The Jew sits on his front porch drinking an iced coffee and looking out at his rose bushes. They’re not champions – just things he planted from a couple grocery store pots he received from one of his kids on Father’s Day several years back. But he treats them like they’re that – champions – because he never knows when someone who loves roses will walk by and throw a compliment his way. The Jew likes those – compliments from strangers, or better yet, one of his neighbors. When he gets one he feels like people are finally noticing how hard he’s been trying.
He doesn’t really like flowers, nor living out here away from the City where all the plants, not just his roses, grow so much more readily. He still misses the clamor and the dirt and the bustle of his old neighborhood after all these years, everyone out here tries to keep things so under wraps. Plus he doesn’t really think of himself as a farmer, or really, a horticulturist, he should say; he’d rather spend his free time reading books, or watching the ball games on TV. It seems to him you have to learn something about the flora if you choose to live out here, what will survive the winter, what likes the October shade versus the emerging April sun. Unless, of course, you’re one of the ones who just turns the whole operation over to the hired help. And this he is unwilling to do.
So he sits on his stoop and thinks his roses need some pruning, even if most people wouldn’t notice. He can see the beginnings of rust on some of the lower leaves, the ones far removed from the flowers. He’ll need to cut them back and maybe even treat them, probably with some of the fungicide spray he keeps in the garage alongside his clippers, though he isn’t ready to go back there just yet. He hasn’t wanted to go back there since Rosh Hashanah, almost a week ago now. In the afternoon, when they found it there after coming home from their annual attendance at services.
Perhaps he could get away with waiting, though that is almost always a bad idea. If he waits to tend to the roses, there’s a chance the rust will go away. It’s happened before. His cherry trees, for instance. He has a couple of the sour ones that were here when they moved in six years ago this past February. They were part of the sales pitch on the house – harvest your own fruit, make your own pies. That, and the proximity to the local public schools, which were highly rated according to his wife Anna, along with the stand-alone two-car garage that was built before the HOA started discouraging them. He had to admit, that caught his eye.
He uses one half of the garage for everything except parking the car, he and Anna just leave the second one out most of the time at the foot of the driveway. Mostly it’s stuff for him to take care of the plants – hoses and bags of soil and fertilizer and all manner of tools. A ride-on mower, which Anna purchased for him this spring when his old stand-behind gave out. He liked using that one, liked walking behind it, making the straight lines in the grass, sometimes switching it up to go diagonally or in circles. Riding on the new one makes him feel old and a bit fat, even though the Jew is in great shape for his age, everyone says.
You can see most everything in the garage from the street when the door is open, which used to be most of the time when spring came, before the new woman running the HOA asked him last year if he could try to keep the door shut more often. Sure, he said. I can do that. Anything to make the neighbors happy. He even repainted the door in a nice green and white pattern to match the shutters on the house, which she commented on favorably. And he’s been good about honoring her request, he’d lay even money that he remembers to close the door three times out of five. Though he guesses right now the HOA lady wishes he would have left the door open these past several days. Or at least had the courtesy to pull the second car all the way to the back.
The rust spray and his clippers are on the shelf by the side window, he’ll need to be careful when he goes over to them so that he doesn’t stumble on something. He did that once – stuck his foot where he shouldn’t have when trying to retrieve a box of fertilizer spikes and tripped and gashed his chin. Blood everywhere and then six stitches at the urgent care to patch him up, the boys oohed and aahed over the ER doctor’s handiwork. If he remembers correctly, it was the basket of nets he uses to cover the fruit trees that caused his fall, the ones he employs so that the birds don’t eat everything before Anna can harvest. The birds particularly like the cherry trees. He learned that the year after they moved in, after he’d saved the trees by mostly leaving them alone.
In June of the year before, he’d noticed the leaves of the two cherries were all curling when he went out one morning to retrieve the newspaper from the driveway. This was back when they still got a newspaper. How quaint, he thinks now, as he takes another sip of his coffee, actually going outside in the morning to retrieve a daily paper. The Jew dropped the subscription sometime back when they shrank the paper to the point where it felt more like a large magazine in his hand than the papers of his youth. And they were giving a much better deal for the online version anyway.
He went to the garden center about the curled leaves on his cherry trees. After some mucking about amongst the pots of lilies to find someone who might help him, a pretty middle-aged woman carrying a tray of annuals came to his rescue. She asked him how the flowers had looked when they bloomed, what percentage of the leaves had the curl, and other questions that seemed sensible enough that he no longer remembers. He does recall her turquoise earrings though, as well as her neck scarf decorated with yellow and orange paisleys.
He told her he didn’t know about the flowers because he wasn’t paying attention, but as for the leaves, nearly all of them had the problem, at which point the woman said he would be better off cutting down the trees and starting over. Any fruit the trees would produce would rot before ripening and getting the trees back to full health would take years, if it were even possible. Plus the disease – a fungus in all probability – might leap from the cherry trees to anything nearby, did he have other types of fruit growing? There were still some decent-sized cherries in stock out back that would produce within the next two years, come with her to the arbor area and she would show them to him.
But all this was before the Jew knew anything about tending any kind of plants, let alone fruit trees, and he didn’t know whether to believe the woman or if instead she might be hustling him for the sale, though she certainly didn’t look the type. So he thanked her and turned to leave, spinning his car keys around one of his index fingers, thinking he would just wait and see. The woman with the earrings caught up to him at the door and tapped him on his shoulder. When he turned around to see what was what, the Jew saw in one of her hands a plastic canister long enough to store spaghetti and as wide as his fist adorned with a cartoon of a farmer pushing a wheelbarrow filled with fruit. The Jew knows that farmer now. A different version of him is on the container of rust spray.
“I suppose it’s always possible that the soil is just degraded,” the woman said. “You can try adding this to the soil around the trees every week for the rest of the summer and watering more heavily. You never know.”
So he did that and, lo and behold, the next spring the cherry trees were fine, and he was living out that real estate ad. Anna got six pies out of the two trees that first year after the birds took their share, and then between eight and ten every year since. Everyone has heard of those pies on the Jew’s street, he and Anna make sure to freeze enough of the cherries so she can trot one out not just at the summer block party but also at any end of the year holiday celebrations to which they are invited. It was at one of these where the cherry pies made their first appearance, two years after they’d moved in. How cute, the looks from all the goyim said, two Jews who didn’t know you don’t have cherry pie for Christmas. But then people tasted the pie and all was forgiven, and now Anna has to bake at least two, sometimes even three, every mid-December.
The Jew wasn’t so lucky with the pear and plum trees – they died within a year of their moving in. The apple tree went the following year, though he still has raspberries, lots of raspberries, which spread like weeds into the lawn if he’s not careful. The woman at the garden store – Martha is her name, he remembers all of the sudden – said he would’ve needed to start adding to the soil, “amending,” she called it, as soon as the disease had appeared to save the other trees, and even then that probably wouldn’t have been enough. For whatever reason, Martha said she’d found that cherry trees can sometimes bounce back in a way that other fruit trees can’t, particularly the sour ones, maybe because they haven’t been inbred as much. The other ones you’ve got no chance unless you nip the problem in the bud because they’ve been modified too far from nature.
And that’s the way it is, he thinks, as he finishes the last of the coffee – you have to catch things early, whether things are altered or not, though he’ll concede that it’s worse now with everything having changed so much. Hardly anyone ever pays attention when things are just starting to go, whether it’s hidden at the bottom like his roses or right in front of your face, like the leaflet he found under his windshield wipers in January that said exactly what it was they wanted. It’s always easier to wait and just try to make do. And then before you know it, things have turned to shit, and despite the occasional miracle like his cherry trees, there’s nothing to be done about it.
That’s something that’s the same out here as it was in the City. There’s little doubt about that now.
In the City, it was the lampposts. The Jew tells his neighbors that he moved out here because Anna couldn’t take anymore the things he loved about the City – the hubbub, she called it – though he thinks there’s plenty out here to bother someone all the same. Take the street sounds, for instance. Different in character for sure, less constant, yet somehow more jarring at times. The sudden bang of a delivery van’s hydraulic plate against someone’s driveway is much harder on the ears when there isn’t any background music to accompany it, the Jew thinks, ike a cymbal crash in an empty concert hall out of the blue.
But, truth be told, they left for other reasons, and it was those lampposts where things first started. Or perhaps more accurately, where things were first brought to the Jew’s attention. He remembers the day before they began looking at real estate ads, Anna commenting for the millionth time about the ones outside their apartment building. There were two of them in particular, one right outside the building’s front entrance and the other across the street by the corner restaurant. Always they had been one of the few things that bugged the Jew about the apartment, which was otherwise well-appointed and roomy enough to hold the four of them comfortably. At night he had to be careful about walking in the front living room because the two street lights lit a small portion of it up like it was almost day. The Jew still likes to sleep naked in the summer, even with central air conditioning he gets uncomfortably warm.
Anna informed him of the issue with the living room one morning after she’d been out late with some of her girlfriends and the Jew had shut everything down for the evening. This was before the kids were born, when she’d had time for girlfriends. He had wanted to read in bed and remembered a magazine he’d left on their imitation Noguchi coffee table, the one that Anna had picked up at the thrift store for cheap. So he’d gone out into the living room without throwing his bathrobe on just as Anna was coming home. As she handed him his toasted bagel the next morning she told him she’d seen everything, and while she liked it, perhaps next time he should put on a pair of shorts or something so he didn’t attract unwanted attention.
As for the lampposts, Anna related to him that morning before they started looking out here that the kids were beginning to notice the daily vulgarities adorned to the aluminum, had he read the latest monstrosities? He had, he said, and agreed that it was bad, remembering as she told him the first time he’d noticed the problem. It had been perhaps five years prior, right after Aaron had been born, a few stickers with swastikas stamped right on top of the Sea of Galilee. Small things, right below the no parking without neighborhood permit signs, if you didn’t look closely you might miss them. He should have said something about those at the time, maybe at one of the alderman’s bi-annual get to know your representative meetings.
But he didn’t, and the stickers were replaced by something else, something less direct, he remembers as he crunches the ice between his teeth, less immediately off-putting and with more surface appeal. Freedom, oppression, other ten-dollar words, as Anna likes to say. Then at some point, exactly when he couldn’t say, the stickers on the lampposts became posters in peoples’ windows and the posters became speakers appearing in the neighborhood. Even at the local community center, where right after they’d first moved in Anna had sold some of her hamantaschen at a bake sale. Her table had been right next to the woman with the headscarf selling baklava, they had swapped phone numbers and recipes. And together had made fun of the blue-eyed schoolmarm who gave them dirty looks over her plates of snickerdoodles, which were going unsold in the face of the new competition.
The speaker at the community center had spewed vile stuff but oh-so-smooth, he must have gotten his Ph.D. in euphemisms. The Jew had gone to that one so he could at least be sure that it really was time to move on. All manners of offenses had been committed, crimes against humanity and everything else there ever was. When the Jew came back to tell Anna about it he didn’t have the heart to inform her the woman with the headscarf was there, nodding along with the rest of the believers up front. But not the schoolmarm – she and her family had left the neighborhood several years earlier, the Jew had watched their moving van roll down the street, past the laundromat and the flower shop that previously had been devoted to shoe repair.
That was a long time ago, he thinks now, as he pours out the remaining ice from his glass onto the wood chips that border his stoop. And so far away, they haven’t been back to the old neighborhood in at least three years, it’s too much of a haul. Still he thinks of the place fondly, even if the lampposts and everything else conspired to chase them away. Out here he’s less anonymous, and hence more responsible, he thinks, the lady running the HOA has made sure to let him know there are people willing to help them clean up. At least in the old neighborhood he didn’t feel like anyone was blaming him personally.
He stands from the stoop and stretches his arms over his head, a couple of his vertebrae crackling like the popcorn he likes to eat. He’s taller than average for a Jew, for any man really, when he cranes his neck like this he crests almost six foot two. His height will come in handy, he thinks, when he gets around to the garage. He remembers that he’s stored the leftover green paint for the trim on the next-to-top shelf of a cabinet along with all the other flammables, which used to be out of the boys’ reach. Now Joshua can get up there easily, and Aaron can reach on his tippy toes, though both have moved on from the childish fascination with dangerous household substances to baseball and soccer. That’s where they are right now in fact, Anna having driven them with the HOA lady’s kids to the nearby sports complex for this afternoon’s games.
Before the garage though he has to take care of the roses, he really shouldn’t wait any longer. They are planted on either side of his flagpole, which right now is flying the stars and stripes like it usually does before winter comes. That’s how they’d figured it out, he guesses, from the flag he flew last fall. The boys had asked him to raise the additional one that day, the one the Jew had gotten for his Bar Mitzvah decades ago that he kept in its original package in his closet. He remembers how they all carefully took it out of the box, unfolded it, and then how he showed the boys the way to string it properly, Anna taking videos on her phone the whole while. They’d flown it for a month until the weather was about to turn, the blue and white looking sharp beneath the red, white and blue.
Technically, that had been against the HOA rules, the flying of multiple flags. But, no one had complained.
He had been scared that day, he remembers, and for many days after. That was the point of the whole thing, he guesses, the instillation of fear. Certainly, they didn’t think they could win, did they? Well, it succeeded, he thinks as he steps over to his roses, even though the fear faded relatively quickly into a generalized anxiety. That’s why they’d taken the flag down, in addition to the weather. Anna worried that it would attract more of that unwanted attention, mainly to the boys. Now he looks up at the only flag he has flying and thinks he should have left the other one up there all along. A lot of good it did taking it down – he wonders if he has enough of the green paint up on that shelf to get the job done.
But first the roses, he needs to tend to them. The plants are at their zenith this time of year, they are almost as tall as the Jew, he has to squat on his haunches to get a good look at what’s going on down low. It’s worse than he thought, he sees upon closer inspection, the rust has spread up the plants on the sides nearest the flagpole. About halfway to the top he estimates, he wonders how he missed it, he’s out here on his stoop every weekend if it isn’t raining. He reaches underneath the most affected of the canes, feels along the joint to see if it has already gone soft, being careful not to prick himself on any of the thorns. It hasn’t thankfully, the rot that he’s read can follow the rust hasn’t set in yet. If that were to happen the bushes might be too far gone, though as it is, he thinks he is weeks late in applying the spray.
The flowers still look terrific though, funny how that is. Huge and red, they’re almost a bit cartoonish, from time to time he has to prop one or two of the stems up with garden stakes, the blooms get so damn heavy with the morning dew. Scarlet red, people always tell him, blood red. If he remembers correctly, the tags on the pots said they were of the Born Free variety, it would be pretty hard to just make that name up as a memory. Though he has looked at a catalogue or two over the years, occasionally Anna gets after him to plant one or two bushes more.
He brushes one of the blossoms with his forearm, a stray petal falling off onto his hand. He caresses it for a moment, admiring its velvety softness, before standing straight again and squinting into the sun. Normally he loves this time of year, the light splitting the air crisp and clean, the leaves just about ready to change. Now he supposes he’ll remember it for a far different reason, there’s no avoiding anniversaries like these.
He steps away from the roses and towards the garage, wondering about the math for the fungicide, is it three parts water or is it four? He’s concerned the concentrate might have dried out since he last used it, it’s happened to him before, he’s opened up the bottle only to find a dried cake stuck to the bottom. He’ll just have to hope for the best, he thinks, that’s what you have to do sometimes, regardless if things are going against you. Forward, Anna likes to say, there really isn’t anywhere else to go.
It isn’t far to the garage, its not as if his driveway is some dramatic carriageway like some of the newer construction on the block. It’s much more functional, just a way to get where you’re going or a space on which to play four-square or basketball. The Jew put up a hoop and backboard when they first moved here, he and Anna and the boys played two on two sometimes, he usually teamed up with Aaron, she with Joshua. They always ended the games with him lifting the boys up one by one so each could dunk the ball, and then Anna flirtatiously asking “How ‘bout me?”
You wouldn’t think she was like that when you first looked at her, but you would be sorely mistaken. Which is why it hurt all the more when she first saw it and all she could do was break down and start crying.
He walks past the hoop laying on the ground by the fence to his neighbors’ place, they’d torn that down for good measure, the proverbial salt in the wound. As if the message needed further emphasis, the Jew understood what they were saying even if his neighbors didn’t quite get it. Unimaginable, they’d said, inconceivable. Especially here. When really it was the other way around, they’d been lucky it had taken so long. He looks at the fragment of particle board attached to the back of the discarded rim, then over at the ruined backboard still mounted above the garage door. That will have to be replaced too, he thinks, once he gets around to it. After he takes care of the roses.
And then he stops in front of the garage, once again amazed by the audacity of it all. You had to admire that, he supposes, in some sick sort of way. In broad daylight, with people all around. As if they were just delivering the newspaper the Jew cancelled long ago. He stands with his hands on his hips and studies the markings, the color. Not so different from his roses, he thinks, though no one is going to mistake the writing for championship calligraphy.
The Jew is no expert on spray paint, but he knows enough to appreciate that the enterprise took some amount of time. You can see they went over it twice, and it’s clear enough on top that they must have used some kind of step stool. Though their spelling is less than perfect, there is that at least. He takes some comfort in thinking they can’t spell all that well, as if propriety in orthography will save him somehow. Now there’s a couple of ten-dollar words – propriety, orthography. Just like the lampposts, or that guy at the community center with his hard-earned Ph.D.
Ten minutes it must have taken, at least fifteen, if you add in the time to wreck the basketball hoop. And no one says they saw a thing. He supposes it could have been worse, they could have smashed some windows or defaced his front door. That happened to some other people at his synagogue, though that had been this past Passover. That was when things had gotten really hot, there’d even been parades downtown. What was the world coming to, Anna had said, when the educated took the side of the depraved?
Or torn up his roses, he thinks, they might’ve done that. He stands back from the garage door and takes it all in one more time. The name, the curse. And then the ten-dollar words, misspellings and all, in the bright red hue of his roses.
JEW
MURDERER
ZIONIST GENOSIDER
The Jew opens the garage and steps inside to find his clippers and the rust spray. It’s musty in here, the days with it shut tight have left behind a funny odor. But hopefully it isn’t too late for the roses. He isn’t really all that sure, but he at least has to try.
Jonathan Singer lives in the San Diego area with his lovely wife, Dina. He is a father of three wonderful children: one daughter and two sons. In addition to his writing, Jonathan is a trial lawyer at a large American intellectual property law firm.