Tinderbox by Lisa Gornick Read Free Book Online Page B

Tangier, and then another train
     south to Casablanca. Terrified of the overtures of a Coca-Cola distributorship heir
     which had taken a nasty turn, but more, really, of herself and who she’d become during
     the months since her employer had pulled back her sheets, she fled Casablanca, taking
     the first departing bus.
    The bus had gone to Essaouira, a town she knew nothing about. She spent three days
     in bed with what she thought was a case of tourista before she ventured out, wandering
     through a maze of narrow streets just wide enough for a wheelbarrow or donkey cart,
     the white light and briny smell from the adjacent sea lending a holiday atmosphere.
    At the jewelers’ souk, she found a silver bracelet for her mother, a braided cuff
     over which she bargained with the bearded shop owner to reach a price of 550 dirham.
     “A very rare piece,” the owner said. “I am losing money selling it to you.”
    Two stores down, the identical cuff was displayed in the window. “How much?” she inquired
     of the young man behind the counter.
    “I will give you a very good deal. Three hundred dirham.”
    Indignant, Caro returned to the first shop to protest.
    “That,” the man sneered, “that bracelet you saw, to mention it in the same breath
     as mine is an insult. I will give you the benefit of the doubt. You are ignorant about
     the differences in the quality of silver.”
    The man had a long face with a bulbous nose. His cheeks were flecked with broken capillaries.
     It was clear that, from his point of view, inflating prices for a tourist was acceptable
     practice, the exchange between them entirely within the realm of principle.
    Her eyes wandered to a shelf where there was a candelabrum that looked like a menorah.
     “Can I see that?”
    Very carefully, the shop owner reached for the object, which he placed on the glass
     countertop. There was a star of David on the base of the piece. He peered at her.
     “You are a Jew?”
    She did not answer.
    “You want this instead?”
    She nodded.
    “For you, I will rob myself. Rob my own family. But no more discussion of the quality
     of my silver. You will come to my home tomorrow for the Sabbath dinner.”
    And so Caro met Uri and his vain, hypochondriacal wife, Raquel, and then their brainy
     angry daughter, Rachida, and her sweet older sister, Esther, the mother’s handmaiden
     and an image of how Rachida might have looked had she not felt her life depended on
     being as unlike her sister and mother as possible.
    Esther and Raquel fingered Caro’s clothes, the hem of the loose blouse and the folds
     of the long skirt she’d worn to walk the streets alone.
    “These are shoes for a girl?” Esther asked, giggling as she slipped her tiny soft
     feet inside Caro’s beat-up Birkenstocks.
    Uri batted Esther’s leg. “Excuse this rude child of mine.”
    Before dinner, Raquel lit candles. The family held hands, Rachida grimacing as she
     placed hers inside Caro’s, and Uri said the blessing over the wine, the same baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh haolam, borei p’ri hagafen Caro dimly recalled her mother’s uncle saying on their annual visits to her mother’s
     parents’ home.
    “Your parents, they keep the Sabbath?” Uri asked as Raquel served the couscous.
    “Not really. They both had uncles who were rabbis, but neither of them is religious.”
    “Your father should have insisted. That is the job of the father.”
    She did not want to say that her parents were divorced, her father remarried to a
     woman who wasn’t Jewish, but before she could decide what to say, Rachida blurted
     out, the first words Caro can remember her having said, her face locked until that
     moment in a bored scowl, “In America, they are not still in the Dark Ages. There are
     Jews who actually use their minds.”
    A vein throbbed in Uri’s temple. When he spoke, it was as though he were releasing
     his words one by one. “My daughter, she thinks that she is more intelligent