The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  The same instinct or skill served her now, although the farther she walked along the path, the fewer people she encountered.The threatening weather seemed to be a factor, for those she did see were all heading in the direction of the lot. Sure enough, just as she found a spot suitable to her purpose, it began to rain, or to mist, really, a speckling sort of moisture breaking out all around her. She left the path and climbed down onto a rocky slice of beach framed by a short spit of rocks on one side and the natural curve of the shoreline on the other. A squat, bent-necked tree craned out over the vertex of the little cove. Biscuit understood that if anyone were to see her doing what she was about to do, it would invite scrutiny, or possibly actual intervention. But she also saw that from this position, the ashes would not reach the water.

  She peered over her shoulder. The cinder path was empty. The mist had become rain. The chances of anyone else coming along seemed slim. All right, she’d do it properly. She left the shelter of the tree and the ice-littered shoreline and went onto the spit, picking her way out along the rocks.

  Light rain dashed her face. At the end of the spit, a few inches back from the darker, slippery outer rocks, bearded with yellowish rime, she stopped. The egg first, she decided, and removed it from her pocket. She squatted, tapped the shell smartly on a rock, and broke it over the water. The yolk slipped out, seemed to float on the waves, then was swallowed by them. Strands of the white hung from the broken shell in long, viscous trails. Biscuit let go. The halves of the shell floated like two round-bottomed boats.

  She straightened and took the washcloth out of her pocket, unfolding the corners carefully. It felt heavy to her. She almost forgot it wasn’t the real thing. She checked again over her shoulder. No one. Then looked out across the heathery expanse of water, squinting past the drops. Along the opposite shore, a train snaked silver past Philipse Manor and Tarrytown before slipping beneath the Tappan Zee Bridge. Biscuit imagined, as she sometimes did, the gray lady riding that train, the lady who was able to look out the moving windows and take note of her far across the water. Biscuit could not remember a time when she hadn’t had this idea of the gray lady. She was a kind of friend, or not quite. She was sad and just and mute, and she traveled along the border of Biscuit’s life and could see all Biscuit could see and all that she could not.

  Biscuit gathered a small handful of ashes, along with one of the chicken bones, and threw these gently toward the water. A lot of the ashes blew back and stuck to her jeans.The rest floated on top of the waves like pepper. The bone floated, too. She paused to see whether she felt anything.

  Her mother had not liked the cake. She hadn’t said so, but Biscuit could see that she hadn’t. She had said, “Thank you, John,” and Biscuit’s father had smiled at her with such relief that Biscuit had felt a little sick, and let down by them both, and then the cake, which she had been looking forward to, had tasted just so: of disappointment.

  She was here on the spit because of them, because of the way her mother and her father had fallen down behind themselves. She thought of it like this, like the way a book can fall down behind all the others on a shelf, and in this way it’s missing, only you don’t know it to look at the shelf: all that you see looks orderly and complete. Her parents seemed like the books you could see: they smiled and spoke and dressed and made supper and went off to work and all the other things they were supposed to do, but something, a crucial volume, had slipped down in back and couldn’t be reached.

  She was here, too, because of Mrs. Mukhopadhyay and the library book. Mrs. Mukhopadhyay whom she hadn’t seen in almost a year, and the library book which she’d stolen.

  And of course she was here because of the baby. To sever its last earthly ties.

  The rain was falling harder. Biscuit raised her hood and fingers of rain tapped on it: Hello, hello, Biscuit. Silver drops like Mrs. Mukhopadhyay’s silver bangles, which fell up and down her wrists, singing, as she checked out books. Good girl, tapped the rain, in Mrs. Mukhopadhyay’s lilting, practical voice. Come on, then: get on with it.

  She ought to speak, Biscuit knew, or at least to think some words. She squinted through the rain, trying to remember the words from the book, which had been too fat and heavy to stuff inside her parka and so was back at home where she kept it hidden underneath her bed. She was supposed to beg the water to bear the ashes safely away. Please, dear water, she began, but that didn’t seem right and she faltered. Then words did come: Blessed be, less for meaning than pure sound: blessed be, blessed be, blessed, blessed, blessed be. It was something you might skip rope to. She saw girls skipping rope, tap-scraping the ground with their hardbottomed shoes.

  But she was not here for skipping-rope girls.

  This was about the egg, the ashes, the bones, the baby.

  The baby’s name had been Simon.

  Blessed be, Simon Ryrie.

  She reached again into the nest of ash and bone. Before she threw the second handful, something big and hard and soft pushed against the backs of her legs, and her knees buckled, her feet slipped out from under her, and she slid, as if amenably, into the river.

  2.

  Just before one, just as he was about to start priming the second flat, the theme song from Scooby-Doo sounded from within John Ryrie’s pants. He transferred the brush to his other hand and fished among keys, loose change, crumpled bills and receipts, for his cell. His thirteen-year-old son was in the habit of swiping it, downloading a new ring tone, and replacing it all without John’s knowledge, so that he never knew precisely what tune or sound effect was going to emit next. John recognized his son’s high jinks for what they were: love notes. Usually they pleased him, although once, while riding an elevator that happened also to contain his department chair, an admissions rep, and a bunch of prospective students, he’d suffered the indignity of having Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” (explicit version) issue from the region of his groin; he’d admonished Paul, lightly, for that.

  Now he glanced to see who it was, and flipped it open.“Hey.”

  His wife. No preamble. “Upper Nyack called.”

  The elementary school. “What’s up?”

  “They wanted to know if Biscuit’s all right.”

  “They couldn’t ask her?” He aimed for Groucho Marx, even as he felt the sinking in his gut.

  “John, she skipped again. Do you think you could get over to the house?”

  John refrained from sighing into the phone. This was their daughter’s fifth unexcused absence this year, her third since winter break alone. They’d been called in to discuss the matter last month, after the most recent incident. He and Ricky had sat down with the principal, Biscuit’s teacher, and the school guidance counselor, and they’d had a lengthy, convivial, and unilluminating conversation, not so much about Biscuit as about curricular benchmarks, hormones, childhood depression, pharmaceutical research, and the works of Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and Rachel Simmons.The meeting had ended with John feeling touched by the concern of the school personnel, Ricky seething at what she characterized as their prepackaged condescension, and neither of them one whit closer to understanding what was going on with their daughter.

  John was baffled. All he could think was that Biscuit seemed awfully young to have truancy issues. When he’d been ten he would no more have thought of playing hooky than robbing a bank. “Did you try calling the house?”

  “I did.” Her brevity told all.

  Still, he hesitated.

  “Do you think you could drive over?” she asked again; he could hear her working to make it a request.

  Now John did sigh. He looked at the glistening paintbrush in his hand. The four students in the scene shop with him, currently applying soy-based theater paint to a dozen flats, would be unable to go beyond that task without his guidance. He’d counted on cutting the brick wall out of Styrofoam this afternoon. It would take at least an hour and a half to go home, register his and Ricky’s concern with Biscuit, and make it back to campus. And it wouldn’t be f
air to the students, who were required to work in the scene shop for course credit, to ask them to rearrange their schedules and come back later in the day. Which meant he’d wind up giving them credit for hours worked, while he himself would cut and paint the wall alone tonight. In fact, despite the relative minimalism of the set, and the fact that John was largely recycling an old design (For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf was a perennial favorite at Congers Community College; this was its second production during his short tenure there), the opening was only four days away, so he could pretty well prophesy at least one all-nighter in his immediate future.

  When John first met Ricky Shapiro, when they’d first begun dating, it had not been uncommon for him to spend entire nights in the theater. Back then he’d earned a living (after a fashion, Ricky would qualify) teching professional shows at Broadway and regional theaters. He had many happy memories of her visiting him at work on a set after midnight, when the world at large was dark and oblivious, and all light, all life seemed temporarily concentrated within whatever minor world he was constructing. She’d bring in food and they’d sit at the edge of the stage together—he in his painty, sawdusty clothes, she looking so clean and smelling so good—with little white cardboard take-out containers spread out around them. Their love had sprung up, taken root, and run rampant in half-realized forests and tenement houses, castles and kitchens, drawing rooms and hospital rooms, and once in heaven, and once in Denmark.

  Back then Ricky—a freshly minted financial engineer (a “quant,” as they called themselves, as she called herself, with a kind of utilitarian pride), not long out of graduate school and playing her new role to the hilt in hose and pumps, pencil skirts and tailored shirts—had been captivated by all his tricks of the trade: how you’d mix perlite (the tiny white balls in potting soil) with paint in order to bring texture to an interior surface; how you’d spray a little paint on the artificial flora, in order to pull it into the world of the show; how, for a big backdrop, you’d spray fixative on charcoal, then tint it and build up a few layers of paint to give it the depth and richness of an oil painting. She’d loved the lingo of the scene shop: scumble painting, scenic fitches, pounce wheels. She’d loved the tools of his profession, from flogger to feather duster, chicken wire to Cellupress; even the most banal piece of equipment—the hair dryer he’d use to quick-dry a patch of paint in order to check the end color—fascinated her in its theatrical context. With a kind of busybody intensity he found sexy, she’d insist he describe to her, in detail and in language she could understand, exactly what he was working on, on a given night, and why he was going about it in that particular way.

  “All make-believe,” she would say. “All this for just pretend.” Her tone of wonderment at once paying tribute and poking fun.

  “But this stuff is real,” John would counter, rapping his knuckles against the wooden brace holding up a painted storefront, fingering a sharktooth scrim. “Your stuff’s pretend.”

  “My stuff!”

  “What are derivatives? Stuff you can’t touch. Futures. Swaps. Forwards. Backwards.”

  “There’s no backwards, smart guy.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “No . . . oh.”

  Already he’d have turned her around, positioned her tight against his hips, begun to peel her skirt up slowly from the hem.

  The truth is he’d never been particularly interested in her world. Volatility arbitrage had sounded exotic—hell, had sounded hot—when first she’d uttered it, tucking a piece of hair primly behind her ear as she did. And it was a rush when he’d realized how flat-out smart she was, how quick and sharp, in a way he’d never be; her interest in him seemed to confer on him a sort of attractiveness he hadn’t suspected he possessed. But in another respect, although John avoided thinking of it in such terms, he found Ricky’s profession beneath him. He thought of her and all her ilk—not only other quants but the whole phylum: investment bankers, hedge fund managers, speculators, riskmanagement analysts—as so many self-absorbed children playing an elaborate game of make-believe, running around dressed in the costumes of power brokers, issuing decrees in gobbledygook, trading promises like wads of play money. Sipping air from plastic teacups. Although he was both too considerate and too uncertain of this view to voice these impressions outright, his general opinion of her field was not exactly a secret. Even before their marriage it had begun to show.

  As for Ricky, what had started as genuine interest in John’s work transformed over time not into feigned interest but frank resentment. At first, and really, all throughout Paul’s toddlerhood, she’d continued to be at least nominally supportive. If she’d tolerated John’s late nights and sporadic employment with more stoicism than grace, she’d made only the occasional, concertedly factual observation of the strain it put on her. After Biscuit was born, however, Ricky had put her foot down and John had given up this work, with its gypsy schedule and irregular paychecks.

  In fact, John knew the phrase “put her foot down” did Ricky a disservice—for any number of reasons, one being she had not actually put her foot down but merely registered her preference; another being John had not been unhappy to accept the job at Congers Community College’s Llewellyn-Price Theater. The Llewellyn-Price, a five-hundred-seat performance center, was used (or “utilized,” as CCC brochures unfailingly put it) not only for campus productions but also by amateur and professional groups from around the county. John, whose official title for the past nine years had been Lecturer in Theater Design, taught one course each semester covering the basics of stagecraft and lighting; managed the scene shop; designed sets for a fourshow season; helped supervise the student work crews; and served as technical consultant for outside groups using the space. An insane job.Which he did not pretend not to love.

  This was precisely what complicated matters on the phone now with his wife. Ricky, who for the past three years had headed the research group of Birnbaum and Traux in White Plains, hated her job as passionately and openly as he loved his. The work itself had once captivated her: the search for patterns in apparently random systems, the idea that one could forecast future volatility, devise models of what was “true in expectation.” It wasn’t simply that she’d loved the notion of hidden order, of discernible outcomes. It was that she’d cast her lot with it, banked on its existence. It was almost not too much to call it her principles, her faith.

  When they first met, Ricky’d been contemplating going for a doctorate in the philosophy of mathematics. Sometimes John wondered, with a kind of confused, guilty perturbation, how things might have turned out if she’d gone this route. She’d have been happier, he supposed. They might all have been. Even if it meant they’d still be paying off student loans, renting instead of owning, borrowing instead of investing. He couldn’t help his rather embarrassingly rosy image of what their life would have looked like then—chillier house, older cars, rattier sweaters, more pasta, less steak: happier.

  At the beginning of the economic crisis, and during the long plummeting months of recession, he’d lived with the fear that she would lose her job. Daily he rehearsed receiving the news, offering consolations, making adjustments, weathering loss. The dread was a pressure in his chest, a gnawing in his bones. His very teeth ached with it.Yet when things began to bottom out, when the layoffs tapered off and the market began to evince feeble signs of life, he was aware of a bashful, bewildered disappointment. They had been left unscathed, untested. Only then did he wonder if such a test might have been their saving grace, the very thing that would have shaken them awake, restored to them their vitality, their happiness. Like that summer at Cabruda Lake, when, tested, they’d risen admirably to the occasion, surprising themselves a little, discovering within their relationship something heartier, at once more stalwart and accommodating than they’d known.

  Ricky never complained about what she did, the work itself, but she griped volubly about the accoutrements of her job: the twice daily commute across t
he bridge; the fact that she had to leave the house each morning before the rest of the family was awake and arrive home each evening too late to cook dinner; the fact that she had to wear “clothes,” as she put it (she had a special, contemptuous way of pronouncing the word in this context); and, perhaps most of all, the fact that she earned three times as much as her husband, making her job pretty much unquittable. John knew all of this, including the fact that the last part was not, strictly speaking, true, that Ricky could quit if only he were willing to do something that paid more. That this was a possibility they had never properly discussed loomed over him at all times.

  It was because he lived in trepidation of such a discussion, because he lived with the burden of his unspoken (by either of them) indebtedness, that he knew he would give in to Ricky’s current request: would go to the house, check on Biscuit, and scold her in some weary fashion, even though he felt there was little to be achieved by such a gesture. And because he knew, and knew Ricky knew, that he would ultimately give in, John took a moment to dispute the necessity.