It was while I was cutting up some unused credit cards that I saw the note written on a piece of fabric. It was torn, but not enough. It was there. Right there, on top of the stack on the desk. I’d put it there, not noticing. Front and center. It wasn’t even ashamed of itself. And it was nothing fancy, just a scrap of old thin cloth, as though it were a tag that had been itchy and yanked out. White with purple letters, like veins on old skin. It was in a woman’s handwriting.
Meet me at the Bow Bridge at sunrise.
I felt like I was going to pass out. I was weak. I was weak. I sat down slowly in the desk chair, not wanting to rush this. It felt like this shouldn’t be rushed. I picked up the note, delicately, feeling it in my hands. I wondered if something like this should have been heavier, with the heft of a hamantashen, at the very least. I looked at the words and then I didn’t. I put it back where it came from. And then I picked it up again. I mashed it in my fist. Go. Vanish. I decided I wouldn’t look at it again. It wasn’t meant for me. I tossed it into the garbage can. I took it out of the garbage can. I uncrumpled it. Flattened it onto the desk. The letters leaned to the right, poised as if with their hands on their hips.
I sniffed it.
I turned it over. There was a tiny grease stain. From our counter? From fish?
I folded it. It went willingly, like a ballerina being lifted at her waist. Tiny square.
From the Bow Bridge in Central Park, Joseph and I watched the ducks. Sometimes we’d sit in a gazebo nearby and feed them old bread. I didn’t like when they came too close. They had ferocious little beaks. Joseph liked to stomp near them and cause them to fly toward my head. I’d scolded him. I’d told him to find someone else to harass. I was always saying things like that.
I’d read that a man was murdered in our gazebo.
Joseph was always up at sunrise, his favorite time of day. He’d go for a walk and return to make our coffee before his shower. Sometimes, he’d walk with Dottie. She was an insomniac and a hypochondriac. He’d tell her it was good for her lungs. She would have drunk parrot urine if she thought it would diminish her frown lines.
For a moment, I thought: Maybe I wrote this note. It could have been me. I could have been a walker. I could have liked the mornings. But then, could I have? I liked the afternoons. Sunset, not sunrise. Cooling down, not warming up. I hated walking first thing. It made the system reel. I tried to imagine us. Me, groggy. Him, tugging me along. The air—it never happened. I would have remembered. Perhaps it was Dottie, then. But of course it wasn’t. Dottie didn’t have the patience to write something down. She just barged in, never knocked, never made polite requests.
And then it hit me: our daughter. I recalled what I’d said to Joseph just after he’d passed, about finding her. I wanted to know where he’d been when I said that—for how long hearing continues to work and when it shuts off. This note, I thought, what if it was from her? What if they had met, after all these years? I always knew that he couldn’t let go, but maybe he found a way so that he didn’t have to.
It wasn’t easy. I will say that. After we gave up the baby, we hated each other a little. I couldn’t stand his disappointment in me. I’d wanted to be enough. When I wasn’t, I shunned any possible replacement. It’s horrible, I know. Still, it’s been a very long time. And he, heart of gold, had wanted only something of his own, something to love. I deprived him of that. I know I did. And yet, we moved on. It required silence and shame. It required opening our restaurant just to be something other than non-parents, to watch each other in a different context. They never left us, those feelings, but they dimmed. We grew around the hole. I’d like to think it made us stronger, but I suppose it’s impossible to know a thing like that.
Pain in my chest. I wheezed.
I sniffed the note again. There was lead in my stomach. A whole new world had just broken into my house. Then the jealousy surged. Why had he been so secretive? Why had he kept her from me? You gave her up, Victoria, I told myself. Our relationship after that—Joseph’s and mine—was a delicate hora around that crater. That’s the funny thing about loss. Sometimes it’s the absence of something that makes everything else appear around it. It’s like turning off the lights in order to see.
And yet, I believed we’d moved on. Not always together, but along, past, in whatever way we could. That he’d met her, known her, and for years perhaps, was a betrayal I couldn’t begin to comprehend. He had kept her from me, and he’d kept some of himself from me too.
I looked at the leaves. “Did she press these?” I said out loud, waving them in the air. “Why didn’t you share them? Her?”
And then I couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t think. Maybe Dottie had a point—all these reminders were too much. I marched into the kitchen, began collecting used dishes. There were paperweights crouching in a corner next to a tall stack of red manila folders. There was a tissue box impaled and balancing on a little copper giraffe. Our lemon tree was totally dead now. Its smell had been our nostalgia. Baghdad. Now the leaves were brown and shriveled on the floor. I hadn’t even noticed.
Moments before, I’d thought: This was Joseph’s world, his memory. It all bore such weight. Everything and its dust needed to stay just so. To clean it would be to remove him. Now I reached for his sock. I knotted it for effect and hurled it across the room. “How could you,” I heard myself whisper.
I went to Joseph’s closet. I yanked things off the hangers. Blazers and coats and merino wool sweaters. I should have been sleeping. A smell of him leaped up, a smell I hadn’t smelled for months—garlic and the lavender water I’d ironed his shirts with. In the end, he had stopped smelling like himself.
I knocked his hats off the top shelf with the back of a broom. They scattered like bugs. I pulled his polo shirts out of their drawers. They crumbled onto the floor. I threw his underwear, one by one, into the crouching bag. His handkerchiefs. His undershirts. His khakis bowed into themselves.
I lifted up a pair of jeans, meaning to fold them. I should have folded everything. Brought it all to the Salvation Army. Oh well. I dropped the jeans back onto the floor. I picked up a silk shirt, laid it out on the bed. I saw the shape of it—the wide, bubbled shape of it. This would not do. The intimacy would not do.
Then I was gathering the clothes into a giant hill. I was falling over my feet. My shoulders were going stiff. I was an old, old lady. I put on my leather gloves. I felt criminal.
I set off in search of every half-full pill bottle. The diapers, slipper socks, lotions, ointments, heating pads, urinal, therapeutic pillows, bedpans, baby wipes, wash bucket and its thick orange sponge.
I was outraged. I was hysterical.
I went to the kitchen looking for garbage bags, but there were none. I went to the hall closet. So many odd things. It overwhelmed me. I wanted it all out. I moved the broom to get a better look and the top shelf fell down.
Boom.
Shit.
Immediately, Dottie banged with her heel. She lived above us but heard everything. It was counterintuitive, I often thought, unless she kept her ear to the floor constantly, which wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. These flimsy walls were the only things lamer, frailer than me. I thought, Go away, please. I rifled around in the closet. Not one single garbage bag in the entire place.
Then, here appeared Dottie. Next to me. She hadn’t knocked. She had a headful of pink curlers. She found me on my knees.
“Shit hellfire,” she said. “What on earth.” I looked up at her. Sometimes, I wondered if she was really from the South or if she just watched too much TV.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
For a second, I was about to tell her everything, about the note, the truth. But when I took a preparatory breath, I choked on some dust. And then I couldn’t. I couldn’t get the words out. It was my dignity, among other things, that Joseph had stolen when he’d decided to keep his relationship with our daughter from me.
So I pretended that I didn’t see her. I moved arou
nd her like she was an ornamental plant. She was used to it. She took the hint and vanished. I located some old supermarket plastic bags on top of the fridge. They were small but they were something. I stood on a dining-room chair, fully aware that I could break my neck. “Fine,” I said to no one in particular. “Break twice.”
In the bedroom, I found Dottie delicately folding some of Joseph’s sweaters. Her eyes were full of tears.
My first thought was that she was messing with my mess and interfering. I had already cleaned up after her—her endless piles of crap. But she was making everything smell like her lipstick again—like wet powder, a smell that made me cringe. I did not want to see her face and felt confident that Joseph would not have either. He wouldn’t have wanted her all over his things. I had the urge to tell her that this was not a petting zoo.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
I grabbed at the sweaters.
“You’re really going to do this tonight?” she asked, and let go. “Let’s have tea instead. Let’s watch a movie. Come, doll. Let’s sit.”
“I don’t want to sit,” I said.
“All right, then,” she said. “But you’re really going to throw all this out? It’s good stuff. Someone would want it, you know. I’ll help you,” she said.
It was quite comical: Dottie all of a sudden so philanthropic—an ambassador to the poor. Joseph, I wanted to say. Let’s call a spade a spade. Has Dottie ever done a charitable thing in her life?
And then, I remembered what he’d done. Forget it, I said to him in my head. I’m not talking to you.
I threw one of his shirts at her and she caught it. It hung from her hands by the sleeve, like a small child unwilling to walk. I wasn’t feeling well. I was queasy in the throat. I started another bag, stuffing in thing after thing after thing. The bags were thin, some of them already ripped. I began to sweat. Dottie wasn’t helping. I looked at her, about to give it to her good. But then I thought of what Joseph would say: She’s alone, she has nothing; it wouldn’t kill us to humor her. But this was extreme, even for Dottie. This needed more than just humoring.
Just then my chest exploded.
“Ouch!” I cried. I lurched forward and crashed. Dottie was there with me on the floor, on her knees.
“Are you all right?” she said, touching my face. “My word. You’re pale as a ghost.”
The pain was gone, but I lingered. Here was Dottie, I thought. I looked at her. Dottie. In my head, I begged her to stay like that—with me, for a moment. No one else would.
“You look awful,” she said.
“I had a pain.”
“Sharp?” she asked. “Below the breastbone?” I nodded. She waved it off.
“I get those all the time,” she said. “The doctor says it’s gas. I say it’s lovesickness. But either way, what can you do?”
I looked at her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Dottie had her moments. Like just then. Amazingly, she had justified my feelings, my whole life with Joseph. She hadn’t meant to, of course, but she had. Dear Dottie. I was lovesick. And despite herself, she understood. I put my hand on her arm, gave it a little squeeze.
“I’ll help,” she said. We both stood up, arms full of clothes. She was standing there with the same pile and no progress.
We both got down, gathering. We were a team, and we weren’t. We went through one, two, three, seven bags and cleared the floor. We pushed them down by leaning with our elbows. I could smell Dottie’s lipstick again. I rolled my eyes. I didn’t care if she saw me. Then I held the bag down and Dottie tried to make knots of the tiny bits of plastic that were left.
My body felt like it had been dipped in concrete. It was heavy and stiff. I wanted to quit. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
There must have been twenty bags in all. We kicked them out the front door and into the elevator foyer. I asked myself if I was sure about this, and I was. I wanted to feel lighter. This would help. As we waited for the elevator, the bags popped open. One after the other, like lawn sprinklers. I almost fell on the floor, dove headfirst into his coats.
“It’s okay,” Dottie said. “Let’s just get the stuff back into the bags and we’ll tape them shut.”
It had always been like this. I hated her. I loved her. She was optimistic. I wasn’t. She didn’t sweat the small stuff. I did. She was uncomplicated. It was as if the American paleness of her skin reflected something from the inside: day clouds or the foam on cold milk. I imagined my own insides but all I could come up with was a steely basement, full of complex mechanisms, functioning and airtight.
We took care of all the bags. Dottie picked up each one and held it while I wrapped, around and around, with tape, which made a loud, screeching sound that I was grateful for, its irreverence.
And then I remembered. “One second,” I said to Dottie and ran back inside. I got an old white blouse from my closet, stuck my fingers into the pocket stitching, and began to rip. I couldn’t stop. I’d meant to do something small but instead I made a gash nearly the length of the entire blouse, as if I were somehow aware of a certain gasping that was taking place in my chest and was hoping to give it space, a little air. It sounded like a tiny orchestra of cracking bones and I grimaced, thinking of Joseph being hoisted now from the stretcher to somewhere else. Would they see his bones? I wondered. And what color would they be?
“Oh, Joseph,” I said, stuffing my testament to our abandoned Jewish faith under my shirt. I went into the study and grabbed the memento leaves from the garbage. I stuffed those under my shirt too, and I raced—using that term loosely—back out the door to Dottie.
I felt like an abandoned ship, rotted and heavy at the bottom of an ocean, and yet as stray and tinny as a can.
In the elevator, Dottie and I were suddenly, obviously still. I could hear our high, wispy old-lady breaths. For a second, I thought I should get back upstairs to check on Joseph. It didn’t feel so different yet. For nearly a year, I’d been talking to him in my head, where he was more likely to answer. I’d been reminding myself of him, not the other way around, him reminding me of himself. I was grateful for what hadn’t yet sunk in.
Dottie looked awful. I hadn’t ever seen her like this. I didn’t imagine she’d ever seen herself like this. She’d never given birth. She never exercised. She never cried in public. Black fuzz stuck to the sweat on her face so she appeared bearded. Stray eye makeup had condensed into native smudges above her cheeks. Still, there was something feminine about her. Graceful even. Despite all her hoopla—the makeup, the fur, the high heels—Dottie had always made me question my own looks. Next to her, I was always wrong—too dressed up or down. I was always trying too hard. But Dottie, she knew what to do. She had a vast knowledge of things that I never would. I could say that about plumbers too, I suppose, or nuclear physicists, but that had nothing to do with anything.
We left the bags by the curb between the smeared dog poop and a meter. They made little expanding sounds against the tape. I threw the leaves into the street, hoping they’d be swallowed by a gutter. I folded my white shirt, the ripped one, and put it on top. Begrudgingly, I wished Joseph rest.
I wiped sweat from my eyebrows. Salt was dripping into my mouth.
Upstairs, I sat on the couch in Joseph’s study with the note in my hands. They were old hands, I noticed, and unattractive, like raw meat. The room seemed enormous but darker without all those pale sheets and blankets. For a moment, I considered going back down, carting the bags up again, emptying them onto the bed, folding everything nicely, and keeping the pile in the study. I could have put flowers by it. I pushed the thought away.
It had been like that when we gave her up. Now it was like that again.
But I wanted to find her. No matter what, no matter what Joseph might have told her about me, I had to find her. Or maybe, I thought, she’d find me. Now. Maybe she was already looking. Maybe she knew all about me and when he didn’t call her, she would come, knowing that we’d lost him, and som
ehow we could share just a little bit in each other’s hurt.
I went back to his desk. There were no other clues. I spent hours going through the whole house, searching for our daughter in every dusty corner. I found paperwork I thought we’d thrown out ages ago. Despite the hour, I called numbers for the adoption agency, the doctor we’d gone to. I even called the hospital where I’d given birth. At some point, everything in New York becomes a dry cleaner’s. Or a nail salon. I came to one dead end after another, and with each failed attempt, I was let down not only because I was getting nowhere but because each moment I spent wondering about her, about who she was, about her relationship with Joseph, was another moment in which she wasn’t finding me either.
I made a mental list of the things that I wouldn’t do: I would not turn on music. It would make me cry. I would not read the newspapers. They would make me cry. I would not open the mail, put food in the fishless fish tank, use cardamom, or go near the study. I would not cry. I would not wait.
Everything I did was an act against waiting for her.
That’s when I remembered the leaves. I raced to the window, but his things were already picked over. The pile was smaller, ruffled up. I put on my glasses. And the leaves, which I’d tossed into the street, were definitely gone. Probably in the sewer system and halfway to Chinatown by now. I stared at the space where they’d been.
Lorca
SURPRISE, SURPRISE, I couldn’t stop thinking about Blot.
Late Friday night, after I got home from buzzing Victoria and Joseph, I was thinking that if I could have gotten my act together earlier, left my mother not-eating her dinner, Blot and I could have both rung the buzzer. We could have been disappointed together. If I hadn’t come up with the brilliant idea to cook dinner—a crappy, no-red-wine-in-the-sauce disaster—we could have done the whole thing together. I wouldn’t have been by myself. I wouldn’t have almost literally killed two birds—Blot and the Shohets—with one stone.
Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots Page 9