That wasn’t so long ago, Joseph thought as he helped Esther place the lavender shell-shaped soaps in dishes, smooth as sea glass, in the bath and potpourri in her Lenox cut-crystal bowls on the bureau in the bedroom for their new in-laws. He knew that his wife had taken great pains to make the Blooms feel at home and that she had even given a key to their neighbor so she could place freshly cut flowers in the Steuben vases, arranged strategically around the small—but quaint—guest cottage.
This, however, had all been done before the wedding.
“What will you do?” Miriam said to her mother. She stood in front of the mirror, removing the pins that had held her veil in place. “Perhaps David and I shouldn’t go,” she said, not meaning a single word of it.
“Don’t be a lunatic,” Esther said.
Miriam laughed, though she knew her mother wasn’t kidding. “Don’t worry, Mom,” she said.
Esther stood behind her daughter, peering over her shoulder. Miriam watched her mother looking at them both in the glass, and wondered whether her mother recognized herself. Once, in one of Esther’s infrequent moments of vulnerability, she had told Miriam how sometimes she looked in the mirror and startled herself. Looking at her now, Miriam wondered if she had ever seen this woman who had gone a bit fleshy at the cheeks, where intricate spiderwebs of blood vessels exploded right below her skin. Her mother held her head up and to the side. What am I, a frog? she had once asked Miriam when she found a new sagging at her throat and neck.
Now Esther placed her chin on Miriam’s shoulder. “You know, I never had any doubts that I married the right man,” she said. “I have been incredibly lucky.”
Miriam took her eyes away from the glass and looked at her mother, startled by her honesty.
“I hope you always feel that way. I hope you have a lovely life together, Miriam, like we have, but I pray that you know it as well, while it’s happening.” Esther reached out and placed her daughter’s hair behind her ears. She sniffled.
Miriam closed her eyes and held out her face to her mother.
“In any case.” Esther shook herself back. “You must go on your honeymoon,” she said. “We’ll all be just fine.”
“You’re sure?” Miriam asked. She put both hands on her mother’s shoulders.
That’s when she saw Joseph, lingering at the threshold, kicking at a piece of loose wood. “Daddy,” she said. She turned and went to her father and felt a wash of grief—or was it happiness?—shake her heart. Was growing older not being able to discern the difference between the two? By the time she reached him, tears rolled down both his cheeks.
Joseph bent down to look at the piece of loose wood. I need to nail this down, he thought. Someone will surely get a splinter or worse, the gangrene! In this way he avoided remembering his daughter, who, when she was an infant, he had tried so frantically to protect that anyone who wanted even to have a look at her had to wear a surgical mask. He did not think of the little girl smiling into his new camera from the top of the staircase, or the one on roller skates falling into a patch of grass, or the young lady pushing back the living room curtains waiting for the arrival of her date, or the woman who turned her back on him to board a plane for South America.
He could not help but remember her at the lake, however, where so many of his good memories took place. Stored in here, he thought to himself, wanting to thump his chest and to break open the cage of his confining ribs to set that delicate organ free for just one moment. To just once not feel its beating and crashing against those fragile bones. He remembered watching his elder daughter separate sand on the beach below the house with a magnet. Black and purple and stone. All summer long Miriam had lined the porch with empty yahrtzeit candles filled with layered sand. Now where did I leave those nails? he thought, standing upright to face this woman who was miraculously his daughter.
“Don’t cry, sugar,” he said to Miriam, but he was wiping the corners of his own eyes.
A few days after their honeymoon began—after the horror of getting to Santorini, and then recovering from the jet lag, why, it was just about time to turn around and go home—Miriam lay in David’s arms. The blue shutters swung open, knocking against the bright white stucco of the quaint hotel. As sweet Aegean air wafted over them, the couple was finally able to relax for a moment. Miriam pulled at the hair on David’s tanned arms and, for the first time since they’d arrived in Greece, thought for a moment about the days leading up to the wedding.
“The Days of Horror” David had called them as they were taking place.
Miriam had disagreed. “I don’t see the horror,” she’d said. “After all, it’s my mother who’s doing everything.”
David had laughed at this, and Miriam had shrugged it off.
Now she looked up at the wooden cross pinned to the white, white wall and tried to remember the best part of the wedding. Most of the girls she knew from school told her that their weddings had been the happiest days of their lives. So much of her young life had been spent listening to such hyperbole. Over those dreadful teas and at the evening mixers in college, friends told Miriam how thrilling their proms and cotillions had been, how much they were gripped by their studies. Most recently, her friend Edith had extolled the wonders of childbirth to Miriam over the telephone, to the point that Miriam was positively green with envy, not so much for the prospect of children but for the very act of giving birth. Miriam knew to question, and yet, whenever any of her friends spoke about her wedding, they did so with a genuine love for the day, and Miriam couldn’t help but believe them. Some girls, she was momentarily reassured to hear, didn’t remember their big days, though that was soon explained away by the dreamlike state they had been in at the time. These girls wanted to do it all over again, so that the best days of their lives would not be entirely lost to them.
Had Miriam loved her wedding?
Lying with David now, smelling the sea air and listening to the hotelier scream at an American who was checking in after what Miriam knew had to have been an excruciating journey, she thought that not only had she not loved her wedding but she hadn’t even liked it. Who were half those people? Shouldn’t she at least have been able to recognize them if they were coming to her wedding? Were she to pass them on the street tomorrow, would they know her?
She too had been a stranger, she knew. To these anonymous guests, yes, but also to herself. A stranger to myself, she thought now. Just as she had felt looking in the mirror in that doctor’s office all those years ago. But where’s my nose? she had thought. And beneath this thought was that singular and paralyzing fear: And where am I? At the wedding, Miriam had smiled and curtsied and bowed her head demurely. A stranger here myself, she corrected herself, remembering Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus, which David had berated her for not knowing was a Broadway musical because she had seen only the movie. But inside? Inside grew a ball of rage as tight as a fist. She remembered being a teenager on her mother’s bed watching Essoil commercials. “Women of the future!” Frances Gold had said so brightly. Well, here it is, she’d thought as David rose to toast her after his mother had humiliated her in front of everyone. My future is upon me, and this is it.
All Miriam could remember about her wedding was a terrible sadness that night. David had not carried her over the threshold into the hotel room, and what shocked her was that she had not wanted him to. All she could hear was her mother the next day, asking if it had happened. This was the only reason she had cared.
David had gone straight into the bathroom, and Miriam had taken off her own wedding dress, laying it over the back of the wooden chair. It had looked like a deflated doll there, waiting for someone to breathe life into it. Miriam had climbed into bed and pretended she was asleep when David came out of the bathroom in his underwear. She had heard the sad sound of his glasses hitting the wood ever so slightly as he set them down on the night table.
And what on earth had passed between her parents and David’s? Miriam couldn’t get the cruel slur of her
new mother-in-law’s voice out of her mind.
She sat up in bed, and David’s arm flopped on her lap.
“David,” she said. She brought her legs up to her chest, put her arms around them, and laid her head on the table of her knees.
“Hmmm.” After a day spent lying on the red beach and swimming in the blue, blue sea, a late lunch at the taverna covered in vines and cut deep into the cliffs, homemade barrel wine, and, despite the waiters’ warnings—It will make you crazy, crazy!—three ouzos, David was well on his way to a late-afternoon sleep.
Looking at her husband, his thick hair still short from Esther’s insistence that he cut it for the wedding, Miriam thought of her father, the way he had stood up and screamed like that, pointing a mean finger at her new father-in-law. Miriam had never seen him so furious. “I want to talk about the wedding,” she said.
For a brief and horrifying second, David, slowly stirring awake, thought the wedding was still to come. For an instant, he was being badgered about the rabbi, pestered over the sauce for the chicken, queried as to what their wedding flower should be, begged over and over to help his fiancée, who was rendered utterly unable to make even the smallest decision.
“Daffodils,” he said sleepily.
Miriam lifted her head up and patted his neck. “No, sweetie, we chose daisies, remember?”
David sat up and, after a moment, registered the hotel room, the stark white walls, the marble floors, and the wooden bureau dotted with small black holes, the work of termites.
“What, Miriam? I thought we came here to forget all that.”
“Huuh!” she gasped. “You don’t go on a honeymoon to forget your wedding, David.” She was deeply hurt. Deeply. It seemed their wedding had not been the best day of her husband’s life either.
“What I mean is we spent so much time on the bloody wedding before it happened, I’d actually like to take the time to just enjoy being married.”
He did have a point. And this calmed Miriam for a moment, until she remembered why she’d brought the wedding up in the first place. “That’s true,” she said. “But I just keep turning over that horrible moment when your mother called me a Polish peasant. And then when my father went completely berserk. I’ve never seen him like that.”
“My mother is crazy, Miriam.” David rolled toward her. “You know that. Believe me, that’s the nicest thing she’s called anyone I’ve ever dated.”
“Okay,” Miriam said, cutting him off before he went into all the women he had brought home to Sarah. The actresses. The fabulousness. The charm. She’d heard more than enough about that. “But what did he mean, my father?” Miriam asked. “That your father was a gangster? Is that an insult of some kind? Does it mean something in Jewish?”
David sat up and looked at his wife in disbelief. “It means your father was accusing mine of being a gangster, Miriam.”
“Oh.” She sat up and brushed her hair behind her ears. “I thought it might be some kind of expression from Russia. Well, was he a gangster?” She rubbed her nose.
In truth, David didn’t know how to answer the question. Gangster. What did it mean really? He remembered late nights when he sneaked downstairs and sat at the kitchen table in the dark waiting for his father to come home. Was he coming in from the theater those nights? Perhaps he was waiting for his father to come in and lift him up, embrace him, carry him upstairs, and put him to bed.
“I’m not sure,” David said. “I’m not sure about your uncle either,” he said, in an effort to inform Miriam that he wasn’t the only one who had a family riddled with thugs.
Solomon. Miriam remembered her father screaming at Esther if she ever so much as said his name: Don’t mention his name to me. Joseph would hold his hands in the air as if to stop the sound from traveling past them.
It was one of the few times she’d heard her father raise his voice. And yet Miriam and her sister had grown up believing that their uncle had died, “In the war,” Esther once told them, reaching for her daughters’ hands. In this manner, Miriam and Gloria had learned to understand the war: it was a fleeting touch, a brief facial expression that looked strangely conspiratorial, a silence moving slowly through a crowded room.
What war? Miriam thought now as she looked at her new husband in disbelief. The Spanish Civil War? “Fascinating,” she said. “Jewish gangsters.” She had to admit, she liked the idea of them.
For some reason, the thought of his father filled with violence made David think of West Side Story, which he knew was opening in a few weeks. David couldn’t wait. How much longer could they be so far away from what was going on? What was happening in the world, anyway? Entire wars could be waged right now and it seemed they would not know it. It was pleasant to drink wine on the cliffs and watch the sun burst upon the sea, to feel as if they had reached the edge of the world. It hadn’t felt like they would falter and fall off; instead he felt comfort that they had come here together. David had enjoyed it, but now, frankly, it made him nervous.
He rose out of bed slowly. Did they have the Evening News here? He was dying for a little reassurance from Doug Edwards.
“Sweetie,” he said, pulling on his trousers. “I’m going to go downstairs and see if there’s any news on.”
“On?” she said. Miriam had tried to get a Herald Tribune all day.
“I remember there was a television in the back room downstairs. Maybe they’ll just let me have a peek.” David had spent little of his life without a television in close proximity.
“It’s in Greek,” Miriam said. It pained her that this was a language she could neither speak nor understand. At the market in town, she’d spoken English with an accent she herself could not place, as if this would make her pass for Greek.
David buttoned his shirt and shoved his tanned feet into the leather sandals he had bought in Athens. You look like a Greek god, Miriam had said as he stopped at the first of the rows of booths beneath the Parthenon. That had sealed the deal, and the more the leather had worn down to fit the shapes of his feet, the more comfortable he had felt in the sandals.
“I just want to see, okay?” he said. Why did she have to argue with everything? He’d imagined his wife conforming to his will, as his sandals did to his feet.
Downstairs, David rang the bell at the desk, and a man came out of the back room, smoking a cigarette.
David pointed to the room where he could hear the sound of canned laughter. “May I see?” he screamed, as if this would make the man understand him.
The manager nodded his head, pursing his lips. “Why not?” he said.
David walked behind the counter, and for a brief and, he realized, silly moment, he felt the way he had when his father brought him backstage. Even though he dreaded meeting the cast each evening, he adored going where regular citizens were not allowed. He enjoyed watching what was behind the scenes, the process, as it were, and it always made him enjoy the finished product so much more.
Here, there were no actors smoking, no girls rolling down stockings one leg at a time, to behold. Amid the stale smoke and old couches there was a television, and David went over to it to try to find the news. There were only three stations, and Miriam was right, everything was in Greek, even the one playing I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball screaming in Greek as her lips moved to English made him slightly anxious. There was absolutely no recognition. He turned the dial anyway, clicking through the three channels, and then, as if a valentine sent from America, Frances Gold came on the set.
She held a gleaming bottle of Essoil, and though she mouthed English, the television spat Greek at him. Did they use Essoil here? David looked around the room for evidence of its work. He took a deep breath, expecting the clean, fresh smell of his father-in-law: only stale smoke. David looked back at Frances’s smiling face. Jesus fucking Christ, David thought, as he watched her smile into the camera, into this back room in this hotel in Santorini. I am a part of the world.
The Brodskys and the Blooms had not canceled their time tog
ether.
“Jeesum Crow,” Esther said to Joseph as they had watched the young couple get into their blue Renault, the shaving-creamed “Just Married” already sliding down the rear window. Tin cans scraped the asphalt behind them as they pulled away. “Can you believe they’re still coming, Joe?” Esther put her hand to the side of her head. “I just can’t believe the nerve of that woman.”
“It will be fine, Es.”
Joseph ran his hand over his wife’s back. He had plans to ignore the whole incident.
“Pssh,” she said. “Says you.”
The first day at the house, the two couples kept largely to themselves. But on the second morning Esther succumbed to what she told Joseph—told, or warned?—was her good breeding and walked over the pine needles to the guest cottage.
Joseph could hear her rapping three times on the red door. “Hello, hello!” she said.
He got up from the table and peered out the kitchen window just as Sarah—or at least a woman who resembled Sarah—appeared at the door of the cottage. He could see she wore a sheet wrapped around her body and a sleep mask pushed up onto her head.
Even from the main house, Joseph could hear the gasp that escaped Esther upon seeing Sarah. “Good morning!” She tried to recover brightly.
Sarah rubbed her head. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Nearly ten o’clock!” Esther said. “Well, I was hoping you two would come up to the house for brunch,” she went on. “And then Joe and I thought we’d go out on the MiriGlo, the four of us.”
“The who?” Sarah said.
Esther laughed. “The MiriGlo! Our little motorboat. Named for the children: Miri for Miriam, Glo for Gloria! Do you water-ski?”
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