Honeydew

by Edith Pearlman

  A bowl of peaches stood at one end of the trestle table, and a pitcher of foaming liquid. Several people were playing a card game near the peaches. They did not speak, Bella realized, but rather made occasional motions with their free hands. At the other end of the table sat a woman and a man, rapidly signing. In one corner of the room, where bunks met bunks, there was a shipboard oddity—a rocking chair. In it sat a young long-haired Indian woman with a child in her arms, an infant of six months, maybe eight. Robin would have known its age.

  Bella remained in the recess at the bottom of the stairs. She was grateful that she was wearing black. The maid paused to hang the basket on a hook. Then she rushed to the chair. With fluttering fingers she addressed the rocking young woman, who slid an arm from beneath the baby and answered in the same way. Then she stood and handed the child to the maid, and the maid sank into the rocker, unbuttoning the top of her uniform and unhooking an undergarment as well. She put the baby to her breast. She bent her head to meet the baby’s eyes, but not before Bella saw that her face had finally attained expression—a kind of meager exaltation.

  The girl who had been rocking the child was the same one who’d been sweeping in front of the infirmary the day the cousins got lost. Now she crossed the room, skirting the trestle table and the card players and the animated couple. She entered Bella’s hiding place. This time she had no trouble giving directions. Go away, commanded the beauty wordlessly, her index finger pointing upward.

  Bella allowed herself a long final look at the deaf-mute servants, whose employment here was either a kindly move on the part of a paternalistic ship company or a sensible one on the part of a smuggling racket. She took an even longer look at the hungry child, the stowaway whose presence everyone in the room and now Bella too was bound to protect. After these informative looks, she climbed the helical stairs—a journey less difficult than it would have been five pounds ago.

  Somewhat later she had finished her own packing and had placed Robin’s empty suitcase on Robin’s bed. Certainly she could pack Robin’s gifts, bathing suits…The key turned in the lock and her cousin entered, pale skin splotched, hair awry, one shoulder strap broken.

  “Bella! You don’t have to,” she giggled. She rapidly laid clothing in the case, along with the hammock she’d bought, and a little mahogany box. Meanwhile she hummed, apparently not wanting to ask Bella what she’d been up to. And so Bella kept to herself the Golden Swan’s secrets, and its secret within those secrets. And her sudden distress—envy, wasn’t it—she kept that to herself too.

  The cousins stowed their suitcases in the hall and got undressed and went to bed, all without further speech, without gesture, though from time to time Bella glanced at Robin, and, she supposed, Robin glanced every so often at her.

  Cul-de-sac

  I.

  Daphna invaded and then detonated whenever it suited her. Never on Fridays, though. Friday evening was Sabbath, and her husband expected a proper meal; Daphna’s preparations, however slipshod, kept her busy. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons she taught Hebrew at a local synagogue. As for Mondays, when the weekend had lost its affirmative pull—Mondays were days of sapped energy even for Daphna.

  So Wednesdays, by default, were likeliest for her unannounced visits. On Wednesdays her husband taught two classes at the university—an afternoon seminar for graduate students, an evening survey for adults. He took his dinner at the university cafeteria, so Daphna could forget about cooking altogether, could toss tuna fish and a plate of sliced tomatoes onto a kitchen table already burdened with homework and half-eaten apples and Israeli newspapers. That table was so littered that sometimes the children dined on the floor. The newspapers were days old. “Stale news,” Daphna said, “news that has been superseded or even proven false, lifts me to dizzy heights, like the works of magic realism. Have you read García Márquez, Ann? Saramago?” She didn’t pause for a reply; I could have slipped away.

  The kids often ate the tuna right out of the can. Three smart and pretty girls—eleven, thirteen, and fifteen at the time the family moved in. They had adapted to their mother’s habits, had learned to take over from her. It was they who set up and then reminded her of parent-teacher conferences, they who organized shopping expeditions for school clothing, they who commanded the housecleaning on Sunday mornings. Sometimes they made additions to the Wednesday-night cuisine—raw carrots, buckwheat kernels. While the buckwheat boiled on the back burner of the ancient stove, the oldest girl sautéed the onions. I saw her doing it one night when Daphna pulled me in for a consultation about the kitchen fan—it was on strike, she said. The girl’s dark hair was bound loosely at the nape. Her lovely, long-nosed profile bent toward her task. When the telephone rang in the hall the youngest picked it up and then called the oldest’s name, and the middle girl took over the onions without a word.

  “This malefactory fan?” said Daphna, never without a word.

  “Call an electrician,” I advised, and fled.

  And so, on late Wednesday afternoons, Daphna, not needing even to chop those onions herself, was free to call on her four resistant neighbors.

  We each had a way to avoid her.

  Lucienne—seventy-five or so, widowed, overweight—could duck under her kitchen counter as fast as a girl. Fat legs bent, fat arms encircling knees, the whole round self keeping company with a trash can and a bin of root vegetables, Lucienne rested in her makeshift cave until the doorbell stopped ringing. Then she crawled out and struggled to her feet, retying whichever romantic chiffon scarf she was wearing that day.

  Connie, who worked mornings at a clinic, had a more deliberate Wednesday defense. At four o’clock she popped a chicken into the oven for her family’s dinner, then ran upstairs to her little alcove of an office, where she could remain unseen. She unlocked her briefcase and did paperwork for two hours; sometimes the bird shriveled, but so what?

  I had an easier time than either Lucienne or Connie. I am divorced and my children are out of the house. Perhaps once a week I poach a sole for my friend Rand, but otherwise the kitchen rarely claims me. (Saturday nights he takes me to the dining room at his club: long windows, long portraits, a lengthy evening.) At the real estate agency that bears my name I can always arrange to show a property, and so on those dangerous Wednesday afternoons I was usually convincing a customer to buy some house, mostly by not talking. My height and slenderness alone can make a sale, my staff claims; my golden hair, they add, if they really crave a bonus.

  But Sylvia, our street’s spinster, was easy prey. Sylvia started nipping after lunch, and a few hours later she often opened the back door in a fuddled error. Her blouse had by then crept out of her skirt. Her gray hair, which had started the day in a bun, was now a limp corkscrew hanging below its elastic band.

  “Ah, Sylvia, I’m so glad to find you at home. Have you time for a cup of tea?” But Daphna didn’t say that. She didn’t say that to any of us when she succeeded in making a capture—of Lucienne, standing in plain view at the window over her sink, having forgotten it was Wednesday, fixed by Daphna’s stare; or of Connie, daring to run downstairs and baste her chicken at just the wrong time, stopped by a knock on the glass door from the deck; or of me, home early, the sale accomplished, intercepted on a dash from garage to back door.

  What Daphna did say was some version of this: “Shalom, dear friend. Scandals here, scandals back in Jerusalem, and the French minister of tin cans was found in bed with his biographer. All politics is local, the gentleman said. Local? Smaller yet: household, if you ask me, though who asks me. My gutters are clogged with leaves. I can’t stay long—cranberries are simmering on my stove.” Cranberries were frequently simmering on her stove, and were often forgotten there. Sometimes on trash-collection day, Daphna’s pile of newspapers was topped with an aluminum pot whose interior was glazed an unscrubbable purple. “More than two million bushels of cranberries are produced each year,” she might go on. “The plant is cultivated on acid soils of peat or vegetable mold.
Such scrupulous recycling of natural elements—it is as if the Talmud decreed it. The Hebrew word for cranberry is hamutsit. The French is canneberge. The Linnaean term is…” The briefest pause here perhaps—during which opportunity, still in my backyard, I claimed to hear the telephone ringing; or, leaning against her jamb, Sylvia softly belched; or, at her window, Lucienne, adjusting her scarf, mentioned that it was time for a nap; or, sliding open the glass door to the deck, Connie indicated in her flat Wisconsin accent that the monologue might continue inside.

  It continued inside anyway, whatever any of us did, as Daphna followed me into the house, cocking her head at the silent telephone; or advanced on Sylvia; or ignored Lucienne’s invented fatigue until the poor woman plodded to her back door and opened it. “…Vaccinium macrocarpon, the Linnaean cranberry.” By this time Daphna was seated at Sylvia’s breakfast table, Lucienne’s, Connie’s, or mine; and Sylvia, Lucienne, Connie, or I was seated opposite her, our fingers splayed on wood or cloth. We gazed at the backs of our hands. We avoided eye contact with her as we would with a rabid dog.

  “Politics, you were saying?” Daphna remarked. “The things husband says to wife at breakfast, wife to husband, determine the course of the day, the year, the nation; they influence everything from some grocery clerk’s nervous mistake to the idiocy which commands our destinies.” She leaned forward. “They influence the policeman on the beat.” She leaned farther forward. “My youngest child has the highest mathematical aptitude of all eleven-year-olds in the town of Godolphin.” Another of her boastful hyperboles. “What shall I do about the leaves in my gutters?”

  She had quantities of brown frizzy hair and a perfect lozenge of a face—brow narrow, chin narrow, cheekbones curved like almonds. Her large gray eyes were calm as water, her full lips about to froth. She favored ankle-length skirts and long overblouses, wore sandals in winter and no shoes at all the rest of the time. She might have stepped out of the pages of a child’s illustrated Old Testament, just as her husband might have stepped out of a photograph taken in 1890 on Hester Street: an immigrant tailor, wearing black pants, black vest, white shirt, and a little beard. No skullcap, though. They were not pious, Daphna assured me—their Friday-night meal was simply a reenactment of Jerusalem life. “Every family, the godless, the frum, they all sit down together Erev Shabbat. To interrogate each other. It’s our tradition.”

  They were thorough Jerusalemites, she said, all born there—Avner during the Mandate, Daphna during the Suez Crisis, the older girls during the First Intifada, the third during the Madrid Conference. They had lived in a beautiful part of the city: “Stones so golden they are almost pink, like very expensive face powder.” Then Avner accepted the offer of a professorship of political science at the university here, and they arrived pell-mell in August, and somebody gave them my name, and I sold them the crumbling stucco house on my own swab-shaped street. Its feeble owners, after boldly installing a new furnace, had entered a nursing home. For house and furniture they’d take a low price. A low price was what they got.

  Avner was sixty years old. Daphna was forty-five. How, once upon a time, had the little scholar won the tall beauty? We didn’t have to speculate. “Ah, my Avner, his mind makes me think of a high-rise hotel, on every floor something is going on. I was twenty-six. He proposed on Mount Gilboa. We had climbed to look at the irises. I ran through the fields. He ran after me. He proposed again on Ben Maimon Street, under a eucalyptus. Again on Rav Kook Street. He asked for my hand from my father, in my father’s house, in my father’s study lined with books in seven languages, no, nine, no, eleven, he speaks ten, my beloved Abba, there’s one he only reads. And that one is? you inquire,” she might demand of whichever neighbor was at that moment studying her own knuckles at her own breakfast table. “Persian.”

  Daphna seemed to consider the four of us one woman—one ear, really—though she acknowledged certain individual attributes. Lucienne, who’d had a French mother, knew about sauces. Connie the social worker could recommend a course of action to take with a daughter’s brief defiance. (In fact Connie made no recommendations; she kept her mouth locked, like her briefcase.) When Sylvia wasn’t drinking she was thinking. She had grown up on the campus of Swarthmore College, where her father had taught philosophy; she was acquainted with meaning. She was probably acquainted with sorrow too.

  And I? “You are American royalty,” Daphna said. “You are a direct descendant of John Adams, I know that for a fact.”

  It is a fact. It is another fact that the Adams descendants number in the thousands. And there is a third, unrelated fact, an odd one: though I avoided Daphna, as did my three neighbors, because, as Sylvia said, give her a sip and she’ll gulp you entire; because, as Lucienne said, she’s dérangée; because, as Connie said, her intensity makes you feel charred—an insightful remark, though it slid with no emphasis from Connie’s mouth, as if it were a standard lease form received on the fax…though I avoided her, I did half enjoy—well, quarter—the times I got captured. Her nonstop talk included celebrity gossip (she knew something about everyone in the universe); bits of information like the word for “cranberry”; and comments about her dry motherland. “We are parched, we worship water, our phlegmy consonants are the result of our nonlubricated pharynx.” A change, this dérangée stuff, from my usual conversations about mortgage rates and bridge loans and house footprints and zoning bylaws. A change from Rand’s solemn pronouncements about the decline of civility in the Western world.

  “Every time we look around, Avner is being summoned to the councils of the great. He is great himself.” Certainly the little tailor traveled often. We imagined him at unworldly academic conferences. When he was away, his females ate tuna fish out of the can every night. “He has embezzled my dreams,” she said. “I am his favorite,” she told me. “His favorite thorn,” she told me. “His favorite demon,” she told me, told me, told me.

  Saturdays we were safe from her. Avner and Daphna disdained synagogue worship, but the family devoted Sabbath mornings to scriptural study at home and the afternoons to those shopping trips led by the daughters. Sunday mornings they all cleaned the house. But the rest of the day we were at risk. On Sunday afternoons—at other times too—Daphna occupied herself by vigorously sweeping her seven front stairs. Sometimes she mopped them as well, and then swept them again. Depending on the season she engaged in conversation with the widower on one corner clipping his hedge or the elderly bachelor on the other corner shoveling his snow. The conversation would be conducted in a yell, woman to old man, old man to woman. Soon, though, Daphna would walk diagonally across the street to the hedge trimmer or down the street to the shoveler, dragging her broom like a nightmare tail. Eventually the chosen man would go indoors, probably to pour himself a stiff drink. Then Daphna would select one of us. Maybe Lucienne in the house next to hers (“handsome Tudor,” I’d say, if I ever had to sell it). Maybe Sylvia in the neglected house directly across the street (“Victorian fixer-upper”). Maybe Connie, next to Sylvia (“Colonial with deck, mint condition”). Maybe me, located at the end of our cul-de-sac like a hostess (“split-level charmer”).

  But Daphna knew that Sunday was my busy day and that she was unlikely to find me at home. If I did happen to be in the house I might watch from between the slats of my upper-level bathroom as she made her rounds—loopy rounds, for she never rang the front doorbell, always the back. Barefoot, now holding her broom upright but upside down, she would disappear and reappear, cross and recross the street. The broom’s horizontal bar of whiskers was level with the top of her head. She looked like a peasant girl who had acquired a military suitor, or maybe a constabulary one.

  Every Thursday afternoon I meet Rand in a coffee shop in Godolphin Center. I go home first to freshen up. One Thursday in October—it was Daphna’s second year in town, so I knew her schedule—I gave the street a once-over, then left my house on foot. Of course, to be safe, I walked on the side opposite Daphna’s house, and of course I walked fast.

/>   “Shalom!” she screamed. She was standing on her top step, broom in hand. She must have been watching from a window, waiting to pop out. “Where are you going?”

  “Coffee…with a good friend.” I didn’t break stride. “I’m late,” I said over my shoulder.

  “The Marigold Café?” she yelled.

  I nodded. My head was facing forward now, my right arm behind me like a wing. I wished it really were a wing.

  “I’ll walk with you!” In a moment she was by my side. Her hand clutched the upended broom around its waist. Her unshod feet kept pace with mine.

  “Daphna, don’t you teach on Thursdays?”

  “It’s Sukkoth; no class.” Of course: in various Jewish backyards leafy structures had sprung up overnight. “You are enjoying that book under your arm? My oldest reads everything she can get her hands on. She reads upon rising, she reads when she goes to bed, she reads while she’s chopping onions, she reads in the shower…”

  “A remarkable feat.”

  “She accomplishes it. The teacher of my middle one tells me that she is the best science student he has ever encountered. She will become a physician, of that I am utterly sure. She will work on a Native American reservation with victims of fetal alcohol syndrome.”

  “My husband was a drunk.”

  “Ojibwa?”

  “Episcopalian.”

  We were passing a string of double-deckers. “These houses are advised to devote two-thirds of their land to grass, or something green,” she said. “But some are utterly blacktopped. Why? For the sake of the automobile.” Her family did not own a car; they used trolleys and an occasional taxi. They didn’t have a television either. “Did you see the sky at sunset yesterday? Royal purple, like the irises on Mount Gilboa. I stood in the attic of my home. There is a window facing west. The telephone rang several times, but I refused to abandon my post. Anyway, the calls are always for Avner or the girls. My oldest is sixteen. There are boys already in love with her. That is her destiny.”