Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  William has never been to my sister's house in Carroll Gardens. More astonishing, he makes the unlikely claim never to have even once set foot in the borough of Lundy's restaurant, the Charlotte Russe, and the long-lost, accursed, but still beloved and mourned Dodgers. As we leave Manhattan I tell him that a person who has never walked across the Brooklyn Bridge can hardly claim to be a New Yorker.

  “Brooklyn is not really New York,” he says. He is sitting between Jack and me in the backseat of the taxicab, showing absolutely no ill effects from his evening of lactose debauchery. He is in his booster seat, which he allowed himself to be buckled into with nary a protest, to my grateful surprise. He seems to have taken our bargain seriously.

  Jack says, “I know about two and a half million people who would take issue with that statement, my man.”

  “But when people say, ‘New York,' they mean Manhattan. If they mean Brooklyn, then they have to say, ‘Brooklyn.' Also Queens, or the Bronx, or Staten Island, or New Jersey.”

  “New Jersey is not a borough of New York,” I say.

  “I know that, Emilia,” William says. “I am not a stupid baby. I know there are only five boroughs of New York. But sometimes you say you're from New York. And you're really from New Jersey. New York means Manhattan. Not Brooklyn. And definitely not New Jersey.”

  Jack sputters, swallowing his laughter, and points out the window.

  “Look,” he says. “If you look behind you, you can see where the towers used to be.”

  “I can't look behind me because of my booster seat,” William says. Then he gives me a knowing glance. “But that's okay, because I am happy to ride in my booster seat. It's very safe. Six and sixty, that's the rule.”

  “Sixty,” I say. “You'll probably be in high school by then, but whatever.”

  William giggles.

  “What are you two laughing about?” Jack sees William and me sharing a joke, the weight that has crushed him for more than two years suddenly takes wing from his back and flutters out the windows of the cab, and he floats two inches above the plastic upholstery.

  I lean across William and rub my nose against Jack's face. “It's private,” I say and kiss the rough stubble of his unshaven cheek.

  Jack's smile is so wide that the creases in his cheek are hard under my lips.

  Allison's kitchen table is crowded with dozens of bagels, glazed pottery bowls of cream cheese, heavy platters of pink lox, plates mounded with flaked whitefish. There are tomatoes, red onions, and capers. There are multicolored pastas, spreads, and casseroles that I don't recognize, that I expect were provided by various of the dark-skinned families milling around the living room. Allison's stable of friends is always meticulously assorted and multihued.

  She exchanges our coats for plates and pushes us in the direction of the buffet. “You must try the coconut rice with chicken,” she says. “Marybeth Babalalu made it and it's just delicious.” Allison points to a sallow-faced white woman wearing a calf-length wrap of black, green, and yellow kente cloth with a pattern of diamonds and arrows. Another piece of kente cloth is wrapped around her hair. It leans, a precariously tall tower, slightly off-kilter at the crown of her head. Her husband, who has purple-black skin and a small pink scar under one eye that is the precise hue of his plump lower lip, is wearing pressed Chinos and a white button-down shirt.

  “William, you're gigantic!” Allison says. “Get some food and then go downstairs to the basement. Emma is down there with all the other kids.”

  Allison's daughter, Emma, is nine years old. She is in the third grade at the Carroll School. It is, of course, a public school, PS 58. Lennon, Allison's son, is graduating this year from Stuyvesant High. My sister agonized for some time about Lennon's decision to apply to a magnet high school. Allison is an opponent of tracking; she believes it stigmatizes those not blessed with a certain, easily quantifiable intelligence, that it unfairly benefits the middle and upper classes. Lennon, however, wanted very much to commute with his circle of friends across the river, and his scores on the admissions test were among the highest in the city. His father, not usually given to interfering with the decisions of the not-yet-but-sure-to-be-appointed-any-day-now Judge Greenleaf, took the boy's side. Allison will not face the same crisis with Emma. Poor Emma is learning delayed, and struggles with even the simplest of school assignments. At Passover last year, after the third glass of wine, and in a rare moment of maternal insecurity, even despair, Allison told me that she worries that the girl will never learn to read, that her disabilities will prove to be permanent, that she might never be able to function in even the most basic of academic environments.

  My sister has clearly determined to do battle with her fear. She is the room parent of Emma's classroom, and most of the adults at this birthday party are, like Marybeth and Olatunji Babalalu, the parents of Emma's classmates. Lucy is not here. Her youngest has a hockey game in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, this weekend, and she has gone along as a chaperone. Allison tells me that Lucy has high hopes for the hockey coach, the divorced father of two of the boys on the team. Over the years since her divorce Lucy has worked her way through two soccer coaches, an SAT tutor, and an earth sciences teacher.

  William does not want to go downstairs with the rest of the kids. He stands next to Jack and me eating pita triangles and peculiarly bright-colored humus while Jack makes small talk with Allison's husband, Ben. I like Ben, although he reminds me of an egg. He is round and bald, and his skin is smooth and speckled. He has an egglike personality, too. It is hard to latch on to Ben, hard to feel close to him or to figure out whether what you are saying is having any effect on him. Allison says that his clients, particularly the young African American men, adore him, that they find him to be a kindred spirit. While it is hard for me to believe that a sixteen-year-old black kid whose wrinkled, baggy pants are slung so low that they hobble him could possibly have much in common with Ben, I am willing to give my brother-in-law the benefit of the doubt.

  “How's work?” Ben asks Jack.

  “Fine,” Jack says. He never discusses his work with my sister and her husband. This is not because he is ashamed of being a commercial litigator. Jack does not accept Allison's view of him as a tool of the corporate establishment. I should not criticize my sister. As I have said, she personifies her principles. She has been a public-interest lawyer, representing only the indigent, ever since she graduated from law school. Before that she spent a year with the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, digging wells. Allison's family eats organic food, some of which they grow in their garden; her thermostat is set to sixty-two degrees; and she does not drive a car. I cannot quibble with the way my sister lives her life, but her look of disdain when Jack first described his work made me want to slam her face into a platter of cold noodles with sesame sauce. My father had invited Lucy, Allison, and Ben out for Chinese food to meet the man I was moving in with, the man I had told my father I intended to marry as soon as his divorce became final. While I think Jack expected a certain amount of suspicion from my family, he had probably assumed it would be because of the age difference, or because he was married when we met. He did not imagine that it would be because my sister views any attorney who does not devote his or her life to battling on behalf of the underprivileged, myself and my father included, as having sold his or her soul to the devil. I should have warned him, but I was so enraptured that it had never occurred to me that anyone else would think Jack was anything other than perfect.

  Allison greeted Jack's description of his latest case, an acquisition soured into a lawsuit, with a sneer and a sharp exhalation of disgust.

  I said, “Why is it that the only people who find the earning of money to be morally reprehensible are the ones who grew up with plenty of it?”

  “Em, hush,” Jack said.

  “No, honey, it's okay,” I said. “Allison, you are so fucking sanctimonious. Well, guess what? Jack didn't have a childhood like ours. He didn't grow up in a nice big house in New Jersey. He didn't have h
orseback riding lessons.” For a brief period, when she was about twelve, Allison had wanted to be a jockey. “Jack grew up in Yonkers, in a three-family house that his father lost to the IRS when Jack was in his sophomore year of high school. He went to SUNY New Paltz, because that's where he could go to college for free, and he got a full ride to Columbia Law School. He has about two hundred Syrian cousins he sends money to, he bought both his mother and his sister houses in Boston, and he pays more child support than any other divorced father in the city of New York. So give him a break, Allison. Just give him a fucking break.”

  Jack stared at his plate, combing his chopsticks through his pile of rice.

  “The work we do is an expression of the world we want,” Allison said.

  “Girls, enough,” my father said. He was sitting across the table from me, and over the top of the lazy Susan heaped with soy sauce, mustard bottles, and brimming platters of food, I could see his hands outstretched beseechingly. “This is a family dinner, not a political debate.”

  “Everything is a political debate with Allison,” I said. “And if you dare say ‘the personal is political,'” I said to her, “I will reach across this table and dump the kung pao shrimp down the neck of your shirt.”

  Everyone laughed, pretending that I had made a joke, and for the rest of the meal we acted as if nothing had happened, as if I had not just humiliated my boyfriend by trotting out his working-class credentials like a badge of honor, a trump card in the never-ending game of Greenleaf family one-upmanship. Jack doesn't talk about his work with any of them now, except my father, and only when the others are not there.

  Jack says, “How about you, Ben? Any good cases, lately?”

  “Rape case. You probably read about it in the paper. The victim allegedly had her finger cut off.”

  “William, it's time to go downstairs and play with the other kids,” Allison calls out from across the room. “The upstairs is grown-ups only now.” Allison has magical powers; she can overhear with particular detail and accuracy any conversation that happens within the walls of her house. It must be very frustrating to be her child.

  “I don't want to go downstairs,” William says.

  “Go on, Will,” Jack says. “The kids are all down there. You'll have fun.”

  Lennon picks his way across the room, clearly sent over by his mother.

  “Hey, William,” he says. “Do you remember me?”

  “Yes,” William says. “Lennon, like John Lennon.”

  “Right on, man. You're an awfully little dude to know about John Lennon.”

  “My father takes me to Strawberry Fields sometimes.”

  “That's cool!”

  “I don't like the Beatles.”

  “Maybe you haven't listened to the right songs. Has anyone ever played you ‘Imagine'?” Lennon winks at me. He is trying very hard, this good-natured boy. “It's awesome.” Lennon sings, “Imagine all the people, living for today . . .” in a surprisingly pretty voice.

  William says, “‘Imagine' is not a Beatles song. John Lennon wrote it all by himself.”

  “Go downstairs with Lennon,” I say. “If you don't have fun, you can come back up.”

  William closes his eyes, clamps his lips in a thin line, and then nods. He follows Lennon through the arched doorway and we watch their retreating backs. They are separated by a mere twelve years, these two, and yet they could be different species. Lennon is huge, six foot three or four, and if his father is an egg, then he is the hatchling, all knobby knees and splayed paddles for feet, his feather-soft hair defying its armor of bright blue gel, his arms like long wings, flapping at his sides as if he is so surprised by their size that he cannot control their jerking movements. While Lennon, who is so much older, still seems unformed, slightly blurred around the edges by growth and change, there is a rigid, finished quality about William's tiny form, as if this is the size he has always been, the way he has always looked, and the way he intends to remain for the rest of his life.

  After William's descent into the perilous bowels of the rumpus room, Ben tells us about his trial, about his borderline-retarded client, about the victim who Ben believes accidentally severed her own index finger while chopping chicken parts. He tells this story with his usual bland impassivity, as if he is recounting a dull and pointless Mets game played long after the team has given up hope of winning the pennant. I wonder if Ben sheds this laconic style when he is in front of a jury, or if it is this very mildness that convinces them so often to acquit his clients.

  “Ben,” Allison calls across the room, “I need you to make a quick Grand Union run.”

  He pushes his glasses back on his egg face with one finger and nods distractedly, continuing his story about his thwarted attempts to convince the judge to authorize funds for an expert on self-mutilation.

  “Now, hon,” she says.

  He snaps to attention.

  “You forgot Rice Dream,” she says reproachfully.

  “Rice Dream?” he says.

  “For the kids who can't eat ice cream.”

  “Don't trouble yourself on William's behalf,” Jack says. “He'll be fine with just birthday cake. He's used to it.”

  “Don't be silly,” Allison says in her booming voice. “We have other children with lactose issues. I have a spelt alternative for the children with wheat allergies and I want a rice-milk alternative for the children with dairy allergies. Ben, you have to leave right now if we're going to cut the cake by twelve thirty.”

  Ben makes for the door. As he is wrapping a long purple muffler around his short neck he says to Jack, “I don't suppose you'd like to join me? Take a walk to the market? It's just a few blocks.”

  “Sure,” Jack says.

  I am about to follow when Allison says, “Emilia, come meet Lizbet. Her daughter Fiona is William's age. Lizbet and her partner, Angela, live on the Upper West Side, too.”

  Jack winks at me from across the room and makes his escape. I trudge over to be introduced to a slightly younger version of my sister. Lizbet has Allison's frizzle of gray hair and her earnest and pietistic expression.

  “Lizbet's signed Fiona up for PS 87,” Allison says.

  “We're hoping to get into the dual-language program,” Lizbet says. “By eighth grade the children are completely bilingual. Have you signed William up for kindergarten yet? Or will he be going to . . .” Here she pauses and purses her lips around the words, as though they are too sour to be spoken without making a face. “To private school?”

  “It's really not up to us,” I say. “William's mother would never in a million years let him near a public school.”

  “It's such a shame,” Allison says in a pained voice, as if she is very sorry for William. And for me. “William is a sweet boy, but I think it's already possible to see in him the effects of an overly sheltered upbringing. When a child grows up surrounded only by people of his own race and socioeconomic class, he cannot be expected to be sensitive to difference.”

  “Oh for God's sake, Allison. He goes to the 92nd Street Y preschool,” I say. “He's got black and Asian kids in his class. Diversity is one of their things.”

  “Experiencing rich people of all colors is not experiencing diversity.”

  “Not everyone there is rich.”

  “You're rich.”

  “Not really,” I say. But of course we are rich. Certainly richer than the other people in this house. Certainly richer than I ever expected to be.

  Olatunji Babalalu, who is listening to the conversation, reassures me. “Private schools can be wonderful. I myself attended the Bishop Pertteerson Comprehensive Secondary School, in Mbosi.”

  I am saved from replying by a loud pounding from the stairs leading up from the basement. Lennon appears, red-faced and sweaty. “Emilia!” he shouts. “You better get downstairs right now!”

  “What happened? Is William okay?” I run across the room, dodging around the dining-room table and nearly toppling a woman in an apple-green sari.

&n
bsp; I take the stairs two at a time, Lennon on my heels. At the bottom, on the garden level that my sister has turned into a playroom complete with beanbag chairs, ugly peach carpeting, and an ancient stereo system, but devoid, of course, of television, video, or anything else that might pollute her children's pristine minds, I find a dozen or so children huddled together under a banner that says, FELIZ COMPLEAñOS, EMMA.

  “Where is he?” I shout. “Where's William?”

  My niece, who is sucking on the end of one her red braids, points to a foam sofa. “He's hiding behind the couch.”

  I grab one end of the sofa and heave, expecting to need all my strength to budge the thing, but it is so flimsy it flies away from the wall and halfway across the room, toward the group of children. They scatter, squealing.

  William is lying on the floor curled in a ball, his head buried under his folded arms. I can tell immediately what has happened; it is horribly obvious. The smell is overpowering.

  “Oh no, William,” I say. “Did you poop in your pants?”

  He scrambles into a tighter knot.

  “We were playing statue tag,” Lennon says. He has come up beside me and is obviously trying not to breath through his nose. His voice has a nasal twang. “He was tagged and I think he was just afraid to move or something. I guess it sort of hit him suddenly because one minute he was totally fine and the next he just . . . I dunno. Did it.”

  I kneel down next to William and, doing my best not to gag from the stench, reach out a tentative hand. “William? Hey, William? Are you okay?”