You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  I felt my heart constrict again. Such a strange sensation. It never changes, yet always surprises.

  I too have such regret, I said to her, these vast black oceans of regret. Their simply being alive was—(I hunted for it)—the possibility that they might change. Some day? Their dying took that away.

  She pulled a strand of hair behind an ear. “Their dying didn’t really change anything, Anne.”

  The stars above the palms disappeared and reappeared as the fronds moved in the air, like the warning lights on the tops of skyscrapers. She was right, of course. I remember, I said to her, when we got the call. I remember stumbling to a chair and putting my face in my hands. Howard’s voice, his hand on the back of my neck.

  I took a breath, eyes opening. I looked around. I said, I’ve never really talked about this.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling, “I know that.”

  Howard’s mother, cancer. And very fast. Not as fast as a pileup on the BQE, but fast. His father, a stroke, six years before that. They exit one by one, or sometimes two by two. You scatter pieces of them on the snow in the woods and run away as fast as you can, and then you turn and run back toward them, once they’re beyond your reach.

  I did not know Sam had felt this great loss from his bubbe dying, or rather I didn’t know he was feeling it to such a degree. He was seventeen. The young sometimes show much less, and I simply didn’t see it, or wasn’t looking, or didn’t know how to look. Degrees of culpability, I suppose, but little difference in the end.

  Sam had gone with Howard to New York to sit shiva for his grandfather, but it was his grandmother’s death—it was just last September—that had shaken him. He had watched Howard crumple as the beeping hospital machines finally silenced themselves, the heart rate line flattened, and her hand went lax in his father’s. Howard lay himself along her cooling arm, eyes closed, facedown on the metal gurney, and the nurses skirted them for a few minutes as Sam watched this man hold his mother’s body. He put a hand tentatively on his father’s shoulder and in that gesture, seeking to comfort, experienced the moment that the child starts to become the parent. Sam sensed that in his grief something had also changed inside Howard.

  For years, every year, when he saw her in that house in Brooklyn, “Next year in Jerusalem!” his bubbe had said to him. It’s the way the seder always ends. He’d been told it was a promise.

  The first time I heard it, at age nineteen, I said brightly to Howard’s father, “Oh, you’re going to Jerusalem?” They fell over themselves, and she had laughed hardest, one of the few times I’d seen her do this. She had looked at me, for the first time and briefly, with a kind of affection. She told and retold the story every year at the end of the dinner, Sam listening. The aspect of rebuke and its function as identification of the outsider, which were crystaline, Howard simply pretended not to hear. The Anne/Jerusalem story became, to Sam, a part of his grandmother. And now she had left, and he himself was leaving us, and (this is my interpretation) he got the idea that he would follow her. One last time.

  We forget that they also mourn incipient loss. High school will soon end, and they are reassuring one another that they will all be friends forever, and they are about to discover that this is false. They cover the sadness and fear. They bluff. The college applications are in, the tests are taken, the doors are in sight, the control tower is guiding them to the take-off point, and they have absolutely no idea how to navigate this flight.

  It is also only in retrospect in which I see where Howard was at this moment. That Howard’s son, whom he loved more than anything, was disappearing before his eyes and he could do nothing to stop it, and I had amazingly noticed nothing at all. I can argue responsibility—Howard should have said something, led me, given me the end of the thread. But that would be meaningless.

  As for Sam: They might seem a bit needier than usual, they might slow just the tiniest bit their trajectory away from us to adulthood up ahead, and waver for a moment, their longing palpable. Exodus is a disorienting affair no matter where or when. Sam decided—I did not know any of this till later—that out of love, out of habit, out of programming, out of hope, because he had to, because he was mourning, because he had nothing else to do, because it had been implanted in him, because he was restless, or abandoned, or afraid, or optimistic, or lost in some strange stratosphere, that he would go to Israel.

  He would be leaving for college in September. He would be leaving us. Next year in Jerusalem.

  His entire life, Howard had trained his son to come to this conclusion. Naturally he could never have foreseen what Sam would find there. Or what it would mean to himself, Howard.

  FAULKNER, I SAID TO THEM.

  I said, This will make you uncomfortable, but that is what literature is for.

  My paternal grandmother’s campaign to hire and retain a butler in her Knightsbridge residence was unending. I learned early a bit of H. H. Munro because Grandmother repeated it, acidly, at regular intervals: “The cook was a good cook as cooks go, and as good cooks go, she went.” The entire serving class in that era seemed to be evaporating bodily from London.

  Denise, to contradict Munro, is a cook of ever expanding achievement. When Sam was eleven we proposed, and after quite a bit of consideration she accepted, the two-week course at the Culinary Institute in Napa. I’d seen their glossy ad in, I think, Gourmet; this is the kind of cooking school that has a spa attached. Howard wrote a check for the substantial tuition. There was some trepidation at the setting out, but Roy told her to “go on, do it,” so she went and did. She had not spent a night away from Roy, nor outside Compton, in twenty-two years (nor from Kelvin, since he was born, though he decreasingly slept at home), and her face was an unreadable mask as she prepared to get on the Greyhound. (She refused to fly.) I had touched her arm. I was a bit anguished and suddenly as uncertain about this as she. She had paused. She had not given me her hand in return, but she had focused on the weight of my hand on her and let it anchor her for a moment. Then she had nodded briefly and gotten out of the car and climbed onto the bus.

  On the return she registered suave equanimity. (I do this all the time, said her shoulders as she descended from the bus and smoothly into my Saab.) For her initial report, she merely stated that it had been odd sleeping in a bed not her own. And that was that. Very Denise. But she communicated in her own time. We learned that she had enjoyed the lush, crisp cotton sheets, the maid service that turned them down every evening, the chocolate on her pillow, her own big white bath towel by the tumbled-stone shower, having everything laundered. All the things that occupied her day at our house, done by other people, and done for her. She would not get a massage, though she visited the spa’s steam room twice. This, she liked. She dangled her legs in the Jacuzzi, once. And she allowed the Filipina women to give her a pedicure, which she loved.

  What had she studied? Sauces. Soups. Garden greens. After much consternation, she had tried horse and liked it, and buffalo and ostrich, and liked them even more. She at first categorically refused, then slowly acquiesced to, then eagerly participated in sampling from everyone else’s sauce pans as the instructors required them to do. She learned the names of fungi. She wrote them down. She learned knives: cutting from paring from chopping. She did reductions and daubes and tasted cooking wines and had the cork waved under her nose (she glared at the sommelier as if he was crazy).

  And everything changed. She herself came back different. Her sauces were now light and delicate and complex. They had done an entire day on Asian flavorings, and we started finding Thai and Vietnamese fusions. Kaffir leaves. Tangerine zest in surprising places. They’d made them keep a detailed, very lengthy notebook, which the instructors had supplemented, and which the school then had printed and expensively bound, and I caught her glancing sideways at hers next to the stove. Eventually she just kept it open on the counter and didn’t care who saw. I bought her a Plexiglas cookbook holder for it. She made nasi goreng and an amazingly authentic Indonesian es campur,
with the gelatin and the condensed milk. I took her to Chinatown’s grotty food shops, and she read M. F. K. Fisher in the car after shopping for rice noodles and nuoc mam. She made gigot d’agneau and risotto primavera and a buttermilk African American catfish fry into which she improvised lemongrass and a dark-green Asian citrus leaf whose name she never told me. Sam gingerly picked up a piece and took a small bite. After a moment I said, Slow down, Samuel.

  “Have you tasted this?” said Howard with his mouth full.

  She began watching us with a critical eye as we sampled. Then she would turn and go back to her affairs. We willingly showed our enthusiasm. She was batting high 800s, said Howard.

  By complete chance I got a secondhand report. The woman thin, blond highlights, perfectly bleached teeth. It turned out she had been in Denise’s class. How interesting to send your maid, she said. Perhaps (she cleared her throat) a better cook than anyone else. And she’d been so very interested in the school’s cookware. (I knew this. I’d had to spend a breathtaking sum at Williams Sonoma when she got back.) Not very talkative, though. And she had been, you know, the only black person taking the course.

  I said that yes, in fact I imagined she was the only person with a net worth below four million dollars taking the course. The woman laughed, ah ha ha ha ha.

  I gleaned from the exchange that her fellow students were distracted by the degree to which Denise is reserved. I sympathize. It is extreme. Though it happens to be the quality that most attracts me to her, and her to me. We get along quite well. She will point at a tomato variety in a farmer’s bin, one eyebrow raised, and I will give my opinion with a nod or shake my head, and she will make her decision. I feel comfortable with her.

  Actually I feel protected.

  Then there is the part of Denise’s story that I tell them, but in shadings and not as a story per se; obviously I will protect Denise. But I have asked her, explained my textual and personal reasons for want ing to discuss this with my readers, and she has given me her permission. She, of course, is fully aware of its import. She lives it. It went like this.

  I had been in the lower study when Denise appeared in the doorway. She was agitated. There was a problem, her car was in the shop—a friend had dropped her off this morning—and Kelvin had just called. Do you need to go home? She considered her answer. Yes, she said. She meant instantly. I picked up my car keys and stood.

  I had never been to Compton. She sat in the passenger seat with her seat belt fastened, eyes on the road. It is quintessentially Faulkner (which is why I gave Faulkner to my studios executives, why I was talking about it now; I was talking more frequently in book club about myself and my life) to be a privileged European-American woman driving your underprivileged maid to her house. And here’s what is so fascinating, I said to them. Faulkner’s powers are such that he still defines what this scene means today. When the difference is no longer, as it was in his time, race. Race is completely irrelevant. Today, the difference is culture. Race is merely a proxy (and an increasingly inexact proxy) for culture, and culture, I said, is much, much more difficult.

  Denise and I drove in silence, Denise saying only “Left” or “Right” as we approached traffic signals. Sometimes pointing to the turns. When on the rare occasions I am sick, I think of Oscar Wilde’s statement that the vastest distance between humans lies between the sick and the well. But I tended at that moment toward Karl Marx’s view: It is between the employing and the employed.

  I pulled up outside the battered bungalow and turned off the engine. Would I care to come in? she asked. Certainly I would come in. Don’t forget to lock the car, she said.

  She beat back an ancient screen door, still trying its best. She held it open for me. I saw that she had hung a small frame on the wall in which there was only text. “I will call them my people which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved. Romans 9:25.”

  Though I’d heard nothing she suddenly turned her head upward and said loudly, “Dat you?” An instant, and Kelvin’s voice, from somewhere: “Yeah.” And then he said something I didn’t understood. She responded. I understood none of this. She yelled that he was to come down. He pounded down the stairs, a large boy of nineteen, the house’s wooden frame shaking, and froze at seeing me.

  “Miz Rosenbaum brung me,” she said to him, which was reproving his rudeness.

  Hello, Kelvin, I say. I do not hold out my hand.

  He nods briefly. “’lo.” Shaking hands is not his custom. We note a bandage around one ankle, some fresh blood.

  He speaks to, but does not look at, his mother. He says that it will be not only highly unlikely but possibly dangerous if a thing, which he references but does not describe, occurs.

  She stipulates that she is quite familiar with the problem. More familiar than she’d like to be. Kelvin seems concurrently bored and passionate. They disagree on a course of action. There are apparently three distinct alternatives, which they lay out, although both disdain the first for some reason, which leaves the second and third. I still have not caught the subject. Everything is verbs, “don matter” and “gone” and relative pronouns in the place of all propers. Verb conjugations bear no relation to person or number and “to be” is never conjugated at all. I understand approximately 70 percent of this English. In her opinion, it is evidently futile to pursue the unnamed problem through certain authorities (not, it seems, a reference to the police) since they have demonstrated a clear disinterest. The proof of this, she proposes, is self-evident. Kelvin, whose financial situation I gather the issue touches on, though only tangentially, disputes this. He is not helping the situation. His last name is Williams, like Denise’s, while Roy’s last name is Parker, which is odd because I’d always understood Kelvin to be Roy’s son, although I know there is some complicating aspect to this story involving a separation of several years. Kelvin is recalcitrant and vituperative.

  This cognitive/interactive process is standard among humans. Howard goes through it with Sam all the time. The variable is how it is done. What strikes one here is that the ideas are poorly expressed, the analysis reductive and unimaginative, the frail logic overpowered by emotion. I stand, watching as they sling these odd, semicomprehensible phonemes at each other. Denise’s face registers dull fury.

  I drive us back. I am not clear why Denise’s presence was needed—although it was, and she is evidently appreciative of my help—but I think that something was supposed to happen that didn’t. It is impossible for me to tell.

  Kelvin is a sullen boy, ineloquent with internal gravity, like some collapsed star. He is an exhibition of limited capacity. He projects a dark tunnel. And though he debates options and logistics, at nineteen his reasoning is inferior to Sam’s at eight. Sam’s friends, hyper-articulate, slightly neurotic, typically aggressive Jewish boys and girls, ambitious and verbally off-the-charts, Denise has known for years. And then Kelvin. I think: No, Wilde and Marx are both wrong. Not the sick and the well. Not employer and employee. The greatest distance between any two human beings is the greatest possible distance between any two cultures. She looks out her window at Los Angeles rushing by, and finally she says darkly, “Din raise Kelvin. Street raise ’im.” Her voice claims that she accepted this reality long ago. But it’s obvious she never really has, nor will.

  They all sit with their copies of Faulkner, which I had assigned them two weeks ago, the day after I drove Denise to Compton. They listen to me telling these stories, staring at my hyacinth or the Los Angeles sky overhead or glaring at their hands. What I am saying makes them uncomfortable. I can see that. I hesitate, trying to be gentle. It is simply observation, I point out to them. Perhaps we don’t discuss it. But if you’re going to tackle Faulkner, you’re going to have to tackle this bitter empirical reality, although Faulkner of course does it through fiction.

  Half of all black men between twenty-four and thirty-five have no full-time employment. One black man graduates from college for every hundred who go to jail. Almost half of
all black children live in poverty.

  I glance down at my notes. In a letter, dated August 30, 1791, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Banneker, a black astronomer and mathematician whom he had had appointed official surveyor of the District of Columbia: “No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”

  They glance at one another. The book they hold is Absalom, Absalom!

  I get two glares. I say to them, I understand the desire not to wound, but it has been long observed that literature, if it is not ruthless, is nothing. They do not capitulate, but they turn the point over in their minds.

  I can feel a breeze moving up from the Los Angeles side. For an instant it carries the sound of a radio, the music then blown toward the valley. No one says anything. I repeat to them, to clarify. Remember, I say, that in this context, this is a literary question.

  THINGS HAPPEN. YOU ANTICIPATE THEM without knowing it. This one had waited for us, quietly. Then it arrived.

  Out of nowhere, Sam announces that he will go to Israel by himself for a few weeks.

  “Out of nowhere,” says Howard to me, looking surprised and pleased. (It wasn’t, of course, out of nowhere at all, but I do think that is the way Howard perceived it.)

  Naturally we debate the timing. It is mid-January, but his college applications have been in “since forever,” everyone is (Sam points out) just waiting for the letters to come, and his grades essentially can’t be higher. By the way, Josh Weinberg’s parents are letting him go.

  What’s it hurt, Howard argues, missing one short week your senior spring? (He said two, I say. Howard promises that one of the two will be spring break, which makes it one. Yes, Howard will handle the school, don’t worry about it.) Howard is very excited about it. He buys Sam the ticket. Economy class, a window seat, 14A, so he can sleep, on the El Al flight departing just before midnight.