Karen Bender - Refund - Stories

He wiped the sweat off his forehead. We were both always sweating now.

— I don’t know.

— What are the children going to think?

The children were mostly sad. They wanted only to eat sour-cream-and-onion potato chips and stare at alternative worlds on screens. Any extra energy was reserved for demands that could not be met, that seemed, in a way, nostalgic.

— I want a Wii.

— I want a Barbie head to put makeup on.

Nope, nothing, don’t even ask. It felt almost like a relief to not be able to buy this stuff, any stuff, but the problem was that others still seemed to be able to buy it; we watched.

— Why doesn’t anyone invite us over?

The kids looked at us with new, critical eyes. They sensed we had failed them, but they did not know how deeply. Some nights I dreamed of Lionel Solang, not because I wanted him, but because that moment in the conference room was the last time I felt any sort of power. Who was I? I thought, looking at my husband, who slept fitfully, containing his own crimes and sadness. Sometimes he cried out in the night.

— What’s going to happen? I asked my husband in the middle of the night. He lay beside me, naked, pale, both of us large, bewildered animals huddled under our thin Walmart sheets.

— They’ll go to college, he said.

— Not for a while, I said. — And what are we using for payment?

— Uh, he said. — Maybe you’ll dream what we should do.

We closed our eyes.

SO WE WERE HERE, IN THIS SMALL SOUTHERN TOWN, AND ONE PLACE where everyone invited us was to church. Come over to First Baptist! Presbyterian! St. John’s! Come worship Jesus with us! We said thank you but no, because, actually, by the way, we were Jews.

Oh, they said. Oh.

We were Jews in the most superficial way. In our former city, we went to Temple maybe once or twice a year. But here, we were odd enough so that people mentioned this about me in a cursory description. There is Donna. She’s new in town. By the way, she’s Jewish.

We wouldn’t call ourselves Jews ordinarily, but now we were, supposedly, Jews.

It was, in this new state of affairs, something.

OUR SON HAD A TALENT FOR SPOTTING THE TOWN’S CHASIDIC RABBI striding down the streets. The rabbi walked down the creamy, hot streets, in his long black coat and top hat, his wife with her ankle-length dresses and her extremely convincing wigs. He walked, his glasses steaming up beneath the branches of the glossy-leaved magnolia trees, the lacy pink crepe myrtle, the deep green, erotic foliage of the South.

— There’s Rabbi Jacob again.

The rabbi and his wife had a purpose. They wanted to locate any Jews in town and convince them to do Jewish things. The recession was apparently not harming them. In fact, maybe it was good for their business. He loved us. We were it. We could be holy if we wanted. The rationale for this was not clear to me, but I did know that we were like catnip to him, and that after he had located us, one month after we moved to town, he came knocking at our door. He brought us homemade challah one Friday afternoon. Then he came by to blow the shofar for us at Rosh Hashanah. In his mind, these visits were not startling intrusions but kind and welcome gifts. He came in and blew the ram’s horn, that long, bleating sound flooding our pine-walled, orange-carpeted rental. The walls were so flimsy we knew our neighbor’s TV-viewing schedule by heart. The shofar interrupted Anything For Money .

— What the hell is that sound? our neighbors shouted. — My God! Can you turn it off?

The rabbi and his wife had been sent here on a mission. They could have ended up in Bismarck or Petaluma or Mobile; they landed here, in North Carolina. Part of their job was to spread their version of wisdom. And they wanted to spread it to us.

Rabbi Jacob kept inviting us to his apartment for a Shabbat meal. He was like a suitor who could not be discouraged. There was, I will admit, something flattering about the attention, even if we thought a lot of what they believed was, well, misinformed. Why did the men and women have to sit on separate sides of the temple? Why couldn’t they have sex with each other when the woman had her period? On and on. My husband was desperate for some kind of friend here, anyone. I was not.

— It’s free food, my husband said. — Because we’re Jews, we get free food. We don’t even have to bring anything because it won’t be kosher enough. We’re totally off the hook. When else do we get a deal like that?

At least he was practical, and it wasn’t as though we had money for dinners out. He was right. It was something I loved about him.

So, finally, one day in April, we trudged over to the rabbi’s apartment one warm Saturday for a free Pesach lunch. That was the main reason we went; our own desperate loneliness and a free lunch. Perhaps that was why anyone dipped a toe into religion. I didn’t eat breakfast so that I would be particularly hungry for this event. I felt guilty that these were not really appropriate reasons, so I insisted that we pretend we were observant and walk there instead of drive. It was a mile-long walk.

— Why are we walking again?

— They don’t drive on Saturdays. So we won’t today.

— Why not?

— They just don’t. It’s their rule.

Of course, as we pretended to be observant, Lionel Solang was in my head. Of course. He came into my mind at inopportune moments; he stamped on me when I was trying to make some new start. Lionel was the only one who knew me, in a way. He knew how far I had fallen.

We wound down a street named, sadly, Confederate Drive, to Plantation Estates, a slapped-together development of townhouses where the residents looked unemployed or as though they were about to be. We knocked. The door opened. There they were, Rabbi Jacob, in his black top hat, and his wife Aviva, with her convincing wig.

— Hello! Hello! Come in!

They were absurdly delighted, the sort of joy reserved for relatives greeting infants; perhaps that was what they thought we were.

— Come meet Joshua and Adam!

Their children were four and three. There was a newborn sleeping upstairs. Aviva beamed at us. The table had been set beautifully, the silver gleaming. The rental condo was not in such good shape; it looked like there had been a flood in one corner, as the ceiling had a large, cloudy stain. There were suspicious dents in the wall, as though someone had been kicking it.

— Welcome! said Aviva.

We walked inside to the heavy, wonderful odor of stewed meat. The kitchen walls and counters were completely covered in tinfoil. The room resembled the silver wrinkled interior of a Jiffy Pop container.

— Was there a fire? I asked.

— Oh, we cover everything in foil for Pesach. So nothing leavened will touch the counters.

— That must take forever, I said.

— It was easy, she said.

Joshua and Adam stood, staring at us, clad in their tefillin and kipas . They looked cute, miniature versions of their father. Our son reluctantly donned a kipa ; it kept falling off.

— Go play. They’ve been waiting for you, said Aviva.

Joshua and Adam ran into an area with a rust-colored carpet that appeared to be buckling. Aviva had made several salads. She picked up a lettuce head, lifted each leaf, and peered at it fiercely.

— What are you looking for? I asked.

— Bugs. Not kosher. If I find one, I have to throw the whole thing out.

— The whole salad? I asked. I wondered if we could intervene and take it home.

— Yes.

Our son emerged from the den.

— He hit me, he hissed. — That little guy.

— Uh, I said.

— He also threw a truck against the wall.

— Maybe it was a mistake, I said.