Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  “I wish it were tomorrow,” she tells him.

  “Me, too,” he says before he gets off. And she believes him—he wants to come home.

  But in January there is a 6.9-magnitude earthquake in Kobe, Japan, that kills 6,425 people, injures 25,000, and renders 300,000 people homeless. It is the worst Japanese disaster since World War II, and Global Hope sends Casey immediately.

  “I don’t have control over all this,” Casey informs Isabelle in an early-morning phone call that wakes her up. “They need every able body they can get to Japan, fast. It’s better that I go there than come home. You can see the sense of it.”

  Isabelle is silent. She doesn’t see the sense of it, not at all, but she also doesn’t feel awake enough to present a cogent argument. It’s dark outside her uncurtained window, just a few minutes past four o’clock, and her mind won’t work. Only her emotions are awake, and they are screaming, No! No! I want you with me! But she knows she can’t say that. Even to her ears it sounds too selfish to voice.

  “I’ll be home as soon as I can.” His tone isn’t placating or the least bit guilty. It’s matter-of-fact and firm.

  But what Isabelle hears is home. He considers her home.

  Five months later, it’s spring when Casey returns to Oakland and moves into Isabelle’s half of the Craftsman duplex. With Casey’s unerring instincts, he arrives in time for her birthing classes, to pick out a crib, and to marvel at the physical changes in her body. How beautiful she is. How beautiful their baby will be. He can’t get enough of placing his large, warm hand on the tight basketball she carries proudly in front of her. He wants to feel the baby stretch and kick. “I need to,” he tells Isabelle, as if his desire to connect with their child were a physical ache. All of it delights him, and his happiness lulls Isabelle into thinking that somehow everything will be all right. Casey loves her. He’s excited about the baby. He’s here now. The possibility of his going away again she banishes from her mind. No, the three of them will be fine, she tells herself every day.

  But before he comes home, Isabelle has to fend for herself. She’s proud of how she manages to find a job, which pays the rent and the necessities, just barely, but that’s all right. Lots of people in Oakland and its neighboring city, Berkeley, live the sort of frugal life she is crafting. People make do. They tend home gardens, shop at thrift shops and co-ops, buy secondhand books, and barter services for goods. They help each other out.

  Isabelle never once considers asking her parents for money. She understands without needing to have the conversation that the support would come with demands—Come back, leave Casey, play by our rules. So she waits until she knows Casey is coming home to her, until she has found a job and can pay her rent, until she can speak calmly and firmly, until her pregnancy is well advanced and she’s sure she won’t buckle, to call her father at work. He tells her mother, of course, and her mother calls and says all the things Isabelle knew she would: How could you be so stupid, Come home immediately, There’s no way you can manage by yourself, Whatever were you thinking, getting pregnant?

  To the last question, Isabelle answers simply, “I wasn’t,” and hangs up.

  Mrs. Hershfeld turns out to be her inadvertent guardian angel, inadvertent because her neighbor is not in the habit of being especially benevolent. Fanny Hershfeld’s preferred stance toward the world has always been a slow, simmering indignation, but as she tells Isabelle the long-running story of her estrangement from her brother, Meir, Isabelle sees a possibility.

  They are in the backyard, their common space, their only meeting place, since Isabelle hasn’t accumulated enough furniture yet to invite Mrs. Hershfeld over for coffee, and Mrs. Hershfeld never invites anyone into her half of the house. It is her domain and she doesn’t want it invaded. But the backyard, that’s where she allows herself a few minutes to stop and talk.

  Years ago, a long-forgotten tenant left behind a tiny, circular wrought-iron table and two lacy chairs. The white paint has chipped and blistered, but the wrought iron underneath is sturdy, and Isabelle often finds herself walking out and sitting there at the table, under the one tree in the yard, a persimmon tree, which hangs its globular orange fruit on leafless limbs from October through January. Organic holiday ornaments.

  It is the week between Christmas, which Isabelle spent with Deepti and Sadhil in San Francisco, and New Year’s, and Mrs. Hershfeld is shuffling out with a wad of dripping-wet cotton support hose to hang on the clothesline. Isabelle is bundled in a heavy sweater—the sun is out but gives little warmth this far into the winter—reading The Simple Truth by Philip Levine, which had been published earlier that year. She has set herself the task of trying again to understand the poetic form, to discover what speaks so strongly to Daniel.

  “You like to read. Every time I see you—here, the front porch—you’re reading.”

  “It’s poetry,” Isabelle tells her, holding up the book so Mrs. Hershfeld can see the front cover.

  “Ah, Levine,” the older woman says as she lowers her aging body into the other chair and gingerly straightens out her aching knees. Fanny Hershfeld reminds Isabelle of a pouter pigeon, all billowy chest and skinny, birdlike legs. Rarely has she seen her out of a housecoat—this current one is printed with a green-and-yellow pineapple pattern—and Isabelle watches as Fanny smoothes the cotton down over her naked legs.

  “Do you know him?” Isabelle asks.

  “I know he’s Jewish and writes about the working man. What else is there to know? He’s on our side.”

  Isabelle is struck again by the dichotomy Mrs. Hershfeld insists upon. The Jews over here, everyone else over there. Gingerly she says, “I guess I never thought about the world as our side or their side.”

  “That’s because you’re too young,” Fanny Hershfeld shoots back. “What year were you born?”

  “Nineteen seventy-two.”

  Fanny utters something that sounds like “Pssshaw,” and Isabelle is chastised, dismissed by her youth and inexperience.

  “Try the thirties and the forties, when anti-Semitism grew like baker’s yeast. And the fifties, when that megalomaniac Joe McCarthy saw a Communist under every bed. People were blacklisted.” Fanny turns and stares into Isabelle’s eyes as if to burn in her message. “Jewish people. Their lives were ruined. Permanently.” And now the older woman turns away from Isabelle and stares out over the overgrown backyard. “Sometimes they even became other people.”

  “You mean they changed their names?”

  “I mean they changed their souls!”

  “Oh.”

  And a silence hangs between them. Fanny isn’t looking at Isabelle. The rough turn of her shoulder and the deliberate twist away of her head make Isabelle hesitate to say anything, but it feels like there’s a story to be told. Just as Isabelle is gathering her courage to ask, Fanny begins to talk again.

  “My husband and I were both blacklisted. Why?” She shrugs. “We were clerks at city hall. Nothing important. I did real estate deeds, that kind of thing. Saul, he was in the parks and recreation division. We filed things. We helped people out when they came in. It was fine. It paid the bills, but our lives were elsewhere. What we did for a living, that was just to have our lives.”

  Now she turns to look at Isabelle. This part of the story she will address head-on. “Okay, we were Communists, but so what? We weren’t going to burn down the government. We wanted fairness, that’s all, fairness for the working man, and when that paskudnyak, holding his Senate hearings and sweating and yelling and pointing his finger, accusing all sorts of people of being traitors, when he got on TV, well, we were fired and then we couldn’t get other jobs. People were afraid to hire us. We were branded. Achhh, there was so much fear.

  “And what did my husband do? He blamed me. ‘You’re the one who got me into this,’ he told me. He meant the Party. ‘You’re the one who insisted.’ As if he had no will of his own.”

  Fanny stops talking, lost in remembering, and Isabelle feels she has to say so
mething. “That must have been a hard time.”

  “Hard?” Fanny shrugs again. “He was a weak man, Saul Hershfeld. How did he fight back against the evil of Joe McCarthy? He found a shiksa—stupid, with two stuck-up parents—and married her.”

  Mrs. Hershfeld has found her groove. She doesn’t stop talking, and as her stories evolve, it becomes clear to Isabelle that this woman doesn’t have much use for men. Each story she tells has at its root some condemnation of a man’s ill-conceived action. It is when she is talking about her brother, Meir, that Isabelle pays better attention. He took the wrong path in life: he became a capitalist, although he would never admit to it. He bought and sold things to make a profit. He skimmed and scammed and kept on making more and more money.

  “But is he happy?” Mrs. Hershfeld asks, and then answers her own question. “Not on your life. So what difference does it make that he owns a block of College Avenue?”

  “He does?” Isabelle is frankly impressed. College is one of the main commercial streets flowing from Oakland down through Berkeley to the university. Long stretches of it hold small and interesting shops and restaurants and fresh-produce markets and craft shops. And then there are the seedier establishments, often interspersed here and there.

  “So what good does it do anybody that he keeps a tattoo parlor going and a place that sells T-shirts and some hamburger joint?”

  “Bluto’s?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “Oh, their hamburgers are delicious.”

  Mrs. Hershfeld looks at her as if she’s committed treason. Us versus them again. Isabelle realizes her mistake immediately and her first impulse is to apologize and placate, and then she thinks better of it and forges ahead.

  “And then down at the corner of that same block is a wonderful old bookshop, Noah’s Ark—right, Mrs. Hershfeld? It reminds me of a shop I used to go to all the time when I was in college—Seaman’s, it’s called—where the books are piled up everywhere and you can spend hours just browsing until you find this hidden gem, a book you’ve heard of and always wanted to read but never could find. Oh, I love stores like that.”

  “Well, the next time you’re in, tell Meir you live next to me and see what you get. He spends his days sitting at the front counter pretending he’s one of us working people, but all he really does is get fatter and fatter by the day.”

  And the next day Isabelle walks into the bookstore to find part of Mrs. Hershfeld’s rant to be accurate. Her brother, Meir Schapiro, is a very large man. And he’s sitting at the front counter, reading a book and working his way through a bag of Doritos. To the right of the front door, in a shallow alcove, are a secondhand sofa and two easy chairs around a small steamer trunk serving as a coffee table—somewhere to rest and read and fall in love with a book.

  Meir looks up when he sees Isabelle come in, says, “Welcome,” as if he means it, and goes back to his book, leaving Isabelle to browse and dawdle.

  She makes a tour of the shelves lining the walls, then repeats the walk around, only this time she edges closer and closer to the center. It’s all here, everything she loved about Seaman’s: stacks crammed with secondhand books, volumes on esoteric subjects—witchcraft, Malaysian basket weaving, American foreign policy in the Depression—and early, out-of-print novels by established writers. It’s here that she finds Daniel’s third book and takes it to Meir at the front counter.

  “Ah, Daniel Jablonski,” Meir says as he looks over the book. “Not one of his best, I’m afraid.”

  “But still worth reading, don’t you think?”

  Meir lifts his shoulders in uncertainty. “The first two—gems.”

  “I know!”

  “But this one…” Meir shakes his head.

  “Yes?”

  Meir thinks for a minute. He wants to get this right. The girl seems so eager for his opinion. Or maybe just eager in general, full of life. Attractive, very attractive to a man who’s eating himself into a certain grave. “The first novel, about his father, was like spun gold. Shining, as if each word had to be there, in that order, making those sentences. There wasn’t a false step.”

  “And tough, too, don’t you think?”

  “Honest, I would say.”

  “Very,” Isabelle agrees.

  “And the second book, about his marriage dissolving, it felt just as raw.”

  “But the writing was even better.”

  “You felt he’d hit his stride as a writer.”

  “Yes!” Isabelle is so happy to be exchanging praise about Daniel with this complete stranger, she’s slightly giddy.

  “But when he decided to write this one,” Meir says as he picks up the book, “I don’t know. It’s about Harry Bridges and the San Francisco longshoremen’s strike of 1934. Did you know that?”

  “Not until I saw it here.”

  “Maybe he thought it would elevate his game, you know, historical subject, but instead it just shouts Look at me, I’m trying to be significant.”

  “And that’s so unlike him.”

  “The critics hated the book.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “And they were brutal—‘self-important,’ ‘stillborn,’ ‘lifeless,’ they called it. And even worse. So”—and here Meir smiles at her—“read it at your own peril. Either you will see some glimmer of his early brilliance in it or you will be disillusioned with Jablonski for good. Risky business, reading it.”

  “I’ll take the risk. I’m inclined to see the glimmers.”

  “A hopeful girl,” Meir says, “I like that.” And he’s smitten.

  And from that first conversation about Daniel’s work comes Isabelle’s job at Noah’s Ark, Used Books.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When Daniel and Stefan leave Colorado Springs, their exit has nothing to do with Daniel’s disdain for his students. They leave to keep Stefan out of harm’s way. All through the winter and early spring, on the days that Daniel teaches, Stefan continues to haunt the High Plains Ice Hall.

  Over the months he has honed his routine to a tight choreography. And he never deviates from it. There is immense satisfaction for him in the repetition of predictable events. He enters from the same glass door every day, farthest left of the four that make up Gate B. With purpose he makes his way up to the very top row of Section 210, where he waits patiently for his reward, the first sighting of Mitsuko Kita as she floats onto the ice to begin her practice. The despicable coach (and jailer, as Stefan thinks of him) is always there, as well, stern-faced, punitive, from time to time calling out abrupt and harsh instructions, but Stefan tries to ignore him. If he dwells too much on the small Japanese man, it ruins his day.

  Instead Stefan goes to work: he makes his way down to the third row of section 109, mere feet from the ice, takes the first seat on the aisle, and assembles himself for his task. He pulls a spiral notebook from his backpack, its green cover curling from extensive use, and then a series of pens, which he lays across his lap. The red one is for mistakes and errors of judgment, the black for moves Mitsuko has mastered. Here Stefan’s comments are cut-and-dried. What is working, what isn’t. Every move is given a numerical value. But the purple pen—that is for his personal observations. And here he allows himself more leeway. His system is meticulous and foolproof, he feels. He secretly hopes that one day Mitsuko will be able to take a look at his immaculate charts and know exactly where she is—her strengths, her weaknesses, even the path to perfection.

  There are other people in the arena watching the skaters as they work through their practices, so Stefan’s observation and recording garner no scrutiny. He stays put in his seat on the aisle and doesn’t raise any kind of alarm. He never approaches the skater. He never intrudes.

  It is as he follows Mitsuko home to her apartment that he gets into trouble. Even though he walks at least a block behind, hoping to blend in with the rest of the pedestrians, it isn’t long before both the tiny skater and her coach, Hideo Suzuki, begin to notice him. He’s always there. He take
s the same position every time, across the street from her apartment house, leaning against a leafless tree, to watch her walk into the building, waiting for the glass door to click shut behind her so he can experience that moment of exquisite relief—she’s safe for now! And then he waits for the Japanese coach to move off down the street and turn the corner and be gone.

  But Hideo Suzuki has taken to circling the block and surreptitiously watching Stefan watch Mitsuko’s building, making sure the large young man doesn’t make a move toward his skater. And Stefan doesn’t. He’s not ready. His notes aren’t complete. His courage hasn’t been gathered yet, so he simply stands across the street, his eyes on the second-floor window where sometimes, if he’s lucky, he can catch a glimpse of Mitsuko as she walks through her living room.

  “You’re six-foot-four!” Daniel roars at him some weeks later, when he has made his way, somehow, to the police station to claim his wayward son. “And you dress like a homeless person! Didn’t it occur to you that someone might notice you?”

  “I was making sure she was all right.” Stefan is unrepentant. “That coach of hers is a wild card, I can tell.”

  “Why is this your job?”

  “I take care of people. That’s what I do.” Stefan is belligerent as he confronts his father. That’s what you’ve made of me, he wants to say to Daniel, but doesn’t.

  The two men stare at each other in a small windowless interrogation room in the Colorado Springs police station, the fluorescent overhead lights buzzing and flickering sporadically. A fleshy uniformed cop, close to retirement age, his arms crossed against his bright blue shirt, watches from his spot near the door, saying nothing.

  Ron Sessions has been doing police work for almost thirty years, and he’s learned a few things. Sometimes stepping back from the problem is more powerful than stepping in. He’s never actually articulated this philosophy to other officers—their work, after all, is almost exclusively about active engagement—but he has learned that there are times when waiting has its merits. And this is one of them. He wants to see if this father can get control of this son. Maybe then they can all avert a problem.