“Hey-a, Em. I’m off to my Spanish conversation class, but all’s well, I presume? Gotta run. ¡Adiós, hija mía!”
“Isn’t that sweet?” her mom said. “It’s taken him weeks to get that far. This group has really built up his confidence. He likes to drag me to the markets now just so he can ask for el precio and name the vegetables he’s learned. Although last week we ended up with a dozen tomatoes when he confused dos and doce. We were eating gazpacho up the wazoo. Of course I was fluent ages ago, but we all learn at a different pace, right?”
“Right.” Emma hadn’t made a Skype date with her mom to talk about tomatoes or varying rates of learning, but somehow she felt incapable of steering the conversation back to what she’d intended to discuss: Nick’s head injury. Emma hadn’t told her mother about the hospital visit, and it was eating at her; withholding something that had caused her such fear and worry for the past few weeks seemed like lying. And now that Nick was almost entirely healed, the whole fiasco felt safe to bring up. But the topic seemed out-of-bounds of this airy chat so it sat unmentioned, heavy in the pit of Emma’s stomach.
“All right, give me Annie’s address so I know where to send your next care package. I’ll throw in a few extra goodies for the newlyweds.” Emma read out the address, the swanky SoHo location lost on her mother. “Perfecto. And when you guys land on a fabulous new place, make sure you send me that address pronto, too. I wouldn’t want you to miss a package amid the hubbub of a move.”
“Sure, Mom. Listen, I have to finish packing.”
“Ooh, I read an article in the Times about these companies that’ll come in and pack up all your stuff for you, and then when you get to your new place they’ll unpack everything and set it up exactly where you want it. It sounds fab. I’ll send you the link.”
“Thanks, Mom.” Emma knew about these services—Eli had hired one for Annie when she moved into his place earlier this year. The cost was exorbitant.
“Anything else, Em?” Her mother popped the last piece of pastry into her mouth, then licked her fingers one by one. Again Emma thought of Nick in the hospital, and how scared she’d been. She shook her head.
“Okay, sweetheart. I love you more than anything. ¡Hasta luego!”
Emma shut her laptop and slumped against the boxes she’d filled that morning. Dipping into her mother’s world, so bright and European and pastry-filled, often made Emma’s own feel dull and dark. She reached to turn on a lamp. It didn’t help. So she got up and pulled a pint of ice cream from the freezer, then settled back onto the floor, where she soothed herself with spoonfuls of the cold sweetness until her mouth went numb.
Emma remembered back to when she was little, when her mother had meant everything to her, when she’d truly believed she had the best mom on earth. There had always been something to celebrate—after a school play a candy bar would await Emma on her pillow, and at the end of a softball season she’d be allowed to stay up late and watch A League of Her Own, brand new on VHS. For the temple’s Purim festival one year, her mom had helped her build a ball-toss game with life-sized photos of Blossom and Six from Emma’s favorite TV show; at the news that her game had drawn the longest lines all day, her mom had high-fived her, as if she’d never doubted it. Then she’d surprised Emma with a replica of Blossom’s outfit, matching scrunchie and all.
But at some point, her mother’s enthusiasm had stopped seeming magical and started feeling overbearing to Emma. Did everything have to be cause for celebration? she wondered; did every day have to be extraordinary? She’d started to resent all the goodies and the fanfare, which, for their ubiquity, came to feel not so special at all. And then she’d begun to suspect that maybe something was wrong with her when she sometimes felt sad or upset. Consciously or not, her mother had confirmed this suspicion when, in reaction to Emma crying over a poor grade or a fight with a friend, she’d descended upon her daughter as if the world had ended, offering up so much solace that Emma felt she might drown in it. Eventually she’d learned to monitor her feelings around her mom, shielding her from the extremes so as not to feel so overcome by her mom’s responses.
Emma’s thoughts tilted toward Lily Bart. She knew it was childish to identify with the tragic heroine (an orphan, no less). But Emma couldn’t help comparing her impending stay with Annie to Lily’s sojourns to her wealthy friends’ estates, the people who’d taken pity on her and given her shelter when she was broke and in need. (This daydreaming had ultimately gotten Emma in trouble in grad school, when she’d started viewing Wharton’s novels as fairy tales to slip into rather than scholarly texts to be studied.) But the imagining was a pleasure like ice cream, sweet and simple and soothing.
Scraping up the last bits of ice cream from the pint, Emma sighed. She wondered if her brother felt this same strange gloom after talking to their parents. Probably not. Max was often declaring (a little too adamantly, if you asked Emma) that he was just as happy if not more so than their parents. Although who knew? Maybe he was. After all, the trickle of loneliness now infecting Emma was the kind of thing Max had been talking about when he’d gone on about the power of religion. His answer to uncertainty and anger and despair was Judaism. Emma knew her brother felt part of a tight-knit community—both of his congregation and of Jews all across the globe (not to mention throughout history). Emma couldn’t imagine that kind of comfort. Although she also had her heritage—you didn’t just stop being a Jew because you ate cheeseburgers—it didn’t possess the same power as what Max had, that total commitment and giving over of yourself, that impervious bond of belief. Agnostics like Emma sat on the sidelines. She was envious, not of religion itself but of what it provided for its faithful. “Oy vey,” she said, then burped loudly.
And then Emma remembered what her brother had said to her when she’d visited, how he wanted to make more of an effort to hang out together. She was dialing his number before her idea was fully formed. “Max!” she yelped, surprised that he’d picked up; he’d described early evenings as chaos with the kids. “I’m so glad you’re there.”
“Yeah?” He sounded both flattered and skeptical. “I was just going to call you to wish you happy break fast.”
“Oh, right, Yom Kippur. Chag Sameach.” Emma was proud to remember how to say “Happy Holiday” in Hebrew, although she guiltily pushed away the empty ice-cream container; apparently her parents had blown off the high holiday, too.
“So what’s up, Emmy?”
She related a truncated version of the apartment drama, downplaying the more traumatic parts, then asked if he was free that weekend to help her move.
“Ah, so you need my car?”
“Yeah, and also your brute strength. I’ve heard Alysse brag about your bench-pressing skills, and even flimsy IKEA furniture is heavy.” Emma was only half joking. “Come on, I’ll pay you in pizza and we can hang out.”
“Sure, I’ll work for food. As long as we can do it on Sunday, and no pepperoni, it’s a deal. I’ll drop the kids off at Hebrew school, then drive down to the city.”
“Excellent. See you then.” Emma felt good about this, spending time with just her brother, far away from his wife and kids and his home turf, which had formerly been both of theirs, and which could make Emma so uncomfortable. Finally she felt that uplifting closeness that family is supposed to make you feel. It was a feeling she always hoped for when she set up the Skype dates with her parents, but one that rarely materialized. Satisfied, she set about configuring another box, aiming to fill five more that night.
By Thursday evenings, Nick was usually almost brain-dead, so short on energy and mental resources that the oasis of Friday afternoon started to seem like a mirage. But only on Thursdays was the Kings County courthouse open late enough for both Emma and Nick to make it there before closing time. And Emma had insisted they file their grievance against Luis together—“as a team,” she’d declared with pep, as if suing their almost-landlord were an intramural softball tournament. Nick would’ve preferred they drop the w
hole thing altogether, just leave it be and move on. But Emma was determined for justice. So there they were at rush hour, battling hordes of commuters and the smoggy downtown air in search of the address among a row of identical municipal buildings.
It should’ve been simple—according to the court’s Web site, they’d check a box on a form to indicate their grounds for suing, pay the fifteen-dollar fee, and then get assigned a court date. The first complication came at the metal detector, when Nick’s backpack was flagged for containing scissors, which meant he had to stop in the security office to register the “potential weapon.” Nick asked whether he might abandon the scissors in lieu of registering them, but was informed that that would not be permitted: “We can’t just have people leaving weapons willy-nilly on our premises, can we?” replied the guard, arms crossed against an ample bosom. Nick wondered aloud what kind of damage he might do with the childproof tool’s blunt edges. The guard didn’t crack a smile, so he figured it wouldn’t help to show her the nonviolent pursuit for which he’d been using them—to cut up goods and services cards for a lesson about bartering in colonial America. To make Emma laugh, on the weapon registration paperwork Nick filled in his name as Edward Scissorhands. They quickly fled the office.
Next came the elevator, which was packed with people and all their various odors, and which lurched violently to each floor’s stop, so that by the time they reached their destination, Nick, never one for carnival rides, felt ill. The guard had told them Floor 9, but when the doors opened to a hushed hallway, well lit and sparsely populated, Nick thought, no way was this Housing Court. And he was right—several surly officials had to redirect them several more times before they found the right floor, where they joined the end of a line snaking down a long hallway. The mood reminded Nick of an airport terminal after a several-hour delay. Their neighbors’ chatter, in what Nick could identify as at least three languages, clashed in a cacophony of noise, and two babies seemed to be competing to outfuss each other. Worst of all, it smelled as if the invention of deodorant had not reached this part of town, or perhaps like Nick, most of these people had worked a very long day and were overdue for hygiene refreshment.
“We don’t belong here,” Emma whispered, clutching at Nick’s arm.
“Excuse me?” he said, feeling strangely defensive.
“We don’t belong here,” she repeated, now in a whine. “You know what I mean.”
Nick didn’t respond. He wasn’t going to be cruel and make Emma articulate what he guessed she meant: that they were the only white people, or that it never would’ve occurred to them to wear torn sweatpants to court, or that their haircuts and shoes were clearly more expensive than the ones all around them. Especially when a moment earlier Nick had been doing some judging of his own. In truth, he wasn’t thrilled to spend his evening among this crowd, either. But he was ashamed of this judgmental part of himself, and he never would’ve given voice to it; he couldn’t help feeling contemptuous of Emma’s brazen complaints. Still, he had to remind himself that Emma spent most of her time in a sleek high-rise among Manhattan’s wealthiest families, or else with Annie and her platinum credit card at the city’s trendiest restaurants. Whereas for Nick, back-to-school night in his classroom had more in common with this courthouse scene than it did with any setting Emma was familiar with; it was a miracle if he could get half his students’ families to contribute five bucks to the classroom tissue fund.
But beyond demographics, the truth was that Nick and Emma did belong here. They’d gotten themselves into a sorry legal snafu just like everyone else in this line, and just like everyone else they weren’t above pursuing their right to recoup what they’d lost.
“How long do you think we’ll be waiting?” Emma asked, and then she assumed that faraway actress-y look that Nick knew all too well; she was imagining herself as that pathetic Edith Wharton character. The line hadn’t budged for fifteen minutes, but Nick noted that no one else but the babies was complaining.
“Are you doing the Lily Bart thing, feeling sorry for yourself?”
“Oh, give me a break, Nick,” Emma said, forgetting to whisper. “Here we are, two decent, hardworking people surrounded by who knows who, in this interminable line that shows zero sign of moving. There’s this scene in The House of Mirth where Lily hits rock-bottom and has to start working as a hat maker, a job that’s far below her class—”
Nick could feel people staring. Now he was the one to whisper: “Emma, stop it. You are not some society lady-who-lunches stuck in a terrible tragedy. You’re not above anyone here. And you’re the one who wanted to pursue this in court, remember?”
“Well, I just thought—”
“What, that you’d get special treatment? That you’d be able to skip to the front of the line?” Emma pouted, and Nick realized he was being harsh; he was exhausted and taking it out on her. There was a reason he usually spent Thursday nights home alone, sans girlfriend. He worried what Thursdays would be like once they were living together.
A half hour later, when it was finally their turn at the window, Emma nudged Nick, pointing to a sign: CASH ONLY. MUST HAVE EXACT CHANGE! NO EXCEPTIONS! ATM AT MCDONALD’S AROUND CORNER. “I don’t have cash,” she said. “Do you?”
Nick felt so exasperated that he began laughing. “Of course not. And of course they wouldn’t think to mention this on the Web site, or at the start of the line.”
“Next!” snapped the clerk behind the glass. “I don’t have all day.”
“Come on,” Nick said, taking Emma’s hand. “Let’s go get some money.” Reluctantly they abandoned their hard-earned spot at the head of the line.
As the elevator bumped its way to the ground, Nick held his head between his legs. “This ain’t Edith Wharton territory, by the way. It’s Kafka.”
Emma was suddenly scratching at Nick’s back and arms. When he glanced at her, startled, she said, “I’ve metamorphosed into a cockroach. I’m crawling all over you.”
“Ah, Kafka.” It was a feeble attempt at a joke, but Nick went along with it. “You better disguise yourself before we hit McDonald’s. I don’t think they’re too fond of large existential bugs on their premises.” He kissed her on the forehead.
At the ATM, Nick avoided looking at his bank balance as he withdrew twenty dollars. He broke the bill on an Oreo McFlurry, a treat he knew Emma secretly preferred over the organic tart yogurt she often ate with Annie. Back upstairs, and back to the end of the line, Emma slurped at her dessert, which drew envious stares from the cranky kids; Nick was relieved when it was gone. The line did creep forward, although at the rate of a DMV, and occasionally Nick caught Emma re-afflicted with her Lily Bart look. “Cut it out,” he’d say, pinching her. “Return to real life, please.” In Nick’s opinion, Emma had been leaning on this escapist crutch for far too long; instead of facing life’s unpleasant and uncomfortable moments, instead of feeling them and dealing with them like a mature adult, Emma had the bad habit of slipping away from reality and envisioning herself as the heroine of some long-gone society with black-and-white rules, good guys and bad guys, and a beginning, middle, and end already written and memorialized. Nick felt that it would do Emma a world of good to give up her obsession with Wharton’s high society, once and for all.
After an hour of waiting the second time around, Nick and Emma finally reached the front of the line, only to discover that they could’ve completed the whole process online. “Although I’m not sure if we’ve updated the Web site to let you know that,” mentioned the clerk, double-checking that they’d handed him fifteen dollars. Their court date was set for October twenty-fifth, exactly four weeks away. Nick considered how, by then, they would’ve come and gone from Annie and Eli’s apartment, and they’d be settling into a new home, wherever it might be. It seemed not quite believable.
It was not until the next morning when Nick, hoping to finish the Barter Day preparations for his fifth graders, realized he’d forgotten to retrieve his scissors from the court. He ima
gined the officers issuing a warrant for the arrest of Edward Scissorhands, with the charge of “abandoning a potential weapon, willy-nilly, on the premises.” This made Nick snort out a laugh, although he did worry, irrational as he knew it was, that they’d dust the scissors for fingerprints.
“So Emma’s a racist, huh?” Carl asked, sucking at a juice box.
“Not racist, exactly.” Nick had visited his friend’s office to vent about the courthouse experience. He’d brought along his pet, Mensa.
“I mean, you’re either racist or you’re not, right?”
“I think it’s more like, everyone she works with is in the top one percent—superwealthy and privileged and, yeah, for the most part Caucasian.”
“So she’s classist, then. Almost as bad.” Carl tossed a handful of animal crackers into his mouth, then held out a giraffe for Mensa; the gerbil grabbed at its neck in nibbles. Carl had clearly stolen his snack stash from the kindergarten supply closet.
“It’s not that simple,” said Nick. “I dunno, the whole thing just made me uneasy.”
“Because you’re secretly a racist and a classist, too, obviously. Don’t deny it, dude. I know you get nervous walking to school early in the morning in the winter, when it’s dark out and the streets are empty and at any moment someone might jump out and mug you like, POW!” Carl leaped forward in his seat and mock-punched Nick. Nick’s breath caught in his throat and Mensa emitted a squeak, then scurried down his leg. Carl erupted in laughter, cracker crumbs spewing from his mouth. “Just screwing with you, man. I know you’re not like that. But seriously, dude, fuck the courts. After working for the goddamned government all these years, I can’t believe you haven’t learned your lesson that everything in the public sector is a total cluster-fuck. Maybe Emma doesn’t know any better, but you should. If I were you I’d forget about the few Gs you lost and save yourself the hassle of dealing with the system’s bullshit.”
If We Lived Here Page 19
