by Lisa Gornick
“You want a girl to cook meat for Omar. You think a growing boy needs meat and it bother you to have to do it yourself.”
“This has nothing to do with your work. You are doing a fine job.”
“I can cook meat. I will do it from now on.”
A feeling of despair descends over Myra: it is too late with Eva, they are already in too deep. Don’t be ridiculous, she chastises herself. You just have to handle this with clinical tact. “This has nothing to do with your cooking. This has to do with what you’ve been telling me about yourself, with your needing more time to talk and someone who can listen to you without interruption.”
“You can listen to me. I will come down earlier.”
“It’s not good for your therapist to be the person you work for.”
“After my mother die, my aunt take me to a doctor. He come out to the waiting room and listen to my heart. He pinch my cheek, then give my aunt some pills to give me.”
“This doctor will talk with you before he decides what would help. The appointment is for noon. I’ll go with you the first time.”
Eva turns up the water; it splashes against the sides of the sink. Myra imagines Eva as a young girl, putting the pills under her tongue and then, when her aunt turns her head, spitting them into her palm.
34
On Thursday, Myra comes upstairs after her last morning patient. Eva is not in the kitchen. On the third floor, Adam has the door to the music room closed. The beds are made in Omar’s room, in Adam and Rachida’s room on the fourth floor, and in Eva’s room, but Eva is nowhere to be seen. At five minutes to twelve, Myra cancels the appointment.
“I forget,” Eva says when Myra sees her before dinner.
“Are you sure you forgot?”
“Yes. I am more careful next time.”
But the next week, the same thing happens. Again, when Myra comes upstairs to get Eva, she is gone. She searches the house, calling Eva’s name before canceling the appointment. This time, instead of waiting fruitlessly for Eva to reappear, she changes her clothes for her reservoir walk.
When Myra returns to her office, a lunch tray is on her desk. Eva is in the patient chair.
Myra sits behind her desk. Eva looks at her shyly, then giggles. “I am sorry. I forget again.”
“Clearly, you did not forget.”
“I cannot talk to a strange man.”
“Would you feel better if the psychiatrist were a woman?”
Eva shrugs her shoulders. Myra wonders where Eva hid today. In the synagogue on West End Avenue? In the back of a closet, sucking her thumb, listening as Myra called her name?
35
“Her mother burned to death?”
They are in Dreis’s living room, where the housekeeper has made a fire. Outside, the air is the murky white that harkens a freeze. The room is exceedingly warm, but Dreis keeps her legs covered with a blanket. It occurs to Myra that it has been a long time since she has seen her former analyst standing. Even in full health, Dreis was tiny, hardly five feet. Myra wonders how tall she stands now or if she can, in fact, stand at all.
Myra nods.
“People die of smoke inhalation, of injuries from falling beams. Does she mean her mother was pulverized?”
Myra feels suddenly very foolish. Inept. Eva has said that her father set the fire and that she watched the house burn to the ground. Did she manage to get herself out or did her father change his mind and rescue her and her sister?
“I know that the picture doesn’t quite fit together.”
Now Dreis nods.
“She needs to tell her story. I know she shouldn’t be telling it to me, but I don’t think she’s going to tell it to anyone else. If I refuse to let her talk to me, she’ll never tell anyone.”
In her mind’s eye, Myra can see the newspaper photograph from the summer when Adam and Rachida and Omar traveled out West: a moose, antlers aloft, standing in the middle of the Salmon River, banks aflame.
36
Were it up to Adam, Eva would never be allowed into the music room, but his mother has gently insisted that Eva, whom he has instructed not to touch the papers on his desk or the boxes in the closet, be permitted once a week to vacuum the rug and dust the piano. Usually, Eva vacuums on Thursday afternoons while he is picking up Omar, Rachida’s plans for doing pickup never having materialized, but this Thursday, the first Thursday in December, when he arrives home with Omar, he can hear the vacuum still running.
Adam forces himself to climb the stairs. Two weeks have passed, during which he’s avoided telling Eva that he can’t find her amulet.
Eva is bent over the vacuum, carefully guiding it between the piano legs.
“Eva, could I talk with you?”
Eva stares at him.
“Could you turn off the vacuum?”
The vacuum stops. Adam points at the wing chair. He drags the desk chair over for himself.
“I have bad news.” He swallows, rests his clammy palms on his thighs. “I seem to have misplaced your amulet. I feel terrible about it. I’ve searched everywhere.”
Eva sits motionless, her lips slightly parted.
“I’m sure it will turn up because I never took it out of the house. I showed it to Rachida. Then, when I went to get it to give it back to you, I couldn’t find it. Rachida and I tore apart our room. We looked under the mattress. We even rolled up the rug.”
Eva does not reply. She appears to be watching Adam’s lips, as though they are strange doggish fish.
“Rachida’s father—he’s a jeweler—is making you another one. I know it’s not the same, and I’m not saying we won’t find yours. But in the meantime, at least you’ll have something.”
Adam’s armpits are pouring sweat. He would not have felt worse if he were telling a kid he’d run over her dog.
“Can I go back to vacuuming?”
37
“My mother always say never tell anyone anything,” Eva tells Myra the following day.
“Many children are told that.”
“If I tell you things, you will think I am lying.”
It is she, Myra, who feels like the liar. She told Dreis she would insist that Eva go to a clinic, that their talks cease. And she has tried. She made a third clinic appointment, which Eva also missed, but it was followed by a week during which Eva retrieved Myra’s tray without sitting in the patient chair, so that Myra had thought, Well, she understands even if she won’t go see another therapist. The following Monday, though, Eva was back in the patient chair. Before Myra could say, You can’t sit here with me in the office, Eva resumed. Rags. Her father had stuffed rags soaked with kerosene in the corners. It was night, her mother asleep in the back bedroom. At the last minute, with the house already filling with fumes, he dragged Eva and her sister outside. He put them in the chicken coop and told them not to move. Then he crept into the kitchen and threw a lit match.
“All I have left from my mother is the amulet she give me.” Eva touches something hanging under her shirt.
“Now you will quit me,” she continues.
“Quit you?”
“Make me leave.”
“Why would I make you leave?”
“The people who want it.”
“Who want what?”
“When my sister tell her teacher that our mother die, my father hit her in the mouth with a rock.”
Myra’s buzzer rings.
After Eva leaves, Myra stands to stretch her back. She bends forward, her head and arms dangling down. A wave of dizziness, then nausea, comes over her, and for a moment she wonders if the sandwich Eva made for her was spoiled.
She walks toward the waiting room, not thinking, as she usually does, about the patient she will greet, the mood she might encounter, the link to what happened in his last session, her mind still on Eva so that the sight of her patient’s face comes as a jolt, like a boat bumping against a dock, an undertow of fear in its wake.
THREE
1
Si
nce she was a child, Caro has dreaded Christmas. The dread begins the week after Thanksgiving, when the city falls down the rabbit hole into what is euphemistically called the holiday season but everyone knows is really the Christmas season. Vendors selling trees arrive from Canada with earmuffs and lumber jackets, the bound trees imprisoned along the sidewalks of upper Broadway. Drugstore windows are filled with squashed boxes of lights and neon tinsel on the verge of combustion. In the cramped supermarkets, carols blare through the loudspeaker systems.
When she was young, the dread had centered on the feeling that there are two groups: those who eagerly await Santa Claus and the mountains of presents, and then, in some alternate darker universe, the Jewish children who, like her, had been hoodwinked into accepting Hanukkah as their meager alternative. (Then it had not occurred to her that there are also Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist children greeting Christmas morning without excitement.) Yes, her mother made latkes, and they had a holiday meal with her father’s parents, who gave Adam and her chocolate gelt and fifty-dollar checks. Yes, there were dreidl games with Grandpa Max, who each year produced an outlandish dreidl—one that emitted gospel-style songs, one that lit up like a slot machine—but it all paled against the visions of her classmates running to their living rooms Christmas mornings to see the gifts piled under their trimmed and lit trees, their handsome bathrobe-clad parents sipping eggnog while the children rip wrapping paper from marvelous toy after marvelous toy.
Christmas had hit an all-time low the year her mother kicked their father out and Adam refused to go to Max and Ida’s Riverdale house for Hanukkah without her. Gently, her mother attempted to explain that now that she and their father were getting divorced, she would no longer be attending his father’s family gatherings. “Go,” she urged. “Grandpa will be so sad if you don’t.” But Adam had been unbudgeable, so that Caro had to go alone.
Arriving home that night, Caro burst into tears. “I hate Christmas,” she sobbed.
Her mother bundled her into her arms. “I think this is about the divorce, don’t you, darling?”
“No, it’s not about the stupid divorce. It’s about Christmas. I hate being Jewish. I want Christmas.”
In the morning, instead of their usual sensible breakfast of Irish oatmeal and fruit, there were waffles dusted with powdered sugar and mugs of hot chocolate capped with whipped cream. Adam pressed his moistened finger onto the plate until he’d captured every sugar morsel.
“Children,” her mother announced, “I’ve been thinking things over. We live in the city where Christmas is the most beautifully celebrated, save perhaps in Rome, of anywhere in the world. Christmas is a New York tradition. We are New Yorkers. There is no reason we can’t enjoy the part of Christmas that is about New York, not Jesus.”
After that, her mother had taken them every year to see the tree at Rockefeller Center, the windows at Saks and Lord & Taylor, the Neapolitan crèche in the Medieval Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, for Caro, the highlight of the season, the Balanchine version of The Nutcracker performed by the New York City Ballet. Each year, they would invite another Jewish family for Christmas dinner, and her mother would serve mulled cider and oysters Rockefeller and roast a leg of lamb bought from a butcher shop on Madison Avenue. For dessert, there would be a bûche de Noël and chocolate-covered strawberries.
Caro had loved the tree that magically grows to the ceiling as Marie’s nutcracker transforms into her prince, the scent of nutmeg and rosemary that would fill the parlor floor Christmas afternoon. But the dread never fully disappeared, the feeling that she was counting the days until the holiday season was over.
2
The first weekend in December, Caro arrives at her mother’s house for Sunday dinner to discover Eva and Omar decorating a tree in the parlor. Bing Crosby is singing carols while Eva, humming along, hangs red and green balls and Omar makes loops out of construction paper. In the kitchen, her mother is stuffing Meyer lemons into the cavities of two organic chickens.
“What’s going on?”
“Eva brought home a tree. She carried it herself from Broadway. God knows how she did it. Omar was so excited when he saw it that I decided to leave the decision up to his parents. Rachida surprised me by being entirely gung ho. Adam tried debating with her about the capitulation to capitalism and the hegemonic culture until Rachida told him to do something I won’t repeat. She took Eva and Omar to CVS to buy lights and ornaments.”
“How do you feel about it?”
Her mother puts the chickens in the oven. She washes her hands and begins wiping down the counters with white vinegar, the way her own mother, a germ’s worst enemy, Larry had called her, had taught her to avoid the parasites poultry breed. “At first, I felt uncomfortable. But when I saw how much fun it is for Omar and Eva, I thought what’s the harm. The tree has nothing to do with anything religious.”
“So are you going to have Santa Claus bring presents?”
“Omar already told me that Santa Claus is made up. Reindeer are the size of horses, he said. Nothing that size could fly. No. Of course not. We don’t have to fall prey to the domino theory: that if you give way in one area, you’re doomed to give way for everything.”
Caro feels oddly chastised. Had she been a parent, she could imagine herself under the sway of this slippery-slope logic, as though a lollipop for a three-year-old would lead to Twinkies and cotton candy for dinner. “I’m surprised Eva wanted a tree.”
“Before her mother died, she always had one. She thought it was a present for us. It never occurred to her that as Jews we might not want one.”
3
When his parents were alive, Larry had come to New York every year for the week between Christmas and New Year’s, a week when his office closed and the only heart procedures were on those persons unfortunate enough to have a coronary event over the holidays, when they’d be left in the care of the lowest-rung attendants.
This year, with Adam and Omar in New York, Larry feels a yen to again come East during this week. As long as he is home on Christmas Day—exclaiming over presents he doesn’t want, accepting grunted thank you’s from Betty’s boys for the gifts he will learn he has given them—and for the New Year’s Eve dinner dance at their club, Betty will not object to his being gone in between.
He decides to test the idea with Caro.
“Sounds great, Dad. Omar and I are both off from school, so we’ll have lots of free time. Rachida probably has to work, but I’m sure she’s not the reason you’re coming. And Adam, well, he doesn’t pay attention to the calendar.”
“How about your mother? I assume I’d have to come to the house to get Omar. Do you think she’d mind?”
Caro hesitates. Her mother has always been the poster-child divorced parent; it never occurred to Caro that seeing her father might still be hard for her. “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
“She might not welcome a phone call from me. It’s been a long time since we talked—since Grandpa Max’s funeral, I think.”
At the funeral home, Larry still recalls, Myra had kissed him on the cheek. Her eyes were damp as she told him how sorry she was about Max’s death. Three years later, though, when his mother died, she’d not come to the service, sending, instead, a contribution to the B’nai B’rith fund they designated in memoriam. Part of his despondency at his mother’s funeral, he’d known, was because Myra was not there.
“Maybe I could shoot her an e-mail.”
“That’s a good idea.”
4
On the second Monday of December, Myra opens her e-mail to see [email protected]:
Dear Myra,
I hope it doesn’t shock you to hear from me this way, but I thought you might prefer the screen to the phone. I’m thinking of coming East (by myself) for the week between Christmas and New Year’s to see the kids and Omar. I’d like to take Omar to do some things, which would probably mean picking him up or dropping him off at your house. Okay with you?
; I would think I’d won the lottery if you’d have dinner with me, but I won’t even ask since I know you won’t. How about a line or two to hear how you are?
There seems no way to sign this damn thing without offending you, so I’ll just say Ciao.
Larry
Myra stares at the words. She puts her sandwich back on the plate. It pleases her that Larry has written his e-mail like a letter, not all in lowercase without punctuation, the way the kids do, or with the self-consciously casual diction so many affect, an excuse, she’s always thought, for sloppy writing, which translates in her mind to sloppy thinking.
It surprises her that she does not feel adverse to the idea of seeing Larry, of having his bearish form lumber up her front steps. For a moment, she imagines him seated on her sofa, drinking a glass of red wine while Omar plays on the floor. They’d had only nine years together as parents. Omar will be seven in February, the age Adam was when they separated.
She glances at her watch. It is a little past two. Soon Eva will come for her tray. In the week since Eva told Myra about her father lacing the house with kerosene-soaked rags, she has not sat again in the patient chair.
Myra takes a bite of her sandwich and then gulps down half a glass of water.
Dear Larry,
I read in The Times that there are now websites divorced parents can use to coordinate schedules and finances without having direct contact. I’m not sure if we’re lucky or unlucky to have missed these developments.
Of course you may pick up Omar at my house. I’ll decline the dinner invitation for both of our well-being, but hope you’ll stay for a glass of wine in my parlor.
All best,
Myra
PS Don’t be shocked when you see a Christmas tree. Eva brought one home and none of us had the heart to disappoint Omar by refusing to let her put it up.