Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  I racked my brain for other things to play and found some old pick-up sticks, in a Lucite box from about 1978 at the stationer’s on Sixth Avenue. We spilled them out on the floor and sprawled there, taking turns at selecting the color we were and making nothing move. This was the sort of thing that fascinated Jerry: that such a game existed, and that I knew what it was. Did most people know about things like this? His rearing had been so singular and specific that it sometimes seemed like the most banal scraps of knowledge were the things that intrigued him about me the most.

  We played dominoes, built houses of dominoes, built houses of cards. I taught him how to play jacks, and sometimes we just sat against the wall and bounced a dime-store bag’s worth of tiny balls all over the room, seeing how many we could keep in play at once. I taught him a modified version of this Spaldeen handball game I played as a kid: Namesies, Clapsies, Rollsies, High as the Sky, Deep as the Sea, Touch My Knee, Touch My Toe, Touch My Heel, and Away We Go.

  “Namesies—what the heck is Namesies?” he said.

  “I don’t know. It might have been ‘Mainsies,’ but we all butchered everything in my neighborhood.”

  “In your neighborhood,” he said, smiling at me so unguardedly I had to turn away.

  I brought in a stack of scrap paper and bought one of those big boxes of crayons that were such magic to me as a kid. We both liked the metallics, especially copper and bronze. We sat and drew for hours that day, hiding our drawings and then trading them at the end, like I had done with my sisters and brothers when we were kids.

  When he showed me his pictures, I gasped out loud. They were extraordinary. They were alive and huge and cosmic, filling every last inch of the page, crazy abstractions and fantastic starbursts and spirals and mad crazy colors. His mind was bursting with creativity.

  “These are amazing.”

  “Yours are much better,” he said.

  “Mine suck,” I said, most sincerely.

  “Yours are so precise and linear.”

  “And completely tight-assed. This is why I didn’t go to art school. Jerry, you don’t really get how great these are. You could sell these for, like, cash money. This is a thing you’re doing—look, this is something I know about. You’ve got the insistence of a real artist, a singularity, a need. What do you say we clean you up and get you in a cab and take these over to Sonnabend?” I was doing my funny-girl shtick, but I also meant every word of it.

  “Oh, it’s fun, but it’s kind of like garbage,” he said.

  I was shaking my head, baffled by his lack of enthusiasm, by how he devalued his work.

  “May I keep these?” he asked.

  “My drawings?”

  “May I?”

  “Sure, but that’s the real trash,” I said.

  He looked at them, smiling. It made no sense to me.

  “Why do you always draw houses?” he asked.

  “I don’t know that I always draw houses,” I said.

  “I think you do,” he said. He fanned out my pictures and pointed from one to the next, showing me the house in each.

  “I had no idea,” I said.

  I studied them.

  “ ‘Tired and unhappy, you think of houses,’ ” I said.

  He looked up sharply.

  “You are tired and unhappy?” he asked.

  “No. No no no—it’s a Delmore Schwartz poem,” I said.

  “Because I’m not unhappy at all,” he said.

  I showed him how to cut out paper snowflakes and together we made hundreds of them, a million tiny paper scraps littering his bed like a snowfall. I stood on the chair and taped them up all over his bedroom ceiling as he lay in his bed, looking up at me with his somber green eyes.

  “I like this a lot,” he would say. I like this a lot—as if too much enthusiasm would risk ruining a thing, cause it to disappear.

  I lived and breathed him, ate and slept him. Looking back at it so many years later, it was a perfect moment, some breach in space that allowed only us to inhabit it, some momentary stalling of the clock that gave us something like this: a childhood together.

  And then Thanksgiving came.

  15

  In the days leading up to the holiday, Jerry became well enough to leave his room. I’d help him down the stairs, bundle him against the weather, tuck him into a chair in the bright and cold solarium that looked out over the garden, and read to him.

  What did he want to hear? At first he told me to pick out something I liked. But make it a story, he said, nothing “from the world.” Thus I tried favorite book after favorite book with him—and each one of these he waved away after a few minutes. On one hand things were too old or too florid, but on the other he wasn’t interested in anything remotely experimental. He wondered at my penchant for what he called fussy books. When I picked up Walter Abish’s How German Is It and read to him its opening piece—“What are the first words a visitor from France can expect to hear upon his arrival at a German airport? Bonjour? Or, Guten Tag? Or, Ihren Pass bitte?”—he held his hands up in the air and nearly shouted.

  “You like this?”

  “Oh, it’s brilliant. It kills on many levels.”

  “What does that mean, ‘it kills on many levels’? I don’t like a book that’s so much smarter than I am.”

  Finally I started reading him the story of Cosimo, who pushes away his plate of snails one day when he’s twelve—“Never had we seen such disobedience”—climbs a holm oak, and stays there for the rest of his life. The Baron in the Trees. Jerry listened deeply, his eyes flashing as he looked out into the backyard garden. But I knew he was seeing a different landscape. That day I read until my voice was hoarse.

  The next morning we were back in the sunroom early to finish the book. Jerry really did want to see “what happens.” It was crisp and bright outside, one of those autumn mornings of exceptional clarity. I can still see it now. And I remember how silent he was as I read the final passage, as Calvino’s narrator writes his last words with a thread of ink that “splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.”

  I closed the book and looked at him.

  “It’s over,” he said at last. “I can’t believe it’s over.”

  He held out his hand and I gave him the book. He sat rubbing its cover with his hand, as if he were petting it.

  “I’m just so sorry it’s finished,” he said.

  “There are others,” I said softly.

  “But this is the only book that is this,” he said.

  Thanksgiving was just days away now, and Dolores brought in her sister Marta and daughter Yolanda to help with the cooking and baking. We would have, as Clarice said, quite a table for the holiday, meaning not only the menu but who would be there, and Dolores, Marta, and Yolanda would serve the dinner. Clarice had even bought them matching black frocks, cut a bit in the style of Edwardian maidservant mufti. This sat especially badly with me, because by then I’d met Yolanda, a thoroughly hip kid in an oversize MC Lyte T-shirt, paint-splatter-look leggings, and enormous gold shrimp earrings, and I could see that for her this whole Upstairs, Downstairs routine was a source of humiliation. She covered up this fact by relentless eye-rolling and constant use of the word “Duh!” Which is just what I’d have done if I’d been in her shoes.

  Since Clarice was always telling me what elegant cursive I had, I was the one who sat with her to make the place cards, a nerve-racking job that involved writing with a glass dip pen and sepia ink on special paper bought in Florence. Cornelia would be coming down from boarding school for the holiday, but Bertrand had no plans to come in from London anytime soon, and there was of course no need to ask about Kendra. Sidney’s sister Anne, brother-in-law Mitchell, young niece Shoshanna, and father would be there—and this was how I learned that Zeyde’s name was actually Isadore—as would other extended Löwenstein cousins from the New Jersey hinterlands.

  I wrote no names of anyone from Clarice’s side of the family, a fac
t that I puzzled over. Instead, as if to fill the gap, Clarice would be opening her table to a throng of widowers, childless divorcées, and, as she put it, unattached young people.

  “The young people will keep things lively,” she told me, as if I didn’t actually count among the members of this special tribe.

  The house was humming with activity all that week. Rented tables were set up, stacks of napkins ironed, piles of chestnuts shelled, pumpkin and mincemeat and apple pies with crisscross crusts made, a thirty-pound turkey from Balducci’s delivered to the door.

  The night before, I was sitting with Jerry in the solarium. I had found us a copy of Calvino’s Italian Folktales, but after I read him a few, they ceased to hold his interest. He thought them too short and most so méchant—he said this in French—and the endings too pat or moralistic. Someone was always getting killed or eaten, he said. To which I replied, “Yes, they are folktales.”

  “I guess I don’t like folktales, then,” he said. We were both looking out the window into the trees. Lights had gone on in many of the buildings across the backyard canyon, and we could see various people in their apartments moving about their lives, making their own pies or vacuuming their rugs or taking down special glasses from high cupboards or some, alone, sitting in the blue light of a television screen.

  “Do you think any people across the way are watching us?” he said at last.

  “Probably. Someone in the dark, some lonely soul. Some bored kid.”

  “Kendra and I used to do that when we were little,” he said.

  “She told me. The Shakespearian actor who closed the arm of his wrap in the dishwasher.”

  “Oh, she made that up. She makes up all kinds of things. What’s absurd is that some of the things that really happened were actually much stranger than her stories.”

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “Terrible things.” He shook his head, gestured. “We were here one day, just the two of us. I was probably twelve. Kendra was at the barre there, that used to be there, and I was practicing my flute. And a woman went down right there. Right down from that window. A jumper. It was so sudden and the sound it made was so strange, like a big comforter hitting the ground. The sound she made. I mean, it was muffled, not like a bang but a thud. She was an old lady, a widow. Her husband died and she was left alone.”

  “Horrible that you saw that,” I said, turning to look at him.

  “No one believed us when we told them we saw it. They thought we’d made it up.”

  “Maybe it was too scary for them to think of you seeing it. Young as you were.” I studied his profile.

  “I always felt like everything is cursed here.”

  “In this house? I’m just not feeling such a thing.”

  He turned and looked at me.

  “It’s different with you here,” he said.

  Now I was the one to turn and look out the window.

  “Different how?” I said.

  “Different good,” he said.

  “That’s good,” I said. Some kind of nervous laugh came out of me.

  “That’s banal,” I said then.

  “I just think it would be good if maybe it would be able to stay like that,” he said.

  “Well, I haven’t been fired yet,” I said.

  “No, I mean—because I’ll have to leave here. I’m getting better and then I’ll have to leave and find somewhere to go.”

  “You’ll go back to the squat?”

  He didn’t reply for a while.

  “I think I’m done there,” he said at last.

  “So where will you go?” I asked.

  He turned away and now we were both looking straight ahead, out the window.

  “I’m thinking. I’m thinking. But. Somewhere that maybe you’ll come with me.”

  “What?” I said.

  Because I couldn’t possibly have heard him right.

  He opened his mouth to say something, but he seemed to suddenly freeze with the night.

  The double doors burst open and Cornelia flew into the room.

  “JERRY!” she screamed, landing on his neck.

  And the rest of the night it was Cornelia showing us the traditional dances of Zaire, Cornelia playing us beats on her doumbek, Cornelia saying in terrible-sounding Mandarin, These are my shoes, How is your uncle, Where is my drinking glass, Cornelia talking a mile a minute and jumping and spinning and laughing, and me wondering if I’d hallucinated everything that came before.

  *

  Thanksgiving morning I was up early. I had to talk to Jerry alone before the day began.

  I dressed in any old clothes and stepped out into the hallway, closing the bedroom door softly behind me. I looked up and Clarice was standing there on the landing. Some crazy noise leapt out of my throat.

  “You startled me,” I managed to say.

  How long had she been there, waiting?

  “We’ll need your help in the kitchen,” she said. She had her hand on the banister going up to the next floor, where Jerry’s room was, as if she were barring the way. She came forward, sweeping me thither, and marched me down the stairs to the kitchen.

  Dolores and Marta already had things humming, pots on all six burners, every counter covered. The menu was impossibly elaborate—fancy versions of all the usual Thanksgiving things but also roast duck and a sweetbreads plate and vegan dishes and multiple sauces and the mac-and-cheese option for the young Löwenstein cousins. I was thrown right into it, directed by Dolores, peeling and chopping and mixing. Dinner would be early—at two o’clock—and there was still so much to do. At some point Cornelia materialized by my side, mashing and pureeing and, in a moment, running to the back door to violently shake out a contraption that she insisted was a nineteenth-century French precursor to the salad spinner, an absurd wire armature shaped like a chicken.

  “Where’s Yolanda?” I thought to ask at some point, and Dolores, looking down at her able fingers moving over her own work, only shook her head in an angry-sad way.

  “Yolanda no’ here today,” Marta offered.

  I had a blip of an idea in my head, but we were all too busy gunning for me to take the time to examine it.

  Too early we could hear the doorbell start to ring.

  “Ai!” Dolores and Marta and Cornelia all yelled together.

  I was at the sink when Clarice came in through the swinging doors. She was beautifully put together in a new Chanel, and I could see that her hairdresser must have come by that morning and “lifted” her hair. The maids’ uniforms hung from her arm.

  “Here, Dolores, Marta,” she said, holding out the uniforms to them. They took them.

  “And Francesca,” she said, “you’ll take this.”

  And she held out Yolanda’s uniform to me.

  “I’ve gotta go get changed,” Cornelia yelled, diving through the doors and blasting out of the kitchen.

  I stared at the black polyester uniform in Clarice’s outstretched hand.

  What?

  Dolores and Marta, usually so industrious, were suddenly still as statues.

  “Take it,” Clarice said, thrusting the uniform at me again.

  “That’s too big for me,” I said.

  “The belt ties like a bow in the back and you can make it snug.”

  All I could do was stare.

  I wanted to say, Why are you doing this to me? But I felt embarrassed saying this in front of Dolores and Marta. Because why should Dolores and Marta have to wear stupid demeaning uniforms? Why was I special?

  Miserably, I took the uniform out of Clarice’s hand. I couldn’t look at her, but I had no doubt she was smiling.

  I was out of the kitchen and up both staircases and I ran into Kendra’s room and slammed the door. The dress was balled under my arm, and I whipped it out and threw it against the wall. I stomped around the room, banging my fist into my palm. I wanted to jet away, explode into a million particles.

  In a minute I grabbed the dress and looked at it in my outs
tretched arms. I went to the mirror and held it up in front of me.

  It was marginally less ugly than it had first appeared.

  But it was not the stupid ugly dress, it was the fact of it. It was the fact that Clarice was laying down this thing on me.

  All at once I had the dress by the either side of the neck and I yanked it and yanked it until I heard the fabric give—and I ripped it full down the front. I threw it on the floor.

  “Well, I can’t wear it now,” I said to the room.

  *

  When I went downstairs, it was in my own dress.

  The house had filled up and people stood in tight groups, wineglasses in hand. Was I imagining a kind of heaviness in the air? Bach played, just slightly too loudly. To fit everyone in, the doors between the sitting and dining rooms had been thrown open, and a series of tables stretched in one long line from the front of the house to the back, like a single, endless banquet board, somehow medieval in feeling. Everything was colorful and festive, but I saw it all at a remove. It had nothing to do with me.

  Then I saw Zeyde in his wheelchair, left by the windows that looked out to Eleventh Street. His weak old head leaned to one side, and his eyes were half closed. I wondered what he was dreaming of.

  I leaned down beside him and softly greeted him. His eyes opened wide.

  “ ’Cesca!” he said. He grasped my hands and squeezed them and then, in a moment, deanimated entirely. His hands slipped away and his eyes closed, and his head drifted gently back down, like a baby chick nodding in sleep. I realized he would be gone from this world soon.

  I searched the crowd, wanting only to get this moment over with, and it was at the far end of the room that I saw Clarice. She was talking with two nearly identical blondes, both sleekly groomed and dressed in Calvin Klein taupe. Her head turned my way like a homing device. She instantly assimilated what I’d done, and in a moment she was coming toward me.

  “What happened to the dress?” she asked in an awful smiling-to-cover-extreme-anger way.