Free The Best American Short Stories® 2011 by Geraldine Brooks Page B

him.
    He fixed upon her an envenomed look, clearly resisting what he wanted to say.
Religion
, she knew, was what he wanted to say.
    He recklessly took her hands in his. When she made no effort to return his clasp he rubbed his thumb along the valley between her index and middle-finger knuckles. His voice turned soft. "I cannot understand why you're so attached to being Jewish when you don't even believe in God. And why all of this is only coming up now. Not to mention why we keep fighting about it."
    "And I cannot understand your difficulty in understanding this. It has nothing to do with God and your position is absolutely bizarre to me." With this she twisted her hands around so that she was holding his. "And it makes me, I have to tell you, extremely worried and sad."
    Last night, after the restaurant, after the confrontation over the stupidest fucking book he had ever seen her read, they had argued, again, for the first time since the wedding, about their child, due now in six months. They had told themselves, in the weeks leading up to the wedding, that her accidental pregnancy after four months of dating was not the reason they had decided to get married. But it was clear to both of them now that this was quite possibly not the case. She knew he felt betrayed. His atheism was one of the first things he had told her about himself, and once things became serious he had quizzed her about her feelings concerning God, and she had answered that she had no particular feelings about God, other than a strong suspicion he did not exist. And this made him happy at a time when his happiness seemed to her a most precious and mysterious thing. All of that had begun to un-spool a week before the wedding, when she had mentioned (in passing) that it was important (to her) that their child would understand him- or herself (they had agreed on keeping the child's gender a surprise) as a Jew. She could not even remember the context in which this had come up—
that
was how uncontroversially she had regarded the matter. At hearing that his child would be Jewish, her husband had laughed, once and loudly, like a king at some forced merriment, before realizing his pregnant fiancée was not kidding.
We'll ... talk about that later
, he had told her. She did not let him, saying that it was beyond her ability to fathom how exactly this could bother him. What was there to talk about? She was Jewish, her parents were Jewish, her child would be Jewish. His position: Jewishness was and could be only a religion. It was not a race, because there were Chinese and Turkish and Indian Jews. He had met some himself. It was not a proper culture, because there were Sephardic Jews, for instance, whose culture was completely different from that of Ashkenazi Jews. He described to her—one of his less wise moments—some of those differences. It was not an ethnicity, because the idea of Jewishness being determined by matrilineal descent was a religious concept. Out came his feverishly marginaliaed New Revised Standard for citation. It was, therefore, only and solely a religion, and, he told her, he could not and in fact refused to live within a household, a family, in which religion played any role other than that of an occasionally bashed piñata. She could not argue against this reasoning, which part of her agreed with. She disliked Jewish tribalism as much as anyone and had managed to escape Hebrew school without learning how to read, speak, or write Hebrew. Once, after a nephew's bar mitzvah, the theme of which was Wall Street, and which her uncle had broadcastedly made known cost $22,000, she had actually renounced her Jewishness (for two days). But she was having a child, and while she did not want to raise Menachim Begin, a Chabadnik, or a Settler, she did want to raise a Jew in the way she was a Jew, the formalities of which she knew almost nothing about. Being Jewish was, in her innerland, nothing more than a faint but definite light, and it offered her