“You finish a sefer and then you say Hadran Alakh. We will return to you, and you will return to us.”
“Or you bury it.”
“Well, yeah,” he said, “if it’s destroyed.”
“So your point is that you’re more attached to a sefer than you are to me?”
“No,” he said noncommittally. “My point is that with a sefer, you know what to do. You know you’ll see that Torah again.”
“But with me—”
He shrugged.
I gazed empty-eyed at the water, made dim and silvery by twilight. “I see.”
“Like, it’s hard to say goodbye, but it’s also not that hard,” he pressed. “I don’t know. I mean, you’re not that sad yourself about it, are you?”
Aryeh Eden, I thought. Rav Glick’s shiur. Torah Temimah. Borough Park. Brooklyn. New York. United States. Olam HaZeh. The Universe.
“No,” I said, feeling a conspicuous lack of shame admitting this.
“Maybe because most things seem sad with you.” Shimon’s cheeks flushed. I felt overwhelmed with desire to be away, to slink into dusk and never see him again.
“Think you’ll come back?” he asked eventually, breaking the silence snaking between us. In the years since, I’ve thought a lot about what this meant. Brooklyn? Our friendship? Religiosity? It didn’t matter. They were all tied up in each other, they all meant the same thing.
“No,” I told him. “I don’t suppose I will.”
We stayed a while longer, watching night plunge upon the bridge, and then retrieved our bikes. We rode the entire way home in deference to a larger silence. When we turned on to our street, we parted with a wave.
I’ve seen Shimon only once since.
* * *
THE FIRST THING ABOUT FLORIDA was the heat, which blasted us the moment the automated airport doors slid open, leading us outside into exhaust fumes and fever-searing sunlight. Within minutes of waiting for a cab, my clothing clung to my skin. Like a good Brooklyn boy, I had worn a white button-down, tucked into dark, formless pants, with the white strings of my tzitzit dancing at my knees. I felt like Shimon, sweating, sweating.
It was a quick drive to our neighborhood. We were restless to see the new house, and my mother urged our driver, who offered broken English and mistaken turns, to go faster. For the last several weeks all I’d heard from her was how jaw-dropping Zion Hills was: immaculate homes, filled with doctors and lawyers and bankers—“professionals,” my mother called them, relics of a life before my father. Still, I was floored seeing it in person, the multistoried houses, the golf course, the sports cars parked lazily in paved driveways.
My mother drew down the window and pointed. “That’s the high school!” Torah Temimah had been tiny and utterly run-down, a two-story building with cracks in the pavement, perpetually overflowing toilets, unpainted walls adorned with mold and five and a half classrooms, half because, weather permitting, freshman year shuirs were held on the porch, overlooking the parking lot. This school, in stark contrast, was titanic. The building looked a good five stories high and was surrounded by basketball hoops, full-length verdant soccer fields, clay tennis courts. “Breathtaking, isn’t it?” My mother had her face against the window. Her voice carried with unfamiliar exuberance.
“Not exactly haymish,” my father said under his breath, less awestruck. He turned his attention to one of the far-off fields, where shirtless soccer players jostled in pursuit of the ball. “Looks like a goyishe prep school.”
Eventually, after several trips down the wrong cul-de-sacs, our driver found Milton Drive. We pulled onto the street and drove slowly, looking for number 599. “There,” my mother motioned. And then, seeing our driver’s eyes widen: “Not the gigantic one, I’m afraid. The one on the right.”
Our neighbor directly across the street, the house at 598, was indeed gigantic: a red-bricked, vaguely Tudor mansion, built on a double lot, with large, stained-glass windows, a balcony overlooking the driveway, a three-car garage and four cars. I didn’t know much about cars, but I knew one was an Audi.
“Goodness,” my mother said, “that backyard.”
I caught only a glimpse of what seemed to be an Olympic-size pool, since my father decided we’d marveled enough at our neighbor (“a house is a house: what do you do with so many rooms?”) and urged our driver to pull into our more humble abode.
That our neighbor towered over us did not lessen my excitement. I felt an immediate surge of attachment to our new house: single-storied, cozy, considerably larger than what we’d ever had before. We had weather-beaten pavement in our driveway, slightly brown grass baking in the heat, two palm trees out front and, I was delighted to discover, a small pool out back, the perimeter of which was overrun by tiny, leucistic lizards.
“What do you think, Ari?” my mother asked nervously after we unloaded the car and loitered in our driveway.
“It’s great,” I said, and I meant it. For the first time for as long as I could remember, I felt overwhelmed with fluid happiness, overjoyed at the distance separating me from my old life.
* * *
WE WERE SITTING IN OUR living room that evening, after a makeshift dinner of scrambled eggs and several hours unloading boxes, moving furniture, transferring miscellaneous items from one side of the room to the other and back. I was reviewing a page of Talmud with my father when our landline rang. My mother answered; I heard her give loud, exaggerated laughs. Foreign sounds to me.
“Our neighbors,” my mother said, bustling in from the kitchen. “From the house across the street. Cynthia and Eddie Harris—they sound lovely.”
My father stared blankly. “What’d they want?”
“They’ve invited us to a barbecue tomorrow.”
My father’s finger held our place in the Gemara. Damages caused by oxen or by mav’eh are caused by a living spirit. Fire has no living spirit. “And what’d you tell them?”
She looked rosy-cheeked. “That we’d be delighted, of course.”
He nodded slightly, returning his attention to the Talmud. Without another word, we resumed learning.
* * *
THE BARBECUE WAS ON a sun-dazzled afternoon. Even in the oppressive Florida heat we dressed as we always did: my father and I in black and white, my mother tzniut in her long sleeves, though I noticed she donned a new floral dress for the occasion.
Timidly, we rang the doorbell and waited for several minutes, admiring the flagstone steps and double-hinged oak doors, my mother elated at the prospect of a social life, my father looking as if he’d prefer to be anywhere else. Eventually, when no one answered, we made our way around the side of the mansion, following the sound of laughter. We opened an iron gate and let ourselves into the party.
Horror washed over my father’s face as he surveyed the backyard. Wives in short, colorful sundresses, Chardonnay in hand. Men in Burberry polos, gripping beers. Teenage boys and girls thrashing together in the pool, a cardinal sin in our former lives. Dazzlingly alien sights: wealth, charm, hysteria. My stomach turned uneasily.
“Hello, there,” a hearty voice boomed behind us. A thick man in a crisp white polo clapped my father on the back, startling him. “You must be the Edens!” Ever so slightly, my father stole a look at the top of the man’s gelled hair. No yarmulke. The man extended a beefy hand. “Our new neighbors! You guys know how excited we’ve been to meet you? Wasn’t too much love lost with the people who used to own your house. I mean, nice people, I guess, but kept to themselves too much. We needed new friends.” He squinted, his eyes sweeping the backyard—incidentally the most impressive backyard I’d ever seen: an enormous pool, a marble bathhouse, a Jacuzzi and bar, a fence bordering a picturesque golf course—and shrugged. “I don’t know where Cynthia went off, she must be inside. Come, I’ll bring you in to meet her. Eddie Harris, by the way. Real pleasure.”