Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  Pablo gave me a big hug, one of the hired helpers brought paper towels from the kitchen, and Pablo’s bride dutifully handed him the paper towels, a few at a time, to scoop up the splotched cake. Then he let one of the hired helpers clean the rug. The festivities had resumed.

  I drank more than I ever had in my life, picking up half-empty glasses from the counter and tables and draining them without regard for what they contained. I don’t remember the end of the evening, when the bride and groom took off for their one-night-and-day honeymoon in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, where they’d been guaranteed a glorious view of Central Park. I awakened, lying on my own bed downstairs, fully dressed, extremely thirsty, and with a bad headache. The bedside light was on. The clock said it was ten to four.

  My shoes were off.

  Leon was not in the room with me.

  There was a light on somewhere in the apartment.

  I decided to take some aspirin and drink a lot of water before I let my brain work.

  The small kitchen light was on. The kids we’d hired had done a good job. The big room and the kitchen were clean. I went to the bathroom, took four aspirin with water, and only when I came back through the nearly dark living room saw that Leon was half-sitting, half-lying on one of the couches, propped up on an elbow. His eyes were open. He was watching me.

  I had no idea what to expect. We’d had little to do with each other during the day. The coatrack was upstairs in his living room, and his girls had volunteered to take turns supervising Max and Rebecca, as well as the many kids in Pablo’s family, up there. For all I knew, Leon had spent most of the party there, too; I could remember only a brief exchange when he’d asked if I realized how much I was drinking and I’d replied, less snotty than insouciant, or so I’d thought, that I kept trying to realize but I always needed another drink to do it.

  Now I told him I needed to change, went into my bedroom, took off the maroon-velvet Mother-of-the-Bride dress I’d almost liked when I bought it, and put on jeans and a sweater, not because I assumed I was going up to Leon’s but out of a sense that I needed to be prepared for anything. When I returned to the living room, he was sitting upright but his eyes were closed. I sat down facing him. He began to snore, but gently, not in a way that could take the edge off the sadness just welling in me.

  I’d been like one possessed; the possibility of losing him hadn’t been in the part of my brain that knew how I was feeling. He’d once accused me of tucking him away for times when it would be convenient to think about him. I’d persuaded him that if I were living upstairs with him, it wouldn’t happen. Mostly, it hadn’t. But in my postnuptial depression I could feel for the first time how it would be to lose him and I wanted to cry, though once again my mouth and every other part of me was too dry.

  After a couple of minutes, he turned and his eyes opened slightly, then, when he saw me, all the way. He went to the kitchen sink, splashed his face with water, and instead of taking a cloth dish towel, grabbed two or three paper towels to dry himself, one of the hundreds of small acts we performed differently since I’d acquired my adult habits in a kitchen in Italy, where disposable goods were not used with the American profligacy that assumed nobody would ever run out of anything. I’d tried to get him to use fewer paper towels, while he’d tried to get me to buy more and store them where he could find them.

  He looked toward me. Our eyes met. We smiled.

  “So,” he said, walking back to his sofa, “you still want to marry me?”

  “Not if you think you’re doing me a favor,” I lied.

  “You’re a pretty tough broad,” he said, his smile a trifle grim now. “Just as well for me to know it.”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t particularly changed since we met.”

  “You know what’s changed.”

  I knew. Not only did I know, but I thought the changes might be even greater than he feared. It had begun to seem likely that Pablo and Livvy and their baby would be with us, at least with me, for a while. It had already occurred to me that the circular wrought-iron staircase I’d fantasized would be dangerous for a little kid. My brain hadn’t specified the little kid’s age, but I knew I wasn’t thinking about an infant anymore.

  “The only thing I can promise is that I won’t change.” I smiled. “I’ll even stay blonde. At least for a while.”

  “You have a bug about this blonde thing,” he said, throwing up his hands. But I was courting him now, and he wasn’t really angry. “Anyway, it seems to me we have no choice now but to just do it. Get married. It’s such an issue that . . . I don’t want to live without you—I mean, I’ve tried to imagine what it would be like, and I don’t want to, and the only way I can imagine things getting back to normal is if we get married.”

  I said, “If that’s a proposal, I accept.”

  He stared at me for a while. He had to retreat now or forget about it. He ground one heel into the rug as though he were making sure a cigarette butt had no spark left. Then we both stood and came around the coffee table for our first real embrace in a ridiculously long time.

  We decided we’d have only family and a few close friends at the wedding, then a party afterward for all our friends as well. Upstairs and downstairs. We’d have a rabbi if we could find a Reform rabbi who didn’t remind us of a mortician. If we couldn’t, there was a lovely woman judge who’d married two couples we knew. She might spare us the discomforts of measured religion and false ritual without turning the ceremony into a procedure à la City Hall. I’d have to ask the judge if she would let us step on a glass; on the other hand, my current sense was that we wouldn’t need any reminder of life’s difficulties.

  Livvy and Pablo had come home shortly after breakfast at the Sherry-Netherland. Livvy said she just couldn’t sleep there. Pablo grinned uncomfortably, asked, “How do you like that, for a mama’s girl?” Livvy looked at him as though he were out of his mind; what on earth did being home have to do with me?

  She had greeted the news that Leon and I were getting married with amusement, as though we’d never have thought of it if she and Pablo hadn’t done it first. He, on the other hand, thought it was great, told us how happy his mother was going to be. He was flustered when I laughed, said he’d just meant because she was crazy about both of us. (He still barely spoke to Leon.) I had told them we were asking the landlord for permission not only to improve the walls, but to put in stairs, turn the place into “sort of a duplex.” Pablo nodded gravely, said stairs would make it easier for everyone. Livvy didn’t react.

  She appeared to be doing homework again. She never talked about her pregnancy, or about college. But two weeks after the wedding, she began checking the mail before she’d even dropped her knapsack; April fifteenth was when Harvard and many other schools sent word of admission. I grew more tense. One thing to have a pregnant teenager dream about being discovered for television when that dream has been created and fostered by a professional. Another to find her refusing to relinquish the fantasy of leaving a husband and baby for college a week or two after she’s given birth. There were moments when it seemed the best I could hope for was a rejection, others when I feared she couldn’t tolerate one. I tried again to talk her into seeing a shrink. She turned briefly into someone resembling the old Livvy. Actually, I would have liked to believe she was that girl; the one I saw was more frightening, not all of one angry piece but fragmented, more likely to collapse weepily into herself than to explode at me. The shrink I’d felt was the smartest of the ones I’d talked to thought it would be pointless to push her to see him until she heard from Harvard and we had a better idea of the immediate problem.

  On April 17 there was mail from Harvard and Brown. I made certain to be in the kitchen and occupied when she came home from school. She went straight to the end of my desk where I left things for her, grabbed the two envelopes, opened one, then, expressionless, the other. She handed me the letters. She had been accepted by both schools.

  I was overwhelmed by pride and dread.


  “My goodness, sweetheart,” I said, “you should be proud of yourself.” I hugged her. “Just being accepted—”

  “Do all schools begin at the same time?”

  “I guess,” I said. “At least within a week or so.” She’d been given a due date of August 29.

  She nodded.

  “Too close for this coming term, Liv. Even if we were talking about New York.”

  Her demeanor altered; the Sugar Plum Fairy had plucked the magic fruit from her hand as she grasped it.

  “In the meantime,” I rushed on, “even if you have to delay college, I hope you’ll keep working hard at school.”

  “Don’t you understand,” Livvy asked, her manner that of a five-year-old who needs mommy to see that it’s not just that she wants some Cracker Jack, she’s really hungry, “I don’t want to lose a whole term?”

  “Livvy,” I said, “I think maybe we should talk about this when Pablo comes home. Okay? With Pablo here, maybe it’ll be a little easier to figure things out.”

  He came home early. Livvy was sleeping. I told him what was happening, suggested she should see a psychiatrist. Before he spoke to Livvy, his manner was matter-of-fact: Harvard was not happening. By the time I called them to dinner, he was more troubled. (Leon was working late; I’d brought the kids’ dinners upstairs.)

  Livvy was abstracted, not responding to anything Pablo or I said until it occurred to me to draw her toward the future by way of the past.

  “You know, I was thinking today about when I had you, Liv.”

  She looked at me, expressionless.

  “It was the happiest time in my life. In the morning, I’d wake up and I’d nurse you. . . . I don’t know whether you’ll want to nurse your baby.”

  Her hands flew to her breasts as though I’d proposed cutting them off. She shook her head adamantly.

  “Anyway, I’d feed you, loaf around for a while. Then I usually took you for a walk. When you were little, I just carried you. You weren’t just little, you were tiny! I remember when I put the tiniest undershirt on you, I was sure it would be small, and it was much too big!”

  She’d grown attentive.

  “There weren’t all those contraptions they have now for carrying kids, but a tiny baby’s very easy to carry; I carried you everyplace in my arms.” I smiled. “One arm, a lot of the time. When I was cooking, we had a car bed in the kitchen of the restaurant. But before I went back to work, when we were visiting Anna, she’d sit in the rocking chair and hold you so I could work. Or we made a little bed out of a quilt in one corner of the kitchen, on the floor, and you slept and we both worked. You don’t remember Anna anymore, do you?”

  She nodded, then shook her head. She was rapt.

  “We’d go home, and I’d feed you, and then we’d both sleep for a while. Eating and sleeping. That’s what we mostly did the first few months. I felt so lucky to have those quiet months with you. So glad I didn’t have to be working all the time.”

  “See, honey?” Pablo said. “That’s what your mom’s trying to tell you. You’ll need a lot of sleep.”

  Livvy nodded emphatically. “You can go to school and sleep a lot. Especially college. You take as many credits as you want to and sleep as much as you want to.”

  An utterly sensible statement unless you had some feeling for the realities. Not to speak of the fact that she appeared to have in mind a college in Boston.

  I smiled. “Especially if the baby happens to sleep when you do. In the first few months they’re just as likely to be up in the night as the day. That’s why you can’t just say, ‘Well, the baby’ll do this and I’ll do that.’ ”

  She said, “I thought you were going to help me.”

  “Of course I am, love. I’m going to help you a lot. I want to. But it’s still . . . I think if you look at that book, maybe you’ll get a feeling . . .”

  “It doesn’t have to be such a big deal,” Pablo said. “My aunt had my three cousins in the first three years she was married.’ ”

  I shrugged. “I guess it’s different for different people.” It was the first time I’d felt irritated with my son-in-law. “Maybe she was older than Livvy. Or just more ready. Livvy’s very young.”

  “My aunt was young.”

  I decided to ignore him.

  “In the meantime, Liv, I think you ought to keep doing just what you’re doing in school. For this last term. Then, when you do start thinking about colleges again—”

  “Not colleges,” she interrupted. “Harvard.”

  It was too much for all at once.

  “Well, whether it’s Harvard . . . or Columbia . . . or NYU . . . which’d be easier, because they’re here in New York, and Pablo’ll be here, and I’m here . . . Then you’ll have the grades to show them, including for your last term.”

  She looked back and forth between Pablo and me, trying to make up her mind about something.

  “You’re right,” she said, standing up abruptly. “I have to do my homework. Can I have some coffee? No, I mean, tea. No. Coke. Diet Coke. I’ll take it into my room with me.” She came around the table to kiss the top of my head. “You’re absolutely right, Mama. This isn’t the time to let my schoolwork slide.” She took the roll that was left in the breadbasket and went to her room.

  She was eating at least as much as she usually did, and her belly was visibly larger than it had been at the wedding. She wore big black sweaters and jeans to school every day, varying the sweater occasionally with one of a couple of oversized black cotton T-shirts I’d picked up for her because the weather was growing warmer and she’d shown no interest in shopping for clothes.

  Because of the recession, we were able to get a good contractor, a friend of Pablo’s, who would begin work, the bedroom walls first, right after our wedding. It was written into our two new leases that we (Leon) would be responsible for removing the staircase and bringing both floors back to their original condition if one or both of us moved and the landlord requested that it be done.

  We had planned to rent the same big Westhampton house as we’d had the summer before and were surprised to discover that Leon’s kids wanted to go back to their old camps. We felt it had to do with their uneasiness around Livvy. We’d told them she was pregnant, but they sensed that more than a pregnancy was going on and they seldom came downstairs without a reason these days, unless they knew Pablo and Livvy were out. Rennie didn’t mind that they would use her bedroom while she was at camp and the walls were being done, though Livvy might choose to stay out at the summer house with me. The one wrinkle was that Leon couldn’t afford all the renovations, plus camp, plus the substantial rent on that house, so we ended up taking a considerably smaller place in Bridgehampton that would be a squeeze when the kids returned from camp, a week or so before Livvy’s due date.

  There was no longer talk of Pablo and Livvy’s looking for an apartment. I’d told them it seemed just as well for them to remain with us “at the beginning.” He’d nodded eagerly, said his aunt had told him that every new mother could use some help. Presumably this was the same aunt who’d had three children without needing any. I didn’t feel inclined to ask. Pablo was extremely eager to do whatever he could for us. He had great faith in Benny Torres, his friend who would be our contractor, but he still planned to oversee the men working in the apartment to make sure things went right.

  Leon and I were married in my parents’ living room with just our kids and families present. My parents were joyous; Larry, congratulatory; Beatrice, pleasant to me, girlish-giggly with Leon; Max and Rebecca, supervised by Leon’s kids, lively and agreeable. (If he had problems with his kids over our marriage, Leon spared me knowledge of them. Only in Annie could I see renewed signs of hostility, and she’d reached that age where you could never be certain what was bothering her, or whether you had anything to do with it.) Leon’s parents, old and wrinkled and very cranky, came up from Florida for the wedding. They spent most of their time here telling everyone that if they’d known what
New York was like now, they wouldn’t have complained about Miami. Leon assured me they would complain as much as ever when they went back. We left them our upstairs bedroom, and we slept downstairs.

  The judge had turned out to be booked through July, so we settled on the most innocuous rabbi we could find, a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed kid who looked about twenty, and whom I almost asked, before I caught myself, whether he’d gone to Harvard. Rabbi Merker was more than happy to incorporate into the ceremony any nugget of wisdom precious to Leon or me. My choice was the last lines of a beautiful poem by Yeats, the only poet who’d ever left me wanting to take another English class. Its title is “A Prayer for My Daughter.” I had loved it long before I knew it would come to have the meaning for me it did now.

  And may her bride-groom bring her to a house

  Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

  For arrogance and hatred are the wares

  Peddled in the thoroughfares.

  How but in custom and in ceremony

  Are innocence and beauty born?

  Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,

  And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

  “Some of you will remember shows I’ve done on an Italian, and then a Cuban-Puerto Rican, wedding. Recently I had occasion to make a party for an American Jewish couple who aren’t religious. They married in a ceremony that was performed by a rabbi and was quite lovely, except that many of the words might as well have been spoken by a Unitarian. Or a Buddhist priest. I compensated by cooking a lot of good Jewish food. But good food that’s just Jewish is almost as complicated as good weddings that’re just Jewish. Since this will be my last show for a while, it seemed inappropriate for me to do something entirely different from what I’ve been doing all along. So I’ve posted a couple of recipes but I won’t—please don’t tell See-more!—actually cook either dish. Instead, I’m going to talk about the Jews and food. Tonight, my swan song, will be just conversation.