A Town of Empty Rooms (3 page)

She stood, by the door, waiting for him to look up; he stared at his files, determined. “Dan,” she said, feeling his name, familiar, but flat, just a word, on her lips. “Would you like to go to services Friday? There's a temple here. I thought we could go.”

She heard herself and was embarrassed; it sounded ridiculous, as though she were asking him on a date. It occurred to her that marriage
was, in its distinctive currents, almost like dating, but with the same person, over and over; they had each shifted over the years, in ways both hopeful and otherwise, and now this person sat in their kitchen, in this house where they both lived, and it was almost as though she was introducing herself to him for the first time.

He glanced up. The yellow kitchen light shaded his face. “Why would I want to do that?”

“It's somewhere to go,” she said. “Maybe we'll like it.” She was oddly shy saying
we.

“You can go.”

“You don't want to?” she asked.

“Why would I want to?” he said. All right — that was clear. There was a deflation in her chest, the fading of hope that he would say something that would remind her that he harbored some sort of love for her — but he did not, and she crossed the room in the silence that made it seem that there was no one there.

 

 

SHE WALKED IN, ALONE, TO the Temple that Friday. In the front room there was a silk shawl with a Chagall print spread over a section of water damage — an attached note said that the damage was from Hurricane Fran and they had not yet been able to repair it; she looked at the framed glass pictures of the tiny Bar/Bat Mitzvah classes — sometimes with just one child a year. The room had an elaborate feeling of cleanliness, as though what the room lacked in grandeur would be made up for in soap. An ancient hunched man with a nametag was handing out mimeographed services. “Welcome,” he said, handing her a blank sticker, marked VISITOR. “Write your name.”

She was not a religious person, but now she needed to be here. There were fourteen other people scattered among the pews. The sight of a dozen or so Jews dressed formally for the Southern evening, waiting for services to begin, startled her. This synagogue was a simple, beige, boxy room, much smaller than the sanctuary where she had sat as a child, a temple in the San Fernando Valley that in its vastness and girth resembled a spaceship; there was a thoughtlessness, a brash optimism, to that temple, with its membership of six thousand and the
sparkling black lake that was its parking lot. Her father, who grew up, after Berlin, in a small town near Sacramento, had never gotten over the expanse of their Los Angeles temple; he walked through its parking lot slowly, taking pleasure in methodically counting the cars. Once he walked through it, turned to her, and smiled. “Three hundred and twenty-seven,” he said, with a kind of awe. “They all came.”

Stepping into this room was different; it was a declaration.

She stood in the back, wondering where to sit; there was no lack of available seats here, but she wanted to find a good spot. She stepped forward, not too close to the front, hovering near the middle, and then she sat down, quickly.

“What's your name, darling?” asked a woman in front of her with a nametag that read BETTY B, notable for a silk hat with an eerily realistic azalea branch on the front.

“Uh. Serena,” she said, briefly, ridiculously, forgetting. “We've been here a month.”

“Welcome,” said Betty. “We need y'all. We need new blood.” She laughed. “How many are you? You married?”

“Yes,” she said, carefully. “Four of us.”

“Well, where are they? How many families do you think we have?”

Serena tried to come up with a number that would not be insulting. “Two hundred?”

“Ninety-five!” said Betty. Her face became almost maniacally hopeful. “But growing.”

“There are 5,045 families in that cruise ship across the street,” said a squarish man in a silk navy suit; his voice sounded as though he were speaking through a microphone. “That's just First Baptist.”

“According to the international Jewish mailing list,” said Betty.

“You may ask, compiled by who?” said the man in the navy suit.

“Norman. Please. We have about 263 Jews here. We have a county of one hundred thousand people.”

Rabbi Golden ascended the stairs to the maroon-carpeted bima. An organist began to play softly on the second level of the synagogue. The congregants settled quickly into their seats.

The rabbi began the service. Serena did not listen to the prayers exactly but was moved by the straggly red velvet cushions on the pews,
the clear jingle of the silver crowns of the Torah. She was in the one place in this city that reminded her of her youth. Or — three decades removed from it, a nostalgic youth, not one that she had actually lived. Her family's attendance at services was erratic — her mother never went, and her father attended only when he needed to drive her for services required for her Bat Mitzvah. Her father would grab a yarmulke and bolt into the synagogue, slumping shyly in a seat near the back, like a student unprepared for class. He stammered through the prayers, lost his spot on the page, cleared his throat; Serena sat, reciting each prayer slowly so he could copy her. He sat, leg jiggling, and she tried, with her concentration, to keep him still. She was ten years old. Suddenly, she had a purpose.

Now she found herself glad for the moments in the service during which she could stand up and see the rabbi more clearly; she wanted to watch him. She noticed this about the rabbi: how tightly his hands gripped the sides of the lectern where he gave his sermon, and the hard, bright confidence of his gaze as he looked out at the congregants, as though he were taunting all of them.

 

 

 

THE RABBI CAME STRAIGHT TO her during the oneg, the ode to lemon squares and dry brownies that followed the service. The other congregants gathered around a foldout table, arranging desserts on paper plates. “So, you've enlisted,” he said, leaning toward her. “New York. I was an army chaplain. I'm here from Fort Myers. Five years before that, Brussels. Akron. Sarajevo. San Diego. Iraq. Camp Lejeune.” His words tumbled out as though he was trying to catch his breath. “Now I'm here.” He grinned — that sunlight again — and held out his arms. “Forty years old and I've made it to my first pulpit!”

“You've traveled a lot,” said Serena.

“Always traveled,” said the rabbi. “Hobo as a child. A kind word for what I was. Then life in the military. I've seen everything. Jews in India! Morocco! Alaska! You wouldn't believe how glad they were to see me. They wanted to see what I brought with me. Matzos. Dreidels. Hamantaschen. These were things that reminded them of home.” He paused. “What do you think of the Jewish community here?”

“Is this it?” asked Serena.

He laughed. “My point exactly. I want two hundred families here in the next five years.” He punched his hand into his fist. “Watch me! Two hundred!”

His voice had the tininess of a game show host's, a controlling cheeriness — it was as though he could not quite perceive his own volume. But Serena heard something in his voice that got her attention; his words were expansive. “Where are you going to find them?” Serena asked.

“I have plans,” the rabbi said. He bounced on the balls of his feet so he seemed to be half-floating in the air. “The Southeastern North Carolina Jewish Community Center. Five thousand square feet, with classrooms and lounges, and outside, baseball diamonds. The Baptists have it, the Catholics have it. We should have it. The elderly in one room, reading to the little kids. The teenagers playing basketball outside. Everyone steps in and is welcomed. Everyone has a place to go.”

They stood, clutching their tiny plastic cups of wine. The rabbi's breath smelled like a child's, cherry-sweet.

The rabbi cleared his throat. He looked at her with the strained desperation of a suitor. “Serena Hirsch. Join. I can tell you are board material. You are going to help lead us.”

He knew nothing about her. Serena was grateful to him, his ignorance, his assumption of her goodness; she was also glad that no one was there to contradict him.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Shabbat shalom,” he said, and stepped back. “And don't try to get away from us.”

At another moment in her life, she would have found that statement a little cloying and false; but at this particular moment, she wanted him to go on. After she had been fired from Pepsi, after she had said she was guilty, after she paid the fine, after they landed here, in this strange city — perhaps this person could help her. She stood amid the small, talkative group and found herself following the rabbi's orbit around the table, positioning herself so she could hear his conversations with the other congregants.

“Jackie,” he said. “Is your brother out of the ICU?”

“Not yet,” said a woman whose bright blue eyeliner matched her purse. “Maybe Thursday. Still on the ventilator.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “That is hard,” he said.

Jackie's eyes were teary. “I don't know what to do, Rabbi.”

“He's in all our prayers, Jackie. Day by day. We'll keep him on Mi Sheberach.”

He stood beside his congregant in his crisp suit, looking down, hands clasped. It was a posture he had clearly refined through the years. His arms made a triangle in front of his body, one hand gripped the other, his head was lowered; if he was not a rabbi offering comfort to a congregant, he could be a movie executive considering an enormous deal. He was listening. It seemed to require a large effort on his part to remain this still. Serena noticed he was, very softly, deliberately, tapping his foot. It was as though he was allowing Jackie to borrow him for a moment, accessing some supreme power that rose from him.

She watched the rabbi move around the table. He knew everything. His mind contained information about the sick, the wayward or ungrateful grown children, the hip surgeries, the upcoming trips to Israel, the divorces, the new grandchildren, the children's marriages to spouses the parents did or did not approve of, the SAT scores, the jobs gained or lost, the untimely deaths. His navy rayon suit shone bleakly in the overhead light; it needed to be ironed. She watched the expressions of the people as he barreled around the table toward them, everyone affixed with nametags, clutching cups of soda or coffee; they were all, in one way or another, waiting for him.

After a while, she said good night. On the way to the car, she looked back at the small building on the corner. The stained glass windows burned amber and blue in the darkness. It was impossible to see who was inside; the building simply stood there. Above the city, the deep sky stretched, the clouds floated overhead, great gray ships lit through with the moonlight, gleaming — throughout the day, the clouds had shuddered with light and thunder. Her soles floated on the sidewalk as though on ice. She looked back at the Temple, the pure golden light in the windows. She wanted to go back inside.

Chapter Two

THE CHILDREN DID NOT KNOW why they were here. They had moved to Waring in July, as soon as Dan received word about the job, and Zeb woke up each morning asking if they were going back to New York, or if they were going on to Alabama, or England, or any place he had heard about; he and Rachel jumped out of bed, going about their days finding ways to dismantle the house. They reached into a corner and found the spot where the floors detached from the walls, knocked against a door and watched it fall off its hinges, stuck a finger into a hole and came out with a fingernail streaked with mold. They moved through the house with stealth and relentless fortitude, on a mission to locate the nail or spring that would either make their parents move back to a place they knew or bring the whole house down altogether.

The task of moving had absorbed Serena and Dan, their conversation those days brisk and utilitarian. But the night they had moved into the new house, when the boxes were all inside and when the children had passed out, he had reached for her under the blanket. It felt like it had been weeks since they had made love; his hand was urgent, slipping her nightgown off, and, without a word, they had wound into each other quickly, as though here, in their bodies, in the quick rise of desire, they would find a place to hide from the world. In the morning, when she awoke, she had hoped that he would mention it, that the silence between them would subside, that they could talk as they always had, but he had retreated back into himself. He whisked forward to the morning. She felt, after eight years of marriage, strangely, a little cheap.

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.