by Miriam Sved
Today is probably one of those times for his mother – times of hair-trigger emotion – that he is definitely aware of not quite understanding from within.
(And even during that scene with Bethany, even when he was contemplating with self-destructive relish what he might be capable of doing with the ball of confused sad rage in his gut, he had looked up at her, his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, and felt a static ripple of shock when he saw that her eyes were actually filling with tears; and he’d thought, even now – even at this precipice in his young life – he was missing something.)
His mother is closer now, her halting, elderly-hampered migration having covered half the large room, Josh still hovering over the drinks table, poised suddenly on a moment of decision. Neural options flowing into different networks: a future with his mother’s cash in hand and a plane ticket to the centre of the world, where his life can begin in earnest; or a more immediate future, the cool comfort of glass like the smooth contours of an iPhone screen. Beside him, Eszter says something quietly and burps again. She seems oblivious to her hovering daughter.
‘What was that, Nagymama?’ says Josh, from high up on his knife-edge.
The old woman is nodding slowly, staring into space, into somewhere else, and she says, ‘We start always with the wrong conditions. Maybe if there is one or two changes, then everything falls into place and the truth is there like a perfect shape, but we cannot see this until it is too late.’
She nods some more, as if what she just said made any sense whatsoever, and Josh – also as if the statement made some sort of sense – feels himself tipping and sliding into a not-quite-rational decision. He doesn’t want to be in the normal, rational world at the moment; he wants to stay in this cryptically fizzing bubble where he is starting to quite like his drunk grandmother. Extending his left hand to encompass as many champagne glasses as he can hold (his mother always used to go on about his amazing finger-span when she was trying to convince him to take the piano seriously; he can hold three glasses quite easily), with his other arm he turns and encompasses Nagymama in what he hopes might look like a comforting half-embrace. He hoists her into an upright position and starts shuffling her as gently as he can towards the nearby fire escape, hoping it is not locked.
Nagymama giggles as Josh nudges the bar of the door open with his back and pivots her around, through the door, into what turns out to be a stairwell. The world of the funeral shuts behind them with a gentle click.
He experiences a swell of triumph, which dies quickly when he sees the way Nagymama is standing, one hand braced against the wall, slumped and breathing hard. Emotionally-Tourette’sy Josh thinks, If she dies in here, I definitely won’t get the money. Trying-to-be-normal Josh says, ‘Sorry, Nagymama, let me get you a chair,’ and sorties back to the other side of the fire escape, where he scans the room quickly and sees the minor miracle of both his mother and sister fully bailed up by gesticulating well-wishers in different parts of the room, neither of them looking towards Nagymama’s abandoned post. They haven’t seen. It might take them full minutes to register Nagymama and Josh’s desertion and figure out where they’ve gone. Josh grabs a chair with one hand and another cluster of champagne flutes in the other, and shoves his way back into the muffled sanctuary of the stairwell.
Nagymama sags onto the chair. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she says. ‘You are a good boy.’ She takes one of the glasses from his champagne-bristling hand. ‘Although I see why it is hard for Illy.’
Josh takes a seat on the stairs, bringing him level with Nagymama, and waits for her to explain why it is hard for his mother (what is hard? he is hard?), but she only drinks some champagne and lapses into one of those remote-eyed, slack-mouthed stares, which he thinks is her grieving face.
Josh braces himself with a large swallow of bubbles and says, ‘What did you mean before? About conditions not being right and not seeing the truth until too late?’
Her face snaps back into place and she looks at him. One hand moves in the air as though it will craft an answer, but instead she says, ‘What is this happening with your mother?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘With you and your mother. What is the problem, why you and Illy look all day at each other, so …’ She scrunches her face into a wrinkly version of stink-eye. Josh laughs.
‘Oh, you should ask her what the problem is. I mean, I don’t have a problem. I do need a favour from her. But apparently I have problems. So maybe I’m her problem.’ Hating how young he sounds, whiney and pathetic.
‘Eh.’ Nagymama waves a hand in the air. ‘The young ones always think like this. People say now about the generation, me, me – me this and that, always the me generation, but I remember it is the same when I was young. With the young it is always me, me, me.’
Josh, unsure whether he has been mollified or insulted, says, ‘Why is it hard for Mum? For … Illy?’ He says it with Nagymama’s pronunciation: Eely. ‘You said before that you could see why it’s hard for her, with me.’
She waves her hand in the air again and says, ‘It is hard for your mother to – how do you say? – make the trust. This is another one that is probably my fault.’
Josh has probably drunk too much champagne; he has a slightly vertiginous feeling of disorientation: a more intense version of the flash he had looking down at the top of Nagymama’s head, the realisation of her life’s enormity and her own centrality in it.
‘It’s hard for Mum to trust? Why? And why is it your fault?’ He is used to thinking of his mother in adolescent door-slamming terms: as unreasonable, unfair, sometimes as a bitch, but trust issues opens up a different, unrecognisable compartment.
Nagymama is nodding in a slightly trancelike way, head bobbing up and down and swaying slightly.
‘What do you mean, it’s hard for Mum to trust?’ Josh asks again, trying not to sound too eager.
‘There are things,’ she says slowly. ‘Things with us, when your Illymama is born, that are not so happy. In America everything is new and strange and we have no friends. Your Nagypapa –’ She stops. Josh waits it out. ‘I was very young when I marry your Nagypapa and the marriage is not so much … We have done things to the people we love that hurt them. There is guilt. So when your Illymama is born I think sometimes that this is a bad start. Starting with the guilt of the parents. And then when she grows up I think maybe … For a long time I think she is –’ Nagymama breaks off and does something with her face, features twisted into an angry fist, and taps her head with her finger.
‘Mental?’ Josh laughs nervously. ‘You thought she was mental?’
‘No, darling. Just so unhappy that she cannot do the normal things. Never serious boyfriends, and not so good with the studying. You know she was an artist. Wonderful with the sculptures, the print things. But always then she stops. I don’t know, she thinks maybe she wants to do something else – now it is the craft business, now the shop for tea, and always something else.’
She shrugs, and in the shrug Josh sees a hint of judgement and feels a confused flicker of associations, like an eyelid fluttered open and shut in his brain: some sense of portent carried over from his grandmother’s talk of guilt, and a gentle tug towards his mother of something like sympathy, or maybe empathy. Ildiko, the longed-for only child who never amounted to enough. And then a flash of Bethany in the fight they had, saying, ‘You don’t even know enough to be ashamed. You don’t even get how small you are in the world.’ The flicker of shame he’d felt when she said that, which he’d doused by accusing her of jealousy, threatens him again, creeping up from his toes with the banally shocking revelation that his mother and grandmother are people. People with lives and secrets that predate him.
‘What happened, Nagymama?’ he says, meaning everything. What happened between her and his grandfather? What was so bad that it infected their daughter? What happened to make them all strange?
But Nagymama
says, ‘What happens is finally, when we have all maybe given up, Illy meets your father. And we think that she leaves it too late for babies, but then there is your sister, and then’ – waving her hand to indicate Josh, his solid, unarguable existence – ‘and, phew, I think maybe we haven’t … nem tudom, what is this word?’
Josh shakes his head.
Nagymama stares into space for a moment and then comes back. ‘Blighted!’
Josh snorts. ‘Of course you hadn’t blighted her. She’s not blighted. She’s just … Mum.’
She waves him away. ‘You do not know what it is to be young when we are young. You think to buy the house, the car, to have the good job and be all the time going up in the world. It was not so easy for us. More … what do you say? Brutalis. Not cruel but …’
‘Brutal?’ Josh offers.
‘Yes, it was more brutal, this world.’
‘I thought you said young people have always been the same, that it’s not about my generation or anyone else’s generation. And anyway, I don’t care about any of that stuff: buying a house or a car or getting a good job.’ Not true. ‘Or, I don’t just care about it.’
Nagymama chuckles. ‘You are right, darling. I am the foolish babbling old woman. And when I was young these things are what I think about too. I wanted always to be able to buy beautiful things, and travel, and maybe most of all that people will admire me. Always I want to be someone. Which is not meaning someone, you understand; everyone is someone. It is meaning to be the best.’ She lets out a small belch. ‘Of course I was not the best. Never.’
The despondency of this statement hits Josh as another small revelation bobbing around camouflaged in the undergrowth of his daily life. Nagymama thinks she is a failure. Her achievements are a kind of family lore, trotted out by Josh’s parents to illuminate morals about hard work and perseverance, or sometimes about privilege and luck: Look how easy you have it. Eszter worked in dressmaking factories when they went to America and cleaned office buildings when they came to Australia, and then, at sixty-eight, kid grown up and husband retired, she turned around and got her doctorate in abstract geometry. She never really did anything, of course – her achievements might be family lore but it is universal lore that maths is a young man’s game – but she got the piece of paper and the graduation robe, and even a write-up in the local paper. It would be failure in Josh’s own terms, but it never occurred to him that Eszter had any higher ambitions. That she might have wanted more.
Josh takes a swig of his champagne and they sit together in silence. It seems like the surprising bubble of closeness will deflate in the breath-heavy air of the stairwell, until Nagymama leans over in her chair. At first Josh is worried that she is trying to stand up, that – in a badly timed alcoholic break for verticality – she might lurch right off the chair onto the ground. But she doesn’t stand up; instead she reaches a hand towards him, a quick old claw that he initially jerks away from. Unfazed, Nagymama leans further forward and … strokes his hair. Or, rather, gets a wedge of it between her fingers and gently pulls it, letting it spring back into place. She laughs.
‘Always I wanted to do this.’ She does it again, and says, ‘Boing! ’ And then, ‘I wanted always to know what it feels like. When you are a baby it is so soft, but now’ – she pats the hair reflectively – ‘it is like I thought. The springiness, and rough.’ Another delighted little giggle, and Josh flushes with embarrassed anger. He works so hard to control his hair – he has always hated it – and would like to believe that with his grown-up regime of gels and clippings and sprayings it is no longer boingable. His hair is so incurably, uncontrollably nerdy, and something else that he can’t quite label – or perhaps doesn’t want to label for fear that the only adjectives for it will reveal in his secular soul that old pitiable, laughable caricature: the self-hating Jew.
Nagymama must see the cloud pass over him; she pulls her hand back and says, ‘I think it is wonderful, darling. Glorious. I know once another boy with hair like this.’
Josh thinks: someone in the old country. In the shtetl. He is feeling irretrievably sulky and wishing his WASPish father were here as a point of identification. He takes stock of the martial row of champagne glasses on the floor – they seem to have drunk all but one, which he should probably leave for Nagymama: grieving elders first (although those mouthfuls of alcohol could be the last blood-vessel-dilating shove her old circulatory system can take; how much can almost-ninety-year-olds safely drink, anyway?).
It seems like she reads his alcoholic thoughts; she gestures at the last full flute and says, ‘You have it, darling. I am like the skunk.’
It’s true she is doing that slight swaying thing again, and her always-rheumy eyes look particularly glazed.
Josh lifts the glass and takes a swig, and feels neurones popping back to life, just as Nagymama says, ‘So now, what is it going on between you and your Illymama?’ Cunning old bird.
‘I don’t know what you mean, Nagymama.’ Sure that his face is betraying him – his annoyingly, terminally uncool face.
She makes a rough noise – a snort with some extra, grosser element of nasal passage. ‘Don’t give to me this. You say you need a favour. And I see you two all day, the shoulder turned, the cold cheek.’
Josh musters a faint laugh. This subject – especially in light of what he has done here, which could in unsympathetic eyes be seen as abducting his grandmother and getting her drunk – is hitting all kinds of sore spots.
‘Everything’s fine with me and Mum, Nagymama. She’s just, you know, sad. About, you know.’ Death: another hard grown-up truth that reduces him to a blushing kid. Josh thinks of his sister Zoe. He is not really jealous of her – confident that in almost every way that matters he has come out ahead in the genetic lottery – but there is one commodity that Zoe has cornered (although she seems wilfully incapable of monetising it): his sister is cool. She can dance and make friends easily, she can pull off dreadlocks; she is not a blusher.
‘Okay, darling,’ Nagymama says, repositioning herself and running a hand down her leg in a way that makes Josh aware of her old bones beneath thin skin in the uncomfortable stairwell. What are they doing here? He would like to return to the previous conversation, the stuff about guilt and betrayal, when it seemed like Nagymama might tell him something interesting about her past. But he can’t think of a way back.
‘Do you want to go back to the party, Nagymama? I mean the event?’
He starts to rise but she waves him back down and says, ‘No more of all the death.’ The word in her mouth (dess) is stripped of its Anglo glower; she sounds dismissive, as though she’s talking about a fashion trend that doesn’t appeal to her. ‘I want to know about you, your life. Tell me, darling, what you are working on? You are finishing the degree next year, yes?’
Another trigger-happy subject. She has asked about his degree with the same unthinking confidence that all the grown-ups – his mother and father and teachers – used to have in Josh’s future; a clearly delineated if not exactly iridescent future: academia, or some safely geeky crossover with academia. IT, or maybe finance. Not managerial. Not working too closely with people. Josh won the state maths Olympiad when he was twelve, and was on the Australian team at fourteen. Unlike Zoe, his brain has always worked in a way that guaranteed grades and awards and a certain smug certainty in the adults around him. Until the last couple of years, when he woke up and his brain … he thinks of it as switched course. Made a not-so-smooth network transition. His mother blames his friend Max – peer pressure, a bad crowd – but Josh bristles at these high-school-flavour scapegoats. He doesn’t want Max getting the credit. Josh awoke to the world on his own dime. He reaches into his pocket and strokes the shiny phone, considering whether to enter this fraught conversation with his grandmother. It could so easily disintegrate into the same tedious talk he’s had versions of with his mum, with various condescending lecturers and tutors
and with his course coordinator at uni. The don’t ruin your future talk. But he is feeling quite drunk – smooth-edged, confident drunk; the exact amount of drunk at which, for the only time in his life, he can become a good pool player – and he decides that not having the conversation will be more boring than having it will be risky.
He says, ‘Have you ever heard of small world networks, Nagymama?’
And instantly the old woman is changed, as though she has passed through some kind of sharpening filter: eyebrows raised, shoulders straighter, even her old-lady hair seems to bristle to life.
‘Maybe, darling,’ she says. ‘Or something like this. Is it what you work on at the university?’
‘Not exactly.’ Josh shifts his bum on the increasingly uncomfortable step. ‘Or, well, sort of. Maybe.’
It depends on the whim of Sol Milos, his course coordinator, to whom he took the work two weeks ago. Sol had clearly been impressed, but with a slight huffy overlay of disapproval about the quality (and of course quantity) of Josh’s extracurricular work compared to what he has done towards the syllabus. Josh was hoping for degree credits; what he got was an offer of joint publication in some academic journal. (And does he even care about the degree anymore? He doesn’t need it for the incubator program at MIT, and now that he has pinpointed his future on a map of the world the piece of paper seems flimsy and irrelevant. Maybe in Silicon Valley, if accompanied by the right amount of brilliance, being a drop-out will actually confer more credibility than a degree.)
‘It wasn’t really part of my uni work,’ he says to Nagymama. ‘And I didn’t exactly intend to do so much work on it. It was just …’ He takes a deep breath. ‘Okay, do you like dogs?’
Nagymama cocks her head slightly (like an old cocker spaniel, Josh thinks). She says, ‘My friend in Budapest, his family had a beautiful dog. An Alsatian – George. For the king, you know. We walk sometimes with George in the hills. Other dogs … eh.’