Archive for category: Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize

Someone was painting the bochurim. Ever since the Rabbi noticed the first portrait hanging from the artist’s studio, the paintings seemed to multiply, until there were almost as many as the students themselves. Each night after zal ended and the boys went to sleep, the Rabbi walked past the darkened storefront where their familiar faces posed. There he recognized Zalman from shiur aleph, his ears keeping his black hat afloat; there was Yossi with the desperate first strokes of a mustache. The Rabbi noticed the way the artist tinged all their black jackets with blue, turned their faces into a rough collision of lines, painted the eyes soft and almost empty, with thick, lined lashes like girls or baby calves. Behind the window, the Rabbi could see stacks and stacks of canvasses, and, if he squinted his eyes, the shape of teenage boys sloped on each one.

The Rabbi wondered how the artist knew each student’s likeness. He considered that she must have first seen them on their daily route past her storefront window, at the corner of Lunt and California in the West Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, right between the boys’ dorm and the yeshiva building. Still, the Rabbi wasn’t sure how she captured the boys in such detail. Did she step outside her studio at seven in the morning or twelve in the afternoon, stare at the boys and then imprint their images onto her memory? What would the parents say when they visited and noticed images of their sons, hanging in the street for everyone to see?

The Rabbi knew the artist was a woman. It wasn’t just the heavy lashes she painted—he saw her himself, standing at the window one morning and arranging a new portrait for display. She was middle-aged and chubby with curly hair that appeared frizzier in the display lighting. Her clothes were dark and oversized, and when she lifted her arms to hang one of her newest portraits, a stretch-marked patch of stomach fell out, causing the Rabbi to turn in embarrassment and walk away.

*

As far as the Rabbi knew, the artist had never come into contact with his students. He had never seen her visit the yeshiva, and she had no way of knowing where the dorms were located. The students had a strict schedule: studying lasted from early in the morning until long after sunset, and breaks between learning were rarely spent away from the yeshiva’s property. During lunch, the bochurim ate at the yeshiva or the dorms, and during breaks they played basketball in the parking lot behind the school. In the evenings they walked to the park under the supervision of the dorm counselor, and curfew was at 9PM sharp. Besides, the artist’s studio closed at five each day. The only time the boys were permitted to leave the neighborhood was on Friday afternoons, when they went on mivtzoyim, wandering the city’s streets in search of Jews who would lay tefillin. But the Rabbi knew they wouldn’t lay tefillin on a woman. All possibilities exhausted, he continued his walking past the portraits in perpetual unease, seeing the pictures without seeing them entirely.

*

“Baila Rochel,” the Rabbi finally said to his wife one evening, as they sat down for dinner, just the two of them, over meatloaf and soup. All eight of their children already had children of their own, and suppertime was a delayed honeymoon—they hadn’t been alone since the ten months after their marriage. “Do you think it’s illegal to paint someone without their permission?”

Baila Rochel held her spoon mid-air as if asking him to elaborate.

“I mean, say you walk past a store front, for instance, and see a painting of someone you recognize, someone who didn’t give the artist permission to paint them.”

Baila Rochel resumed her eating. “Are you talking about the studio on Lunt and California?”

“Yes,” the Rabbi said, relieved he no longer had to explain.

“I drove past it the other day, it’s very strange.”

“Have you looked closely at the paintings? If you look, you’ll see that she captured the bochurim exactly, their faces…It’s like she has the whole yeshiva in her studio.”

“What do you make of it? You think she’s Jewish?”

The Rabbi pushed his bowl up the table. “I’ve never seen her before.”

Baila Rochel stood up and collected her husband’s bowl, pouring his leftover soup into hers.

“Well, I think it’s scary,” she declared, and then stacked the bowls together, as if to say that she’d made up her mind and was done with the conversation.

The Rabbi pondered this assessment for a moment while Baila Rochel walked into the kitchen and filled the house with the familiar sound of rushing water.

“What do you think?” he shouted. “Should I at least talk to her?”

But Baila Rochel didn’t seem to hear, or at least she pretended not to, leaving the Rabbi to conclude that it was better not to make a fuss.

*

After speaking with Baila Rochel, the Rabbi kept his eyes from stopping at the portraits as he walked past them, ignoring the bochurim behind the stranger’s glass window. It was already spring when the portraits began to appear, almost exactly a year after his youngest son’s wedding. They all thought Mendel would never get married. But he did, the Rabbi reminded himself, he finally did get married. Of course, Mendel’s wife developed certain suspicions and read some messages in Mendel’s phone, messages between Mendel and a non-Jewish man. Mendel did not confirm or deny a relationship between him and the other man, yet their daughter-in-law seemed convinced regardless, and wanted a divorce. But Mendel didn’t confirm, and the Rabbi’s thoughts returned to this small comfort, that she could easily be reading too much into the situation. Mendel and his wife had only been married for a year, but she was already six months pregnant, with Mendel on a half salary at the cheder. If they did divorce, she would take the Rabbi’s grandchild.  

The painted boys in the window seemed to ask him about these troubles, though their real-life counterparts were undoubtedly unaware of Mendel’s secret. The Rabbi heard their voices during his own rounds past the storefront window between the yeshiva and the dorm.

Maybe they won’t get divorced, the line drawings whispered. She is pregnant after all.

The Rabbi continued walking past, thinking over which sections of the Talmud he might drill the students on. The portraits remained suspended this way for some time, present in the Rabbi’s periphery, until he received a call from one of the boys’ mothers, asking if it would be possible for her son, Shmuel Shapiro, to take art lessons. The Rabbi was so surprised by the suggestion he almost wasn’t sure he heard her right.

“What do you mean?” the Rabbi tried to keep polite. Mrs. Shapiro and her husband were ba’alay teshuvah from Richmond, Virginia, who only recently became Lubavitchers. Unlike most ba’alay teshuvah who came from completely secular backgrounds, the Shapiros were modern orthodox before they turned ultra-orthodox, a transition that wasn’t too drastic for their son, Shmuel. That was the only reason the Rabbi accepted Shmuel into the yeshiva – usually he would recommend Morristown, or other, more suitable environments. But Shmuel had a good head for Gemara, and a gentle disposition. He seemed genuinely enthusiastic about joining the yeshiva, and the Rabbi got the sense that it was his choice, and not his parents’. Besides, Shmuel was one of two children and his father made a lot of money, enough to pay full tuition, making Shmuel a bit too valuable for the yeshiva to lose.

“Well, Sam has been saying that he feels like he needs a bit of an outlet,” Mrs. Shapiro explained.

The use of Shmuel’s English name made the Rabbi cringe.

“That’s why we give the boys a break every day after lunch,” the Rabbi said, keeping an even tone. “For the bochurim to channel their energy outside of class.”

“Yes, yes, he told me about that,” Shmuel’s mother replied. “But you know, Sam isn’t much of a sports guy, he really doesn’t like to play basketball. And he’s always been so creative, we think it’d be nice for him to continue it there at the yeshiva.”

“We’ve never really had a student take art lessons before.” The Rabbi felt uncomfortable. They didn’t teach math, science, or history—the idea of art lessons was absurd.

“Besides,” he added, “there really isn’t time in the schedule.”

“Oh, I know the boys are so busy,” Mrs. Shapiro said, unbothered by the Rabbi’s hesitance, or perhaps unaware, “but Sam told me about this lovely lady around the corner who offers art lessons for a very reasonable price. Couldn’t he go during the basketball time?”

“Shmuel has been going into the art studio?”

Mrs. Shapiro said something in response, but the Rabbi didn’t hear. He stared at the calendar in his office and tried to remember when paintings of his students began to appear, whether he’d ever noticed a student inside the woman’s studio.

“Let me think about it,” the Rabbi said, and then he hung up the phone. He brushed a couple of long, dark beard hairs off his jacket and absentmindedly lifted a pen off his desk, clicking it with his thumb. The Rabbi wondered why it never occurred to him before. The woman was able to capture the boy’s faces because she had met them. The bochurim were posing for her.

The Rabbi sat on his secret knowledge through spring as though it were information with the potential to damage him and not just his students. He considered asking the boys about it, and then thought the better of it. He hoped he were wrong, and none of the boys ever noticed the artist, in which case it wouldn’t be right to bring her and her paintings to the yeshiva’s attention.  He developed a habit of walking two blocks out of the way so as to avoid the studio entirely, curving around Lunt Street and walking towards the yeshiva through the alley as if the portraits could disappear by his very will. Stranger things had happened throughout history after all.

One Shabbos in late April, the Rabbi and Baila Rochel were invited to a meal hosted by the Rifkins, the couple that ran the girls’ elementary school. The two of them walked to the Rifkin house in distracted silence after shul. The weather was pleasant: cold enough for black suit jackets to be comfortable and not oppressive, but not so cold as to require extra layers.

Rabbi Rifkin and his wife had invited no other guests. The meal was small and intimate; the four of them leisurely enjoying their aging process; anxieties of rearing young children already far behind them. Baila Rochel thrived in her new role as grandmother, and the Rabbi felt he and his wife were closer than ever, even one of the same mind. When Mrs. Rifkin asked about Mendel, the Rabbi and Baila Rochel answered that Mendel was good, boruch hashem, neither one looking to the other before replying. Rabbi and Mrs. Rifkin murmured their assent, gently remembering how hard it was for Mendel to find someone. They all agreed Mendel’s wife was very special. The Rabbi asked about the Rifkin children, and the laughter came easy again, just how the Rabbi preferred. Once kiddush was made and the salads were eaten, Mrs. Rifkin began to discuss a recent issue they were struggling with at the girl’s school: the use of Yiddish in the classrooms.

“It’s a problem,” Mrs. Rifkin explained. “Many of the parents have started calling me to complain about the Yiddish-only policy.”

The Rabbi listened sympathetically. He, his wife, and the Rifkins were part of another class of Lubavitchers: children of old, prestigious families, unlike the other members of their young Chicago community, most of whom returned to religiosity in their twenties, or even later, possessing little knowledge of Judaism. These fresh adherents struggled with reading Hebrew, and Yiddish was a second language twice removed, patched together from too many other languages and insider references for any newcomer to remember.

“They should be happy their children are learning Yiddish,” Baila Rochel said. “If they don’t learn it in cheder, where else? Their parents don’t speak it to them.”

“That’s the problem,” Mrs. Rifkin told her. “The parents feel like they can’t help their children with the homework because they don’t understand the language.”

The Rabbi didn’t see how this was a problem. “The Rebbe spoke in Yiddish because he thought Yiddish was important. The parents should see that as well.”

Mrs. Rifkin struggled to articulate herself. “I agree that it’s important, but I don’t know…many of the students do poorly in Yiddish, but have no problem in English classes. It’s frustrating for them, and it’s frustrating for the parents. They worry their children aren’t properly learning either language.”

“That’s because the parents still have goyish values,” Rabbi Rifkin said, responding to his wife, but addressing the other Rabbi.

The Rabbi agreed. “A lot of them don’t understand the essence of what Judaism is.” He remembered the conversation he had with Shmuel’s mother. “You know I actually had a parent call me up and ask if her son could take art classes? Never, in all my years of teaching, has anyone ever asked me if their son could take art classes. No one would have even considered such a thing when I was in yeshiva.”

Rabbi Rifkin leaned back in his chair and pushed his plate away, prompting his wife and the other rebbetzin to stand up and clear the table.

“It was just a different time,” he mused.

“I suppose,” the Rabbi said, and then he paused. The two Rabbis shared an anxious silence as the dishes steadily disappeared from the table. Rabbi Rifkin hummed a nigun and the Rabbi tugged at his beard, letting the uncertainty linger between him and his old friend. He joined along with Rabbi Rifkin’s nigun, singing the wordless tune loudly, the emotive familiarity buried in the song’s dips and rises. As he sang the familiar melody, etched into the muscle memory of his jaw so that it rushed out without premeditation, the Rabbi considered the fate of their next generation. The two Rabbis banged their fists on the emptied table and sang out the painful questions they had no answers for. Why did the Rebbe abandon them twenty years before and never return? Why had their leader tasked them with searching out new followers—Jews with no religious background or understanding—who threatened to dissolve the fabric of the community once they joined? They harbored the superstitious fear, one incapable of verbalization, that the world they so zealously guarded would end with their generation. But most of all, they feared the approaching extinction was their own doing. They feared the outreach they had devoted themselves to meant looking outwards instead of inwards; so that for each young man or woman coaxed into the tiny neighborhood of their lives, another son or daughter found an opening and slipped out.

“Do you want tea?” Mrs. Rifkin asked the Rabbi. Not waiting for his reply, she brought out a tray, balancing a teapot and little painted teacups.

*

Once the wives settled back into their seats, the conversation about the elementary school resumed. “Something very strange happened to me the other day,” Mrs. Rifkin told the others.

“A woman named Lisa came to the cheder and told me she was an artist, and that she wanted to paint the girls. She was wondering if she could take pictures of them. I told her no, of course, and then asked her why she’d been painting the bochurim.” At this, Mrs. Rifkin looked to the Rabbi, who looked down at his teacup and began to stir.

“This is the woman on Lunt and California?” Baila Rochel asked, even though everyone knew which artist Mrs. Rifkin was talking about.

“Yeah, you know, the one who has the big portraits of the boys hanging in the studio window.” Mrs. Rifkin stretched her hands as she said “big,” as if to emphasize her innocence in the face of artistic practices.  

“It’s creepy,” Rabbi Rifkin weighed in. “And besides, she’s not a very good artist. The paintings don’t look anything like the bochurim. I think she’s trying to make it abstract.”

“Really?” the Rabbi interrupted his friend. “You don’t think the pictures don’t look like them? For me, I can recognize the face of every student.”

“That’s the thing,” Mrs. Rifkin continued. “She’s painting them from photographs, that’s what the woman told me. Did you know that?” she asked the Rabbi, turning to address him directly. “Apparently during their Friday rounds, one of the boys went into her studio and asked if her husband was Jewish. She said, yes, my husband is Jewish. So, they asked if he would put on tefillin. She said only if they would pose for a painting. The boys said no, of course, but they let her husband photograph them instead. Now every week, a different pair of boys goes into her studio for her husband to take pictures of them, and in exchange he puts on tefillin.”

Upon finishing her story, Mrs. Rifkin looked around the table, but none of the other three ventured a response.

“Well…” Baila Rochel finally said. “At least her husband is doing a mitzvah, right?”

“You think that’s what the Rebbe would have wanted?” Rabbi Rifkin said, and the Rabbi startled at the sharp tone in his friend’s voice. Baila Rochel said nothing.

“Who knows what the Rebbe would have wanted,” the Rabbi added softly. He knew his friend did not expect an answer from anyone.

That evening the Rabbi went to shul for mincha, and when Shabbos ended, he walked home along California Avenue instead of his usual route, following the street to the woman’s studio on Lunt. Once he turned off Devon, the streets were empty, besides for occasional cars and other Jews making their way home from shul. California was the border street that separated houses from apartments, the Jewish community from the rest of Rogers Park, and to the Rabbi it felt like venturing down a long strip of the city’s seams, masquerading as concrete. They had only moved to that neighborhood thirty years ago, in 1979, fifteen years before the Rebbe abandoned them on earth. And since then, a few families had grown to hundreds of families, one shul to numerous shuls fanned beyond the original streets. The Rabbi resigned himself to the transience of their lives, and arrived at the darkened storefront where the portraits of his students hung. He looked around at the empty street and took a step forward to examine the paintings up close, his upper half bent towards the studio window.

In some ways, he noted, she painted them all the same. Each boy was shaped with angular shoulders and extra bony hands, as if the fingers on yeshiva boys’ hands bent in five places instead of three. But the shoulders and hands were where the similarities ended. The faces reflected the individual students he knew so well, students from around the world that he himself painstakingly selected from a pile of applications. Students he lectured at each morning as they stretched and yawned and picked at the white plastic tablecloths covering the yeshiva’s folding tables.

And yet, staring at the boys in the clean space of a portrait felt like encountering them for the first time. The Rabbi noticed, to his surprise, how young they all were; that their limbs seemed to float in their black hats and jackets, those signifiers of membership they wore so awkwardly and proudly. None of the boys tucked in their shirts, which gave them a haphazard appearance when studied individually, though this quirk appeared organized and neat when they sat before him as a collective in the school building. They all buttoned up the same way, keeping the top button undone so the collars flapped around their throats and the eager protrusions of their necks leaped from their dress shirts.

Taking in each painting, the Rabbi noticed a detail he had entirely missed all those months he walked past the portraits. In the corner of each one, the boys had signed their names in both Hebrew and English as if to approvingly say, Yes, this is me. The Rabbi’s eyes traveled from portrait to portrait and took in all the names scrawled in the corners of the paintings, evidence of something he could not place just yet. Yossi Feldman, Chaim Kornberg, Yitzchak Bogomilsky, Zalman Rapaport. He mouthed each bochur’s name and wondered how this woman’s project had managed to develop so innocuously, completely within his purview.

The Rabbi abruptly pulled himself away, moving faster than he had before. He resolved to email the teachers that evening. He would instruct them, he decided, to forbid the students from visiting the studio on Friday or any other day for that matter. Finally, he would personally visit the studio and ask the woman to take the paintings down.

As he neared his own block, the Rabbi removed his hands from his pockets and slowed his moving feet. He thought of the leaping necks and open eyes. It occurred to him that his bochurim were so unaware of themselves, the way they gingerly posed beneath the artist’s brush, their interior lives never coming into contact with the world’s perception of them.

He thought once again–the thousandth time since the news was relayed to him–of the troubles he was having with Mendel. The Rabbi couldn’t shake from his mind an image of Mendel as a young boy, so similar to those propped up in the window, yet different—drastically different. Mendel was already too conscious of his limbs at that age, and they met the clothing he wore with ease, took up natural residence in the four-cornered frame Mendel carried with him wherever he went, forcing everyone to encounter him as an individual, despite his black pants and greying button down. Mendel possessed a vanity that none of the other boys seemed to know they were capable of discovering—a oneness of body and spirit—and it disturbed the Rabbi to recognize this harmony in his own son. But these boys, these bochurim, they didn’t have to know about the four corners a body could carry around the world with it. The Rabbi wanted his yeshiva boys to live like they didn’t ever imprint themselves on another person’s mind, and it wasn’t right for the artist to take that away from them.

*

At home the Rabbi drafted an email to the other teachers at the yeshiva, and then read the daily portions before shutting off the lights in the various corners of his home. He passed his sleeping wife on the way to the bathroom, and brushed his teeth in the dark, his hands finding the toothpaste and toothbrush automatically. After rinsing out his mouth, the Rabbi paused and then turned on the bathroom light, examining the reflection before him in the mirror. He searched his features for remnants of continuity, something of the past that could be buried in his face. Under his eyes, the veins shone over dark circles, and the hairs of his beard crept so far up his cheeks that the space between his beard and his baggy eyes was almost negligible. The Rabbi tried to wriggle out of his own body and watch the face as though it were not his face at all, but he wasn’t sure how. All he saw was the skin he had breathed and sweated in for so many years, the functional collection of arteries and muscles, and the millions and millions of pores.

The Rabbi shut off the bathroom light and carried himself into bed. His wife turned over to adjust the blankets, and when he saw that she was still awake, he whispered,

“Did you speak to Mendel tonight?”

“No,” she whispered back. “He didn’t call.”

“I’ve decided to stop the boys from visiting that woman’s studio.”

“That’s good,” Baila Rochel said. “They shouldn’t visit.”

“No,” the Rabbi agreed. “They shouldn’t.” Then the two of them fell quiet, each breathing the blanket up and down in their separate beds.

“Baila Rochel?” The Rabbi finally said.

“Yes?”

“Do you ever think about your body?”

“Do I ever think about my body?

“Yes.”

“What do you mean?”      

The Rabbi thought into the silence again. “I mean, if you ever think about how the world sees you, what you look like to them?” It wasn’t what he meant to ask, but it was close.

“All the time,” Baila Rochel replied. “But I don’t really have to think about it, because I already know. Do you notice how people talk to us differently? Like we’re not one of them? Sometimes I’ll be at the grocery store and I’ll hear how the person behind the counter changes their voice when it’s my turn. Everyone becomes politer, more reserved, but kinder too, as if I’m a child.”

The Rabbi hesitated and collected his thoughts again. “I guess I mean what you think about your body, what you see when you imagine yourself.”

“Well, let me think.”

The Rabbi waited.

“I guess I just imagine me,” Baila Rochel said after a while. “My shaytl and my face, and maybe that I look older.”

She paused, and then continued talking, in that slow, absorbed way people talk when thinking about something for the first time.

“It’s always a surprise to think about how much older I look. Whenever I imagine myself, the first thing I see is me before all the children, myself at twenty, but really, I’ve spent more time with my body as a mother, myself after all the pregnancies.” She sat up and looked at him in the thinning dark.

“Why do you ask? Is this about the paintings?”

“I don’t know,” the Rabbi sighed. “I’m really not sure.”

In the morning, Shmuel’s mother called the Rabbi again, reminding him of the unpleasant task he was to take care of that day. Though she seemed to have forgotten about the art classes, at least for the time being, and was calling about an online math program for her son.

“I understand that the yeshiva doesn’t have time for secular subjects,” Mrs. Shapiro said, “but Sam is thinking of going to college someday. He’d like to be an engineer. Maybe he could skip some Gemara in the afternoon and take a math class online.”

“I see, I see,” the Rabbi murmured in response. He wanted to tell her that the Rebbe didn’t support college, or at least only supported college in special cases, and surely not before marriage. But because Mrs. Shapiro was so new he wasn’t sure whether it would be right to tell her. Maybe he could tell the boy one on one. They could speak in his office and the Rabbi would give Shmuel some letters from the Rebbe on college. The Rabbi already knew what the boy would say. He would protest that the Rebbe went to college, the Sorbonne no less, and ask how it could be that the Rebbe went to college and he, Shmuel, shouldn’t be allowed to go. The Rabbi sighed.

“I understand your concerns, Mrs. Shapiro. Let me schedule a meeting with Shmuel and see where he is holding in Gemara. You understand he is a little behind the other students. I will see where he is holding, and try to understand from him what he’s looking for.”

 “Ok, thank you Rabbi,” Mrs. Shapiro said, and she hung up the phone.

*

The Rabbi put on a light jacket and left the house. He headed towards the art studio on Lunt and California, letting his eyes search for another reflection in the storefront windows. Not just the image that existed in his own mind, but the reflection others might see: his black hat, his long beard, the rolling belly, and his dark colored shoes, walking with stiff purpose.  

Inside the studio, the Rabbi dizzied at the colorful paintings overwhelming the small room, paintings papered from floor to ceiling with piles more around the studio. Most of the paintings on the walls were of women, older women, detailed in the same bony, angular way the artist had made the bochurim, except bursting with earthy reds and greens with almost no blue. In the bright, bizarrely colored room, the bochurim stood out like a mistake, the only canvasses lacking in deep color.

“Hello?” the Rabbi called out cautiously, stepping slowly into the packed space.

“Yes, I’m coming! One moment!” A voice shouted from the back room. The Rabbi almost turned around and left. Swallowing the impulse, he placed his hands in his pant pockets instead, and rocked his weight between his heels and his toes, glancing from one painting to the next, and skipping his glance over the ones depicting nudes.        

From the back of the room came the squeak of a faucet, and then the woman herself. She wiped her hands on her long tunic and pushed back her frizzy hair with a breathless gesture.

“Hello,” she said, sounding surprised but not unpleasantly so. “I would offer you my handshake but I know you guys don’t do that.”

The Rabbi smiled politely. “I see you’ve met my students.”

“Oh!” the woman said, her eyes brightening. “So you’re in charge of the school?”

“Yes, I’m the principal.”

“Maybe they told me about you. They’re such sweet boys, you know. When I first saw them walking down the street, I couldn’t tell the difference between them.”

She laughed at herself, and then quickly added, “I don’t mean that in an offensive way.” She held out her hand as if to reassure him, before letting it fall to her side again.

“Just that, well, they all dress the same, and it’s almost impossible to tell any difference from afar. But when I started painting them, I couldn’t understand how I ever mixed them up in the first place! They all seem so different to me now, even in the way they wear their hats or button their shirts, there’s such personality within the uniform. Do you notice that, too?”

The Rabbi had never considered the bochurim to be indistinguishable from one another, or at least not in the way she described.

“Oh!” she said abruptly, jumping up and turning to her back room. “I should show you.”

The artist disappeared into the back and came out again, carrying out a large painted canvas. When the Rabbi saw the beginning etches of his Rebbe, the leader’s likeness taking form in the strokes of paint, he felt something like shock, or maybe anger.

“The boys kept bringing me this man’s photo and asking me to paint him,” the artist explained, chuckling a little. “Do you know who he is?” She didn’t wait for a response. “I told them I would only paint him if they brought me a photo of him smiling. ‘He’s always frowning!’ I said. ‘Why are you always bringing me angry photos?’ But then they brought me this very nice picture of him smiling, so I started painting that one.”

The Rebbe was indeed smiling as he took shape on the big, white square. His eyes crinkled in the corners, and his cheeks bubbled up underneath them, two crescent moons pushed into a smile by the lively mustache and the upturned mouth. The Rabbi could almost hear the sounds of nigunim, he could see the Rebbe’s fist lifted high above his smile, shaking and pushing through the air with enthusiasm, moving together with the livening rhythm. The Rabbi swallowed and buttoned his jacket, a slight shake in his fingers. It wasn’t the woman’s place to paint the Rebbe and bring him to life. From the portrait, the Rebbe seemed to be smiling at him, telling the Rabbi that it was okay, he knew, he had allowed it to happen. It was all part of a master plan, the Rebbe’s eyes winked from the canvas, but the familiar feeling of the doubt prevented the Rabbi from falling into the Rebbe’s image.

The Rabbi turned away from the painting and made as if to leave.

“Please take down the portraits of my students,” he said near the door, “and do not distribute or sell any of them.”

The artist looked at him curiously, warmth still lingering in her face.

“Why?”

“The parents are upset. The students are minors. You have no permission to paint them. Please remove the portraits or we’ll be forced to take further action.”

The woman’s face flushed; whether she was embarrassed or upset the Rabbi could not tell.

“Ok,” she finally said, after studying the Rabbi’s face for a few stifled minutes, searching for a clear emotion. “I’ll take them down.”

*

The artist made true to her promise, and by the next day, his students’ portraits were already gone. In their place stood canvases full of naked women, shoulders peeking out from reds and purples that barely covered their breasts. During morning class the students did not seem considerably changed. They sat and yawned and slouched as they usually did, and a few even asked questions. There was no indication that anything had shifted, that they had ceased to exist outside the world of their own minds. The relative calm that followed the tense events of the previous month gave the Rabbi a mournful relief. He allowed himself to settle into the calm, until a student knocked on his door, bearing the smiling painting of the Rebbe from the day before.

“Sorry to bother you,” the student said. It was Shmuel. He held the painting carefully, like it was holy or still wet. “The woman down the street gave this to me,” Shmuel stretched the painting towards the Rabbi, who didn’t make any motion to accept it. “Have you seen her paintings of everyone? She stopped by today with a crate full of them and gave us each a picture. She said to give this one to you.”

“Thank you, Shmuel.” The Rabbi gestured to a corner on the floor. “You can just put it there. I’ll figure out what to do with it.”

Shmuel put down the picture. The Rabbi leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. He returned his attention to Shmuel.

“I received a call from your mother yesterday.”

Shmuel nodded. “She told me about it.”

“Come see me tomorrow and we’ll speak some more. In the meantime, I think you should read the Rebbe’s letters on college. Ask the other boys, they’ll show you where to find them.”

“Ok,” Shmuel said, and he turned to go.

As he watched Shmuel walk away, the Rabbi was interrupted by another memory of his son Mendel at that age, the way Mendel’s shoulders sliced through the air like Shmuel’s. For a second, the Rabbi thought he saw Shmuel’s shoulders blur and then subsequently sharpen, turning angular and rough like those of the portrait that used to hang in the studio window. The Rabbi blinked, and Shmuel’s back straightened out again, the lines became clear and the colors more realistic.   

The Rabbi studied the portrait on his office floor. There, among the Rebbe’s features, the Rabbi saw his own. It wasn’t just the beard they shared, or the shadow of a hat brim. He saw, even in the first sketchings of the deceased man’s image, the sum of his life. Everything he had tried to be, every word or thought he shaped for the past fifty years. There was his father in the Rebbe’s eyes. There was his mother in the crinkles at the eye’s corners. His wedding day, the first day of his job, his children’s faces, his son Mendel underneath the chuppah. All of it rested in the curve of the Rebbe’s smile.

The Rabbi was hit with a disturbing awareness. His leader, his Rebbe, the man smiling from the painting, had become unfamiliar to him. Taking care not to smudge the paint, the Rabbi lifted the canvas and carefully placed it in his office closet. He cleared out any objects in its way and gently positioned the portrait upright so that nothing would crush it.

Cover Image: O’Keeffe, Georgia. “A Storm.” 1922. Pastel on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.Sports brands | Women's Nike Superrep

I dream that I speak.

Tuesday night: our house has been plucked from Trafalgar Street and moved downtown, so that a river of polyester skirt suits and slouching backpacks shuffle past me instead of lonely Mr. Sherborn and his ancient Great Dane. I stand at our steps and hand out scraps of speech: scribbled notes to Mum; printouts of comments left on YouTube videos and Reddit threads; bundles of text messages, somehow tangible; ripped-out pages of my Ready to Learn! workbooks. I read them out loud as I thrust them at the swarm, broken sentences strung together:

much like the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which Jefferson
and Romy at 3 today, I’ll just take the RTS back
but the eyeshadow is honestly so creative that i dont think you even need a bold lip. Like its a stronger aesthetic to just accent one part of your face at a time otherwise

Nobody is looking at me. In desperation, I beg people to take my words from me. Hear me, I scream hollowly. Zip me back up. Dream-Milo knows she’s making noise, but the words feel like nothing as they leak out of my throat. No substance, no vibrations. Ooooh, bop bop, good vibrations … such a sweeeeet sensation, my disoriented brain sings to me in the final seconds, and I wake up thinking of Brian Wilson and Marky Mark.

After these dreams, I sit up, take a sip of room-temperature water, swallow, and open my mouth wide. I push out air at different frequencies. I click my tongue, chatter my teeth, lap wetly at my cracked lips. Anything to make noise.

Words don’t come. It is like scooping at an empty bowl, every time.

*

The first thing I noticed about Romy Meyer-Katz was her hideous glasses. Cheap plastic magenta frames, perched on her face like a joke. They make her look like an off-brand comic book villain. I spend an hour with Romy every Wednesday, and I still have not gotten over those three dollar glasses, cat-eyed and just a little too small.

I go to Romy’s house so that she can read to me. This is not what Mum hired her to do. She was supposed to cure me with “alternative techniques”—Mum’s way of saying that she couldn’t afford to pay real doctors for weekly failure anymore. Mum came with me to the first session, the time Romy wanted us to play with fine white sand in a black plastic tray.

“What do you want us to do with it?” Mum was uncertain.

“Just play,” said Romy, flashing her perpetual encouraging smile. “It’s a form of tactile therapy. Sometimes the sensory distraction allows sound to flow out.”

Laughter bubbled in my lungs. I’ve been to the beach, I told Romy with my eyebrows.

Mum trailed a manicured pinky in the sand, leaving a curve like a C. When I came back alone the following Wednesday, the sand was nowhere in sight.

It took Romy twenty weeks to run out of “alternative techniques”. She acted like the reading idea was something she had worked hard to come up with, but I knew that it was her way of giving up as much as her kindness and determination would allow. Post-sand, post-hypnosis, post-electrocurrent therapy, I showed up to our appointment one day to find her empty-handed.

“Okay.” Romy exhaled and plastered on a toothy smile that dug creases into the rolls of fat on her neck. “We’re going to take a break from physical stimulation, and work on Emotional Response,” she said, like she was trademarking it. It’s amazing to me how people can capitalize words with just their tone or italicize them with an inflection; how sarcasm happens in the ear, not on the page; how emotion carries itself through sounds and becomes a quaver or a crack. Who teaches you how to do that?

“I want you to take the whiteboard and the marker,” Romy continued, giving me instructions she had given twenty times before, “and if something I say makes you think, start writing. Then, if you want, we can discuss that further. Remember to keep your mouth open as much as you can, and try to hum. Okay, Milo?”

The first few weeks, I hated that directive: Keep your mouth open. I felt awkward and dirty, like a supermarket fish. My gums dried out. I kept forgetting and letting it drift shut, which made Romy admonish me in her unbearably friendly way. Now it’s become second nature; I walk into her house with my jaw loose, even though my chin is saying: Nothing but drool and empty air has come out in almost twenty years, what do you expect is going to happen? Romy ignores my chin. She has decided that sound will slip out of my mouth one day, and that my lips had better not be in the way when it does.

She handed me the whiteboard, and as always, I marveled at her huge fingers, the middle one swollen around a silver band. Even her cuticles were puffy, like her fat was running out of places to spread. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a library book, opening it without preamble. It had no dust jacket, but I recognized the story within minutes of hearing Romy read.

“—light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul—”

How funny to hear Nabokov in Romy’s frank New England accent, when I had always read him in a non-comic mixture of Alan Rickman and Patrick Warburton.

“—gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.” Romy wasn’t a particularly expressive reader, but she pronounced every word carefully and never took her eyes off the book. A smile played at my open mouth. That first session, I wrote nothing; I listened to the first few chapters of Humbert Humbert’s great pedophilic manifesto with interest, and at four o’clock, I picked up my bag and left.

I didn’t think we would continue with the same book every week, and I was right. The next week Romy read selections from Heidi Murkoff’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Some excerpts, explicit in their description of bodily function, were clearly chosen to prod an ‘ugh’ from my unyielding throat; others I couldn’t figure out at all. Romy began by opening to a random page, instead of to the first chapter as she had the previous Wednesday. After a while, however, she halted mid-sentence, flipped to the beginning of the book, and began tonelessly reading out the table of contents. This went on for less than a minute before I marked an impatient ? on the whiteboard. She glanced at me and my trout-mouth offering the question mark up to her aggressively, like it was a gift instead of a query.

“Anything you want to comment on so far, Milo?” No.

She smiled as she continued reading.

The next fifteen weeks were a blur of Toni Morrison, Aphra Behn, and Haruki Murakami. There were Western Civilization textbooks, medical journals, a shockingly flowery love letter that Romy claimed her grandfather had written her grandmother when they were teenagers. Memoirs. Old college research papers. Children’s books.

I made the occasional comment on the whiteboard. One word, sometimes two. I didn’t want to give too much, to let the word progress tease the corner of her mind.

Today, Romy holds a sheaf of printed paper instead of a book, and I remember, for a microsecond, last night’s dream. She explains that it is a piece she found on a blog called “Fat Logic.” Her arms wobble gracelessly as she flips through the paper, searching for the beginning, and dread courses in my marrow.

“I don’t understand why they don’t just lose weight, like have some fucking self-respect,” she reads, her voice even. “The worst part is when whales make some bullshit medical excuse. Like honestly if diet and exercise truly won’t work for some reason, then just kill yourself because no one wants to look at you, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” She reads out the machine-gun fire of the ha’s so tonelessly that it is almost funny.

My mouth is closed. She reads for another minute or two before glancing up and promptly reminding me to open it. Instead, I write: Idiot.

“The writer, right? Not me?”

I nod, my mouth shut tight, unable to believe how widely she’s smiling. Creases appear in her neck again, like folded paper.

*

I take the RTS to and from my appointments with Romy. If Mum isn’t working, she insists on driving me, and then acts so reluctantly that I hate her by the time we park. There’s a Transit stop at the end of Trafalgar Street and another one two blocks from Romy’s one-story duplex in Pittsford, Rochester’s nicest suburb. The twenty minutes on the bus is easier than ten minutes in a car with Mum’s sighs and drumming fingers. Everyone on the RTS is so bleak and disinterested that no attempts at conversation are ever made. Besides, headphones make an effective wall.

The woman staring at me on the way home today has wild red hair and an enormous mole. It sits right where her eyebrows meet, making them look conjoined. I bet she hated it growing up. I remind myself to ask Google: How expensive is mole-removal surgery? Then I manage to tuck away my morbid curiosity.

I think of Romy and her ugly glasses. I think of her boa constrictor ankles stuffed into those white polyester socks, which always peek out from beneath her hundred-inch-waist dress pants. I think of her non-chin; I look at my sharp one in the bus’s wet, filthy window. That silver ring like twine around her doughy middle finger. Romy, all six hundred pounds of her, who read hate aloud to me today and smiled at it. I find myself cowering away from this strength.

Thoughts of Romy’s fat and Romy’s voice and Romy’s smile carry me to my doorstep and fade as I unlock my house. On Wednesdays, my daily schedule of sleeping and reading and withering gets interrupted by our meetings, and by the time it’s four-thirty and I’m back in my bedroom, I’m drained.

Hello, Christopher, I say with my fingertips. Christopher is my eight-year-old Macbook. When I first got him, I wrote a horrendous and thankfully private poem about how he is my voice, my one true friend, my connection to the outside world. Title: ‘Portal’. We were all thirteen once.

I open the Internet, feeling acute relief in the anticipation of losing myself for a while.

Here’s what I love about Reddit: Everything in the world is in there, but you have to dig for it. Each community is like its own commune or city or neighborhood or pep rally, depending on the attitude of the page. My favorite type of post is the AMA: Ask Me Anything. Everyone from biologists to World War II veterans to supermodels to presidents to cult escapees, beckoning questions. Drowning in someone else’s answers: beautiful.

I am Leah Remini, Ask Me Anything about Scientology

I was Goofy at Walt Disney World for over 20 years! AMA!

I’m Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak, Ask Me Anything!

Hello Reddit, it’s Sacha Baron Cohen, Ask me anything. Apart from for money.

I open Reddit and go to r/IamA, the biggest AMA community. I do what I always do—browse, trying to convince myself I’m not looking for anything specific.

It isn’t like Mum to buy me expensive gifts. I get the feeling that she doesn’t think I deserve gifts, or that I really deserve anything at all. I got Christopher in the first place because she decided she couldn’t keep working three-day weeks in order to homeschool me the other four days. We sat at the rarely-used dining room table and set up my education apps and websites together, finality in her breath every time she exhaled. You can do it yourself. Finally. When she stood up, she shrugged off thirteen years of weariness like a scarf.

The GED subject tests, which I took two years later, were so easy that they made me feel stupid. I told myself that I would take a year off before enrolling in online college courses. I’ve never felt more hopeful and less scattered than I did then: fifteen, finished with high school, and curious about everything. I fell into a routine of reading books and browsing the internet, peppered with an occasional doctor’s appointment. Six years later, I still haven’t fallen out of it.

I took a health class online my second-to-last year of school, though I already knew the basics of conception from Mum’s explanation of her own pregnancy. I am fatherless in the least traumatic way you can be fatherless. When Mum was thirty-six years old and working for a publishing house in Manhattan, she drove to the South Jersey Fertility Center in Marlton, New Jersey and asked them to artificially inseminate her, please. She was given the option of flipping through a book of donors and choosing one based on height, coloring, education, occupation. She refused to even look. Her only request was a donor with the blood type O+, the same as hers. That way, she said, the baby would have a ninety-four percent chance of matching her; that way, she could donate blood or platelets if her child ever got sick.

I don’t know what Mum expected. I think I know what she wanted: a carbon copy of herself, blond and tall and slate-eyed. An affinity for music and math. Rosacea and early grays. It’s like she thought that if she never saw the donor, she could somehow be my only biological creator. I would match her in her best ways and her worst, and we would be best friends; Leona and her daughter vs. The World.

But I let her down the second I was born. I slipped out in a distressing silence, too small and too swarthy right away; my six percent O- rarity immediately denying Mum her one wish. I grew into pale skin, dark hair, small brown eyes. Ugly teeth. Short and skinny, all bony elbows, and far too quiet.

“You barely cried,” she told me in the car, the only place she could ever talk to me, because she was really talking to the windshield. “You used to whine. You used to make this whining sound. Especially when I played music—God, you hated Chopin.” A wan smile.

She told me this story matter-of-factly when I was eleven, entirely unprompted. On our way to a specialist whose office was a two-hour drive away, Mum explained sex to me, then promptly told me that she didn’t need to have it to become pregnant. She spoke plainly and made lots of room for questions, and I still left the conversation feeling confused about parts of it. I didn’t understand, for example, why she had moved to Rochester. The wistful way Mum spoke about New York City seemed incongruous with her decision to move so far away from it. This was one of the few things that couldn’t be my fault; she had moved, she told me, as soon as she found out she was pregnant. Under the assumption that her daughter would be normal, she moved to a smaller, less expensive city, only to discover years later that our unique psychiatric needs would probably have been better catered to in Manhattan.

What she left unsaid: Her pain when people cooed over me as a toddler, only for me to stare silently at them until their smiles faltered. Has she picked up your accent? asked in innocent delight by friends and co-workers. Mum’s grip on my shoulder tightening.

Mum’s puzzling explanation of sex and conception left me with questions that I shelved at eleven and dusted off at fifteen. I blushed as I typed words in the Google search bar only to immediately delete them. mute girl+sex, I began. Backspace. mute girl having sex. What I really wanted to know was whether it was even possible. Or difficult—mute girl having sex+hard?

I pressed enter. The result was such weird pornography that I couldn’t even guess how I was supposed to enjoy it. This experience effectively scared me away—for a while—but left behind a pungent curiosity that was impossible to ignore. After a few more days of wavering between delving deeper or wiping Christopher’s hard drive out of sheer embarrassment, I decided to search for information more carefully—by using the Wikipedia widget on my browser. Less disturbing, less informative. Soon after that adventure, I discovered Reddit. Sudden love story: A Girl and The Internet.

Mum made an effort (once) to care about what I do when I’m alone in my room. It was after our first session with Romy. On the drive home, she decided to speak to the windshield about Christopher and expected me to listen.

“Milo.” She always starts that way—my name, declarative, like she’s about to begin a speech. “I just want to make sure I’m doing my job when it comes to—I mean—like, you’re not talking to anyone online, are you?” A pause, always; it’s like she never gets used to the fact that I don’t answer. “Not talking, obviously, but—typing? I just ask because I feel like I never really briefed you on the Internet—on Internet safety. You don’t give out our address, or anything, do you? Or your last name?”

I turned my head toward her very slightly, glancing from behind my half-lowered eyelids. This is the best way I can roll my eyes without actually rolling my eyes.

Mum’s gaze never left the road, but her right hand began drumming on the steering wheel, out of time with the Brahms sonata humming softly through the radio, which is how I knew she was irritated. Even if our communication is dysfunctional, it is there: we know each other’s slightest movements, can read a finger’s dance and get offended by half a look.

“I just feel,” she continued, her voice thorny and stretched thin, “that you are very closed off about what you do on that damned computer. Lately it’s ten, twelve hours a day. You know, privacy is a privilege, Milo. You understand that.” I can feel her wanting to add Right? to the end of her sentence.

It’s not that Mum and I have many conversations. But during the ones we do have, I always feel like she’s waiting for an answer. After twenty years, she bothers to wait. Is this kindness or delusion? Forgetfulness? Hope?

Eventually, I told her with a fist clenched on my windowsill to leave Christopher and me alone.

Now, I scroll mindlessly through an AMA with the manager of a Petco. I catch myself with my mouth open and I snap it shut, annoyed that this habit has spilled over from Romy’s hours to my own. Discussion in the comment section has turned to pets, and one long, rambling paragraph catches my eye. It’s a guy, u/prestochange_o, who claims his older sister has been neglecting her pet hermit crabs. She brags about them to her friends, prestochange_o frets, but she won’t give them any attention at home. Its like she likes the idea of them more than the crabs themselves. Please help what should I do I cant buy their food myself because I dont get an allowance anymore.

At first I find prestochange_o’s concern genuinely endearing, but something about his story gnaws at me. The hermit crabs dont do much and she complains about it, he writes. Why would she get hermit crabs in the first place, she knows its not the coolest pet but at least its something. I read his comment again and then realize dully that his story reminds me of Mum. I’m a hermit crab. My thoughts are punctuated by a bubbling, almost like a giggle. Only there’s no concerned little brother looking out for me.

I can’t manage despair, but I do scrape up some silent laughter.

I shut Christopher’s screen, letting him warm my thighs. After a while, other people’s stories make me feel too small, make my lungs constrict, and my hands shake.

There’s a reason I don’t search mute anymore. There’s a reason I don’t try to collect sentiments of solidarity from Internet strangers, not for this part of my life. I cast out a wary net once and was so nauseated with myself by the end of it that I never tried again. Need help finding resources for trauma-induced mutism? thread titles pleaded, followed by details of the horrific rape or assault or heartbreak that cut her (almost always, her) vocal chords in two. And your excuse is? my subconscious breathed in my ear, and Christopher’s screen seemed to become blurrier with every indirect accusation.

I can open my laptop and leave comments on makeup tutorials; I can summarize someone else’s opinion on British politics; I can scratch out a perforated analysis of the latest Great Millennial Novel and post it to r/books for digital applause. But I cannot lay down the truth: that I have three meals a day and one whole and healthy parent. That I have privacy and clean clothes, a therapist, a library card. That there is no good reason, physical or otherwise, that I can’t speak. And my biggest secret: that I frantically, bitterly want to.

*

The following Tuesday night I dream that Romy and I stand next to each other against a wall. The red-haired woman from the bus watches us from a shadow cast by her mole, which has become frighteningly huge.

What’s wrong with you? she asks. I know what’s wrong with her, she continues when I don’t answer, her head jerking toward Romy, whose smile is much too wide. But what’s wrong with you? Why are you here? I look down; we are standing in fine white sand.

You can’t tell just by looking at me, I say, before forgetting how to speak again.

At some point on Wednesday morning, I realize that I’ve never seen Romy stand up before. I have no idea how tall she is.

This week, instead of a thin stack of paper, Romy holds a thick book with a speckled navy cover. It looks like a dictionary, but the spine reads American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

No greeting. No reminder to keep my mouth open. Just a smile, the handoff of the whiteboard, and a nod toward the door signaling for me to close it. I wonder if she is trying silence on for size. Maybe she thinks that if she tastes what I taste, she will understand ‘why Milo can’t speak’, even though no one else ever has.

Romy opens the book, and for the first time, I see a bookmark holding a page hostage. “Selective mutism,” she reads, her head very still, “is an anxiety disorder affecting less than one percent of individuals. It is normally diagnosed by a speech-language pathologist, who will often work with the individual’s neurologist and psychiatrist to—”

My spine goes rigid as a knife. Heat washes over me so quickly that it is a moment before I recognize it as rage. It takes seconds for tears to sting the corners of my eyes, and I am surprised at how shallow in me they lived. I don’t want to hear this, I say furiously to Romy. I say it with the clatter of the whiteboard as it falls from my lap to the carpet, with my balled fists, with the slam of her door.

Outside, I gulp damp air. I scream silently, my neck craned, tears leaking sideways into my ears. I never want to hear any of those words again, I tell myself, and fuck her for trying.

I pace around Romy’s perfect Pittsford yard and move from doctor’s office to doctor’s office, year to year, willing exhalation to magick itself into communication. Angiograms, MRIs, oxygen pushed through tubes that run down my useless throat and invade me. Prodding fingers looking for cancer, for inflamed lymph nodes, for blood disorders. Personality tests. IQ tests. Words whispered to my mother while I sit on ugly cloth chairs in the hallway: Schizophrenia. Anxiety. Chronic pain. Concern in these voices, and derision in others: Attention seeking. Psychosomatic. And the worst, finally, because it meant a diagnosis, which meant that they stopped trying: Selective mutism. Selective. As if I selected this.

Deep breaths.

What do I want?

The question is bursting, desperate, but my answer is swift and clean: I want to get better. I blink. I am calming down. I want to feel like I deserve what I have.

Then you have to try.

The stars behind my eyelids fade away as I work to relax each muscle in my face. After a minute, I turn around and face Romy’s house.

She is standing in the doorway, as enormous and welcoming as land from sea. I feel tears close to the surface again, so I chew my lip to keep them under.

“Come on up, Milo.”

When I reach the top of her steps, I notice that we are exactly the same height.

We weave through the house back to her office. I shut the door as if nothing has happened, settling down on the couch and picking up the whiteboard delicately.

Romy waits, uncharacteristically quiet. No smile, just eyes behind those magenta glasses swallowing me whole. I bite my lip harder—a burst of pain and the taste of coins erupt in my mouth, and Romy absently hands me a tissue for the blood.

The marker is slick in my hand. It feels like Romy’s magnet gaze is picking it up and drawing it toward the whiteboard, even though her eyes never leave mine.

In my head, again: I want to get better.

Then you have to give something.

I uncap the marker. Then I look at her blankly, finally asking for help. Zip me back up.

“Begin at the beginning,” Romy says.

Begin at the beginning.

I hate your glasses, I write.

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