World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  “How ’bout we go rock climbing,” Noelle says, this to Mark Hathaway, Noelle guiding Mark’s hand beneath her shirt, Mark, only thirteen, a year younger than she is. Noelle’s heart goes out to the boys like this, the timid ones, like birds, the peach fuzz on Mark’s cheeks, the two of them in the audiovisual room where Mark spends most of his time, because he’s vice chair of the AV squad, shining the strobe lights on the students during the productions of Guys and Dolls and Our Town. Noelle runs her hands across Mark’s body, the smooth hairlessness of him, thinking of her mother back in medical school sticking her hands inside a cadaver. Mark is used to shining the lights on others, only now, with Noelle, the lights are on him and he wants them off; he doesn’t believe in kissing a girl with the lights on. But Noelle wants to see him; she won’t do anything with Mark unless she can watch what they’re doing. “How ’bout we go spelunking,” Noelle says, and she guides Mark’s hand down the inside of her jeans under the waistband of her panties. And it’s true what the boys say about her, Noelle, just thinking about you makes me come, because Noelle can see it on Mark’s face, the mere anticipation has caused him to ejaculate, and it’s as if Mark has forgotten his cue and everyone onstage is looking up at him, and Mark, humiliated, runs out, leaving Noelle alone, and now Mark has told the rest of the school what Noelle said, How ’bout we go spelunking.

  Soon everyone is saying it, the boys chanting it in Mr. Hampton’s English class and along West Boston Post Road, waiting for their parents to retrieve them from band practice. They say it on the way home from synagogue and church, seeing Noelle in a white bikini in front of her parents’ house sunning herself on a lawn chair, placing a halo of tinfoil around her neck so the sun will reflect off it to give her a better tan, her red hair settling in the crevice between her breasts. Hey, Noelle, how ’bout we go spelunking. And Noelle just laughs.

  She does it everywhere with these boys, even in her parents’ house, in her bedroom when they’re asleep, and once in her parents’ bed when they were out, with a boy named Stanley, who said, “Doesn’t it creep you out, doing it in your parents’ bed?” but Noelle simply shrugged. Noelle’s enterprising, the boys say. She makes do with what she can. She’s had sex standing in the school elevator, having learned how to stop the elevator between floors, elevators having always been her thing. (One Halloween, when her family still lived in Manhattan, she told Rudolph, the elevator man, he could go home for the night, and she, at twelve, took over for him, offering the tenants candy and other trick-or-treats as she took them up to their apartments) Her parents moved to Westchester to keep her out of trouble, but there’s plenty of trouble to be found in Westchester, Noelle caught with the construction worker, Jimmy, twenty-three, blond and handsome, with that tool belt dangling from his slim waist, and, frankly, Noelle is tired of high school boys, Noelle who feels in that instant when a guy is about to come, in that moment of rapture that crosses his face, that everything’s okay and somebody loves her. She stands in the glaring light, knock-kneed as a foal, saying through the simple stance, the fragile pose, Here I am, do what you want with me.

  Noelle the slattern. Lubricious Noelle. Licentious. Lascivious. Wanton. Slut. Noelle knows these words, having taken Ms. Pickens’s vocabulary-building class, the boys in the hallway staring up at her from their Barron’s books as she walks insouciantly by. Noelle doing her best to study for the SAT, the way her sisters are doing, Clarissa and Lily off to Yale and Princeton while Noelle is going nowhere (Nowhere Noelle is how she thinks of herself, up in her bedroom, crying, alone). But then she reminds herself that no one is calling out her sisters’ names at night and no one is staying up late to help them with their math homework the way her mother is doing with her. But her mother loses patience with her; it’s hard for her to understand how school doesn’t come easily to Noelle. Her mother graduated number one in her class from the University of Pennsylvania and then again from NYU Medical School; like Clarissa and Lily, she has never failed at anything in her life.

  “In that case,” Noelle says, “why don’t you take my test for me?”

  “I can’t, sweetie.”

  But in that I can’t, Noelle’s hears I would if I could, and she hates her mother for having no faith in her. “Go ahead,” she says. “Tell me you hate me.”

  “How could you even think that?”

  “You wish I’d never been born.” Then Noelle starts to cry, and she says, “Why do I fuck everything up?” because there’s something about her, she thinks, that’s at core unknowable, unlovable.

  Even now, looking back, she wonders what her parents could have done differently. They tried counselors and therapists. They sent her to a summer camp for troubled youth. They punished her. They bribed her. But nothing worked.

  She was twenty-five when she arrived in Israel. It was random that she landed there, another stop on a round-the-world plane ticket. She figured she’d work on a kibbutz, wake up at four in the morning to pick melons, then sleep away the afternoons with the other volunteers. She’d fall in love with an Israeli air force pilot, get up in the morning and put on his uniform and march like a soldier through the streets.

  “Look at me.” Ari has dumped his pretzel twists into his ginger ale and is admiring how they float.

  “Ari!” she says, then thinks better of it. It’s a twelve-hour flight; at a certain point you have to surrender.

  “They look like fish,” Ari says, peering into his cup of pretzels.

  Dov says, “You put pretzels in soda and you get Goldfish.”

  “Not the food,” Akiva says. “Actual fish.” He looks up at his brothers. “Okay,” he says, “who can tell me what’s happening in Israel right now?”

  “People are playing soccer,” Dov says.

  “They probably are, but what I meant is, who can tell me what time it is?”

  No one answers him.

  “I’ll give you a hint. London is five hours later than Boston, and Jerusalem is two hours later than that.”

  “In Israel, people are asleep,” Yoni says.

  “The kids might be,” Akiva says. “But the grownups are eating dinner, or sitting at a café.”

  On the screen above their seats, CNN is broadcasting NBA highlights, and Akiva snaps to attention. Like other Israeli basketball fans, he dreams that an Israeli will play in the NBA, though his real dream is to be that Israeli. He has memorized the names of the Israeli basketball players who almost made it to the NBA, and he has become a fan of the University of Connecticut, whose former star, Doron Sheffer, was drafted by the Los Angeles Clippers, only to accept a safer, better offer from Maccabi Tel Aviv. In a few years, the NBA will have its first Israeli player, but Akiva doesn’t know this yet, so it’s Sheffer who preoccupies him, Sheffer, who played for the University of Connecticut before Akiva was even born. But Akiva acts as if he’d been alive then, and at eight he, too, shares the burden of Sheffer’s failure. Akiva sees America as all-basketball-all-the-time, so when he meets an American who displays no interest in the sport he can’t help but feel that the person’s pulling his leg. He’s happy in Israel; it’s his home. Yet he believes that his parents, in moving to Jerusalem, voluntarily left heaven for the false consolations of earth. It’s as if in making aliyah they left the NBA itself, and so he inquires about their lives in the United States, thinking there must be something more than what his mother has told him, that they’re Jews and they want to live in the Jewish homeland.

  Occasionally, Akiva will spot a tall African American on the street, a former NBA player extending his career and given, as Israeli law requires, a quickie conversion, and he will ask the player for his autograph. But he’s always being frustrated. Just last month, when Noelle told him about their trip, he said, “Why does it have to be during the summer?” Meaning why not during the NBA season when he could watch a game live? Another time, Noelle said. But when Akiva persisted, she explained to him about July Fourth, American Independence Day. “A long weekend,” she said, though this year
July Fourth falls in the middle of the week. Every weekend in America is long, she explained. It’s one of the things she misses most about the States—sleeping in late on Sundays when she was a girl, bagels and whitefish, afternoons at her parents’ house sunning herself in the yard next to her mother’s bougainvillea—because in Israel Sunday is a workday like any other day of the week. Leo’s yahrzeit was coming up, she explained, which made it a more complicated occasion. “Bittersweet,” she said, realizing as she said this that Akiva didn’t understand what the word meant. But he pretended he did, or simply chose not to ask, which is what he always does when he doesn’t wish to discuss something. Noelle would like to talk to the children about Leo, but what is there to say? So many senseless deaths. Why compound them with another one? It’s Akiva she’s most tempted to talk to, because he’s older and might understand, and because he has memories of Leo, though it’s hard to know what he remembers and what he has gleaned from the stories she has told him and from the photograph of Leo, which stands on the shelf in their living room, her brother’s face looking down at them like some imperious god. But then she reminds herself that Akiva’s only eight, which was why when he said, “Well, I wish he’d died during the NBA season,” she let it pass.

  “Is there a basketball hoop at Grandma and Grandpa’s?” he asks now.

  She shakes her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Probably because Grandma and Grandpa don’t play basketball.” There was once a hoop in the driveway, but Leo and his friends used to stand on each other’s shoulders and grab onto the rim, and eventually they brought it down. The summer before he died, there was talk of putting up a new hoop, but it never happened, and now the court remains as it was, the downward slope of concrete going to the garage, the bare wooden backboard with the holes where the rim hung, the discoloration from the wind and rain, from the years of balls shot against it. “The next-door neighbors have a hoop.”

  “Will they let me use it?”

  “Maybe,” she says. “If you ask nicely.”

  Ari starts to cry. To distract him, Noelle devises a game that involves figuring out what portion of the trip has elapsed, but because Akiva is getting all the answers right, his brothers lose interest.

  Then they’re on to the next game, this one led by Amram, which involves guessing which of the passengers are undercover; there are rumored to be soldiers on every El Al flight. But the boys go about this too loudly (“That guy in the brown pants!” Yoni calls out), and Noelle is forced to make them stop.

  The children order Sprites, their fourth of the trip, and Noelle says, “That’s enough, kids, you’ve had too much soda already,” but the flight attendant has already poured the drinks, and Amram says, “It’s an airplane flight, a special occasion,” and the boys all cheer and gulp down their sodas before their father can change his mind.

  A couple of people wearing yarmulkes walk down the aisle looking for men to help make a minyan, and Amram gets up and joins them. Noelle doesn’t count for a minyan, but she decides to pray, too, doing so quietly from her seat.

  Judaism, Lily likes to say: just another installment in the random life of Noelle Glucksman. (Lily was the one who wasn’t surprised when they learned after months of not hearing from her that Noelle, at twenty-six, had become an Orthodox Jew, living in Jerusalem, engaged to Amram.) Hey, Noelle, what are you, deaf? This when Noelle was a mere six and Lily seven, and sometimes Lily would shout and Noelle seemed not to hear her. Noelle ten and Lily eleven, Lily singing The Who to her, changing the words to teenage spaceman. In the morning when the alarm went off, Noelle slept right through it. And there Lily was again, coming out of the shower, screaming, “Would you turn off the fucking alarm, Noelle!”

  It turned out Noelle did have a hearing problem, discovered when she was a freshman in high school, and maybe that was why she was doing so badly in school: she couldn’t hear what the teacher was saying. There had been hints of this earlier, Noelle at seven saying to her mother, “Why if people have two ears do they only hear out of one?”

  “What are you talking about?” her mother said, but Noelle insisted she was only joking.

  At fourteen, when she went to the audiologist and discovered she had moderate hearing loss in her right ear and a little in her left ear too, Noelle began to blame everything on her hearing loss. She had a slight lisp, which she’d always attributed to an overbite, but now, sitting in the ENT’s office going over the results of her test, she became convinced that her lisp was because she couldn’t hear well. She was listening to the doctor even as she wasn’t listening to him, turning him off as she’d learned to do, and when he asked her if she’d be willing to wear a hearing aid, she said, “Sure,” even as she was thinking, No way I’m wearing a hearing aid, hearing aids are for old people.

  Later, at home, she overheard Clarissa and Lily talking about her.

  “Now are you proud of yourself?” Clarissa said. “Saying, ‘What are you, deaf?’ She’s hard of hearing.”

  “Oh, come on, Clarissa,” Lily said. “She’s faking it.”

  How, Noelle wondered, did Lily know? Although she wasn’t faking it, her hearing loss wasn’t as great as the doctor believed, because when the audiologist tested her she intentionally got some of the answers wrong. It was the same way with school. She wasn’t an A student and would never be one. But if she tried harder she could have gotten B’s. But who wanted B’s? You got B’s and no one noticed you. She would get C’s and D’s. She’d flunk out. She’d get left back.

  Home from the audiologist, she asked her parents to enroll her in a sign-language course. At first they refused, saying she needed to focus on high school, but then they struck a deal with her that if she did better in her classes they’d let her take sign language. And for a time her grades improved.

  Once she saw a group of deaf teenagers on her subway car, and though her signing had gotten better, she still had trouble following them. She watched them, glanced away, then watched them again until, finally, one of them shouted, “Stop staring at us!” her voice as high-pitched as a hyena’s.

  She went to a party sponsored by the New York Association for the Deaf, but not knowing anyone, she stood in the corner sipping a beer, feeling excluded and alone. She would use sex, she thought; she’d make a pass at someone. But she found herself, a hearing person among the deaf, unusually self-conscious in front of the guys, and when she tried to approach one she was convinced all the girls were staring at her, accusing her of trying to steal one of their own when all she wanted was to talk to somebody. Then the dance music came on—everyone danced by feeling the vibrations beneath their feet—but it was so loud she couldn’t tolerate it, and she had to go out onto the balcony. Standing next to the chips and the keg of beer, watching everyone gesture to each other, the beautiful choreography of sign language, she resolved to go back inside and dance, thinking if she exposed her ears to the noise maybe she would really become deaf.

  At home, she tried to facilitate the process. She practiced backflips on her bed, treating the mattress as a trampoline, and she began to do this with Q-tips in her ears, hoping to block out the world of sound, but also thinking what if she slipped and landed on her side, plunging the Q-tip into her ear.

  She learned about someone who had gone deaf at age twelve and could read lips so well you couldn’t tell she was deaf. She was a graduate student at Columbia and taught a section of introductory European history. She could even talk on the telephone; she would be on one receiver and her roommate would be on the other repeating what the person said, and when she spoke there was no lag time. Noelle tracked her down, pretending she was a student studying for her midterm, until, revealing she didn’t know anything about European history, she heard the woman ask who she was, and she panicked and hung up.

  For days after that she felt disgusted by herself. She was always impersonating people: her sisters, her mother, the girls at school. Only in a boy’s arms: that was the one time she felt she belon
ged, huddled like a duck in the AV room, attending to him, the look on his face, the grimace, the Oh, Noelle, oh, God, the feeling that they’d melded. But then he would roll off her and she’d be alone again, a lump of shame, and his gaze was slack and distant, his eyes like sea glass, and she swore she would never do it again, never have sex with another boy, but then the next one came along and she convinced herself this one would be different.

  Even as a baby she was self-punishing. She would tug on her hair and squeeze her stomach. As a teenager, she developed trichotillomania; she pulled out clumps of her own hair. Sometimes she thinks she was simply born this way. Other times she traces it back to Leo. She was four when her mother got pregnant again, and from the start of the pregnancy there were complications. Finally, labor was induced at thirty weeks. In the delivery room, Leo’s heart rate plummeted, the umbilical cord was noosed around the baby’s throat, an emergency C-section had to be performed. There was some question about loss of oxygen. Leo developed late; he didn’t walk until twenty months and he spoke even later. The doctors said there might be brain damage, maybe simply learning disabilities, maybe nothing at all. Those first few weeks, no one except Noelle’s parents was allowed to handle him. The quiet, the delicacy, her mother sick, the baby sick, the baby’s sleeping, don’t wake the baby, don’t disturb the baby, don’t hold the baby, don’t drop the baby. Always the baby, as if it were hubris to give him a name. Don’t touch the baby, as if telescoping to Noelle’s most unspeakable thoughts: her wish to drop the baby, to kill the baby, to be the baby. It was what she’d been her whole life; she’d always assumed she’d continue to be that.

  She was the last one to see Leo alive. He spent Shabbat with her and Amram in Jerusalem, and a few days later, in Iraq, he was abducted. Then came the week when the family was on TV, pleading with his captors for his release, handsome, buoyant Leo looking drugged. And when his body was flown home, President Bush called him a martyr in the war to rid the world of evil. He invited Noelle’s family to the White House. Publicly, her mother refused to go. She wouldn’t allow her son to be used that way, to become an instrument in the service of the war.