printed schedule.
“So if it’s mostly Italian, how come they’re showing
Johnny licked whipped cream off his fingers. “The neighborhood would never go for
“Why not? It’s classic.”
“You know.” He tucked his hands in his armpits and tipped his chair back to rest against the formstone.
“What?” Angie said, comprehension dawning. “Too much like home movies?”
Johnny snorted. “Yeah. Everybody thinks we hang out on street corners with stupid meatheads named Vito saying ‘fahgedaboutit’ all day.”
Angie laughed out loud. “Does any rational person
“Stereotypes,” said her brother.
“Cultural bias,” said his sister, settling back to enjoy the movie. “Fahgedaboutit.”
LIMINAL BY JOSEPH WALLACE
As always, the rabbi had spoken in calm, measured ones. If we could learn to see them, we’d recognize that our existence is full of liminal moments,” he’d said, “times when we’ve already left our previous life behind, but have yet to take the step into a new one. A liminal moment represents the space between an ending and beginning-a critically important gap, and of course potentially a very dangerous one.
That had been three days ago. Now Tania Blumen’s head banged against the motel’s bathroom wall, unloosing a blue-green flash deep within her skull. Pain followed after a respectful pause, radiating along her jawline and cheekbones like thunder pursuing a lightning bolt.
“God, I’m sorry, sweetie,” the man said to her, his voice wet, his hands grasping the waistband of her panties and tugging. Something stung her on the hip: his fingernail tearing her skin. “I didn’t mean to do that, I’ll never do it again, I promise,” he said. “If you’d just listened to me, trusted me… Didn’t you know this was going to happen? You must have known. I’m asking so little, and you’re making it so hard-”
Liminal moments.
Tania guessed this qualified as one.
“Room 213,” the teenage clerk at the Round Tripper Inn said. “Out that door into the courtyard, up the stairs on your right.” His eyes were on her face. “You need help, come back and ask.”
“The room,” Tania replied, “it says the number on the door?”
The clerk blinked. “Sure.”
“Then I’ll find it,” she told him.
“Oh, wait,” he called as she hoisted her bag over her shoulder and turned away. “I forgot to tell you.”
She looked back.
“Mr. Sims isn’t here yet. He called to say he’d be a little late.”
Tania stood still, thinking. Thinking: Still time to turn around. Still time to get on the bus and head back home.
And face Yoshi. And tell him she’d lost her nerve.
She went out into the courtyard.
Two bus rides, that’s all it took to get from Falstaff Road to Security Boulevard. Yet it was a different world.
Tania stood blinking in the milky spring sunshine, the pounding in her head competing with the ceaseless roar, like a river in flood, of the boulevard a block away. No one she knew would ever find her here. The people from her neighborhood didn’t work at the Social Security offices, those giant buildings that towered over the neighborhood like active volcanos. They didn’t shop at the Old Navy, rent movies at the Blockbuster, buy sandwiches at the Subway and cars at the Chevrolet dealership over there, with its giant plaster fox.
And they didn’t stay at the Round Tripper Inn.
But that was the point, wasn’t it?
The room was suffused with brownish light filtering through closed curtains decorated with crudely stitched crossed baseball bats. The queen-sized bedspread displayed a repeating pattern of gloves, and the lampshades were designed to look like baseballs. Two garish paintings of a tubby Babe Ruth hung on the wall, a mirror with an inexplicable seashell frame between them.
Tania felt shaky. She hadn’t been able to eat breakfast this morning, or even dinner last night. Tzom, Yoshi had named it. The ritual fast. Purification, it was said, was an essential part of the journey. But looking at her face in the mirror, at its pallor in the room’s earthy light, Tania didn’t feel pure.
“In the midst of a liminal moment, you are out of the world,” the rabbi had said. “For that time, it is as if you no longer exist.”
A keycard hissed as it slid into the slot outside the door of Room 213.
Almost at once, Tania knew.
“You’re so beautiful!” Gary Sims spoke in tones of awe. “Even more beautiful than the photographs your uncle-”
“Yoshi.”
“Your Uncle Yoshi sent me. Beautiful!”
“Thank you,” Tania said.
Her face was hot. It did not feel like her face at all.
“Don’t thank me,” Gary said, placing a heavy shoulder bag and a smaller, flatter case on the bed, then turning back toward her and clasping his hands in front of his chest. “I should thank you, Tania. For giving me this chance.”
Gary smiled, nodded his head, made a little bow toward her. He was maybe thirty-five, but looked younger, with a round face, a wispy beard and mustache surrounding red lips that stood out against his pinkish skin. Just an inch or two taller than Tania’s 5’8” and always in motion, hands knotting and releasing, foot tapping, head tilted to one side, then the other, as he looked at her and away.
Making Tania feel like something heavy and ponderous, a cow, an elephant, in comparison.
But Gary seeming to think otherwise. “I couldn’t tell from the photos, but your nose is perfect,” he said. “Those little buttons-they just don’t show up well. And those girls who get their noses broken and reset-” His hand went up and pushed at the tip of his nose. “They look like pigs, don’t you think?” Another quick glance. “With you, though, I was worried about a bump. You know, a lot of girls like you have that bump right here-” Touching the bridge of his nose now. “But not you.”
A lot of girls like me.
“I’m so glad to be here,” he said. “It was worth the drive.” Looking suddenly shy, he reached into his pocket. “I brought this for you.”
A long silver necklace, interlocking links, a chain. Hanging from it was a Jewish star.
He placed it around her neck, arranged it so the star rested in the little indentation between her breasts. It shone against the navy-blue of her Goucher sweatshirt.
Tania knew then.
She understood exactly how this worked.
And why it worked.
“Your uncle told me you don’t have a computer at home.”
She shrugged.
