Grey Suede Shoes
The synagogue of my youth wandered throughout the city, from the basement of the Methodist church on the Manayunk hills to the East Falls nursing home with its fire escape complex and bells, till it finally found Canaan in the sloping suburbs, still wood and pastureland and promise—right when I began to prepare for my bar mitzvah with a brand-new rabbi from realms unknown, a sour, mordant, thick-lipped old man who dripped his accent all over the new floor. My classmates and I were incredulous that his name was Fabian, like the current teen idol from South Philly, responsible for wave upon wave of hysteria engulfing teenage girls.
That year my family held Passover at the ranch home of an eccentric divorcée whose daughter Jo had just won a chaperoned date with the non-rabbinical Fabian. It was her napkin whose puckered lipstick imprint was judged to be most kissable.
Meanwhile, I was suffering with my lessons with the non-movie-star Rabbi Fabian. I could learn no Hebrew, disrupted class, turned all moral lessons into Three-Stooges skits—so repelled I was, for no good reason, by all of it. The wife of Rabbi Fabian made me her project. She was spindly with hair like matted string, interfering and nosy, and one day after school she scolded me ferociously for wearing ratty, hide-worn shoes.
How could she know what feet and shoes meant to me, that my early childhood was passed in some foot captivity? Lacking arches and angled out like the wings of a soaring buzzard, my feet left inhuman evidence of every trek across beach and snow; every puddle betrayed my crossing—and to make it worse, I can’t explain it, but for some reason I chose the most outlandish shoes, the worst of which were swollen boats with spongy saw-toothed soles that squealed on me, at least two sizes too small because otherwise they looked so huge, and thus unbearable.
So I wore my brother’s loaned gray Hush Puppies to Sunday school: they were old, broken in, my toes could stretch and wriggle, relax from the strict regimen of clasping marbles between them, one hundred times a day, to release them in a nearby bowl as my mother counted clinks. Next week, when I wore them, Mrs. Fabian was livid; she tripped me in the hall, marched me by shirt-tail out to our idling Rambler where my mother remained speechless, and the rabbi’s wife excoriated us in displaced Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and I slithered over seats in the station wagon, as the tongue of her screams arched into a shoehorn, to slip me into that sealed chamber.
Elijah
We leave our walk-ups in the city—to mulch like tumors in the breezeless night. We head out in underground trolleys, switching to trackless lines at the city’s edge. We hitch and walk on, no thought of return, until we come to the forest. Bob who is a folklorist lectures us on the semiotics of roadside dumping, as we pass ditched fridge and loveseat, crib and bassinet—until he admits, no taxonomy is revealed. Janey his lover swats mosquitos gorging themselves on what remains of her pregnancy, itching standing in for grief. Eli, short for Elijah, leads us to the cool waters of an abandoned limestone quarry.
His girlfriend Abby trudges behind, chanting in mute embarrassed tones—because it is her favorite prayer, because she knows it’s inappropriate for daughters, because her parents both still live—Kaddish for the dead. She wants desperately to go to rabbinical school at a time when women don’t and has talked Martin Buber’s translator and biographer into interceding unsuccessfully.
As soon as we reach the stacked-slab shore and settle into the constant roar of birds, Eli and Abby disappear. At first we hear them comparing old family Passovers—the empty chair, the overflowing goblet, the whoosh when someone jars the door to let Elijah in, the practical joke appreciated by all but Eli and Abby. And then we hear nothing but the bleating lamb of sex, the sighs of a plague lifted. To keep from listening, Janey tells us about Abby’s plan to dump Eli before the fall.
Eli emerges, stripped of his clothing, and mounts the boulder above. He is short, so we are shocked that muscles ripple on his limbs, that his cock admonishes the night sky. He is in every way the hero of his own just-finished Herakliad, undaunted that on one of his labors whole sections of his upper body had been exposed, that as a result of what his eyes had seen, he’d always have to squint, even while wearing his thick black astigmatic lenses. The Elijah that we as kids expected at the seder door resembled Martin Buber—puppy-eyed, short as a fifth grader, furry as an Easter bunny. Not the biblical mangled angel of death, hacking beneath the broom tree, living off the rejectamenta of crows, slaughtering four-hundred-and-fifty priests, who pricked their breasts for Ba’al’s blood and dined at Ahab’s table. Abby returns, dressing herself in a shiver of tears, digging her nails ferociously into her clotted mosquito bites. Eli pokes up, rising from the shadows. He raises his fisted knuckles to the moon and speaks—I want to be with them, the immortals! I want to be with Dante! Then he takes off into the water, a perfect cannonball, which leaves, lapping at our toes, an ever-expanding, ever reduplicating ringing out of rings—when he plunges the surface of the water and briefly disappears beneath it.
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Leonard Kress has published fiction, poetry, translations, and nonfiction in Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, and Harvard Review, among others. Some of his books are Craniotomy Sestinas, The Orpheus Complex, Walk Like Bo Diddley, and Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems. He is working on a verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. He has received grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Kress lives in Blackwood, New Jersey and teaches at Temple University.
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Sasha Weiss is a poet who moved from LA to Chicago for the weather. He’s written a poetry chapbook, autumn is when the ghosts come out, and made a glitchy video game, Tissue Paper.
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