To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  “She doesn’t remember you. Yesterday she thought I was her mother.”

  Noa felt a stab of hurt. She didn’t say what she wanted to: that the whole family was disintegrating. Instead she said a firm goodbye and returned the phone to her pocket. She slid her feet out of her sandals and pressed her toes into the dash. The palm trees outside were thrashing in the wind. She thought how if her grandmother had been present enough to receive the news of Monica and Leonard’s divorce, she would have been shocked and outraged. She would have been capable of any number of outsize reactions, but none would have been accepting. Maybe Monica had waited until her mother was sheltered by dementia so as to spare them both. Or maybe it had been her grandmother’s frailty, the fact of her approaching death, that made Monica feel how time was running out for the things she still wanted from life. Or had the whole thing been Leonard’s idea? Her parents had presented a united front, making it impossible for their daughters to know who had instigated the separation. No one was hurt; each had gotten what they wanted. They were in agreement about no longer needing to agree on how to live the rest of their lives.

  On the news, the reports of the fire’s progress kept coming, the facts circled over and repeated. The tons of water and fire retardants released from the air, the efforts to box it inside a buffer zone, the crews working in lines, hacking away at whatever could burn. The van left the coastal roads, and the air-conditioning momentarily brought in the smell of smoke. Nick switched off the radio. This was his last month of work; he was moving north at the end of July. He told Noa about the yurt he’d been constructing on his friend’s land. It would be different to live in the round, without corners, he said. With his free hand he scrolled on his phone to a photo of the view from the property of distant blue mountains. He was studying biodynamic farming. The land was a cooperative, united in the goal of sustainability and community. In the summer, they swam naked in the Yuba River. He showed her a photo of the passionate river, rushing wild and muddy after a storm. Now it would already be green, he said, pouring down from the High Sierra, clear all the way to the granite bottom.

  Nick probably didn’t believe in marriage, Noa decided as they made their way toward the bride’s house in the hills. He probably didn’t even believe in monogamy, considering it a convention as obsolete as corners. Did Monica and Leonard no longer believe in monogamy, either? And what about her? What did she believe in? She thought of Gabe, and with an ache of longing his body came back to her, the way it smelled, and how his stomach went concave when she slid her fingers beneath the elastic of his underwear. His face when he came. By now some other girl must have seen that expression, the one that looked like both pleasure and pain. The girl at the pool where he was a lifeguard, maybe, with shiny hair and breasts that sat like perfect oranges in her bikini top, who wouldn’t hesitate to sleep with him. Noa imagined Gabe’s mouth on hers, and her longing opened into jealousy and pain. Feeling her face flush, she turned to look out the window.

  At the bride’s house, the pool man was skimming the purple jacaranda flowers out of the water with his long net. A white tent with gauzy sides had been erected to shade the guests from the sun and wind, and the sound of a hammer rang out from within. The wedding organizer came to meet them and led them along a path edged with lavender. Noa broke off a flower and crushed it between her fingers. The smell it released reminded her of Israel, of the stucco houses of the kibbutz, with their gardens decorated with old tractor parts used as planters, out of which spilled succulents in all shapes and sizes. Inside the tent, twenty-four round tables were covered with white tablecloths, and a raised dais was being constructed for the table of the bride and groom.

  While they carried the flower arrangements in from the van, the bride’s mother came out of the house and called out to the wedding planner, who didn’t hear her, busy giving instructions over the phone. The mother of the bride wore high heels that clicked anxiously across the wooden dance floor. She stopped to examine the flowers Noa had just set down. As she fingered the petals, her fallen face fell further. Her front teeth were stained with lipstick. The arrangements were too small, she said. They had expected lilac. Her daughter would not be happy.

  Noa looked down and again felt the heat rising at the back of her neck. Who did these people think they were? To shout about flowers? To celebrate while a few miles away people were losing their homes and dying in the brutal fight against the fires? She felt that if she answered now, she might not be able to control what came out, and so she called Nick and retreated to the van.

  Inside the cool interior, she closed her eyes and exhaled. Her anger had been at a constant low boil for months, always ready to spill over. Before they’d broken up, she’d started fights with Gabe over nothing, overreacting to the smallest things. She wanted to be left alone, and then once he was gone, she was furious at him for leaving. Or she would curl into him like a child, but when he’d utter some offhand comment that rubbed her the wrong way, she’d turn away, cold and injured, and even when she wanted to reach for him again, she couldn’t. She hadn’t agreed to have sex with him. He’d done it before, and she had never, and this imbalance bothered her. It wasn’t that she was romantic about her first time. More that she was too aware of how the moment would be differently valued in each of their lives, not just then but always. The other girl, his first, would be remembered after Noa might long be forgotten, whereas she would be promising to remember him forever. “Make up your mind!” he shouted at her before they broke up, when once again she’d gone from warm to cold, and given him her back. But aside from whether or not to sleep with him, what had been up to her, really? He was leaving for college in August. He would find someone else, a girl more easygoing than her, lighthearted and beautiful. She told him as much, and when he protested, she insisted, calmly, practically, as if she were invulnerable.

  Had she always been this way? Her independence was a matter of pride. Monica and Leonard claimed she’d been like that since she was a baby. One of the earliest stories they told about her was how, when she was only two, she had walked into the first day of preschool without looking back. She’d climbed onto the rocking horse and screamed when any of the other children wanted a turn. She’d sat astride the horse, stubborn and imperious, and used her lung power to keep the others at bay. Noa had never really questioned this telling of the story, how it had come to be used, like all of the earliest stories parents tell children about themselves, as proof of character. But why hadn’t she hung back and clung to her mother? Mustn’t there have been a need for independence long before it became the story about her, and a point of pride? Wasn’t the pride only vulnerability masquerading as strength, until at last it had become one? But as with all strengths that grew out of need, its foundation had never been solid. It was built on top of a hole. Wouldn’t she have held tight to her mother if Monica had been a mother she could reliably cling to, rather than the comfort of a rocking horse?

  Nick came back and reported that the owner of the shop was on her way with a supply of flowers to redo the bouquets. They waited inside the van with the air-conditioning on full blast. When Noa’s phone rang again, it was Leonard, and she let it ring through to voice mail. She imagined him where he was, standing on the tell at dusk. The hill beneath his feet had been man-made by slow accumulation: layers of life and its destruction, continuous from 7000 BC to biblical times. The jewel in the crown of biblical archaeology! as he never let anyone forget. No other site in Israel possessed more Bronze or Iron Age monuments, he told the students at the start of every summer. As he looked south across the Jezreel Valley, his eyes would come to rest on the distant blue hills of Samaria, and the view produced a flicker of agitation: to think of the wealth of secrets buried there, off-limits, not to be touched in his lifetime! From atop the tell, Leonard left her a message. She didn’t need to listen to it to know what it said. But she was not going to the Berkowitzes’.

  Nick took out rolling papers and a tin box of weed. He pinched up
a clump, worked it between his fingers, and sprinkled the fragrant grass into the fold of the paper. She didn’t usually like getting high, but she was bored and annoyed enough to take a few hits. The smoke burned her throat, but soon her chest relaxed and lightness filled her head.

  When she had to go to the bathroom, she got out of the van and headed toward the house. The enormous front door was propped open, and the catering staff sailed hurriedly in and out. She stopped one with a box of Beaujolais on his shoulder and asked for directions to the bathroom. “Ask in the kitchen,” he said, gesturing toward the interior.

  It was dark and cool there. Through the leaded-glass windows of the library, the garden was a blur of muted greens. She made her way down the oak-paneled corridor, everything at a greater remove than usual. Trying the first door she came to, she discovered a closet full of golf clubs. Soon she came to the kitchen, which was bustling with activity. Three chefs in white paper hats and checked pants were giving orders to the rest of the staff. No one even glanced at her; they were cooking for two hundred and fifty. Noa continued down the hall until she came to a wide-carpeted staircase. The need to pee was now urgent, and, emboldened by the weed, she went up.

  An antique console with a rounded belly and claw feet guarded the landing. On its marble top, photos were displayed of a girl at nine, twelve, sixteen. A little farther on was a doorway, and through it Noa glimpsed the gleaming brass of a faucet. She hurried in, locked the door behind her, and sank with relief onto the toilet, kicking off her sandals. She sat there for a while, relaxing in peace. Through the wall she heard laughter, though it might have been crying. If she ever married, she would elope, she decided. Or have the wedding at a dive, someplace that didn’t suggest any expectation. It seemed only to be asking for trouble, a wedding like this.

  Someone jiggled the door handle. Noa stood and turned on the tap. “One minute,” she called, quickly drying her hands on the soft terry cloth towel and opening the door. It was the girl in the photos, standing with her bridal dress gathered around her torso. She was older, but still young, with a face that was somehow monkeylike and yet not unpretty. She didn’t look much older than twenty-two or -three.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “Who are you?”

  “I’m with the caterer,” Noa lied.

  The bride hesitated a moment, but as everyone in the house was under her command, she gave it no further thought and turned around, lifting the wavy tendrils curled that morning by an iron.

  “Can you zip this?”

  Noa wiped her hands again on her shorts and took up the tiny zipper. The fabric strained at the seams as she tried to zip it up. She thought it might rip, but finally the zipper pull passed the widest point of the bride’s broad back and slid smoothly to the top.

  “I was a swimmer,” she explained, turning to face Noa. To prove the point, her lashes were wet, as if the swimmer-bride had just surfaced from underwater. Or maybe it had been crying Noa had heard through the wall after all.

  “Come here, I need help with something else.”

  Noa didn’t liked being ordered around, but she couldn’t resist her curiosity. She followed the bride into the bedroom. It was decorated with her first- and second-prize ribbons, for not only swim competitions but equestrian ones as well. Pictures of horses were framed on the wall like beloved relatives. Above the desk, a collection of Hello Kitty erasers and pencil sharpeners were displayed on the glass shelves. Noa had once had some like that; she’d forgotten all about them, and seeing them brought back the strong sensation of her childhood. Impulsively, just as she had sometimes done as a child, she stuck out her hand and picked up an eraser, and just before the bride turned back to her, she slipped it into her pocket.

  “I can’t walk in these,” the bride said, gesturing to her high-heeled silver shoes.

  It was true that she looked ungainly, stomping down hard on her toes. Noa wondered where her bridesmaids had gone, or whoever was supposed to be guiding her on the last, risky stretch of a path that might still be abandoned, where doubt and bewilderment lay in wait to ambush her. In Jewish weddings, the kalla, the bride, was meant to be treated like a queen, tended to like royalty, an approach that, however ancient, was filled with wisdom of human psychology, of the frailty of the heart. The frailty of the heart, and the shame of the body, because the Orthodox brides had never been with a man, nor their grooms with a woman, a circumstance they were obligated to reverse directly after the ceremonies. And so perhaps the royal treatment was designed to distract from any lurking terror, too.

  The bride’s pale forehead wrinkled.

  “I’ll fall on my face if I wear these, I swear.”

  Noa felt a flicker of agitation that the bride did not see the absurdity of the whole situation, not even a little. Seeing a pair of old canvas sneakers kicked off at the foot of the bed, she pointed.

  “How about those?”

  The bride began to laugh. Her eyes were shining. She gave the impression of being vaguely crazy. She kicked her feet free of the high heels, hitched up her train, and, restored to her natural agility, leaped across the room. Her muscular body, trained to swim leagues and exert dominion over horses, to win and never to lose, gave the impression of knowing itself better than her mind. She slipped her feet into the sneakers without bothering with the laces, and danced over to the mirrored closets. But as she surveyed her reflection, the laugh disappeared from her twisted mouth.

  A long silence passed. Then the bride met Noa’s eyes in the mirror.

  “You’re not with the caterer,” she said darkly.

  Noa said nothing.

  “I can tell from the dirt under your nails.”

  It was true: the moons under her fingernails were black. It was like that all summer, the potting soil washed clean only when she swam.

  Noa shrugged, unbothered by being caught out in a lie. An inner sense of her own abundant reason often led her to see others as lacking in the same, a quality she had inherited from Leonard, and which Gabe had often pointed out was a form of superiority. But wasn’t everyone convinced of their own unimpeachable reason? Not everyone, Gabe had said; most leave open the possibility that they might be wrong, and at the very least that other ways of thinking are not lunacy. Noa accepted his point, if only to demonstrate her openness to other people’s thinking. This, too, was not original to her: Leonard, when accused of obstinacy, could be magnanimous for the rest of the day, until he forgot and became himself again.

  “I didn’t want to raise your fury about the flowers. Your mother said you wouldn’t like the bouquets. There’s no lilac, and they’re too small and need to be redone. We’re waiting for the owner to deliver more flowers.”

  “My mother,” the bride groaned, as if she’d just been reminded of bad news. But she didn’t say more, and, called back to the task at hand, lifted a mass of gauzy material from where it lay on her bed and handed it to Noa. The veil was attached to a tortoiseshell comb, and the bride turned her back again, this time so that Noa could see where to slide it into the coiffed hair, half gathered up with bobby pins. It was stiff from spray, and Noa had to push hard to work the teeth of the comb into the mass. Finally it was secure, and the bride turned back around and lowered her chin solemnly, waiting for the veil to be lifted over her face. Taken by the power of the ritual, she closed her eyes. Her features turned soft and vague as they disappeared behind the lace, and Noa felt a shiver, too, as if she really were to be the last to look upon the bride’s face as it was then, before whatever was to happen—the undertaking of grave responsibility, the induction into secret wisdom—that would change it afterward. Slowly the bride turned to look at herself in the mirror, and Noa turned, too, surprised at her own reflection, tall and lanky, with flat chest and dirt under her nails, suddenly boyish, as if all her femininity had been stolen by the bride in virginal white lace.

  But there was no time to study the changes in themselves further, because the voice of the bride’s mother, shrill with the anxiety of imp
erfection, or still deeper than that, of losing her only child to loyalties greater than the one to her, rang out from the bottom of the stairs. Their eyes met in the mirror, and much passed between them in that moment that Noa didn’t fully understand. She offered a mumbled good-luck to the bride, and hurried out of the bedroom, hiding out in the bathroom until the mother of the bride had passed before making her way downstairs again and out to the van.

  By the time they got back to the florist shop, it was already three o’clock, but there was more work to do. The fires hadn’t put much of a pause to the passion, longing, grief, or simple desire to mark anniversaries, it seemed, all of which called for flowers. Short of staff, Noa’s boss, Ciara, asked her to stay on until all the orders were complete at well past seven. The radio spilled news of the fires nonstop: two more firemen had lost their lives, and hundreds more homes had been evacuated. Ciara, who years ago had lost a son to brain cancer and was used to variance between her private life and the celebrations of others, worked silently alongside her at the cutting table. When Noa had finished the last bouquet, a tropical affair with fronds and gaudy birds of paradise, she rinsed her hands in the enormous metal sink. Scrubbing her nails, she thought of the bride, who must already have been married by now.

  Only when she got into her car did she see the envelope from the Supreme Court lying on the passenger seat, and remember her promise to the rabbi. She was exhausted, and the sadness that had been welling in her chest now begged to be relieved by the familiar smell of home, where she could collapse on the sofa and watch TV. But the rabbi was leaving for Poland tomorrow, and without the necessary paperwork, nothing would be final. He had wanted everything to be in order: the disorder of what had been broken and upended, annulled and canceled, transformed magically into order by the simple filing of the paperwork in the official archives of the Jewish court. And though Noa had no desire to aid and abet this granting of order to what she knew would long remain, might always remain, a disorder in her heart, she also did not wish to be the one to stand in its way. She entered the address the rabbi had given her into her phone, ignoring the missed calls and texts that had come from her parents earlier in the day. She had repeated her decision, and eventually they’d had to accept it. Being late where they were, and the fires no closer, each must have gone off to sleep, since her phone had been quiet for hours. Now she saw that the address, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, was only twenty minutes away, not far from the synagogue where the rabbi had performed—if performed was the right word—the get. And though she knew it might take longer if the closure of roads had caused more traffic than predicted, she turned the wheel in the direction the GPS instructed.