The New Earth by Jess Row

Author:Jess Row
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Good Morning, Buddhas

(Sandy in a Moment of Silence)

The image precedes its meaning.

Imagine a man who has left his life and still wakes in the dark every morning at six, listening to the rain. As if he has to get up and go to work. Imagine that, he says to the novel, the only one listening.

He’s forgotten the size, the sheer size and weight, of the weather. Observed from a high meadow, a mountainside. Having not checked his phone he was ambushed by a storm the day after he arrived: two solid days of icy rain, sleet thudding on the roof at night, clouds like gigantic boulders rolling overhead.

It’s late April. It’s early May. He doesn’t bother to check.

In the bookstore in Montpelier he bought three fancy notebooks with waxy red covers, ten dollars each, and a box of special recycled pens, each guaranteed to last three years.

* * *

His daily schedule, tacked with a Buffalo Mountain Food Co-op magnet to the fridge:

6 A.M.: Wake up, morning exercises

6:30: Breakfast

7:30: Cleaning/work period

10: Meditation with walking breaks

12: Lunch

1: Rest period

2: Long walk

4: Reading

6: Dinner. Listen to the news on the radio for 15 min.

7: Meditation

9: Reading, sleep

Errands on Saturdays

* * *

Before I arrived at Oberlin I’d never thought of masturbation as a serious hobby.

More of an urgent, occasional need, dispensed with quickly, in the basement toilet where Mother never went. But in East Hall, where he’d been given a private room, through some glitch in the system, he became a seasoned solo practitioner.

That’s not quite right. Not quite honest. Not a solo practitioner so much as an accidental voyeur. It wasn’t his doing that Rachel Glazer and Judy Shapiro’s window faced his, over the narrow walkway between East and Halstead. They had taken down the standard-issue Venetians and hung a diaphanous white sheet in their place, which at night was all but transparent.

Maybe they thought, being on the top floor, at the back, that no one would be looking. Maybe they didn’t care. It was 1970, after all. He kept his blinds down and flat, and then made a strategic crack with a piece of Scotch tape. And what was there to see? Voyeurs dwell in possibility. Most nights Judy was out with her a cappella singing group and Rachel was reading and smoking, exhaling into a wire-caged fan. They went braless, almost all the time, it seemed to him, and if he was up late he might catch a glimpse of a breast, a breath of a nipple.

That was his sexual revolution.

He had never before met a Jew, not in his conscious memory. In Davenport there were Jewish doctors and pawnshops and Finkel’s, a dress store downtown, but he’d never been to any of those places. Never knew what a synagogue was, never heard of Hanukkah. In Honors English his teacher had made it through The Merchant of Venice without ever uttering the word Jew. It sounded dirty to him, wrong and insulting. He had been taught, without quite knowing why, to say Jewish or of the Jewish persuasion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.