What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (3 page)

“I’ll tell you,” Mark says. “That’s got to be the number-one most annoying thing about being Hassidic in the outside world. Worse than the rude stuff that gets said is the constant policing by civilians. I’m telling you, everywhere we go, people are checking on us. Ready to make some sort of liturgical citizen’s arrest.”

“Strangers!” Shoshana says. “Just the other day, down here, on the way from the airport. Yuri pulled into a McDonald’s to pee, and some guy in a trucker hat came up to him as he went in and said, ‘You allowed to go in there, brother?’ Just like that.”

“Not true!” Deb says.

“True,” Shoshana says.

“It’s not that I don’t see the fun in that,” Mark says. “The allure. You know, we’ve got Mormons in Jerusalem. They’ve got a base there. A seminary. The rule is—the deal with the government—they can have their place, but they can’t do outreach. No proselytizing. Anyway, I do some business with one of their guys.”

“From Utah?” Deb says.

“From Idaho. His name is Jebediah, for real—do you believe it?”

“No, Yerucham and Shoshana,” I say. “Jebediah is a very strange name.” Mark rolls his eyes at that, and hands me what’s left of the joint. Without even asking, he gets up and gets the tin and reaches into his wife’s purse for another tampon. He’s confident now, at home in my home. And I’m a little less comfortable with this than with the white bread, with a guest coming into the house and smoking up all our son’s pot. Deb must be thinking something similar, as she says, “After this story, I’m going to text Trev and make sure he’s not coming back anytime soon.”

“That’d be good,” I say.

“Actually, I’ll tell him to come straight home after practice. Or I’ll tell him he can have dinner with his friends but that he better be here by nine, not a minute later. Then he’ll beg for ten. If I tell him he has to be home no matter what, we’re safe.”

“Okay,” I say. “A good plan.”

“So when Jeb’s at our house, when he comes by to eat and pours himself a Coke, I do that same religious-police thing. I can’t resist. I say, ‘Hey, Jeb, you allowed to have that? You supposed to be drinking Coke, or what?’ I say it every time. Somehow, I can’t resist. People don’t mind breaking their own rules, but they’re real strict about someone else’s.”

“So are they allowed to have Coke?” Deb says.

“I don’t know,” Mark says. “All Jeb ever says back is, ‘You’re thinking of coffee, and mind your own business, either way.’ ”

“What happens in Jerusalem, stays in Jerusalem,” I say. But they must not have that commercial there, because neither of them thinks that’s funny at all.

And then my Deb. She just can’t help herself. “You heard about the scandal? The Mormons going through the Holocaust list.”

“Like in
Dead Souls
,” I say, explaining, “Like in the Gogol book, but real.”

“Do you think we read that?” Mark says. “As Hassidim, or before?” He passes me the joint as he says this, so it’s both a little aggressive and funny at the same time. And then, because one doesn’t preclude the other, he pours himself a drink.

“They took the records of the dead,” Deb says, “and they started running through them. They took these people who died as Jews and started converting them into Mormons. Converting the six million against their will.”

“And this bothers you?” Mark says. “This is what keeps an American Jew up at night?”

“What does that mean?” Deb says.

“It means—,” Mark says.

But Shoshana interrupts him. “Don’t tell them what it means, Yuri. Just leave it unmeant.”

“We can handle it,” I say. “We are interested, even, in handling it. This stuff,” I say, pointing in the general direction of the Altoids tin, “has ripened our minds. We’re primed to entertain even the highest concepts.”

“High concepts, because we’re high,” Deb says, earnest, not joking at all.

“Your son, he seems like a nice boy.”

“Do not talk about their son,” Shoshana says.

“Do not talk about our son,” Deb says. This time I reach across and lay a hand on her elbow.

“Talk,” I say.

“He does not,” Mark says, “seem Jewish to me.”

“How can you say that?” Deb says. “What is wrong with you?” But Deb’s upset draws less attention than my response. I am laughing so hard that everyone turns toward me.

“What?” Mark says.

“Jewish to you?” I say. “The hat, the beard, the blocky shoes. A lot of pressure, I’d venture, to look Jewish to you. Like say, maybe, Ozzy Osbourne, or the guys from Kiss, like them telling Paul Simon, saying, ‘You do not look like a musician to me.’ ”

“It is not about the outfit,” Mark says. “It’s about building life in a vacuum. Do you know what I saw on the drive over here? Supermarket, supermarket, adult bookstore, supermarket, supermarket, firing range.”

“Floridians do like their guns and porn,” I say. “And their supermarkets.”

“Oh my God,” Deb says. “That’s like your ‘Goldberg, Goldberg—Atta’ thing. Just the same, but different words.”

“He likes that rhythm,” Shoshana says. “He does that a lot.”

“What I’m trying to say, whether you want to take it seriously or not, is that you can’t build Judaism only on the foundation of one terrible crime. It is about this obsession with the Holocaust as a necessary sign of identity. As your only educational tool. Because for the children, there is no connection otherwise. Nothing Jewish that binds.”

“Wow, that’s offensive,” Deb says. “And close-minded. There is such a thing as Jewish culture. One can live a culturally rich life.”

“Not if it’s supposed to be a Jewish life. Judaism is a religion. And with religion comes ritual. Culture is nothing. Culture is some construction of the modern world. And because of that, it is not fixed; it is ever-changing, and a weak way to bind generations. It’s like taking two pieces of metal, and instead of making a nice weld, you hold them together with glue.”

“What does that even mean?” Deb says. “Practically.”

Mark raises a finger to make his point, to educate. “Do you know why in Israel all the buses and trucks, why all the taxis, even, are Mercedes?”

“Because they give you a big guilt-based discount?” I say. “Or maybe because Mercedes is the best at building vehicles for the transport of Jews—they have a certain knack?”

“Because in Israel we are sound, solid Jews, and so it is nothing, even right after the war, for us to drive German cars and turn on our German Siemens radios to listen to the Hebrew news. We don’t need to impose some brand-based apartheid, to busy ourselves with symbolic efforts to keep our memories in place. Because we live exactly as our parents lived before the war. And this serves us in all things, in our relationships, too, in our marriages and parenting.”

“Are you saying your marriage is better than ours?” Deb says. “Really? Just because of the rules you live by? That makes a marriage stronger—just between any two random people?”

“I’m saying your husband would not have the long face, worried over if his wife is keeping secrets. And your son, he would not get into the business of smoking without first coming to you. Because the relationships, they are defined. They are clear.”

“Because they are welded together,” I say, “and not glued.”

“Yes,” he says. “And I bet Shoshana agrees.” But Shoshana is distracted. She is working carefully with an apple and a knife. She is making a little apple pipe, all the tampons done.

“Did your daughters?” Deb says. “If they tell you everything, did they come to you first, before they smoked?”

“Our daughters do not have the taint of the world we grew up in. They have no interest in such things.”

“So you think,” I say.

“So I know,” he says. “Our concerns are different, our worries.”

“Let’s hear ’em,” Deb says.

“Let’s not,” Shoshana says. “Honestly, we’re drunk, we’re high, we are having a lovely reunion.”

“Every time you tell him not to talk,” I say, “it makes me want to hear what he’s got to say more.”

“Our concern,” Mark says, “is not the past Holocaust. It is the current one. The one that takes more than fifty percent of the Jews this generation. Our concern is intermarriage. It is the Holocaust that’s happening now. You don’t need to be worrying about some Mormons doing hocus-pocus on the murdered six million. You need to worry that your son marries a Jew.”

“Oh my God,” Deb says. “Oh my God. Are you calling intermarriage a Holocaust? You can’t really—I mean, Shoshana. I mean, don’t … Are you really comparing?”

“You ask my feeling, that’s my feeling. But this, no, it does not exactly apply to you, except in the example you set for the boy. Because you’re Jewish, your son, he is as Jewish as me. No more, no less.”

“I went to yeshiva, too, Born-Again Harry! You don’t need to explain the rules to me.”

“Did you call me ‘Born-Again Harry’?” Mark asks.

“I did,” Deb says. And she and he, they start to laugh at that. They think “Born-Again Harry” is the funniest thing they’ve heard in awhile. And Shoshana then laughs, and then I laugh, because laughter is infectious—and it is doubly so when you’re high.

“You don’t really think our family, my lovely, beautiful son, is headed for a Holocaust, do you?” Deb says. “Because that would really hurt. That would really cast a pall on this beautiful day.”

“No, I don’t,” Mark says. “It is a lovely house and a lovely family, a beautiful home that you’ve made for that strapping young man. You’re a real
balabusta
,” Mark says. “I mean it.”

“That makes me happy,” Deb says. And she tilts her head
nearly ninety degrees to show her happy, sweet smile. “Can I hug you?” Deb says. “I’d really like to give you a hug.”

“No,” Mark says, though he says it really, really politely. “But you can hug my wife. How about that?”

“That’s a great idea,” Deb says. Shoshana hands the loaded apple to me, and I smoke from the apple as the two women hug a tight, deep, dancing-back-and-forth hug, tilting this way and that, so, once again, I’m afraid they might fall.

“It is a beautiful day,” I say.

“It is,” Mark says. And both of us look out the window, and both of us watch the perfect clouds in a perfect sky. We are watching this and enjoying this, and so we are staring out, too, as the sky darkens in an instant. It is a change so abrupt that the ladies undo their hug to watch, so sharp is the sudden change of light.

“It is like that here,” Deb says. And then the skies open up and torrential tropical rain drops straight down, battering. It is loud against the roof, and loud against the windows, and the fronds of the palm trees bend, and the floaties in the pool jump as the water boils.

Shoshana goes to the window. And Mark passes Deb the apple and goes to the window. “Really, it’s always like this here?” Shoshana says.

“Sure,” I say. “Every day like that. Stops as quick as it starts.”

And both of them have their hands pressed up against the window. And they stay like that for some time, and when Mark turns around, harsh guy, tough guy, we see that he is weeping. Weeping from the rain.

“You do not know,” he says. “I forget what it’s like to live in a place rich with water. This is a blessing above all others.”

“If you had what we had,” I say.

“Yes,” he says, wiping his eyes.

“Can we go out?” Shoshana says. “In the rain?”

“Of course,” Deb says. And then Shoshana tells me to close my eyes. To close them tight. Only me. And I swear, I think she’s going to be stark naked when she calls, “Open up.”

She’s taken off her wig is all, and she’s wearing one of Trev’s baseball hats in its place.

“I’ve only got the one wig this trip,” she says. “If Trev wouldn’t mind.”

“He wouldn’t mind,” Deb says. And this is how the four of us move out into the rain. How we find ourselves in the backyard, on a searingly hot day, getting pounded by all this cool, cool rain. It is, with the weather, and the being high, and being drunk, and after all that conversation, it is just about the best feeling in the world. And I have to say, Shoshana looks twenty years younger in that hat.

We do not talk. We are too busy frolicking and laughing and jumping around. And that’s how it happens, that I’m holding Mark’s hand and sort of dancing, and Deb is holding Shoshana’s hand, and also, they’re doing their own kind of jig. And when I take Deb’s hand, though neither of those two is touching the other, somehow we’ve formed a broken circle. We’ve started dancing our own kind of hora in the rain.

It is the most glorious, and silliest, and freest I can remember feeling in years. Who would think that’s what I’d be saying with these strict, suffocatingly austere people come to visit our house. And then my Deb, my love, once again she is thinking what I’m thinking and she says, face up into the rain, all of us spinning, “Are you sure this is okay, Shoshana? That it’s not mixed dancing? That this is allowed? I don’t want anyone feeling bad after.”

“We’ll be just fine,” Shoshana says. “We will live with the
consequences.” The question slows us, and stops us, though no one has yet let go.

“It’s like the old joke,” I say. And without waiting for anyone to ask which one, I say, “Why don’t Hassidim have sex standing up?”