I’m just over five feet in kitten heels which is what I was
wearing the night Mercury flew past me in a CVS pharmacy in a Brooklyn slum. The
man, in muscle, was twice my weight. He ran faster than I drive. But when a
cashier yelled “Catch that guy!” I jumped him.
I had him around his alpha neck. In retrospect, it must have
been hilarious to see a woman in a velvet cape riding this Hulk piggyback up the
makeup aisle, out to the parking lot, and dumped, like Superman’s gym bag, on
the blacktop. I was all shook up. I was not particularly safe living in
New York.
A decade later I flashed on that cape as I waited one
freezing Shabbat afternoon for my elderly neighbor, Mrs. M., to drain a last
drop of Kirschwasser from the only
household item to survive her Warsaw girlhood, a red lead crystal aperitif. She
had disturbing news before Shabbat from a more elderly friend vacationing in Antwerp.
A doctor there refused to treat the woman’s broken rib, because, give him H for
honesty, she was a Jew.
“Can you believe it?” Mrs. M. asked. I almost said, “You have trouble believing it?” But she
was slumped forward, shoes off, her stockings bunched at the toes. It was no
time to get mouthy, and it was not the right time to tell her what just formed in
my mind, seemingly from nowhere but in truth subterranean years in the making.
I would sell my house. I would pack up my furniture, my books, my clothes, and
my cat and I would move to Israel, before I lost the choice.
Late after Shabbat was over I peeked through the shutters. The
lights in Mrs. M’s bedroom were still on. I turned up the heat, wrapped myself
in heavy blankets, and plopped down to make a list of all the things I needed
to do to move my New York body and soul to Israel.
At first I thought the abnormal screams were icicles
scraping my windows, until I realized they were coming from further outside. In
my bathrobe, with no brains and an old flashlight, I threw open the door to my
backyard.
On the winter limbs of my only tree swung three skeletal raccoons,
raving, howling, staring me down.
My house was sold to an optimistic young couple who planned
to expand it and fill it with children. One morning in early spring I handed them my ring of keys.
