Gigantic
They say the Baal Shem Tov visited Slutsk in the year 1733, or perhaps 1734. According to legend, he came at the behest of Shmuel Ickowicz and his younger brother Gdal, wealthy leaseholders who’d recently moved south from the town of Biała Podlaska to deepen their coffers and expand their influence. Why the Bal Shem Tov—the Besht—would concede to such a visit, why he would feel the need to advise a pair of ruthless social climbers who regularly fleeced their fellow Jews, isn’t clear. Perhaps he hoped to steer them from material aims toward spiritual ones. If so, he wasn’t successful. In the following years, the Ickowicz brothers only increased their profits and their cruelty. They leased more land, developed a trading network to rival that of the Polish court, secured a rabbinate for a cousin in Krakow. Though hated, the brothers were considered royalty by their people and served as a source of grudging pride for the citizens of Slutsk, who naturally felt inferior to their brethren in the much larger city of Minsk, fifty miles to the north. But all this came to an end in 1745, when the brothers’ success angered a gentile landowner who ordered Shmuel arrested for corruption. He died in prison two years later, and Gdal lived out his remaining years in exile in Prussia.
More than likely, Israel ben Eliezer—as the Besht was known during his lifetime—never actually set foot in Slutsk, and tellers of Hasidic tales simply used the notorious Ickowicz brothers as a moral caution. Or else the Ickowicz brothers themselves invented the episode to ingratiate themselves in the community. In either case, the story of the Besht’s visit stuck. But instead of attracting residents to his nascent mystical Hasidic movement, it brought the attention of the Gaon of Vilna, a revered Talmudist and strict follower of tradition, who, determined to crush what he deemed a new heretical sect, wrote numerous tracts condemning the Besht and his teachings, comparing him to other false messiahs like Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Joseph Frank. In order to fend off Hasidic encroachment from its roots in the backwoods of Ukraine into what was then part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Gaon supported the construction of a new Kalte Shul, or Great Synagogue, in the heart of Slutsk. It was built in the four-pillared Baroque style of the time, with masonry walls and barrel-vaulted bays, a main sanctuary for men with room for two hundred, and an additional hundred in the women’s gallery above.
And that’s where Janet Edelman’s family worshipped for nearly 150 years, until her great-grandfather and two of his four older brothers packed a single trunk between them, traveled by wagon to Hamburg, and boarded a steamer for New York. The Edelmans of Slutsk were observant and obedient people with little imagination. They prayed three times a day, said blessings before and after every meal, celebrated the holy days and consulted their rabbi about legal and family matters. In the Kalte Shul, they practiced their faith but did not contemplate it. They were a staid, sober bunch, and so they remained in America, most building quiet but successful careers in business, medicine, law. Several made names for themselves in the sciences—including a faculty member at MIT—and a few worked in government. Those relatives who’d stayed behind might have lived equally productive lives if most weren’t murdered over a two-day period in October of 1941, following Operation Barbarossa and the German incursion into Byelorussia.
If there were a strain of adventurousness in the family, Janet might have traced it to her great-grandfather and his brothers, given their willingness to abandon their parents and cross an ocean without any clear sense of what awaited them on the other side. But what they sought was far more practical than mystical. What her great-grandfather was looking for was prosperity, and what he found instead was two decades of factory labor and an early death. Once disembarked, he never showed any further signs of audacity. He married, fathered six children, brought them to shul every week. His offspring and their cousins moved from lower Manhattan to Brooklyn, and their children scattered to the suburbs. They drifted from strict adherence to Jewish ritual to a watered-down observance of High Holidays, along with elaborate bar and bat mitzvah celebrations for their own kids.
If any new religious passion replaced the former orthodoxy, it came out only in a rivalry between the Long Island Edelmans who supported the Yankees and the Connecticut branch who rooted for the Red Sox. Janet’s own small New Jersey clan celebrated ecstatically when the Mets won the World Series in 1986 and then waited in mute anticipation for the next time glory would shine upon them.
So, what accounts for Janet’s sudden and intense spiritual yearning? Had the Baal Shem Tov visited her ancestral home after all, planting a mystical seed that waited nearly three hundred years to bloom in accommodating soil?
As a girl, Janet didn’t care any more about Hebrew school or Friday night services than any of her cousins. During a six-week summer trip to Israel as a teenager, she was more interested in dance clubs where she could drink gin and tonics and flirt with dark-eyed soldiers than in visits to ruins once inhabited by zealots or tales of the Rashbi composing the Zohar in a dusty cave while hiding from the Romans. In college, she experimented with mushrooms and mescaline but only to enjoy the light trails from a friend’s cigarette. In her twenties, she attended yoga classes but only to keep her body limber. She had no interest in meditation except as preparation to stretch. She worked in an office, managing a technology group for a large investment firm, and after a day in front of computer screens, the muscles in her shoulders and neck often cramped. She used breathing exercises to keep herself from clenching and coming home with knots in her back; in bed with her boyfriend Mark—later her husband—the same exercises helped her achieve orgasm, something with which she otherwise struggled.
Throughout this time, she was content with her life’s goals, which were similar to those pursued by other family members: love, children, financial security, regular tropical vacations. By age thirty-five, when the second of her two sons was born, she’d achieved all of these things. And in the years that followed she didn’t suffer any blows that might have caused her to question her values and desires. Her boys were healthy, her marriage stable, her retirement portfolio diverse and steadily growing. Any setbacks she suffered were minor or expected. The death of a parent following a long illness. Her firm’s merger with a larger one that meant a brief subordination to an unworthy male colleague. But soon enough, she recovered from these jolts and regained her footing. At times, like most people, she felt herself grinding into a rut, becoming bored or impatient, but she dealt with such moments by taking up a hobby—kayaking, for instance, or remodeling her kitchen.
The change came about with no warning, nor any specific trigger, except perhaps age and a growing recognition of mortality. She was forty-seven years old, healthy and fit and still attractive, though she’d always felt her chin was too narrow, her nose taking up too much room on her face. She’d recently dyed her hair back to its natural color for the first time in more than a decade. Her older son was in high school, her younger starting seventh grade; Mark, just two years her senior, had mapped out a plan to early retirement before either of them turned sixty. She had no particular reason to fret about the future, aside from a generalized anxiety sparked by reading the news, but the future began to seem increasingly murky, not just rife with uncertainty as it always had been, but empty, a big black hole into which she was flinging herself willingly, when she might just as easily have filled it with light. She’d listen to her younger son practicing for his bar mitzvah, chanting the ancient words of the Old Testament prophets in his haftorah portion, words whose meanings she’d never bothered to learn, and find herself on the edge of tears. She’d always believed in some version of God, or at least the presence of a divine will that may or may not have had any interest in the lives of human beings. Only now did it occur to her to ponder the nature of this divinity or search for signs of it in the world.
And it didn’t take long for her to spy those signs everywhere. She might be driving home from work, for example, stuck in traffic on Route 46 and listening to music she’d downloaded onto her phone, music that made her nostalgic for earlier times in her life. Today it was the Pixies’ first album, which she’d played obsessively the summer—nearly thirty years ago!—between her sophomore and junior years of college. She’d been taking extra classes to make up for a coming semester abroad, working in the library and sharing an Amherst apartment with two boys, both of whom, she knew, wanted to sleep with her. She’d walk around the apartment in her underwear, listening to Kim Deal shout about a big, big love, and feel her power over those boys she’d never let into her bed. And as she recalled the thrill she’d experience brushing past one or the other, letting her hip scrape against his backside as she reached for a box of cereal in a high kitchen cabinet, she had the odd sensation of time collapsing, as if that Amherst summer had just ended, and she was listening to the Pixies as she drove home to her parents’ house for two weeks before her semester in Galway. Or else time was just lining up in a new way, so she could see each moment stacked behind the next, and it extended far past her in either direction, like the posts on guardrails on either side of the highway, a pattern she could glimpse only for a moment until the song ended. When the next song began—Black Francis shrieking about riding a tiger down the Euphrates—she was left with a sense that something had just slipped through her grasp, something she would now long for daily even though she’d never known she needed it before.
It took a number of these episodes—which she first believed might have been the early onset of menopause, a possibility that came with a mixture of shock and sadness and surprising relief—before Janet decided to pursue any conscious exploration. One afternoon, after her son’s private lesson, she asked for a moment of the rabbi’s time. She was already paying him fifty dollars an hour, and he spent at least a quarter of each talking to the boy about baseball, so she wasn’t chagrined to ask for a consultation. He was a new rabbi, younger than she was but already balding, and he looked at her with what she thought were slightly lascivious eyes, his gaze settling too often on the rounded top of her knee or the space where her blouse bunched and revealed a gap between buttons. His office was small but tidy, and the shelves behind him drew her attention with their tightly packed black spines and gold lettering, especially the older leather-bound volumes whose Hebrew titles she couldn’t decipher, their deep creases appearing like veins of ore, she thought, where they’d been opened hundreds of times.
Without asking what she wanted to discuss, the rabbi began by saying that her son was coming along just fine; he may sound a little shaky at this point, but he’d be ready for his big day, he just needed to practice more consistently, and really there wasn’t much he could do about that, it was up to her to enforce discipline. His voice was nervous and defensive, and because the longer he spoke the less he ogled her legs, she let him go on rather than redirect.
Only after he finished and took a breath did she say she was perfectly happy with the lessons and that her reasons for seeking counsel concerned her own needs rather than her son’s. At this, the rabbi sat up straight, and once again his gaze drifted to the hem of her skirt. She waited a beat, feeling foolish, debating whether to change her mind and keep her thoughts to herself. But the pull of those old books behind the rabbi was too strong, the musty scent of their pages she thought she could smell even from the opposite side of his desk. She cleared her throat, folded both hands on her knee, and said she was interested in learning about the Kabbalah. Could he point her to some useful introductory texts? Or perhaps some good videos online? She’d searched YouTube, but most of what she pulled up was amateurish garbage, and you wouldn’t believe the antisemitic rants in the comments . . .
By the time her voice trailed off, the rabbi had settled back in his chair, with his hands clasped atop his yarmulke. The exposed patches of scalp beneath his thinning hair seemed too intimate, almost lewd. Even before he spoke, she anticipated the condescending tone. People thought learning Kabbalah was something you could just dabble in, he said, but it took extensive inquiry, and most scholars believed you first needed to study Torah and Talmud for twenty years before approaching its esoteric side. It had become a trendy sideshow of Judaism, referenced by pop stars on social media—but really she should start with the basics, and if she was interested in learning, he led an adult Torah discussion group every Tuesday evening. He’d love to have her join them; it was mostly a bunch of old codgers, and a dose of younger energy would do them all some good.
Afterward, she didn’t remember if she thanked him on her way out. She was still shaking with anger by the time she made it home. Her son recognized her look well enough to know he should stay quiet during the ride. So did Mark, who ordered takeout Thai for dinner. Twenty years of study. Who had that long? The idea that the rabbi would compare her to pop singers whose music she’d always found frivolous and forgettable was maddening. She was no dilettante, though she suspected he thought of all women as unserious and whimsical. There was a reason he’d married a doughy housefrau who wore fifties-style wrap dresses to services. But Janet didn’t want easy answers or watered-down new age dreaminess, only immediate and full immersion in mystery and complicated truths.
While her family slept, she took a glass of wine onto the back deck and stared across the lawn to the dark hedges beyond. There was no breeze that she could feel—it was mid-August and muggy—but as her eyes adjusted to the light from streetlamps, a quarter moon, and a handful of stars, she detected movement in the dense leaves, a little rustling that might have been birds, or squirrels, or perhaps a raccoon. But it seemed to her that the source was none of these things, nothing she could actually see or touch or even explain, just a rustling that went on beneath the surface of everything around her, always, except only now was she able or willing to notice.
She checked out books on Jewish mysticism from the local library, and when she finished with those, more from the central county branch. But she found the books either too simplistic or too dense, and her attention quickly drifted. The only one to engage her deeply was a primer on the history of the Kabbalah—which lingered for some time on the possibility of transcendence for husbands who please their wives in bed—and particularly the chapter chronicling the controversy surrounding the origins of the Zohar. She learned that it was first published in Spain in the thirteenth century by Moses de León, the Moshe ben Shem-Tov, who claimed it had been written by Shimon bar Yochai during the Roman wars. But there were certain anachronisms in the text, along with strange Aramaic phrasing, which made some scholars believe that León, not Yochai, was the true author. An apocryphal story suggested that León’s widow, not long after his death, confessed that her husband had ascribed the book to bar Yochai to generate interest and increase sales. The entire book may have been a fraud from the start.
Janet was equally fascinated and appalled by the possibility, and she wondered if she’d find Buddhism or Sufism less fraught. But her sense of loyalty to her family and heritage was too strong to seek answers elsewhere; to go to a Buddhist temple would be like rooting for the Yankees, and she quickly imagined the horrified faces of her father, her husband, her sons were she to don a pinstripe jersey at a holiday meal. But she needed community and guidance, and once again she found herself listening to “Surfer Rosa” at a volume just shy of painful while raging about their young rabbi who’d so casually dismissed her as a dimwitted dabbler.
Eventually, after extensive searching online, she discovered a small institution called the Jewish Center for Inner Truth, whose approach combined traditional Judaic study with meditation, psychology, and body movement. The Center’s website was out of date and hard to navigate but included a phone number at the bottom of its home page. When Janet called, a voice answered on the first ring, sounding so scratchy and distant that at first, she thought it must be a recording on an old answering machine. But it was live, a woman’s voice, not cheerful but not unfriendly either. The woman provided Janet the information she asked for: the center’s address, the schedule of weekly services—“sessions,” the voice said—and the requested donation amount for prospective members.
She left work early on Tuesday and sat in traffic on the west slope of the Pulaski Skyway and again at the tolls for the Holland Tunnel. On the way, she’d pulled into a rest area and changed out of her work outfit into yoga attire as the voice on the phone had directed. The center was located in lower Manhattan, not far from the spot where her great-grandparents had raised their young children in a tenement demolished long ago. When she arrived, the street was busy. The address typed into her phone brought her to a narrow old building pressed on either side by newer glass and steel boxes, its ground floor constructed with square stones, brick above, a bay window with a balcony on the third floor, two tiny turrets on either side of a dormered roof. It was a building you could pass a thousand times without noticing, but just like the rustling in the hedges, once you spotted it, she thought, you wanted to keep it in sight forever.
She hadn’t told her assistant why she was taking the day off; she was senior enough in her firm that she didn’t need to explain her absence to anyone. To Mark, she said she had a late meeting, that he could take the boys out for pizza if he didn’t feel like firing up the grill. No one in the entire world knew where she was.
The neighborhood hadn’t been Jewish for more than half a century, and instead of Hebrew letters, most of the nearby stores displayed Korean characters above their entrances. The building itself had no signage, only a directory inside the front doors telling her to walk up to Suite 401. She met no one coming up or down the stairs, whose stones had been worn away in the middle, leaving a dip that made her ankles, even in running shoes, buckle more than once. As she rose, she thought she heard voices from above, maybe singing, maybe just humming a tune. It was quiet, however, by the time she opened the suite door and stepped into a room whose ceiling slanted at an angle that forced her to duck her head and bend her knees. The papery voice from the phone welcomed her. Janet was astonished to see that it belonged to a woman in her early twenties, with hair cropped close on the sides and dangling stylishly in front of one eye. A poster hanging on the wall behind her featured a drawing that looked something like a tree but also like a molecular diagram, branches connecting circles with Hebrew words inside. Janet found herself stuttering as she explained that they’d spoken on the phone, that she was here to try out this afternoon’s service—“session,” the young woman corrected—and that she wasn’t sure she’d attend more than one, but that she’d brought a donation that would cover a longer term if she found it was a good fit.
She handed over a check, and the young woman—who, to Janet’s continued surprise, had numerous abstract tattoos on both arms, in violation of the Jewish prohibition with which her parents had admonished her when she’d had one etched on and later removed from her left ankle—inspected it closely, folded it, and slipped it somewhere beneath the surface of her desk. “Follow me,” she said in the voice that still sounded far away and recorded on outdated equipment, and she led Janet through a series of short hallways between closed doors. Janet thought she heard at least one creak open behind her, but when she glanced behind she saw nothing.
The young woman, too, was dressed in yoga clothes, though tighter than Janet’s, showing off her slimmer waist and flatter buttocks, and when they emerged into an open space where the roof peaked and the ceiling rose high above them, she immediately started rolling her shoulders and bending her neck from side to side, as if she’d been ducking beneath the dormer for hours. From a bin beside the door, she plucked a polyester yarmulke, which she propped on her spiky hair, and from an adjacent rack, a tallis, which she draped over her shoulders like a stole. Then she gestured for Janet to do the same. The room had a polished wooden floor scattered with yoga mats and nothing else. No adornments on the wall, only a stained-glass window that let in purple-tinted light, and a small egg-shaped lamp hanging from a ceiling beam by a long chain, an electric bulb inside made to flicker like a candle. There was no one else present, and Janet asked the young woman if she was early, even though she knew she was exactly on time.
They didn’t need a minyan, for inner truth, the young woman told her, or else she said that Janet would find the minyan inside her. It was difficult to comprehend the young woman, with that brittle voice that seemed to grow wispier with each word she spoke and to come from farther away. But she understood when the young woman gestured for her to sit on one of the mats, to take a few minutes to get settled, to loosen up and breathe and quiet her mind. The young woman, meanwhile, cycled through a series of rapid aerobic exercises—jumping jacks, knee lifts, burpees—followed by five hasty push-ups. Then she guided Janet through several long stretches, sometimes coming over to adjust an arm or a leg, her touch gentle and intimate but fleeting. Occasionally she’d add pressure to ease Janet deeper into a bend. She whispered as she did so, but Janet couldn’t make out the words. Understanding them didn’t seem necessary in any case, just letting their rhythms drum across her as she leaned forward against the pull of her hamstrings and felt a soft pop in her hips.
The young woman closed Janet’s eyes with her fingertips. “What you’re looking for,” the voice said, clearly now, and directly in her ear. “Visualize it. An image of your desire.”
For a moment Janet didn’t know what she meant, or else she didn’t know what she was looking for, and said so, but the young woman shushed her, harshly, with a dry hand over her mouth.
“Just picture,” the young woman said.
A rustling sounded in one corner of the room and went quiet. And then Janet did picture. It wasn’t so difficult, because a part of her had an inkling of what she wanted when she’d decided a connection with God—or the mystical or the spirit world or the divine within herself, whatever it was she couldn’t easily reach out and touch—was something she needed. What she saw when prompted was her small life, her aging body, being enveloped, embraced on all sides by something warm and soft like flesh or fur or feathers, so that the vastness that surrounded her in the open studio—sanctuary?—and beyond, was suddenly filled with presence, if not tangible then at least as close as faith or imagination—was there any difference?—would allow. The young woman was whispering again, louder now, and indeed the words were in a language Janet didn’t understand—perhaps Hebrew, or Aramaic, or some combination that had been lost to her family many years ago.
Instinct told her to resist these words, as the rest of her relatives would have, the ones who rooted for the Yankees and the Red Sox, the ones who’d sat dutifully beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Kalte Shul so long ago, practicing their faith without doubt or longing or any need to delve into mysteries beyond those laid out plainly in Torah and Talmud. They would have shied away from the Baal Shem Tov, that Ukrainian mystic, if he really had visited Slutsk as the old story claimed. So why should she turn to him now, with her ears attuned to words she couldn’t comprehend, to what lay beyond utterances in a realm of pure sensation? She’d fight these words and images off, maintain her distance, and live out the rest of her years with the quiet dignity and resignation of those who’d come before her.
Except now she found herself breathing in a deliberate pattern similar to the one she’d used in bed with Mark for the past two decades, and she experienced a similar flush, too, first in her neck, and then spreading downward through her chest. Though instead of her husband inside her, she felt something at once vaster and more diffuse, filling up all the spaces between her organs, or maybe between her cells. And what she envisioned then was the Atlantic Ocean her great-grandfather had crossed at nineteen years old—the same age she’d been when she’d shared an Amherst apartment with two frustrated boys—the dark water as he and his brothers might have seen it from the railing of an overcrowded ship, when there was nothing else to gaze at but the flat horizon and the roll of gentle waves stretching without end in all directions.
Generations of Edelmans stood with their backs to that ocean, trying to block her view. But now she couldn’t take her eyes from the pulsing water. She pushed through the crowd until there was nothing between her and the whitecaps where a hand beckoned and then removed a fur cap in anticipation of her arrival. Except when she drew closer, it was no longer a cap but a fin above flashing scales. A pair of words reached her in English, words she might have encountered in the books she’d checked out from the library, though the context was now lost to her, and whether they meant anything in tandem she didn’t know: supernal, delight.
Then she was beneath the horizon line of the sea, and the water—only it didn’t feel like water—covered her mouth, her nose, her eyes. It crept between her legs, it tingled her skin with warmth or cold—she couldn’t sense the difference—and she no longer needed to maintain her breathing to reach climax, because she was in the middle already, she had become climax and nothing else, and she wanted it to stop before it shook her cells loose from each other and sent them flying in all directions.
She understood now why her great-grandfather was done with adventure after that one journey across the ocean; it was enough for an entire lifetime, and so was this, if she could survive it. Afterward, she’d no longer need a thing.
How long she remained in this state—what state was it, exactly? bliss? terror?—she couldn’t have said. But when her senses returned, the young woman’s voice had gone silent. She opened her eyes, and no tattoos or spiky hair hovered above her. She was alone in the room, flat on her back on the yoga mat, now damp with sweat, her arms and legs spread wide. Or maybe not alone: when she raised her head, she thought she spied a figure in a corner—stoop shouldered and long bearded—duck quickly behind a partition and out of sight. Above her, the little egg-shaped lamp flickered, and the purple-tinted light through the window had dimmed. She found the young woman waiting for her outside the studio, and without a word, the latter led Janet back through the series of short hallways, for which she was grateful; she didn’t think she could have found her way out on her own. Her legs felt wobbly, and when she stumbled over a raised threshold, the young woman put out a tattooed arm to steady her.
When they reached the front desk, the young woman handed Janet a paper cup filled with water—cucumber flavored—which Janet drank in a single gulp. Janet thanked her, said it was an enlightening experience. She’d consider returning, she said, she’d have to think about it and consult her schedule, though she suspected she never would. But she was already writing out another donation check and sliding it across the desk. The young woman wished her a good Shabbos, and for a moment Janet worried that days had passed while she was on the yoga mat, that she’d stayed all the way to Friday, though when she checked her watch, she was relieved to see it was still Tuesday. Several hours had gone by, however, and it was dark by the time she reached her car, jammed between two others and blocked from leaving by a double-parked Prius on the same street where her great-grandfather had lived more than a hundred years earlier.
It was late by the time she got home. Mark and the boys were watching baseball, a game that had gone into extra innings. Too late for a school night, but she was too worn out—too something, though not quite sleepy—to object. On the kitchen table was a mostly empty pizza box, and beside it the day’s mail, a mix of bills and catalogs and a brochure for a Caribbean resort she’d been considering for their next family vacation. She kissed all three of the boys—her older son’s scruff nearly as scratchy as Mark’s—excused herself and went upstairs to her office. There she gathered up all the library books she’d accumulated and put them in bags to return on her way to work in the morning.
She didn’t plan to open them again—after today, she no longer needed, no longer wanted, any mysteries they might pose, any answers they might offer—but then found herself paging through the Kabbalah primer once more, pausing at the chapter detailing the origins of the Zohar. On facing pages were paintings of Shimon bar Yochai, the Rashbi, and the Spanish rabbi Moshe ben Shem-Tov. The former held a scroll at the mouth of a cave, the latter gazed out from a mysterious grid of lines connecting Hebrew letters. Neither portrait had been made from life, both rendered from an artist’s imagination. She hadn’t managed to read much of the Zohar’s actual text, and what she had read she didn’t retain, so whether or not the Spaniard had attributed it to an ancient sage to sell books was all the same to her. Did it really matter, in any case, if some words were fraudulent, so long as people believed them or felt them vibrating beneath their skin?
What she found most mysterious right now was the number she’d written on the second check she’d slipped the young woman, a much larger figure than she’d intended. She closed the Kabbalah primer and stuffed it into a bag with the other books. The office window was open, and she strained to hear anything moving, anything in the hedges, or beyond the screen. Instead, from the hallway, Mark asked with a familiar inflection indicating desire—everyday earthly desire—if she was coming to bed. If she responded by saying she had a few things to take care of, then needed to shower, he’d understand she wasn’t interested tonight.
That her family had always made do with what they could easily see and touch and hear, leaving it to others to explain those things they couldn’t, now struck her as a perfectly reasonable defense, warding off any experience that might prove too overwhelming to withstand. If any of her ancestors had heard the Besht hailing them, either in person or in spirit, they’d wisely ignored his call, or else kept their mouths shut afterward. She might join them now in turning her back to the ocean into which she’d briefly plunged, in forgetting the shape or shadow, the sensation she’d encountered beneath the waves.
Another nagging thought persisted, however: that to deny any opportunity once presented would be like living the rest of one’s life with a hand pressed over an eye. The choice left to her was to consciously accept what now seemed mundane, meager, and circumscribed, or else to decide she deserved something more. Once again, she listened at the window, waiting for the hedges to release a sound—any sound—to direct her.
Outside her office door, Mark knocked lightly. A fine line of light seeped around the edges of painted wood. Her bare arms shone with a skein of dried sweat, and a salty smell rose from her skin. A shower might wash away all trace of where she’d been today and make her forget she’d ever climbed those worn stone steps or lay beneath the flickering lamp. The possibility brought a measure of relief followed swiftly by an equal—or weightier?—threat of loss.
Instead of rustling came the sound of Mark clearing his throat, with just a hint of impatience. Then she uttered the words that had become an unspoken code of assent between them long before they joined hands beneath a chuppah and a rabbi—from Mark’s Conservative synagogue—told them their union was divine: “On my way.” As always, she hoped her zeal for what he could offer sounded sincere.
Scott Nadelson is the author of eight books, most recently the story collection While It Lasts. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2020, Five Points, New England Review, and Ploughshares.