In Case We're Separated Read online

  “They do something . . .”

  “When are you going to do it?”

  “Next week. There’s a man who does it.”

  “A mohel.”

  “Yes.”

  There would be a sharp knife, slender and very bright. “Shall I come with you?”

  “If you would walk to the building with me . . .”

  “And wait?”

  He hesitated. It was late fall, and Timothy was wearing thick trousers. He stood firmly on his two big legs, which he tended to separate a little. His tweed jacket was thick, too. It seemed to her that his clothing was fur; he was naked in the way an animal is. Rebecca knew she wanted to do something, but at first she didn’t know what. Then she pulled her broadcloth blouse free of her skirt. As she pushed it up toward her neck, she knew the gesture was clumsy, that she must look more foolish than alluring, with crushed cloth bunched under her chin. Holding the sturdy material in place, she tried to push aside her slip, which came up high on her chest, with a brassiere under it. Rebecca’s breasts were large, and she wore underwear with good support. She took Timothy’s hand, which trembled, and drew it under her clothes. He pushed the cloth aside, leaned over her, found and released her breast, and put his mouth on it. He seemed to be crying. “Walk there with me, but then go away,” he said.

  “But won’t you need someone, later?” Her voice had a sob in it, because of the pleasure of his touch on her breast.

  “Jews are used to trouble,” Timothy said. He was making a joke, the second of his life.

  She loved his joke. “Are you really Jewish?” she said.

  He stepped back from her and held out his hands, turning them as if the answer was written on them, maybe on his palms, maybe on the backs of his hands. “Shema Yisrael . . .” he began, and though the vowels were flat, Rebecca recognized what he was saying. Her cheeks grew warm, and she straightened her clothes.

  All night—shamed, throbbing—Timothy was enraged with himself and with all Jews. He wondered if a cruel trick had been played on him, and if years from now he might discover that circumcision was rare among Jews, and that the rabbi had put him through such an experience as punishment for desiring one of their women. First his wife had died, and now, when he had miraculously fallen in love again, this hideously ludicrous requirement had been placed upon him. A religion that required him to expose himself, that required blood and pain . . . They gave him whiskey, but it just caused a headache. In bed, he tried not to think of his view of the knife, just before the job had been done, despite the mohel’s courteous effort to place his black-clothed self between Timothy and the table where it lay. Now his penis felt as large as a melon. If it were infected, he would die and be buried a Jew, to the consternation of his Protestant relatives. Timothy began to pray in Hebrew. Then he prayed in English, to Jesus, the Jew he’d betrayed. As the pain lessened a little, as he began to think he might want to touch his penis to someone else’s body again, he imagined the future, in which he and Rebecca would endure derision and shame. Timothy and Rebecca, the well behaved. That was what they had in common, good behavior and the discovery that it meant nothing: it originated in no excellence, afforded no ease or safety.

  Timothy wanted to be present when Rebecca told her parents that he had become a Jew, but she refused. Three days after his conversion, she helped her mother cook supper, though her hands shook and she dropped the potatoes. “Stir,” Leah said, and Rebecca stirred the soup and skimmed the fat. It was Shabbas. Rebecca waited until her father came into the dining room, then until her mother had spoken the blessing and lit the candles. She still couldn’t speak. Once she did, there would be no more eating, and there was no reason to waste the food and leave everyone hungry.

  When the plates were almost empty, she put down her fork. “Mama, Papa, I have to tell you something,” she said.

  Her mother drew her hand to her mouth so abruptly that Rebecca knew she had thought incessantly of their last conversation. Rebecca said, “Mr. Hardy wants to marry me.” Her father sat back quickly; obviously Leah hadn’t told him. “He has become a Jew,” Rebecca continued. Then she started to cry. “Because he loves me. He . . . he went to the mohel. He was cut.”

  Her father stared. “You didn’t tell me?” he said. “Rebecca?”

  It hadn’t occurred to her how he’d feel. He didn’t look angry, as she had expected. He pushed his chair back, looking pinched and fearful, as if he’d been exiled. She’d never seen her father look that way.

  Leah had kept her hand on her mouth and now she bit it and pulled it away quickly and then put it on the table. Rebecca could see tooth marks. “Rebecca,” said Leah quietly, her voice unsteady, “I am not your mother.”

  In a rush, Rebecca heard the mumbled story of Goldie the difficult and shameless, who she thought must somehow remind Leah of Timothy—but that wasn’t the point. It became clear why Papa, by now, was backing his chair toward the window. The knob at the top of the chair made a star-crack in the glass that nobody noticed until next morning, by which time Rebecca, who’d cried all night, no longer thought of it as her window, or in any sense her responsibility. Yet felt for the poor broken pane a nostalgia that made her weep some more. For calamity had not made Leah’s speech extravagant and hyperbolical. Leah was not Rebecca’s mother.

  She was not Rebecca’s mother, Reuben was not her father, but they loved her like parents. They didn’t hold a funeral because Rebecca wasn’t their daughter and, by means of some chicanery, she was not marrying a gentile. Leah continued embroidering Torah covers and following the laws, but sitting in her chair in the late afternoons, she felt as if the sides of her house had fallen away from the roof, that the furniture around her had slid down slides made by the fallen walls, that the wind blew on her without obstacle.

  Sonia’s children were amazed, full of whooping and obstreperousness. Rebecca was their first cousin and Sonia, who seemed incapable of secrecy but had known all along, was Rebecca’s aunt. After the first hard night, Rebecca had taken the trolley, Shabbas or not, to her cousins’ house. “Mama says she’s not my mama.”

  Sonia started and sucked in her breath. “Aunt Chicago is your mama.”

  Nobody remembered Goldie very well. “Aunt Chicago whose husband walked out.”

  “That Aaron, the rat.”

  Five years earlier, when Aaron had left, Rebecca had been dismayed to think of a cousin who couldn’t keep track of her husband. “She wasn’t married when she had me?”

  “She was a girl. What did she know?”

  Rebecca got on a bus and went to Chicago, where she located her mother in a tenement that seemed from the outside much like the one where she’d grown up, but was different inside. Rebecca had not thought to telephone Goldie; she’d simply taken the address from Sonia, packed a bag, had a tearful, stubborn conversation at the store with Timothy, and set forth. When Aunt Chicago—who had long gray-brown hair that she hadn’t yet braided that morning—opened the door in her bathrobe, a dog pressed past her, wagging her tail and barking. Goldie and Rebecca looked at each other, listening to the dog. Finally Goldie said, “Who?”

  “Rebecca.”

  “From Aunt Leah?”

  “She told me.”

  “They wouldn’t let me say anything,” said Goldie, before she began to scream so loudly that the neighbors, not knowing whether they heard joy or anguish, came running. Suddenly Rebecca belonged to twenty people and a dog she had never known about: half brothers, friends. The rejoicing involved food, dancing, drink, talk, shouts. Goldie said, “I lost that worthless Aaron but I got my baby back.” When Rebecca told her about Timothy, Goldie asked, “What if he can’t still do it, from the cutting?”

  “It’s healing.”

  “Thank God.”

  Goldie and the boys needed her as much as Timothy and his girls, but nobody could imagine moving. Changing a religion was one thing, leaving New York or Chicago something else. Rebecca and Goldie wrote letters from then on, and shouted on the tele
phone. When Aaron had been gone seven years, Goldie had him declared dead. She married a widowed neighbor, a man who was gentle with her. In the end everyone moved to Florida and ran in and out of one another’s apartments, but that wasn’t until the fifties or sixties, when they began to grow old. Goldie had been so young when Rebecca was born that they grew old together. Timothy was the oldest, but he outlived them all, weeping and praying in a Florida synagogue in his old age, when he looked more Jewish. People asked him what his name was changed from. He thanked God for the happiness he’d had in his life. He and Rebecca, Goldie and her second husband, would all go dancing at a big hotel in Miami Beach. Rebecca always looked like a demure young girl, even as she grew gray, but she learned lightheartedness. At the wedding of one of Goldie’s sons, she walked to the microphone in a slinky green satin dress and wished her half brother “every kind of happiness, including with no clothes on.” It was Rebecca’s closest approximation to a dirty joke. But nothing Rebecca did could be dirty, Timothy thought, remembering—as he drove a big white convertible to the synagogue in the Florida sun—the way she had offered him her breast that first time, drawing his hand under her clothes. How happy he’d been, then and later, bending his head and pressing it into her neck, putting his mouth on Rebecca’s breasts.

  In the Dark, Who Pats the Air

  Jo stood at the foot of the bed in her jeans and sweater, looking at naked Josh, who’d been her roommate for a year and her lover for three months. Josh was solid, small, and fair, with glowing orange hair on his chest and groin. Jo had long black hair. “You’re a marmalade cat,” she said.

  They were about to make love, but they hadn’t said so. She waited, as she’d waited all those chaste months, for either to speak or act; she’d known early that they would be lovers.

  Josh said, “A Jewish marmalade cat!” Jo was not Jewish. She was Korean-American.

  She undressed and lay down. Not touching, they were silent. His penis was erect.

  “I’ll give you . . .” Josh said then, elongating his words as if he didn’t know how he’d finish, “a kiss! And you give me a kiss.” They kissed lustily, their tongues busy.

  When Jo spoke, to propose her own swaps, her voice was that of a child dressed as a robber. For what if he said no? “I’ll give you a bite, you give me a pinch.” She bit his shoulder and he pinched her ass. How had they begun this game? Not by discussion or decision. It embarrassed Jo, not because it was kinky; maybe because it wasn’t.

  Sometimes they made mistakes, they became distracted, and nothing happened. A few days earlier, she’d said, “I’ll give you a clothesline, you give me a kiss.”

  “A clothesline?” said Josh.

  “Yeah.”

  “Laundry?”

  She was already sorry she’d said it. After a while he said, “Oh, you mean tying me up. Or whipping me. Which?”

  “Never mind,” she said. She’d thought of tying him up, but hadn’t intended to go out to their small, square backyard and retrieve an old clothesline she’d noticed.

  This time they were not distracted. As she dressed, afterward, she decided that the person who had strung the clothesline, which sagged from a fence to a hook near the back door, was a long-dead Irish woman. The woman had stood on a tottering kitchen chair, wearing an apron. Or she’d awakened her husband—a policeman, possibly, who worked nights—and made him string up the clothesline. The woman talked to him even when he wasn’t home, even after he was killed. She was still talking: the apartment was haunted. Jo heard mocking, anguished whispers, occasionally in rudimentary Korean—she was the child of immigrants, and knew a few words—yet the ghost was surely not Jo’s dead grandmother, not Korean at all. Surely it was the woman she’d just imagined, thinking all around the clothesline like someone lost in the dark, who pats the air. Had the woman killed her husband? Or was he murdered, and then the murderer came for her, too? She and Josh were being watched: How dare you not be dead? How dare you not be in danger? Jo had gone to Harvard, Josh to Brandeis. Somerville, where both had moved after graduation, had narrow, treeless streets, steep hills, and tiny backyards behind tiny plain, crowded houses. Students and college graduates were taking over old neighborhoods: the air itself sometimes seemed angry.

  Jo was a teacher in a day-care center. At work next day she stretched on a rug telling her three-year-olds a story, making it up as she went along. “So Dinah said to the giant, ‘I can’t reach your hand, or I’d give you a cookie.’ ” The real Dinah smiled, sweet and untidy in oversized overalls because she’d wet her pants and had to be dressed from the Extras Drawer. “Then Henry”—as Jo nodded to the real Henry—“climbed on Dinah’s shoulders. But they were still too small. So they called Krishna.”

  Krishna was a tiny, serious child who could read.

  “ ‘Krishna! Krishna!’ they called.”

  Jo noticed within herself a gray and purple emotion—a Josh-and-sex emotion—instead of her usual primary-color work feeling. As she invented the story of the giant, she stared at a shelf, and on it was another clothesline, knotted every foot and a half. On walks, each child grasped a knot. After the giant finally ate her cookie, Jo brought down the rope and led an indoor jungle walk, past swamps and crocodiles. She liked her job, but when she looked at her watch it was never as late as she’d thought. Neither she nor Josh—who did computer support at a nonprofit—knew what they’d become.

  At the end of the day it was Jo’s turn to wait with a few children, some from each room, whose parents paid extra to pick them up late. “Sing the train song,” the older ones begged. The song was supposed to be about a peanut waiting for a train, but one day she’d used their names, and now they demanded it. She sang:

  A Tammy sat on a railroad track,

  Her heart was all aflutter.

  Around the bend came Engine Ten,

  Uh-oh, Tammy butter.

  A Krishna sat on a railroad track,

  His heart was all aflutter. . . .

  She sang with embarrassed gusto as the first parent arrived. Then others came, they greeted their children and one another, they slowly departed—the children subtly different in their parents’ presence—and at last the workday was complete.

  In welcome silence, Jo coiled the rope. She vacuumed the blue carpet. When she turned off the machine, she heard a knock that was repeated. She opened the street door and a man entered. Had he come to retrieve his child, whom she’d somehow misplaced? “Yes?” she said quickly.

  “I’m interested in enrolling my daughter,” said the man. He was older than most of the fathers, maybe a professor or a lawyer on his second marriage. He was boyish, in a baseball jacket, but gray-haired.

  “Oh! Well, I’m not the right person to talk to. The director’s gone.”

  “May I look around?”

  “This is the three-year-old room,” said Jo.

  “Are you a teacher?” The man sat down on one of the children’s chairs.

  Now she was annoyed. He was probably thinking, A Chinese girl. She said, “There’s not much I can tell you. . . . Did you want to start in the summer?”

  “She’s two,” he said.

  “When will she be three?”

  The man hesitated, and suddenly Jo felt afraid. Then, sure enough, he said, “Do you see this?” He stretched out his hand.

  “I have to leave,” said Jo.

  The man stood, keeping his hand steady as if it held a naturalist’s treasure, a leaf or a striated rock. Jo saw what it contained: a small outdoorsman’s knife with a black plastic handle.

  “It’s quite sharp,” said the man. “Please take off your clothes.”

  “What if I don’t?” Jo said.

  “Please do.” He sat down.

  So she did, nauseated and longing only for a moment, any moment, after this incident, when she could remember it instead of being in it. For two periods of a few seconds each, she couldn’t see the man, as she pulled first her sweater and then her shirt over her head. He said nothing, sitt
ing without moving, the knife still in the palm of his hand, which was held out like an offering. He looked frightened. Sitting on the floor to take off her shoes, she thought of helping the children with their shoes, then of the man’s daughter.

  “Socks,” said the man. She stood to take off her jeans, and undid her bra. Finally she took off her panties, then swiftly sat down on the rough carpet, raised her knees, and hugged them. She made herself look again at the man and he looked back. He stood, put the knife in his pocket, walked to the door, flipped the light switch, and stepped outside, letting the door close behind him and leaving Jo in the dark.

  When Jo was late, Josh imagined that a parent had failed to show up, abandoning a child. Finally, Jo would arrive, carrying a damp toddler whom they’d keep—at least overnight. He’d play with it, sitting on the floor, while Jo went to the drugstore for diapers. When Jo came in, he looked up from his computer.

  “Did you cook?” Jo said. Her voice sounded odd.

  “I lost track of the time,” said Josh untruthfully.

  “I’m so hungry,” said Jo, and began to cry. She opened her bag and took something out—a pair of panties.

  “What happened?” said Josh, standing and reaching for her.

  Jo shook her head, and went into the bedroom.

  “What happened?” he said again, when she came out.

  “A man—”

  “In the street? Somebody raped you?”

  She told the story quickly. “He didn’t touch me.”

  “Oh, Jo.” He reached to hold her, but didn’t feel allowed, and only touched the fuzz above the surface of her sleeve, as he used to do before they were lovers. “Shall I call the cops?”