Two Days After the Fire, Max and I pick our way through the rubble toward the car. He’s wearing a rented tux, carrying a corsage of delicate tea roses in a clear plastic box. I’m in yoga pants and a stretch cami.
We drive across the river to meet Jackie, who looks stunning—her hair upswept, her face framed by curled tendrils, her tiny body wrapped in a body-skimming white gown.
I stand with her father and a cluster of parents I’ve never met, eating potato chips and making small talk. The words slip out before I can stop them: “We had a fire.”
“When?” they ask.
“Two days ago.”
They cock their heads, looking at me as if to say, Why are you here?
Yet, besides this strange compulsion to blurt, I feel nothing—a great big nothing, an emptiness that starts at the center of my belly and glows out to my edges, eclipsing everything.
After a while, I leave Max with Jackie and drive home. As I pull into the driveway, a huge tractor-shovel is lifting a dead horse into the air.
Three Days After the Fire, I rise at dawn for the Family Music Festival. “Go pick up the ice,” Gail says. She’s the manager. I’m the assistant. She gives me the receipt, printed with the name and address of the ice place - Abbey Ice.
I follow printed directions from MapQuest—this is before Google Maps—and wind up facing a brick wall, lost in the tangle of back streets of Monsey. I find my way back to Route 59 and pull into a 7/11 parking lot, where I put my head on the steering wheel, wondering what to do.
Just then, a white panel truck pulls in beside me. Abbey Ice is painted on its side. I ask the driver if I can follow him to the warehouse.
This is the kind of thing that happens to me—all the time.
At Abbey Ice, a young man loads my car, but there’s a mistake in the order. He sends me inside to speak to the counterman, a burly, middle-aged man.
“We don’t sell 20-pound blocks of ice,” he snaps. “They come in 25-pound blocks.” Confused and embarrassed, I try to explain. I show him the pre-paid invoice, which clearly says 20-pound blocks. His impatience escalates. “Your order is complete!” he shouts. “Go pick it up!”
Out of all proportion to the situation, I burst into tears and run from the room, across the loading dock, and straight into the arms of the plant manager.
“What in the world?” he asks, astonished. Then, seeing my tears, he wraps his enormous arms around me and holds on.
My body takes over—quaking, shaking, releasing buried hurt. Face smeared with tears, I stammer, “I’m sorry! But how can I be expected to know you don’t sell 20-pound blocks of ice? I am not an ice person.”
“No,” he soothes, patting my back, “you are not an ice person.”
Four Days After the Fire, an ill-tempered man in a pickup truck starts patrolling the property. He bangs on the back door to bully Matthew about trash disposal rules.
“It’s like we are just tenants now,” Matthew says into the darkness of our bedroom.
“We were always tenants,” I say.
“But we were never treated that way. We were part of the family. Now . . . “
Five Days After the Fire, while I’m at work, the landlord’s daughter-in-law shows up.
“She as much as said, ‘You’re a piece of shit, and I’ll be glad when you’re gone,’” Matthew tells me.
“Why?”
“The back rent,” he says.
“What back rent?”
“You knew,” he snaps. But I didn’t know—and now I do.
Six Days After the Fire, the house begins falling apart.
“The toilet’s broken,” I say.
“I’ll fix it,” Matthew replies.
“The dishwasher won’t start.”
“Gimme a minute.”
“The storm window fell out of its frame.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he says.
“Matt, it’s a rental house. Let them hire someone.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he says.
The landlord’s daughter emails: “We need you to clear all your things out of the garage.” A dumpster arrives, and Matthew begins to fill it. Lawn furniture, scraps of wood, broken exercise machines—all of it goes. Among the detritus, he finds the model of our wedding chuppah.
“This is liberating,” he says. “I feel life pouring back into me.”
This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. I’ll tell you more about it as we go along. For now, I’m getting it set up over on my second Substack, All The Books I’m Writing. It’s one of several books I am making there, one chapter at a time.
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