by Amy Bloom
Elizabeth put the check in her jewelry box until she could figure out what to do with it.
May God forgive me.
Max said this every morning, drinking a beer in the bathroom. Clearly, his life would get much better or much worse very soon. He’d been planning a strategy for weeks. He sent her a bouquet of pink and yellow calla lilies with a note of condolence. He sent a funny postcard of a woman scolding a cat, saying “And you call yourself a dog,” and signed it Max Stone. He called when he thought her mother might be gone and said, “I’d like a chance to say good-bye before you go off.”
She said she’d meet him for coffee. He wouldn’t talk about getting back together right away. He wouldn’t say “share.” It sounded too much like what he really wanted, a life forever together. Maybe he’d mention that if she was planning to be around for the summer he was thinking of renting a small place for himself, since Greta and the boys would be away. Maybe she’d like to stay there with him. Maybe he could get two places, across the hall from each other. Maybe he’d just beg her to spend the summer with him, give him two months before she went off to college and found her next romance, her next bareback-riding hero, her future husband. There was something to be said for frank and honest groveling.
Sitting with Elizabeth in a diner twenty miles from Great Neck, his hands circling her wrists, Max could not remember what he had planned to say. Her face was a little thinner. New contact lenses made her eyes brightly pink and round as little lightbulbs. She looked bored.
“I’d love to have you visit me this summer. I might take a little place in the city. Do you think that might be fun? Or maybe a cabin in the Berkshires?”
“I don’t know.” She made a nest of torn sugar packets around her coffee cup.
“Think it over. It’s the end of June now. If you could decide this week, I could start looking. We could start looking, if you felt like it.”
Max and Elizabeth shared, for twenty seconds, exactly the same mental picture: Max and Elizabeth trudging from walk-up to walk-up, meeting a dozen rental agents whose pleasant surprise at this nice father-daughter pair curdles before the plumbing’s been tested.
“No, I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll tell you next week.”
“I’ll take maybe, milacku. Maybe yes? Is that yes for a visit or yes for—for a long visit?”
Elizabeth was done. Between his fat shrimp fingers around her wrist and the last sugar packet. Done. Now everything out of her mouth would be a lie, and she smiled like he was her favorite person.
“Maybe yes. Maybe very likely yes, a long visit. I could stay for a month or six weeks if you want, but I don’t even want to talk about it for another week, okay? There’s been too much going on.”
“Okay, baby girl.” He kissed each of the ten fingers he’d been squeezing. “Of course that’s okay.”
“Don’t call me for a week,” she said.
“Whatever you say. You’re the boss.”
They kissed, and Elizabeth thought, This is it, this is the last time I’m doing this.
Max thought, Yes, Lord, help me turn this around, even now, and I will be your devoted servant. Help me. The boys aren’t babies, they can see this is killing us, it can’t be good for them, seeing us suffer. Greta will be better off without me, she’ll be more independent, she’ll be a better mother, God, she’ll probably recover, she’ll become a counselor for other agoraphobic ladies, write a book about it, she’ll make a lot of money. She’ll remarry some nice Jewish guy, not to be another father, but a nice guy, bald, a podiatrist. And Lizzie and I will be like other happy couples, whoever they are, except she is so beautifully young, and we will be beyond happy, sweet Jesus, and want only each other.
Everything that drove Elizabeth crazy about Rachel turned out to be exactly what was called for in their Great Getaway. Rachel persuaded her father to lend them the station wagon, drove all the way uptown to Columbia University to collect sleeping bags from her brother and his roommate, showed her interested parents and an utterly bored Margaret the AAA trip map, and pointed out all the educational side trips and that no day’s drive was more than a reasonable 250 miles. Rachel, who would become a fine doctor, would also have made an excellent president or a criminal genius. Elizabeth’s only job was to be pleasant to her mother for the remaining eight days and remember her camera and a heavy sweater for the cold nights in the Rockies. Rachel packed two of most items, assuming that Elizabeth would forget almost everything, which she did, knowing that Rachel would pack two. For nine weeks they drove across America, eating apple-butter-and-whole-wheat sandwiches, kissing boys who were handsome only by the firelight of various campgrounds, and becoming expert at putting on eyeliner using their Sierra Club cups as mirrors.
Huddie lies on the gritty floor. He smells the drops of sweat spattered on the shining wood, sees the frayed plastic tip of the ref’s shoelace; his face is near enough to the man’s left sneaker to lay his tongue on it. Water roars through both ears. He hears only a dense, cupping sound. Huddie concentrates on these things to keep from screaming. He has to cry. The ring of fire in his right knee flames dark red up his whole side, and his flesh must be falling off in seared chunks now. Kind faces he recognizes but can’t place hover over him, and he sinks into a grey minty ocean and sees Elizabeth arched back above him, white legs tight around him, their black hairs joined, green trees over them, his fists wrapped in her long hair, his face deep soft between her breasts. His mother’s hand, wide, gardenia-scented, slides up his face, into nothing.
Max’s letters found Elizabeth at college and she read them, the only thick, nicely written letters of her life, of course she read them and cried and returned them all, except the last one.
March 6, 1974
Dearest girl,
I won’t begin with another lament. If you were moved by my misery, I would have heard from you in the last three years. I’m no longer astonished, you’ll be indifferent to hear, that you ran off like that. I am not even astonished that a relationship that I thought made us both happy was obviously a burden to you, one to be shed at the earliest possible moment.
I said to you, in one of our very sweet times together, you were sitting on my lap, that you would break my heart. As I recall, you weren’t in the least upset or guilty, just annoyed with me for bringing it up. And rightly so. Since we both knew what the ending would be, why harp on it?
I regret wasting even one second of those times on anger and shame and self-pity. I am trying my damnedest now to live in the past whenever possible and expect to continue doing so.
You, of course, have moved on and so I won’t be writing again.
I never think of you with anything but love.
Your Max
The Night Is Dark
“Every couple has a life,” Greta said. “Bury me.”
Max stood up, staring at the ocean bleached and mirrored in the late afternoon sun.
“I know you thought ours would be a happy life, and so you are disappointed. Please bury me, I’ve got everything but my arm.”
He put one foot out, pushed a little hill of sand toward her brown arm, and walked closer to the water.
Greta raised her voice. “Come, just a little more, Max. Just my arm. I am not asking for the world, you know, just a little sand.”
He didn’t move.
“I did think it would be a happy life. That is what people think. That’s why they marry and have children. In anticipation of further joy, of multiplying happinesses.”
“Maybe that’s why Americans marry. People like me marry and have children because we are apparently not dead, because we are grateful, because we wish to become like the others. To experience normal despair and disappointment. Garden-variety unhappiness. So, I am not sorry. We have had a normal life together.”
Max was not surprised, not even inclined to argue, when Greta described insomnia and agoraphobia, sex both dismal and frightening, and the death of their oldest child as a normal life, but he was not comfort
ed.
“Do you know what I remember most when I came here? Betty Boop. They showed her all the time, late at night, early in the morning, some channel in New Jersey. They love Betty Boop. And Bimbo and Koko. And Shirley Temple, day and night. Polly wolly doodle. The Littlest Rebel. Did you see that?”
“No. I was selling shoes or still killing Germans. Whatever I was doing, I wasn’t watching cartoons or musicals commemorating the good old days of slavery.” He came back from the water and put two scoops of damp sand on Greta’s arm.
“Do the rest, Max, just cover me up.”
He did, and when she wiggled two long fingers, he covered those, and when they broke free again, to show that it wasn’t enough, he mounded the sand six inches high on top of her hand and crowned it with a sprig of stiff black seaweed.
Greta smiled. “You’re a good man.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know you don’t. That’s part of your charm, milacku.”
Max smiled too; only his crazy wife could find him charming.
“I know you blame me for the accident,” she said.
“I don’t. We don’t have to talk about it.”
“You do. We do. Dr. Shein said it would help.”
“It doesn’t help me.”
“It helps me.”
“Then by all means, if it helps you,” Max said.
“When I went to see Dr. Berg—you remember him?”
“The first one. Two before Shein.”
“Very good. I told him everything I could remember about the camp. They were all happy memories. Can you imagine? Making daisy wreaths with another little girl, Marya. Where did we find daisies? Her name was Marya. The sun was always shining and it seemed to me that the evenings were quite cozy. We would walk to a grassy field, a group of us and my mother, and we would all hold hands and sing. I remember one of the girls had a harmonica. How could that be? We had no shoes, I know we had no shoes until winter, how could there have been a harmonica? They had taken everything. How could there have been singing in a grass field?”
Max put little shells on the sand over Greta’s body, drew half-circles to indicate her breasts, and fanned out a cluster of brownish, dry kelp for her pubic hair.
“Berg said he understood, that it was a beautiful dream. You see, that I needed it to be—”
“I get it. Really.”
“I was very careful in the car. I told Benjie to wear his seat belt. I told him two times. The first time when he—”
“It’s not your fault, Greta.”
“Of course it is my fault. I am trying to tell you what I feel about it. And you believe it is my fault. As it is.”
And Greta tried to talk about the wet leaves and the square, odd headlights of Vin Malarino’s fathers van and the audible hesitation of sound as the car moved into and under the old maple trees. Greta heard her own voice saying O boyze, and then the harsh cymbaline crash of the vans left side against the front of her car, its hood flying up like one of the boys’ little plastic cars and the glass showering them as the wide green hands of the maple leaves pushed through, right to their faces, Benjie’s white under the red streaming lines across his forehead, spitting out bits of shiny, bloody glass until he fainted and Greta thought, If he is dead, let me die now. And he was not dead, only briefly unconscious, and as he lay on the stretcher, his face wiped with great tenderness by the paramedic, he smiled at his mother. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m okay.” And for one minute, she was grateful as she had never been. Surviving the camps, in the golden arms of a big American, terrible white and red acne around his beautiful smile, she was not so grateful or sure as she was in that minute with Benjie that life was hers, that she was meant to live.
“She’s killing you,” Greta said.
Max pressed his feet into the sand, noting the imprint of his whole right foot and his abbreviated left.
“The girl. I’m not criticizing. I’m not criticizing you or even her, but it’s very cruel of her to leave you like that.”
He didn’t ask who, and he hoped Greta wouldn’t say her name.
“What do you think? I don’t see? I see. I saw. She never answered your letters, she never calls anymore.”
Max put his hands out behind him and leaned forward, listening to the crisp gunshot crack of his vertebrae.
“I know it broke your heart, her going away. You haven’t recovered. The mother’s getting remarried soon, I heard. What is it you always say, the triumph of hope over experience?”
“That’s what I say. More sand?”
“No, I’m fine. Very happy. Perhaps she’s back in town for the wedding. Do you call her?”
Max kept watching the water, hoping for a few boats, but the ocean was on Greta’s side. There was nothing to look at but the relentless bouncing light.
“Max, Maxie. You can tell me. Who else can you tell? You think I’m going to hurt you now? No, dearie, not now that you’re in such pain.”
Max felt like every B-movie prisoner of war offered a cigarette by the suddenly kindly Kommandant. If he talked, he’d get the cigarette and lose his self-respect. Probably, in the end, they’d kill him anyway. If he didn’t talk, he wouldn’t get the cigarette, he’d keep his self-respect, and they’d hang him as an example to the others.
“I’m not in pain.”
Greta laughed, not a common thing, and Max smiled back. When she laughed, she sounded like Edith Piaf, Max’s darling for the last thirty years. He has daydreams of playing Piaf for Elizabeth, and in them she sips red wine and sits without jiggling her feet.
“All right. But you’re not hap-pee.” Greta sang the last word.
“You said it’s a mistake to want happiness.”
“It is. But you do, you can’t help it. And I feel bad for you, dearie. That’s all.”
Greta had learned most of her English from a Dover war bride in Jersey City and had been calling people “dearie” and “ducks” and “love” with Czech softness ever since. It was a thing that Max, even as he prayed for her immediate, painless death, even as he envisioned Elizabeth on Greta’s side of the bed, found completely endearing.
“I think you should build a little shrine,” Greta said.
“I think you’re nuts.”
“So? You have not been spared on account of sanity, have you? A little shrine. Her picture from the yearbook, the one you keep in your sock drawer. Maybe a few votive candles. I have those old pressed glass holders, in the shape of hands. That would be nice, you could have those. And maybe some of the letters that came back to you, the ones in the garage. That would be good.”
Max sat down beside her, poking a hole for her navel and laying shell bits out in a star pattern.
“And then what?”
Greta lifted a hand carefully, balancing the packed sand on her forearm.
“And then, in your own little apartment, you listen to Mahler and drink Scotch, you mourn. You could pray.”
That Greta believed not only in a Greater Force but in an attentive, specific God was another source of astonishment to Max. “How can you, of all people?”
“It’s the least I can do,” she said, and moved from synagogue to synagogue, praying in the back until the night they ask her to join a committee.
“Am I going to be in my own little apartment? Is that what this is? You’re telling me to move out?”
Greta clicked her tongue, as she did when the boys were being particularly difficult.
“You can stay. You can go. We could keep each other company. You, me, grief. But why, Maxie? The boys are almost grown. Danny could live with you, even. I’m not abandoning you, I just think it would be better.” Greta turned her face toward the empty lifeguard chair. “I do get tired of watching you.”
“You get tired of watching me? After all these years, watching you cry at every goddamned intersection, watching you scare the shit out of the boys, watching you break a sweat just thinking about grocery shopping?” Max stopped, he didn’t even know why he w
anted to go on. She was setting him free. He hated living with her; just two days ago, he’d written in his journal that he was serving a life sentence, with time added for good behavior.
Greta shrugged, and chunks of sand slid down.
“I’m getting up,” she said.
Max gave her a hand and dusted her off, wiping down the backs of her calves and thighs, trying to keep the sand from going into her suit bottom.
“I’m giving you the candle holders,” Greta said.
I Surrender All
Not long after Max’s last letter, Elizabeth came home for one final weekend before the end of spring, shortly before she would have to find herself a real home. Standing on line at the Bagel Hut, squashed between two suede jackets, she stood patiently, even penitently, the edges of a pink sequinned turban brushing her eyelids. At each jingle of the door chime, everyone turned to scrutinize the next wave of customers: a pushy newcomer, sneaking in at the head of the line to make off with the really fresh bagels and the last of the whitefish chubs, or someone fondly, vaguely remembered from the old neighborhood, before everybody had become middle-aged and found themselves with expensive, youthful clothing and spoiled children. In Great Neck a woman’s face or hair color meant nothing; only the backs of the hands and the little hump at the base of the neck told you the truth.
Elizabeth turned at the jingle, with everyone else, and saw Max. She pushed through the crowd surging into the small space she’d left and held on to his sleeve, making herself talk.
“Hi. I can’t believe you’re in here. Margaret’s getting married tonight. That’s why I’m back.”
“That’s why you’re back?”
Something had changed his face. Whatever it was had torn up his cheeks, leaving them so soft and pulpy that if she’d had the nerve to touch him, skin would have stuck to her finger.
“Max, are you all right?”
He backed out of the store, brushing against the thick coats, his hands feeling for the doorpull behind him.
Elizabeth followed him onto the street, forgetting the whitefish salad and bagels and three kinds of cream cheese she’d offered to pick up for the get-acquainted lunch with her mother’s groom and his sister. She stood a few steps behind Max, thinking, He is not walking away from me, he loves me.
