Open Doors

by Gloria Goldreich

  He smiled wryly. Lauren was not wrong. He was adhering to the pattern of his childhood, setting the stage, even rehearsing a mental script. He was, as always, the producer of his own life.

  “All right. I want things to be nice for her. I want her to be comfortable. It’s been tough for her since my dad died.”

  He adjusted the photograph of his family that he had placed on a low table. The group photo had been taken in Jerusalem when they had all assembled for Moshe and Sandy’s wedding. (He could not, even after all these years, think of his sister as Sarah.) Flanked by the bride and groom, his parents were seated, their fingers linked, looking at each other, their shoulders touching. Lisa and Denis knelt at their feet. He tried to remember if Andrew had been at the wedding. Yes, of course he had been there. But circumspect as always, his brother’s partner had remained at a remove from the family portrait and probably no one had thought to include him. He and Lauren, she newly pregnant with Eric, stood just behind them, Renée, a pigtailed toothless toddler then, held close in his arms. Lauren had been radiant in the glow of her pregnancy, her blond hair floating to her shoulders, smiling, her eyes soft, her head resting on his shoulder. It had been a long time since she had rested her head on his shoulder, a long time since she had flashed that soft-eyed smile.

  “You know how close she and my dad were,” he added. “So it’s especially tough on her.”

  “Not as tough as it is for a lot of people who’ve been widowed,” Lauren retorted and he cringed at the harshness of her voice.

  She was thinking of her own father, he knew. Lauren’s mother had died three years earlier and her father, gentle Herb Glasser, was still mired in the depression of loss.

  “She has her work. She has her children. She has resources,” Lauren continued. “Everyone seems to be making time for her. Not that she ever really made time for you and Denis or for your sisters. You know yourself that it was always your father and her work that came first,” Lauren said bitterly.

  “That’s unfair. She was a terrific mother. My friends in high school envied our family, our home. Dinner always on the table, everything organized. But her work was important to her so there wasn’t a lot of time. Lisa used to say that she rationed out the hours of her day. The studio, the house, the time she and my father spent together. They had something really close, really special.”

  “Really exclusive.” Lauren shook her head wearily and stared out the window. Jose had finished at the pool and was now raking the pale yellow palm fronds that littered the bright green expanse of lawn.

  “You never really liked her, did you?” Peter asked, his own question, dormant all these years, startling him. But, of course, he seemed to be facing a lot of new truths these days, too many, perhaps.

  “It’s hard to like someone who has never liked you. Maybe even harder than loving someone who probably never really loved you.” Lauren’s voice was edged with bitterness and she turned away so that he could not see her face.

  He clenched and unclenched his fists. They would have to talk very soon. But not yet. Not yet. After her surgery. After his mother’s visit.

  He took the balloon, twirled the string and released it. It soared to the ceiling and bobbed gently about. Eureka! Welcome Grandma. The words were clearly visible. His mother would surely see them. His spirits lifted. This visit would be different. She would have time for him, time that he needed. His sister Lisa had confided, during a late-night phone call, that Elaine no longer had to be miserly with her minutes. “We get Dad’s share,” his sister had said, her voice so muffled that he wondered if she had been weeping.

  He turned to his wife.

  “Lauren,” he said, annoyed by the plea in his voice, the words unsaid.

  She shrugged.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be nice. I’ll be great. It’s just that I’m so edgy. The surgery. And everything else.”

  “Yeah. I know. You’ll be fine. You always are.”

  He flashed her a grateful smile, touched her shoulder lightly. He was the producer, offering positive reinforcement. He did not mention the “everything else.” There was no point. It had no relevance to the scenes so soon to be played out.

  “Renée,” he called. “Let’s go!”

  He grabbed the balloon and the flowers, brushed Lauren’s damp cheek with his lips as he rushed past her. With Renée’s hand in his, they hurried out. The freeway might be jammed and he wanted to be on time to meet his mother’s plane. He was a man who was never late. Like all good producers he knew the penalties for lateness.

  LAX was, as always, a frenzy of activity. Elaine waited at the baggage carousel and watched the bags and parcels being disgorged from the New York flight whirl around and around. Surfboards poked their way through cardboard containers and were impatiently plucked up by muscular young men who hugged them to their chests. Matching Gucci suitcases tumbled over each other, claimed by one young woman and counterclaimed by another, their voices rising shrilly as they leaned forward to examine tags and were finally forced to surrender the luggage to yet a third woman, a blonde whose mink coat was draped over bare shoulders and whose eyelids were painted so heavily with blue shadow that Elaine marveled at her ability to read her own name.

  Girls in diaphanous pastel-colored sundresses floated by and young men in business suits loosened their ties and clutched their PalmPilots as they rushed past.

  Bilingual signs flashed throughout the cavernous room. Ground transportation counters and car rental agencies advertised their locales in Spanish and English, in Japanese and Arabic, the neon letters reflected in dancing lights across a floor scuffed by the wheels of suitcases and trolleys. Skyhops and taxi drivers shouted at each other and at their passengers, elbowing their way past an army of limo drivers who waved signs. MR. AND MRS. LIFSHITZ. MR. YAKIMOTO. KELLY AND BRIAN. There were squeals of pleasure as reunions were realized and a child’s plaintive cry, “Mommy, Daddy,” was an eerie wail amid the cacophony of jangling cell phones and warnings about the dangers of leaving luggage unattended. A disembodied voice announced flight delays and flight arrivals, advised passengers, who all seemed to be named Scott or Nicki, that their parties were waiting for them at the information desk, at the Avis counter, at Gate Eleven.

  It was with relief that Elaine retrieved her own bag from the carousel and gasped with pleasure at the sight of the pink Mylar balloon that Renée held high.

  “Peter!” she called, wheeling her bag past a Japanese family caught in a massive embrace which they interrupted to bow courteously to her.

  Peter rushed toward her and Renée thrust the bouquet of pink roses into her arms and hugged her.

  “Hey, Grandma.”

  Elaine breathed in the citrus scent of her granddaughter’s skin, smoothed her silken blond hair, and looked into her eyes. Renée had Neil’s eyes, deep blue flecked with gray, and long-lashed.

  “Sweetie,” Elaine said and returned her granddaughter’s embrace, lightly traced a pale eyebrow, silken soft as Neil’s had been.

  She turned to Peter, surprised as always by his height, the thickness of his hair, the brightness of his skin, the easy grace with which he moved toward her through the frenetic airport crowds. He wore the California uniform—light blue cotton shirt and carefully pressed khaki chinos and his bare feet, as narrow as Neil’s own, were encased in wide-strapped leather sandals.

  He was no longer the boy who had left their home all those years ago to find his own way in the coastal city across the continent. He had transformed himself into a Los Angelino, not unlike Sandy’s emergence as Sarah, the orthodox Jerusalemite. Their children, after all, had created their own persona. She wondered whether this should be a source of pride or of disappointment.

  “How’s my Californian?” she asked.

  “Glad as always not to be a New Yorker,” he replied, smiling.

  Elaine held Renée’s hand as they followed Peter out to the parking lot, shedding her sweater and scarf. As always, she had forgotten the ferocity of
the midday heat of Los Angeles. She was grateful when Peter turned up the air-conditioning as they began the drive out of the airport. He grinned at his mother, the teasing grin of his boyhood. But when he spoke there was a sharp edge to his voice.

  “I thought you’d be accustomed to the heat after spending so much time in Israel.”

  “It’s a different kind of heat,” she said. “I did stay longer than I had planned to but Sarah really needed me.”

  She recognized, with some surprise, the note of apology in her words. Why should she apologize to Peter for her visit to Jerusalem, for her long stay with Sarah’s family? Perhaps because she had discerned the accusative tone in his voice.

  Peter did not take his eyes off the road as he nodded.

  “I know. Someone has always needed you more than I did. The girls. Denis. Dad. A gallery owner on Madison Avenue. A decorator in Connecticut.” He spoke the words lightly, but they were laced with a bitterness he immediately regretted. Damn it. Two minutes into the visit and he was already playing the neglected middle child. Lauren would be proud of him.

  “Peter!” His name, spoken sharply, was a protest and he countered it by placing his hand on her head.

  “Sorry, Mom. Just joking. Don’t take me seriously. Your dad’s a big joker, isn’t he, Renée?”

  But Renée, still clutching the balloon, had fallen asleep on the backseat. The fragrance of the pink roses, already wilting, drifted sadly through the speeding car.

  As they moved past the gleaming new buildings that rose like concrete canyons to surround the airport and then past strip malls and shopping complexes until they reached the freeway, Elaine asked about his work, about Eric, about Lauren.

  He was working hard, he told her, cursing briefly as traffic slowed to a halt and drivers in every lane honked their horns imperiously. One new project after another. A pilot sitcom had just been bought by a cable television company. He had produced a series of industrial films for a Japanese electronics firm. And he was negotiating a contract for animated commercials with an ad agency.

  “The animation thing is really big now,” he said, skillfully changing lanes to avoid yet another jam. “But what I’m really excited about is a documentary on the Russian Jewish experience. We’re going to start shooting soon.”

  “We?” Elaine asked.

  “I’m co-producing with the writer. Her script is brilliant.”

  Deftly then, he changed the topic and spoke glowingly of his son, his voice resonant with pride.

  Eric was doing great in school. Terrific grades. He even seemed to like Hebrew school. The only reason he had not come to the airport was because he was being tutored for the entrance exam to a prestigious private school and Lauren hadn’t wanted him to miss a session. He was a great athlete. Soccer, swimming, tennis. He was actually being coached by a former pro.

  “It sounds like a pretty packed schedule for a little boy,” Elaine said carefully. Eric was nine, only a year older than Leora, his Jerusalem cousin who played neither soccer nor tennis but who laughed easily, daydreamed over books and drawing pads and skipped rope with her friends in the sun-spangled gardens of Ramat Chessed. When did a child who rushed from school to tennis lessons to tutoring sessions have time to daydream? she wondered.

  “Well, Lauren thinks all this stuff is really important. All our friends’ kids have the same sort of schedules.”

  Peter avoided an off-ramp and swerved intrepidly past an interchange that swept onto a concrete parabola and Elaine stared out the window at the coastal road, at the shimmering expanse of the Pacific Ocean bathed in the pale subtropical light of southern California.

  “And how is Lauren?” she asked as they veered eastward toward the Santa Monica mountains.

  His face tightened. He glanced back at Renée as though to make sure that his daughter was still asleep before he replied to his mother’s question, but when he spoke his tone was flat and his eyes were riveted to the freeway.

  “She’s a little stressed out. She only takes one psych course a semester for her graduate degree but she’s on a million committees. PTA. Fundraising. Country club beautification. Synagogue dinner dance. Benefits for the Disease of the Month. And of course she’s constantly chauffeuring Renée and Eric to lessons and playdates and juggling our social calendar—that’s what she calls it. She hardly has time to pick up takeout meals for the kids on the days when Maria, our housekeeper, is off. We’re both so busy that sometimes it seems that the only time we’re together is at some dinner party or a fundraiser.”

  “Sounds a little stressful for both of you,” Elaine said.

  “Well, that’s the way we live. A lot different from the way you and Dad lived, I know. But maybe not that different. You were both always busy, caught up in your work, Dad with the hospital and his patients, you with the studio and your shows.”

  “Yes. I suppose we were,” she admitted but she wondered how he could compare his family’s frenetic life with the calm and serenity she and Neil had created in their home, where dinners were always served on time, soft music played and their cars remained in the driveway from early evening until morning. Still, she would not challenge him, not on this first day of her visit.

  “And how is Lauren feeling?” she asked. “You said this surgery was elective.”

  “Yeah. It’s apparently no big deal. She has some uterine fibroids and her gynecologist thinks they should come out sooner rather than later. Routine surgery.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Elaine did not remind him that she was a doctor’s widow and she had listened often enough to Neil’s colleagues’ discussions of operating room dilemmas to know that no surgery was really routine.

  “Are we almost home, Daddy?” Renée asked in a sleepy voice.

  “Almost there, baby,” Peter said. “We’re just passing Ventura. Another couple of miles and we’ll be in Encino Hills.”

  “Great. Grandma, I can’t wait to show you my room. Mommy did it over for my birthday. It’s all pink and purple with silver stars on the ceiling.”

  “It sounds beautiful,” Elaine said and glanced at Peter who grimaced slightly.

  “I did tell Lauren that there were enough stars in the skies. We really didn’t need to have them in the house. But you know Lauren.”

  Elaine nodded. But the truth was that she did not really know her son’s wife, that through all the years of Peter’s marriage she and Lauren had never spoken with any intimacy nor had they ever quarreled. Theirs was the peace of the uninvolved, devoid of intensity, informed only by their relationship to Peter. Elaine was his mother, Lauren his wife. They were not bonded by an affection independently forged. They had simply accepted each other because there had been no other choice.

  Elaine remembered still how startled she and Neil had been when Peter wrote them, during the spring semester of his senior year, that he was engaged to Lauren Glasser and that they planned to be married in the autumn.

  “Married?” Neil had sputtered as he handed her the letter with trembling hands. Neil who seldom lost his calm, who prided himself on withholding judgment, had been pale with anger. “He’s twenty-one, he’s a kid, he hasn’t lived yet.”

  “We were very young when we married,” she had protested mildly.

  “That was different. We were different. You were different. You weren’t a blond sorority princess driving a sky-blue convertible and charging sweater sets at I. Magnin.”

  They had looked at each other then, acknowledging that it was not Peter’s decision to marry at so young an age that disturbed them. It was his decision to marry Lauren.

  He had brought the very slender, large-eyed blond girl home to Westchester during winter break, an awkward visit that they remembered with little pleasure. Lauren had changed her clothes twice a day, looked at herself in every mirror she passed, said little and laughed nervously. When she spoke about her family she was careful to specify their professions, their schools, their addresses. Her uncle Robert, a dermatologist. He
r cousin Lloyd, a senior at Yale. Her parents’ friends, the Rosens who lived next door to them in Beverly Hills, attorneys. Corporate attorneys, she had added, her whispery voice rising slightly. Peter had bought theater tickets, opting for orchestra seats “because that was what Lauren was used to.” He had taken her to dinner at the Tavern on the Green and, twice during that visit, he had accompanied her on shopping trips to New York and they returned to Westchester with overflowing shopping bags, intent on displaying their purchases to Lisa and Sandy who examined the cashmere sweater sets and designer jackets with little interest.

  “Pete’s valley girl,” Lisa had called Lauren dismissively, annoyed at the amount of time she spent in the bathroom, applying makeup and brushing her hair, which she washed once in the morning and once in the afternoon, using a lemon-scented shampoo that Lisa knew sold for twenty-five dollars a bottle.

  Elaine and Neil had flown to Los Angeles days after receiving Peter’s letter. Ostensibly, the purpose of the trip was to meet Lauren’s parents and discuss the wedding. They did meet the Glassers, a pleasant couple who were delighted with the engagement, delighted with Peter. Lauren was an only child. An older son had died of leukemia. Gertrude Glasser had wept when she told them that, and Herb, her husband, took her hand in his own and stroked it comfortingly although his own face was briefly frozen into a mask of sadness. It was that loss, that terrible loss, that had caused them to cherish Lauren. To coddle and spoil her.

  “She has always been our princess,” Herb Glasser had said. They had smiled apologetically. “Whatever she wanted we gave her.”

  But she was such a good daughter, really. A swift emendation, because they had seen the look Neil and Elaine exchanged. She had never caused them any difficulty, any disappointment. Implicit in their words was the assurance that she would never cause Peter and his family any difficulty, that she would never disappoint them. If their daughter wanted this marriage, then they wanted it for her. Many couples married right out of college. Why not?