The Anglophile

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  Yes, late at night, I sometimes still search Kit’s name on the Internet. But there are an infinite number of hits in all the variations: Christopher Brown, Christopher T. Brown, Chris Brown and Kit Brown. I open each page, just to be sure, searching the cyber universe as determinedly as a treasure diver hoping to catch sight of a Spanish-era relic glinting in a seabed impossibly tangled over with watery weeds.

  I sigh inwardly. Yesterday, Google’s images option had a new face for me to investigate. An English Christopher T. Brown no less. But this one had a salt-and-pepper beard, and sunken eyes and dark rings around his eyes. Not a chance that it was my Kit.

  When I heard Owen opening the front door of the new apartment we share, I closed out of my telltale screen with lightning speed.

  “Working on your dissertation?”

  My stomach burned with my lie. “Yeah.”

  “Did you get any interviews?”

  “I have one with a temp agency near Wall Street. For a legal proofreading job. Pays pretty well.”

  Owen tried to be nice. “It should. Proofreading is skill intensive.”

  When he was peeing, I raced to check my name, too, my other daily masochistic ritual. Perhaps there was an orbiting fuck-you in cyberspace. I’d take anything from Kit.

  I’ve only ever found one—from Kevin on his Manga blog. Since I’d checked his Web site last, he’d posted a chapter of a Manga novel with a villainess named Shari Dee.

  Dr. Zuckerman taps my hand. “Did my son tell you about his uncle Mort and where he has to sit?”

  “Dad—” Wendy cries preemptively.

  Dr. Zuckerman looks at her firmly. “This is your family. Let’s bring it up now.”

  “Mort is a handful,” Owen explains.

  “He’s been half-deaf since he was a little kid and poured ten peppercorns in his ear and had to be operated on.”

  Owen laughs with a bit of goose in his mouth. “Have you been taking a continuing ed memoir class again?”

  My mother turns to me. “So should we sit Mort near Eric?”

  “I don’t think you sit two half-deaf people next to each other,” says Gene. “It’s not like they both like model building.”

  Owen’s father cuts in again. “Shari, you look a little tired, have you been taking the Levothroid every day?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “It’s great to have a doctor in the family,” Mom says flirtatiously.

  Dr. Zuckerman beams. “Well, with Owen’s successful dissertation last year, you have two.”

  There is notable silence from my blood relatives. When and if I will ever finish that Volapük dissertation is one big question mark.

  Professor David Mitchell’s glowing report on Kit’s presentation was published two weeks after the Chicago conference in the online newsletter that Journal for Constructed Language subscribers all receive.

  Dr. Cox called me in for a much-needed powwow the week after I returned from the U.K.

  I brought in a vanity pressing of Scot Gaelic proverbs I bought for a buck off a bargain bin bookrack outside the Strand.

  “Maybe I can switch my expertise to Scot Gaelic,” I said lamely.

  “Nonsense. Stay with Volapük. You think no one can write about Shakespeare anymore? Every topic has a new angle if you think hard enough. Have you considered a dissertation addressing religious persecution as a reason the universal language was started? A Jew started Esperanto because he was sick of nationalism. You could explore the persecution of the Jew as it relates to Volapük…”

  I have an appointment to see Dr. Cox on Monday, I realize. I need to write that on a wall calendar somewhere, before I forget.

  “Bread?” Gene says, and I’m back with the table.

  The table next to us is done with their meal. The waiters sweep in for a fast turnover during the high season of this restaurant. The host in a Santa suit announces on the loudspeaker: “Lowenstein Party of Six, please. Benjamin Lowenstein party of six.”

  The Christmas jingles resume with the first bells of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”

  “So how long have you been a widower?” my mother says to Dr. Zuckerman. She has rarely been so forward.

  “Fifteen years.”

  She catches his eye with the empathy of a single parent who has suffered intense loss. “That’s almost as long as my stretch.”

  “Did you ever remarry?” Dr. Zuckerman says kindly.

  She breathes. “The right man never came along.”

  “Well, I remarried.”

  “The wrong woman came along,” Wendy says after a sip of ice water.

  “She sure did,” Owen says.

  Dr. Zuckerman eyes them intently and refocuses on my mother. “It was a record-short marriage. Vicki was too young to understand how precious marriage was.”

  “Twenty years his junior,” Wendy says with obvious distaste.

  “Okay, Wendy, that’s enough,” Dr. Zuckerman says piercingly. At the knowing looks from his two kids, he breaks down laughing. “Okay, she was a mistake.”

  “Thank you,” Wendy says. “Finally.”

  “Why was she so awful?” I ask.

  “For one, she was an awful snob about Queens. It was beneath her to live in her husband’s house. She kept pressing me to move into Manhattan.”

  “A snob about Jamaica Estates?” Mom says. “Your part of Queens is extraordinary—leafy and lovely.”

  Dr. Zuckerman glows. “Well, to tell you the truth, you’re lovely. If I knew such an extraordinary and beautiful woman lived so close, I might never have gone out with her.”

  Gene kicks me under the table again and I kick him back. Of course. Why hadn’t the thought even crossed my mind before? Dr. Zuckerman is her quintessential type. Jewish. Funny. Warm.

  “Anyone ever have the Starbucks maple scone?” Wendy asks out of the blue.

  “What about it?” Owen asks his sister. “I eat that about once a week.”

  It’s true, he does, thinks me, his fiancée.

  “Perfection.”

  “At Starbucks?” Alan doubts.

  Wendy shrugs. “I know. I feel so guilty buying it.” She and Alan start a private conversation about capitalism I can only hear the odd word of. Now and then Alan stops to cherrypick the things he will actually eat in any given side salad, cucumbers and lettuce. Tomatoes, onions and peppers are strictly verboten to his precious palate.

  “So what do you do for fun?” Gene says to Owen. “You fish?”

  “Me? God no. Who has time to do that? I prefer my fish already dead and buttered.”

  “I’m hyper-busy,” Gene says congenially, “but I find it relaxing. Maybe you can go with me some weekend.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t really have time for play, I have a book coming out.”

  Gene can hardly hide his disdain as he sneaks a look at his expensive banker-on-the-rise watch. I wince. When I got back from my disastrous trip to England, Gene was eager to see if I could bring Kit over for a weeklong brown trout and fly-casting extravaganza. He’d gotten so giddy at the thought he’d already gone online and bought the three of us Buzz Off wide-brimmed hats from Orvis.com at fifty dollars a pop.

  “So we need to decide, kids. Whose rabbi? What synagogue to go to? You like Rabbi Grossman, Owen?”

  “Dad, can we do this later? This is just a family meet-and-greet.”

  “You don’t like Grossman?”

  “He is a comedian, not a clergyman. Who brings up Bob and Ray sketches in a service?”

  “A rabbi who knows his comedy, that’s who. Bob and Ray are geniuses.”

  My mother looks at Gene, who winks at her. My father lived for the old Bob and Ray sketches. He had every Bob and Ray record, and knew their routines backward. “Do you know Matt Nuffer, Boy Spotwelder?” she says to Dr. Zuckerman warmly.

  Dr. Zuckerman scans her thin face. “You know Matt Nuffer, Boy Spotwelder?” He picks up my mother’s hand. “By the way, Donna, I know a woman’s family sometimes pays for the weddin
g, but I have to let you know, we will pick up the full cost.”

  Owen gapes at his dad. The current plan now is for the wedding to be paid for by him via a loan taken out against his trust fund, which will kick in when he’s forty. We were never going to ask my mother for anything except her organizing skills that she’s perfected as a secretary.

  I’m sure Owen’s surprise at his father’s offer is genuine, and I am just as shocked. But I’m not feeling especially guilty about the bighearted proposal. Mom is ridiculously insisting that a bride’s family should pay for a wedding and wants to cash in her retirement savings for her only daughter.

  Yesterday I almost brought up eloping to Vegas on a supersaver fare to Owen as a way to remedy the conflict.

  Owen insisted his sister would never talk to him again if we eloped. He said he’d talk to my mother and ensure her that in the long run he wouldn’t even feel the wedding bills.

  I shook my head in shame and said, “I can’t imagine what it would be like to grow up with that kind of safety net underneath you, finance-wise—when Gene lost thirty-nine dollars out of his pocket once my mom reacted like he’d dropped thirty-nine hundred dollars.” Maybe Owen had repeated my reaction to his father.

  Another astonishment: “I’ll pay for my sister’s wedding,” Gene says pointedly, proudly.

  Now it’s my turn to gape.

  I suspect that even with Gene’s portfolio in shipshape, his net worth must be chickenfeed compared to Dr. Zuckerman’s holdings. Owen briefly mentioned a summer spread in the Hamptons, and when my fiancé says the word spread, that worries me.

  “Gene,” Dr. Zuckerman says adamantly, “we have a lot of cousins, and they would be very insulted if they were not invited.”

  “How many is a lot?” Gene responds coolly.

  “I have nine brothers and sisters. And my deceased wife had five, four of whom are still living.”

  “And they have kids,” Wendy says.

  His father takes a sip of red wine. “Defeats the law of averages. They all had girls. Owen is the only boy among thirteen girl cousins and a sister.”

  Gene keeps a poker face, but he can’t be too happy.

  “Our Owen is the prince in our family,” Wendy says. “If any of them are left out, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Prince Zuckerman smiles as he admonishes his father. “You’re being amazingly generous, but we just got engaged this week. Give us a minute to plan things out. You’re not the bride.”

  “Eat your wienerschnitzel,” Dr. Zuckerman says to Gene congenially. “We’ll duke it out later.”

  “My dad’s going to win out,” Wendy says. “When he says he’ll pay, he’ll pay.”

  I smile as I eat another mouthful of trout. I really like Owen’s father. He’s a warm man, born into poverty but who advanced by sheer intellect (and continued luck with the stock market). I got the sense that big display of financial wealth was more about an assurance to my mom than a self-worth boosting brag.

  “What’s a good date?” Dr. Zuckerman asks.

  Owen looks at my face—he knows I was thrilled to be asked, but even so I hemmed and hawed for a day before coming back with a definitive yes to his proposal. “We’ll get back to you on that, Dad.”

  “Where are you taking your honeymoon?” Summer asks quietly.

  I feel bad saying Paris because I know Alan and Summer took their honeymoon in Cape May. That may be New Jersey’s prettiest seaside town, full of charming Victorian houses, but it sure as hell isn’t Paris. That’s why I feel bad about discussing my honeymoon, isn’t it? Pity for a sister-in-law who married my poor brother? It can’t be because I’ll be taking a celebratory jaunt abroad without Kit. Would I have survived this awful year without Owen and his incredible patience and humor? The year AK, After Kit, as I think of it, started out sour but when Owen and I finally acknowledged our growing connection, I enjoyed my days. It took three months for us to sleep together, but then, we were rarely apart. I was thrilled the day he asked me to move in to his quite roomy place in the Gramercy Park area. Owen and I have tons in common, if not the status of our bank accounts. He loves that I can proofread for him, and I love that he is always ready with a book recommendation.

  My future father-in-law pats his belly. “How did we all forget the toast! A Chanukah toast to marital bliss!”

  “You’re getting married in a synagogue?” Dot says. Knitting needles click from somewhere very close to her phone. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

  Eric is next with his congratulations. As he speaks, the clicking noise is farther way, and then it’s back to the first level of volume. “Hold, on, darling,” Eric says. “Dot wants you again.”

  I brace for the worst as I wait for her to speak. What could she say to bruise me now? Gene once said it best. Dot can’t help herself. If given enough time on the phone, she hits you with the very thing that will hurt the most, even if she never has a clue that she is so automatically insensitive.

  “So your mother is a locked box on the matter, but honey, you tell me. What happened to Kit?”

  I grit my teeth before I answer. “Fell by the wayside.”

  “I have to say, he was a lovely man.”

  “For a Christian?”

  There is a shocked pause at my insouciance. “I never spoke out against that relationship, did I?”

  “No, but tell me Dot, if things had worked out, would you have approved?”

  “Cookie, do you really care what your silly old aunt thinks? And there are loopholes as far as the rabbinate is concerned—”

  “Loopholes?”

  “For children. The child of a Jewish woman is always Jewish.”

  I let a few seconds go by, and try to mask my curiously intense reaction as humorous. “Now you remind me of this?”

  “I had no idea you had any interest in a Jewish home.”

  “I’m not sure what I want, Aunt Dot.”

  She pauses. Breathes loud. “Enough nonsense, Shari. You’re getting married to a scholar. Mazel Tov.”

  I stand in my childhood bedroom, really a storage closet with a bed that was given to me. There was and is, as the expression goes, not even enough room to swing a cat. But I never minded, I loved my itsy-bitsy closet room and the privacy it offered me. If I closed the door I could hardly hear my brothers fighting.

  I look up at the time on the swinging cattail hallway clock that has always been there. Mom is on a date. With my father-in-law to be. Except they’re not calling it a date. They are shopping, as neighbors. Rolling individual carts down the gourmet oil aisle in the supermarket.

  She wants me to take my best shot at the guest list so we can go over it together when she gets back.

  Since I’ve visited Mom last, she’s converted my room back to its original use of storage space. My bed is gone, but on the new shelving is my pillow sham with its fairy hovering over a girl asleep in a bed of flowers. I really would like to take that back with me to Manhattan. I put it on the floor so I won’t forget it.

  I remove a box off the highest shelf, and immediately spot some of her three children’s camp Peanuts postalettes preserved in a see-through sandwich bag. The rubber band snaps with age as I try to wiggle one out.

  Before Dad died we got to go for two sessions a year, but afterward only one session of three weeks. My mother forewarned us not to complain, as she and Dad never went to camp at all.

  “Awesome time!” were Gene’s two sole words on his Snoopy postalette.

  “Camp sucks,” Alan wrote after three paragraphs summarizing his dislikes and resentment at being forced to go. “Please come get me now!”

  “I learned how to float in the creek,” Mommy’s good girl scrawled, sealing her news with a Lucy sticker.

  Mom has piled up more remnants of our childhood on the lower shelf. There are our favorite board games including Basket, a lever-action game with “working” mini nets, baskets and backboards that popped up to shoot the basketball that we always felt looked more li
ke a Ping Pong ball. The corners of the Basket box are taped together for strength. The old price sticker of eight dollars is still on Billionaire: The Game of Global Enterprise—I can almost remember the rules: you could try your luck at investments like diamonds or electronics, something like that. Whatever industry Gene chose he always creamed us in profits. There is Alan’s favorite, Stay Alive! He loves moving those slides. A new configuration of recesses would appear every time a slide moved, and if you were unlucky, one of your five marbles would disappear into them. Alan always had the last ball left, and even back then I suspected Gene let him win at his game because Alan loved it so.

  And yes, she’s saved my favorite, every little girl’s favorite, Candyland. The game box is dirtied with water stains. I smile as I unfold the board. I select a red gingerbread man to move around the rainbow path. I race my man through Peppermint Stick Forest to the candy castle. I laugh out loud. Whenever Alan tried to trounce me at my favorite game, Gene slipped me the “big advance” ladder cards from the pick deck.

  A tongue depressor from my toy nurse’s kit is on the floor. I pick it up and marvel; it must have been stuck in the side of the Candyland box for thirty-odd years. I was ridiculously sad the day I wrote off that piece of wood, and secretly never felt it was the same with a long adult-sized tongue depressor replacement from the drug store.

  Countless other small family sorrows will never be fixed. As hard as Jack pitched his mother those magic beans, Gene begged Mom to buy circus tickets so he could see the Ringling elephant doing the headstand like in the TV commercial, and when Uncle Sam finally took us Gene bellowed at Alan for eating most of the big box of Sno-Caps and we missed the headstand. Oh, and what about the time I lost the seven-layer chocolate cake Dad handed to me from the bakery to hold—five Diamonds couldn’t figure out where I could have left it if not on a car rooftop.

  I fight the lump in my throat that you get from digging around in your past.

  There’s change in the kitchen. I forgot that Gene gave Mom money to spruce up her kitchen with a cheery yellow paint job, new white cabinets and a dishwasher. But there’s familiarity, too, a comforting box of Wheatina on top of the fridge. I quickly run water in the kettle and put it on a burner. With no one to set my limits, I slather the serving with heaping tablespoons of butter and sugar.