A Town of Empty Rooms (28 page)

She knew what he was talking about — Betty 's list. She sighed sharply and clasped her arms around herself. His eyes were cool in a deliberate way, the coolness of someone holding back a wave of feeling. She did not want to ask the next question, but she did.

“What if they can't walk away?” she asked.

He shrugged. “And why not?”

She paused. “Because they have felt hurt,” she said.

He crossed his arms. “So, they say they have felt hurt. Maybe they hurt
me.
Have you ever thought of that? Have you thought about how a rabbi has feelings? No. None of them think of that. They just think of what they want. They need to forget about it,” he said. “You know what the Schwartzes told me about the Eisenbergs when I came to live with them? ‘Forget about them. They didn't want you? Forget them.' If she had red hair before, now it was black. If he was a fat guy, now he was thin. They didn't exist. I changed them in my mind. Now I don't know what they look like. I did it, why can't they?”

His voice had taken on a light, almost sprightly tone, which unnerved her.

“They're in pain,” she said. “They want you to help them.”

His eyes were bright, both stimulated and oppressed by his congregants' errant needs. “Why don't you think for a moment,” he said. “Listen to yourself. They are all asking me to do things for them. So are
you. Maybe they should be asking God. Maybe they should think about how they can change. Maybe — ” he snapped his fingers, as though he had just had a brilliant thought. “Maybe their own relationship with God needs to change.”

“But why is it just them?” she asked.

“I didn't say it was just them,” he said. “I said — ” he shifted on the balls of his feet, like a basketball player. He turned, suddenly, and returned to the kitchen. Now he came out eating half a bagel.

“No one understands what I mean,” he said, looking bereft. “I don't know how to say it — ”

“Rabbi. Are you planning to lock us out?” she said.

The bagel stopped, midair. “Excuse me?”

“I heard,” she said, “that some members of the Temple were collecting keys to lock people out.”

He stared at her. “The Temple is my
home,
” he said. “I came here when I was nine years old. When no one wanted me! This was where I was wanted. Truly. I never left. Maybe I help guide them to something godlike.” He paused. “I wouldn't lock them out.
I bring them in.
”

He took a bite out of his bagel.

“So, when is this meeting?” he said.

“Next week,” she said.

“I will be there,” he said, solemnly. He wrote down the address and time in his day planner. “Don't you worry,” he said. “We're going to announce that we're here.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“See you then,” he said briskly, and headed quickly into the kitchen.

She hurried out of his apartment, away from the smell of rotting fruit, away from the stale amber light coming in from the window, past the empty pool, its currents ribbing in the low wind. She turned once, and she saw him, standing at the window, a thin figure, looking out at the dark autumn light.

Chapter Fifteen

THE CHRISTMAS DERBY WAS SCHEDULED for December 5; it was the November 30th Scout meeting, the final night to construct the cars. The church hall was crowded with various woodworking devices. A couple electric saws were set up at stations, and beige squares of sandpaper littered the foldout tables. Stained glass windows sent clear diamonds of red and yellow onto the wood floor, and there was the sweet smell of fresh wood and the appearance of honest and blameless industry. Dan sat with his son, who penciled in the shape he wanted his car to have. It was a sedan with fins, resembling the Batmobile.

Forrest wandered across the room, watching the parents bend over the cars. He leaned over a long table and said, “Remember. Scouts make it. We will disqualify any cars purchased on the illegal Internet sites. You know what I'm talking about.” A murmur shimmered through the troop. “It's not just about cheating. I ask you: What true scout is going to make cars to sell on the Internet? Why are dads who buy these not spending time on their kids?”

“My first year, one dad put mercury in the car, which made it fast, except when the car crashed and spilled mercury all over the finish line. We had to be evacuated because the raceway became toxic,” said one father, who glued wheels onto the car while his son crouched under the table and picked his nose.

“We placed second last year,” one father said.

Laughter. One said, “They hate being second.”

Another responded, “They do? I do.” He whispered, quietly, “Screw second.” There was raucous laughter behind hands.

“Tyler, you dog, you.”

The electric saw screeched, murderous, in the background.

“I just got Harper into the Optimist softball league. I
love
it,” Dan
heard one father say. “He hit a home run last week. You've got to sign them up early. By seven. You have to get them entrenched. Before they realize they can get out of it. Because by eight they have their own ideas, and you look at the parents who have their kids in this stuff by four, and by eight it's all over.”

Dan felt the skin of his arms harden, like armor.

“Hey, Scout, what do you think?” Dan said, holding out the penciled block for Zeb to approve.

His son looked at it. “I don't know,” he said, and he darted off.

Dan surveyed the cars already lined up for display. They were a triumph of parental manual dexterity and painting skill. He looked around to see if he saw a single boy making his own car. The boys had mostly dispersed, and it was the fathers leaning, sweaty, intent, over the tiny cars. No one wanted his child to lose. Dan felt camaraderie with these men he barely knew — they were all part of this, the basic engine of the American family. It began with this car, and that would echo in the future on the soccer field, the baseball diamond, the awards assembly, the job interview. It was strange, but it was something to be part of; it was the brute force driving the room.

Forrest came up to him. “Looking good,” he said. He held up a car that was so flat it looked like a giant had stomped on it. “This is the car I made for my grandson this year. Dawson. He's coming in from Benson County for the great event. It's a beaut.”

Forrest handed the car to Dan. It was light, almost like a wafer. He wondered what kinetic theory Forrest wanted the car to embody.

“Nice,” he said.

“Isn't it?” said Forrest.

“Very,” he said. He paused. “How 's Evelyn?”

Forrest blinked. “Day by day,” he said. “She can walk around a little now. She can fix herself an egg. But she was supposed to help me out, and now Jeb Wilson said he can't do timing — ”

Dan heard a thin plea in Forrest's voice.

“I can help with timing,” Dan said.

Chapter Sixteen

THE NEXT DAY WAS A bright, hot December day. The hard sunlight in the kitchen, the summerlike climate, made the day seem as though it were occurring in an alternate hemisphere. It was both cheering and eerie. Dan woke up, put on his work suit, walked outside to get the paper, and came back inside sweating. The sudden change in weather made him irritable. The children put on their shorts and T-shirts again, baffled. It was not like a new beginning, just confusion at all the ways of the world.

Serena had half an hour before she was due to work at the Temple office. She went into her bedroom and made the bed. Dan had left a navy sweatshirt crumpled on the floor; she picked it up and suddenly breathed the tangy, cotton smell. It was an old shirt, one he had owned for years, and to hold the soft shirt felt like containing those years in her hands. She remembered an evening ten years ago, when they were first dating, walking along the West Side Highway, gazing at the enormous boxes of light that made up the buildings in the Financial District. The huge, blazing buildings seemed a perfect backdrop for their new feelings for each other, and it seemed somehow that their love, in its strangeness and newness, gave them a right to be here. They were full of opinions that all sounded correct, and they were talking about the idiocy of Pepsi's most recent marketing campaign or what Hillary Clinton's role in the White House should be or what was the best recipe for spaghetti sauce, and when Serena shivered, Dan set this sweatshirt around her shoulders. They were clasping hands, and he lifted her hand to his lips and very gently kissed it. Holding the shirt now, she imagined this gesture so fully she could almost feel it on the back of her hand.

She sat down on the bed, exhausted.

She turned on her laptop.
The email from Tom read:

IT WAS DECEMBER 5 , THE evening of the Pinewood Derby. Dan came home early that day; he slipped quickly from his work clothes into his crisp beige uniform and stood with Zeb in front of the mirror. The two of them combed their hair.

“Ready?” Dan asked his son, who was gazing at his reflection as though just memorizing the particularities of his small face.

“For what?” asked Zeb.

The wooden derby car seemed oddly small and light to contain the weight of this particular dream. They all piled into their car for the big event. Dan moved briskly, strapping the timing equipment into the backseat. The children bubbled with excitement. Zeb held his car carefully in his lap. He touched the wheel with his finger, rolling it back and forth. Serena had never seen her son this hopeful; she wondered if Dan's idea was, in some way, right. They traveled through the thin mauve dusk to the room where the tiny cars would roll down wooden tracks to cries of disappointment or triumph.

They arrived early so that Dan could set up the tracks and computers. He did not know what he would get if Zeb won, but just that he
wanted his son to win. Or, more accurately, Dan wanted to win. The incident with the pennies had troubled him in a way that he didn't want to reveal to Serena; the joke about the quarters had just come to him, he had said it, and everyone, thankfully, had laughed, but Serena didn't know how he had seen her fear, felt it start to invade him, like a dark wave, and before he joined in on this madness, he made the joke. He was so grateful for the derby! It had presented itself, miraculously, that night, as a distraction, an opportunity. He wanted Zeb to have a memory to replace the other; he could remember this and forget about the pennies. Dan could not bear the idea of his son walking away from this event with nothing in his hands.

Dan had set up the sensors at the top of the track, linked them to the computer, flicked the on switch, and watched the cars zip down the track. Each track had to be set up the same way, to trigger the sensor to start the computer. Serena watched him crouching at the bottom of the tracks, scrutinizing the cars rushing down, trying to identify what made one faster than another. The room was heavy with the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg, and it had transformed into a paean to both spiritualism and materialism. A soundtrack floating out from the walls alternated between the sound of car engines revving up and a chorus singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Little Drummer Boy.” The racetracks finished at the bottom of a three-foot-tall papier-mâché statue of the holy infant in a manger, surrounded by smiling farm animals that had been slapped with brown paint by some scouts' siblings who, said one mother, wanted “to contribute to the great event.” A halo made of tinfoil hovered above the baby, a plastic doll. Dan had not expected this display; he worried about a car flipping off the track and damaging the various participants in the scene.

“A car will not hit the holy infant,” said Forrest, adjusting the animals a bit.

“Are these figures going to affect the aerodynamics of the cars?” Dan asked.

Forrest regarded him with an exasperated expression. “Perhaps they'll help the most virtuous scouts,” he said, and he darted off.

Forrest was escorting his grandson Dawson around the room. A man whom Serena assumed to be Dawson's father — he had the same
forehead and chin as Forrest — stood at the back. He had a long blond ponytail and was the sort of muscular man who was intently aware of his muscularity; he walked a little lightly, girlishly, holding out his arms, which were covered with tattoos. The tattoos had a theme of breasts and weaponry, and some of the tattoos featured breasts wielding weapons. The other parents carefully left space around him. When a phone rang on Dawson's father's belt, he bolted from the room and did not return.

Dawson was a heavy boy whose flushed cheeks gave him the appearance of someone who was perpetually embarrassed. He had more badges on his uniform than Serena had ever seen on any scout. It seemed impossible to have earned all those badges at his young age. She wondered if Forrest had simply sewn them on in an act of tribute or as talismans against a troubled future. “This is Dawson Sanders from Burgaw,” Forrest said. “Most badges for a Cub in the county. Count his badges. Go ahead.” The boy did not seem to appreciate the grand introduction and slunk by Forrest, rubbing the car against his bottom lip as though he wanted to eat it.