Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Did your daughters?” Deb says. “If they tell you everything, did they come to you first, before they smoked?”

“Our daughters do not have the taint of the world we grew up in. They have no interest in such things.”

“So you think,” I say.

“So I know,” he says. “Our concerns are different, our worries.”

“Let’s hear ’em,” Deb says.

“Let’s not,” Shoshana says. “Honestly, we’re drunk, we’re high, we are having a lovely reunion.”

“Every time you tell him not to talk,” I say, “it makes me want to hear what he’s got to say even more.”

“Our concern,” Mark says, “is not the past Holocaust. It is the current one. The one that takes more than fifty percent of the Jews of this generation. Our concern is intermarriage. It’s the Holocaust that’s happening now. You don’t need to be worrying about some Mormons doing hocus-pocus on the murdered six million. You need to worry that your son marries a Jew.”

“Oh, my God,” Deb says. “Are you calling intermarriage a Holocaust?”

“You ask my feeling, that’s my feeling. But this, no, it does not exactly apply to you, except in the example you set for the boy. Because you’re Jewish, your son, he is as Jewish as me. No more, no less.”

“I went to yeshiva too, Born-Again Harry! You don’t need to explain the rules to me.”

“Did you just call me ‘Born-Again Harry’?” Mark asks.

“I did,” Deb says. And she and he, they start to laugh at that. They think “Born-Again Harry” is the funniest thing they’ve heard in a while. And Shoshana laughs, and then I laugh, because laughter is infectious — and it is doubly so when you’re high.

“You don’t really think our family, my lovely, beautiful son, is headed for a Holocaust, do you?” Deb says. “Because that would really cast a pall on this beautiful day.”

“No, I don’t,” Mark says. “It’s a lovely house and a lovely family, a beautiful home that you’ve made for that strapping young man. You’re a real balabusta ,” Mark says.

“That makes me happy,” Deb says. And she tilts her head nearly ninety degrees to show her happy, sweet smile. “Can I hug you? I’d really like to give you a hug.”

“No,” Mark says, though he says it really politely. “But you can hug my wife. How about that?”

“That’s a great idea,” Deb says. Shoshana gets up and hands the loaded apple to me, and I smoke from the apple as the two women hug a tight, deep, dancing-back-and-forth hug, tilting this way and that, so, once again, I’m afraid they might fall.

“It is a beautiful day,” I say.

“It is,” Mark says. And both of us look out the window, and both of us watch the perfect clouds in a perfect sky, so that we’re both staring out as the sky suddenly darkens. It is a change so abrupt that the ladies undo their hug to watch.

“It’s like that here,” Deb says. And the clouds open up and torrential tropical rain drops straight down, battering. It is loud against the roof, and loud against the windows, and the fronds of the palm trees bend, and the floaties in the pool jump as the water boils.

Shoshana goes to the window. And Mark passes Deb the apple and goes to the window. “Really, it’s always like this here?” Shoshana says.

“Sure,” I say. “Every day. Stops as quick as it starts.”

And both of them have their hands pressed up against the window. And they stay like that for some time, and when Mark turns around, harsh guy, tough guy, we see that he is weeping.

“You do not know,” he says. “I forget what it’s like to live in a place rich with water. This is a blessing above all others.”

“If you had what we had,” I say.

“Yes,” he says, wiping his eyes.

“Can we go out?” Shoshana says. “In the rain?”

“Of course,” Deb says. Then Shoshana tells me to close my eyes. Only me. And I swear I think she’s going to be stark naked when she calls, “Open up.”

She’s taken off her wig is all, and she’s wearing one of Trev’s baseball caps in its place.

“I’ve only got the one wig this trip,” she says. “If Trev won’t mind.”

“He won’t mind,” Deb says. And this is how the four of us find ourselves in the back yard, on a searingly hot day, getting pounded by all this cool, cool rain. It’s just about the best feeling in the world. And, I have to say, Shoshana looks twenty years younger in that hat.

We do not talk in the rain. We are too busy frolicking and laughing and jumping around. And that’s how it happens that I’m holding Mark’s hand and sort of dancing, and Deb is holding Shoshana’s hand, and they’re doing their own kind of jig. And when I take Deb’s hand, though neither Mark nor Shoshana is touching the other, somehow we’ve formed a broken circle. We’ve started dancing our own kind of hora in the rain.

It is the silliest and freest and most glorious I can remember feeling in years. Who would think that’s what I’d be saying with these strict, suffocatingly austere people visiting our house? And then my Deb, my love, once again she is thinking what I’m thinking, and she says, face up into the rain, all of us spinning, “Are you sure this is okay, Shoshana? That it’s not mixed dancing? I don’t want anyone feeling bad after.”

“We’ll be just fine,” Shoshana says. “We will live with the consequences.” The question slows us, and stops us, though no one has yet let go.

“It’s like the old joke,” I say. Without waiting for anyone to ask which one, I say, “Why don’t Hasidim have sex standing up?”

“Why?” Shoshana says.

“Because it might lead to mixed dancing.”

Deb and Shoshana pretend to be horrified as we let go of hands, as we recognize that the moment is over, the rain disappearing as quickly as it came. Mark stands there staring into the sky, lips pressed tight. “That joke is very, very old,” he says. “And mixed dancing makes me think of mixed nuts, and mixed grill, and insalata mista . The sound of ‘mixed dancing’ has made me wildly hungry. And I’m going to panic if the only kosher thing in the house is that loaf of bleached American bread.”

“You have the munchies,” I say.

“Diagnosis correct,” he says.

Deb starts clapping at that, tiny claps, her hands held to her chest in prayer. She says to him, absolutely beaming, “You will not even believe what riches await.”

The four of us stand in the pantry, soaking wet, hunting through the shelves and dripping on the floor. “Have you ever seen such a pantry?” Shoshana says, reaching her arms out. “It’s gigantic.” It is indeed large, and it is indeed stocked, an enormous amount of food, and an enormous selection of sweets, befitting a home that is often host to a swarm of teenage boys.

“Are you expecting a nuclear winter?” Shoshana says.

“I’ll tell you what she’s expecting,” I say. “You want to know how Holocaust-obsessed she really is? I mean, to what degree?”

“To no degree,” Deb says. “We are done with the Holocaust.”

“Tell us,” Shoshana says.

“She’s always plotting our secret hiding place,” I say.

“No kidding,” Shoshana says.

“Like, look at this. At the pantry, with a bathroom next to it, and the door to the garage. If you sealed it all up — like put drywall at the entrance to the den — you’d never suspect. If you covered that door inside the garage up good with, I don’t know — if you hung your tools in front of it and hid hinges behind, maybe leaned the bikes and the mower against it, you’d have this closed area, with running water and a toilet and all this food. I mean, if someone sneaked into the garage to replenish things, you could rent out the house. Put in another family without their having any idea.”