Fire Year Read online

  I turned to Susan with an apologetic look but she just shrugged.

  Now he was moving, throwing his arms over his head and kicking wildly. He jumped, fell to his knees, and jumped again. He spun around and shook his ass. Someone had to save him from the silence of the room, and suddenly there came the terrible knowledge that it was going to be me. In high school I had succeeded at making myself invisible, most importantly here, in the lunchroom. Now I started clapping and stared straight ahead as everyone looked my way. An aeon passed before Susan joined me, and then someone else. “Tag!” a voice called out, and finally the room broke into laughter and applause.

  Our classmates’ delayed but genuine enthusiasm encouraged Tag to make an effort at a split that was hilarious in its failure. Maybe it was because he was more established in the world, maybe it was because he had gotten fucked on a sand dune the night before—whatever the reason, he was going at it with an even greater sense of liberation than he had shown in high school. No gay person acted this way, no drag queen knew these moves. Only a safely married ladies’ man like Tag could get away with a performance like this.

  But when I looked over at my brother I could see these nuances were lost on him. Within the narrow range of emotion his face allowed, he seemed amazed at the level of faggishness on display here in the lunchroom. I waited for the usual feeling to start inside me, the tightening up, the closing off of sympathy. But it didn’t come, and instead I just smiled at him, my brother, for I shared his amazement, and when I turned back to Tag I even let myself laugh a little.

  “Give it up for Tag Kingsley,” Ray announced, while Ramirez did something on the drums.

  Everyone applauded.

  “Tag Kingsley,” my brother said again, his lips right up against the microphone. He wasn’t smiling, of course, but a look of faint amusement appeared on his face and I wondered where this was heading. At one point he had introduced the members of the band but otherwise he hadn’t said anything until now. He had been content to do what he had done as a kid, watch silently, blackly.

  But he had, apparently, also been thinking. Some plot was taking shape. “Hey, great legs, Tag,” he said.

  I stood there wincing.

  “Ahooooooooo, werewolf of London,” Ray sang, accompanying himself on bass.

  And now I could see people turning to one another with a smile, a terrible one, nothing like the way they had been smiling at Tag. They had been laughing with Tag but now they were starting to laugh at my brother.

  “She’s got legs,” Ray sang. “She knows how to use them.”

  He was miscalculating. Of course, I had too. Basking in the band’s glow, I identified with them precisely because they were outsiders. But Ray believed he had become an insider. What else was this patter, these song quotes, but the same kind of crap he spewed at the gym and the sports bar? This was why he was so comfortable doing his lame roast of Tag Kingsley, who was, yes, making a fool of himself but who Ray didn’t seem to realize was still one of them.

  I pushed my way toward the stage.

  “Give it up for Tag Kingsley,” my brother said. “Or is that his sister, Tag Queensley?”

  No one laughed. All Ray had to do was launch into a song, something untopical and fun, like “China Grove,” a song he could do in his sleep. Everyone would forget about the grotesque little pep rally and start dancing again. My brother would be saved. I just had to make a request.

  But I didn’t get there fast enough.

  “She was a gay stripper,” he sang. “Gay stripper, yeah. It took me soooooooo long to find out.”

  It was rushing through me, pumping up out of me, all the feeling I had never been able to summon for Ray. Unnatural brother no more! Now I was at the front of the pit, a step below the stage. I jumped up and threw my arms around him in one movement. I held on to his waist and he stumbled backward, right into the drums.

  He got up and I caught him again, this time around his upper body. He felt so solid and strong. He freed his arms and I felt a hot quick jab to my neck. All the air in my body seemed to fly out of my mouth and I staggered backward, expecting any second to fall into the pit. He grabbed my shirt collar and yanked me toward him, either to save me from breaking my neck or to take advantage of my stumble.

  I was tired of this kind of ambiguity in our relationship.

  I knocked away his hands and righted myself. He tried to punch me in the stomach but I twisted out of the way. He had lost his footing and I managed to lock my arms around his head. I was bigger than he was, I could wrestle him down to the stage.

  It was his athlete-at-peak-performance look, that’s what I saw in Ray’s eyes, and suddenly I was scared of him. How far would he go? No referee was going to cite illegal moves, neither his nor mine. No one seemed to be coming to break us apart. My brother tried to pry me off but I didn’t dare let go. He pivoted and kicked me behind my knee—he was going for every soft spot I had—and my legs buckled. But I kept my arms wrapped tightly around him.

  All the World’s a Field

  They were moving and the cow wasn’t coming with them.

  Miriam’s son Shmuel referred to the cow in Yiddish, though he and his brother had stopped speaking and understanding the language two and a half years ago. That had been at Chanukah. Miriam had pointed out to Izzy, her oldest grandson, that the wagon he had just freed from its box, a present from her, looked so much like the wagons loaded with hay that used to pass through her village in the summer. She was speaking to her grandson, not to her sons, but they both turned to her and glared. It had been a plan, prearranged. “From now on we don’t speak Yiddish in this house,” Shmuel, who called himself Sam, said. “I know you understand what we’re saying, you’ve lived here long enough,” his brother, Moishe, who called himself Moe, chimed in. He lived next door. “My kids grow up speaking English exclusively, is that understood?” Shmuel said. Moishe nodded, seconding his brother. The wives regarded her from slyly lowered lids, their mouths two lines. Izzy played with his wagon. He didn’t care what language was spoken in the house, as long as it came from the heart. Miriam leaned over and mussed his hair. “Shainkeit,” she said, stroking the golden down on his head. Beauty. Shmuel pointed a finger at her heart and said, “I mean it.”

  And so he had. At first when Miriam spoke to him in Yiddish Shmuel answered in English. Then he just made a face at her. Then he stopped turning his head, refusing to acknowledge that she was speaking, making sound, opening her mouth. That she was even there. Yet the punishment of being ignored she had not found so punishing. The inevitable threat to keep her from the grandchildren had not materialized, because, after all, she lived in the same house as two of them and next door to the other three. Also, no one could deny she had eventually complied—she no longer spoke Yiddish to the grandchildren or to anyone else in the house. Nor did she speak any other language—she had not learned English and did not intend to, though she understood everything she needed to understand. She understood all too well. Shmuel thought she was angry, but she was not. She lived in a peaceful silence with her memories of Nur and her cow.

  She believed Shmuel held against her the failure of his strategy. And because it was his fault, his failure, she knew he would never forgive her. She had had a husband once, a shoemaker but a scholar at heart. How proud she had been of him, how happy lying in his arms as the words tumbled from his racing brain. The rabbi led a study group Shabbes afternoons, and when Tsvi came home he filled her with questions, ostensibly of a legal nature but truly little stories. “If I find two coins stacked by the side of the road, are they mine?” he once asked her, and she could see her Tsvi coming down some country lane with that rich man’s swagger of his, the faraway look in his blue eyes, the shine on his golden ear curls. He asked this question and actually waited to hear what she would say. As always she had to come up with something, some nonsensical guess, before he would reveal the answer, which led always to another question. What she learned from all this, besides the excellence
of her husband, was that not only every word but also every letter counted—this, as far as she could tell, was what all the Bible verses and commentaries boiled down to. And now her son Shmuel, who had not taken so much after his father, was paying the price for his carelessness. He had issued his tsar’s edict that Yiddish not be spoken in the house, he had conscripted his children into the American language, but at no point did he decree she speak English herself. Perhaps he had assumed she would.

  Miriam believed he would no longer recognize his own mother’s voice in the unlikely event she should find it again.

  She was certainly in no danger of forgetting her son’s voice. We’re moving and the behayma isn’t coming with us. Behayma—the beast, also said of people, incomprehensibly, as if comparing someone to an animal meant the person was stupid. Her son, avowed enemy of Yiddish, had said to her one word in Yiddish. When he wanted her to understand, this was the language that came out.

  And in what language was she permitted to deliver her response?

  Redness spread like a tide across Shmuel’s face. He hitched his thumbs into his pants.

  “Well?” he asked.

  Madwoman, mute, Miriam moved between the rows of wooden bungalows in the bluing light. Her pail swung from one arm and her little stool from the other. The ground was sandy beneath her feet—there were no paving stones here, or grass, just acorns and burrs and a swordlike weed, and fat roots bubbling out of the ground. It was an exciting and paradoxical time of day. As things in the world resolved, gaining authority, they also seemed to lose it. They broke apart. They shifted from place to place. Clotheslines, jutting palmetto frond, tricycle overturned in the sand, unidentifiable thing by the side of a house—look again and they were not where they had been. Chickens peered out at her from their coops, softly clucking, like the engine of the world warming up. Gulls whistled, and from the main road two blocks away the deliverymen were heard making their rounds.

  The houses ended at a fenced-in lot with a few patches of grass. It was light enough to see the cow looking in her direction, as it always did. She would not say the cow was smiling but obviously it was happy to see her. Its dark liquid eyes did not project the melancholy look of cows at all. You could sense its anticipation. It had intelligence. Of course it knew what she had come to do—but there was something more. Occasionally its ears flicked forward like the stroke of a paddle, it took a step to find fresh grass, but otherwise it did not move and in its solidity and stillness it projected a definite self-consciousness. It knew her, it knew itself. It was a black cow with a white belly, and as the light went from blue to gray to yellow, as the world took on a scratchy appearance, ready to snap into itself or dissolve, the cow seemed to stand apart, unchanging. It existed in a realm out of time and place, and she remembered Tsvi talking this way about God.

  She sat and stroked the cow’s bristly hair, she pressed her nose into its side and smelled its warm sweetness. Her family believed she had an unhealthy attachment to this beast. This was not true. She alone in the family had a country girl’s attitude toward animals. She cut chickens’ throats, singed off their pinfeathers. She koshered meat, rubbing it with salt and patiently watching the blood drip into the pan as the children ran screaming out of the kitchen and her daughter-in-law looked on with distaste. Her sons were away at the shoeshop during the day, they never witnessed this supposed carnage, and perhaps when their wives told them in bed of her old-world savagery (which incidentally had enabled them to eat their dinner), her boys did not recall that they had witnessed the same things when they were growing up, before she had sent them with their uncle to America.

  She could have been a slaughterer. And even with this cow she limited her affections. When she was fresh off the boat, when she was still a novelty in America and her family indulged her, they happily complied with her desire for a cow. Actually, they had to do nothing at all except reap the profits—the wonderful fresh milk on the table, the extra money from her delivery rounds. She had not even expected them to help her procure the cow. She could see right away that here in Savannah, Georgia, her sons had become city people. And so she had Mr. Shankman from the Workman’s Circle take her out to the country.

  She chose this one immediately, she felt a certain connection—and yet she did not name it or even think of it as a she most of the time. In Nur Miriam was friends with a peasant girl whose family kept pigs. She only named the runt of each litter, and this piglet she would make her pet, nursing it with a bottle, fattening it up, but not shedding a tear when the time came for it to be killed. Miriam had found this behavior cold but somehow admirable. She herself did not think she would be able to part so easily with an animal she had named.

  The cow, impatient, stamped its front legs. Miriam laughed. The cow whimpered. She laughed again and set to work. She hadn’t named her cow and so parting with it would not be so hard. But she did not intend to part with it. Where they were moving was a mystery—there was an outing scheduled this weekend to see the house—but surely something could be arranged. Mainly on their wives’ urging, she felt, her sons were not happy living in this neighborhood of poor Jews, Yiddish squawkers every one of them. But Miriam herself did not find the situation ideal. She had to walk ten minutes to see her cow, who for its part had to stand in its humble lot lonely and unwatched most of the day.

  “It’s a wonderful house,” said Shmuel’s wife, Dora, washing something at the sink. “It’s a double house, really, with white columns in front in the plantation style. You are going to love it when you see it.”

  The goose in Miriam’s lap had stopped struggling. It was swaddled in her apron and with her left hand Miriam held open its beak. There was a bowl of mashed corn on the table and Miriam dropped a bit into the goose’s mouth, then pushed the paste down. Other women used some kind of object, a spoon maybe, but Miriam would not do something like this to a poor bird, in such an awkward position to begin with. Wrapped in a bit of shmatte, her finger plunged again and again. Under such circumstances the goose could not quite manage to bite. Miriam was quick—in two seconds the corn was gone and the goose ready for more.

  Her grandsons peeked in from the doorway, pretending they were not there, but nevertheless responding to Miriam’s beckoning finger, wrapped in its dirty rag, by shaking their heads.

  “You’ll see it on Sunday,” Dora was saying. “It’s so big there’s a room for you on both sides.”

  So this had something to do with it—back and forth between the half houses she would bounce like a ball.

  “The finer families are all moving out there.” Dora brought a dripping colander of green beans to the table and began stringing them onto newspaper. “The Gutentags just bought a house on the same block. We ourselves have always brought up the children to treat everyone alike, but it’s what they hear at school—”

  Miriam looked at her and nodded.

  “And more than once the other kids have taunted my children,” Dora went on. “You must admit there are colored families living not two blocks away.”

  So now Miriam understood. But look! There was Izzy sneaking across the kitchen. Miriam looked down at the goose and tried not to smile. Dora turned in his direction and said, “Honey, go out and play.”

  He froze, hoping this would restore his invisibility, but Dora did not turn away. She pointed a bean at him. “I don’t want you touching that nasty goose.”

  That they were going to eat and enjoy one day very soon, Miriam would have liked to explain to her grandson. But she sensed he understood.

  Now Izzy was standing alongside Dora. His younger brother, Ike, seemed to have taken a step or two into the room.

  “I want to feed the bird,” Izzy said bravely.

  “This is your grandmother’s job,” Dora said, frowning. “Your father has a weakness for goose.”

  Miriam smiled at Izzy, the terror leaching from his face.

  “I don’t know why you encourage him,” Dora said. “Oh, I guess it’s not your fault,” she
quickly put in, and Miriam wondered how she could have possibly given the impression of being offended by anything her silly daughter-in-law had said.

  “This is why Sam and I decided to move, and Moe and Evelyn agree. Everyone has a menagerie around here,” Dora continued. “It’s just the way people live. I don’t think it’s a healthful environment for children at all.”

  Izzy held a bit of corn between two fingers.

  “Just be careful,” Dora said.

  Miriam pried the goose’s beak open and nodded to Izzy to go. He looked straight down its throat and dropped in the corn. Miriam laughed. He flinched but stood his ground. He looked down at his fingers, and when he saw they were still there he reached into the bowl and said, “Another.”

  “All right, one more,” Dora said, “then I want you and your brother”—who was on the advance—“to go out and play.”

  The goose kicked and first Izzy and then little Ike screamed and fled from the kitchen. Miriam pressed down what was in the goose’s mouth and pushed aside the bowl, which was almost empty anyway. She wrapped both arms around the hot goose in her lap and smiled sympathetically at her daughter-in-law, who turned away. Dora looked hard at the green bean in her hand and tore off the string.

  With the life she had lived Miriam thought she was prepared for anything, but as the motorcar approached the house she saw she was wrong. In the infernal machine they had moved bumpily through the city, past the grand rowhouses on their brick and cobblestone streets downtown, through the beautiful squares, one after another. South, south, past the park, past the end of the trolley tracks, where who knew anyone even lived. But the pineforest had been cut away here and the streets had numbers and not names, and as they turned down Thirty-seventh Street she recognized the house from Dora’s description. It was a great yellow wooden house with four fluted white columns supported on square bases; there was a wide porch with a balustrade and two screened front doors right next to each other. But the house disappeared from her awareness when the car stopped and a green field in back was revealed. This was a cow pasture, bigger than the lot in which her cow currently lived, and she felt as if a knife had been plunged into her heart.