A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  He had a yarmulke at the back of his head, almost falling down, shiny blue with a Mets logo stitched into it. Bill ordered a mix of things, including two pieces of crumb cake and a bag of powdered cookies. Then he walked out, blinking, into the sunshine.

  Rose had a house on Prescott Street, overlooking a park. About a fifteen-minute walk through quiet neighborhoods. By this point Bill was tired and hungry – he ate a cookie as he walked, and then another. Really it was too far to walk, he should have taken a cab; he was putting something off. The houses depressed him. Some of them were boarded up. Around Nepperhan, among the shopping streets, there were handsome pale brick apartment blocks, turn of the century. But leaving these behind, he saw crowded row-houses with cheap siding. Most of them looked lopsided, they had weak foundations. And the people he saw in the street were black. He couldn’t help it, it upset him, the thought of his sister, spending her life indoors, while the demographics changed around her, and everybody she knew moved to White Plains or Rockland County. Or Florida. (We figured that might happen when we moved here, Rose had said, the wrong side of Lincoln Park. But it’s what we could afford.) Her cleaner was mixed race, Rosario, a wonderful woman, who also helped in other ways – she sometimes did a little shopping for her, she changed the sheets. Rose and Rosario. People adapt, what else are they going to do.

  Sometimes he got on her case to sell up, too, and move somewhere with a bit of street life. Something to look at from the window or just so that walking out of the door gave her places to go. Restaurants and supermarkets. So she didn’t have to get in the car. But this was the house of her marriage, it was the house where Judith grew up, if you took those things away from her, she said …

  What, he said.

  I don’t know.

  She was sitting in the front room when he walked up the driveway, sitting in the window, and he waited for her to get up and come to the door. He didn’t need to ring.

  ‘Billy,’ she said.

  The way she stood, leaning slightly back, thick-legged, you could tell she had trouble with her knees. Nobody called him Billy anymore. He put his arm lightly across her shoulder. The Essingers were not a physical family, they were talkers not touchers. And then he waited again for her to turn around – it was like watching a vehicle turn – and followed her slowly down the dark hallway, checking his stride. She sat at the kitchen table while he laid out the food. He took plates from the dishwasher (which had recently run), he filled glasses from the tap, waiting for the cloudiness to resolve itself and then filling them again. He put two kielbasas in the oven, and while they were baking he emptied the rest of the dishwasher and stacked what he couldn’t find places for on the counter.

  ‘I like this kitchen,’ he said.

  There was a view over the sink of the boxed-in garden, which had gone to seed, but not unattractively. Rose just didn’t have the energy or money. Blighted roses grew against the wooden fence. The grass looked long and thin, like thinning hair; it was seeding, too. Dead ivy, still clinging to the windowpanes, blocked some of the sunlight but also cast pretty shadows. Linoleum counters, milky with age, a few burn rings. The tap dripped, onto the metal sink. On the shelf with her cookbooks, next to them, Rose kept her cereal boxes, which were also bright and decorative in their way – yellow Cheerios, purple Raisin Bran, Frosted Flakes, sky blue. Judith, her daughter, had a four-year-old boy, and when she visited, Rose liked to spoil him with sweet things, but after he left the packets went stale and she couldn’t bear to throw them away.

  It looked like their mother’s kitchen at home, in Port Jervis. In their first house, the one they were born into. When Rose was thirteen and Billy was ten, they moved. The new house had a funny position, on the corner of Roosevelt and Watkins – its garden backed onto Roosevelt, while the front door opened onto Watkins. But they listed their address as Roosevelt, which was a well-known avenue, with grand houses, a very good address, and for the rest of his childhood Bill had to suppress a slight embarrassment whenever he told someone where he lived. He never liked the new house as much as the old one. For one thing, he loved the old kitchen, which had a hanging lamp in the middle and a table for four underneath, where you could squeeze six people, especially if the extras were kids. Kids like Lisa Liebowitz and Kelly Hanes, Rose’s friends, and Mike Schultz, who played short stop on Bill’s Little League team. In the evening, under that lamp, his mother taught him to read. He did his homework while she washed clothes in the sink. The new house had a laundry room and a dining room.

  Rose, peeling the lid off the potato salad, said, ‘Judith’s going through something right now, I don’t know what to call it. If we were Catholics maybe you’d say a crisis of faith. But it’s hard for me to do anything. She’s too far away.’

  Her daughter had moved to the Midwest for college and never come back. At Northwestern, she studied biology. Judith wanted to be a doctor and got into med school in Chicago. Three years later, she changed her mind and dropped out. The coursework involved a lot of memorization; it was like a factory, she said. You pick your little part of the process, you do things over and over. This isn’t why she went into medicine, to be a cog in the machine. After that, she bummed around for a while, living with friends, working as a secretary at a medical clinic in Jefferson Park. Wasting her life, as she said herself. She also had a lot of unhappiness with men, some of them Jews, but mostly not. Eventually she applied to law school. I miss getting grades, she told her mother. Northwestern accepted her, and she even made it through two and a half semesters, before dropping out – to get married.

  Somewhere along the way she had decided that the cause of her unhappiness was religious, that she had drifted away from her faith. Northwestern had a strong Hillel community, and one thing led to another. She changed her diet and lost weight, she started covering her head. Whatever Judith did, she had to be the best, and that also meant being the best Jew. She let herself be persuaded to try a matchmaker. Two dates later, she was in love. For months this was all she could talk about. How she had spent ten years on the dating circuit and never met an intelligent, decent, clean American man. Rose found the whole thing extremely upsetting. But for a while, it’s true, Judith seemed happier. She married the guy, a doctor, as it happens, who seemed perfectly nice, with predictably old-fashioned views; but patient and gentle. They bought a house in West Ridge; they had a beautiful boy. For the first few years, Judith said, she was busier than she had ever been in her whole life, including med school.

  But now her son was four and she was getting restless again. She didn’t like the school they were sending Michael to – she didn’t like what they taught him. A very restricted education. This is not how she’d been brought up.

  ‘I could have told her that from the beginning,’ Rose said to her brother. They were picking at the food while the sausages blistered in the oven. Pickles and potato salad, with hot mustard. Wiping the dressing up with the soft rye. ‘Really the trouble is, she’s bored. They wanted a large family, but it’s not happening. If there’s something she should pray for, it’s a baby, but even that is only a short-term solution.’

  When Rose stood up, to get salt, she pushed at the table with both hands. Bill could feel it in his groin, watching her move; that’s how it hurt him. A sharp, very intimate pain.

  ‘I put on a dress for you,’ she said, sitting down again. It was blue with white shapes on it, like little moons. She wore it over thick dark tights so you couldn’t see her legs. He stood up to turn off the oven and used a tea towel to lift out the tray of kielbasas.

  ‘There are more condiments in the fridge. Mustard is fine with me. I shouldn’t complain – you listen to her talk, and everything she says is very reasonable. It always has been. She starts something and it turns out to be not what she wanted. So she quits and starts over. After a while, like this, you don’t get anywhere. You just get older. But this thing she’s started now is a little harder to quit than the others. You can’t drop out of motherhood. There’s s
omething else, too. Alex keeps bugging me.’ Alex, her ex-husband, worked in pharmaceuticals and lived in Santa Fe. He had married again, a schoolteacher named Guadalupe, and they had two girls, twins. ‘He wants Judith to have some kind of contact with the girls, he wants them to know Michael. It doesn’t make sense to me but all these kids are roughly the same age. What can I tell him, she doesn’t want to. But it puts me in a strange position, especially since, on this front, I think he’s right. Kids are just kids. I’m pissed off with Alex but that’s his fault not theirs. I like to think Judith is taking my side, but that’s not why. He’s raising the girls Catholic, like their mother. Judith thinks it would be confusing for Michael. What can you say to that? It is confusing.’

  The kielbasas were good, but he should have left them in longer. Bill liked the fat too hot to eat and the skin almost burned. But he couldn’t just sit there listening, he had to do something. Also, otherwise you fill up on potato salad. He cut a sausage in half and folded the meat in a slice of rye, where it stained the bread. Before each bite, he dipped the end in mustard. He said, ‘So what do you tell him?’

  ‘I tell him she’s thirty-five years old. You can’t make her do anymore what she doesn’t want to do. Go out and see her yourself, show up at her door. But he’s right. Judith’s husband wouldn’t like it. I think there’s a very real possibility he wouldn’t let them in.’

  ‘She would let him in.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. But it doesn’t really matter. Alex is lazy. He complains but he doesn’t … I don’t mean to sound critical. The truth is, I like talking to him these days. How’s Paul?’

  ‘Nervous, a little on edge. He wants to retire, but he’s not thinking straight. A tennis player has a long life to be retired in. I mention this in case you want me to see if I can get you a ticket. Tomorrow could be his last match.’

  But Rose only looked at him and looked down. She had a fat bottom lip; when she was younger, a teenager and a young woman, boys liked her mouth, which was full and sensual. Now, with her heavy chin and thick nose, her cheeks, pale and red, her soft thin hair, her mouth expressed apology, shame, pity and good-humored self-deprecation.

  ‘I’d like to, Billy. But it’s a long way. I don’t like sitting on those narrow seats. My legs swell up. If I can get it on the television, I’ll watch it here.’

  ‘I don’t think it will be on TV.’

  For some reason, this killed the conversation, at least temporarily. They sat like that, eating. Bill refilled his water glass – he drank a lot with meals. He had shaved that morning, under his beard, and his Adam’s apple looked a little raw. When he drank, it moved. There was mayonnaise in his moustache; he wiped his mouth. Eventually Rose said, ‘I didn’t tell you, but Nathan came to visit me, with the girls. All of your children are very attentive. Some friends of his with a big house in Brooklyn were throwing a Fourth of July party. He said I was on the way, he was just stopping by. He’s a good kid, coming to see an old woman. That Julie has a head on her, right? Though what she did to her hair, I don’t know. Everybody wants to grow up. The way she talks, like a professor. Nathan I remember was just the same. Always looking for somebody to explain something to. It runs in the family.’

  Bill said, ‘I’m worried about him, too.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing maybe. But he’s getting mixed up in something political, which I don’t much like. There are people from the Justice Department trying to woo him. He wrote an opinion, which they think lets them off the hook. I disagree – with the opinion, I mean, but it’s hard for us to have these conversations. He thinks it’s personal for me. Professional jealousy. Maybe he’s right.’

  ‘All of this is beyond me,’ Rose said. ‘You know what I hear when you talk like this? Success, that’s what I hear. I’m proud of all of you. My little brother and his many children.’

  Bill had told himself beforehand not to mention it, but somehow the association set him off. Also, with Rose in front of him, just across the table, he couldn’t pass up a chance to give her pleasure.

  ‘Nathan went with us to see a couple of apartments yesterday,’ he said. ‘Liesel, when she retires, wants to have a place in the city. She says Texas gets too hot, she wants to be able to walk outside. And then there’s Paul in New York and Nathan in Boston. Susie in Hartford. The grandkids.’

  Rose stopped eating. Her wide eyes could still look girlish – she made vivid expressions.

  ‘Well, we looked at them,’ Bill said.

  ‘Where were they?’

  ‘Upper West Side. One of them around the corner from Aunt Ethel’s.’

  ‘I’m not going to say anything,’ Rose said, and Bill averted his face. When they were kids, they talked about opening a shop together. This was Rose’s idea, it was one of their games, and she dressed him in an apron and bossed him around. He loved it. They stuck prices on their mother’s cans of food, five cents, ten cents. The coffee table in their living room served as a shop counter. Mother came in and pretended to buy things from them, handing over real change. She sometimes had to fight to get it back.

  ‘It’s something Liesel wants,’ Bill said. ‘I don’t know. She wants to retire, I don’t. She likes big cities. It doesn’t make sense to me how much everything costs. For four rooms, five rooms. But I guess these days we don’t need much more.’

  Afterwards, he cleaned up, rinsing the plates thoroughly and lining them up in the dishwasher. There was half a kielbasa left on Rose’s plate, and Bill asked her where she kept the aluminum foil. But Rose shook her head. ‘For this kind of thing, at Yom Kippur, I add a few lines to the Al Chet.’ And she recited, in her synagogue voice, ‘For the sins we have committed by throwing away leftovers. For the sins we have committed by not making stock from the chicken carcass. For the sins we have committed by opening a new jar of jam …’ Meanwhile he scraped the sausage into the bin and took a piece of steel wool to the baking tray – some of the fats had burned into a crust. Rose watched him, sitting down with the chair pushed away from the table. ‘You’re a good brother,’ she said. ‘I’ll drive you to the station.’

  ‘That’s okay. I don’t mind walking.’

  ‘Otherwise I don’t get out of the house, I sit around all day going crazy.’

  ‘What should I do with the crumb cake?’

  ‘Take it.’

  ‘There’s no hurry. I can make a pot of tea.’

  But Rose said, ‘I’ll drop you at the station and come home and have a nap. It’s something to look forward to.’

  Before they left, he used the bathroom. Bill had had prostate surgery a few years before, and every time he went on a trip, even a short one, he took a pre-emptive leak. The toilet had a padded seat; the skin over the cushioning was cracking. Rose used an air freshener, Woodland Escape, a little lime-green unit attached to the wall, but the liquid inside had run out. He looked at himself in the mirror (he looked like his father) and then tugged at the edge to check the medicine cabinet. But there wasn’t much there – it was the downstairs bathroom. Just an open bag of Bic razors and a toothpaste tube. As if she sometimes entertained male guests, people who stayed the night but slept in the spare room. Maybe he had left them there himself.

  In the Buick, he said to her, which he always said, ‘How are you for money? Can I give you something?’ And she said, ‘A little would help.’

  With Judith unhappy, really in bad shape, Rose wanted to fly out to see her. But flights cost money, and everything ended up costing a little extra for Rose. A cab to the airport, porters. She could only travel in a business-class seat. She worried about thrombosis. Before you know it, just to see your daughter, to see your grandson, costs two, three thousand dollars. That’s the price of admission. Judith was trying to get Michael into a different school – she wanted at least to check out the alternatives, but there was resistance from his father. If Rose were around, it might make a difference. Everybody resents their mother-in-law anyway, she said. I can take the heat
, I got nothing to lose.

  ‘I’ll call Bryce Newman tomorrow,’ Bill said. ‘Tell him to wire it over.’

  Rose blushed. ‘Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do …’

  The car was full of those coupons you get in Sunday’s Times. There were newspapers on the rubber matting at his feet, along with muffin wrappers, empty juice bottles, even a box of Kleenex. When he got in, she reached over and swept everything onto the floor. ‘Excuse the way I live,’ she told him. Climbing out, he took some of the trash with him – there was a bin by the station. ‘It’s no trouble,’ he said, and Rose waited by the curb for him to come back. They didn’t kiss, but she reached over and took his hand; her palm was soft and very warm. Traffic built up behind her, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and squeezed her hand and let go.

  She leaned across the empty seat. ‘Tell Nathan to send me the links to those apartments.’

  He pushed the door shut and watched her drive off. Then he was alone again – at the hot point of the afternoon, around three o’clock. People were coming out of the station, a train must have arrived, and he waited for the concourse to clear before going in.

  On the journey back into Manhattan, he watched the view reverse itself – the green strips of landscape, the woody bluffs, the river, following the telephone lines, running towards Inwood, where the architecture greeted you like a postcard. He had forgotten to leave Rose the bag of cookies. From time to time he ate one, and licked the powder off his fingers. He needed the sugar hit; he felt low. And in his head, he kept up the conversation with Liesel he had started on the train-ride out. You have to understand that for me moving here is like going backwards, it’s not a simple thing to do, it stirs up various associations.