Lev Polikoff reached for my hand, and I gave it to him. He held on to it while he said my name and then his. His eyes were a calm blue, his eyebrows outstandingly bushy.
I liked him. I liked that he looked right at me and seemed to regard our meeting as important, just as my mother seemed to half pretend that it wasn’t happening. He was as still as she was fluttery.
The three of us sat on the egregiously uncomfortable chairs on the porch.
I explained as efficiently as I could why I was there, and I sped up because of how uncomfortable my mother seemed—not just embarrassed, but caught. The word that came to mind was guilty, though it was something I sensed rather than saw—until I did see: Lev Polikoff was wearing a wedding band.
I got out of there as fast as I could, and only once I was on the expressway did it occur to me that my mother and I might’ve driven down together.
. . . . .
My grandmother looked like a withered bird, all beak and bones. I got right into bed with her.
“I heard you had a rough night,” I said, rubbing her arm.
She was breathing hard. “I saw Grandpop,” she said. “He was sitting right there.” She looked over at the wing chair.
“Really?” I said.
“He said, ‘What the hell’s taking you so long?’ and I said, ‘I might’ve asked you the same question.’ ”
“What did you mean?”
“I meant,” she said, “why did he keep me waiting all those years?”
“I’m not following.”
“And the whole time my parents saying, ‘Well? Well? Why doesn’t he ask?’ ”
I took her hand, but she was too agitated to let me hold it.
“I was in the bathtub,” she said, and I could see that she was remembering herself so vividly that she almost was that girl now. “And I thought, Why not?”
I said, “Why not . . . ?”
She said, “End it.”
“End . . . ?”
“My life,” she said. “It was terrible.”
“Terrible,” I said.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
She laced her fingers through mine, and we lay like that for a while. Just when I thought she’d fallen asleep, she spoke: “I wrote to his mother.” She squeezed my hand. “I wrote her a long letter.” She smiled, nodding now, at her victory.
Finally, she did fall asleep. I was pulling my fingers out of hers when my mother walked in. Her face was stricken: She thought her mother had died.
. . . . .
I meant only to drop the keys off at Robert’s, but at the door I told him about Lev, and I wound up lying on the sofa.
“What a drag,” he said.
Naomi said, “It’s going to be hard for your mother.”
I nodded. “Hard how?”
Naomi was as loud a breather as she was slow a talker; she inhaled and exhaled exclusively through her nostrils, probably on principle. While she thought of her answer, I imagined myself as her patient and tried to interpret her breathing; I thought, Boredom? Impatience? and realized I was projecting.
Finally, Naomi said the obvious: “She spent her life as a wife and mother.” Another week passed while she chose her words. “Being a mistress will confuse her identity.”
I turned to Robert and said, “Mom is a mistress.”
Robert nodded, the sole inheritor of my father’s equanimity.
“It’s sort of weird even to put Mom and mistress in the same sentence,” I said. “It’s like the rabbit and the duck, remember?”
He didn’t.
I was referring to a drawing in which you could see either animal, but not both at the same time. I said, “I think it was in Highlights,” a magazine from our childhood.
“I must have missed that issue,” he said. “But ask me anything about ‘Goofus and Gallant.’ ”
. . . . .
When I got home, Neil was asleep on my sofa. I woke him up, saying I needed pizza. We ordered in. Even though I knew I’d soon be naked, I ate as many slices as I could.
In bed, he said, “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
I hadn’t told Neil anything important in a long time, and part of me didn’t want to now. I was afraid to, afraid that he might be holding my character up to the light and turning it, as I did his.
Who could survive under such a cold eye?
It was the opposite of love, and yet it wasn’t love I was opposed to but the murmurs that said, This is your chance, which seemed less like the promise of a door opening than the threat of one sealing shut. Judging Neil had been my way of saying that it was up to me to open the door or not, and I would be the one choosing the doors here, and there would be other doors and doors leading to doors. Meanwhile, I’d turned Neil into a door.
It was hard to talk at first, but I told him everything, starting with Lev Polikoff’s blue sedan in the driveway. I didn’t worry about how childish I sounded. In the morning I could say the adult things that I was supposed to feel; in the morning I would understand it from my mother’s point of view. But now I said, “It’s just one of those things you don’t want your mother to do. You don’t want her to do drugs. You don’t want her to go out with a married guy.”
“I’m sorry,” Neil said, and somehow I knew that he wasn’t thinking of me, but of what he, the married guy, had done to his own daughter.
“I’m not ready for you to meet Ella,” he said. His voice was quiet and slow. He told me that he didn’t know how to be a father and a boyfriend at the same time. He wanted to learn, he said, but it would take time.
“Okay,” I said.
He was lying on his back beside me, his arms and legs pulled into his sides. I thought of the phrase The wide open now not as endless possibility but as the great plains between us. What made me move toward him had nothing to do with him as my boyfriend or us as a couple, but seeing him as him and me as me, just us chickens, two lost longers. I said, “We’re not ready.”
He nodded, but I wasn’t sure he’d heard; he was receding from the contempt he imagined I had for him.
I spoke so low I could hardly hear myself when I said, “Did you love her?”
“I did,” he said.
“Who was she?”
“She sang in a band,” he said, almost helplessly.
. . . . .
My mother waited eight days to call. “Grandmom’s doing much better,” she said.
I knew—I’d spoken to my grandmother eight times by then—but I said, “That’s good.”
She said, “I’m sorry . . .” and her intonation promised more, but then she just said a more finite, “I’m sorry.”
I said, “It’s okay.”
She hesitated. “Lev liked you very much.”
“I liked him,” I said.
“Did you?” she said, sounding girlish.
I said, “I did,” straight back like a man. “But it’s sort of ‘Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?’ ”
“You mean because he’s married,” she said softly.
“Right,” I said, and I wondered why I was playing Speeding Ticket opposite her Joyride.
She said, “I asked him to take his ring off.”
I let this go.
It was because I’d learned about fidelity from her that I said, “I thought you said that marriage was sacred.”
For that instant, waiting for her answer, I was a younger woman and she an older one; I was the daughter and she the mother.
She said, “I meant my marriage was sacred,” but her voice was thin, as though she hoped this was a good enough answer and suspected it wasn’t.
“What about his wife?”
“That’s really his business,” she said. “I don’t know if she’s mentally ill . . .”
I stopped myself from saying, Do you think you’re Jane Eyre? Instead, I said, “Do you have any reason to think she’s mentally ill?”
“Just that they lead very separate lives.”
r /> I would hear this line so many times that it would become what was called a tag line in advertising: Trix are for kids. Just do it. No one can eat just one.
. . . . .
Robert told Jack, who said, “I don’t want to think about it.”
By then, his whole life was Mindy, Mindy, Mindy, Bronstein, Bronstein, Bronstein.
I’d hardly seen him. Whenever we tried to make plans, he said he had to check with Mindy: “She keeps the book.” He’d call me back to say they were busy. They had dinner plans or theater tickets with her brothers and sisters-in-law; her parents had invited them to a silent auction, a black-tie dinner, or a performance to benefit a ballet company, leukemia research, or Israel.
On weekends, they flew up to Martha’s Vineyard. Her whole family went—her parents, her brothers and sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, and cousins—as well as the many friends who were like family.
I said, “Don’t you guys ever want to be alone?”
The idea seemed never to have occurred to him. “It’s a really big place,” he said. There were three houses on the property.
“Still,” I said.
He and I were having breakfast at the diner around the corner from his apartment; he was only in the city because he and Mindy had a wedding to go to in Scarsdale. He must’ve been missing the three houses; he drew them on a napkin. My brother was a great artist, and I liked watching him draw; he could make a napkin beautiful.
Unfortunately, as he drew, he talked about the Bronstein multiplex. Forgetting that I didn’t care about architecture, he talked about the architecture.
I perked up when I heard him say, “. . . tongue in groove . . .” I thought he was talking about sex, but then he said, “It was built without a single nail.”
I went back to dozing with my eyes open until he got to the vanishing pool—vanishing because it seemed to vanish into the ocean.
“Wait,” I said. “They’re on the ocean?”
He smiled, and tried not to.
“Wow,” I said.
He said, “I know.”
I said, “How does the pool vanish into the ocean?”
“No edges,” he said. “It overflows.”
“Sounds wasteful,” I said.
He smiled.
“Isn’t it hubris to blend your pool with the ocean?” I said. “Icarus-y?”
He had the easy smile of a man who spent his weekends floating in a vanishing pool, and I took advantage of this moment of mirth to bring up the main reason I’d met him for breakfast: “Are you going to visit Mom at all this summer?”
“Isn’t she with that guy?”
“Not every weekend,” I said.
He said, “I’ll see her at Robert’s in a couple weeks,” meaning the birthday party for the twins.
He pretended to work on his sketch, though it was finished; he was just dotting the beach, grassing up dunes. When I took the sketch from him, he said, “They call it the Shtetl.”
. . . . .
I told Neil he didn’t have to come to the birthday party, but he said, “Are you kidding?” He loved children’s birthday parties.
Robert answered the door. After hello, he told me that Grandma Mamie, my father’s mother, was inside.
I’d avoided her since Max’s bris, when she’d cornered me in the kitchen and said, “Tell me, Sophie, you don’t want to get married?”
Chris had died only a few weeks before, and I’d barely been able to make myself answer. “I don’t know if I do.”
She’d said, “Tell me, you want to go home alone to a dark apartment night after night after night?”
Now Neil and I walked down the long hall, and there she was, sitting alone, sunk down in the sofa.
I bent down and kissed her. “Hi, Grandma.”
“Is that you, Sophie?” she said in my general vicinity. According to Robert, she was nearly blind.
“I hardly recognize your voice,” she said. “It’s been so long.”
“Well,” I said, “here I am. And this is my friend Neil.”
“Hi,” Neil said, bending down. “How do you do?”
She said, “Well, hello,” smiling.
She invited both of us to sit on the sofa with her, but only Neil took her up on it; I couldn’t bring myself to get that close yet.
I was working up to it when I heard my grandmother say a long and happy, “Oh,” and I realized that Neil had told her he was a doctor.
It was probably a coincidence that she looked me right in the eye just then, though it occurred to me that my doctor had cured her blindness.
“We’re going to get a drink,” I said. “Would you like something?”
“No, no,” she said. “Stay here with your old grandma a minute.”
“Go ahead,” I said to Neil. I took his place on the sofa.
“Well, Sophilla,” she said. “A doctor.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Tell me,” she said, “have you met your mother-in-law yet?”
I said, “You’re sure I can’t get you anything to drink?”
When I stood up, Neil was at my side. “You okay?”
“I guess I am,” I said.
We ate hot dogs and chips and I introduced him to Naomi’s parents, slow speakers both; I could feel myself getting older as we said hello. Her brother passed by, and his mother explained that he was going to the bedroom to check the score of the baseball game.
There were a dozen children from Max and Isabelle’s preschool and as many parents, some of them presumably the anti-nappists Naomi deplored.
Mindy was rescuing a crying child from the Magic Tunnel.
Jack was on all fours, giving Max a pony ride, and whinnied when he saw us.
Neil, excellent sport that he was, offered his own back.
Jack stood. “You know Mom isn’t here yet?”
“No,” I said.
Naomi peeked out of the kitchen and said, “Sophie? Can you give me a hand?”
“Sure.” To Jack I said, “Do I have to?”
In the kitchen, Naomi said, “We just want you to know how much we like Neil,” and her “we” reminded me of We the Jury.
But Robert, at his subtlemost, cut in and said, “Why don’t you have a drink?” and set about making a Bloody Mary.
I said, “Mom isn’t here?”
Naomi shook her head and gave me a look as though we two might disapprove together.
“Five more minutes,” Robert said, “and I’m lighting the candles.”
When he handed me the drink, I saw the face of Robert as a little boy, watching our parents smoke.
I took my Bloody Mary into the bedroom, where Naomi’s brother was standing in front of the TV. He’d been in there for a good half-hour, but he said, “I just want to check the score.”
I said, “Am I my brother’s brother-in-law’s keeper?” Then I called my mother.
She picked up on the first ring and said a cheerful, “Hello?”
“Mom,” I said. “Where are you?”
She sounded confused: “You called me.”
“I’m at Robert’s,” I said. “At the birthday party.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, and I was relieved that she’d made a mistake, and hadn’t chosen to be with Lev instead of us. He was there, though; in the background, I heard the same game Naomi’s brother was watching.
She said, “I thought it was next Saturday,” and asked if I could call Robert to the phone, and I did.
During “Happy Birthday,” Neil sat with my grandmother, and I stood next to Jack, who sang what might have been an imitation of Dean Martin. After the twins blew out their candles, he said a lounge singer’s, “How’s your steak?” and, “Anyone here from Jersey?”
Then he said, “I can’t believe Mom didn’t show up.”
It occurred to me that he was angry at her just for having a boyfriend; he saw it as unmotherly. That Lev was married only made her lapse more flagrant, and, lucky for Jack, gave him permiss
ion to disapprove.
I said, “She got the dates mixed up,” meaning that her absence had nothing to do with her boyfriend, meaning that she was just being the mother we knew and loved and were irritated by.
“I was going to bring Mindy’s parents,” he said, absorbing nothing I’d said. “They would’ve come if they didn’t have a bar mitzvah to go to.”
“What is it with those people?” I said. “Every week a Bronstein gets circumcised or bar mitzvahed or married.”
“It’s a big family,” he said. “They like to get together.”
“That’s sick,” I said.
. . . . .
Steeny moved in and out of coherence. She sometimes seemed to be narrating a dream she was in the middle of. She could repeat herself two, three, four hundred times in a single conversation. She saw my grandfather regularly now; she seemed to commute almost daily to the afterworld, or, I guess, he came here.
I said, “Did he tell you what it was like?”
“I asked him,” she said, “and he told me, ‘Stop asking so many questions and get over here,’ ” which was exactly how my grandfather spoke.
When she was lucid, I asked her questions (Did she see herself as different from how she’d been before her strokes? Why had she always favored my uncle?), but her answers—often, “You do the best you can”—weren’t the revelations I’d hoped for.
I kept trying, though: “When you used to say, ‘I don’t blame the children—’ ”
She interrupted: “I blame the parents.”
“What did you mean?”
“I meant, I blame the parents.”
“For what, though?”
She said, “Your hair was always so messy,” with the sharpness I’d almost forgotten.
. . . . .
For Thanksgiving, my uncle Dan flew into Philadelphia to surprise my grandmother, and my mother joined their bedside feast.
Jack was going to the Bronsteins’.
Neil and I were going to Robert’s. I went over early to help baste or stuff, but Naomi had ordered the meal from a kosher place on the East Side. She and her parents had gone to pick it up. Her brother was watching television. The twins were napping. I helped Robert fold laundry.
He seemed quiet, and I asked if anything was wrong.
“Just thinking,” he said.