What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

torrential tropical rain drops straight down, battering. It is loud against the roof, and loud against the windows, and the fronds of the palm trees bend, and the floaties in the pool jump as the water boils.
    Shoshana goes to the window. And Mark passes Deb the apple and goes to the window. “Really, it’s always like this here?” Shoshana says.
    “Sure,” I say. “Every day like that. Stops as quick as it starts.”
    And both of them have their hands pressed up against the window. And they stay like that for some time, and when Mark turns around, harsh guy, tough guy, we see that he is weeping. Weeping from the rain.
    “You do not know,” he says. “I forget what it’s like to live in a place rich with water. This is a blessing above all others.”
    “If you had what we had,” I say.
    “Yes,” he says, wiping his eyes.
    “Can we go out?” Shoshana says. “In the rain?”
    “Of course,” Deb says. And then Shoshana tells me to close my eyes. To close them tight. Only me. And I swear, I think she’s going to be stark naked when she calls, “Open up.”
    She’s taken off her wig is all, and she’s wearing one of Trev’s baseball hats in its place.
    “I’ve only got the one wig this trip,” she says. “If Trev wouldn’t mind.”
    “He wouldn’t mind,” Deb says. And this is how the four of us move out into the rain. How we find ourselves in the backyard, on a searingly hot day, getting pounded by all this cool, cool rain. It is, with the weather, and the being high, and being drunk, and after all that conversation, it is just about the best feeling in the world. And I have to say, Shoshana looks twenty years younger in that hat.
    We do not talk. We are too busy frolicking and laughing and jumping around. And that’s how it happens, that I’m holding Mark’s hand and sort of dancing, and Deb is holding Shoshana’s hand, and also, they’re doing their own kind of jig. And when I take Deb’s hand, though neither of those two is touching the other, somehow we’ve formed a broken circle. We’ve started dancing our own kind of hora in the rain.
    It is the most glorious, and silliest, and freest I can remember feeling in years. Who would think that’s what I’d be saying with these strict, suffocatingly austere people come to visit our house. And then my Deb, my love, once again she is thinking what I’m thinking and she says, face up into the rain, all of us spinning, “Are you sure this is okay, Shoshana? That it’s not mixed dancing? That this is allowed? I don’t want anyone feeling bad after.”
    “We’ll be just fine,” Shoshana says. “We will live with theconsequences.” The question slows us, and stops us, though no one has yet let go.
    “It’s like the old joke,” I say. And without waiting for anyone to ask which one, I say, “Why don’t Hassidim have sex standing up?”
    “Why?” Shoshana says.
    “Because it might lead to mixed dancing.”
    Deb and Shoshana pretend to be horrified as we let go of hands, as we recognize that the moment is over, the rain disappearing as quickly as it came. Mark stands there staring into the sky, lips pressed tight. “That joke is very, very old,” he says. And then he says, “Mixed dancing makes me think of mixed nuts, and mixed grill, and insalata mista . The sound of ‘mixed dancing’ has made me wildly hungry. And I’m going to panic if the only kosher thing in the house is that loaf of bleached American bread.”
    “You have the munchies,” I say.
    “Diagnosis correct,” he says.
    Deb starts clapping at that, tiny claps, her hands held to her chest in prayer. “You will not,” Deb says to him, absolutely beaming, “even believe what riches await.”
     
    · · ·
     
    The four of us stand in the pantry, soaking wet, hunting through the shelves and dripping on the floor. “Have you ever seen such a pantry?” Shoshana says. “It’s gigantic,” she says, reaching her arms out from side to side. It is indeed large,