The Place Will Comfort You

by Naama Goldstein

  “What’s he doing?”

  Working on our roof, as if it isn’t plain. Repairs.

  “What was the problem?”

  Permeation, what else? Wasn’t she just in our room? The results are there. A mottle, greenish-gray, above our beds. In the living room the evidence is older, yellow scaling. The symptoms are averted in one spot, then reappear on the next outfacing wall. Our contractor cut corners, our mother said she’d sue, the laborer became a fixture soon after we took up residence. He shows up every morning.

  “Where from?”

  The really curious fact is that he always comes in the same shirt. It’s plausible he owns six garments of the same design, it’s also possible the style is so related, that distinctions blur. Goes for a formal look, buttons and cuffs, slacks, never jeans, never a T-shirt no matter the heat. Always looks ready for a podium, before the dirt.

  “He is a natty dresser,” Tiffy says. “Let’s have him step into our shot.”

  We let our heads slump to one side in consternation, east. The silly-grownup act again.

  “I mean it,” Tiffy says. “Why not?”

  Just then our mother’s voice carries up from the kitchen porch. It’s time to eat, she cries, and we’re glad to comply. Tiffy is slower, so her protests have a hard time catching up, though they keep coming. Once she’s huffing at our side, downstairs, she gets her answers from our mother.

  “He never has. He wouldn’t expect or like it. His dinner is waiting at his home.”

  That night we stare at her round form under our sheets and listen to her adenoidal rattle. We can’t sleep. How can we let ourselves, beside those eerie powers of mood infection, those strange ideas, and no gift. Still no gift! The next to youngest, and most impulsive, creeps up to the desk.

  “Tomorrow,” hisses our big sister. She’s our conscience. She reminds us of our past: After the Frosted Flakes affair our mother made us swear to wait. How long? Until it’s offered.

  The suitcase is a black square in the dark. The cousin lugged the whole of it out of our room when she prepared for bed. She changed into a pair of baby-doll pajamas. Through the bathroom door, we heard each spring-latch pop and resonantly thrum in the acoustics of our blue enamel. Later we found this: the soap on the wrong side of the sink, her glasses soap-smeared in our dish, a sock hanging from the showerhead, the floor mat soaked. The toilet has been sanitized, and she’s replaced our paper. The new roll doles out a double ply of staggeringly considerate fiber, fleecy, otherworldly, and—could it be?—infused with oils. Such a subservience to parts never so privately entertained. Is this the gift? Somehow it impresses only our eldest. Is this the thing our mother opposed? Could her sense of threat be this overblown?

  Late in the night we hear the high emotion carrying into her daily summary, telephoned to our grandmother. “I know whose ass she’s thinking of,” she says. “I mean the nerve.”

  Our door is locked when we come home from school. It always is. We’re latchkey children. But today, before we even fumble with the thick new key, the whole great apparatus shirks its job before our eyes. The bolts retract, the frame gives. The cumbrous door sighs and swings. Our surprise is something like discovering the staircase down has not yet leveled. Within this mind frame, it’s a sort of comfort to find Tiffy on the inside, shouting:

  “Guess who!”

  The baby is wailing on the floor. The cousin sports our mother’s apron, an old one we all remember well. Some stains are ancient but those red ones are brand-new.

  Who let her use that?

  “Mom’s gonna be held up,” our cousin says. “More work even than usual. And after she has errands, quite a few. She’s a procrastinator, like I couldn’t guess. Is she a Klein or what? I told her don’t you worry, today you’ve got an extra pair of hands.” These we eye, filing past: red-stained as well. She closes the door. “I’m making us all sloppy Joe!”

  Which is what?

  “You’ll see. I could only find flat bread. A little more thickness would have been good. Whatever. Once the meat’s in the pocket we’ll have to eat quick. Listen, I could use a hand in here. I still don’t have the hang of where Mom keeps all her supplies. Some of you could set the table. Some of you could run up to the roof and tell Ibrahim it’ll be fifteen minutes at the most. He should just come down.”

  A sour smell wafts from the kitchen. Red flecks the edges of her lenses, red on the toes of her shoes, as they pivot, heading off.

  “What do you mean?” our eldest asks.

  Tiffy’s bifocals sparkle as she turns again. “What do you mean what do I mean?”

  Our eldest swallows and repeats our mother’s words: “He never has.”

  “So? Until yesterday, me neither!”

  “He wouldn’t expect or like it.”

  “Talked to him. Seems like the first was true. The second, not so sure, there was a language barrier. What I do know, when I see it, is a mild but significant squint, what I would call strabismus. I offered him professional attention. Anyone could see the man was moved.”

  “His dinner is waiting at home.”

  “I guess today he dines from two cuisines! Look, why the hell not?”

  “Our mother doesn’t let.”

  “Your mother has left me in charge.”

  “To get us killed?”

  “Holy crap.” Our cousin scrutinizes us through every combination of her lenses. “You guys are genuinely upset!” She squats. She opens wide her arms. “Come here, you.”

  We hand our wailing youngest over, drop into a half-circle and look up. Our cousin holds the baby by the underarms. His diaper’s wet. He whimpers, and she shakes him once.

  “Hmm,” she says. “Tiffy needs her hands to tell a story. A Klein or what?”

  A story! Our eldest takes the child. He goes to sleep on her thin chest, while we three older ones forget our troubles once again in Tiffy’s lively face.

  “My Temple Nefesh music teacher,” she says, ducking the head seriously, “as you know, Mrs. Milstein. The inspiration for the trip, not just in the past. Actively, now.”

  They’re still in touch?

  “I know, I know,” she says. She makes her face absurdist now. She plumps her lower lip. “As if her teachers would still be alive! Old!” she yelps, then laughs and slumps. “But yes. She is alive. We are in touch. In fact she is now a dear friend, a friend who is slowly slipping away.”

  How awful. How terrible. Sick?

  “The worst kind.”

  Oh no.

  “Of the breasts.”

  Our eldest nearly drops the baby as she tries to plug our ears.

  “What?” Tiffy asks. “Too harsh a topic for your age? The cancer?”

  Of course not.

  “Then the breasts?”

  Shhh! Good G-d.

  “Get outta here. I thought this was a largely permissive culture. I thought the majority is secular.”

  Yes to both. But not us.

  “Then I guess I shouldn’t tell you she’s a dyke.”

  A what?

  Tiffy explains in such a matter-of-fact way, that the idea simply strolls into our head and stays awhile, as ordinary as a sitter on a bench, whom we chase off, eventually, in a fit of giggles.

  “What’s so funny?” Tiffy says, in such a way that we’re inspired to find our composure all at once. “Do you think it’s wrong?”

  Perhaps not. Truth is we simply never thought about the possibility. We knew about the boy and boy. Leviticus 18, verse 22. But girl and girl? We don’t recall a mention. Maybe that’s okay.

  “The next part should be easier for you,” she says. “Ultratraditional. Folks like you would have heard of the practice. Mrs. Milstein, Fiona, sent me here with her dying wish.”

  To be buried here? HaShem preserve us. She here now? In the case? That kind makes the very worst guest.

  “She isn’t dead yet,” our cousin snaps

  May He bring her full recovery.

  “That is no longer an opti
on,” Tiffy says. She pushes a hand into an apron pocket, loose and shallow for easy reach, yet she fumbles. She takes a breath and works herself to equilibrium again. Finally she yanks out a small bag: “She sent me for this.”

  A sandwich bag, darkened, plump and prickly with crystallized instant coffee, about two hundred grams.

  “No,” Tiffy says. “Dirt.”

  But of course. A sprinkling of the holy soil of Eretz Yisrael. For the eyes in the coffin?

  “That’s right.” She bites her lip and pushes the small parcel back in its storage place. “I got it from your building garden. Just a little. Didn’t think you’d mind.”

  This is just dreadful. Where’s our happy Tiffy? We must try to lighten things up.

  So what else did she do today? Where else did she go?

  “Oh, nowhere. Tour bus not leaving till tomorrow.”

  Not even a walk down the block? The local grocer offers a particularly fine fizzing sweet. There is the young mothers’ clinic, Drop of Milk. The name itself is wonderful, and never has she seen so many infants and their mothers traveling up and down one flight of steps! There are apartment buildings older than ours in design. Different shrubs in different gardens, a deserted house.

  “Believe me,” Tiffy says. “Terrible sense of direction. I would find a way to get lost.”

  Did she at least go up to the roof?

  “You know I did!” she cries. Because we asked.

  Somehow, we brought the dreaded subject back upon ourselves. We, us.

  “Oh come on!” she says. She punches a few shoulders, lightly, leaves the baby out. “Did I or did I not hear you say the man has worked up there for years?”

  He stands for a continuous blight in our lives.

  “But do you actually know him?”

  Yes. He shows up every day in the same shirt. The shirt arrives here clean each morning, but, every night, it goes home stained.

  “Not that again. Does he have kids?”

  How should we know? And can she fault us? She, who did not know our demographics, names, or level of religious practice, her own blood and hosts.

  Tiffy shakes her head. “Don’t even know where he lives, I’ll betcha. Bet you have no idea what kind of a home.”

  She, who won’t set foot on our block. In and out of a taxi.

  “He is your neighbor!” Tiffy says. “That’s closer. You walk the same land. I’m only saying it’s a shame, and to imagine what you might be missing, think of the cultural exchange. He probably plays something. I’ve heard that the musicianship is staggering. That artist sampled it, and I mean, yeah, a little goes a long way, but yeah! Amazing stuff, rides a completely different wave. I’m telling you. Just do it. Climb those stairs, extend that hand and flash that friendly smile. When you wish upon a star and so on. Thinking positive is half the game. Live your dream.”

  The woman is mad.

  Her beliefs are inane, we tell her. Can we dream our walls back from their spreading problem? Can we think away the rot? And when we find ourselves wall-less, will a wish shorten the fall from a narrow apartment at the top?

  “It’s a moot point,” she says. “I already invited him. He’s coming. Try to remember we’re just talking about a sandwich.”

  Oh.

  How could we have known?

  A skillet in the kitchen seethes, dispatching its aroma. Beef? Tomato sauce. In a sandwich? But that would be sloppy!

  Oh.

  We stand. We stare down at our mother’s apron swaddling the bottom-heavy form. She is ripely shaped, maternally, you might say. We are young, our minds are flexible. We can imagine her part of the household. Tiffy leaps up to her feet, agile considering her girth. She has been spared the usual jet lag. She is full of energy.

  “I am!” she says. “I can just feel the air restoring me. I also have this helpful little pill.”

  She gives us each a coated half. The smile returns.

  The barriers have come down. No longer can we look at Tiffy as a guest. She is our baby-sitter, a whole different thing, an outsider who comes in as the boss. And entertainer! And brings prizes for good listeners, and have we not been that?

  The cousin freezes. She regards us squarely through her specs, each eye divided by the seam. “That you should feel you have to ask!” She wipes her palms on the lined apron and leaves the pattern sloppied up. “My little angels. You had doubt?” Tears fill her eyes, then resolve. “Avanti!” And she leads us to our room.

  One by one we plunk down on her bed, which crackles with a moisture-proof sheet Imma didn’t think to take out. Tiffy approaches us, and then steps back, assesses, nears again, and shuffles us, arranges us by height, closes the gaps. She waits until we’re absolutely still. She flips the shutters and submerges us in dark.

  “Now close your eyes.”

  The first thing we all hear is the metallic clack and spring of clasps. We anticipate the whisper of cereal settling in its box, the crepitation of cellophane, perhaps the snick of Cousin’s nails against the side of a glass jar. Instead we hear another, fainter clack and spring. We’re stumped.

  “Every head I tap opens wide,” Tiffy says, and taps—each child in turn, oldest to youngest, one by one, and each one pops. The baby needs assistance, because of his age and as he is sleeping. One of us pushes up a lid, one steadies the head, taking care not to compress the pliant fontanel. The cousin bows over, pointing her narrow red ray. Slowly, the baby’s irises uncloak of their own will.

  We have already seen what he is seeing, and we see it still. The imagery endures past the removal of the tool:

  The eyes are flooded with an edgeless flood of black, which seems to heave, although the heaving isn’t seen. How one perceives the heaving one cannot define, and this throws off one’s senses from a cliff. Not in a frightening way. The cliffs rise from the stars, it seems, as gravity pulls only faintly. Though the general direction of the fall is down, one floats, and presently the floating pupil fixes on a landscape hitherto unseen, but present all around, a glowing veiny network, like the intricate venation of a leaf, except not green but red, not flat but very deep, the circuitry like never-ending branches of a fragile blood-red tree.

  We are suspended in a world of frailty, effulgent, tantalizing, begging to be touched. We keep floating down. While we are at it, we can swim, beneath and over luminescent intersections, our only burden to avoid collision, not to interfere, to leave the glowing system unimpaired. The craft is painstaking, but in this slowness, we can learn. We exercise—we become—delicacy, heedfulness, astuteness, fine, fine care.

  Until we hear our cousin’s happy sigh. The darkness suddenly is ordinary, the daylight sifting, dim, through the thick plastic shutters.

  “Wasn’t that neat?” Tiffy asks.

  The middlemost skips to the window, forces it ajar. Upon our particleboard desk the suitcase lies agape, blooming with clothes. On these a smaller case perches, open as well, the inside lined with velvet cavities, harboring metal tools. One of the cavities is empty. The cousin holds her implement. The handle is black, the head a one-eyed, silver cone, which still emits its concentrated ray, until she clicks it off.

  “So?” she says. “Wasn’t that mind-blowing?”

  We’re sure our mind remains largely the same. We’ve tasted no new flavor, smelled no new smell, masticated no new texture. That was it? Nothing else?

  “Sure there’s something else!” Tiffy says. “Did I or did I not give you the pitch already yesterday? I saw you sitting there. I saw you listening, or so I thought.”

  Again she reaches in our mother’s apron, this time producing a catalog. Our eldest receives it. The publication is thin, notebooksized, but densely paged, the pages slick but also powdery, sharp-scented, freshly inked. The language we can’t read. The photographs, in rows and rows, page after page, show eyeglasses, framed or not, in metal or plastic. Glass glints over the infinite eyes of numberless stiff-headed models.

  “Little girls often like page six,” Tiffy says.
“The pearly hues. The pink looks amazing on a redhead.”

  Our eldest casts the catalog aside. She rises as it hits the floor. Gently, she lays the baby on the bed, and smoothes the khaki skirt over her adolescent hips. She steps up to our cousin till her forehead nearly brushes the plump chin, then spins around to face our way. A stain darkens the area where the baby sat.

  “She think she’s going to make us four-eyed,” our big sister says. “Like her.”

  We know a call to action when we hear one. That’s the present? We arise as one.

  We swarm the guest, immobilize her, search her suitcase: skirts and skorts and peasant blouses, baby dolls, bras, panties, fifty rolls of toilet paper. Nothing! What is left to do, except tear our mother’s apron off this fraud? The cotton sashes remain tied in a bow while the stitches break on one end.

  Our next-to-youngest reaches in the pocket, and removes the parcel of dirt. Then the little monkey jumps up on the windowsill. Perfectly safe; our mother has furnished the window with convex bars. Hanging out, he rips the parcel and shakes it out. He watches as our soil rains down brown and disappears below our myrtles, back in place.

  Tiffy never resists. She waits until we loosen our grip and, sneering at her, back away. Our eldest hurries to the baby, whose wild motions have impelled him near the edge. He has been howling with delight at the melee.

  Tiffy exacts no vengeance. She does not explode in a burst of temper. She never says a word, after these four: “Seven to ten days.” She only leaves.

  She tramps, heavy-footed, to her nesting cases, closes the small one and the large over that. Head hanging, she hoists the suitcase off the desk, lowers it, and stands it on its wheels.

  A shudder passes through the tiles as she leads the case away. We hear the heavy key turn with the smoothness of ball bearings. Our Pladelet slowly swishes open, yet more slowly swishes closed, and is received.

  We gallop through the flat to end the sequence. Our eldest turns the key.

  Our kitchen is filled with smoke. We switch the gas off. Baby on slim hip, our eldest slips her free hand in the oven mitt. Our mission she describes as twofold. We must drive the fumes out of our house and change the dinner plans, both before our mother’s return.