The World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  “How about you?” Noelle says. “Do you work out a lot?”

  “When I can,” Thisbe says. “Grad school comes with a gym, so I might as well use it. The problem is, I hate those machines. Leo used to say any exercise you can do while reading isn’t really exercise, and I agree. I run a couple of times a week up in the Berkeley hills. It’s my version of sightseeing.”

  “It’s funny,” Noelle says, “but I used to be the athlete in my family.”

  “Not anymore?”

  She shrugs.

  “You seem pretty good with wheels on your feet. I can’t imagine you’re worse without them.”

  “I was on the swim team in high school,” Noelle says, “and I used to play in the father-daughter two-on-two basketball tournament. I fought with my father growing up, but not as much as with my mother. I liked playing basketball with him. Sports were this thing we had together.”

  “And now?”

  “Now he’s here and I’m there. And I doubt he plays basketball anymore. There’s an over-fifty league, but once you get to sixty everyone but the crazies has been weeded out. At a certain point, people start to tear their ACLs.”

  “How about in Jerusalem?” Thisbe says. “Do you play basketball there?”

  Noelle shakes her head. “It’s hard to find women who want to play, and I can’t play with men.” She shrugs, half apologetically. “No physical contact with anyone but your husband. Basketball isn’t football, but it’s still a contact sport.” She subsides onto the grass at the edge of the Institute. More musicians walk by; the brass section seems to have been released en masse. A cluster of young men move past holding tubas.

  “Does it feel like a concession, not playing basketball anymore?”

  “At first everything felt like a concession,” Noelle says. “But after a while I began to see things differently.” She removes a granola bar from her pocket. “Want some?”

  Thisbe shakes her head.

  “Though, sure, I wonder sometimes. I miss things, especially when I’m here.” She dispenses with the granola bar in a few bites. Patches of sweat bleed through her kerchief.

  Thisbe’s sweating, too. Her blond hair is noosed behind her, and as she tilts her head forward her ponytail swings over her and slides across the ground.

  “It was weird seeing everybody at the memorial. It felt like I’d left and everyone else was still here. I don’t know why that should surprise me. Where did I think they would go?” Noelle grabs a clump of dirt and disperses it like grain.

  “It was nice of you to say kaddish,” Thisbe says. “It would have meant something to Leo.”

  “You think? I was afraid you’d disapprove.”

  “Why?”

  “Imposing my religion on you? You may recall I skipped your wedding.”

  Thisbe does recall it, and it didn’t please her at the time. How, she wondered, could Noelle not come when her own brother was the one getting married? And she, through no fault of her own, was to blame. Marilyn and David were frantic about it; they did what they could to get Noelle to change her mind. Leo, for his part, seemed not to care. “More cake for me,” he said to Thisbe, which bewildered her. There had been years of this, she understood, years of having to endure Noelle, but she had grown up alone, always wanting a sibling, and then to be granted one and not have her come to your wedding seemed almost too much to bear.

  Noelle is still sitting on the ground, her legs moving back and forth, digging little trenches with her rollerblades. “It’s weird,” she says, “twelve years ago I didn’t even know the Hebrew alphabet, and now I’m fluent. If you’d told me Israel was where I’d end up, I’d have thought you were crazy. And the thing is, I could as easily have landed in Sweden.”

  “But you’re happy in Israel, aren’t you?”

  Noelle shrugs.

  “You tough Israelis.”

  “We just pretend we’re tough.”

  “I can’t imagine living in a place where my kids would have to go to the army.”

  “I can’t, either.”

  “Yet you’re there.”

  It’s true, Noelle thinks. She’s reminded of how, when she first moved to Israel, it was one of the country’s attractions—how she could walk cavalierly through the streets while back home her parents were reading about the latest bombing. She saw her parents the way New Yorkers saw tourists—cautious, jittery, terrified of subway crime—when all they had to do was come visit. They did come visit, and at the end of the day when she dropped them off at their hotel she said, “Well, that’s a relief. You made it back alive.”

  “Okay,” her mother said, “so it’s not so dangerous.”

  But when they returned to New York, they were afraid for her again. The first few years of their marriage, she and Amram lived on the West Bank, in a town that’s been in Israel’s possession since 1948; even under Oslo no one was talking about giving it back. “It’s got everything we need,” she told her parents. “The bank and the supermarket are just a stone’s throw away.”

  “Very funny,” her mother said.

  “I keep reminding myself,” Noelle tells Thisbe, “that after Christopher Reeve was paralyzed, his daughter joined the college polo team. It’s how I buck myself up.” She’s sitting against a tree, and she tucks her rollerblades beneath her. A line of ants ascends the trunk, moving in procession. “Anyway, the army is years off. I have more immediate problems to worry about.”

  “You mean Amram?”

  “Even if he comes back, what good does it do me? I joke that I have five boys to take care of, but it’s not really a joke. He doesn’t help out much with the children.”

  “Welcome to my world.”

  “Why?” she says. “Was Leo the same way?”

  “Well, he drove off, too, didn’t he? Or flew off, rather. It’s hard to change a diaper when you’re in Iraq and your son’s in some walk-up in lower Manhattan. Before long, technology will solve that problem, but it will be too late for me.”

  “And when he was home?”

  “When he was around, he was around. When he was available, he was available.”

  Beside them, the cars inch their way down to Tanglewood. The sun is unspooling across the sky. On someone’s rear window is a HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT bumper sticker, though the election is still more than three years away.

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” Noelle says, “but after Leo died Amram tried to market his story.”

  “Market it?” Thisbe says. “How?”

  “He knows some TV guys in Tel Aviv, and he had this idea for a script. A true-life story about Leo Frankel. It was around the same time he was talking with Malcolm about going in on his restaurant. He casts his net wide.”

  “Everyone needs to make a living.”

  “There are livings and there are livings.”

  This is true, Thisbe thinks, but she doesn’t care. Another bad script about Leo: she’s seen more than her share of them. In the weeks and months after Leo died, she received e-mails and phone calls from literary agents and Hollywood scouts. Her story had to be told, she was informed. A publisher intimated that she wouldn’t even need to write the book herself; she could hire a ghostwriter. Everyone descended upon her like maggots on carrion. The rights to Leo’s story, the rights to her story: she shooed them all away.

  “It’s funny,” Noelle says, “but I’ve always taken comfort in the idea that Amram and I have known each other since high school. And the crazy thing is, we didn’t really know each other in high school. I mean, I would have recognized him in the halls, sure, but I doubt we exchanged more than ten words our whole time there. Amram and I have the same birthday—May eleventh, a year apart. I was born at one in the morning and he was born at one in the afternoon. It’s ridiculous to think that makes a marriage.”

  “Come on, Noelle. You can’t convince me you married him because of that.”

  “Or the fact that we’re both lefties? I’m the only lefty in my family, and I wore it like a ba
dge. I insisted on being seated at the dinner table so I wouldn’t bump elbows with the person next to me. I demanded special scissors for lefties, and a chair at school with the desk growing out of the left side instead of the right. I used to memorize the names of famous lefties. Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, Ty Cobb.”

  “Oh, Noelle. You didn’t marry Amram because of that either.”

  “For a time, I was obsessed with horoscopes. If a guy was the right sign, then I’d think he was the one for me, and if he wasn’t the right sign, I’d convince myself he was still the one for me.” Noelle forces out a laugh, a single propulsion of breath like a pneumatic door being opened. “But you probably think I’m no different now, praying to some absurd God.”

  “I don’t think religion is the same as astrology.”

  “When I told the rabbi at the Wailing Wall that Amram and I share a birthday, he said, ‘You see? It’s bashert.’ ”

  “What does that mean?”

  “According to Jewish tradition, God chooses your spouse for you. Your helpmeet, like Adam and Eve.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I used to,” Noelle says. “Now I’m not so sure.” She plucks a dandelion and blows at the fuzz, which lands like little hairs on her rollerblades. She’s been wearing a sweatshirt around her waist, but now, in the shade, with the sweat seeping into her clothes, she’s starting to feel the evening’s impending chill, so she puts the sweatshirt on. “I’m much more patient than Amram. He’ll be in the bathroom washing up and the boys will be badgering him to go make them breakfast. But he won’t be moved. He yells at the kids more than I’d like him to. But he’s a good father. He’s the fun parent—the one who swoops in and does the tickling and the card tricks, who gets the kids to levitate.”

  “To levitate?” Thisbe says.

  “When the boys were babies, he would stand behind a wall and extend them out into the room so it looked like they were flying. That’s what drew Amram to Judaism. The miracles. He’d like to perform a few miracles himself.” Noelle rises, then sits down again, as if she’s rubber-banded to the ground. She taps her rollerblade against the grass. “You probably think we’re ridiculous, bringing our own kosher food.”

  Thisbe shakes her head. She’s seen far stranger things than that. She lives in northern California, she reminds Noelle. They have all-liquid diets there, and entirely plant-based ones. She’s at the epicenter of the raw-foods movement.

  “And the crazy thing is, I passed a nonkosher hotdog stand this morning, and it was all I could do to stop myself from buying one.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do. At the airport the other night when we were waiting for our luggage, I came across a Playboy at the newsstand. Back when I was in high school and Clarissa and Lily were in college, Playboy came to campuses to audition models. ‘Girls of the Ivy League,’ the issue was called. Clarissa and Lily were indignant, of course; they’ve made a life out of being indignant. But if I had been a student at Princeton or Yale, I’d have been the first to pose. Modeling for Playboy, having the whole world look at me—it was the only thing I cared about. You don’t know me, Thisbe. I’m sitting here with my hair covered, but am I any different from who I was then?” With a single thrust, Noelle pulls her kerchief off, and for an instant Thisbe expects to see her bald. But beneath the kerchief is just her hair, red and matted to her forehead. Thisbe averts her gaze, and she keeps it averted as Noelle puts her kerchief back on and reties it behind her head. “I can feel myself slipping,” she says. “What if I go back to how I was?”

  “You’re away from your surroundings,” Thisbe says. “You just need to get home to Jerusalem.”

  “Maybe this is just who I am.”

  “It’s not who you are.” And then, because, despite having been her sister-in-law, Thisbe doesn’t really know Noelle, and because she doesn’t believe, in any case, that people are simply one thing to the exclusion of others, she says, “You’re probably a lot of different things.” Which comes off as patronizing.

  “You’re not listening to me,” Noelle says.

  “I am listening to you.” But Thisbe realizes Noelle is right.

  They’re still sitting on the grounds of the Tanglewood Institute, where a couple of girls emerge from behind a copse of trees. They must be eight or nine, and they’re chasing each other, clumps of mud flying from their sneakers, laughter swelling and dissipating as they orbit an enormous oak, appearing and disappearing and reappearing again like horses on a carousel. Soon they pick up paddle racquets in the shape of violins and start to hit a rubber ball back and forth. Tanglewood kitsch, Thisbe thinks.

  But Noelle isn’t paying attention to them. She’s looking above her, where a helicopter has emerged from between the clouds. She wishes she were up there. She used to go on helicopter rides above Manhattan, hoping the pilot would fall sick and she’d be forced to take over the aircraft. When Leo was sixteen she took him hang-gliding, though she made him promise not to tell their parents; they’d have been apoplectic if they’d found out. She signed the consent forms, saying she was Leo’s guardian, which she was, at least for the day. She and Leo were the risk takers in the family, the ones who jumped off high ledges on their skateboards, who went diving off the rocks at the quarry, coming within inches of their lives. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s follow those cars.”

  But the cars are all stuck bumper to bumper, and so Noelle and Thisbe pass them now, moving along the shoulder of 183 as the blacktop continues its steady downward incline toward Kripalu and Tanglewood.

  When they reach the tent, teenage boys in matching Tanglewood T-shirts are guiding the concertgoers into the parking lot. A family of four walks through the gate, the parents holding beach chairs, two boys of about sixteen carrying a mammoth cooler, out of which sticks a plastic baggie, flapping in the air like a fish. At the edge of the road, an eagle pecks at a piece of hotdog. Someone is playing “Sweet Baby James” on a boom box.

  There’s a clearing ahead, and soon Thisbe sees it: the lake, Stockbridge Bowl, where she and Leo used to swim. Noelle is skating there now, so she follows her, to where Noelle sits down beside the water.

  “It’s getting late,” Thisbe says. “Your parents will start to worry about us.”

  “Let them worry.” Noelle removes her rollerblades, and now she removes her socks as well. She’s sitting barefoot on the ground in just her blouse and long skirt.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going for a swim.”

  “In what?”

  “In my skin,” she says. “Are you telling me I can’t do that?”

  “No,” Thisbe says. She’s not telling Noelle that. Though she does say, lamely, “Isn’t that against your religion?”

  Noelle laughs. “Since when have you become an authority on my religion?”

  Since never, Thisbe thinks. And when Noelle points out that Stockbridge Bowl is desolate, that it’s off the main road and no one’s going to be here now—a Wednesday evening at seven o’clock with the July Fourth crowd roaring in the distance for James Taylor to emerge—that there’s no lifeguard on duty, that it’s just the two of them, Noelle and Thisbe, both of them women, relatives, in fact (“Unless you don’t consider me your sister-in-law any longer”), that there’s no injunction in the world forbidding Thisbe from seeing Noelle naked, Thisbe just nods. She continues to nod as Noelle removes her blouse and skirt so she’s in just her bra and underwear, and then she removes those too. She’s standing naked in front of Thisbe in only her kerchief, and Thisbe has a brief, absurd image of some photography exhibit, a photo of Noelle with the title Devout Skinny Dipper, but before the image is even complete, Noelle has removed her kerchief as well. She’s bent over in the grass so that, from behind, Thisbe can see her genitals. Noelle folds her blouse, her skirt, her undergarments, her kerchief, and lays them in a pile at her feet. “Well?” she says. “Are you going to join me?”

  Thisbe shakes her head.<
br />
  “I trust it’s not against your religion, either.”

  “No, Noelle, it isn’t.”

  “Then what’s stopping you?”

  “I just don’t want to swim.” Though the real reason is that, though she has signed on for a lot by coming back east, one thing Thisbe hasn’t signed on for is going skinny-dipping with her Orthodox former sister-in-law. As uneasy as she felt watching Noelle undress, she would feel that much more uneasy getting undressed herself. Just to make that clear, she doesn’t so much as loosen her rollerblades as she settles herself onto the grass.

  As she watches Noelle step into the lake, her red hair loosed from its kerchief, as she sees the water rise to her thighs, as she watches her sister-in-law throw herself into the water so she’s fully submerged except for her head, Thisbe finds herself recalling Noelle, a hot August day shortly after she and Leo got married, wearing an evening dress that was long-sleeved and loose-fitting, as the rabbis dictated. Dowdy. That was the word Leo used to describe the women in Noelle’s Jerusalem neighborhood. It was the word he’d once used to describe Noelle herself. But looking at her that night, Thisbe thought that, despite the kerchief and the dress, despite having given birth only three months earlier, Noelle was anything but dowdy. She’d been a lovely girl, and she was still lovely. The feeling returned—it returns to her again—of having been an only child, looking in solitary on the adult world. How she had wanted a sister! And now she had a sister-in-law. Three of them, in fact. This is what she’s thinking as she watches Noelle do the crawl, remembering what a fine swimmer she is. Still, she cries out, “Be careful, Noelle! Don’t go too far! There’s no lifeguard here!”

  But if Noelle has heard her, she doesn’t let on.

  Now the concert has begun. James Taylor has come onstage; Thisbe can hear the crowd cheering for him as she waits by the water for Noelle, who has switched from the crawl to the breaststroke and back again and who, having been in the lake for twenty minutes now, gives no sign that she’s through. Thisbe’s just sitting on the ground, feeling her shorts stick to the backs of her thighs, her feet growing sore in their rollerblades.