World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

And now she’s sitting with the pennant in her lap, wondering what she’ll do with it when she gets home, and presently some gravy drips off her plate, staining the pennant brown.

  She will do it now, she decides: she will tell Marilyn about Wyeth. But when she goes to speak, she falls mute. She grabs her wine glass, and she’s holding the stem so tight she fears it might break. “Things are different now,” she says. “A year has passed. A lot has happened since Leo.”

  “It’s been endless,” Marilyn agrees. “It’s been terrible for the whole family.”

  “But it’s changed—”

  “I know.”

  “I—”

  “Darling.”

  There it is, she thinks, that noxious word again, and why, she wonders, does she let it bother her when it’s meant as an endearment? But it doesn’t feel like an endearment; it feels like an assault. Marilyn doesn’t have the right to call her that. If they’d had another kind of relationship she might have the right, but they didn’t have that kind of relationship, and now, with Leo gone, they’re not going to have it. “I need to be excused.” She exits the dining room, and finding Calder with his cousins in front of the TV, she picks him up and carries him down the stairs.

  In the basement, she gives Calder a bath, and when he’s done, he comes back upstairs to watch TV with his cousins.

  Soon, though, he runs into the kitchen. “Ari wet his pants! He got pee on Grandma and Grandpa’s carpet!”

  “That’s impossible,” Noelle says. Ari must hold the world record for earliest toilet training; he stopped wearing diapers before he turned two.

  Calder directs her into the living room, where his cousins are crouched as if examining a dead bug. Marilyn is already wiping up the pee. “Should I get him a diaper?” she asks Noelle.

  “He doesn’t need a diaper.” It’s an absurd response, Noelle understands, coming from someone whose child just peed on the floor, yet she refuses to believe it. Ari never has accidents. She gets down on the rug and, in what feels like a humiliation, puts her nose to the fabric. Maybe Calder is mistaken and someone spilled a glass of water. Or maybe it is pee and Calder is the guilty party.

  But of course Ari peed. He’s standing right in front of her with his pants wet.

  Noelle takes him upstairs and cleans him off, and in violation of everything the books advise about parenting and everything she herself believes, she says, “Why did you do that?”

  “It was a ta’ut,” Ari says. An accident.

  Except it wasn’t an accident. There are no accidents with Ari. “Is it because Abba drove off?”

  “It was a ta’ut,” Ari insists, and he starts to cry.

  Back in the living room, she finds herself apologizing again and again, and every time she does so she feels worse for it.

  “Really, Noelle,” her mother says. “It’s not a big deal.”

  But it feels like a big deal, and everyone’s insisting that it isn’t one only flusters her further. “I’ll pay to have the carpet cleaned.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  She’s still down on the carpet, examining the stain. “I don’t know how it happened. He was toilet trained at twenty-one months.”

  “Noelle. Please. Forget about it.”

  Amram drove off, so Ari peed in his pants. She’s making too big a deal of it, but she can’t help it. It’s Amram’s fault, yet it’s her fault, too; she might as well not be able to keep her own bladder in check. Sleeping with whatever boy came her way. What good is her newfound modesty when she can’t control things any more than she ever could? She can’t control her husband and she can’t control her children, and what good is she if she can’t do that?

  She puts the boys to bed, but when she comes downstairs everyone is silent and she’s convinced they’ve been talking about her. Thisbe is trying to get Calder to sleep, but he’s running around the living room holding his pajamas aloft, which gives her brief comfort—she got her children to bed—but soon Thisbe corrals him and brings him downstairs, and that feeling disappears, too.

  She goes over the last couple of hours like a dog pawing over a clump of dirt. She measures her mother’s affection for her grandchildren and it seems that her boys have gotten the short end of the stick. She thinks of the way her mother is with Calder, the sweeties and darlings she doles out, words with which she herself once measured her mother’s affection and found herself wanting. Her mother seems more enthusiastic, more open-armed, more something with Calder. Noelle can’t blame her. Her mother sees Calder more often than she sees her boys; Calder may live across the country, but he doesn’t live across the world. That was her choice. She’s Orthodox now; that was her choice, too. Her mother has more in common with Calder; of course she favors him. Maybe she’s imagining it, maybe she’s being paranoid, but it doesn’t matter, it’s what she feels.

  She goes into the kitchen, where food is strewn everywhere: on top of the microwave and spilling into the sink and perched precariously on the butcher-block table. A few leek tops have fallen from the counter, the thin white filaments spread like hair across the floor. Someone left the water running, and now, when Noelle tries to turn it off, she can’t get the dripping to stop. She erred from the start by refusing to eat her parents’ food, when by any reasonable standard it was kosher, by any standard other than her own. Even the dishes were new. So it was cooked in a nonkosher oven, on a nonkosher stove. What difference does that make? It makes all the difference in the world; at least it usually does. But now, with Amram gone, all the rules she abides by seem to have no purpose, and she thrusts a serving spoon into the bowl and shoves several spoonfuls of potato salad into her mouth.

  A fence around the Torah. That is what the rabbis say. You must hold yourself to the strictest standard possible if you hope to avoid transgression. But she doesn’t need a fence around the Torah. She needs a moat. She needs an entire city. She swallows the potato salad and washes the dishes, scrubs them as if to erase all evidence of what she’s done, as if to erase her very self. Then she puts away the food and sweeps and mops the floor. When she’s finished, everything is so clean she imagines the kitchen the way it was forty years ago, when her parents first bought the house.

  Up in her bedroom, she can’t find her nightgown. She rifles through her suitcase, but it isn’t there. When she comes downstairs, she finds her sisters and mother in the living room, her father with his toolbox moving quietly about the house. “I need something to sleep in,” she says. She’s hoping Clarissa or Lily will lend her something. She recalls that song she used to listen to, “Big Sister’s Clothes,” and how, growing up, she loved to borrow clothing from Clarissa and Lily, loved how, over time, the three of them forgot whose clothes were whose, and their mother simply left the clean laundry on top of the washer and they took whatever they wanted, as if out of an enormous grab bag. But her sisters seem not to have a spare nightgown, or, if they do, they don’t offer her one. Now it’s her mother who goes upstairs and returns with a nightgown, and Noelle retires to put it on in the bathroom, which, smelling as it does of fresh paint, makes her retch.

  Back in the living room, she deposits herself into an armchair, and since everyone else is reading, she tries to read, too. But she can’t concentrate.

  “That becomes you,” her mother says.

  “What?

  “My nightgown. You can keep it if you’d like.”

  “I have plenty of nightgowns.”

  “You can have one more.”

  She doesn’t want to be here with her family, doesn’t want to be waiting for Amram, pretending not to wait for him, knowing they know she’s pretending not to wait for him. “I’m going to bed,” she says softly, and her sisters nod and her mother comes over and kisses her on the forehead, and she feels as if she’s going to cry and she can’t let herself do that.

  “Pleasant dreams,” someone says, but she’s not sure who.

  Upstairs, she checks her cell phone, but there aren’t any messages. She refuses to
call Amram; he can call her. She’ll wait for him, she thinks, though it’s as futile, she knows, as waiting for the Messiah. Part of her hopes he never comes back, because if he does come back what will she do then? Yet she rebukes herself for even thinking this way: he’s her husband no matter what he’s done. She thinks of the Hebrew words ezer k’negdo. Husband and wife, that’s what they are, and remembering they have an agreement not to go to sleep angry, she tries to do the same when he’s not here. She fluffs up his pillow and leaves him a wide berth to get into bed. Then she searches through her suitcase for her packet of mints, and when she finds one she places it on his pillow where it will wait for him like at a hotel, and then she turns out the light.

  “Were you at the same dinner as me?” Thisbe says.

  “I was there,” says Lily.

  “So I’m not crazy.”

  “I heard what you heard.”

  “I tried to tell her,” Thisbe says,

  “I know.”

  It’s after midnight, and Thisbe has come upstairs, where Lily is readying herself for sleep. Thisbe, in her cotton pajamas, is preparing for bed, too; she’s dabbing moisturizer on her face. A shadow passes over them, and Thisbe turns around, expecting to see someone, but it’s just her and Lily illuminated in the hallway by the tiny nightlight. She thinks she hears the kettle whistling downstairs, but the sound is coming from the street.

  “Think of it this way,” Lily says. “In two days you’ll be back home. You’ll be thousands of miles away from here.”

  “And you?” Thisbe says.

  “I’ll be home, too.”

  “It was stupid,” she says, “trying to bring up Wyeth at dinner.”

  “Wait until after the memorial,” Lily says. “Then she’ll be able to hear you.”

  Thisbe rubs her eyes and sees pinwheels, flashes of light coming to her in the darkness. Her pajama pants drag along the floor; she leans over and cuffs them. “These were Leo’s.”

  “I thought I recognized them,” Lily says.

  “We were the same height, but they’re still too big on me.”

  “He had long legs.”

  “Long legs, compact torso.” And he was brawny, she thinks, while she’s lithe. She leans against the plaster, and the passageway is so narrow she can stick out her feet and touch the opposite wall. “It’s funny,” she says, “I never wear pajamas.”

  “So why are you wearing them now?”

  “They’re my most modest nightclothes. Anyway, I like the feel of cotton.” She looks up at her sister-in-law. “Remember what you said to me last night? How I could sleep up here if I wanted to?”

  Lily nods.

  “Can I tonight?”

  “Oh, Thisbe. Of course.”

  It’s a big bed, with room for them both, and Thisbe gets under the covers beside Lily, and soon they’ve fallen asleep.

  She wakes at three in the morning with a jolt, thinking she thinks she hears Calder calling out to her. She rises from the bed without disturbing Lily and tiptoes silently out of the room.

  But when she reaches the basement, Calder is asleep. She nudges him over and gets into bed, and she closes her eyes and takes his hand and soon she’s asleep herself.

  10

  A bottle of grapefruit juice in one hand, a tube of lipstick in the other, Clarissa stands rooted in the aisle at the Village Pharmacy, where the fluorescent lights shine down on her beside the aspirin and cold cream and cleaning products and get-well cards. She has opened the grapefruit juice and started to drink it, though she hasn’t paid for it yet.

  It’s nine in the morning, her brother’s memorial is in a few hours, but what she really needs is space to breathe. She called home an hour ago to retrieve her messages, and her fertility doctor had called. He needed to talk to her as soon as possible. It was July Fourth and the office was closed, but he knew how anxious she’d been, so he gave her his cell phone number. Clutching that number in her hand, she stepped outside into her mother’s garden; it was the closest she could get to privacy.

  When the doctor picked up, all she could do was thank him for talking to her on the holiday.

  “I’m happy to,” he said, but his voice was somber, his tone severe. It seemed they’d discovered what the problem was. He said something about her LH levels and FSH levels, and she got lost in the thicket of gynecological terminology, but the bottom line, he made clear, was that without intervention she would have trouble getting pregnant; even with intervention it could be tough. She needed to start thinking about IVF. Then he told her to make an appointment for the following week.

  It was eight in the morning and Nathaniel was still asleep. She thought of going back inside to wake him, but what difference would it make? She’d be just as infertile in an hour. So she drove into town and wound up where she is now, in the drugstore aisle, pulled there as if by some subliminal force. It’s where she invariably circles back to, the pharmacy, though this time she has studiously avoided her usual port of landing, having steered clear of feminine hygiene, the pregnancy tests and home ovulation kits nestled right among the maxi pads and down the row from incontinence.

  At the register, she bats away a mosquito with her grapefruit juice. In her other hand, she’s clutching the lipstick so tight the cap has come loose and left a smudge on her thumb. “America the Beautiful” pipes through the speakers; “Born in the U.S.A.” follows it. The man behind the register—a boy, really; he must be no more than sixteen—is dressed like Uncle Sam.

  “You’re in no mood to celebrate, I’m betting.” It’s the woman in line behind Clarissa, who looks familiar to her. An acquaintance of her parents, presumably; there’s no one they don’t know in this town.

  “I hate the Fourth,” she tells this stranger.

  “I’m sorry about today.”

  She nods.

  “Will you be speaking?”

  “I’m going to try.” She looks down at her hand, still smudged with lipstick. “You caught me.”

  “What?”

  “Possessing lipstick.”

  “I didn’t realize it was contraband.”

  “I just always thought makeup was cheating. What can I say? I’m trying to look pretty for my brother’s memorial.”

  When she gets home, she finds Nathaniel in their bedroom, already dressed. His dark hair is slicked back, and he’s standing in front of the mirror in a navy suit and tie. He has polished his shoes, and now he’s bending over to tie them. At his feet lies a crumpled rag streaked with shoe polish. “Where were you?”

  “In town,” she says. “I was buying grapefruit juice.” She raises the empty bottle to show him. She tries to imagine what she would do on a normal day, what she would have done before she knew everything she knows now, about her parents, about her LH levels and FSH levels.

  She logs onto the computer and types “LH levels” and “FSH levels” into the search engine and gets seven hundred thousand results for FSH and thirty-five million results for LH. She’ll be sitting at this computer when she hits menopause.

  According to her parents, she didn’t say a word until she turned three, at which point she began to speak in full sentences. She suspects the story is exaggerated, but it gets at an essential truth about her. After college, when she and Lily traveled through South America, it was Lily who did all the Spanish speaking, though Lily’s Spanish is no better than hers; in fact, it’s probably worse. Lily throws herself into things, whereas she’s a watcher, she’s cautious, she’s a student first, and she doesn’t like to make mistakes. It was why when she was growing up she refused to play baseball until she learned all the rules; like a general, she wanted to master the field of battle before she took up arms. It is, she supposes, what she’s doing now, trying to figure out what’s wrong with her in advance of a doctor’s appointment she hasn’t even scheduled yet, hoping to make up for how she was on the phone: incoherent, a child.

  She starts to cry.

  “Clarissa, what’s wrong?” Nathaniel is standing abo
ve her in his handsome suit, while she sits on the bed, her head in her hands.

  “I spoke to my fertility doctor,” she says. “I can’t have a baby.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  She tries to explain it to him, but she can’t. “He said we need to start intervention.”

  “Soon?”

  “Now.”

  “The test results were bad?”

  “He wants me to come in next week.”

  Before Nathaniel can say anything more, she grabs her toiletry case and runs into the bathroom. She divests herself of her jeans and T-shirt, and now, standing in her bra and underpants, she flosses her teeth. But she jabs the floss so hard against her gums blood drips into the sink.

  She removes a pregnancy test from her toiletry case, and an ovulation test for good measure, and she pees on them successively, though she knows she’s not pregnant and her ovulation test was positive two days ago. Ha! she thinks. She’ll turn out to be pregnant. She’ll show the fertility doctor what he knows. But the results are exactly as she expected. She breaks the sticks in half and tosses them violently into the garbage.

  Nathaniel is waiting when she returns to the room. “Get undressed,” she says. She wants to have sex with him. Her parents may be getting separated, but she had her own life before they got separated and she will have her own life after they get separated, and she’s ovulating, for God’s sake, and maybe intervention is necessary but they need to be doing whatever they can, too.

  “Come on, Clarissa,” Nathaniel says. “Your brother’s memorial is in an hour and a half.”

  “I know when it is.”

  “Well?”

  “Pretend you’re fifteen,” she says. “It can be over in a minute.”

  “Sounds like fun,” he says cheerlessly.

  “Are you going to make me undress you?”

  He’s across the room from her, moving his head from side to side as if hoping someone will rescue him. His hair is dark and straight, and as he cants his head it falls across his eyes, physical manifestation of his reticence. He’s narrow and lanky, with a jutting-out quality to his limbs, which, though he’s six foot two, makes him seem even taller than that. He prefers to be the observer—on most occasions, he’d like to be a fly on the wall—and it was his misfortune to have his growth spurt take place when he was young, so that when he would have rather been out of sight, hiding under the staircase, simply watching the goings-on, he was always sticking out. It’s what he’s trying to do now: hoping to disappear. But it won’t work. Because Clarissa has approached him and is undoing his tie, and now she has him fully naked.