The Place Will Comfort You (14 page)

What!
Why?
No present?
Why
no present? Our youngest crawls over to sit on Tiffy's shoe. She strokes his head, her other hand remaining on the latch.

“There are a lot of you, I know,” she says. “But I insist. My pleasure, honestly. The raise paid for my trip so what the heck. It's something I decided I would do. I get the glasses at materials cost. The fifteen-minute promise doesn't travel I should say. I'm going to ask for your indulgence while I wire the prescriptions to the grinders. Shipping will take seven to ten working days.”

Our Imma's nostrils flare though she maintains the social smile. “Let's talk about sleeping arrangements.”

“Homework time a challenge for the gang? Studies show fifty-three percent of cases, the reason's purely physical! A staggering forty of that's vision.”

“In the area of the visual arts my children shine,” our Imma says. “The annual school psychometric test proves preternaturally astute spatial perceptions, across the board. And no surprise. Their Great-Great-Grandpa Yokhanan of blessed memory cobbled the main street of our city. Samaritan limestone, cut by hand, transported by carriage. Laid them, too, not a gap. Never a set of lenses in the family then or since.”

“Had to make do.”

“Only thing wrong with his eyes, he sometimes had to close them. Killed in his sleep. Bedouin horse thieves. He had laid all but the last block.”

“No kidding. You'll have to show me where he took that nap.”

“Where he was felled there is now a modern quarry, massively mechanized, highly regulated and enormously explosive, closed to the public.”

“Not a problem. I'll snap shots of his roadwork. Be great to send back to the crew. We'll take the kids out on location. What's your schedule looking like this week?”

“Asphalt proved better for the shocks, in time.”

“Well, there you go!” Tiffy says. “Open your door to technological advancement is what I say.”

“A well-established point of view,” our Imma says, “holds that corrective lenses make for weakened eyes. The eye develops a dependency. The unassisted vision comes to be unbearable. Before you know, you always need them on.” She claps her hands against her aproned lap and stands.

The cousin rises, too, our youngest sliding off her foot. We remain seated on the tiles, stunned, as mother, guest and suitcase move away. Why? Why? Hard wheels roll with an occasional shudder, which the tiles pass to us.

When we recover and catch up, they're in our bedroom, the suitcase gleaming in the shadow of our desk.

Our mother tucks the edges of a sheet under the corner of a
mattress. Cousin Tiffy dwarfs one of our chairs, exciting our space with her hands. When she sees us her arms extend in a full stretch, palms soft side up. We fall in her embrace. We press against her thighs and back. We drop our youngest on her yielding lap. Her sweet smell isn't of a soap we know.

“Delicious and delicious and delicious,” she says, pinching every cheek. “Priceless. Whose chipped tooth?” Our next to eldest's. But the middlemost curls back his lips, as well, to show a compromised incisor. Him Tiffy proclaims a doll. She grins and her lip flips right up.

And thus we stand, half of our little group and all of her, flashing each other with the coverings of our hard roots. Even the frail connections to the inner-upper lip are shown. Our youngest joins right in, the pacifier falling out. Our eldest is a second mother to him, she melts, and united we grin.

Only our Imma keeps up her reserve. She twists a pillow through the opening of a case. “That's nothing to be proud of.”

Tiffy's lenses sparkle with our wounded eyes.

“We broke our teeth because we fell,” our Imma says. “We fell because we flouted better judgment. Who was in charge?” Our eldest bows her head. “And who rode who to the point of shared collapse?”

The guilty seal their teeth behind their lips, our eldest sputtering through them: “Who always works till late?”

“Kids!” Tiffy says, spreading her fingers in the air. “Kids will be kids.”

Our mother drops the pillow in its place, her fists against her hips.

Tiffy looks down.

“Tiles!” she says. “Even in the bedroom? Wow, stark. Desertlike, barren in the elegant sense of the word. A little hard under the foot. Be hard on a kid's teeth. I was accident-prone as a child myself. My mother had the carpenter put extra cushion in. My choice was
salmon plush. Forget it, though,” she says. “I understand. If I were you I'd go for this exact look. I mean the specialness of life here is so apparent, even when you stay at home. Look at the stones. Look at the shells. That one's a fossil. Some have to be relics. What a concept. Every individual tile is basically an Eretz bar.”

How can we but forgive this loving whimsy with our mother tongue? On the sofa she was happier than at the door and in the bedroom she is happier than there. We're off the topic of our broken teeth. Where this is going is clear. The future is bright. The sun shines through our shutters, tiger-striping Tiffy's mobile face.

If only Imma could be with us in our mirth. Her knitted brow betrays a mounting headache. “Take your cousin to the roof,” she says.

Away we go.

And up, along the tiled stairs which rise from the kitchen porch. An ordinary wooden door opens into the high outdoors.

Ours is the tallest structure in the area, because the newest, but if a taller one were built here, it would see us like we see the rest: the bulges of utility rooms, prickly with antennae, the blinking solar panels angled at the sun, sending up postcards of the sky. The cousin is spellbound by the horizon.

The craggy hills resemble piles of scrap metal in the coppering light. A column of rich dust rises above the southeast range, nearly inactive in the breezeless evening, pale, whitish-yellow, lumpy, laden as a grandma's hose.

“Fantastic,” Tiffy says. “Oh, perfect.” She arranges us before this view, steps back and fumbles at her neck. She finds a strap. She draws a compact camera from inside her blouse. She aims, zooms in, out, in, and snaps.

The column slowly swells. The far-off blams of dynamite growl like a belly. Tiffy gasps. “Oh yes.” The camera shaking in her hands.
Flash flashing, she goes oracular for a moment, not unusual in this kind of guest. The proclamation she recites comes from the third book of the Pentateuch. The scrolls of her flame-colored hair unfurl and stand on end.

“‘. . . thou Lord are among this people . . . thou goest before them, by day time in a pillar of a cloud, and in a pillar of fire by night.'” We explain it's from the quarry. She explains it's the effect, and snaps another shot.

A bike with tasseled handles leans against a water vat, a tricycle stands by the generator, and a jump rope is slung on the antenna. She poses us in play. She poses us before our mother's potted cacti, as we holler, Cheese! in our tongue. Gveena! She laughs.

“Forget the word,” she says. “Shows too much throat. Let's all just decide to be happy.”

Again? All right. But as we organize the team, Tiffy's attention moves on. She is hunting for the source of a near sound.

“What's that?”

The scraping of a trowel.

“By whom?”

By Ibrahim, we tell her, not too loud.

She scrutinizes twilit pools of copper on the tiles, and soon her eye finds the man. He is kneeling, back turned to us. A softening beach ball has rolled down the slope and rests not far from him, beside the PVC lip of the rain pipe. His shirt is soiled, white-stained with plaster, suntanned where it clings, and pin-striped where the fabric remains unaffected. He is neither young nor elderly, about the age of our mother. In his hand he holds a trowel, which becomes visible each time he plunges it in a bucket.

“What's he doing?”

Working on our roof, as if it isn't plain. Repairs.

“What was the problem?”

Permeation, what else? Wasn't she just in our room? The results are there. A mottle, greenish-gray, above our beds. In the living
room the evidence is older, yellow scaling. The symptoms are averted in one spot, then reappear on the next outfacing wall. Our contractor cut corners, our mother said she'd sue, the laborer became a fixture soon after we took up residence. He shows up every morning.

“Where from?”

The really curious fact is that he always comes in the same shirt. It's plausible he owns six garments of the same design, it's also possible the style is so related, that distinctions blur. Goes for a formal look, buttons and cuffs, slacks, never jeans, never a T-shirt no matter the heat. Always looks ready for a podium, before the dirt.

“He is a natty dresser,” Tiffy says. “Let's have him step into our shot.”

We let our heads slump to one side in consternation, east. The silly-grownup act again.

“I mean it,” Tiffy says. “Why not?”

Just then our mother's voice carries up from the kitchen porch. It's time to eat, she cries, and we're glad to comply. Tiffy is slower, so her protests have a hard time catching up, though they keep coming. Once she's huffing at our side, downstairs, she gets her answers from our mother.

“He never has. He wouldn't expect or like it. His dinner is waiting at his home.”

That night we stare at her round form under our sheets and listen to her adenoidal rattle. We can't sleep. How can we let ourselves, beside those eerie powers of mood infection, those strange ideas, and no gift. Still no gift! The next to youngest, and most impulsive, creeps up to the desk.

“Tomorrow,” hisses our big sister. She's our conscience. She reminds us of our past: After the Frosted Flakes affair our mother made us swear to wait. How long? Until it's offered.

The suitcase is a black square in the dark. The cousin lugged the whole of it out of our room when she prepared for bed. She changed into a pair of baby-doll pajamas. Through the bathroom door, we heard each spring-latch pop and resonantly thrum in the acoustics of our blue enamel. Later we found this: the soap on the wrong side of the sink, her glasses soap-smeared in our dish, a sock hanging from the showerhead, the floor mat soaked. The toilet has been sanitized, and she's replaced our paper. The new roll doles out a double ply of staggeringly considerate fiber, fleecy, otherworldly, and—could it be?—infused with oils. Such a subservience to parts never so privately entertained. Is this the gift? Somehow it impresses only our eldest. Is this the thing our mother opposed? Could her sense of threat be this overblown?

Late in the night we hear the high emotion carrying into her daily summary, telephoned to our grandmother. “I know whose ass she's thinking of,” she says. “I mean the nerve.”

Our door is locked when we come home from school. It always is. We're latchkey children. But today, before we even fumble with the thick new key, the whole great apparatus shirks its job before our eyes. The bolts retract, the frame gives. The cumbrous door sighs and swings. Our surprise is something like discovering the staircase down has not yet leveled. Within this mind frame, it's a sort of comfort to find Tiffy on the inside, shouting:

“Guess who!”

The baby is wailing on the floor. The cousin sports our mother's apron, an old one we all remember well. Some stains are ancient but those red ones are brand-new.

Who let her use that?

“Mom's gonna be held up,” our cousin says. “More work even than usual. And after she has errands, quite a few. She's a procrastinator, like I couldn't guess. Is she a Klein or what? I told her don't
you worry, today you've got an extra pair of hands.” These we eye, filing past: red-stained as well. She closes the door. “I'm making us all sloppy Joe!”

Which is what?

“You'll see. I could only find flat bread. A little more thickness would have been good. Whatever. Once the meat's in the pocket we'll have to eat quick. Listen, I could use a hand in here. I still don't have the hang of where Mom keeps all her supplies. Some of you could set the table. Some of you could run up to the roof and tell Ibrahim it'll be fifteen minutes at the most. He should just come down.”

A sour smell wafts from the kitchen. Red flecks the edges of her lenses, red on the toes of her shoes, as they pivot, heading off.

“What do you mean?” our eldest asks.

Tiffy's bifocals sparkle as she turns again. “What do you mean what do I mean?”

Our eldest swallows and repeats our mother's words: “He never has.”

“So? Until yesterday, me neither!”

“He wouldn't expect or like it.”

“Talked to him. Seems like the first was true. The second, not so sure, there was a language barrier. What I
do
know, when I see it, is a mild but significant squint, what I would call strabismus. I offered him professional attention. Anyone could see the man was moved.”

“His dinner is waiting at home.”

“I guess today he dines from two cuisines! Look, why the hell not?”

“Our mother doesn't let.”

“Your mother has left me in charge.”

“To get us killed?”

“Holy crap.” Our cousin scrutinizes us through every combination of her lenses. “You guys are genuinely upset!” She squats. She opens wide her arms. “Come here, you.”

We hand our wailing youngest over, drop into a half-circle and look up. Our cousin holds the baby by the underarms. His diaper's wet. He whimpers, and she shakes him once.

“Hmm,” she says. “Tiffy needs her hands to tell a story. A Klein or what?”

A story! Our eldest takes the child. He goes to sleep on her thin chest, while we three older ones forget our troubles once again in Tiffy's lively face.

“My Temple Nefesh music teacher,” she says, ducking the head seriously, “as you know, Mrs. Milstein. The inspiration for the trip, not just in the past. Actively, now.”

They're still in touch?

“I know, I know,” she says. She makes her face absurdist now. She plumps her lower lip. “As if
her
teachers would still be alive! Old!” she yelps, then laughs and slumps. “But yes. She is alive. We are in touch. In fact she is now a dear friend, a friend who is slowly slipping away.”