A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (13 page)

Only Joel approached what she would have expected as Jewish. His coloring was darker than Neal’s and he maintained a diffident, attractively serious air after being introduced to Joyce’s family. He shook their hands hard and retreated. It transpired that Elise and Amanda had once attended the same cooking school in Toulouse and Neal and Flora were hashing out some ever-expanding complications involving the wedding, so that left Joel with Joyce, but he didn’t show an interest in chitchat. He was walking around the living room, inspecting their furnishings—the pictures on the wall, the secretary—like an anthropologist.

In any case, the kids had to be roped in before dinner. Joyce had deliberately left them outside, since they were playing unusually well together. The game they had devised that afternoon, its rules ramified and mysterious, mandated hours of running and shouting, as well as repeated leaps off the side of the porch onto a small slope that declined toward the woods. They always jumped holding hands and rolled down the lawn screaming and whooping. When she found them they were a mess of tangled hair and grass stains, but she reveled in their freedom. She wondered, as she had even before New York be
came a terrorist target, whether they would be better off living outside the city. She quickly dismissed the thought. Any proposal to change domiciles would have been impossible, reopening all the previous, provisionally settled negotiations. Marshall would have used the proposal against her.

Dinner was ready by the time the children were changed, washed, and made presentable. The Weisses were charmed as Viola and Vic went around the table introducing themselves. The kids were comfortable with Neal and let him grab them by their heads and administer noogies. Amanda was taken aback for a moment, never having, probably, experienced a noogie herself. Then she smiled coolly. Joel’s smile was cool too, Joyce discerned.

As Joyce and her truncated family took their seats, the table, as a committee of the whole, returned to the business before it: finalizing the logistics for the next two days. The arrangements were too urgent to wait for after dinner. Beyond the florist and the caterer lay encounters with dry cleaners, hairdressers, and the Beverage Barn, every one of them at different points on the compass. Even with three cars at their disposal, the scheduling was complicated. Joyce feared to mention that she needed to have her nails done. Tomorrow before the rehearsal dinner Neal had an appointment for the final fitting and pickup of his tuxedo. Flora insisted on being there to give it her approval.

“I want you at your cutest,” she said, reaching over and squeezing his cheek. Neal giggled.

Joyce couldn’t recall whether she had ever done anything in public like that to Marshall.

“Fine,” Joel agreed, “but then we have to go to Hartford.”

These words were delivered like a judgment from the bench. His family nodded.

“Hartford?” Amanda said. “That’s more than an hour away.”

“It’s the location of the closest Jewish religious supply store,”
Joel replied, almost reprovingly. “It’s the only store in the region that has a chuppah rental. We made a reservation.”

The chuppah. He had been quiet during most of the logistics discussion, waiting for this moment.

“No problem,” Flora said. “You can leave me off here. It’s on the way back from the tuxedo store.”

“And we have to get a wineglass,” Neal reminded her. The mark left by Flora’s pinch hadn’t entirely faded. It occurred to Joyce that the cheek pinch was a characteristically Jewish gesture. Flora was becoming more Jewish every day.

“We have glasses. Right, Mom?”

“Of course we do.” Amanda asked quietly, “Is there a special kind of glass that you require, Neal?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said, and grinned. “It shouldn’t be expensive, since, you know, we’re going to be smashing it.”

“As long as it’s Waterford,” Harold broke in. He was a big man with a large bald forehead and a rakishly droopy mustache. He gazed unsmilingly with cold, dark brown eyes into Amanda’s. When she didn’t respond at once, he rushed to say, “I’m joking. I have no idea what kind of glass. A Flintstones glass would be fine, I’m sure.” He paused thoughtfully. “If the jelly was kosher.”

Joyce saw Amanda flash something at Flora. The expression was obliquely observed and so short-lived that Joyce couldn’t read its meaning, but she guessed it contained several quanta of exasperation.

Joel told them, “Getting the chuppah, though—for that we need the religious supply store.”

Flora repeated, “No problem. You’ll drop me off with the tux, I’ll hang it, and you can go on your way.”

“The chuppah’s important,” Neal said to Flora’s family in apology. He grinned, eyes wide, and suddenly threw up his hands. “It’s just one of those wacky desert-nomad chosen-people things.”

“Okay, okay,” Flora said. “Get two.”

JOYCE WAS LEFT
with the kids the following morning as the machinery of the wedding was put into motion, each car dispatched with a list and a fully charged cell phone. Joyce was relieved not to rush off anywhere and not to be at the center of the drama, with time to linger over her coffee at the breakfast table. It wasn’t her wedding, hurrah. She considered the personal baggage Neal and Flora had assembled for their honeymoon and beyond. It wasn’t her marriage, hurrah. She resolved to do her nails herself and not even mention it. She was pleased not to be in the way—not, for a change, to be the problem. Indeed, there were times, like yesterday afternoon, when she thought she could demonstrate to her mother and sister her clearheadedness and good judgment. At some point, perhaps, she would make obvious to her family and to
herself
just how well she was handling the turmoil in her life.

As the morning warmed the kids agitated to go out and she walked them through the country neighborhood, pointing out where her best friends had lived, where she had gone to school, and in which homes she had babysat. The walk proved slightly deflating: Victor and Viola were more interested in kicking stones, especially a particular blue-black rock they had found in the gutter. Viola declared that it was a piece of an airplane. Within a few blocks Joyce had changed her mind about the excursion. Almost every one of these houses provoked memories of her childhood; it had been a happy enough childhood, but the markers of her past innocence and promise now reminded her only of her present misery. At the same time familiar neighbors still inhabited most of these homes. A single glance from a window would resurrect
their
recollections. They knew of her pending divorce. They would sigh when they saw her. Some were sighing behind the curtains right now. It was a Friday
morning and she was walking aimlessly through streets in which no one commonly walked at all.

After lunch the kids went to the porch to resume the game from the night before. Joyce watched them for a minute, amused, and returned inside the house to read the newspaper, which detailed the stepped-up war in Afghanistan, where continuing betrayals were followed by further chicanery and rival factions duped the U.S. into targeting more innocent civilians. But the war proved to be considerably less interesting when read about in Connecticut, rather than in New York City, where the towers’ absence was still palpable. Here New York and Kabul seemed equally distant and foreign. New York remained part of the world’s current history, its streets teeming with immigrants and refugees, its ethnic, corrupt politics kin to the strife that redrew maps and toppled regimes elsewhere. Connecticut was almost shut off from the times—but then she recalled that her sister had recently mentioned that an Ethiopian restaurant had opened in the adjacent town. And Joyce had heard something Slavic being spoken in the Rexall.

Flora, Neal, and Joel returned late with the tuxedo, nearly at two. As Flora brought the suit bag to her bedroom, Neal followed her on a run into the house, to use the bathroom. Joyce saw that the three of them were hardly speaking to each other and were even grim. Things must have gone poorly at the tuxedo rental. Joel remained in the car with the motor running, strumming his fingers on the roof. She thought it would be a kind gesture to keep him company for a minute. Observing his nervous impatience as she approached the car, she regretted the courtesy, but it was too late to turn back.

“That took a while,” she ventured, smiling.

“Yes.” He glanced at her. A map of the state lay in his lap. “Your sister wasn’t happy with the fit.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to get to Hartford,” she assured him, though she was probably only making matters worse. She
should have remained in the house. The day had turned cool and she wasn’t even wearing a coat.

“The sun sets at four twenty-seven tonight,” he said evenly. “It’s the Sabbath. The store closes at four.”

“He’ll be out in a minute and it’s a quick shot down. I promise.”

Just as she said this, regretting that she was making promises to Neal’s brother, a shriek ricocheted off the trees in the woods alongside the house and pierced them both. Whatever her deficiencies as a mother—her self-centeredness, her inattentiveness, her temper, her poor judgment, her foolish fantasies of total freedom, all of which had been reconfirmed in recent months—she knew at once that the shriek belonged to Viola.

She sprinted around the side of the house, where Viola lay sprawled halfway down the side of the hill. Victor stood at the edge of the porch, looking over it, his hands covering his face.

“Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow!” Viola cried.

Joyce rushed at her, searching for blood. There wasn’t any, but the girl was in great pain. She was holding her forearm while simultaneously trying to writhe away from it, howling. Joyce knelt. “Sweetie,” she murmured. But the girl couldn’t see. Her face had gone puffy, melted into a stew of tears. Without thinking, Joyce wished Marshall were there.

“It not my fault!” Victor protested.

Joel had left the car and had come around the corner of the house, climbing the lawn in laborious strides. As he approached the tableau of mother and stricken child, he crossed his arms and frowned in contemplation.

She tried to speak to her daughter. “Sweetie, sweetie, where does it hurt?”

“Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow!”

Her screams were broadcast up and down the street. The neighbors who had spied her through their curtains this morning were sighing again.

“Can you stand, sweetie?”

The girl was encased in the soundproof shell of her own cries. Vic was bawling too. His tears rained down on them.

Joyce lifted her to a standing position and coaxed her to show the arm. It was swelling already. As Joyce touched it, the girl yelped. Joyce snapped back her hand.

She said, “Oh my God.” Viola had turned pale, her lips completely bloodless. “She must have broken it.”

Neal and Flora appeared, emerging from the back door with quizzical half smiles, apparently unable to identify the source of the wailing or even to identify the wailing as an expression of pain. Was Joyce the only one who had never heard anything worse than this? Or was it simply impossible for another individual, even an aunt, to hear a child’s cries as her mother did? There was no blood, this was going to be okay, and still Joyce thought of the children trapped in the world’s wars. You couldn’t bear to hear their cries either, not while you were pursuing the serious, challenging business of your own life. Viola was still screaming, and Victor was weeping, his arms raised in the hope that someone would pick him up. Joyce’s mind seemed marooned in the Congo, Gaza, and Afghanistan, yet she was sufficiently composed to note that Flora’s cheeks were flushed and that the cups of her brassiere rode loose beneath her sweater. She and Neal had been making love, a desperate quickie while Joel was waiting in the car.

“It’s not broken,” Joel declared.

She wondered. He was a microbiologist, but that didn’t mean he was medically trained.

“You don’t know that.”

“The ground’s soft.” There had been rain that night. To demonstrate, he rocked on the lawn with one foot. “She couldn’t have broken it.”

“She could have fallen in a hundred different ways.” Joyce didn’t understand what capital Joel had invested in the wholeness
of Viola’s wristbone. “We have to take her to the emergency room.”

“You could put ice on it.”

“Joel!” Neal intervened. “Stop being a schmuck.”

Flora led Victor, who was still sobbing, inside the house while Joyce huddled with Viola in the back of the car. She gave the brothers directions to the hospital, located on the other side of a construction zone. Viola moaned. Joel drove quickly, nearly running a light. Joyce realized that he was worried about making it to the religious supply store in time—and she shared his concern. She didn’t want Viola to make them late. “You can just drop us off at the ER,” she offered.

Viola was blubbering about her brother.

“Now come on, honey, let’s be fair,” Joyce said. “I think you did this on your own.”

“No! He did it!”

“Are we going to blame Victor for everything? Joel, make the next left—here. You were jumping off the porch all day and yesterday too. I watched you. If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine, for letting you do it.”

Of course the accident was Joyce’s fault, she realized.
Idiot!
Marshall’s lawyer was going to love this, especially if the wrist was broken. He had been building an increasingly persuasive case against her all autumn. She had
watched
them jumping from the porch?

“It’s because of Victor!”

“No, honey—”

“He let go! That was the game we were playing.”

“That was—”

“The World Trade Center was on fire and we had to jump off together! But he let go of my hand!”

Joyce kissed her forehead, which had gone clammy. “Well, that was the game, honey, but I don’t see how him letting go made you fall on your wrist.”

“He made me lose my balance!” she howled. “He broke the rules!”

Joel half turned in the driver’s seat, wincing. “The porch was the World Trade Center? That was your game?”

Joyce held the girl more closely to her. The kids had been jumping for hours today and the day before, hundreds of leaps from the side of the porch. And every time it had been like new, with the towers still standing, spewing flame and black smoke. Viola whimpered, “We were playing 9/11.”