Glass Breaking

Contributed by Rivka Jacobs on 06/03/10

She stood facing the carved oak credenza and mirror behind it, trying to remember what she was doing there. She contemplated the three rows of clean wine glasses, the amber and cobalt-blue water goblets that sat sparkling on the polished wood. It looked like they were waiting for something she couldn’t quite recall.

“Maya, Maya….” someone said from behind her. Someone … was it her sister? … touched her arm. “Maya, leave it alone, go sit down,” the voice said impatiently. “I’ll get you something to drink.”

Maya turned unsteadily, the anger rising despite the effects of the Klonopin. “I don’t want to sit there any longer,” she hissed at her younger sibling Julie, vaguely aware of the happiness she felt when she was as far away from her family as possible.

Julie straightened. Her dark bangs and short straight bob made her sour expression look prankish and silly. She stuck her fists on her hips, her skinny elbows splayed under the loose sleeves of her black silk blouse. “You have to sit down,” she said. “As the wife….”

Maya turned her back to Julie, looking at the reflection of her sister’s pinched and reddening face. “You go do the Jewish thing, I don’t care,” she said, trying to make her lips work.

“Jeff was a devout Jew, you have to sit Shiva for him,” Julie said, raising her voice.

Maya shrugged, and gazed at herself in the mirror. She looked like the picture of an old-world widow, her black suit jacket torn over her heart, her golden hair frizzing around her face like a nimbus, her blue eyes nearly obscured by the puffiness and bruising caused by constant crying. She wasn’t crying any more. The Klonopin was working wonders. But the world seemed to be sliding back and forth, in and out of frame.

Julie was calling “Mom, Mom,” now as she spun around and then disappeared into the living room. “I’m going to tell mommy on you,” Maya said to herself in a mocking, high-pitched voice, and then emitted a “hmph.” She leaned forward, peering at her face. “Did I put on any makeup? Oh wait, I’m not supposed to wear any for seven fucking days. Nice one, Jeff. You weren’t supposed to leave the stage at the age of forty-two, you bastard.” Progressing nicely to the anger stage, she said to herself.

Behind her she heard a commotion coming from the large and lofty living room where low stools and benches were arranged in a semi-circle for the immediate family. She dimly listened to the doorbell; more visitors, bringing more food for the bereaved. She thought she heard loud, wafting exclamations, “Rabbi, we’re so happy you’re here….”

“Crap,” Maya said to her reflection. All these Jewish rites and rules were meant to comfort the mourner, to bring a family together in mutual support, except she had never gotten along with any member of her family. Her best friend, her soul mate, her husband who loved her and made her understand she was good, beautiful, and special, he was Jeff Adler and he was dead.

She straightened and took a step in the direction of the French doors that led to the kitchen, but wobbled and grasped the back of a chair for support. “Wow, benzos kick ass,” she said. She studied the polished oak-parquet floor under her black stocking-clad feet. She beheld the fine workmanship of the massive dining table they had found in Italy. The chair she held on to was one of a matching set of eight, commissioned by Jeff, hand-made and upholstered to his specifications.

“Crap,” she said again, and half turned back towards the credenza, reaching for one of the wine glasses that glimmered like a rainbow in the sheen of the antique brass chandelier overhead.

She barely brushed the stem with her fingers when the entire glass seemed to fly out and away from her. She watched as if paralyzed as it hung in the air, spinning slowly.

Maya, Maya, she heard … it sounded like a male voice, but was melodious, sibilant, and sweet.

She slid her eyes to the right, abruptly unable to move any other part of her body. She saw, standing between the large window at the back of the dining room and the wine glass still in the air, the figure of a tall beautiful man dressed in a white three-piece suit, a white fedora at an angle on his head. The sunshine coming in behind him seemed to illuminate him, as if he were translucent, and a glow collected around the outline of his form.

The wine glass hovered slightly, the cup upended as if caught in the middle of a rotation, then it began to float downward.

Ma ‘inyanim, Maya, you should not drink alcohol while taking your medication.

The wine glass was now on its side, drifting like a soap bubble. Maya shifted her eyes back to the visitor. “Who are you? What do you want?” she tried to say; her mouth didn’t move but she could hear her own voice.

He looked directly at her from under his hat brim; his eyes were colorless and crackling with electrical fire. He lifted both his hands, palms out. Be at peace, I will not take you today. There are times when I stop to talk with the sons and daughters of Adam. I offer you my condolences. Your husband was a remarkable human being.

“And you are?” she was certain she said, tracking the wine glass as it was poised about a foot above the parquet tiles.

I am the Ma’lak Hamavet, the one and there is only one.

The wine glass soundlessly appeared to contact the floor, the cup was suddenly crisscrossed with a myriad jagged lines.

“You’re the ‘Angel of Death?’ And you want to chat with me? When you’re not killing people, don’t you usually spend your spare time with Moses or King Solomon or famous scholars and rabbis? Why me?” She felt giddy, certain she was hallucinating. She tried to smile, and the man or angel before her seemed to flare.

Because the Talmud doesn’t record my conversations with women of great mind and spirit, doesn’t mean I haven’t paused to converse with them.

Maya considered herself more of a teacher than a scholar. She taught ancient Middle Eastern and Biblical history at a private Pennsylvania college. She had studied hundreds of different texts, in the course of her research. To her any religion was something to be deconstructed and analyzed, an expression of the human unconscious filed under the heading of mythology. Religious practice in her view was nothing more than ritualistic behavior married to habitual doctrine.

Her guest beamed, a white-yellow shell of brightness shimmering all around him. Yet your husband was devout, and attended Sabbath evening and morning services faithfully. You kept the laws of kashrut for him.

“My Jeff never imposed his views on me, and I didn’t force mine on him. We got along fine. I kept kosher out of respect for him, not because he made me do it.” Maya rolled her gaze downward. The fracture lines of the glass were widening, the cup had taken on a convex, ovoid shape in front of her visitor’s white gleaming shoes. Tiny broken edges were beginning to lift, glinting with pinpoints of light. She still couldn’t move anything except her eyes, which she slipped upward again, staring into what was now a pulsating glare around the angel’s face and shoulders. “Did you also stop and shoot the breeze with any of the people chosen to live at Auschwitz while their loved ones went up the chimney in smoke?” She mentally flinched as the figure in front of the window brightened further.

Yes, I have.

“My husband just had a heart attack, did you cause that?” Maya reflexively noted the wine glass had ceased to exist. In its place was a cylindrical section of stem and a spray of glittering glass chips and sharp pieces frozen in the air just above the lustrous oak floor.

There are many paths that bring me to your door. I obey my orders.

“You are only following orders…?” She felt contempt and anger and a pinch of fear.

The shards and scintillating spots of glass billowed upward and outward, suspended in luminescence like flecks of mica in granite.

Your husband came to me a happy and successful man. You live in a fine home, in a peaceful town, in a time when you will be afforded all the rights of property and ownership, and will be accorded respect.

“So I should be humble and grateful at my good fortune? I should feel guilty for being angry and saying you and your Boss can kiss my ass?”

Is that a question?

The spray of bits and slivers of glass spread more fully and hung in front of her hands, arms, and breasts like twinkling stars. The brilliance of the human form in front of her was so overpowering it was hard to keep focused on it; she slipped her eyes to either side as she attempted to confront this presence. “What is it that you actually do, anyway? If a man waits in an alley and decides to rob and kill someone walking by — where do you fit in all of that, exactly?”

I am his arm, I am his knife, I am his murderous thoughts.

The radiance seemed to grow more dim. Maya fastened her sight on the man in the white suit once again; his face became fluid, with eyes, nose, and mouth indistinct and in motion. The enormity of the concept impacted her and she felt a sudden surge of sorrow. “So, for the entire history of humankind, you’ve been every death, every thought of death, every instrument of death, from a flint ax to a copper-jacketed bullet to a bomb or crystal of Zyklon-B?”

I am the mind and matter of death. I am myself as well. For eternity.

He was melting now, flowing into the sunlight streaming through the window. Glass was all around her like a cloud, with the chunk of stem already resting on the floor. She felt pity for him, sympathy. “I’m sorry,” she tried to say. But he appeared to understand. “Is that why you visit with people, then? You have to, to preserve your essence, to define yourself. To remind yourself there is a God.”

There was a clicking in her ears, a static fuzz. Her eyes began to blink, her fingers twitched. The figure in front of her swirled into a small white cyclone.

I will see you again in forty years, he said inside her head, and then there was an explosive crashing, clinking, tinkling that startled her and made her jump. Grains and larger fragments of glass pricked her skin, spattered her black skirt and studded her stockings. Behind her excited voices were calling to her, telling her not to move. Julie bounded to her side.

“We’ll clean it up, Maya, don’t worry about it,” her sister said.

Maya shuddered and breathed, in and out, deeply. She tilted her head, giving a quizzical look at her mother-in-law, her husband’s brother, and two of his cousins who were all over her whisking off glass, putting Kleenex and handkerchiefs to bleeding cuts, leading her away.

She tried to twist all the way around, to look back at the window. Nothing was there but her fancy made-to-order drapes over a Belgian-lace panel.

Her own mother arrived, haughty and bossy as always, giving orders for someone to “Call the doctor.”

Maya smiled to herself as she was lead to the stairs leading to her bedroom on the second floor. “That wasn’t the Klonopin,” she said out loud. She still didn’t like the people around her very much, and she didn’t feel any closer to them. But she knew she had forty more years. She began calculating how quickly she could sell this house, and the rest of her belongings. Life was waiting.