“Then you’re crazier than I thought.”
“Why?”
“You’re a starving graduate student, Thisbe. I should have bought you more than a tank of gas. I should have paid for your therapist.”
“Who are you to talk? You don’t take money from Gretchen either.”
“But if I were a graduate student—”
“Oh, stop it with the graduate student, already! It’s insulting!”
“And if I were a widow with a three-year-old to take care of, I wouldn’t have so much pride.”
“Is that what you think this is? Pride?”
“You don’t?”
“You’re her granddaughter, Lily.”
“And you’re—”
“I lived in the same city as her for years and I hardly ever saw her. I’m just some girl who married into the family.”
“You’re the mother of her great-grandson, is what you are.”
“Who, a year later, is shacked up with another guy.”
“Ah,” Lily says. “So that’s the issue. Wyeth.”
“It’s one of them. I don’t want the privilege of receiving Gretchen’s gift. Or the burden of it, either. I’m alone now, and I want to do things on my own. You of all people should understand that.”
“And so you’ll deprive Calder in order to make your point?”
“Calder will manage.”
“How?”
“The same way everyone else manages who doesn’t have two hundred thousand dollars in his name. Which is to say the rest of the world.”
“So what are you going to do with the money? Just let it sit there?”
“It’s what I’ve been doing until now.”
“Fine,” Lily says. “I can see your mind is made up.”
They stop in to O’Brien’s to pick up some beers, and now, as they move silently around the bend, the Community Center comes into view, where Leo’s memorial will be held tomorrow. It’s six in the evening, and two women in their forties emerge from the center holding yoga mats. Above the entrance to the center is an American flag. “God bless America,” Lily says glumly. “Don’t forget to salute.”
In back, beyond the long porch that spans the width of the building, sits a playground. Everything is made of plastic, the jungle gym and the slide curling back on themselves like those rollercoaster straws Thisbe used to drink from as a girl. The ground is lined with wood chips, and she spreads out her jacket and sits down. Lily subsides next to her. Across from them sits a basketball court and five tennis courts. Down the hill is an expanse of green with a volleyball net erected in the middle. An elderly couple has been playing tennis, but now they’ve put their racquets away, and it’s just Thisbe and Lily alone.
It’s a hundred yards across the lawn to the Lenox Children’s Center, where, when they sit down on the concrete steps, they can see the Community Center looming above them, the ballroom on the second floor where the memorial will be held. Behind the Children’s Center Thisbe installs herself on a swing. Now Lily does, too, and soon they’re swinging, climbing high above town, then descending in an arc toward each other.
“Look at me,” Thisbe says, pointing at her open beer bottle. “I’m back in Lenox and I’m going to get myself arrested.”
“You’ll spend Leo’s memorial in jail.” Lily moves past her in the shadows, her legs and torso flashing by. The cables sway from side to side; their legs almost touch. Lily takes her hand, and now they’re swinging together, as if they’re on a trapeze.
Back on the steps, they stare up the hill at the Community Center. “That’s where it’s going to be,” Thisbe says. “My late husband’s memorial.”
“Your late husband,” Lily says, and she forces out a laugh.
“I figure if I talk that way it might be easier.”
They sit quietly for several seconds, dragging their feet through the grass.
“Everyone who knew us says Leo and I were great together. Our tragic love story. There’s no love like the love that’s been erased.”
“What about you?” Lily says.
“Me?”
“Do you say you were great together?”
“Sometimes we were great and sometimes we weren’t.” Toward the end, she admits, they were less and less great. In the months leading up to his departure for Iraq, she and Leo were fighting more and more. It was even worse when he got there. She would stay up like a schoolgirl waiting for his call, and when he finally did call, they would fight about the fact that he hadn’t been calling. Calder’s second birthday was coming up, and she wanted to know whether he would be home for the party. But he couldn’t be sure, which was his answer to everything. They’d agreed, he reminded her, that he would go to Iraq. Agreed! As if he’d signed a contract! I agree to work for Newsday for a paltry salary! I agree to cover a war I’m opposed to, waged by a president I don’t support, a president who stole the election! And she—she’d agreed to none of it!
Leo didn’t make it home for Calder’s birthday, and a week later, at four in the morning, Thisbe had to take Calder in to the emergency room. He was having an asthma attack; he couldn’t breathe.
“Come home now,” she told Leo.
“What do you mean come home now? What would I tell my editor? That my kid is sick?”
“I don’t care what you tell your editor. Just come home.”
Where, she wondered, was the boy she’d met, affable, winsome Leo who had once convinced his mother to grow pot for him; that way, she could be sure it wasn’t tainted. Years ago, in that vast swath of his life before she came along, he used to argue with his friends about which was the better trick, putting the porn movie inside the Disney movie box or the Disney movie inside the porn movie box, both of which pranks they used to perform on torpid summer nights as they trolled the local video store. It was sophomoric, it was ridiculous, Thisbe didn’t even know him then, but she’d have chosen that teenager over the man he had become.
Yet even early on she’d seen glints of his resolve. When he was editor of the Argus, he’d once stayed up for sixty straight hours.
“So the defense rests,” Lily says.
“What defense?”
“Even if your marriage to Leo was perfect, you wouldn’t have to justify what’s happening now.”
Maybe she doesn’t, Thisbe thinks. But what she doesn’t tell Lily, what she can’t bring herself to say, is that late at night in one of their awful phone calls she told Leo she was through; she wanted a trial separation. Afterward, she had a premonition he was going to die. Silly, silly Thisbe, she thought. What did it mean to have a premonition your husband was going to die in Iraq? Someone aimed a gun at you, and you were long past the point of premonition.
“It’s no fun being alone,” she says. “I’m thirty-three and I have a toddler, and when people say ‘How are you?’ to me I wonder if it’s a greeting or a question. Because if it’s a question, the answer is long, and it’s different from moment to moment.” Everyone, she thinks, wants to know about the milestones—Leo’s birthday, their anniversary—and those are hard, of course, but it’s the everyday things that are the toughest. When she used to shop for groceries, she would get this cereal Leo liked, Great Grains Raisins, Dates and Pecans, and she mustn’t have been thinking because a couple of months ago she ended up with a box of it in her shopping cart. There it was when she got home, sitting in her bag from the Strand, which was where she and Leo used to buy their books. She was clear across the country, holding that box of cereal, and she couldn’t even eat it—she’s allergic to nuts—and she was standing in the kitchen and she started to cry.
“Before Leo died,” she tells Lily, “we talked about getting a dog. He had his heart set on a Siberian husky. He’d even picked out a name for her. He was going to call her Demeter. But I wasn’t going to take care of a dog while he was in Iraq. You come back, I told him, you settle into a life in Berkeley, and we’ll get a dog.” But then he died and she was alone, and she thought, stupidly, she’d be
less lonely if she had a dog, and Calder wanted a dog, too. But there was no way they could handle a Siberian husky. She had just started graduate school and she was taking care of Calder, who was as much work as a whole pack of Siberian huskies. “So we settled on a turtle,” she tells Lily, “and sometimes when I’m home and Calder is at day care I’ll go over to the tank and pick that turtle up. I’ll take my highlighter and poke it in the back because I’m just the kind of compulsive grad student who always carries her highlighter with her, and the turtle will just lie there—dead, for all I know. There I am, in my T-shirt and underwear at eleven in the morning, thinking, This is the solution to my loneliness? A fucking reptile? A turtle I’ve named Demeter, which is a retarded name for a turtle, especially since it turns out he’s male? And all I can think is, I’m never, ever going to get over Leo.”
“You are getting over him,” Lily says.
“Which is even worse.”
Lily stares straight ahead of her. “If it’s as serious with Wyeth as you say it is, you’re going to have to tell my parents.”
Thisbe nods. She also needs to talk to Noelle. Because Noelle was the last person to see Leo alive. Maybe Noelle can answer her questions. Thisbe doesn’t even know what those questions are, but she knows she needs to talk to her.
They drive back to the house with the windows open, the breeze blowing Thisbe’s hair against her face. Lily presses on the gas, and now they’re hurtling up Cliffwood Street into the shadows.
When they reach the house, a single lantern is on next to the bird feeder, casting a ribbon of light across the porch. A lamp flashes on upstairs. Thisbe shuts the car door behind her and, using her jacket as an umbrella, she makes her way up the path.
When they step inside, David is in the foyer removing his rain boots. Amram, though, hasn’t returned. Noelle, as if to make a point, has set the dinner table without a place setting for him.
“Don’t worry,” Marilyn says. “He’ll be back soon.”
“That’s what you told me six hours ago.”
Marilyn stands at the entrance to the kitchen, holding a ladle in one hand and an oven mitt in the other. “You were gone for quite a while.”
“We had a lot to talk about,” Lily says.
“Well, come help make dinner.” Marilyn ushers them through the swinging door and into the pantry, where she hands them each an apron. She removes a bunch of carrots from the fridge, and a bag of arugula. “You can wash and chop these,” she tells Thisbe. “The salad bowl is above the sink. And you,” she says to Lily, “can help me make the fruit soup.”
“Keep busy,” Lily says. “That’s your solution to everything.”
“It’s my solution to nothing,” Marilyn says. “But people need to eat.”
9
It’s eight o’clock, but dinner hasn’t started yet; everyone is stalling except Noelle. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s eat.” If they wait until Amram comes back they may never eat again. Yet even as she’s thinking this, she cranes her neck and looks out the window, hoping to see his car.
“Pavlov’s bell is ringing,” Marilyn says. She bangs a fork against the kettle, but all it makes is a dull thud.
“I hope Pavlov could hear well,” Lily says.
“Certainly better than me,” says Noelle. She set the table earlier, but she put the knife on the left and the fork on the right and the spoon on the inside of the fork, knowing as she did so that she was making a mistake but not sure how to correct it. It didn’t matter, she told herself. As long as everyone had silverware. But it felt symbolic of something larger. If there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, she could be counted on to choose the wrong way.
“Where’s Abba?” Yoni asks.
“He’ll be back soon,” Noelle says, doing her best to sound convincing.
“Where did he go?”
“Out,” she says. “To run some errands.”
“What errands?” Dov says. “Why has he been gone so long?”
“Boys, boys,” Noelle says, drawing the four of them into a hug. “So many questions.”
They eat at the same table where they ate last night, only now, with the children present, they’re flank to flank as if at a trough. Marilyn has placed a long silk runner down the length of the table, all blues and reds and purples, in the hope that something colorful might brighten her mood. One of the chandelier bulbs has gone out, and she gets on tiptoe and taps at it until it comes on again. She spins the chandelier like a roulette wheel. It’s what she used to do when the children were babies—the rotating lights mesmerized them—and when she does it now Ari snaps to attention, watching the bulbs spin and spin.
“In another life you’d have been Vanna White,” Lily says.
“Whoever that is,” says Marilyn.
“Oh, Mom, come on.”
Marilyn has seated the children strategically, adult next to child next to adult next to child, but there’s only so much strategic seating can do. At her table sit an eight-year-old, a six-year-old, a five-year-old, and two three-year-olds. A representative of every age group, like some child’s version of the UN. Though they feel at the same time like one age group: the rabble. She didn’t have enough dining room chairs to seat them all, so Clarissa removed two folding chairs from the closet, but now the boys are fighting over who gets the regular chairs and who gets the folding ones, and soon they’re negotiating over the size of the cutlery—some of them got larger forks than others—and Ari is saying he wants the teddy bear spoon, but the teddy bear spoon, Noelle informs him, is back in Israel.
“It’s not fair!” Ari says.
“It never is,” says Noelle, blowing out air in mock exasperation, though the feeling is less counterfeit than she lets on.
“That’s Calder’s favorite phrase,” Thisbe says.
Noelle says, “Sometimes I think it’s Ari’s only phrase. It’s the first thing he says when he wakes up in the morning. I should put it on a T-shirt.”
Marilyn wishes her grandsons would settle down, especially now, the night before Leo’s memorial. He was your father, she wants to say. And your uncle. Show some respect. But they would just stare at her blankly, the way grandchildren have been staring at their grandparents for years, the way, she suspects, she stared at her own grandparents. So she decides to be Zen about it, a phrase and a concept she doesn’t like, but if being Zen about it means surrendering, then that’s what she wants to do.
“Will you be joining us?” she asks David. He’s wandering about the living room, toolbox in hand, as if he’s less a member of the family than the neighborhood contractor: foreman of the crew. He has finished with the hinge on the bathroom mirror, and now he’s on to the other bathroom, where the paint has started to flake. Okay, she wants to say, you’ve made your point. They will have to sell the house, but they don’t have to sell it this minute, or this week. David’s just staging his mute protest, but at this point she’s inclined to let him. Leo’s memorial is tomorrow, and as the time has drawn closer, she has found herself buried among his possessions, absenting herself for the last few hours while she ransacked his room, she doesn’t know for what.
“I’m not hungry,” David says, and she’s almost glad for it. She’d rather he not be in the way.
“Well, if you want anything, it’s on the stove.”
“Okay,” he says tonelessly.
“I’ll put the leftovers in a baggie.”
“That’s fine.”
“I’ll leave dessert out, too.”
But David has already departed, back to the bathroom and then who knows where, to wherever his revolving workstation deposits him.
Even without him and Amram, everyone is crowded around the table like at a mess hall; the boys are all elbows as they reach over each other, fighting for the orange juice and the sweetened iced tea.
Marilyn serves the fruit soup while Noelle forks the kosher food onto her boys’ plates, the corned beef on bagels, which she splatters ketchup and mustard on, dousing e
verything in condiments because that’s how her boys like it. Through her eating restrictions she’s separated herself from the others, but she feels as if they’ve separated themselves from her. She thinks of Joseph down in Egypt, of the ancient Egyptian custom of eating separately from the Israelites. That’s how she feels now, not sure if she’s the Israelite or the Egyptian here, only that she’s been banished. The corned beef abrades her throat as it goes down; the pastrami feels no better. She doesn’t like cold cuts, but that’s all she has. She’s overcome by the urge to dispense with everything: all these senseless rules. Amram’s not here to watch over her, and it’s only the shame of thinking this (Has that been his role? To keep her in line?) that makes her continue to eat what she’s eating. She glances at her watch, then at her cell phone. He’s been gone for seven hours.
“You’ve gotten a suntan,” Marilyn says. She’s looking up at Thisbe across the table.
“My life’s one big suntan,” Thisbe says. “That’s the problem when you go to school out west. It’s hard to study indoors.” She thinks Marilyn might rebuke her; she can be a fanatic when it comes to sunscreen. A doctor and a mother, Leo used to say; it was a lethal combination.
Marilyn is wearing a row of bracelets, which clink against each other like wind chimes. She’s looking up at Thisbe again. It’s Leo she’s thinking about, though she’s thinking about Thisbe too, which is another way of thinking about Leo.
It’s her own fault, she believes. She still doesn’t know why she didn’t warm to Thisbe. Was it because everyone else warmed to her, because everyone found her so congenial, so winning, everyone, that is, except for Marilyn herself, who felt compelled to stand up for some principle she couldn’t even name? Everybody thinks Marilyn didn’t like Thisbe because she wasn’t Nora; it’s what Thisbe herself believes. But that’s not true. Marilyn knew Nora when she was four, when Nora used to run along the beach in her purple flip-flops and yellow one-piece, Leo, in his own flip-flops, dutifully trailing her. “Those two are going to get married,” Nora’s mother used to say, and Marilyn saw no harm in agreeing. She liked Nora. But there was always a species of compassion in the way she liked her. Nora was lovely, but she was troubled, and this was apparent to Marilyn even when Nora was in preschool, the way obstacles impeded her that other children could surmount; not infrequently, she reminded Marilyn of Noelle. As headstrong as he was, there was never a chance Leo would marry Nora; for all her drama, she was safe. She was the exact sort of girlfriend for a teenage son of hers to have: adventurous, explosive, ultimately anodyne.
World Without You Page 21