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

Really, let’s go back to the kitchen. I can order in from the glatt kosher place. We can eat outside on the grass, and have a real dinner and not just junk.”
    “No, no,” Mark says, “I’ll play. I’ll take it seriously.”
    “So would the guy hide you?” I say.
    “And the kids, too?” Mark says. “I’m supposed to pretend that in Jerusalem he’s got a hidden motel or something where he can put the twelve of us?”
    “Yes,” Shoshana says. “In their seminary or something. Sure.”
    Mark thinks about this for a long, long time. He eats Fig Newmans and considers, and you can tell from the way he’s staring that he’s gotten into it, that he’s taking it real seriously—serious to the extreme.
    “Yes,” Mark says, and he looks honestly choked up. “I think, yes, Jeb would do that for us. He would hide us. He would risk it all.”
    “I think so, too,” Shoshana says, and smiles. “Wow, it makes you—as an adult—it makes you appreciate people more.”
    “Yes,” Mark says. “Jeb’s a good man.”
    “Now you go,” Shoshana says to us. “You take a turn.”
    “But we don’t know any of the same people anymore,” Deb says. “We usually just talk about the neighbors.”
    “Our across-the-street neighbors,” I tell them. “They’re the perfect example. Because the husband, Mitch, he would hide us. I know it. He’d lay down his life for what’s right. But that wife of his …” I say.
    “Yes,” Deb says, “he’s right. Mitch would hide us, butGloria, she’d buckle. When he was at work one day, she’d turn us in.”
    “You could play against yourselves, then,” Shoshana says. “What if one of you wasn’t Jewish? Would you hide the other?”
    “I’ll do it,” I say. “I’ll be the Gentile, because I could pass best. A grown woman who still has an ankle-length denim skirt in her closet—they’d catch you in a flash.”
    “Fine,” Deb says. And I stand up straight, put my shoulders back, like maybe I’m in a lineup. I stand there with my chin raised so my wife can study me. So she can really get a look in, and get a think in, and decide if her husband really has what it takes. Would I really have the strength, would I care enough—and it is not a light question, not a throwaway question—to risk my life to save her and our son?
    Deb stares, and Deb smiles, and gives me a little push to my chest. “Of course he would,” Deb says. And she takes the half stride that’s between us and gives me a tight hug that she doesn’t release. “Now you,” Deb says. “You and Yuri go.”
    “How does that even make sense?” Mark says. “Even for imagining.”
    “Shhh,” Shoshana says. “Just stand over there and be a good Gentile while I look.”
    “But if I weren’t Jewish, I wouldn’t be me.”
    “That’s for sure,” I say.
    “He agrees,” Mark says. “We wouldn’t even be married. We wouldn’t have kids.”
    “Of course you can imagine it,” Shoshana says. “Look,” she says, and goes over and closes the pantry door. “Here we are, caught in South Florida for the second Holocaust. You’re not Jewish, and you’ve got the three of us hiding in your pantry.”
    “But look at me!” he says.
    “I’ve got a fix,” I say. “You’re a background singer for ZZ Top. You know them? You know that band?”
    Deb lets go of me, just so she can give my arm a slap.
    “Really,” Shoshana says. “Try to look at the three of us like that, like it’s your house and we’re your charges, locked up in this room.”
    “And what’re you going to do while I do that?” Mark says.
    “I’m going to look at you looking at us. I’m going to imagine.”
    “Okay,” he says. “ Nu , get to it. I will stand, you imagine.”
    And that’s what we do, the four of us. We stand there playing our roles, and we really get into it. We really all imagine it. I can see Deb seeing him, and him seeing us, and Shoshana just staring and staring at her husband.
    We stand there so