Swell by Jill Eisenstadt

Author:Jill Eisenstadt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

Sue curses a thorny, overgrown bush at the back of the brick patio. A bloody cross pulses on her shin—same leg, already scalded by tea. She whacks at the plant with her plastic bag of mezuzahs. The thing attacked her right as she walked out that pain-in-the-ass door. Her pain-in-the-ass door, she reminds herself. She can replace it and the bush and even the patio bricks—in between which, she suspects, those biting black flies with green eyes lay their eggs.

Cheered, Sue begins searching through the clanking sack for a mezuzah light enough to hang on the loose door frame. The temple claimed to be giving her a “major discount,” but who knows. They refused to take her cash on Shabbat. Behind her, Bibi sits and jeers while Sage and Ed feed “hay” to their “pony,” Blacky.

What Sue didn’t tell Dan about temple was how she’d walked in to find his father in back, slumped and seemingly unconscious. In actuality, he’d been listening to Dan’s little radio, ingeniously wrapped in a sweater, with one earplug hidden between his head and the wall. “I don’t go to temple to be with God”—Sy’s defense. “I go to be with my friends.”

But Sue didn’t see any friends other than Rabbi Larry up on the bimah with a squeaky bar mitzvah boy. “You mean your friends at WFAN sports talk?”

Sy just patted the empty seat beside him. “You’re late, Sue.” Had he followed her there, sped ahead, and snuck in the side door? She wouldn’t have put it past him. When she sat down, Sy took her hand and, one by one, uncurled her fingers to reveal the iPod she thought she’d concealed there. “So alike, the two of us.”

Sue looked away, at the stained-glass rendering of Eve and the Serpent. She and Sy “so alike”? Please, no. But their interactions with Dan were similarly composed of exasperated bullying and affection, Dan wishing they were more accommodating of others, they wishing Dan were less. As the rabbi’s remarks came perilously close to comparing Roger Clemens with Osama bin Laden (an eye for an eye), Sue had no choice but to admit that she and Sy shared a whole host of interests and traits: What they’d dreamed of (a beach house), what they found most irritating (other people), who they loved most in the world (Dan, June, Sage). Both Sue and Sy flew into rages, held grudges, were temperamentally sour people addicted to sugar.

In the backyard, Sue continues halfheartedly rustling through the bag of mezuzahs. Her plan—to get real Jewish and scare the men—had worked on Dan well enough, but “so alike” Sy had plainly seen through it. The bush at her foot could spontaneously combust and start talking, and the old man would shrug and summon Dan to summon Tim to put out the fire. Luckily for him, Tim’s retired or he wouldn’t have time to do the Glassman bidding 24/7. On today’s list: teach June to drive, replant the garden, spray the tree, fix

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