pioneer. She liked showing people what she had done for the Temple. As a girl, the Temple had prepared her, she thought, for her later achievement — her catering service. Norman, Tom — they had to just think beyond the small and embrace the potential grandness.

  Lately, she had lots of ideas for the Temple. Betty spent a great deal of time thinking about the Temple and its future. She thought about it when she sat in her home, trying to become accustomed to the immense silence; it had been six months since her husband had left — suddenly, after thirty-three years of marriage. After Pearl came to her, eight months ago, she had begun compiling the list. Betty wanted to find someone who would understand the gravity of the complaints on it.

  Norman Weiss had been at the Temple second to Betty in terms of time. She had grown up here, and he had come here by choice, when he moved from the North after the death of his first wife. He had seen so many others join and drop, leave and die. He was still here. He had run the most sought after pediatric practice in the western part of Long Island; he did not even know why the children had liked him, or why the stocks he had picked had
risen. He could never quite trust the good luck that befell him. He wanted to spread it around this place. If people looked around, they would see him everywhere. He had bought back the second Torah when he returned from Israel in 1979. He had paid for the new and elegant gold-plated Eternal Light that hung over the Ark. If the others knew what he had bought for the Temple, they would appreciate him. Now, with the news of his throat, after the doctor had sat down with him and told him what the results of the biopsy could mean, he wanted anyone to walk into Temple Shalom and know that Norman Weiss was the most generous member of the congregation — that he was somehow essential.

  Tiffany Stein understood immediately why Serena had dressed in a suit; it was to show respect for the board. This was why Tiffany wore the large golden Star of David, the Chai charms around her neck. Her husband joked that she looked like a Jewish gangster, but she was trying to show the others her respect for the religion and also to convince them that she belonged. Her life as a Jew dated two years and seven months — it had coincided with her marriage to Harvey Stein. She had been recently divorced and had not believed she would ever marry again. Harvey loved her, but he wanted her to be Jewish, and she had never felt particularly attached to her Methodist upbringing, so she studied with Rabbi Moshe Rappaport in Tampa, and then the couple moved here. She came to Temple Shalom a fully certified — or however one would say it — Jew. And then, a year into her membership, she was invited to become a member of the Temple Board. She had cried when she had been asked; she believed they took her seriously.

  Serena walked into the Temple basement to join the eleven members of the board hunched around a folding table. The room gave the general impression of a cave. The fluorescent lights let out a long, aching buzz, and there was the undersea gurgle of the coffee machine. Betty Blumenthal was smiling at her.

  Rabbi Golden saw her and clapped his hands together. “We’re all here,” he said. “Let’s begin. Tom, do you want to lead the opening prayer?”