“No,” David said. “I prefer not to,” he added, quoting a character he had liked in a story from his literature class.
“So,” the rabbi said. “I see this is your choice, what you wish.”
“I didn’t think so. Maybe it is.” He thought about the moon circling the earth, the earth circling the sun, the planets circling each other, the galaxy rotating round another galaxy, the entire universe passing through a white hole to another universe and all of it repeated ad infinitum on a microcosmic level with subatomic particles, nothing stable. “I won’t do it,” David said. “I won’t roll forward.”
Q12081011 shines as brightly as 500 galaxies yet is a fraction of the diameter; a mere light month across. The quasar is the most powerful known, capable in one hour of generating as much energy as the sun does in its entire lifetime. Distance is seventy-three billion trillion miles from earth. Moving at a speed of 36,000 miles per second away from us this makes the quasar a front runner at the edge of the expanding universe. If God wears a jewel in his forehead, this is it. I have felt myself waiting for a discovery of this power. If I could see it, see any part of its light…
David’s sister knocked at his door. “What?”
“Open up.”
“Why?”
“Please!”
David unlocked the door. Tina stood there in her school clothes—parrot green pants and an orange T-shirt hanging down one shoulder. She had just gotten home from the mall where she went with her friends every afternoon to see boys and play Whirlyball. “Mom won’t come out of her room.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She won’t come out. I tried calling to her that I was home and she didn’t answer.”
“Maybe she’s asleep.”
“She isn’t asleep. She never sleeps in the afternoon. You go and see if you can get her to come out.”
“Not me,” David said. He backed away. The thought of entering his mother’s room unbidden scared him. He hardly spoke to her as it was. They saw each other at dinner and in the hallway only when he found it unavoidable. She was a ghost or he was a ghost. Either way, the idea of knocking on her locked bedroom door was out of the question.
“Leave her alone. She’s just resting,” David said, making himself believe it.
“Will you please do something?”
David shook his head.
“You make me so mad! You’re so snotty about everything because you can’t even do a somersault in gym you’re so spastic!” They were back to this again. She was liable to say anything now. He sat with his arm around the barrel of his telescope and waited. “I hate you! I hate everyone in this family!”
David heard her running up and down the hallway, to no apparent purpose. If anything was to get his mother out of her room, this was sure to do it—noise.
But she didn’t come out. And his sister returned and pleaded with him to do something, please do something. Now, too, Wayne came jiggling into his room and looked up at David with bloodshot eyes.
David went down the hallway and took a few deep breaths before knocking lightly on his mother’s door. There was no answer.
“What should we do?” his sister said. Her purple eye shadow, smeared from crying, was the color of eggplant.
He rested his hand on the doorknob; it turned. “Didn’t you try the door before?”
She shook her head. “I thought it was locked,” she said, as surprised as he was. They spoke in whispers to each other.
He opened the door. His mother was sitting at the table where she had coffee every morning by the window. She was wearing her bathrobe. She must have been there since morning, David realized. “Mom?” he said. His sister looked over his shoulder. Wayne’s uncut claws clicked across the wood floor, but even he stayed back. “Mom, are you okay?”
He walked closer and then touched her shoulder and looked at her face. It was empty, chalky pale in the light from the window. Her hair was flat against her right cheek as though she’d slept on it all night. Her bathrobe was open, and he turned away from her flaccid breasts. She said something, but too faintly to hear.
“What?” David said.
“I’m going to make dinner.”
“Mom,” his sister said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“We’ll have green beans tonight. Both of you children. Don’t you? You both like green beans?”
Her voice was barely audible, the words at the tail end of a breath in a monotone that made him shiver.
“Watch her,” he whispered to Tina, who stood against the wall, her eyes huge; she held on to Wayne and stared at their mother, who didn’t move. “I’m going downstairs to call Dad.”
In the kitchen, he dialed his father’s office. The new secretary—Fran had left five months ago—asked if she could take a message. His father was in conference.
“This is his son.”
“Oh, hi, David.”
“Could you interrupt him? It’s important.” He added “urgent,” but she had already put him on hold.
“What’s the matter, David?” His father’s voice was quick, annoyed. It was his busiest time of the year. Two weeks before tax day, April 15.
“Something’s wrong with Mom. She won’t come out of the bedroom.”
“What do you mean she won’t come out of the bedroom? Is she lying down?”
“She’s just sitting at the window. She’s still in her bathrobe.”
“Put her on.”
“She can’t talk.”
“What’s going on, David? Stop playing games and put your mother on the phone.”
“I’m not playing games. Don’t talk to me about playing games!” He was shouting. He cradled the phone under his chin and calmed himself. His temples pounded with blood and he could hear all the noise inside his head that his mother made in the mornings when she went on her drawer-slamming rampage. “If you’re not home in a half-hour I’ll tell everyone—everybody you ever met! I swear I will. You know what I’m talking about.”
“David?”
“You better come home. That’s all I got to say. If you don’t come home…I swear if you don’t come home…”
He hung up, then took the receiver off the hook so his father couldn’t call back. He went upstairs. His mother and sister were as he had left them. “Is Dad coming?” Tina asked quickly.
“He’d better,” David said. He sat down beside his mother.
“Can I get you anything?” She didn’t answer him. She started to move her lips, there was some spittle between her bottom teeth and lip, then she closed her mouth. She thought she had spoken.
David touched her palm, open flat in her lap. She let his finger lie there, then closed her hand around it. Tina was swallowing her tears. “Come here,” he told her. She came over immediately. “Sit down next to us and hold onto Mom’s other hand.” She did so obediently, glad to be following orders. “Tell her what you did at school today.”
“What?”
“Tell her anything.”
His sister talked about a math quiz and planning her class’s project for Ecology Day and the spicy burritos for lunch. He listened to her voice…how hard she was trying. Their mother began to cry silently. He thought about the new quasar, to know he might one day see it! But its light was 12.4 billion years old, just now reaching the earth—who could know if the quasar itself still existed? He felt his throat tighten in pain. His sister rushed on about choral practice and a fire drill at school and her friend Joan’s spiked hair, and he held tight to his mother’s hand and looked out the window with her and down at their world.
Stranger
After packing up the apartment and helping her sister deal with their father’s estate, Elaine was flying back to Denver. Her father had died peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy-nine. He had been strong and healthy right up until the end. He walked a mile a day at a brisk pace. He drank celery and carrot juice, watched his weight, and kept his mind active with everything from crossword puzzles to pract
icing piano to the occasional nine holes of golf. And he played a sharp game of poker with the other “youngsters” at the Jewish Community Center in Philadelphia. His blood pressure and cholesterol count had been those of a teenager, and his doctor expected him to live another decade or two. On the dark side, as her father put it, he liked his cigars and his martinis. But he hadn’t died of smoking or drinking; he’d gone out just as he said he would: “They’ll take me when I’m not looking, without a fight.” And they had; he’d died right in the middle of the seven hours he slept a night.
Elaine’s Aunt Winnie, her father’s sister and a spry seventy-seven herself, had walked across the hall from her condo and found him lying in bed on his back, one hand across his stomach. “He looked like he’d just eaten a good meal,” Aunt Winnie said. Elaine thought that everyone was trying to make his death appear so serene because her mother’s had been so violent. She’d died at forty-eight in an automobile accident when Elaine was in her senior year of high school.
Sitting now in the waiting area for her flight home, she glanced at the Philadelphia newspaper and then heard the ticket agent’s voice on the intercom. The news was not good. The flight coming from Chicago had been delayed by bad weather and would be at least an hour late. She slumped in her seat. She just wanted to get back to Denver. Richard and Katy—or “Caidee,” as she spelled it now—their thirteen-year-old, had already flown home a week ago. As it was, Elaine would be coming in late at night. She’d made a reservation on the last possible flight of the day because she wanted to pack up as much of Dad’s stuff as possible and not leave her sister, Rachel, with the entire mess. She’d decided she would need to make another trip back anyway. There was too much to sort through, including all the clippings from the local theater productions he’d been in. She read each of them, going back to the forties, when her mother had been in Oklahoma! with him. Elaine’s expectation had been that she’d race through all the old photographs, accounts, bills, medical and insurance records and pave the way for Rachel to finish. But she’d been painfully slow, and frankly, at the end of two weeks, she felt as if she’d failed to make meaning of the details that profaned death into tabulations and schedules, receipts and scribbled notes, worn shoes and dusty suits.
Her father had never remarried. Plenty of widows and divorcées had been after him, but he rejected their interest. “Marriage is for life,” he told Elaine once, “and in my case, death.” The gloomy sentiment drove Elaine crazy. He could have remarried and had a full life, even perhaps another family. Instead, for the past thirty-one years, he’d kept a shrine to his dead wife. Her pictures were everywhere in the condo. In his later years he became even worse, referring to “we” all the time, as though Elaine’s mother were still alive. When Elaine and the family visited from Colorado and he had his only grandchild in front of him—Rachel and her husband had never had children—he told stories not about when Elaine and Rachel were young but about his life with Elaine’s mother: the ballroom dancing they did so suavely (Foxtrot champions), the husband-wife golf tournaments, the charity balls they organized. “We were quite the team,” he boasted to Elaine in a phone call, just before he died. She held the phone through his reverie hoping for him to ask about Caidee, let alone her and Richard. But he didn’t, and she could see now that he’d been bowing his head at death’s door all this time, waiting to knock.
She awoke to the announcement that her flight would be delayed another hour. She’d fallen sound asleep; her head had lolled back on her left shoulder, her arm flung out as if she’d died in battle.
Reflexively, she touched her collar for any sign of drool; it had been that kind of sleep—deep and insular, from which you returned as if kidnapped. She sat up and started off to the bathroom. An older woman with white hair and thick tinted lenses in square frames stopped her.
“Your husband,” the woman began, and gave Elaine’s hand a friendly squeeze, “will be back in a moment.”
“Pardon?”
The woman wore pink slacks and white sneakers and had a large straw bag that said “Grand Cayman.” Fragile, slight, about the same age her mother would have been if she’d lived, she squeezed Elaine’s hand again. “He’s coming right back. He had to take your wallet for a minute to buy some travel items.”
Elaine immediately plunged her hand into her bag, then dumped the contents of the purse out on the floor, combing frantically through the items—keys, lipstick, sales slips—her checkbook!—but no wallet. “Who?” Elaine said. “Who took it?”
“I don’t…I thought—”
“What did he look like?”
“He was tall, blond—”
“What was he wearing?”
“A dark suit and a blue tie, I think. My goodness, I thought—”
Elaine quickly scraped everything back into her bag. A suit and blue tie. Every businessman in the world fit the description. “What else?” she said, her voice shrill. But she couldn’t control her impatience, directed now at this woman who shrank from her. How could she have just watched someone take her wallet?
“He was carrying an overcoat on his arm. I’m so sorry. I didn’t even look which way he went. He was so nicely dressed, and he…I thought he must be your husband,” the woman said, obviously distraught now. “He kissed you, after all.”
“What?” Elaine asked. “What did you say?”
“He kissed you. Right there,” and she pointed to Elaine’s right cheek, close to her lips. She touched her cheek and felt incredulous that this had been done while she slept, a violation disguised as sweetness.
The elderly woman said she was going to Miami, a flight that was scheduled to board in ten minutes. There was no time to search the airport. The best thing would be to call Richard at work and have him start the process of canceling their credit cards. He was teaching today, so she’d have to leave a message for him on his phone, or with the department secretary, and how could she succinctly explain that a stranger had kissed her while stealing her wallet? She felt the burn on her cheek, his lips creeping toward the moist corner of her mouth.
A ticket agent came up to her. The elderly lady from Miami had brought him over while Elaine had been trying to remember her calling card number—that card gone too.
“I understand your wallet is lost, ma’am.”
“Stolen.”
The agent nodded noncommittally.
“I saw him take it,” the older woman spoke up. Elaine felt grateful for the witnessed support.
“We can have security look into it.”
“I have to make my flight. I know it’s delayed but I don’t want to miss it just to have…” She was about to say just to have nothing happen, because she knew nothing would. The airport police or whoever was in charge would get information from her about something she’d not even observed. The woman who had seen it all, who had been an unwitting participant, searched nervously in her own handbag for something to write her name and address on, as directed by the ticket agent, so she could make the last boarding call of her flight. She gave Elaine a hug—it felt awkwardly inappropriate—and looked back over her shoulder once before she disappeared into the jetway. Elaine summoned enough generosity to smile back at her, then sat down with her purse, gutted of its wallet, her license, pictures of Caidee, credit cards from too many stores—she’d been meaning to consolidate—emergency phone numbers, her AAA, library, and insurance cards, a picture of her mother and her taken at a photo booth in Atlantic City when Elaine was eight years old and that she’d kept in her wallet all her life.
She looked for a tall man carrying an overcoat over his arm, dressed in a blue tie and a dark suit. Hundreds of them, of course. A crowd of travelers safely on their way. That’s all, nothing else.
The airline gave her fifteen dollars in food vouchers and ten dollars in cash. “We’re not required to do this,” the woman at the customer service desk told her. “But we certainly understand and sympathize with your predicament.” Her plane, coming through Chicago and
held up by weather, was now two hours delayed. Elaine had made her way to customer service, then to security, filled out papers, and said what she knew. Which was nothing. A man had taken her wallet from her purse. She’d been sleeping. The purse had been wedged next to her in the seat. He’d apparently kissed her—though she left this part out, because she didn’t want to undermine her claim. She had talked to a round-shouldered man with an airport badge and she didn’t want to see anything cross his face that would indicate he thought she was imagining or fantasizing the incident. The kiss was both the least relevant part of the robbery and of course the most. Long after today, she would remember it beyond any money gone or other inconvenience. For now, it was her own private piece of news, not quite a secret—that bestowed on it too much intrigue and hinted of pleasure—just a lone fact only she would know.
“We’ll contact you as soon as we hear anything,” the security officer had told her, then sent her back to customer service for further assistance—the vouchers. She thought the choice of “as soon as we hear anything” instead of “if we hear something” sounded much more positive, even if she didn’t believe a word of it. It was all public relations at this point. She herself worked in the marketing department for a large software company in Denver, so she knew all about making a concept appealing. You sold the idea, not the thing.
Now she sat in a bar, using part of her courtesy money not for food but to have a glass of wine. She should buy some food to fill her stomach—her appetite had been off anyway ever since the funeral—but she was not hungry. The airline meal for sale would be expectantly horrible, and she would pass and perhaps order another drink. The thought of doing so, of having another glass or two of wine with the chintzy little bag of pretzels made her happy for a moment. Something to look forward to. She should also get off her stool, find a quiet place, and call Richard. Who knew how many charges had been made to her credit cards? But she was feeling lazy, knowing she would not be responsible for unauthorized purchases and dreading having to explain the whole annoying mishap to Richard. She continued to sip her wine.
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