“Yes, she was,” Cassandra said. “We carried you out into the water and said a few words, and Will and I promised to look after you, and then in spite of your Aunt Cassandra's objections Will poured a little of that frigid water over your head. Because it was, after all, a baptism.”
“I cried.”
“As any sensible person would. You cried all the way back to the car, and then the minute we were moving again, you fell asleep.”
“And that's the end,” Jamal said.
“More or less. That's how this tired old thing you see before you became a godmother. Honey, the world is full of nothing if not surprises.”
“That's the end,” Jamal said.
“Well, yes and then again no,” Cassandra answered.
Zoe was in the fever when they came home. She'd been out of it for a while, she'd been a woman in a room drinking a cup of chamomile tea, watching the snow tumble past her window, waiting for her son to return. Then the fever flared again and she was inside, she was only heat and sickness and odd sizzling thoughts that wanted to turn into dreams. The sickness was like a drug but it had a sharper edge, a meanness in it, and she fought to keep order, ordinary time in a room in the snow. It was New York, it was January. The faded roses on the armchair tried to move, to take on faces, but she said no and they remained roses, pink and purple, stationary. She was lying on her mattress watching the roses and then they were there, she'd been watching the roses too carefully to hear the door. Jamal climbed shyly and eagerly onto the mattress with her, emanating cold, his hair studded with perfect beads of clear water.
“Hey,” she whispered. “You're back.”
“I got a spaceship,” he said. He showed it to her, a gray saucer with a clear bubble on top. He swooped it in a wide arc and she could smell it, the hard new plastic odor, the unliving sweetness.
“Just like you wanted,” she said. She heard her voice, a watery thread that came from someplace near her but not in her. “Did you have a good time?”
“Yes,” he said, though she knew he wasn't telling the truth. How did they learn to lie, so early, even when no one asked them to?
Her mother sat on the edge of the mattress, put her hand to Zoe's forehead. “You're still burning up,” she said.
“I'm okay,” Zoe answered. “I felt better for a while, this just came back about a half hour ago.”
“I think you'd better go to the doctor,” Will said. “If you won't call him, I will.”
“No, I'm fine,” Zoe told him. “It's the flu, people get the flu. Jamal had it last week, didn't you, honey?”
He nodded. He was lost, contemplating the spaceship, and she lost herself with him. Lamplight shone on the gray surface of the deck, on the white word Enterprise. Outer space was bright, not dark. You could go anywhere.
Cassandra said, “I'm going to heat up some soup for Jamal. Hon, do you feel like you could eat a little, too?”
“No,” Zoe said. The deck of the ship was smooth and brilliant as granite, and briefly she believed that something fabulous lay hidden inside this simple toy. Then she didn't believe it, then she did again.
“I don't want any soup,” Jamal said.
“Okay, fine,” Cassandra answered. “I didn't want to risk my fingernails opening a can, anyway.”
“He should eat something,” Zoe's mother said. “Jamal, you haven't had anything all day but junk.”
“He's had birthday cake, ice cream, and a considerable quantity of snow,” Cassandra said. “Some days you feel like an all-white diet.”
“Just a few bites of soup, Jamal,” Zoe's mother said.
“No soup,” Jamal said, but Zoe's mother went into the kitchen to heat soup because she had decided. Zoe felt Jamal's little chaos of fears and desires, his hunger, his need to have no hunger, his love of the spaceship. She reminded herself: You're his mother. Don't get too lost with him.
Will knelt beside the mattress, stroked her hair. “I'm worried about you,” he said.
“Don't be,” she told him. “Flu, what's the big deal?”
“Three times since September.”
“I get it from Jamal, anybody who spends a lot of time with a child gets sick. He and I just trade germs back and forth.”
“I still wish you'd go to the doctor.”
“I don't need a doctor,” she said. “I stay in bed for a couple of days, and it goes away.”
Cassandra knelt beside Will. There they were in their nimbus of worry and love, their pride, their self-hatred, their complex dislike for each other. Cassandra said, “What I suspect you need is for all of us to go away and leave you the hell alone so you can get some sleep.”
Zoe smiled, wreathed in heat. There was Will's face, handsomer now that he had invented a self, settled and sure as a garden devoted to just one crop. There was the frank defiant ugliness of Cassandra, the harsh shine. “You don't have to go,” Zoe said, knowing that whatever she said, they'd go eventually, whether she wanted them to or not.
She'd been dreaming. A fever dream, roiling, shot through with anxious little jolts of terror that seemed to live in the world the way eels live in a rock. She woke up and lay breathing as the room came back, its uneven ceiling and old furniture, its blue window through which a single winter star shone feebly. Jamal had gotten into bed with her. She fought the urge to wake him up and then he woke up on his own, as if he'd heard her thinking. That happened sometimes. She couldn't decide whether it was a virtue or a failing of her motherhood. He opened his eyes and stared at her.
“Hi,” she said. He didn't answer. He'd brought the spaceship with him.
“You okay?” she asked. He nodded. She pulled the quilt up over his chest. The one pale cold star shone through the Window, and Zoe lived through a half-dream in which she and her son were hiding together in a ruin, in the blue shade of a decrepit monument, concealed among echoing marbles and wet tangles of vine while someone or something searched for them. It was so vivid that she put her finger to her lips, cautioning Jamal to keep quiet. Then the dream passed and she saw that she was just a woman in a room with her son, in New York, though the hunted feeling refused to quit. She told Jamal, in a whisper, to go back to sleep and he answered by taking the spaceship and holding it over his head.
“Beam us up,” he said.
1987/ His mother wanted him. He lay under the bed breathing darkness as her voice put his name in the rooms, searching. “Ben? Ben? Benjamin?” He shrank inside his own silence. He wasn't ready to be seen, not now. He had old mistakes buzzing around in him, sour thoughts, a dank poverty of being. She wanted him in his shining condition. He couldn't shine, not now, so he disappeared and let her call his name into rooms that answered only with wallpaper and afternoon light, the mute feminine dignity of furniture. He waited; he felt her perfume as she passed. Please, he said, silently, and finally she went and said to his grandfather, “He's not here, maybe he went down to the beach.” Right, he thought, the beach, and he could see himself there, the golden version, happy and strong, unafraid, holding a shell or the handle of a china cup or some other little gift he'd found. He waited, here, hidden in his sadder version, a boy under a bed who didn't answer his mother's call, and after a minute had passed he crawled out and peered up over the windowsill. There she was, walking toward the beach, looking for him, a thin determined figure in a pale pink skirt, moving with a fierce sense of ownership, as if she were the lost wife of the ocean, on her way back to reclaim her privileges. Mom, he called, silently, and watched as she strode away to find the son she needed, not sad or wrong, waiting with a gift for her.
When she'd gone he let himself climb up onto the bed and lie there, feeling his grandfather's house around him. He loved this house more than any other place. It threw a shadow over its own trees; all its secrets were new and clean. From the bedroom windows you saw the garden and from the garden you saw the firm blue line of the ocean, which seemed, when you stood in the garden, like something immense and simple and unimaginably expensive that had bee
n placed where it was to show off the more complicated beauties of the house. The house had windows of blue and red glass. The house had chandeliers that shivered with precise colorless brilliance, a stone fireplace Ben could stand up in, a room he called the Ice Palace, with thick white carpets and white cloth flowers and white wicker chairs that waited in frozen silence for someone to sit on them so they could produce their hidden music of icy cracks and groans. Something bright and promising, something invisible, moved with unhurried certainty from room to room. It was not a ghost—the house was too immaculate for ghosts, too scoured by light. But something inhabited it along with his grandfather and Magda, a living non-human spirit Ben thought of as a white peacock, fabulous and proud and serene, strutting now up the curve of the staircase, now down the carpeted hall to the third-floor turret room, where the telescope turned its eye to the garden and the ocean and where the American flag snapped on the roof.
He lay on the bed he'd claimed for himself, in the small room that looked over the tree, where the chest of drawers had brass pulls shaped like scowling, indignant eagles. He let a minute pass, and another. Then he got up, briefly practiced a look of innocence in front of the mirror, and went out to find his grandfather.
His grandfather had gone downstairs, to the kitchen, where he was arranging tomatoes on the windowsill. His grandfather was broad in a dark blue shirt, kind and soft-haired in a battered straw hat.
“Hi,” Ben said, and thought his voice sounded properly ordinary. His grandfather turned. His grandfather had the meek generosity of old men, the blunted needs.
“Hey, buddy. Your mother was looking all over for you.”
“I've been here,” Ben said. He walked quickly to the windowsill and picked up a tomato, which shone, heavy and translucent, in his hand. There was the tomato and there was his grandfather's smell, the layers of his after-shave and his spicy, acrid flesh.
“She went down to the beach to look for you,” his grandfather said.
Ben balanced the tomato on his palm. “Beefsteak,” he said.
“The pride of New Jersey,” his grandfather answered. “C'mon, let's go get your mother. Your dad'll be here any minute to pick you up.”
Ben put the tomato back, reluctantly, and followed his grandfather out the kitchen door. As they walked toward the ocean his grandfather took his hand. Ben, at seven, was too old for a gesture like that but he permitted it, even desired it, from his grandfather, because his grandfather had secret knowledge and a truer, more satisfied life. Ben held his grandfather's hand and walked along the outer edge of the garden and he was filled with a flushed buoyancy, a large unfocused desire made of his grandfather's smell and the remembered heft of the tomato in his hand, its fullness and shine, the fat irregularities of its flesh. He knew a pure, tingling exultation—there was a fullness between his legs, the word beefsteak in his head—and then he fell immediately into shame. He was wrong, though he could not have said exactly how. He was his lesser self, the craven one, the one who hid, and soon, very soon, they'd find his mother, who would need him to be otherwise. As he and his grandfather passed the garden and started down the slope that led to the beach Ben imagined himself climbing inside his grandfather, riding in him like a soldier inside a tank, steering him toward the woman in the pink skirt who demanded righteousness. There she was, on the sand with the ocean behind her, searching.
“Hey, Susie,” his grandfather called. “Look who I found.”
She turned, and saw him. Ben was never sure how much she knew, how deep her eyes could go. He put his face in order, let go of his grandfather's hand. He ran to her and in running he began to catch up with himself, his own strength and purity. When he called, “Hi, Mom,” his voice was solid as the waves.
“Hey, you,” she said, and she was not angry or disappointed. Her face darkened with pleasure at the sight of him, the running fact. “I've been looking everywhere,” she said.
“I was around,” he told her. It was beginning to happen. He could feel it. He'd run right out of his fears and wrongness, he'd eluded everything, and here he was, a cheerful boy with nothing to hide. He ran to his mother, did a quick feinting little dance before her, picked up a stone and threw it into the blue water. He felt the strength of his arm, the heat of her pleasure in him.
“Come on,” she said. “Your father'll be here any minute, and we're not even half ready.”
Ben threw another stone, and another. He danced on the shore, a spastic jig in celebration of his own rightful life. “Come on,” his mother said, but he knew his little disobediences, his rampant energy, were part of his charm. His grandfather tried to put a big brown hand on his mother's shoulder but she stepped away. She came and touched Ben, tenderly, with bottomless pride, on the back of his head.
“I couldn't find you anywhere,” she said in a soft thrilling voice, as if it were a secret they shared and needed to keep from his grandfather. Ben picked up a stone, held it. The ocean was full of bright specks, a steady purpose. He stood with his mother, looking out. He held the stone.
“Better get moving,” his grandfather said, and Ben felt what his grandfather's voice did along his mother's skin, the little scraping. He threw the last stone—it skipped once, twice—and ran back up the beach. He adored the air blowing over this skin of his, the late sun and the wind. As he ran he left small flashes behind, the opposite of shadows, little glintings he seemed to put out, like light bouncing off a knife. He ran to the house, knowing he'd be worth finding. He thought of going all the way to the turret room, pushing his mother's interest that far, but when he got to the foyer Magda was home, still settling her car keys inside her purse. She produced her little jinglings and sparks, the hard white glare of her attention. Magda looked at him. She aimed a searchlight; she knew the names of everything.
“Hello,” she said. She looked from Ben back into her purse, where she saw a miniature world, one that gave her more satisfaction and ease than the larger one did.
“Hi,” Ben said. Magda, alone among the adults he knew, did not feel compelled to say or do anything that would make him like her better. For that reason, along with several others, he loved her. She needed nothing, not from him or from anybody. She was rich and hard-spirited and defiantly, extravagantly fat.
“I was at the beach,” he said in a tone of urgent conviction, as if he needed to expain something to her, to precisely locate himself. Magda had a huge, breathing chest and a square head; he thought of her sometimes as the prophetic spirit and voice of a volcano.
“That beach is full of broken glass,” she said. “I don't know where it all comes from.”
She snapped her purse shut, pulled up from her chest a rumbling sigh that seemed to excite the chandelier into a frantic, tinkling demonstration of its ability to refract and change. Magda left the pleasant little world of her purse for a world full of broken glass, a world that needed ferocious powers of judgment and restraint.
“I'm always careful,” Ben said, in exactly the spirit he would toss a too-small offering—a hibiscus blossom, a pomegranate—into a crater.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, and her voice implied that hunger was intimately related to caution. It struck Ben as a riddle, with a right and a wrong answer.
“No,” he said uncertainly, and she nodded. He'd chosen correctly. Magda wore big irregular pearls at her ears, the small opalescent cousins of Grandfather's tomatoes. A diamond lizard crouched, frozen, on the slope of her breast; diamonds on her fingers answered the nervous shine of the chandelier. Ben had gone with her to a jewelry store in New York once, and had seen that it gave her the same satisfaction she derived from the inside of her purse. The store had been sharp-edged and orderly, full of a cool, prosperous hush, and Ben imagined that Hungary, where Magda came from, was like the jewelry store and the inside of her purse. She was homesick for a world of perfect safety and glittering, velvet organization.
“It's hot today,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“I'm going t
o have a glass of soda. You want some?”
“Okay,” he said, and she smiled wanly at him. Magda was complete. All her lacks had bottoms to them—she bought whatever she needed.
Then Ben's mother and grandfather came in, and everything changed. When Magda heard them entering through the kitchen door she looked at Ben as if he'd been withholding information from her, something she might have needed in her campaign against chaos and surprise. She set her purse, regretfully, on the gold half table and went to the kitchen to meet them. Ben followed in her wake.
In the kitchen, Grandpa was showing one of the tomatoes to Ben's mother. When Magda came in, Ben saw his mother look from the tomato to Magda and he saw that everything here was the cause of everything else, through invisible lines of blame and effect. Magda was somehow the tomato's fault.
“Hi,” Ben's mother said cheerfully.
“Hello,” Magda answered.
Grandpa came and kissed Magda's cool, powdered cheek. Ben's mother made a line with her mouth, a tight smiling spasm.
“Hey there,” Grandpa said. “You buy out the stores?”
Magda's face shifted over into an attitude of impatience and disdain, like a car going from forward into reverse. The beach was full of broken glass; sea gulls were ruining the shingles on the roof. “I couldn't find a dress,” she answered. “Everything was hideous.”
“We're having another shindig here next week,” Grandpa said proudly. “One of Magda's charities.”
“Cancer,” she said, and the satisfaction returned to her face.
“Mm,” Ben's mother said.
“A big deal, this one,” Grandpa said. “Tents, a band. Army of fairies with flowers and hors d'oeuvres.”
Ben's mother looked at the clock and said, “I don't know what's keeping Todd.” Magda was the tomato's fault and cancer was Magda's fault and everything, Magda and cancer and the broken glass that washed up on the beach, referred back to Grandpa, standing proud and happy in a battered straw hat. Grandpa was the one Ben loved above all others.