by Judith Frank
Matt stood and went into the kitchen, which held a big messy pile of syrup-covered plates, coffee mugs, a griddle glistening with the residue of melted butter. There were a few cold pancakes left on a plate, and he picked one up with his fingers and tore it in quarters, dragged a piece through the syrup streaks on the top plate, wadded the sweet mess into his mouth. Then he ate the other three quarters as well. From the other room he could hear Gal talking excitedly, saying “No offense,” her favorite new expression. “I love you and Matt and Yo-yo. I just think Noam and I should be in Ema’s family. Don’t you think Ema would be happy if I was?”
Matt found the screw top to the syrup bottle, set it on top, and twisted it closed over a ring of sludge. Then he sighed and headed back into the living room.
“Actually, I don’t, sweetie,” Daniel said. “Ema and Abba wanted you to live with us, and we have to honor their wishes. And we went to court, and the judge agreed that you and your brother should live with us.”
Matt turned around. Gal said, “But back then, I was still pretty little, and didn’t know how to talk to him myself. Maybe we should go back to the judge and this time I’ll talk to him.” She was still sitting on her grandmother’s lap, and Malka was pressing her lips against the side of her head, whispering, “Shh, shh.” He saw that Gal didn’t look so much defiant as exalted, although uncertainty was beginning to cloud her face. The front door slammed: Yaakov taking Yo-yo out for a walk.
“There aren’t any do-overs,” Daniel said evenly. “The judge thought very carefully about what’s best for you, and once he made his decision, we had to obey him. Otherwise we’re breaking the law.”
Matt opened his mouth with the urge to say something like, “But we understand how much you love Sabba and Savta and how nice it is to be with them,” then closed it. It wasn’t really his place. Instead, he asked, in Hebrew, “Malka, would you like another cup of coffee?”
But she was standing. “There’s no reason to be cruel,” she said to Daniel. “ ‘Breaking the law’?”
“That’s true, Dani!” Gal said. “There’s no reason to be cruel!”
Daniel turned to Matt with a shrug of puzzled and angry dismay.
“It’s a hard day for everybody,” Matt said.
Gal was sitting by herself on the couch now, crying. She’d tried to make a grand gesture, Matt thought, now sitting heavily beside her, and it had given all the grown-ups a heart attack.
“Oh, sweetie,” he said.
THE NEXT MORNING THEY couldn’t get Malka out of bed. She lay on the air mattress with her hand splayed over her face, emitting an occasional animal whimper. Yaakov was up and dressed in stocking feet, his steely gray hair standing up, hovering over her with a cold washcloth and a mug of warm tea that shook in his hand. “She has a migraine,” he told Daniel.
Daniel nodded, studying them for a moment. They were ashen, both of them. From outside, he heard the loud rumble of the garbage can being wheeled to the curb by Matt. “Let’s move her into our bedroom,” he said. “Don’t say no.” And he ran upstairs to change the sheets and straighten up, thinking with strange excitement as he pulled down the fitted corners of the clean sheets, which smelled of a long stay in the linen closet, that this was it, one of Malka’s famous breakdowns. Not that he wished it upon her—God, no—and not that he wished it upon Gal, either. And yet, if Gal witnessed her grandmother’s incapacity, surely his and Matt’s guardianship of her would be settled in her mind, once and for all. And then he berated himself for even having that thought, for who wanted her to accept being in their family because all other options were closed off to her? At six years old?
He grabbed their shaving kits and toothbrushes and toothpaste, the hairbrush and hair gel, brought them downstairs and piled them on the bathroom sink. Matt was stomping his boots on the kitchen entry mat to rid them of snow, then bending to take them off, when Daniel hurried into the kitchen. “You went outside without socks?” Daniel said, as a bare foot emerged from the first boot. “You’re nuts.”
“Tell me about it,” Matt said, giving it a rueful rub.
“Hey, listen, it’s happening. One of Malka’s breakdowns.” Matt looked at him sharply. “Yaakov is calling it a migraine. But I’m pretty sure.”
“What should we do?” Matt asked.
“I’m clearing out our bedroom and bathroom so we can move her up there.”
“Okay. Do you need help?”
They spoke with quiet urgency. Daniel was imagining Matt stepping into the room where one person was disintegrating and the other was trying to hide it, and apparently so was Matt. “I’m going to leave the house,” Matt said. “Not because I don’t want to help.”
“Okay.”
“Because I don’t want to add stress to them.”
“I know.”
Matt looked at his watch. “Yo-yo!” He reached for the leash as the dog came into the kitchen with a quizzical wag.
“Get socks!” Daniel said.
“Believe me,” Matt said. They looked at their watches again and agreed that Matt would be home in half an hour.
Back in the living room, Yaakov had gotten Malka into a sitting position, and the kids were sitting on the floor on their heels, watching gravely. “Savta has a migraine,” Gal announced. “That’s a horrible, horrible headache.”
“I know,” Daniel said. “So we’re going to give her mine and Matt’s room, because it’s darker and quieter.”
Malka was in her nightgown, her feet bare; Yaakov had placed her bathrobe over her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, the lids translucent, and the skin on her face sagged, drawing down the corners of her mouth as if gravity had fought energy and brutally pummeled it. Daniel’s impulse was to act quickly, to move this frightening, spectral version of her grandmother away from Gal, and yet, even a few feet away from her, he felt the energy draining from his limbs. He sat down beside Malka, and although a feeling of entropy made him wonder how he’d ever get up again, he draped her arm around his shoulders and helped Yaakov hoist her off the bed. “Stay down here with your brother,” he told Gal sternly.
They brought her upstairs and laid her on the bed, and hastened to cover her with the comforter. Daniel pulled down the blinds, and turned to Yaakov. “Tell me what you need,” he said.
“Take away your razors and medications, your scissors and clippers,” Yaakov said. “And then go. This happens. I’ll stay with her.”
Daniel looked at him doubtfully. “Lech!” Yaakov barked, flapping his hand toward the bathroom door. Daniel saw that he was ashamed, and angry at Daniel for witnessing his shame.
“Okay,” Daniel said gently.
He got a plastic grocery bag from under the sink and gathered all the sharp things and all the medications into it. Then he went downstairs and peeked into the kitchen. Noam had climbed into the Tupperware drawer, and Gal was feeding him Goldfish crackers, placing them onto his orange, gummy tongue, saying, “Don’t worry, Noam.”
Over the next few days the house was so silent they became aware of the refrigerator hum, the water in the pipes, the infuriating tinny whine of the cable box. They spoke in quiet voices that barely rose from their throats, and leaned toward each other to hear. Everything had to be murmured twice or three times, as though it required a running start before the noise it made could heave itself into something intelligible. They awoke from restless sleep with headaches, blaming the barometric pressure that had brought in unseasonable warmth. Yaakov shuffled in his slippers back and forth from the kitchen to the bedroom, bearing tea and toast Malka didn’t touch. Matt and Daniel privately wondered whether she needed to be hospitalized and put on a drip for nutrition. They heard Yaakov moving around at night. In the daytime he fell asleep in the living room rocker, snores blubbering out of his lips. He was both less himself and more himself, Daniel thought. Quieter and more shadowy. But also, the sole, stern sentry, the last competent man on earth.
Gal squatted on the rug and watched him. His chin was squashed doub
le against his neck; his big hands had lost their clasp at his lap, and now the lifeless fingers barely touched. She could see his chest rising and falling above the gut that pushed out his shirt. She had seen Savta sick once, when she’d gone over to their house with Ema. While Ema argued with Sabba in the kitchen, Gal crept into the bedroom. Savta was under the covers, her face as bleached and immobile as stone in sun, and Gal focused fiercely on her chest to see if it was moving. For a second, terror plunged through her. But there—there was the faintest of movements. She imagined Savta in a pile of corpses. She wasn’t supposed to know about the pile of corpses, she was pretty sure. Was it cold in there, or warm? She imagined it having this same sick smell. That night, in bed, and for many nights after that, Gal practiced breathing so shallow nobody could see her chest move. She could do it about five or six times before she needed to gulp in air, and felt its clean, beautiful swell inside her. C’mo gal, she thought. Like a wave.
DERRICK AND BRENT RETURNED home, and Matt and Daniel planned to spend New Year’s with them. But that evening Daniel felt he couldn’t leave the kids alone with their grandparents, given Malka’s condition, and he didn’t want to bring a babysitter into this situation either. He sent Matt over alone, saying, “You have to go, we haven’t seen them since Brent got tenure,” and promising a thousand times that he didn’t really care about New Year’s anyway.
When Matt arrived, he could tell Brent was already slightly drunk: his cheeks were flushed and his eyes narrowed and a little watery. Soon he would become cuttingly observant and funny. He also had a tendency, when drunk, to climb onto Matt’s lap and kiss him wetly, wondering with sentimental fervor why they’d never gotten together.
They toasted his tenure with tequila shots and beer. “Really, honey,” Matt said. “Knowing you can stay here—whew! Because what would I do without you?”
“No kidding,” Derrick said. “I was all, ‘I can move, my job is portable’—but really, I didn’t mean it, I was just trying to be supportive.”
Brent laughed. “You talk a good game, Mr. Man, but I saw through that one.”
They sat on stools at the kitchen ell, and Matt filled them in on Yaakov and Malka’s visit while they winced and sighed. They ordered in pizza, and after they’d eaten, they went into the living room and sprawled out. There was a party Brent had heard about, some rich guy on Pomeroy Terrace, and they’d go in a little while. They watched a Project Runway rerun, a challenge in which the designers had to create looks out of salad vegetables, and then another reality show in which contestants apparently made famous from other reality shows were given a series of team challenges on an obstacle course. Matt was deeply relaxed, for the first time in weeks, sunk into an easy chair with a cat on his lap, Derrick and Brent on the couch with their legs draped over each other. They pondered the reality show convention of being challenged to eat disgusting things like insects and maggots, and decided that it was some kind of commentary on Americans consuming such a huge share of the world’s resources, although what kind of commentary, they weren’t sure. Around eleven thirty, they looked at their watches and at one another. Derrick stretched and groaned, settled more deeply into the couch. “I can’t do it,” he said. “Too tired. Too old. You guys go. Do you despise me?”
“Yes, we despise you,” Brent and Matt said in unison. But Brent wasn’t up for going either.
Matt stared at him in exasperation. “Well, as intrigued as I am by the idea of a rich guy on Pomeroy Terrace,” Matt said, “if you’re not going, I’m not going. I should go kiss Daniel at midnight anyway.” He stood and got his jacket. “Thanks for letting me celebrate with you.”
He hugged and kissed them both, and stepped out into the Northampton night. Christmas lights from the fire station dotted his peripheral vision and glinted from the puddles; mist rose from the huge piles of melting snow that had been plowed into the meridian, giving the night a billowy movie set feel. He walked through the wet streets of downtown with an unzipped jacket and ungloved hands, stepping around groups of teenagers and families celebrating First Night.
He wasn’t in a hurry. He was drunk, and the night was comfortable, and the air cooled his face. Music—bluegrass, swing, zydeco—emerged from various events in the buildings around him. His boots made a pleasing noise as his heels ground the wet, gritty pavement. The house would be quiet by now, Malka and Yaakov huddled under the spare comforter in the dark bedroom, Daniel asleep on the air mattress unless one of the kids was up with nightmares. He thought of the house, the people in it, and it tilted in his mind till he saw it from the perspective of an alien observer. It was a box full of strangers. Strangers: Somehow, out of its billions and billions of people, the universe had hurtled these six from the plots of earth they were born and lived on, across the seas, over the prairie, and into the very same set of rooms. The randomness of it blew his mind. He thought: There wasn’t one of them he’d have chosen under normal circumstances. Even Daniel. He was glad he’d chosen him, but he had to be honest about it.
A notion on the very surface of his mind, separate from thought, made him turn toward Pomeroy Terrace instead of toward home. He picked up his pace, his mind nowhere, his will glimmering in twitches of his muscles like the faintest of radio signals, until the sound of dance music and the sight of cars crammed next to each other at the curb indicated which house it was. It was a huge purple Victorian he drove past almost daily, and the party was in a turret.
Inside, a techno baseline thundering in his ears, he nosed his way toward the bar, sidling past clusters of men talking loudly over the music and laughing. The house was broken into several condos, but even still, this one was huge, with lustrous oak floors. He nodded at a colleague of Brent’s whose name he’d forgotten; some guys from the gay runner’s group he’d run with a few years ago; Jeff Schafer, another designer he knew, who occasionally referred work his way. There were women here and there, spiky-haired, short-skirted, lipsticked—straight, he assessed—but it was mostly men, as though a gay scene had popped up out of nowhere, like those barns and castles and old-woman-who-lived-in-a-shoe shoes that rose, looming and latticed, out of the pages of Noam’s storybooks. On the windows, heavy flowered curtains hung from iron rods curiously hammered and curlicued at the ends. Built-in bookcases soared to the ceiling. An enormous flat-screen TV broadcast a New Year’s countdown show with the volume off; it was six minutes to midnight.
Who on earth owned this place? Matt found the long table serving as a bar and poured himself a vodka tonic, found a strip of lime next to a wet paring knife and squeezed it in, feeling it bite at a tiny cut on his thumb. He drank it quickly in order to re-kick-start the buzz that had faded. How had he ended up here? He was still wearing his jacket; he would stay for just a few minutes, absorb it as a strange tale he would tell Daniel tomorrow, the story of a gay wonderland that had sprung up in the middle of honest, lesbionic Northampton. The sight of full-speed flirting—bursts of fake laughter, voices brimming with irony, eyes careless and languid and calculating, or darting to gauge the impression a joke had made—made him feel superior, repelled; at the same time, taking in the rich tones of male voices and male scent made him giddy. He quickly finished his drink and poured himself another as people started gathering in front of the TV screen, counting down. At midnight, they gave out a shout and started hugging and kissing.
Happy New Year, Daniel, he thought. Let’s hope it’s an improvement on the last one! He was dying for a cigarette; his eyes sought out and found a pair of elegant French doors leading out to a deck. He went outside with his drink, trying to pick up the smell of cigarette smoke, the glow of an ember. The house was on a fairly busy street, but back here it was quiet except for the occasional celebratory burst of honks from passing cars. On a separate level of the deck a few steps down, a canvas cover wet with melted snow and plastered with dead oak leaves stretched over a hot tub. The bare branches of trees waved gently in the misty sky. There was a couple making out, hands clutching. A man stood smo
king at the corner of the wood railing, and as soon as he saw Matt zeroing in on him, he laughed and held out a cigarette pack.
“That obvious, huh?” Matt said. He set his drink on the railing and pulled a cigarette out of the pack, leaned forward as the guy reached toward him with his hand cupped around the flame of his lighter. He was drunk by now, and as he lightly touched the man’s hand and drew on the cigarette, he was fully cognizant that he was an utter cliché of a gay man on the prowl, only somehow that very awareness made it unreal, the way a stick figure gestures toward a portrait, or a portrait gestures toward the living, breathing human face.
“Happy New Year,” the guy said. “I’m Andrew.”
“Matt. Happy New Year.” He drew on his cigarette and exhaled with pleasure. Through the dim reflected light coming through the French doors, Matt was taking in this guy’s particular brand of beauty. He was bigger and younger than Matt, full in the face; in middle age he’d be cursing what would become a double chin, but now that fullness made him look younger rather than older, at once angelic and sensual. His eyes were clear and wide and he had the expression of someone on the verge of laughter, or amazement.
“Can you believe this place?” Andrew said. “Apparently there are seven bedrooms upstairs.”
“You’re kidding,” Matt said, his heartbeat quickening gleefully.
They drifted back in, languorously, “to explore the house,” Matt thought merrily, fingers making big cartoon scare quotes in his mind, and found that people were clustered around the bar, heads thrown back, lips sucking, throats working. Jell-O shots! He slid his way in. They had been set out in trays, artisanal, glistening in layers of fluorescent colors, as gorgeous as tiny pastries, or jewels. He lifted one and Andrew lifted one, and they brought them to their noses first, then their tongues, and then they slurped them down. They looked at each other with narrowed eyes, evaluating: Matt tasted a complicated mix of tequila and lime, and was that something spicy? His tongue and palate tingled on the perfect edge of the pleasant-unpleasant continuum. He ate a pellucid champagne shot with a raspberry suspended in it, and reached for another, this one in the shape of a tiny house. It dawned on him: It was this house!—with gables and turrets—the owner must have had them specially made. Good for you, bucko! he thought, biting into the house, sucking it in and feeling it slide down his throat. By now he could no longer parse the flavors; they were too layered, too subtle, and his mind was rapidly losing its capacity to make fine distinctions.
