“You flew out here, didn’t you?” Gretchen says. “You traveled across the country with your son.”
“He was Leo’s son, too,” Thisbe says. She can hear Calder now, playing with his cousins in the living room.
“But you could have declined the invitation. It would have been easy enough to find an excuse.”
Thisbe looks down at the floor.
“No one likes to fly across the country with a small child. Believe me, I’ve done it myself. And that doesn’t even take into account the cost of plane fare.”
“It’s okay,” Thisbe says. “It wasn’t a burden.”
“Please, Thisbe. Learn to take a compliment.”
“Okay,” she says. “Thank you, Gretchen.” It’s true, she thinks. She’s never been good at taking a compliment, certainly not from Gretchen, who always scared her and still does. She’s never been good, either, at being floodlighted with attention the way she’s being floodlighted now, and she thinks if she just acts grateful and says thank you, Gretchen might cast her gaze, her reedy voice, at someone else.
“All I know,” Gretchen says, “is that I’m surrounded by blood relatives, but it’s the people who have married into this family who have shown the most character.”
Noelle sits up ramrod straight. She’s not sure whom to defend and whom to attack. She looks directly at Gretchen. “If Thisbe’s so loyal, why does she have a new boyfriend?”
“She what?” Marilyn says.
Lily turns in her seat. “Jesus Christ, Noelle!”
“Not only that, but she’s about to move in with him. I overheard them on the phone last night.”
“What happened to your vaunted hearing defect?” And the words come back to Lily, You little snoop. Noelle always with her ear to people’s doors, never able to keep a secret. The girl who couldn’t keep her legs shut couldn’t keep her mouth shut.
“And you,” Noelle says to Lily, “saying what you did at Leo’s memorial. Don’t you have any shame?”
“I have nothing to be ashamed of,” Lily says. “Mom and Dad are splitting up. Everyone at this table knows it’s happening, and the rest of the world will know it soon, too.”
“You have a new boyfriend?” Marilyn says to Thisbe.
Thisbe hears a fork fall, a single blueberry roll across the table and drop slowly to the floor. “I was going to tell you.”
“She tried to tell you,” Lily says.
“You already knew?” says Marilyn.
“I knew Thisbe had a boyfriend,” Lily says. “He’s an old friend of Malcolm’s and mine. When we heard Wyeth was going to Berkeley, we put him and Thisbe in touch. ”
“You set them up?” Marilyn says.
“She didn’t set us up,” says Thisbe.
“Even if I did.” Lily can hear her mother’s voice. He was your brother. Where do your allegiances lie? And she hates that question. Hates the very idea of allegiances.
“I’d have met Wyeth, anyway,” Thisbe says. “Our department is tiny. A year in, and we already know each other too well.”
“That’s what kills me,” Marilyn says. “A year in.”
“What do you mean?”
“Leo was alive a year ago.”
Thisbe nods. How, she thinks, can she possibly forget this when she’s here, in Lenox, thousands of miles from home, returned like a package to Leo’s family, to everyone, to everything, she abandoned?
“Why?” Marilyn says, and she might as well be asking this about Leo himself. It’s what Thisbe herself has been asking this past year, what she continues to ask: why did this happen to him, to her, to all of them?
But Marilyn is asking her about Wyeth. “Why are you moving in with him?”
“Because I love him, Marilyn. Because I want to move in with him. Because Calder loves him, too. Because I’m thirty-three years old and …”
Marilyn is standing now, and Thisbe senses anything is possible; she believes Marilyn might hit her.
“You may think I’m an unreasonable person, Thisbe.”
“No, Marilyn. I don’t think you’re unreasonable.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to be alone for the rest of your life.”
“But you’d have liked more time?”
Marilyn nods. But now, looking down at the remains of her scrambled eggs, she says, “I don’t know.”
She’d have liked more time, too, Thisbe wants to say. She certainly hadn’t been planning for this to happen. A friend of hers once said that it’s the people with the best marriages who are the quickest to meet someone new. They like being in a relationship; it’s actually a testament to the person who died. But Thisbe’s not going to tell Marilyn this because it will sound condescending, and because she suspects it won’t ring true; she’s not even sure it rings true to her. She won’t tell Marilyn about her and Leo’s troubles. It would seem like she’s trying to absolve herself, and she doesn’t wish to be absolved. And why should she destroy her mother-in-law’s illusions when they may not be illusions in the first place? She loved Leo; they might have worked things out if he’d come home from Iraq. And if someone said it was a blissful marriage, she wouldn’t disagree. Only a year has passed, but she already can’t remember it. “I’m sorry,” she says. The words feel piddly, insufficient, a coat thrown over a corpse, but they’re all she has.
And Marilyn nods, removes her plate from the table, and silently exits the room.
Holding an ice pack, Lily climbs the stairs to the second floor and knocks on the door to Amram’s bedroom. “Can I come in?”
Amram, who has just woken up, groggily admits her. The tissue surrounding his right eye has started to inflate; the skin has already begun to yellow.
“How are you doing?”
He shrugs. “The oddsmakers say I’m going to live.”
“I’ll tell you one thing. I’d sure like to see the other guy.” Lily recalls the time Malcolm got a black eye, playing pickup basketball. He’d been breaking up a fight, and a punch intended for someone else landed on him. Socked in the eye by his own teammate. Felled by friendly fire. The skin around his eye turned yellow, then purple, then orange, before settling into a dusky blue-black. Killer Malcolm, his friends began to call him, and Lily started to call him that, too. She discovered, to her surprise, that with a certain segment of the population Malcolm’s injury conferred on him a kind of status, and one time, on the Metro, a girl whistled at him and said, “Baby, you’re hot!” Whatever else, getting punched in the face made you public property. She suspects Amram is in for that now.
“You did see the other guy,” Amram says. “She was downstairs eating breakfast with you.”
Lily steps tentatively toward him, holding out the ice pack. “Here,” she says. “I thought you could use replenishment.”
He could. The ice pack Noelle gave him is all melted now, sitting on the nightstand beside the bed, dripping to the floor. As he props himself up, he looks at Lily askance through his good eye. “Have I missed something, or have you become a doctor?”
“I was born to one,” Lily says, shrugging. “Maybe some of it got passed down.” Passed down enough, she thinks, for her to have contemplated going to medical school for a time, though a week of organic chemistry her sophomore year at Princeton ended any chance of that. It wouldn’t have worked out, anyway. She gets squeamish at the sight of blood.
“So is this the pity vote?”
“What pity vote?”
“Come on. Don’t pretend you ever liked me.” Amram seats himself up straight so he’s staring directly at her, though he needs to tilt his head to look out of his good eye.
“Since when do doctors have to like their patients?”
“Or patients their doctors.”
“Exactly.”
Lily’s hands have gotten wet from holding the ice pack, and a little numb too. She wipes them on the back of her jeans. She’s standing by the window where she can see out on the deck her father’s new telescope directed at the firmament like a cann
on. Astronomy’s a guy thing, she thinks: point your phallus at Cassiopeia. There’s something about the stars, especially in Lenox where there are so many of them, that turns a person mushy-headed. The world is so big and you’re so small; it can make you start mooning. “We missed you at breakfast,” she tells Amram.
“Was it a notable meal?”
“Among the most notable I’ve been at.”
He gives her a dubious look.
“You should have heard the praise that got heaped on you. It was a veritable love fest. Some of it even came from me.”
“Somehow, I doubt that.”
“It’s true,” she says. “Ask Noelle. She’ll fill you in on what happened.”
“If she ever talks to me again.”
“Oh, she’ll talk to you again.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“She has to. You’re her husband. And you have something else going for you. How angry can a person stay at someone who looks like that?”
Amram shrugs. “Noelle can be pretty stubborn.” Though, he’s forced to admit, he can be pretty stubborn, too.
“Just try not to let that thing heal too quickly. You’re going to want to milk that injury for all it’s worth.”
Amram smiles.
“And one more thing. The next time you disappear for a couple of days, you might call your wife to let her know where you’re going.”
Lily means what she says. She believes Noelle and Amram will work things out. If they’ve been together for this long, there must be a reason. She and Malcolm have worked things out themselves, though it’s true they don’t fight the way Noelle and Amram do, and she certainly has never hit him in the face. Still, she knows how to fight, and Malcolm, for all his reserve, knows how to fight, too. Mr. Inward-Focused, Mr. Self-Contained, but if the black cod has been cooked five seconds too long, if the leek emulsion is too lemony, he’ll take a pot to the line cook. Leo was the same way. Affable, unruffled, but you put him on the basketball court and he’d throw an elbow at you if you were in his way; he would curse out the referee and be called for a technical foul. If only, Lily thinks, she had an arena in which to do that. People think lawyers do that in the courtroom, but that’s because they watch too much TV. Lawyers spend little time in the courtroom; it’s all about negotiating and self-restraint.
Now, as she looks at Amram, she recalls the sabra, the Israeli fruit, come to be the nickname for Israelis themselves: hard on the outside and soft on the inside. “I want to thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“For bringing my grandmother back with you. Because you’re the one who did it, and though I suspect there may be a more complicated story, I’m choosing to believe the simple one.”
“What’s that?”
“That you wanted the family together one last time.” She takes a step toward Amram. She’s sticking out her arm.
“What’s that?”
“It’s my hand, Amram. I’d like you to shake it.”
He hesitates.
“Come on. You can’t claim you’re not allowed to shake a woman’s hand. You shook my hand at the airport the other night. And don’t tell me you’ve become more religious in the last few days.”
“Okay,” he says, and he reaches out to take it.
She’s still standing there awkwardly shaking his hand, and it’s only when he pulls his own hand away that she manages to extricate herself. “Get some rest,” she says.
Amram looks at her impassively and nods.
She bends over the nightstand to pick up the old ice pack, and now, holding the old one in her left hand, the new one in her right, she shuts the door and heads downstairs.
15
“Closing up for winter?” Lily says.
And for fall, spring, and summer, Clarissa thinks. She has her suitcase open and she’s tossing her clothes into it, and Nathaniel’s clothes, too. She considers herself a light packer, but now that she’s gotten to the end of the trip she hasn’t worn half the things she packed. “And you?”
“I’m looting and pillaging,” Lily says. “Mom and Dad are selling the house. I’m never coming back here.”
“You sound just like Grandma.”
“Grandma’s wise.” Lily is standing on the lip of the doorway, waiting to be invited in. “Where’s Nathaniel?”
“In the driveway.” Clarissa points out the window to where he’s standing, refilling the bird feeder.
“Doing some last-minute son-in-law tasks?”
“And some last-minute tall-person tasks.”
They could all use a tall person, Lily thinks. She and Malcolm practically have to stand on each other’s shoulders just to get down supplies.
Now Malcolm has come outside with more birdfeed. He hands it to Nathaniel, who has his arms extended above his head so it looks like he’s climbing a rope.
“Our men,” Clarissa says. She’s sitting beside Lily on her bed, her suitcase open between them. “So Thisbe has a new boyfriend.”
Lily nods.
“Now I understand why you were being so protective of her. You knew all along.”
“I knew,” Lily says, “but I didn’t realize how serious it was. Not until she told me the other day.”
“Are you surprised?”
“It’s a little sooner than I expected. But no.”
“Have you seen them together?”
“Just once,” Lily says. “They had a layover in D.C. for a couple of hours, and Malcolm and I met up with them at the terminal.”
“And?”
“It was two hours sitting across from them at a Cinnabon. But looking back at it now, I guess they were in love.”
“So he’s a good guy?”
“He was when I knew him. He was the kind of guy women wanted to marry, at least if you were the marrying kind.”
“It seems Thisbe is.”
“Most people are,” Lily says. “I’m the stubborn exception.”
“So I shouldn’t be overprotective?”
“Of Leo?”
“Of Calder.”
“You’re asking if Wyeth is good with him?”
Clarissa nods.
“I can’t imagine Thisbe would be with someone who wasn’t.” The summer Lily and Malcolm knew Wyeth, he used to entertain the other waiters by juggling produce in back. Cucumbers, melons, rutabagas: he could do it all. What three-year-old, Lily thinks, wouldn’t like that?
“I wonder where they’ll be going,” Clarissa says.
“Going?” says Lily.
“Anthropologists have to do fieldwork, Lil. And Thisbe always had wanderlust. She was married to Leo, remember?”
“Maybe she’ll go back to Africa.”
That’s exactly what Clarissa is worried about. When she pictures Africa, she thinks of dysentery and mud huts. Why can’t Thisbe fly to Scandinavia to study the Norse? “Oh, God,” she says. “It’s not like I haven’t been to those places myself.” When her boss needs someone to fly to the Third World, she’s the first to raise her hand. She’s sitting on her stripped bed, and she lets her arms fall dully against the mattress. “I’m becoming middle-aged.”
“No,” Lily says. “Just overprotective.”
She’s right, Clarissa thinks. But who is she to be protective of Calder when she’s seen him how many times since Leo died? Two? Maybe three? When he arrived in Lenox the other day, he didn’t even recognize her.
She’s in the closet now, making sure she hasn’t forgotten anything. She opens and closes dresser drawers.
“And I thought I was compulsive.”
Clarissa laughs. Nathaniel makes fun of her for doing this, but then, when he thinks she’s not looking, he does the same thing. “What about you? Did you find anything good in your looting and pillaging?”
Lily removes from her bag a T-shirt with the words I DIDN’T DO IT printed across the front. “Remember this?”
How could Clarissa forget? It was Leo’s T-shirt, and when he misplaced it one time, he pai
nted the words directly across his chest, emblem of his professed innocence. The shirt is faded, and there are tiny holes along the sleeves, and a bigger one across the back. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Save it,” Lily says, shrugging. “I don’t know.”
“You’re not going to ask if anyone else wants it?”
“Why?” Lily says. “Do you?”
As a matter of fact, Clarissa does. Though she’s embarrassed to say it, embarrassed even to think the words. It’s an old T-shirt, worn by her brother when he was twelve. What in the world would she do with it? It wouldn’t fit her; she’d stretch it until it really ripped. Besides, she hates T-shirts with words printed across them; they make her feel like a message board.
“Here,” Lily says, handing her the T-shirt. “You can have it.”
“Lily, come on.”
“You deserve it,” she says. “You were closer to him than I was.” Lily can still remember Clarissa when she was six, pressing her nose to the glass of the NICU. And years later, she would send Leo care packages at summer camp, and then again at college. “Clarissa,” she says. “Please. Take the T-shirt.”
Reluctantly, Clarissa agrees.
Out in the garden, Lily and Malcolm can be seen kissing. At least Nathaniel can see them, and now he’s saying, “Hey, kids, get a room!”
Clarissa, sitting beside him on a beach chair, agrees. “Look at those lovebirds.”
“You see?” Lily says. “Absence really does make the heart grow fonder. You should try it yourselves.”
“Okay,” Nathaniel says, looking up at them from beneath his baseball cap. “We’ll take it under advisement.”
“Take it under advisement?” Malcolm says. “What’s that? Neuroscientist talk?”
“It’s just talk-talk,” Nathaniel says, settling himself onto Clarissa’s beach chair so that it nearly topples over.
Now Lily and Malcolm are at the badminton net, hitting a shuttlecock back and forth.
“Watch him slam that thing,” Lily says. “Have you ever seen anyone so competitive?”
Clarissa says, “It takes one to know one, doesn’t it, Lily?”
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