I let fifteen minutes go by. “What are you thinking about?”
He hesitated. “Naomi wants me to talk about my feelings more.”
“Wow,” I said. “You’d think she got enough of that at the office.”
He smiled. It was the only time he’d ever talked to me about Naomi, and he was finished now.
“Maybe you could fake it,” I said. “That’s what I do with my shrink.”
He turned toward the baby monitor; he’d heard the barely audible sound of one twin waking. He told me that we probably had three more minutes of civilization before the monkeys invaded.
I said, “Should I straighten up a little?” There were toys on every table and chair and all over the floor.
He shook his head and mentioned Sisyphus. Three minutes, Robert said, was just enough time to make a perfect martini.
. . . . .
My mother didn’t want to come with me to my grandmother’s. She forced herself. I said, “Do you want me to drive?”
She said, “Fine,” like we were in a fight.
“I’d be happy to,” I said.
By then I’d realized that her anger had nothing to do with her mother’s transformed disposition or diminished health: Her mother had prevented her from marrying Lev when she’d had the chance.
I wanted to remind her that if she had married Lev there would be no Jack or Robert or me, but it wasn’t for me to say.
. . . . .
My mother sat in the wing chair across the room, her whole body turned toward the door, like a sullen teenager. Then she walked out.
I was scratching my grandmother’s back. She said, “What’s with her?”
I was impressed that she’d noticed, and said I’d find out.
My mother was in the living room, staring not at the portrait but at the teddy bear below.
“I’m going to take a walk,” she said, and left.
As usual, I was thinking that this might be the last time I’d ever see my grandmother. As usual, I asked myself what I wanted to say to her. As usual, I said, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said. “How’s Neil?”
“Okay,” I said.
She said, “A good man is hard to find.”
“You can say that again,” I said.
She said, “A good man is hard to find.”
I thought, The old girl hasn’t lost her sense of humor; then she repeated “A good man is hard to find” about ten times. I thought maybe I’d go out for a walk myself when I heard her say, “It’s even harder to find a good woman.”
“Did you just say, ‘It’s even harder to find a good woman’?”
She nodded.
I looked at her and said, “You mean . . . ?”
“I mean just what I said.”
It was then that I finally said, “Granny, I think it would be really nice if you left that portrait to my mom.”
She nodded, and I could tell by the set of her jaw that she’d heard and not liked what I’d said.
For a few minutes I couldn’t talk. Then I said, “Why were you so hard on my mother?”
She said, “You want the best for the people you love.”
. . . . .
The funeral was small. My uncle Dan cried more than anyone, even me, and I wondered if my grandmother had always been as loving to him as she’d only lately been to us.
Once, years ago, I’d brought up how obviously she’d favored Dan: “Wasn’t it hard, Mom?”
She’d said, “It was hard on him, too.”
I’d said, “It was hard on the slaveholders, too.”
. . . . .
A few weeks after the funeral, I went with her to my grandmother’s apartment. We both stopped in the living room and looked at the wall where the portrait had hung.
I assumed that my grandmother had left it to my uncle, and I said, “I’m sorry.”
But my mother said that the portrait hadn’t been mentioned in the will. “I told Dan he could have it.”
I looked at her.
“That’s what she would’ve wanted,” my mother said.
I rummaged through the drawers of the night table, desk, and bureau, as I’d always wanted to. My grandmother had kept everything. In one chest, I found every card my brothers and I had made for her, every postcard, every letter, and it occurred to me that even during her tenure as the wicked witch, she’d cared about us more than any of us had imagined. On the nay side of this pretty notion was that she’d also saved coupons for products long since extinct, my grandfather’s prescription pads, promotional desk calendars from insurance companies and banks, and a rake for the yard she hadn’t had for more than twenty-five years. I counted nineteen hotel sewing kits and twenty-four decks of cards.
I’d waited my whole life to open the rubber-banded jewelry boxes, and I saved them for last. I was thrilled cutting the rubber bands. But there was was nothing inside that I wanted; inexplicably, most of the boxes contained empty beds of cotton.
My mother was holding the white vinyl purse that her mother had clutched in her last months. I said, “What’s in there, anyway?”
She pulled out Kleenex after Kleenex.
I sat on the bed beside her.
She kept shaking her head, and finally she spoke: Lev was never going to leave his wife.
“Did he say he would?” I asked.
“He never did,” she said.
I thought, Well, that’s good, but I didn’t say it. I said, “Oh, Mom,” and she let herself be hugged.
Then she sat up straight and said, “Let’s go.”
I said, “Aren’t you going to take anything?”
She said, “It would just remind me of her.”
. . . . .
A few months later, she changed her mind. She hired a moving company, and into our house she installed her mother’s apartment—mahogany, brass, chintz, and velvet. On my bureau there now sashayed a china belle wearing a hoop skirt with ruffly pantaloons. My grandmother’s teddy bear lounged on Robert’s bed, reminiscing about the glory days on her silk sofa.
I asked my mother what time the tag sale started.
She told me that she liked being around her mother’s things. “I have fond memories,” she said.
Then she told me how good she felt about her work at the Jewish Home for the Aged. She’d arranged for a Girl Scout troop to carol there on Christmas Eve.
I said, “Aren’t the Jewish-aged Jewish?”
“Everyone likes carols,” she said. In her own defense, she added that many of the residents were deaf, and others disoriented.
. . . . .
I was packing to go back to New York when my mother knocked on my door and handed me an envelope. I recognized Francine Lawlor’s handwriting, a script so uniform and legible it might’ve belonged to the star pupil in a penmanship class. The card was a photograph of a poinsettia overlaid with the words Seasons Greetings in gold foil; with a blue ballpoint, Francine had inserted an apostrophe between the n and the s.
She reported no news, either of Steinhardt or of herself. She’d written only her standard, “Best wishes for a Happy New Year,” and signed her full name. I turned the envelope over to see if she still lived in the same apartment in Carteret, New Jersey, and only then did I notice how painstakingly she’d written her return address. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that she’d hoped for a card in return.
. . . . .
When I got back to New York, I called Adam at home, as I rarely did; he wrote on weekends. I said that I was sorry to bother him, and he said, “Dontcha know me, Bert?” his favorite line from It’s a Wonderful Life. “What’s up?”
“I’m worried about Francine,” I said.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” he said.
“What makes you think so?”
“She’s a good editor.” Then he said that he’d been meaning to call me about a job on a new talk show at PBS: I’d do research on the guests and make up questions for the host. He told me
he was sure I’d be good at it. “You ask a lot of questions,” he said.
. . . . .
My apartment was overheated, and I couldn’t fall asleep with Neil in bed, and I couldn’t fall asleep on the sofa. I was thinking about Francine. In my nightmare daydream, I saw her at Steinhardt, in the area where all the editorial assistants worked—the Cave, we’d called it—and it was dark except for her tensor lamp.
. . . . .
The agency Christmas party was huge and awful—a strobe light, a DJ, an open bar—one of those parties where you have to drink and drink just to survive. I noticed Ian because he was so elegant in an atmosphere overflowing with inelegance, because he was so tall and so skinny and so sexy; I noticed him because he noticed me.
He came over to the bar and when he introduced himself it was like a silk shade had been thrown over the glare of the evening. He was from the London office, and his English accent made him both hard to understand and more charming.
If I couldn’t exactly hear his words, I could see them. He had Danger and Warning writ large all over him; he himself looked like a skull and crossbones. I liked talking to him, though, and not just because he was smart and funny, deadpan and reserved. He was exactly the kind of man I’d been drawn to pre-Neil, the kind I’d never be drawn to again.
I leaned back and my elbow missed the bar. “I’m not drunk,” I said. “I’m clumsy.”
Still, he suggested that food might be in order.
I said, “If anyone needs to eat, it’s you.”
I felt as safe and relaxed as I would have at home reading a novel about a scoundrel imperiling a naïf; I was radiant with superiority, not over him but over the easy mark I’d been.
. . . . .
On Christmas Eve, I called New Jersey Information and got Francine’s number in Carteret.
“Hello,” she said, and her voice in that single word reminded me of how pale she was and how pinched.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s Sophie Applebaum.”
“Sophie,” she said. Then, nothing. I thought maybe she was stunned to hear from me; I’d never called her.
I said, “I just wanted to wish you a merry Christmas.”
“Thank you,” she said.
I’d forgotten how hard it was to talk to Francine, and I wished now that I’d planned what I was going to say. “And I wanted to thank you for your Christmas card.” For the last fifteen years.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“So,” I said, “I was just wondering how you were.”
“I’m fine.”
“Great.” I waited a moment to give her a chance to ask how I was, but she didn’t. “I wanted to tell you how sorry I was to hear about Steinhardt.”
“Thank you.”
I said, “I guess I wondered if I could help in any way,” though I wasn’t sure what I could offer.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m doing very well.”
As it turned out, after Steinhardt had been sold, Adam had called to ask if Francine would be willing to help his old boss, who was in a real jam; Wolfe needed a top-notch freelance line editor.
I knew it was my turn to talk, but I couldn’t. I was thinking, Ah Adam! Ah Humanity!
Finally, I got out, “That’s good to hear.”
She was surprised that Adam hadn’t told me. “I thought you were such good friends,” she said, and I thought, You haven’t lost your edge, Francie.
“Well,” I said, winding down.
She said, “Wolfe works at Knopf,” and I heard pride in her voice.
“That’s wonderful, Francine,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “I should get back to work now. Thank you very much for calling, and happy Hanukkah.”
. . . . .
I went to Jack’s engagement party alone. Neil had plans with Ella for New Year’s Eve. He’d offered to ask Beth about rescheduling but said she wasn’t exactly eager to accommodate him, and I knew he wasn’t exactly eager to ask.
I’d lived in Manhattan long enough not to be impressed by the word loft; as often as not, a loft had the feel of a garage. Rebecca’s was in west, west, West Chelsea, close to the river, on a dark street past an auto-glass repair shop that offered free estimates. I buzzed Goldberg, and Goldberg buzzed back. In the elevator I pressed PH for penthouse; in the hall I hung my coat on the long rack.
Then I walked into the white dream the word loft inspired.
A jazz band was playing.
It was a big party, a party full of dancing, talking, drinking people—and me. I backed into the kitchen, where women in white shirts and black pants were loading and unloading trays of hors d’oeuvres.
I said, “Can I help with anything?”
“We’ve got everything under control, I think,” a nice woman said. “How about a glass of champagne?” I took one and thanked her.
With my champagne, I stood at the refrigerator and looked at the Before and During pictures of the loft; I tried to act as interested as I would be if I myself were planning a renovation. I made my face say, Now, how did they do that?
I wondered why Rebecca hadn’t hung the After pictures. Then I realized I was in the After picture, and also in the way of the caterers. I asked, “Do you know where the bathroom is?”
It was down the hall. My studio didn’t even have a hall; my studio was a hall.
In the powder-room mirror, my skin had the gray-green pallor I associated with heroin addiction. Imitating an antidrug public-service announcement, I said, “Sophie needs help.”
I found it in a small basket of makeup samples. I put on blush. I put on lipstick.
Back out in the world of the party, my mother had just arrived. She seemed shaky, maybe because she’d never driven to New York by herself before, or maybe because she was about to meet the Bronsteins.
“You okay?” I said. “How are you?”
She said, “Great,” while her eyes said, Save me.
I held her hand, and we walked around. We talked to Robert and Naomi, who was pregnant with their third child and just beginning to show.
The big, beefy Bronstein brothers, the two in real estate and the black-sheep investment banker, introduced themselves and their wives, two of whom seemed to be named Julie.
Mindy came over looking as beautiful as any fiancée ever had. We all kissed and cooed. She was wearing a long black dress with a white sash like the one in the picture of Dovima. It was at that moment that I realized I’d been on the wrong search all along: I’d thought I wanted Dovima’s dress when what I really wanted were her elephants.
A moment later, Mindy’s parents, Sandy and Ellis, introduced themselves. Sandy wore a spangly dress, and my mother’s eyes got spangly looking at her. When my mother got her back up, as happened with only a few women and never with men, she lifted her chin, and she lifted it now.
“I’m so thrilled about Mindy,” she said.
Sandy said, “We couldn’t be happier about Jack.”
All the Bronsteins were standing together now, and father Ellis had his arm around Jack. I knew from Jack that the Bronsteins were rich and powerful, but they were richer and more powerful than I’d imagined: They were a family. That was what Jack wanted. He was willing to go to every bris and bar mitzvah. One Saturday he couldn’t go to the movies with me because he was taking Mindy’s grandmother to the optician. He would work to be part of Mindy’s family as he’d never worked to be part of our family. But then, no one had asked him to.
Rebecca joined us, holding the hand of a man she introduced as her boyfriend, Eugene, who was an even lighter shade of pale than she was. She hugged my mother, whom she called “Aunt Joyce”; she called me “Cousin Sophie,” as though we were Quakers at Meeting.
Her mother headed over, looking even more uptight than I’d remembered. I was only a part-time believer in the theory that people became more themselves as they got older, but her face was carved in stone like a commandment: Thou Shalt Relax.
“Sophie,” she said. “
I don’t believe it!”
What? I wanted to ask, What don’t you believe? Instead, I said, “Hi.” I’d grown up calling her Aunt Nora, and decided just then that I didn’t have to anymore.
I stopped myself from asking where Rebecca’s father was, which I realized would’ve been a theological question at that point; he’d died years before my own father. My mother had dragged us to his funeral, and I remembered that in the car Jack had said, “Uncle David, we hardly knew ye,” because the man had never said a word to any of us.
The Bronsteins had already taken a tour of the loft, but Rebecca asked if my mother and I wanted one. Of course we did.
I walked behind Rebecca, a dance therapist who still carried herself like the ballerina she’d been as a child—shoulders back, feet duckish.
As we crossed the living room, I spotted Jack’s friend Pete from Martha’s Vineyard, standing like an island.
I motioned for him to join the tour; Come on, my arm said, and he caught up.
“So, you’re in advertising,” my former aunt Nora was saying. “Do you love it?”
I thought, Why would you think I love it? but said nothing, and she didn’t notice. Nora Goldberg did not have big ears, and thus I kept my jazz to myself.
A peek into the powder room, and we were off to the bedroom and the bathroom. Rebecca’s mother called the second bedroom her pied-à-terre, and my mother said, “How often do you come in?”
“About once a week.” Rebecca was out in the hall, but her mother still lowered her voice when she told mine, “I hope to share it before too long.”
It took me a moment to realize that she wasn’t talking about the room as a future love nest, but as a nursery for what might be the palest grandchild in the history of the world.
My mother, however, didn’t realize. She said, “Are you seeing someone?”
“God, no.” Her friend laughed, and then said, “Are you?”
“No, no, no,” my mother said, “no.” No one knew about Lev, and I saw now how it isolated her. I saw her try to summon up the Joyce Applebaum she was expected to be, but that Joyce Applebaum wasn’t on speaking terms with this one; what followed was the emptiness of a credible imitation.
I wish I’d known then and could have told her what was going to happen: Though Lev Polikoff refused to leave his wife, in another year she would get cancer and leave him and everyone else. Piece by piece, my mother would ship her mother’s brass and china to her brother. She and Lev would go to flea markets and hunt for blue bottles, which are supposed to be lucky, and he would convince her to hang them in a tree in the backyard.