The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones (Criticism)

Criticism

Bryan Aubrey

Bryan Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on literature. In this essay, he discusses the contrast between Esty and Rebecca and Rebecca's growing spiritual awareness.

In an interview with Robert Birnbaum, Orringer said of her stories: "They tend to be about young women who are in between childhood and adulthood. They are about people who are at a moment of an incredibly difficult transition in their lives." This statement certainly applies to Rebecca in "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones," a story which captures with great immediacy and perceptiveness the world of adolescence in all its turmoil and uncertainty. In one summer away from home, new experiences, new ideas, and new feelings crowd in on the growing girl, and she must quickly develop ways of understanding and integrating them into her awareness of what life is and how she is going to approach it. The other young characters in the story, Esty Adelstein and Dovid Frankel, are also going through similar transitions.

The themes of the story are revealed through the relationship between Rebecca and Esty. Esty is older than Rebecca by a year or so, and initially it is she who appears to take the lead in their relationship. It is Esty who wades first into the lake, unconcerned that her parents do not allow the girls to swim. Esty has a ready-made excuse; if they are challenged on why their clothes are wet, they will tell her parents that they fell in. Deviousness seems to come naturally to Esty; behind her pious exterior she does whatever she wants to do, regardless of whether it breaks the rules. Although the reader only sees Esty through Rebecca's eyes and therefore does not have the same insight into her motivations, Esty does not seem to be conscious of the dichotomy between what she professes and what she actually does. She may have studied her religion with zeal, but she has not yet absorbed in a sincere and mature way the implications it may have for her conduct. It is Esty, for example, who suggests taking the book Essence of Persimmon home with them, and it is Esty, despite her assurance to Rebecca that they will not look at it, who is the first to take the book down from the top shelf in the closet and begin reading it.

Esty, however, does have an excuse. She is suffering from that most overwhelming of experiences, first love, a shattering event that has not yet, it appears, happened for Rebecca. It is because Esty is upset with Rebecca over Dovid Frankel that she heads for the closet and reads the forbidden book. Rebecca's sin was to go outside and spend a few moments alone with Dovid, an experience for which Esty apparently longs. Her subsequent jealousy may explain some of her spiteful and manipulative behavior toward Rebecca.

Esty's deviousness does not come so naturally to Rebecca, who is in the process of slowly assimilating what Esty, for all her piety, seems to have missed. Rebecca has been raised in a secular household but in the highly religious environment in which she now finds herself, she gradually develops a quiet awareness of God and some insight into the demands of a life lived in accordance with God's will. Unlike Esty, Rebecca shows no signs of adopting an excessively pious exterior, but she does indicate that she is developing an ability to listen to her religious feelings and let them guide her in honest but unostentatious way.

Rebecca's religious feelings come from many sources. Sometimes at Shabbos she feels the presence of something larger than herself, and she is also quite affected by Uncle Shimon's story about the flaw in the mezuzah that was responsible — so Uncle Shimon believes — for a house fire. His making this connection sets her thinking about the judgment of God, and the image she forms in her mind of God and religion seems to be a stern one, suggested by the forbidding face of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, whose piercing eyes stare down at her from the portrait on the bedroom wall. Rebecca even convinces herself that the death of her infant brother is God's punishment of her because she once, for a moment, wished that the baby would die. (Her wish sprang from her awareness that if the baby survived he would need constant care, and she feared as a result she might be neglected by her parents.) Religion as it comes to her in its official form is full of prohibitions, a long list of things one is supposed not to do, especially on Shabbos. There is an especially long list pertaining to when it is and is not permissible to have sex, as Esty informs her with all the confidence of one who knows: "You can't do it outside. You can't do it drunk. You can't do it during the day or with the lights on. You're supposed to think about subjects of Torah while you do it."

One of her most powerful religious experiences, however, is not mediated, at least not directly, by anything she has read or heard about God and religion. It comes directly from nature and has the stamp of personal experience, not just something someone has told her about what Judaism teaches. It comes when she is alone outside, as Shabbos nears its end. As she lies in the tall grass, experiencing nature through all her senses, she feels a presence gathering around her which culminates in a tremendous moment of new spiritual awareness:

It is God who makes the shadows dissolve around me. He sharpens the scent of clover. He pushes the bees past my ears, directs the sun onto my back until my skin burns through the cotton of my Shabbos dress. I want to know what He wants and do what He wants, and I let my mind fall blank, waiting to be told.

By letting her mind "fall blank" Rebecca shows that she is ready to learn a more mature understanding of how to discern the will of God. She waits, passively, for God to make his will known to her rather than thinking that all she must do is slavishly follow an external code of law. By making her own individual mind blank, she allows a space for God to step in. The God that speaks directly to the mind and heart in quiet moments is quite different from the deity who harshly judges those who make one small mistake.

However, in spite of this moment of revelation, Rebecca is not yet able to free herself of the shadow of guilt and judgment, since later that night she reproaches herself, and everyone else, for not being more mindful of the demands of God as they go about their day-to-day lives.

Toward the end of the story, Rebecca's emerging religious awareness bears fruit. As Esty prepares for her reckless encounter with Dovid at night, the relationship between the cousins has been quietly reversed from what it was at the beginning. Now Rebecca, the younger of the two, is the one for whom the dictates of religion influence her attitude and conduct. Rebecca also feels a sense of responsibility to protect her cousin, even though, being so young, she is not sure what she is protecting her from.

Esty in this situation certainly needs some help. She is so much in the grip of her infatuation with Dovid that she will do whatever she feels she must in order to get what she wants. By insisting that if she and Rebecca are caught, Rebecca must take all the blame, she shows her immaturity, her failure to accept that she is responsible for her own actions. It must be said also that Rebecca is not above using unscrupulous tactics of her own, as when Esty is writing a note to Dovid, and Rebecca says she will scream for Esty's mother unless Esty tells her what she is doing.

When Esty does meet up with Dovid, she is quite brazen in her attempt to manipulate him. Faced with this aggressive and cunning girl, the previously self-assured Dovid, the same boy who confidently touched Rebecca's arm the previous evening, does not have a clue how to behave. "What do you want me to do?" he says feebly. "What am I supposed to do?" As Esty reaches up to him and kisses him, Rebecca goes about some action of her own. On their way to meet Dovid, she has been acutely aware of the moral and religious implications of what they are about to do; even the natural environment reminds her of it: "Tree frogs call in the dark, the rubber-band twang of their throats sounding to me like God, God, God." Rebecca seems to have a quiet awareness that the book Essence of Persimmon has brought them nothing but quarrels and danger. They are too young, not ready for such a book, and she knows it. As she wades into the water and floats on her back, gazing up at the Milky Way, the water acts like a mikvah for her — the ritual bath of purification that Aunt Malka explained to her; it is spiritually cleansing, and she has no difficulty in letting go of the fascinating but forbidden book. She has chosen the sensible, moral choice, but done it quietly, with no great fanfare of piety.

And yet, even while Rebecca takes a mature action of which her religious, conservative relatives would approve, there is another element in this scene that suggests Rebecca is also cultivating an independent spirit and is not bound solely by the prescriptions of her religion. At the beginning of the story she pointed out that she and Esty were forbidden to swim because, they were told, it was immodest to show their bodies. Instead, they had waded fully clothed into the lake. But this time Rebecca does not hesitate to remove her shirt and skirt, and she notes how she feels the night air against her bare skin. Equivalent of a mikvah this may be, but it is one that is closely connected to the natural world in all its sensuality. The nearly naked young girl who floats serenely on the water at night is a very different person from the one who returned home with the Shabbos groceries only a few days earlier. Quietly doing what she feels is the right thing (as Aunt Malka told Esty that she must), she also shows she is growing in independence, calmly ignoring a rule for which she sees no justification.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

What Do I Read Next?

• Renowned Canadian writer Alice Munro is one of Orringer's favorite writers. Orringer singled out Munro's short story collection, The Love of a Good Woman (1999) for particular praise, admiring the stories "The Children Stay," "Before the Change," and "My Mother's Dream," as well as the title story. Orringer admires the way Munro describes the inner lives of her characters.
• In an interview available on the Barnes and Noble website, Orringer named George Saunders's Pastoralia (2001) as one of her favorite books. It is Saunders's second collection, consisting of five stories as well as the title novella. Saunders sets his stories in a disturbing near future in which capitalism and the free market rule the world, resulting in grotesque inequities. The stories feature many wretched characters in appallingly bad situations, but there are many moments of grace and humor, and in spite of the squalor, the human spirit seems to triumph. Orringer commented that the stories always hit the right emotional notes.
• Sue Fishkoff's The Rebbe's Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch (2003) explores how young Lubavitchers carry their message of spiritual renewal to the wider Jewish world throughout the United States. Fishkoff, who admires and respects the Lubavitch movement, draws on many interviews she conducted, as well as her experiences in traveling with Lubavitchers to Shabbos dinners, mikvah demonstrations, and fundraising events.
• The Chosen (1967), by Chaim Potok, is a coming-of-age story that focuses on the friendship between two Jewish boys in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s. Reuven is from an Orthodox Jewish family. Danny is a member of a Hasidic sect, and his father is a respected rebbe and zaddik. The unlikely friendship between the boys grows against a background of World War II, Zionism, and the founding of the state of Israel.
• In Alice McDermott's Child of My Heart (2002), Theresa, a middle-aged woman, looks back on a summer spent working among the rich residents of East Hampton, on Long Island, New York, in the 1960s, when she was fifteen. Theresa also has to look after her visiting eight-year-old cousin. Together they weave a fantasy world, which for Theresa includes emerging sexual awareness.