Эйми Бендер - The Color Master

“I’m not here to push anything on you,” she said. “Lots of Jews I know are atheist Jews.”

“Your eyes shine,” he said. “How do they do that?”

“Blood,” she said.

They slipped into the affair, even though it was not an affair. It was never anything to do with losing clothes. It was not the deep sharing of feelings. It was almost entirely one-sided. It was simple, like he’d slipped slightly into her blood, and she slipped strongly into his thinking. She had one or two dreams in which he played a part, as a kind of helpful direction-giver when lost on a highway, dreams she was only mildly aware of when she woke up and went to shower.

For the most part, she focused on the congregants who needed comfort, and her husband and young son with the amazing brown eyes. The doctor, however, cultivated thoughts of her like a fresh little garden. Sometimes he pulled out her chart just to reread her basic stats, because the numbers brought him something akin to joy. To joy, really—the numbers lifted his heart and step, buoyed his day. It was just knowing this person was alive, he thought. That he had helped her, maybe even saved her, and now she was out there talking about all this business he did not believe in.

God, he said, in his car, driving from hospital to home. What a word. Much had been made already of its similarity to “dog,” but as he wound through the streets, he particularly enjoyed conjuring up the image in his head of some kind of old and glowing man on a leash.

Not that he believed in such things, but he wondered if giving her atheist blood might in fact turn her into an atheist, and he felt guilty at the thought but also pleased—like she could come over to his house and they could browse his bookshelves, shoulder to shoulder, and read Sartre together, or a dash of Camus, and then stand on chairs in old-fashioned hats and drop apples from great heights to the floor.

He returned to the rabbi’s office. His mother was not well. She had cancer. She was in the hospital. Her illness had little to do with blood, or at least not his kind of blood, and so he’d stood around her hospital room, awkward, without a task. He watched the TV, attached to the ceiling with metal straps and hooks, the show pointing down upon them. He loved his mother, even though she seemed to be so private a person he had never understood much about her. She only ever told him on a daily basis about her day.

“I went to the grocery store,” she would say. “I got my hair done.”

“What else?” he asked once.

“I ate potato chips,” she said. “I talked to your Aunt Sophie.”

“About what?” he said.

She hummed, thinking. “About everything, I suppose,” she said. “And how are you?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I bought a radio. But what do you mean, everything?”

She paused on the phone. He could hear her unpacking groceries. “Sophie tells me about everything she is thinking and feeling,” his mother said. “It’s very interesting.”

“And you?”

“I so enjoy hearing what Sophie has to say,” she said.

“I have been unable to work very much this week,” he told the rabbi. “I took two days off.”

“Makes sense,” she said. She was wearing a navy-blue suit, maybe because she had attended a funeral, or a business meeting. The daily workings of a rabbi’s schedule were highly mysterious to him.

She was also surrounded by cardboard boxes of donations for a charity drive, and had just started sorting items into piles. A kid clothing pile, an adult clothing pile, a book pile, a toy pile.

“Want to help?” she asked.

“Sure.” He took the free seat. She had a pile of books in her lap, and was separating them into kid and adult levels.

“And my son is not doing well, either,” he said, settling in. “He lives with my ex-wife. He failed algebra.”

He opened a donation box. Sweaters. The rabbi was divvying up her book piles, but he could tell she was listening. She divvied quietly.

“I tried to tutor him,” he said, “but I didn’t know how. I forgot algebra.”

The rabbi shrugged. “Who remembers?”

“My ex-wife doesn’t like to talk about it,” he said. “My mother is doing a little better. They say she can go home tomorrow.”

He listed all the people on his fingers. Mother, son, ex. Looked at his hands. Ham-handed, he’d been called, as a boy. Big fingers. He had turned out to be very deft with needles, which had surprised everybody.

“And how are you holding up?” the rabbi asked.

“Fine,” he said.

He folded up the sweaters. Two had fairly large moth holes eating up the sleeves. “This okay?” he asked, showing her.

“Agh, no,” she said. She pointed under her desk. “Ungivables.”

He tossed over the sweaters, began folding others.

“What a stressful time,” said the rabbi.

“You say that to all the visitors,” he said, smiling a little.

She smiled back. “I still mean it.”

He folded the arms in carefully, then made the sweaters into tidy squares, smoothing down the fronts, so that each one looked new, like it had just been taken from a box at a department store and placed upon a table.

“Let me ask you a question,” said the rabbi, balancing the last book in the adult pile. “You’re here to see me. Why?”

“Because I like seeing you.”

“I like seeing you, too. But you could go to a friend. To a colleague.”

“You think doctors know how to talk about this stuff?”

She pulled a pile of animal toys into her lap, including an unusually large red plastic chicken.

“Bock-bock,” she said, moving the chicken up and down.

“I like seeing you,” the doctor said again.

“Well,” said the rabbi, steadying the chicken in her lap. “I ask because I have a rabbi kind of thing to say.”

“Let’s hear it,” he said.

“It’s not a secular comment, is what I’m saying,” said the rabbi. “It will probably piss off the atheist.”

“I get it, that’s okay,” said the doctor, pressing hands down on his pants. He placed his neat pile of sweaters in the adult pile. “I came here. Let’s hear it.”

She touched the plastic comb on the chicken’s head gently.

“You could pray,” she said. “Either on your own, or with us.”

“Oh, that?” said the doctor, shaking his head. “The ‘p’ word? No.”

“Not to an old-man-in-the-sky kind of God,” she said. “Not to solve all your problems. Just to ask for some help.”

“Oh,” said the doctor. “Nah. I don’t do that sort of thing.”

“Why not?” she said. There was no edge to her voice. Just interest.

The doctor put a small bottle of bubbles in the kid pile.

“Bubbles!” he said.

He looked back at her.

“Just because I think it’s useless,” he said. “And a little creepy.”

She laughed. “Okay,” she said. The red chicken bobbed in her lap. “Fair enough.” She glanced at the adult clothes pile.

“What beautiful folding,” she said.

He had opened another box and found a mushed pile of T-shirts, washed but unfolded, as if they had gone straight from the dryer into the donation box.

“And,” he said, after a minute, shaking out a T-shirt, “just to play along. You know. I wouldn’t want to use up the line space.”

“What line space?” she said. She placed the chicken in the kid pile. “You mean like margins?”

He swept his hand in the air. “No, a line,” he said. “A line-line. Like in the post office. Let’s say there’s a line. Of people praying. And I added my prayer to it. Well, I don’t want to take up someone else’s space in line with my half-assed, half-believing, baloney prayer.”

She laughed, again. Now she had a pile of very-loved stuffed animals in her lap. She was looking so well. He could not help but feel a little proud of how she was looking. He had made sure she had gotten very good blood.