Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Each night she lay awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering which of the superstitions that she’d been taught as a girl could have prevented this. She’d stopped summoning those superstitions, those shots in the dark for protection, pretty much completely after she met and married a man whose wealth was its own elaborate system of safeties. She had, as a girl, been taught reams of rituals to forestall injury and demise—to spit three times upon hearing a scary thought; to step into the house with her right foot to avert disaster; to not cut her fingernails and toenails on the same day because that’s what’s done to you on the day of your burial; to not sit at the corner of a table, lest she not get married for seven years. She’d been taught to whisper “God forbid” over and over, to spit on the ground upon hearing the names of her enemies. But in recent years, since her marriage, she had begun to see all the superstitions that were her heritage as the silly burden of a poor and desperate people who had no control and no explanation of why they were constantly being chased to their death.