A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  Afterwards, she had a coffee and took out her map. The nearest subway was on 14th Street, about ten blocks away. She could make it that far, she felt okay. And when she reached the station she took the cab receipt out of her purse and threw it away – a gesture towards something, who knows what.

  *

  But when she got home, over an hour later, Liesel almost burst into tears. Her eyes filled. It always surprised her, it struck her afresh each time, the pleasure she got from seeing her children. The pleasure it seemed to give them – Susie especially, who had sentimental feelings about family. She was sitting on a sofa with her son Ben, a likable kid with glasses; they were doing the Times crossword together, with the newspaper spread out across the coffee table, over the art books. Both of them stood up when Liesel came through the elevator doors. ‘The first thing I need is the toilet,’ Liesel told them, setting her purse on the floor. When she came out again, Susie put her arms around her mother, and then Ben, rather dutifully, took his turn. At ten years old, he was tall for his age, and a little too old to hug her childishly. But he tried and Liesel was touched. She didn’t see him often, they didn’t know each other well.

  ‘Where are the others?’ Liesel asked but didn’t listen to the answer. She meant David, Susie’s husband, and her younger son, William. Maybe they had gone out already.

  Jean stood in the background awkwardly, barefoot with crazy hair. She had gone to bed after a shower and just gotten up.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she said to Liesel. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘I’m fine, I’m tired. It went fine. I got a little lost, that’s all. I need a nap.’

  ‘How did what go?’ Susie asked.

  But explaining herself was more than Liesel had the energy for. She started and then stopped. She said, ‘I’m really very glad you’re here, but I’m going to bed.’ She went to the kitchen and poured herself water in a mug – the glasses were on a higher shelf. She drank some and took the rest to her bedroom. Susie sort of followed her around, Ben followed Susie. In the doorway, Susie said, ‘Sleep tight. Do you want us to wake you up?’

  ‘In an hour, maybe. If you don’t hear from me.’

  But she couldn’t fall asleep right away. Normally at home she napped on the rug outside her study. The hard wood floor underneath made her feel that sleeping in the middle of the day was an act of virtue. But she didn’t feel comfortable in someone else’s apartment, lying on the floor. And climbing into bed with her clothes on felt dirty and sad. So she lay on top of the sheets, with her shoes off. Daylight streamed in through the opened curtains. She stood up to draw them but that turned out to be worse. Light glowed around the edges, it was like sitting in a closet. She opened them again, pulling on the curtain cord, drawing back the radiance from the pillows where she wanted to put her head – a tug and the light shifted, creaking. A little more. Sunshine on her lap she didn’t mind.

  But if you can’t sleep, you can’t sleep. You can’t think yourself into sleeping. There were things she had said to Karen that she wished she had said differently or not at all. Now on the video she would always repeat them, exactly the same way, like a dinner party bore. Mutti used to grow her own tobacco, to save money. She was very resourceful but also suspected it wasn’t good for you, and gave her children extra pocket money if they could tell her honestly they hadn’t smoked at the end of the week. I suppose we thought it was glamorous, we were dumb kids. She told this story in front of her grandchildren, and afterwards Susie took her angrily aside. What were you thinking, she said? Liesel felt angry, too, and a little embarrassed. Smoking is a very bad thing to do, I made that clear. For some reason she mentioned this incident to Karen on camera. She meant, it’s funny, the different things different generations get worked up about. Americans are very attached to the idea of purity, there are no half-measures, you’re either a smoker or not, everything is a potential source of identification. When she was a young woman it was much stranger not to smoke at all. People didn’t worry so much about what camp they belonged to. She realized later, this was a stupid way of putting it. That’s the trouble with interviews, you can’t edit anything out, you have no control.

  Also, they stir things up and it takes a while afterwards for them to settle down again. You keep talking in your head, intimately, to a stranger. You say things like, it’s upsetting, none of my children knew my mother very well. Lying on top of the strange sheets, in the strange bedroom – in your son’s girlfriend’s ex-husband’s apartment.

  Mutti died when Nathan was nine or ten. She had been ill with colon cancer for over a year, and Liesel flew out at spring break on her own, to visit her. It turned out to be an extremely important trip, a kind of turning point. She was thirty-eight years old, she still spoke English with a German accent. Her parents had retired to Bonn, to a nice suburban house, near some woods, with a large garden of its own; but it was not the house she grew up in. Mutti had bought a new dog, to keep her husband busy after her death. But the dog was young and difficult – you forget how much trouble they make in the first few years. It was a mistake. Mutti was mostly bedridden by the time Liesel left, but they could still talk optimistically about seeing each other again over the summer; it wasn’t quite out of the question.

  When Liesel landed at the Austin airport, and stepped outside into the wall of Texas heat, she felt an almost overwhelming sense of being a stranger, which persisted in the presence of her husband, and even her children. (Later she took some comfort from these feelings.) The temperature outside, even in the shade, was ninety-five degrees – humid heat. Just walking from the airport terminal to the car put you in a sweat. Bill picked her up in the old Volvo, which didn’t have air conditioning. He had started growing his beard by that point and kept scratching his neck. The leather of the car seats was almost too hot to sit on. Germany seemed a long way away.

  Two weeks later Mutti died. When Liesel broke the news to her children, only Susie cried. Nathan tried to explain to her that he didn’t want to pretend to be upset, because that would be worse; but he didn’t really know his grandmother well enough to feel much. Paul was just a four-year-old boy, you couldn’t explain anything to him, you couldn’t force his attention; and anyway, at that stage, he took his cues from Nathan. Jean was just a baby. But Susie cried and cried. Of course, this was also a bid for attention – the second child, pushed out by two more babies. Wanting sympathy. Eventually even Liesel lost patience with her. She wanted to say, she did say, it was my mother who died. Yet it meant something to her, seeing Susie in tears, having to console her, and thinking, this is what gets passed on, the role gets passed on, you have to do for them what she did for you.

  Of all her children, Susie resembled Mutti the most. She had Mutti’s large eyes and brittle, slightly curly brown hair, down to her shoulders, and Mutti’s pretty-enough face. For a woman of her time, Mutti had a very modern outlook, she was forward-thinking; but somehow, in their resemblance, Susie sometimes came across as old-fashioned. She was a good cook, she was a good mother, they had a nice house, tastefully cluttered, but Bill worried about her career. Liesel did, too. When Susie met David they were both junior faculty. David made tenure but at some point between the births of Ben and William, Susie had taken herself off the clock. She said it made everybody’s life much easier. She could still teach if she wanted to, and she did teach, on an adjunct basis. A few courses each year, for the money and something to do, now that William was in school full-time. But you reach a point in your life when you realize that some things matter more than others. She just didn’t want to do what you have to do to get tenure. Let David spend his time at conferences. If it’s a choice between that and seeing the kids … then it’s not a difficult choice.

  The house is what she put her energy into, a barn-red saltbox about half an hour outside of Hartford. It was almost three hundred years old and needed endless work, the chimney leaked, some of the windows were original, only certain skilled people could restore whatever went wrong, and Sus
ie had developed relationships with local tradesmen and craftsmen, often interesting types, but the kind who need a lot of management. The plot was over three acres; she had turned it into an English garden, with tulips in the grass, wild borders, everything always on the verge of overgrowing, a vegetable patch, staked and veiled with nets, a dirty greenhouse. When you came round for lunch, she put cut flowers on the window-ledge and on the table, the salad was from the garden, there were home-made jams and breads. She sent the boys out to get logs from the woodshed, she lit the fire. All of this took work. The fact that she made it seem natural, the over-production of benevolent neglect, this was part of the work; and the time that Susie spent on the house was time she couldn’t spend on other things.

  When she was younger, she wanted to be an artist, which Bill had discouraged. Now she talked about writing children’s books. It seemed to Bill the kind of thing you do when you don’t know what to do. When you’re restless and bored and your kids are growing up. But okay, let her try it, he thought. Let her do something. We should do something. People were talking next door, everything blended together. Liesel felt happy enough just listening to them. I mean, it’s a sunny day, we’ve got all afternoon, we’re in the middle of New York. When Mom wakes up. Someone in a parked car outside was playing their stereo with the windows open, loud enough Liesel could hear the melody, but the words were just noise.

  *

  It’s about a half-hour train ride to Yonkers, much of it along the river. You come out of the city, off the island, and countryside appears, green strips of landscape, woody bluffs, brown water, telephone lines, you can see New Jersey. Stacked up behind you, northern Manhattan fades away. Liesel liked the train, she liked looking out the window, but Bill felt the confinement. He got bored. In Texas you get used to driving everywhere, you live in the car. He tried to play a game of solitaire on the empty seat next to him, but the train shook too much. He tried to read a book but felt distracted by various things, including the view. By other things, too. The sound of the wheels on the tracks, metal on metal. It’s true, though (he was talking to Liesel in his head), you get these youngman feelings in a train, you could go anywhere. Or see your sister.

  At Yonkers he picked up his empty bag and emerged into warm late-August sunshine. The station was on a bridge. A river ran under it, or hardly moved, covered in rocks and reeds. The city had recently invested in its municipal spaces. There was wide clean pavement with bicycle racks and benches lined up against the river railings. The blind windows of a new office block reflected the sunshine; you had to squint against them. Bill stood for a second on the sidewalk, sweating lightly. Rose had taken him to Polanka’s deli before, but that was three years ago, after picking him up from the station. She offered to pick him up again, but he said, don’t bother. I like walking. But you don’t know the way. I remember, I’ll figure it out. And he set off in a good mood, with just enough low-level anxiety to keep it afloat.

  Ever since Rose’s divorce she had been in decline. She had put on weight. For years he argued with her about this. You can’t eat your way out of loneliness. But, of course, she told him, what do you mean, eat my way. I’m always on some diet or other, you’ve seen that for yourself. Which was perfectly true. And later, when the doctor diagnosed her with a thyroid problem, she felt vindicated – she called him up on the phone. It’s a condition, she said. It’s got a name. Then she read it out to him: Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Bill believed her but he also didn’t totally believe her. He also thought, whatever you’ve got, weakness of will played a part, unhappiness played a part. For none of which he blamed her. When he used to watch Paul playing tennis, in junior high, he couldn’t stop thinking, come to net, come to net. As a father you have to repress certain insights. It was the same with Rose – there are preventable mistakes, there are correctable habits. You want to be able to control what you can’t control, out of love.

  But you can eat your way into loneliness, that you can do. You can surround yourself with fatty tissue. They treated her with levothyroxine, a little pill like an aspirin, which she took once a day. Her TSH levels were under three, the doctors seemed satisfied. But still she kept the weight on, she felt slack and slow and had a hard time getting out of the house. They spoke on the phone once a week and most of what they talked about was their kids. Rose had a daughter, who lived in Evanston. She had wanted a large family but never expressed the slightest envy of Bill and was endlessly interested in all his children, in Jean and Paul and Susie and Nathan. She was a warm curious person and complained very little. When they were kids together (Rose was three years older), Bill would lie in her bed on Saturday mornings and she would read to him. Whatever he wanted, comic books, even the sports page. He loved her body – they bathed together, too. She used a bar of soap or a toothpaste tube and pretended to have a penis. So they could be alike, it was all a big joke. She had sensitive skin, like Jean, and turned red in the hot bath. When he lay across her lap he slipped off in the soapy water. And now just the thought of her body made him physically turn away or avert his gaze, out of sympathy. He actually lowered his head.

  When he first told his father about his engagement (they knew about Liesel and had met her and disapproved), his father and mother drove him to Pittsburgh to see one of his cousins, who was a rabbi. This cousin was a persuasive and sympathetic man. He was supposed to talk Bill out of it. He was supposed to say, how can you marry a woman who is not only Christian but German? As if these things don’t matter, history doesn’t matter, religion doesn’t matter. As if you’re above all that. Bill said, okay, I’ll go along. He was willing to do whatever his parents wanted him to do, apart from the one thing they wanted him to do, which was break it off. So they drove up together in his father’s Lincoln Continental. In those days, in that car, it took them eight hours. They set off after breakfast and stopped for lunch at some Penn State student diner. They ate supper with the rabbi and stayed the night, and the next day drove back – watching from the window the Pennsylvania farmland and listening to a Dodgers–Phillies double-header on the radio. Bill had kind of a good time. He was twenty-seven years old and about to go on the job market, after finishing his PhD. He was about to get married. Who knew where they might end up (Texas!). This was the last extended period of time he spent with his father, who was hard-working, patient, self-disciplined and shy. Later, after he died, Bill’s mother had a stroke and came to live with them for several years. But all of that was in the unimaginable distant future, which you don’t have to imagine because it happens anyway.

  Rose probably suffered most in the fallout. She hated any kind of family strife. Once she admitted to him, I hoped Cousin Seymour would talk you out of it. I don’t know why, because I always liked Liesel, but I didn’t think Mom and Dad would forgive you. But she came to the wedding anyway, at the Statler Hotel in Ithaca. Wedding isn’t quite right; Bill and Liesel walked in and they walked out married a half-hour later. Two of their Cornell buddies signed the registry. (Both Jews, as it happens, a couple who later married and then divorced, after which everybody fell out of touch.) Rose got all dressed up. She was the only family on either side and wanted to make an effort. Bill wore what he wore to teach in, chinos and shirt and jacket, but he took off the jacket, because it was a hot day. Liesel had on a long pleated skirt. But Rose did the business, pink dress, flowers in her hair, and felt silly the whole time, emotional and uncomfortable, because it showed she didn’t know her brother as well as these other people, who got the tone right without trying. On the long Greyhound bus ride back to New York the next day, she broke down in tears. Her little brother. She told Bill that part, too.

  Nepperhan Avenue is a busy, undistinguished street, with a highway frontage road curving off it on the far side, pushing traffic in the opposite direction. A concrete-block wall, growing with the access lane as it peels away, separates the higher ground above it from the street level, where Bill was walking. He could see the cheap houses and apartment blocks above him, wh
ile sycamores grew out against the chain-link fence. Maybe there were kids whose backyards ended in that sheer drop, kicking their balls against the fence. And everywhere, the sound of cars, which bounced between the frontage wall and the buildings on the other side. Not pleasant walking, and Polanka’s wasn’t the kind of place you’d look twice at unless you knew about it – two cheap store fronts under a fifties block of flats, at the beginning of a commercial strip. His kids always told him, you’re a little crazy, but this is the kind of place he liked. As a teenager, he used to help out in the stockroom of his uncles’ store. That’s what the Essingers did when they came to America. Sell groceries.

  The signs were in Polish, but the staff looked Latino. At the back of the shop, through an open door, Bill could see metal racks hung with pale sausages. Hundreds of them, like loose fingers. Under the counter, there were metal trays of food, potato salad and something oily with carrots, goulash, meatballs in tomato sauce, a party platter with fanned-out cold cuts, wrapped so closely the Saran Wrap had laddered like tights. On a warm afternoon, the shop had a smoky locker-room smell. Various breads, dark and white, lay on the counter top, and there were more loaves stacked in floury baskets, sitting on shelves behind. One of the guys was busy making a sandwich for somebody, thickly slicing the tomatoes and laying them flat. ‘Not too much mayo,’ the customer said – a fat kid with his first moustache, unshaved. ‘That’s what my mom said. But, you know.’