World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  The happy girlfriend, Marilyn called Thisbe. Why? Because she was blond and pretty and from California? Because she didn’t have an eating disorder? Thisbe was tempted to protest that she wasn’t happy and to argue, at the same time, that happiness was nothing to be ashamed of, both of which led her down a path she didn’t wish to take, of defending herself to her boyfriend’s mother. What had Marilyn been hoping for? That Leo would marry Nora? It should be illegal, Thisbe thinks, to marry someone you dated in high school; marrying someone you dated in college is hard enough. The story goes that after Thisbe was born her parents made placenta soup. It was a ludicrous ritual, but this was Santa Cruz in the 1970s, when everyone was engaged in ludicrous rituals. And she was only a few days old at the time: it wasn’t her idea to make placenta soup. But Marilyn saw this story as confirmation. Of what? Thisbe thinks. That she’s a pagan? That she wasn’t worthy of Marilyn’s darling son? From the start, David was more generous—Thisbe likes David—but he was overshadowed by Marilyn, who has the larger, blunter personality. Over time, Thisbe grew fonder of Marilyn, but for years she felt as if she were competing with the ghost of Nora and with the photos of her that still remained in the house long after Leo and she had broken up. Standing in the hallway in front of the family photos, Thisbe feels vindicated, but she experiences it as false consolation, because now that she’s been given such a prominent place on the mantel, she isn’t sure she wants to be there.

  David comes up the stairs now, carrying her suitcases. She doesn’t know where she’ll be sleeping, but as he guides her through the long corridor, she realizes he’s leading her to Leo’s old bedroom. They’re halfway down the hall before she can so much as expel a breath.

  “Is there—”

  “I just thought …”

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “David, you don’t need to apologize.”

  “Mi casa su casa.”

  “I know …”

  It’s a big house, he reminds her. There’s the basement and the attic and the other bedrooms. But the truth, he admits, is that with so many people coming he hasn’t given much thought to who will sleep where. Then, as if to belie his claim about the size of the house, he bumps into her in the hallway. He’s still holding her suitcases, one in each hand like a set of weights, and they do a clumsy dance to escape each other.

  Now they retrace their steps through the hall and down the stairs, where, in the basement, a bed has been made and where David deposits her suitcases. “Is this all right?”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “Calder can sleep here as well.”

  Thisbe starts to unpack, but then the doorbell rings and she goes upstairs to find Lily, Noelle, Amram, and the boys standing in the foyer with their luggage.

  David hugs Lily, Noelle, and the boys. He shakes Amram’s hand.

  Marilyn, behind him, lines up her grandsons. “You kids are huge. Positively mammoth. What have they been feeding you in Jerusalem?”

  “Falafel,” Akiva says.

  “Beans make you grow,” Noelle says, shrugging, and she reaches down to grab a suitcase.

  It isn’t until they’re inside that Marilyn realizes they’re not all there. “Where’s Clarissa and Nathaniel?”

  “Beats me,” Lily says.

  “What do you mean, beats you?”

  “She left a message saying she’d meet us at the house. I guess she’s running behind schedule.”

  “Why hasn’t she called?” Marilyn goes over to the window, but there’s nothing to see but their driveway, which winds down a hill amidst a thicket of trees. She tries Clarissa’s cell phone but is sent straight to voicemail. She tries Nathaniel’s cell phone, too, but is sent to voicemail again.

  “Come on,” Lily says. “Let’s eat. Those slowpokes can catch up with us when they get here.”

  But Marilyn won’t countenance it. She looks to David for support, but he gives her his signature shrug, his gaze tunneling beyond her. She wants to shake him, really she does, though no doubt he wants to shake her, too.

  In the kitchen, she tries to make herself look busy, tasting the gazpacho, the corn, the pasta salad, but there’s nothing to taste but what’s already been tasted, and so she floats around the room in her black silk skirt, fearing that she’s overdressed, that she looks at once too decked out and too funereal.

  In the living room, she places books on top of one another, on coffee tables and lamp stands, whatever will sustain them. At the foot of the grand piano sit copies of the Times, which have piled up from summers past, the way they pile up in Manhattan. She should just tie them in twine and leave them out for recycling, but David is still going at them. He reads the paper in order, every day from front to back, and in this manner he has fallen years behind, the fact of which he likes to report with a mixture of self-mockery and mulish pride. But the sight of those papers assails her now, and so she makes a pile of them and ties them up, then leaves them out front beside the garbage bins.

  A bulb is extinguished in the reading lamp, but when she goes to replace it all she can find is a halogen bulb, and this one takes fluorescent. She returns to the closet, and this time she comes back with the right bulb, but when she unscrews the extinguished one it slips from her hand and shatters on the floor.

  “Shit!” she says. “Damn it!” There are shards of glass all over the floor and spilling onto the carpet.

  She gets the broom and dustpan, the vacuum cleaner for good measure, but when she turns it on, the sound of the motor feels like a drill going off, and she thinks, What if Clarissa is trying to call, so she puts the vacuum away. The shards are embedded in the rug, and she tries to remove them with a pair of tweezers, then resorts to using her hands.

  Now Amram comes inside carrying the last of the luggage. He’s halfway to the second floor when Yoni runs past him down the stairs. “My tooth is loose!” he cries.

  “I’m going to yank it out,” Akiva says. He’s running down the stairs himself, a few steps behind his brother.

  “You will do no such thing,” Noelle says.

  “It will be quick and painless,” says Akiva.

  “Let me have a look at it,” Marilyn says, happy to have something, anything, to distract her.

  Yoni opens his mouth for his grandmother to see, and his teeth sparkle in the kitchen light.

  Now Akiva is telling Yoni to make sure his tooth falls out in America; that way, the tooth fairy will pay him in dollars. “Never get shekels,” Akiva says, “when you can get dollars.”

  A coil of lightning slashes the sky. Thunder rings out a second later. Marilyn presses her nose to the window, and her breath comes back along the glass. A car drives by on the road below them, but she can’t see it through the brush. All she can make out is the diffuse yellow of the headlights and the sound of water spraying against trees.

  Soon David joins her, and for a minute they’re standing there, looking out the window for their daughter and son-in-law. Reflexively, Marilyn puts her hand to David’s shoulder, but he flinches, and she pulls away as if she’s been given an electric shock.

  It’s nine o’clock when a light comes up the driveway. Lily says, “Is that Clarissa’s car?”

  Everyone cranes their necks. The car blinds them as it tacks up the path, mist dispersing from its headlights, which glare at them like a disco ball.

  “They’re here!” Marilyn says.

  Clarissa and Nathaniel emerge, looking drawn.

  Everyone hugs so that, bathed in the porch light beneath the wrung-out sky, they look like they’re doing a dance. Clarissa’s clothes cling to her, her hair flat and sopping as a retriever’s coat.

  “You look like you walked here,” David says.

  “We did,” says Clarissa. “From the driveway to the front door. It’s that bad out there.” She bends forward in a yoga pose: downward Clarissa. Her long red hair flips over itself; she shakes it from side to side.

  They’re inside now, drying off, and through the window Marilyn can
make out the dripping exteriors of her daughters’ cars, arranged in the driveway nose to tail, a fleet of them beside her own car. “Where in the world were you?”

  “Oh, Mom, you don’t want to know.”

  “Actually, I do.”

  “We fell asleep,” Clarissa says.

  “While you were driving?”

  “You know what, Mom? It’s private.”

  “What?”

  “They’re here now, Marilyn,” David says. “What difference does it make?”

  She gives him a scathing look, because, once again, he has to paper over things. Because the world could be imploding—the world is imploding—and he’d find some good in it.

  She hands Clarissa and Nathaniel each a towel, and now she’s drying off her daughter’s hair, and Clarissa, laughing, poised in the foyer beside the standing lamp, says, “Mom, I’m almost forty, I can dry off my own hair.”

  “Come on,” David says. “The food’s getting cold.”

  Marilyn guides them through the living room, crossing one Persian rug after another, flattened by years of feet, all those summer flip-flops. In the kitchen, the food, on trivets, is arrayed along the counter. The stove is on, keeping the leeks warm, the flame the dull blue glow of an extinguished campfire. In the corner beneath the spice rack the rice cooker flickers from cook to warm to cook again, as if it can’t make up its mind.

  “Dad’s spice rack,” Lily says, grabbing a bottle of fenugreek and a bottle of cream of tartar.

  “Sixty-four bottles,” Clarissa says. “Enough spices to last a lifetime.”

  “Not my lifetime,” David says.

  Noelle grabs a couple of bottles herself. “Dad’s a spice addict,” she says. “He keeps getting more.”

  “They mask the deficiencies in my cooking,” David says.

  “Now, now,” says Lily.

  Marilyn puts one arm around Noelle and another around Thisbe, and with her elbow she’s nudging Nathaniel, too, into the dining room.

  At the center of the room is a long table of pale blond wood, which was passed down from Marilyn’s parents, who are now dead, and which she’s overlaid with a white tablecloth. The cutlery is sterling silver, David’s mother’s, which she gave to them when she remarried for the last time. Marilyn is looking at it all, cataloguing it, the silverware, the tablecloth, the table itself, the wineglasses, which she and David were given as a wedding present by a friend, also now dead, as if trying to remember it all.

  It’s the nine of them standing behind their seats, eight adults plus Akiva, who was supposed to go to bed with his brothers and his cousin; he’s on Israel time, and it’s four-thirty in the morning there. But he claimed he wasn’t tired, and Noelle and Amram were too tired themselves to argue with him (“He’s already a teenager,” Noelle told Marilyn. “What am I going to do when he’s a real teenager?”), so they agreed to let him stay up for another half hour.

  Marilyn is at one end of the table, and David is at the other. Everyone is still standing, waiting for Marilyn to tell them what to do. “Sit,” she says, but she remains standing herself, and it’s not until she pulls out her chair that everyone else does as well.

  She smooths her skirt beneath her. She brushes some hair from in front of her face. “This is just …” Her voice cracks. She tries to gather her composure. “This is the first time we’ve been together since Leo died.” It’s not like she needs to tell them this. Yet she feels as if she does, as if she has to remind them why they’re here.

  Everyone casts their glances down, even Akiva, who is running his feet along the floor, the only sound Marilyn can hear besides the muted noise of her own gulping. She thinks of the food in the kitchen, of the meal they’ve prepared, and it’s not lost on her that what she and David are serving is what Leo himself would have ordered if she’d asked him to choose the menu.

  She raises her wineglass to make a toast, but nothing comes out. Her reflection undulates in the china, coming back to her murkily as if from under water. “This past year has been awful. Dad and I, it’s like we’re going through this cloud cover, and then there’s more cloud cover and more cloud cover and it never stops.”

  But David has gone into the kitchen, and soon he emerges with the gazpacho on a cart. Now he’s recalling for the family a memory from when he and Marilyn were first married, living in a one-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue, when they had a dumbwaiter that went down into the courtyard.

  But Marilyn can barely hear him. She’s sitting at the table, staring vacantly ahead, unable to pay attention to anything he’s saying.

  “Amram and I need to wash,” Noelle says, and Marilyn remembers: the ritual hand-washing before they eat bread, which they do at the start of every meal. How quickly she forgets, when the easiest thing is to remember Noelle as she was years ago, when there was no washing or ritual blessings, when there were, it sometimes seemed, no meals at all, when dinner for Noelle, despite Marilyn and David’s objections, was a couple of Hostess Twinkies washed down with a Tab. Is it possible she longs for that now?

  Amram breaks a challah roll into three and gives a piece to Noelle and a piece to Akiva and leaves the last piece for himself. Akiva leads them in the motzi blessing, and it astonishes Marilyn to listen to this, the language her grandson speaks so effortlessly, the things he knows that she never will.

  Noelle removes a plastic bag out of which she produces a couple of turkey sandwiches and a tub of sliced cucumber. She passes out plastic cutlery and disposable plates to Amram and Akiva.

  “What’s that?” Lily says.

  “Our food,” says Noelle.

  “And paper dishes,” says Amram.

  “You brought your own?” Lily’s wearing a bright red shirt, which matches her hair, and a silver chain from which dangles an amethyst. Her skin is pale, but she flushes easily in the heat, and beneath the bulbs of the chandelier color rises to her forehead.

  “We always do,” Noelle says. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

  Lily hasn’t, exactly, though it startles her every time. She feels vaguely offended, on her own behalf and on her parents’, as if everything they do, everything they touch, is contaminated.

  “But the food is kosher,” Marilyn says. “Don’t you remember?” She escorts Noelle into the kitchen, where, laid out in a row, are the chicken thighs, the caramelized vegetables, the corn on the cob, the pasta salad, the slushies.

  “That’s nice of you, Mom. It’s just …”

  “What?”

  “The dishes,” Noelle says. “They would need to be kosher, too.”

  “They are kosher,” David says. “Don’t you remember? We bought new dishes.”

  Noelle is quiet.

  “What?” Marilyn says. “I don’t understand.”

  “You know how strict Amram and I are.”

  Marilyn opens the fridge and shows Noelle a package of Miller’s Swiss Cheese, with the rabbinic seal of approval laminated across it.

  “The kitchen itself would need to be kosher,” Noelle says. “The oven, the dishwasher, the microwave, everything. “

  “Are you kidding me?” David says. He’s ready to chronicle the hours he and Marilyn spent cooking, the trips to the kosher butcher, ready to lay out the receipts for the dishes and pots, all so Noelle and Amram and their four boys could eat in their house, so they wouldn’t feel excluded over the holiday.

  “I’m sorry,” Noelle says. “I should have told you not to bother.”

  “Well, we did bother,” Marilyn says.

  “I’m sorry,” Noelle says again. But what do her parents want her to do? Eat something that’s not permitted?

  Now Marilyn is back at the table, and she’s looking at everyone and she starts to cry.

  “Oh, Mom,” Noelle says. “I’m so sorry. We know how hard you and Dad must have worked.”

  “I don’t care about the food,” Marilyn says. “You and Amram can eat what you want to.”

  “What’s wrong, then?”

 
Marilyn glances up at David, but he’s looking away. She thought she could wait until after the memorial, but she sees she can’t. All her plans, her whole life, feel like folly. “Dad and I need to tell you something.”

  Everyone looks up.

  “We have some news you need to know.”

  “Marilyn,” David says sharply. “You said we were going to wait.”

  They were going to wait, but she can’t do it. She can’t do anything but sit here and stare at her family, even as she knows she must talk.

  Outside, in the distance, a siren blares. From upstairs comes the sound of a grandson coughing. “Dad and I are separating,” she blurts out.

  “You’re what?” says Lily.

  “We’re splitting up,” she says. “I’m leaving Daddy.”

  For several seconds there’s pure silence.

  “Are you kidding me?” Clarissa says.

  David says, “Do you think we’d joke about something like this?”

  Meanwhile, Marilyn is trying to explain things, though she can’t explain them, even to herself. She won’t say those words, that she doesn’t love him anymore, because they’re not true. “We lost our son,” she says. “It’s ruined us.”