Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Seymour seemed enraptured. He shook his head and felt the air traveling through his hair. He sped up, shifting the boat into third gear, and decided right then that he would get a convertible. How grand would it be to drive into Times Square this way? Then he realized what the problem had been his whole life: why, it had only been the traffic! Had there been no traffic, he always would have felt this free.

  “Everything all right?” Esther called out to Sarah, whose knees seemed to be buckling a bit as she attempted to stay within the boat’s wake. Her upper body was thrust forward awkwardly.

  Sarah signaled for Seymour to slow down.

  “Slow down,” Esther called back to Seymour.

  He didn’t seem to notice, so entranced was he with driving. Joseph tapped him on the shoulder. “Seymour,” he said. “You should probably go a leetle easier on zhe gas.”

  Now Seymour looked up from the panel, with its compass and speedometer, and into the rearview to see his wife faltering. She was making the thumbs-down signal and then quickly grabbing the rope so as not to lose her balance.

  “Slow down!” Esther said, standing.

  But there was no slowing Seymour, and he watched, not caring what his face revealed, as Sarah tried to steady herself. Then he watched her let go of the rope. And as they pulled away from her, the bar of the ski rope ticking the water behind them, she dropped peacefully into the water.

  “Here,” Joseph said, nudging the much larger Seymour. “Let me go around to pick her up.”

  Slowly, Seymour let out the gas, and the boat slowed. “I can do it,” he said. He nodded, assuring his host that he would do it properly, like a gentleman.

  Esther slowly pulled in the rope, winding it around her arm and in between her thumb and forefinger, as if it were a lasso. Seymour turned the boat around to retrieve Sarah. As they pulled up alongside her, Joseph leaned down to grab her hand.

  “You all right?” he asked her.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Joseph could tell that for a brief moment she had been someone else, maybe herself a long time ago, or maybe someone she had always wished she could be. Now she was back to herself.

  “Just fine,” she said, and, taking Joseph’s hand, she pulled herself back onboard. Dripping water, she removed the life jacket. She undid the strap of the blue bathing cap, and, pulling against the rubber, she shook her light hair free. She let Esther place a towel around her bare shoulders. But, Joseph noted, Sarah could not look at her husband. He imagined her as a fragile vase about to be broken to bits.

  Seymour looked out across the water to the other side of the lake, where the Brodskys’ house stood on a hill of rocks above the shore. A whole other town existed over there. Brushing his hands through his wind-tangled hair, he could see her again, his wife dropping the line and descending. In that drawn-out instant, he pictured the very moment he had met Sarah on the Duck Pond in Central Park, she all rosy and bundled up against the weather. As he pictured her gradually sinking into the water, he remembered crashing into her on the ice, how he had clumsily turned around and watched her slip and fall.

  Chapter 18

  Thanksgiving:

  Brodsky, Verdonik, Bloom, 1960

  MIRIAM WAS STILL FRECKLED from the honeymoon, and David had managed to hang on to two bottles of ouzo purchased from the Athens duty free, when the newlyweds bought a brownstone with access to a large outdoor space on 105th and Central Park West.

  “Are you sure we want to be so far uptown?” Miriam asked nervously.

  “But you didn’t like the place in the West Village,” David, who had fallen in love with a brownstone on Horatio Street, said. “You found it seedy down there, which is ridiculous.”

  “Well, isn’t there something in between?” she asked.

  “No, Miriam,” he said. Did everything have to be a compromise? “I don’t want to live in midtown.”

  Miriam sighed.

  “What about Brooklyn?” David was cheered to think of it.

  “Absolutely not,” she said. She thought of all her father’s terrible stories, the way he had worked so hard to get his mother out as soon as possible.

  “There are parts of Brooklyn that are wonderful,” he said. “Brooklyn Heights has a view of the whole city.”

  “There is a stigma to Brooklyn,” Miriam said. “No.”

  “Then the Upper West Side it is,” David said, resisting the urge to tell his wife she had never even been to Brooklyn. “I want some room to breathe. I want a garden,” he said.

  It was also near the park, and Miriam imagined the two of them taking walks every Saturday morning, arm in arm as they aged together. She remembered looking into his eyes beneath the chuppa. And she thought of the night in the hotel, before they’d left for Athens, and how she had shivered, her shoulder to the windowpane, thinking how scared she’d been to be alone as a child. Now she remembered the bare branches of the yet-to-bloom trees outside the window, terrible claws, swaying in the wind. Miriam had had nightmares that she would go to sleep each night alone. “You’re right, David. By the park sounds perfect,” she said, kissing him on the nose.

  The young couple’s parents, and grandparents for that matter, had worked hard enough. Miriam and David Bloom now lived in art. There was little in the brownstone that did not stem from the theater, be it the sheet music stacked along the piano no one ever so much as thought to play or the signed, framed posters of The Music Man and The King and I and Guys and Dolls that lined the walls.

  David Bloom began to garden his small patch of land. Why, I could live on a goddamn kibbutz! he thought, digging the trowel into the earth. As he planted tomatoes, he thought about how his mother would loathe this idea and smiled.

  As David guided climbing roses over wooden trellises and pruned their hoary thorns, he was reminded of the way his grandmother had braided her clients’ hair. The year before, Inez had sublet that beauty shop to two Hasidic girls—they were wearing wigs, what did they know from cutting hair? she’d said.

  As her husband gardened, Miriam worried her way into language. The more she read, the more books took over the bedroom, proliferating like David’s plants. They were piled on the floor next to the couple’s bed and beneath it, stacked on the veneer top of her bureau. But Miriam’s books were all French or Spanish titles, from far-flung places such as Algeria and Morocco and Chad, the nearest coming from Paris or Barcelona. I must maintain my languages, she would tell herself, checking dictionaries for words she could just kick herself for forgetting. Each year she took an evaluation, and, though she would always receive the highest rating, it was never quite good enough. Miriam was always going for Native Speaker.

  In this way, Miriam and David divided their kingdom. But when David came in from his garden with bunches of flowers clutched in his fists, dirt up and down his arms, his brown shoulders sprayed with freckles, Miriam was almost always led away from her foreign lands. Just to see her half-naked husband smelling of sweat and earth, clutching blossoms like a boy, stirred her in a manner that his getting into bed and turning toward her never had. When David came in from the garden, it almost always led to a session of rutting and romping.

  As months went by, David became even more preoccupied with his garden, and he watched in horror as leaf miners, mites, nematodes ate their way through his most carefully tended tomatoes. He was dismayed to find that fungus had developed on the fuzzy green tips of his flowering beans.

  “I just wish I could garden all day long,” he would tell Miriam. “I wish I could protect it,” he’d say, all the time knowing he had to go to work. David was not obsessed with the theater any longer—if he couldn’t be in the shows, then he could care less where the theater was headed or if he would be a part of it at all. He had become a businessman, but one without a competitive edge. So what, the Shuberts took over Broadway? They could have the whole White Way as far as David was concerned. They could have the fucking world. Needless to say, this attitude did not sit well with Seymour, and
father and son would go days in the office without even the exchange of pleasantries.

  The prospect of his garden’s devastation caused David much anxiety. Just the threat of one more ruined root, another deteriorated daffodil, drove him to start experimenting. In the basement, he worked in the enormous washroom sink to find a product that both prevented rot and removed whatever havoc had already been wreaked.

  They came in powders and waxes and aerosol sprays, in liquids and solids, in crystals; clear and white and yellow and blue. All weekend long David worked, applying chemicals to his seeds and cuttings and petals and bulbs and stamens and stems and roots. He wrote up his findings in a composition notebook, a black-and-white marbleized affair like the one Joseph had used so many years before. Miriam watched her husband as she had once watched her father, his hair thick and wild, his glasses crooked as if he’d just been socked in the face, as he held beakers up to the dim light.

  As it turned out, Essoil, something David had painted on his tomatoes one morning as a joke, was the most efficacious in keeping them completely free from worms and all kinds of molds. Like Joseph, David liked things clean and shiny. When he got right down to it, this had been part of his initial attraction to Miriam Brodsky: her freshness. She was, after all, an heiress to cleanliness. David wanted the produce to look as he had felt as a boy in his grandmother’s pink, shiny, shellacked beauty shop, where all the ladies brought him peppermints and shook their tits at him, and where Inez loved him in a manner that no other woman ever would or could again: with a smothering, all-over love that claimed him as it liberated him. Soon David began moving his version of science from his basement-cum-

  laboratory to his actual garden.

  Of course, David Bloom knew that Essoil could not be consumed. But, still, he wanted to grow a perfect crop: the roundest, reddest tomatoes, the largest, firmest pumpkins, floating hydrangea as light and lovely as flakes of snow, or chrysanthemums as red and shiny as Dorothy’s slippers. And so he separated the little garden into two sections—one side with produce that could be eaten and the other portion simply for admiring. The comparison was shocking. Day after day, David would look at his perfect crop with longing as he went to pick the herbs for a vinaigrette or a flower for a centerpiece from his more tired and sad-looking section of his garden. Actors, he’d think, admiring a perfect, round, red globe. Bravo!

  One afternoon, a little over two years and two entire growing seasons in their new home, Miriam wandered into the garden, where her husband was planting his just-purchased daffodil and tulip bulbs. “Let’s have Thanksgiving here this year,” she said.

  He made no response.

  “Are you listening?” she said.

  David’s back rose before her, a question mark she watched transform into an exclamation point. “I hear you, Miriam,” he said. “Just who would we invite exactly?”

  He knew precisely what her response would be, and he positively dreaded the idea of their parents together. His parents and hers simply didn’t work. East and west, oil and vinegar, no matter how you sliced it, they simply were not cut from the same cloth. Miriam’s sister was in Massachusetts, and she wouldn’t come down with her dull husband and two kids just for a night of eating. And David would rather kill himself, truly, than invite Dulcy, who had become an elitist of the worst kind ever since she set foot on the Abbot Academy campus her freshman year. Smith had positively done her in, and David could just imagine her with Sarah, glaring over their martinis at the Brodskys. For God’s sake tell them to quiet down, Dulcy would whisper to Sarah. I like my Jews WASPy, she’d laugh into her mother.

  “Why, we’d invite our families, of course, David.” Miriam knew it could be a disaster—she’d heard more than enough from her mother about their dreadful week together at the lake house—but she still felt it was something she should do.

  “Do you really think that’s wise?” he asked her, now standing completely straight, sweat pouring from his face.

  “You look earthy, don’t you?” Miriam went sashaying up to her husband. She loved the natural appearance of him when he was not tidy and clean, dressed in those Brooks Brothers suits he wore to work. She wished then that she could smell him, an essence not covered by soap and shampoo, one that he did not share with the world, that only she would recognize.

  “I don’t want to do Thanksgiving,” he said. “Sounds like a whole lot of trouble for very little payoff.” What he wanted to say was: This will be a catastrophe.

  Miriam kicked the ground, and a small tuft of young grass flew up and then landed with a light thud. She watched David cringe at the sight of it. “Are you sure?” she asked him.

  “Positive.” He bent down to attend to his planting, and she was again confronted by her husband’s back.

  Miriam crossed her arms and stomped a foot, unable to sway him with her feminine wiles.

  “Well, it’s too late anyway. I’ve already invited my parents.”

  Slowly David again rose from the ground and turned to face his wife. “Well, thank you for consulting me.”

  “I knew you would say no,” she said. “Why do we have this beautiful house, the one you wanted, by the way, if we’re not going to share it with our family?”

  “Why would you invite them if you knew I would say no?” David asked.

  Miriam shrugged. “Do you want to invite your parents then?” She raised one side of her mouth into a smirk. Another effect of her rhinoplasty was that only one side of her mouth really worked—in fact, only one side of her entire face was completely functional. She could wink only to the left, raise the left nostril, and now smirk with the left side of her mouth. It could never be proved—Esther would not hear of any such nonsense—but Miriam had always wondered if that doctor hadn’t snipped some muscle that connected the whole right side. Somehow that side of her face was disconnected, and, in addition to her poor motor skills, somewhere behind her face floated two loose ends.

  “Well, that would only be right now, wouldn’t it?” He forced a smile.

  “I have an idea,” she said, knowing her husband was angry with her. “Let’s invite Frances and Vladimir as well. They don’t have kids, they’re fun, they’re sweet, they’re in New York, it will be a nice way to avoid the whole family dynamic.”

  David had to hand it to Miriam. The lady had a way, didn’t she? How did she not only get what she wanted but convince him that she was right and there was nothing for which to apologize? But she was right. It would be far more festive with the Zworykins. “Okay, Miriam,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  Slowly a smile made its way over David’s face as he pictured his wife coming out of the steaming kitchen, a huge hump of a golden bird surrounded by apples and carrots and onions, and this made him proud of her. He would use his own squash for the occasion, the rosemary he’d been coaxing into a bush since they’d moved in. He pictured himself shaking martinis, and, after passing them around the room—the smallest for his mother, or maybe, he decided, he wouldn’t give her one at all—he’d lean against the mantel and take in the scintillating conversation. When his wife came in sniffling over the heaped platter, her cheeks rosy from the steam, David would be pleased to have had the evening, contented with the company, and so proud that Miriam had chosen him to accompany her in the world.

  As luck would have it, everyone agreed to come. And David and Miriam prepared for over a week.

  “It’s our first big holiday in our new home,” she told her husband when he berated her for all her list making. “I want it to go just perfectly.”

  David shook his head. Even if the bird sat in brine for a fucking month, the dining room table laid with the longest linen runner in the land, lighted candles on every smooth surface in the whole damn house, there was no way in hell it was going to go smoothly. “No matter what we do, it’s not going to go perfectly, Miriam.”

  “Fine, David,” she said. “If that’s the case, at least let’s have all our ducks in a row. In other words, does it hurt to be
prepared?” She placed one more votive on the coffee table and tilted her head to see her handiwork. Now she pushed the votive two inches to the left and stepped back, crossing her arms.

  He looked at her in disbelief. “I know what having all our ducks in a row means, thank you,” he said.

  But once again, she did have a point. And so David, who had never so much as dipped a mop into a pail or dragged a broom over a wooden floorboard, helped to clean up the place. He washed the counters and the downstairs bathroom with Essoil. He found that he enjoyed vacuuming—the constant noise of it blocked out the world, and carrying the awkward contraption from room to room, sucking up the dust and balls of hair, was also rather thrilling.

  As he cleaned, Miriam bustled around the kitchen. She whisked together a vinaigrette with rosemary she’d picked from the garden herself. She put aside ten hearty sprigs to tuck beneath the skin of the turkey and then made the cranberry sauce from scratch. Stirring the fresh cranberries in the boiling water, she loved to listen to them burst open with a snap, which somehow compensated for her inability to smell them. Just like popping pimples, she thought, exhilarated. She could sit in front of the mirror for hours, pinching her skin and watching those little white teardrops emerge from her pores. Sometimes she would crawl into bed, her face splotched red and covered with the imprints of her fingernails. Who the hell bit you? David would ask, examining her temporarily ravaged face. Miriam would swat him away and hide beneath the bedspread.

  Thanksgiving Day, she got out her mini pumpernickels and ryes, and finished preparing the salmon mousse. No party, Esther had always said as she stirred the mousse and prepared to pour it into the mold, is really complete without one. This one was Esther’s recipe, and now Miriam readied herself to release the gelled salmon from the copper mold. She ran a knife along the edges of the fish-shaped cast and then, after sliding a plate beneath it, flipped it over. After knocking on the mold with the knife—not too hard, Esther constantly warned, you’ll destroy it—Miriam carefully lifted it off. This was always the moment of revelation she happily anticipated. This time, however, this one very important time, the lifting of the mold revealed the shape of the fish to be missing a large chunk of tail and an eye, which had been gorged from its socket.