She hears a crunching through the phone. “What’s that?”
“It’s me,” Malcolm says. “I’m eating potato chips.”
Lily laughs. When Malcolm’s not at the restaurant he likes junk food. Cheez Doodles, onion rings, French fries, sloppy joes. It’s as if he’s been let loose from the prison of haute cuisine. Leo was a junk-food fanatic, too, and he and Malcolm used to go out for ribs together, then top them off with a couple orders of fries. One July Fourth, Leo covered the hot-dog-eating contest on Coney Island; Malcolm came along for the trip, and when the contest was over he and Leo got in on the fun, seeing how many hot dogs they could eat, dunking the buns in water and gulping them down. “I wish I were there,” Lily says.
“And I wish I were there.”
“Then I’m happy to switch places with you. I’ll go south and you come north. We can swap prisoners.”
“I’m serious, Lily. Jesus, it’s your brother’s memorial. I loved the guy. Even if I didn’t love him, how can I be down here when you’re up there? And now your parents are splitting up.”
“You can’t be here,” Lily says. “You’re too busy at work.”
“If I’m too busy at work, why am I at the beach?”
“Because your roommates are in town. Because you deserve a vacation.”
“Well, it’s not much of a vacation if all I’m doing is thinking about you.”
They’ve been through this already. Malcolm believes he should be in Lenox, he wants to be in Lenox, but Lily insists on going it alone. She’ll get this over with, do what she needs to do, and then she can return to her life. Because her sisters, her parents, this house she used to spend her summers in: they’re not her life. Her life is with Malcolm, and if he’d just let her be, she could get back to her life with him, to their life together.
But yes, she admits, it’s hard that he’s not here. “Promise me something, Malcolm?”
“What?”
“Promise you’ll take care of me when I’m old and infirm?”
“What if I get old and infirm first?”
“Then I’ll take care of you.” Her hands are slicked with sweat, silver with it in the glowing moonlight. For a second the phone slips out of her hand and lands softly on the bed. “Malcolm?”
“I’m here.”
From outside the bedroom come the sounds of tapping. Someone is padding down the hall; Lily hears the staccato beat of footsteps. “Malcolm, I don’t want to become old and infirm.”
“I don’t, either.”
“I have to go,” she says. “I love you, Malcolm.”
But there’s a hollow hissing sound coming back to her. Malcolm has hung up already. Or maybe she’s disconnected him.
6
“Do you hear that?” Clarissa says, sitting up in bed. She’s in that startled, semiconscious state when she’s not sure where she is. The bedroom is dark; she can’t see anything. Slowly her eyes acclimate. Shadows chase each other across the walls. The water stains on the ceiling swell and buckle. She turns on the bedside lamp.
Nathaniel has a pillow across his face, in protection and protest; it looks as though he’s trying to asphyxiate himself. “I don’t hear anything.”
And now she can’t, either. But she’s already awake, sitting up in bed. On the nightstand, the alarm-clock numbers peel back from themselves. “Come on, you. It’s morning.”
“It’s five o’clock,” Nathaniel says. “That’s not morning.”
“Actually, it is.” But she doesn’t resist when he turns off the lamp.
Her hair settles in clumps on her shoulders; a few tangles plunge down her back. She curls into Nathaniel, feels his breath against her arms. Outside, beyond the bulrushes, a siren keens. “Are you up?”
“Do I have a choice?”
She’s quiet.
“Okay,” he says. “Yes, I’m up.”
For now, the rain has stopped, replaced by humidity hanging thick over town. She should put the air-conditioning back on. “Aren’t you hot?” she says, but Nathaniel shakes his head. It’s the cold that bothers him. If only they could divide it up, like Jack and Mrs. Sprat. She removes her T-shirt and lies in only her underwear. Nathaniel rests his hand on her stomach.
And what, she says, are they supposed to do now? Go back to having sex whenever they can?
“We could still try,” he says.
She shakes her head.
“Well, for the record, I’m willing.”
She’s wearing a white tank top and red satin boxers. Nathaniel is shirtless, in a pair of gym shorts, and it seems he’s waiting for her to mount him, and she, in turn, is waiting for him. For a second she wishes Nathaniel’s own parents had split up and they could commiserate. The next second she wishes they had a blissful marriage and she could take vicarious comfort in that. But they have neither of those things. They have a workmanlike marriage, something low-fire and dependable, something that appears to suit them. Nathaniel doesn’t understand them, nor, it seems, does he really want to. It’s as if he’s bewildered at having grown up where he did, in Nebraska City, dweller in his parents’ home, inheritor of their genes. He’s the aberrant one—the freak—destined from the first to get out and never to return. Sometimes it feels as if he raised himself, as if he were born fully sprung as an adult, tenured professor at Columbia. There’s a way in which Clarissa’s own parents have adopted him (“The orphan from the Midwest,” her mother once joked), and so it doesn’t surprise her now when he seems almost as shell-shocked as she is.
She turns off the light and rolls onto her stomach. She has her nose pressed to the pillow, the edge of it tucked into her mouth. “Let’s try to get some sleep.”
But she can’t follow her own advice. She stares up at the ceiling, pocked as a piece of cheese. She walks over to the closet; she’ll choose her clothes for the day. But there are hardly any clothes in there, just items in storage from over the years: a lacrosse stick, a flock of rain boots, a ripped board game a couple of whose dice have come loose from the box and are lying desolate on the floor. Behind it all sits her cello case. Growing up, she kept one cello in the city and another in the Berkshires. A cello in every port, her sisters used to say.
A car passes on the road below them, floodlighting the room. Presently, there comes a knock on the door. “Are you awake?”
“Mom?” Clarissa puts on a pair of shorts and steps out into the hall.
“Here,” Marilyn says, and she takes Clarissa’s hand and they tiptoe through the dark to the boys’ bedroom, where Noelle’s children are arrayed in matching blue sleeping bags, head to foot. “They’re darling, aren’t they? No matter what else is happening, at least I have them.”
Clarissa remembers how, when Akiva was born, her mother said, “I’m too young to be a grandmother.” Or maybe it was just that the baby was Noelle’s, and a grandson in Israel, raised an Orthodox Jew, made everything seem doubly anomalous. When her mother turned sixty-five, she refused to apply for the senior citizens’ discount on the city’s buses and subways; she figured anyone with her cross-court backhand didn’t need to be coddled by the MTA. But when it comes to being a grandmother, she has done an about-face. She’s doting, Clarissa thinks, a word she never would have associated with her mother.
Marilyn is over at the window, looking down at the tennis court. “There it is,” she says. “All those years of Dad’s and my life.” The court lights are on, and scores and scores of balls still dot the clay from when she was hitting serves last night. In the illumination cast down from above the trees, the balls look golden, like apples. And it occurs to Marilyn for the first time that they’re going to have to sell the house.
They’ve been in Lenox for forty years now; she and David bought the house before the girls were even born. Later, they figured out that they’d signed the contract five years to the day from when they were first introduced. They met on a camping trip, David arriving with his then-girlfriend, Marilyn with her then-boyfriend, each of whom was an inveterat
e camper, having hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. It wasn’t until a year later when they ran into each other at the information booth in Penn Station that they discovered that the friendship they’d struck up on that trip, the two of them lagging behind the rest of the campers, sticking their hands into the bag of trail mix, hadn’t been an accident. They’d been loath to admit it at the time, but now, having ended their respective romances, they discovered that they didn’t like to camp; in fact, they both despised it. “My boyfriend was testing me,” Marilyn said. “Could I carry the big backpack? Could I start a fire with two sticks? Would I moon over every mountain and sunset?” Afterward, over coffee and cinnamon doughnuts at Chock Full o’ Nuts and continuing on into the evening, and later, into the years when they were married, it became a joke between them: the couple that hated camping had met while camping. Marilyn’s father had fought in World War I, and when Marilyn’s mother suggested they take the children camping, he said, “I spent three years of my life in a tent. That’s not my idea of a vacation.” When Marilyn and David married, they promised that they would love each other till death did them part and that they would never spend the night in sleeping bags beneath the stars, never navigate through thistle with Calamine lotion dripping off them, and no amount of s’mores, a snack they both loved, was going to dissuade them. So years later, when Clarissa and Lily erected a play tent in the living room, and when Noelle demanded that they buy her a play tent, too, when Marilyn and David awoke in the morning to find their daughters not in their beds but in their tents, they knew they were getting their comeuppance.
A house in Lenox? Where, Marilyn wanted to know, were the museums and subways? The smell of salsa from the corner taqueria, the truck horns peppering the cityscape? But David had this idea about a country house. They would have children before long; it would be a place to get away with the family. And the Berkshires wasn’t the country, exactly. It was more like a Massachusetts outpost of the Upper West Side. A friend of David’s swore he was going to open a branch of Zabar’s in Lenox. And Marilyn, who remained skeptical, finally relented when David promised he’d build her a tennis court. No more waiting for the courts in Central Park, sitting on the benches, banging her racquet against the ground, hoping to scatter the other players with her temper.
Zabar’s never made it to Lenox, but it was a good decision, Marilyn thinks, to have bought the house. She found the place peaceful, and she discovered, to her surprise, that peaceful wasn’t so bad. Still, as the years passed, she and David spent less and less time here. The girls had grown up, and the drive, even without the fighting in back that had punctuated their trips for decades, felt duller and less compelling, less worthwhile, ultimately, now that the children had moved away. Even July Fourth and Labor Day, which had been family mainstays, began to be met with protests and no-shows, certainly from Noelle, who was in Israel now, but soon from Lily too, who never seemed able to make it up from D.C., and so the family had trouble reaching critical mass. Marilyn and David rarely came up alone, and when they did, it was with a sense of obligation, as if they were tending to a dying friend they no longer liked. Although they’d paid off the mortgage, they still had property taxes, not to mention other costs: leaky roofs, freezing pipes, squirrels trapped in the insulation, a snowstorm last winter in which an electric line was toppled and singed a hole in the roof. It got to the point that whenever the phone rang, Marilyn thought, What’s it going to be now? A year ago Memorial Day, she and David came up alone and, faced with the heat and the mosquitoes, they returned to the city and spent the weekend there. They’ve been back only a few times since, mostly for maintenance and repairs, on a house they’re most consumed by when things go wrong, and in April, during tax time.
Leo alone remained committed to Lenox. He once calculated that he’d spent over eighteen hundred nights there: five years of his life. It’s because of Leo, Marilyn realizes, that they’ve kept the house, and it’s because of him that she and David continue to come here. They were in Lenox when they got the news. A phone call in the middle of the night, exactly as she would have imagined it if she’d allowed herself to imagine such things; even in the week when he was being held captive, she didn’t permit herself to think it would end as it did. Back in their apartment in Manhattan, where they moved when Leo was in eighth grade, his room has been cleared out. But here his possessions remain, his bedroom door always open as if the room itself is waiting for his return. The clothes lie folded in his drawers, the pressed shirts hanging in the closet, the medicine cabinet still filled with dental floss and nail clippers and shampoo and Ace bandages, shelf upon shelf of a young man’s sundries.
You’re so brave, everyone told her after Leo died. You’re so unbelievably courageous. Why? she thought. Because she didn’t just expire? No one gave her that choice. Though it will take courage, she realizes, to prepare the house for sale. They will need to divide up Leo’s possessions. There was some of that already, in the weeks and months after his death, a parceling out of objects to family members and friends in what seemed at the time like a macabre auction. But that, she realizes, was simply an overture.
After Leo died, she spent the first week sleeping on his bedroom floor, but once she left, she didn’t return. She looks in sometimes through the open doorway, but it’s as if the room has been cordoned off. In the weeks after he died, friends trailed through the house bearing flowers, soufflés, lasagnas, pies; others returned possessions of his dug up from basements and attics. When people arrived, Marilyn directed them upstairs to Leo’s bedroom, where they deposited what they’d brought. And then, not knowing what to do, how to stay or how to leave, they stood uncertainly in the kitchen, shifting their weight from leg to leg, leaning against the refrigerator, the stove, poking idly at the pies, quiches, and gratins they had brought, the price of admission to this house that had been a second home to them and where they stood now, silently gawking.
Marilyn stares down at the tennis court. “I have a half a mind to take it with me. To remove it patch by patch.” The Venetian blinds sway in the breeze, casting segmented shadows across the room.
Clarissa, beside her, stares down, too. “What are all those balls doing there? It looks like someone was conducting a clinic.”
“Someone was.”
“You?”
“I was hitting serves before you girls got here. Taking out my rage.”
Clarissa tries to count the balls. “That’s a lot of rage.”
“Wait here,” Marilyn says, and she steps out into the hall. When she returns, she’s holding two tennis racquets.
“Oh, Mom, you want us to play?”
“Not play. Just clean up. We can use these to sweep.”
Quietly, they descend the stairs, their feet tapping out their hushed rhythm. Marilyn slides open the porch door, and now, past the rosebushes, they light out for the tennis court behind the house, bushwhacking their way through the tall grass. Sunrise is a little after five, but it’s overcast again, and the night’s darkness has only just lifted. “Come on,” Marilyn says. “Hup two.”
She’s at one baseline with a bucket at her feet, and Clarissa, at the other baseline, also has a bucket. They pick up the balls, working their way across the length of the court, moving toward each other. Clarissa is bending over to pick up the balls, but Marilyn, as promised, is using her tennis racquet to assist her. She has sandwiched the ball between the racquet and her shoe and, with a single jerk, she lifts her foot and the ball flies into the air and lands gently in the bucket. Now she’s using her racquet like a giant spatula, scooping up several balls at a time. “I’m way ahead of you.”
“You’ll turn anything into a competition, won’t you, Mom?”
“Whenever possible.”
Clarissa’s kneeling at the service line, scooping up balls in each hand. She deposits them into the bucket, and when she rises, clay is caked to her calves. Outside the fence lie more balls, and as she goes to retrieve them she recalls a childhood game of tennis
with Leo, when he must have been no more than five, and she, the forbearing big sister, spending the afternoon among the dandelions, fishing out errant balls.
It starts to rain.
“Hurry up!” Marilyn says. “We’re almost done!”
But there are still thirty, forty balls to be retrieved. Clarissa runs into the garage to seek cover, but Marilyn remains on the court, jogging from ball to ball, using that quick jerk of the foot to flip them into the bucket.
Finally, drenched herself, Marilyn runs across the court to the garage, the balls hopping as she goes. She subsides onto a folding chair next to Clarissa. She wrings out her hair at her feet.
“Mission accomplished?” Clarissa says.
“We rescued what we could.”
It’s raining harder now. Fog settles heavily on the court. Clarissa leans back in her chair so it’s resting on only two legs. She’s staring straight ahead of her.
“Talk to me, darling,” Marilyn says. “With everything that’s been happening between Dad and me, I haven’t heard a word about you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you want to tell me.”
But that’s the problem, Clarissa thinks. She isn’t sure what she wants to tell her mother, especially not now. “I’ve started to play the cello again.”
“You have? Since when?”
“Since Leo died, I guess. Just a little here, a little there.” She reaches down and picks up a tennis ball. She bounces it on the ground at her feet. “A few weeks ago, I ran into Mrs. Pritchett on the subway. I hadn’t seen her in twenty years, and there she was, looking the same as she always did. It was as if she’d been keeping tabs on me.”
The World Without You Page 12
