The Scapegoat

“Grow up,” my mom tells me, unfolding my fingers from the box locked tightly in my hands. I fight with little resistance before she pries it from me. The contents rattle, and I let out a cry.

“Don’t break them!”

“Don’t be silly,” she coos, putting the box on the counter, just out of reach. “They won’t fly away before we get back.”

But her words don’t assure me. At six years old in my Sunday school dress, I push my face against the glass of the old Toyota Camry as we pull out from the driveway. In my mind, the figurines rattle in their box, waiting for me. They were a gift from my grandma for my sixth birthday: two crystalline wings in a glass box. 

“From your grandma,” my grandma whispered into my knotted black hair, the hint of the Old language in her accent. The folds of sandpaper skin revealed her lipless jowls, blowing air into my ear. “From Isreal. And I’m watching you, my dear. Don’t break them.”

I bit my lower lip. “But what if I--”

“No!” And those black eyes, often distant, grew hard and heavy. “Even if it’s an accident, it is your heritage! These are your heart!”

My mom argued with her once she thinks I’m out of earshot. “What are you doing, scaring her like that? Jesus, she’s a kid!”

“They need to learn young,” she retorts. 

“She’s six, Ema! I don’t understand--”

“It is never too young to understand who you are, Miriam.”

“I’ve taught her so much about her Judaism already, Ma. It can wait--”

“I learned early, didn’t I!” my grandma’s breathing rattles like beads inside her. “Who protected me?

My mother grew quiet. My grandma won. And that was that.

Since then, I followed my grandmother’s words like an instinct. I kept the box on the lower bookshelf of my childhood bedroom, checking it three times a day. In a way, I held the heirloom inside me. It was a part of me, as it was hers. In my daily ritual, my hands drag open the lid, stroke the contents inside, then replace the artifact back onto its shelf.

My grandma’s artifact, the one I could never break: the glass box filled with wings.

…

The train bumps below me. 

I curl up against the window, my eyes too sore too from many late nights and early mornings. It’s seven AM, but the gentle jostle of the train against old trucks lulls me back to my slumber. Next to me, a stranger snores, a heavy-set man entranced by his own dream. If only. Exhaustion is my default, constantly, where alertness is a blessing only served cold in a can of Nitro triple expresso. It’s a commodity for this world to feel like anything more than a dream.

My problem? I try to fill my days too full, like Boston Creme doughnuts. It's a tactic, I think, to forget.

My grandma died two months ago. It’s June now, and Los Angeles heat bears down on me. The warm air slogs like my exhaustion. No matter what I did, no matter how many shelves I reorganized, how many times I checked the wings, the knowledge bore into me, caving my shoulders inward. I couldn’t stay there with my mom. I couldn’t stand the house’s empty hollows, bare without her.

So I bought a train ticket to San Francisco. I fled. I flew.

I’m thinking of my grandma again, which means I'm thinking of religion. I'm thinking of the carpenter that builds the wings for the angels who make the scripture fly. In my mind, the box is open, those glass wings expanding as they breathe in the fresh air. They’re carved from a kind of glass or marble--I couldn’t be sure. I reach my hands into the box and the train flows further away, stumbling along a broken track… 

...

Suddenly, I’m propped on a public bench, perpendicular to San Luis Obispo’s mission. I’d gotten off there as a stop for a few hours to stretch my legs. The glass box is in my hands, with my fingers swaying precariously midway between the box’s opening. Inside the chapel, the priest hums with the clergy in a language I don’t wholly understand. 

Next to the church doors, I feel like I’m tiptoeing the precipice of a religion that echoes itself in mine, but only in the tune of their hymns. Eyes half-closed, I wonder if mass sounds as deceitful to me as my own prayers do to a Goyum. Does its meaninglessness discount the ethics’ beauty? Its amazing grace?

I take one wing figurine out from the box and cradle it in my palm. It unfurls, squirming and bucking, lost. I hold it up like a baby bird, waiting for it to take flight. It tucks further into my palm. Meanwhile, the other wing sways in the box in my lap, antsy. Waiting.

A religious instinct stirs inside me, squirming like the feathers in my palms, shielding me away from the open air. I don’t know when I realize, but when I do the breath escapes me.

These wings are a part of me.

At once, both wing bones snap to full extension, loaded to take flight. Defying all laws of the Earth and physics, the figurines rise into the air, two lopsided extensions of a bird, or angel. The marble of their structure grows, lose their sheen, and the feathers soften, widen. Both wings extend before me now, two great deities, their feathers tickling my palms, my cheeks. They bow, midflight, and I can’t help returning the gesture. Here, the appendages are my servants. 

I stand, the box in my lap forgotten. It hurdles to the floor like a meteor, shattering into a thousand pieces. The ringing is a sound like harmony with the wind. I hardly notice, because now I stand full height with both wings. They extend up to my shoulder, their tips nearly dragging on the floor. It’s a marriage in happenstance when two things come together without reason but makes sense, somehow. My Converse crunch the shattered glass; the breaking of the box feels like a sin, but I can’t even begin to define what that word means to me. There’s nothing equal to it in the Jewish scripture. 

And suddenly, I stand before my servants, the two grooms of a union without witnesses. Except this wedding does have an overseer, doesn’t it? My arms raise above me, the glass below my shoe soles, and the strangest feeling crosses me. A shiver of terror, flickering awe, that brings tears to my eyes--

…

The train shudders again, and the film quelching my eyes shut snaps open. I’ve sunk into my seat, my knees two crumpled heaps before me. Around me, farmlands embrace us as their epicenter. On one side, vineyards dot the Napa Valley skyline; on the other, a goat poops in plain view of the train’s passengers.

There’s a portion in Leviticus, Acharei Mot, that tells the story of the scapegoat. Rather than atoning for our sins, the Ancient Hebrews would put their wrongs on one goat every year by painting its head in blood. Then, they would cast the goat into the forest, sending their sins to a place that they would never see again. 

The thought crosses me: am I, a Jew, that goat? The animal whose sin gives it no shame? 

I stare out the window. Out and up. The clouds embrace another center, a hazy Sun in the middle of the swirl of the clouds. The whole image paints the sky a golden-gray, a bright center encircled by storm. An eye. Staring now, at me, a tangled heap wedged between the seats of the train…

Weary head!--my eyes lull, en route away from this train, the farmland, the unapologetic goats, and the menace in the sky--

…

These wings outstretch behind me, hard bone a comforting weight, balancing me. I brace the feathers tight against my back, then snap them open. The force creates a stirring wind, trembling the glass under my feet. Distantly, half-lidded eyes suction close. But here, my partners outstretch behind me in a crescent. And I am completely awake.

It’s Sunday morning en route to mass, and a Jewish angel showers the Church steps with snow-white feathers.  

I rise above the San Luis Obispo church, the hymns the background noise to the torrent that the wind yowls underneath me. My shadow casts a moon on the sidewalk. The small town extends before me, a world now so foreign. Thrift stores and book stores and record stores and cafes. The little joys in life.

Below, at one of the cafes, two young men gather over a shagged dog. They argue about the mundanity of iced coffee, the economic incentive to buy hot drinks over cold. They sit across each other, their knees knocking, hands interlocked below the table. It’s a relation entirely wholly, entirely sinful (one that the Ancient Hebrews would cast into the forest to die) but who does it harm? Who does it harm but the poor dog who has to hear them bicker?

I rise higher, past the bricked roofs of the town, onto the spire of the San Luis Obispo mission. I tap the roof with the toe of a broken-in Converse, the footwear of the rebel. The scaffold doesn’t budge. Gently, I set myself down on the roof, wrapping my wings around me like a shawl. 

This mission, this spire, it’s a foundation for an idea that doesn’t exist identically, everywhere. If Junipero Serra saw me like this now, a testament to the Old Testament, the poor man would internally combust. 

Me, the Jew, the scapegoat, sitting here on his salvation. 

… 

The train screeches to a halt. This time, I don't have to pry open my eyes. Rather, I look easily ahead and out, to the silver sea under a cool, placid sky. Above, the senile clouds float like feathers, fizzling in the daylight. 

And further, out ahead, the golden light gleams over the city skyline. My breath hitches in my chest.

San Francisco.

I reach below the hem of my crewneck, holding the pair of wings that I threaded onto a silver chain. They stay close to my chest, resting alongside my heart. Since her death, I felt that I couldn’t trust the box to keep her artifacts safe. They stay with me now, always, a childhood instinct that’s welded to me like the wings to the chain. 

I look out and up, at the Sun that burnt off the morning fog. I see her there, in these moments, those ethereal eyes watching me, to make sure that her wings aren’t broken. 

“Look Grandma,” I whisper, holding the figurines to the window, San Fransisco, the open sea. “Look who’s all grown up.”