I went home and called Yesim and told her about my conversation with Kerem. I said I wanted to read her poems, and Yesim said that was very flattering, but she didn’t know how she felt about the part of her life that had ended in Cambridge years ago. I said of course I understood, but I still wanted to read the poems.
“You have to be patient with me,” Yesim said. “I have good parts and bad parts.”
“Everyone is like that,” I said.
“That may be true, but I’m a little more so.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I want to see you again.”
Yesim said I could come over anytime. After all, I knew where she lived. But I said I meant just her, alone. There was a longish silence, then she said she would stop by on her way home, but just for a minute.
I spent the afternoon on the sofa, reading in Progress in Flying Machines about Screws That Lift and Propel. Outside, the sky got darker and darker. Just when it seemed like Yesim wouldn’t come, the Outback arrived in my grandfather’s driveway, and there she was, a brown paper bag in her arms. She’d brought food, she hoped I didn’t mind, she hadn’t eaten all day.
Yesim paused on the doorstep. “You know I’ve never been here?” It hadn’t occurred to me but of course it was true. “All these years,” she said, carrying the bag to the kitchen table, and unpacking a plastic tub of soup and white Chinese-takeout boxes, “I’ve wondered what your grandparents’ house was like.”
“Come and see,” I said. I showed her the dining room, the parlor, where she admired Mary’s watercolors; my mothers’ room, my grandparents’ bedroom, the study. Somewhere on the second floor Yesim stopped talking, and she didn’t speak again until we were back in the kitchen.
“Excuse me for asking,” she said, finding bowls, plates, forks and spoons, carrying everything to the old scarred kitchen table, “but I thought you were supposed to be packing up?”
“I should be. But look at this place. I have no idea where to start.”
“It’s not hard. You just make two piles, one for things to give away and one for things to keep. Anything that’s too big to go on one of the piles, you tag with a sticker. Color coded, red for keep, green for sell or give away.” Kerem was right: Yesim was a born manager.
We opened the takeout boxes to reveal chicken and peanuts, broccoli, some kind of eggplant, this last, I thought, an almost Turkish touch. There was a little silence: so much not to talk about.
“So,” I asked, “how was your day?”
“Not bad,” Yesim said around a mouthful of chicken. The terrain park was almost finished but the contractor had gone AWOL. He didn’t have a regular phone; Yesim imagined that he was some kind of elf, hiding in an enchanted forest of concrete. “What about you?”
“Oh,” I said, “things with me are pretty quiet.”
We finished dinner in comfortable silence. It was as if we’d always been there, the two of us, as if all the contradictions of our history were dissolving in cheap broth and brown sauce, and what remained was just this image, the Rowland child and the Regenzeit child at the ancestral Rowland table, eating soup from my grandparents’ chipped white bowls.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get it,” I said, as Yesim stood, plate in her hands, headed for the sink, but she was already washing the dishes.
“I like your kitchen more than mine,” she said. “It’s cozy. I never understood why my parents made ours so shiny and, you know, chrome-y. On the other hand”—she nodded at the clock in the shape of a cat, with a wagging tail and eyes set with rhinestones—“that’s a weird clock.”
“My grandfather bought it after my grandmother died. I don’t know why.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean to imply that he had bad taste. I’ve just never seen a clock like that before.”
“Get rid of it, you think?”
“I would,” Yesim said.
So it began. It seems ironic that the one thing Yesim and I could talk about was my grandparents’ possessions, the stuff that had brought me to Thebes in the first place, but it makes sense: everything else was too dangerous. When I had unplugged the clock and taken it down from the wall, it made sense to both of us that she would point at a ceramic beer stein, which had been full of pennies and nickels for as long as I could remember, and ask, “Are you going to keep that?” I asked if she thought I should.
“It looks kind of dirty.”
“OK, stein, Achtung!” I said. “To ze garage mit you!”
When I came back she was looking at the coat tree. “I know,” I said. “I’ll take it out later.”
It made sense that I would call Yesim at work the next day, to ask if she could spare an hour or two. Because I was cleaning out the library, and I could use her advice. Yesim came over and we spent the evening picking things up, showing them to each other, asking, Yes or no? Her advice was good, even if it tended to the nonaccumulative. That boat-shaped ashtray? Forget it. The box of matchbooks? The china shepherd? The green-shaded lamp? The lamp, maybe. It was a nice lamp. After a couple of hours, Yesim looked at her watch and said she had to go. Maybe she suspected that something else was happening, less innocent than the division of my grandparents’ things into two heaps, because she drove the fifty feet that separated her house from mine, as if she wanted to emphasize that we were not together. But she came back the next night. We worked in the dining room, then in the living room, with increasing sureness and speed. The great mass of Rowland stuff gave way before us, like ice breaking and spinning away into a warming river, and what was, from my point of view, even better, Yesim and I learned things about each other. I discovered that she had no use for the kitsch that people in San Francisco liked (“Please tell me,” she said indignantly, “what you are going to do with Cooking with Pineapples?”), but she showed a strange reverence for old-fashioned things (“You’ve got to hold on to these letter openers”), which I would have been happy (“Five letter openers? Yesim, I don’t get any mail!”) not to keep. We agreed about paperweights, planters, anything crocheted. These weren’t the things we would have chosen to reveal about ourselves, but somehow that made them even more intimate, more revealing. They were the secrets we didn’t know we had. How else, short of living together, would I have learned that Yesim didn’t like pillows or mirrors, that she hated curtains and only grudgingly tolerated blinds? How would she have discovered my strange fascination with the electric toothbrush?
With the things came stories. Yesim wanted to know about the Catskill landscapes in the dining room; I told her about my grandmother’s expeditions into the mountains, in all seasons, all weathers, expeditions that caused my grandfather furies of worry that didn’t end until she came home, sometimes in the middle of the night, the back of her station wagon full of diminutive canvases.
“She was really talented,” Yesim said.
“It’s true,” I said.
But my grandmother’s interest in painting ended when my mothers went to New York to become artists: as if she couldn’t stand the competition, or maybe it was just that, with her daughters gone and her son on his way to Vietnam, she didn’t have anyone to run away from anymore. After that, my grandmother put her energy into her garden, almost as if she’d become the one who was rooted to the spot.
“She sounds interesting,” Yesim said. “Not like my grandmother, ugh.” But Yesim didn’t talk about her grandmother: my house, she said, my stories.
On Saturday afternoon I found a box of my grandparents’ records. Here was Gil Gideon and the Two-Time Tunesters with a double album of Moonlite Melodies, here were Benny Goodman, Harry James, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb and all their orchestras. Some of the records were thick, ten-inch 78s; others were regular 33s, in bright, busy album covers that belonged to a world untouched or unretouched by the airbrush. I put on Gil Gideon and turned the volume up, and his songs became the soundtrack for our work in the parlor, which went faster now that there was music playing. “Give me a sign,” Gil sang. “A spoon. The month of June. A reason to be fallin’
in love.”
“How did they meet?” Yesim asked.
“Gil and the Tunesters?”
“No, your grandparents.”
The way my grandmother told the story, I said, Oliver had fallen in love with her at a college dance contest. He was no kind of dancer; his first words to her were apparently, “Is that your foot?” Mary was disposed to tell him off. She already had a beau, a Baltimorean named Brett, also an undergraduate at Bleak, who possessed a widow’s peak, jet-black hair, commanding eyes, a sterling white waistcoat and one of each kind of foot. But something about Oliver stopped her. That was the word she used, stopped, as if it meant more than it did, as if Oliver stopped not only her lips but some crazy clockwork that had carried her from boarding school to boarding school, from state to state, from boyfriend to boyfriend, because young Mary was wild, or restless at least, very much like her daughters in that regard. If Oliver hadn’t come along, she didn’t know where she would have ended up. A lost woman, she said. Probably. Oliver stopped her. He was a talker; before the song was over he had told her how he came from a long line of tree exploiters: his great-great-grandfather had run a sawmill, and his grandfather had run a furniture company and his father made walking sticks and other wooden souvenirs for tourists in the Catskills. First trees, then chairs, then walking sticks: the only thing left for Oliver would be toothpicks, so he’d left home before the family business whittled him down to nothing. He got Mary to tell him her story. He listened, as though to him the music were no music, as though everything in the world were still except her voice, which grew still in turn, and the band stopped playing, and they lost the contest, and went outside for a breath of air.
Then came the Second World War. Oliver enlisted in the Army, hoping to see some action, but he was clumsy, clumsy, and in the interest of everyone’s safety he was posted to a base in Florida, where he excelled as assistant quartermaster, and then quartermaster, and probably he would have made it all the way to half-master and master entire if the war hadn’t ended when it did. He went back to Bleak and married Mary, and for a few months they lived in New York City, while they decided what to do with the rest of their lives. Mary argued for London; Oliver wanted time to think. They were still and moving at the same time. It was a strange experience, like being on a ride at a fair; you sat there and the lights went past, then passed again. Where were they going? Thebes, as it turned out. Oliver’s father had died and left behind him a fat dark skein of unresolved business, which looked from the outside as though there would be money in it, but unraveled, and unraveled, until Oliver was left holding nothing, only the thin end of a thread that led to someone else’s pocket. The Rowland Mill was bankrupt; the mill closed down. All that was left were the houses in town, and some securities, enough to live on if they lived in Thebes. Oliver liked the idea of having some more time to think, and besides, Mary was already pregnant with Charles. They moved to Thebes.
Instead of English hills, Mary got the Catskills, and not the busy Catskills, where the Jewish resorts were, nor the majestic Catskills as painted by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, but Thebes, a town in the northeastern corner of Espy County, which she’d never heard of, a place so remote that the inhabitants spoke a foreign language. How good Brett and his urbane charms must have looked as the car stopped and the cold air came in, and Oliver explained to her that the house had been built in stages, that the original house had been only the kitchen and what was now the dining room and one of the bedrooms upstairs, that the parlor and library and the big bedroom had been added by John Rowland I, and his son added the bow window, a mistake, in Oliver’s opinion … A commentary that did not cease until she fell sick and Oliver took her to a teaching hospital in Syracuse, forty-five years later.
Mary was stopped, and good. Even so, she was smart enough to guess there was a reason why everything happened, smart enough to guess that she was, in fact, smart. If she’d been in love with Brett she would have let him make love to her; but she hadn’t. She had married Oliver for a reason, even if she couldn’t say exactly what the reason was, now, standing on the front steps of the Rowland house, looking out at a valley where few people lived, and all of them odd. So she made the best of it. She took up painting and drove off to turn the vast Hudson Valley into tiny watercolors; she made molehills of mountains, and spider lines of streams; forests turned to blotches under her brush, stippled with orange as the fall approached. And she had Saturday nights at Summerland, the old resort. Look: Oliver is in his shirtsleeves; Mary’s in a flared skirt that swings nicely when she swings, and she swings all right. Her hair is mussed. Now it’s Sunday morning, the kids are going to be up soon and Mary will have to cook, but until then she’s free to remember the night she’s had, and the band that was playing, let’s say it was Gil Gideon and his orchestra, and how she got Oliver to dance; when he was tired she danced with his friend Pete Samson, a doctor, who wasn’t bad, and when they were done Oliver took her out to the garden, which was lit up like a fairyland. She let him smoke a cigarette and kiss her; she grabbed his big behind and had the pleasure of watching his eyes get all round.
“Mary, please,” he murmured to her neck, “someone will see us.”
“Who’s to see? Everyone else is doing the same thing.”
It was true; the bushes rustled with amorous activity. Now and then someone hooted like an owl carrying something soft away in its talons. She pressed his hips into her stomach, dug her fingers into the scratchy wool of the seat of his pants.
“Mary!”
She could feel his cock getting hard, though, and she wondered if she ought to drag him into the bushes. Instead they went indoors. Gil G. was pulling out all the stops. The drummer was soaking in his shirtsleeves and the trumpeter’s eyes had gone red like sucking candies.
“Here’s the champion!” Pete Samson seized Mary’s waist and led her back to the dance floor, over Oliver’s objections that a man ought to be able to enjoy a moment with his wife …
“Let’s run away,” Pete whispered in Mary’s ear. He was ten years younger than she was, young enough to have strong blocky legs and a baby-boy face. His soft cheek pressed against hers. He was joking, but he wasn’t joking.
“Where to?” Mary asked.
“Anywhere you want,” said Pete.
“Not tonight,” Mary said. “Call me in the morning.”
“You always say that,” Pete said.
“You never call.”
Then she went back to Oliver, who was brooding. She squeezed his arm and told him to get her a drink. Mary knew that she was smart, smarter in fact than her husband, definitely smarter than Pete Samson, probably smarter than her children as well. She understood what none of them were even close to figuring out, that this was all there was. Wherever you went in the world, whatever you did, you would find more or less the same thing, people dancing in hot rooms, brooding husbands, gardens, lights, the sound of sex, children who wanted breakfast, and there was no point in wishing that life were otherwise, because if it was very much different from this, then it wouldn’t be life at all. Give me a rock, she sings. A ring. The promise of spring. A season. A reason to be fallin’ in love.
My uncle came over that night. “Hey,” he said, “you’re making progress!” He had been worried about me, but it looked like I was doing all right. “Maybe our talk did you some good,” Charles said.
“Maybe it did,” I said.
On Monday Yesim and I started on the parlor.
REGENZEIT
This is the good part: it’s the story of Yesim calling me at midnight to say she’d changed her mind, I ought to keep Mary’s sewing machine, and me saying, you’re calling at midnight about the sewing machine? And Yesim saying, I couldn’t sleep, I was worried that you would throw it out. It’s an antique, you ought to hold on to it. And me saying, I promise, I won’t make any rash decisions about the sewing machine until tomorrow morning at the earliest. And going back to bed, pretending to be annoyed that Yesim had woken me up
for something so unimportant, but actually happy that she was thinking of me at midnight, that she was thinking of me and my grandmother’s sewing machine. It’s the story of Yesim calling me breathlessly in the middle of the afternoon to say she just saw a moose on the ski slope, a moose, can you believe it? And me saying, it couldn’t have been a moose, and Yesim saying, you don’t believe me? Come over and see for yourself. It’s the story of the two of us walking all over Mount Espy looking for a hypothetical moose and coming back to the lodge almost doubled over with laughter and not being able to tell Kerem what was so funny. It’s that story. You know how it goes.
But here are a few surprises: one afternoon when we were tired of packing, we sat on my grandfather’s porch, watching yellow leaves skitter past on Route 56, and talked about things we’d done when we were kids. It was just like the fantasy I had right after that first dinner with Yesim and Kerem—months ago, it seemed, although it had actually been less than two weeks. I told Yesim the story of how I was expelled from Nederland, and Yesim laughed, and said, if she had been expelled from high school her father would have strangled her.
“He wouldn’t let us do anything wrong,” Yesim said. “If I got a B in school, he would shout, Aren’t you ashamed?”
“That’s pretty harsh,” I agreed.
Yesim looked at me sidelong. “You have no idea.”
Even before he came to Thebes, Joe Regenzeit had figured out that here, in America, there was no room for error, and no one to catch him if he fell, an impression that his experiences with the Thebans did nothing to dispel. If his shirt was wrinkled, it was because Turks were slovenly; if Snowbird failed to file for a permit no one had ever mentioned until the deadline for it had passed, it was because Turks thought everything could be settled with baksheesh. What Joe Regenzeit received as prejudice, he transmitted to his children as obsession. He expected Yesim’s and Kerem’s lives to be as spotless as the glass-topped table in the dining room. His demands were all the harder to satisfy because he wanted his children to be perfect and Turkish, to show the town what educated Turks could accomplish in the New World. His idea of Turkishness came from Anatolia, where nothing was possible, Yesim said, and so it was only natural that it mostly took the form of restriction: no television, no parties, no short skirts, no jeans, no teen magazines. If Joe Regenzeit could have got into his children’s sleeping heads he would probably have forbidden them to dream.
Luminous Airplanes: A Novel Page 13