I Want to Be Left Behind by Brenda Peterson

Author:Brenda Peterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books

NEW YORK CITY LIFE seemed to take place against a brazenly artificial movie set, not on an actual island anchored between real rivers. I was mugged three times the first few weeks I was in Manhattan, until a friend kindly advised me, “Keep your eyes straight ahead and walk with purpose—as if you are late for everything.” After a scary stint in the Puerto Rican whorehouse, I had called the lead singer from our college All-Hours Lullaby Service, whose father was president of a Jewish philanthropic organization. He found a dorm room for me in the Ninety-second Street Y, but I had to pass a rigorous interview.

“You can teach those Israelis a thing or two about scripture,” Mrs. Simha told me after grilling me for what seemed hours on my background. “You’ll be the only shiksa here,” she said. “Watch out that the more militant Israelis don’t tear the mezuzah off your door in protest.”

Life as the only Gentile in the Ninety-second Street Jewish Y dormitory was yet another immersion in a new language and culture. When I told my mother where I was living and that on my salary even the Y was a stretch, she responded, “You’re living in the Old Testament! I hope you can save a few of your friends, dear. You know, they’re still waiting for the Messiah!”

“Aren’t you too?” I asked.

“Well,” Mother paused, and then added fiercely, “well, at least we Christians know He came down here in the first place!” She paused, then took a milder tact. “But it’s good you have Jewish friends now, honey. You know what an important role they are playing in bringing about . . . ,” she hesitated, as if struggling with herself, then insisted, “well, what some of us still believe is God’s plan.”

“Do we have to talk about the end of the world now, Mother?” I sighed.

I glanced down the hallway of the top-floor dormitory. No other girls were waiting yet to use the hall pay phone. We both had time on our hands, and Mother was paying for the call. So we were off again in our End Times wrangling. Mother had recently sent me an audio-tape on “the Great White Throne of Judgment” and another one of her hand-me-down thrillers. She had always been downright evangelical about her spy novels—or, as I’d heard one of the magazine critics disdainfully call it, “spy-fi.” Mother had not warned me about the book’s gleeful violence, but she had advised, “Just skip the sex scenes.”

Propped now against the dormitory wall and tethered to the pay phone, I chided myself for falling into another family philosophical slugfest—what I’d come to think of as similar to Jacob’s “wrestling with angels.” The story of Jacob was one of my own and my mother’s Bible story favorites: Jacob, who had already tricked his brother Esau out of a patriarchal blessing, finds himself wrestling all night with an angel. Jacob will not let the muscular angel go “except thou bless me.” The blessing comes with a wound to Jacob’s thigh and an annunciation.

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