“You didn’t vote for Reagan, did you?” I said. Richard was the kind of long-armed, thick-armed pianist who looked as if he might pick up the piano, and now he spotted his grandmother and pointed his big arm at her.
“Richard, Richard,” she was saying, extending her own good arm toward him.
“I didn’t vote,” said Richard, over his shoulder.
“You didn’t vote?” I considered driving him through the city to his precinct—an hour, with traffic—but managed not to make the offer. I think Richard voted for Carter last time, but in ’72 we had a fight. I was running a McGovern headquarters, but my son, recently discharged from the army, was for Nixon. Now I was saved by my mother. Richard bent to kiss her, and the conversation changed. She demanded to know if his work tired him. “It’s not good to live alone,” she said. “And who keeps clean?”
“I have a nice cleaning lady.”
Lou had turned on the television. The polls would be open in New York for a while and in California for hours to come, but as he flipped channels, commentators already displayed ominously shaded maps of the United States.
“That’s ridiculous,” Lou said, pausing to glance at a map before snapping the set off. The red states—where Republicans were predicted to win Senate seats—far outnumbered the blue, I saw as I passed behind him.
“Let Mom see,” said Richard, who was sitting on the floor next to the wheelchair.
“She’ll see plenty.”
I dished out pot roast and potatoes, while Richard scrambled to his feet and came to help. As he moves toward middle age, Richard resembles his father. He’s taller but has Lou’s sloping look: the glistening forehead tipped slightly back, so the grade of the stomach is that of the face, the brown curls. Both men loosen their ties in the evening so the knot rests at the same place on their chests, and they roll up their sleeves in the same careless way, so the cuffs dangle. I’d been angry with Richard for failing to vote, but I wanted to kiss the skin below his elbow that showed when he swung his arm and his cuff flapped.
At dinner, Richard and Lou sat across from my mother and me. My mother can use a fork awkwardly, but I cut her meat. “Here, when my teeth come out,” she said, “the dentist makes new ones. In Europe, no such thing.”
“Or she couldn’t afford them,” I said.
“Afford what?” said Lou from across the table, his knife pausing in midair.
“Dentures.”
“Who’s talking about dentures?”
“Mama knew a woman whose teeth fell out all at once,” I said. “Could that happen?”
“They fell out?” said Richard.
“Into her hand.”
My mother put down her fork and raised her good hand to her lips, curving her fingers as if to catch teeth. The gesture seemed girlish, almost playful.
“I didn’t know you wore dentures, Bubbi,” Richard said.
“In the morning, no teeth, just like that woman.”
We were silent. I lost a tooth—the first—a few years ago. At the time I felt old without limit, and until the dentist made a bridge, the gap seemed large enough for three or four teeth. I didn’t want to say that. I couldn’t say it to my mother, who’d lost so much more—teeth, husband, continence. I couldn’t say it to Lou, who wouldn’t answer, nor to Richard, who, these days, might answer too simply. I said it anyway. “When I had a tooth taken out, I felt old. And the space was huge.”
Richard looked up and spoke. “Like the space when someone dies. The gap in the line.”
“Soldiers?” I said, startled.
“Or anyone. It doesn’t seem like just one.”
He’d surprised me and I didn’t do well with it; I was embarrassed and didn’t respond. “She can’t remember what the shock was,” I said. “What made the woman’s teeth fall out.”
I was looking at my mother, so I missed the look that must have been on Lou’s face. “Who died?” he said urgently to Richard.
“What?” said Richard.
“What? What?” said my mother.
“He goes to war. He tells me nothing,” said Lou. “Now someone dies. Who died?”
“I didn’t really go to war,” said Richard. “Plenty died, though.”
“You went there. What do you mean, you didn’t go to war?”
“What happened to me was nothing.”
“Who died?” Lou said. He’d heard a seriousness in Richard’s voice that I’d let myself miss.
“Bradley’s friend,” said Richard at last. “Not in the war. Bradley’s friend died.”
“Bradley,” said my mother then, “is a homosexual.”
I didn’t know she knew. Bradley, my nephew, is my sister Bobbie’s son. “He said so?”
“Everything, Bradley tells me,” said my mother. She always pronounces it “Brodley.”
It came to me that Bradley might know about Harold, that Bobbie might have told him before she died. “The man who died, Richard, did you love him?” I said abruptly.
And Richard cried at the dinner table. “What, what?” said Lou. “Whatever is going on with you—she knows.” He pointed to me as I sat with my mother—like my lawyer—at my side.
So Richard had loved Bradley’s lover, and Bradley’s lover had died.
“Dad,” said Richard, “I’ll tell you anything, but not if you’re going to treat me like an idiot.”
When Lou is upset his sentences get longer and longer around a repeated unpleasant word. “Idiot? Who’s calling you an idiot? What do you mean, treat you like an idiot?”
“It’s not that you don’t approve of my kind of person,” said Richard. “I don’t think you believe we exist.”
“What do you mean, your kind of person? This business of men with men?”
“Men and men.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“In Europe, my father’s cousin,” said my mother evenly, when nobody spoke for a moment. “They said he liked the boys.”
“I’m not getting over it,” Richard said then. He was red and his voice was tight.
“What kind of nonsense?”
Richard left the table. Our dining room is connected by an archway to the living room, and with his napkin still tucked into his belt—his father’s habit—he walked the periphery of the room, coming close to the walls and furniture, but touching nothing, as if cataloging the objects he was not going to throw at his father—at all of us, maybe. But what he picked up, finally, was the program for Robin’s play, which had been performed at a gallery in Soho. “What’s this?”
I explained, and Richard quieted, and returned to the table, bringing the program with him. He sat down and took another bite or two. “Didn’t we see him?” he said.
“Robin Stanford?”
“Maybe at Shakespeare in the Park? The name is familiar.”
A couple of years earlier, we’d met in Central Park, I’d brought a picnic supper, and Richard and I had seen The Taming of the Shrew. A happy occasion.
“I don’t remember,” I said. “I’ll ask him.” If Robin had acted in something I might have seen, he’d surely have said so. But I liked the thought: Richard and I bundling our tablecloth off the grass and going to stand on line with the other playgoers, while Robin strides past us on his way to work, watching me walk.
“The woman,” said my mother. “She lost her teeth when her husband found out she loved another man.”
“He knocked them out?” said Lou.
“No, no, they fell. In the morning, they fell.”
Clearing the table, while again Richard moved to help me, I made a sympathetic noise with my mouth, but said nothing.
“With a tie on, you ate,” said my mother as Richard paused opposite her, gathering plates. “One spot, it will be ruined.”
“You’re right,” said Richard. He took off his tie.
“Let me see that tie,” Lou said now, his voice different—lighter. “What did you pay for this tie? This is a cheap tie.”
Richard’s voice grew lo
ud, but I knew he was grateful. “What are you talking about? This is a beautiful tie I bought at Bloomingdale’s!” It was patterned, greens and yellows.
“You don’t need to get your ties from Bloomingdale’s,” Lou said. “I get much better ones at a little place near my office.”
“Now who’s wearing a cheap tie? Huh?”
His father undid the knot of his own tie, yanked it off, and forced it into Richard’s hand. It was a quieter tie, dark red on black. “Here’s a tie. Give me that tie of yours.” Solemnly they rolled down their sleeves, buttoned their collars, and put on each other’s tie, facing each other like a couple of mirrors.
“Not bad,” Richard said, shaking his head. He and I stacked the dishwasher while Lou turned on the TV again so he and my mother could watch the election returns. Soon it would be time to drive her back to the nursing home. Then Lou brushed his fingers against the loose spoke of the wheelchair. He exclaimed, and Richard went to look. They’d forgotten they’d exchanged ties. They couldn’t break the spoke off, so together they decided to twist it out of the way. Lou brought some twine and while Richard held the bent spoke in place, Lou wrapped it. I watched them and so did my mother, looking down at them benevolently, her cropped white head bent. In the background journalists spoke numbers. “How could you not vote against Ronald Reagan?” I said. “Him and his ‘moral majority.’ ”
But Richard, squatting near the wheelchair with his father, didn’t hear me, and neither he nor my husband seemed aware of the old woman—now drowsing, I thought—sitting in the chair. I felt her solitude and mine as the men struggled with their conscientious repair together. I stood to get our coats, spoke so she’d awaken, and helped her into hers, raising her so as to ease it underneath her. The knotting of the twine was complete.
“Sylvia, a glass of water?” my mother said, and I brought her one. She’s always thirsty after dinner, and as I grow older, so am I. “If I drank that much,” I said as she sipped from the glass I held, “I’d be running to the bathroom all night.”
My mother said, “Whatever I do, when they come, I’m wet. But they don’t mind.”
“Did you hear that?” Lou said. “Sylvia, did you hear that? Your boyfriend. It’s all over with your boyfriend.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. I felt myself redden, and turned to the television set. I don’t know what I expected to see.
“McGovern lost his Senate seat, Mom,” Richard said. “They just projected that outcome.”
“Her boyfriend,” Lou said. “He was like her boyfriend.”
He was. I loved him, though I never met him, and was sometimes bored by his position papers. I cried when I knew he wouldn’t be president. Now I didn’t cry. I wheeled my mother to the car, and Richard helped me scoop her sweet bulk into the passenger seat. I went around to the driver’s side and he crouched in the open passenger door, his curls lit by the streetlight behind him, extending his good-bye as I got behind the wheel. I looked across my mother at my son. I hadn’t asked what the man had died of—the man he’d loved, Bradley’s boyfriend. Had Richard stolen him from Bradley, or tried to and failed, or been too ethical to try? I’d been a good mother, close to my children, but I didn’t know what my son would do. Richard kissed his grandmother, reached across her to squeeze my shoulder, and closed the door. She’d be asleep in moments. I started the car and drove away, searching the night—with its traffic and ordinary sounds—searching for something to want, something that might possibly happen.
The Bad Jew
I’ll eat on a fast day, a bad Jew, exultant,
happy beyond fear of my maker, my God.
FROM “A BAD JEW” BY JOYCE PESEROFF
For one year, at fourteen, I went to synagogue. I liked a ceremony during which the rabbi carried the Torah up and down the aisles, but on the whole I was restless, vocal with objections. My parents had joined the temple at my request, but didn’t go there; presently their membership lapsed. To them religion was a simple matter: we were Jewish, we should always say we were Jewish, we should eat traditional Jewish foods along with our ham and shellfish, and that was enough. Years later my mother told me that her immigrant parents dressed up on the High Holy Days and went to the movies, letting the neighbors think they were in shul. I imagine my grandparents serene as they carried out this deception, but as I grew up, still defiantly irreligious, I never became serene about anything.
“The entire content of Jewish services is ‘God’s good, we’re Jewish, God’s good, we’re Jewish,’ ” I’d say to one of my more observant cousins. “And I’m not so sure God’s good.”
But envy complicated my impatience when, invariably, the cousin would reply, “I follow the laws that make sense and ignore the rest. I just want the children to know they’re Jewish.” When I married, it was not to a Jew. Children of a Jewish mother are Jewish, but even after my marriage broke up and I was alone with my son and daughter, taking lovers as wild-eyed as possible while soberly working as an editor, I didn’t know how to make my Jewish children know what they were.
Eric Teak, a flamboyant man who was not a Jew and not my lover, was the publisher of the Boston environmental magazine Aqua when I was its editor. When I worked for him, Eric was in his sixties—ten or fifteen years older than I—with messy gray hair, a belly, and the smooth speaking voice of a younger man. He belonged to the rich Boston family whose foundation paid Aqua’s bills. He wasn’t married, not then. While interviewing me for the job, Eric offered coffee. I declined, then wondered as he abruptly left the room and returned, hurrying, to set down a glass of water. Confused, I took a sip.
He shook his head, and into the water stuck a long middle finger, which seemed to swell as I stared. He flicked droplets at me. The gesture was all but obscene but I guess it also resembled baptism, because I heard myself say, “I’m Jewish.”
“I’m not,” he said. Then he said, “Water.” The magazine dealt with water pollution, endangered aquatic mammals, depleted fishing grounds, rivers restored to cleanliness. “Can you take water seriously?”
I said I could, and tried to make sense of him.
Nobody worked at Aqua but Eric and me. “How’s your sex life, Ruth?” he said, passing through the open space in the middle of the office on my third or fourth day.
“None of your business,” I replied pleasantly, trying to decide just how much I minded him. (My sex life was all right. For a few years I’d had a lover who lived in New York.) Another time, Eric asked, “Ruth, do you still menstruate?”
One day, downtown, I stopped to look at posters and photographs mounted on a kiosk: students were protesting foreign sweatshops run by American companies. That night I had a dream. Eric stood near me as I proofread galleys at our metal table. The story was about monthly self-examination of the breasts, and I asked him, “What has this to do with water?”
“How often do you examine your breasts, Ruth?” Eric said in the dream, as he might have in life. He stretched an arm across the table and squeezed my left breast through my sweater. “You have cancer,” he said, “but it’s a good kind of cancer. I’ll just cut it out.” He took a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and opened the blade.
“I’d rather have my doctor do it,” I said, and awoke. As I opened my eyes I remembered, from the protest wall I’d glanced at the day before, a photograph of a young woman. Its caption quoted her: “My boss touches my breasts.”
A few months after I took that job, Eric and I hired a young man named Tibby to type, answer the phone, and help out. My children’s age, Tibby had left college to train dolphins in Florida, then returned home to Boston because his grandmother was dying. Though it was late fall, Tibby wore no coat to his interview at our office; a long green woolen scarf was twisted around his neck. While we spoke, as the three of us sat around the metal table in the office’s central room, Tibby seemed to play with something, and then he dropped it and had to scramble to retrieve it: a red wooden yo-yo. Unself-consciously, he wound the long cord ti
ghtly while Eric stared, and only then put the yo-yo into his pocket.
Tibby looked fragile, like a man on stilts who might fall. He didn’t seem impressively efficient, but he was the only applicant we cared to remember after a series of interviews. “How do they capture those dolphins?” Eric demanded of me, as we sat alone, making the decision. “Are they allowed to mate?”
“We need someone good here,” I said. I admired Tibby’s interest in the dolphins and the grandmother.
“Moral or competent?”
“Moral.”
“Are we bad?” said Eric. We hired Tibby, who might or might not have been moral but continued to be noticeable, untwisting that green scarf as he arrived, talking, every day. Like my children, Tibby had grown up calling adults by their first names, and sometimes I wished he was slightly in awe of us. He and Eric argued about those dolphins, and the morality of confining any animal. Aging, untrammeled Eric hated zoos and aquariums, however well run, but Tibby believed in the capacity of right-thinking people to do anything right. He did his work, but slowly. His friends visited him at the office, silently watching us or interjecting opinions of their own. Tibby was learning to do tricks with the yo-yo, which looked tiny hanging from his outstretched bony hand, held high above the ground. Occasionally I had to interrupt him with a task as the thing swooped and wobbled. When he wasn’t learning tricks, he kept the yo-yo on his lap or on the table, twisting its string on his fingers, or rolling it until it clattered to the floor.
When the three of us were alone one day, Eric paused before entering his office to ask me, “Do Jews believe in original sin?”
“How should I know?” I said. I had an office of my own, but I preferred the light at the metal table, and I was proofreading there.
He said, “You’ve expressed interest in morality. I’m a Christian, and I believe in original sin. The first thing you ever said to me was ‘I’m Jewish’—not that I overhear you praying in Hebrew. Not that a Star of David bounces on your breasts.”
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