“Now, now,” Sol said, awkwardly patting her on the arm. He had never been physically affectionate with Ruth—or with any women except his wife and daughter. He just didn’t know how. “You’re not even sure it’s a stroke. Wait and see what the doctors say.”
“But what if it is a stroke?” Ruth persisted. She had always been stubborn, a little bull terrier.
“Then we’ll deal with it. People recover from strokes all the time,” Sol said. “Arthur is tougher than he looks. You wait and see.”
“They recover?”
“Sure they do. All the time.” He was lying through his teeth. He had no idea about strokes. His own uncle Mortie had died of one. So had his cousin Sadie, when she was only in her fifties. In his experience, that’s what happened. People had a stroke out of nowhere, maybe two, sometimes they eked along for a few weeks, and then they died. How old was Arthur? Sixty-eight. That was still considered young, these days.
“Have you called your son?” he asked Ruth.
“He’s very concerned. But this is tax season. He told me to call the minute we have any news.”
Schmuck, thought Sol. Aloud he said, “Look, I’m going to step out into the waiting room just for a minute and call Sarah, let her know where I am. Then I’ll be right back. She can call Abigail. I’m sure they’ll all want to see Arthur.”
“You’ll come right back?” Ruth asked. She seemed resigned to being deserted by the world. Her bulgy eyes were red and tear-filled.
“I’ll be back.”
“You’re not leaving?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he told her.
She clawed at his hand again. Her fingernails were painted bright red. “You’re a good guy,” she said. “Some people say you’re a mean bastard, but I was never one of those. I know you got a good heart, like your brother. I know you twos love each other.”
“Can I get you anything?” he asked.
“How about a double martini straight up,” she said. She opened her mouth to pantomime a laugh, but nothing came out.
LATE SPRING 2012
Flying High
The chains on the backyard swing creaked in and out, in and out. Jay kept promising to oil them, but lately he had let everything slide. The chains needed to be adjusted, too. Daisy’s long legs barely skimmed above the ground as she swung. Julian wished, not for the first time, that he was handier, but his father had never taught him anything practical, as if Ari were afraid that if Julian learned how to use a hammer he was doomed to become a day laborer. Daisy seemed set on going up so high that the swing would flip right over the top pole. Every so often one of the frame poles lifted a little in its spot, and then thumped back down again, like an old man limping. What if it came apart?
Daisy twisted her lovely face around to look at Julian. “Push me harder!” she commanded. “I want to go really, really high.”
“You are going high,” he said, giving her a halfhearted push. “Aren’t you getting a little too old for this swing?”
“No!” she said. “I’m only eight.”
“Soon you’ll be nine.”
“You’ll be twelve. You’ll be a teenager.”
They both contemplated this a moment. Then Julian shrugged. “No biggie.”
“Hang on,” Daisy said. “I’m going to jump off.”
This was Julian’s least favorite part of her swinging. He was always sure his cousin, who looked as if she was made of twigs in the first place, was going to leap into the air and land in the dirt, snapping a few bones in the process. She never did, though. Instead she went flying again and landed graceful as a cat. Her dark brown eyes were flecked with gold, also like a cat’s. She smiled at him through the swing, and his heart melted.
“Are you going to get bar-mitzvahed next year?” she asked.
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Things are sort of—up in the air.”
“If you do, I won’t be able to come, you know.”
“Then I won’t bother. It’s a lot of work anyway.”
“Don’t be silly,” Daisy said. “You’ll be great. You’re great at everything.”
“So…” Julian stuck his hands into the pockets of his baggy khaki pants and looked around the yard. It looked sort of bare, especially compared to his. “What do you want to do now?”
Daisy squatted in the dirt, drawing something with a stick. She was a surprisingly good artist. She was always scribbling, painting, doodling. Her little desk was covered with dozens of little pieces of paper. Her artwork hung on all the walls of her house and completely obscured the Greenes’ refrigerator. Julian even had a couple over his desk. She was drawing a mermaid in the dirt now, complete with tail and long, flowing hair. “I don’t know,” she said in a dull voice. “My mom’s resting again. We probably should stay out here.”
“Okay,” Julian agreed, though he was thirsty.
“I don’t know,” she said again. Her shoulders slumped. She looked up again, her wide eyes catching the glint of gold from the afternoon. “I don’t think she’s very long for this world.”
Something about the adultness of the expression made Julian shiver. It was partly to dissipate his own chill that he went over and put his arms around his cousin. She wasn’t usually very demonstrative; for one thing it was hard for her to stand still in one place long enough. Like hugging a sunbeam. But now she rested her sharp little chin on his shoulder.
“I’ll always be here for you,” Julian said into her hair. “I’ll always take care of you. That’s a promise.”
“I know,” she said. His shoulder was getting damp; that was the only way he could tell she was crying. He patted her bony back.
“Thanks. Your shirts always smell nice,” she said.
“They do?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Like deodorant.”
Julian laughed.
Daisy kept her face pressed against him. “I made my dad promise to live at least till you’re twenty-one. Then you’d be old enough to be my guardian. He says he plans to live a lot longer than that, though.”
“I’m sure he will,” Julian said. He suddenly felt awkward, holding his cousin. A strand of her red hair fell over his wrist like a copper bracelet. That kind of thing came over him suddenly, these days. Feeling too clumsy to hold a pencil, much less a human being. Becoming formal all of a sudden, like a wooden soldier.
“So,” he said, putting her at arm’s length. “Seriously, what do you want to do? Ride bicycles?”
Daisy’s bicycle was small and pink, covered with images of some cartoon character. She had just shed her training wheels that spring. But she was already more adept on her bike than Julian was on his. Her face lit up. “Yay!” she said, clapping her hands. “Let’s ride. I want to show you my new basket and streamers.”
“I’m sure they’re very pretty,” he said condescendingly. “Do you have a light?”
“What for? It’s the middle of the afternoon.”
“For riding at night, silly. You want one in front so you can see the road. Then you need a light in back, maybe with blinkers, so you can signal which way you’re turning, like a car.”
“Like a car,” she breathed.
“Next time I come,” he promised, “I’ll bring you a set of lights. Cool ones. Blinking ones.” He imitated the lights by opening and closing both hands. She smiled radiantly. It was worth making an idiot of himself, he thought, for that smile.
Arthur was able to sit up in bed. He had spent nine days in the ICU, suffering what the doctors feared was a second stroke, but now he’d been moved to a regular hospital room, which he shared with an old black man addicted to watching sports on TV. The room was never quiet for one minute. Shouts went up steadily, periodically, from the other side of the room, and the white curtain did nothing to muffle the sound.
Arthur had been in intensive care so long he had already lost weight. His face, no longer so chubby, had begun to sag with age. But he was perfectly cheerful. His speech was unimpaired, the muscle
s unaffected; he had escaped the worst effects of a stroke and knew enough to be grateful. They had him on all kinds of drugs, of course—something for high blood pressure, plus Coumadin to thin his blood and who knew what else. It seemed like every day they discovered a new condition for which there was a new medication. The result, he explained, was that his memory was all out of whack. He might not remember that Sol had visited him three days earlier, but he had a vivid and exact recollection of going blueberry picking in the Catskills with his brother when they were young children.
“You remember,” he would prod his brother. “The hills were covered with blueberry bushes. Mama wore a red handkerchief, with little blue and yellow triangles on it. We brought tin pails along and the berries made the most wonderful plunking sound going into the pail. Like tree frogs.”
Arthur’s descriptions were so vivid that for an instant Sol would believe that he did indeed remember. A whole scene would flash before his eyes—but whether it was really memory, or just some picture that Arthur had created, he could not tell.
“You were so intense,” Arthur went on. “You’d square up to the nearest bush and just pull whatever came into your hand and pop it into your mouth. Even the hard little green berries that weren’t ripe.—I think you liked the sour ones best of all.”
“Matched his disposition,” said Ruth, calmly crocheting in the corner. She was making some rainbow-colored blanket for Iris, in garish colors—lime green, orange, fluorescent pink.
She seldom left her post in that hospital room, sitting on what was otherwise Arthur’s commode and leaving the more comfortable armchair for guests. Day and night, she sat watching over Arthur, leaving only to bring him in decent takeout food. She drove all over Queens, looking for delicacies to tempt him. Ever the gourmand, he could not bear the sight, much less the smell or taste, of hospital food. The orderlies with their Styrofoam trays were banished from his side of the room, and often Arthur begged Ruth to bring some decent food for his roommate—partly out of pity, partly so he wouldn’t have to smell the aroma of the hospital food six or seven feet away.
“I don’t really remember,” Sol said, regarding the unripe blueberries.
Sarah gave him a sharp look, as if his failure to remember were a kind of betrayal.
“They were so tart they made my mouth pucker. I could go for a handful of those green and red blueberries right now. You know,” Arthur said, turning to Ruth, “the next time I make a blueberry compote I think I’m going to throw in a few of the little unripe berries, for extra flavoring. I’ll bet it would be delicious. Like adding a squeeze of lemon or lime.”
“Maybe,” Ruth said dubiously.
The other side effect of the drugs, Arthur explained, was that he was having vivid and extended dreams. Almost like hallucinations.
“It’s like living a second life at night,” he said. “I wake up exhausted.”
“Poor baby,” Sarah said. She had always been fond of her brother-in-law; she saw what Sol regarded as his weaknesses as signs of his gentleness and good heart.
“Some good heart,” Sol had grumbled. “Two heart attacks and two strokes.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Sarah had rebuked him, “and you know it. Shah! Still jealous of your own brother.”
“Take last night, for instance,” Arthur said now. “I dreamed I was giving a luncheon party at our house. Everything very elegant—white linens, crystal, good wine. You were there, Sol, and Sarah, you, too.”
“What about me?” Ruth demanded.
“You of course,” Arthur said. “Looking like an angel, as usual. You know who else was there?” He looked at Sol, as if it would be easy for him to guess.
“Jesus Christ?” Sol said.
“Close. Mr. O’Hare.—Our elementary school principal,” he explained to the others. “Nice man. Worked at that same job for forty years. He used to brag that you could eat off his playground. And you could.” He shut his eyes, remembering. “So, we’re in the middle of this elegant party when I suddenly realize—We are serving canned salmon.” His throat wobbled with distress. “There it is, on each person’s china plate.”
“Oh, dear,” Sarah said sympathetically.
“What’s so terrible about canned salmon?” Ruth said. “It’s not like we were serving canned tuna.”
“Yes, but my dear,” said Arthur tragically, “couldn’t you at least have taken the salmon out of the can?”
Abigail and the rabbi—even now it was hard for her to think of him as simply Teddy—had seen each other six or seven times, but always just as friends. At the end of each event, the same warm friendly grasp of the hand, or at most, a kiss on the cheek. Yet he persisted in calling her. His gaze followed her wherever she went; when she stood across the room from him, no matter how crowded it was, she would find his dark eyes searching her out. He leaned close to her when they spoke; his voice was tender and warm. He had all the symptoms of a man in love except that he did not behave at all like a man in love. It was maddening. Especially since Abigail had no doubts about her own feelings for him. It was a textbook head-over-heels schoolgirl heart-hammering crush.
Even Iris seemed smitten—she reached for Teddy, flirted, batted her long eyelashes, cried when she was dragged away from him. “The child is the unspoken secret of the parent revealed,” Jung wrote, and Abigail worried that everyone in the world would see her emotions on the open face of her child. They were closely watched whenever they went out in public. Her mother told her the gossip was incessant in the bat-mitzvah group.
“They’re always nudgering me,” Sarah complained. “Always trying to get me to drop some hint. Will you please let me know what’s going on?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. We’re just friends.”
Her mother huffed. “Some friends.”
“We’re very good friends,” Abigail said. “Mom, I promise you, as soon as I know anything different, you’ll be the first to know.”
“He’s older than you are,” her mother said.
“Not as much older as you think.”
“He’s had terrible tragedy in his life.”
“He’ll get over it.”
“Hard-hearted Hannah,” her mother groused.
“I would think you would approve,” Abigail said. “A rabbi, for heaven’s sake. What more could you possibly want?”
“I do approve,” her mother said. “I just don’t want to get my hopes up. And I don’t want you to get your hopes up. I don’t like it when things are so—indefinite.”
Abigail held her tongue—she was learning this, too, from the rabbi. “You never regret the things you don’t say,” he had once told her. “We Jews are people of the mouth. And that’s what gets us into ninety-nine percent of our trouble. Saying what’s on our minds.”
“You know I love you,” Sarah said now, as if to prove the rabbi’s point about the virtue of holding one’s tongue. “I’ll gladly dance at your wedding.—Which reminds me, isn’t Tomas coming by to get the last of his things?”
“Next week, he says. He’s moving out to New Mexico. Which is fine with me.—How’s Uncle Arthur?” Abigail said, deftly changing the subject.
“Better,” her mother said. “Much better. It’s a miracle, really. The doctors are flabbergasted. He should be dead now.”
“Well, don’t tell him that,” Abigail said. “He might die just to please the doctors.”
Abigail didn’t believe she would feel anything, one way or the other, when she saw Tomas again, and for the last time. Teddy told her otherwise. “It’s going to hit you like a load of bricks,” he told her. “I just want you to be prepared.”
“It’s different for me,” Abigail told him. They were grabbing a quick lunch—he had a class to teach that afternoon, on Jewish kabbalah. That’s all people wanted to hear about these days, he said. Ever since Madonna and the other movie stars started studying kabbalah.
“How is it different for you?” he asked her now. He was busy salting his egg
s. He salted everything too much. Abigail wished she could cook for him. Keep him healthy and safe.
“Well, for one thing,” she said, “we were never married. He was just a boyfriend.”
“A boyfriend you lived with for almost four years.”
Abigail forgot that she had told him that. She should have known better; the rabbi never forgot anything. “Still, it’s not a surprise for me, the way it was for you. I saw this coming a long time ago. I don’t know that Tomas and I were ever suited to each other, really. It’s just not that big a deal.”
“You wait and see,” Teddy warned her. “Like a ton of bricks. Just call me when it happens. Will you promise me that?”
Laughing, she promised.
Only as it turned out it wasn’t so funny after all. She did not anticipate the jolt she felt at the sight of Tomas standing among her things. He had helped pick out the dining room set; he had built the bookcase. It all came back in a rush. Tomas had already begun the move to New Mexico. He came to the apartment looking happy and fit. He’d even brought a little doll for Iris, with black hair and red smiling lips. He was wearing black pants and a white shirt, his olive skin beautiful above the open collar of his shirt. He talked about a new business venture with a female partner, and Abigail knew what that meant. His obvious happiness hurt her feelings. He kissed her good-bye, chastely, the way Teddy did. It took him two trips to the car to clear out everything he had left behind. And then, within fifteen minutes, he was gone forever and she was no longer anyone’s anything.
She had left Iris to stay with the nanny, of course, pretty blonde Lauren. Lauren was athletic, kindly, tall, young, and surprisingly cynical about relationships. Abigail sent her home early that day. “I’ll pay you, of course,” Abigail said. “I just need to be alone with Iris.”
“I understand,” Lauren said, rising quickly to go. Her own parents had had a vicious divorce—it turned out her father had been cheating on her mother for years. She scurried out the door, head down, as if fleeing her own memories, but gave Abigail a rare hug before she went.
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