Read Online A Remarkable Kindness by Diana Bletter - Free Book Online

tongues.
    Lauren spotted a sukkah hut with white cloth walls and palm fronds stretched across its roof in one of the side yards. Through the doorway she noticed a few chairs and some overturned plastic cups on the table. She lingered, thinking of the sukkah that David had put up in their backyard, which she’d decorated with tinsel lanterns and twinkling colored lights. “People eat all their meals in the sukkah to commemorate the Israelites’ forty-year trek in the desert with Moses,” David had explained, because Lauren had known nothing about the holiday. “The hut is supposed to look simple .”
    â€œBut I miss seeing Christmas lights,” Lauren said. “And if they sell blinking lights in Israel for people’s sukkah s, then I’m buying them.”
    David hadn’t argued, and she decided not to mention to him the year her parents had put up a Christmas tree in their living room. “Just for the fun of it,” her mother had said, until her father put his foot down. “I have to consider my reputation,” he said. “What will my Orthodox patients think?”
    Lauren reached David’s clinic, with its sign on the door in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and English. DR . DAVID UZIEL , FAMILY MEDICINE . PLEASE KEEP QUIET AND WAIT YOUR TURN PATIENTLY . THANK YOU .
    She stood in the doorway for a moment. Too many people were seated on chairs lined against all four walls of the waiting room. A painting that Emily had made for David—a colorful rendition of Boston Common—hung next to a NO SMOKING sign. The air-conditioning unit mounted on the far wall blew out slightly cool puffs of stale air.
    â€œLook how they sit here with all the diseases they’ve brought from Africa,” a doughy-faced woman with frizzy orange hair and a black chiffon blouse suddenly said to nobody in particular. She lifted her chin at an Ethiopian woman and her son sitting in the far corner of the room. “Are they even Jewish? Nu, just look at them.”
    â€œYou Russians think you’ve got culture because you came here with a couple of violins,” said a silver-haired woman with a hoarse smoker’s voice.
    â€œWho brought us the Mafia?” An olive-skinned man jumpedinto the conversation. “Who brought us whores and entire stores filled with pork sausages?” He drew his long pinkie fingernail through the air like a saber. “You Russians! You pretend to be Jewish, but you’d sell your own mothers for visas to America.”
    The Russian woman scowled.
    â€œWho’s last in line?” Lauren asked in the silence that followed.
    â€œWe are,” said the Ethiopian boy, a white yarmulke floating on top of his soft brown hair.
    â€œThen I’m after you.” But the only seat available was next to the Russian woman, and Lauren vehemently did not want to sit next to her, so she stepped outside to wait her turn. She plopped down on the cement step under the overhang and opened the worn copy of Everything That Rises Must Converge that she’d brought along in her backpack, but, as usual, she was too tired to read. She sighed and closed the book, watching people enter and leave the clinic. After a while, the olive-skinned man stepped out, followed by the Russian woman, so Lauren went back inside and sat across from the Ethiopian woman and her son. Lauren could see blue circles tattooed along the woman’s gaunt jaw.
    The wait was long. Lauren leaned her head against the wall, closed her eyes, and tried to appreciate this moment, drowsy and undisturbed. Maya, her older daughter, was two, and she now had a six-month-old daughter named Yael. Lauren had named Maya after David’s mother, Miriam; Yael was named for his father, Yossi, who had died a year ago. Lauren liked the name—it sounded glamorous—but her mother still pronounced it as Yale.
    â€œAt least it’s Ivy League,” Ethel said whenever Lauren tried to correct