guess who's back (back again)

i needed an amanuensis for this anamnesis! loosely a homecoming/denouement -- forget joyce, we’re going back to homer (yes i am odysseus)... will this become talia’s blahblahlawblog? stay tuned!

1. Xenia

Six months ago, it was dark and raw still, and a puddle on the corner of Blackfriars Court never drained. Aidan was leaving soon, and John after him, and likely Adi when she graduated; Alessandra had moved to London, Wendi back to Beijing, Ilan to Canada. And it was hard to picture the Hungarians, the Franks, the Amalias staying here forever; the current would tug them along eventually. Of course I would leave at some point, too, although I didn’t know when yet.

Most of us had chosen to be in Glasgow but it felt more like we had been deposited here in some mythic sense, washed ashore to this mild, shipbuilding city like Odysseus to Scheria.

…

Two women from the church embroidery group, Hazel and Moira, came to the glass studio. They flipped through notebooks of sketched crosses and pinned scraps of colored silks. Neither of them reached my chin, even in their heels.

…

At shul I gave a talk about Jewish glass artists and aesthetic philosophy. We sat in a small group around a table upstairs.

A 1909 American magazine described Jews categorically as ‘non-visuals,’ I said. ‘Good at abstract thinking and at chess, they lacked all sense of form, color and line.’ Did Jews have to give up religion to be good artists? Was this because of Deuteronomy? The rebbetzin interrupted me every few sentences. I wore a new shirt, too frilly for me, navy with white trim and a bow. My sleeves kept flopping open at the wrist.

Afterwards we ate untoasted bagels with cream cheese, bell pepper, and cucumber. Daniel Frank came and went. It was early evening, dark. We walked through the main sanctuary on our way out, and Sydney turned on the lights, so the stained windows shone out artificially and harshly, like a desktop left on at night. There was a compulsory appreciative murmur. In truth the windows in the sanctuary looked ugly, ersatz, flat; I concluded that every Saturday morning I spent in the women’s box, staring at them— book open and forgotten in my lap, a background static of words I didn’t believe, in a language I didn’t understand.

…

In the studio I needed to pick out a sheet of clear glass to use in my windows – I can’t remember for which part, let’s decide it was for the clouds. I needed them to be colorless but somehow not see-through. Steven called this “stopping your eye.”

He held up a series of samples – bubbled, iridized, rippled, textured; clear rectangles that covered his face – and asked me to look at him through each increasing distortion. We stopped when we found the piece that adequately obscured him.

…

I spent Ash Wednesday at the homeless shelter. In the morning it was unusually quiet. People read their newspapers or watched television as we cleared the last cold plates of breakfast. The night before, I had read the Gospel of Matthew, and it had left me feeling saintly and self-sacrificial, but also irritable and impatient.

Another volunteer, E-, was piloting a new strategy for lunchtime cup distribution, one that prevented our homeless guests from procuring their own cups, in theory to reduce unnecessary cup washing. In practice this meant we all had to go on repeated, time-wasting trips to the backroom to get cups for homeless people while also reinforcing the sense that they were indigent invalids, incapable of meeting their own most basic needs. E- had a habit of addressing non-existent problems with solutions that created new, material problems. She would stop volunteering, one day to the next, without explanation.

Soon before lunch, a few men and women marched in from the upstairs chapel with ash marks on their foreheads, heavy and distinct grey-black crosses. I saw the minister I had met while working the Christmas shift. I was confused; I had thought he was a Protestant.

Yeah, but I like getting the mark, he said.

I asked if they did to dust you shall return or repent and believe and he said neither, they did know you are loved.

When I went to fetch a cup of water for a guest, I saw a nun in the back room. She stood at the sink, getting the ash out from beneath her fingernails.

…

A couple at the shelter – a large man and a small woman – were engaged; he proposed during afternoon karaoke. They wore matching tracksuits to the spring ceilidh.

One lunch I brought over a plate of pasta and a bowl of custard.

She’s eating for two, the man said. She’s seven weeks.

That’ll be hard, Helen said later, clucking her tongue.

…

I flew to Paris to visit Aliénor. We walked around the city. Aliénor showed me the bench where Simone du Beauvoir felt intellectually subjugated by Sartre. Later we sat in front of Notre Dame.

Aliénor said she felt moved by the centuries of people and labor involved in the construction and maintenance of the building, more than by God as such.

You’re finally a secular humanist, I said, beaming.

…

We wandered, disoriented, around the top floor of the Musée d'Orsay, passing a large clock. Men aren’t real, Aliénor was saying, which was also how I felt at the time. I had gone out for drinks recently, met two Glaswegian boys my age; they were both, if not nasty, certainly brutish and short, and I had treated them like cartoon characters.

We were both wearing blue. I liked a Monet of a woman with her back braced against the wind. Months later, Lea and Marcell would wander the same floor and send photos of a Monet, some stained glass.

From Paris we traveled to Normandy. Aliénor drove; her grandmother gave directions. I shared the backseat with a toddler-sized brass candelabra.

…

It was sunny in Normandy, which it isn’t usually; just as when Aliénor visited Scotland, it was sunny, although it isn’t usually. I knew that years from now my memories of these trips would smear: images of us walking along windy, seaside cliffs, blues and greens, her family and mine, transcendence and immanence, mercy and justice. Moving away in time would be like slowly approaching an impressionist painting.

One morning there were gunshots, bells, and screams in the distance, a wild boar hunt. Catholicism was an ethnoreligion, like Judaism, Aliénor and I decided. I ate a croissant.

My parents take people seriously, I said at one point. This is a form of demand but also a form of respect.

At high tide we could glimpse the sea out the window. At night we watched Little Women and Pride and Prejudice.

…

We talked about the defining element of what we find attractive in other people. Vivacity, aliveness, Aliénor said. Awareness, I said, although that wasn’t quite the right word for the quality I meant.

…

I called my parents after the trip. I had thought a lot about my grandparents; my grandfather on my father’s side had jumped with the 101^st Airborne, vaccinated his children against polio at a public demonstration for vaccine safety, and sent my dad and his brother to the integrated high school. My mom’s parents had met at a labor demonstration and done the March on Washington. Tremendous intellectual and moral bravery on both your sides, I said on the call.

…

Back in Glasgow, I was busy waiting. More than half of each window was supposed to be cut from a blue glass that had not yet arrived: Saint-Just bleu sur clair, UBPP tons 12 & 13 (3 mil thick.) The windows would not succeed with any other blue – of this I was certain – but the shipment was months late with no explanation.

I was waiting as well to hear back from the minister for approval on the scripture and translations I wanted to paint onto the glass. The minister rarely replied to emails and never said yes or no; he spoke exclusively in what-abouts, you-coulds. He also changed his mind whenever we spoke. It was hard to tell if these vacillations represented an evolving opinion or if every conversation washed away his memories of the previous one.

I had to push back my trip home, for perhaps the fifth time.

Waiting could fill up entire days.

…

I was on a vegetarian soup kick at the food pantry. This Thursday we can say I was making a carrot and ginger stew.

What you don’t know is that I have a back-channel with the minister, Stuart said. I keep getting him to change his mind so you have to stay longer.

…

Meredith visited, and I took her to a Shabbat dinner, a big one at Sydney’s with everybody: Sydney and Patrick, of course, Lea and Marcell, Daniel Frank and Harriet. We brought a vegan chocolate cake. Sydney wasn’t growing oyster mushrooms yet, but I picture them sprouting in her kitchen already, weavings hanging from branches on the wall, overfull cups of sea glass, fish hooks dangling in the bathroom, seedlings on the windowsill.

Watching Meredith interact with everyone – talking to Lea about plays, learning dances and clapping games with Harriet, jousting with Marcell about Quakerism and political violence – I thought, this is how I am with these people, this is the role I play. Some kind of rising agent, maybe. Without envy I admired Meredith’s grace; I knew when she left, Lea would say: she is so lovely. She detangled something of Harriet’s, maybe it was a bracelet. In a letter to her months later I wrote, “I had this happy desire to leave the room – not in a self-effacing way, but because I loved the idea of you and my people in Glasgow, being together joyfully in a way that was so true and real it didn’t require me to witness it.”

…

And I think Talia agrees with me, Meredith concluded.

Well, if Talia agrees, Marcell said, rolling his eyes.

…

Meredith and I debriefed the next day over curries from The Dhabba.

As I had hoped, we noticed many similar things, certain preoccupations and dynamics.

Can I ask you a self-obsessed question, I said. How do you think they see me?

As an honored guest, she said. I think they’re proud of you. You’re a person who does cool things and will do cool things, and right now they get to have you.

I liked this answer, obviously. But I also didn’t want to be a guest because I wanted all pretenses dropped. I knew I couldn’t have it both ways. Anyway, a guest is someone who leaves, eventually.

…

We ran into Colin wandering around the Cathedral. I introduced Meredith as a scholar of medieval Christianity at Cambridge.

I told her about the University of Glasgow theology professor who told me not to read any of Paul. No one understands Paul, the professor had said. Paul makes no sense.

When I was asked about the source for something in my thesis, and I didn’t know, Meredith said, I just said ‘I think it’s from Paul.’

…

Catherine – a woman from the Hebrides who sometimes gave me rides home from the studio– invited us to a glass fusing session. Meredith made colorful coasters, a nautical dish for her mom’s seashells. We agreed that she would pick up these pieces when she was back in Glasgow for my window unveiling ceremony, although that still seemed unimaginably far away, a shrouded skerry on the horizon. Catherine teased me for spending all my time on a single blue bowl.

…

Meredith was reading the Neapolitan Novels. They’re an adaptation of Little Women, she theorized.

I had visited her in Cambridge around the same time the previous year, when the crocuses and snowdrops were blooming, the very dawn of spring; and in Edinburgh on a whiskey ‘experience’; and of course the fall before that, when we climbed up the Necropolis and baked cookies with Ilan.

This year was so fast and last year was so slow, she said.

When I pictured my time in Scotland I pictured us together, in coats and scarves, moving between gray air and warm rooms. It was strange to live in an empire in twilight, we agreed. What had been core now felt like periphery.

She picked up a vegan meal deal at Tesco on her way to the train station.

…

After months the blue glass for my night sky arrived from France. It had been delayed, I learned, because all of the quality glass in France had been redirected to the restoration of Notre Dame. It came in two square meter sheets that varied in thickness, like a layer of ice over a pond. To cut a strip one had to slam the whole glass square down along the edge of a table and hope it cracked in a straight line.

…

Aidan was leaving. We had his goodbye dinner at Mother India, the one near the Kelvingrove Museum; I had been there once in the summer but it looked unfamiliar in the misty gloom.

All around the restaurant were sketches of grim, horrified faces. They had captions like ‘Despair,’ ‘Lost Soul,’ and ‘Ignorance is Bliss.’ The men at the table next to us ranked their favorite Hitchcock films.

…

I took the bus to visit Julien, a French glass salesman with a shop on the Hidden Lane in Finnieston.

Give this to him, he’ll know what to do with it, Steven had said before I left the studio, handing me a small, unlabeled vial of liquid.

At Julien’s shop I purchased green Artista glass, which had scratches that made it look handblown. I asked Julien how his trip to France had been, and he complained about the treatment he received when he visited the Saint-Just company headquarters in Lyon.

No one even offered me coffee, he said, aghast.

…

Steven said to give you this, I said, proffering the vial.

Oh great, Julien said. I have a gift for him, too.

He handed me an opaque white bottle, also unlabeled.

He and Brian will know what to do with it, he said.

Julien had a Chagall poster in the back of his shop.

…

I listened to Lorelei by the Cocteau Twins, humming the chorus to myself on walks: without, without a doubt!

In the studio Steven played The Verve — I’m a million different people, from one day to the next.

…

Lea, Marcell and I saw Death of a Salesman.

Attention must be paid, Linda Loman cries to her sons.

Afterwards we went to the pub. I drank cider and immediately felt very drunk and maudlin; I hadn’t eaten. They walked me home.

You two are models of meaningful, good adult life, I pronounced, instead of saying goodbye.

…

My mom visited Glasgow again in mid-March. She came for five days.

At the pantry we made another soup.

Five days is a short trip, Stuart said. Do you have to get back to your son?

No, I have to get back to my plants, my mom said.

…

In the elevator of her hotel, a man showed us videos of his son fighting other boys in some sort of ritualized recreational combat.

…

It was Purim; we went to the shul party in Harry Potter costumes. My mom was McGonagall, I was Hermione, Lea was Ron, in a riotous orange wig.

Dinner comprised limp, thin slices of pizza and half-frozen chips, all brought in from Manchester, served by the rebbetzin. A fabulous magician came to our table.

…

I introduced my mom to the Rabbi.

Her window, the Rabbi said, is the best stained glass in the building.

…

That Sunday we went in a big group to New Lanark, the site of old mills and a failed utopian experiment. We walked along a gorge to the Falls of Clyde: Sydney and her parents and Patrick, Lea and Marcell, my mom and me. I thought of the walks my extended family takes during Thanksgiving, the choreography of shifting groups, ebbing tides of conversations. We stopped often to take pictures of ourselves. The water looked black where it pooled in the gorge.

All the trees look like they could be from Macbeth, my mom said.

She, Marcell, and I talked for a while about law school. I was feeling at peace about it, I said. It was a morally urgent time. There was a fight to be had.

I pictured helmed hoplites, clashing swords in dusty fields.

Well, Marcell started to say.

Yeah, probably all times are morally urgent, somewhere, I admitted. But things do seem increasingly precarious, now. Or maybe just the moral urgency is more proximate to me, personally.

…

We came across a wildlife camera. All people would be edited out, a sign said.

Imagine the job of watching wildlife footage and erasing all the humans, Marcell said to Lea.

That sounds like a job from an opaque and obscure short story, I said.

Does that mean this is going in your blog, my mom asked.

Oh, of course, I said.

…

I dropped my mom off at the airport and walked back from Queen Street Station. More pigeons than I’d ever seen were flocked together on the sparse grass by George Square: a sensate, susurrating carpet. It wasn’t warm enough yet for people to sit there outside.

…

During a Shabbos lunch Daniel Frank detailed his plan to revitalize the Glasgow Jewish community: building a proper Jewish community center, hiring events coordinators, stocking Mark’s with better kosher food.

Daniel Frank seemed like one of the only community members – Sydney was an obvious exception – who was both aware that the community here was moribund, and active in attempting to change that fact. Apparently various Jewish organizations were sitting on millions of pounds in trusts even as the shul struggled to form a minyan reliably; such money, Daniel Frank theorized, could be spent to increase the quality and quantity of Jewish offerings here, which would then induce young families to come and stay.

If Harvard had objectively prepared me for anything, it was to be a consultant. Would increasing supply really increase demand? I wasn’t convinced. There were obvious structural problems that would inhibit any attempt to scale up. Anyone Orthodox enough to care deeply about standards would find Glasgow too lax; almost everyone else would be alienated by the level of observance. In the meantime, all Scottish converts (often some of the most dedicated young shul members) were being siphoned away from small Jewish communities like Glasgow – the exact communities that were hemorrhaging young people already – because the beit din had determined that no one could finish conversion anywhere besides London or Manchester. This decision seemed like the equivalent of putting a brick on top of the accelerator of a car headed over a cliff. Look around the room, Marcell had said to me once at a Saturday morning Kiddush, and tell me who will be here in twenty years, even ten.

Lea was often quiet during these conversations; Sydney and Daniel Frank argued about existing community offerings. I bickered with Marcell about kashrut, sitting on the carpet, hugging my knees. It’s not about food, he was saying, and food is everything, I was saying. What were we really saying? Something like – he was saying, it’s not personal, and I was rejecting that, because theology is always really politics, and all politics is personal, to someone –- how unfortunate that right now it is personal to us. I was saying, I climb through loopholes to come here, you all let me; I pushed and you opened the door, don’t let it slam shut behind me.

But my opinion on this didn’t matter, not really. I was a guest. Not my circus not my monkeys, I said eventually, pointlessly, raising my palms up like, no ref, I didn’t touch that ball.

…

I was listening to Fiona Apple again, Get Gone. Cause I do know what's good for me. And I've done what I could for you.

…

In the homeless shelter, Chris, the manager – tattoos, Celtics fan, boisterous – filled a Styrofoam cup of noodles with boiling water for one of the guys.

I’ve never had one of those, E- said. They look so terrible.

I laughed. You know, they’re pretty cheap, they have protein, carbs, fats, they taste pretty good, I said.

E- grimaced and walked away.

You know people like her, they’re not like us, Chris whispered to me. They don’t understand.

2. Hubris

Once a week or so, I thought to myself: How do I make sense of what is going on? Like, why, with no stained-glass experience, have I been asked to make five windows for the entrance of the oldest cathedral in Scotland? Why do I feel mired in a Homeric epic, unable to return home?

Either I am the agent making all these things happen through, like, my will to power, which is narcissistic and self-centered, or I default to a ‘things happen to me, specifically’ paradigm, which is irrational and self-serving, I said to Julian on the phone.

That is the most Talia thing ever, Julian said. ‘Either I am godlike through rationality and will or I am godlike through irrationality and being chosen.’

Later on the call I volunteered a theory I had been nursing about a force similar to the death drive, its obverse, an equally irrational will to choose life.

Like suddenly I am eating salads and exercising regularly, I said to Julian, not out of a rational commitment to health and wellness but because of momentary desires to do those things.

Obviously the subconscious is in conversation with the conscious, Julian said, and you’re assimilating the rational benefits of exercise and good nutrition. I could hear him rolling his eyes.

But nah, you’re just a brownie in motion, he added.

In a physics class my freshman year, I learned about Brownian motion for the first time; I thought people were saying “Brownie in motion,” like I was supposed to picture a little fudge square bopping about randomly, forever.

…

Brian and Steven applied for a grant for a summer glass event. One of the application requirements was proof that they had hosted an arts event with a footfall of more than ten thousand people.

Do you think opening for Metallica counts, Brian asked, smiling.

You opened for Metallica? I asked before I could muzzle myself. More likely than not this was a joke; it shared the form of many jokes made at the studio in that the fulcrum of the humor would be my credulousness.

He opened for KISS too, Steven said, pulling up a photo: Brian in a leopard print jacket, acid washed jeans, a spiky dark mullet.

…

We looked at some paint samples for my windows. They weren’t right.

I want it to be, like, clean and graphical, I said, frowning.

‘Clean’ and ‘graphical,’ Brian said, mimicking the chopping motions I had made.

…

Are you seeing anyone, Talia, Petra asked. She was painting sweeps of grass on tall, tawny glass door panels.

Oh no, I’m in my nun era, I said. Reading the Bible, hanging out at the Cathedral, making stained glass.

Close to taking orders, are you, she laughed.

…

For a week or so I felt very anxious that I had not been listening to classical music. This happened sometimes in different ways, an alarm sounding that I was not making sufficient progress along certain lifetime intellectual-cultural axes. A sort of noetic sublimation of my fear of mortality, perhaps. While I worked in the studio, while I cooked, while I walked, while I got ready for bed, I listened to Mozart, Chopin, Vivaldi, but primarily Rachmaninoff and Beethoven.

As if prompted Julian texted me a link for a Rachmaninoff piano concerto.

Idk I had a feeling it was Rach season, he wrote.

…

I played The Four Seasons and then Steven put Moonlight Sonata on the studio speaker. It was now light out until dinner time, and acutely slanted sunbeams filled up the studio, touching everything with gold and sundust.

…

At a shul dinner, Sydney and I were laughing about some debate we found ourselves having with an annoying divorcee – I remember it as being about the lack of archaeological evidence for the Exodus. On the walk home, the night sky was clouded over, purple, and the creek behind Sydney’s flat glimmered over pavestones, silvery in the moonlight like rippling fish scales. Sydney asked the Rabbi why so many explanations in Jewish texts didn’t make sense.

…

I burned myself again cooking. (The burn is gone now, and it wasn’t in the webbing between my fingers, but that’s where I feel a spectral, psychosomatic itch.) I knew it would go away eventually, but not before an indeterminate, sinusoidal period of discomfort. What was adulthood, I thought, if not an accelerating succession of such low-level infirmities.

…

I was stuck on Numbers 24:19: I see him, but not now. The drama of the comma! The impossibility of the present tense!

…

Aliénor visited the Rijksmuseum. The Vermeers, we agreed. The blues, the woman reading the letter.

…

I was stung by a bee on the way to the studio. It flew into my hand as I was swinging it, colliding mid-stride. I saw it try to fly on, its fuzzy body veering turbulently, falling, its organic machinery failing.

…

In the three synoptic Gospels, Jesus finds his friends sleeping in the garden. Sometimes I thought about this when friends called me late at night.

…

A sample of the sunrise, glass from the kiln warm like asphalt in summer. The red copper stain wouldn’t take.

…

I complained on the phone to Magi that I felt like I was constantly accommodating the realities of other people – the studio, the Cathedral, Giffnock – none of which were my own, all of which were governed by rules and norms that were illegible, inconstant, bizarre, frustrating. We agreed this wasn’t entirely fair: everything was bidirectional; I was being accommodated, too. Still, I felt increasingly frayed at the edges.

I also knew I would be leaving everyone soon and would subconsciously induce conflict in a misguided attempt to ease the pain of ripping myself away. I did this as a teenager, involuntarily forcing minor spats with my mom when she was dropping me off at summer camp. It was one of the only ticks I knew I had that I felt wholly incapable of suppressing.

…

On a walk I spotted a pigeon with twin pale scruffs by its ears, like a rockhopper penguin.

…

Reading the Bible I was often struck by how much better I liked certain lines out of context, when their interpretive possibilities extended in all directions, unconstrained by intent or plot.

In Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner says something similar about poetry: “I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.”

Like the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, the good parts about the meek and turning the other cheek were actively cheapened, I thought, by the stuff about adultery and divorce that immediately followed.

But this was alright for my glasswork. I was picking lines and deliberately removing them from context, stitching them back together to tell a different story.

…

I read a Glaswegian novel about a little boy named Kieron Smith. It was written in postwar Glaswegian slang, so Kieron would often formulate sentences as twisty tautologies: If it was so it was. If I was a best fighter, so I was. Like ‘If I perish, I perish,’ from Esther. I started thinking this way too, half-acceptance, half-determination. If I finish the glass so I finish the glass.

…

In the studio one evening, just Brian and I were at work: He was still finishing his whiskey bottle panels; the company sent them back to be redone if they found even the slightest blemish. Brian wanted to be working on his and Steven’s gothic Persephone pieces instead, three giant windows commissioned by the wealthy ex-wife of an oligarch. She had asked Brian to paint three faces: her twelve-year-old daughter, the daughter imagined at thirty, and the daughter imagined at fifty. Brian had to be careful about the wrinkle levels. Strangely the family had other children who were not being featured.

…

You feel it here, the medieval stuff, Brian said, clutching his chest. Have you seen The Last Duel?

In his accent “duel” sounded like “jewel.” I told him I hadn’t, but I’d met Matt Damon at a Dunkin’ Donuts once.

A feeling passed over his face, dimming it like a lampshade.

When you go back, you’ll have to tell me, me and Steven, how you’re getting on, he said.

…

On the train ride over to Giffnock for Shabbat, I struck up a conversation with the person across from me, an old man from the Isle of Barra. We talked about his childhood there; he mimed rowing a little boat, scooping up pink jellyfish by hand. When his family moved to Oban, he thought it was the biggest city in the world. He got in trouble for stealing candy at the shop; back home in Barra, he would just go to the candy store and take what he wanted – he hadn’t realized his mom knew the shop owner and always paid later.

I’m going to law school, I told him, when he asked if I’d be going home soon.

Harvard? Or what’s that other one called, he said.

3. Oikos

It was just the three of us for Shabbat. We took turns reading poems aloud from an anthology. Lea read a poem about a tiger; it made her eyes wet. I read an Elizabeth Bishop poem. Rainbow rainbow rainbow and I let the fish go. Then “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” Let be be finale of seem – we couldn’t decide what that meant.

…

Lea had started referring to the room I stayed in as mine. Like: ‘Do you mind if I go into your room?’ Or, better: ‘The book is in Talia’s room.’ I kept a stack of pajamas there, deodorant, a toothbrush in the bathroom.

…

We talked past 2 or 3 in the morning; this wasn’t unusual. I pictured time dripping away like a clock in a Dali painting. After we agreed it was time to sleep we lingered in the door frames of our bedrooms, reciting our favorite palindromes: Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog.

…

At Sydney’s house we sang Havdalah. We all sat on the floor: Sydney cross-legged with her guitar in her lap, Patrick beside her, Lea and Marcell leaned against the seat of the couch. The room was dark; shapes moved dimly on the walls, faces caught in the lambent glow of the double-wicked candle’s tall flame. People seemed to blur into each other, into the past: I thought of when I sang Havdalah with Ilan, and on the Isle of Arran after midnight, and with Harriet, although that hadn’t happened yet. We smelled the cinnamon, held up our hands to see candlelight through the reddened quick of our nails. Afterwards we talked for a while longer, Marcell lightly strumming Sydney’s guitar.

…

My Uber driver told me his daughter was named Talia, and that it means ‘applause’ in Arabic. He asked if I had read the Quran, to which I said I had, for a class; I had written a paper on a surah about light. But I hear you lost a lot by not reading it in the original Arabic. Yes, he was fasting for Ramadan.

…

At the Cathedral we interviewed a new tour guide, a Russian marine veterinarian.

The guides are becoming so cosmopolitan, Colin said.

We should do a potluck, where everyone brings food from our native cultures, I said.

I’ll bring chicken tikka masala and I’ll get the recipe from your window, Colin said.

…

I felt hollow after Shabbat that following week. A line from Philip Roth surfaced: “All that happened is that things almost happened, yet I returned as though from some massive happening.” This was also how I felt after debate tournaments. Like I had seen a full moon but wanted it to be a crescent again, a slim circle of earthshine visible: the possibility of the beyond.

I hadn’t booked tickets home yet but I was certain I wouldn’t go back on the trip to Arran with everyone in June. Lea didn’t understand why. I need to go home, I said. I thought of the ending of La Vita Nuova, when the babysitter leaves the family she’s become enmeshed in: “Because the only reason I came to Boston was my fiancé. Because the question is what I’m going to do with my life... But all she said aloud was ‘That’s where I’m from.’”

I gave Lea evasive shrugs limited to my hands, Talking Heads lyrics: This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.

…

BT is Before Talia, Lea had said.

…

I had decided that if my window installation ceremony was on a Saturday during Shabbat, which seemed likely because of Sunday church services, the Giffnock Jews probably wouldn’t come. I was considering scheduling it for the weekend of the Arran trip. This would spare them the guilt of injuring me and spare me the knowledge that they had made a decision they knew would hurt my feelings.

You have a habit, Julian said on a call, of being so confident that you know what people will do that you remove their choices. In addition to being unfair this guarantees rather than preempts disappointment.

Thinking about it was making my stomach churn. At another Shabbat at Sydney’s I floated the possibility that the ceremony would be on a Saturday. I’d understand if this meant they couldn’t come, I said quickly. Of course we’d come, Lea said. She sounded hurt. We’d find a hotel or something, she added. But of course we’ll be there.

As soon as she said that it felt obvious that it was what they would do, it was the kind of people they were. I was so grateful to be wrong it hurt.

It didn’t end up mattering. Months later the minister would schedule it on a Sunday, after a meeting in which he told me he came from a family of Orthodox Jews.

…

In the corner of the food pantry there was a stack of dusty electric keyboards that wouldn’t turn on. I had a dream in which Stuart and I were in my childhood room in Lexington, my desk replaced by an electric piano. We looked out over the birdfeeder to the garden, where my mom was at work. The dream took the form of a piano lesson, but it was unclear whether I was teaching Stuart or he was teaching me or we were learning together.

…

My fourth panel of stained glass included the weathervane on top of the Cathedral, which I was planning to have acid etched and then silver stained. I wanted it to be accurate to the real thing, not just a generic, Platonic cockerel. Fortunately the television show BBC Repair Shop had recently produced an episode about repairing the Glasgow Cathedral weathervane, which Steven and I watched to get good close-ups.

(Later BBC Repair Shop would come film at the glass studio. Nice lighthouse, the cameraman would say, pointing to the painted cathedral.)

In the weathervane episode people scrubbed at the cockerel’s neck with ineffectual-looking toothbrushes. Colin told me the following week that the Repair Shop team had actually failed; the Cathedral had to ship the cockerel out again to someone else.

In close up it was a lumpy, clumsy-looking rooster.

Steven cocked his head.

Well, he’s not a bonny fellow, Steven said.

…

A rowdy cadre of Glasgow boys stepped into my subway car. They had the usual look: skinny track pants, hair shorn on the sides and long on top, patchy beards. A little younger than I, teens or early college students maybe; it was hard to tell here. Neds, a voice in my head supplied, and I cringed, as though ‘lumpenproletariat’ would be any less elitist. The boys were on their phones in that generational half-solitary, half-communal way. I heard familiar chime notifications, a polyphony of tinny voices in different languages. They were all using Duolingo. Bro are you doing French or Spanish, one of them said.

…

I went alone to an Orla Gartland concert, following women my age to a venue underneath train tracks. You’re not special, babe, she sang, catching guitars tossed by her bandmates. You're an adult now / Make your own to-do list/ And eat whatever you want for breakfast. At the end, she asked bashfully for the ‘Glasgow encore’: Wan mare tewn, people chanted.

…

Back at shul for the first time in weeks. Couldn’t come up with an excuse, which is to say I forgot I was an adult. People drifting in and out, like an uneven shoreline. In the box: An old woman, stone faced, her hat at a jaunty angle.

…

One day I wore black denim overalls to the studio and drank iced coffee.

I was waiting rather impatiently for Geraldine to finish the row of painted medallions at the bottom of the panels.

…

When do you think you’ll come home, the Greek chorus clamored.

…

In an Abbott Elementary episode, Janine says, I’m not trying to rush art, I’m just trying to know art’s ETA.

…

I was describing the crescent moon to Julian over the phone. Oh that’s the same moon I’m seeing, he said, laughing.

Later, Steven messaged me about the moon as well; it was identical to the one in my stained glass.

…

On spring days with good weather, Glaswegians rushed to do wedding photos in Merchant City. Women in white, voluminous wedding dresses, men in jackets and kilts or tartan trousers.

…

I ran into an old man from shul on Buchanan Street. He asked if I was going to the Passover event for young people that Sydney and Daniel Frank were hosting. I said I was.

In that case I’ll tell my son that there will be lots of pretty girls there, he said. Or at least one.

At Glasgow Central someone was playing Everybody Wants To Rule The World.

…

At the pantry Stuart told me about an art exhibition he had seen. The blues in it reminded him of me. His flat was full of art he collected, from friends, from shows.

While we cooked he put on Talking Heads, This Must Be The Place.

…

I brought in a chocolate coconut banana bread for the studio. Once I discovered that baked goods could grease certain wheels, I started baking for the studio weekly.

Talia, you don’t do things halfway, do you, Geraldine said, her mouth full.

…

During Shabbat we often read aloud Spectator articles. Usually Marcell sat on the broken chair in the kitchen and read as Lea cooked in slippers by the stove and I chopped vegetables or spritzed the potted plants. The light in the kitchen was buttery and we drank from green bottles of sparkling water.

The Spectator articles were catalysts for arguments that I enjoyed greatly, even looked forward to during the week. It was rare, I felt, to have arguments that were both vigorous and bloodless, all the pleasures of brawling and no bruises the next day — and crucial, because I enjoyed being belligerent but I never wanted anyone I cared about to be angry with me.

In one argument – let’s say it was about Harvard’s biomedical research – I said Marcell was being ‘cantankerous, censorious, and vituperative.’ Then I admitted I actually didn’t know what that last word meant so we all looked it up in the dictionary together. Marcell paused along the way to read aloud the definitions of other unfamiliar words. Then Lea asked if we could please just go to sleep.

…

Colin came to the studio for a check-in. I was especially excited to show him the glass we had screenprinted with text.

More than anyone, Colin brought up the longevity of my windows. Certainly they’ll be there past me, he always said, which made me sad. His Facebook profile picture was a selfie in front of the Cathedral. ‘At my favourite place,’ the caption read.

I thought he seemed very pleased by the progress on the panels; he went right up to them to read the text. One of them, written by a prominent Scottish doctor and abolitionist, had a reference to Frederick Douglass.

Yes, Frederick Douglass. He debated Abraham Lincoln, Colin said.

I realized he thought that the Douglas in the Lincoln-Douglas debates was Frederick Douglass. On a whim I didn’t correct him. It was exactly what someone like Colin, who read widely and thoughtfully about history, might conclude, a misunderstanding that paradoxically demonstrated deep understanding.

There’s a photo from this visit, taken by Geraldine, one of my favorite photos from Scotland: The fourth and fifth panels are propped up on top of bubble wrap by the studio entrance, where for weeks we’d cart them out on glass easels to look at them in proper sun and make notes about color and texture. In the picture Colin is smiling and I’m turning to look at him, my braided hair flying.

As he was leaving – I made sure he took some of whatever I’d baked, let’s imagine it was a napkin-wrapped scone – Colin said, your work is the opposite of an impressionist painting. You want to walk as close to it as you can.

…

One evening Lea and I tried to get our ears pierced. We went to a tattoo studio on the second floor of a building overlooking Sauchiehall Street. It was like a doctor’s office in structure and ambience – the waiting areas with attached private rooms, the health forms, the emphasis on sterilizing and sanitizing— but people came here to have wounds inflicted rather than healed. On the waiting room couch there was an old gray dog named Dorian. Like the picture? I asked. Like the picture, the manager said.

Neither Lea nor I could pierce our ears, we learned. Not enough real estate on my inadequate lobes, and I’d be prone to keloids. Months later I’d be told by a doctor that I had a form of reactive hypoglycemia which could largely determine how, what, and when I ate, and I’d look back on this failed piercing as the initial moment in a certain notion of adulthood, wherein one is increasingly limited by the mysterious and ungovernable workings of the body.

The piercing artists were so apologetic about my forever-imperforate ears that I felt like I had to be the one consoling them. I reminded myself that piercings are a quintessential example of capitalism creating an artificial need that one feels compelled to fill by buying products. In other words I’d saved myself hundreds of dollars.

…

Afterward it was a warm enough April evening to sit out in George Square. Lea and I moved several times, chasing the receding tide of sunlight like those time lapses of cats. We talked about psychotherapy, opening to each other the way one carefully peels the lid from a metal can, avoiding certain sharp edges. Eventually we retreated to the ledge surrounding the city chambers. In the city we joined Marcell for dinner at a vegan restaurant, one of the few places they could eat out, for kosher reasons. I derided Lea’s vegan pizza before trying it and admitting it was pretty good.

..

At the Cathedral there was a run on 2025 calendars, which we were selling mid-year for a pound each. Chinese teachers, in town for a convention, came through straight from the airport; they only had fifty-pound notes for which we didn’t have enough cash in the till to break. You can use a credit card, I said in my Duolingo-refreshed high school Chinese. You do not have to pay in cash. Afterward the teachers lined up to take pictures with me, holding their new-old calendars.

4. Polytropos

I rewatched one of my favorite music videos, my dad’s as well, Kylie Minogue’s “Come Into My World.” Kylie walks the same block repeatedly; on each loop, she duplicates, twisting and turning around previous versions of herself.

…

Instead of going to shul one morning I split off from Lea and Marcell to see the baby cows at Pollok Park. It was warm enough for me to be conscious of sweat marks on my shirt. Later I joined everyone for lunch.

Harriet showed me that she had learned the cup song from Pitch Perfect, although just the cup part; she didn’t know the lyrics, so I sang them for her: When I’m gone, when I’m gone, you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone!

She spun around, then put her head close to mine and we looked at each other until my eyes crossed and her eyes merged into one big orb, like a cyclops’.

…

Post daylight saving the trees flowered and the midges were out; it was light all of the time.

…

The annoying divorcee Sydney and I had argued with at shul invited himself on a hike we were planning, then volunteered to drive me. The car ride was long, made longer by detours around wildfires. For several hours he described his rather insane views about Judaism, interrupting himself only by throwing out the occasional suggestive comment. I thought of the scene in Ladybird when Saoirse Ronan hurls herself out of the car, breaking her arm. Eventually I asked him to pull over into a field of sheep under the pretense of taking photos of the pasture, and then I made a distress call to Sydney. It was a supremely beautiful day.

…

As we hiked, a magnificent orange blush spread over the sky – from the wildfires, about which I could offer no meaningful knowledge despite my three years of wildfire research. We tried to swim in a small, rocky loch, but encroaching smoke made us nervous.

Sydney scrambled eggs over a camping stove for our picnic lunch. We talked about Rabbi Sacks.

Of course you like Rabbi Sacks, he’s all, ‘I went to an elite college and I like art,’ Marcell sniffed.

…

On the walk back Lea and I talked about feminism, why I didn’t want to come to shul anymore. I don’t want to sit in a box at the back, I said. Nobody puts baby in the corner, Lea said.

I thought about the box a lot. It had been fine when I had been a tourist, the way I wouldn’t mind covering up more than usual before entering some major European basilica. But when I was clearly no longer a tourist here I had this strange feeling of nausea at the thought of my daughter sitting in the box. Once I had this thought, I could not sit in the box anymore. I was reading Andrea Dworkin at the time, which I quoted to Lea: “Sisters, bloody feet have worn smooth the path by which you came here.”

Of course it was not just about the box. Only men were supposed to lead, read from the Torah, be seen and heard; any argument about difference rather than inequality was feeble, risible, asinine, a gendered version of separate but equal: women inside the home and outside of history, outside of knowledge, outside of power. I didn’t even know why I was bothering to reinvent this wheel.

On all-male institutions, Dworkin writes: “As long as a road is closed to women, it is closed to women; and that means that women cannot take that road, however nicely the men on it suggest they would not mind. The road is not only a road to power or independence or equity; it is often the only road away from tremendous abuse. The antifeminism in an all-male institution cannot be mitigated by attitude; nor can male dominance— always the meaning of an all-male enclave— ever accept that women are not inferior to men.”

…

When I asked Steven for help in the studio, sometimes he’d respond in bewildering Scottish idioms. Steven, can I have a key to the studio? It’s hen’s teeth. Steven, should I curve and iron out the border lead now, or at the end? It’s six and half a dozen. What’s the situation with the outlets? It’s chalk and cheese.

…

I was sad and wrung-out leaving Shabbat early, walking to the train station. I was working on the windows seven days a week now. No more lotus-eating. I passed a house with a cat in the window, one of those pushed-in faces. Animals could pierce me. A bus passed, lit yellow inside, no one sitting in the seats.

…

Sydney, Lea, and Marcell had a joint birthday party. The main activity was a quiz about them, which I won handily.

I thought about the time Ilan had said I treated getting to know people like I was studying for an exam.

…

My dad had sent me a London Review of Books article about growing up amid gentrification. I thought about one fragment a lot: the second going, in going, going, gone.

…

Daniel Frank described a neck problem Harriet had as an infant. The doctors prescribed turning her neck. It was the hardest thing to do, Daniel Frank said. Pushing her into the pain.

…

Before Shabbat came in Marcell and I were mid-argument about whether it was of any value to listen to popular music. I was saying something about Taylor Swift or ABBA when Lea came out of the shower, then it was Marcell’s turn. A few minutes later he came back, hair wet.

And another thing, he started.

…

I found a Jewish woman with good calligraphy to paint Hebrew on my glass for me. When I invited her to the studio, she brought her whole family. Her husband was a hotshot lawyer; he scrolled through the Yale faculty list on my phone, identifying his friends. I recognized their daughter as a peer of Amalia’s; I talked to her about math competitions. She held up a shard of the French glass, which cast her face in a blue glare.

I had to do the Latin glass writing myself, after the professor who hated Paul checked my translations. Steven showed me a scene in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: A Roman centurion catches a graffiti artist, only to correct his Latin grammar.

…

I went with Lea to see a documentary about Edna O’Brien at the Glasgow Film Theatre. O’Brien’s trilogy was what all novels should be, Lea had said, when I asked if there were any writers plugged into her particular beyond; Walter Benjamin was my answer and Vonnegut was Marcell’s.

The documentary was spliced with surreal, lovely images of light filtering through curtains. They suggested a thin, gauzy fabric separating life and fiction, life and imagination, life and work. I could imagine people wrapping themselves in this fabric, pressing their faces against it to make their features show through.

O’Brien moved between wilderness and ‘glitz,’ always working, always reading. I found her winsome face more and more beautiful. Her last book before she died was about the Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram.

…

In a dream that night: It was installation day at the Cathedral, but it wasn’t the Glasgow Cathedral; it was Tudeley Church in England, the one with all the Chagall windows. My five panels somehow only took up a small square of the space they were supposed to fill. When light came through, the windows looked like – were transmuted into? – the stained glass cookies I had made with melted down hard candies, these pale pastel shades that were all wrong in the hard darkness of the church interior. Later in the dream I was kidnapped by Boko Haram. The man sent to rescue me – maybe a single-season character from an old superhero show – disappeared with our escape car; for some reason I wasn’t angry at him. By the end of the dream I was home in Massachusetts, desperately locking all the doors, unsure if my parents knew why I was so anxious.

When I told Lea about the dream, she asked if the Giffnock Jews were Boko Haram. No, I said, I don’t think Boko Haram is the friends I made along the way.

…

The idea for the blog, whenever, if ever, I had time to write it: letting moments hang, lit up, like paper lanterns on a string.

…

Walking to the studio I wondered when I would finally part with my most-special-little-girl-in-the-world mantle. I thought of a conversation I had with a history professor when I was choosing between coming to Scotland or doing the debate Fulbright in Taiwan. The professor had simply shaken his head at me. Teaching debate is something normal people do, he had said. Did that mean I wasn’t normal, or that I shouldn’t want to be normal?

It was sunny outside and easy to forget it had ever been anything else. I thought about throwing a goodbye dinner party – my dad, Aliénor, and Julian agreed that all life and good literature could be expressed and found in the dinner party. It was so green out. A giant billboard advertised KFC. It is green, nature thinks, even in the dark – that was what the billboard above the highway said. Under the KFC sign, yellow flowers and brown bristles that looked like wheat, afterlife of dandelions, ghostly white puffs.

…

In the studio Petra said, I’ve been looking at it so long I can’t see it, which sounded like a line from the Gospel of John. I felt that way about my windows, which increasingly swam away into colors and shapes when I tried to see them, like phosphenes behind closed lids. Still I loved how the panels looked turned on their sides, when they scattered colored light in spangles across the table.

…

A woman crossed the street and her daughter pranced along beside her, wearing a leopard print leotard and a twirly, pleated skirt made of a shiny metallic fabric. The woman tugged the girl’s hand; a car was coming.

…

The train to Giffnock was down; every Friday I walked to the Hungarians from the Pollok Park train station instead. I was carrying a dessert, perhaps it was brownies, in a square tin with foil that lifted in the wind.

By the rotary there was a tall building, much taller than anything around, and a woman in one of the higher apartments smoked out of her window, leaning into the warm evening. Someone lived in every window, I thought dreamily, imagining a future when I’d live in a tall building like this, some place corporate and anonymous and high-up above a real grey city. I’d take the elevator and see the sunrise when I couldn’t sleep. This life did not seem unattainable or separate from the one I was currently living; rather it was one of many lives I could fold into this one, like pleats in a gathered skirt.

…

I had developed an uncanny ability to predict what people were going to say. For example Lea was talking about how much she loved Chicago. My favorite line–

It’s ‘He ran into my knife. He ran into my knife ten times,’ I guessed.

How did I know that? I’ve never even seen Chicago.

Or in post-midnight arguments with Marcell, I would jump ahead, proleptic, like: You’re going to say, ‘You know what happens if you don’t get cancer? You get something worse!’ And then I’ll say something like, ‘That makes no sense at all, are you saying that we should all ingest maximal amounts of carcinogens to ensure we die of cancer instead of dementia,’ to which Marcell will say ‘Talia is strawmanning me as usual’ and then he’ll launch into a long story that only at the end touches glancingly back at the original argument, if at all, and which tangentially offends Lea, who will whack his arm and say, ‘Hey!’

…

In the studio I leaded panels in record time, holding everything in place with horseshoe nails I’d tap in at odd angles, so they leaned drunkenly.

Two international students from China, Geraldine’s pupils at the art school, were in the studio finishing copper foil pieces. They discussed public transit and rent in Chinese. One of them, the one doing the more intricate piece, was critical of the other and often bossy.

Do you speak Chinese? Geraldine asked, after they had left. Sometimes you smiled at certain things they said.

…

I wanted to “bag” at least one Munroe, so we chose the closest, Ben Lomond. A Hungarian friend came too, bringing her small, carsick dog. On the drive there we got caught up in Glasgow’s tiny Chinatown because of a series of blocked roads.

This makes no sense at all, Marcell said.

Forget it, Marcell, it’s Chinatown, I said.

My legs, especially my hips, throbbed the next day in the studio.

You look like a burst couch, Steven said.

…

Seated next to me on the bus to Edinburgh was a woman with blue eyes, heavy under-eye bags, veined hands. We both turned to face the window. I like looking at the buildings, she said to me quietly, with an implied intimacy, like she was telling a secret. At the front of the bus, a family: a little girl in a stroller, an older brother playing with her. He put his finger in her mouth and she bit down. She kicked her foot in the air and he held her Velcro-strapped shoe. Later I smiled at her and she gave me a tiny, hesitant thumbs up.

…

I was in Edinburgh for a cake decorating class. The instructor wanted us to conceal the cake entirely in multiple layers of ganache and fondant, then decorate it to look like a different cake, or perhaps a cartoon of a cake. I was puzzled by this simulacrum approach; it reminded me of people who try to hide certain qualities by exaggerating them, e.g. performing a certain additional awkwardness to cover up being genuinely awkward. A girl and her mother were there, clearly on some mother-daughter outing, and the girl smiled diffidently whenever she tried to make eye contact with me. I remembered feeling that way toward older girls. When asked how old they thought I was, Harriet said 16 and Amalia said 30. A woman next to me kept melting the ganache and swearing to herself. My hands are too hot, she said.

…

It seemed obvious in retrospect that I would leave the cake decorating class with a decorated cake, but I hadn’t thought about the return trip. The cake was heavy – the fondant was like cement – and I didn’t really want to eat any of it, much less carry it on a train ride and then another long walk.

I formulated a plan: Inevitably a Scottish person would say “For me? You shouldn’t have,” something that always happened when I ferried my desserts to Giffnock. My plan was simply to give the cake to the first person who said this.

Sure enough, as I approached the barriers, cake held aloft, a ScotRail attendant said “Oh, for me?” and I said yes, and I gave it to him.

…

I spent the train ride back to Glasgow looking out the window – towns with small houses and stone churches, clouds, sloping fields – and trying to get on the WiFi. Rendering my life the way I had, constantly gathering and attending, was a way of withholding, even repressing and avoiding. How else to explain how much changed without my noticing, even as I ostensibly paid constant attention? Though surely some self-knowledge had been attained — I did want to go to law school, I did not want to be in another relationship like the previous one — I hadn’t written to understand these shifts or even written about them. Their contours were barely visible amid tens of thousands of words of other things.

…

The sun shone for two weeks straight. I slept restlessly, sweating and thrashing; in the morning I stepped over blankets and shed clothing strewn across the floor. The moon was visible in the daytime sky, and it didn’t rain at all. I wanted to enjoy the light, dry warmth, but instead it made me tense, edgy, something like the Santa Ana winds.

When it was above 70 degrees in Glasgow, locals complained that the heat was boiling, stifling. ‘Taps aff’ weather, it was called; men went around shirtless, and women opened windows on the bus.

…

Pesach came around. At the shul seder I said something about how our empathetic identification with Israelite slaves is supposed to fail because of the ultimate opacity of the Other; we cannot completely inhabit others. There was a small debacle over my lemon possets, which were, to some, insufficiently kosher.

I was quite bruised about the posset issue, honestly, more than was warranted. The force that created my relationship with the Giffnock Jews and brought me close to them was the same one that repelled me, kept me at arm’s length; in no domain was this clearer than food. Sometimes I was troubled by the thought that I could have been a different person entirely and the Giffnock Jews would not have cared, so long as I was Jewish.

This revealed the fundamental contradiction in my personality, I thought: I wanted (to have, to believe in) love as agape, as universal humanism, but I also wanted love as favoritism. I wanted it to be unconditional – the love of a parent for a child, the teacher for a student – and I wanted to have earned it – to be the favorite child, the teacher’s pet. Nationalism was an attempt to square this circle.

It’s dialectical, I concluded triumphantly on a call to my mom.

Wait you cut out, my mom said. Did you say it’s Dayenu?

5. Anagnorisis

Once during Passover I had dinner at the home of the shul’s Hasidic Rabbi. I had not actually been invited; Lea and Marcell had been invited and managed to convey to their hosts that I was something of a package deal on Friday nights. I couldn’t bring anything over: no dessert or wine would be kosher enough, flowers would violate Shabbat, and if we left late, carrying anything at all would be inherently problematic. My vegetarianism, communicated in advance by Lea, had reportedly already irritated the rebbetzin. Before we left I gave Lea two books as birthday presents, a collection of Yehuda Amichai poetry and Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women.

Upon arrival the rebbetzin ushered us into a living room, where three of her eight adult children were gathered, arguing ferociously about the costs of different music streaming services. The men wore black coats and black hats; the women wore full length skirts and the married ones wore wigs. I was encouraged to sit in the corner on a reclining couch; the leg part was fully extended and the springs of the reclining mechanism were broken.

The Hungarians spoke Hungarian to each other quietly on an ottoman across the room. I looked around: board games stacked on shelves, magazines splayed on a table, all in Hebrew. The arguing continued, deafening. Nobody made eye contact or acknowledged that I was there. I looked, intently and almost rudely, at each of the children, trying to latch onto someone – maybe the youngest daughter, or the daughter-in-law hiding silently on the landing of the staircase – desperate for a small gesture, of friendship or assurance or even just recognition. But their faces were blank, and more than that, something surrounded them all that was slick and hard and impermeable, like marble; all my looking merely slid off. Across from me the Hungarians were still speaking Hungarian. Even if we had been sitting together and speaking the same language, we would have been thinking of different things. For a moment I felt genuinely despondent. I don’t know what I had been expecting.

…

I tried to temper my feelings by memorizing details that would be funny to render later; this dinner was an obvious and inevitable plot point in some future novel. Eventually I realized that the Rabbi was defending a Jewish music service called 24Six. For higher fees one could get exclusively Jewish music. Spotify had all the same Jewish music, just with other crap mixed in.

So you’re paying more money to not have some music, I said.

Well I don’t want him listening to Eminem, the Rabbi said, jerking his head towards the youngest son, a towering teenager with a mop of dark hair.

I think no Eminem might be a dealbreaker for me, I said.

No Eric Clapton would be the dealbreaker for me, the Rabbi said, smiling.

…

The Rabbi sat at the head of the table. The rebbetzin sat at the foot, closest to the kitchen, so she could jump up to bring in and serve food. The Rabbi led the usual rituals, offering everything first to his wife, then to their children.

…

In Right-Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin writes:

“The far-Right solution translates the presumed biological destiny of women into a politics of orthodox religion: even in a secular republic, far-Right women live in a theocracy. Religion shrouds women in real as well as magical grace in that the sex-class functions of women are formally honored, carefully spelled out, and exploited within clear and prescribed boundaries.”

…

Over dinner the Rabbi and I had a half hour back and forth in which, to my memory, the seven other people present remained silent.

Are you worried about antisemitism at Harvard, he said.

No, I’m worried about the way antisemitism is being used as a Trojan horse for fascistic intervention in American higher education, I said.

Do you like that woman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, he said.

Yeah, I’d say I like her, I said. I think she’s one of the few Democrats effectively galvanizing people about democratic backsliding, and she takes climate change and socioeconomic issues seriously.

No, he said. She’s very anti-Israel.

We moved onto stained glass.

…

It was Passover, so none of the matzoh could touch water in this household; even matzoh ball soup was verboten. (Hearing people explain the intricacies of kosher rules always felt like hearing children explain the inner lives of their dolls.) We were discouraged from spilling anything or getting any crumbs on the tablecloth, lest they come into contact, so of course I immediately managed to spill wine. It was an accident but it was probably also an outburst of repressed psychic energies.

Later I was seized by a kind of breathless fury, thinking about how they treated Sydney, Sydney and Patrick, Alessandra; at their passivity as the shul population senesced. Sydney in particular was probably the single most important person in the Glasgow Jewish community – as an educator, an organizer, a creative, the point of contact for any Jew wandering through; she was the source of all support and growth, a tree, really. And she would have been deported – because of their utter disregard, their indifference, their literal anti-miscegenation policy – if not for her own determination, the efforts of her friends, and the caprices of a parliament of geriatric zealots.

…

The rebbetzin and I bonded over her well-cooked potatoes. To stay in good faith I did my best to charm her and her daughter with my usual party trick of memorizing a lot of information quickly, in this case the names of the other five siblings, their spouses, and their numerous children. I recited them in age order on demand, singsong, like a child with a new nursery rhyme. We had a long discussion on the merits and drawbacks of various UK seminaries.

Sometimes the Rabbi and his sons would break out into harmonized tunes – not prayers or rituals, I thought, but sort of Hebraic phonemes that repeated but never cohered into words or melodies.

i’d be trying to talk to the rebbetzin about how she homeschooled her eight kids and then boom there’s a barbershop quartet on the other side of the table, I texted Julian later.

Within a few minutes I was asked if I had been to Israel.

No, actually, I said.

Everyone was flabbergasted. Why not, demanded the rebbetzin.

Oh, I’ve just been so busy! I said.

…

Differences within groups are greater than differences between groups, I kept thinking, although I couldn’t remember where that idea came from, whether it was a statistical truism or an ethnographic observation.

I was not a nationalist, I decided, in the sense that I did not feel an indiscriminate commitment to these people just because they were Jewish. Sometimes I felt shudders of kinship with other Jews that were stronger and more ineffable than solidarity or understanding – that I could not deny. And yes, yes, we’d all be in the box car together, and I understood why some people found that kind of transhistorical ontology to be the beginning and the end, the defining imperative. But for better or worse I did not think that way, and I certainly did not feel that way, not in this house with these people, who felt further from me than almost anyone I’d met in Scotland.

…

I tried to retain perspective. Nobody here seemed unhappy, at least. They genuinely loved each other; this was a performance of a happy family that was successful and possible only because the actors were a truly happy family. I saw the appeal this would hold for anyone with a difficult or unstable childhood. But even at their nicest they were entirely closed off, a group of people holding hands in a circle facing each other, backs to the outside, occasionally looking over and smiling apologetically.

…

The conversation turned to marrying off the youngest daughter. They were already worried about her prospects. The night of the dinner I think she was 19.

6. Nostos

I went home very briefly for my Rockefeller presentation.

At the Rockefeller retreat there were nightly bonfires. Aliénor, TJ and I stood huddled together. TJ told us he was applying to seminary. We hugged him. I felt very moved. It was like we were in a clearing in the woods, and it would be years before the three of us were together again in another clearing, and we would have taken very different paths there. We would be ourselves, maybe more so than we were now, but we would be changed.

…

No one on the Rockefeller Committee ever seemed concerned about financial or existential danger.

‘How could anything be bad, ever?’ was how Caleb summarized the committee’s approach. This was also, I felt, the guiding national ethos of Scotland.

…

At home I felt like I was standing with two feet on the ground; being in Scotland again felt like standing on one foot.

……

In the studio I was picking cement out of hundreds of acid-etched stars.

…

On a phone call, Vicki said, I think in seven lives you stay in Europe. Like if you lived your life one hundred times, in seven of them you’d just be in Scotland forever.

…

You’re brine, I thought a woman said, on my walk home: across a pavilion lined with uneven, wide stones, past a grassy square with a No Football sign, along a neogothic building with strange tracery and gargoyles.

I’m saying, my wee dog, he’s blind, she clarified.

…

Early May, Marcell’s parents visited Scotland. On Saturday we all walked to Pollok Park. I asked them questions about journalism and Hungarian politics; his mom reminded me of my mom. Lea and I sat in the sun along the riverbank, where the ground was damp. Ducks motored in the muddy water. Sexual dimorphism, I remembered, was the term for when males and females of a species exhibit different morphological characteristics.

On Sunday evening Marcell’s parents came with Lea and Marcell to a gypsy jazz session, which of course was happening at the Babbity Bowster, directly across the street from my flat. Maybe this is just what it is to live in a city, a small city, I thought, gentle gusts bringing people near to me at the right times.

I hadn’t heard gypsy jazz before, really even heard of it, which I was sheepish about; I liked it a lot, especially ‘Joseph Joseph.’ We talked about the Danube Institute, conservative ideology laundering, a viral moment Marcell’s mother had with an unprepared foe. Marcell’s dad smiled with the corners of his mouth pulled down, like Colin. They drank Guinness; everyone’s plates had sheens of oil. Lea and Marcell were eating too, even though it wasn’t kosher; this had something to do with love, I decided. Allowing certain people to be exceptions. I liked the dark wood paneling; the high, decorated ceilings; how everyone around us looked like distinguished British character actors. I leaned in to hear Lea over the music.

In the corner the accordion player wore a rich blue shirt. He was an old man with a moon face, and he smiled toothlessly.

The guitar was like a carpet on which the horns slid and danced. If I was leaving Scotland, I determined, it was with a better taste in music and a thorough understanding of Hungarian domestic affairs.

…

Brian always seemed happy to see me in the studio. Hello, he always piped, lingering on the second syllable, Hellooooo. Everyday he wore a long black hoodie and ran his hand through his short white hair until it stuck up.

…

I experienced intense creative urges walking home, especially the stretch downhill along the Necropolis, past the hospital mural of the mother and baby, the sunlight glaring, grass on the sloping cemetery so green and bright, tree branches throwing spots of light. I wanted to make things just to give them away: glass, bread, desserts, paintings.

…

A long evening at the beach with Lea, in Troon: The sun descended leisurely, in clear view over the water. We sat with two older ladies from the shul. One of them I recognized as the second wife of Ephraim, the woman for whom he had possibly left Micheline. I almost didn’t recognize her at first because she wasn’t wearing her usual sleek wig; she was sporting a pixie cut that I first thought was her real hair, but later determined was in fact a different wig. She smiled at me; she was not unfriendly but she had a coolness. Ephraim had once told me he was responsible for the John Clark stained glass in the shul; the Rabbi had scoffed about this later.

…

Lea and I waded out. For a while the water didn’t deepen; it stayed just at the knee, so I’d feel we hadn’t moved much but then I’d look back and the shore was so far, dots of clumped figures like in paintings, steeples pointing up in the little town, a black dog wagging its tail.

Sunlight faintly heated my shoulders; the water was frigid. Lea said she could see it climbing the ladder of my ribs, staining my green bathing suit a darker olive. I laughed and said I could see the same effect on her skin, where it turned red with the chill. We talked about last year’s trip to Arran, the mikveh experience: holding hands, singing, sea flowing through a borrowed red dress. Back then I thought all mikveh experiences were communal, about women being together; I didn’t know yet that women traditionally immersed alone.

Again, would I go to Arran this year? No, I was closed to religious experience, I said.

Is it because of us? Lea asked.

No, it just comes and goes, I said. Some kind of inertia.

It was all right here. For a moment I allowed myself to consider staying forever, Odysseus in Ogygia. I didn’t know how to say goodbye to this. The text was spilling over the notebook page I’d allotted and there was no perforated line, no arrow saying: tear here.

…

On the way out, Lea had to go back in, as I knew she would, unable to leave without fully immersing – it didn’t count if you didn’t go all the way in, that was her philosophy. Was the word emerge or immerse, she asked. Immerse, I said, and then you emerge, in a more profound sense. I don’t feel moved to, I’m no longer doing anything to prove to myself I can. I’m only acting on authentic and spontaneous desires.

…

After she immersed and emerged we waded out properly. In the water we passed a white crab and a mysterious floating object, undulating in the waves.

I hate jellyfish, I said.

Me too, Lea said. They’re vile, disgusting creatures that should all die.

…

I bet America doesn’t have this, Lea said. Or it probably does.

America doesn’t have Scotland, I said. Or Lea.

…

On the drive home I watched the finale of the sunset, fiery red streaks over sheep fields. Lea watched the road. I teased her for a few wrong turns. She dropped me off at the bus stop, where I waited for the 57 in her jacket.

…

It was Lucy’s birthday. I was reading A Room with a View, which is about a girl named Lucy, and watching an episode of Friday Night Dinner, in which both boys get girlfriends named Lucy.

…

During dead Monday mornings at the Cathedral I had Colin quiz me on the 17th century English monarchs.

Okay so it’s James I, Charles I, the Cromwell situation. Then, um, Charles II, James II, because it switches. Then maybe there’s someone else and then it’s the Glorious Revolution, I guessed.

The cathedral was my omphalos. But I am skipping many conversations and moments in a rare attempt to be more synoptic.

…

More arguments about the Glasgow Jewish community, involving an extended, Byzantine analogy from Marcell relating forms of Judaism to tennis: tennis as it was played in the time of Henry the Eighth, tennis as played by Venus and Serena Williams, tennis as opposed to badminton. Lots of cavil on all parts. Come on, there’s no true transhistorical Judaism, I was saying. Hasidism is not some kind of embalmed 1st century rabbinical whatever; it’s as much an artifact as Reform Judaism – they’re just different 18th and 19th century responses to industrialization and assimilation. This is just dialectical materialism 101.

You don’t even believe what you’re saying, Marcell said.

Neither do you! I said.

…

On the phone with Magi, reciting to her a line from Paul that I liked:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

…

Out for a walk along Buchanan street, the morning free and mine. I was reminded of buying a latte at a cafe my freshman year. I paid for it with gold dollar coins from my little blue wallet, coins that the subway machine had spit out as change after I purchased a Charliecard with my new roommates. I was a few cents short, but the cashier smiled me off. I remembered it because I had felt like such an adult, which is funny in retrospect; the cashier probably let it slide because I seemed so young. The latte was vanilla-flavored but not nearly sweet enough. How little I knew about my own preferences, then, and how little I had expanded my will to realize them; I was still a little afraid to go into Boston alone on the T. And so much I had not done then, that I would soon: read Virginia Woolf or Ben Lerner, listen to Fiona Apple or the Stop Making Sense album, fight irreparably with a best friend, try to share a life with someone. And yet so much was already there, the openness that would lead to these things, next year it’ll be clear that this was only leading me to that.

The rain in Glasgow stopped discretely; I walked out from beneath a cloud into sunlight.

…

Geraldine said I had a very distinctive color palette. She gave me a rectangle of blue flash glass, acid etched and silver stained with an apple.

Because of the poem you mentioned, she said. About being inside an apple.

In the final weeks of the project, the three of us – Steven, Geraldine, and I – worked in focused, peaceful silence at our three tables, painting, brushing, cleaning, leading, separately but somehow together, threads connecting our movements like marionettes.

…

I don’t understand, I said to Lea and Marcell. The religion thing, why? And Marcell recounted something his dad had said to him: I just don’t see you wanting anything.

That was unfathomable to me, I said, when Marcell gave me a ride home later. What I saw when I looked back at my adolescence, or when I looked ahead to law school, stomach already cramping about clerkships and fellowships and law review: wanting too many things, wanting them painfully.

7. Kleos

The windows were miraculously almost done, all the pieces in place. Everything else was falling apart. Stuart was angry at me, for the first time ever, when I tried to cook chicken. Sydney didn’t seem to want to hang out anymore. Long-ignored kosher rules were revived and enforced, limiting what I could make for people at the extravagant goodbye Shabbat dinner I had ludicrously tasked myself with preparing. I was asked to give a talk about my windows. I was asked to give a separate, more technical talk to the Scottish Glass Society. I was asked, within the week, to make and finish another stained glass panel. The windows themselves still needed to be installed. Of course I was also supposed to be packing.

Magi read everyone’s irrational behavior as a meta commentary on my departure, an inability to properly emote. Like: you can’t quit, I fire you!

…

My Duolingo Chinese lessons were somehow responding to reality: Are you tired? No, you cannot rest. Daughter, first you must clean the window!

…

After a week of vibrating out of my skin I decided to take a day off. Lea and I went on a tour of a castle. In one of the rooms an unusually tall woman had tea parties with her pet rats, the guide told us. The castle’s deer park was delightfully and inexplicably full of llamas. We walked along the beach nearby and passed another jellyfish, the biggest one I’d ever seen; we gave it a wide berth. I think we talked about The Red and the Black. A rain started and then changed its mind.

…

An old man named George – Colin said he was 93 – was the carpenter in charge of the window installation. George was supposed to show up at 10am on a Wednesday and instead arrived at half past 7 on a Tuesday. It was unclear how he was able to enter the building; guards found him drilling away. He removed the five existing windows in half a day; it had taken the previous carpenter the same amount of time to get just one out. The Cathedral had to pay George under the table because his wife didn’t want him to be taking on jobs anymore.

…

A man named Bob showed up during the installation. I was useless that entire day, biting my nails and trying to look away as Steven and Brian jimmied the windows into place. Bob was from Massachusetts. He was hyper, gregarious, inquisitive; he took artful pictures of the process. For your parents, he said. He stayed by my side the whole day.

…

I sent long, frantic voice memos to Thesi and Natalia. Even if I don’t get everything done, please come to Scotland and kidnap me.

…

I listened to Bob Dylan albums in full, making my slapdash final panel. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” – I listened to that over and over again. When your rooster crows at the break of dawn, look out your window and I'll be gone! I gave you my heart, but you wanted my soul!

…

On the way to Shabbat with Lea and Marcell I realized, probably we all did, that it was the penultimate Friday night dinner and in some sense the final one; I’d be there one more time with friends and family, but it wouldn’t be just us three again. Shabbat was iterative, anticipatory; every Friday left threads to be discussed the following week, which meant the conversation never had to end — until now, the first time I didn’t know when it could continue.

But I didn’t want the night’s tenor to be altered by a sense of finality. I wanted it to be the same as it ever was.

They both showered, Lea cooked, Marcell spilled a little kiddush wine. We stayed up late, long past the smoldering of the candles.

…

I went to the pantry one last time, and organized the spice cabinet, as I had always promised Stuart I would.

…

Mid week I picked up my parents at the airport. The Clash was playing in the lobby of their hotel: Should I Stay Or Should I Go.

Julian flew in too. It was a rough two weeks, I told him. I need moral support.

He walked next to me, clapping. Yippee, hooray, yahoo, he said.

…

On Thursday we went over at night to the Hungarians to cook the goodbye Shabbat dinner party food in a suitably kosher kitchen. Lea took us shopping at the Giffnock Lidl, the very first grocery store I visited in Glasgow. We bought many green vegetables and fruits — the theme of the party was the color green – and while we cooked we listened to Once in a Lifetime and Cupid’s Chokehold (Breakfast in America), because Marcell said he had once opened for Gym Class Heroes.

…

Natalia and Thesi flew in Friday afternoon; we finished frosting my mint cake and along with Julian and my parents we Ubered to the Hungarians.

In Giffnock, Natalia, Thesi, and my dad made an exquisite green charcuterie board. I attempted to carve a swan out of an apple.

…

Sydney, bearing two green-tinted loaves of challah, shoved a gift bag at me. Happy birthday, she said.

I opened it at the end of the night, before I left. It was a gorgeous handmade sweater, patterned with a whale.

…

I thought about being here forever — not in the sense of continuing my life in Scotland in any real way, but trying to arrest time. Being myself exactly as I was, exactly as things were, forever.

…

I don’t remember any of the conversation from the dinner party, except coordinating a kind of Balkanization, and an argument about the pain of memory.

That’s where nostalgia comes from, nostos plus algos, homegoing and pain, I said.

You’re using that out of context, Julian said.

I know, I admitted. I’m weaponizing it incorrectly to have an argument with Marcell.

…

I’m so happy, I said to my mom in the kitchen. And so sad.

…

A fox sat outside, very close to the window, and looked in on us. We made eye contact. Then he scampered into the brush.

…

I pictured returning, decades into the future, with a family: a faceless man and two faceless children. Not just anonymous but literally faceless, paintings with features rubbed away.

…

That Sunday my windows were unveiled. Julian, Thesi, and Natalia ran around for me all morning, picking up my film and assembling the photo album I wanted to give to the Hungarians that night. Caleb in all his tallness came to help me clean the glass a final time. Colin and Steven rigged the lighting and the curtain, which was from Colin’s old shower.

…

To begin the ceremony one of the Cathedral’s custodians played guitar. I’ll think of you every time it rains, she sang. After her, another custodian played the bagpipes, and the church ladies behind us hummed the wordless melodies.

I started weeping. I was completely, unwillingly, honestly overcome. I had done everything I set out to do. The whole aim of my life in Scotland was to have a profound experience of art and religion, and it was finally happening because that life — that special life, with its rhythms and geographies and inhabitants, its private textures and scents — was over, and it would never exist again.

…

I tried to pull myself together for my opening remarks. When my voice wobbled, Geraldine grabbed my hand.

…

Everyone was there: Stuart and the team from the pantry, Chris and Gill and the kitchen ladies from the shelter, all the glass artists, Steven and Brian and Geraldine and Tim, all the Jews, Lea and Marcell, Sydney and Patrick, Daniel Frank and Harriet, Amalia and her parents; Lucy and her boyfriend; Madge and Debra and Eilidh and the School of Art ladies; Colin and the minister and the guides and the congregation; my friends, my parents. My dad invited the Copperbox Coffee barista when we bought coffee and hot chocolate that morning, and he said he would come, and he did.

…

In the afternoon I gave a longer talk in the choir of the Cathedral, ‘On the Making and the Meaning of the Glasgow 850 Panels.’ I got to speak from the big eagle lectern. In one photo from that talk, I have both my hands raised, like I’m delivering a fire and brimstone sermon.

…

We had the after party at – where else? – the Babbity Bowster. We had sausage rolls and sticky toffee pudding, and an open bar, although I was too happy to eat or drink anything.

…

People gave me presents and cards, like it was my birthday.

…

I sat for a while with Harriet and Amalia. They ate all of the mac n cheese pies.

When I got up, Harriet said, But you promised you’d sit with us! And Amalia said, No, today is for her.

…

I caught up with Meredith and Patrick, I made the rounds to the glass artists and their spouses, found Colin and the minister, talked about my upcoming trip to Dublin and James Joyce. Finally I sat at the big table with Natalia, Thesi, Julian, my parents, Sydney and Patrick, and Lea and Marcell.

…

I cried again at the end of the night, when people started to leave. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that the night would end, that we would all go home. ABBA came on: I was sick and tired of everything, when I called you last night from Glasgow. It was still light out, and I wanted to live here forever, a night when the sun would never set, in a room full of people I loved.