The World Without You (11 page)

On the rafters are the siblings’ names and the names of old boyfriends and girlfriends etched into the wood. After she and Leo started to go out, he climbed up a beam and, in a ritual of mock seriousness, crossed out the name of his old girlfriend, Nora, and carved in Thisbe’s name instead.
Her gallant boyfriend.
It’s been twelve years since then, but she can still make out her name on the rafters; it flusters her to see herself here, living on in this house after he’s gone. A shudder runs through her, though it could be from the cold as much as from anything else. The house feels damp, as it always did, perhaps because it wasn’t winterized when it was first built and because, once it was, the process was done haphazardly and on the cheap. You’d think going to Bowdoin would have acclimated her to the cold, but it hasn’t; even San Francisco feels chilly to her. Berkeley is warmer, which is one reason she’s staying there, though she’s a city person and if Calder weren’t so happy at preschool, she might move across the Bay.

In the closet are arrayed sandals, flip-flops, and tennis sneakers—shoes of languor, Thisbe thinks, meant for traipsing through town, and for hitting a shuttlecock behind the house. There’s even a pair of snow boots amidst everything else, though the family is in Lenox mostly during the summer. In the off-season they rent out the house for weeks at a time, though no one can remember when it’s being rented; more than once somebody drove up, only to find the house occupied. It was Leo one time, and he so startled the renter that she pointed a hunting rifle at him. After that, Leo told Thisbe always to ring the doorbell when she arrived unless she wanted his parents to shoot her. A laughable notion: Thisbe can think of no one less likely to shoot a gun than Marilyn or David. Apparently, when Marilyn was growing up she refused on moral grounds to touch a weapon—she even opted out of archery practice at summer camp—and when she became a parent, she didn’t allow her children to play with toy guns. “Good liberals,” Leo said of them, only half derisively; they’d turned him into a good liberal, too.

Upstairs in the hallway everything is as she remembers it—the Kathe Kollwitz etchings on the wall, the faded portraits of Leo’s great-grandparents, the old charcoal street map of Paris. On a glass table sit the family photos, where Thisbe finds a younger version of herself standing next to Leo at his Wesleyan graduation, and another photo, from their wedding, at the New York Aquarium, she in her wedding gown holding a glass of champagne, and behind her, in his tank, the walrus pressed against the glass, making his walrus noises. That walrus alone, Leo used to say, was worth the cost of the wedding; he kept referring to the walrus as his best man. In another photograph, this one taken after Leo’s death, she’s holding Calder, just two years old. In all these photos she plays a supporting role—the girlfriend, the wife, the mother—though there’s also one of her alone, in a yellow sundress, a look of perplexity across her face, taken when, she isn’t sure. This photo, in particular, makes her feel obscurely violated, which is strange because for years there were no photos of her in the house, and she took this as evidence that she wasn’t welcomed by Leo’s parents, at least not by Marilyn, who from the start was suspicious of her, why, she doesn’t know. The only reason she can come up with is that she wasn’t Nora, Leo’s high school girlfriend, who lingered on haphazardly into college, showing up in Middletown when she and Leo weren’t with someone else to perpetrate another act of high drama.
The girl with the extra toe
, Thisbe called Nora, which, she understood, was mean-spirited (though Nora did, in fact, have an extra toe, at the base of where her first two toes met), and was, besides, the least remarkable thing about her. More remarkable was her capacity for self-destruction, for putting things into her body that didn’t belong and failing to put in things that did. Leo’s mother helped Nora get treatment (for drugs, for anorexia), and because of this, and because Leo knew Nora as long as he did (they were in the same nursery-school class in Morningside Heights), Marilyn saw Nora as a surrogate daughter and was almost as protective of her as Leo was.

The happy girlfriend
, Marilyn called Thisbe. Why? Because she was blond and pretty and from California? Because she didn’t have an eating disorder? Thisbe was tempted to protest that she wasn’t happy and to argue, at the same time, that happiness was nothing to be ashamed of, both of which led her down a path she didn’t wish to take, of defending herself to her boyfriend’s mother. What had Marilyn been hoping for? That Leo would marry Nora? It should be illegal, Thisbe thinks, to marry someone you dated in high school; marrying someone you dated in college is hard enough. The story goes that after Thisbe was born her parents made placenta soup. It was a ludicrous ritual, but this was Santa Cruz in the 1970s, when everyone was engaged in ludicrous rituals. And she was only a few days old at the time: it wasn’t her idea to make placenta soup. But Marilyn saw this story as confirmation. Of what? Thisbe thinks. That she’s a pagan? That she wasn’t worthy of Marilyn’s darling son? From the start, David was more generous—Thisbe
likes
David—but he was overshadowed by Marilyn, who has the larger, blunter personality. Over time, Thisbe grew fonder of Marilyn, but for years she felt as if she were competing with the ghost of Nora and with the photos of her that still remained in the house long after Leo and she had broken up. Standing in the hallway in front of the family photos, Thisbe feels vindicated, but she experiences it as false consolation, because now that she’s been given such a prominent place on the mantel, she isn’t sure she wants to be there.

David comes up the stairs now, carrying her suitcases. She doesn’t know where she’ll be sleeping, but as he guides her through the long corridor, she realizes he’s leading her to Leo’s old bedroom. They’re halfway down the hall before she can so much as expel a breath.

“Is there—”

“I just thought …”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“David, you don’t need to apologize.”

“
Mi casa su casa.
”

“I know …”

It’s a big house, he reminds her. There’s the basement and the attic and the other bedrooms. But the truth, he admits, is that with so many people coming he hasn’t given much thought to who will sleep where. Then, as if to belie his claim about the size of the house, he bumps into her in the hallway. He’s still holding her suitcases, one in each hand like a set of weights, and they do a clumsy dance to escape each other.

Now they retrace their steps through the hall and down the stairs, where, in the basement, a bed has been made and where David deposits her suitcases. “Is this all right?”

“It’s perfect.”

“Calder can sleep here as well.”

Thisbe starts to unpack, but then the doorbell rings and she goes upstairs to find Lily, Noelle, Amram, and the boys standing in the foyer with their luggage.

David hugs Lily, Noelle, and the boys. He shakes Amram’s hand.

Marilyn, behind him, lines up her grandsons. “You kids are huge. Positively mammoth. What have they been feeding you in Jerusalem?”

“Falafel,” Akiva says.

“Beans make you grow,” Noelle says, shrugging, and she reaches down to grab a suitcase.

It isn’t until they’re inside that Marilyn realizes they’re not all there. “Where’s Clarissa and Nathaniel?”

“Beats me,” Lily says.

“What do you mean, beats you?”

“She left a message saying she’d meet us at the house. I guess she’s running behind schedule.”

“Why hasn’t she called?” Marilyn goes over to the window, but there’s nothing to see but their driveway, which winds down a hill amidst a thicket of trees. She tries Clarissa’s cell phone but is sent straight to voicemail. She tries Nathaniel’s cell phone, too, but is sent to voicemail again.

“Come on,” Lily says. “Let’s eat. Those slowpokes can catch up with us when they get here.”

But Marilyn won’t countenance it. She looks to David for support, but he gives her his signature shrug, his gaze tunneling beyond her. She wants to shake him, really she does, though no doubt he wants to shake her, too.

In the kitchen, she tries to make herself look busy, tasting the gazpacho, the corn, the pasta salad, but there’s nothing to taste but what’s already been tasted, and so she floats around the room in her black silk skirt, fearing that she’s overdressed, that she looks at once too decked out and too funereal.

In the living room, she places books on top of one another, on coffee tables and lamp stands, whatever will sustain them. At the foot of the grand piano sit copies of the
Times
, which have piled up from summers past, the way they pile up in Manhattan. She should just tie them in twine and leave them out for recycling, but David is still going at them. He reads the paper in order, every day from front to back, and in this manner he has fallen years behind, the fact of which he likes to report with a mixture of self-mockery and mulish pride. But the sight of those papers assails her now, and so she makes a pile of them and ties them up, then leaves them out front beside the garbage bins.

A bulb is extinguished in the reading lamp, but when she goes to replace it all she can find is a halogen bulb, and this one takes fluorescent. She returns to the closet, and this time she comes back with the right bulb, but when she unscrews the extinguished one it slips from her hand and shatters on the floor.

“Shit!” she says. “Damn it!” There are shards of glass all over the floor and spilling onto the carpet.

She gets the broom and dustpan, the vacuum cleaner for good measure, but when she turns it on, the sound of the motor feels like a drill going off, and she thinks, What if Clarissa is trying to call, so she puts the vacuum away. The shards are embedded in the rug, and she tries to remove them with a pair of tweezers, then resorts to using her hands.

Now Amram comes inside carrying the last of the luggage. He’s halfway to the second floor when Yoni runs past him down the stairs. “My tooth is loose!” he cries.

“I’m going to yank it out,” Akiva says. He’s running down the stairs himself, a few steps behind his brother.

“You will do no such thing,” Noelle says.

“It will be quick and painless,” says Akiva.

“Let me have a look at it,” Marilyn says, happy to have something, anything, to distract her.

Yoni opens his mouth for his grandmother to see, and his teeth sparkle in the kitchen light.

Now Akiva is telling Yoni to make sure his tooth falls out in America; that way, the tooth fairy will pay him in dollars. “Never get shekels,” Akiva says, “when you can get dollars.”

A coil of lightning slashes the sky. Thunder rings out a second later. Marilyn presses her nose to the window, and her breath comes back along the glass. A car drives by on the road below them, but she can’t see it through the brush. All she can make out is the diffuse yellow of the headlights and the sound of water spraying against trees.

Soon David joins her, and for a minute they’re standing there, looking out the window for their daughter and son-in-law. Reflexively, Marilyn puts her hand to David’s shoulder, but he flinches, and she pulls away as if she’s been given an electric shock.

It’s nine o’clock when a light comes up the driveway. Lily says, “Is that Clarissa’s car?”

Everyone cranes their necks. The car blinds them as it tacks up the path, mist dispersing from its headlights, which glare at them like a disco ball.

“They’re here!” Marilyn says.

Clarissa and Nathaniel emerge, looking drawn.

Everyone hugs so that, bathed in the porch light beneath the wrung-out sky, they look like they’re doing a dance. Clarissa’s clothes cling to her, her hair flat and sopping as a retriever’s coat.

“You look like you walked here,” David says.

“We did,” says Clarissa. “From the driveway to the front door. It’s that bad out there.” She bends forward in a yoga pose: downward Clarissa. Her long red hair flips over itself; she shakes it from side to side.

They’re inside now, drying off, and through the window Marilyn can make out the dripping exteriors of her daughters’ cars, arranged in the driveway nose to tail, a fleet of them beside her own car. “Where in the world were you?”

“Oh, Mom, you don’t want to know.”

“Actually, I do.”

“We fell asleep,” Clarissa says.

“While you were driving?”

“You know what, Mom? It’s private.”

“What?”

“They’re here now, Marilyn,” David says. “What difference does it make?”

She gives him a scathing look, because, once again, he has to paper over things. Because the world could be imploding—the world is imploding—and he’d find some good in it.

She hands Clarissa and Nathaniel each a towel, and now she’s drying off her daughter’s hair, and Clarissa, laughing, poised in the foyer beside the standing lamp, says, “Mom, I’m almost forty, I can dry off my own hair.”

“Come on,” David says. “The food’s getting cold.”

Marilyn guides them through the living room, crossing one Persian rug after another, flattened by years of feet, all those summer flip-flops. In the kitchen, the food, on trivets, is arrayed along the counter. The stove is on, keeping the leeks warm, the flame the dull blue glow of an extinguished campfire. In the corner beneath the spice rack the rice cooker flickers from
cook
to
warm
to
cook
again, as if it can’t make up its mind.

“Dad’s spice rack,” Lily says, grabbing a bottle of fenugreek and a bottle of cream of tartar.

“Sixty-four bottles,” Clarissa says. “Enough spices to last a lifetime.”

“Not
my
lifetime,” David says.

Noelle grabs a couple of bottles herself. “Dad’s a spice addict,” she says. “He keeps getting more.”

“They mask the deficiencies in my cooking,” David says.

“Now, now,” says Lily.

Marilyn puts one arm around Noelle and another around Thisbe, and with her elbow she’s nudging Nathaniel, too, into the dining room.

At the center of the room is a long table of pale blond wood, which was passed down from Marilyn’s parents, who are now dead, and which she’s overlaid with a white tablecloth. The cutlery is sterling silver, David’s mother’s, which she gave to them when she remarried for the last time. Marilyn is looking at it all, cataloguing it, the silverware, the tablecloth, the table itself, the wineglasses, which she and David were given as a wedding present by a friend, also now dead, as if trying to remember it all.