The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler

  Oona sat back against her seat. Henrietta, too, leaned back. She had found herself spending all her time in the kitchen these last weeks, trying to summon if not a ghost then some phantom waft of his cooking, some remnant sensation of his presence. She had also found herself holding the handle of Harold’s suitcase, standing by the door, just looking out at the path he used to take, up and down the hill. Her good sense, quite possibly, was dissipating.

  In the beginning the land embarrassed her. Henrietta Horowitz, city girl, with all these acres. It was a fiefdom, she told her mother on the phone. Enough room for blocks and blocks of apartment towers and tenements. You could fit the whole neighborhood in the backyard, she told her mother. Now, she figured, it might just happen.

  “The new place is very blank,” Henrietta said. “That’s the word that comes to mind. Everything is cream-colored. There’s carpeting. I’m allowed to have a small dog. Under fifty pounds, they told me. I don’t know—maybe there’s a doggy scale they bring in to see if I’m following the rules.”

  “That doesn’t sound awful.”

  Henrietta laughed. “Is that the standard now?”

  “That is the standard now, yes. Modern American life means being able to afford someplace that isn’t awful.”

  “I wanted to ask you to move in with me,” Henrietta said. She had rehearsed this. Another thing that embarrassed her.

  “With you?”

  “Like roommates.”

  Oona laughed.

  “Why is it funny?” Henrietta asked. “It’s been nice to have you near me.”

  Oona nervously zipped her coat up to her neck. “It has been nice.”

  “It’s hard for you to admit!”

  “I’m emotionally underdeveloped,” Oona said. “What do you want from me? It’s genetic.”

  “You could have gone elsewhere, I know. You have the money.”

  “It’s not like you never saw me before all of this.”

  “That’s debatable.”

  “I came for holidays.”

  “People don’t want to be around their mother. I understand. When you were the littlest girl, I knew that you would be that kind of woman. And that made me happy. But to see you every day. And to have you sleeping in my house. I’ve liked it. I’ve liked it very much.”

  “The novelty will wear off. Trust me. Ask my husband.”

  Henrietta said nothing. She knew the trickiness of time and language. Husband. Ex-husband. Late husband.

  “So, what happens if I want to bring a man home to the apartment?” Oona asked.

  “Sex? That’s the first thing you think about? Are you sure you’re my daughter? What happened to you, Oona?”

  “Yes, that’s what I think! You’re my mother! You wrote the stupid book. Which I read far, far too early. Obviously sex is what I think about!”

  “You misread the book, sweetie.”

  “Me and apparently everyone else.”

  Henrietta opened the door partway. The cold came in. “What I would like, at least, is for you to bring my granddaughter over. So I could, you know, potentially have a conversation with her before I’m senile.”

  Oona grinned. “You’re ruining the fun with guilt,” she said.

  “I would like her to know me as a human. Especially since she’ll probably read that stupid book.”

  “It’s a delightful book.”

  Henrietta scoffed and opened her door. “Come with me,” she said. “Come out. It’s great this time of year. You can walk right on it. Right on the ice.”

  “How about I watch?” Oona said.

  From the road to the shore was a hundred yards. Henrietta pushed through the weeds and bushes. Underfoot the leaves were frozen, which she loved, that sound your foot makes on frozen leaves. The original plan had been to give the house to Oona. Henrietta found Harold’s will while she packed up the house. All his best laid plans. He had given Oona the Feast, too. The quality of the establishment must be maintained at all costs, he’d written. She kicked her way through a tangled mess of dead chestnuts and dogwoods. Overhead there were blackbirds. Behind her Oona approached slowly. There were patches where the tree cover stood so thick snow hadn’t reached the ground yet, and autumn was visible, a few stray shards of green, October colors: red and yellow and the orange of a jack-o’-lantern.

  At the water’s edge, the ice looked purple. She stood there, tapped her foot against the sheet of it.

  “Don’t do it,” Oona shouted.

  She went out two steps, closed her eyes, pushed off, and glided. After a moment she started to bellow with laughter, and when her laughter echoed across the ice, bats sprung from the trees.

  “Look,” she called out. “Look.”

  Oona stood on the shore, her arms crossed, with Harold’s face and eyes and nose and chin. Maybe this was where the spirits went.

  Henrietta spun on her heels. She swung her arms in an arc, twirling. She whistled with joy. All this childish happiness surprised her. “This is the most fun I’ve had in ages,” she said, pushing out, one step and then two, gliding and cutting the air and sliding while the snow brushed up over the toes of her shoes. The new construction in town threw lights up into the sky that deadened the stars, so that even very late at night you could not make out the belt of Orion in winter. She spun a second time, inexpertly, her feet leaving smooth loops on the surface of the ice.

  She knew that all this talk of ghosts was just another way to talk about memories. If the dead lingered, then they were doing a poor job lingering around her. She needed help recalling her father’s face. Her mother’s voice and laugh were gone. Every Horowitz who had ever crowded into her mother’s apartment on Orchard Street—all of them had vanished, and she could not, even when she wanted to, remember the way they were when they were living.

  If she lived long enough, the same thing would happen with Harold. He, too, would go eventually.

  She knew that she was losing not just her house, but the land Harold loved, the foot-beaten dirt paths to the chicken pens, his idea of the place, the spot where he fell. All of this was just something else to grieve, and she was exhausted by grief.

  She went out far enough that she could see the whole house and the stripe of land that was hers. The pasture, the barn roof, the back meadow, the mess of it all. She kept going, almost to the center of the lake, because this was the only place where you could see, against the hill, far off and on either side of the porch, that the apple trees he had planted that first year were planted in the shape of two Hs, one for her, one for him. When the saplings came up the first or second winter—she could no longer remember which—he took her out here to see, and she had, because she was joyless and a crank, mocked him for the whole idea: this corny thing, this cheap attempt at romanticism. She had told him that it was the single most schmaltzy thing anyone had ever done for her.

  She pushed out, her feet gathering slush. Behind her Oona stayed at the edge of the lake, full with worry.

  “I swear to Christ if you fall through the ice and drown I will kill you,” Oona called out.

  Henrietta kept going out, five feet, ten feet, and the whole of the place began to come into view. Eventually she stopped and gaped at the hill and the house. Oona finally came out onto the ice, managing slowly.

  “What are you looking at?” Oona said when she reached the center of the lake. “What’s so damn important in the middle of this stupid lake?”

  Henrietta pointed.

  33.

  Before Lydia went away to Hartwell, her parents had been talking a good deal about the old days. This made sense now that they were separate from each other. Before everything falls apart one goes back to the crucial decisions. Babies or no babies. City or country. New York or not New York. They had decided on everything, she knew, over pierogies at a Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village. Marriage, motherhood, Massachusetts.

  She thought of this on the way home, as her father insisted on taking her through Manhattan in order to show h
er the place where she was born, the room, the window that was her first window. It was late and the city was full. They drove uptown to the west side, passing the big avenues, light-drenched and looking, each of them, like parted seas. He changed the disc to something different, more jazz, and he said, whispering, forced awe in his voice, This is something you’ll love. I’m sure of it. The blocks were thickset with shadow. Wind careened off the sycamore branches. Horse piss from the hansom cabs wafted from the street and in through the vents.

  All of her parents’ friends had babies the same year. Lydia had seen the home videos. Small Brooklyn apartments full of young-looking people and outdated technology, and all these babies drool-splattered in their oversize strollers, looking so life-affirmingly adorable. This was the beginning of the new century, and all the baby names were the names of sitcom characters. Niles. Monica. Carlton. Lydia knew all these children vaguely. They were tangentially related, she liked to think. Manhattanites in exile, each of them born in a hospital one block from Central Park, and then whisked away to places like Crestview. Because of this, she was supposed to feel a deep connection to this city, some spiritual kinship with the skyline. But she regarded this place with none of the regret and sentiment of her parents, whose zest for the city grew every year they were absent from it, and who tortured her with stories of their brief foray into metropolitan glamour. She had all their stories memorized. How her father knew a man who knew a man who groomed Jacqueline Kennedy’s dogs. Or how her father read poetry earnestly and for entertainment and was not embarrassed by either of these facts. She knew that her mother had tried to inhabit the spirit of Bridget Fonda. And that she’d momentarily had Jennifer Aniston’s hair, two years after it was fashionable. All of it needed to be recited yearly, like the Passover story.

  She watched her father as he drove along Central Park. His face brightened. Time, he had told her, began to feel so strange the moment they moved away from here. The body ages fast, but the spirit lags. He narrated as they went, a finger raised to point out buildings black against the bruised sky, to show her the homes of their old friends, or of other babies she had played with, of roommates and old girlfriends and places where there were parties and restaurants in which they had plotted their future and whole city blocks—unchanged, he claimed, brick for brick. This city, she was supposed to understand, was full of ghosts.

  “You miss this,” she said. “It’s obvious.”

  “Only a little,” he said.

  “If this is you missing something only a little,” Lydia said, “I can’t imagine how my mother feels.”

  He allowed only a small smile at this. The Toyota glided uptown on a string of successive green lights.

  “You were only twenty-five when I was born,” she said. “That’s young.”

  “Very young,” he agreed.

  “What were you thinking?” she asked.

  “I think I was too terrified to be thinking anything,” he said.

  “I have a hard time picturing you as a young person,” she said.

  “I was very charming,” he said.

  “Doubtful.”

  “Before you were born I had all these convictions that childbearing was a political act, incompatible with certain notions I had about social privilege and global overpopulation and food shortages. I just thought, does the world really need another person?”

  “I don’t think I’m the one you tell this story to,” she said.

  “Another person just gobbling up fuel and creating more garbage.”

  “Like I said, this is really doing wonders for my self-confidence,” she told him, her voice nearly lost in the city noise through the open windows.

  “Naturally, you would think, this person sounds like a person who should definitely go to law school. That sounds wise, right?”

  She shrugged. “Lawyers make money.”

  “I borrowed every cent. We were in debt for so long. Your grandmother supported us financially.”

  Lydia smiled.

  “Which occasioned all sorts of guilt about inherited wealth and entitlement and the scourge of first-world capitalism.”

  “The twenty-five-year-old version of you sounds like a real catch.”

  “I kept a very, very serious journal on the matter,” he told her.

  “Oh Lord.”

  “There’s a possibility that some of the entries may have been written in iambic pentameter.”

  “You did not just utter those words.”

  “One day, when I lose my capacity for shame, I’ll let you read it. You’ll get a kick out of it.”

  She smiled. “Please don’t do that. Please burn these journals before you die.”

  They stopped. Red light from a traffic signal glowed in the puddles on the avenue. Up ahead the clouds over Manhattan cloaked the island like a fire blanket; midtown stopped at the fortieth story, all the skyscrapers with their tops smothered by the weather.

  “You were the first baby I ever held,” he said. “I knew nothing about babies. I’d never been around them.”

  “You told me. You read books on fatherhood.”

  “I read books on everything,” he said. “Cooking for your baby. The songs to sing to your baby. I read every book I could find on being a father.”

  “You thought you would drop me?”

  “Or do something wrong. Everybody wants to show you how,” he said, cradling an imaginary infant. “You hold the head. Make sure it’s safe.”

  “Seems obvious enough,” Lydia said.

  “Except I didn’t know. It wasn’t obvious to me. I was sure I had no idea.”

  “You were also stoned all the time.”

  “It was like someone handing you a table saw for the first time and telling you to go to work.”

  “Are you saying that you read baby books to learn how to hold me?” she asked.

  They went north along the river into the West Nineties. “Do you remember this?” he kept asking, at everything, at bakeries, at high trees, at the flight of pigeons gathered on church steps. She remembered none of it, and if she said she did, it was only because he wanted her to remember it so badly. His best years, he kept saying, his happiest years, his most important, most formative years, pointing at subway station staircases and sidewalk cafés.

  She rooted around in the glove box for tissues and found a picture of her parents that he used to hang from the rearview mirror. It was from the early days, taken outside the apartment on 103rd Street. In it they were clutching each other. It looked less like an embrace than a way to keep the other person from floating away. All the pictures from that era were like this. The hair. The evidence of leftover adolescent acne. All the rapturous smiling. Eager for proof that these were in fact the people who had spawned her, she had always inspected pictures like this for clues. Who were these happy smiling people? What exactly were their customs? Whatever happened to this society of gleeful people?

  When they finally parked, having circled the same three corner bodegas and iron-gated kindergarten academies, passing three times the same lovely black flash of the Hudson, they rummaged for winter wear before they got out of the car. The temperature had plunged. Ice formed on the windshield. “I think I might have a hat for you,” she said. In the back of the car, one of the backpacks that she’d taken from her dorm at Hartwell was stuffed full of her old school uniforms and textbooks. They pulled the bag from the backseat to the front. The stereo played low. A street sweeper passed.

  He unzipped the top. Then he made a small, almost imperceptibly exhausted noise. “Oh God, Lydia,” he said.

  He held the blue box containing the small weathervane. Beneath the streetlight, the chips and dents on it were clear. The patina on it looked worn and green and smudged with dirt. She had swiped it from the house last month, on her visit home, for no other reason than because at that moment Lydia was sure that it was doomed for the trash, just like everything else in the house, everything that at one point had ever meant something. She had watched her
grandmother that night at home. The catatonic misery of disposal. This was the reality of widowhood: she went room to room with a big trash bag. Her grandmother was junking her life.

  “You took it,” he said.

  “I saved it,” she said.

  He turned it over in his hands. She had admired it perhaps for the same reason that her grandmother had kept it all this time on the mantel downstairs. It always seemed important to remember that men rendered liberty as a woman.

  “She’s been looking for this,” her father told her.

  She took it from him. “I found it at the house last month,” she said. “She was going to throw it away.” She saw his face. She winced.

  “You came home and you didn’t let me know,” he said.

  On the underside of the statue she could see where it had snapped off the roof. She ran her hand along the jagged fissure. “I’m guessing you’re not happy about me coming home and not telling you.”

  He nodded.

  “I should have called you,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “You missed me,” she said. “I know.”

  “I got pretty used to having you around,” he said.

  She bowed her head.

  “We were buddies,” he said. “Right?”

  She looked up at him. It had so often been just the two of them, him and her, she and he.

  “I figured I had at least another few years before you began to openly ignore me.”

  “Shitty thing to do, I know,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Sad thing.”

  “Does it help to say that I didn’t really think about it?”

  He started to laugh. “That you didn’t think about me?” he said. “Oh, yes. That makes it so much better.”

  “Is there something I can say that doesn’t make me sound like an awful person?”

  He thought about it. “You could say that you just wanted your mother,” he said. “That’s never not an acceptable thing to say.”

  She thought about it. “Are you sure?”