A Stranger on the Planet

by Adam Schwartz

  “We are, we are,” I assured her. “Tomorrow is Grace’s—I mean, Madeline’s—birthday. We’re going to Henry Bear’s Park so she can show me what she wants me to buy her.”

  “Well, happy birthday, Madeline,” Molly said.

  “Thank you,” Grace replied.

  “Molly’s birthday is coming up soon too. May 2,” I said.

  Molly stepped back, placing her hand over her heart. “Seth, I cannot believe you remember my birthday!”

  “Well . . . I was married to you,” I stammered, suddenly self-conscious that my words had registered so powerfully. “I ought to remember your birthday.”

  “Hold on,” Grace said. “You two were married?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Did you get divorced?” Grace asked, continuing to cross-examine me.

  “Yes.”

  Then she asked Molly if she had any kids. Molly told her she didn’t.

  “It’s against the law to get divorced if you have children,” Grace declared.

  “That’s right,” I told her.

  Molly smiled at me, perhaps understanding a child’s need to invent a world in which parents don’t fall out of love or die.

  “We’re adopting,” she said. “From China.”

  “I’m adopting!” Grace exclaimed.

  “You’re adopted,” I corrected.

  “I know that,” she replied.

  “Well, I didn’t,” Molly said, casting me a reproachful look through her smile.

  Bea and Ken had adopted Grace four years ago. I knew so many couples with adopted children that I had come to think of Cambridge as a refuge for foundlings.

  “Would you like to see a picture of my baby?” Molly asked me.

  “Yes, of course!” I said.

  “I have to prepare you, Seth. She’s extremely beautiful.”

  “Of course she is.”

  “No, I really mean it. Shockingly beautiful.”

  When she showed me the photo, I nearly let out a cry. Molly hadn’t been exaggerating. The baby had a high, round moonscape of a forehead. Her eyes, a pair of shiny black pearls, stared directly back into the camera, directly into the soul of anyone who held the photograph. I had friends who had daughters adopted from China, and I knew that all the children had been abandoned. Looking at the photograph, I wondered how this baby’s mother could have gazed into those eyes one last time and then left her at a bus stop or a police station, or wherever she had abandoned her. How could anyone bear such a loss? I thought of the eight years Molly had probably spent trying to get pregnant, recalling the emotional and physical trial it had been for Bea and Ken when they were trying to conceive. I wondered how many more miscarriages she had suffered. How had she endured it?

  “Oh, Molly, she is beautiful. Congratulations.”

  I gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  “You’re divorced!” a voice admonished me from above. “That’s against the law!”

  Molly and I both laughed, but we didn’t stop staring at the photograph. Perhaps my kiss had awoken a long-dormant feeling between us: our arms were pressed against each other, our heads tilted together, our whole beings, it seemed, enveloped in a numinous aura, as if we were gazing at a photograph of the child we had always wanted, as if we had finally completed each other. Then Molly looked up at me with an enigmatic smile. Was she seeing the Seth that she remembered? Or the person she was hoping I might be when she called a complete stranger one night more than fifteen years earlier?

  BOTH ENDS

  • SEPTEMBER 23, 1993 •

  For her sixtieth birthday, Ruth planned a surprise party for herself. The guests were told to come at eight thirty, but by three in the afternoon Ruth had decided that eight thirty was all wrong. I had just arrived from the airport and was pressing my ear against the door. Sarah was attempting to provide Ruth with plausible excuses for staying away from home until eight thirty, but my mother complained that all her ideas sounded too phony. She told Sarah they wouldn’t be having this problem if Sarah had planned the party for seven thirty like she had told her to. I changed the position of my ear and closed my eyes, hoping to divine other voices, other secrets, but all I heard, of course, was my mother’s plaintive voice and my sister’s sober one.

  I rang the bell and the voices stopped. Ruth opened the door, her face so drawn that it looked six inches longer than usual. Even the capillaries running across her eyeballs appeared agitated. For a second I wondered if she actually recognized me, but then I realized she was staring at the tiny scar over my right eye where she had struck me with a heavy enamel cup more than twenty-five years before. Blood had splashed into my eye, and Ruth had shrieked and draped herself over me, as if someone else had pitched the cup across the table and she was protecting me from further harm. The scar was hardly visible anymore—a pale pink apostrophe in the middle of my eyebrow—but Ruth sometimes would brood over it as if it were some hieroglyph, recording all the sins and slights of my childhood.

  “You couldn’t have come last night?” she said.

  “Happy birthday,” I said, briefly kissing her.

  I embraced Sarah lightly, careful not to press too hard against her belly. She was six months pregnant with her second child. She had a five-year-old daughter named Vanessa; Seamus, four years younger than me, already had two children: four-year-old Zipporah and one-year-old Avi. Seamus still lived in the same town we had grown up in, and all the children were spending the day and evening at his house. Sarah, Aaron, and Vanessa lived an hour away from our mother’s apartment.

  Both women appeared dazed, as if I had just interrupted them in an act of violence or intimacy.

  “Is there a problem here?” I asked.

  “We’re just trying to come up with a believable reason for Mom to be out of the house until eight thirty,” Sarah explained.

  I turned to Ruth. “Is that all? I don’t think anyone really cares, Mom.”

  “I care!” she declared.

  “Mom,” Sarah said, “I really think Seth is right about this one. Just say anything. Say you were at the dentist’s or the doctor’s.”

  “Sarah, no one comes home from the dentist’s at eight thirty on a Saturday night. Oh, this whole thing is going to look staged!”

  “Mom,” I exclaimed, “this whole thing is staged.”

  She shot me an annoyed look.

  “Look, Sarah planned this whole event because you wanted her to, and now you’re acting like she’s trying to ruin your birthday.”

  Sarah glared at me.

  “Is that true, Sarah?” Ruth asked. “You’re doing this only because I want you to? Well, then you can forget it. Tell the guests anything you want, because all I know is that I wouldn’t show up now for all the tea in China!”

  “Mom, Mom,” Sarah pleaded. “Seth meant we’re doing this because we love you. Right, Seth?”

  Both women turned to me. “I have a great idea,” I replied. “At seven thirty we’ll put my overnight bag in the car, and Mom and I can go somewhere for an hour. Then we can walk in together at eight thirty, like Mom has just brought me back from the airport.”

  A triumphant look transformed Ruth’s face. “Oh, yes!” she cried. “Oh, Seth, darling, I know I can always count on you to save the day!”

  RUTH LEFT FOR AN APPOINTMENT at the beauty parlor not long after I arrived; Sarah and I went for a walk with Benny, our mother’s beagle. Benny pulled Sarah along in the wake of his firenzied interest in every frozen turd along the curb. I ran after them every now and then to catch up. The houses on our street were uniformly small and drab, the patchy yards scattered with overturned tricycles, clotheslines, doghouses, outdoor furniture left to rust.

  But after about ten minutes, we were in a completely different neighborhood of stately old Tudors and stylish ranch houses. Benny slowed down in front of a house with a grand, sweeping lawn. He circled a figure of a little black jockey statue holding a lantern that had been there for as long as I could remember.


  “Go here, Benny. Go here,” I urged from behind a telephone pole.

  He stopped circling and gave me a sorrowful look.

  “Go wherever you want, sweetheart,” Sarah said to him.

  He lifted his leg and peed against the jockey’s ankle. Then he looked up at Sarah.

  “Yes, darling, that was wonderful,” Sarah said.

  This was our aunt Rhoda and uncle Barry’s house. I caught up to Sarah and Benny.

  “Are you angry at me?” I asked.

  “Not too angry.”

  “I’m sorry if I caused you any grief back at the apartment.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, with a dismissive laugh. “I’ve been getting grief all weekend. This morning she wanted me to call all the guests again and remind them to be on time. She also can’t decide which outfit to wear, and for some reason that’s my fault too. Plus she’s upset that Marcy is spending more time with Vanessa than she is today.”

  Abe Zelman had died two years before. Since his death, Ruth and Marcy had been engaged in a mighty battle for the affections of little Vanessa, a battle in which my mother was heavily outspent. Marcy’s latest salvos were the entire American Girl doll collection with all the accessories and a life-sized Steiff teddy bear from FAO Schwarz.

  “She’s also hoping Jimmy Conroy is going to show up tonight, and she’s anxious about that too,” Sarah said.

  Jimmy Conroy, the principal of the school where Ruth had taught second grade for the past thirty years and where my siblings and I had all gone, had been her on-and-off-again lover for most of that time. The state of their affair had always depended on the vagaries of Mr. Conroy’s relationship with his wife, his six children, and his church.

  “Do you think he’s going to show?”

  “He’ll try. I called him this morning. His wife knows about the party, and she’s giving him a difficult time.”

  “You called him and he told you that?”

  “Sure.”

  I realized that I wouldn’t even recognize Jimmy Conroy if I saw him on the street.

  “Seth, could you also try to get along with Seamus tonight for Mom’s sake?”

  “I’ll try,” I said, without enthusiasm. Seamus and I had not spoken in five years.

  “You know it goes both ways, Seth.”

  “How does it go both ways?” I said angrily.

  “I mean you could have called him or sent him a note after his children were born.”

  “Well, he could have called me after Molly left me. He must have known what bad shape I was in. A call from my brother would have been nice. But of course he couldn’t call me because he didn’t recognize my relationship with Molly. I mean, he wouldn’t even come to my fucking wedding.”

  “Look, Seth, just try for Mom’s sake. You don’t know how painful it is for her that the two of you don’t speak.”

  “All right, I’ll try.”

  We walked a couple more seconds in silence, and then I cried out, “You know, I lost a baby! Don’t you think he ought to have acknowledged that?”

  “Of course I do,” she said.

  “By the time he’s my age he’s probably going to have six children. A whole household of little Tovahs and Zalmans and Yaels.”

  Sarah said, “Seth, Mom’s also upset because you forgot her birthday again.”

  “Forgot her birthday? Where am I now? I’m here for her birthday.”

  “Today is Saturday. Her birthday was yesterday. She’s upset because you didn’t call her.”

  “Because I knew I was coming home today.”

  “Come on, Seth, you forgot to call her.”

  “Fine, fine. I’ll apologize.”

  She didn’t respond, and I put my arm through hers.

  “Sarah, I’m sorry, but I never know the right thing to say to her.”

  “Tell her you love her,” she implored me. “She just wants to hear you say it.”

  “All right, all right.”

  Sarah was silent for couple of seconds, then said, “You’re going to have to say it at some point.”

  “I know,” I replied.

  Two weeks before, Ruth had been diagnosed with Stage III lung cancer. Inoperable, but treatable with chemotherapy. The five-year survival rate was five percent. None of us knew how many months Ruth had ignored the symptoms—bronchitis that wouldn’t go away, wheezing, shortness of breath. Her doctor had wanted her to begin chemotherapy immediately, but she insisted on waiting until after her party.

  “She claims that the last time you told her you loved her was the night of our bar and bat mitzvah,” Sarah said.

  “She remembers that?”

  “Apparently. Do you?”

  “Me? I’m the boy who remembers everything.”

  “Except for your mother’s birthday.”

  THE TELEVISION WAS NO LONGER in the living room; Ruth had moved it into her bedroom years ago. When we returned from the dog walk, I went into her room to watch a baseball game. Lying down on her bed, I was enveloped by her stale, sad odors—the bitter residue of tobacco and the gamey scent of the dog. Then I looked at the lace canopy above me, at the beautiful firetwork spiraling down the four posts, and I was reminded that this bed was the closest thing we had to a family heirloom. It was the bed where my mother had been born and conceived her children, the bed she and my father had slept in for the eighteen hundred and thirty-one nights of their marriage, and the bed she had often shared with me, Sarah, and Seamus in the months after he left. On those nights, she hummed lullabies in our ears and, in place of a prayer, always recited the same poem:

  Ample make this Bed—

  Make this Bed with Awe—

  In it wait till Judgment break

  Excellent and Fair

  SOMETIMES IN THE MIDDLE OF the night she would rearrange us, shifting around the sheets, toys, and small bodies, saying softly, “Come on, kiddos, ample make this bed.”

  When I had last told her I loved her, on the night of my bar mitzvah, I was lying next to her in this bed. Eddie had fed just three weeks before. As I chanted from my portion of the Torah that morning, with the sun shining through the stained-glass windows of the synagogue, I had watched rainbows of light skate across the sacred parchment and felt as if the beams were refracted through my joyful heart. Eddie was gone, and Zelda was safely ensconced at an all-girls boarding school until I was old enough to come for her. I chanted my haftarah like a songbird released from the ark.

  After the services, we had a party at the VFW hall down the street from our apartment. A man in a pink ruffed shirt and a black vest played an electric guitar and sang popular songs. All of the girls, most of them Sarah’s friends, felt compelled to slow dance with me. I still had slight, iridescent bruising under my eyes from the surgery to repair my broken nose, the result of my fight with Eddie. Dancing with Cheryl Edelstein to “Little Green Apples,” I held her tightly and breathed in the scent of her hair. With my hands between her lower back and her ass, I began to stiffen up. Embarrassed, I moved a step back. Cheryl and I stared at each other, our faces hot and red. Then she pulled me back into a bear hug, twirled a lock of my hair around her finger, and whispered in my ear, “I’m only letting you do this because you had brain surgery.”

  My mother was not having a very good time. The invitations had gone out with the names Mr. and Mrs. Edward Lipper, and, apparently, her father and sister had not bothered to tell any of the other relatives that the marriage was over. It was as if they had decided that this would be my mother’s public humiliation for the shame of marrying Eddie, despite the fact that Rhoda had set them up by giving Eddie my mother’s phone number. Every time I looked in Ruth’s direction, she was holding a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other, her face fixed in a pained, anxious-to-please expression as she explained about Eddie to another cousin, uncle, or aunt. Once I was standing close enough to her to hear her say, “I’m usually such a good judge of character. That’s what bothers me the most. I’ve always had such excellent judgment.
”

  That night Sarah was sleeping over at Cheryl’s house. When I went to bed, Seamus was already asleep. In bed I read Zelda’s letter for probably the hundredth time. I knew it as well as my haftarah. I began to touch myself, calling up visions of Zelda putting me in her mouth, but then I heard my mother crying in her bedroom. I waited a couple of minutes for her cries to subside, but they kept on, not loudly, but mournfully, incessantly, as if she had fallen to the bottom of a deep, black well. My mother had always warned me that I would cause her to have a nervous breakdown. Of all her dramatic declarations (May God strike me dead if I’m wrong! I’m sending you to reform school!), her threat of a nervous breakdown felt the most true, and I always wondered how I would know if she was actually having one. Hearing her cries that night, I understood that it was finally happening. I tried to think through the consequences. Would I have to call an ambulance? If I did, and she was hospitalized, where would my sister, brother, and I stay? My father wouldn’t have all of us, and neither would Rhoda for more than a day or two. We would surely be separated.

  I went to my mother’s bedroom and stood in the doorway.

  “Mom, are you all right?”

  She shook her head back and forth on the pillow.

  I went to her bed and lay down next to her. Finally, I said, “Are you thinking about Eddie?” She shook her head. Then I asked her if she felt bad that her life wasn’t more like Rhoda’s. She nodded. I told her that she was a much more accomplished person than her sister. She was brighter, better educated, more independent. Who cared if she didn’t have a big house and a husband? She squeezed my hand, but she was still crying.

  “What is it, Mom?”

  “Your father. I’m still in love with him.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s such a bastard.”

  “I know.”

  “He drives me out of my mind.”

  “Me too,” I admitted, and we both laughed a little.

  These were the truest words we had ever spoken to each other. I put my arms around her, and we lay together, bound by the knowledge that we were both in love with a man who would never love us back. I held her for a long time. When I finally asked her if she was feeling better, she nodded her head, then said, “Seth. Thank you.” She would get through the night; we would all stay together and continue with our lives. She pressed the back of her hand against my cheek. I kissed her on the forehead and then briefly on the lips. I told her I loved her and went back to my own bed.