The World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  “In an ideal world, he’d have had one all along.”

  “So, yes,” he says, “I’m okay with it.”

  “And Marilyn?”

  He gives her a mournful smile. “You’re not dumb, Thisbe. I assume there’s a reason you spoke to me.”

  She reaches into her pocket and hands him a check.

  “Two hundred and five thousand dollars!” he says. “I didn’t realize anthropologists were paid so well!”

  “We’re not.”

  “What have you been doing? Spending your spring break in Reno?”

  “If only.”

  And David’s just standing there, waiting for her to explain.

  “The money’s from Gretchen,” she says.

  “I figured as much.”

  “After Leo died, she gave me a check for two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “And the extra five thousand?”

  “That’s my paltry interest rate. Good thing I didn’t go to business school.”

  David turns the check over in his hand. “What were you planning to do with it?”

  “I figured it would go to Calder’s education.”

  “Sounds like he’s going to be a very well-educated young man.”

  “Except now I’m giving it back to you.”

  “Why?” he says. “It’s not for my education.”

  “It doesn’t belong to me, or to Calder either.”

  “Who do you think it belongs to?” David gives her back the check, and when she refuses to take it, he tears it in half.

  And now he has returned to his telescope.

  Men and their implements, Thisbe thinks. Though Marilyn, she realizes, is the same way. Leo used to say that’s why his parents played the piano, so they could move their hands and feet at the same time. And Leo, it turned out, was no different. “Do you always have to be in motion?” she asked him once. “Apparently so,” he said. “I’m a Frankel.”

  So it’s with hands aflutter, going up and down the telescope, that David says, “You won’t have an easy time cutting ties.”

  “Is that what you think I’m trying to do?”

  “Isn’t that why you returned the money? So you wouldn’t be beholden to us anymore?”

  “Oh, David. That’s not true.”

  “I’m still Calder’s grandfather,” he says. “Unless you’re planning to have Wyeth’s parents adopt him, too.”

  Thisbe laughs. “I barely even know Wyeth’s parents.”

  “Well, you better get to it, don’t you think?”

  She touches him on the sleeve. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m not cutting ties. Calder will be back soon. I promise.”

  “And I’ll come out to visit as well. As long as you’ll have me, I’ll be on the next flight.”

  “Of course I’ll have you.”

  “Well, I’m glad that’s settled.” And he folds up his telescope and goes inside.

  Now, in the driveway, Clarissa sits behind the wheel of her car. Gretchen is next to her; Nathaniel has his legs extended across the backseat. Marilyn and David stand beside the open window.

  “Look at that guy,” Clarissa says, thrusting her thumb toward Nathaniel. “How tall is he? Six-eight?”

  “Try six-two,” Nathaniel says.

  “I volunteered to sit in back, but he wouldn’t let me.”

  “Chivalry isn’t dead,” Nathaniel says.

  “Neither, apparently, is discomfort.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Nathaniel says, and now Gretchen, who’s been silent through this all, inches her seat forward. She’s sitting with her pocketbook on her lap, and she reaches inside it and removes some lipstick. She’s putting it on now, examining herself in the rearview mirror.

  “You want to look good for the tollbooth collector, Grandma?”

  “You’ll do the same thing when you’re turning ninety-five.”

  “I can only hope.”

  “Wait a minute,” Marilyn says. “I forgot something.” She trots back to the house, and when she returns she’s holding a Tupperware of leftover food. “A doggie bag,” she says. “Reward for your travels.”

  Though the reward, Clarissa thinks, will probably go to their actual dog, to Gwendolyn, whose idea of travel is to migrate from the couch to the armchair and back again. “That dog could have gone to college with me,” Leo used to say. To Wesleyan, where the students’ idea of exercise was to walk to the store to buy cigarettes.

  As Clarissa turns on the engine, Marilyn presses her nose to the window, the better to say goodbye. It’s what she and David used to do when the children left for school, pressing their noses against various panes of glass: the living room window looking down at the bus stop, the elevator window through which she and David would make funny faces as the children dropped out of sight.

  Now everyone has departed, and it’s just Marilyn and David alone. It’s lunchtime and Marilyn is hungry, and David has offered to make her an omelet. She sits behind him on the breakfast stool while he cuts peppers and onions and grates cheddar cheese. “You’re chopping vegetables again.”

  “Use it or lose it, isn’t that what they say?”

  “And you’re wearing goggles.”

  “Onions,” he explains. “I’m the culinary Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.” He gets onioneye, and now that he has started to play racquetball again, he brings out his goggles when there are onions to be chopped.

  “Who?”

  “Lew Alcindor,” he says. “Basketball reference. He got poked in the eye, so for the rest of his career he wore goggles.”

  “I see.”

  In the dining room, she clears the last of the breakfast dishes. She better take care of those before there are lunch dishes, too.

  Back in the kitchen, on the butcher-block table, she finds a copy of the memorial program that someone must have left. She leafs through it while David butters the pan.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, looking up at her.

  “What?”

  “You asked me to change the font on the program, and I never did. You said it was too blocky.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I meant to,” he says, “and I plumb forgot.”

  She finds a few Styrofoam peanuts beneath the breakfast table, left over from the packing materials, the boxes of new dishes they bought for Noelle. She sweeps them into the dustpan, then removes a pair of nail scissors lying on top of the toaster oven and a child’s yo-yo secreted beneath a chair.

  On the counter sits a photo of Clarissa, taken when she must have been twelve. “She was a beautiful girl,” Marilyn says.

  “She’s still beautiful,” says David.

  “All the girls are. Leo was beautiful, too.”

  “He was, wasn’t he?” It’s not something one usually says about a boy, but in this case, David thinks, it’s true.

  Marilyn washes a few more dishes, then sets them out to dry.

  “I remember when he had the chickenpox,” David says. “How old was he? Five? Maybe six? Every morning, he would stand naked in his bedroom and the girls would count his chickenpox. Lily would take the front and Noelle would take the back and Clarissa would stand there with her pad and pencil.”

  “He was utterly unself-conscious, wasn’t he?” Marilyn says.

  “And he wanted to win. He was determined to set the world chickenpox record.”

  “He could always turn a bad thing into a good thing.” The world, Marilyn thinks, is filled with people turning good things into bad things, and then there was Leo.

  Again she glances at the photo of Clarissa. She’s holding a lacrosse stick, running through some field, and the thing is, she can’t remember Clarissa’s ever having played lacrosse, and David can’t, either.

  “I guess she’s not going to have a baby, after all.”

  “Are you disappointed?” he says.

  “For her, I am. I liked having babies. I’d do it again if I could.”

  “It might still work out for them.”

 
“You never know.”

  “You would be a good grandmother.”

  “Would be?”

  “Are.”

  “But you’re saying with Clarissa it would be different?”

  “Don’t you think?”

  She does. In many ways, she still feels like a grandparent in waiting. It’s as if Noelle’s children have been taken from her, these alien boys with their yarmulkes and prayer fringes, speaking a language she doesn’t understand. She sees them only a couple of times a year, and when she does, there are countless rules she must follow, the very structure of Judaism designed, it seems to her, to impede her relationship with her grandchildren, the way Noelle’s living in Israel seems similarly designed. And Calder, darling Calder, carries with him his own attendant complications, and not just geographic ones.

  She’s in the girls’ bedroom now, where Noelle’s wedding dress is laid out, the one from when she was engaged the first time, years before Amram. It seemed to Marilyn at the time that Noelle barely knew the boy she was going to marry. They had dinner with Noelle and her fiancé, at which point they were already fighting, and soon the engagement was called off. Although she never told Noelle this, Marilyn delayed ordering the wedding invitations because she suspected the marriage wouldn’t take place. Though Noelle waited to call it off until she got her wedding dress. She looked beautiful in that dress. She must have spent hours examining herself up in Lenox, where if you opened the adjoining closets the mirrors would line up: Noelle after Noelle after Noelle after Noelle, an endless row of brides.

  “Do you even remember his name?” Marilyn says. “That boy she was planning to marry?” And he was a boy, she thinks: he and Noelle had been only twenty-one.

  “Tom?” David says. “Something plain like that?”

  “Plain?” she says, laughing. “Like David?” Though she’s thinking Noelle would have done well to marry someone like David. But there’s no point in wishing for that, in going down paths that might have been taken, when with Noelle any path was as likely as the rest. “At least he wasn’t Orthodox.” In fact, she recalls, he wasn’t even Jewish.

  “No,” David says, “but he was other things. I seem to remember he couldn’t keep a job.”

  Though the same could be said about Amram. But this path, too, she doesn’t wish to take. Noelle has been with Amram for over a decade now. It’s time, she suspects, to make peace with that.

  Five years later, when Noelle was engaged to Amram, Marilyn suggested she wear her original wedding dress—she’d looked so lovely in it—and it was left to Leo, who generally didn’t pay attention to such things, to say, “No way Noelle is going to wear that dress. She’ll think it’s bad luck.”

  Though bad luck was the least of it. Noelle was Orthodox now; the dress was too low-cut.

  Earlier today, as Noelle and Amram were preparing to leave, Marilyn said, “You should take that dress back to Israel with you.”

  “What for?”

  “You could give it to a friend.”

  “My friends are already married,” Noelle said. “And even if they weren’t, they wouldn’t wear that dress.”

  “Then how about taking these?” Marilyn handed Noelle a stack of books with Hebrew handwriting inside the covers. How peculiar, Marilyn thought, when for most of her life Noelle hadn’t been interested in books. And now Noelle was staking claim to their books, writing Hebrew inside them. “What do those words say?”

  Noelle read the Hebrew back to her. “Actually, it’s Amram who wrote that. It’s his handwriting, not mine.”

  “Proselytizing from afar?”

  “Could be.”

  Though in her own quieter way, Noelle had become a proselytizer, too. One time visiting Lenox, she lamented that there were no mezuzahs on her parents’ doorposts, and feeling fragile, eager to please, grateful to have their daughter home if only for a visit, Marilyn and David allowed her to bolt a mezuzah to their front doorpost. But the following summer it was gone, removed by the renters, and the next time she visited she’d moved on to other things, to a stealth campaign against their books. Though apparently it was Amram who did that.

  Noelle had been four when Marilyn got pregnant again, and everyone assumed it was a mistake, the girls already older, Marilyn getting older herself. But it hadn’t been a mistake. In an abstract, hypothetical way she and David had talked about having a fourth child, but at thirty-six, she was convinced she wasn’t going to get pregnant, and so, in having intercourse without protection, she saw herself as engaged in a scientific experiment whose results she knew in advance. When the doctor told her the news, she made him repeat the pregnancy test. As her body began to thicken, she and David grew to realize how intimately their decision to have a baby was tied to Noelle. They never said as much, but they each thought it. In case something happens to her.

  They’d had Leo as an insurance policy against Noelle, but soon they came to believe the reverse was true. Stormy, reckless Noelle would protect Leo, whose recklessness was of a more affable sort. Even when he left for Iraq, they weren’t worried. Iraq was dangerous, but Leo wasn’t in the military; he was reporting for a good newspaper. The person they worried about was Noelle, who was in the Middle East, too, but she lived there—for a time she’d been living on the West Bank—with her temperamental husband, with her four small children and her part-time job.

  In their old bedroom, Marilyn sits down to the computer. She’s idly surfing the Web, looking for what, she has no idea, but David assumes she’s writing another op-ed (she has published twenty-four of them over the past year, nearly one every two weeks), so he’s surprised when she says, “That’s it for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m officially retiring from the opinion business. The world has heard enough from me. I’ve heard enough from myself. If I ever publish anything again it will be filled with medical jargon. I’m going to make sure it’s completely unreadable.” She reaches into the desk drawer and removes a stack of letters. “Now I can finally get rid of this hate mail.”

  “What hate mail?”

  “There are even a couple of death threats mixed in with the rest, just to keep me on my toes.”

  “Hate mail?” he says. “Death threats?”

  “There are a lot of nuts out there.”

  “Why in the world didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I didn’t want you to be worried.” She holds the pile in her palm as if to weigh it. Then she drops the letters into the trash.

  At the washing machine, she piles the clean clothes, but now she’s confused them with the dirty ones, and she finds herself gathering the same pair of jeans, folding and unfolding them like dough.

  “And now,” she says, “the great molting begins.” She’s standing with David in Leo’s old bedroom, trying to figure out what to discard, and she seems to think that if she’s dramatic about it, she’ll find the task easier.

  She goes through his desk drawers. She recalls the mounds of condolence letters, many of them unanswered, unopened, dozens upon dozens of friends to write back. And then, amidst everything else, were the people who, unaccountably, hadn’t heard what had happened, and so she was forced to deliver the news all over again. A year after his death, they continue to get mail addressed to Leo: subscription offers, pledge requests, statements from a bank account with $1.22 left in it that they haven’t managed to close down. Leo still gets summoned for jury duty, though he hasn’t lived at their address for fifteen years; apparently, he’s still registered to vote there. When Marilyn told him this, he said, “I should have given them a few addresses for me in Florida. Perpetrated a little election fraud of my own.” One time, she handed him his jury summons and said, “Here, you deal with it,” and Leo, in his idea of a joke, returned it with the word DECEASED across the envelope. But it didn’t work then any more than it works now. His Reader’s Digest still arrives faithfully every month. When he was born, Gretchen gave him a lifetime subscription, but no one seemed to unders
tand what lifetime meant; they’ll just have to wait for Reader’s Digest to close down. Now the smell of mothballs wafts through the room, and something else, sweet and sickly, like rubbing oil and lemon, something she can’t name. “I can’t remember what they dressed him in for the funeral.”

  “I can’t, either,” David says.

  She recalls a discussion: did the dead get buried naked or in clothes? What, she wondered, was the tradition? And what tradition, besides? The Jewish one? It was her tradition in a way, but she felt so removed from it she was loath to rely on its edicts and consolations. Thank goodness for Noelle, whose tradition it now was; maybe she would have an answer. Though even as Marilyn considered it, she found it foolish to bury Leo in clothes; it was too reminiscent of the Egyptian pharaohs. There was talk of having him buried in a jacket and tie, which was ridiculous, she thought, because when he was alive he never wore a jacket and tie. She recalls a disagreement she had with Thisbe (there were so many of them—she’s always regretted that) about what clothes to bury him in, and it was decided that someone should buy him new clothes so he wouldn’t have to be buried in the ones he had lived in. Though even of that she isn’t sure. Everyone shielded her and David from these things, left them up to Thisbe and the girls, to the funeral people themselves, the diggers and embalmers. “I remember what Thisbe was wearing that day.”

  “I do, too,” says David. “She had on a black pants suit.”

  “And a pale yellow shirt.” This has stuck with her, she doesn’t know why. She looks up at David. “Did you talk to her?”

  He nods.

  “And?”

  “She’s moving on, but we knew that already.”

  “Are they getting married?”

  He shakes his head. “At least not yet.”

  “But eventually …”

  “I presume.”

  “And if not to him, then to someone else.” She’s standing at the window, looking out at the elms swaying in the breeze. A sparrow has landed on the bird feeder. “Maybe she’ll do us a favor and not invite us to the wedding.”

  “Why would she do that?”