Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(16)

Mike lets me leave early when I tell him I’m going to interview a source on the Pessie Goldin story. I get home at nine and Iris asks me what she should wear.

“If the girls are frum they’ll probably be in long skirts and long sleeves and stockings,” I say.

“From?”

“Frum. F-r-u-m. It means, like, observant.”

“Rocking the lingo,” she says, “I like it.”

“Anyway, I don’t think it matters. Clearly they’re liberal. I mean, it says BYOB.”

“BYOB! Really? This could be awesome. Are pants okay? I think I’ll wear pants.”

“I’m wearing jeans.”

“Cool. How about we get a six-pack? I’ll bring a big bag and if it’s weird, I’ll just keep it,” says Iris. I agree this is a good plan.

We leave the house at nine thirty and take the F train to Avenue I. It’s a little warmer tonight than it has been in weeks and it feels nice not to have to rush from one place to the next. I even left my hat at home. The address on Ocean Parkway, it turns out, is a synagogue.

“It’s in a church?” whispers Iris. We’re standing across the street.

“It’s a synagogue,” I say.

“I know,” says Iris, still whispering. “I just meant, you know, a house of worship. I wouldn’t have guessed they’d let them do that.”

“I don’t think they can hear you,” I say.

“Come on,” she says. “Isn’t that strange?”

“I read about two in The New York Times. One was in somebody’s home. One was in a community center basement in Manhattan. A synagogue is kind of a community center, so…”

The ornate stone building is probably at least a hundred years old. Two sets of steps come together in the front, and on them linger about a dozen people. One man is very fat, with an enormous beard and wild brown hair. A Jew-fro, I’ve heard it called. He is wearing a yellow hooded sweatshirt with a Hawaiian scene silk-screened on it, and talking to two girls about my age. Both girls are dressed in long skirts and flat shoes, their hair covered with scarves. But the skirts aren’t plain black like the ones most of the women I saw in Borough Park wore; one is denim, and one is a crinkled, fiery red-and-orange fabric. Little rebellions, I think.

Iris and I walk toward the threesome and Jew-fro greets us.

“We tend to start late,” he says, with a smile. “Welcome. There’s food and drink inside.”

Iris and I say thank you and continue inside the iron gates and up the stairs to the entrance. People are smoking and drinking from plastic cups and chatting with each other. I spot two black-hatted men. We walk into the foyer, an elegant, if worn, mosaic-tiled rotunda with a dome rising fifty feet into the sky. I look up and see a stained glass window. It’s too dark to tell whether the image is abstract or depicts some sort of scene. At my dad’s church they had a stained glass window called the Christ window. It wasn’t a terribly artful illustration—just white Jesus in a white robe with his hands out, a halo above his head—but I remember that when the sun lit the blues and yellows and pinks on the mornings when I used to go to Sunday school I couldn’t help but be a little bit mesmerized by it. Iris and I follow the noise down the hallway from the foyer to a multipurpose room big enough for a wedding or a concert. Plastic and aluminum folding chairs line the walls. There is a buffet set on tables along one side of the vast space. I see beer and wine. We set down our six-pack and Iris opens one for each of us with the flamingo bottle opener on her key chain (a holdover from college). There are probably twenty people in the room. Most of the men wear some kind of covering on their head. Many have black yarmulkes, and several wear sidecurls and black pants. But more than one wears a knit beanie, or a baseball cap. One has a hat that says COMME DES FUCKDOWN. I alert Iris and she loves it.

The buffet is mostly canned or bagged—chips, nuts, salsa, Oreos, a plastic barrel of Cheez puffs—but everyone seems to have chipped in. There is white wine in a box, several varieties of juice and punch, and a half-empty jug of Smirnoff. We drink our beers and look around. It’s mostly men inside, and everyone appears engaged in conversations that don’t lend themselves to interruption, so we walk back out to the front steps. We aren’t leaning against the railing a minute when a woman approaches us.

“Are you here to see Dov?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Are you?”

The woman nods. She is wearing a wig and a navy blue turtleneck. She is probably in her late thirties. “You know him from Facebook?”

“Sort of.”

“I do not agree with everything he says, but I think he is doing a good thing.”

I nod.

“You are frum?”

“No,” I say.

“But you are Jewish?”

I hate this question. Before I moved to Brooklyn, I don’t think anyone had ever asked me if I was Jewish. Now I feel like I get asked every other day, and my answer is more complicated than they assume, or, frankly, want to hear about. Fortunately, Iris jumps in.

“I’m not,” she says. “But she is.”

“Are you from Brooklyn?”

“No,” I say. “We’re from Florida.”

“Florida! Miami? I have cousins in Miami.”