A Town of Empty Rooms (2 page)

“Keep something with you that you can sell,” he told her once, when she was nine, when she wandered, sleepy, into the quiet dawn of the kitchen.

“Why?” she asked.

“Just in case. Good to have it. So you can sell it and move.”

“What's going to happen?”

“You never know,” he said. “Remember. When things are falling apart around you, be ready to go.”

When she had received twenty S-chain gold necklaces for her Bat Mitzvah, the delicate offerings from teenage girls who had all purchased them at the same jewelry store in Westwood Village, he bought her a special jewelry box where she could keep them. She had wanted something with a ballerina, with lavender adolescent froufrou, but
her father proudly presented her with a jewelry box that was a small, armored safe.

One day he drove her around to identify pawnshops in the Los Angeles area. He had familiarized himself with them, the ones that paid the best prices, the ones with the friendliest proprietors, and she sat in his car as he drove them by the storefronts that announced, in enormous letters: CASH NOW! WE TAKE GOLD, SILVER , STUDENT LOAN CHECKS, INCOME TAX REFUNDS! INSTA-CASH HERE!

“You're the oldest,” he said, “so you should know this. This is my advice.”

She was proud that she was getting this advice, that she was deemed worthy of it, but she looked at the stores, shabby, with enormous, overly enthusiastic signs, and she shuddered.

“I don't want to go in there,” she said.

“Good point. On a regular day, don't. But think ahead of the pack. Be a wolf, honey, not a sheep.”

“How do you know who's who?” she asked.

“What?”

“A wolf. Or a sheep.”

He scratched his neck, which was pink and spackled; he never wore sunscreen, as though believing himself immune to the effects of the sun. Her father and his family had left Germany in 1936, not long before the rest of their relatives had been herded off and sent to the camps, and he had a particularly fierce awareness of the preciousness of life. He stocked antiviral medication and antibiotics in preparation for future epidemics, once cancelled her seat for a flight she was booked on because he had heard about thunderstorms in the flight path — she had not found out about the cancellation until she was standing in the check-in line. He wept aloud at newspaper stories of untimely death — the teenager who was shot by the police, the mother who drove the wrong way down a one-way street and was killed. As a child, she often found him at the kitchen table, the newspaper neatly folded beside himself, a Kleenex crumpled in his hand. “Don't look,” he said, his eyes red, as he tried to pour her some cereal. “It's something bad.”

It was a fresh, bright morning in Los Angeles, and a few young
women were jogging, faces gleaming with sweat. “Don't trust her,” he said, pointing to one blonde girl smiling to the music playing in her ears.

“Why?”

“Sheep don't have their eyes open. You can have your eyes open. You can lead the way.”

She was nine years old. How did anyone know how to lead the way? He claimed to have known, when he was three years younger than she wa then, of the end of his world. He had told his parents, who had not wanted to leave, that they had to leave Berlin in 1936, and finally they had listened to him. If everyone has one age, one moment, in which they are stuck and that shapes them forever, it was this time for her father. It was his bravest moment. She sat with him in the car, the blue vinyl warm on her back, and she cared mostly that he had decided to impart to her this information.

“Serena,” he said. “I trust you. You'll know what to do.”

Here, at forty, she strolled absurdly down Fifth Avenue. She imagined where she and her family could go. Quebec. Israel. Japan. Really, she wanted to go where he was, she wanted to talk to him one last time; she looked at the phone, waiting for it to ring. And later, when the security guards showed up at her office, when the lawyers hammered out a deal, when they asked why she had done this, for she had never done it before and did not think she would again, she did not know how to tell them how natural and free it felt, buying up the world with fake money; she could not explain how it felt like a final conversation with her father, like a deep and uncontrollable act of love.

 

 

 

THREE MONTHS LATER, AFTER WORD had gotten out about her and she was unable to find a job in marketing at any corporation in New York, after the lawyers' fees depleted all their finances, she and her husband Dan hurled their resumes all over the nation and took the one job that was offered; it was to Dan. They piled everything into a U-Haul and drove six hundred miles to Waring, North Carolina.

The first month, Serena found herself, consistently, embarrassingly, getting lost. She had not yet found a job, so she was trying to get to know the city of Waring with their children — Zeb, five, and Rachel, three — toting them to playgrounds, parks, but she was having trouble negotiating the streets. Her heart marching, she hunched over the steering wheel so that they would not see her trembling hands. Waring was the kind of town where people seemed to wash up when their luck grew thin, a place that people picked off a map at a moment when the creditors were closing in or the divorce papers were filed. She drove down the main drag of the city, a former port in the Civil War, where one now noticed a longing for bargain electronic equipment, discount shoes, and cheap burgers. Marble antebellum mansions now stood deified as museums, and placards outside the churches declared, without irony:
If God Is Your Co-Pilot, Switch Seats ; Democracy Is Nice, but the King Is Coming
;
Choose Your Future: Smoking or Non-Smoking
? She tried to find the best route home.

They did not know anyone here. It was a city of pickup trucks perched on tires the size of inner tubes, of SUVs humming along ribbons of asphalt. There were the billboards by the highway:
Honesty, Caring, Responsibility, Faith,
as though the simple declaration of these traits on the wall would cause them to be absorbed by the people driving by; she passed
Jesus says: I will make my home with you; Free Coffee: Everlasting Life; Don't Be So Open-Minded: Your Brains Will Fall Out.
The purpose behind them all was so puzzling that she actually missed the half-naked underwear models looming over any given corner in Manhattan.

 

 

 

 

ONE DAY SERENA WAS COMING back from the supermarket, made a wrong turn by a church placard which held the distracting message
His Blood's For You,
and ended up in a web of streets that wound through a development with no trees, the sky an impassive, enormous blue. The houses appeared to have been built all at once, with five different design plans, the streets were unnamed, identifiable only to those who understood some private code, and she felt herself become afraid. The
world seemed the consistency of paper, first from her father's abrupt death, and then from the incidents with the credit cards — everyone had asked her over and over what she had been thinking, and, really, there had been no thought at all. She had been borne on a wave of feeling, a desire to be close to him in this new, shocking state of who he was. The action had revealed some tawdriness in her, and she did not know what would happen next. The children still saw her as good, and she wanted to do right for them, but she still could not find her way through these streets. “Hold on, hold on,” she murmured to the children, handing them handfuls of cheese goldfish as they sat in the back, innocent and cantankerous and hungry. She swung the car onto a side street and then back onto a main road and onto Tenth; she knew that if she called Dan, he would not want to hear from her, knew that in a moment the goldfish she was handing to the backseat would be rejected, and she was afraid of herself, of her children's imminent outrage, of the sheer and surprising number of Bojangles' and Hardee's, and of the fact that anyone in the world could, at any moment, disappear.

She passed a building, a plain, concrete box with deep blue stained glass windows and golden doors. The name Temple Shalom was written over the doors.

The royal blue of the stained glass windows and the gleaming gold door lent the simple building the exaggerated, grand aura particular to all religious institutions, as though its structure could somehow contain the varied, raw longings of its congregants. It was the only synagogue she had seen in the city, surrounded by the vast, modern church compounds — Baptist, Catholic, A.M.E. Zion.

She drove past the building once, paused, turned around. She did not feel Jewish, or interested in God at all, really, and in New York she would have walked by this building without another thought. But this was the only building here that seemed at all familiar to her. She stopped the car, unbuckled the car seats, and coaxed Zeb and Rachel out. Stepping into the converted basement, she said, “Hello?” to the air.

A man wearing a yarmulke walked in. He was a tall, taut man, and his hair was a lush, glossy brown. His skin was the color of caramel. The room was dim and quiet; he looked surprised that anyone was coming inside.

“Rabbi Josh Golden!” he said, as though he had just decided this. He looked to be about forty-five, though there was something in his face that looked younger; his arms appeared stiff and muscular under his blazer, as though he was preparing to combat his congregants' myriad spiritual doubts. “Who are we welcoming here?”

“Serena Hirsch. This is Zeb and Rachel. I just need directions to Old Oak Street,” Serena said. “The kids are hungry and — ”

“Hi, hungry kids,” he said, kneeling beside them. He rose and stepped into a closet and brought out some chocolate coins. “Leftover gelt. Can they have some?”

“Sure,” she said.

The children grabbed the gold coins and began eating them, ravenous.

The rabbi stood and smiled at her. He regarded her in a peculiar way, as though she were both right in front of him and a window, and through her was a place unexpected and beautiful, a pristine outline of a lake. She turned around to see what he was looking at, but she saw only a slightly peeling wall.

“Where are you from, Serena?” he asked.

“We just moved from New York,” she said. “I'm trying to find Old Oak.”

“You're almost there,” he said. With a pencil, he drew a little map on the back of a Temple Bulletin. “You just have to turn back onto Sycamore and make that left on Haynes. That's a left that a lot of people miss.”

“Thank you,” she said, and meant it.

“You're welcome,” he said. His eyes were dark and blue and so intent she looked away from them briefly. He smiled. It was as though he contained something, not sunlight, but an essence just as illuminating. “You should come and join the festivities!”

They all stared at the dim, silent room.

“Where?” asked Zeb, squinting.

“Maybe,” she said. “Thank you again.”

He shook her hand. His grip encased her hand completely for a moment, and then he released it.

THEY KNEW NO ONE IN Waring, and now she and Dan did not know each other. Once the children were asleep and the house had settled into a sort of quiet save the shudders of the dishwasher and dryer and the children's mournful calls for juice, she and Dan assumed the grim, silent chore of avoiding each other. That night, after she had sent out another resume, she stood by the kitchen door, watching Dan read his files. She wanted to go to him, to touch his shoulder, his hair, but there was a warning, a stiffness in his shoulders that had become more pronounced, a wall against her, in the last year. He had had a loss of his own eight months before; he had learned of the death of his older brother. Harold had not been in contact with the family for years. He had been wandering the globe and was in a car accident, and after Dan found out, he, a publicist, a tall, talkative, optimistic man, seemed encased in ice. Serena had tried to figure out what might comfort him, tried to help him talk or not talk, remember Harold or not, but he did not want to engage with anyone at all. She tried to hold him at night, and sometimes they clutched each other, silent, but the sun rose and they stumbled forward, separate, into their days.

And then she had walked into Saks. She had tried to explain that she had thought perhaps that the gathering of diamonds and silver might actually help them when the country fell apart, that she had been nobly preparing to take all of them as they resettled in some new country, but now this plan did not sound practical as much as insane. He had no idea why she had done this, and neither did she. She had not been able to stop herself those few days with the credit cards; she had not been able to think about the regular rules of commerce because the death seemed to break every rule she knew. But Dan seemed to be waiting for something to answer his outrage, and, unfortunately, it was this. He became silent after the credit cards, the move, as though with this action, she had betrayed him.