Also, everyone grieves or worries in her own way. It doesn’t always come out as grief, or even as sympathy.
Rose’s house was one of these Fifties boxes, with a little porch and a front parlor and a kitchen at the back. There were three bedrooms upstairs, but one of the bedrooms had been turned into storage. Rose, in her old age, had discovered eBay and internet shopping, and often ordered new furniture and appliances to keep up with the times. But she couldn’t throw anything out. She missed the old times, too. So on top of everything else the third bedroom contained a two-seater couch, vaguely French, button-backed, with doodads carved into the wooden legs; the pink upholstery was shiny with ancient use. It used to sit in the front parlor and before that in their childhood home on Roosevelt Avenue in Port Jervis—in the grown-up living room, where the kids could only go on special occasions. To see it there, like that; Bill shook his head.
The second bedroom was also full of stuff, including an old vacuum cleaner with a thick mesh cord. A basket of sports equipment, an Apple computer from the 1980s, dusty and lying on the floor … a Sony turntable (Alex, her ex-husband, collected vinyl). Garbage bags full of clothes. With stuff spilling out of them, including a pair of ice skates, which almost certainly didn’t fit anyone anymore. Maybe she was keeping them for her grandson; it’s hard to throw these childish things away. But there was a mattress on the floor that you could access without moving anything. The other bedroom was Rose’s, still with her sheets on the narrow queen-size. For some reason, Bill didn’t want to sleep in his sister’s bed. But Judith didn’t want to either, and he gave in.
For a while they couldn’t find the bedding. Judith looked all over the house—she kept up a running commentary—it was almost like something fun they could do together, it lightened the mood. (They were in the storage room, in a chest of drawers.) Bill changed the sheets himself, pulling off the old ones, which still smelled of something, Rose’s perfume—he could see a bottle on her dresser, Knowing by Estee Lauder. His sister used to have a cleaning woman come once a week, Rosario, she was really a friend, but Rosario had retired and sent her niece instead and Rose didn’t trust her. She’s a nice girl, Rose said on the phone, but—I don’t know, there are things I don’t want her to have to do. When you’re that age, you don’t want to … who wants to … clean up after an old woman. There are things I don’t want her to have to see. Even her clean linens had little stains on them, discolorations, like tea stains; the elastic in the fitted sheet had stretched too far, Bill had to drape it over the corners and tuck it in between the mattress and the box spring. This isn’t the kind of household chore he did at home. (When he woke up the next morning, half of it had pulled away; he was lying on the yellowing artificial fabric of the mattress.)
For supper they telephoned for takeout, Chinese food—Judith called in the order. The storm hadn’t blown in yet, but the wind was picking up, it was weirdly warm for the time of year. Walking outside, waiting for the guy to come, you got dust in your eyes, bits of something, debris from the road, the tarmac was cracked and gravelly, in very poor condition. The whole neighborhood looked rundown. The Chinese food wasn’t great either, but still it had a kind of nostalgia value: egg rolls and fried rice, wonton soup, moo goo gai pan, the cold noodles in sesame sauce were pretty good. He ate with a fork; Judith used chopsticks. And he listened to her talk. Once you take yourself out of the sexual market, I’m telling you, everything goes downhill. This is a medical fact. For years I’ve been telling her, you need to date, you need to go on dates, you need to have … some reason for getting changed after five o’clock in the afternoon.
Believe me, it isn’t easy, I know that. Preparing yourself every time for disappointment. The people you meet … I mean, what kind of a country produces these men? You should see the … men who can’t order at a restaurant without checking five times that you don’t mind. They’re so worried you think they’re trying to male-dominate you. Wet handshakes. Vegetarians, vegans. They can never find anything on the menu. After a meal they give you these … hugs, like what’s just happened here, some kind of group sharing. It’s gotten to the point where honestly I can’t tell if somebody is gay anymore, they all sound the same. Especially, and I hate to say this, I’m talking about Jewish men. And after a while it’s like you’re grateful for these people, because at least they listen. Because most people don’t. But that’s not the … that’s not the … while she was eating, some kind of echo seemed to have come back to her. They sat in the kitchen with the wind blowing the dead ivy in the window, you could hear it rattling the panes. Because what’s actually difficult, she went on after a minute, she had stood up to refill her glass of water, and this is the part that takes guts, you realize eventually you’re also a disappointment to them. I mean who are you kidding, right? You can see it when you show up, and that’s not … easy to take, right? That takes a little bit of … and this is what she couldn’t do.
Suddenly she was crying, the lower part of her face had given way, like a landslide, and she drank from her glass of water and sat down again. She turned her head against her neck so her uncle couldn’t see her, she breathed through her nose. I’m sorry, she said. It’s just … coming back here. This is not a house of happy memories for me. Laughing again, I mean, the relationship you want with your mother is not … I don’t want to end up like that. Right? It’s not even like … I mean, I hope she doesn’t die, of course, I hope she pulls through but even if she does, is this really what she comes back to, to sit in this house? One of the … you know my father has been … since the divorce, he’s been saying—he actually calls me from time to time, which is … Why don’t you come down to Tempe? He wants Mikey to meet his kids. He wants everybody to get to know everybody. And the truth is (she was fighting off tears again), I would rather do that than come here, because the truth is, he’s made at least some kind of a life for himself, even though, it’s not like I have any illusions about whose side I’m on in all this.
Bill said, “I don’t think, at this stage, it’s a question of taking sides.”
“Well, you say that,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s how Rose would look at it.”
“I think she … it’s something we’ve discussed before.”
“Well.”
They cleared up together; afterward, it gave Bill some pleasure to wipe the kitchen table with a cloth, to make everything clean. He was pretty tired though (he said to her, it seems like my day started a long time ago), and went up to bed shortly after. Judith was trying to get the internet to work—Rose had a computer downstairs, an old-fashioned PC in the front room, and eventually Judith gave up on connecting her laptop and used that. Bill said good night. He stood in the doorway, by the stairs, and looked at his niece, who looked like his sister when she was thirty-eight, but taller and broader-shouldered. She had her father’s build but her mother’s face. Thick-lipped, pale-skinned, with large eyes that were bright and pretty enough when she dressed up, when she made up, though they appeared slightly exophthalmic under the lenses of her glasses, which she needed to read the screen. Apart from anything else there was a faint residual strangeness to sharing the house like this (and there was only one bathroom upstairs) with a young woman to whom he was not particularly close. In spite of … or maybe especially because of the … level of intimacy or habit of familiarity produced by the situation and their relation to each other.
“Sleep tight, Uncle Bill,” she said. This is what she still called him; it almost upset him to see her so fully recovered.
In the morning, when he came down, Judith was still at the computer—as if she hadn’t slept, except that she wore a thick bathrobe and a towel in her hair. The heating was set to an uncomfortably high temperature. You could hear the vents blowing and also occasionally a kind of cracking or shifting sound, the pressure of the outside world operating against an imperfectly sealed container. But the air felt dry and close, and Judith in her terry-cloth clothes contributed somehow to the bathhous
e atmosphere. She was talking to somebody, and then Bill saw the image on the screen, her son, or rather the back of his head. Mikey was in a brightly lit room, sitting on a small chair in front of a large television. The kind you can hang on the wall, and the computer on his end was stationed so that Judith could see the television, too. They were watching cartoons together, and from time to time Judith said, “oh no, oh no,” when something went wrong, and Mikey would turn around to look at her. “I told you,” he said, while Bill stood in the background. “I told you.”
“Do you want any breakfast?” Bill asked her.
“Say hello to Uncle Bill,” Judith said in her kiddy voice, and then, demonstrating: “Hello Uncle Bill …” but Mikey had turned back to the television.
“I thought I might go to the hospital,” Bill said.
“Have you looked outside?”
“It snowed.”
“It snowed like …” and she gave him the kind of look he remembered well, from his mother and his aunts when he was a kid, from the older Jewish women in his life. Her tone of voice was the tone you use when you finish a sentence with “like a hole in the head” but she obviously couldn’t think of an appropriate equivalent. It surprised Bill a little, how comfortable she seemed in her bathrobe, talking the way you do to her son, in front of him, and he was almost touched, by her trust or sense of familiarity, in spite of the fact that he basically didn’t like her much, or wouldn’t have liked her, apart from loyalty to his sister. Judith seemed to him a self-involved and self-important person who had made a number of obvious mistakes in life without learning from them. Somebody who blamed other people. “Like the Pope’s Catholic,” she finally said. “How are you going to get there? At some point today they might get around to clearing the avenues, but you still have to make it down the hill.”
“I thought I might walk,” he said. “What else am I going to do?” And then, because he couldn’t help himself: “I don’t want to sit around the house all day.”
But she didn’t seem to notice. “In those shoes? Is that all you brought?”
They were the old leather Rockports he liked to teach in, with a thick rubber sole. But she said, “There’s three feet of snow out there. You’re gonna get soaked. You’re gonna freeze.”
“I thought I might put plastic bags around them. This is what we used to do, for the kids.”
She gave him a look but she helped him find the bags—long thin sacks, the kind they deliver the New York Times in, a faint translucent blue. And by the time he set off she had entered into the spirit of the adventure, more Essinger craziness, in which she took a kind of pride, even though she also liked to present it as her personal affliction. “You know the way, right?” she asked him. “If you want to go the scenic route you can take the Old Croton Trailway.”
“I’ll probably just stick to the roads.”
“Have you got a phone? Have you got a map?”
“I made it here all right, I can make it back.”
“You haven’t had breakfast.”
“I don’t like to … I like to eat lunch. If I get hungry, I can pick something up at the hospital.”
She was still in her bathrobe when he left, a tall large-breasted thirty-something woman, wrapped in towels. Already you could see she had some trouble with her hips, you had a sense of second-rate construction, the need for maintenance. She said, “When the cabs can make it on Ashburton Avenue, I’ll come in. You can tell her that. I’m willing to walk that far.” And then, in a different voice, the voice she used for serious discussion among women, “From what I saw last night she won’t know the difference.” She raised her eyebrows at him, surprised at herself. Sometimes just saying it brings on the emotion, and he looked at her, full in the face, he gave her the frown of sympathy. But when he walked out she called out, “Close the door, you’re letting all the cold in.”
The snow came up to his ankles, though it was deeper by the eaves, almost knee-deep, where sheets of ice had fallen off the roof in the morning sunshine. Cars lay tufted, trees wore wigs. White lay everywhere and the light bounced off it so vividly it was like staring too closely at a television—a bright pervasive blur that quickly induced a faint sense of headache, if not the thing itself. But it didn’t feel too cold, at least at first. After a few blocks the bags on his feet stretched and tore, the wet came through, and he eventually abandoned them, or rather, pulled them off and carried them dripping in his hand until he could find a garbage can. When he crossed Yonkers Avenue, he saw the entrance to the Old Croton Trailway Park and decided to take it. From what he could tell, the path was tarmacked, and no worse than the sidewalks. Going was still hard, you had to pull your leg out of the drift at every step, and the wet snow slipped a little underfoot, so that by the time he’d been walking ten minutes he felt the sweat and the heat of the sweat building up in his armpits, under his shirt, his sweater and his L.L. Bean winter coat—rising into his neck. His glasses fogged, his beard dripped. But the roads were empty, the parked cars looked abandoned. It was a bright sunny winter morning, he saw someone walking his dog, he saw kids riding sleds down the middle of a steep road. People talked to each other, he didn’t mind walking, it gave him something to do. Yesterday he was cooped up in the plane all day, and then sitting in traffic. He wasn’t unhappy.
* * *
Dana was up half the night with Cal. She went to bed early, a little after ten o’clock. Paul and Susie and David were in the TV room, flipping channels (Paul had the remote control). Then Liesel came in and wanted to watch the headlines. Dana as it happens was sitting in her chair, the wooden rocker with the loose armrest and the cushion that Liesel always placed on the floor before sitting down. “I’m going to bed anyway,” Dana said. No, don’t bother … but Liesel accepted the chair and removed the cushion and sat down heavily, with an end-of-day sigh. “Na du.” She had an orange in her hand, with a bowl and a knife, and began peeling. It gave Dana pleasure to understand the routines, to not get in the way—to show Paul. Two car bombs in Damascus, coordinated attacks. Outside government buildings, thirty-seven confirmed dead, though the figure would probably rise. Hundreds wounded. Dana, standing in the doorway, said, “Too depressing for me. Good night.” But she had got the tone slightly wrong, and felt it, as she left them there and retreated along the darkened corridor. Paul was reaching for a piece of orange from his mother, but he said good night, too, like everybody else.
Cal was still deeply asleep when she looked in their room. It bothered her that she wouldn’t be able to read in bed, because after brushing her teeth and changing in the bathroom, she felt suddenly awake—tired but superconscious. If she left the door to the hallway open a wedge of light fell across her lap but not enough to read by. And she wanted the door closed; she wanted to feel shut in. Lying down, climbing under the sheets, she could make out the blades of the ceiling fan above her. Wooden blinds over the windows facing the street revealed in thin lines that the front porch lamp was on. Liesel had said she was going to wait up for Nathan and Jean (and Clémence and the kids, Dana thought). At dinner Paul and Susie had argued about what was a reasonable time to expect them. One in the morning, two in the morning. For some reason even this kind of conversation could become a source of heated disagreement, but Dana could see it from Paul’s point of view, too, because really what Susie was saying is, you should have gone. And maybe Susie was right. But the reason she couldn’t say it explicitly and why Paul couldn’t defend himself was because the subtext was that Susie and everyone else wanted him to spend time with … She must have drifted off because the next thing she heard was Cal whimpering.
He was still asleep, or mostly asleep, but every breath now seemed to involve his speaking voice, as if he were saying, ow ow ow. For a while Dana just listened to him, but then she got out of bed to check. He lay on his mattress on the floor, and when she kneeled beside him, he must have felt the pressure of her weight, because his eyes opened, though it still wasn’t clear if he was awake. Snot crusted
his nose and apart from anything else he had trouble breathing—his chest lifted with the strain, and she could hear a catch in his nose or throat, like a loose screw rolling around. “Hey Buddy, hey Cally,” she said, and stroked the hair off his forehead, partly to feel his temperature. But also because she couldn’t help herself, she was glad to see him and thought or felt something like, it’s just you and me, right? and all these crazy people. But he felt hot, too, he felt too hot, as if his brain were working overtime, dreaming hard, giving off a kind of engine heat. It was like touching a radiator.
Maybe this woke him up; he began to cry properly and after that she couldn’t get him back to sleep. Probably he’d have woken up anyway. She had to blow his nose. There was a tissue in the pocket of her jeans, but she couldn’t find them on the chair for almost a minute, by which point he was borderline screaming. His cousins’ bedroom lay just across the hall and she felt the panic of an intruder when an alarm goes off. Who knows how late it was. Everyone was probably asleep. But she found the tissue and wiped his nose and threw it somewhere on the floor, who cares, and lay down next to him. He called her Daddy, and eventually she realized what he was saying: I don’t want you, Daddy. Go away. So she picked him up in her arms and rolled on to her back. He lay on his belly on her belly, with his head on her breasts, while she told him, into his ear, “It’s Mommy, it’s okay,” feeling at the same time a kind of pang of disloyalty and some vague sense of being in the lead.
Christmas in Austin Page 18
