Jubilee

Allison’s mother’s favorite piece of advice was “Be nice to people who aren’t obviously useful to you.” One doesn’t need religion to understand that, Allison thought, but she didn’t follow the advice. Her mother said the Torah was there in case of emergency. “In case of emergency, break glass.” It was funny to hear her say this since the house was full of glass, dark smoky glass, dark glass coffee table, dark mirrors. Her mother liked everything to be black or white. Allison’s mother gave Allison lots of advice, but then, when Allison said she was separating from Doug after only two years of marriage, the advice stopped.

The rain started and Allison opened her umbrella, steadying the wine in the plastic bag between her ankles. Next to her, Doug was getting wet. Doug didn’t like umbrellas. He didn’t think they “did” anything, even when the evidence was all around him.

“Is this funny somehow?” Doug asked, looking at Facebook on his phone, which was dotted with raindrops. “The past, present, and future walk into a bar. It was tense.”

“I don’t see how that could be funny,” Allison said. She shifted the wine bottles in the plastic bag. The plastic bag was so flimsy and unprotective, it was more like the idea of a bag, a mist that enchanted the bottles into vicinity.

The wine store near their apartment was tended by a distracted European woman who always had the wrong details about them. “How’s your dog,” she’d ask, smiling with her short teeth, and they’d make things up; they didn’t have a dog. In the mind of the wine store woman, their marriage probably was great.

Two weeks ago, Doug had dropped a bottle of wine from the store, a juicy smash. The droplets came as high as the poem on their wall, a poem Doug liked about “the gate to endless joy”: death. It was by Isaac Watts. Once it had been cut fresh from a book and then somehow it was amber at the edges, time the enterprising props master, then wine-spotted, and then finally, just a few days before, taken down and thrown away.

Doug said, “Shouldn’t the punchline be, ‘They were tenses’?”

“Then it’s just a statement of fact,” said Allison.

The divorce was happening in slow motion, six months of couples therapy in a room decorated with a harsh charcoal drawing of a woman’s plump rear, which Allison stared at as Doug waffled, sometimes saying “a divorce would be a relief,” sometimes “it’s all circular.” A bottom shouldn’t be drawn with crosshatching, ever, Allison thought; it looked grilled. And the shoulders of the woman vanished into contour lines, and her head dissolved.

One week Doug said that he felt trapped. He held his head, his strong guitarist’s fingers cleaving his dark hair. The way he held his head it looked like it would easily detach. He wanted to focus on his music.

He played melodic folk music. On his record, which came in a special edition of fifty in dark blue vinyl, he did all his own backup singing and played banjo, mandolin, guitar, bass, drums, and even violin, though badly. His desire to professionalize, to make it, was uncomfortable to Allison—he was always trying to pitch himself at everyone, though he was impractical, messy, a black hole.

Still, they were going to the Keystone Convention together, two days of singing in Lancaster County. They’d planned on this trip for as long as they’d been together. They would be welcomed in by people in plain dress and sing in a group of hundreds. He used to tell her it would help her understand his music. Now that they were separating, he stopped talking about how if she came, she would understand. Instead he just said, “I want you to come.”

And then right after the convention they would make it official. Allison was moving out, and Doug was filing the no-fault petition. Even now, they were capable of having a civil time.

Now Jenny arrived at the Hertz. Jenny made a living as a background actor. She had an antique-looking face and kept her hair long. Jenny bounced up to hug Doug. So far, none of the singers knew about the divorce, and Allison would follow Doug’s lead; these were his people. They drove out of Manhattan and across the marshes of New Jersey on the long rainy way to Lancaster. The wine rolled around in the footwell.

They picked up two more singers in Allentown. The conversation had an eager, childish shape, like they were presenting their lives to Doug for approval. Jenny told them how, in a recent scene, the actor had to fall onto a pile of gummy glass. They gave him a loose prop tooth, daubed in prop blood, and he spat that out. “Amazing,” said Doug, and Jenny smiled. It wasn’t that Allison was ignorant about how much all the singers loved Doug. But it was more painful than she expected. He always brought people along with him. His impracticality, his patience. He was, along with everything else, absurdly generous with physical affection; he would touch her for hours, until she got anxious about the time.

There was an app where you could hear the past recordings of all the convention songs, and you could sort to hear just the songs Doug led, singing, “Sail by faith upon that flood to endless day,” beating time so slowly, conjuring a march of the sinners through curtains of sparkling, bright red, magical blood. Sometimes, in the besotted early days, Allison used to listen to his songs, a way of sticking her finger into an electrical socket, a shock of attraction.

They stopped at a rest station, wet black asphalt and waving plastic triangle garlands, Jenny in her long coat. Inside was an assortment of fast-food stores and a gift shop.

Allison bought a magazine. It was half about cooking and half about interior design. The cover showed crisped, orange-edged potatoes on a blue plate, everything strewn with salt and snippets of herbs. Allison knew she would have to learn how to cook now that they were separating. She hadn’t before because Doug could make anything out of anything, all his stone soups, stews, stir-fries.

At a plastic table, Doug was blowing on a piece of fast-food pie.

“You think I can learn to make these potatoes?” said Allison. She was joking, playing stupid.

“Probably,” said Doug.

“Maybe you can write down some of your recipes for me.”

“I never know what I do,” he said, with an irritated turn of his head.

“Just write it down when you do it.”

“I won’t be cooking a lot on tour,” he said.

She imagined how she’d feel if he hit it big. More likely, he wouldn’t; he would move to a windowless room, maybe carpeted or infested with roaches, or he would crash with friends, maybe for months or years. He might adopt some rabbits like he’d always wanted. Maybe he would play in wedding bands, maybe he would leave the city. But maybe he would make it. And she knew that if he did, she would feel horrible regret.

The February they met, they went to Brighton Beach for Uyghur meatballs and then Doug said they had to go into the ocean. Had to? Why? There was no answer, but she came along: that was the answer, really. Clothes off, pulled into the bright and trashy waves. They gasped in shock together, the way that ghosts sing. The whole thing was a thrill. They warmed up in a bodega eating squishy and elastic red gummy hearts, the flat ones that are softer to the touch. Salty from their ocean fingers.

He couldn’t have a normal conversation and that was a big part of what she liked about him, at first.

And then they made it a year, and the notes were shaped like diamonds and squares. They sang at Menno House in Gramercy. In the back rooms were the high lofts painted with fresh white paint holding mattresses up close to the ceiling where it was warm. Pacifists lived there. Doug and Allison and ten other people sang in the front room, a parlor library, sitting in overlarge desk chairs that all bumped into one another and rolled. Some of the songs were complicated gospel and everyone got lost.

They reached Lancaster. Allison thought it would look like a suburb, a suburb of DC or Philadelphia, but it did not. Allison had never seen a place like this, though Doug had been coming here for more than a decade. Gentle green hills, a yellow sunset, then darkness, sob-inducing scent of earth, manure, dew, the heaviest fog, so heavy it bounced back the headlights, the streetlights’ cones, or cast amazing explosions of light through trees.

They drove deeper into the black fields. A total hush in the car as they penetrated further and further into the past. Gleaming eyes by the roadside.

Then in the middle of the farmland they saw first a blue electric glow and then, up on a hill, a blocky hotel. “This wasn’t even here last year,” Jenny said, navigating toward it.

“I hate it,” said Doug. The tone of his voice was like when he said, “A divorce would be a relief.” His moralizing tone.

It was a Comfort Suites with a stony beige front and a big orange-and-blue sign. Jenny parked. Allison was unsteady on her feet. They walked through the silent mist in the parking lot.

The lobby smelled of Windex; a piano jazz “Over the Rainbow” was playing. It was a portal to another world of dull cleanliness, lonely business trips, visits to old relatives in the hospital, and family, Allison’s family, her mother, her advice: “Keep all your complaints to yourself. Don’t nag. You wouldn’t believe the things I hide from your father.”

A dozen people crammed into Doug’s room and sang “New Orleans” with the woman who had ordered all of the Daily Books, which now were in great demand in Cork and Berlin. The Daily Book had the song with the lyrics:

Corruption, earth, and worms

Shall but refine this flesh,

Till my triumphant spirit comes

To put it on afresh.

Allison liked the lyrics; she liked remembering mortality. But more than the lyrics, the music, with its harsh, hollow harmonies, made her feel something about the past and the people gone on before. Most of the songs weren’t available in decent recorded form. They just existed in the triangle between eyes and mouth and page.

Allison’s voice was hard to control; she kept attempting the notes softly, trying to get them perfect. She wasn’t a strong singer, so the best she could do was keep quiet. The best singers, like Doug, hit the notes loud and clear, with no vibrato, just pure tone. Without him, the group wouldn’t have had an anchor. She wondered if he was showing off or trying to win her back. He never had such clear motives, but liked to keep all his options open.

Doug used to say, “Your mother doesn’t see what she doesn’t want to see.” He’d always felt ignored by her family. Doug wasn’t Jewish, but that didn’t matter to Allison’s mother, so long as Allison joined a synagogue, and had kids, and got her future kids bar mitzvahed. They’d gotten married under a chuppah; they stepped on a light bulb. To her mother, Doug played a purely functional role. “I don’t want you to be lonely,” her mother said. “You would otherwise be lonely.”

Allison’s mother maybe blocked things out, but Allison, even when she consented to the marriage, already saw so clearly what she didn’t want to see. She saw Doug refusing a schedule, because everything could get in the way of his pursuit of his music. She saw herself working to support him, saw him disdaining her tech-writing job. When she pointed out that she had to keep it for health insurance, he said, “You’re the only one who cares about health insurance.” As time went on, they each began to think that the other lived in an invented reality.

He led the way on the couples therapy. But she saw why it was necessary. She wished he would change completely.

Midway through couples therapy, the therapist had asked them to try the core values exercise. At home, Allison printed out the sixty values and cut them into individual words, Security, Growth, Friends, Wealth, Authenticity, and then she and Doug each laid them in priority order on the floor, in order to compare. The floor was scattered with kitty litter, shards of garlic jackets, sidewalk salt, little white feathers. The values were light and stuck to their hands and they picked out the same ones. Pleasure, Creativity.

It was hard to sleep after the singing. She kept looking out the hotel window. Where am I? she wondered. At home, her rented plastic boxes were all packed. She’d soon be gone from that sticky parlor-floor apartment—she was moving to an elevator building. When she imagined life without Doug, she imagined spending money on the things she couldn’t afford when she’d had to support him too. She would buy a Nespresso machine, fresh flowers, and a very nice secondhand handbag; she would go to Rome by herself. Then, she would be happy. But she kept picturing the dog that the wine shop owner thought she’d shared with Doug, an imaginary dog, a whiny brown mutt. It barked and barked. As a phantom, it never needed food or rest.

She read her magazine. Cut your medium-sized Yukon Gold potatoes into eight wedges of equal size. If you have time, bathe them in a large bowl of cold water for a half hour.

She looked out at the antique farmland. The hotel was the only anomaly, and so from the inside, there were no disruptions on the dense blue hills.

In the morning, Allison drank weak hotel coffee and went out to the land, so recently a farm.

Black seed pods dripped with dew. Heavy fog lightened the trees. Her breath condensed in her bangs. A creek. Little Chickies, someone called it. The neighborhood was called Spooky Nook. Ferns and a farm across the way. She inhaled, inhaled, inhaled.

Then she returned to the hotel, where everyone put on their fancy clothes and walked up past the horses to the singing.

The hall for singing was huge and brown and utterly blank and plain. There were several hundred people there, and, outside of the singing room, many Crock-Pots plugged into power strips, urns of coffee, and yellow slices of cake. Their hosts wore bonnets and dresses with tiny floral patterns and capelets, or button-ups and suspenders. Allison filled out a card for the arranging committee but wrote that she did not want to lead. She’d never led a song. Doug had always wanted her to, but now he was not by her side urging her to do anything anymore.

During the welcome, everyone hustled to a seat in the giant inward-facing square formation, finding their place among tenors, trebles, altos, or basses, scooting inward along the rows of chairs or stumbling past one another, opening their songbooks on their laps. A quiet eager hubbub and then someone called out the keying notes and hundreds of voices rose and merged to become perfectly in tune. Then the singing started, the voices broke open, superabundant, and fanned into redounding harmony. It was incredibly loud. Allison left the singing room to listen to the music from the porch and hear all the voices mixing together. Across the soft, saturated fields, boys in black hats were playing on the fence.

Lunch was sauerkraut and pork, pork soup, pork and cracked corn, curry vegetables, shoofly pie, coconut cream pie, and all kinds of bars, lemon bars, peanut butter bars.

Doug looked happy. A woman came and draped herself over his shoulders to chat. Allison avoided the two of them and sat in a separate circle.

“So I heard the news,” said Jenny, with a glance at Doug. Some of the Philadelphia singers leaned in. “How are you keeping up?”

“It was time,” said Allison.

“Doug seems like a tough husband,” said Jenny, smiling.

Allison started to tear up. Her own friends just called Doug so nice, so nice. They called him that because they didn’t understand what she saw in him.

“He is who he seems to be,” said Allison. “At least there’s that.” She told Jenny how, on their second date, he asked her for a clipping of her hair, so he could hex her if he needed to.

“And you gave it to him?”

“Of course,” said Allison.

Jenny laughed at that. “Are you going to lead?”

Allison shook her head.

“Lead tomorrow. You can just stand there.”

The keyer cried out the notes again, and they ran back to their chairs. They sang until late afternoon.

Everyone went back to the hotel for a nap, but Allison couldn’t sleep.

“The past and present walked into a bar,” Allison muttered to herself, lying on six pillows. Was it funnier that way? She remembered learning her Torah portion and her Haftarah from a cassette tape that her tutor had made her. She had a black Sony boom box and lay on her stomach in the foyer of the house, pressing play and rewind on those big clunky black keys until she learned the mournful, wiggling music. She’d fortunately been assigned the best section of Leviticus, the Holiness Code, admonitions about no molten idols, no stealing, no reaping to the edges of the field. Maybe her mother had something to do with the passage assignment. Leave the gleanings. That’s what Doug would do. He loved to leave the gleanings, even if they had nothing for themselves.

She remembered flipping through the big book of bat mitzvah invitation styles, which her mother borrowed from the synagogue. Its ruptured beige binding. The options for silver foil, gold foil, rainbow foil, all too expensive, according to her mother. Allison chose pale blue invitations with blue butterflies at the edges.

Allison’s family wasn’t close or chatty. Her brothers and half-brothers had followed her father into logistics; her mother was a part-time decorator. Her father also had a favorite saying; his was, “Always have your own money,” which Allison had not abided by, spending it all on Doug. And then her mother’s, “Be nice to people who aren’t obviously useful to you.” As though, to her parents, all interactions existed on a line between stinginess and generosity. Be stingy here, generous there. A man should be strict. A dress should cover the collar bones. A child should be teased for being clean or messy, for hating sports, for hairy arms, until such a time as a true transgression is made; afterward all must molt into politesse. Her brothers with their poor eyesight and wide mouths all would have been better cut off and freed like she was. And Allison was only generous to one person she plainly needed.

The sun set. Then they walked across the field to the farmhouses for the social.

The girls in their translucent, pleated bonnets over tightly wound buns looked beautiful and haughty and then they were shy and nice with funny country accents. Allison asked them what was for dinner.

“Stew,” said a tall girl. “Potato rolls. That’s Queen Anne’s lace jelly.” It was neon yellow. “Whoopie pies.”

“What’s your favorite?” said Allison.

“Whoopie pies.”

A woodstove and smell of old smoke, the old world. The large square room with brown windows and white walls. It was like a museum except they were using it.

They did an hour of singing the local way. A man in suspenders stood before them. He had a tiny black book with gold edges. “Here’s how we do this one,” he said. And then his voice leapt into a different register. She couldn’t look at his face. Slow tunes with slides, passed down orally and barely comparable to their melodies in the book. Harmonies improvised by anyone who wanted to. Maybe a hundred people elsewhere in the farmhouse, talking, and forty of them in the living room, not really sitting in parts, singing.

Doug had such a beautiful voice. He sat on the piano bench next to an old woman. Doug’s world, not hers. She appreciated it as it went sailing past her. Wet windows, an out-of-doors that suggested bears and wolves. Condensation on the black panes. “Arrayed in glorious grace,” they sang, “let these vile bodies shine.”

Doug used to go to the Library of Congress and sing the unknown songs in his head, copying the best to introduce back into the land of the living. He knew more about the past than Allison did. He knew more about the land of spirits, whatever that meant; he knew about trusting. She had betrayed his trust by being small-minded. But he was always allowed to be himself, to spew his personality all over the world; she was the one who tried and failed to adapt. She recalled how he’d thrown the wine bottle on the floor. She was not supposed to mention how hard she worked, because he also worked hard. But there she was lording it over him, he said, you’re just like your mom, you’re so judgmental, fuck this, and he took up the neck of the bottle in his hand and hurled it onto the floor. Smash. And up came the bloody wine.

This was how he hexed her, if he did—the ghost dog, the ghost children they had desired, the idea of a future where they would feel abundant and generous, where one could afford an itinerant life of singing in harmony—that was what she’d thought they could will into existence, her peonies in hand, her mother so deeply confused.

She walked back to the Windexed hotel to read her design and cooking magazine in bed.

Dress the potatoes with olive oil, sparingly. Toss them in your mixture of salt, onion powder, garlic powder, and cayenne. Take care to give each wedge room on your baking sheet. This is the key to those crispy edges. She flipped to the interior design section. It was all about clay colors, burled edges, bouclé, vines, and arches. Her mother liked modern rooms in black and white, all straight lines, square lantern-style lights with black metal edges. The kinds of houses where you are always rebelling, just by being; where you feel all the more meltingly alive. She wanted to protect her mother from going out of date. Her mother with her stiff hair, silver at the forehead, and her fluttering hands. Was she judgmental? Her mother apparently didn’t believe the Jewish people would last into the future unless propelled by huge energy and guilt. Still, turning the pages of the magazine, Allison allowed herself to dream of going home and lying down with a fake fever in her twin bed.

Later she learned that a lot of the young people, including Doug, went to the indoor pool and sang there from memory. Dark and wet in the bright blue water.

The next morning Allison took another walk. She walked in the fog, down a gravel road, and into an abandoned barn and up into the hayloft. She stood there in the dark. She found the toolshed, black silhouettes of long farm tools painted on the white walls.

In the singing room, little girls with a different kind of bonnet, more like a doily, lined up against the wall.

Allison’s throat was starting to hurt.

A man named Michael gave the memorial lesson. He talked about what was meant by “I’m called to contend with the powers of darkness.” He read the sick and shut-in list. And then there was lunch. Doug led after lunch. He wore a plain white oxford shirt and big slumped chinos and loafers with white socks. His arms looked strong, precise, as he beat time. Even singers who were supposed to be arrayed in glorious grace could not resist him. The very best version of himself, energetic, strange, powerful, an emissary from the world beyond the grave. Doug made out of fog, all the voices making this angel out of their silver humidity: “The year of jubilee is come, the year of jubilee is come.” In the year of jubilee, the idea was that you release all your slaves and don’t reap or sow.

Allison went out onto the porch, hurt somehow by Doug taking on this useless form. All of the glamour and none of the intimacy.

The singing restarted. Allison walked uphill and sat in the field. The moist land soaked into her pink twill trousers. She could just barely hear the music, especially when the wind blew up from the building. She called her mother.

“Where are you, Allison?”

“Columbus Circle.”

“That’s funny. It’s very quiet.”

“Wow, they’re kicking a shoplifter out of the mall,” Allison said. “They’re hauling him away.”

“Goodness gracious,” her mother said. There was a pause. “Your father says hello.”

“Hello to him.”

“We decided to buy the maple that is green in the spring,” her mother said. “Not the one that’s red year-round.” She was silent for a moment. “I think it goes red in the fall.”

“I’m glad you worked it out,” said Allison.

“The shade is worth it,” her mother said.

Doug was running up the field toward her. She shook her head, put her finger across her neck.

“Who are you talking to?” he asked. His loafers were covered in mud now.

“My mom!” whispered Allison.

“Who’s that? Doug?” said her mother. “It’s been too long. Put him on the phone.”

“Yeah, he just came out of the subway,” said Allison, widening her eyes authoritatively at Doug.

Allison put the phone on speakerphone.

“Dougie.”

Allison cringed.

“I don’t know why she’s talking about the subway,” said Doug. “We’re in Pennsylvania, singing!”

“Oh, that Jesusy stuff?”

“It’s nondenominational.”

“It’s not very cold this January,” she said.

“Not very cold,” he repeated overlappingly.

“You know, I always liked you, Doug,” she said. “You kept Allison happy.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Rosenbaum,” he said, like a schoolboy.

“Tell Allison. I know she doesn’t want to listen to me. I’m her old mother.”

“Mom, I can hear you,” said Allison.

“No love is perfect. Look at me and your father.”

But Allison knew that they looked perfect to Doug, whose dad had left before he was born.

“We have to go, Mom, thanks,” said Allison.

“Marriage goes through twists and turns,” said her mother.

“We are actually submitting the paperwork on Monday.” Allison hung up.

For a moment the two of them looked down at the singing hall. Over the next hill, a black horse-drawn carriage was moving.

“Come sing with me. I put you on the list,” he said.

“We’re past this,” she said. “You don’t have to be nice.”

“I guess I thought you’d enjoy it.” He rubbed his head.

“I can’t believe my mom,” said Allison. But she was too angry about the whole situation to smooth it over, to say she was sorry.

He sighed. He lifted his arms and let them fall to his sides. “Do we have a chance, do you think?”

“God, haven’t we discussed it thoroughly?” She stood and brushed off. The seat of her pants was very dirty.

“Lead with me,” he said.

Then the arranging committee called them as soon as he spoke with them because they wanted her, a new leader, to get her chance. She thought she was going to pee her pants, she was so nervous.

She lifted her shaking hand into the air. Hundreds of faces smiled up at her as she stood in the center. She didn’t look at Doug but saw his arm raising and lowering beside her. Her lips wobbled, her mouth’s circle collapsing in with nerves. It was an eschaton song: “And will the judge descend? And must the dead arise?” The noise was like being caught in a giant machine, a warm roar on all sides. She could have fainted and the singing would have continued. Afterward she hustled back to her seat and everyone said, “Good job! Good job!”

“Do we have a chance?” Now Allison left the singing. It was infuriating how he thought he could reopen that door. Doug and her mother, united by doubts. This was the whole problem, the problem of agency. Because he refused to clarify, she had to clarify, and then he could pretend everything was her choice. No. It needed to be settled. It was settled.

She walked alone back to the Comfort Suites. The farmland was intensely quiet, soaked in rain. Flashes of birds in the sky. The Comfort Suites looked so ugly, really destroying the landscape with its blocky strip mall architecture, its dark green windows. And no one even cared about it. It wasn’t even a mastermind’s evil ziggurat. Just lazy and tasteless.

She had a great desire to read the rest of the magazine, which she’d left in a plastic bag next to her bed. She let herself into the brown room with the key card. But the magazine was gone. The plastic bag had been thrown out.

Enraged, she went to the front desk. A melancholy man sat behind it. “Someone threw away my magazine!” she said in a rude tone.

He apologized and asked what kind of magazine. He started looking around behind the desk as though he might find them there. She wondered if they taught that move at concierge school. “You could have a pretzel or granola bar if you want,” he said defeatedly, pointing to the snack stand.

Allison left, still angry, and turned and went down the hill behind the hotel, abruptly smelling the manure smell and the grass, listening to the creek.

“Miss!” someone called behind her. “Miss!”

Allison always got the urge to run, remembering being dragged into the back room in Hudson Belk because they’d thought she was stealing a necklace.

The caller appeared, it was a youngish woman with a high and tight haircut. “I’m the hotel manager,” she said.

Allison was too surprised to say anything.

“Tell me everything you’d like, and I’ll drive to the store and buy it for you.” And now Allison could see she had a pen and a little square of Post-its.

“No, it’s okay,” Allison said.

“Please. I insist.”

“I don’t need anything.”

“I am really fricking sorry.”

Allison almost wanted to ask for something to make her feel better.

“I was just looking at the view,” Allison said.

“So beautiful,” said the manager. “I just moved here from Florida to manage this hotel.”

Allison and the manager looked out at the foggy green fields.

“This is a really nice hotel,” Allison said.

The manager pointed. “In the morning, there are sheep.”