The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

It was the only way she could think of to remagnetize herself, and when she found real love, no one would ever need to know that to obtain it, she had feigned being a woman in love.

  Raquel has sugared her coffee and sipped—“De-lish”—and Phoebe says, “Follow me. Benny’s on the bed. I want him to get used to you,” and Raquel follows along, beneath the kitchen arch, into the dining room and out, a left down the long, well-lit hallway, and across the transom.

  “Jesus, Feebs. SOS, big time. You should get those trees cut back.”

  Phoebe takes in the big bosomy leaves of the rubber trees pressing against the large north-facing windows, preventing the entry of outside light, causing the dim watery atmosphere of her bedroom in which she sleeps, dreams, and dresses. She ought to call someone, but she’s grown used to the intimacies of her life spent alone in this oxygenated version of being underwater.

  “OMG, OMG, I always forget how totes adorb he is,” Raquel says. Always meaning the two times she’s been invited over, when Benny kept to himself, hiding away in here, behaving unlike the social creature that he is. Aware of the change in airflow, Benny, on the bed, cocks open an eye, gives Raquel a hard stare, then rolls himself tight into a ball, crosses his paws over his head. Phoebe feels proud.

  She shows Raquel the heating pad, the trickle of water in the bathroom, how much dry and wet food to set out in his bowls on the black-and-white checkerboard kitchen floor bright with sunshine.

  Raquel jerks her head at the coffee machine.

  “Sure. Help yourself.”

  “Am I taking care of Benny because your brother’s going to Palm Springs, too?”

  Phoebe is as nonplussed by the disappearance of Raquel’s usually overexcited voice as by the words Raquel has spoken.

  “Yes. With his family. He’s married, Raquel, with two kids.”

  “Oh, I know. But he’s the kind of solid guy I want to end up with. I love chatting with him.”

  Simon chatting with Raquel? Phoebe can’t imagine what they would chat about, but her brother is that kind of very nice guy, wouldn’t blow off his sister’s inquisitive neighbor in case he did any harm.

  She looks at Raquel, takes in the wide blue eyes, the pink bowed mouth, the itsy-bitsy top from which pulchritude overflows, the extremely short shorts, the bare feet with toenails painted watermelon, for she has come into Phoebe’s apartment shoeless.

  Could Simon find this girl attractive? No, too obvious, too overly flirtatious. Especially compared to Elena, who is tall and lithe, a combination of sweet and tough. Her brother’s eyes have never roamed since the day he met his wife.

  Simon has Elena.

  Camille has Valentine.

  They are cozy in love, and it spears her straight through, skewers her heart.

  Why is she the crescent moon waning when her siblings seem always to be waxing?

  Her mother says Phoebe’s the kind of woman men do not quickly release, and boys from various stages of her life still occasionally beat their man-sized wings in her direction, raising the air around her, blowing the dust off their joint old times, a checking-in, a checking-up, wanting to know if Phoebe has allowed someone to stick, to roost—not them, they know, though they had all tried hard.

  But her mother also says that the men from Phoebe’s past will always hang on, because she gave them up in the limerence phase, when romantic euphoria is at its peak. Maybe her mother is right; maybe that’s why she has no flesh-and-blood man, only the perfect golem she dreamt up.

  Raquel is holding her coffee cup and doing calf raises at the kitchen counter, and Phoebe says, “Raquel, you have to keep the dry food bowl filled, okay. And fresh water in his bowl, morning and night. And if he hasn’t touched the wet, just dump it out and give him a fresh dollop or two.”

  “It’ll be like having my own baby for a few days. I want my own, like right this minute, but I’ll wait until I land my first really big role or a global campaign.”

  Phoebe has never asked Raquel the questions she’d ask if they were becoming friends—if she graduated from college, or went to acting school, or auditions regularly for roles, or what category she is considered to inhabit as a model—and it dawns on her that perhaps she’s misjudged, that Raquel must have some measure of success because the rents in this lovely two-story building are high.

  “Is there anything big on the horizon for you?” she asks.

  “Yes! The Brazilians love me. I’m on billboards there selling Fanta and suntan lotion. And in a month I’ll know if I’m the face and body of a hot Rio designer’s clothing line.”

  The look on Raquel’s face is absolutely honest—she’s not telling any lies. And Phoebe is certain that life will turn out ideally for Raquel—she’ll book that new campaign, find a solid man like Simon to love, be pregnant by next year.

  Unfair, unfair, she thinks. Raquel will have it all. Simon already has it all. Camille seems to have no interest in marriage or a child of her own, but Phoebe wants those things. She strives and succeeds and reaps the benefits, but the rewards she desperately wants remain out of reach.

  Best as she can, she abstains from thinking about a child because there are tsunamic emotions and morning hangovers. All that control exercised in her earlier years, all that prophylactic womb-protecting, when now, even if unguarded, likely nothing would stay behind, take root, reside within her walls for the duration. She is, after all, two years from forty.

  Her weekends away with the imaginary Aaron Green, meant to uncover love, haven’t panned out, have instead become indulgent curatives she uses to try and settle into the truth: no one is going to show up—not the man to love, nor a child, a cooing baby in her arms, fairy-tale-named Annabelle or Daisy or Giselle. When the charges appear on her credit card statement, she is always surprised that she indeed spent that weekend eating, drinking, and treating herself at the hotel spas, and spending some amount of time researching on her laptop where she supposedly is with her lover, noting it all down, because her family always asks for detailed recitations of her trips.

  Last month, at the Laguna Niguel Capri, she was impressed with how adept she has become at eating by herself in sumptuous hotel restaurants, sampling intricate cocktails perched on stools at burnished bars or outside under the stars, and found herself having impulsive relations, loud and uninhibited, with a Philadelphia heart surgeon there for a conference. He had been swimming laps in the hotel’s pool, and she, on her way to swim laps herself, was diverted by the whirlpool and by the pool boy asking if she would like a cocktail, and was lounging with a specialty drink in the hot bubbling water when the heart surgeon joined her and struck up a conversation. He was married, twenty years and counting, ten years older than she, with a nice build and manner, and she had gone with him to his room, engaged with him as she hasn’t with anyone else during these weekends away. He has since sent her several long romantic email missives, a poet misshaped as a doctor.

  She responded only once because the love of her life will not take the form of a married man. When she received his latest email, she had nearly typed, Best to your wife!, then deleted it. Why raise his infidelity when it affected her not at all, when she had no intention of ever seeing him again? Who was she to judge another, when she had a pretend lover named Aaron Green?

  Raquel hugs her tight, says, “Have a blasto time. Benny will be fine. He’ll be alive and happy when you come home. I promise I won’t lose your spare key.” Then she is gone from Phoebe’s apartment.

  PHOEBE RINSES THEIR CUPS, locks the front door, snuggles Benny to her chest, and rubs her forehead against his. Then she is at the back door, hanging bag over her arm, wheeling her suitcase out, bumping her way down the stairs, along the concrete path bordered by the rubber trees that prosper, and the hapless, wilted flowers that struggle under the heavy shade, to the row of small single-car garages that belong to the building, where her own car is housed.

  It isn’t that she, as the eldest Tabor child, expected to outshine her siblings—they all heard t
heir father’s exhortations that success in life turns on elements more substantial than money. That fiery lesson he instilled when he burned the dollar bills she and Camille once fought over, saying with the force of paternal disappointment, “We do not fight about money in this family.” It seemed a fortune he sent up in smoke when she was nine, especially since he bellowed when they left lights on in rooms they had vacated. She’s learned Harry’s lesson, about money not being everything, although at that age she’d been confused—were they poor and in danger of the lights being permanently turned off, or rich if money could be burned? It was six years before she stopped worrying, learned they “had money in the bank,” as Harry said, dating back to his stockbroker days, the earnings accruing because of his deftness at trading for his own accounts, but that even with deftness, success in the market was mostly a matter of uncertain luck and the exercise of a discipline that forbade seeking out the big score. “Losing it all can happen so fast, it would make your head spin,” he told her during that same conversation. “I left the stock market behind in nineteen eighty-six and have never again ventured in. You are not to enter the market at all.” And she never has. She earns serious money these days heading up her own firm, and follows her father’s precepts and actions for a well-balanced, useful, and honest life, doing mitzvahs, like offering her legal services pro bono to talented, impoverished artists, but she has failed anyway. She was sure by now she would have attained what her parents attained, what Simon has, the natural additions to that well-balanced life: a beloved spouse, a child or two, road-trip vacations with the kids to places they would not otherwise see, just as Roma and Harry had done with the three of them.

  Objectively, she isn’t, but there are times she feels like the loneliest girl in the world, and she refuses to emend the terminology, for a lonely woman seems infinitely more pathetic than a lonely girl rightfully still wrapped up in teenage angst and despair.

  Still, the critical question remains: How does she keep hope alive when this solitary existence is stunting her as surely as the rubber trees stunt the flowers wriggling hard up through the dirt, only to find themselves in shade, their petals curling, browning, falling away. Death comes early to flowers, to most living things, when there is no sunlight. It’s not hard for her to imagine a similar outcome for herself if love and motherhood escape her forever.

  She unlocks the garage door and pushes it up. She drops the suitcase in the trunk, hangs the bagged gown on the backseat hook, and backs out of the small garage. Then she is out of the car again, pulling down the door and locking it, strapping in, checking her rearview mirror, backing out into the street, shifting into drive, reaching the long traffic light, which has just turned red.

  She tries casting away the momentary descent into darkness by listing her attributes: mildly eclectic, highly educated, the owner of a voluminous vocabulary, which she flexibly mines. Lovely smile employed frequently, contagious laugh. She knows her thoughts are self-absorbed, but if not she herself, who will consider her life? Not her parents or her siblings, or her clients, who range from amenable to misanthropic, whom she handles with a preternatural ease. Given her level of engagement in their singular worlds and the busyness of her firm, it would seem right to assume that her personal life is similarly riotously full. For bursts of time it is, or has been: hours racked up in weekend exercise; in classes where she has learned the rudiments of Chinese cooking, advanced conversational French, wine appreciation, the construction of crossword puzzles for beginners; and in a multitude of rounds of internet dating. In that vein, before she constructed Aaron Green, she toyed with the notion of hiring an old-fashioned Jewish matchmaker, and briefly considered dialing up the level of Judaism she was willing to accept—from Reform, as Phoebe and the rest of the Tabors are, to the more involved Conservative branch—to enlarge the pool of possibilities. Since her college days, she has tried to remember to light Shabbat candles when she is home on a Friday night, saying the prayer in Hebrew, speaking aloud the wishes she harbors inside. And she is a good holiday Jew, driving to Palm Springs to join her parents in the preparation of Rosh Hashanah dinners, attending services at the temple they’ve belonged to forever, returning ten days later for Yom Kippur dinner and services and the next endless day spent in temple hungry and thirsty, breaking the fast with bagels and cream cheese and the salty types of fish her father particularly likes from his childhood in the Bronx.

  When the light turns, she makes a left onto Olympic. Not far from her apartment are two Jewish neighborhoods, one thick with Orthodox, black hats and beards and ear curls, and the other, Modern Orthodox, mostly clean-shaven, identifiable by their kippahs or baseball caps, the acceptable substitute for honoring God above, appearing otherwise normal, but who require a nearby temple within walking distance and are wholly unavailable from sunset on Friday nights until after sunset on Saturdays, rendering null romantic weekends. Studying those two subsets of religious men, she had retreated entirely from the thought of a Jewish matchmaker.

  There’s a coven, a pride, a flock of the ultrareligious right now, walking on the otherwise empty sidewalk. The men with the sidelock curls, those dangling peyot, hands clasped behind their backs, bodies tilting forward, overdressed in their dully black coats that absorb the morning sun. Passing them, she uselessly admonishes herself to not dwell on what’s missing in her life.

  A bright red car whizzes past. She is like that car, carrying herself with spangle and spark, but the strength that has long held her up is weakening. In Palm Springs, she’s going to disappoint everyone when she walks in alone, without Aaron Green. Should she throw out a few hints that the relationship may be experiencing a loss of acceleration?

  God, no. Nothing has come of his supposed existence, except for the homework she must do and the need to keep everything straight, but she’s not ready to resume her old role as the Tabor offspring unloved outside the familial circle.

  Is it wrong that she wants the warmth of her family’s attention, to retain their newly revived belief that love is not beyond her reach, that love has found her again?

  Absolutely not.

  And not telling the truth is kinder—she wouldn’t want to be responsible for torching Harry’s big award weekend.

  That’s not the real reason.

  She’s a coward, plain and simple, lacking the kind of bravery needed to come clean about her whale of a lie.

  And that makes her think of the story from Hebrew school that she never got straight—was Jonah saved, regurgitated out of the whale’s massive mouth, and into the cleansing water, as she could be if she came clean, or did he die in there? He probably died in there.

  The pretend lover, the few relationship details she has coyly shared with her family about Aaron Green, illuminate what she tries to forget: the Phoebe who existed at twenty-three, in love with a long-haired boy named Elijah, who threw himself into life with abandon. The only former love who has never reached out to her.

  Over the years, she has debated whether the way she let him go has been responsible for her perennial single status, the diminution, then disappearance, of that magnetism she once took for granted.

  Sometimes late at night in her office she searches for Elijah’s name, but no engine finds him, not even one other person with his name seems to exist in the whole great world, and she wonders if he went off the grid, as he swore he wanted to do someday. Or if he is dead.

  She was a foolish young woman back then, and did him wrong, did herself wrong, too. She had lacked the courage to face him and explain she didn’t possess his audacity to live an explorative life, that the idea of dropping out, even temporarily, frightened her, that the life she was living gave her the comfort and certainty she needed and desired. She had disappeared on him, shunned his calls, deleted his emails, hid in the tiny bathroom in the small apartment she then had, until he removed his finger from the buzzer, until his rapping against the door stopped—she imagined him putting his tongue to his knuckles and tasting the blood, inh
aling the iron scent of confusion. It had taken four months before he gave up, before she sighed in relief, then flinched in horror, that she had murdered something so rare with silence.

  It sounds like a bad country song, Phoebe thinks.

  Then she thinks, no, it feels biblical, the resultant suffering she has endured since tossing away that long-ago love.

  The mundane intrudes. Her car requires fuel and she swings into her regular station. At the pump, she listens to the rush of the gasoline, watches the gallons ratchet up. On the other side of the tanks, a man extracts himself from his low-slung convertible, runs his card through, and starts doing the same.

  “Happy Saturday morning,” he says to Phoebe across the concrete divide. He is rather handsome. His smile is nice, so are his eyes. But drawing love to herself would never happen at a gas station.

  “Bonjour,” she says.

  “Are you French?”

  “Oui.” And with that floating oui comes the thought that she’s wrong about where love could happen. It could happen here, but it’s too late, she’s declared herself French. Why didn’t she simply say hello in her native English?

  “Are you visiting, or do you live here?”

  This interest of his, surely it’s been triggered by the allure of her supposed foreignness. If she’d said, “Hello,” he would have said, “Lovely day, enjoy it,” filled his tank and driven away.

  Because it’s a lost cause, she shakes her head and says, “Je suis désolée. Je ne parle pas l’anglais.”

  “You don’t speak English?”

  “Non.” She could backpedal the lie that she doesn’t speak English, but not the lie that she’s French.

  She feels his eyes on her as she hangs up the hose, screws on the fuel cap, enters the car, shuts the door, and starts the engine. At the exit, she glances in her rearview mirror and the man is looking in her direction, his hand raised in what could be a wave.

  When she’s back on the road, she yells at herself. He could have been the one, and what a story they could have told, about how their love ignited over premium unleaded at Shell. Real love, maybe, rather than the illusory love she shares with Aaron Green, whose invention was to find the real thing.