Being Esther

by Miriam Karmel

  “Your coat?”

  “Is there an echo in this room?”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  Esther considers explaining. Instead, she says, “I’m sorry if you’re having trouble understanding.” She pauses. “Let’s talk later. Maybe I’ll make sense after I brush my glasses and put on my teeth.”

  They laugh at the stale joke.

  After hanging up, Esther gives the thread one last tug and it’s out.

  First Sophie arrives. Then Amos shows up carrying a bicycle wheel. He holds it out, as if he’s come bearing flowers. “Where should I set this, Esther?”

  She bristles at his informality. If only he’d given her the chance to say, “Call me Esther. Please.”

  Sophie, who is setting the table, looks up and smiles at Amos. “Hey!” she says. And when he smiles back at her, repeating the greeting, Esther wonders how one word can be so erotically charged. She recalls that the first time Ceely brought Lenny home for dinner, he choked on the roast beef. Esther had hoped her daughter would come to her senses, find a man who didn’t wolf his food, talk with his mouth full, someone whose self-confidence put others at ease, a man at home in the world. Yet Esther has come to appreciate her son-in-law, even championed Lenny’s cause that time Ceely made noises about leaving. Esther supposes that this Amos, who is wearing a yellow helmet and orange backpack and has all the mannerisms of a rambunctious family dog, and who, her granddaughter has informed her, works in a bakery, though he is really a lawyer, she supposes he could grow on her, too.

  Esther’s parents had an arranged marriage, though her mother made no secret that as a young woman she’d been in love with another man—the Bondit, she’d called him, invoking his name perhaps at times when her own marriage felt tired or disappointing. What had the Bondit looked like? What had he done? How had they met? Esther never asked. To ask would have felt like a betrayal of her father. Even if she’d asked, her mother might not have remembered. Over time, the Bondit’s looks, preferences, mannerisms would have faded in Mrs. Glass’s mind, until all that remained was a name, one that left Esther conjuring her mother’s first love as a cross between Jesse James and the Cisco Kid. The Bondit sounded dangerous, so unlike her father, whom Esther adored, but who had all the dash and swagger of a women’s dress shop proprietor, which is what he was. When Esther was younger, she’d felt heartbroken over her mother’s lost love. As an adult she was outraged by a custom that thwarted love for the cold economic motivations of tribal elders. Yet her mother had adored her father. And he worshipped her. Esther couldn’t say how she knew. It would have been easier to explain the swallows returning to Capistrano.

  If only Esther could arrange a marriage for her granddaughter, she thinks, as she tells Amos to set the tire against the wall.

  He removes his helmet, revealing a mop of rust-colored hair, which he makes no effort to rearrange. And when he slips off his backpack she sees that he is wearing a striped T-shirt, the kind she dressed Barry in as a young boy. In his toddler’s apparel, Amos’s hands and feet appear disproportionately large. Esther looks away to avoid thinking of those overgrown appendages in bed with her golden granddaughter.

  Suddenly, the bird lets out a shriek. “Pipe down, Mickey!” Esther cries, though secretly she is grateful for the distraction. When the bird doesn’t let up, Amos pokes a finger into its cage and speaks in soothing tones about a bomb that had gone off in a Baghdad market that day. “Two brothers left home in the morning to buy a bird,” he coos. “Probably one very much like you.”

  As the parakeet hops onto Amos’s finger, Sophie shrugs and Esther smiles and strokes her granddaughter’s cheek.

  At dinner, Esther ladles barley-bean soup into white porcelain bowls while Amos, voluble as the bird, chatters about his renunciation of red meat. “E. coli is only part of it. These days, you can get sick from spinach,” he declares. “Or tomatoes!” He speaks knowledgeably about the conversion of rain forest to grazing land and about overcrowding in cattle feedlots. He talks about animal waste running off into rivers and streams.

  Esther nods, rapt, as if she hasn’t heard any of this before. It is the passion with which Amos speaks that captivates her. She is still nodding when he starts talking about cows unleashing methane into the atmosphere. “Ninety-five percent of their gaseous output comes from belching,” he says, at which point Sophie sets down her spoon with a clang.

  “Amos!”

  “What?” He looks confused.

  “Nonna doesn’t need to hear this.”

  “That’s not true,” Esther says, inclining her head toward her granddaughter’s boyfriend, who sits wedged between the two of them at the small kitchen table. “I knew about E. coli. Mad cow, too.” She pauses. “But all those emissions? That’s a whole new angle. In fact, it never occurred to me that cows do.” Again she pauses. Having been schooled in the notion that certain topics are off-limits at the dinner table, she wonders how to phrase what comes next. “It never occurred to me that cows . . . that cows.” She stops and starts, pausing several times before saying, “That cows . . . that cows belch.” There! She said it. And nothing happened. Well, not nothing. She feels carefree and buoyant. Younger.

  And then she smiles, which is all the encouragement Amos needs to continue his discourse on the ecological disaster spawned by, as he puts it, “Our insatiable demand for Big Macs.”

  “Amos, please,” Sophie sighs, giving him a fondly disapproving look. “This is hardly dinner talk.” Then she turns to seek her grandmother’s approval. But Esther’s gaze is fixed on Amos. “This is fascinating,” she says, leaning closer to Amos and stroking the base of his wine glass. “Don’t stop.”

  “Do stop!” Sophie cries, clapping her hands to her ears. “Please. Can’t we please change the subject?”

  Amos holds up his hands in mock resignation. “I guess that’s enough of that,” he declares, grinning at Esther.

  She leans over until their shoulders are touching and in a stage whisper says, “I’m certainly glad we’re having chicken tonight.”

  Amos laughs. “I hope it was a happy chicken, Esther.”

  This time, she doesn’t bristle at the sound of her name. “Happy chicken? Why should a chicken be happy?”

  “Oh, Nonna,” Sophie whines. “Not that.” She glares at Esther with those mismatched eyes—her father’s eyes.

  “Not what?” Amos turns from one woman to the other, grinning, exposing perfect teeth, big teeth, overgrown as his hands and feet. Once again, Esther forces herself to think of something other than Amos in bed with her granddaughter. “Not what?” he repeats.

  “Oh, nothing,” Sophie snaps.

  “Something,” he says.

  Sophie, who translates poems from Italian into English for a former professor whom Esther suspects she’d slept with, grudgingly acts as interpreter. “My Nonna doesn’t think anyone is really happy. ‘Who’s happy?’ It’s like her mantra.” She turns to Esther. “Right, Nonna?” Then to Amos, she says, “She’ll defy you to name one happy person.”

  Ignoring the challenge, Amos starts talking about what they already know—that earlier in the day more than forty people had been killed, a hundred wounded, in an Iraqi bird market. “A young pigeon vendor, Ali Ahmed—don’t ask me how I remember that—told a reporter that it had been a beautiful day, and people, taking advantage of a lull in the fighting, had flocked to the outdoor market and the last thing Ali remembered, before waking up in the hospital, was seeing bodies of the dead and wounded mixed with the blood of the birds. And feathers. Feathers everywhere.”

  Esther is wondering whether Amos has considered the incongruence of the bloody bird market and the roasted chicken on the blue ceramic platter in the center of the crowded table, when Sophie, who might have sensed her grandmother’s displeasure, hijacks the conversation.

  “Speaking of chickens,” Sophie says. She goes on to describe the pamphlet on the butcher’s counter at the natural foods co-op where she shops. “It sa
ys the chickens get to roam about. Or range. I can’t remember. Roam. Range. I’m not sure I understand the difference. But the point is . . .” Her face has grown flushed, her eyes bright, like a feverish child’s. “The point is they’re supposed to be happy. The pamphlet actually calls them happy chickens.” Her voice trails off. “Though how would anyone know?” Sophie pauses. “That they’re happy, I mean.” Then she slumps back in her chair, as if sensing that she just talked herself into a corner.

  Esther wants to pat Sophie’s hand, console her, explain that it isn’t her fault; she’s wired to stop conversations. It’s a trait she acquired, like her mismatched eyes, from her father. Poor Lenny. He can talk until the cows come home, then go right on talking. On the other hand, he has never talked down to Esther, though lately more and more people do just that, as if age has shrouded her in stupidity.

  They eat in silence, the only noise coming from the intermittent clink of cutlery on china and the parakeet’s occasional outbursts. The table is so compact there isn’t even the need to speak up for the salt to be passed.

  Suddenly, Esther feels tired. Perhaps it’s the wine, though she’s had just a few sips. She takes another, before breaking the silence. “Chickens are stupid,” she declares. “When it rains, they hold their heads up to the heavens, open their beaks, and drown. There’s nothing happy about that.”

  “Turkeys, Nonna,” Sophie says, patting Esther’s arm.

  Esther regards Sophie’s hand as if it were a cat walking across the table. She recoils from her granddaughter’s touch. “What do turkeys have to do with anything?”

  “They drown in the rain,” Sophie replies, squeezing Esther’s arm for emphasis. “Not chickens.”

  The young couple exchanges a knowing glance. Is there also a hint of triumph in Sophie’s face, the way it opens to Amos, as if to say, I told you she couldn’t stay on track for long. And you were so charmed by her.

  Esther has the urge to tell them that growing old is one of the most surprising things that has happened to her. She hadn’t given it any thought. Then one day, she was eighty-five. She is old. Not just old, but an object of derision, pity. Is there any use explaining that she is still herself—albeit a slower, achier, creakier version of the original?

  “Turkey. Chicken,” Esther says, trying to control the tremor in her voice. “Big bird. Little bird. What’s the difference?” She can tell them that she knows a thing or two about birds. She can remind Sophie again about the poultry market on Kedzie. Instead, she says, “Tell me this: How does anyone know the chicken was happy? Sophie’s right. Of all the nonsense.” She dismisses the nonsense with a wave of her hand.

  Esther considers adding that she would never fall for such a marketing gimmick, never pay extra for a bird just because of a brochure. Perhaps she should reveal that the bird set before them on a blue ceramic platter had, until recently, sat under warming lamps at the Jewel. Then she could joke that in all likelihood they’re eating an “unhappy” chicken. Cooking is over!

  Sophie, didactic as her father, breaks in and says, “The idea, Nonna, is that the chicken lived well until it died. It was fed properly, and treated humanely, to the end. In other words, it was happy until it died.” Clearly pleased with herself, she smiles and says, “You could even say it died a happy death.”

  Esther observes that the knuckle of the index finger of the hand Sophie is using to cut her chicken is smudged black and blue. A tattoo. How long has it been there? Suddenly she wonders how long Sophie and Amos will be here? She’s tired. She’s tired of all the talk about death. She’s tired of having to prove herself, of having to demonstrate her ability to follow a conversation, even one as inane as this. She’s tired from the dinner preparations. Once, she could fix a meal without any effort. Last night, she made do with peanut butter on toast. She’s tired of having to engage with a young man who, despite the fact that he’s a good talker and enjoys second helpings of everything, hasn’t bothered to remove the bicycle clips from his pants and who, in all likelihood, will one day walk out the door with his tire and helmet and break her granddaughter’s heart.

  “Happy death,” Esther snaps. “Sounds like an oxymoron to me.”

  “Oxymoron?” Amos cocks an eyebrow.

  “It means . . .” Esther starts.

  “I know what it means, Esther.”

  For the second time this evening, she bristles at the sound of her name.

  “But why,” Amos continues, “can’t the two be used in conjunction?” Then he launches into another spiel, this time about his plans to die at home. “In my own bed.” He speaks of his grandmother, who was tethered to tubes in a noisy hospital room before she died. “She had the roommate from hell. All day long, ringing for pillows, juice, cookies, blankets, ice cream.” Amos tells them that each time the roommate hollered for something else, he recited, under his breath, a Buddhist loving-kindness meditation. “But by late afternoon I was at the nurses’ station threatening to put a pillow over the old bat’s head.”

  Esther recalls sitting at Marty’s bedside, holding his hot, dry hand. Leaning closer, she whispered in his ear. “Let’s go to Mexico. Just the two of us. I’ll drive. You’ll sit back and enjoy the ride.” Marty opened his eyes. “It’s a long drive, Essie.” When he closed his eyes and fell asleep she thought of putting a pillow over his head. Sometimes she imagined putting one over her own head. She had no stomach for guns, not like Peppy Grossman, that fellow who’d worked at her brother’s shop. Harry got to work one morning, found Peppy slumped over a desk with a note apologizing for the mess. No. Esther could never use a gun. Or a rope, like that sweet Mia Kelly, from down the block. At the memorial service, when Mia’s psychiatrist got up and explained that she’d had an illness as real as leukemia or a deformed heart, Esther thought she couldn’t have done that, stand there and face down a gathering of mourners who were probably blaming him for dereliction of duty. It took a lot of nerve standing up there, but not half as much as standing on a chair in the basement with a rope around your neck. No, a pillow sounded just right. Almost like dying in your sleep.

  “In my own bed,” Amos is saying, as if he’d read Esther’s mind. “That’s the only way to go.”

  Esther looks at the couple, so young, so sure of themselves, so full of answers. She wishes for Amos a peaceful ending, but first, a long life, though not, she realizes, eyeing the tire propped against the wall, the yellow helmet on the counter, a life with Sophie.

  Every January, Sophie and Esther drive to Waldheim to visit Marty on the anniversary of his death. They bundle up in long silk underwear, wool mufflers, heavy coats, and sheepskin boots. Esther fills a thermos with hot tea. She packs a Ziploc bag with Marty’s favorite cookies, two of which she leaves on his grave, in lieu of stones. Afterward, Esther takes Sophie to lunch.

  But on this brilliant October day, Fanny Pearlman, Helen’s daughter, will drive Esther for an unscheduled visit.

  Esther waits for Fanny on the living room sofa, her hands folded in her lap, as if she were in an airport lounge listening for her flight to be called. The living room is crowded with the few familiar furnishings she and Marty moved from the house on Shady Hill Road. She has lived among her things for so long that she’s become blind to them. Now she takes them in with the wonder of a stranger happening upon the new and unexpected. She’s glad that she’s hung on to her mother’s pink cut-glass bowl, the ceramic water jug from the market in San Miguel, the bone china teacups that she collected one at a time. Photographs in ornamental frames jockey for space on the tabletops.

  A sadness akin to grief overcomes Esther at the thought that Ceely and Sophie might not want any of it, not even the red leather chair that she fell in love with at an estate sale in Winnetka. Her daughter-in-law, who can’t buy a flower vase without her decorator, won’t want a thing. “I suppose it will all have to go,” Esther says to the bird, who chirps agreeably.

  When the time comes, when Ceely finally gets her way and hustles her off to Bingovill
e, Esther supposes she can rescue a few pieces, take with her the Persian carpet, the pink bowl, a few pictures. Helen’s room at Cedar Shores has just enough space for a bed and an easy chair. She stores a few knickknacks in the pressed-wood bookcase, along with the boxes of Jell-O she buys on weekly outings to the supermarket. Had Helen once sat like this taking inventory, deciding what to take, what to leave behind? Perhaps somebody decided for her.

  Esther’s eye falls on a photo of five young women sitting on a stone wall in front of an ivy-covered brick building. She picks it up, absentmindedly polishing the silver frame with the hem of her sweater. There they are, five girls from Albany Park (Esther is the one in the middle), sitting on a stone wall outside a college dorm. All of them are dressed in white T-shirts, rolled-up jeans, shiny penny loafers. They were the Starrlites (the name, a silly conceit). Perhaps the casual attire was a uniform. She can’t remember, though she remembers that Brenda Starr never would have been caught wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Brenda favored décolletage and high-heeled shoes. Once, all the Starrlites dyed their hair red, like Brenda’s, but unlike their heroine they preferred dressing up in ballet slippers, flowing skirts, and peasant blouses. They flirted with bohemianism, smoked cigarettes, signed petitions. Then one by one they married and had children. Their rebellion erupted, if at all, in mildly quotidian ways, by breaking rank with their mothers. Esther cooked pork; she served meat with dairy. Like the other Starrlites, who’d grown up in homes where the only wine served was sweet and reserved for ceremonial occasions—the Sabbath Kiddush, the yearly seder—Esther served cocktails at dinner parties. She went to French films, traveled to Mexico. One year, she took up the guitar and learned to play “We Shall Overcome.” For a while, she smoked a pipe, albeit one with a thimble-sized bowl.

  Once, years ago, Esther found Ceely curled up on her bed, sucking on a rope of red licorice as she flipped through old photo albums. “Who’s this?” she asked, pointing to the picture of Esther seated among her friends on the stone wall. Esther was about to say, “Why it’s me, silly!” But then she glimpsed her reflection in the mirror. Glancing back at the picture, she said, “Humpty Dumpty.”