Zeeva Bukai's stories have appeared in Frankly Feminist: Short Stories by Jewish Women, Pithead Chapel, Masters Review, McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern, Image Journal, December Magazine, and elsewhere. You can reach her at zeevabukai.com.
I
When Uli Baal studies the autumnal window dressing in Macy’s department store, she thinks of hoedowns. She thinks of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline crooning. She nicknames the hunky mannequins sporting corduroy and plaid, Johnny and Obadiah. Their hair streaked blonde, their skin the color of smashed white peaches. There’s a wagon, straw hats, and hay bales stacked like the A-B-C blocks her sister, Hila, played with after they arrived in the U.S. Uli can almost hear the duo singing, This Land is Your Land in a midwestern twang. The all-Americanness on display as much as the Levis and Frye boots.
She tries to sail past the guard at the entrance, hoping he hasn’t noticed her, a plain girl in baggy cargos, dark hair that frizzes in the heat. He’s got a silver badge pinned to his breast pocket, and cups the revolver holstered at his waist—a rent-a-sheriff in a Macy’s western. A few more steps and she’s past the vestibule where the air is metal-cold and the fluorescents gleam on carousels packed with back-to-school woolens and fleeces. She knows what she wants but first has to get beyond the guard’s line of vision. Inside it’s all chrome, glass, and light—an attainable fantasy with a charge card. She homes in on the third carousel from the right, in the far back. One step, two, and a middle-aged blonde shoots her with Obsession, trigger finger already pointing at another customer before Uli can react.
Still not far enough from the guard, she picks up speed. She can feel his gaze on her neck. Fucking sheriff wannabe. Another ten feet will get her there, but then suddenly he’s there, in front of her, and her eyes jerk to his, stricken, then skid away. Her heart is pounding. “Miss, you dropped this.” He holds her Fall ’81 senior class schedule she’d picked up that morning in homeroom.
“Thanks,” she says, and stuffs it into her pocket and pushes on, leaving Sportswear, reaching Junior Miss, a near-empty oasis. She counts five shoppers on the floor, all combing through the Missus section on the other side of the divide. The guard is back at his post. Her chest loosens.
Alone and softly humming to piped-in Burt Bacharach, she forages through blouses and chooses a sage knit made in Hong Kong, elegant scalloped edge, low bodice, cool as silk. A swift tug on the hanger and it falls to the carpet. She drops to her knees, rolls the blouse to the size of a fat cigar, and stuffs it down the front of her pants. She imagines what Freddie Hall will say when he sees her in it tonight and forces herself to slow down and flits from rack to rack, willing the tightness in her shoulders to ease, and continues on to the cosmetics counter, where she exchanges a word with the salesgirl. Uli applies red gloss that makes her mouth look like a puncture wound. She checks the north exit. Now the guard’s perched on a stool, trousers hitched, not a centimeter of fat folds over his utility belt. There’s another exit, but she’d have to cross the entire floor to get there, and she can already feel the blouse slipping. She tucks her hands into her pockets, clutching at the garment. She’s nearly there. The guard touches his cap. Before she can push open the door, he’s beside her, smiling. His pale brown eyes remind her of sunlight at the bottom of a muddy lake.
“That lipstick’s pretty on you,” he says.
She stiffens.
“Don’t be scared.” He gives her shoulder a squeeze, opens the door, and leans in close, “Catch ya later.” His breath condenses in her ear.
She plunges into the throng of shoppers. Unable to help herself, she looks back to find him watching her.
II
Thirty minutes before the Starlight Carnival on Ralph Avenue shuts down for the night, Uli, wearing the sage knit, buys a ticket for the Ferris wheel, hoping Freddie Hall will show. Freddie Hall, who until four years ago, was Faraj Halwani. His father and her father grew up in the same Jewish ghetto in Damascus before they escaped across the border into Israel.
When they were in the sixth grade, Faraj dared her to steal their teacher’s brooch. The latch had broken during the pledge of allegiance and Mrs. Bernstein put it in her desk. Uli was the board monitor. Faraj came in during their lunch period when the room was empty.
“Do you love me?” he asked.
“Yes.” Her belly a knot of desire.
“Prove it.”
The terrible need not to disappoint him, to prove her worth, had her hand in the drawer, reaching past the forest of pencils and chains of paperclips, landing on Mrs. Bernstein’s cameo, the long bar-pin slicing her palm. Small punishment for sin. He shoved it into his pocket and said, wallah habibi you’re a natural-born thief in an accent that sounded just like her Aba’s before the Yom Kippur war when they’d lived in Israel. Before he’d rushed to join his unit in the Sinai desert. The heat had silenced the empty streets and then the siren cracked the day in half. He barely had time for an embrace. From the terrace, she, Hila, and Ima watched him disappear round a corner, his back curved in the question they didn’t dare ask aloud.
On the afternoon of the theft, Principal Gardner strode into their classroom and told everyone to empty their pockets. Faraj sent her a desperate look. His eyes begged her to admit to the crime. He’d already been suspended twice for cutting school and smoking on the premises. But her tongue had gone numb and grown fat in her mouth. Her pulse pounded in her ears, and her face was so pale the teacher sent her to the nurse, who’d insisted she lie down.
Faraj spent two years in Eagle Pines, a quasi-military school for troubled boys in the Finger Lakes. She still has no idea what it was like for him. He never responded to her letters and his mother only shook her head when Uli asked how he was. She can imagine the hazing and the brutal insults meted out to a foreigner, a boy darker than them who spoke with an accent.
While he was in Eagle Pines, his family moved to Canarsie, Brooklyn. Five years later her family followed to a new development across the Paerdegat Basin, a neighborhood of townhouses built on landfill that shifted, causing pavements and asphalt to split like overripe fruit. Small sinkholes appeared. Rodents liberated from darkness crawled up the sides, blinking at the sunlight. Each week Aba measured and reported on the depth and width of the holes, bracing for their house to slide into the abyss.
“Anyone who buys a home built on sand deserves what they get,” Ima muttered when he was out of earshot. To Aba she said, “Momo, come inside, the neighbors are watching.” Ima’s great worry was that people would give them the evil eye, as if the war hadn’t been curse enough.
Now, by the time they meet again as seniors in high school, Faraj has magically shed his accent. He’s grown tall, while she isn’t much above the same five feet she was in the sixth grade and still mangles words like ridiculous and teeth, her accent thick as when she first arrived in Brooklyn. He has learned to play basketball and is the point guard on the Tigers, their high school team. He hangs out with jocks and cheerleaders in the rotunda while she looks on, hugging her backpack to her overdeveloped breasts that she despises but is in awe of. She wishes they were friends like before Eagle Pines, when they’d lived on Cortelyou Road in a five-story walkup across from the elevated on MacDonald Avenue. Saturday mornings he threw jujubes at her window to coax her outside. They’d play stoop ball and collect bottle caps, fill them with melted crayons for games of skelly. In summer, they’d ride their bikes to Prospect Park, explore the Quaker cemetery, and roll down Suicide Hill, breathless at the bottom, the shorn grass tickling the backs of their knees. In winter, they’d walk across the frozen lake and lie in the center, listening to the ice creak. Dormant koi suspended beneath them.
“How long can you stare at the sky?” Faraj asked, and she, hypnotized by the vast blueness, gripped his hand and said, “Forever.”
Their clothes damp, cold wending through their jackets, they’d walk back to shore where the ice was thin. If Faraj reached it first, he’d taunt her by jumping to make it crack, forcing her to run or crawl to safety. He’d laugh at her struggle, a laughter so endearing and cruel, her heart squeezed at the sound of it. This, she thought, this exquisite pain was love, the real thing, until she let him down and he was sent away.
While he was gone, she felt a slow inexorable erasure of self. Now that he’s Freddie Hall, his eyes skate over her, registering neither recognition nor interest, until that morning when he finally looked at her and said, “You going to the carnival tonight?”
“Are you?” she said and held her breath.
“Yeah.”
“Me, too.”
“Okay then, see you there.”
Ticket in hand, she climbs aboard the Ferris wheel. Schoolkids she barely knows scramble into the cars. They’re coupled, drunk on beer and funnel cake. She sits alone and looks at the crowd below, converging on food carts that serve sausage and peppers. They win bears, shoot ducks. The main attraction is the spider ride that spins pink neon, blasting Shining Star. She tugs at the hem of her blouse.
Two revolutions and the ride stops. She’s trapped at the top. From that elevation she can see all of Ralph Avenue, the two strip malls that bookend the neighborhood. At 10:45, the IHOP behind her has a line of customers that snakes into the parking lot. Kids on the stalled ride toss a baseball. Boys catcall and make the cars swing. Girls shriek. Couples kiss. With a jolt, the wheel starts up again. She holds on, imagining plunging to the ground, splitting her skull, brains in the dirt. Fucking humiliating, the mess she’d make.
The carnival folds up at eleven. There’s no sign of Freddie, so she decides to be bold and go to Bloom’s, a bar on Flatbush Avenue she’s overheard him talk about. She pulls a pack of Salems from her pocket and lights up. She’d go home if she could, but Aba’s still awake. He can’t sleep, and when he does, he dreams he’s on fire.
If he hears her come in, he’ll rush at her all hands and fists. Ima will barrel out of the bedroom, hiss at him to leave her alone. He’ll point at Uli. “Whore,” he’ll say and then weep. Ima will look grim. She’ll put him to bed then come into Uli’s room and ask if she’s all right. “Fine,” Uli will say, and Ima will confess, “I wish I still felt pity for him.”
It’s the tits, Uli thinks, the way she filled out last year overblown, curved like a cartoon femme fatale. She’s caught Aba staring. His ruined face one long scowl, the burns isthmuses from cheek to chest. The smell of single malt leaching out his pores. She’d never go home if it wasn’t for Hila. The thought of leaving her fourteen-year-old sister alone with their parents is unbearable.
Long ago Uli had asked her mother, “How can you stand knowing we’re not enough for him?”
“I can’t,” Ima said.
. . .
Uli walks down residential streets, passes bungalows with patched aluminum siding and rusted gates that lead to lawn ornaments of the Virgin, plastic roses in her outstretched hands, her face serene in the knowledge that suffering on earth is the entry to heaven. Television lights flicker Morse code onto the sidewalk. She reaches Avenue N with its storefront real estate offices and cheap beauty salons. Chicken Delight serves buckets of chicken and mashed potatoes to carnival goers. She passes the darkened windows of Italian specialty shops where wheels of cheese hang from the ceiling alongside dried haunches of pork. At the bakery, light splits the seam of the cellar door in the pavement. Sugar and yeast funnel into the air. She reaches Bloom’s sweating and hopes the Arid Extra Dry has turned her pits into a desert.
Bloom’s, with its violet light over the bar, reminds her of a saltwater fish tank, all the fish gliding past her, mouthing something she can’t make out. Decades of cigarette smoke skim-coat the walls. Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” thumps out of the jukebox. There’s sawdust on the floor to catch the spills. Two dartboards are nailed to the wall and a green felt billiard table takes up half the back room. An IRA flag is stapled to the soffit. No one’s dared take it down since Bobby Sands was arrested.
She serpentines between dancing couples and orders a Coke. She can’t stand the taste of liquor. There’s never any room to sit at the bar. The regulars are parked on the stools, old grizzled men with worn-out backs and shoes who endure the teenagers on the weekend by huddling over their beer. She stands near the jukebox, sips her soda, and tries not to look as awkward as she feels, assembling her features into a neutral expression. The door swings open. Faraj—Freddie Hall is there. He stops when he sees her, his face registering surprise and a wariness that makes her stomach clench.
“What are you doing here?”
Her breath shallow, she lifts her glass and manages a smile.
He cocks his head and gives her a calculating look. “Right,” he says and holds out his hand.
She takes it. Her heart beats so hard it’s visible through her shirt. He shouts to the bar for a Heineken, then leads her into the back room.
“You dance?
“Sure.” Uli thinks of the hours she’s spent pretending to be Cyd Charise in her living room when Ima is at the supermarket and Aba is at work at the garage. Hila watches from the sofa, offering suggestions on how to execute a perfect pirouette, her feet clad in Ima’s stilettos; a cigarette burns in the ashtray. Hila doesn’t inhale, she just likes the way the cigarette makes her feel like a girl who isn’t afraid of anything.
They skirt the pool table and high school kids who talk too loud. No bump or grind for Freddie, just a slow dance like their parents used to do at salon parties in Tel-Aviv before the war. Someone would dim the lights, and couples shuffled across the floor to Jacques Brel or Peggy Lee. She wonders where Freddie learned the steps. Her shirt slides to where the vertebrae on her spine poke like knots on a branch. His fingers trail up her back. She gazes at his face, at the green eyes that look almost yellow under the light of the Miller High Life sign. He smiles, slips his hands into her pockets, and gives her ass a gentle squeeze. His mouth millimeters from hers.
The only time he’s ever kissed her was six years ago when they were at a bar mitzvah at the Shaare Zion Temple on Ocean Parkway. Faraj pulled her into the men’s room. His tongue suddenly, surprisingly in her mouth. He rocked back and said, “Wanna be my girlfriend?”
She nodded, overcome with shyness and gratitude.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes,” she shouted, and they kissed like couples do in the movies when they’re standing in the rain, only she and Faraj stood in the men’s room of the temple, the band booming “Hava Nagilah,” and the smell of deodorizer so strong, Faraj’s lips tasted of pine.
A few days later, she stole the brooch and Principal Gardner called his parents into the school; Faraj’s last word to her, mouthed as he passed the nurse’s office, was traitor. Now, he looks at her breasts snug in the bodice of the Hong Kong knit.
“Nice blouse,” he murmurs.
“Thanks.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
They go out the back. The light over the door puddles at their feet. She wonders if this alley with its suede shadows and fire escapes reaching for the sky might be heaven. He pins her against the brick wall. His lips are soft and taste of beer. She wants to glide inside him, find sanctuary in the temple of his mouth, in the place where she no longer has to think about who she is and where she belongs. He cups her breasts and watches her to see if she’ll stop him. When she doesn’t, he pushes her onto her knees.
“Come on, babe,” he says.
Concrete cuts through her jeans. He wraps her hair around his hand and tugs until her neck, stretched at an awkward angle, is exposed like in pictures of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac before God saves him from his Aba’s knife. She has the awful feeling Faraj has forgotten who she is to him, how as children they’d hide under the stairwell of their building. How he’d hold her after Aba lashed out. The welt across the backs of her thighs stinging, attesting to his rage, and really what had she done but run across the room when he was on the couch, lost in the fire of his thoughts. Faraj was there, grounding her, saving her.
“Who am I?” she says.
“Uli.” He elongates the vowels and turns her name into a moan, making it sound the way her name has sounded in the mouths of all the boys at school who grab her when she walks by, pretend to bump into her, brush against her. Boys who know nothing beyond her name. But she wants Faraj to be different. Faraj, who’s taught her to steal and who’s seen the two sides of Aba, the rage and the love and has saved her from both.
He tugs at his zipper and lets her call him by his real name.
“Only when we’re alone,” he says.
She opens her mouth and thinks of sanctuary. Her mouth is a temple blessing him, loving him, begging for forgiveness.
III
The week before Yom Kippur she’s with Freddie at the St. Francis dance where Christian boys grease their hair and smell of their father’s Aqua Velva. A life-sized Jesus hangs above the scoreboard in the gymnasium. Freddie is on the other side of the room, two-stepping it to Barry White’s “I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little More Baby” with Prue, a pretty brunette on the gymnastics team everyone calls “the bullet.” The girl is a miracle on the pommel horse.
Uli wonders how she got here, Freddie on one side of the room, she on the other, when just that afternoon they’d walked home from school together. The silence between them freighted with what she’d done to him in the back of Bloom’s. She’s not sure how to let him know she’d do it again.
“We’re friends, right?” he asked as they trudged through the empty lots that bordered their neighborhood.
Too excited to speak, she planted her eyes on the ground, on the rocks and pebbles slick as pearls in the dirt, wishing she’d worn something nicer than a pair of jeans with holes in the knees.
“Listen,” Freddie began, “I need a date for the dance tonight, but I don’t want to go with someone who’s gonna think it’s a date.”
“A non-date.” She felt her stomach tank.
He grinned. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“What about someone on your team?”
“They’re at a meet tonight.”
“Why aren’t you?” She pictured him dunking a basket, taking her breath with him.
“Gotta baby my shoulder for next week’s game in Atlantic City. We’re the first high school playing interstate competitions. My parents are coming. Spending the night in a fancy hotel. You wouldn’t believe how proud Dad is. First time since…” He pumped a fist into the air. “It’s gonna be fuckin’ A.” When they reached her block he said, “So, will you do me this solid?”
A few hours later she meets him outside the St. Francis gym, wearing the sage knit, hoping it’ll remind him of their kiss, of her on her knees for him. He gives her a peck on the cheek and says, “Thanks for coming. Now I don’t look like an ahabal. I hate walking in alone.”
“You could never look like an idiot,” she says, surprised he spoke to her in Hebrew slang which is really Arabic, something he hasn’t done since before Eagle Pines when he used to call her habibi, instead of babe—the way he does now when he wants something. She imagines the word babe folded into an origami square, and in its center the word habibi secreted like a jewel between them. She can almost hear him whispering into her ear, ya habibi, my beloved.
They step into the gym where disco balls splash color and light. The music is so loud she can feel the baseline pound in her chest. He wants to buy her a soda and asks her what kind she likes. She bites the inside of her cheek, hoping the pain will curb her excitement, which feels uncontainable. She wonders if his earlier speech about this not being a date was a ruse to get her here.
“How about a dance?” she says, feeling emboldened.
But he’s gazing at Prue, whose laughter rivers through the gym.
“Wasn’t sure she’d be here.” He tosses Uli a laconic smile. “Thanks for coming. Later, babe.”
Bereft, she watches him go. When Prue steps into his arms, Uli feels herself drift above the dance floor, bumping into the ceiling, a balloon cut loose. The muscles in her cheeks ache from smiling. The effort of appearing normal exhausts her. By the end of the evening, she feels like she’s been mugged, robbed of something precious.
At midnight she looks for Freddie and finds him with Prue in the courtyard near a fountain of St. Francis, birds eating out of his hands. Neither of them sees her. He gives Prue a coin. She giggles, clutching it in her fist, her face joyful. Uli shrinks at the sight of them.
“No one better steal my wish.” Prue tosses the coin in.
“What did you wish for?” he asks.
“This, you,” she says, straightening his collar.
He drapes his good arm across her shoulders. They exit St. Francis through a side door that leads to the street. In the distance an ambulance wails. A strong wind rustles a pile of dead leaves. Uli looks at the sky, the big dipper so low she can almost crawl inside it. She sticks her hands into the scummy water, scoops up all the coins and drops them in her purse.
IV
It’s Yom Kippur eve. She wears the sage knit and waits for Freddie in the rotunda in front of their high school, picturing the walk home together, hands touching, the clean yet feral scent of him. In the evening they’ll meet at the synagogue for the Kol Nidre prayer. They will sit together. The cantor’s voice will wrap them in threads of anguish that beg God to forgive the sins that were and the sins to come. In the temple, he’ll be Faraj and she’ll be the Uli he knew before he was sent to Eagle Pines. He’ll remember that he loved her and will forget Prue, Prue who has no idea who he truly is, who cannot fathom the place they come from, or what it means to survive a war.
. . .
She cuts class and positions herself in the center of the rotunda, near the conch shell, a five-hundred-pound marble sculpture nicknamed the great cunt by the first graduating class. Sullied with graffiti, it’s a stone canvas where sweaty aspirations are written. At 2:30 students flood the rotunda. For Uli, the conch is an island, a lookout point from which to peer into the welter and find Freddie’s long-legged stride parting a sea of students.
She almost misses him. He saunters past and greets his friends. Soft punches land on his arms, pecks on the cheeks from girls who gaze at him with familiar longing. She walks toward him, halting when he places an arm around Prue, but doesn’t let it deter her. When he sees her, he’ll know they belong together. She just needs to catch his eye. And come sundown it will be Yom Kippur. His family, like hers, will be in the temple praying together, mourning together. She continues. Her skin feels tight; she struggles to reach him. He bends to whisper in Prue’s ear and then brushes a strand of hair off her face and kisses her, a gentle exploration of her mouth. Unbidden, the kiss he gave her in Bloom’s comes to her, a carnal talisman, something she can use to ward off loneliness.
He’s never kissed her at school. He barely speaks to her here. She’s saved for dark alleys, illicit and anonymous. By now everyone has seen the kiss and a wave of gossip washes through the rotunda. Freddie lifts his head and finds her gaze. She’s startled and hasn’t had a chance to compose herself, to wipe away the ugly shock, to still the tremor in her lips, and squeeze the color back into her cheeks. A squad car pulls up.
“Get a move on,” an officer shouts.
She lurches forward, carried on the current of bodies rushing to leave. Freddie and Prue up ahead. They turn down a side street. Uli breaks through the crowd, backpack clutched to her chest. He isn’t going home.
. . .
She’s all instinct and adrenaline. Flashing her pass, she climbs aboard the downtown bus, stumbling through a web of passengers. There’s hardly room. Like her father, she hates confined spaces. The bus picks up speed. Uli stares at the passing buildings and trees engulfed in sunlight. Yom Kippur eve. She recalls the war. The siren that cracked open the afternoon. Her father in the moment the tank catches fire. If someone hadn’t grabbed the ripcord on his uniform and pulled him out, he’d have died like the others, trapped. Over and over it plays—the sound of the mortar, the blast, the screams. He can’t shake it and so it lives with them, another body at the table, a ghost of war. She closes her eyes and is back with Faraj in the classroom when the principal forced him to turn out his pockets and the missing brooch clattered to the floor. The collective gasp of their classmates, the grim expressions on the grown-ups’ faces. Faraj falling to his knees. He never gave her away. It must have meant something. It must mean something now.
. . .
There’s a sale at Macy’s. Clothing’s piled high atop carousels. Carpets strewn with apparel. Clerks can’t keep up with the destruction. The same guard is at his post. Uli walks past the perfume counter into Junior Miss. She grabs the first thing she sees: red, white, and blue seersucker shorts. They’re hideous. Without her baggy cargos, she knows a moment of panic, then simply stuffs the garment into her backpack and walks toward the Fulton Street exit, away from the guard. A song from her childhood croons through the sound system, Honey in the morning, honey in the evening, honey at suppertime, be my little honey and love me… and the game her mother played, changing the words to ladybugs in the morning, or spiders in the evening, and then to sillier combinations like spaghetti and toads, or falafel and snails. She and Hila laughing, their mother grinning. Uli doesn’t want to think about those days, just as she doesn’t want to keep seeing the image of Faraj and Prue, but they come at her like wasps.
Shit! The guard is at the exit, blocking the doors, shaking his head at her. She turns and aims for the Hoyt Street exit, but again he’s there, tapping a billy club against his shoe. She doesn’t know how he got there so fast. Her heart batters her ribs. Head down, she ducks behind a mannequin, and then runs, forgetting the one detail that can save her—drop the shorts. But it’s too late: He pulls up behind her and whispers, “Better not, sweetheart,” and marches her through the aisles. Shoppers stare. She’s dizzy with fear. His hand cups her elbow like an old-fashioned suitor. Desperate, she searches for a way out. Her eyes lift to the clock. It’s 4:50 p.m. Less than two hours to sundown, to the start of Yom Kippur.
The fluorescent lights flicker in the ceiling. The same song continues: sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, and she thinks, tarantulas in the morning, hornets in the evening.
“Please,” she says.
He tells her to keep quiet. They skirt carousels of clothing, clothing she wants to steal, even now, especially now. Then, through a set of swinging doors, down a dim corridor to a back room marked Personnel. It’s empty, a beige box. Even if she screams no one will hear. The only spot of color is the black telephone on the desk. There are two straight-backed chairs. The office is windowless, the air stale. She draws a breath, then another. Soon she’s gasping.
“Girly, you gotta calm down. You want a Coke?”
“Okay.” She hopes he’ll step out and leave the door open.
He tugs at the bottom drawer, pulls out a can, and pops the lid. “Bit warm, but it’s wet.” He takes a long gulp. “Sit.”
She settles on the edge of the seat. Her backpack on the floor beside her. He gives her the soda. She has no choice but to place her lips where his have been. The warm cola froths in her mouth. She almost gags. He removes his cap and sits opposite her, legs spread wide. A stringy ponytail at his neck. Forehead gleaming, he undoes his cuffs and rolls up his sleeves. His arms are ropey and veined.
“Drink up,” he says. She does as she’s told. “Now give me the shorts.”
She puts them on the desk.
“You got a lot to answer for. This isn’t your first offense. I let you slide last time, but I got you now.”
She closes her eyes.
“Hey.” He snaps his fingers. “You got something to say?”
She flinches, but keeps her eyes closed. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.”
“Damn straight. What’s your number? Gotta inform your folks.”
Now her eyes fly open. “Please don’t,” she whispers.
“What did you say?”
“It’s a holiday tonight. Please don’t call them.”
He looks at her suspiciously. “What holiday?”
“Yom Kippur.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
He rises to his feet, twists his head right then left. Bones crack in his neck, the sound like poppers hitting the pavement. “The one where you don’t eat. Atoning for sins.” She nods. “I like that. Seems fitting.”
He stands behind her, hands on her shoulders. A wall of heat rises off him. “If you’re lying…” His fingers sink into her flesh.
“No sir. I’m not. Yom Kippur starts at 6:42.”
“If I find out you are,” he lifts a hank of her hair, “you can forget calling your parents. I’ll call the cops, tell them you’re a repeat offender. They’ll throw your pretty ass in jail. Now go stand against the wall.”
Her legs barely hold her weight. She remembers the prayer for sleep and death, the notion that in moments of terror one wishes they were in a dream. She ought to pray, but the words escape her and already it’s too late; she’s reached the wall. He takes her photograph with a Polaroid camera. Holding her breath, she waits for the image to appear, half hoping it will be of someone else. I’m not here, she thinks. This isn’t me.
“See. This goes behind the door.” There are a dozen rows of snapshots of people caught shoplifting, most of them girls. “That’s the blacklist right there. Know what that means?”
She shakes her head.
“You’re banned from Macy’s. Exiled. Now turn around and face the wall.”
She pivots and hears the click of the camera again. He’s behind her. His breath warm on the crown of her head. She can’t stop shaking.
“I know what you are.” His voice is a silkworm, sifting through her hair, chewing through the last of her resolve. Her knees buckle. He’s so close the weight of him holds her up, flattens her against the wall.
“Please,” she says, unable to finish the sentence, the words cut off by the harsh sound of his zipper. He lifts her shirt, revealing the smooth line of her back. Something soft and fleshy brushes against her. Her body jerks.
“Hold still,” he hisses, then positions himself along the natural dip in her spine. He grabs hold of her shoulders and shudders. All the time he is moving, moving with increasing speed. He stretches her arms wide and pins them to the wall. Up and down, he rubs against her. The friction burns her skin. Her arms ache. She looks out the corner of her eye and sees their hands, knuckles and fingertips bloodless. The guard’s breath is quick. She squeezes her eyes shut. A gush of something hot and viscous on her back. When he’s done, he tugs her shirt down over the wet and zips his pants. And then, before she’s had the chance to turn around and face him, before her legs stop trembling, and the bile stops rising he says, “Now get the fuck out and don’t let me catch you here again.”
V
The bus hurtles down Flatbush Avenue. The sky is red, the streets a blur. At high speed, objects lose their shape. She twists the hem of the sage knit, tempted to tear it off, and realizes she’s left the backpack with her schoolbooks in that room. Her breath catches and she leans into the seat. The stain on her shirt spreads.
. . .
Soon, the holiday begins. She pictures her family in the temple. The cantor dressed in his white robe and Keppel, singing of sin and forgiveness, his golden voice filling the sanctuary. Aba moans. He can’t help it. He can’t forgive himself for surviving. He can’t forgive them for wanting him to. Ima seems almost petrified, her face smooth as stone, while Hila is a field of worry wondering where Uli is. Freddie’s in the same row, gazing at the eternal light that hangs over the bima. Finally, she imagines him thinking, he’s got everything he’s ever wanted—Prue, basketball, friends. His parents trust him again. He’s an American now. Prue’s laughter washes away everything he was, cleansing him of his foreignness, of his secret, of Eagle Pines, of Uli. The expression on her face in the rotunda, same as when he called her traitor. Something in him sours. He hears her crying his name Faraj, Faraj. Before anyone notices, he leads her out of the sanctuary into the park, behind the handball court. Babe, he says, expecting her to get on her knees for him. Instead, she cups his face and whispers, habibi.
. . .
Uli takes the bus to Belle Harbor and walks down hushed streets, past stately homes, soft-lit worlds with safety latches on doors and windows. At that hour the beach is empty and cast in stippled shadows. The waning sun lights the ocean and ignites the sky. She strips out of her clothes and tosses the green knit into the surf. The sand is cool under her feet. She dives into the soothing waters.
