The Laws of Gravity

by Liz Rosenberg

  “What’s the matter?” he’d asked. “You don’t like it? Wrong color?”

  “No, no, it’s beautiful,” she said, chuckling. “But I’m allergic to angora. If I wore this I’d stop breathing in an hour.”

  It was Mimi she went out to lunch with, and shopping, and to the movies; Mimi she asked for when she phoned late at night. Mimi drove her to the chemo appointments when Jay was working, chauffeured her back home, tucked her in bed, comforted her, cheered her on. Ari tried not to resent any of it. But it was hard. He had been robbed of one of the few intimate friends he had ever had. Now he felt clumsy around her, blundering.

  “Your hair looks nice,” he said. “Different hairstyle.” Actually, he thought her hair had lost some of its usual luster.

  “Oh, this.” She rubbed the top of her head, and to his horror, the red hair moved at the scalp. “It’s a wig,” she said. She smiled ruefully. “How’s business?” she asked in her soft voice.

  “Awesome,” Ari said automatically. Then, realizing he was speaking to his blood relative and not to a prospective customer, he said, “Slow as hell. Mortgages are tight right now—people keep waiting for the rates to go down, and the banks are acting crazy. Of course, I deal with commercial clients, so I’m protected from most of that. Can’t complain.”

  “You still traveling a lot?”

  “Constantly,” Ari said. “I’m exhausted. I feel like I live in my car.” Upstairs, the shower water abruptly shut off. “How are you feeling?” The words sounded too loud, as if he had shouted the question at her, but Nicole smiled.

  “Exhausted. The latest chemo makes me sick as a dog. I feel like I live at the doctor’s office.”

  “I’ll bet,” he said. “If there’s anything I can ever do—”

  “I’ll let you know,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “I mean it,” he persisted. “I already saved your life once when we were kids, you know. I’d do it again.”

  “So you say,” she answered, but the smile lingered at the corners of her lips. Her lips were full, almost pouty. She wore lipstick the color of cranberries.

  “I did save you,” he said. “You were drowning.”

  “Why don’t I remember it?” she said. “Was this Cape Cod or Montauk?”

  “Montauk Point,” he said. “The Atlantic Ocean.”

  “Figures.”

  “What does that mean?” Ari said.

  “Nothing, just—didn’t I always get sick when we went to Montauk?”

  “You got sick wherever we went. You were always getting stomach bugs. This time you almost drowned. You swam out too far. I dragged you all the way back to shore.”

  “Funny how I don’t remember. I must have blocked it out.” She moved her glass of lemonade around on the kitchen table. One wet ring blurred into another. The ammonites glimmered bluish black, with flashes of rainbow coloration like an opal. Nearly everything in the house was extraordinary in some way, and custom-made. It struck Nikki as funny because her cousin had always been such an ordinary kid. Not anymore. Even his suits and shirts were bespoke. Ari was a wine aficionado with a temperature-controlled wine cellar. He cooked large, lavish meals. He redecorated the house every few years, each time more extravagantly than the last.

  He doesn’t know what to do with his money, so he spends it, Mimi had told her. I think we should just stuff a few pillows with thousand-dollar bills and be done with it.

  “I do remember you hanging my doll,” Nicole said to Ari now.

  “Oh, my God. One time. One bad thing.”

  “It’s a vivid memory,” she said, teasing him. “You made a noose and everything.”

  “Al put me up to it,” Ari protested. Big Al, the eldest cousin, Ari’s older brother, had been rough and sometimes mean. He’d been killed in a boating accident ten years earlier.

  “Easy to blame everything on Big Al now,” she said. “Better not let that happen when I’m gone.” The scar on the inside of her wrist glimmered like a streak of light.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Ari said. “The doctors say the leukemia and lymphoma are chronic, not terminal. Remember?”

  “I’m not responding to any of the treatments,” she said. “That’s why they switched from Tasigna to the chemo.”

  “I never found you unresponsive,” he said. It sounded suggestive. He flushed and backpedaled. “I mean—you will,” he said. “I’m sure you will.” He heard his wife open the closet door, rolling it in its long track, then slide it closed again. Soon he would hear her light footsteps on the stairs, her easy laughter. He both longed for and dreaded her interruption of this rare moment of conversation alone.

  “Listen, Nikki,” he said, leaning forward. He was looking straight at Nicole now, directly into her dark brown eyes, which were as wide open as a child’s, and seemed almost frightened, certainly startled. She reminded him of a deer, he realized. Any second she might unfreeze, change direction, and bound away.

  He put his hand over her hand, pinning it down. “If there’s anything I can ever do to help, I want you to tell me,” he said. “I’m serious. We’re family. Nothing will ever change that.”

  His hand was brown and square and muscular. It made her uneasy, the way he was holding her, staring intensely into her eyes. She stood it as long as she could—just a couple of seconds—then slid her own thin hand away.

  The expression on his face shifted. He seemed at that moment actually ugly, his face heavy and resentful. Ari was not yet forty, but his hair, she suddenly noticed, was strongly threaded with silver. His chin sagged, he was starting to get jowls. “Right,” he said. He looked exactly like his father, her uncle Charlie, a squat bullfrog’s look on his normally handsome face. He squinted, as if he were in the throes of one of his headaches. Nicole would look back at this moment in Ari’s kitchen and replay it again and again, as the seed of so much that would follow.

  “Thank you, Ari,” she added quickly. She reached out to touch him. He sat back and folded his arms. “You’ve always been so generous.” It was true. Ari had bought Daisy an elaborate swing set for her fifth birthday, with swings and slides and fancy red cedar climbing equipment, something far nicer than they could have afforded on Jay’s salary. Ari had picked up more restaurant tabs than Nikki could count, treated them to plays and concerts, pretending a client had given him the tickets, pretending they’d cost nothing.

  But Ari was already looking out the back window again, picking at his upper lip, the spitting image of his father. Silence dropped down between them like a curtain. It was not the comfortable silence of old friends and relations, but a dull wordlessness. The thing held suspended between them, delicate as a spider’s web, whatever it was, in that moment, whatever assurance he had wanted, whatever he had hoped for—now hung broken, too tiny to detect or mend.

  MAY 2011

  Flying

  Daisy and Julian were playing at Daisy’s house, which was always less fun than his own house. There was no swimming pool, for one thing. No video games, no large-screen TV, no basement movie theater, no rec room, and Daisy always wanted to play Barbies. If any of Julian’s friends had known he sometimes still played Barbies with his little girl cousin, he might as well have packed up and moved to a new school. Luckily he went to Glen Cove, Daisy lived in Huntington.

  Julian was turning eleven that June. He was one of the tallest kids in the fifth grade. He had a face that looked at one instant like an grown-up’s, and the next like he was still a little kid—there was an openness about his features, a purity of expression, and he still dressed like an elementary school kid in elastic-banded sweat pants and Velcro shoes: “to save time,” he said.

  He wanted to be an efficiency expert when he grew up. He went to school with his pajamas on under his clothes for this reason. “Why waste time changing clothes twice?” he asked. He was fascinated by the whole idea of saving time, minute by minute. He liked to time himself in the shower. His best time so far was two minutes and forty-eight seconds. His
favorite possession was a waterproof stopwatch with a built-in compass, calendar, and calculator. Julian laughed like an adult, in short, surprised barks. The sharpness of his profile—he already had a long, beaked nose like his father’s—made him sometimes look like a teenager, sometimes like a wise old man. Around his friends he said little, but he was the leader of most groups, from school to sports to Hebrew school. He had won the leadership award in his fifth-grade class.

  “Are you sure you want to invite Daisy to your birthday party?” Ari had asked Julian earlier that week. “She’ll be so much younger and smaller than everyone else. How much fun is she going to have?”

  “I’m sure,” Julian said.

  “Maybe we could have a separate family get-together, go out to dinner someplace fancy. Someplace elegant. Daisy might like that better.” Ari was smiling his wide salesman smile, doing his best to convince.

  “I’m super sure, Dad. We can still do that, too. She’s invited to my party, I’m not going to hurt her feelings.”

  “But—”

  Julian held up one small broad hand, palm out, like a traffic cop. “Drop it.”

  Now Julian watched Daisy lay out all her dolls. He pushed his black-rimmed spectacles back up—they were always sliding down, giving him a professorial air. Eleven Barbie dolls and one lone Ken doll, a token male in a sea of overdressed females.

  This moment was just the opposite of his upcoming paintball birthday party, which was going to be a testosterone fest in June in the woods in Great Neck. Daisy would just sit on a bench and watch, he was pretty sure. She might decide to play for a little while. He’d slaughter anyone who tried to nail her with a paintball. That paint stuff could sting. It wasn’t his idea of fun. Julian would rather have herded everyone into the basement for a Charlie Chaplin film festival, with gourmet popcorn and movie-themed party favors, but his father had researched all the Long Island paintball venues and come up with the best one, with state-of-the-art equipment, the one that had been written up in New York magazine. So—paintball it was.

  Julian tried to shove the Ken doll’s feet into a pair of loafers, hoping they were the right size. They were not. Everything else was a narrow high heel in silver or hot pink.

  “This is the mommy doll,” Daisy said, choosing her red-haired Stacey doll, the hair in a 1950s-style flip, wearing a blue-flowered housecoat. “She’s lying down because she doesn’t feel good.” She placed her carefully down on a pink-and-yellow-striped toiletry case, which Daisy pretended was a sofa.

  Julian laughed. “Mommies don’t lie down. They stand up and tell jokes.”

  “Yes, they do. Mine does.” Her dark eyes, fixed on his, looked worried and deep, deep, almost fathomless. Daisy’s skin was tawny; her hair had grown past her shoulders and halfway down her back. He was fascinated by her red hair. It was as if it were made up of hundreds of silky threads, each one a slightly different color—russet and gold, apricot and cherry red, all cascading in a coppery waterfall. She was going to be gorgeous, he thought, feeling almost angry about it. He would have to protect her—her whole life, creeps were going to be chasing after her.

  As if she had read his mind, she grabbed his hand and hung on to it, squeezing it so hard it actually hurt him, made him say, “Hey!” before he realized she was not doing it to be tough.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “What are you scared about?” he said, like he didn’t know. “Don’t be scared. Your mom’s going to be fine. Everyone says so.”

  “But what if they’re wrong?” she said. “What if she isn’t fine? Sometimes I think they’re all wrong, and she’s going to die. Who will take care of me?”

  Julian laid the Ken doll down on the make-believe sofa. “Your dad will. My family. All of us. Look, Daisy, look at me.”

  But she wouldn’t look at him. She had picked up the tiny brown toy loafers and was working the Ken doll’s feet into them toe first, then stretching the brown plastic over the heels. Her hair glimmered in the light.

  Julian scootched forward and put his arm around his cousin. She didn’t exactly lean into him, but she didn’t pull away, either. The only time she ever really showed affection was when you were saying good-bye, or when she was about to go to sleep. Then she would cling to you like a monkey.

  “I will always take care of you,” he told her. “You don’t ever have to worry. Ever.”

  “Okay.” She raised the Ken doll up in the air like a trophy. “See?” she said. “The shoes fit fine. You just have to know how to do it. You have to pay close attention.”

  Later, they went into her backyard and Daisy made Julian push her on the old tire swing. It always made him nervous; he wished the thing had a seatbelt or something.

  “Make it go super-fast!” she said.

  “Right,” he said, giving it a slight push.

  “Not like that.” She jumped off the tire and hung on to two of the ropes that held it suspended from the maple tree. She raced around and around in a circle, leaning back, hanging onto the ropes. It made him dizzy and sick to his stomach to watch. Then, suddenly, both feet left the ground and she was whirling around like a dervish on top of the tire, legs curved, head thrown back, her red hair whipping across her face, in a blur of motion.

  “Don’t,” he pleaded. “Daisy, slow down.”

  But she was too busy flying.

  “So Sam runs into his old friend Irving on the street and says, ‘Irving, I got a new hobby.’” Mimi pronounced it with a guttural wet Yiddish ch sound—“chobby.” She was trying to feed Arianna, who kept twisting her round little head away, lips tight.

  “ ‘What kind of hobby?’ Irving asks.

  “ ‘I keep bees,’ Sam says.

  “ ‘Bees? That’s a hobby? You keep them in the house—don’t they sting you?’

  “ ‘Nah,’ says Sam. ‘I keep them in the bedroom.’

  “ ‘In the bedroom? They don’t fly around and sting you?’

  “ ‘Nah,’ says Sam. ‘I keep them in the closet.’

  “ ‘In the closet?’ Irving says. ‘Don’t they get into your clothes?’

  “ ‘I keep them in a sealed box.’

  “ ‘Don’t they die?’ Irving asks.

  “ ‘Fock ’em,’ Sam says. ‘It’s just a hobby.’”

  As if on cue, Arianna seized the bowl of rice cereal and dumped it on the kitchen floor.

  “Everybody’s a critic,” Mimi said.

  Nicole laughed, that lovely contagious laugh of hers, and the baby laughed, too. Her laugh sounded like heh-heh-heh. It startled the two women and made them laugh all over again.

  But there was a darker something behind Nicole’s eyes, Mimi thought. Something akin to desperation, a look that Mimi had never seen in her best friend before, not in all the years they’d known each other, not even these last few hard months after the diagnosis. Mimi felt a heaviness in the pit of her own stomach. Nicole kept toying with the salt and pepper shakers on the table, swapping them around, back and forth. She seemed on the verge of asking for something. What could she possibly want that Mimi would not instantly give?

  Still, Mimi was scared. Her instinct, normally so loving, was to run and hide. “I wish you’d come with me to the elder hostel,” Mimi said to cover over the silence. “Daisy would love it there. They have a huge swimming pool, full of old Jews bobbing around. Enough chlorine to kill any germ within a hundred-mile radius. Nineteen-fifties-style elegance. But a tough crowd. Very tough. You know the joke: Three cranky old Jewish women are eating lunch. Constant complaining. The waiter comes by at the end and says, ‘Well, ladies, was anything all right?’ I need you there with me. We can hang out by the pool and breathe chlorine fumes.”

  “Tempting,” Nicole said. “Let me think about it, okay?”

  “You’re done with treatments for now, aren’t you?” Mimi asked.

  “For now,” Nicole said. “But it makes me nervous to be far away from the hospitals I know.” She made a wry face. “I’ll fit
right in at an elder hostel. Hobbling around. Afraid to leave my doctors.” She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. The baby tried to imitate her.

  “This baby will not eat,” Mimi said. “Seriously. Not a bite. She seems offended by the sight of a spoon.” To demonstrate, she lifted a spoon and brought it close to her daughter’s little lips. Arianna looked like she was about to cry, swatted it away.

  “Hey,” Nicole said, interested. She sat up a little straighter.

  “All she does is drink from a bottle.”

  “You’re not breast-feeding her anymore?”

  “Can’t,” Mimi said. “She bites.”

  Nicole chuckled and shook her head.

  “The kid’s got teeth, and she’s not afraid to use them. Top and bottom. I’ve got the scars to prove it,” Mimi said.

  “But she really won’t eat?”

  Mimi lifted the spoon again. The baby tightened her lips.

  “How old is she now?”

  They both bent close to the baby, as if examining an interesting specimen. Her hair was dark, like her father’s, and springy.

  “Almost fourteen months. I’m going nuts. She’s chugging eight bottles a day. She’s still waking up every four hours during the night. She’s exhausted, I’m exhausted, Ari’s acting like a son of a bitch. He hates it when he can’t fix everything. Does she look underweight? I’m honestly afraid she’s starving.”

  “Have you tried finger foods? Maybe she just doesn’t like silverware.” Nicole put one hand under the baby’s face and tilted it up. “Is that right, Rianna? Are you a little savage like your auntie Nicole?”

  Arianna was named after her father, in defiance of Jewish custom never to name a child after a living parent—but no one ever called her anything but Rianna, or sometimes, Ana.