She erased the board while she was at it. The alcohol dissolved the words.
“Now you’re talking,” Yitz said.
She pitched the paper towel, the solvent drying icy on her fingertips. Yitz hadn’t shouted, but she had heard him as if he were just outside the doorway, and he was, across the dining area, still on the porch. She had to remember the facts of this apartment.
“Now who’s talking?” Once she was done with the big cleanout, she would have a radically easier time housekeeping than she had had in years. There was so much less space now. Mopping, only in here and in the bathroom, maybe sixty square feet of linoleum, everywhere else carpeted. “Your little brother’s with you? Eytan, I thought you were getting ready for bed.”
But she heard only Yitz, clearing his throat in a farcical manner. He and his brother must have struck up a clownish mood and were preparing some sort of presentation. Yitz would direct and Eytan would perform, the little introvert briefly turned out by his big brother’s theatricality. No food matter stuck in an ear, she hoped, or nostril. The desired audience would be one taken unawares, so she walked over without clearing the fatigue from her face.
But Yitz alone stood on the porch once she had skirted the glossy oval of the dining table and pushed through the heavy folds of the floor-length curtains, the shock of changed location hitting her once again in the outdoor smell, Maryland at summer’s peak. The humidity had brought out the curl in her son’s black hair. Where was his kippa? His head was bare.
She couldn’t see what he was looking at, just the evening sky, still fully lit and yet amazingly permissive of examination, the glare hung with a filter of thick clouds, lush with the details of a slowed or building storm. Another slice of this phenomenon was visible at foot level, framed by the iron stilts on which the wall was raised. The Astroturf disguised the unforgiving cement only by prickling at her feet through her hosiery. Each step forward reawakened the long miles of the passenger-plane flight stored in the vessels of her calves. She wondered if the pull of gravity at this height was worsening the congestion. The complaint dated to her first pregnancy, this boy, this discharged soldier, who at the start of their travels had been a nine-year-old charged for a historic climax, a permanent return, they had all thought, from Hoboken to the land of their Fathers. Through that journey, too, her legs had been such a bother that she still remembered. Coming or going the blood did the same, striving towards the ground the whole airborne way, but how much longer now it took the legs to return to normal.
She stopped just short of her son’s side. When she saw his view she forgot her legs. Across the freeway lay the suburb, but sub-arboreal would have described it better from these heights, as it was entirely sunk beneath the trees, all evidence of human development shielded by a blanket of green, though not truly a blanket. In the layer, shaggy shapes swayed this way and that, pressed together, like a woolly-shouldered nation hunkering in prayer, or rather pending decision, given that the movement seemed to flow like a debate, circulating, splitting and returning. The chirr of some abundant local bug surged suddenly out of the dark divisions, and she would not have been surprised to see a ponderous neck drawn up from bowing, here and there a face turning up, in a time when the coming evening was announced by a great peal of silver hammers, ascending and descending, against aluminum it sounded like. The damp air bore sweet rot and verdure far above the fertile soil.
“Look at that,” Yitz said. “Boom. Green green green. That’s trees for you,” he said, with nervous admiration as if he hoped to be one someday, at which ambition she could only raise her eyebrows. With the boom she had snapped out of the spell.
Why boom? Like a cry in a magic trick, to announce an immense change? And of course, yes, three days ago they would have regarded from their old home the rails of another porch set in stucco across a street where boys would pause from playing soccer when a car passed, their shouts rising in Hebrew when the conditions for play returned, whereas here today—boom! Nothing but green, green, green beyond the graphite streak of the far-down thruway. But unlike a magician he had extended both arms joined, right fist squeezed against left forearm, and jerked them like the mechanism of a rocket launcher. Boom.
“I need a chair,” he said. “I’m going to sit here.”
“The nephew could have taken that monster of a television and left us deck chairs,” she said. “Look at the grooves in the Astroturf There were deck chairs.”
“I dig that TV.”
“With all the woodwork?” she said. “Horrible. Dig?”
“It should be ornate. It’s a shrine. It’s a God.”
“Please with the nonsense. You don’t say this kind of thing for your brother to hear, correct?”
“I’ll buy it off the old dude. That thing’s an antique, circa, what? Nineteen-something-or-other Americana, electronic Americana, electronicana. Dig it. First thing I’ll set up when I get my own pad. Could use a new antenna, could use a better antenna.” He had started speaking at a normal pace but now he was racing. “Caught cartoons on it at three A.M., three in the morning, man.”
“I’m your mother and not a man, please.”
“Any time of day you can watch anything,” he said. “There’s never nothing on, which I find very cool, my learned gentlemen and fellow prodigies. Let us say grace.”
“Cool I don’t think you even say anymore. That’s from the sixties.” Did he need the indiscriminate greed for local idiom to mark him even more a stranger? The nonsense talk would be enough of an impedance when he began to make his way here, and with a faint Israeli accent now to boot.
“Cool’s cool,” he said. “I heard it about five times from the bagger at Safeway.”
“That’s from who you’ll learn?” she said, but she allowed herself an ironic smile. She had been touched by the experience herself. “Did you hear all the Have a Nice Days from the cashiers?” she said. “And two How You Doin’s on the way, from perfect strangers.”
“Have a nice day, now!” Yitz said.
“It’s a pleasant practice,” she said. “Really agreeable.”
“Let’s get kitchen chairs.”
“Okh, all those bags collecting on the floor. They won’t fit in the chute. You saw where the garbage room was downstairs?”
“Five minutes let’s enjoy the panorama.”
“View,” she said. “A panorama’s only from a pinnacle with visibility all around.” From within the apartment came a childish voice: Imma! “What is it?” To use it? “Use what?” But even as she shouted her voice declined towards the pitch of conversation, because who knew what he had found, and she would have to go and check. “I have to go check,” she told Yitz, turning to go back in. “Come soon. There’s so much to do still inside.”
“That family is finished by now,” he said.
She turned back towards him. “I don’t understand this,” she said. She didn’t. Why he must continue to invite the war in Lebanon into their daily routine she could guess. What determined his timing, she couldn’t. “Now, Yitz?”
He gazed past her cheekbone, as if expecting other company, more important. As always he proceeded to look down, annoyed, having been stood up.
“The Hezbollah by now would have come in and finished them off,” he said. “Collaborators they finish off.” He kicked the Astroturf, studying the action. “Did the poor schleps ask us to set up camp on their roof? Does the Hezbollah make fine distinctions? Wonderful questions, thank you, Yitzhak Hirschhorn. Discuss.”
“Please,” she said. “You can sit with me later. You and I, later we’ll sit.” Again Eytan called out. “Wait!” she shouted.
“Just you and I?” Yitz said. “Bring him out with you, so he can hear what he won’t have to see. They had three girls, one his age. She liked to bring the soldiers lemonade. Finished,” he said. “Boom.”
So there, the chilling sound again. And there, the momentary nausea that she had barely let herself acknowledge when, in the kitchen, she had thought E
ytan was out here with his big brother, alone on the porch. What was that fiction she had told herself, a skit they were preparing for her? The boys hadn’t done that in over three years.
“You should think,” she said slowly. “Before you speak about your little brother in this way, please think, a child who only knows to idolize you, a boy entering the second grade as a foreigner, your baby brother. He would have been perfectly happy staying in the one place he knows.”
“When he’s eighteen I’m sure he’ll hold the sacrifice against you,” Yitz said. He used an expletive from the army, which struck her only with the ring of deep spite, but no meaning since it was in Arabic. The gallop of the furious words vanished into one of his farcical throat clearings, at the end of which the raging Arab reemerged as her surly son. “They had a dog,” he said. “I liked that dog, I always wanted a dog, yeah, dig it. I’m going to get myself a mastiff.”
“Not according to my lease,” she said.
Again she approached the curtains and pushed through. Again she stood in the old man’s apartment, and an old man’s apartment it still was, a much too fully furnished rental, choked with the choices of an uninspiring lifetime and the odors of canned soup. In her rush she nearly knocked a heaping bowl of furred wax peaches to the ground. She found Eytan sitting on the toilet, pants down, smooth thighs squashed against the seat. The seat was transparent and contained the shells of mollusks. He was looking at the ceiling.
“What’s that?” he said.
“A heat lamp.”
“To use it?”
“Not to use it.” She flicked off the switch. Eytan watched the glare behind the glass shrink to a dot. “Don’t look,” she said. “Harmful to the eyes. Remember to hold the flusher till the water starts.”
Through the hallway and the living room, the mustard carpet spared her legs and assaulted her eyes, likewise the oat-mash curtains and wallpaper, and doilies everywhere like fallen moths. What was this passion for draping, cloaking, coating every firm surface with something soft? She felt as if she were negotiating the folds of a great, slumped sack. A giant hand could gather up the edges and lift her up, out and away. She would find herself floating over the treetops, Yitz watching her from the porch, his face blurring until altogether swallowed by the tower. The toe of her hose caught on a steel carpet border as she crossed the threshold of the kitchenette again. She yanked free and heard a run begin.
Among his other puzzling comforts, the old man had hoarded a colony of sealed sandwich bags stuffed with a mysterious substance, dark and dry. She could live with the mystery. She threw the bags out by the handful, but soon she had poked one open, rubbed a pinch between her fingers and sniffed, what? Tea leaves, but weaksmelling and silty, not the cut of leaf sold loose. He had salvaged the contents of used teabags.
She was washing her hands for the umpteenth time that day when the phone rang. The best rates had set in there hours ago.
“How You Doin’s on the street from perfect strangers,” she told Harvey. “Have a Nice Day in every shop. You having a nice day?”
His time it was the dead of night, he said. The voice came across corrupted, not altogether him and the retort uncalled for. She knew what time it was for all of them.
“I should say reaccustomed for myself,” she said. “I find I’m touched. I find I appreciate the civility, and not to mention Yitz. This morning at Safeway I thought he was going to propose to the cashier. I told him, Yitz, I’m positive the sentiment is genuine. It also happens to be in her job description. Eytan dropped a blueberry yogurt in the parking lot, and the cart collector offered a replacement. It wasn’t even cracked, only caved in.”
He said there were still some loose ends at the department, some last-minute demands.
He had his ticket, though?
Yitz muttered on the porch and shuffled his sandals. Harvey must have heard the shift in her attention. He was waiting.
“Monday you said you would book it at lunch,” she said.
Soon as the pace let up, he said, a lot of administrative loose ends. Considering his appointment as department chair he owed his colleagues a thorough wrap-up.
“Your chairmanship ended a year and four months ago,” she said. “And the buyers?”
The closing had to be rescheduled.
“Why?”
“A few remaining questions.”
“But we had cake and coffee twice. They were looking to renovate. They didn’t mind the parking spot, they met the tenants’ council. They got along with Abukasis!”
“Only a few remaining questions,” he said. “Leave it to me. You have enough on your hands right now. Trust me. Are you having a nice day?”
“Thank you,” she said. “I am indeed.” She let him know she had set all the important concerns in motion. Yitz’s application at the college was missing only his discharge papers, Eytan and she were to meet the principal at Jewish Day tomorrow.
Harvey asked where the principal had gone to college. She didn’t know. Had the boys made it to morning prayers at the local shul? he asked. Not yet.
The line was lousy. At times there was a delay in reception. She would hear nothing and then he would come in with just a fraction of the first syllable shaved off, so that there was the unpleasant but really unfounded sense of omission. Other times it seemed her voice was being transmitted to him more swiftly than it could travel to her own ears. He would interrupt.
She already had one job lead, she said, from a member of the community who— Yes, very homey. Only a little tidying up. She wondered if she shouldn’t be the one to call him tomorrow, so the—
“Leave it to me.”
“That phrase again,” she said.
“That what?”
“Leave it to me,” she said. “Twice now. It sounds glib. You never say that.”
“Bonny.”
“Are you punishing me?” she said.
“What is this all of a sudden?”
“You won’t answer the question.”
“Can I be punishing you when it seems I’m the one being prosecuted?”
“So this is debate club and not a conversation.”
“I’d rather not go looking for extra grief,” he said. “I called to see how you’re all doing.”
“We would do better with you here.”
“Is this a choice that I’m making?” he said.
“So it’s my choice. Terrific. He is punishing me.”
“Is this a choice that I’m making, having to wrap up our affairs here. What are you trying to stir up, Bonny?”
“Get your ticket,” she said.
“Don’t speak to me in this manner, Bonny!” She moved the phone farther from her ear, heart quickened with the disconcerting thrill she always felt when she had managed finally to provoke open resistance. “Don’t treat me like some self-indulgent balker, a child, a foot dragger. Don’t trivialize my task here. Don’t—”
“What else?” she said. “God knows I could use the help right now and this is enormously helpful, Harvey. I shouldn’t do what else?”
He said nothing and in fact she had been primed to carry on, but someone was addressing her from outside.
“You can give me one more job?”
And if only this had been Yitz expressing interest in a useful outlet. However the voice was the voice of a second-grader and the syntax that of a native Hebrew speaker. Eytan stood in the doorway with bright red shoulders, in Israeli pajamas consisting of a thin tank top and shorts, hair dripping wet beneath his kippa, crocheted of white thread bordered with green.
“You ran the shower too hot!” she said.
“I did what now?” Harvey said.
“So I fixed it,” Eytan said.
She told her husband she had to go. She would call him tomorrow. He told her to have it her way.
She herded Eytan back into the bathroom, where she removed his kippa and wrapped his head in a towel. The container of ointment was lined up on the rim of the sink along with all the
other new pharmaceuticals awaiting a clean shelf.
“I can do some more with the blue spray on where there’s glass?”
“No, enough of that,” she said. She smoothed the cream onto his shoulders. “Next time before you shower you call me. Does it hurt?”
“No,” he said. “So another job. What one are you doing now? I can help?”
“I’m in between. Listen, you have to learn the settings before you run it alone.”
“One more job,” he said.
She returned the ointment to its place, unwrapped the boy’s head, and secured the tightly knit kippa back at his crown, with a metal clip that clicked as it shut.
“One and no more,” she said. “Then we call it a day.”
A White House snow dome, a Miss Liberty snow dome, Mount Rushmore in a snow dome, Abe Lincoln cleaving pewter logs, corkbacked coasters, two sets intermixed, one celebrating aspects of Virginia, the other stamped with simplified Chagalls.
Two glass bluebirds, two ruby cardinals, a Disney-type woolly mammoth, ferocity replaced with dimples and a lolling tongue cast in a rubbery polymer. She transferred everything to Eytan, where he squatted by the tasseled sofa, ripping the Times for padding. For each new artifact he paused and with a ceremonious gesture extended his hands, received it but did not yet wrap, instead arranging everything in rows on the sofa. She piled doilies on the armrest. Her eyes began to itch. Once in a while Eytan sneezed.
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