The Wonder Spot (40 page)

“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 permission 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.

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.