Livvy Krakower
Scream at God and He Will Scream Back
I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
—Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
Part 1: UMass Amherst
2017 He licks his fingers before he dips them into me. My head tilts back, and he smiles knowing that he has control. I tell him I am a virgin. I tell every guy I sleep with that I am a virgin. He lifts me up and puts me on his twin XL bed. His roommate is out of town for the weekend. I like to make eye contact. I don’t believe what the cliches say about the eyes being the passage to the soul, but I know that everybody else does. Everybody except for Dallas. Dallas was the one who told me that the eyes were the passage to nothing, that everything was nothing. He wraps his hand around my neck and I look up. I make constellations out of the popcorn ceiling, but no matter how many I create the only thing I see is Dallas’ face—laughing The sex lasts seven minutes and then it is done. He asks me to put my clothes on before he asks if I finished.
“Yes,” I say and give him a quick kiss. It is an obvious lie. I want him to know that it is an obvious lie.
I walk back to my dorm. It is almost three a.m., and yet the campus is alive; it is a Saturday night, after all. Drunk girls are yelling at the moon and drunk boys are holding onto them by the tits as if their lungs will turn into helium balloons and lift them up, never to be seen again.
Dear Dallas, I whisper into the dark wind, today I woke up tired, I got a B on my essay, the one about Prufrock, I had a salad for lunch, put too much dressing on it, I’m still tired, I don’t know why I keep having sex, I give these men what they want and they give me nothing, maybe I give them nothing too. Talk soon. Always, Remi.
I don’t go back to my dorm; I walk past it instead. The campus is surrounded by woods, a small oasis of horny kids in the vast nothingness of Western Massachusetts. As I walk, the trees turn into themselves and hover over me. The sun could be shining bright and I would not know. The leaves are so heavy. Fall on me—crush me into the soil.
Dear Dallas, you would love it here, you would sit next to a tree and pretend it was an old friend, pretend it was family until it actually was family. You never appreciated nature, you were jealous of it, you wanted to be nature. Come home Dallas, let me be your home, live inside my skin. Always, Remi.
When I imagine Dallas, I see his smile. I see his tall and awkward frame, how he looked like he was from the stars. How he talked like he was almost human. When I imagine Dallas, I hear him laughing, but then it is muffled and I see the water rising and rising and Dallas with his eyes open, unfazed and accepting death like a goldfish turning over—belly-up.
Dear Dallas, Why couldn’t you stop? Why didn’t you turn the kayak around? What was there to see? We used to play in that river every summer, there was nothing new about it. Just a stream of minnows and litter. What else were you looking for? Why were you looking for nothing? Always, Remi
I walk through the woods and suddenly I am on a highway. Cars zoom by me and I stand and think of where they may be heading off to—the gas station, Applebee’s, the ledge?
An old man driving a silver Honda Civic slows down by me.
“Where you trying to go?” he says. He smells like my mother.
“Can you take me to synagogue?”
The old man’s name is Vinny. He is a sunset type of man who misses his daughter dearly and wishes she called more. He is a Catholic, but he doesn’t care that I am a Jew. “At the end of the day it’s the same God,” he says to me.
I nod.
He reaches to turn the radio on but I shake my head.
“Nothing wrong with silence,” he says and puts his hand back on the wheel.
Dear Dallas, I wish I hated you. I have so many reasons to hate you. But I can’t hate you, so I guess I have to love you, yet that doesn’t seem possible either. I try to allow myself to just be, but nobody can really ever accept existing. I’m still tired but I’m driving with Vinny now. We stop for gas and at the station get beef jerky and some scratches. We win $3, can you believe that? Vinny doesn’t know how to split the money. I tell him to keep it all but he says he can’t do that. I insist and he easily agrees to keep the money.
When I smile he says I look like his daughter. I tell him he looks like my father even though I have no idea what my father looks like. I tell Vinny about my mother, I tell Vinny about you, I tell Vinny about how confused I am.
“You’re eighteen,” Vinny says to me, “Gosh, you got too much in your mind for an eighteen year old.”
“That’s why I need to pray,” I tell him.
“No, that’s not true.”
“Then what?”
“You just need a place to sit,” he says and takes another bite of his beef jerky.
What are you doing, Dallas? What are you doing right now?
Always, Remi.
Vinny drops me off at the nearest synagogue. Before he leaves I tell him he is a good man even though I don’t really know that.
The sanctuary is empty. It is now early Sunday, with the sun just starting to come through the stained glass windows. I sit in the front row. The ark stares at me and I look back at it.
“Dear Dallas,” I start to whisper into the holy air, but I stop myself.
“Dear God,” I say instead.
I breathe and I let myself listen to the silence.
Part 2: B’nai Torah Congregation, New Jersey
2003
I am six when I wander into the sanctuary. When I look up, the ark looks like a door to another dimension. It takes both of my hands and all of my young strength to open one of the big doors. When I do I think I am entering Oz, or Narnia, or just somewhere else.
The custodian finds me the next morning with the Torah wrapped around me. It got so cold in the ark. I couldn’t push the doors open. My mom picks me up. The rabbi doesn’t question her about why I was able to walk out of our house, why she didn’t notice my absence. My mother smokes and prays and ignores everyone except for God. In many ways she is like the rabbi, except he smokes a pipe instead of cigarettes.
Back in the apartment, my mother puts me in the kitchen sink and uses dish soap to wash the holy ink off of me. The last traces of the Shema are still on my body when she turns the water off and leaves to smoke another cigarette.
2010
I can trace the Hebrew words with the yad but I never know what they mean. The day of my bat mitzvah I get my period. I am standing in front of the congregation reading my Torah portion—Leviticus. I feel the pain before I feel the blood. The ancient words are slipping out of my mouth, but the only thing I want to do is scream. I don’t. For my mother, for the rabbi, for the sake of the minyan, I don’t scream. My lungs are burning like the first temple. I know God isn’t listening to me. Everybody knows God isn’t listening to me. God has heard Leviticus time and time again. God was there for Leviticus. But God has not heard me scream.
Part 3: South Orange, New Jersey
2015
Dallas went kayaking instead of going to college. The day after we graduated from high school, it rained and rained.
“I’m going out kayaking,” Dallas says to me as I rest on his hollow stomach. We have just made love to celebrate the fact that we will be leaving suburbia forever. I am naked, and yet with Dallas I don’t feel it at all. It is only natural for him to see me without anything.
“It’s pouring,” I say.
“Exactly. The river will be flooded.”
“You’ll drown.”
I don’t turn around, but I feel his body shrug off the concept of death.
I hear Dallas leave the apartment and I imagine his steps. In my mind, I see him walking down the hill, past the abandoned town hall filled with asbestos, underneath the tunnel where the lackluster graffiti was just covered up, and finally to the river. When I was little, I heard stories about how the original founders of South Orange would drink from the river. I would imagine them bent over like horses, sipping water straight from the stream.
The sun would be a circle and reflect off the asses of the young girls. The boys would smile. People must’ve thought that life couldn’t get better, and maybe it couldn’t.
I don’t know when it happened. Maybe it happened in the river. Maybe it happened just before he got in. Maybe he made it all the way through the river mouth, and it happened deep in the Atlantic. All I know is that the rain stopped, and Dallas was dead.
Part 4: B’nai Torah Congregation, New Jersey
2015
This is the last Shabbos before I leave for college. Dallas is still dead. At the end of the service the rabbi comes over and shakes my hand. My mother stands beside me proudly, not proud of me but proud that the rabbi is in the vicinity of me.
“You are a fine Jewish woman,” the Rabbi says to me. His hand is sweaty and I can feel his wrinkles, but I don’t know what they mean.
“Thank you.” I nod and smile; my mother does the same.When he walks away my mother turns to me and says, “Well, that was a nice thing for him to do.”
“Yes, it was,” I say, and then I turn around and walk out of the synagogue.
“Where are you going?” I hear my mother ask.
“I have to tell God something.”
It is the end of summer and I can feel the heat turning into a chill when I walk out into the open air. I can sense my mother behind me. I don’t know what she expects me to do. I don’t turn to see her reaction, but I hear the smallest gasp escape her mouth after she hears me scream.
Part 5: South Orange, New Jersey
2012
Dallas walks me home. I am fifteen. We have been dating for less than six months, but already I am in love with him and I believe him when he says he is in love with me. Dallas doesn’t believe in God. He tells me that one of the reasons he fell in love with me is because I do.
“It will always amaze me to meet such a sad person who has such a faith,” he says to me. I kiss him instead of responding. We walk the rest of the way in a silence that I wish were more comfortable. Before I enter my house, Dallas squeezes my hand and looks at me, asking a question without words.
“I’m not ready yet,” I say to him.
“It’s really not a big deal,” he says.
“It’s a big deal to me,” I say. He nods and smiles. I want him to say he understands, but he doesn’t. He kisses me again, and when I turn away to unlock the door I swear I can hear him mutter, tease.
My mother is not home yet, a fact that doesn’t surprise me. I lie down on the couch and close my eyes. When I open them it is dark. I decide to not turn on the light. My mother is still not back from wherever she is. It is a Friday evening. Shabbos is about to begin.
I light the candles. They melt like two tired children. I match my breath with their flames. The inhale, the exhale, the laugh. You don’t have to pretend with me, I whisper to the candles. You can explode, you can scream, you can burn it all down.