Dina’s room overlooked an elegant brick building across the street, with gargoyles minding the cornices. When the nurse came to check Dina’s vitals, Natalie stood by the window and studied the gargoyles. They were bug-eyed, open-mouthed, hunched over, as if the weight of the building rested on their backs. In medieval times, people thought gargoyles had the power to ward off evil spirits. This seemed like the right idea. Fight ghoulishness with ghoulishness; give fear a suitably fearful shape. Natalie wished the hospital itself were filled with gargoyles rather than with soft-focus paintings of flowers and shorelines, posters printed with inspirational quotes, helpful signage.
December now, holiday time. As she walked down the corridors, Natalie glimpsed wreaths, shiny packages, colorful lights, and cancer patients with all of the meat sucked off their bones. In Dina’s room, a tarnished silver menorah teetered on the radiator. It had belonged to her mother. As children, Natalie and Matt always went to their grandmother’s crumbling apartment in Washington Heights for the first night of Hanukkah. Their mothers had grown up there, in that cramped apartment with the hissing radiators and peeling paint. Natalie’s mom complained about it, tried to get their grandmother to move to a retirement home close to them in Connecticut. “Lay off her,” Dina would say. “Her life is here, where the action is. She doesn’t want to be with a bunch of old suburbanites.”
At the Hanukkah celebration, they ate latkes fried on all four burners of the stove and jelly donuts plucked from a white bakery box. They made their tuneless way through songs about Maccabees and dreidels. They tore open sixteen packages wrapped in The Jewish Week and tied with yarn, eight for Natalie and eight for Matt. “Why don’t you each open one present now and bring the rest home for the other nights?” Natalie’s mother would say.
“No,” her grandmother intervened. “Let them do it like the Christians. Everything at once—a big bonanza, so they feel like they’re rich.”
Her grandmother had been dead fourteen years now, such a long time it wasn’t painful to think of her being dead anymore, though Natalie had loved her, and had run away from the family gathering after the funeral, away from her own house, because everyone was just stuffing their faces and talking about stupid things.
Dina was sitting up in the hospital bed, wearing the wig Natalie had helped her pick out. It was nicer than her real hair, which had been scrub-brush coarse and shot through with graying frizz. The silky wig hung in soft waves to Dina’s shoulders. “I used to spend a lot of time trying to make my hair look like this,” she’d said to Natalie when she tried it on. “It never worked. I guess this is my chance to have the hair I always wanted.”
Natalie produced a box of Hanukkah candles from her briefcase and handed it to Dina. “You got the good ones,” Dina said. “That sweet Israeli family on the back.” A woman with a saintly glow was lighting a giant menorah, while two young boys appeared entranced by their mother’s magic. The Western Wall gleamed gold behind them.
Dina opened the box and fingered the wicks. “Do you know why lighting candles is considered a woman’s job? Because Eve was responsible for dimming the world’s light.”
“Goddamn. Maybe we should refuse to light them. Is there some male orderly we can call in?”
“Nope. It’s all women on this floor at night. You have to wait until morning for your doctor man to breeze through.”
Tonight Natalie was supposed to tell Dina that she was pregnant. The first trimester had passed, and Ian had called his parents, his brother, and his best friends with the news. From the couch, Natalie had listened to him in the kitchen, where he was preparing a healthy, protein-rich meal, as he’d taken it upon himself to do these days. In the reverential tone of the pregnancy magazines in the obstetrician’s waiting room, he reported on Natalie’s morning sickness, the prenatal tests they had scheduled, their excitement about what was to come.
They told her parents at Sunday brunch, which Natalie wasn’t eating, because omelets smelled like unborn chicks. Her mom squealed, teared up, rushed about fixing Natalie a different breakfast. Her dad hugged them and said he would build the baby a crib.
“Let me tell Dina,” Natalie said.
“Of course,” her mother said sharply, acting offended at the implication that she had to be instructed to hold her tongue.
Now Natalie lit the shamash, the servant candle, which was used to ignite the others, each night lighting one more candle than it had the night before. This was the first night: two flames. “Let’s turn out the light,” Dina said, and the two of them sat in the almost dark, with the sounds of creaky carts and cheery nurses.
“I want to tell you something but I’m nervous,” Natalie said.
“Okay,” Dina said.
“It’s silly that I’m nervous.” Her mom would have said Don’t be. Dina would not say that.
“I’m pregnant.”
“That’s wonderful.” Dina was looking at her carefully.
“I don’t feel that right now,” she said. She was embarrassed to be crying, which she hadn’t done in front of Dina since her grandmother died. She hadn’t cried in her presence this entire fall. The doctors had said that even with aggressive chemo, the odds weren’t good. The odds of living, they meant. And here Natalie was, crying over something that was supposed to be wonderful.
“I didn’t feel it,” Dina said. She pulled a tissue from the box on her bedside table and handed it to Natalie. “Not till Matt was more than a month old. I felt sick the whole pregnancy. I wanted the baby out of me, but I also wasn’t ready. After he was born, the little sleep I got, I had these nightmares. Somehow we’d left him alone in the house. We were neglectful, or maybe we were dead. My son was left completely alone, with no idea what was happening. In the dream I could feel his terror as if it were my own. It was, of course.”
Dina’s voice was still Dina’s voice, thoughtful and calm.
“And I felt resentful, too, and then guilty for feeling that way. You know, in the beginning, there’s crying and not crying. There’s distressed and there’s neutral. I had a really hard time with the lack of positive feedback. I remember when I first felt we had something that might be mutual. Matt was lying in his bassinet, about six weeks old. Suddenly I wanted to sing to him. You know I can’t sing. Even ‘Happy Birthday’—I move my mouth, but I don’t let the sound come out. That day, though, I sang all the songs I can’t sing. ‘Whole Lotta Love.’ ‘Very Young.’ ‘Heart of Gold.’ Matt started making this sound: Oh, oh, oh. This surprised, amazing sound. He was six weeks old and he liked my singing. I’d been waiting my entire life for someone to want to hear me sing.”
It was getting late. Dina had stopped talking, and she looked very tired. But Natalie didn’t want to leave until the candles had melted all the way down. One Hanukkah night, years ago, Natalie and her mom had needed to make a semi-emergency trip to the drugstore. As they prepared to leave an empty house behind, the candles in the menorah stood at half their original size, the flames still going strong. Before herding Natalie out the door, her mom blew out the candles. By then, age ten or so, Natalie had already considered the existence of God and found him absent from the heavens, but to extinguish the Hanukkah candles rather than letting them burn down naturally felt like a sacrilege. And yet her mother seemed to do it without a second thought.
Complaining of itchiness, Dina removed the wig. She was completely bald. The muscles in her neck bulged; her face was in retreat. Natalie was relieved to have told Dina about the pregnancy, and, for the first time since she’d learned of it, she was awestruck by what her body was doing. But Dina’s body was betraying her at every moment.
* * *
—
Back in high school, Natalie had witnessed another betrayal. It was an ending for Dina—and it coincided with a beginning of sorts for her. One fall day in her sophomore year, when the bell rang at the end of English class, her crush si
nce fifth grade turned around and asked her out. He used to be Billy. Now he went by William. In middle school he’d teased her for getting good grades. Now he wanted to hear her thoughts on The Odyssey. She spent the rest of the day in a white heat underneath her clingy sweater. Instead of taking the bus, she walked home from school: an hour’s trudge through winding streets with old stone houses and scarlet foliage. Her surroundings registered vaguely as beautiful and boring. She was caught up in a meandering fantasy, though not exactly about her impending date with William. There was excitement in the thought of sitting next to each other in a movie theater, his hand grabbing hers in the dark—but it wasn’t the real excitement to come, the excitement that the first date of her life would set into motion. She was imagining being older and living in New York City, gliding down Fifth Avenue on a snowy evening, her long wool coat brushing against the long wool coat of some man, not William, not anyone from Chesterbrook High, no matter how cute he was. They would climb the stairs up to the roof of an apartment building and stand there embracing, pressing all of their heat into each other, while thousands of lights glowing softly in the snow kept promising: more, more, more.
When she arrived home, her mom was on the upstairs phone, shouting about some bastard, some unbelievable bullshit artist. It took Natalie a minute to realize she was talking about Uncle Rob. He’d been having an affair with some woman, cheating on Dina. The kitchen stewed in a mid-dinner-preparation mess: chicken breasts half breaded, boiling potatoes popping out of their red skins, a cutting board full of string beans not yet severed from their pointy ends. Natalie turned off the stove and stood by the sink, sneaking slivered almonds. Was it unbelievable that Rob had turned out to be a bastard and a bullshit artist? He was her uncle, a dentist. He lived a short car ride away, and she had known him all her life. The last time she’d seen him, he asked about her grades, and when she started mumbling about As and A minuses, he boomed, “Excellent, excellent. Keep it up.” He had the dentist’s requisite glistening smile and the lean physique of a former college tennis player. He was better looking, and more energetic and jovial than Dina, with her serious eyes, her refusal to smile when she didn’t feel like smiling. Natalie supposed that most people would consider him the better catch. But Dina was the one who never made small talk, who talked only because she had real things that she wanted to say.
When Natalie’s mom finally came downstairs, she went straight to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer.
“I guess you heard,” she said, grimacing, as she popped off the top.
“What’s Dina going to do?”
“Smart lawyer—she’s already had the divorce papers drawn up.”
“How did she find out?”
“Oh, these things leave a trail.” Natalie wasn’t sure if that meant her mom didn’t want to disclose the details, or if she wasn’t clear on them herself.
“Does Matt know?”
“They’ll tell him tomorrow afternoon, poor little boy. What a father. It goes without saying, no New York trip this weekend. You and Daddy and I can go to the movies.”
Every other Saturday, some familial combination of Bernsteins and Newbergs took the train to Grand Central. From there they went to a museum, or a show, or a street festival, or just out for Chinese food at Ollie’s, followed by a long walk. When William had asked Natalie out for this Saturday, she timidly proposed the following Saturday instead. She could have skipped the family outing, but not without making a bigger deal of this date than she’d felt prepared to do on a day’s notice.
“What other questions do you have, honey? I know this is so hard to process.”
After the phone tirade, the good mother persona was kicking into gear, that tone of exaggerated concern that never made Natalie want to confess to anything. She wanted to hear about the situation from Dina herself, but she was also afraid to hear it. She had seen her mother hurt many times: crying, bearing a crumpled look that made Natalie ashamed for her, rather than compassionate. Though she’d heard Dina speak harshly at times—to Rob, to Matt, to someone at work who was driving her crazy—it was a kind of controlled anger that seemed warranted, even admirable. Natalie didn’t want to find her aunt transformed into a pitiable creature, a cheated-upon wife, whether raging or weeping.
“I’ll help you finish making dinner,” Natalie said, snapping the ends off the string beans.
On Saturday afternoon she sat between her parents at the local movie theater, watching a documentary about the migratory patterns of birds. It was a compromise. Her mom wanted to see a Holocaust drama. Her dad wanted to see a sci-fi thriller. Natalie wanted to stay home and lie in bed, maybe finish The Odyssey reading she had to do. The birds on the screen rose up in flocks, circled the skies, voyaged heroically to distant lands. There weren’t any people in this movie, just birds: goofy and elegant, striking and plain. To see them going about their lives was a kind of relief.
The next day Dina called and asked Natalie to come over. Rob had taken Matt out for pizza and bowling. Natalie and her aunt sat on the couch eating pretzels and watching the wind round up the autumn leaves outside. Dina looked the same as she always looked on a Sunday: her angular frame softer in comfort clothes than lawyer clothes, hair fanned out in a ponytail, her face sleepy and kinder without makeup. You couldn’t tell what had happened by looking at her. Somehow, Natalie had imagined that you could.
“We should talk about what’s going on,” Dina said.
“Okay,” Natalie said.
“I’m very angry and I’m very hurt. But I’m all right.”
“I know.” Natalie couldn’t think of what else to say.
“Almost half of married couples get divorced. I feel awful, but I’m not special. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“Some milk would go well with these pretzels, wouldn’t it?” Dina went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses. “I’ll be a single mother now. I’ve always thought that would be the hardest thing.”
“I’ll help you. I’ll babysit more, if you want me to.”
“Thanks.” Dina sighed. “People expect me to fall apart. They expect me to rail about what pigs men are, to break down in public, this pathetic woman, this poor mother, this tough lady lawyer—look at her now. I won’t do it. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Natalie said. She wasn’t sure that she did, but whatever Dina wanted her to understand, she wanted to understand it too.
Just before Natalie’s mom came to pick her up, Dina suggested that next Saturday she and Matt and Natalie could go to New York, maybe stand in the half-price ticket line and get tickets to a show. Natalie hesitated. She hadn’t planned to mention William, felt ashamed to, especially now, but she couldn’t not tell her aunt.
“I’m supposed to hang out with this guy next Saturday.”
“You are?”
“He asked me on Friday. But I can tell him we could do it another time.”
“No, no.” Dina smiled. “Come here.”
Dina’s hug was like no one else’s. It wasn’t the kind of hug where you leaned in, just for a second, and then back out. Dina gripped you so hard you had to remember to breathe, and it made you think about how your body existed alone in space almost all of the time.
“Dating,” she said. “I guess I might have to learn to do it again. You’ll need to tell me what to do.”
Since then, seventeen years ago, Dina had gone on many dates, a few of her relationships lasting for a year or more. Rob got married to a hygienist and had a child with her. But Dina had never married or lived with anyone again. The weekend before the test results came back showing stage 4 stomach cancer, she’d gone on a first date with a man she’d liked instantly. While she was trying to digest the news, he called and left a message asking her out again. She didn’t call him back.
“I’ve never blown someone off like that,” s
he told Natalie during the first round of chemo. “I feel bad about it. But what could I say? I’m sorry, I’m having cancer right now. Come see me in the hospital.”
“You could still call him,” Natalie said.
What if—as in one of those romantic cancer movies—Dina had a real chance at love now, sick as she was? Maybe this man would cling to her bedside, worship the beautiful spirit beneath the failing body.
“No,” Dina said. “No one wants that.”
* * *
—
The heartbeat filled the warm room with a whumping sound. Outside it was February, the kind of record-breaking winter that provided a steady source of material for conversations with people in waiting rooms. So cold, so much snow, so many days without sun. The baby would be born in a kinder season.
“A hundred forty beats per minute,” the technician said. “That’s perfectly fine.”
A fetal ultrasound was perhaps the only medical procedure that could be seen as joyful, though of course it could reveal terrible news too. But inside Natalie, things seemed to be going well. The fetus was projected on the screen, its organs and appendages announced and praised.
“You said you want to know the gender, right?” the technician asked.
“Yes,” Natalie said. Ian took her hand. He’d told her he didn’t have a preference. She was hoping for a girl, not because of the so-called mother/daughter bond, or because she liked girly things, but because as a girl herself she’d imagined having her own girl one day, and it meant something to have that fantasy fulfilled.
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