They’re in our house maybe ten minutes and already Mark’s lecturing us on the Israeli occupation. Mark and Lauren live in Jerusalem, and people from there think it gives them the right.
Mark is looking all stoic and nodding his head. “If we had what you have down here in South Florida,” he says, and trails off. “Yup,” he says, and he’s nodding again. “We’d have no troubles at all.”
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“You do have what we have,” I tell him. “All of it. Sun and palm trees. Old Jews and oranges and the worst drivers around. At this point, we’ve probably got more Israelis than you.” Debbie, my wife, puts a hand on my arm—her signal that I’m either taking a tone, interrupting someone’s story, sharing something private, or making an inappropriate joke. That’s my cue, and I’m surprised, considering how often I get it, that she ever lets go of my arm.
“Yes, you’ve got everything now,” Mark says. “Even terrorists.”
I look at Lauren. She’s the one my wife has the relationship with—the one who should take charge. But Lauren isn’t going to give her husband any signal. She and Mark ran off to Israel twenty years ago and turned Hasidic, and neither of them will put a hand on the other in public. Not for this. Not to put out a fire.
“Wasn’t Mohamed Atta living right here before 9/11?” Mark says, and now he pantomimes pointing out houses. “Goldberg, Goldberg, Goldberg—Atta. How’d you miss him in this place?”
“Other side of town,” I say.
“That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what you have that we don’t. Other sides of town. Wrong sides of the tracks. Space upon space.” And now he’s fingering the granite countertop in our kitchen, looking out into the living room and the dining room, staring through the kitchen windows at the pool. “All this house,” he says, “and one son? Can you imagine?”
“No,” Lauren says. And then she turns to us, backing him up. “You should see how we live with ten.”
“Ten kids,” I say. “We could get you a reality show with that here in the States. Help you get a bigger place.”
The hand is back pulling at my sleeve. “Pictures,” Debbie says. “I want to see the girls.” We all follow Lauren into the den for her purse.
“Do you believe it?” Mark says. “Ten girls!” And the way it comes out of his mouth, it’s the first time I like the guy. The first time I think about giving him a chance.
Facebook and Skype brought Deb and Lauren back together. They were glued at the hip growing up. Went all the way through school together. Yeshiva school. All girls. Out in Queens till high school and then riding the subway together to one called Central in Manhattan. They stayed best friends until I married Deb and turned her secular, and soon after that Lauren met Mark and they went off to the Holy Land and shifted from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox, which to me sounds like a repackaged detergent—ORTHODOX ULTRA®, now with more deep-healing power. Because of that, we’re supposed to call them Shoshana and Yerucham now. Deb’s been doing it. I’m just not saying their names.
“You want some water?” I offer. “Coke in the can?”
“ ‘You’—which of us?” Mark says.
“You both,” I say. “Or I’ve got whiskey. Whiskey’s kosher, too, right?”
“If it’s not, I’ll kosher it up real fast,” he says, pretending to be easygoing. And right then he takes off that big black hat and plops down on the couch in the den.
Lauren’s holding the verticals aside and looking out at the yard. “Two girls from Forest Hills,” she says. “Who ever thought we’d be the mothers of grownups?”
“Trevor’s sixteen,” Deb says. “You may think he’s a grownup, and he may think he’s a grownup—but we are not convinced.”
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Right then is when Trev comes padding into the den, all six feet of him, plaid pajama bottoms dragging on the floor and T-shirt full of holes. He’s just woken up, and you can tell he’s not sure if he’s still dreaming. We told him we had guests. But there’s Trev, staring at this man in the black suit, a beard resting on his belly. And Lauren, I met her once before, right when Deb and I got married, but ten girls and a thousand Shabbos dinners later—well, she’s a big woman, in a bad dress and a giant blond Marilyn Monroe wig. Seeing them at the door, I can’t say I wasn’t shocked myself.
“Hey,” he says.
And then Deb’s on him, preening and fixing his hair and hugging him. “Trevy, this is my best friend from childhood,” she says. “This is Shoshana, and this is—”
“Mark,” I say.
“Yerucham,” Mark says, and sticks out a hand. Trev shakes it. Then Trev sticks out his hand, polite, to Lauren. She looks at it, just hanging there in the air.
“I don’t shake,” she says. “But I’m so happy to see you. Like meeting my own son. I mean it.” And here she starts to cry, and then she and Deb are hugging. And the boys, we just stand there until Mark looks at his watch and gets himself a good manly grip on Trev’s shoulder.
“Sleeping until three on a Sunday? Man, those were the days,” Mark says. “A regular little Rumpleforeskin.” Trev looks at me, and I want to shrug, but Mark’s also looking, so I don’t move. Trev just gives us both his best teen-age glare and edges out of the room. As he does, he says, “Baseball practice,” and takes my car keys off the hook by the door to the garage.
“There’s gas,” I say.
“They let them drive here at sixteen?” Mark says. “Insane.”
“So what brings you here after all these years?” I say.
“My mother,” Mark says. “She’s failing, and my father’s getting old—and they come to us for Sukkot every year. You know?”
“I know the holidays.”
“They used to fly out to us. For Sukkot and Pesach, both. But they can’t fly now, and I just wanted to get over while things are still good. We haven’t been in America—”
“Oh, gosh,” Lauren says. “I’m afraid to think how long it’s been. More than ten years. Twelve,” she says. “With the kids, it’s just impossible until enough of them are big.”
“How do you do it?” Deb says. “Ten kids? I really do want to hear.”
That’s when I remember. “I forgot your drink,” I say to Mark.
“Yes, his drink. That’s how,” Lauren says. “That’s how we cope.”
And that’s how the four of us end up back at the kitchen table with a bottle of vodka between us. I’m not one to get drunk on a Sunday afternoon, but, I tell you, when the plan is to spend the day with Mark I jump at the chance. Deb’s drinking, too, but not for the same reason. I think she and Lauren are reliving a little bit of the wild times. The very small window when they were together, barely grown up, two young women living in New York on the edge of two worlds.
Deb says, “This is really racy for us. I mean, really racy. We try not to drink much at all these days. We think it sets a bad example for Trevor. It’s not good to drink in front of them right at this age when they’re all transgressive. He’s suddenly so interested in that kind of thing.”
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“I’m just happy when he’s interested in something,” I say.
Deb slaps at the air. “I just don’t think it’s good to make drinking look like it’s fun with a teen-ager around.”
Lauren smiles and straightens her wig. “Does anything we do look fun to our kids?”
I laugh at that. Honestly, I’m liking her more and more.
“It’s the age limit that does it,” Mark says. “It’s the whole American puritanical thing, the twenty-one-year-old drinking age and all that. We don’t make a big deal about it in Israel, and so the kids, they don’t even notice alcohol. Except for the foreign workers on Fridays, you hardly see anyone drunk at all.”
“The workers and the Russians,” Lauren says.
“The Russian immigrants,” he says, “that’s a whole separate matter. Most of them, you know, not even Jews.”
“What does that mean?” I say.
“It means matrilineal descent, is what it means,” Mark says. “With the Ethiopians there were conversions.”
But Deb wants to keep us away from politics, and the way we’re arranged, me in between them and Deb opposite (it’s a round table, our kitchen table), she practically has to throw herself across to grab hold of my arm. “Fix me another,” she says.
And here she switches the subject to Mark’s parents. “How’s the visit been going?” she says, her face all sombre. “How are your folks holding up?”
Deb is very interested in Mark’s parents. They’re Holocaust survivors. And Deb has what can only be called an unhealthy obsession with the idea of that generation being gone. Don’t get me wrong. It’s important to me, too. All I’m saying is there’s healthy and unhealthy, and my wife, she gives the subject a lot of time.
“What can I say?” Mark says. “My mother’s a very sick woman. And my father, he tries to keep his spirits up. He’s a tough guy.”
“I’m sure,” I say. Then I look down at my drink, all serious, and give a shake of my head. “They really are amazing.”
“Who?” Mark says. “Fathers?”
I look back up and they’re all staring at me. “Survivors,” I say, realizing I jumped the gun.
“There’s good and bad,” Mark says. “Like anyone else.”
Lauren says, “The whole of Carmel Lake Village, it’s like a D.P. camp with a billiards room.”
“One tells the other, and they follow,” Mark says. “From Europe to New York, and now, for the end of their lives, again the same place.”
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