World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  Thisbe shakes her head.

  “I trust it’s not against your religion, either.”

  “No, Noelle, it isn’t.”

  “Then what’s stopping you?”

  “I just don’t want to swim.” Though the real reason is that, though Thisbe has signed on for a lot by coming back east, one thing she hasn’t signed on for is going skinny-dipping with her Orthodox former sister-in-law. As uneasy as she felt watching Noelle undress, she would feel that much more uneasy getting undressed herself. Just to make that clear, she doesn’t so much as loosen her rollerblades as she settles herself onto the grass.

  As she watches Noelle step into the lake, her red hair loosed from its kerchief, as she sees the water rise to her thighs, as she watches her sister-in-law throw herself into the water so she’s fully submerged except for her head, Thisbe finds herself recalling Noelle, a hot August day shortly after she and Leo got married, wearing an evening dress that was long-sleeved and loose-fitting, as the rabbis dictated. Dowdy. That was the word Leo used to describe the women in Noelle’s Jerusalem neighborhood. It was the word he’d once used to describe Noelle herself. But looking at her that night, Thisbe thought that, despite the kerchief and the dress, despite having given birth only three months earlier, Noelle was anything but dowdy. She’d been a lovely girl, and she was still lovely. The feeling returned—it returns to her again—of having been an only child, looking in solitary on the adult world. How she had wanted a sister! And now she had a sister-in-law. Three of them, in fact. This is what she’s thinking as she watches Noelle do the crawl, remembering what a fine swimmer she is. Still, she cries out, “Be careful, Noelle! Don’t go too far! There’s no lifeguard here!”

  But if Noelle has heard her, she doesn’t let on.

  Now the concert has begun. James Taylor has come onstage; Thisbe can hear the crowd cheering for him as she waits by the water for Noelle, who has switched from the crawl to the breaststroke and back again and who, having been in the lake for twenty minutes now, gives no sign that she’s through. Thisbe’s just sitting on the ground, feeling her shorts stick to the backs of her thighs, her feet growing sore in their rollerblades.

  Finally, Noelle swims back to shore, and when she emerges she shakes her head from side to side, trying to drain the water from her ears. She sits down naked next Thisbe and makes no move to put her clothes back on. She’s letting herself drip-dry in the hovering twilight.

  “I’d offer you a towel if I had one.”

  But Noelle seems not to care. She’s sitting no more than two feet away from Thisbe, as if she’s daring her to look, or not look, and so Thisbe settles on some compromise between looking and not looking, hoping that, whatever she’s doing, she doesn’t piss Noelle off.

  The oak trees swirl above them, making low, guttural sounds. A few fireworks go off, and a few more. Noelle, still naked, is staring at Thisbe’s hands. “I see you’ve stopped wearing your wedding ring.”

  Thisbe nods. “Why should I be wearing it?” Though the last time she saw Noelle she was wearing it. And even after that. Her first semester in Berkeley, sitting alone at a Chinese restaurant, her bag laid carefully on the seat across from her as if she were saving it for someone, she was approached by a busboy, who said, “Are you waiting for your husband?” and she started to cry over her spinach dumplings. Because she realized she was waiting for her husband, waiting for Leo to return from Iraq. When did a widow remove her wedding ring? The Jews must have had an answer for that, the Jews like Noelle. The Varsity Jew, Leo used to call her; he said Noelle lettered in Judaism. More than once after Leo’s death she wished she were like Noelle, steadfast, consoled by religion’s ministrations, not the doubter she was, without a ready-made community to take her in. Sometimes she thinks that’s why she went to graduate school, to have a community, paltry as it is, her group of graduate students commiserating over their classes, her cohort of anthropologists. A month after she and Wyeth got together, she was washing up in the bathroom when her wedding ring fell off and rolled down the drain. She screamed as it disappeared, but she didn’t call the plumber, and she suspects she was secretly relieved. The next day, Clarissa phoned. They hadn’t spoken in months, and it was as if Clarissa knew what had happened and was watching out for Leo. Talking to her, Thisbe felt shaken, and when she got off the phone she went back to the bathroom and inserted her fingers down the drain, trying vainly to retrieve the ring. “It fell down the sink,” she tells Noelle. “I took it as a sign that it was time to stop wearing it.”

  “You think that was a sign?” Noelle says. “That’s idiocy..”

  “No more idiocy than marrying someone because you share a birthday. Or because your rabbi told you to marry him.”

  “That’s not why I married Amram.”

  James Taylor is between songs—he’s talking now—and someone in the crowd seems to have called out, but Thisbe can’t decipher the words. A few piano chords ring in the distance. The audience starts to cheer. Noelle is still sitting naked on the grass, though now she reaches over and puts on her kerchief. “I miss Leo,” she says. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  Thisbe nods.

  “Don’t you miss him?”

  “Of course I do.” A squirrel shoots down a tree, its tail moving spasmodically like a mop.

  “How?”

  “What do you mean, how?”

  “How do you miss him?”

  In every way, Thisbe thinks. Because how can she not miss Leo when all his mail still gets forwarded to her, when just last week she received a reminder for his six-month dental appointment, and she was tempted to call the dentist and yell into the phone that Leo didn’t get a six-month dental appointment, he got a six-year dental appointment (his mother notwithstanding, he hated dentists and doctors both), and besides, he was dead, it was his very dental records with which they’d identified him, and didn’t they know that, or did they not have such a box to check off? How can she not miss Leo when he was still on her phone machine when she moved to Berkeley, and he might still be on it were it not for the fact that it broke and she had to buy a new machine. How can she not miss Leo when on Calder’s birthday she signed the card from both of them, though it didn’t matter, of course—Calder can’t read—but she can read, and for the week after his birthday she would read the card to him every night before he went to sleep, closing with the words Love, Mommy and Daddy. How can she not miss Leo when she still has his clothes, many of which have gotten mixed up with hers, and one time when Wyeth jumped out of the shower to answer the doorbell he threw on her shirt, which was lying on the chair, only it was Leo’s shirt, and when she saw him in it, she screamed, “Would you please take that thing off!” How can she not miss Leo when she often thinks of her grandmother, dead for a decade, and of her grandfather, dead even longer than that, and how when her grandfather was dying, a slow, protracted, excruciating death, her grandmother didn’t want him to go into the hospital; she wanted him to die at home. And how when he did die, early one morning, she got into bed with him one last time and held his body, already overcome with rigor mortis, and how Thisbe, when she heard that story, thought it was so beautiful she swore to herself that if she ever got married and outlived her husband, she would lie down with him one last time like that. Only the way she imagined it she was eighty or ninety, not thirty-two, and she didn’t picture that he would be far away and there would be no body to speak of, nothing, certainly, she could lie down with even if he were there. Is that what Noelle means by how does she miss him? She thinks, Let me count the ways. But she’s not going to tell Noelle any of this because it’s private and, besides, she has nothing to prove to her. “I just miss him,” she says.

  “What if he’s not really dead?” says Noelle.

  “What do you mean, what if he’s not really dead?”

  “What if he’s missing in action?”

  “He’s not missing in action, Noelle. He was a journalist, not a soldier. And his body was flown back. Don’t you
remember?”

  “You’re saying you never imagined it?”

  Of course she did. Those last few weeks in New York, standing in the dark beside the East River, while behind her the trucks cast their lights on her like stun guns, moving in procession down the FDR Drive. Queens was across the river, and beyond it, if she could only train her eyes, she could see all the way to Iraq.

  And later, in Berkeley, already with Wyeth, she would say to herself, What if Leo came back now?

  And a month later: How about now?

  And now?

  A memory comes to her, she and Leo going to the Price Chopper in Great Barrington, grocery list in hand, trying to decipher Marilyn’s handwriting. One time, they had to turn around and go back to the house because they couldn’t read what she’d written. Marilyn herself couldn’t figure it out; it was only later that she remembered. Bagged carrots! And Leo’s handwriting was even worse than hers. Last month, Thisbe found in her apartment a note Leo had written her. Off for a run. Be back in an hour. And for a moment it pierced her, and she needed to know when the note had been written and where Leo had run, before she allowed herself to ask the more obvious question: how had the note gotten there, across the country from where she and Leo had lived, moving with her from apartment to apartment, adhering to her like flypaper? She’d found it in her wallet, which surprised her: she wasn’t someone who kept things. That had been Leo’s task; he was a secret sentimentalist. Though sometimes she wondered whether it was sentimentality as much as an aversion to cleaning up. She thinks of his bachelor days at Wesleyan, if someone in college could even be called a bachelor, but he certainly lived like one. Having failed to sign up for the college meal plan, he lived for semesters at a time off pizza and ramen noodles. He ate from a set of rubber camping dishes that he kept in his dresser drawer, and whenever they got dirty he would dump them into the shower and rinse them off with shampoo. The problem was, he didn’t own a dish drainer, so he would place the dishes, still wet, back into his dresser, and soon the wood would start to warp, the dishes to mold. His refrigerator was a specimen lab. A milk carton from every month, he liked to say. You could carbon date things with it.

  And suddenly she can’t sit here anymore, letting naked Noelle drip-dry beside her in the fast-descending sun while in the distance James Taylor is crooning to whomever he’s crooning to, and now the fireworks are starting to go off, issuing their staccato clamor. “Would you get dressed already?”

  Noelle stands up. She’s still in her paisley kerchief and nothing else, and this time, as she bends over her pile of clothes, Thisbe looks away: she’s not going to be forced to stare at her genitals. Noelle puts on her underwear, her bra, her blouse, her skirt, moving methodically, unhurriedly, seeming to dare Thisbe to rush her. Now she’s fully clothed except for her socks, which she puts on, methodically as well, and her rollerblades, which she begins to lace. Thisbe is still sitting beside her, staring out at the lake, which in the growing darkness looms before them like a dark blue dish, and for the first time the words Stockbridge Bowl make sense to her.

  She recalls Noelle’s speech at the memorial, the story she told about Leo holding the havdalah candle, saying he’d marry her again. And his words to Noelle. I’m thinking about her. The next time you talk to her, please tell her that. “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” she says. “When Leo said those words to you? Even when he was in Iraq, I talked to him every couple of days. Yet you could go months without speaking to him.”

  “So?”

  “It’s not like you two were close.”

  Noelle is silent.

  “Then why did he ask you to tell me that?”

  “Beats me.”

  “It was as if he knew we’d never speak again. Come on, Noelle. What are you hiding from me?”

  But Noelle has taken off. She’s gliding away, out past the clearing, skating along the blacktop up toward historic Lenox.

  “Wait, Noelle! Come back!”

  Noelle turns around.

  “That weekend Leo visited you, did he seem reckless?”

  “In Jerusalem?” Noelle says.. Leo had Shabbat dinner at her and Amram’s house. He dandled his nephews on his knee. How reckless could a person be doing that? It’s not like you two were close. Thisbe probably meant no harm with those words, but they cut into her just the same. Well, maybe they weren’t close, but Noelle would like to remind Thisbe that she preceded her by years. Leo was twenty-one when he met Thisbe; Noelle knew him his whole life. K’heref ayin. Like the blink of an eye. The whole world is like that for God. And, for a moment, Noelle feels like God herself. The last one to see her brother alive. Standing balanced on her rollerblades at the side of the road, her head covering in place, exuding the cool she always strives for but that consistently eludes her, she looks at her sister-in-law with a malevolent calm.

  And Thisbe stares back at her just as malevolently. Foolish Noelle with her religious code, her sundry enjoinders and prohibitions, Thisbe’s fatuous former sister-in-law standing kerchiefed on rollerblades at the side of the road a couple of miles from her parents’ house. The last person to see Leo alive. This is what Thisbe has been waiting for. To talk to Noelle. Yet what was she hoping would happen? That she would tell Noelle about that night on the telephone, when she asked Leo for a separation? That she would admit it was the last time they ever spoke? And what was she hoping for in return? That Noelle would tell her whether Leo had been reckless? That she’d say if he killed himself? As if Noelle would know, Noelle, who knew little about Leo when he was alive and who knows even less about him now that he’s gone. Did Leo put himself in harm’s way? Of course he did. He was putting himself in harm’s way from the instant he was born.

  It’s unseemly, Thisbe thinks, to blame herself for Leo’s death. There’s something tawdry about it, to give herself that kind of credit, to accept that kind of blame, to be so self-dramatic when she knows that to say, “Hate me, it’s all my fault” is a way, paradoxically, of not taking responsibility for everything that’s happened since then. “Forget it,” she says, because what difference does it make what Noelle says? There’s nothing Noelle can tell her, nothing at all. She turns on her rollerblades and heads back up the hill. Noelle can follow her if she wants to, and if she doesn’t, that’s fine, too. Thisbe doesn’t care if she ever sees her again.

  When she arrives at the house, the family is dispersed, a person here, a person there, as if someone strewed them across the floor.

  “How was your workout?” Lily asks.

  “Okay,” says Thisbe. “Terrible.”

  It’s dark now, and the fireworks have really started to go off. They’re lighting up the sky with stars and arrows and other points of light, every shape Thisbe can fathom. “I hate fireworks.”

  “Join the club,” Lily says. “I sent my father out to buy ear plugs. I should have told him to buy nose plugs too. The whole town smells like sausage.”

  But David hasn’t gotten far, because when Thisbe enters the living room she finds him on the couch, listlessly tapping a badminton racquet against his knee.

  “Where are the kids?”

  “Watching baseball,” he says. “American pastime.”

  Sure enough, when Thisbe gets upstairs, she finds the TV playing in the boys’ bedroom. The cousins are lying on the floor, their heads propped against their rolled-up sleeping bags.

  “Explain baseball to me,” Calder says, and Thisbe, not much of a baseball fan herself, feels suddenly remiss and strangely un-American for having failed to teach her son about baseball. She starts to tell him about the Cyclones, the Mets minor league team on Coney Island, how she and his father used to watch them play, and afterward they would stroll on the boardwalk past the amusement park, the Cyclone roller coaster plunging down its tracks, and on toward the aquarium where they had gotten married.

  But Calder wants to know about the rules of baseball. “What is everyone trying to do?”

  So Thisbe, sitting on the floor beside
him, does her best to make things clear. “To start with,” she says, “there are two teams.”

  The fireworks are still exploding when she reaches Wyeth. She’s down in the basement, and she can feel the noise rattling the house.

  “It sounds like you’re in a bunker.”

  “I am,” she says. “I’ve been watching the rocket’s red glare. It will be coming to you soon on tape delay.” She takes a quick breath. “Wyeth, please. Get me out of here.”

  “Has it been bad?”

  “Terrible. What was I thinking? I shouldn’t have come.” Her shirt has come out of her shorts, and she tucks it back inside, but it emerges again. “I’m all right,” she assures him.

  “Are you?”

  She doesn’t know. Or knows in only the vaguest, most fleeting sense: a shadow on the wall of a cave. What’s wrong is she’s here and Wyeth’s there. She should have brought him with her. He’s her boyfriend; she had every right to insist that he come. The blood funnels to her head. I will always be part of your family. She said those words, not because she meant them but because she believed she was supposed to say them, that flying across the country for your dead husband required you to make a pronouncement. So she made one. But saying those words made her feel them. We shall do and we shall listen. Noelle was right. What if she dropped out of graduate school and never came back? What if she stayed in Lenox? The idea is preposterous, but the fact that she can entertain it, even as whimsy, makes her lose her breath.