The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  Karla had tried this once or twice—scrunching her eyes shut and picturing the silent struggle for life that was beginning somewhere within: the clamorous tadpole horde racing through the darkness of the cervical canal; the egg in its pink fallopian boudoir, languorously awaiting its courtiers. But at some point, the positive images always got hijacked by negative ones. The sperm who had set out so boisterously would grow languid and start to dawdle. Or vast mushroomlike fibroids would billow out from her womb, barring their way. Or the egg would turn out to be ensnared, like a fairy-tale princess, within an impassable thicket of endometrial scar tissue.

  She didn’t really believe in the possibility of making good things happen with the sheer strength of your desire for them. If anything, it seemed to her, the opposite was true. The moment you wanted anything too fervently, the moment you yearned, the universe gazed with disgust upon your mewling and withheld. To get things, you had to be careless about them, the way that Rosa was. Rosa, who tied her blond hair back in an untidy ponytail and wore cheap sneakers until they fell apart on her feet, and washed her face with soap and water, but still looked like a French film actress….

  Mike was hissing something in her ear. “Up! Up!” he seemed to be saying.

  “What?” Karla said sleepily. She opened her eyes to see Mike’s face scowling at her in the darkness.

  “Put your legs up!” he said. She felt the angry jab of his foot against her thigh. “The twenty minutes aren’t done yet.”

  PART

  II

  CHAPTER

  5

  “Mrs. Audre-ey!”

  Audrey woke from a doze on her living room sofa to find Sylvia, her cleaning lady, standing over her. “I gotta vacuum in here,” Sylvia said in a teasing singsong. “Don’t you got a bed upstairs?”

  Audrey groaned. When she had sat down to read the paper, the living room had been chilly and dark. Now sunlight was filtering in through the dirty windows, striping her shirt and gently broiling the fusty sofa. It was upsetting to have Sylvia discover her recumbent and snoring in the middle of the day. To offset some of the embarrassment of having an elderly Latina scrub her toilets, she usually made sure to be elaborately, importantly busy whenever Sylvia was in the house.

  “I’ll get up,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”

  “Okay.” Sylvia wagged her finger. “Don’t be too long!”

  Audrey watched her as she left the room. Maintaining the fiction of chummy equality with your help could be very wearing at times. Privately, she thought her socialist conscience could have survived a tiny bit more deference from Sylvia. She closed her eyes and tried to recollect the dream she had just been having. But the few stray images that had survived Sylvia’s intrusion were already escaping—slipping away from her grasp, like the prizes in a fairground machine falling from the clumsy mechanical claw. After a while, she gave up and opened her eyes again. She looked at her watch. She was supposed to be meeting Rosa in Brooklyn in an hour to take Joel’s mother, Hannah, to see Joel. She hadn’t even put gas in the car. She got up and began hunting in her pocketbook for her keys.

  Audrey hated napping in the daytime. It was demoralizing. It made her feel like an old lady. She wasn’t getting enough nighttime sleep, that was the problem; she wasn’t scheduling things efficiently. By day, she sat at Joel’s bedside in a narcoleptic stupor; by night she rattled around the Perry Street house, a lone pea in an oversize pod. Her domestic life, which for forty years had been framed by Joel’s clamorous, demanding presence, had become a shambolic, unpunctuated affair. She frittered her evenings away, gazing listlessly at the television, smoking joints, wandering in and out of the kitchen to open and close the fridge—always putting off the moment when she would have to clomp up the stairs to bed. The procrastination had nothing to do with fear of the dark, or of the bogeyman: it was simply that without Joel, she didn’t have the gumption, the discipline, to call a halt to the day by herself.

  The keys were not in her bag. She went into the kitchen and began searching through the piles of newspaper and mail on the kitchen table.

  She felt a sort of guilty nostalgia now for the early, hectic days of Joel’s illness. In the first week after the stroke, the crisis had formed a cocoon into which nothing resembling normalcy had been allowed to intrude. Joel had had two emergency surgeries to stop bleeding in his brain. His heart had stopped beating twice. She had set up camp in the ICU—sleeping in the chair next to Joel’s bed at night and showering in the maternity ward in the morning. Rosa and Karla had taken compassionate leave from their jobs. And every day, a procession of Joel’s friends and colleagues and former clients had passed through the Family and Friends Lounge. Sometimes, there had been as many as twenty people gathered in the little room, telling sentimental stories about Joel and ordering in bagels and lox from the deli across the street. One night, Judy Collins had come by, and they’d all sung “We Shall Overcome.”

  Six weeks on, that first, exhilarating spike of catastrophe had subsided. Joel, still languishing in the no-man’s-land of coma, had been demoted to “sub-acute” status and moved to a rehab center at NYU. His law office had been closed, and his small staff—with what seemed to Audrey rather heartless efficiency—had found themselves new jobs. Rosa and Karla were back at work. Audrey had come home.

  Everyone had assured her that coming home was the sensible thing to do. Joel would likely be in the rehab place for months to come, and it would be silly, they said, to wear herself out at this stage in hysterical displays of saintliness. She needed to conserve her energy for the long haul. The nurses had been instructed to phone her immediately if Joel’s condition changed in her absence, and in the case of an emergency she could get from the house to the hospital in under half an hour.

  Still, there was a part of Audrey that was appalled by her decision. Six weeks Joel had been in a coma—just six weeks—and already she was making choices based on what was practical and convenient? As a child she had often fantasized that her failure to perform certain tasks—to stay off cracks in the pavement all the way home from school, or to touch the stair banister before her bedroom door swung shut—would result in cosmic disasters. Now, when she lay on the sofa late at night, listening to the familiar creaks of her gently subsiding house, she was visited by similar superstitious forebodings. What if staying with Joel had been a test of her devotion? What if her presence at his bedside had been the one thing keeping him alive, and by coming home, she had condemned him to death?

  A few nights ago, Jean had persuaded Audrey to accompany her to an antiwar meeting in Chelsea. Audrey needed to get out in the world and recharge her batteries, she said. She needed a change of scene. It had seemed a reasonable enough idea at the time. But the outing had proved to be a terrible mistake. Audrey was not ready yet to put her personal calamity in the perspective that social life required. It did not reassure her to know that life in the great world was going on as before: it offended her.

  The meeting, which had been convened to strategize protest actions against a U.S. invasion of Iraq, was largely taken up with a debate about whether to make a pro-Palestinian stance part of the official antiwar platform. Toward the end, it had digressed into a not very productive squabble over whether or not actors were appropriate speakers at antiwar rallies. “Everybody always wants to have Susan Sarandon at these things because she’s good-looking,” one man said, “but how well informed is she, really?” Half the meeting nodded. The other half hissed. The Sarandon defenders accused the anti-Sarandon man of being sexist. (“What about Tim Robbins?” a woman cried angrily. “You’re going to let Tim Robbins speak and not Susan Sarandon?”) The anti-Sarandon faction indignantly demanded a retraction of this slander. (“But I don’t like Tim Robbins either,” the man insisted.) And so it went on. Audrey had listened with tears of rage blurring her vision. Joel was lying unconscious in a hospital bed—and these people were fretting over the bona fides of Susan Sa-fucking-randon?

  At the bar afterwa
rd, several people had approached her to ask after Joel’s health. She had been waiting impatiently for some acknowledgment of her troubles, but as soon as it came, she found she didn’t want it, after all. Some of the well-wishers offered medical advice: inspirational coma recovery stories gleaned from NPR, Internet apocrypha about the miraculous properties of hyperbaric chambers. Some bragged about how blown away they had been by the news of Joel’s misfortune—what scary thoughts of their own mortality it had conjured. Others, having mumbled their condolences, lapsed into discomfited silence and simply stared at Audrey, waiting to be rescued from their ineptitude. Audrey tried to perform, tried to be brave and breezy. But she misjudged her tone apparently—overdid it somehow. A few people were visibly shocked by what they took to be her inappropriate levity. The rest seemed to be persuaded that Joel was not in such bad shape after all. One man she spoke to concluded their exchange by asking her to give Joel his best. His best. As if Joel were laid up at home with a bad case of gout!

  Audrey was still going through the crap on the kitchen table. Beneath a wodge of unopened, coffee-stained mail, she came across a copy of Noam Chomsky’s 9/11 book. She sat down and stared disconsolately at its cover. A few nights before Joel’s collapse, she had declined to make love to him because she wanted to read this book. (Joel, who had a passing acquaintance with Chomsky, had jokingly threatened to write to him, complaining that his critique of the American imperium was interfering with his sex life.) Now look. The book remained unread. She had never made it past the first three pages. How terrible to have missed what might have been her last chance to make love to Joel—for Chomsky! She shook her head. Remorse of this sort was useless; it was sentimental. In the great Icelandic saga of a marriage, such minor spousal failings were nothing. Footnotes at most. Married life was like good health: there was no bloody point to it if you could not occasionally abuse it, or take it for granted.

  Sylvia was coming back downstairs now, making the house tremble with her stomping tread. “Mrs. Aud-rey,” she called.

  Audrey got up and went out into the hallway.

  “I found these in the bathroom sink,” Sylvia said, dangling Audrey’s keys over the banister. “You want them?”

  “You’re late,” Rosa said when Audrey arrived at Hannah’s apartment.

  Audrey wiped her feet carefully on the doormat. “And good afternoon to you too, dear.”

  “I’m not going to be able to come to the hospital with you,” Rosa said, closing the door and following her mother down the hallway. “It’s too late. I have to be somewhere at three.”

  “Don’t be daft,” Audrey replied airily. “You know I can’t manage Nana and the wheelchair.”

  The air in Hannah’s dark sitting room was thick with the thrift-store scent of old person’s dwelling. Hannah lay asleep in her electric recliner with the scissors and magnifying glass that she had been using to clip articles of interest from the New York Times still resting in her lap.

  “I have an appointment,” Rosa said.

  Audrey walked over to turn off the radio, which had got stuck between stations and was now emitting a faint contrapuntal roar of Bartók symphony and KISS FM. “Call up and tell them you’re going to be late,” she said.

  Arranged in a semicircle on the mantelpiece was a group of framed family photographs: Hannah, aged three, in a Brooklyn photographer’s studio, shortly after arriving in America from Odessa in 1912. Joel’s father, Irving, making his maiden speech at a meeting of the Trade Union Unity League in 1924. Hannah’s brother, Lou, in the uniform of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, boarding a ship to Spain in 1933. Joel, aged seven, marching down Fifth Avenue with his parents in the 1937 May Day parade. Audrey turned away with a grimace. She had never liked old photographs. All those dead relatives staring out reproachfully from the past, humming their vanity-of-human-wishes dirge. You might as well decorate your house with skulls, she thought.

  “What is this thing you have to go to?” she asked, turning back to Rosa.

  “I’m going to Monsey for the weekend.”

  “Muncie? What, in Idaho?”

  “No, Monsey upstate.”

  Audrey looked at Rosa’s calf-length navy skirt and high-necked black blouse. Her eyes narrowed. “Is this something Jewy?”

  “Actually, I’m attending a Shabbaton.”

  “And what the fuck is that when it’s had its hair washed?”

  “It’s an extended Sabbath, with extra lectures and things.” Rosa paused. “I’m staying with a rabbi and his family.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake—”

  “I’m not going to argue about this, Mom.”

  Hannah woke up now and peered about her indignantly. “Where’s Magda?”

  “I think she just popped out for a second,” Audrey said. Magda was the morose Polish lady who came in five days a week to cook and clean for Hannah. Audrey had passed her on her way in, sneaking a cigarette in front of the building.

  She went over and crouched down next to Hannah’s recliner. “How are you doing, Nana?”

  “Fine,” Hannah said curtly. She began to fumble through the ranks of yellow plastic prescription bottles on her side table. In the buttery light of the table lamp, her face, with all its intricate whorls and cross-hatchings, looked like the surface of the ocean seen from a plane.

  “Do you need something, Nana?” Audrey asked.

  “I can’t find the…oh, there it is.” Hannah picked up the keypad that controlled her chair and began jabbing at the buttons. There was a loud, promising hum of hydraulics, but the chair remained stationary.

  “Can I help with that?”

  “No,” Hannah snapped. “You don’t know how it works.”

  Hannah’s fiendishly expensive and complicated recliner had been a gift from Joel on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday. It was equipped with five angles of repose and three modes of massage, none of which Hannah knew how to operate. Consequently, a substantial portion of her waking hours was spent riding helplessly back and forth in its rigid velveteen clutches, furiously refusing all offers of assistance.

  “Come on, Nana,” Audrey said. “Let me have a look.”

  “No!” Hannah hugged the keypad jealously to her chest. The recliner gave a sudden, violent judder and lurched backward, sending the scissors and magnifying glass on her lap clattering to the floor. As Audrey stepped forward, preparing to wrestle the keypad from Hannah’s grasp, the recliner came zooming forward again, abruptly delivering Hannah into an upright position.

  ”There you go!” Audrey said. “Good for you, Nana!”

  Hannah, sitting as straight-backed now as an Egyptian queen, lowered her eyelids witheringly. “No need to congratulate me, dear. I am not a half-wit.” She looked over at her granddaughter. “Rosa, what was it we were talking about just now?”

  “We were discussing the piece in the Times, Nana.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “What piece?” Audrey asked.

  Hannah pointed to the pile of newspapers at the foot of her chair. “There’s an interview today with the head of Karla’s union.”

  Audrey nodded. She had been meaning to read the article that morning but had fallen asleep before she had a chance. “Oh, that,” she said dismissively. “I couldn’t be bothered. I don’t need to hear Judas trying to justify himself.”

  Hannah’s face took on a pained expression. “No, no, dear,” she said, “you are blaming the wrong people. If the Democrats had done anything in the last twenty years to support the labor movement, the union wouldn’t have been forced to strike this sort of deal.”

  “Well, but isn’t the labor movement supposed to advocate for all working people?” Audrey said.

  Hannah closed her eyes. “Perhaps, Audrey, if you had ever been in a union…”

  Audrey gave a tinkling little laugh. “I’m not sure we can really call the health workers a union anymore, can we, Nana? It looks to me like they’ve turned themselves into a special interest group.”

  Ha
nnah declined to acknowledge this remark. “It’s just as Joel’s father used to say,” she observed. “The labor movement requires solidarity, and solidarity requires discipline, and discipline—”

  “Bugger discipline!” Audrey interrupted. “If Karla had any gumption, she’d hand in her membership.”

  Hannah smiled a private smile and began to hum to herself.

  Rosa stood up. “I should go.”

  “What’s that?” Hannah said.

  “I have to go now, Nana.”

  “Didn’t Rosa tell you?” Audrey said. “She’s not coming to the hospital. She has a very important appointment with a rabbi.”

  Hannah made a guttural sound of disapproval.

  “Now, now,” Audrey said. “We mustn’t be mean about Rosa’s religious friends. She’ll get angry with us.”

  Rosa exhaled noisily. “Mother, could you not—”

  “Let me tell you something, Rosa,” Hannah said. “My parents came thousands of miles on a boat to get to this country…”

  Rosa gazed at the floor with studied patience.

  “Three weeks they were at sea,” Hannah continued. “In steerage. With two small children. And what do you think my mother did the day the boat came into New York Harbor and she saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time?”

  Rosa waited.

  “She took off her head-scarf and threw it in the water! And you understand, this was an extremely scandalous thing—a shanda—for a Jewish woman to show her hair in public. People were shouting at her, telling her she was going to bring God’s wrath on them, but my mother didn’t care. ‘I am in America now,’ she said. ‘From now on, I am going to be a free woman. I am not going to listen to the rabbis who tell me what to eat and how to dress. You all can do what you like, but this is my decision.’ Can you imagine what courage that took? They nearly threw her overboard! And why did she do this? So that her children and her children’s children would not have to grow up under the tyranny of religion as she did. What do you think she would say today, if she could see her great-granddaughter futzing around with all the hocus-pocus and pie-in-the-sky that she rejected a century ago?”