In a life that had of late been composed of vast swaths of solitude, Jane had never felt so completely alone. She pulled the pie over to her, picked up the fork, and took a large bite. She ate the whole thing, and if there had been a second pie, she would have eaten that one, too.
VI
If Iris had not woken up so early, in all likelihood she would have assumed that he had gone into town to wait in the café at the co-op for the New York Times to arrive. That was, after all, what he had done nearly every summer morning for more than twenty years. But she had slept fitfully, and he woke her when he got out of bed. She tried for a few minutes to fall back asleep, but when she could not, she went down to the kitchen. She found him standing at the sink drinking a cup of coffee. He was wearing sweatpants and a torn T-shirt, and his gym bag hung from his shoulder. She looked at the gym bag and crossed her arms over her chest.
“It’s a stress reliever, Iris,” Daniel said. “It makes me feel good. I need it.”
“You need your stress relieved? You can run,” Iris said. “Lift weights. I don’t know. But you can’t go getting yourself beaten up. It’s ridiculous for a man of your age to think he can box. It’s embarrassing.”
“It was just a little sparring,” he muttered, like a recalcitrant child. “And if you hadn’t come in and distracted me I never would have gone down.”
“Give me a break, Daniel. It’s been days and your face still looks like a side of beef. I won’t have you boxing anymore.”
“You’re not my mother, Iris. You’re my wife,” Daniel said. “You don’t get to tell me what you’ll have and what you won’t have. I’m going to do what I want to do. For once.”
Determined not to lose her cool, Iris crossed the kitchen, took a coffee mug from the drain board, and went to fill it, passing next to Daniel on her way to the coffeepot. When her arm brushed against his, he flinched. She was seized by an urge to press herself up against him, to force him to feel her body, her skin, her flesh. She wanted to slap him across the face, to hurt him for making her feel that her touch repulsed him. He never stroked her hair, or kissed her cheek, or held her hand anymore. And they had not made love since the week after Becca and John died.
Before the accident, while not frequent, their lovemaking was regular. If not passionate, it was certainly comfortable, and occurred at least a couple of times a month.
In the immediate aftermath of the accident, for reasons neither of them understood, they had made furious love nearly every night. It began the night after the funeral. First to bed, Iris lay curled on her side between the chilled sheets, shaking. When Daniel slipped into the bed, he spooned himself around her and they lay like that for a while, warming each other. Suddenly Iris was conscious of his penis shifting against her, growing hard. She pressed herself against him, and Daniel groaned.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I can’t help it.”
“It’s okay,” Iris said, turning around so they faced each other. She wrapped her arm around his neck, knotting her fingers in his hair and pulling it, harder than she had intended. They drove their tongues into each other’s mouths, biting and sucking as if they were trying to consume each other. With his mouth still pressed to hers, he thrust inside her. He ground his hips against her and she arched her back. It was as if they were trying, at fifty years old, to pound another child into existence to replace the one they had lost. Or as if they were taking out on each other’s bodies the rage that had no other obvious target. Soon they were bathed in sweat, their bodies slipping on the sheets. For traction, Daniel grabbed the headboard with one hand. The other he clamped over her mouth to muffle her screams.
They never spoke about it, they never planned it, but for nearly a week they fucked every night, always with the same intensity. When he came Daniel cried, his tears and sweat raining down on Iris’s face. Then, suddenly, as inexplicably as it had begun, it stopped. Nearly two years had passed since then, and they had not made love once.
Remembering those nights, Iris could not deny that the violence of their lovemaking had not been an accident. The brutality had been the point. Tenderness could follow only because of the aggression, even the pain, that preceded it. She had accepted it then. Even, if she was honest with herself, took a kind of grim pleasure in it. But now, two years later, when he no longer touched her, she could not bear the idea of him finding satisfaction in the ring.
“Please. Daniel,” she said. “Please promise me you won’t do it anymore. You’ll get hurt, and I don’t honestly think I can handle that. Not now.”
Before he could answer, they heard the tapping of Mr. Kimmelbrod’s walker as he made his way down the long hall from the guest bedroom where he was living this summer, having finally conceded that he could no longer manage in the Peter’s Point Road cottage on his own. As they waited for him to arrive in the kitchen, they exchanged a long, fraught glance, at the end of which Daniel shrugged the gym bag off his shoulder and tossed it into a corner of the room.
Iris set about preparing the single slice of toast and soft-boiled egg on which Mr. Kimmelbrod breakfasted every morning. After she served it, she called up to Ruthie. By the time the girl was sitting at the table wiping the sleep from her bleary eyes, Iris was sliding a neatly pleated tomato-and-cheese omelet as snug as a love letter onto her plate. She put a pot of Earl Grey tea and two cups on the table and sat next to her daughter. She poured herself a cup of tea and offered one to Ruthie, who shook her head. Daniel presented Ruthie with a cup of coffee. She poured in a splash of milk and drank.
“I’m surprised Oxford didn’t turn you into a tea drinker,” Iris said. “It certainly did me. I used to drink dozens of cups a day, just to keep warm.”
“There are Starbucks all over Oxford now. And, like, twenty other cafés.”
“That’s a shame,” Iris said.
“Why?” Ruthie said, poking at her omelet. “Oxford’s no different than anywhere else.”
“I don’t know,” Iris said. “I thought it was pretty special. Although I suppose it’s true that the world has experienced a creeping homogeneity since I was a student. Don’t you like your omelet?”
Ruthie sighed and pushed away her plate. “Mom, Dad. And Grandpa, too. I have something to tell you.”
Iris wrapped her hands around her mug, steeling herself for what could, with that introduction, only be bad news.
“I think I want to take a break from school.”
“A break?” Iris said.
“A year off. I’m not quitting the program.”
“Of course you’re not,” Daniel said.
“Just a hiatus. It’s very common for people to do that.”
“Is it?” Iris said.
“Yes. At least, at Oxford it is. It’s called a gap year. People do it to sort of clear their heads. So they can make sure they’re certain about their courses of study.”
Iris said, “I was under the impression that a gap year was something young people did before they even began university, not something graduate students did in the middle of their degree programs. I can’t imagine it’s something Fulbright Fellows do.”
“All right, not a gap year exactly. Call it a break. As in, ‘Give me a goddamn break.’ Sorry, Grandpa.”
Mr. Kimmelbrod shook his head. “No need to apologize. In fact, I must excuse myself for a moment.”
“Dad, don’t you want to finish your breakfast?” Iris said.
“A moment,” he said. They watched him make his laborious way back up the hall.
When the door to his room clicked shut, Ruthie said, “I’ve been in school for nineteen years. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to take a year off.”
Daniel said, “I don’t see why she couldn’t take a short break.”
“Oh, really, you don’t?” Iris said. “Let me explain it, then. She can’t take a year off because it’ll take her off track. Ruthie, right now you’re well positioned to get into a first-rate doctoral program. You could even continue on a
t Oxford. You don’t want to do anything to threaten that. You don’t want to end up teaching composition at some crappy college in North Dakota.” Iris regretted the words as soon as she said them. The law school at CUNY, where Daniel taught, fell into the category of the kind of institution she was dismissing so harshly.
“Not everybody has to teach at Columbia,” Ruthie said.
“Everyone in North Dakota wishes they were teaching at Columbia,” Iris said. “But fine. A break. Great. Terrific. So what do you plan to do with your break?”
“I don’t know,” Ruthie said, all defiance now sapped from her tone.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You can’t just quit. You have to have a plan.”
“I don’t know. I’ll get a job or something.”
“What kind of job?”
“I don’t know, Mom. A job. Any job. I can wait tables or work retail. It’s not that important.”
“Really? What you do isn’t important?”
“Come on, Iris,” Daniel said. “Leave her alone.”
Ruthie said, “I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘important.’ Clearly, in this case you mean ‘important to you.’”
All at once Iris saw, panicking, the life she had imagined for Ruthie slipping away. She had never approved of Ruthie’s field; the English departments of America were lousy with scholars of the women novelists and poets Ruthie loved. But despite her poor choice of concentration, Iris knew that Ruthie was perfectly suited to the life of the mind. She, like her mother, took her greatest pleasure from reading. She always had. It didn’t make sense for Ruthie to do anything else. She was an ideal scholar, devoted to her subject, patient and thorough, easily immersed. Iris had counseled Ruthie to turn her attention to a lesser-traveled area of study but Ruthie had remained true to her passion, in the end Iris had admired her for it. Ruthie could not give up on her ambitions now, when she was well on her way to seeing them come to fruition. She couldn’t follow Becca’s pointless path.
“You could work as a paralegal,” Daniel said, keeping his eyes firmly averted from his wife, as if her objections were no longer at issue. As if Ruthie’s decision had already been made. “Law firms hire kids to work for a year before applying to law school.”
“She isn’t applying to law school,” Iris said. “Or are you, Ruthie? Have you suddenly decided to become a lawyer?”
“No, I’m not going to law school,” Ruthie said.
And with that—Ruthie’s vagueness, layered on top of Daniel’s obtuse acquiescence to her foolishness, an acquiescence Iris knew to be based as much on hostility to her as on concern for Ruthie’s welfare—Iris snapped.
“You’d better figure out what you want, Ruthie,” she said. “Before you make a complete hash out of your life.”
“Will you please give her a break,” Daniel said. “She’s not making a hash out of her life. She’s taking a year off from school, for Christ’s sake. You’re acting like she’s decided to become a crackhead.”
Iris said, “I just don’t want her to make a mistake that she’ll regret.” This conversation was far too reminiscent of the argument they’d had in the wake of Becca’s decision to quit the Conservatory. Then, too, Daniel had taken Becca’s side. At least this time her father had not added his voice to the chorus.
“You can’t order her around,” Daniel said. “She’s not a child.”
“Okay, who are we talking about now?” Iris said. “Are we talking about Ruthie and her future, or do you have something you want to say to me?”
“Jesus Christ,” Daniel said. “You really are a piece of work.” He leaped to his feet and strode across the room, scooped up his gym bag, and stormed out of the house, banging the screen door behind him.
For a moment Iris sat at the table trembling, wanting to leap up and follow him, to take back everything she had said. She took a deep breath and cupped her hands around her warm mug. Then she rose unsteadily and walked out to the screen porch, where her armchair sat waiting for her to settle into its familiar embrace.
She left Ruthie sitting alone at the kitchen table, her head resting in her hands.
VII
“Samantha!” Iris called.
The girl spun around and waved. Then she raced across the yard toward Iris, her brown legs pumping up and down, her hair swinging wildly behind her. Samantha flung her arms up in the air and hurled herself forward in an ungainly cartwheel, her legs bent, her feet splayed every which way. She’d been practicing her violin for the last two hours while Mr. Kimmelbrod napped, and would still be hard at it had Iris not insisted that she take a break. Iris practically had to push Samantha out the door to get some fresh air, but now she was cavorting around like the little girl she was.
“Gather some flowers for the table, why don’t you,” Iris shouted. “There’s a patch of lupines on the other side of the Grange Hall.”
A few minutes later, Samantha returned bearing a lavish armload of purple, pink, and white flowers. Iris looked up from the dish of egg salad she had been preparing and saw Samantha holding the bouquet in her arms. Iris grew lupines because it was Becca’s favorite flower. Each June since the accident she had kept the house full to bursting with masses of lupines, refreshing the vases as soon as the petals showed the first sign of wilting. She would pick them until there were no more lupines to be had in the garden, or even by the sides of the most remote roads. She liked to be reminded of her daughter this way, and yet something about seeing the young girl with the enormous armload of purple flowers brought the wedding day back too forcefully.
Samantha’s smile faded, her eyebrows knotting with concern. “Did I take too many?”
“No,” Iris said. “You took the perfect amount. There’s an enameled pitcher on the table. You can put them in there.”
Samantha buried her face in the flowers, inhaled deeply, then sneezed. Iris burst out laughing. Samantha started to join her, then sneezed again.
“Here,” Iris laughed, offering her a tissue.
It was good to have a little girl in the house again. The giggles, the squeak of the bicycle brakes when Samantha pulled up to the house, the small feet running up the porch steps. The sound of the violin. Samantha tuned her A string in a manner very similar to Becca’s drawn-out, rising wail that grew louder as the bow traveled across the string. And just as when Becca was a child, the pitch of the string as she tuned it matched precisely the whistle of the old tea kettle that had been Iris’s grandmother’s. This morning, as on so many mornings long ago, Iris had rushed into the kitchen to pull the kettle off the burner, only to find it sitting unemployed, mocking her with its cold copper sides.
They had lunch on the screen porch and waited for Mr. Kimmelbrod to wake up from his nap. He had seemed tired this morning, and in the middle of the lesson he had excused himself, instructing Samantha to practice the first movement of the Bach Sonata no. 1 in G Minor, which they had been studying for the last few weeks. The piece was challenging for Samantha, more difficult, perhaps, than she could handle, and the effort of teaching her had exhausted him. He had gone to his bedroom, promising to return within the hour. Nearly two and a half hours had passed, and Iris now was starting to worry.
As if attuned to Iris’s thoughts, Samantha asked, “Do you think Mr. Kimmelbrod is okay?”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Iris said. She would give him another few minutes before going to check on him. Her father was so private that she loathed intruding on him. It had been a very difficult transition for him, getting used to living in her house rather than alone in his. She had tried to make things easier for him by never entering his room uninvited.
“I hope he’s not sick,” Samantha said.
“Sometimes he just needs to recharge his batteries. He’s ninety years old, you know.”
Samantha, who had been about to take a large bite of her egg salad sandwich, stopped it midway between the plate and her mouth. “Should I go home and let him rest?”
“Of course not. We
’ll enjoy our lunch, and by the time we’re done he’ll be awake. Unless you have somewhere you need to be?”
“This is the only place,” Samantha said.
“Are your lessons going well? Is Mr. Kimmelbrod being very hard on you?”
“Oh, no!” Samantha said. “I mean, yes, but I like it.”
“My daughter used to say that when he listened to her play he looked like a man in a dentist’s chair anticipating a root canal.”
Samantha laughed. “Sometimes he does. But sometimes, when he hears something he likes, he kind of nods, like this.” She executed a slow, solemn nod of her head. It was a surprisingly faithful reproduction of Mr. Kimmelbrod’s grave, slightly stiff Mitteleuropean demeanor, given its presence on the face of a young Asian girl.
“And does he nod often during your lessons?”
“It depends on how well I’m playing.”
“I wonder if he nodded for Becca like that,” Iris said.
“It must have been so nice for …” Samantha hesitated. “For your daughter to have her grandfather to play for.”
Iris smiled, touched and saddened as always that it was so hard for Samantha to say Becca’s name. So many people, young and old, seemed to be under the impression that the mention of the dead by name was a social transgression, something done in bad taste. No one understood how much Iris craved to hear Becca’s name spoken aloud, how important it was to have the fact that Becca had once existed acknowledged by more than just their family. When she made explicit mention of Becca in public, it was as though the name were a heavy stone dropped into the pool of conversation. It disturbed the tranquil surface, sending ripples across the room.
Iris said, “When she wasn’t giving him a root canal, Becca loved playing for her grandfather. Your family must enjoy hearing you play.”
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