The Place Will Comfort You (15 page)

How awful. How terrible. Sick?

“The worst kind.”

Oh no.

“Of the breasts.”

Our eldest nearly drops the baby as she tries to plug our ears.

“What?” Tiffy asks. “Too harsh a topic for your age? The cancer?”

Of course not.

“Then the breasts?”

Shhh! Good G-d.

“Get outta here. I thought this was a largely permissive culture. I thought the majority is secular.”

Yes to both. But not us.

“Then I guess I shouldn't tell you she's a dyke.”

A what?

Tiffy explains in such a matter-of-fact way, that the idea simply
strolls into our head and stays awhile, as ordinary as a sitter on a bench, whom we chase off, eventually, in a fit of giggles.

“What's so funny?” Tiffy says, in such a way that we're inspired to find our composure all at once. “Do you think it's wrong?”

Perhaps not. Truth is we simply never thought about the possibility. We knew about the boy and boy. Leviticus 18, verse 22. But girl and girl? We don't recall a mention. Maybe that's okay.

“The next part should be easier for you,” she says. “Ultratraditional. Folks like you would have heard of the practice. Mrs. Milstein, Fiona, sent me here with her dying wish.”

To be buried here? HaShem preserve us. She here now? In the case? That kind makes the very worst guest.

“She isn't dead yet,” our cousin snaps

May He bring her full recovery.

“That is no longer an option,” Tiffy says. She pushes a hand into an apron pocket, loose and shallow for easy reach, yet she fumbles. She takes a breath and works herself to equilibrium again. Finally she yanks out a small bag: “She sent me for this.”

A sandwich bag, darkened, plump and prickly with crystallized instant coffee, about two hundred grams.

“No,” Tiffy says. “Dirt.”

But of course. A sprinkling of the holy soil of Eretz Yisrael. For the eyes in the coffin?

“That's right.” She bites her lip and pushes the small parcel back in its storage place. “I got it from your building garden. Just a little. Didn't think you'd mind.”

This is just dreadful. Where's our happy Tiffy? We must try to lighten things up.

So what else did she do today? Where else did she go?

“Oh, nowhere. Tour bus not leaving till tomorrow.”

Not even a walk down the block? The local grocer offers a particularly fine fizzing sweet. There is the young mothers' clinic, Drop of Milk. The name itself is wonderful, and never has she seen so
many infants and their mothers traveling up and down one flight of steps! There are apartment buildings older than ours in design. Different shrubs in different gardens, a deserted house.

“Believe me,” Tiffy says. “Terrible sense of direction. I would find a way to get lost.”

Did she at least go up to the roof?

“You know I did!” she cries. Because
we
asked.

Somehow, we brought the dreaded subject back upon ourselves. We, us.

“Oh come on!” she says. She punches a few shoulders, lightly, leaves the baby out. “Did I or did I not hear you say the man has worked up there for years?”

He stands for a continuous blight in our lives.

“But do you actually know
him?”

Yes. He shows up every day in the same shirt. The shirt arrives here clean each morning, but, every night, it goes home stained.

“Not that again. Does he have kids?”

How should we know? And can
she
fault us? She, who did not know our demographics, names, or level of religious practice, her own blood and hosts.

Tiffy shakes her head. “Don't even know where he lives, I'll betcha. Bet you have no idea what kind of a home.”

She, who won't set foot on our block. In and out of a taxi.

“He is your
neighbor!”
Tiffy says. “That's closer. You walk the same land. I'm only saying it's a shame, and to imagine what you might be missing, think of the cultural exchange. He probably plays something. I've heard that the musicianship is staggering. That artist sampled it, and I mean, yeah, a little goes a long way, but yeah! Amazing stuff, rides a completely different wave. I'm telling you. Just do it. Climb those stairs, extend that hand and flash that friendly smile. When you wish upon a star and so on. Thinking positive is half the game. Live your dream.”

The woman is mad.

Her beliefs are inane, we tell her. Can we dream our walls back from their spreading problem? Can we think away the rot? And when we find ourselves wall-less, will a wish shorten the fall from a narrow apartment at the top?

“It's a moot point,” she says. “I already invited him. He's coming. Try to remember we're just talking about a sandwich.”

Oh.

How could we have known?

A skillet in the kitchen seethes, dispatching its aroma. Beef? Tomato sauce. In a sandwich? But that would be sloppy!

Oh.

We stand. We stare down at our mother's apron swaddling the bottom-heavy form. She is ripely shaped, maternally, you might say. We are young, our minds are flexible. We can imagine her part of the household. Tiffy leaps up to her feet, agile considering her girth. She has been spared the usual jet lag. She is full of energy.

“I am!” she says. “I can just feel the air
restoring
me. I also have this helpful little pill.”

She gives us each a coated half. The smile returns.

The barriers have come down. No longer can we look at Tiffy as a guest. She is our
baby-sitter,
a whole different thing, an outsider who comes in as the boss. And entertainer! And brings prizes for good listeners, and have we not been that?

The cousin freezes. She regards us squarely through her specs, each eye divided by the seam. “That you should feel you have to ask!” She wipes her palms on the lined apron and leaves the pattern sloppied up. “My little angels. You had doubt?” Tears fill her eyes, then resolve. “Avanti!” And she leads us to our room.

One by one we plunk down on her bed, which crackles with a moisture-proof sheet Imma didn't think to take out. Tiffy approaches us, and then steps back, assesses, nears again, and shuffles us, arranges us by height, closes the gaps. She waits until we're absolutely still. She flips the shutters and submerges us in dark.

“Now close your eyes.”

The first thing we all hear is the metallic clack and spring of clasps. We anticipate the whisper of cereal settling in its box, the crepitation of cellophane, perhaps the snick of Cousin's nails against the side of a glass jar. Instead we hear another, fainter clack and spring. We're stumped.

“Every head I tap opens wide,” Tiffy says, and taps—each child in turn, oldest to youngest, one by one, and each one pops. The baby needs assistance, because of his age and as he is sleeping. One of us pushes up a lid, one steadies the head, taking care not to compress the pliant fontanel. The cousin bows over, pointing her narrow red ray. Slowly, the baby's irises uncloak of their own will.

We have already seen what he is seeing, and we see it still. The imagery endures past the removal of the tool:

The eyes are flooded with an edgeless flood of black, which seems to heave, although the heaving isn't seen. How one perceives the heaving one cannot define, and this throws off one's senses from a cliff. Not in a frightening way. The cliffs rise from the stars, it seems, as gravity pulls only faintly. Though the general direction of the fall is down, one floats, and presently the floating pupil fixes on a landscape hitherto unseen, but present all around, a glowing veiny network, like the intricate venation of a leaf, except not green but red, not flat but very deep, the circuitry like never-ending branches of a fragile blood-red tree.

We are suspended in a world of frailty, effulgent, tantalizing, begging to be touched. We keep floating down. While we are at it, we can swim, beneath and over luminescent intersections, our only burden to avoid collision, not to interfere, to leave the glowing system unimpaired. The craft is painstaking, but in this slowness, we can learn. We exercise—we
become
—delicacy, heedfulness, astuteness, fine, fine care.

Until we hear our cousin's happy sigh. The darkness suddenly is ordinary, the daylight sifting, dim, through the thick plastic shutters.

“Wasn't that neat?” Tiffy asks.

The middlemost skips to the window, forces it ajar. Upon our particleboard desk the suitcase lies agape, blooming with clothes. On these a smaller case perches, open as well, the inside lined with velvet cavities, harboring metal tools. One of the cavities is empty. The cousin holds her implement. The handle is black, the head a one-eyed, silver cone, which still emits its concentrated ray, until she clicks it off.

“So?” she says. “Wasn't that mind-blowing?”

We're sure our mind remains largely the same. We've tasted no new flavor, smelled no new smell, masticated no new texture. That was it? Nothing else?

“Sure there's something else!” Tiffy says. “Did I or did I not give you the pitch already yesterday? I saw you sitting there. I saw you listening, or so I thought.”

Again she reaches in our mother's apron, this time producing a catalog. Our eldest receives it. The publication is thin, notebooksized, but densely paged, the pages slick but also powdery, sharp-scented, freshly inked. The language we can't read. The photographs, in rows and rows, page after page, show eyeglasses, framed or not, in metal or plastic. Glass glints over the infinite eyes of numberless stiff-headed models.

“Little girls often like page six,” Tiffy says. “The pearly hues. The pink looks amazing on a redhead.”

Our eldest casts the catalog aside. She rises as it hits the floor. Gently, she lays the baby on the bed, and smoothes the khaki skirt over her adolescent hips. She steps up to our cousin till her forehead nearly brushes the plump chin, then spins around to face our way. A stain darkens the area where the baby sat.

“She think she's going to make us four-eyed,” our big sister says. “Like her.”

We know a call to action when we hear one. That's the present? We arise as one.

We swarm the guest, immobilize her, search her suitcase: skirts and skorts and peasant blouses, baby dolls, bras, panties, fifty rolls of toilet paper. Nothing! What is left to do, except tear our mother's apron off this fraud? The cotton sashes remain tied in a bow while the stitches break on one end.

Our next-to-youngest reaches in the pocket, and removes the parcel of dirt. Then the little monkey jumps up on the windowsill. Perfectly safe; our mother has furnished the window with convex bars. Hanging out, he rips the parcel and shakes it out. He watches as our soil rains down brown and disappears below our myrtles, back in place.

Tiffy never resists. She waits until we loosen our grip and, sneering at her, back away. Our eldest hurries to the baby, whose wild motions have impelled him near the edge. He has been howling with delight at the melee.

Tiffy exacts no vengeance. She does not explode in a burst of temper. She never says a word, after these four: “Seven to ten days.” She only leaves.

She tramps, heavy-footed, to her nesting cases, closes the small one and the large over that. Head hanging, she hoists the suitcase off the desk, lowers it, and stands it on its wheels.

A shudder passes through the tiles as she leads the case away. We hear the heavy key turn with the smoothness of ball bearings. Our Pladelet slowly swishes open, yet more slowly swishes closed, and is received.

We gallop through the flat to end the sequence. Our eldest turns the key.

Our kitchen is filled with smoke. We switch the gas off. Baby on slim hip, our eldest slips her free hand in the oven mitt. Our mission she describes as twofold. We must drive the fumes out of our house and change the dinner plans, both before our mother's return.

Taking the skillet to the roof does it all. Ibrahim can see. Whatever ocular deficiency our cousin found in him is indiscernible by us, if one exists. His eyes are very like ours. He watches the smoke rising in between us with a beetled brow, much like our mother would, flickering his lashes much in the same way, over eyes similarly lit, sleek as two oil-soaked black olives.

Our mother was once beautiful, and so was he. Although he is stooped and thickened and begins to wrinkle, his hair retains the pigment of his youth, a Nordic blond, some new or ancient history of influx dyed into his locks. The black smoke billows in the wind, tilting aside, unveiling the pillar of the quarry dust, far-off, white, stolid. Black waves in, and again rises.

We have talked to him before, but only as messengers from Imma. These are our first words to him which we ourselves compose:

We would like to go air out the house. Would he mind the skillet?

“I could douse it if you like,” he says.

He could do what? We don't know the word.

“Such clever children?” he says. “Your own language?”

They probably teach it in the seventh grade, our eldest says, setting the skillet on the tar.

“Tar burns,” Ibrahim says. He reaches through the smoke, his plaster-whitened fingers graying, ungloves our sister of our mother's mitt, and slips it on his own hand. He bends and takes the skillet by the handle.

The column of smoke scatters and regroups as Ibrahim straightens again, then slowly travels west, towards a water tap that curves out of a segment of our building's silver pipes, though every shine in twilight appears copper. As in the same time, yesterday, the solar panels duplicate the sunset. Copper spokes our bikes. A copper droplet quivers from the tap's ridged copper nose. We rise and follow as the column from the skillet, unreflective black, inclines east as though resisting, as Ibrahim walks on.

Though the roof is not so sprawling, the journey is long. The sun sinks lower in the sky. On any other day we would be gaining in abandon as we lost the light. Perhaps the mention of the middleschool grade has made us tired, all the hard work still ahead. The eyelids wish to close as if the worker is our teacher.