The Laws of Gravity

by Liz Rosenberg

  Nicole’s hands felt clammy, just hearing the word death. Trying to sound casual, she mentioned the woman she’d heard about that day, the one who had died so young of a brain tumor. She knit faster, as if she could push the story away with the clicking speed of the needles. “That mother died before her daughter even reached third grade.”

  “There’s nothing scarier than having kids,” Mimi said, her dark eyes wide. “Halloween can’t touch it.”

  “I know. But just think—” Nicole began.

  “I can’t,” Mimi said. “I won’t. And you shouldn’t, either. Everything to do with having children is terrifying. You can’t afford to sweat the details—and it’s all details,” she added. “Now talk about something else, or I’m going to start telling knock-knock jokes.”

  Nicole knew there was no point in pushing. And anyway, Mimi was usually right about these things. “Are we dressing up for Halloween?” Nicole had brought along a large pink witch’s hat with a broad brim. Some of the trick-or-treating grown-ups went the whole nine yards, bought expensive costumes, wore masks, cloaks—the works. Others just went disguised as suburban parents, trailing behind their kids.

  “Maybe I’ll go as a pumpkin,” Mimi said, patting her stomach. She already had a high, small round tummy. She pulled her T-shirt tighter, to demonstrate. “See? I can paint the bump orange, with a little stem on top.”

  “Suit yourself,” Nicole said. She unraveled and started over at the beginning of the row.

  “It’s not fair,” Mimi said. “If I went a year from now, I’d have this cute little baby, and no matter how I dressed her, people would coo and say, Aw, how adorable.”

  “I think you’re adorable right now,” Nicole said.

  “Well, you’re in the minority,” said Mimi. “Julian thinks I’m gross. Ari tactfully avoids the subject, and Dr. Kassis thinks this baby is going to come early. She wants me on bed rest by the time I hit six months.”

  “You’re kidding,” Nicole said.

  “Nope. The baby’s head is pressed too far down. My muscles aren’t tight enough down there. That’s what the doctor said. It’s my own fault. I should have done more exercises.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Nicole said. “You’re blaming yourself. Seriously. You are, aren’t you?”

  Mimi blushed. “I am not.”

  “You are.” Nicole set down her knitting in her lap and looked sternly at her friend. She pointed one needle at Mimi. “Repeat after me: There is nothing wrong with my vagina.”

  “Okay,” Mimi said. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Repeat after me!” Nicole waved the knitting needle like a baton. “There is nothing wrong with my vagina!—Say it with me.”

  They chanted it together. “Again!” Nicole called.

  “We’re going to scare the kids,” Mimi said. They chanted again, this time more softly.

  “Thank you.” Nicole picked up the needles and resumed knitting. She frowned, counting her stitches.

  “You are completely insane,” Mimi said. “I hope you know that. You seem normal, but really, you’re not.”

  “Quiet, or I’ll make you chant again,” Nicole said.

  Later, when Mimi went upstairs to check on Julian—Daisy was curled up against his side, asleep, wrapped in his vampire cloak—her son put down his chapter book and asked, “What were you and Aunt Nicole singing about?”

  “We weren’t singing, sweetie.”

  “It sounded like cheerleading.”

  “It was nothing.”

  He nodded and stretched. He reached for the vampire fangs and put them in his mouth. Then, when she nearly reached the door he said, “Mom? Who is China?”

  “China is a what, not a who. It’s a big country in Asia. Or it can be a kind of dishware, too.”

  “Then why were you singing, ‘There is nothing wrong with my friend China’?”

  “Oh!” Mimi said.

  “Mom?” Julian said. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “There is nothing wrong with my friend China.”

  Nicole posed the two costumed cousins outside Mimi’s sprawling house and took photos. The sun was beginning its slow early descent; it was still light, but the peak of the day had turned. Now the colors shone out preternaturally bright and clear, crisp at the edges. This part of Glen Cove was so lushly wooded, it felt like stepping back in time. Inching along the expressway, you could easily forget that Long Island still had peaceful deep green corners like this, full of trees and meadows. Ari had created a full-length stretch of decorated pumpkins, alternating orange and white, a natural gate that ran the width of the property. He’d bagged his fall leaves inside orange plastic bags that looked like soft-sided pumpkins. The lawn was perfectly clean of loose leaves.

  Daisy sat cross-legged and skinny next to one of the bags. Julian loomed over her, one cloaked arm around her, grinning fiercely, as if about to suck her blood. It was that time of day that Nicole’s father—an amateur photographer—used to call “magic hour.” The horizontal light touched every surface and made it gleam, fired up the colors in their costumes and in the changing leaves behind them. Even the black of Daisy’s dress glowed under her autumn-colored hair.

  Walking in the streets, a few of the first trick-or-treaters were meandering back and forth across Glen Cove Estates like dressed-up drunks, weaving from door to door. A few went in flocks or couples, but many of the children walked alone.

  “We’re so lucky,” Nicole said to Mimi, standing close by her side. Their shoulders touched.

  Mimi followed her gaze. “That our kids have each other, you mean?”

  “Not just them,” Nicole said. “We all do.”

  Then she snapped the shutter. It seemed, in retrospect, like the last perfectly happy day on earth. That photo of the two young vampires hung brightly in the Greenes’ kitchen for years.

  JANUARY 1, 2011

  The Future

  Justice Sol Richter lay awake beside his wife, Sarah, near dawn, his chin pointing at the ceiling, contemplating the year ahead. Looming up was his seventieth birthday, the age of mandatory retirement from the Supreme Court of New York State. He could picture himself lying there in the glimmering winter dark, arms crossed across his chest like one of the Egyptian mummies in the Metropolitan Museum. He’d taken Tylenol for his headache, and when that didn’t work he had opened Sarah’s side of the medicine cabinet and selected one of the small, flat pale-yellow tablets she took on nights when she could not sleep.

  The judge had been frightened of the dark as a child. Often he’d crept into bed with Arthur, his youngest and gentlest brother. Sol’s older siblings had passed away long ago, and slept peacefully now with his parents in Woodlawn Cemetery, that vast granite city of the dead at the outskirts of the Bronx. There lay Otto Preminger and Oscar Hammerstein, Miles Davis, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, and Herman Melville. His siblings’ plots settled modestly beside “Our Beloved Bessie, Yiddishe Mama” and the imposing white stone belonging to Max Richter, Solomon’s stepfather. He pictured Woodlawn, a peaceful place, inhabited by marble angels. One stone couple lay entangled in each other’s arms. It was especially beautiful in the autumn, when the granite glimmered beneath crimson leaves.

  Now retirement was around the corner, less than twelve months away and the clock ticking. A lifetime gone in the blink of an eye. A few steps farther along lay Woodlawn and the plots that waited there. A man’s working life defined him. Which meant he was—what? He still wasn’t sure.

  His wife Sarah slept soundly beside him, the overhead light turned down very low so you could just see a faint glow through the floral swirls of the milk-white lamp. Outside it had begun to snow lightly on the new decade. He wrapped his arms around her. She did not move. Her feet were icy cold, and he tried to warm them with his own—a small kindness given too late, and one she slept through unaware. She no longer looked like the young woman he had married; her skin at the chest was loose under her flannel nightgown. Yet she
was still beautiful to him, still mysterious. She slept with her mouth slightly open, as if she had swallowed a disk of darkness.

  “Happy New Year,” the judge told the darkness, hugging her tighter, pressing himself against the familiar length of her body, and finally he, too, slept.

  JANUARY 2011

  Waiting

  Nicole and Jay sat in the waiting room of the radiology department. He was reading Sports Illustrated, turning the pages with one hand, frowning in concentration, while the other hand clasped one of hers. Nicole did not read. She tried to ignore the soap opera blaring in a corner of the room. In an hour they had to pick Daisy up from school. They’d already been waiting forty-five minutes. Her heart was fluttering in her chest, fluid and ice cold.

  “Maybe we should go,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

  Jay looked up from the magazine and smiled reassuringly. He inched his chair toward her, and strengthened his hold on her hand. “They said it would only be another five or ten minutes.”

  “Okay, but then we should go.”

  He shook his head. “Relax,” he said. “Everything is going to be fine.”

  When someone walked into the room, her head jerked up. It was not the radiologist, but someone else she knew. At first she could not place him, his round, pleasant face, the navy-blue watch cap—it was the crossing guard at Daisy’s elementary school, a man she knew simply as Angelo. He recognized her, too. His face broke into a wide grin, one gold tooth gleaming.

  “Little Daisy, right?” He held out one hand to demonstrate the little girl’s height.

  “Right,” Nicole said. “Jay, this is Angelo. Angelo—my husband Jay.”

  He sat right across from her, dropping heavily into the chair. He rubbed one of his knees. She had noticed whenever he helped them cross the street that he walked with a slightly rocking gait.

  Jay looked up, friendly but cautious. “How you doing,” he said.

  “Angelo is the best crossing guard in the world. I once saw him charm a little runaway back into the school.”

  Angelo laughed. “Happens all the time. What are you in for?” he asked. He gestured around the room.

  “Oh!” she said. “Tests.”

  “You okay?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I hope so. We’ll know better in about ten minutes.” Jay had gone back to reading his Sports Illustrated. They had dropped hands, but Jay kept one palm protectively over Nicole’s blue-jeaned knee.

  “Doctors,” Angelo said. “Doctors and their tests. You can’t believe everything they tell you.”

  “I suppose not,” she said.

  “That’s what I keep telling her,” Jay said, looking up. He licked one finger and turned a page.

  “I’ve got a bum knee,” Angelo said. “Two bum knees, in fact. One I hurt on the job six years ago, mowing that steep hill behind the school. Smashed my leg to pieces. The school didn’t want to pay. Made me go to court over it, but the judge was a true gentleman. He told them where to go. He says to me, Mr. Lucca, I understand you spent eight hours in the hospital waiting for the X-ray results. Can you tell the court why it took so long? I says, that’s because to save money they sent the X-rays to Australia. Australia? he says. That’s right, Your Honor. The continent of Australia. You may have heard of it.”

  Nicole laughed.

  “Daisy is a real nice little girl,” he said. “Some of the kids, they were poking fun at me on account of my swarthy complexion. Hurt my feelings. You know what she says? She says, I think Angie is beautiful just the way he is. She stood right up for me. Bee-yootiful. I told my wife about it.”

  “Sounds just like her mother,” Jay said, at the exact same instant that Nicole said, “She takes after her father.” They gazed at one another and laughed.

  Angie looked from one parent to the other. “My wife says we should get your little girl a present. Wanted to bake her a batch of cookies. Trust me, you and your little girl, you’re both going to be A-okay.”

  There was a burst of gunfire from the TV set. Nicole and Jay both flinched and turned to look at the same time. On the TV the music swelled. Angelo shrugged and laughed.

  “If I’m going to find out I’m dying, I don’t want to do it to organ music,” Nicole said.

  “Aw, now—” Angelo began.

  “Mrs. Greene?” The radiologist was standing in the doorway, wearing pale blue scrubs. He blinked, as if surprised to find himself standing in the light. He wasn’t smiling, and he didn’t look directly at her. Instead he kept his eyes on Jay, who jumped to his feet, as if he were in the backcourt and could dart in front of her and shield her. She forgot sometimes how tall her husband was. There was a sudden roaring in her head as of rushing waters. When she stood, she tottered for an instant. Jay put out one hand; it closed protectively around her wrist.

  “Good luck,” Angelo said.

  “Mrs. Greene? This way, please.” There was a touch of impatience in the radiologist’s voice, though he tried to disguise it by smiling in her general direction. Still he had not met her eyes. Then he turned and disappeared back through the doorway. Jay was looking at her pleadingly. She would have kissed him good-bye, as they always kissed at every parting, no matter how brief, but the radiologist had already gone inside. She would have stopped time for Jay’s sake. She wanted to say something reassuring, but could think of no words. There was nothing for her to do but follow.

  APRIL 2011

  A Moment

  By spring of 2011, Nicole had been sick long enough that she barely remembered how it felt to be well. How to behave like a nonsick person, how to function in that world. It was like trying to stand on two land masses slowly drifting apart. Whoever had invented the phrase “in sickness and in health” had no idea how hard it was to keep the two together. The rules of each sphere, the measures, the people, the vocabulary—all were different. She could rattle off the names of every medication they had tried, but couldn’t conjure up the names of her daughter’s classmates. What was it like to wake in the morning with enough energy to meet the day—how to get through a night without pain, nausea, or panic—she no longer knew. The diagnosis of leukemia and lymphoma seemed to have come a century ago, falling like a hammer.

  Jay and Daisy had learned to tiptoe around her. They planned morning expeditions on the weekends to Dunkin’ Donuts so that Nicole could sleep a little longer. They went to parent/child swim classes at the Huntington Y. For the first time since her daughter’s birth, Nikki was not the primary caregiver, not the center of her daughter’s universe. After a particularly ghastly round of chemo, she’d missed one of Daisy’s dance recitals. She vowed never to let that happen again, not while there was a breath left in her body. She got angry, and the anger carried her. From that day forward, she would schedule her medical life around Daisy, not the other way around. But the energy came at a price. Every month, every week, she was losing ground.

  Nikki was in her midthirties, but she looked older these days; cords stood out on either side of her neck. Her eyes, a dark brown, gleamed with unearthly intensity, and her skin, still porcelain and glowing under the faintest dusting of freckles, had the bluish-white translucence of a teacup’s rim. As a teenager she had been cast in a few bit parts in movies, and she had worked as a print model for Macy’s in her twenties. Now, ill as she was, she was still beautiful enough to turn heads on the street.

  Her cousin Ari rested his cheek on one hand and considered this, without wanting to seem as if he were staring. When they were children, he was mesmerized by Nicole’s beauty, and often teased about it. He had learned how to sneak glances at his red-haired cousin, when to look away. It was not some silly romantic feeling that had moved him but something deeper. It was, he thought, the way some people felt about a sunset or a mountain view—the fascination you had with something so beautiful because of the sheer wonder of it. It was hard to believe they were related by blood. No one else in his family looked quite like her. His own parents were downright funny looki
ng. Yet there Nikki was. She was the closest he came to having a baby sister. Ari had learned about loving by the way he practiced loving Nicole. And he hadn’t always been all that good at it. He remembered the feel of her sharp flannel-pajamaed ribs when they used to play Tickle Torture, a game he had enjoyed far more than she did, with an almost guilty pleasure, and the thought that he may have actually tormented her still made him blush.

  At the moment he appeared to be gazing just past Nicole into the depths of his long, sloping backyard. It was as smooth and green as a golf course, interrupted only by the turquoise cover of the pool. He could see his tennis court beyond a scrim of trees. Daisy and Julian were upstairs, playing a board game. Now and again he could hear shouts of laughter. The baby, Arianna, napped in her nursery on the third floor. The intercom to the nursery lay on the kitchen table, emitting nothing but steady, quiet static. His wife Mimi was still in the shower. The sound of rushing water overhead made a ringing background noise against the silence between the cousins. Here was a chance to talk. He never knew what to say. Once upon a time they had talked for hours, without awkwardness or reservation. When had that stopped? They were seldom alone together anymore, Nicole and Ari.

  Nicole sat at her cousin’s kitchen table, leaning her face on her hand. It was an expensive table that matched the long countertops, with the sheen of mother of pearl, but deeper, the shimmering electric blue of a twilight sky. Ammonites, millions of years old, were embedded in it as well. The table and counters, custom-made, had cost thirty thousand dollars.

  They sat like mirror images, Nicole and Ari, head in hand. But it was really Mimi that Nikki was great friends with now; everyone knew that. In college she had introduced Mimi to Ari Wiesenthal, and then—as it seemed to Ari—his cousin had forgotten all about him. She grew up, she moved on. Suddenly he no longer knew all her tastes, her secrets. He remembered how, when she was a newlywed, he had bought her an expensive angora sweater for her birthday. Nikki had looked with him almost in pity and said, “Oh, Ari.”