He said, “What names do you like for children?”
I was so taken aback that I said, “I like Ella.”
He laughed and said, “I can’t have two daughters named Ella.”
“Albertine?” I said. “And Cleo.”
“What about for a boy?”
“George.”
He said, “I like George.”
We went to Neil’s because it was only a few blocks away on West End Avenue. We hardly ever stayed there. The living room was filled with furniture from his parents’ basement in Shaker Heights, which was where it belonged.
The only inviting room in the apartment was Ella’s. He’d given her the master bedroom, though he went up to Boston on weekends and took her to Cape Cod in the summer. Her room was big and full of light, and he’d decorated it himself with a vanity and ruffled gingham curtains that matched her canopy bed, which was like the one in my childhood bedroom.
Neil’s room was small and bare—a brown shag rug, a futon on a platform, a clock on a crate table—a room that made me want to turn out the lights.
In the dark, we kissed. “Naomi is a very, very slow speaker,” I said very, very slowly.
Five minutes later, Neil said, “I. Noticed.”
. . . . .
In my office, Joe was designing the fulfillment package for all the enthusiastic mothers who checked “YES! Send me my FREE baby wipes.”
“Do you realize what we’re doing?”
“Of course I do,” I said.
“You don’t seem to be suffering as much as you should be.”
“I’m suffering in silence,” I said.
“You’re whistling,” he said, with real concern. “I heard you whistle.”
. . . . .
Over breakfast, Jack told me that Mindy really liked Neil.
“Good,” I said.
“I’m sure I would’ve liked him better . . .” and I waited for him to say, If he weren’t your boyfriend. Instead, he stopped. “It’s just that Mindy’s last boyfriend was a doctor. She has a doctor thing,” he said. “She’s a mediphile.” Then he said, “You know who he reminds me of? Who was that friend of Robert’s who used to come over wearing pajamas and a bathrobe to study?”
I said, “Ivan Tarsky.”
“Ivan Tarsky,” he said.
“I loved Ivan Tarsky,” I said.
Jack said, “So, what’re Neil’s friends like?”
I thought of the only one I’d met. What was Jules like? He’d seated us right away. “Nice.”
Jack said, “That’s good,” and he seemed genuinely pleased. He told me how much he liked Mindy’s friends and smiled, maybe thinking of the ones he liked most.
“The only thing I will say about Neil,” Jack said, “is he seems a little young.”
“You only grew up about fifteen minutes ago,” I said. “With Mindy.”
He said, “I did grow up with Mindy.”
“What happened?”
“Beats me,” he said. “I was just ready. It was time.”
“I feel like that,” I said.
He said, “You’re just saying that because I said it.”
. . . . .
Neil had met a lot of my friends, and I didn’t want to ask outright why he hadn’t introduced me to his. I waited until we were in bed with the lights out. Then I said, “Let’s go out with your friends some night, if you want.”
He didn’t answer.
I was almost asleep when I heard him say, “I was friends with other couples,” he said. “And when Beth found out about Darcy . . .”
I thought, Who’s Darcy? He’d never told me her name.
. . . . .
“Is Glatz a friend?” I asked, after Neil got off the phone with his second Glatz patient of the evening and came back to the table to finish the dinner I’d made—pork chops in a rosemary marinade and peas with mint.
“Are you kidding?”
I said, “Why do you cover for him all the time?”
He shrugged. “It’s a pain in the ass,” he said. “And it’s not like I get paid for it.”
“Can you get out of it?”
Even before he answered, I knew what he was going to say: “Glatz does have some pretty interesting patients, though.” Neil mentioned the rock star he’d spoken to—and he sort of laughed and shook his head, like, Me! Dorky Neil Resnick from Shaker Heights High.
“Neil,” I said, “I got a bad feeling when you told Jack about that patient.”
All the pleasure left his face. “Because he’s Glatz’s patient?”
All I said was, “Name-dropping—” and he nodded, not for me to go on but for me to stop.
He got quiet and busy then, clearing the table and running water. “Can we do these in the morning?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“I’m beat,” Neil said. “I am beaten down. I’m ready to batten down the hatches.”
I didn’t know if he’d always free-associated like this, or if I was just noticing it now. It irritated me, and I was triply irritated at myself for being irritated. He was nervous, and I thought, Why wouldn’t he be? I was acting like the cool girl I myself would have feared in high school. I was acting like my grandmother, the pre-stroke Steeny, who’d looked at all of us like we weren’t quite good enough to be related to her.
When I got into bed, he said, “I’m getting on your nerves, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know why,” I said. “It’s me. I’m sorry.”
“No,” he said. “I’m annoying. I know that.”
. . . . .
At Jules, Kate said, “You’re going to have a baby with this guy.” She herself was trying to have a baby, on her own, and she suggested we coordinate our pregnancies.
We’d finished dinner and were having coffee; Neil was outside talking on the phone.
She said, “He seems like such a mensch.”
“He is,” I said.
But she heard or saw me thinking, I don’t love him the way I loved Chris. She looked at me. She nodded. She was deciding what to say. “Neil is a good man,” she said finally. “He’s somebody you could have a family with.”
She was saying, This is your chance.
Jules stopped by our table and said, “How is everything?”
“Great,” I said.
“Great,” he said, and went on to another table; faintly I heard their Great-Greats.
When Neil returned, he said, “Sorry,” and explained that he’d had to take the call. He was beaming, and I waited for him to say the famous name.
“It was Ella,” he said, and to Kate, “my daughter.”
Later, in the cab, he told me he couldn’t wait for me to meet her.
. . . . .
In bed, I remembered Kate saying, Neil is someone you could have a family with.
I pictured Kate at her computer, reading online profiles listing the hair color and hobbies of each potential sperm donor, and with it came the murmurs of absolute authority and undeniable truth, in statistics from Newsweek, gossip from the now-married girls I’d avoided in high school, shtetl advice from my grandma Mamie: It was time to stop looking for a soul mate and to be satisfied with a mate, and actually it was past time, Sophie, and here was a perfectly acceptable specimen, not to mention a doctor, not to mention Jewish.
The murmers said, This is your chance, and Part Two, Don’t blow it.
. . . . .
“How’s Neil?” my grandmother Steeny asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Are you having fun?”
“Yeah,” I said, but I thought of the night before in bed: When I’d tried to tell Neil how to touch me, he’d reminded me of myself trying to hook up my VCR with a poorly translated manual. I said, “But it’s more than, you know, fun.” I mentioned that we’d talked about children.
“Oh,” she said.
“You sound disappointed.”
She said, “I’m just sorry you’re not having more fun.”
. . . . .
&
nbsp; My mother mentioned Lev, both to me and my brothers, but only in passing: He’d taken her to the opera; he’d cooked her dinner; he’d painted her portrait.
She herself was taking an art class. When I visited her in June, she’d finished The House of Mirth and was halfway through The Age of Innocence. She’d started volunteering at the Jewish Home for the Aged, where she was in charge of entertainment and leisure. She’d hired an exercise instructor who got everyone to stand up and raise their hands; as she spoke, she raised her own hands and wiggled her fingers.
On Sunday, we drove downtown to my grandmother’s. When we pulled up in front of her building, my mother said, “When should I pick you up? Four?”
“You’re not coming up?”
“I’m going to the museum,” she said. “Is four good?”
Four was three hours away, which would make my visit the longest in Applebaum-Parker history. I looked at her: Are you meeting Lev?
She said, “So, four?”
“Fine.”
Laura let me into the apartment and said, “Mrs. Parker will be so glad you’re here.”
My grandmother was sitting up in bed. “Where’s your mother?”
“She went to the museum.”
“That’s great,” she said, which was how I wanted to feel about it.
Robert and his family had visited the weekend before, and my grandmother went on and on about how adorable the twins were.
They were, of course, though I’d never expected my grandmother to see it. I was under the impression that she didn’t like children; one of my earliest memories was of her saying, “I don’t blame the children; I blame the parents.”
I wondered what she’d blamed my parents for, but I didn’t dare ask; I was afraid that bringing up the grandmother she’d been might bring her back.
I went to get tea for both of us, and while I was waiting for the water to boil I stood in the living room and looked at the portrait my mother admired. For the first time, I thought of my grandmother’s will, and I wondered if she would leave the portrait to my mother.
When I brought the tea in, my grandmother asked again where my mother was, but this time she said, “Where’s Joyce?”
“She’s at the museum,” I said.
“She loves her work there,” she said.
I stopped: Loves?
“Joyce knows everything about art,” she said.
I admit that it occurred to me to ask about Lev Polikoff, as long as we were in the past. It wouldn’t be like I was telling on my mother; all I had to do was bring up his name. Instead, I agreed that my mother did know a lot about art. “She’s always admiring that portrait.”
“Which?”
“Above the yellow sofa,” I said.
My grandmother said, “You know, I found that in the attic.”
I said, “She really, really loves that portrait.”
My grandmother said, “It is a very fine portrait.”
. . . . .
My mother was late picking me up. I was waiting in the lobby when Dena’s mother walked in.
“Sophie,” she said.
“Hi,” I said.
I looked for a sign that she was disappointed in me for deserting Dena, or for letting Dena desert me.
“How are you?” I said.
She said, “I get by,” and it had the sound of a happy understatement. She told me that her mother lived here and that she herself lived downtown now, too.
“You gave up the house?”
She nodded.
I said, “I loved that house,” and I remembered going over there the year after my father died and drinking bourbon with her in front of the fireplace.
“I liked it when the girls lived at home,” she was saying. “But it was too big for one person.”
It seemed like an extreme way to say that Dr. Blumenthal was never home, though he never was, and maybe that made her extreme.
She saw my reaction. “We got divorced,” she said. “Two years ago.”
I didn’t know what to say; she didn’t seem sorry, so it seemed strange for me to say that I was.
“I live near Rittenhouse Square,” she said. “You’ll have to come visit.”
I was nervous about mentioning Dena, but I did: “How’s Dena?”
She was fine. She was still working in planning on Roosevelt Island. “She runs the show now.”
“Great,” I said.
Mrs. Blumenthal said, “Still with Richard,” very fast, so I knew not to ask any questions.
I wasn’t ready to talk about myself yet, so I asked how Dena’s sisters were.
They were married, and each had three children.
“What do they do?” I asked.
“They’re raising their children,” she said, and I heard that she neither approved nor disapproved. “What about you?”
“I’m still in advertising.”
She said, “Oh,” her tone matching mine; hers would’ve been happy if mine had been.
I said, “I’m still waiting for my calling,” an expression I never used. It sounded both religious and passive, but my word choice didn’t explain the bad feeling I got then: I realized I’d barely thought about my career since meeting Neil.
“Few are called,” she said, not unkindly. Then she laughed: “I thought I was supposed to be a doctor’s wife.”
. . . . .
In the car, I asked my mother if she’d heard about the Blumenthals’ divorce.
“No,” she said, “but I’m not surprised. I always thought Stevie was cold.”
I said, “I like her.”
“It takes two to tango.”
“Or four or fourteen or forty,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
I said, “You said Dr. Blumenthal was a big philanderer.”
My mother said, “Some marriages are more complicated than others.”
. . . . .
At work and on the street, in the subway and on the bus, in restaurants, drugstores, and dry cleaners, I looked around me and thought, Few are called. Almost nobody was. Robert had been called to be a doctor, Francine Lawlor an editor. Adam had always known he wanted to be a playwright. But they were the exceptions. I was like everyone else; I fell into a job, and I worked at it. It didn’t seem wrong to want more, but it was wrong to expect it to be delivered.
3.
MYGRANDMOTHER and I had never said we’d loved each other before her stroke because, in fact, we hadn’t loved each other; now we said it every time we talked.
I said it partly because I thought she was going to die soon, and that was what I was thinking when Laura called me early one Sunday and told me she was worried. “Mrs. Parker isn’t herself.”
I assumed that my grandmother had turned back into a witch: “Mean?” I said.
“Mean?” Laura said. “No. She had a bad night. She didn’t know who I was this morning.”
“Did you call the doctor?”
“He said to keep her comfortable,” Laura said. “She doesn’t want to go back to the hospital.”
“Is my mom there?”
“I’ve been trying to call her,” she said. “The line’s busy.”
I told her I was on my way.
I wished Neil could go with me, but he was in Boston; I wished Robert could go, but he was at the hospital.
I didn’t think Jack would be home; he pretty much lived at Mindy’s. I was leaving a message on his answering machine when he picked up, interrupting his recorded voice with his real one.
After I’d told him everything, he said, “Shit. Mindy’s cousin has the car.”
I was waylaid for a moment—Jack had never lent his car to me—but then I said, “I’m sure I can borrow Robert’s.”
I waited for Jack to ask if I wanted him to go with me. Instead, he said, “You’re going to stop in Surrey for Mom?”
“Yes,” I said, and got off the phone fast, so he wouldn’t hear my disappointment.
. . . . .
Naomi answered
the door and handed me the keys, registration, and the address of the garage where the minivan was parked. She was holding Isabelle, who turned around and said, “Hello, Aunt Thophie,” as though for the thousandth time instead of the first.
It sounded so great that I said, “I’m going to ask everyone to call me that.”
I watched Naomi make the decision not to ask me what I meant. She said, “I wish I could go with you.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“But your mom will be there.”
. . . . .
It was a hazy day and hot, even for June. I drove as fast as I could. I kept picturing my grandmother alone in her big bed, clutching her white pocketbook and asking who Laura was.
It was noon by the time I got to Surrey. I pulled into the driveway, behind a car I didn’t recognize. It was a pale blue sedan with New Jersey plates, and only then did I think of Lev Polikoff.
The back door was wide open, but I didn’t go in. I knocked on the metal frame of the screen door.
I waited. “Mom?”
I stood there for a moment; I didn’t want to surprise them. I decided to go around to the front of the house and ring the doorbell. I was crossing the lawn when I heard my mother’s voice. She was on the screened-in porch. For all my urgency, I stopped. I had never heard her sound so young, incredibly young, younger than I was now. She might have been the twenty-three-year-old Joyce Parker, sneaking behind her mother’s back to see her bearded, unmarriageable artist-boyfriend.
I made myself move toward the porch, and I was there sooner than I wanted to be. I walked up the slate steps. I kept my eyes closed as I knocked so I wouldn’t have to witness my own intrusion.
I thought I heard whispering, and I did hear a man’s voice say, “No.”
When I felt the doorknob turn in my hand, I said, “I’m sorry,” and, “I tried to call.”
My mother’s hair was pulled back in a little ponytail; she wore plaid shorts and was barefoot. “No, no,” she said. “Don’t be silly.”
Lev Polikoff had a white beard, and when he stood up I saw that he was no taller than my mother. Together the two of them looked like a fairy tale: Once upon a time, there was a couple who lived in an old can of corn, with an eraser for a bed, a leaf for a blanket, and a fly for a pet.
I heard my mother say, “This is . . .” and falter.
I said, “I’m Sophie,” though I realized as soon as I’d spoken that I wasn’t the one she was unsure how to introduce.