Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Our grandmothers would often tell us that no matter how much you envy someone, if everyone threw their package of problems into the center of a room and was given a choice of anyone else’s, you would, guaranteed, pick up your own. We didn’t know if that was always true, especially when it came to the Fletchers, but perhaps now we did. Perhaps now we would truly say that we would pick our own problems over even theirs.

Middle Rock was the kind of suburb that no longer exists, a community defined by common ethics and values and populated by a variety of middle-to-upper-class people who moved to be among others who shared those same ethics and values. The problem of extremely wealthy people living amid a clamor of plain middle-class people—forcing those middle-class people to contend with not their enormous luck but their remaining dissatisfactions—was a problem solved with the 1990s proliferation of the McMansion. Suddenly the middle class had plenty of space inside their hollow stucco walls to store their delusions.

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. If all those superstitions were to protect against the dangers that their poverty endowed them with, then money was the solution and it was time for them to finally relax. But now she saw that the money had tricked her.

She was lost; she was terrified. All she needed was a wink, a nod, an iota of prodding—You’re doing it right, Ruth! Keep going, Ruth! But she couldn’t continue to look at them because yes, those people could be federal agents or police, but they could also be the kidnappers. She started to walk away backward, backward, backward until finally, about fifty feet away, she turned around and started walking out of the terminal. Now what, she thought. Now what. NOW WHAT. Once she was outside, she ran back to her car, and a great panic set in. How could she have agreed to send Nathan to school that day? How could she believe these people who didn’t know what they were doing? She looked over her shoulder at her silent, petrified son. How could they have let her bring him along? Because of a tantrum? These federal agents were so afraid of a child’s tantrum that they sent him along on a ransom drop? What kind of people were these? What kind of people were running this operation?

The rabbi nodded. “Do you know who Gershom Scholem was? He was a Jewish philosopher. He wrote about Kabbalah and Shabbtai Zvi and antinomianism. He spoke once about something called a plastic hour, that there are these times in our lives when everything is soft and malleable. We tend to suffer during these times, but his point was that actually, these plastic hours are times when you can make actual change.” “What change?” “Whatever change is necessary. For the better. This is a time when you can become better.

There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.