The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  “Poor John,” she murmurs instead, between her husband’s heaves. She’d been angry with him when they’d gone to bed, and cannot help feeling a little glad that he has gotten sick, not because she is still angry but because it makes him helpless, makes him hers, and draws forth her desire to forgive him.

  She’d been angry because of the way he treated her all day: meanly, or at any rate, grouchily. At first, as they drove toward the Albany train station, where they’d arranged to pick up Jess, Ricky had chalked up his mood to anxiety over successfully completing the handoff. Once they arrived at the station (on time, without getting lost), she thought he’d relax, but as she began to unbuckle Biscuit, expecting they’d all go in and meet Jess together, John had said, No, wait here, and strode off quickly, stranding her in the hot car with the kids. He’d been grouchy in the little diner outside Lake George where they’d had lunch, grouchy again when she asked him to pull off the road so she could change Biscuit’s diaper, and of all things he’d snapped at her when he missed the turnoff for the cabin.

  He did begin to lighten up after they’d finally arrived, but by then Ricky was too hurt to forgive him easily.They’d made supper and washed the dishes and taken the kids down to the dock to brush their teeth and all of that they’d done side by side, but later when he climbed into the double sleeping bag beside her, she’d turned away from him. Ricky knows it is a kind of fear that caused his foul temper today. She believes this fear is also what has made him throw up. She believes, too, that it is Jess who has brought out the fear—not through her actions but through her existence. But the fear predates Jess. Ricky does not know how she knows this. She has not seen John like this before. But she recognizes what she sees: John is afraid of being revealed in a poor light, afraid of being found unworthy, small. Who in his past has made him feel this way? Ricky does not know.

  She rests one hand on the small of his back and looks up at the tall night sky. It is starless, black, and rimmed by the silhouettes of treetops that are blacker still. The silhouettes of trees are like shapes cut out of folded paper. They remind her of a stage set, not the kind John builds but the one that was part of a toy theater she had as a child. It folded out of an album like a popup book, and came with its own paper actors and props. Her mother would help her put on little plays at the kitchen table. Sometimes they’d set up a row of tea lights at the foot of the cardboard stage.

  Her father never took part in the plays, except as an audience member, but he loved to tell stories, mostly the same handful of stories over and over again, sometimes from books and sometimes from memory, and as he told them she saw the action unfold in her mind as if in a play. It was here at Cabruda Lake, some twenty years earlier, that he first told Ricky the story about the rabbi of Nemirov. She’d been lying on the dock well after dark, her head on her mother’s lap, her father’s corduroy shirt spread across her legs like a blanket, her father sitting beside them. They’d come to watch the Perseids, but there was cloud cover. To entertain her while they waited and hoped, her father retold the I. L. Peretz story “If Not Higher.” It was one of his favorites, and she heard him tell it many times throughout her childhood, but it remains always fastened for her to this place, to the night sky and the tall trees here at Cabruda Lake, where she first heard it.

  Ricky thinks she would like to tell John the story. She tries to recollect the way her father told it:

  The rabbi of Nemirov always disappears one day a year, always during the High Holidays. On this day he cannot be found—not at home, not at the synagogue, not at shul. The villagers would always explain this absence by saying the rabbi, on this day, must ascend to heaven, to plead with God on their behalf. But one day a Litvak comes to the village, and he scoffs at this explanation.

  (“What’s a Litvak?” young Ricky had interrupted.

  “A scoffer,” her father replied. “May I please continue?”)

  On the eve of the High Holidays, just before the Day of Atonement, the Litvak nervously hides under the rabbi’s bed. He’s determined to discover wherever it is the rabbi goes. The next morning the rabbi rises, dresses in rough clothing, and grabs an ax and a thick rope. The Litvak, with fear in his heart, follows the rabbi into the woods.As he watches, the rabbi chops up a tree and ties the wood into a bundle with the rope. He carries the bundle to the shack of a sick old woman and knocks on the door, pretending to be a peasant selling firewood. When the woman protests she hasn’t any money, the rabbi says he’ll lend it to her. When she says she may never be able to pay him back, he scolds her for having so little faith in God. When she asks who will make the fire for her—she’s too sick to get up—he does it himself, reciting, as he does, the penitential prayers.

  From this day forth, the Litvak becomes a disciple of the rabbi. From this day forth, whenever he hears someone repeat the rumor that during the High Holidays the rabbi of Nemirov ascends to heaven, the Litvak does not scoff. He only adds quietly, “If not higher.”

  Ricky hears these last words as if her father is speaking them now, and recalls how his voice had seemed to hang above them for a moment, like the wire of black smoke after you blow out a candle.

  (“Why,” young Ricky had asked, “didn’t he just give her the wood?”

  “He did,” said her father.

  “But he makes it sound like she has to pay him back.”

  “Because he knows she won’t accept charity.”

  “Why did he have to dress like a peasant? Why didn’t he just let her know he was the rabbi?”

  Her father turned to her mother. “What am I not saying in English?”)

  And this is the problem with the story, as well as the real reason she has thought of it now. Ricky cannot recall the story of the rabbi without reinvoking the memory of disappointing her father. This is how it always went with them: he forever offering her something he clearly regarded as a precious gem; she forever failing to grasp the crucial thing about it, always apprehending, instead, its poorest facet. She knows a thing or two about being seen as small, as wanting.

  John retches again.

  “Sweetpea,” whispers Ricky.

  His vomit steams on the cold ground.

  Above them, above the steely black of the pines, the sky’s black is soft as a plum. Ricky listens to the tuneless chorale of the insects and the faint clues—twigs snapping, leaves rustling—that weightier creatures are awake in the forest. Her breath comes out as feathery fog, silver in the air before it disappears. Between the trees, Cabruda Lake shows yet another sort of black: slick as obsidian glass. Tomorrow they will take the canoe from the shed.

  The need comes over her to make a vow. Standing with her husband, her palm on his waist while he is sick at their feet, she pledges silently to be the one who will always see in him the large. No matter what, she will be that one.The private nature of her vow, the fact that he is unaware of this new promise, her new obligation, fills her with a kind of solemn awe.

  When he is finished, Ricky ushers him carefully over the prickling pine needles and hard roots to the little washstand set up between the privy and the cabin. Here is a jug of water, a chipped enamel basin, a hand towel. She helps him wash his face, rinse his mouth.When he is done she flings the wash water across the path, into the pines. Then she walks him inside, guides him over to the bed, covers him. She feels his forehead; it is not hot.

  “You’re nice,” whispers John, in fetal curl, within the flannellined sleeping bag.

  She whispers “ssh” into his beard.

  There is a metal pail, which they use to heat dishwater; she takes this from atop the woodstove and places it on the floor by John’s head, just in case. Then she pulls on one of his wool sweaters, slides into her flip-flops, and goes back outside. They keep an identical pail by the big stone fireplace built into the clearing in front of the cabin. Ricky carries this down the path to the lake, walking across the strip of sand and right out to the edge of the floating dock, which sways beneath her as she kneels. She dips the pail, a
nd the black water that swirls into it is warmer than the air.

  Lugging it back to the cabin, she feels her shoulder being pulled earthward, has a graphic sense of the muscle within the casing of skin, the ligaments and bone. Her burden relieves her; she is as light—as happy—as she’s been all day. She pours the lake water back and forth over the door stone, washing it clean.

  PAUL BRINGS HIS bucket up from the shallows and dumps the treasure, along with a fair amount of water and sand, unceremoniously onto Jess’s towel.

  “Dude,” she says, scrambling to sit up, and—“Peh!”—spitting sand from her mouth. She has been lying with her head on her rolled-up sweatshirt, reading one of the library books she brought from home.

  With a small, sticky hand, Paul helps brush the sand from her face. He’s thorough about it and surprisingly gentle. She closes her eyes and holds still. When he finishes, she opens her eyes to find him looking back at her. He is both slender and sturdy, like a young barnyard animal, a calf or colt. He’s wearing red swim trunks and, in his hair, the wreath of white clover she wove that morning. Jess is in her bathing suit, too, a modest black one-piece. Over this she wears a large blue oxford she will not take off, not even to go in the water; earlier she went wading in it, and yesterday, when it was warmer, she jumped off the dock with it on.

  “So what’s this stuff ya dumpin’ on my head?”

  “I didn’t dump it on your head,” he corrects reasonably, and, kneeling, sorts through the jumble. “Shell, shell, plastic thing, shell, pink grass, rock with a line in it, bottle cap, more shells . . . here.” He holds up the glinting item, the prize he has apparently come in order to show. She takes it from him with respect.

  “That was down by the water? That’s dangerous.” She points out the tiny barbs that make the fish hook so dangerous, and shows him, using a fat blade of beach grass, how once the hook pierces something it cannot be pulled out again without causing greater damage. “Good thing you found it.”

  He puffs out his chest. His skin is tawny from a summer’s worth of sun, his hair streaked white and yellow as the bicolor corn Ricky and John cooked last night. Jess and Paul had shucked it themselves, sitting on the big log outside the cabin, with “help” from Biscuit, who had mostly waved around her ear of corn like a maraca, pulling off a husk or two and biting into it raw before flinging it into the cold gray ash of the fireplace. Paul had scolded her perhaps too severely for this—“No, no! Never throw anything in the fire!”—which had so offended her that Biscuit had been compelled to respond with an immediate rebellion, throwing in after the corn the handiest thing available: her pacifier, as it turned out, direct from her mouth.

  It had been, objectively speaking, high comedy, watching the consequences of her action dawn on her. At first, she’d looked slyly pleased with her insurgence. Then came the double take, and after a shocked delay, the tears. Jess, biting the insides of her cheeks in order not to smile, had fished “pie-oo” out of the ashes and gone to rinse it under the spigot. By then Biscuit had begun to wail so hysterically that John came dashing from the cabin, where he’d been making chili, wooden spoon still in hand, and Ricky, emerging from the woods with an armload of kindling, had dropped the sticks by the fireplace, scooped up the squalling girl, and taken her into the hammock for comforting.

  Jess, having delivered the clean pacifier and come back to sit by the bag of corn, caught Paul’s eye in such a way that the two of them had burst into laughter, which they tried unsuccessfully to squelch and which earned them Biscuit’s disdainful refusal to acknowledge their subsequent apologies.The quality of laughter was novel to Jess, not because she’d never experienced it before but because she’d experienced it only in cahoots with a girlfriend, someone her own age, not with a little kid, a mere fiveyear-old. She looks at Paul now, sitting across from her on the towel, grains of dry sand dusting his shoulders like sugar. She wonders if the quick closeness between them could be a result of their shared blood.

  The others are in the cabin now, Biscuit having her nap, John and Ricky washing the dishes. It’s become a routine, Jess bringing Paul to the beach after lunch, just the two of them until mid-afternoon, when the others wander down. Jess wonders if Ricky and John use the time to make love. She is embarrassed to be capable of such a thought, but she can’t help it. Lying at night on the couch in the cabin’s main room, she has heard them whisper and shift within their sleeping bag, and to her mortification she has strained to pick out the sounds she imagines might be associated with sex. She has not been able to, and wonders if they are abstaining because of her, and if so will they abstain the whole two weeks, and if so, how difficult is it? She has heard it can be painful, especially for a man.

  As a couple, John and Ricky are enormously interesting to her, which is repulsive because this means she is having inappropriate thoughts about her father, even though he isn’t her father father. She’s shaken enough by her own inability to stop thinking about such things that she has been avoiding John. She thinks he is feeling bad about this, hurt, but what else can she do? They are so different from her own parents, who, though peaceably wedded, seem not particularly interested in each other. Or interested: yes; but intrigued, entranced: no. John and Ricky have the crackling charge of film stars. They speak in funny little halfsentences, call each other Baby and Sweet Pea, and carry on their own secret dialogue of glance and touch, right in front of Jess and the kids. There is a palpable complexity, as though the air between them has been folded into many layers, within which lie all the artifacts of their history together. Jess tries to monitor her gaze so as not to look at them too long at any one time.

  Not, evidently, a concern for Paul, who has been regarding her unblinking these past several moments.

  “What are you looking at?”

  He shrugs.

  She mimics the gesture, but he continues to stare. “Here. Look at that.” She holds the fish hook out on the flat of her palm so that Paul can better see its tiny, wicked barbs. He brings his face in close. She can feel the breath from his nostrils flowing against her skin in two distinct streams. He remains in this position, surely too close to the hook to be able to focus on it—in fact, she notes, he seems to have half shut his eyes—inhaling deeply. “What are you doing? It’s not food.”

  “You smell like eggs.”

  “Great.”

  “Easter eggs,” he says appreciatively.

  Jess runs her tongue over her braces. “I’d like to take you home and show you to my mother.”

  A skeptical crease appears between his eyebrows. “Why?”

  “’Cause you’re a kick.”

  What she’d really like is to show her mother herself: her, here, with the Ryries. She is something new here, something shiny, different, at the lake with this family. She feels older somehow and also excitingly young, aware of the possibilities of her youth, the great array of things she might eventually be and do. The only thing missing from the experience is a witness, someone who knows her in real life and could perform the task of saying: yes. This is all true. This could all be true.

  “So,” says Jess, holding up the hook. “What are we going to do with this sucker?”

  “Throw it away?”

  “When we go back, but for now, I mean.”

  “Put it someplace safe?”

  “Here.” She picks up her library book, a romance novel, one of seven she has brought. She consumes one every two days.They are, she knows, essentially all the same, and not what she would describe as good, but that’s beside the point; they seem to be a kind of requirement for her these days, as basic as bread. This book’s protective film, she sees, has somehow been infiltrated by sand, sharp grains of it denting the plastic from the inside, a fact that should make her feel guilty but gives her perverse satisfaction: she has marked it, this piece of public property, with a bit of herself. The sand physical evidence of the book’s journey from Elsmere Public Library to Cabruda Lake. Jess opens the back cover and slips the fish hook into
the empty card pocket. “Good?”

  Paul nods. The clover wreath on his head slips over one ear and she settles it back on his crown. She can feel his infatuation extending toward her in waves as distinct, as palpable, as earlier she’d felt the twin streams of his breath on her palm. Her feeling of love for this little boy is like a new frequency she’s discovering, a new channel within her. She is awash in it, shining and addled. He’s cross-legged on her towel and as golden, as bitable, as a toasted marshmallow. It’s yesterday again and they are dissolved in laughter in front of the cold outdoor fireplace, strands of corn silk strewn all around, edges of the sky seeming to tilt and spin them together. It’s tomorrow and she’ll wake to him sitting on her legs, on her sleeping bag, drinking his milk in front of the woodstove. She is fifteen and experiencing for the first time what she thinks of as grown-up love. It turns out not to be the thing described in her romance novels. Nor is it the thing John and Ricky have, although what they have continues to fascinate her, to make her both wistful and uncomfortable. But what she has discovered is another variety altogether, almost another species. This love, she thinks, is selfless, beyond self, mature.

  “WHAT ELSE?” John is taking down the shopping list that Ricky dictates. So far he’s written milk, tomatoes, hot dogs and garlic, butter and chocolate bars and toilet paper.

  “And more of that corn,” says Ricky. “The corn was good.”

  The time is flying. Already they are more than halfway through the vacation. Although she wasn’t expecting it (not this summer, not with John’s daughter on the scene), Ricky realizes there have been a few stellar days, or parts of days: moments that seemed instantly to become emblazoned in her mind as postcards she will look back on. Scavenging for late-season blueberries, and Biscuit turning out to be the best seeker of them all. Playing cards all day, the day it rained without stopping, and eating popcorn straight from the metal pot. Hiking on the blazed trails and logging roads that suddenly opened up and as suddenly stopped, like ghost boulevards in the old forest; the sun filtering down as if in slow motion through the crown cover, the light somehow altered, distilled, as though it had been sent from a long time ago. The evening paddle with John in the bow, Ricky in the stern, Jess and the children sitting on boat cushions in the bottom of the canoe. They’d seen a whole family of deer drinking from the lake, and also, on a branch that stretched out into the water, a prehistoriclooking creature that Ricky said was a turkey vulture. Paul, wondrous and a little frightened, had shrunk against Jess, but Biscuit had been entranced and was barely restrained from climbing out of the canoe; she kept calling lustily, “Bird! Bird, come!”