Read Online Pat Boone Fan Club by Sue William Silverman - Free Book Online

window. The sun, round as an orange (or a gefilte, depending), fractures the glass. White rays radiate from the center of the pane, inappropriate as a halo.

For Jews Only
    Teenage boys dive-bomb into the pool, spraying water. Or they sneak behind girls, grab them, and toss them in. Girls’ voices shriek in mock anger, but I can tell they like being singled out, noticed.
    I dab Coppertone on my nose and shoulders. Humidity frizzes my dark auburn ponytail. Here, I look like the other girls. They look like me. Is this why no one talks to me, notices me: I don’t stand out?
    In the distance, men in caps stroll the golf course.
    Women play mahjongg, a Chinese game. Men play a Scottish game.
    I slide into the water and lie on my back, barely bobbing on the surface. The mahjongg words sound like a meditation, a poem, a chant.
    Women, wearing straw hats and sunglasses, sit beside the swimming pool on patio furniture speaking exotic words as they play. Tiles click.
    Plum. Orchid. Chrysanthemum. Bamboo.
    Dragon tiles. Season tiles. Honor tiles.
    Prevailing winds. East winds. West winds.
    Sun warms my face; water cools my back. I am at the Westwood Country Club in Bergen County, New Jersey. But I could be in Shanghai. I could be Chinese.

That Summer of War and Apricots
    Bukra fil mishmish. (Tomorrow, when the apricots come.)
    At the same moment Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 mission float across the Sea of Tranquility, I lie alone on the ground beneath stars and planets in an orchard of mishmish trees. I am in Israel, having recently quit my job on Capitol Hill, my first after graduating college. I’m not actually trying to see Apollo 11 with a naked eye. Rather, it’s as if I sense the pearly skin of the moon invaded—moon dust, silent for eons, startled by thruster rockets—marred by boot prints.
    Ari’s boots. I press my head against the ground as if I can feel reverberations of his footsteps patrolling the kibbutz, his military boots circling closer to me.
    I’ve been awake since four, just like every morning, except Saturday. From four to eleven, in the cooler air, my group picks apricots. I strap a white canvas bucket over my shoulders and carry a wood ladder from tree to tree. Before dawn, fruit is almost invisible on the dark branches. I search more by feel, my fingers distinguishing fuzz from the slickness of leaves. After filling a bucketful, I unhook the bottom. Apricots, like cataracts of sunbeams, flow into the bed of a truck. Then I return to the ladder: more apricots, more trees.
    Soon I am lost to the soft plop of fruit dropped in my bag. Leaves rustle. Twigs snap. I prop my bucket on the top rung to lean against it, resting. I lick the skin of an apricot before sinking my teeth into pulp—leaving my own mark. My mouth wakens tosmall explosions of sunlit juice. I don’t wipe my lips, craving this stickiness from an apricot that’s mine , that I picked. I grip the ladder, dazzled. As morning rises, apricots become thousands of miniature suns lighting the air—me—my skin flush as fever. My fingertips sense shades of peach, yellow, orange, cantaloupe. The fuzz glows more golden than ancient coins—pale filaments incandescent by dawn.
    Apricot: the vowels sound round as fruit.
    Apricum: The sunny place. Early ripening. Precocious.
    I split a mishmish in two and consider the pit, feeling as if I should swallow it, as if then maybe I’ll bloom.
    Israelis, after all, command even the desert to blossom.
    I flew to Israel after the Six-Day War. For the first time I’m proud to be Jewish, after wishing, all my life, to be Christian. Growing up, wherever we lived, I was one of only a handful of Jewish kids. I skulked school corridors hoping to be proselytized, changed. I peroxided strands of my hair to look Christian, hoping to pass. It didn’t work. I felt alien. Outcast. All my heroes were Christian. I knew no Jewish presidents, teenage heartthrobs, astronauts, or pop idols.
    I cringed in English class in