Chapter 15
15
“...beginning to look a lot like Christmas Toys in every store But the prettiest sight to see is the holly that will be On your own front door...”
My radio alarm goes off, and I blearily rub at my eyes. I barely slept last night. It was almost two in the morning before my laundry was done—Josh went downstairs with me when I swapped my load from washer to dryer, but I had to dart down alone to grab my clothes when the dryer cycle was done. Even after its time in the dryer, my Hanukkah sweater was still damp. Possibly ruined, since I’m not sure if full-out laundering is something the cheap little battery pack can handle.
I should have just dry-cleaned it. Instead, upon realizing my mistake, I hastily draped my once-cheery sweater across the rickety white plastic drying rack some tenant had abandoned in the basement years ago. I touched it gently, thinking of the grin on my father’s face when he gave the sweater to me. My heart twisted painfully at the memory.
Hoping the poor garment might recover, I’d grabbed my mercifully dry coat and hurried back upstairs. Burrowing under my covers, praying to finally sleep, I kept tossing and turning. I was too wired, too anxious. I couldn’t stop thinking about the cold-eyed man on the train. His hateful stare, boring into me from that carelessly handsome face. His spit hitting the floor by my boot.
Fucking Jew.
The vision of my grandmother on the train earlier in the week had felt like a warning, and now it’s hard not to feel like this is exactly the sort of thing she would be trying to warn me about. If anything was going to summon the spirit of a Holocaust survivor, surely it was this rising neo-Nazi tide. But a warning isn’t enough. I’m already scared. I don’t need an alert; I need a plan.
Bubbe, what am I supposed to do?
When I finally did drift off to uneasy sleep, my mind tossed me from one nightmarish scene to another. Bubbe made an appearance at some point. Even while I was sleeping, the feeling that crept through me felt exactly the same as on the train, when the panhandling woman morphed into my grandmother. A fog of dulled dread, hope, and a desperate but futile desire to understand what was happening. She was saying something to me again, something I still couldn’t quite understand.
“Make...” Bubbe repeated, voice firm. “Make...”
Her rasping voice sounded just like the woman on the train—and then, my grandmother became the homeless woman. Just as the homeless woman had become her. She went from being my beloved Bubbe to being a stranger who didn’t even recognize me, which gutted me. And then she rattled her bucket. When I looked down into it, there wasn’t a coin.
Instead, there was a ring.
Emerald and diamond, gold band, something engraved on the inside that I couldn’t quite read. The ring was familiar; with a sudden jolt of recognition, I realized it was the same one my mother had worn to lunch at the Walnut Room. I reached down into the bucket, trying to grasp the ring—but then everything went dark, and I woke up.
Now it’s seven o’clock, and I think I maybe got four consecutive hours of sleep.
Today’s gonna suck.
There’s no good breakfast food at my place, so I get an egg-and-cheese croissant from the bakery near the train station. I practically swallow it whole before my train even arrives, and immediately wish I’d gotten two. Stomach still rumbling, I get on the train, and keep my head down for the whole forty-minute ride to the Loop.
After the mercifully eventless train ride, I head directly to my desk. I keep my head down there, too. The threat of layoffs is still hanging like a heavy cloud over the open-office layout. I open up a blank document and stare at it for a while. I still haven’t written a single word of the toast I’m supposed to give at the wedding Saturday night. My maid-of-honor speech. Even if delivering it will be hard, writing it should be easy, shouldn’t it? I’m a copywriter. This is what I do for a living.
But writing a line that will convince someone they need to pick up a bucket of chicken on their way home is not the same as finding a meaningful way to memorialize my father and grandmother while wishing my sister and her bride much happiness as they begin their new life together.
And somehow making it funny.
I’m starting to realize how little I know about everything—including, and maybe especially, Jewish weddings. I Google “why break glass Jewish wedding” and spend a few minutes reading through the first half-dozen results. This is just like researching content for copywriting , I tell myself. I exhale and force my fingers to move across the keys.
At Jewish weddings, it’s traditional to step on a glass. I’ve known about this ritual forever but never really knew why we did it. Why do we shatter something in the middle of a celebration? Well, as I learned in a deep and meaningful 15 minutes of internet searching, it turns out there are many powerful and poetic reasons people ascribe to this ritual. So much symbolism. So many stories. But there’s this one big theme that really resonates: we shatter the glass to remember past pain and let it exist alongside current joy. We acknowledge that even in the moments of our greatest joy, sorrow still exists. Maybe that also means that even in our moments of greatest sorrow, joy will still exist.
I stare at the words on the screen.
“They’re going to think I’m full of shit,” I mutter.
But I do hit Save before closing out of the document.
Looking down at my phone, I see a text from Rosie reminding me to take the day off on Friday so I can run errands for her. And a calendar invitation to the five-o’clock rehearsal dinner downtown. Then a work email pings through—an invitation to another all-staff meeting Monday morning.
I heave a sigh, and decide I’m not going to ask for Friday off. It just seems too risky with the threat of layoffs still looming. But I’ll email my group creative director, Amy, and ask her if I can work remotely that day. Amy rarely says no to remote-work requests, seeing as she works remotely from Austin. She moved there during the pandemic, and when Mercer I guess he still gets flipped out when anyone mentions parenthood. Then he shakes his head and asks, “They drag you over to the Java-Lo account yet? Rumor has it it’s about to be all-hands-on-deck!”
“No, not yet,” I say, wondering if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that I haven’t been tapped to help that team yet. “How’s the pitch coming along?”
“My junior designer’s freaking out, but we’re making progress,” Bryan says with a shrug. “We’ll get there. Hey, I didn’t ask, how was lunch with your mom yesterday?”
“It was...you know. Lunch with my mom.”
“Was GoGo-RoRo there?”
“Bryan, I swear to God...”
“Okay, okay! So...did you ask hot what’s-his-British-butt to the wedding yet?”
“Not yet,” I say. “But I’m asking him tonight. Swear.”
“Way to eleventh-hour it.”
“We call it ‘Jewish time,’” I inform him.
“Uh-huh,” Bryan says, rolling his eyes. “You seen Sasha today?”
I shake my head.
Before either of us can say anything else, Bryan’s group creative director, Julie, appears at his elbow. Julie is a tough advertising broad, in her early sixties with dyed-blue hair cut pixie short. She never looks nervous.
Except now.
“Bryan, there you are,” she says, and her voice is too bright. Too warm. I can hear the anxiety fraying its edges. “Can I, uh, talk with you for a minute?”
“Sure,” Bryan says, shooting me the briefest of oh-shit! looks. “Everything okay?”
Without answering him, Julie gestures forward, toward the conference room. The room where Barry is holed up, deciding our fates. Bryan doesn’t even have time to give me another look before Julie, biting her lip, escorts him down the hall.