Leon dropped his mail and his textbooks inside the front door and ran toward the ringing telephone.
“Hello?” he answered, out of breath.
“Leon, it’s Shoshanna.”
He felt strangely disappointed, but he wasn’t sure who he’d hoped would be on the other end.
“Oh, hi.”
“You haven’t RSVP’d for my Yom Kippur breakfast. Are you coming? I need to know how many pounds of lox to order.”
Leon sighed. Shoshanna’s meals were notoriously delicious, but he was unwilling to face Louise again. It had taken him weeks to recover from the emotional whiplash.
“I’m not coming if Louise is coming,” he stated bluntly.
“It went that well, huh?” Shoshanna sounded unsurprised. “What did she do this time?”
“She compared me to Hitler.”
Shoshanna laughed. “That’s a bit extreme, even for Louise.” She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “But we should cut her some slack, right? It was the first day of her mother’s shiva.”
“What?”
“She came right to Shabbat dinner from her mother’s shiva on the Island.”
Leon was silent, furiously rewriting their night together in his head, remembering the emotional urgency of the conversation about her mother. A series of details fell into place: the towel on the mirror, the strange words she’d uttered in her sleep, the content of her rant.
“Of course she didn’t tell you,” Shoshanna said.
He twisted the phone cord around his finger. “What did her mother die of?”
“Some sort of weird neurological thing.” He heard Shoshanna moving around in her kitchen, dropping silverware in the sink. “But back to the subject at hand: no, she’s not coming to Yom Kippur, and I really need to know about the lox.”
“Sure, I’ll come,” Leon said vaguely, mumbling the necessary pleasantries to get off the phone.
He sat down heavily at his Formica kitchen table, scraping off some dried egg yolk with the nail of his index finger, remembering the first day of his father’s shiva. He remembered those endless evenings after his father died, eating sad casserole after sad casserole, an unending slurry of soft, gray foods. He still hated kugel.
He felt a sudden tenderness for Louise, remembering the way she’d looked asleep on his bed, her fists clutching the sheets like a toddler. He picked up the telephone and called Shoshanna back.
“Do you have Louise’s address?” he asked. “I want to send her a condolence package.”
“Uh-huh,” Shoshanna said. “Sure, a condolence package.” But she put down the phone and got her address book.
He didn’t have any classes the next day, so he took the subway down to the East Village, carrying a cardboard box. He deliberately didn’t think too hard about why he was delivering it in person instead of putting it in the mail.
When he got to Alphabet City, he picked his way around the piles of uncollected trash and dodged a series of elaborate hopscotch boards. The front door of Louise’s building was propped open, so he slipped inside, walking up the urine-stained staircase to the third floor. He was about to leave the box outside of her apartment with a note when Louise opened the door wearing just a T-shirt and underwear, her eyes red-rimmed.
“Leon?” She looked like she was half-asleep. “What are you doing here?”
“I was just leaving you a condolence gift,” he said, turning toward the stairs, but Louise stepped out into the hallway, cutting off his exit. She squatted down and began pulling things out of the box. “Carrots?” she asked. “Potato chips, Rice Krispies, scotch? Is there a theme that I’m missing?”
Leon sighed. He wasn’t getting out of this conversation. “After my father died, everyone brought us mushy casseroles and soups for our freezer. I don’t think I ate anything crunchy for a year. So I thought I’d bring you something crunchy.”
“And scotch.”
“And scotch. Just because.”
Louise stood up and looked at Leon head-on. “This is actually the most thoughtful gift anyone’s given me since my mother died.”
He avoided her eyes, staring at the floor. She had chipped red paint on her toenails.
“I’m sorry I was such an asshole the other day,” she said. “It’s possible,” she paused, giving him a slight smile, “that I’ve been acting out just a teeny, tiny bit.”
Leon looked at her stained T-shirt and uncombed hair and pale, vulnerable legs, and thought, I’m such a fucking chump, because instead of feeling angry, he was feeling that dangerous tenderness again. “Well,” he said, not quite willing to forgive her just yet, “grief turns everyone into an asshole, I guess.” But then he cracked, confessing, “I stole everything that wasn’t nailed down for six months after my dad died.”
Louise cocked her head. “Oh yeah? Jewels? Impressionist art? Sports cars?” She was trying too hard, but her loneliness tugged at him. “All of the above,” he said, “although I specialized in bubblegum and baseball card heists.”
“That’s smart,” Louise said, relaxing into the doorway. “I hear bubblegum doesn’t depreciate.”
Leon nodded. “That’s why I have it in a safe deposit box. If the Nazis invade, I can always shove it up my ass and flee the country.”
It was the type of joke he wasn’t usually brave enough to make, but he was glad he had, because she tilted her head back and laughed. “Do you want to come in and eat some crunchy foods with me?” “Sure,” Leon said, admitting to himself that this was what he’d hoped for all along.
She led him into a dingy living room. He noticed she had a large, tangled knot in the back of her hair. Her couch was covered with disordered piles of tasteful old lady clothing—scarves that looked like they’d been purchased in the MOMA gift shop; expensive coats from places he’d never entered, like Saks and Bloomingdales. There was something that resembled an altar on the milk crate that passed for a coffee table. He paused and looked at the bizarre assortment of items: a yahrzeit candle, a carton of old Chinese food with the chopsticks perched upright, a copy of Civilization and Its Discontents, and a wine glass filled to the brim with what looked like salt or sugar. He followed her pale legs around the corner into the dirty kitchen. There was a half-eaten kugel on the table, the oxidizing potatoes turning an unappetizing gray-blue.
“I see you, too, have been gifted sad casseroles,” Leon said.
“Luckily, I only have a tiny freezer.” Louise gestured toward one of the chairs while she removed two relatively clean glasses from the cabinet and poured them some scotch. She sat down cross-legged in the rickety chair across from him. Leon feared it might tip over.
“So you stole?” she asked, skipping the small talk.
“Yup, from age ten to eleven I was a real kleptomaniac. It’s not rocket science—I guess I felt like the world owed me something.”
Louise took a sip of scotch and cracked open the bag of potato chips. “I’ve been lying,” she said, “to everybody about everything. The other day I told somebody my birthday was May eleventh instead of May twelfth for absolutely no reason. I told someone at a bar I play the violin instead of the cello. They’re not even interesting lies, but for some reason I can’t answer anything honestly.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, when did it start?” He winced at his therapeutic tone, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“At the shiva. Everyone kept uttering bullshit platitudes about my mother, and then I had to utter bullshit platitudes back, and then I just couldn’t stop.”
“Well, considering how you feel about euphemisms, I can imagine how crazy that made you.” He couldn’t quite manage to keep the bitterness out of his voice.
“I’m really sorry about that,” she said. “That rant wasn’t meant for you. Sometimes I just have to take a shit on good things, you know? Or at least that’s what my mother always said, although she used more clinical terminology.” Louise sat up straight, flaring her nostrils and assuming a pinched, superior tone. “There you go again, Louise, picking a fight to avoid intimacy.”
Leon knew he was supposed to laugh, but he still felt wounded, so he compromised on a thin smile.
“See,” Louise said, making direct eye contact. “I’m self-aware, I have insight—for all the good it does me. With that and ten cents, I can buy a bag of chips.”
“You just indicted my entire profession.”
“Nah,” Louise said, “I’m just therapy-proof. When you’re raised in it, you eventually become immune. It’s like developing a tolerance for arsenic.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” She shrugged. “Not my problem.”
He rolled his eyes and they were silent for a moment. Louise started drawing her initials in the condensation on the table.
“It’s good to talk to you,” she said. “Everybody’s been treating me like I’m contaminated, like death is contagious. No one invites me to anything anymore. And when they do, they’re so uncomfortable.” “No one knows how to talk about death.” Leon swirled the scotch around in his glass, watching the amber liquid lick the sides. “You know what I hate?” he said with unexpected intensity, realizing he’d wanted to have this conversation for over a decade. “When it comes up in conversation that my father’s dead and the other person falls all over themselves apologizing, like I’d forgotten my father was dead until they asked about it.”
“I know!” Louise practically shouted. “And then I’m supposed to make them feel better, which I obviously don’t do.”
“Obviously.”
He fiddled with the potato chip bag, pressing it into the table and smoothing out the wrinkles with his thumbnail. “People didn’t stop inviting me to things,” he said. “In my case, they invited me to everything. All the moms in the neighborhood were worried I wouldn’t have a male role model, so they made all the dads invite me to baseball games. I must have gone to twenty games, and I hate baseball. I would’ve loved it if people left me alone.”
He had a vivid memory of the comforting cave underneath the bleachers, the light filtering dimly through the metal slats, partially illuminating his comic book. After the games, whatever dad had been assigned to him would have to coax him out into the sunlight. That was the summer he’d spent as much time as possible holed up in his room drawing map after map of escape routes. He’d slept with his head under the blankets every night because he was convinced monsters were going to crawl in his window. In those few terrifying minutes before he fell asleep, he would reassure himself by thinking, I’m not a boy, I’m just a lump of clothes under the covers.
He looked at Louise, pale and diminished across the table. He wanted to ask her what was going on in her living room. But he restrained himself because he knew there was nothing more private than the chaotic logic of grief.
Louise rubbed her eyes and tried to stifle a yawn. “Have you been sleeping?” Leon asked.
“Not really. I can’t seem to quiet my brain.” “You look like you could fall asleep now.”
She lifted up her empty glass of scotch. “Maybe.” “I’m going to go,” Leon said. “Try and get some rest.”
He wanted to take her hand and walk into what he suspected was a filthy bedroom, lie down with her on her unwashed sheets, and caress her tangled hair until she fell asleep. But instead he stood up, scraping the chair against the sticky floor, and started toward the door. “Wait! Leon!” Louise shouted even though he was still in her kitchen. “I’m going to be in your neighborhood tomorrow. I was going to do tashlich at Riverside Park. Do you wanna come with me?”
“Tashlich?” Leon asked.
“You know, that thing we Jews have done for thousands of years where we throw our sins into the river for the Jewish new year,” Louise said, with that same smug condescension he remembered from his bedroom. He felt the muscles in his face hardening like an exoskeleton.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said, holding up her hand to stop him. She twisted a hank of her unwashed hair around her finger. “I get mean when I feel vulnerable, okay? But I stopped myself this time. Doesn’t that count for something?”
He took a deep breath and nodded his head almost imperceptibly.”Breadcrumbs,” he said after a minute, because he had a vague memory of following his Hebrew teacher Mrs. Rokeach toward the river on Rosh Hashanah—he must’ve been what, eight? nine?—clutching a gummed-up bag of breadcrumbs in his fist.
“What?”
“Breadcrumbs. You throw them into the river and somehow your sins are magically transubstantiated into breadcrumbs?”
“Yes, right,” Louise said, rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands.
“But why are you doing…” He hesitated, searching for the Hebrew word “…tashlich.”
Louise let out a frustrated breath. “Because I need this year to end,” she said. “I need a fresh start. I’ve tried everything.” She gestured toward the living room, the weird detritus of failed rituals. “And I thought, why reinvent the wheel when there’s a thousands-of-years-old misogynistic religion that’s already done it for me. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
She put her hands on her hips. “So how did I do on the vulnerability versus hostility scale?”
“I’d give you a B+. Good effort, still some room for improvement.”
“Fuck you, Leon.”
“Now you’re down to a C.” They grinned at each other. “Tomorrow at ten?” she said. He nodded. “Tomorrow at ten.”
*
It was one of those perfect fall days in New York when most of the leaves were still on the trees, and the ones on the sidewalk were not yet saturated with dogshit.
“Jesus Christ, look at all those Chasids,” Louise said as they entered the park and glimpsed the river through the cars on the West Side Highway.
Leon squinted at the undulating wall of black in the distance. Slowly, the shapes resolved into individuals davening in eighteenth-century garb.
As they got closer, he heard the collective sound of prayer and Eastern European wailing mingling with the sounds of car horns and weekday traffic.
“Let’s go sit against that tree,” Louise suggested. “I don’t have the energy to push my way through that wall of chauvinism right now.” They made their way to a tall oak with thick roots.
“I have some pot,” Louise said, pulling an elegant, compact joint and a lighter out of the pocket of her peacoat. It did not surprise Leon that Louise could roll a perfect joint. His, on the other hand, were loose and clumsy and inevitably fell apart after one or two drags. They lay down on the grass and passed the joint back and forth between them. Leon looked at the sun filtering through the remaining leaves on the trees and enjoyed the languid feeling of the pot hitting his bloodstream.
Louise gestured toward the keening men by the river. “My mother’s first memory was of tashlich right here. She got in trouble for giving her breadcrumbs to the ducks instead of throwing them into the river. When I was a little kid, we didn’t go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah. We’d go to the nearest pond and just feed the ducks a whole loaf of bread.”
“That sounds like a nice memory.”
“It was. We got along when I was little.”
They were quiet for a moment, lying side by side, their fingertips touching. The clean smell of crumbling leaves filled his nose and gave him a visceral sense of hope and possibility.
“Is it strange,” Louise asked, cutting into his thoughts, “to simultaneously miss someone and still hate them so much?”
“No,” Leon answered. “I think it’s normal, most people just don’t admit it.” He leaned over and propped himself up on his elbow. “So what would you have said about her at the service, if you could have been honest?”
Louise turned to face him.
“Some of the bad stuff, like what I told you at Shoshanna’s. But good stuff, too. There was a lot I liked about her. I kind of liked that she was mean and single-minded. She didn’t follow anybody’s rules. During the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial, she bought a copy in the city and gave it to me. I was twelve.”
“Twelve?”
“Yup, twelve.” Louise carefully tore a red maple leaf along its veins, collecting the fragments in a small pile in the grass between them. “She always believed I had the capacity to be great, which was oppressive, but also, if I’m honest, made me feel special. Of course, I perpetually disappointed her by being just ‘pretty good.’ During the last conversation we had—I was still at Oberlin, and she was already sick—she could barely speak, but she managed to say, ‘Fourth chair?’ with such disdain that I couldn’t pick up my cello for a week. God, I fucking hated her. But it was nice to know there was somebody in the world who thought I was capable of true brilliance. I already miss that.”
Leon reached out and took her hand. A harried Chasidic woman in a drab headscarf with an indeterminate number of children hanging onto her skirts walked past them.
“But mostly, I’m grateful to my mother that I’m not her,” Louise said, pointing at the Chasidic woman, who was now shouting at her children in Yiddish, trying to usher them through the tunnel toward the river. “If my mother hadn’t had the grim determination and ambition to claw her way out of that life, that would be me right now.”
Leon superimposed Louise’s face upon the Chasidic woman, and for a brief, stoned moment he believed that she actually was Louise in an alternate reality. He pictured Alternate Louise’s small, repetitive life and felt overwhelmingly sad. The woman blew three noses in rapid succession while a toddler yanked on her, and Leon felt a surge of gratitude toward Louise’s mother.
“How did your mother get out?” Leon asked.
“I don’t know,” Louise said. “It’s all kind of shrouded in mystery. But part of me wonders if she ever really did get out. Some part of her was always stuck in this world. She didn’t believe in God, but the shtetl superstitions, they lingered. After she died, I found salt in the pockets of all of her jackets and in the bottom of all of her purses.”
“What do you mean, salt in the pockets?”
“It’s a bubbe meise,” Louise explained impatiently. “When you get new clothes or move into a new house, you put salt in your pockets and the corners of the room to keep the dybbuks away. You know, the bad spirits. Your family didn’t do that?”
“No,” Leon said. “My mother isn’t really one for superstition.
Bitter hostility, but not superstition.”
“Well, when my ultra-sophisticated psychoanalyst mother dropped me off at college, she sprinkled salt in all four corners of my dorm room. I had to lie to my shiksa roommate and say it was to prevent ants.”
Leon snorted. “Well, did you get haunted? Maybe it worked.” “Very funny,” Louise said, sitting up and hugging herself. He wanted to touch her back, but he was afraid she’d lash out at him, so he restrained himself. “Can I confess something?” she asked in a tiny voice.
“Of course.”
“I think she’s haunting me. My mother. She’s shown up in my dreams every night since I ran away from the shiva. And she’s horrible. Really mean and judgmental. And I keep seeing her everywhere around the city. I haven’t really slept in days. I don’t know how to get her to leave me alone.”
Leon was trying to figure out how to say something like, “She’s not really haunting you, you just can’t let go,” but then he took one look at Louise hugging her own knees and wisely shut up. He didn’t have any insights that she hadn’t already had. He didn’t have any great wisdom to impart about grief. Sometimes he still slept with his head under the blankets and thought, I’m not a man, I’m just a lump of clothes under the covers.
“Is that why we’re here? To exorcise her ghost?” Louise nodded.
“What does that mean?” Leon asked. The mumbled prayers rising up from the water gave the bright fall day a slightly sinister edge and blurred the normal outlines of reality.
“I don’t know,” Louise said. “I’m trying anything. I was hoping if I came back to this place, I’d know what to do. Maybe if I atone for all the ways in which I’m a fuckup, she’ll leave me alone. Or maybe she wants me to feed the ducks one last time. Or maybe there’s nothing I can do short of getting a spot in the New York Philharmonic.”
“You’re not a fuckup,” Leon said.
“I suspect you and Freya Rackoff have very different criteria about what makes someone a fuckup,” Louise said. Then she stood up and held out her hand, pulling Leon up onto his feet. “Let’s get this over with.” She reached into her peacoat and pulled out a handful of salt. “But just in case, I’m putting this in your pocket. It’s from my mom’s stash. Shtetl salt by way of Saks Fifth Avenue.”
She stuffed the crystals in his jeans, and Leon blushed at the casual intimacy of the gesture. He was half convinced he could feel the salt burning in his pocket. He wasn’t sure how he’d ended up as an accessory in a Rosh Hashanah exorcism, but no part of him wanted to extract himself even though he was a little frightened.
She gripped his hand tightly as they walked through the tunnel, underneath the West Side Highway over to the throngs by the river. They pushed through the crowds to get to the fence by the water. Somehow Leon lost his grip on her hand and was pulled into the sweating mass of black-clad bodies. He panicked, unable to distinguish individual faces, convinced, in his admittedly stoned state, that these men were not individuals but appendages, part of a large, tentacled Lovecraftian monster. He fought his way to a patch of grass, looking around frantically for Louise, trying to keep his breath steady. She tapped him on the shoulder.
“You okay?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m stoned and paranoid. How long was I fighting my way through the crowd? Twenty minutes? Thirty minutes?”
Louise laughed, glancing at her watch. “Two minutes? Maybe two and a half?”
She turned toward the water, and Leon reached out an arm and grabbed her. “Don’t leave me.”
She turned back with an expression Leon knew he wasn’t coherent enough to read correctly. Condescension? Compassion? Bemusement? A combination of the three?
“You really are freaking out.”
“Did my hyperventilating clue you into that fact?” he managed to squeeze out of his tightening lungs. “I can’t breathe. I think I’m having a heart attack.”
“Yeah, you’re not having a heart attack.” “How do you know? Are you a doctor?”
“No. I’m a pothead. And that makes me highly qualified. I basically have a PhD in marijuana-induced panic attacks. Trust me, I know how to deal with this.” She grabbed both his hands in hers. “Have you heard the one about the Jew and the Catholic and the plane crash?”
“Are you seriously trying to tell me a joke right now?” Louise ignored him. “So have you?”
He shook his head, trying not to look at the Chasids on his right or left.
“Keep your eyes on me,” she said. He nodded, suddenly compliant. Her authoritative voice comforted him.
“So this Jew and a Catholic are in a plane crash.”
“What caused the plane crash?” Leon interrupted, picturing a plane falling out of the sky and landing on top of them. He felt exposed on the riverbank.
“Not relevant,” Louise said with an edge of irritation. “But I can tell you no one dies in the plane crash, is that better?”
Leon nodded again.
“So when this Jew and this Catholic come out of the wreckage, the Catholic looks up and sees that the Jew is crossing himself, and the Catholic guy says, ‘I’m glad to see you found Jesus.’ And the Jew says, ‘What are you talking about?’ And the Catholic says, ‘You crossed yourself.’”
Louise dropped Leon’s hands and made the sign of the cross. He could feel the crowd backing away from them and the fresh fall air hitting his skin. He was sure all of the Chasids had horrified looks on their faces, but he was too scared to turn his head.
“And the Jew says, ‘Ha! You wish.’ And then he crosses himself again, saying ‘Spectacles, testicles, wallet, cigar.’ Get it?” Louise asked.
“Spectacles.” She touched her eyes.
“Testicles.” She touched the area above her crotch. “Wallet.” She tapped her left breast.
“Cigar.” And then her right.
Leon followed her fingers with his eyes. He noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra.
“So,” Louise said, “do you have your spectacles?”
Leon picked up his hand and felt around for his glasses. “Yes.” “Your testicles?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Leon deadpanned. “Your wallet?”
He patted his back left pocket. “Yes.”
“And let’s say house keys instead of cigars.”
He felt the metal poking into his right hip. “Yes.”
“Repeat after me,” Louise said. “Spectacles, testicles, wallet, cigar.”
Leon complied. “Spectacles, testicles, wallet, cigar.”
“You see? Now you’re fine.”
He was fine. He knew once he was no longer high he would be embarrassed that he’d freaked out, but right now he truly believed that Louise’s Borscht Belt incantation had saved his life. His breathing calmed down, and the fall air felt good in his lungs.
“So,” Louise said, “you ready to get out of here?” “But what about our sins?”
“Fuck it. Now that I’m here, it feels all wrong. My mother hated these people. If I did tashlich, it would be one more thing for her to haunt me about. Besides, I’m craving a black and white cookie.”
He took her hand. She led them back through the men who no longer looked like tentacled monsters, but like unkempt nebbishes in silly hats. The Chasids cleared the way for Louise so they didn’t have to touch her. It was an easily explained magic trick, but it still felt like Moses parting the Red Sea.
“I think I just figured something out about you,” Leon said as they entered the empty tunnel below the highway.
“Oh yeah, what’s that?” “You’re a Borscht Belt witch.”
She laughed. He could tell the idea delighted her. ”What does that mean?”
“You used magic back there. You chased away the evil spirits and kept me safe.”
“No, I talked you down from a paranoid high.”
“No,” he said firmly. “You did more than that. I’m just saying, if your mom is a dybbuk, you have the power to exorcise her from your life.”
“Oh, yeah?” Louise said. “Any idea how?”
“None,” Leon answered. “But I’m not the witch. You are.”
They were almost at the end of the tunnel. Leon dragged his feet a little, reluctant to plunge back into a regular Wednesday afternoon. He was afraid she would let go of his hand and they would return to their separate apartments and separate lives, that the strange intimacy of this day would dissipate once they reentered the city. He pulled her toward him and kissed her, remembering that moment in his bed, just a few weeks ago, when they were both finally naked and their bare skin touched for the first time. That was always his favorite part. It reminded him of the glorious disorientation of jumping into a cold mountain lake, all of your senses reorienting toward their new watery reality.
A noisy family entered the tunnel behind them, Yiddish echoing off the cement walls, and they broke apart, but Louise kept her grip on his hand. They stepped forward into the park together, both blinking at the ordinary fall day. Leon turned toward Louise and saw that she was crying.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “It’s just that if she stops haunting me, then she’s gone. Really gone.”
“Yes,” Leon said, resisting the urge to reach out and comfort her because that wasn’t what she needed. “It’s going to be terrible for a very long time.”
They were silent for an interminable moment. Louise wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve. “Thank you,” she said finally.
“For what?”
“For being honest. For not bullshitting me.” “Anytime,” Leon said lightly.
Louise snatched her hand back. “Don’t do that,” she said, her voice trembling. “Don’t say things you don’t mean.”
“It’s just an expression,” Leon started to say. But his words sounded off to his own ears because the salt still burned in his pockets. It was the holiest day of the year , and they were half in and half out of multiple rituals he barely understood. “But I do mean it,” he said in a solemn voice he almost didn’t recognize, feeling the promise deep in his chest, in his groin, in his feet. “I swear, no bullshit or euphemisms to the best of my ability.”
Louise stared at him and nodded. “Okay,” she said with finality, as if she’d decided something, as if some sort of sacrament had occurred.
“Okay,” he echoed. They smiled shyly at each other, a still island in the park, while the Chasids streamed around them.
__________________________________
From Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation by Sarah Yahm. Used with permission of the publisher, DZANC Books. Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Yahm.
