by Hilary Zaid
I squinted at her figure, suddenly overcome by the contrast between the deep gold light behind her and the darkening shadow of Francine. “What?” The glue stick rolled off the table and hit the floor at my feet.
We found Sol hunched in his chair at the kitchen table, his forehead resting ponderously on the tips of his fingers. Wordlessly, he reached down to finger a piece of thick, blue paper. The note lay on the table untouched, inviolate as a murder weapon:
Dear Sol,
It’s time we faced the truth. I’m not in love with you. I never have been. I think we both realize, we should never have gotten married. I can’t watch the rest of my life go by on my knees in that damned garden. I’ll get in touch when I am settled.
Betty
Not a word or letter had been crossed out. It was either a letter Betty had practiced over and over in blue ballpoint on the yellow legal pads in the kitchen drawer, working at it, distilling it, until she had every word precisely measured, or it was a letter she’d been inspired to compose in a lightning strike of clarity, and gotten right the very first time. I stared at the page.
Francine looked up. “Was there something . . .?” she started. “Did you . . .?”
Sol turned, his palms up, empty, surrendered. He considered Francine, reached out his large, empty hand and filled it with Francine’s warm cheek. At that moment, she looked very small. Sol looked very old.
I wanted to leave them alone. I left the kitchen and found myself wandering down the hall, past Betty and Sol’s bedroom, down toward my own reflection in the mirror, watching myself get larger, the double doors to Betty and Sol’s bedroom shrinking behind me to a point. When it looked as if I would have to step into the mirror to go any further, I slipped right into the passage to Francine’s old room, the room where Betty and I sat together on Sunday nights after dinner, where Betty sewed, and I watched. It was a small room; when the door swung open, the walls sighed back with a hush. I don’t know what I expected. The room was empty. Betty’s sewing machine stood, silent, bowed, on the table. Beside it, in the sewing basket, threads from sheared pieces of fabric trailed out like broken veins.
“Where do you think she went?” I wondered as we drove home through the fog.
“She could be anywhere, Ellen,” Francine whined, a razor-thin edge in her voice, “and we’d never fucking find her. She’s spent the last twenty-five years helping women disappear!”
At home, the glue stick still lay on the living-room floor, underneath the coffee table littered with flayed envelopes I hadn’t yet glued shut, the innards—invitations, reply cards, stamps—scattered across the table’s cramped surface. Francine threw her keys down on top of it, stepped out of her shoes, and went directly upstairs to bed.
I felt cold, accused, immobile and terribly, terribly sad. I loved Sol and Betty, and now Betty had broken all our hearts. I quietly gathered up the reply cards and tucked them out of sight. “Come on,” I whispered to the dogs.
The light was off in the bedroom, but I could see Francine’s shape hunched under the covers in the streetlight from Broadway, unmoving. Lola leapt onto the bed and, with a turn, settled down at Francine’s feet and heaved a deep, animal sigh of fatigue.
I didn’t want to turn on the light, wash my face or brush my teeth, do anything that would suggest the world was normal, the same world we had gone to bed in last night, or the night before. Instead, I peeled off my clothes where I stood and climbed under the covers. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, taking Francine’s lifeless hand in mine.
When I woke up, Francine was gone. Her side of the bed lay barren, flat and cool as a wound with the scab peeled off. I choked awake, inarticulate with fear, scrabbled into the bathroom and peered into the blood-red darkness: empty. The toilet, which had started to run, endlessly sighed. I stared into the mirror like a figure in a dream; billowing shirt, startled eye-whites, and floating hair gaped back.
Down the deep, narrow stairs, the early gloom gave way to pale, cool, yellow-blue eastern light seeping through the French doors. I didn’t find Francine in the living room. I panicked, grabbed my keys, dropped them, knelt and banged my head on the back of the futon as I rose, softly cursing.
“Mmm.” A groan from the couch arrested me. I held my breath, and made out dark, streaming tendrils of hair among the fringes of the crocheted blanket. I stared. Pressed into the crease of the futon where a dark emptiness had been, a breathing darkness now appeared: Francine, asleep, one pale arm flung up over her face. I reached down and shook her.
“What?” Francine croaked. Her pale, creased eyes opened in fear. When she saw me, her arms tightened around her chest, gripping the edges of her robe where they met, holding it shut over the bones of her breast the way Gramma Sophie’s black seam had held shut the gaping doors of her heart. “I’m tired,” Francine sighed, shutting her eyes.
Upstairs, in the dark bedroom, I huddled beneath the sink and shook, remembering: bright early morning light, white sheets with flowers on them, pale, hollowed with Gramma Sophie’s shape, a smooth, oval moon scooped out. Three years old, I’d bolted up to Jacob’s dream: a stream of firefighters in and out of the living room, heavy angels in burlap coats, black boots. I actually clung to my mother. Her white gown fluttered around me in the searing morning light. “Gramma Sophie had a heart attack,” she said.
I huddled next to the dogs on the floor, long after Francine shut her eyes again and slept, and traced the ghost of the scar in my palm, and remembered the day Francine had told me she wouldn’t leave me. Blocks away, a BART train rushed down the tracks, a wind whistling through a keyhole corridor, gathering speed, direction, distance, howling its fixed path away, away. “Listen,” Sam murmured into the phone, three hours ahead. “This is a big loss.” She spoke in quiet, capital letters. BIG LOSS. I thought of Francine, alone in the living room. “For you.”
A week passed. Then two. Down our block, a line of pomegranate trees stood heavy with pale September fruit. I laughed at myself, bitterly, for never having noticed these trees, for noticing them now. Whether or not she intended it, Betty couldn’t have chosen a more disastrous time to go. Had she given us a whole year, we might have mourned, ranted, coped and moved on. But with just six weeks to go before Francine and I were supposed to exchange rings, Betty had given us just enough time to doubt, and no time to recover.
I reached up. The fruit hung low enough to pluck. It was like the Persephone myth, but backwards. The mother had disappeared into Hades; the daughter, abandoned, spent her season in cold torment. Except, there was no fixed season for this grief.
I didn’t touch the fruit. I didn’t dare. I knew that this sadness, like all sadness for this one, archetypal loss, the mother loss, could go on and on.
( )
The High Holy Days loomed, taunting us with the idea of redemption and return. I wish I could say that we clung together, Francine and I, in those long days after Betty left, but something inside of each of us made us cling to our sadness harder, each to our own cold, cleaving blade of betrayal. We should have keened together. We should have released our grief, like a flock of dark birds, into the sky. But we didn’t. When disaster struck, we had scattered. It was like she blamed me.
Debbie, June and Sam all said the same thing: Give her time. “We don’t have time,” I’d complained. “If we wait too much longer, we’ll have to cancel the wedding.”
“So,” Debbie answered calmly, “you’ll cancel the wedding. You’ll try again.”
“Cancel the wedding!” I screamed. “Have you ever planned a fucking wedding?!”
I suppose we could have gone on this way indefinitely, dodging calls from the florist and the DJ, had we not had our seventh premarital counseling appointment already scheduled with Rabbi Loh. Francine hadn’t suggested we cancel. I think she wanted his blessing. We didn’t talk much on the drive down.
Francine was the one who told him about Betty. I was the one who suggested postponing. Rabbi Loh templed his fingers. I expected him to
close his eyes solemnly and tell us to take all the time that we needed.
Rabbi Loh didn’t close his eyes. “In Jewish tradition,” he told us, “a wedding takes primacy above almost everything. Even—” Rabbi Loh blinked—“God forbid, in the case of the death of a parent” —here Rabbi Loh looked deeply pained—“our tradition requires us to proceed.”
Francine looked at him as if she hadn’t heard correctly.
“We may stand under the chuppah crying tears of sadness as well as tears of joy,” he explained, patient as a father, though he was the same age we were, “but Jewish continuity holds the celebration of Jewish unions above almost all things.” He frowned like he was sorry, sorry he couldn’t tell us just to cancel. He stared at Francine with eyes black and impenetrable as silt from the banks of the Vlatva.
On the way home, Francine and I fought. Underneath us, the Dumbarton Bridge rose up, unfurling its long track flat across the Bay alongside the big, blue flats of the old salt ponds. Francine looked weary. “The rabbis weren’t talking about us. It was meant for straights. It’s about having babies.”
That was probably true. But it wasn’t exactly what Rabbi Loh had said. And he’d said it to us. Not to heterosexuals. “Just because we’re two women, doesn’t mean we’re not going to have babies.” At this point, everything we said about our relationship, we said in safe generalities. Otherwise, I might have said, “You and I are going to have babies, don’t you remember, Francine? Our kids.”
“Having children is dangerous.” Francine didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Something happens to the kid, and the relationship is ruined. Do you really want to invest something else with that much power?”
That came out of left field. Then I remembered: Julia.
“Anyway,” I back-pedaled. “We don’t have to decide this now.” I stared out the window at the water, the straight, dark sheet of the Bay, rushing by.
“We’re supposedly getting married,” Francine said. Her tone scared me; she sounded barely controlled, secretly frantic. I wished I were driving. “We do have to decide it now. Especially now.”
“Your life is all about kids.” I wanted to remind her that we had our own lives. She had her own life, apart from her parents.
“I know.” Francine shifted gears with an alarming jerk. “Other people’s kids.”
I bit my lips. What would it be worth to keep her here, to keep her from driving, frantically, away from me? “If you don’t want to have kids, we won’t.”
At its eastern end, the bridge practically sits on the water, four thin lanes dividing the waters to the north from the waters to the south. The car raced along between them like a skimming stone.
“You think you can say that,” Francine answered, “but you can’t, because when you start to want them, you can’t stop. I’ve seen it.”
Since when had my biological clock started ticking? Francine had wanted kids just as much as I did. Now she was pinning it on me, and there was no way to convince her of anything. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Maybe we need to really think about whether we can make this commitment. Can we really promise we want the same things for the rest of our lives? Can anyone promise that?” Francine was the one who had always talked me out of questions like that. I didn’t know what to say. Francine’s words hung there, like the thin line of cars so precipitously streaming over the water.
I took a deep breath. The words to a Hebrew song popped into my mind: “Kol ha’olam kulo/Gesher tsar me’od.” The whole world is a very narrow bridge. . . . And the main thing is, not to be afraid. “Francine,” I said, calmly as a police officer talking someone down from a ledge, “This isn’t about us. This is about your mother.”
“Ellen.” Francine shifted the car with another jerk and turned to me with an alarming coldness, a coldness I had never seen in her warm features. “Are you having an affair?”
“What?” The breathlessness of my terror at what was happening inside this car, at the speed with which we were traveling on such a narrow road, collided in an instant with my disbelief. “What are you talking about?”
“The whispered phone calls, the torn-up receipts,” Francine answered without missing a beat. “I’ve called you at work, and you’re not there.” When I was with Anya. Tears rolled silently down her cheeks, but her face stayed cold. “You’ve been lying to me.”
“No,” I protested. “You don’t understand.” It was exactly the kind of thing a cheater would say.
“Don’t I?” She smiled, a smile of inevitable sadness.
“Francine,” I pleaded. “This is crazy talk. I love you. You love me.” I shook.
“I’m not sure.” Francine squinted into the rearview mirror. “I’m not sure that’s enough.”
( )
I’ll admit right now, my reaction to this accusation wasn’t logical. Instead of prodding me to contrition, to simple remorse, Francine’s accusation inflamed a righteous anger in me that Betty’s departure had already sparked. How could Francine even think I might have been unfaithful, when what I was doing was trying my hardest to keep a love alive? Anya’s and Batsheva’s. I had written a letter to Batsheva at the Rose of Sharon Home and heard nothing. And I’d almost let it go at that. But after Betty left, I thought: Why do we have to accept this?
I resolved to call Batsheva. But first, I had to tell Wendy. The baby was coming soon. It was time. “Do you remember Anya Kamenets?” I asked Wendy. “A woman you interviewed once, a couple years ago?”
Wendy, breathing a little heavily at her desk, frowned intensely behind her glasses. How on earth would she remember one old lady from another, simply by her name? Before she could cut in, I went on, “I know, we have limits—” Above Wendy’s desk, Chagall’s sad, tallis-wrapped Jew clutched his Torah of truth, pensive and alone. “I just wanted to let you know—” I took a huge breath.
“Ellen—” Wendy started. I expected her to object. I expected her to swivel her chair and adjust her glasses and remind me of what I’d come to think of as the Foundation’s “Prime Directive”—an old phrase from Francine’s and my Star Trek: Next Generation days. In the 24th century: no interference in the development of other civilizations; in the Foundation’s case, no involvement in the lives of our witnesses. I expected her, quite possibly, to fire me. Instead, Wendy gasped; she stood up in a gush of blood.
Lots of blood.
Instantly, I had the phone in my hand.
When I dropped it, I found Wendy on the floor, clutching herself. Her face had gone completely white. I tried not to panic. “The ambulance is coming—right now,” I said. Then, because I wasn’t sure what else to do, I stayed beside her and held her hand.
The good thing, it turns out, about working for a major Jewish organization in a major downtown area of a major city, is that, when you dial 911, about a million sirens start blaring at once. Wendy and I could hear them racing down Market Street, getting closer every second, and the tremulous wail of those sirens, threading down Market like a living umbilicus, helped us breathe when we couldn’t breathe for ourselves.
The emergency caused confusion in the building, and everyone started to evacuate. By the time the paramedics had Wendy on a stretcher, the women from Development in their capri pants and the old ladies from the Post-Soviet Jewish Diaspora Project were already standing on the sidewalk outside, murmuring excitedly about a bomb. As I raced along next to the gurney, I caught a glimpse of Barbara from upstairs. Barbara saw me, and then she saw Wendy, and she broke out of the pack, running, her one short leg trailing half a beat behind. I held out my arm, expecting Barbara to reach out and clutch me, but she sprinted past, and as they lifted the stretcher, she vaulted straight up into the back of the ambulance.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” The paramedic waved his blue glove warningly.
Barbara from upstairs answered without missing a beat, “I’m her mother,” and plunked down next to the stretcher, clutching Wendy’s IV’d hand. I watched the doo
rs shut on them; then the ambulance, casting its sanguine glow on the crowd, the sidewalk, the shining windows of the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory, drove, screaming, away. When I looked down, I saw that I had blood on my shoes.
I trudged heavily up the stairs with Mi’Chelle—it felt like an emergency; in an emergency, everyone remembered, you’re not supposed to use the elevators—and picked up the phone and dialed the Rose of Sharon Home in Tel Aviv.
Seventy-five hundred miles east and nine hours into the future, dusky and ancient consonants murmured in the background: a nurses’ station, possibly, bright with morning light off the Mediterranean, the crisp crackle of Ha’Aretz, the squealing of carts loaded with Galilee oranges. “A moment, please.”
I was back in the ether, between worlds.
Then, the hush of an office, the voice of efficiency: “Shalom. Slicha?”
“Shalom. Hello. I’m trying to reach a resident, Batsheva Singer.”
“Batsheva Singer?”
The woman at the Rose of Sharon Home in Tel Aviv sounded bored. “I’m sorry, Miss—?”
“Margolis.”
“Miss Margolis. I’m sorry, Miss Margolis—”
There was a lag on the line, a transcontinental, trans-Atlantic echo, so that my first words crossed hers and I had to ask her to repeat them.
“I am sorry to tell you, Miss Margolis, that Mrs. Singer died nine months ago.”
I got off the phone and rubbed my eyes. When I opened them, Mi’Chelle was standing in front of me. “Wendy’s had an emergency C.” Mi’Chelle started to smile. “But she’s fine. They have a brand-new little baby boy.” Tears sprang to my eyes. “Leo.” Mi’Chelle looked about as pleased as if she’d popped Leo out herself. “Leo Micah Rosenberg. Six pounds, six ounces.”
