First her neighbor Janey came stumbling through the lobby door and, as the dancer held the elevator for her, she noticed in Janey’s ”thank you” a certain flickering distaste. And as they rode up to their respective floors, Janey said: “I can’t even watch the news. What your people are doing to those poor folks in Gaza is just simply… how do you deal with it?”
“Deal?” asked the dancer with a confused smile.
“Don’t you want to call your relatives up over there in Israel and scream: “People! What are you doing??”
Astonished, the dancer peered at her, trying to grasp her meaning. “My people…?”
“Yes, over there. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but I have no relatives over there.”
“That you know of…” Janey said as the elevator arrived to her stop. Hoisting two grocery bags more firmly in her arms, like an indignant mother holding her two children, she elbowed open the gate and, as she banged her way into the fifth floor corridor, said: “Tell them over there that we’re not going to stand for it one day more.”
The dancer started to say “Stand for what?” but the gate slammed shut and she was now in a small moving chamber filled with poisonous fog and struggling desperately for breath. When the elevator arrived at her floor, the seventh, she felt on the verge of blacking out.
She entered her unit—a one bedroom with high, pale gray walls and black slate floors—a calm place furnished minimally but exquisitely by streamlined shapes of futuristic one-of-a-kind design all in white. Over these floors she had danced, sometimes from...
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