Fleur
“OW!”
“What is it, Fleuricita?” Ignacio shot me a solicitous glance from the striking array of Abraham Darbies he was tending.
“Thorn.” I licked my thumb, then eyeballed it in dismay. “I think I managed to push it in pretty far.”
Tossing down his shears so he could remove his mud-caked glove, he crossed the lawn toward the Claire Austin I’d been pruning, murmuring, “Pobrecita. Let me see.”
I let him have his way with my hand. While he turned it this way and that, I gave Claire Austin’s last few delicate white blooms a forgiving smile. Only under the gathering cloud of climate change would we be enduring such an unbelievable heat wave the day before Christmas. The previous summer had stayed June gloomish through October, and now the city was threatening rolling blackouts thanks to a million air conditioners whistling away at full speed.
Ignacio sighed in exasperation. “You should have worn the gloves.”
Embarrassed, I looked down at Mother’s perfectly manicured rye lawn, where I’d discarded the floral gardening gloves he’d brought out for me. They’d landed with fingertips pointing toward each other, as if in prayer. “I know, I know. Assefa tells me all the time how stubborn I am. But I like to actually feel what I’m touching. With the gloves on, I feel like I have too little control.”
I, of all people, should have known that there are things over which we have no control. Rose thorns were probably somewhere near the top of the list. Affairs of the heart had to be pretty high up there, too. I’d tried telling myself that Assefa could no more forget the girl he’d grown up with in his first incarnation than I could my grandfather or Nana. Like the rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat, our earliest connections are root systems that nourish and define us.
“Stay here,” Ignacio ordered. “I’ve got some tweezers in the truck.” Before I could stop him, he bounded down the driveway. I hated to think I was interrupting his work. He was probably dying to get home to the Christmas curry Dhani was preparing and a nice, cold bottle of Negra Modelo. Really, I didn’t know what was wrong with Mother. Why was he working at all today?
I wandered toward the pool, looking for bees. Sure enough, one was flailing near the spillover from the Jacuzzi. I ran to fetch the turquoise pool net to scoop it out, gratified that it was still moving its antennae and not wearing that water-logged, give-up-the-ghost look. Poor bees. So many of them dove in, thinking they could get a little sip until a surge of water from the Jacuzzi got the best of them. I’d been on a mission to save everyone I could once I’d learned the devastation that neoconid insecticides were wreaking on their worldwide numbers. And I’d been thrilled the previous spring to see a swarm of them moving over the pool like a solid, buzzing organism to establish a new colony because the original one had gotten too crowded. I took it as a good sign.
I waited till this one flew away, inspected the pool one more time, and saved a yellow jacket, who thanked me by aiming straight for my nose. “Get away from me,” I shouted, ducking and darting just as Ignacio reappeared.
“What now, Fleuricita?”
“Oh, don’t bother about me,” I laughed, relieved that the wasp had lost interest. “I’m just your local backyard basket case. First thorns, now wasps.”
He shot me a look. “Sting you?”
“Not this time. Probably thought I’d be bland meat.”
Chuckling, he motioned me to hold out my hand.
He took such care, sweet man. As big as a bear—especially with the gut he’d put on since marrying Dhani—with hands the size of baseball gloves and just as leathery. But his touch was as deft as a surgeon’s as he coaxed away several layers of pale skin to extract the narrow brown sliver. Once he’d gotten it out, I marveled that something so small could cause so much pain.
Ignacio fished a little packet of rubbing alcohol from his pocket. I asked him about it.
“Best thing I’ve found for cleaning my tools. It does a great job on mold.”
“You’re an angel,” I declared. And I meant it. Guardian spirits had graced my life ever since I’d been born: Grandfather, Nana, Cook, Fayga, Sister Flatulencia, Ignacio, Dhani, Adam, Stanley and Gwennie Fiske. How ironic that I’d been moved at the age of twelve to the angels’ very own city.
If a nut-brown man could blush, he would have. “What’re you up to the rest of the day, muchacha?”
“Actually, I’m going to temple with Sammie and Jacob.”
“In that?”
I laughed. I was wearing Mother’s baggy, faded garden trousers and an old paint-spattered tank top.
“No,” I said, giving his chest a playful shove. “I’ve got my nice clothes waiting for me upstairs. Wouldn’t dream of shaming Sammie in front of her new rabbi. Even if Sam’s really a Hindu-Jewdist-Sikh in sheep’s clothing.”
Ignacio, a lapsed Catholic from San Luis Potosi who’d married a woman born in Delhi, snorted and fell back a step or two, pretending I’d actually managed to shove him off balance. His dark eyes danced. Beer belly or not, he was still a handsome man in a careworn, Benicio del Toro sort of way. I was so grateful that, over the years, Angelina had increasingly grown to resemble him. While I wouldn’t have minded being related to her, I couldn’t bear having had that kinship purchased by a liaison between Dhani and my father.
When I was younger, I could never understand why Dhani had carried on with Father and Ignacio at the same time. I knew now how love could get the best of you and was just beginning to comprehend how lust could, too. It was just about impossible to think of my father as sexy, but he’d knocked up more than a few women in his day. I guessed the holier-than-thou veneer was attractive to some.
Ignacio was still grinning cheekily at me. “Wise guy,” I said. “As for dress codes, I don’t know how you manage to stay so neat when you’ve been working twice as hard as I have.” It was true, his garden greens—shirt tucked tidily into his pants—were pressed to perfection, presumably by Dhani, and the only signs of our faux summer were two half-moons of perspiration under his arms.
I was sweating like a pig myself by the time Sammie and Jacob arrived an hour later. Sammie raced up Mother’s walkway to throw me such an enthusiastic hug, you wouldn’t have suspected we’d seen each other the day before. She kissed each cheek, clinging onto me so fiercely I wondered if she and Jacob had been having another row. As we disentangled, she gave me an appreciative once over and whistled. “Love the dress. BCBG? Why couldn’t I have gotten breasts like those?”
I snickered. “Because they’re a matched set with a big butt. Don’t be so ungrateful. You’ve got the perfect gym ass without ever having set foot in a gym.” Leading the way down Mother’s Saltillo tiled steps, I said, “I can’t believe we’re going to synagogue on Christmas Eve.”
“Why not?” she retorted. “Mary was the archetypal Jewish mother, and Jesus her nice, Jewish boy.” Then she squeaked, “Wait,” pointing to my shoulder. I looked over it, but she said, “No, no,” turning me toward her and pressing a finger against my right shoulder blade. I could smell coffee on her breath.
I was getting the heebie-jeebs. “What are you doing?”
A horn honked.
“That’ll be Jacob,” she muttered, then, “Gotcha.” She joined my side and held out her index finger. “Look who was taking a ride on your T-shirt.”
It was a ladybug. Or as she put it, “ladybird.”
I grinned. “Back garden?” She nodded. We ran back onto the porch and followed it around toward the back stairs, rolling our eyes at each other when Jacob impatiently honked a second time.
I led her toward the lavender bushes. Mother had planted three species of them—French, English, and Goodwin Creek Gray—to alternate with low trailing rosemary bushes behind the navy blue lounge chairs surrounding the pool. It was always a treat to brush a sun-baked hand against any one of them and release a hint of olfactory bliss. Sammie carefully tipped her finger toward a furry French lavender flower, and the ladybug toddled obediently off her finger. It choo-chooed assiduously over the top of the flower and down the other side.
We simultaneously sighed, and I imagined a congratulatory hoot from the fake owl standing guard on the garage roof, but our reverie was interrupted instead by a very long blast from Jacob’s horn.
I gave a little jump, and Sammie swore. “For fuck’s sake!” But by the time we reached Jacob’s gray Prius, she was all contrition. She flung open the passenger door and poked her head inside, oozing the rest of her body towards Jacob in a serpentine slither that allowed her to plant a kiss on his frowning forehead. I heard her say, “I’m sorry, sweetie. Fleur had a ladybird on her back, and we could hardly take it out of its environment all the way to temple. It would’ve felt completely lost.”
Which was exactly how I felt when we entered Temple Isaiah on Pico Boulevard. I’d never before entered a Jewish house of worship, but I had prepared for today by pestering Jacob about this particular one. He’d told me that its senior rabbi was a woman and that she was also a novelist and poet. He said that the membership were advocates of tikkun olam, a Hebrew idea that roughly translated as “repair of the world,” rooted in the Kabbalistic teachings of Isaac Luria.
I’d already heard of Luria, thanks to the catholic-with-a-small-c tutoring I’d received from Adam, who’d been determined to balance the punitive theological views of my Catholic-with-a-capital-C father with the myriad ways we humans have imagined the divine, from Zeus (Friend of Strangers and Thunder God) to the dreaming mantis god of the Bushmen of the Kalahari to piquant Ungud (aboriginal God of both rainbows and erections). I remember feeling a little stunned to learn that the Jesus whom my father all but claimed as his personal friend was not the only God in the deck. But when Adam pulled out the Luria card—with its science-smelling God contracting His light to make room for the creation of the world, storing excess God-light in containers, some of which broke and became shards of dark matter that threatened us all—I felt myself edging toward a particularly steep precipice. Seeing I was on the verge of a serious bang and pinch fest, Adam had hastened to explain Luria’s notion that the repair of our wounded world could be achieved by each of us doing good works.
Always one to expand my knowledge, I set out to do some research on tikkun olam. I discovered that Luria thought that God Himself had been fractured into shards in making our world and that it was our job to heal Him. When I’d shared my mental meanderings on the topic with Stanley, he’d given a casual shrug, commenting, “Sounds like Jung and the gnostics,” as if he were tossing out the name of a rock band. Stanley’s lack of perturbation over the image of a broken God was one more clue that other people’s black pits weren’t nearly as bottomless as mine.
Maybe that was why the concept of multiple gods and goddesses grew on me. If two heads are better than one, then what might a thousand godheads accomplish? Then again, what if all those deities were broken, too? What would it take to repair them? And what did it portend for us? I pictured all the diverse worshippings going on in our world as a kind of mockingbird symphony, urging the broken gods not to forsake the wounded creatures of this world. Mockingbirds had always been my favorites, their glorious, layered mimicry guaranteed to vanquish the most dismal of voids.
I could use one of them right now. I felt like the founding member of the Odd Duck Society sitting in the Temple Isaiah sanctuary next to Rabbi Goldenrod, who’d led us there because some repair work was being done in her office. My little joke to her about God not being the only one needing repairing had gone over like a lead balloon, and being invited to sit here with her, Sammie, and Jacob in a row facing a massive, modernistic altar didn’t exactly feel conducive to easy conversation.
But trust Sammie to sense what was required. My endless descriptions of Nana’s Mack truck grip hadn’t been for nothing. Sam had motioned Jacob to sidestep his way into the curved upholstered bench first, then the rabbi, then me. She’d plunked herself down close enough to my other side that we might as well have been conjoined twins.
Sammie revved up the motor with, “So, Rabbi Goldenrod, what can you tell us about the Ark of the Covenant? I know Jacob’s already filled you in about how Fleur’s fiancé’s father has gone missing somewhere in Ethiopia. Since he’s there researching the folklore surrounding the Ark, we thought you might have some sort of clue as to where he might be.”
Rabbi Goldenrod ran an impatient hand through her abundant, tight blond ringlets. She’d seemed distracted from the moment we were introduced, and I felt guilty for taking up her time. But she shot me such a sympathetic look right then that I felt my muscles relax. I understood why Sammie had formed such an affection for Jacob’s mentor.
“You’re very kind to meet with us, Rabbi Goldenrod,” I chimed in.
“Please,” said the rabbi, shaking her head. “Call me Miriam. I’m more than happy to meet with you, but, as I told Jacob, I’m not sure I can help. I’ve certainly read that the Ethiopians claim to be housing the Ark in their church in Aksum, but—”
“Aksum, yes!” I blurted out. “That’s where Achamyalesh and his friend Zalelew were supposed to be going. It’s fascinating, really—they say the Ark’s guarded by a single priest who’s given the job from age seven until death. Sort of like the Dalai Lama.” Sammie shot me a look. “Well,” I conceded, “not exactly. But you know what I mean.”
Rabbi Goldenrod responded with a polite, “Mmm.” Choosing her words with care, she continued, “I don’t mean to disappoint you, but to be honest the whole idea of the Ark being housed at Aksum sounds far-fetched to me. The only possible biblical connection is that some interpretations of the Song of Solomon equate the Queen of Sheba with an Ethiopian queen.” Her expression bespoke her lack of enthusiasm for the notion. “I don’t know if you realize how many people say they have the Ark. These claims come from all over the world—England, Ireland, France. Some Mormons actually think it’s buried in Utah.” Did I detect a flicker of a sly grin? “The latest claimant is an archaeologist who’s said he’s found a section of bedrock on the Temple Mount in the exact dimensions of the Ark as described in Exodus, but he can’t verify it because neither the Israeli nor Muslim authorities will allow the site to be excavated. Personally, I’m satisfied that the Ark is no longer on this earth, which is what’s suggested in both the Second Book of the Maccabees and the Book of Revelation. The truth is, it’s a mystery. It’s more valuable as a symbol than a concrete physical object. Which is as it should be, don’t you think?”
The truth was, I didn’t know what to think. Organized religions were as liable as governments to be rather literal about what they valued. Why else the endless war over that portion of the world dubbed the Holy Land? But it would have been rude to pose the question now, particularly since the rabbi was obviously taking time she didn’t have to speak with me.
My discomfort only increased when she added, “I have a confession to make. I’m a big fan of yours. I’ve been a very amateur student of physics most of my adult life, so I couldn’t resist a chance to meet you.” She gave a little self-deprecating laugh. “Actually, I’m pretty lousy at understanding most of it, but I can’t seem to leave it alone. Quantum physics really does seem to speak the language of the ineffable.”
I slipped that one into a corner of my mind to consider later. I was an expert on what a terrific void killer physics could be, but I’d never considered that others might find in it a bridge to the gods. Right then, I knew only that I felt unaccountably grateful to Rabbi Goldenrod—though there was no way I was going to call her Miriam.
The rabbi paused a moment to stare up at the abstract planes on the polished wood ceiling. This modernistic sanctuary was hardly what I’d expect for worshippers of a 4,000-year-old god. It was certainly a far cry from my old stomping grounds at Saint Monica’s, where I attended services with Mother and Father until Eric Tanner, nearly a year older than my four years and thirty-three days, unhinged me with a particularly graphic imitation of Christ’s agony on the cross. Much to Father’s tight-lipped displeasure, my whirling and screaming got me banned forever from Sunday school class and from St. Monica’s itself. From that day forward, it was Sister Flatulencia who took responsibility for my catechism, delivering her own version of God’s truths along with little dolings-out of extraordinarily pungent gas, which were accompanied by no end of penitential “Forgive mes,” as if I were her pint-sized confessor. But I still remembered the church where I’d been baptized and its confusing references to a God fragmented into three pieces: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. (Though it occurred to me now that the trinity might be a second or third cousin to Luria’s broken God, with the Christian God redeeming us, rather than the other way around.)
Anyway, I could tell you with dead certainty exactly where Saint Monica’s nativity crèche would be displayed today, nestled on a layering of straw atop a quilted, if slightly wrinkled, gold tablecloth beneath a stained glass window depicting Christ standing beneath a distinctly feminine-faced, fiery-plumed sun.
I glanced over at Miriam Goldenrod, her spiral curls a bright cloud around her face. She nodded, seeming to make up her mind about something. She gave me a little wink. “But, listen. As a rabbi, what I do know is stories, and we never know where a story can lead us. Shall I tell you a few of my favorite ones about the Ark?”
All three of us eagerly assented. I noticed that Jacob had been unusually quiet the whole time. Was he intimidated by his livewire of a mentor?
The rabbi broke into my reverie. “Fleur, have you ever read the Bible?”
I made a face. My earliest memories involved sitting on my pastel yellow potty seat in the prettiest bathroom of our family’s wing of Father’s house, reading Vogue and Elle magazines, but mostly Sister Flatulencia’s Holy Bible.
Drawing entirely the wrong conclusion, Rabbi Miriam put a hand on my knee and soothed, “Don’t worry. We Jews aren’t big on conversion. I just wanted to know if we shared a frame of reference. Basically, the Ark is said to contain what we call in Hebrew Luchot HaBrit, the Tablets of the Covenant that were inscribed on two pieces of stone when Moses ascended Mount Sinai. We learn this from the Book of Exodus, which refers to the Tablets of Testimony that give insight into the nature of God. It’s said that the Tablets were made of blue sapphire, a reminder of God’s throne in the heavenly sky. The first set were said to have been inscribed by God Himself—or Herself, as I sometimes like to say.” She waited for an objection, but in our little group, none was forthcoming. “But they were smashed by Moses in a rage over his people worshipping the Golden Calf. Moses inscribed the second at God’s instruction as atonement. Both the shattered and the unbroken set are said to be contained in the Ark.” More shattering? Was everything sacred doomed to be broken? “But never mind. It’s better to begin at the beginning, anyway. As a storyteller, I should know that.”
She tugged her sweater over her thin shoulders, pulled a stray corn-colored curl out of her eye, and began, “The stories about the Ark are abundant. And they always involve a kind of charged energy. Our neighbors up the street at the Jung Institute”—she shot a little smile at Sammie—“like to call such energy ‘numinous.’ I call it ‘holy.’”
“There is a saying that Palestine is the center of the world, with Jerusalem the center of Palestine, the Temple the center of Jerusalem, the Tabernacle—or Holy of Holies—the center of the Temple, and the Ark the center of the Holy of Holies. In front of the Ark itself was a stone called the foundation stone of the world.”
Her mention of Holies brought an entirely different image to mind: Dhani throwing Easter egg dye at me as I whirled and twirled in our own impromptu enactment of the Hindu holiday Holi, which was rudely interrupted by Father coming out of the house to chew on Dhani’s lips and trace his rubbery hand over her bulging belly, terrifying me by teasing her that he wanted to eat her baby.
Except he’d called it “our baby.”
I reminded myself that he’d been wrong about that one, as he’d been wrong about so much else. I felt a little guilty recalling what a creep Father had been, especially since we were here to learn more about the container of the tablet that enjoined the whole world to honor its mothers and fathers. But there was no way around it. Outside of the few months following Father’s loss of his mind and before he’d regained it—seeming for a time to like nothing better than to play horsies with me in his living room and make silly jokes about Sister Flatulencia’s farts—he hadn’t behaved particularly honorably. It wasn’t just the shady transactions between him and baby clothes’ wholesaler Leland Du Ray when he was senator (causing him, ultimately, to be ousted from office), nor the hypocrisy of him hating having children underfoot when he was always parading before the press all the unwanted babies he’d saved, nor his pincer grips and disownings when he didn’t like what I was doing. No, what sealed the dishonorable deal was Father’s using my declining grandfather’s name in such a humiliating way in his “pro-life” speeches. Not to mention his attacks on C-Voids and P.D. as the products of what he liked to call his daughter’s “twisted, autistic mind.”
Sammie gave me a barely perceptible jab with her elbow, and I pulled my mind away from what I’d already known could be a particularly circular set of ruminations. Hatred is like that—a hostage-taker of perfectly good mental energy.
I could see that Rabbi Goldenrod was warming to her story. Her almost Asian-cast, dark brown eyes were luminous, and two daubs of pink had sprung up on her pale cheeks. She gestured toward the head of the room, with its broad blue and green pillars like giant candles on either side of the altar. “Actually, it’s a little synchronistic that we ended up in this Sanctuary, since the Ark was used as a kind of moveable sanctuary that miraculously provided safety to our people, particularly during the Exodus, when it was carried into the bed of the River Jordan and opened the path to freedom.”
I was used to religious lectures. In Father’s house, they were a daily event. But Rabbi Goldenrod’s obvious enthusiasm for her topic was coupled with an endearing humility. She gave me a little smile, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking, and put a hand to her heart. “Forgive me. I do get carried away. But when I think about what it takes to win freedom—in any time, for any people—when the powers-that-be are dead set on holding what they’ve got, the image of the Ark as a container of hope and action for the human spirit just takes my breath away.”
I found myself holding my own breath, too, realizing I was sitting next to a truly religious person. Everyone I’d ever met who’d announced themselves as believers had seemed a little off-kilter, all too happy to dismiss those who thought differently as either clueless or evil. I didn’t count Sister Flatulencia, who’d become disaffected from the Roman Catholic Church after her nervous breakdown, or Aadita, who’d reminded me more than once that Buddhism wasn’t a religion in the common sense of the word.
Rabbi Goldenrod was a believer. Yet somehow, when she expressed the tenets of her faith, I didn’t feel like some worm, liable to spoil the perfect roundness of her apple.
Confirming my suspicion that she was psychic, she remarked, “I like to let my mind flow over the images like a meditation. Wherever your thoughts take you is where God wants you to go.” Maybe Rabbi Goldenrod was secretly a Jewdist, like Sammie. “Most people think of the Ark as a container for Mosaic Law—the basis of all law, you know, in the western world. But the Ark was also said to contain Aaron’s rod.”
Sammie and I exchanged a glance, and I had to work to stifle an incipient snort. We’d discovered Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover when she was twelve and I thirteen and, while Lawrence’s quaint reference to Mellors’ and Connie’s genitals as John Thomas and Lady Jane made us giggle at the time, I think we shared a similar hunger for an eroticism sweeter and more personal than our era’s Internet porn and sexting. I’d ended up using my own inner images of the wedding of John Thomas and Lady Jane to set off innumerable mini-explosions in my tweeter, so I wasn’t too surprised when Sammie excitedly brought over a copy of Aaron’s Rod a few weeks later on the assumption that the title referred to a plethora of phallic scenes. Disappointed, we were forced to make up our own, ones that were informed by images from Internet porn, but the thrill was never the same as when Connie fashioned a garland of flowers for Mellors’ bulging member.
This time, I was the one to jab Sammie with an elbow before turning back to listen to the rabbi.
“Aaron’s rod is an example of the power of the Large Force, which is how I personally think of God. In the story of the exodus of my people from the oppression they endured in Egypt, God instructed Aaron and Moses to use their magical rods to persuade the pharaoh to free them. The pharaoh was so set on holding onto his own power that he didn’t even budge after Aaron’s rod made snakes of his guards, then became an even larger snake that swallowed all those smaller ones. So, what does God do? He visits ten plagues upon Egypt. Not so nice, but there it is. Ten of them, each worse than the one before.” She started ticking them off on her fingers: “Blood, frogs, flies, livestock death, boils, hail, locusts, darkness .... Wait, that should be nine. What have I forgotten?”
We sat for a moment. I sensed some shifting movement down the row and saw Jacob open his mouth and then close it.
The colored pillars at the head of the sanctuary reminded me of the blue and green striped shirt I’d bought for Assefa before he’d left for Addis Ababa. He’d objected to me spending unnecessary money on him when he could hardly return the favor on his meager intern fellowship, but I didn’t care. I would have been happy to dress him in a brand new wardrobe every day.
My reverie was broken by a sudden exclamation by Rabbi Goldenrod. “Lice! Of course I’d forget lice. Between you and me, we had a lousy bout of it this past season in the nursery school. It’s been making the rounds on the Westside for over a year, and we thought we’d escaped it, but it got us in the end. All of us, including the adults. Frankly, it is a bit of a plague. Have you ever had to comb a head of frizzy hair like mine with a nit comb?”
Within seconds, I was back in Father’s house in Main Line. After shampooing my hair in the worst-smelling soap known to mankind, Nana had sat me down between her voluminous thighs at the edge of my bed, where she jerked a comb again and again through my tangled hair, whistling the opening tune to I Dream of Jeannie and snatching my hand away from my belly every time it tried to sidle down for a pinch or two. I’d tried concentrating on my Laura Ashley wallpaper, with its floral pompoms in soothing tones of duck egg and cream. I kept attempting to count the number of flowers on the wall, but each time Nana gave a particularly hard yank, I’d lose track and have to start all over again. Being a sort of aficionado of pain, it wasn’t the pulling that made me want to pinch, but the noxious smell the shampoo left in my nostrils. It was worse than Jillily’s sickly-sweet diarrhea poops, worse than Sister Flatulencia’s silent but deadlies, worse than anything I could remember to this day, save perhaps the poison gun Ignacio had aimed, just before we became friends, at my favorite weed.
I sneaked a quick glance at the rabbi’s hair, its light honey color anomalous for someone with such dark eyes. Though a good deal finer than Assefa’s coarse coils, her curls were pretty tight. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to try to comb through hair like that, when even my own straight locks had been no picnic for Nana. Though I’m sure it hadn’t helped that I had such an oddly shaped head.
“No,” I said to Rabbi Goldenrod, “I never did.”
She made what Jacob liked to refer to as an oy oy oy face. “I hope you never do. But what are lice compared to the tenth plague? Killing all the Egyptians’ first born—every one of them—from livestock to the pharaoh’s own child?” She gave a little shudder.
Which must have been my cue to display my own abominable lack of tact. “Don’t you think that was a little severe? Making so many innocent babies suffer? No wonder we have terrorists, if God’s like that.” As soon as the words came out, I blushed. I suppose it could have been worse. I could have cited other religiously motivated atrocities, such as the destruction of the Twin Towers or even the Israelis’ bombing of Gaza. That would have gone over with a bang. But I was actually thinking of the Ethiopians—in particular, of Medr, whose wife was brutally murdered in one of the myriad miseries his country had been subjected to. No wonder his countrymen and women wanted to keep their hands on the Ark. Maybe they figured that God owed them.
But the rabbi had leapt ahead. “I know how you feel, Fleur. Actually I’ve always thought of Aaron’s rod as epitomizing the two sides of life, which is really what God is about, isn’t it? Life. Sprouting sweet almonds on one side and bitter ones on the other.”
That didn’t settle me down much, but I was grateful for her lack of defensiveness. “The other thing about the Ark,” she continued,—“and this is why I admire your fiancé’s father for attempting to chronicle one of its many stories—is that it’s been shrouded, quite literally, in mystery. It was always supposed to be wrapped in a veil and blue cloth—remember how the tablets themselves were made of blue stone?—and any approach to it would have to be accompanied by protective rituals.”
If that were true, what to make of the stories Achamyalesh had told of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church parading the Ark through the streets of Aksum from time to time? How would they be able to do it without being stricken dead, or at least have some godawful plague visited upon them?
Then again, maybe they had.
I wasn’t much surprised when Sammie and Jacob had one of their humdingers right after we said our thank yous to Rabbi Goldenrod. The rabbi had apologized for not having much to add to what we already knew, but that hadn’t kept Sammie from commenting as soon as we crossed the street to our parking spot in front of the Jung Institute, “Well, you know I like her a lot, but that really was a waste of time.”
Buckling my seat belt, I saw Jacob look at her as if she’d decreed the death of his people’s first born.
“What?” she demanded, defensive.
He didn’t bother to reply. The black turn of his mood was palpable. He turned on the engine, and our car pulled away from the curb with a screech. An Audi coming up along our left side swerved to avoid a collision and blasted us with its horn. Sammie gasped, and shouted, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Jacob?”
Jacob bested her one, pounding the steering wheel as his eyes shot bullets. “Who the fuck do you think you are, Sammie? Miriam Goldenrod took time for us. She’s one of the busiest women in the city. She’s an authentically great human being—rabbi of a major congregation, writer, organizer of three different social outreach programs, member of a national task force on earth-justice, working on a documentary about the commonalities between Jews and Muslims.”
“You don’t have to quote me her fucking vita. I respect the woman already. I bloody well like her. All I’m saying is that she didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.”
If they kept this up, I was going to have to keep a new journal listing all the times they uttered the word “fuck” during their arguments. Jacob pulled over to the curb as soon as he came to Overland. Cars started piling up behind us on the narrow street.
His shouting was actually louder than their honking. “What she told us is that this trip of Achamyalesh’s is bogus. There’s no Ark in Ethiopia. There’s just a bunch of fucked-over, impoverished people trying to salve their self-respect by pretending they own the greatest treasure of the world. Sort of like a cab driver creating no end of havoc by tootling off to no-man’s-land and getting himself lost on a fool’s errand.”
I must say, Sammie wasn’t the only one who was offended by Jacob’s diatribe. Adam had taught me that people said things when they were angry that they didn’t really mean. Which had helped a little with Father when he started his Cackler group to undermine my discovery of C-Voids. Until I realized that Father really did mean all the nasty things he’d said about me.
If I felt angry on behalf of Achamyalesh, I felt awful for Sammie. All I could see was the back of her head, her dark hair caught up in two silver butterfly clips peeking over the tops of her ears. Her hair was so shiny. She sat, silent and immobile, and I could only imagine what was going on in her head.
The clamor of the cars behind us increased and even a homeless man on the sidewalk shouted for us to get moving—what he actually said was, “How’m I s’posed to get my cart across this street with you fucking up traffic, assholes?” I guess it finally got through to Jacob. He started up the car again.
But before he could pick up speed, Sammie undid her seatbelt, opened her door, and jumped out, thank God without a stumble. I’d broken out in a sweat. “Thank you, Jesus,” I muttered under my breath.
I caught a quick glimpse of her standing on the sidewalk, her face ashen, her eyes unseeing, before we moved beyond her—the car door still open—and up toward Olympic Boulevard.
“Let me out,” I demanded. Jacob didn’t bother to respond. The backs of his ears were as red as a Darcey Bussell rose. What to do? The car was moving just a bit faster now, and I didn’t fancy making a leap myself.
Jacob kept going. Had he even heard me? But then he signaled, made a right turn onto Olympic in front of a barreling line of traffic, and stopped the car. Again, we were treated to a cacophony of horns. The guy was becoming a one-man traffic jam. I slid out without a word.
Rushing back on Pelham Avenue in the direction of the spot where we’d left Sammie, I pulled out my cell, but she wasn’t answering. Trying to run in this heat was hell, and me wearing my two-inch black pumps made me feel and—I was sure—look ridiculous.
I stopped to pull off the shoes and stuff them into my purse. Just ahead was a group of people in front of a well-groomed Spanish-style house. They’d spread out a Pendleton style blanket on the lawn, and a woman was bouncing a pink-pajamaed baby on her shoulder with such enthusiasm that she didn’t seem to notice that her efforts were only exacerbating the infant’s unhappy squealing. One of the young men in the group said to the others, “Don’t ever offer to babysit your own child,” and they all burst into laughter.
“I don’t get it,” I muttered to myself as I ran, my bare feet registering every dry leaf, every crack in the sidewalk. Each pebble and twig felt like broken glass.
When I finally reached Sammie I was completely out of breath. She fell into my arms and wept. Really, there wasn’t much to be said. Only she could determine whether Jacob’s intelligence and wit were sufficient compensation for these rages that seemed to be part of his package deal.
We called a cab, and when we arrived at Rose Villa I insisted on paying the exorbitant fare, knowing that the particular cabbie Jacob had defamed would never have charged fifty-five dollars to deliver a palpably distraught woman and her friend home.
