by Lisa Gornick
5
“A Christmas tree?” Larry says to Adam when he calls to discuss his trip. “Why would Eva want a Christmas tree?”
Larry lies wrapped in a towel on a chaise longue on the terrace by his heated pool. Betty is inside baking her umpteenth batch of Christmas cookies, this particular one a cardiologist’s nightmare since they are made with bacon fat, a recipe her first mother-in-law told her is traditional in Sweden. All morning, Betty fried bacon, plate after plate, which she and the boys ate with eggs and then, for lunch, in sandwiches. When he came inside for his own lunch of cottage cheese and salad, there was a measuring cup filled with amber fat.
“Eva says her mother always had a Christmas tree.”
“I thought Eva considers herself a Jew.”
“Not considers, Dad. Is a Jew.”
“How can she claim she’s Jewish? She wouldn’t know if you ate matzoh at Passover or Hanukkah.”
“It’s not a question of claim. It’s how she feels. She feels Jewish.”
“Fine, I feel Chinese. That doesn’t make me Chinese. She was never in a synagogue before she came to New York. She told me she went to Catholic grade school. It’s absurd.”
“To you. She feels in her bones that she’s different, and she connects that difference to her great-great-grandfather. She believes that her life will be righted once she can live as a Jew.”
“I don’t live as a Jew. I haven’t been in a synagogue since I moved out of my parents’ home. But I am a Jew. It was the soup in which I was raised. We ate Jewish foods at home. My grandparents spoke Yiddish. My father was an atheist, well, until the whole Frank Lloyd Wright–God–nature nonsense set in, but that, too, for him was part of Jewish culture—the red-diaper-baby Jewish intelligentsia strain. For Eva, it’s nothing but fantasy.”
“Who gave you the mantle to decide what identities people can take? She’s as much a Jew as you are. She’s not Christian, she’s not Yagua, she’s not Moroccan. She’s a Jew. Perhaps more so, because she feels that being a Jew makes her different from the people she grew up around—that it defines her. You’re a passive Jew. You don’t have to do anything to be a Jew. She struggles day by day to create herself as a Jew.”
Adam senses that his father is thinking about what he is saying, that his father is torn between his intellectual honesty and his adherence to a crusty cynicism, which will inevitably win out in the exchange.
“You’re getting a little liberal-artsy for me. A little theoretical-shmetical. Let’s keep it simple. Does she eat bagels and lox on Sundays? Does she like celery soda? Does she cringe when she sees those bloodied dolls nailed to their plastic crosses? That’s how you tell if she’s a Jew.”
6
Before beginning her writing project on the teleology of love, Myra had collected ideas: tsimtsum, wabi-sabi, the uncarved block. More accurately, she had collected distillations of ideas, since it is not in her nature to study an idea per se: its history, the semantic debates, the fiefdom struggles over its control. That would seem sterile to her, shallow in the way of careers based on the study of well-being via statistical analyses of self-report checklists by researchers who have never sat down with a human being to discuss the subject.
Now she thinks about wabi-sabi as she has come to understand it: the acceptance of not only the inevitability of decay but of the beauty within the process of decay. That from the moment we are born, a wall is painted, a cake baked, decay sets in, and that this decay, if accepted, if part of the object’s organic conception, can be more beautiful, more satisfying than an artificial idea of perfection. An electronic gadget breaks and is done for, more expensive to repair than to replace. A stone wall smooths, rounds, nourishes green moss in its crevices. A woman’s face can change from a plump peach to a sculpted oval of planes and bones and wisdom lines.
It has taken Myra a long time to accept this notion of celebrating decay, in her home, in the objects around her, in her garden, in her body. Now, though, when she looks in the mirror, she does not feel at war with the gray, with the wrinkles. True, she has been lucky—her body has remained lithe and limber—but she has let go of the idea that life is an arc with a build up toward an apex and then a slow winding down. She is no more accelerating or decelerating now at fifty-nine than she was at nineteen. So it comes as a surprise that she feels nervous about seeing Larry—always trying with his young wives and horses and cars to vanquish time. About seeing herself through his eyes.
7
The phone rings on the bedside stand. It is three o’clock in the morning, the week before Christmas. Adam has the receiver in his hand before he realizes that Rachida, who came home after he went to bed, is asleep beside him.
“Rachida, Rachida, is that you?”
He recognizes the voice of Rachida’s sister, Esther. “It’s Adam. She’s right here.”
Rachida bolts up, grabbing the phone so violently that it smashes against his chin. As Adam turns on the light, he sees the tears already streaming down her cheeks, her face crumpling. From the tears, Adam knows it must be her father, Uri.
After she hangs up, he tries to put his arms around her, but she will not have it. She lies on her side, her back to him, and heaves into the pillow. Adam goes into the bathroom to look for a box of tissues. Not finding one, he tears off a wad of toilet paper. Rachida bats it from his hand.
Gingerly, Adam lowers himself back onto the bed, careful not to touch her. He’s seen Rachida cry only once before, at Omar’s birth, when she had cried from joy and exhaustion.
At seven, Adam wakes alone, ashamed that he fell back asleep. He goes downstairs where Rachida, dressed and dry-eyed, is seated at the farm table, drinking coffee with his mother.
“We’ve decided,” Rachida says, “not to tell Omar until the afternoon. Can you give him breakfast and take him to school? I need to get on the phone with the airlines to make reservations.”
“Okay.”
“There’s usually an eleven o’clock night flight direct to Casablanca. I’m going to try to get us on the one for tonight. If not, we’ll have to fly to Paris and change there. Tomorrow’s Omar’s last day of school before the break, so he’ll only miss one day. I’ll call the school once we figure out when we’re leaving.”
Adam’s mouth goes dry and his heart pounds. Dark spots float before his eyes. He clutches the lip of the table. Does Rachida think he is going to get on an airplane with her? He sees his mother watching him. She nods slightly, as though to say, Just go along, don’t challenge Rachida now.
8
When Adam returns from taking Omar to school, his mother is alone in the kitchen. “I’ve moved my first two patients,” she tells him.
“Where’s Rachida?”
“She’s upstairs making phone calls.”
“I can’t fly.”
“Yes, you can. You have to. You can’t not go to your father-in-law’s funeral.”
“I’ll be more trouble than help. You remember the time I tried to fly to Dad’s? I had a panic attack on the runway and they had to let me off the plane.”
“That was fifteen years ago.”
“Well, that was enough for me. I’m not going to try again.”
“I talked to Caro. Tomorrow’s the last day of school for her too. She wants to go to Uri’s funeral, and she said she’ll miss a day of school so she can fly with you. I’ll ask Jim Meyers, he’s the psychopharmacologist I use for my patients, to write a prescription for something to help you relax.”
Adam closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath. He tries to imagine buckling a seat belt, allowing a stranger, a man, he assumes, to take the controls and lift them into the air. “Rachida didn’t even tell me what happened. How did he die?”
“A massive coronary. Apparently Uri told Rachida’s mother that he’d been having chest pains and was going to make an appointment for January to go to the doctor. Rachida cannot believe that her mother or sister didn’t insist he go immediately. And she feels guilty that she didn’t know.�
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“I can’t do it.”
“Yes you can.”
9
Adam sits on the sofa in the parlor reading The Times cover to cover, an attempt to distract himself from thinking about the night flight to Casablanca—two pairs of seats, with a return flight the day before New Year’s Eve—Rachida has succeeded in booking them on. She is upstairs packing for Omar and herself. His mother has sent Eva to pick up the prescription for Xanax that Meyers called in for him. She is downstairs now seeing her late-morning patients.
He plows through a long piece in the Science section on the genetics of birds’ innate migratory patterns. The thought of dissecting the birds to examine the differences in their pituitary glands makes him nauseous. By the time he reaches the second column of a piece on hormone replacement therapy, the meaning of each word dissolves with the arrival of its successor.
A little before eleven, Caro calls.
“How’s everyone?”
“Off doing their thing.”
“Do you even have a passport? You’ve never left the country, have you?”
“Good question, Sherlock. But the answer is yes. Rachida insisted I get a passport when she got Omar his. She thinks I won’t fly as a way of annoying her.”
“Maybe she has a point.”
“I could dream up less unpleasant means of bugging her than breaking into a cold sweat and feeling like I’m going to shit my pants.”
“You went on that rafting trip. That had to have been scary.”
“Put me on a boat, on a train, I’m fine. It’s things that go up in the air, where you can’t get out, that terrify me.”
“We have this theory at school that the kids do better approaching new experiences if we talk them through what it will be like first. Do you want me to do that for you with flying?”
“So I can go through it twice?”
“What exactly frightens you?”
“Taking off. I imagine this huge centrifugal force overpowering me as we lift off. Losing altitude mid-flight and falling in accelerated free-fall straight down. Landing—crashing into the runway.”
Caro sighs. “Let’s take this a step at a time. There’s no huge centrifugal force. At takeoff, you’ll feel a slight pressure pushing you back into the seat as the plane assumes about a ten-degree upward angle from the runway.”
Adam shivers. “I better not talk about it. Just give me a bucketful of the Xanax and let me sleep through it.”
“Did you pack?”
“Not yet. I will.”
Caro imagines her brother’s rumpled wardrobe, his stained T-shirts, his dirty sneakers. “Lay out everything on the bed that you’re going to take. Then let Rachida check it.”
“Ha, ha. Madame Rachida—arbiter of sartorial appropriateness.”
After Adam gets off the phone, he heads upstairs. Caro is right. He should let Rachida give her seal of approval to his clothes. He doesn’t want to be three thousand miles away with her berating him as to why he didn’t bring his brown loafers. When he gets to the third-floor landing, he tells himself he will start by gathering up the papers and books he wants to take.
The outline for “Moishe in the Amazon” and some notes he took from the Internet about Iquitos are scattered across the desk. He tidies the papers, which he puts back inside a manila folder labeled Research Iquitos. Perhaps he will be able to do some research while he’s in Morocco: Moishe, after all, comes from Marrakesh. He’ll bring a notebook. With this thought comes a little relief to his anxiety—there will be a purpose to the trip aside from comforting Rachida, which seems already doomed, followed then by a new wave of terror since the thought implies that he will, indeed, board the plane.
What he wants to bring is the photograph from the magazine of the two men, the little one held aloft by the large one. He locks the door, lowers the shades, and opens the closet. The brown envelope holding the photographs is in the back of the bottom file box. He takes out the picture, averting his eyes so he doesn’t actually look at it. He folds it and places it inside the blue notebook he used when he interviewed Eva about Iquitos.
He puts the envelope back in the file box, at the rear as before. But what if the plane crashes and someone has to go through his papers looking for insurance information or wills? Wouldn’t it be safer to put the photos in a file where no one would look?
He can hear someone moving around in the kitchen—either Eva back from the pharmacy or his mother done with her morning patients.
He empties the envelope and puts the photos inside the manila folder labeled Research Iquitos. He puts the folder inside the file box marked Moishe in the Amazon. After the plane explodes on the runway, no one will care about Moishe.
10
In the end, Myra packs for Adam. Coming upstairs during her lunch break, she finds him staring at the contents of his top dresser drawer, the suitcase Rachida dragged up from the basement empty except for a notebook and a pile of books.
“How are you doing?”
“Caro said to lay everything out and have Rachida check it.”
“Rachida has her hands full. Why don’t we do it together?”
And so it is that Myra comes to see the shabby condition of her son’s wardrobe. After five minutes’ looking through his closet and drawers, she quickly writes a list for Eva to take to Macy’s: six pairs of brown and black socks, two packages each of briefs and undershirts. Because they are largely unused, Adam’s dress clothes are in better condition. She puts his suit in the bathroom to steam and gathers up the best sampling of khaki pants and shirts for Eva to press when she returns.
It has been a long time since she has involved herself with a man’s clothing. With her lovers, she was careful not to make herself available in this way. Larry, though, had refused to pack for himself, claiming he couldn’t fold as well as she could. “If I could fold the way you do,” he’d say, “I’d have become a surgeon.”
“Or an origami artist?”
“Just pack for me, baby.”
Secretly, she had enjoyed handling his things, the vicarious pleasure of his immaculate wardrobe, his way, she thought, of holding on to the era before his father saw God in nature and renounced boxers purchased in dozen-count boxes from Brooks Brothers and Italian shoes each stuffed with a wooden shoe tree. Her own things are neat and lovely in a simple way, but fundamentally they were a peacock family with the male strutting the finery.
Betty, Caro says, is a slob. Myra smiles thinking about Larry living with muddy boots in the entry hall, the kitchen sink filled with the soggy remains of the morning’s cereal, everything covered with hair from the three dogs and two cats.
It is probably good for him. To what had her own pristine ideals—the balanced meals, the orderly dresser drawers, the well-behaved children—led? A husband who had sex with his receptionist.
11
Caro calls her father to tell him about Uri’s death and their departure in a few hours for Morocco.
“Let Rachida know I’m really sorry. What a shock. Did he have any cardiac history?”
“Not that Rachida knows of. Though he’d been complaining for a few weeks about chest pains.”
“Adam’s really going?”
“Rachida didn’t give him a choice. Mom got him some Xanax. I want to attend Uri’s funeral, but I’m mostly going to baby-sit him.”
“Be careful not to overdo it with the Xanax. You know what a cheap date Adam is.”
As always, Caro feels a twinge of surprise on hearing her father’s concern—a residue of her childish belief when he first left that in so doing he’d stopped thinking about them. “You’re going to cancel your trip now that none of us will be here?”
There is a long enough pause before her father’s answer that Caro wonders if perhaps she is wrong. “Sure, no point now.”
12
Myra holds Omar’s hand as the car service driver loads the suitcases Eva and Rachida have carried to the curb. Adam is chalky with fear. Without saying good
bye, he climbs into the front seat where he’ll have more air.
Caro counts their luggage. “Three suitcases, one duffel, and four carry-ons.”
With Caro, Adam will be okay. Rachida and Caro each hug Myra. Myra hands a bag to Omar: some travel games she’d run to a toy store to buy. “Don’t open it until you’re on the plane,” she whispers to Omar.
“Will we be back for Christmas?”
“No, darling. We’ll have Christmas and open all of your Hanukkah presents on New Year’s Eve—the day after you get back.”
“Remember to put water in the tree, Eva,” Omar says.
“I will.”
“You can sleep in my bed while I’m gone.”
Eva smiles awkwardly. As the van pulls away, she and Myra stand in the dark waving goodbye. If Eva had somewhere to go, Myra would tell her to take the week off. It would be a vacation to have the house to herself. But there is nowhere for Eva to go.
Inside, Eva finishes the dinner dishes while Myra goes downstairs to her office. She checks her phone messages, sorts the mail on her desk. Then she turns on her computer.
In the middle of her inbox is [email protected]. She takes a deep breath and clicks open.
Dear Myra,
Well, I’m sorry for Rachida about her father. Sounds like someone upstairs gave him some warning calls and he ignored them, which must be eating up Rachida. Uri and I had a drink together at the kids’ wedding and I thought he was a decent guy—though that wife of his reminded me of my mother, which is not meant as a compliment. He was tickled that my grandfather was a jeweler too.
So I won’t be coming East. I have to admit that I’m sorry that I won’t get a chance to see you. I feel damn sheepish to tell you I was really looking forward to it. Don’t give me any of your psychoanalytic interpretations about wallowing in my guilt and wanting what I can’t have. I just miss you is all.
In any case, I suppose I should say Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah—whichever is now your cup of tea. On my end, I could do without the former. Kiss Omar for me when he gets back.