The World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  “We’re not even close to the Berkshires,” Noelle says. “We’re more than an hour away.”

  “Well, it’s anticipating us.” A gob of bird shit splats against their windshield; Lily turns the wipers on higher. “The last time I was in Lenox, no one could get cell phone coverage. It’s like the fucking Stone Age up there.”

  “Lily!” Noelle thrusts her thumb over her shoulder to where Akiva and Yoni are sitting. “Watch your language.”

  Ah, yes, Lily thinks. The fucking Stone Age. Noelle who when she was eight had her mouth washed out with soap by her third-grade teacher. Noelle who as a teenager used to say about some guy or another, “That’s the one I’m balling,” and Lily would look at her in benign amusement and say, “You’re balling him, Noelle? My understanding is he’s the one balling you.” Now religious Noelle with her long skirts and head coverings has become the language police. “I’m sorry, Noelle. The dang Stone Age. The gosh-darn Stone Age. The dickens of a Stone Age.”

  “How about just the Stone Age?”

  “All I’m saying is I’d like to get cell phone coverage up there.”

  “And all I’m saying is I’d appreciate it if you minded your language.”

  “Yes, Noelle. You’ve made your point.”

  Ahead of them, a deer stands next to the road, looking from side to side, as if checking out the traffic. “Don’t you dare,” Lily says.

  “What?”

  “I was talking to the deer.” She drives around a bend, and when they emerge into the clearing, they are surrounded by huge stalks of corn and, beyond them, patches of butter lettuce. A sign at the side of the road reads MEATBALLS, NACHOS, WATER. They pass an ad for an animal clinic, with the words IAMS SOLD HERE.

  “Why do you need cell phone service, anyway? Can’t you stand to be unwired for a few days?”

  “I have work to do, Noelle. This holiday hasn’t exactly come at a good time.”

  “Well, it’s not good for any of us. Do you think it’s easy to fly in from Israel? Or cheap?”

  “I assumed Mom and Dad helped you out.”

  “Well, they didn’t.”

  “Or Grandma. You’re always asking Grandma for money.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Lily looks at her.

  “Well, sometimes.”

  Lily nods, feeling as if she’s proven a point, though she doesn’t even know what that point is.

  They drive past Brookfield, where the grass is lined with yellow flowers and where, beyond a wooden fence, horses are at a feed trough and a woman in a straw hat is navigating a tractor. Through the window, Lily takes in the smell of freshly mown grass.

  “Grandma could help you out, too,” Noelle says. “And if you weren’t so pigheaded you’d let her.”

  “I don’t need Grandma’s money.”

  “But Malcolm does, doesn’t he? Isn’t he trying to open his own restaurant?”

  “What does that have to do with Grandma?” Malcolm has found a building on Capitol Hill, where there’s been a dining boom, and he’s been getting good press—he had a full-page photo in the Washingtonian in an article about D.C.’s best young chefs—and now all he needs is financial backing. A lot of it. But if Noelle thinks Malcolm should ask Gretchen for help, she misunderstands their grandmother entirely. Gretchen could fund Malcolm’s restaurant singlehandedly and she wouldn’t even know the money was missing. Gretchen’s first husband, Lily’s paternal grandfather, died of a heart attack when Lily’s father, their only child, was six, and she subsequently outlived two other husbands, both of whom were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, neither of whom had children. So Gretchen inherited everything they owned. She speaks of this with pride. What others might call greed she sees as discernment: she knows whom to marry. Gretchen is ninety-four and lives alone in an enormous apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met, where, Lily suspects, she’s busy honing those powers of discernment, determining whom best to bat her eyelashes at. At heart, she’s an insecure woman who believes people value her only for her money; if that’s true, Lily thinks, it’s because she has brought it on herself. She’s always promising people money, then breaking those promises; she rewrites her will every year. She demands strict devotion from her family, and she likes to pit the grandchildren against each other, writing a check to one that’s slightly larger than her check to the next one, all based on her quixotic assessment of who reveres her most. If Malcolm wants Gretchen to fund his restaurant, he’d do well to move to Fifth Avenue and show up every morning with a mimosa. Even that would do him no good, because he’d cross her in a way he hadn’t divined and then all his hard work would be for naught. Lily’s family is comfortable, but it’s possible that when her grandmother dies—though Lily doesn’t believe this will ever happen; Gretchen is too iron-willed to die—she and her sisters could become very wealthy. Just as likely, Gretchen could give all her money to the New York Horticultural Society; she’d do it simply because she could. For all these reasons, Lily has resolved not to win Gretchen’s favor. She received the money all the siblings received at twenty-five and she doesn’t want anything more. If her grandmother offered to fund Malcolm’s restaurant, Malcolm would think the money came without strings, but there are always strings with Gretchen. In no time, she’d be taking the train down to D.C., where she would camp out in Malcolm’s kitchen cooking her favorite breakfast, scrambled eggs with horseradish cheddar. She’d have the restaurant closed in a matter of months.

  “Anyway,” Noelle says, “it’s not just money, it’s time. Do you know how long it takes to fly here?”

  “Probably about as long as it took me to drive up from D.C. You should have seen the traffic. I was stuck with all the soccer moms.” Lily gives the dashboard a firm, affectionate rap, as if she’s thumping the rear of a horse.

  “Well, I’m sorry Leo’s death has inconvenienced you.”

  “Tell me something, Noelle. Do you think Leo would have wanted us to have this memorial?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, I do. He’d have hated it. If he were here, he’d be off vomiting in the corner.”

  On the other side of the road, two scarecrows are pinned to a tree. An American flag hangs from a pole, folded over on itself like a napkin.

  “Where’s Malcolm?” Akiva asks, leaning over from the backseat.

  “I left him behind,” Lily says. “He’s been grounded.”

  “He’s not coming?” says Noelle.

  “He’s too busy at work. He had a hundred reservations for dinner tonight.” What Lily doesn’t tell Noelle is that, once he leaves work, Malcolm will be driving down to the Outer Banks. One of his roommates from culinary school is in from London, so the roommates have decided to make a North Carolina beach holiday out of it.

  They pass a road sign with a picture of a cow on it, and a few hundred yards later a pasture with cattle opens before them. At the exit is a sign for miniature golf.

  “How long have you guys been a couple, anyway?”

  “Ten years,” Lily says. “We celebrated our anniversary last month.”

  “Have you ever thought about getting married?”

  “You mean, have we thought about getting married since the last time you asked me if we’d thought about getting married?”

  “Well, have you?”

  “No, Noelle, we haven’t.” Lily considers asking Noelle why she wants her to marry Malcolm. Malcolm isn’t Jewish, so if she were to marry him Noelle and Amram would boycott their wedding just as they boycotted Leo and Thisbe’s wedding. But there’s no point in pursuing this path. Noelle will disapprove of her not marrying Malcolm the same way she’ll disapprove of her marrying him.

  “Because you don’t believe in marriage,” Noelle says.

  “How can I possibly not believe in marriage?”

  “You certainly don’t seem to.”

  “For several years there, I was spending every weekend in a cocktail dress at some winery, allocating my disposable income to
bridal gifts. Now my paycheck goes to baby showers. I should take it as a tax deduction. Hazard of the job.”

  “What job?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you’re above it all,” Noelle says.

  “Believe me, Noelle, I’m not above anything.”

  “But you’re not going to have kids.”

  “Noelle, you’re having enough kids for both of us.”

  “That wasn’t my intention.”

  “To have so many kids?”

  “To have them for you. Doesn’t it bother you that your line will run out?”

  “My line?” Lily says. “What is this? Divine right of kings? Heir to my throne?”

  “Why do you think we were put here on earth?”

  “We weren’t put here,” Lily says. “We’re just here.”

  Noelle sniffles, blows her nose, and for a second Lily thinks she’s crying. But when she glances over, Noelle is just sitting there impassively, staring straight ahead.

  Now Yoni has woken up, and Lily finds herself rattling to the percussive thump of her nephew’s foot against the back of her seat.

  “Yoni,” Noelle says, “stop kicking Aunt Lily.”

  “I don’t mind,” Lily says.

  “Well, I do.”

  From behind the wheel, Lily can hear the sound of elbows jamming into ribs; one of the boys has slugged the other.

  “Kids!” Noelle says.

  Yoni reaches into his mother’s bag and removes a tube of apple sauce and a container of Jell-O.

  “Be careful,” Noelle says. “You don’t want to dirty Lily’s car.”

  “It’s already dirty,” Lily says. “They can litter it to their hearts’ content.”

  Now one of the boys has switched on the interior light, the better to play finger baseball by.

  “If we weren’t running late,” Lily says, “I’d take you kids to Fenway Park. I could show you the Green Monster.”

  “Are you a Red Sox fan?” Akiva asks.

  “Only when they play the Yankees.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m a Mets fan.” In 1986, the year the Mets won the World Series, Lily accompanied Leo, who was fourteen at the time, on the subway to Flushing, to watch Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry play at Shea Stadium. Everyone in the family was a Mets fan, and in the bleachers at Shea even Lily and Noelle got along. Lily has no patience for Yankees fans, especially the newly minted New Yorkers, the arrivistes. She knows suffering: she’s witnessed the Mets endure hundred-loss seasons. So when Akiva announces he’s a Yankees fan, she says, “Too bad for you. I guess we’ll have to eat at separate tables.”

  Akiva is silent.

  “I’m only kidding,” she says.

  Though Akiva, perhaps to make sure, says, “I like basketball better, anyway.”

  Now the boys have grown quiet, and Lily and Noelle turn quiet, too. Noelle’s phone rings, and she answers it in a whisper.

  “Who was that?” Lily asks when she hangs up.

  “Amram,” Noelle says. “He was checking on our progress.”

  “And?”

  “We’re progressing, aren’t we?”

  More bird shit hits the windshield. It’s as if a flock of geese is following them, dappling them with waste.

  The news is on again: there’s the possibility of a hailstorm. In July! Another reason, Lily thinks, to be back in D.C., land of March cherry blossoms and sweltering summers. Or on the Maryland shore. Or on the North Carolina shore with Malcolm. The summer she met Malcolm, she could occasionally get Mets games on the radio in Des Moines, when the team was playing the Cubs. Now she and Malcolm have gone in with friends to purchase Washington Nationals season tickets, though as often as not they have to give them away; it’s what they’ve done for tomorrow’s game. Lily wouldn’t mind being back home, sitting with Malcolm and their friends in their appointed seats, drinking beer and eating peanuts.

  From the back of the van comes a sneeze, and another one.

  “Does he have a cold?”

  “Allergies,” Noelle says.

  “Hay fever?”

  “Some.” Noelle rolls down the window, but soon the rain starts to come in, so she rolls it up again. “It feels doggy in here. Has Svengali been in the van?”

  “At some point,” Lily says. “Malcolm likes to take him on errands.”

  “On errands?” Noelle says. “He’s a dog.”

  “I know what he is.”

  “Does he still drink from the toilet?”

  “Whenever possible. We try to leave the seat up for him. That way, he has more room to maneuver.”

  “I hope you at least flush beforehand.”

  “If we remember to.”

  “The things you let that dog do. I remember one time you went for a run, and afterward Svengali was licking your forehead.”

  “He likes salt,” Lily says.

  “Well, I wouldn’t let a ninety-pound Rhodesian Ridgeback lick my forehead no matter how much I loved him.”

  “Yes, Noelle, you’ve made that clear.” When, Lily wonders, did Noelle become so squeamish? She remembers years ago catching Noelle peeing in the shower. “We do have toilets in this house,” she said. To which Noelle responded, “What’s a WASP? Someone who gets out of the shower to pee.” And afterward, Lily and Clarissa, the ostensible WASPs, would do little riffs on Noelle’s words. “What’s a WASP?” Lily said. “Someone who puts on clothes to go to school.” “What’s a WASP?” Clarissa said. “Someone who wipes her butt after she takes a dump.”

  The boys have fallen asleep again, and Lily can hear them breathing in quiet syncopation. Through the rearview mirror, she sees a line of drool descend Yoni’s mouth and settle on his chin. “I have a tissue.”

  Noelle shakes her head. “Better to let him sleep.”

  “They’re cute,” she says.

  “Who?”

  “Your kids. The other ones, too. In the car with Amram.” But the words come out hollow. It’s always that way with Noelle. Even when Lily’s doing her best, Noelle looks at her askance, as if whatever she says smacks of pretense.

  The Berkshire mountains surround them now, the clouds perched low above the summits. Lily recalls the car rides when she was a girl, going past Brewster and Pawling and Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center, stuck behind a Winnebago with the words OVERSIZE LOAD printed across it, then on to the familiar Berkshires towns, to South Egremont and Great Barrington and Stockbridge, closer and closer to their summer home. “Soon, soon,” she says, but Noelle doesn’t answer her.

  The boys wake up long enough to play tic-tac-toe on the window, but now they’ve fallen asleep again, moving in and out of wakefulness.

  They go over a small bridge, the car reverberating along the wooden planks. Deer signs lie up ahead, one after the other like mile markings. “Those signs are ridiculous,” Lily says.

  “They’re warnings,” says Noelle. “They’re for our own good.”

  “Those deer are always prancing—looking happy when they’re about to get killed. And us along with them, if we’re not careful.”

  “The problem in Israel is cats,” Noelle says. “You can’t open a dumpster without having one jump out at you.”

  “At least they don’t have antlers.”

  “Israel used to have a mice problem,” Noelle says. “So they brought in the cats. Next they’ll have to bring in the dogs.”

  “And then the buffalo.”

  “What?”

  “Forget it.”

  Lily glances up at the rearview mirror. Akiva’s head, which was leaning against the window, is now lolling to the other side; he’s bent over himself like a puppet. For an instant, she has an image of Leo as a baby, so rubbery, so pliable—he resembled Gumby—and of herself up late holding him against her chest, trying to quiet him as he cried, tiptoeing down the long hallway of her parents’ apartment, around and around as if they were doing a waltz.

  “I’m sorry,” Lily says. “Let’s try not to fight.�
��

  Noelle doesn’t respond.

  Soon it starts to rain harder, and there’s nothing but the beat of water against the windshield and the sound of the boys sleeping quietly in back, nothing in Lily’s head but her own voice reminding her what she told Malcolm before she left, what she said to Clarissa on the phone last night, what she’s been resolving to herself for weeks now, that she won’t fight with Noelle on this trip, for her own sake, for her parents’ sake, for the sake of Leo’s memory. So she stays quiet as she drives, taking occasional sips from her Coke, focused only on the goal of navigating them through the traffic, everyone pressed like boats stern to prow as she drives along the road to her parents’ house.

  4

  Thisbe’s breath catches as she walks up the path; her heart throbs in her forehead. It’s just Marilyn and David, she reminds herself, but to no avail. Calder, blond, long-lashed, is asleep in her arms. It’s six in the evening, an hour before his bedtime, but his clock has been thrown off by the day’s travel. His head thumps against her shoulder to the beat of her walking, but he remains undisturbed.

  The front door looks different. Have they painted it? she wonders. It’s green now; she could have sworn it used to be white. Above the knocker is a note that says “Welcome Home!” with three stick figures beside it. Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle, their arms touching. Marilyn and David have always been this way, the welcome home signs greeting the adult children, the happy birthday notes appended to bedroom doors, but when Thisbe poked fun at this (“What are you guys, seven?” she used to say to Leo), he would turn defensive. Though now she wonders if it’s envy she feels and, as always, that undercurrent of exclusion: was she, despite everything, hoping for a fourth stick figure?

  She rings the bell, and when no one answers, she finds the door unlocked. “Hello? Is anybody home?” She’s in the foyer, next to the coat rack and umbrella stand; beside them sits the shoe cubby with David’s running sneakers spilling out of it. “We’re here!” she shouts. “It’s Thisbe and Calder! Marilyn! David! Your grandson has arrived!” She’s going for animation, engaged, she realizes, in willed histrionics, hoping to lose herself in the hubbub of the reunion. Calder turned three in February. He hasn’t seen Marilyn and David in months, and to compensate for this, Thisbe has placed their photograph beside his bed. Her own parents live in Santa Cruz, a mere hour and a half away, so they see Calder all the time. They’re simply Grandma and Grandpa to him, but in anticipation of this trip, she has started to refer to them as Grandma Natalie and Grandpa Ivan, as if to prove she’s not playing favorites.