The Transformation

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by Terri Kraus

The golfer on the screen whaled at a golf ball, and the crowd applauded and cheered in traditional genteel fashion.

  “Good,” Mr. Cohen said. “No one yelled out, ‘In the hole!’ I really hate when they do that.”

  Oliver was silently grateful that he didn’t have a chance to respond before Samantha’s father spoke again.

  “So, Oliver, why are you here? You’re not working today, are you? Design decision? Need a check? What?”

  “No, sir. I’m not working today. But I needed to talk to Samantha. Sort of on a personal level, I guess.”

  Samuel swiveled on his seat. His stare was penetrating, and Oliver felt totally exposed. “Ah. Samantha says you two have stopped going out. Very disappointed, she was, Mr. Barnett.”

  Oliver, who had little experience with dating, had even less experience dealing with the parents of the girls he dated. And Mr. Cohen’s comment took him by complete surprise.

  “Well, I—” Oliver sputtered, trying to devise a cogent answer, “I guess I was too.”

  Mr. Cohen’s expression remained icy. “She tells me it was your decision. So. How can you be disappointed?”

  Mr. Cohen appeared to have a skill at putting people on the defensive, however politely.

  “It was my decision, I guess. But I wanted to talk with her about it. That’s why I’m here. To talk about it. If she’ll talk to me, that is.”

  At last Mr. Cohen relaxed and took another drink from his martini glass with two olives in it. “She was happy, Mr. Barnett, when you two were dating. She’s my naches, my pride and joy. I like it when she’s happy.”

  “I can imagine, sir.”

  Mr. Cohen swirled the clear liquid around in his glass with a stirrer, the ice cubes delicately clinking against the thin glass. “She told me this cockamamie story about the church and how the old pastor there said that the building was a very special place—a place of truth. Apparently he told Sam a secret from his past because of it. I thought it was pretty far out, that story, but hey, now I’m telling you the truth, so maybe there is something to it. You hear about that story, Oliver?”

  “I did, sir. Well, Sam told me some of what Mr. Han said. Maybe there is something to it. The building, I mean. I’m trying to be honest now. That’s why I need to speak with your daughter.”

  Mr. Cohen took a long swallow and finished his drink. “Happy she was, Oliver. Very happy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It was the happiest I have seen her … well, since her mother died.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Samantha did say that her mother was gone. My sympathies, sir.”

  Mr. Cohen rose from his chair. Oliver noted the lustrous sheen on his soft leather loafers, the kind with two tassels on each shoe, the kind Oliver would have never purchased for himself.

  “She tell you how it happened, Oliver? Speaking about honesty here, and all. She give you the particulars of the story?”

  “No, sir. All I know is that Mrs. Cohen is gone and that it seems Samantha misses her a lot.”

  “Yeah. Well, I guess I’m all for honesty and full disclosure. Samantha’s mother committed suicide.”

  For a long moment, the loudest sound in the room was the almost-muted commentary coming from the countertop television set, still tuned to the golf match.

  “I-I didn’t know,” Oliver stammered.

  “Samantha doesn’t talk about it much. I tell you, it’s a real angry way to die.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “She didn’t tell you about the note then, either, did she?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Samantha found her. Upstairs in the bathtub. Blood everywhere. Oy. And a note on the counter.”

  Oliver had no words to reply.

  “You know what she said in the note?”

  “No, sir.”

  “She blamed her daughter and her husband for it. Me and Samantha. Blamed us for her death. Not in those exact words. But she said the two of us made her invisible. That we had such big personalities that she started to die inside. That she had been miserable for years. She said that we should have known.”

  Oliver managed to whisper, “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Mr. Cohen walked to the window over the sink and stared out at the huge trees in the backyard. “After it all happened, her therapist said that she was bipolar or schizophrenic or manic depressive. I forget which, now—what do I know from mental illnesses?—and had been for a long time. The therapist said it wasn’t our fault. She said we shouldn’t feel guilty. And yet. We were living with a certifiable meshugge in the house and didn’t even know it.”

  Mr. Cohen turned back to Oliver. “You know how hard that is on a young girl, Oliver? Samantha doesn’t talk about it. Well, I saw her use alcohol, for a while, and then men … something to hide from the pain, is what I’m thinking. It’s like the Shiva that would never end, so long she grieved. Oy. But I saw her happy again—really happy, when she was with you. Makes it hard, Oliver. Makes it hard.”

  Oliver didn’t know what to say but wanted to be honest. “Mr. Cohen, are you a religious man?”

  Mr. Cohen straightened up, his lower lip pushed up, as if he were carefully considering the question. “Oliver, we have many traditions. Culture and traditions. My wife, she kept all the laws. Wore herself out. I do the best I can, but I am not a man of great faith. There’s Jewish and then there’s Jewish Jewish. Why? Why do you ask?”

  Oliver’s mind raced. He could say a lot of things—that it’s not about keeping the laws, and that’s why Jesus came, to set us free. But he wondered what might be appropriate to share in this moment with Samantha’s father.

  A cell phone’s shrill warble broke the solemn air.

  Mr. Cohen slapped at his waist. “Samuel here.”

  The older man listened, then held the phone away from his face, just a few inches, so that the caller would hear everything. He looked at Oliver with that straight, penetrating gaze.

  “Seems that my daughter has found a lonely and abandoned dog named Robert inside the old church. She wants to bring him home with her. What should I tell her?”

  Oliver was already nearly at the door. “Tell her not to move. Tell her I’ll be right there.”

  And before he closed the door after himself, Oliver called back, “Thanks for the coffee, Mr. Cohen.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  TALLER DIDN’T EXPECT to hear tapping at his door. He had guests, occasionally, but few, if any of them, ever dropped by unannounced. He switched off the TV, replaced the remote in the antique wooden box where it was stored out of view and uncluttering his coffee table, and walked to the entryway of his apartment. He could tell it was a woman; the shadow through the glass, cast by the streetlamp down the block, indicated his guest’s shorter stature.

  As a rule, Taller didn’t bother to fasten the deadbolt and second chain until he went to bed. He undid just the latch and opened the door.

  “Paula?”

  A moment passed before she looked up. Her face was drawn, her eyes looked troubled, with a tracing of redness. “I need to talk to you, Taller.”

  Taller didn’t step back, not just yet. “Where’s your daughter?”

  “With my mom. She’s a saint.”

  Only then did Taller retreat one step and open the door enough for Paula to enter. He looked out onto the street, then closed the door and snapped the lock shut.

  Taller stepped around Paula, both of them still in the entryway.

  “Can I have … a glass of water, Taller. Please?”

  There was a brief pause, then he replied, “Sure. Come on into the kitchen. I have bottled or tap. Or coffee or tea, if you want.”

  “No. Tap water is fine. Really.”

  She sat at the table, picking the chair Taller never sat in, like she kne
w that Taller would never sit at the table right behind the sleek salt and pepper shakers and matching napkin holder. He would have always picked the chair that faced the archway and the window.

  He removed a glass from a cabinet, let the water run for a moment, then filled it.

  “Ice?”

  “No. No thank you. Just water.”

  Taller placed the glass on the table.

  Paula took the glass and took a long sip. “Taller,” she said softly. “We need to talk.”

  Oliver set off for the church at a jog, then slowed down, not wanting to get there all winded and stumbling over getting his words out of his mouth, or arrive sweaty and disheveled. He stood, catching his breath, looking at the church.

  At night, when the lights are on inside, the windows look alive.

  He stepped inside and Robert the Dog, who had been sitting next to Samantha in one of the center booths, trotted over to Oliver, sniffed at his hand, and deliberately returned to Samantha’s side.

  “Don’t blame him, Oliver. I’ve been feeding him gourmet dog cookies from Wag, that new dog bakery, or ‘barkery,’ they call it, on Aiken. I don’t know, but I always seem to have a package of something in my purse for Robert. And he looked hungry.”

  “You can’t believe a word he says,” Oliver replied as he walked over to them. “He has a full bowl of Kibbles in the basement.”

  “Kibbles? Oy. Just the word is unappetizing. And it’s dark down there. Maybe he’s afraid of dark places.”

  Oliver debated if he should sit next to Samantha or facing her. He decided to face her.

  “He isn’t. He just knows how to play people with a kind heart who fall for his doe-eyed look.”

  Robert gave Oliver a dog’s version of a baleful look, then jumped from the booth and padded off. They could both hear his nails tapping against the stairs as he descended into the basement.

  “The carpet will be here on Monday,” Oliver said.

  “Good. Good,” Samantha replied.

  Oliver had tested a thousand opening lines during the drive back home. None of them worked. He took a deep breath. “I was talking to your father,” he said, one opening line he could truly say that he had never once remotely considered.

  “I surmised as much. You being there. Him being there. Me being here.”

  “He seems like a very nice man.”

  Samantha moved her purse from one side to the other. A nervous gesture, Oliver thought.

  “He is. But crafty as well. I mean, he can be. But not always. Or was he? Crafty, I mean. With you.”

  “No. He was very honest. We talked about golf some.”

  Samantha couldn’t hold her incredulous laugh. “Golf? Really?”

  “It was on TV. He asked if I played.”

  “Do you?”

  “Mostly on courses with big windmills.”

  “Me too.”

  “Samantha …”

  Samantha looked up, the light from all the tiny new downlights on the rafters catching her eyes and her cheeks and her nose and her hair in just such a fashion as to make her look almost angelic, dreamlike.

  “I went camping this weekend.”

  Her expression grew puzzled.

  “It was a cold, wet, miserable time. But I needed to get away. I needed time to think. To sort things out.”

  “Did you? Sort things out, I mean?” Samantha asked, leaning forward just an inch, reaching up with her left hand to take a curl of her long hair and twist it between her fingers.

  “No. Well … maybe I did. Sort of. But I needed to talk to you.”

  A horn sounded from somewhere outside.

  “And now we’re talking, Oliver.”

  “We are.”

  Oliver looked down at his hands, calloused and rough, and in need of some tender care. The hands of a carpenter. The result of hard, honest work.

  There’s that word again. Honest.

  “Your father told me about your mother.”

  He watched her face slowly change, from an expectant look in her eyes, to a sheen of pain, then a noble, wavering disguise. He could see her chest rise and fall, a little more rapidly now, as if her heart had sped up, beating faster as if in flight.

  “We never talk about it,” she said, her words coming from a very distant place. “We have never really talked about it.” Samantha drew in a deep breath, then let it out. “My mother … she said some horrible, horrible things to me, right before she died. I have never been able to get the words out of my head. I can’t get away from what she said to me.”

  Oliver leaned closer to the table. “I’m so sorry, Samantha.”

  “And finding her like that. It was—”

  “I know how you feel,” Oliver said, reaching for her hand.

  “How can you know how I feel? I can’t ever get away from it. Finding your mother like that—”

  “I do know. Really. I need to tell you something too, Samantha. Remember when I told you about my father? How he left the family when I was young? How I had to grow up early?”

  Samantha nodded, obviously not ready for a speech at that moment.

  “He didn’t leave. Well—” Oliver said, searching for the proper way to tell the truth, “he left. But … he didn’t just go away. He killed himself.”

  He heard Samantha draw her breath in sharply.

  “He hung himself in the basement. I found him there, the rope tied to a bare rafter.”

  “Oh, Oliver …,” Samantha said, clearly distraught, recognizing a shared pain.

  “My mother blamed Taller and me. She said he couldn’t take the pressure of being a husband and a father of the two of us. He couldn’t take it. We were a handful back then. She said he couldn’t figure a better way of getting away. It was all our fault.”

  “Oh, Oliver.”

  “That’s what she said. Taller was too young to understand, but I knew what she meant. It was my fault—and Taller’s fault. And the thing is, no one ever found out it was suicide. She made me promise not to tell. My mother knew someone on the police force, and they made it out to be a heart attack. My mother and I alone knew the truth. Taller never found out. And keeping the secret—all these years, carrying it around—it kills me sometimes.”

  “Oh, Oliver.”

  “I’ve spent my whole life trying to make it up to her. Everything was bottled up, and she had nowhere to turn—just like me.”

  Oliver did not think or debate, but stood up and slid into the booth next to Samantha. He placed his arm around her shoulder and noticed the faint, wonderful smell of her. “I-I know what you feel like inside. How you try to make everything perfect so the pain won’t start. How you always try to run fast so the past won’t catch up.”

  Oliver took a deep breath. “I never talked about this with anyone. Not my mother. Not my friends. And Taller doesn’t know. Or at least, I don’t think he really knows. I talk to God about it, a lot. And that’s the only thing that helps. But I can’t keep everything in perfect order anymore. I don’t want to do this anymore. I just can’t … I won’t live my life to please my mother.”

  “I know, Oliver. I know …”

  Samantha wrapped her arms around Oliver, under his, and they held each other tight and long and carefully in the dim blue light, inside the big old church, at the center booth.

  “Are you sure?” Taller demanded, his words firm and direct but not fully angry … or at least that’s what Paula hoped.

  “I am. I tested twice. And then I went to the clinic on Route 30—by the mall. I’m pregnant, Taller.”

  Taller stepped around the table. “And it’s mine? You sure of that?”

  Paula had expected the question and didn’t blame him for asking it. If the situation had been reversed, she would have posed the same q
uestion. And she had debated how to respond—with anger, or disbelief, or damaged innocence.

  None of them sounded right.

  So she simply sighed and said with a resigned tone, “Yes, Taller, I am sure. Just like you are sure.”

  Taller pulled the chair out from the table, lifting it slightly, she noticed, so it wouldn’t scratch the floor. “What are you—” he began, then stopped. He blinked a few times. “What are we going to do about this?”

  A tear began to trail down Paula’s cheek, just on the right side of her face. She knew it would be only a matter of time until more followed. She looked down, knowing he was watching the course of the tear, and then another.

  He reached over and took her hand. “I don’t want you to get an abortion.”

  Paula looked up, surprised. “You don’t?”

  Taller took a deep breath. “No. I-I don’t know why. I mean, I don’t want you to do anything bad. Like an abortion. I’ve screwed my life up enough already. I don’t think I could live with myself anymore if you did that.”

  She watched his eyes. Behind their normal gray coldness something different was going on, as if he were imagining a highchair in the kitchen, a stack of baby bottles on the empty drainboard, and a scrawled picture or two torn out of a coloring book taped to the refrigerator. She could see all that, in spite of knowing that he’d have to work at acceptance every day. But she could see that he would try.

  “Paula, I have to do the right thing—maybe for the first time in my life. We’ll work it out. It may not be perfect, but it has to be better than either of us has now. If you want to. I promise to try.”

  Paula had continued to cry as he spoke. She wiped at her face with her hands and looked up at Taller. “I’ll try, too. We can make it work, can’t we?”

  Taller half-shook his head. “I don’t know. But we can try. I can. I will, Paula. Okay?”

  “Sure. Okay. We can do that. We can.”

  Oliver could not tell how long the two of them sat there, entwined in their fierce embrace. Eventually, they both relaxed a degree or two and leaned back. Oliver wanted to see her face again, to memorize the lines and curves and coloring, and the shape of her lips and the structure of her throat and neck. He reached over, then, and touched her hair—gently, tentatively at first, then slowly moving his fingers through its thickness—something he’d wanted to do for a long time.

 

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