HOW IS THIS NIGHT DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER? by Kim Brooks

Richard and his daughter Kate had not spoken for almost a year when he received a call from her asking if he would come to her wedding. He was reclining on the couch, dreaming of Antarctica when she called. The landscape was before him: a great white envelope of ice dotted with steel ships and oil rigs, stocky men in parkas and ski masks, bracing against the wind, and above it, the northern lights he had known as a child, misplaced but no less luminescent, a gash of blue fire through the bone-cold sky. Laurel was the one who had mentioned Antarctica, in a room at the Red Roof Inn across the freeway from his office. Her face replaced the landscape, and then her body, perched on top of the desk next to the window, knees tucked into chest, naked except for her slate gray stockings. She looked like a girl, hugging her knees like that, her breasts concealed behind her thighs. It was late afternoon and the weak light from the window spread against the outer layer of her hair which was thinner and frailer than the strands beneath it. She was laughing. “They want to go there. Tell me why a man would travel five thousand miles to see the most desolate place on earth?”
She had never been able to appreciate his situation; the affair had ended badly.
The phone beside the couch was ringing. He picked it up.
“My wedding is tomorrow,” Kate said.
He could hear her breathing, waiting. “I know.”
“Will you be there?”
“That depends.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry we argued.” Her tone was flat and even until he thanked her for her apology; then it turned slow and deliberate. “Tomorrow is my wedding. Tomorrow is your daughter’s wedding. I have discussed this with Ariel’s family. If you are not there, I will sit shiva for you. Do you know what that means? It means you will be dead to me. Is that what you want? For just one day could you try to rise above your self-loathing, could you try to . . .” She stopped. “This isn’t the conversation I called to have. Our antagonism exhausts me.”
Our antagonism exhausts me. Rise above your self-loathing. How had such self-righteous venom invaded his daughter? It was in her diction. It was in the clear-as-a-bell vibrations of her voice, until she began crying softly. She always cried, just like her mother. And why shouldn’t they when it got them what they wanted? He had once come home from work and found them standing side by side, smiling, with tears trickling down their cheeks, and had suspected for one horrible moment that they were practicing, that it was something they cultivated and discussed behind his back. Nonetheless, he couldn’t stand to witness their unhappiness.
She gave him the time of the service and the address of the synagogue in Reston which he wrote on the back of a magazine because he had thrown the invitation in the trash after their last argument. As he hung up the phone, his wife walked into the room and looked at him suspiciously the way she always did when he stayed on the line for more than a few seconds. “What are you writing?” she asked.
“The information for Kate’s wedding.”
“Don’t bother. I have the invitation in my desk.”
“I threw it out.”
“Yes. And I retrieved it from the garbage.”
“Fine,” he said. He lifted his legs onto the couch again and closed his eyes. Let her deny him even that. He tried to summon Laurel from his dream, to recreate the vision of her long legs, her slender hips, but his efforts were thwarted when Judith sat beside him and began massaging his feet. Even more than the kneading of his muscles, the familiar warmth of her body comforted and shamed him. “Richard,” she said. “I didn’t do it to spite you. For God’s sake, it’s your daughter’s wedding.”

They had determined even before she was conceived that they would raise her without religion. Judith had come from Tatabanya, a small town south of Budapest, as a girl. Her mother was a devout Catholic and a manic-depressive whose emotional volatility and religious fervor grew side by side until she killed herself at the age of thirty-six. Richard was caught off-guard when she told him this on their second date; he had not yet discovered that many women divulge personal information as a come-on. “It came right after her worst megalomania. They say it usually does. For weeks she had been going to church four, five times a day. That was when I learned to cook, which came in handy later. When my father confronted her, she said she’d kill him if he tried to come between her and God. And then she started saying she was God, or his messenger, or something like that. And then she disappeared, and a week later they dragged her body out of the ocean.” She blew on a spoonful of soup. “Are you okay?”
“I think so. Do you normally skip the small talk like this?”
“I just figure, when you want to get to know someone, really get to know them, why waste time?”
“I’m sorry about your mother. I really am. I didn’t mean to sound cold.”
His hand was resting on the table and she pressed hers on top of it. “I’m sorry if I shocked you. It happened so long ago, it’s such a part of me, I forget how it must sound to other people. The point is, I’m not religious.”
Richard remembered this conversation when Judith became pregnant; a Catholic upbringing was out of the question and all arrows seemed to be pointing toward agnosticism. He tried explaining this to his mother after one of their perfunctory biannual dinners while Judith and his father were doing the dishes. He observed her carefully across the floral centerpiece while his words hung limply in the air between them. She took at least a minute to stir cream into her coffee before responding. “Why not raise her Jewish? Judith could convert. People do it.”
“Let’s not fight, Ma. Listen, Cole Porter’s playing on the radio; let’s dance, instead.”
“Damn it, Richard, you can’t dance your way out of every argument. What kind of a man is afraid to argue? You’re just like your father. You could set the man on fire and he wouldn’t make a peep.”
Richard lunged from his chair, swept her into his arms, and danced her all around the house until she was too exhausted to do anything but collapse on the couch.
“What in the world is going on?” Judith asked from the kitchen doorway, her hands resting protectively on her newly-protruding belly.
“Ma has trouble dancing and kvetching at the same time. It’s a discovery I made way too late in life.”
Judith smiled, crossed the room, draped her arms around Richard’s waist, and that was the last he heard on the subject, from his mother, anyway. His father, for the first time in Richard’s life, was less easy to appease. They retreated to the front stoop for cigars.
“I’m frightened for you,” he said, exhaling a plume of velvety smoke.
“Frightened? Jesus, Dad, she’s Catholic, not a vampire.”
“Please don’t mock me. I know you don’t put much stock in my advice, but there’s no need to mock. Religion is important whether you like it or not. You can’t make a thing disappear by ignoring it.”
“I’m not religious. When are you going to accept that Judaism doesn’t mean to me what it means to you?”
“I accept that, Richard, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a part of you, a part of your identity. When two Jews get married, they’re guaranteed at least that one area of compatibility. It may be small, but it’s nothing to be scoffed at. When a Jew marries a gentile . . .” He looked down at his lap. “I just don’t know.”
He seemed such a pathetic figure in that instant, so incapable of self-knowledge, so willfully ignorant of the fact that, Jewish or not, he and his own wife had nothing in common but complacency and need, that a hard lump of pity rose in Richard’s throat. The thought that his father, of all people, a man who had been snuggling up with misery for as long as Richard could remember, should now offer him marital advice, struck him as the most poignant illustration of life and religion’s sad absurdity. “Don’t sweat it, Pop,” he said, grinding his half-smoked cigar into the ashtray. “Compatibility is overrated.”
Occasionally, Richard would recall a religious image from his childhood; the times, when he was very young, that his father would have him stand in front of him during services so he could rest his prayer book on top of his head, the enthusiasm with which he tore through his Aunt Ethel’s house, searching for the afikomen at Pesach. But these images came to him later in life when Kate was almost a grown woman. When she was born, they had assumed their plan would be every child’s dream: a festive, secular Christmas without all the Christ business. A touch of Jewish heritage without the endless hours studying a language she would never speak or understand, liberated from dogma and narrow-mindedness; they envisioned her a thoughtful, modern American, a human secularist of sorts.
And look at her now. A Hebrew teacher. A Zionist. A leader of Jewish meditation groups. A shining example of orthodoxy, stubborn and judgmental and engaged to a rabbi. For her college graduation, he had purchased her a brand-new car which she had sold the same week, donating the money to a charity that purchased bullet-proof ambulances for Israel. The world was not supposed to move in this direction.
Sometimes he tried to put his finger on the precise moment she had changed from a lighthearted little girl into the woman she was today, but whenever he attempted this he immediately realized she had never been lighthearted; she had never been carefree. As long as she had talked and walked he had sensed in her an uncompromising need for clarity, cleanliness, and direction. If a few crumbs stuck to her bare feet when she crossed the kitchen floor, she’d scream and carry on for hours as if she had stepped on a tangle of snakes. She did not like the foods she ate to touch each other and refused to eat spaghetti unless the meatballs had been washed clean of sauce. When a second-grade substitute teacher abandoned their daily spelling drill to teach them about poetry, she sat at her desk, diligently transcribing letters while the other children leapt around the room enacting verses of Shel Silverstein. But her objections to change and spontaneity were always well-reasoned and she articulated them with the collectedness and eloquence of an orator. “If we miss a week of spelling, I’ll fall behind in English and Reading class. Plus, I’d like to do well in the school bee. Plus, I’ve already read Shel Silverstein.” Did her actions stem from such logical reasoning, or were these reasons no more than careful rationalizations? He honestly could not tell, and when she caught him concentrating on it too hard, pausing for too long before responding, she’d change the subject altogether.
“Justin Linefski put his frog in the freezer and it died, but his parents only grounded him for a week. Does that seem long enough to you?”
“That’s hard to say.”
“Why?”
“Well, I’m not his father, for one. I don’t know all the circumstances.”
“He caught it in his yard and put it in their freezer in the garage until it died.”
“Why do you think he did that?”
“Because he’s bad.”
“People aren’t just bad, sweetie. People are very complicated. Sometimes they do bad things for reasons others don’t understand. Do you see what I’m saying?”
She nodded and sat down at the kitchen table to begin her homework. He was about to go to his bedroom to change out of his work clothes when she looked up from her paper with eyes that were all Judith’s. “Daddy,” she said.
“Yes, sweetie.”
“When people are bad, they should be punished.”

He slept badly and woke late. Judith swirled into the room and pulled back the curtains so that the harsh light burned his eyes. “Rise and shine, father of the bride.” She examined herself in the mirror as she snapped on her jewels. Her face looked fresh and pink. She had tied back her hair so that the streaks of gray weaved in and out of the black.
In the foyer, she straightened his tie and inspected his appearance. “You need a kipah and tallis. She told me to remind you. Do you have them in the attic?”
“I don’t think I ever had them.”
“Wonderful.”
“Can’t I borrow them from someone at the synagogue?”
“It’s not like binoculars, Richard. We’re not going to the races.”
“You’re in a cheerful mood.”
“I slept horribly.”
“Let’s just stay calm and think. Where could we shop for these kinds of things?”
“The new Wal-Mart?”
“If you’re going to joke . . .”
“Okay, okay. How about the Jewish Community Center? They have a gift shop.”
He looked up the address in the phone book and they were on their way. Only when he was opening the car door for her did he think to ask, “How do you know they have a gift shop?”
“How do you think? I’ve been there with Kate more times than I can count.”
It would have been an easy drive to Reston – just hop on the parkway and take 95 toward Washington – but the Center was far north on Hull Street, a part of town he hadn’t been to in years. They drove by the miniature golf park where they had taken Kate for birthday parties. It had not changed except for the most elaborate structures: the Dutch Golfmill, Mount Golfmore, the Taj Magolf, which had all been torn down and replaced with more modest, geometric holes. They drove by the YMCA where Judith would take Kate swimming when they first moved to Richmond and were too pressed by his dental-school debt to pay for things like private pool memberships. They drove past the travel agency where Laurel worked – did she still work there? – the place where he had first met her, looking into a family vacation in Hawaii. She had just been abandoned by her boyfriend and he called in the middle of their meeting to ask when she’d be picking up her belongings. She started crying.
“Oh, God. I’m sorry. I’m not normally this unprofessional.”
He plucked a tissue from the box on her desk and offered it to her. She had features that revealed a gentle disposition most in moments of sadness, a quiet longing that exposed itself without asserting itself. “It looks like you could use a vacation even more than I could.”
She laughed through her tears. What was it about weakness that so moved him, not momentary weakness, but the kind that seemed woven into the fabric of a person’s soul? It seemed like an old friend whose knowing glance was always with him. On their last weekend together, their weekend in Victoria when for a few moments he had actually considered throwing everything away for her, he had told Laurel he needed her to be strong and she had responded by unfolding her weakness in all its delicate splendor like a Japanese fan. She climbed on top of him in bed and let her muscles go slack so that the dead weight of her body covered him like a blanket. She rested her cheek on his chest and spoke in a plain, airy voice that raised the hairs on his shoulder. “I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt I was living with you and Judith and Kate and we were all happy. It wasn’t clear whether I was your mistress or daughter or wife, but I knew that you loved me.” He tried to push her lower on his body so he could look at her face while she spoke, but she wouldn’t budge. “I’m so scared. I feel like no one cares if I live or die. I feel like I don’t exist.” She understood what his father had always understood, that vulnerability can be as aggressive as violence. Her makeup was smeared around her features and made her look childish somehow. She was like a bottomless well through which he could hear his affection falling, falling, without any end in sight.
They stopped at a red light and Judith turned to him. “Silver Compass Travel. That’s the one, isn’t it? The most recent one? Bring back memories?”
He looked straight ahead. “That’s all they are, Judith. Memories can’t hurt us.”
She laughed. “I’d put up a fight on that if I thought you actually believed it.”
“It was the last one. I told you that.”
“Just forget it. I don’t trust you to drive and lie at the same time.”
“You don’t trust me.”
She opened the glove compartment and removed a cigarette from the pack she kept hidden beneath the maps. “It’s so lovely,” she said, striking a match, “to have everything out on the table.”

Richard and Judith’s own wedding took place at city hall; he had never cared much for pomp and propriety. So when Judith began helping Kate with the arrangements, Richard instantly became the outsider. He watched their pains and endeavors, their obsessing over floral arrangements and reception sites, their squabbles over hors d’oeuvres and votive candle, their scurrying around to find a suitable videographer and their attempts to construct origami place cards shaped like little chairs, with the detached yet unwavering interest of an anthropologist; their efforts could not have been more foreign to him had they involved animal sacrifice or howling at the moon.
In addition to the distance he felt to all of their methodical planning, there was the additional religious distance, the Jewish rituals and traditions bumping up against all the secular elements of celebration. Judith had transformed their dining room table, which they never used anymore, into her own private library of Jewish wedding literature. He would come home from work and there she’d be, head buried in a book.
“This is interesting,” she said. “The rabbi actually has to inspect the wedding sheets the day after the wedding to make sure the marriage has been consummated.”
“Interesting?” Richard said. “That’s disgusting. That’s the most disgusting violation of privacy I’ve ever heard of.”
She turned back to the book. “Forget it.”
He wanted to salvage the evening. “I suppose it is kind of interesting. Just a little hard to relate to.”
She kept reading, ignoring him until he had no choice but to leave the room.
Another time, over an enormous bowl of salad at their favorite restaurant (she and Kate had started a pre-wedding diet together), she tried to explain to him the tradition of the chuppa.
“God promised Abraham his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. When the bride and groom stand beneath the chuppa, it’s supposed to remind them of God’s promise and of their Jewish ancestors who stood beneath the chuppa before them. It also symbolizes the home they’ll build together and the family they’ll raise in it.”
The image of two people building a home together, creating a little abode to shelter them from all the nastiness the world had to offer, touched Richard. “That’s beautiful,” he said. He willed her to return his gaze, to let the moment linger.
She removed an olive pit from her mouth and placed it on the side of her plate. “The florist wants five hundred dollars to decorate it with Fancy Amazon roses. Before we go to bed tonight, remind me to write a check.”

The day his father’s cousin and cousin’s wife came to live in their guest room, Richard’s mother hired a housekeeper for the day so she could spend the afternoon getting ready. Richard couldn’t remember what his mother’s face looked like then but he remembered the dress she had worn. He ran into the foyer, flushed and winded from playing outdoors, and she gave a full-circle swirl in front of him so that the jade green pleats of her skirts swished about her stockings. “Do you like Mommy’s new dress, Richard?” He remembered thinking she looked like a movie star, he remembered telling her that, and he remembered the way her face fell when she opened the door to greet his father’s relations, a man in a black wool suit with a full, untrimmed beard, peyos, and top hat, a woman covered from chin to toe in dark fabrics that resembled the rags his mother used for cleaning. Magda and Iosef didn’t eat any of the dinner the housekeeper had prepared. The man spoke for both of them, saying it was not possible, that they would buy their own food and keep it in the guest room with them.
Richard sat on the front porch that night playing jacks and listening to his parents argue through their open bedroom window. The piercing pitch and volume of his mother’s voice embarrassed him as it often did. “I will not have them turn my guest room into a kosher pantry. All my furniture will be ruined. There are antiques in that room.”
“What do you want me to tell them?”
“If they’re going to become American Jews than they should eat like American Jews. They probably think they’re better than us, too. That we’re not really Jewish because we don’t have two sets of dishes. When my great-grandfather came to America, he took less than a year to become one of the most prominent businessmen in Albany. He didn’t waste time worrying about dishes.”
“Your great-grandfather came from Amsterdam, not the Communist Bloc.”
“Of course you take their side. You probably agree with them. You probably think I am a bad Jew.”
“I didn’t marry you for spiritual guidance. Now let’s drop it.”
“Drop it, drop it, drop it. Drop dead, Samuel.”
As they pulled into the parking lot of the Jewish Community Center, hundreds of children, some small, some large, all clad in colorful clothing, were pouring forth from the building and dispersing in all directions like a clipped bundle of helium balloons. The younger ones were holding the hands of the older ones. The older ones were shouting good-byes to one another. All of them were wearing or carrying crowns made of bright construction paper. “Right in time for carpool,” he said, but when he looked at Judith, she was sleeping against the window.
Most of the children had cleared out by the time he stepped inside. A janitor was sweeping up their debris. Richard picked up a paper crown that had fallen on the ground and nodded to the janitor. It must have belonged to one of the younger children because it was barely as large as his hand. The janitor walked away.
“Can I help you?”
He turned around and faced a woman his daughter’s age with long brown hair twisted into a bun and swept through the middle of a crown like the one he was holding. Her accent was similar but not identical to his wife’s. When he continued to stare without responding, she giggled and touched the top of the crown. “Purim,” she said. She was wearing a short black skirt and a leopard-print blouse. He briefly recalled the Hebrew school teachers of his youth; they were mostly short, heavy-set women with drill sergeant posture and breath that smelled of onions and creamed herring. Maybe Kate wasn’t the anomaly he had taken her for. Maybe this was the wave of Judaism’s future.
“Yes. I need to buy a kipah and tallis. Do you sell those here?”
“We do. But I’ll need proof of your membership at a local synagogue.”
“Proof?”
“I’m joking.”
“Is my pronunciation that bad?”
She made a waving gesture with her hand. “Come with me,” she said. “Our gift shop closes at noon, but I have the key.”
When they reached the end of the hall, she unlocked the glass door and held it open for him.
“I appreciate this. I’m on my way to an orthodox wedding and I don’t think they’ll let me enter in a Braves cap.”
She looked over her shoulder and smiled the way people smile when you try to be funny and fail, then flipped on the light switch, illuminating wall-to-wall glass cases of menorahs, mezuzas, Kiddush cups, Shabbat candles and the like. One observation Richard had made again and again throughout his life, was that the more paraphernalia a person or group of people or institution displayed, the more you could bet on the bogusness of whatever snake oil they were selling. He thought of his tenth-grade U.S. history teacher whose classroom had been adorned with unusual maps, military uniforms, construction-paper constitutions, and pipe-cleaner Salem witch dolls, but who didn’t know a historical fact from a hole in the ground.
“Whose wedding are you going to?” she asked.
“A friend’s. A colleague’s.”
She stood in the center of the store and looked around. “Now, let me think, where are they?” She began scanning the merchandise in one of the glass cases.
“Are you a teacher?”
“For now.” Then: “It’s sort of temporary. I’m going to graduate school here. Normally I live in Sofia.”
“What are you studying?”
“Dance.”
He smiled as if he had recognized her as an old friend.
“I remember now. Rachel put them away because the children were playing with them after snack time and got peanut butter everywhere.” She squeezed behind the counter, then placed a cardboard box of kipahs next to the register. “Look and see which you like.”
He leafed through the selection. “When I first moved to Richmond, I’d go into the city all the time to see performances. Here,” he said, holding up a satiny, sapphire blue kipah. He placed it on his head. “What do you think?”
When she put her finger to her lip and stepped back to take him in, he did not avert his eyes the way most people did when confronted by a stranger’s gaze. He watched her. If he watched them closely, sometimes he could see it happen. It was not that he was particularly attractive. That had never been it, not even when he was a young man. Rather, it was the way he saw them, the way he could see something desirable in them that other people overlooked, and the way this desire displayed itself so candidly on his features. The women he wanted saw themselves through his eyes, and that was what made them want him in return. He could literally watch it happen.
“Very handsome,” she said, looking away. “The color matches your eyes.”
“I’ll take it.” He handed her a folded bill and noticed how her movements had grown choppy and awkward as she flattened it in her hand, placed it in the register, and reached below the counter for a bag. She was stalling.
“You know,” she said, “I go to the ballet all the time. Student tickets. If you decide to go again. . . . Here.” She grabbed a pencil with a plastic torah for an eraser from the mug beside the register and wrote her name and number on a card which she slipped inside the bag.
“Thank you.”
“It’s nothing. It’s just more fun with a friend.”
“I mean thank you for this.” He held up the kipah.
“Have a happy wedding,” she called to him as he pushed open the door.
Judith was still sleeping when he returned. When she finally did wake, he showed her the kipah and she nodded and asked, “Where’s the tallis?”
He groaned and hit the rim of the steering wheel with his hand. They were halfway to Reston by then, and it was too late to turn around.

At first, Richard was frightened of his father’s relatives. Magda spoke little English and somehow seemed to migrate between the guestroom, the Laundromat, the bakery on Lincoln, and the synagogue without being seen. Sometimes Richard would be doing his homework in the kitchen or watching television in the family room and would hear the screen door slam, but by the time he leaned around the corner to glimpse the stairs, she’d have made it halfway up the staircase and only the hem of her skirt would be visible. His mother tried to lure her out of her room with various enticements; I’ll take you to one of the nice department stores downtown. I’m going to have my hair set; would you like to come? But Magda’s response never changed: a vigorous expression of gratitude and an even more vigorous refusal. Once, when her mother’s friends came over to play bridge and drink Gibsons, she came to the bottom of the stairs, glimpsed them sitting around the table, and turned back around before she reached the bottom step. His mother sighed. “One more month, then Samuel’s brother in Brooklyn is taking them. He owns a kosher butcher shop and a couple of apartments above it. They’ll be more comfortable there, anyway.”
But if Magda’s shyness, or anti-social behavior, as his mother called it, caused her constant irritation, Iosef’s assertive demands, his insinuations that staying with them for a short time was their right, and not a blessing made possible by her and Samuel’s magnanimity, enraged her. He’d sit in the kitchen, his Yiddish newspaper spread arms-width across the table, and ask Richard’s father to pass the jam as if it was as much his as anyone else’s. The first time Richard heard his father conversing with him in Rumanian, he felt certain it was all a fantastic, practical joke, his father’s usual goofing, like when he told the door-to-door encyclopedia salesman he was facing incarceration. But after the first few instances he became accustomed to the strange words on his father’s tongue and began asking what certain phrases meant. Iosef applauded his curiosity. “He’s an intelligent boy,” he said to his father, as if Richard was no longer in the room, “but is he studious?”
“This is America. Boys don’t study the Talmud here. They study their bank accounts.”
“When I have established myself in New York, perhaps he will come to study with me.”
“I don’t think his mother would approve of that.”
“A boy’s mother decides his education?”
His mother, who had been preparing dinner, stepped into the doorway. “What about education?”
“Richard,” his father said, “is going to be a Talmudic scholar.”
She laughed. “My son will be Bar Mitzvahed like a normal Jew. He will be married in a synagogue by a rabbi and he will be buried in a Jewish cemetery where his kin will say Kaddish over his grave. But he will be an Avon Lady before he’s a Talmudic scholar.” She waved her spatula for exclamation. “Tell him, Richard. Tell your father you’d rather be an Avon Lady.”

Shortly after Kate’s thirteenth birthday, they reluctantly allowed her to attend a Jewish Youth Convention with her one Jewish friend, and she came home three days later with a packet of information on anti-Israel propaganda in the American media and a hickey on her neck the size of a squashed cherry-tomato. He and Judith had argued that night while washing the dishes about which was worse.
“I don’t want her being brainwashed into some crazy who moves to a settlement in the West Bank,” said Richard.
“Believe me. That’s the least of our worries. I don’t think the girl has a political bone in her body. What I want to know is where that growth on her neck came from. God almighty, Richard, I thought it was supposed to be a religious retreat. Aren’t they supposed to have chaperones? Rules about keeping four feet on the floor at all times and that kind of thing?”
“You’re having a relapse of Catholic guilt.”
“I am not.”
“You have to trust her.”
“I do trust her. You’re the one who’s been obsessing over her curfew, her phone calls, her afternoons at the mall.”
“She’s been so brooding lately. When she comes to the dinner table she looks like she’s finished a day of slave labor. She’s been gaining a lot of weight.”
Judith dropped the plate she had been drying into the sink. The soapy water swallowed it. “What is that supposed to mean? All sad, fat girls are easy?”
“I’m just worried about her.”
“Then talk to her. Find a way to talk to her without insulting her.”
Kate was sprawled across her bed writing a letter when he knocked on the half-open door.
“What?” she said, flipping over the stationery.
He sat on the corner of the bed. “How was your weekend?”
“Fine.”
“That’s all I get?”
“How was yours?”
“Okay. I had to do an emergency root canal on the Channel Six anchorman.”
“Gross.”
“So you had a good time? What were the kids like?”
“They were different.”
“Different how?”
She doodled on the back of her paper. “Do you really want to know?”
“That’s why I’m asking.”
“They were a lot smarter and nicer than the kids around here. I was the only one who wasn’t from the West End. They couldn’t believe that you and Mom would move with me to the South Side. They asked if all the rednecks started race riots in school. If girls were raped in the bathroom between classes.”
“There are a lot of stupid people in the world. It’s probably best if you learn that early on.”
“I wouldn’t call them stupid. I mean, it is weird that we live out here in Goyville.”
“In what?”
Her voice was growing louder. “It was embarrassing. I didn’t know anything. The blessings. The songs. On Saturday we sat in services for three hours and I couldn’t understand a word anybody said. I felt so excluded.”
That’s the whole point, he thought. The whole point is to exclude people. Better to be the excluded than the excluder. But how could he expect her to see that now? She was thirteen. “I’m sorry, honey. Maybe you shouldn’t go again if it made you so uncomfortable.”
“It’s not it,” she yelled. “It’s me. It’s you. Why don’t we belong to a synagogue? Why haven’t I ever gone to Hebrew school?”
These are my father’s questions, he thought. No, Judith’s mother’s. They’ve come back to haunt us through our daughter. “Your mother and I believe that –”
“Stop. I don’t want to hear it. If I hear you say the words human secularism ever again I’m going to vomit.”
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s drop it.”
He could see her looking for someplace to put her anger now that the argument was over. She threw her pen across the room. He rose and waited until he had reached the doorway to turn back around. She was reading over the letter. Two fat tears clung to her lashes for an instant before plunging onto the paper. “Who are you writing?” he asked.
“My boyfriend.”
He nodded and shut the door behind him.

Just outside Richmond, Richard saw a flickering of taillights in the distance. He came to a stop behind a line of traffic that stretched into the horizon. Judith sighed, removed her cell phone from her purse. She called Kate and told her they were stuck. “I know. I know, sweetie. We should have left last night. Your father. I know.”
Richard reached for the phone. “Let me talk to her.”
Judith switched the phone to her right ear and leaned into the door. “We’ll be there,” she said. “I promise.” She hung up.
“I’ve lost the right to talk to my own daughter? I was going to ask if she could dig up a tallis for me.”
“You’ll just upset her. She’s under enough stress. She doesn’t need you upsetting her on her wedding day. We’ll work something out when we get there.”
The woman in the car in front of them stepped out onto the shoulder and gazed ahead at the line of stalled automobiles like a lost sailor scanning the sky for birds. Her car was compact and looked like a rental. She was college-aged, maybe a student at U of R, but she was wearing an evening dress in the afternoon. She was meeting someone for an illicit evening. Probably someone off-limits. She reminded him of a hitchhiker he once picked up on his way to meet Judith and Kate at Virginia Beach.
Judith spoke to him without shifting her eyes from the windshield. “Remember the time we drove all the way to New Orleans for my girlfriend’s wedding?”
He remembered. “Just after you told me you were pregnant.”
“I kept falling asleep in the car. I dreamt of losing the baby and woke up crying.”
“We were stuck in traffic for hours in Alabama. Some horrible accident.”
“I remember getting out of the car to play catch in the median. You had thrown some tennis balls in the trunk.”
He remembered how exultant he had felt navigating unfamiliar roads with the sun on his face, with his wife and unborn child beside him; it felt as if everything sad and corrupt had passed him by and only happiness lay ahead.
“I might have a few balls in the trunk now,” Richard said.
Judith looked at him as if he had suggested something obscene. But it didn’t matter; when he looked back at the road, the woman in the evening dress had returned to her car and the illuminated taillights in the distance were snuffing out, one by one.
The summer before he began eighth grade, just a few months after Iosef and Magda had left them, Richard’s mother sent him to a camp in the Adirondacks. He stayed there for two months and was so miserable he tried to catch poison ivy every day in order to be sent home. The bunks were small and sweltering and bug-infested. The counselors were sadistic and often enjoyed humiliating the boys who finished last in races and capsized their kayaks. Two boys from Rhode Island, one fat, one scarred with acne, both outcasts, befriended him, but during the second week of camp he lost his way coming back from canteen and stumbled upon them masturbating each other in the woods behind the boathouse. Neither would look at him after that until the day the fat one, who slept on the bunk above him, leaned over and saw Richard studying the Haftorah portion he needed to learn before his Bar Mitzvah that fall.
“You don’t look Jewish,” the boy said.
“My grandfather came from Amsterdam.”
“Who doesn’t look Jewish?” another boy asked.
“Cooper.”
The most popular boy in the bunk, a boy who had gained widespread respect by beating a squirrel to death with a stick to win a bet, looked up from his magazine. “A Jewish family moved to our neighborhood last year. They wanted to join my parents’ country club even though there was a Jewish country club on the other side of town. Made a big stink about it. Started a petition or some crap. So finally our club – my old man’s on the board – agreed to let them in. And what did they do? They ended up going to the Jew country club anyway. All that for nothing. But I guess it’s not surprising. Jews like to stick together.” He looked at Richard. “Most Jews.”
The next spring, when his mother tried to re-enroll him, he told her she’d have to chain him up and send him in a box.
“I suppose you’d like to sit around the house all summer like your father, getting pudgy and anemic.”
“I’ll go to Brooklyn then and stay with Uncle Iosef and Aunt Magda. They said I could.”
“Uncle Iosef and Aunt Magda?” Their very names appalled her. “You’ll be wishing you were at camp with poison ivy after one week with those two.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You just hate them because they were nice to Dad. You hate being nice to him and you hate anyone who is.”
He expected her to retaliate, but instead she sat down at the kitchen table and covered her hands with her face. When she removed them her eyes were bleary and wet. It was the first time Richard saw her cry. He could not have felt more panicked had the house been burning to the ground around them.
“Don’t you love me?” she asked. “Don’t you love your mother?”
He knew if he hesitated, even for a fraction of a second, life as he knew it would end.
“Of course I love you, Ma. I just don’t want to go back to that camp. I hated it there.”
“How about that camp in Pennsylvania Mr. Albertson’s son went to?”
“No!” Richard said. “I want to go to Brooklyn.”
His mother rose, picked up the napkin holder from the table and threw it across the room. “Fine,” she said. “You can go to Brooklyn and stay there until pigs sing for all I care. Go to Brooklyn and go to your room.”

As Richard drove, he fantasized about the girl from the Jewish Community Center’s gift shop. He imagined entering her apartment behind her, watching the backs of her legs. They’d have to sneak past her roommates who, she’d inform him, didn’t understand her attraction to older men.
“I prefer distinguished,” he’d say. As soon as she closed the bedroom door he’d press his body against her back, slip his hands inside her blouse. She’d begin to unbutton it for him but he’d stop her. He’d tell her to stand completely still while he undressed her. Her body would be all soft, long lines; her flesh would bristle as he kissed her, caressed her, lifted her skirt. She would be his. She would be blank. For a while, he might indulge his own conscience or inhibitions or whatever it was telling him to stop. He’d fool himself into thinking that was a possibility. But then, as always, at that critical moment, he’d let go; he’d let himself sink into the oblivion of her body. No, not of her body. Of his need to prey on her body, to take away its blankness. He couldn’t help it. He always let go.
“Did you hear me?” Judith asked.
“I’m sorry.”
“I said we better stop for gas. You forgot to fill it again when it got down to a quarter of a tank.”
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll stop at the next exit.”
“No problem,” she repeated. “Of course there’s no problem. We’re on Richard time. We have all the time in the world.”

There were three floors between Iosef and Magda’s apartment and the butcher shop, but the scent of blood and salted meat and sweat still wafted through the windows as oppressively and dependably as smoke. It never seemed to bother them, but Richard would not have known if it had. Magda had learned only a smattering of English during her three years in America and Iosef spoke to Richard only when he needed to communicate something of importance, like a chore or a meeting place.
The first thing Richard noticed about their apartment was how little of it was visible beneath boxes and shopping bags and piles of appliances that had never been stowed away in their proper place. The walls were bare, the furniture spare and devoid of style or character. Richard’s mother refused to stay at a hotel without bringing her own bed sheets. When she purchased a picture frame or porcelain ashtray or candy dish, she’d spend half an hour placing it just so, and yell at Richard if he touched it. Iosef and Magda looked as if they barely lived in their apartment at all. If circumstances had changed against them, they could have packed up their essential belongings and vanished in hours.
Magda’s diffidence was visible around strangers as it had been around Richard’s mother, but still, she warmed to him in a way he would not have predicted from the summer she had lived with them. When he came home from Hebrew school, she’d have tea and soft, honey-flavored candies waiting for him. She tucked him in each night, and every morning, before he left, she’d smooth out his suit with her hands and inspect him for lint or loose buttons with a care and tenderness she might have reserved for her own child. Still, Richard grew restless quickly, just as his mother had predicted. He was so far behind the children in the Hebrew classes Iosef insisted he attend, the teachers refused to waste energy on him. He understood little of what was taking place around him and spent hours staring out windows at the cherry blossoms on Meserole Avenue, playing word games in his head. He could sense New York, its sights and smells and tastes, its overflowing maze of automobiles and skyscrapers and beautiful young women in summery dresses, pulsing just beyond his tiny sphere of allotted experience. Manhattan was less than an hour away by train, but living with Iosef and Magda, it might as well have been in Antarctica.
On his way to school one morning, he saw a woman carrying a basket of oranges toward the subway and recognized her as one of his mother’s favorite film stars. She was six feet tall and looked like pure sunshine. He stood against a building, unable to move, watching her long, silken legs take wide strides across the street, carrying her toward the world he longed for, a world beyond family and Hebrew lessons and obligation.
“I hear she’s slept with half of Long Island,” a voice said from behind him.
He spun around.
“That’s what the gossip columns say, anyway.”
The girl speaking was his age, maybe a year or two older. She was leaning against the doorway of a building next to a church, a book bag resting beside her on the steps. Richard remembered Iosef instructing him to walk to school on the other side of the street. She pulled a tube of lipstick out of her pocket and applied it to her lips. “I also heard that she’s Jewish, that she changed her name and she comes to visit relatives in Brooklyn. But she sure is beautiful. Don’t you think?”
Richard’s first instinct was to agree with her, but would that insult her, insinuate the inferiority of her own beauty; it didn’t take much to make girls jealous. Then again, if he disagreed, she might think he was queer or not yet interested in girls and walk away.
“She’s alright,” Richard said.
She introduced herself as Linda. “You just moved into the butcher’s building, didn’t you? I’ve seen you around. Where’d you move from?”
“Albany.”
“Never been there. I’ve been to Lake George, though. My Uncle took me and my sister up to his cabin one summer. It was okay. I like the water, but where I really want to go is Atlantic City.”
“It’s not bad there. My father used to be a dealer at Harrah’s.”
“Really?”
He nodded without looking away.
“Wow!” she said. “My Dad’s only a plumber.”
It was the first time he had lied to a woman not related by blood. It filled him with awe for the power and potential of his imagination, and with anticipation for all that his future might hold.
Each morning, Linda would be waiting for him in exactly the same place. Richard began getting up early so he could spend more time talking to her without being late. A very studious boy, his uncle said, I knew it the first time I met you. One morning, instead of applying her lipstick, she was smoking a cigarette.
“Want a puff?” she asked.
The filter end was pink and sticky, but rather than repelling him the way his mother’s lipstick-stained cigarettes did, it thrilled him; even before the nicotine hit him, his head felt both light and heavy, like a boulder tottering on the edge of a cliff.
“Want to cut with me today?” she asked. “I have an algebra test. Algebra makes me gag. There’s a show at Radio City.”
“Sure. I’ve never been.”
“You’ve never been to Radio City?”
“I’ve never been to Manhattan. Except when I took the train down from Albany.”
She gawked at him, opening her eyes and mouth wide. He wanted to kiss her.
They took the train into the city, ate lunch at an automat, walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, shoplifted candy from Woolworth’s. They sat on a park bench, where she rested her head of honey-colored hair on his shoulder, and then strolled to the matinee at Radio City Music Hall. They sat in the cheapest seats they could buy, alone and far above the action on stage. As soon as the lights dimmed, Linda placed her hand on his knee. He glided his hand along her arm from the tip of her fingers to the top of her elbow. She began to kiss him and he kissed her back. He groped for her breasts. She let him. His heart was beating so loudly he felt certain it was audible to her as well; she would hear his inexperience in it. He took slow, deep breaths. They slid onto the floor. There were shoe prints and candy wrappers all around them. He lifted her shirt over her head. She unhitched her stockings. He wanted to lift her up, wrap her around him, press himself into her, make her his. He wanted something from her he sensed would always be just inches out of reach no matter how willingly she gave herself to him.
Dusk was falling by the time they reached the train. The light penetrating the windows was warm and coppery. He leaned back in his seat. Linda reached for his hand, and although he let her hold it, the longing he had felt just hours ago was gone. He knew it would return, that soon the cycle of desire and satiety would begin all over again and he would want her with that same sense of violent urgency. But at that moment, he almost wished they had parted at the station. He wanted to be by himself and think about the day, think about how his life would be different from now on.
When Richard entered the apartment, Magda was weeping on the couch. His Hebrew teacher and Iosef were sipping coffee at the kitchen table. They turned to him, and Richard felt in their gaze the weightiness of the world they inhabited.
Iosef accompanied him to Grand Central Station. “I feel very sorry for you,” he said, as they walked along a dark street Richard did not recognize. “You American Jews are like bees without a hive. The hive has been crushed and abandoned and you buzz around without purpose or discipline, lost from God and your ancestors. You think you are less intimidating to the gentiles around you because you are no longer a swarm, but you’re wrong. They hate you just the same. And so now you are not only hated. You are alone. You are lost and alone.”
He expected to elicit equal scorn from his mother when she met him at the station, but he was wrong. She pulled him against her in a long embrace and kissed his ruffled hair. Only after squeezing him and telling him how much she had missed him did she hold him at arm’s length and look him over. “You listen to your mother from now on,” she said. “When we get home, I’ll draw you a nice hot bath so you can soak and scrub, get that disgusting ghetto smell off you. Next summer, you’ll be too old for camp. I’ll talk to Grandpa. Maybe he can get you a job at Woolworth’s.”

They stopped at a gas station off the freeway. Richard filled up the tank, went inside to pay, and when he stepped out of the store, Judith and his car were gone. He scanned the lot. Nothing. Maybe she drove around to the other side. He cut through the store, nodded at the clerk, came out the other door. No car.
“You haven’t seen my wife by any chance?” he asked the man behind the register.
“A classy-looking lady in a light-colored suit?”
“That’s the one.”
“She walked around to the driver’s seat while you were paying and took off like a bat out of hell.”
“It’s a little game we play.”
He called her cellular from the payphone outside. “Judith, dear, you’ve left me at the gas station.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.”
“Care to explain why?”
“Because you’re a self-involved prick who can’t get it together for the most important day of his daughter’s life.”
“I see. But listen to me, Judith. Listen to me. I apologized. It’s just a tallis. I’m sorry. What else can I say? We’ll work it out at the synagogue.”
“Who was she? One of Kate’s old Hebrew school teachers? No shame, Richard. You have no shame.”
“I love you. Please don’t do this. Please don’t leave me here. I’ll rip up the number. I’ll rip it up in a hundred pieces. You know you’re still my entire life, you know you’re everything.”
She hung up the phone.
Richard went inside and bought a tube of beef jerky. He sat on the curb and ate it, watching the cars in the distance zip toward their destinations. It wasn’t long before Judith pulled up beside him.
“Thank you,” he said, slouching against the door. “Thank you for coming back.”
“It’s not for you,” she said. “It’s for your daughter.”

The last conversation he held with his daughter had taken place almost a year before. She had surprised him and her mother by returning to observe Passover with them, to teach them how to observe it; her attitude had been one of patient affection. It was one of the first warm days of spring. He noticed how her hair had turned light again, the shade it had been when she was a girl, and instead of entering their house the way she usually did, like a soldier setting out for battle, she floated into their living room as if she were invincible, as if she had just realized that nothing she feared could hurt her. She was not wearing a hat and her long, coppery locks fanned out around her like a skein of silk. This is my daughter, he thought. She went away for a while, but this is my daughter.
He offered her a glass of wine before dinner and she accepted. Judith set the dining room table with her best china and the Kiddush candles Kate had bought her as a birthday present. Everything was prepared and set out for the seder: parsley and salt water, hard-boiled eggs, horseradish, haroset, a box of matzo. Kate supplied the Haggadahs. The Hebrew print was large and each line was followed by transliteration. There were lots of pictures. Richard could tell she was doing her best to keep things brief: skipping blessings, rushing readings, but even in its watered-down version, the sounds and smells and tastes of the seder: dipping his pinky in the salt-water tears of Egyptians and touching it to his tongue, saying the blessings over the wine, the bread, hearing his daughter’s sweet voice sing the words his mother had sung – ma nish ta na halila hazeh me chol ha leh lot, why is this night different from all others? – released a flood of tender memories from within him.
It was the first time Kate had tried to teach them something when she didn’t seem to mind the dumbing down; on the contrary, she couldn’t stop smiling. After the last blessing, they ate greedily and polished off two bottles of wine. Kate announced her engagement to the man she had been dating for a little over a month, and both she and Judith started crying. Judith skipped to her bedroom to call her sister while Kate joined him for a cup of coffee on the screened-in porch.
“That’s wonderful news,” he said. And it was. But for some reason, maybe the wine, his heart felt hard and hollow.
“I’m glad you’re happy. I was worried you wouldn’t approve of me marrying a rabbi.”
“A rabbi?”
“Yes, a rabbi, father. A wonderful rabbi.”
“Wonderful.” He took a sip of his coffee. “That’s funny, for some reason I thought rabbis weren’t allowed to marry.”
“He’s not a priest and you did not think that.”
“I’m happy for you. I really am.”
“Then why do you have this look on your face like you just stubbed your toe?”
“I’ll be honest with you. I’m a little concerned. A month isn’t very long. Not long at all. Living the life of a rabbi’s wife might not be what you expect. It may be difficult, finding common ground.”
“We do have common ground. More common ground than you can imagine.”
“Sure. Why not?” He let out a long breath and lifted his cup to her. “Mazel tov.” A rabbi, he thought. A rabbi’s wife. So it was decided. She would spend her life behind long skirts and black wigs. She was lost to him.
She spoke without looking at him, and the words sounded weighted, as if they had been accumulating inside her clamped mouth. “I suppose you would prefer I marry a philanderer or a self-hating Jew who spent his whole life pretending he was someone other than himself, drowning in shame.”
He laughed softly.
“You think this is funny?”
‘‘I think it’s funny when people talk about things they know nothing about.”
“I know enough.”
“You know nothing,” he said. And he wanted to say more. Who was she to pontificate, she who had been given a clean slate on which to build her life and had fallen in love with the summer camp version of Judaism that had as much to do with true belief as those Chicken Soup for the Soul books his patients bought him for Christmas? If she wanted to know about shame, she should ask him about his father, the most shame-wracked Jew he had ever known. His whole adult life spent struggling to prove his faith was refined enough for the fifth-generation, Reformed, High-Holiday Jews of his wife’s family. The shame he must have felt every time she said he was the only Jewish man she had ever known who was content to spend the rest of his life working for his father-in-law. Or when his mother used one of Magda’s pans left in the sink. I can’t stand it, Samuel. I cooked a piece of chicken in her pan by mistake and she went outside and buried it in the yard. In the yard, Samuel, where all the neighbors could see. If I have to live with these superstitious, Ghetto Jews for one more day I’m going to scream. If Kate thought he was ashamed of his religious roots, she hadn’t seen much of the world.
He would have liked to tell her all this, but the very thought of revealing such personal sentiments made him blush.
He stood up from his chair and walked to the sliding glass door. “Have a happy wedding,” he said. “I’ll send you a check.”

He stepped out of his office one afternoon and found Laurel sitting in his waiting room. He asked his secretary to check a file for him, then pulled Laurel into his office.
“I want to make love to you in another country. I want us to pretend for just one weekend that we’re the only two people in the world,” she said. “I want us to go to Canada.”
“Canada?”
“No, the most romantic city in Canada. Plus, they have whales. I’ve always wanted to go whale watching.” She handed him a brochure with a picture of an elderly couple at the stern of a ferry, smiling, arm-in-arm, the woman pointing gleefully toward an unseen horizon. Judith found it on the floor of his car a few weeks later and held it to his face while he was reading on the sofa.
“Another dental convention with your new friend?”
He took it from her, crumpled it, and tossed it in the trashcan beside the bookcase. “The last one.”
She packed her bags that night and did not return from her sister’s house in Massachusetts until winter. He rarely spoke about those months of Judith’s absence, but he thought about them often. Kate was sixteen at the time, and for some reason he always assumed that had she been a year older or younger, she would have gone with her mother. But she didn’t. She stayed.
Every morning they’d have coffee together and discuss the events of the coming day. When he arrived home from work, she’d be cooking dinner and straightening the house. He’d change out of his work clothes, pour himself a beer, and ask her how things were going at school.
“It sucks. I hate everyone there. Today was flag day and all the rednecks flew confederate flags on the back of their pick-up trucks.”
“To each his own.”
“Easy for you to say.”
But the idea of fleeing from them to her Jewish peers across town had not yet entered her mind. On the weekends, they’d go for long walks around the lake, take drives through the country, dine at fancy restaurants downtown, attend performances at the Carpenter Center, rent movies and watch them with big, buttery bowls of popcorn on their laps. She was all his and he was all hers. Judith called her every night at eight o’clock and they’d talk until nine, but except for that one daily disturbance, their lives seemed sealed off from the rest of the world. He was certain of only two things: these months would be the happiest of his life and these months would inevitably come to an end, one way or another. And he was right. He awoke one morning, and there was Judith, reading the Sunday paper at the kitchen table. He sat down beside her. “Are you going or staying?” he asked.
“Staying for now.” And that was the last they spoke of it. He assumed she was intending to leave after Kate went away to college, but the day came and went and she remained. There were no more fights, no more outbursts of jealousy, no more bouts of guilt, make-up vacations, I’m-sorry gifts. They had never gotten along better. And that was when it dawned on him: there was no reason for her to leave. She was already gone.
Kate sensed the change in her, of course, and did not waste any time in blaming her father. He watched her drift further and further away from him, gaining speed and momentum as the distance grew, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He loved his wife. He was sure of it. But as much as he loved her, he would have turned his back on her forever, torn her from every inch of his life, if he thought it would make any difference, if he thought it would bring his daughter back to him.

They pulled into the parking lot of the synagogue.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I don’t know how I forgot.”
She didn’t answer.
“It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, that a piece of cloth should be so important?”
“You could try.”
“Try what?”
“Try to be understanding. Try to accept that it means something to Kate. Try to have a little respect, or at least pretend to.” She got out of the car and slammed the door. Fine, he thought. He would pretend. He would wait until everyone had entered and then he would stand discreetly in the back and watch respectfully and no one but Kate would ever notice. He would do the same thing he had done as a child. He would follow along in his prayer book and pretend to understand what was being said. He would watch his family, rise when they rose, sit when they sat, and feel more alone than he did at any other time in his life. Or maybe not. Maybe he would sit alone in his car. He would miss it. It would be a horrible crying shame, but that would be that. Kate would never speak to him again and he could stop hoping for things to be different. He thought about his own father. That was a shame too.
The three a.m. phone call. The dry crack of his mother’s screaming into the phone. Driving across town at three a.m. in a haze of panic. The sheets drenched with sweat. His eyes cloudy, rolling upward. The coarse, grunting noises that punctuated his breathing, and his chest heaving. And then, just a minute or two before the ambulance arrived, the pink foam that poured from his mouth, his head snapping back, the little color remaining in his skin draining away, and he was still. Fifty-six.
They took him away and his mother insisted Richard stay until she returned. The ambulance lights grew dim in the distance, but he found himself paralyzed on the porch, unable to free himself from the weight of his thoughts. He thought of his father standing behind him in Saturday morning services, the weight of his prayer book resting on his head, the rush of Hebrew words that sounded like a riddle. On Passover, they’d read about the wicked child who asked his parents, “What does this day mean to you?” He never would have dreamed of asking his father such a question. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could still feel the book’s hard, cool cover pressing against the crown of his head. It was only like that, with those pages between them, that they ever touched. I will never know my father, he thought; the mystery of his silence and exactitude, the reasons for his resignation and distrust will be buried with him in death as deeply as he buried them in life. Richard wanted things to be different with Kate. He wanted her to see him. He didn’t want anything, especially traditions and rituals that had nothing to do with real life, to stand between them. But he couldn’t seem to get it right; his struggling further ensnared him.
He placed the kipah on his head and entered the synagogue. Judith came out of the lobby restroom with a doily-like flap of lace pinned to her hair. She was crying. “They say I have to sit upstairs with the women. I’ll be so far away from her.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’ll sit with me.” He took her by the hand.
“We can’t, Richard.” But he was already pulling her through the doors, past the ushers.
A stumpy old man, the kind of man who had harnessed his age into a weapon, stepped in front of them, blocking their way. “You can’t come in here, sir, without a tallis, and she can’t come in here at all.” His face was an angry maze of wrinkles.
“Who are you to tell us what to do? For your information, we are the bride’s parents and we have traveled from Richmond to be here.”
“Nonetheless, you can’t come in here like that. Rules are rules. I’m sorry.”
“I’m going upstairs,” Judith said. “You’ll enjoy it better without me beside you anyway.” She pulled her arm free and backed through the doors they had just entered.
He turned to the man. “I’ll just sit here in the back.”
“Not without a tallis. And if you don’t leave now, I’ll have to escort you to the parking lot.”
He tried to push by the man and the man pushed back. His arm tightened, tensed. He swung. It wasn’t much of a swing, not even strong enough to draw blood, but the man keeled over, holding his face in his hands. Someone screamed. There was the rustling of bodies rushing toward him, angry voices all around, and then they were taking him away, one man on each side of him gripping under his arm and dragging, so that the wedding could begin.
The parking lot, which had been swarming with latecomers only a few minutes earlier, was now empty. If he listened hard, he could hear the cantor’s muffled vibrato through the synagogue walls. He sat on the curb, a solitary eavesdropper, for half an hour, until he heard people coming toward the door; the thought of facing them, of facing anyone, was simply too much. He fled to his car and sat there in the dark where he could watch the commotion unmolested. A crowd of men in suits and dowdy women in respectable dresses burst forth from the building, and then cleared the way for Kate. Even from a distance, she was the most beautiful bride he had ever seen. How had such beauty come from him? The starkness of her figure seemed to reprimand all the ugliness around her: the ugly cars, the ugly gravel, the ugliness of bickering about directions to the reception; it reminded him of a bundle of funeral flowers carried onto a crowded subway. She was looking for something. She turned around and didn’t find it. The thought that she might be looking for him, that she might be willing to forgive all of his transgressions, pierced him and filled his chest with a familiar humiliation. He remembered the conclusion of their Passover argument.
“Don’t run away,” she had said as he was about to open the door. “Why do you always run away from me when I’m trying to talk to you?”
He turned around to face her. Judith had just switched off the inside light, and standing beside his daughter in the sudden darkness embarrassed him. “You’re doing it to hurt me, aren’t you? No, not to hurt me. To push me away.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’ll always love you. I’m afraid there’s not much you can do about that. But I need something from you in return. I want you to do something for me. You’re an adult now, a beautiful and thoughtful adult. And that means letting go of the past. I know I’ve made mistakes, but that’s all in the past, and part of becoming an adult is forgiving and forgetting. There’s no use dwelling on things past. None. Can’t you forgive me?”
“God can forgive you.”
“That’s not good enough. You’re the only one. You’re the only one who can do it.”
“Don’t cry, Daddy.” She lifted her hand to his face and wiped away tears he hadn’t known were there with a tenderness that pierced him.
“Don’t,” he said. “I don’t know who you are anymore. I don’t know you.”
So she found someone who did know her. He was beside her now and they were walking toward the limousine. Explain yourself, he thought, the way you should have explained yourself then. Paint her a picture of the suffering you want to save her from: thousands of years of dogma and persecution, Jews hung on hooks in the windows of Rumanian butcher shops. No, it’s smaller than that. Judith’s dead mother, her blue and bloated body dragged ashore, the look on his own father’s face as his heart stopped beating, as death ripped him away from an unloved and unexamined life. Save her from her heritage of fear and superstition. Apologize to her for everything, so that your words can be heard above the din of your transgressions. He saw himself struggling, struggling in vain with their certainty and righteous condemnation, lifting a torch of darkness to the light.

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Kim Brooks was awarded a Michener-Copernicus fellowship upon graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “How Is This Night Different from Any Other?” is her first published work of fiction in a national literary magazine.