Hammer-Bleich 1 Reservations Bruria Hammer-Bleich

Jacob was in the lobby of the hotel he had booked a room in, on the original occasion of his nephew Daniel‟s Bar Mitzvah. The hotel was an apartment building that had been converted into suites, and its carpets, which Jacob walked over without noticing, were a dingy purple. He leaned in towards the customer service window, a hard graying plastic. “Reservation under the name of Aaronson please,” he said. His nose drooped and hunched nearly as much as his back did, and he sighed. The man behind the customer service window waved rudely and glared: “Can‟t you tell I‟m on the phone and I don‟t want to deal with yet another customer today so just wait one bloody second, for chrissakes.” Jacob waited. Jacob‟s wife and daughter were not with him because they had finally decided on their attitude towards his family. They had talked through all his family‟s misdoings, yanking out the tangles and gathering them into a ball the way his daughter did with his wife‟s hair when it got knotty. Under regular circumstances they would have compared the ball of offenses against the ball of obligation, but during their daily meditational walks&talks his wife declared, “There is no obligation at all, you know. We have tried a hundred times with them, fulfilling all the so called „obligation‟ and they have just provided us with shit. I mean, look at the fucking product we got. A useless man with half a penis and „obligation.‟ They are just going to hate us anyway.” This revelation was then anointed as Truth, and they told Jacob they couldn‟t come, and they told him why, and they gave him the reason in full detail, including the part about the “useless fucking product” they had gotten.

Jacob looked up questioningly at the customer service man, who gave him the finger. He looked back down at his own hand, which held a red, dense-foam ball. He squeezed it once, twice and his fingers spread spiderlike across it. He had been given the ball by his boss the day he had been fired, five weeks prior. He had lost his temper at a

Hammer-Bleich 2 coworker, and also didn‟t fill out his client documentation legibly. At the end of the firing speech his boss gave him two weeks pay and a foam ball, which had been kept along with a hundred identical others in a large vase in the front lobby, free to all, and which read “Breathe Smokefree. Call 1-800-QuitNow.” He had come home that night with the two weeks‟ pay in an envelope and the ball in his hand that also held his briefcase. The heavy news hung over him, sneering at him along with the forgotten dry cleaning. He had told his wife that night, impassive. He extended the ball to her, a peace offering, and she yelled at him, silently, then threw the ball back at him and stormed out of the room. Outside the room, his daughter was waiting - she had been listening, and had of course, heard everything. She rose from her crouch and gave his wife an “orange-juicesqueeze-hug.” Then they marched purposefully together to the kitchen where they removed the dozen cream puffs Jacob bought weekly from the baker. Together, they tore large chunks of pastry from the waxy bag, and chewed fast and big. In between bites, they loudly retold the tale of the failure of a man they knew called Jacob. When his wife cried, his daughter calmly offered her the last chunk of cream puff from the bag, and produced the longest string of angry curses Jacob had ever heard. Jacob heard his wife laugh through cream puff and cursing, and all the while he remained in the side room.

Jacob squeezed the rejected ball once more, shuffled his leg quietly, and twitched. He looked back up at the customer service man, who now had his back facing the window pane in order to best continue talking with full concentration. Jacob reviewed his speech in his head, twitching even more with effort. It was the same speech he had written for his nephew on the occasion of the Bar Mitzvah, with only a little tweaking to fit the new occasion, sprung on him last week.

The new occasion was a funeral, of his now-dead sister Sarah, the mother of the still-alive nephew Daniel. Daniel‟s Bar Mitzvah had been cancelled, and the caterer had been told to bring the food to a new address, where funeral receptions took place. The caterer had grumbled a little about the change in plans and food that affected the hiring of his delivery men, but he was well compensated and he shut up.

Hammer-Bleich 3 It was likely that his father and brother-in-law were doing the same thing with their speeches, Jacob reassured himself. At the funeral Jacob knew they would all give the expected complicated sources from the most difficult of sacred texts, citing remote places competitively and nodding victoriously if the others did not recognize them. They would then tie it vaguely to Daniel‟s intellectual strength or a blessing regarding his potential in future studies. Now they would tie it instead to Sarah‟s strengths during her life or her potential in the World To Come. They would assure the obligatorily persuadable crowd that she had a special seat next to God‟s throne, in much the same way they would likely have said Daniel had a special place in God‟s mind and in His plans for the future generation.

No one would say about Sarah the truth, except for his wife and daughter back at home. They would lie together in the master bed, fingers intertwined and eulogize. “She turned into a real bitch of a mother,” and, “she should have used birth control, she knew she was sick,” and “eight children wasn‟t fair for anyone except her, and she got away scot free, dying on them like that.” They would then seriously contemplate the significance of a mother dying of breast cancer on the marriage prospects of Sarah‟s eldest daughter, and they might wonder briefly if they had done the right thing by not accompanying Jacob to the funeral after all, but they would brush it off with complaints about having to see the grandmother. “That fucking mad woman, a bitch of a mother-inlaw, she certainly does not deserve our sympathy,” they would say. “Besides,” his daughter might add, “Yeah, besides, there was only one hotel room booked for the Bar Mitzvah anyway, remember?”

Jacob stared at his single suit bag forlornly. He was reminded of a family vacation his parents had taken him on, the sweaty trips they used to take every summer. “For air,” his mother would say and his father would nod slowly in agreement. Sarah made scrapbook diaries of these trips, recordings that would be destined to lie on the extra bookshelf in the apartment at home, and never be looked at after completion. On the third trip they took, they went to Los Angeles. “For air,” his mother said and his father didn‟t even bother with the slow nod of agreement. The plane ride was

Hammer-Bleich 4 stale and boring. Jacob, then eight, had fidgeted the whole time, but his mother was so deep in her snoring fest that she neither noticed nor corrected his twitching. Promptly upon arrival, his mother insisted on getting food, as per her usual custom to fill empty time with consumption. Sarah, the eldest of the two and easily the more responsible, was left with the suitcases. She sat hunched, next to the bags, inspecting her new scrapbook, pasting the airplane ticket stubs carefully on a pink page. Jacob went with his parents for food, and when he came back, Sarah was there, but the bags were gone. He clutched two vanilla ice cream cones in his hands, the tops of which twirled like the ends of Sarah‟s curly ponytail. Jacob mashed his teeth into one of the cones, feeling his teeth shudder with cold that comes too fast. He watched his mother march over, angry, and pull the scrapbook out of Sarah‟s hand, point with rage to the space that used to contain suitcases. Sarah started with shock, then shame at the lost baggage, and began crying, even before his mother delivered the required punishment. Jacob‟s eyes swum with the cold of the ice cream, well plastered now over his face. He looked into it and pretended it was snow while his sister was hit seven times and his father nodded slowly in agreement.

Jacob trembled from the coincidence of it all, of the room booked for the Bar Mitzvah, which was still going to occur but without party, and in its replacement Sarah‟s funeral, and soon he was shaking all over. His heart beat relentlessly, as if an old man was smashing in the attic of his rib cage‟s house. His hand holding the red, dense-foam ball relaxed its grip and the ball fell, rolling uselessly on the carpet, slower and slower until a dirty sheet pile brought it to a stop. Jacob raised his hand and punched, hard, at the dingy window. His wedding ringed hand broke it through, penetrated near the head of the customer service man, who finally dropped the phone, from shock, and Jacob shouted, “reservation under the name of Aaronson goddammit, I said reservation under the name of Aaronson!” Then he wrenched his arm back again, and swung the other arm forward “Reservation on the occasion of the Bar Mitzvah of Daniel, now a funeral goddammit, reservation under the name of Aaronson, goddamit, reservation under the name of Aaronson.” He whimpered after, and then whispered, “Reservation in heaven for Sarah,

Hammer-Bleich 5 please, a reservation,” and slumped down to the floor, his head knocking against the counter on the way and the customer service man all the while watching.