The World Without You (27 page)

“Keep busy,” Lily says. “That’s your solution to everything.”

“It’s my solution to nothing,” Marilyn says. “But people need to eat.”

9

It’s eight o’clock, but dinner hasn’t started yet; everyone is stalling except Noelle. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s eat.” If they wait until Amram comes back they may never eat again. Yet even as she’s thinking this, she cranes her neck and looks out the window, hoping to see his car.

“Pavlov’s bell is ringing,” Marilyn says. She bangs a fork against the kettle, but all it makes is a dull thud.

“I hope Pavlov could hear well,” Lily says.

“Certainly better than me,” says Noelle. She set the table earlier, but she put the knife on the left and the fork on the right and the spoon on the inside of the fork, knowing as she did so that she was making a mistake but not sure how to correct it. It didn’t matter, she told herself. As long as everyone had silverware. But it felt symbolic of something larger. If there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, she could be counted on to choose the wrong way.

“Where’s Abba?” Yoni asks.

“He’ll be back soon,” Noelle says, doing her best to sound convincing.

“Where did he go?”

“Out,” she says. “To run some errands.”

“What errands?” Dov says. “Why has he been gone so long?”

“Boys, boys,” Noelle says, drawing the four of them into a hug. “So many questions.”

They eat at the same table where they ate last night, only now, with the children present, they’re flank to flank as if at a trough. Marilyn has placed a long silk runner down the length of the table, all blues and reds and purples, in the hope that something colorful might brighten her mood. One of the chandelier bulbs has gone out, and she gets on tiptoe and taps at it until it comes on again. She spins the chandelier like a roulette wheel. It’s what she used to do when the children were babies—the rotating lights mesmerized them—and when she does it now Ari snaps to attention, watching the bulbs spin and spin.

“In another life you’d have been Vanna White,” Lily says.

“Whoever that is,” says Marilyn.

“Oh, Mom, come on.”

Marilyn has seated the children strategically, adult next to child next to adult next to child, but there’s only so much strategic seating can do. At her table sit an eight-year-old, a six-year-old, a five-year-old, and two three-year-olds. A representative of every age group, like some child’s version of the UN. Though they feel at the same time like one age group: the rabble. She didn’t have enough dining room chairs to seat them all, so Clarissa removed two folding chairs from the closet, but now the boys are fighting over who gets the regular chairs and who gets the folding ones, and soon they’re negotiating over the size of the cutlery—some of them got larger forks than others—and Ari is saying he wants the teddy bear spoon, but the teddy bear spoon, Noelle informs him, is back in Israel.

“It’s not fair!” Ari says.

“It never is,” says Noelle, blowing out air in mock exasperation, though the feeling is less counterfeit than she lets on.

“That’s Calder’s favorite phrase,” Thisbe says.

Noelle says, “Sometimes I think it’s Ari’s
only
phrase. It’s the first thing he says when he wakes up in the morning. I should put it on a T-shirt.”

Marilyn wishes her grandsons would settle down, especially now, the night before Leo’s memorial. He was your father, she wants to say. And your uncle. Show some respect. But they would just stare at her blankly, the way grandchildren have been staring at their grandparents for years, the way, she suspects, she stared at her own grandparents. So she decides to be Zen about it, a phrase and a concept she doesn’t like, but if being Zen about it means surrendering, then that’s what she wants to do.

“Will you be joining us?” she asks David. He’s wandering about the living room, toolbox in hand, as if he’s less a member of the family than the neighborhood contractor: foreman of the crew. He has finished with the hinge on the bathroom mirror, and now he’s on to the other bathroom, where the paint has started to flake. Okay, she wants to say, you’ve made your point. They will have to sell the house, but they don’t have to sell it this minute, or this week. David’s just staging his mute protest, but at this point she’s inclined to let him. Leo’s memorial is tomorrow, and as the time has drawn closer, she has found herself buried among his possessions, absenting herself for the last few hours while she ransacked his room, she doesn’t know for what.

“I’m not hungry,” David says, and she’s almost glad for it. She’d rather he not be in the way.

“Well, if you want anything, it’s on the stove.”

“Okay,” he says tonelessly.

“I’ll put the leftovers in a baggie.”

“That’s fine.”

“I’ll leave dessert out, too.”

But David has already departed, back to the bathroom and then who knows where, to wherever his revolving workstation deposits him.

Even without him and Amram, everyone is crowded around the table like at a mess hall; the boys are all elbows as they reach over each other, fighting for the orange juice and the sweetened iced tea.

Marilyn serves the fruit soup while Noelle forks the kosher food onto her boys’ plates, the corned beef on bagels, which she splatters ketchup and mustard on, dousing everything in condiments because that’s how her boys like it. Through her eating restrictions she’s separated herself from the others, but she feels as if they’ve separated themselves from her. She thinks of Joseph down in Egypt, of the ancient Egyptian custom of eating separately from the Israelites. That’s how she feels now, not sure if she’s the Israelite or the Egyptian here, only that she’s been banished. The corned beef abrades her throat as it goes down; the pastrami feels no better. She doesn’t like cold cuts, but that’s all she has. She’s overcome by the urge to dispense with everything: all these senseless rules. Amram’s not here to watch over her, and it’s only the shame of thinking this (Has that been his role? To keep her in line?) that makes her continue to eat what she’s eating. She glances at her watch, then at her cell phone. He’s been gone for seven hours.

“You’ve gotten a suntan,” Marilyn says. She’s looking up at Thisbe across the table.

“My life’s one big suntan,” Thisbe says. “That’s the problem when you go to school out west. It’s hard to study indoors.” She thinks Marilyn might rebuke her; she can be a fanatic when it comes to sunscreen. A doctor
and
a mother, Leo used to say; it was a lethal combination.

Marilyn is wearing a row of bracelets, which clink against each other like wind chimes. She’s looking up at Thisbe again. It’s Leo she’s thinking about, though she’s thinking about Thisbe too, which is another way of thinking about Leo.

It’s her own fault, she believes. She still doesn’t know why she didn’t warm to Thisbe. Was it because everyone else warmed to her, because everyone found her so congenial, so winning, everyone, that is, except for Marilyn herself, who felt compelled to stand up for some principle she couldn’t even name? Everybody thinks Marilyn didn’t like Thisbe because she wasn’t Nora; it’s what Thisbe herself believes. But that’s not true. Marilyn knew Nora when she was four, when Nora used to run along the beach in her purple flip-flops and yellow one-piece, Leo, in his own flip-flops, dutifully trailing her. “Those two are going to get married,” Nora’s mother used to say, and Marilyn saw no harm in agreeing. She liked Nora. But there was always a species of compassion in the way she liked her. Nora was lovely, but she was troubled, and this was apparent to Marilyn even when Nora was in preschool, the way obstacles impeded her that other children could surmount; not infrequently, she reminded Marilyn of Noelle. As headstrong as he was, there was never a chance Leo would marry Nora; for all her drama, she was safe. She was the exact sort of girlfriend for a teenage son of hers to have: adventurous, explosive, ultimately anodyne.

But Thisbe, it was clear, was different. She was pleasant to Marilyn, but she didn’t need her, and Marilyn doesn’t like not to feel needed. Mere weeks into their relationship, Marilyn thought: Leo could end up marrying her. He was twenty-one, too young to be with the girl he would marry. But really, she knows, it was something else. Her baby, her only son, was being taken from her. It shocked her to feel that primal possessiveness, that oedipal urge but in reverse, and though she tried to hide it, she wasn’t able to.

Did she think that, given a choice between his girlfriend and his mother, a young man would choose his mother? Did she believe that if she wasn’t welcoming Thisbe would simply leave? Her error had been in thinking she could act out and that she and Thisbe would have time to reconcile. Years would pass and there would be a thawing between them. What had once been begrudging would become openhearted, warm. She and Thisbe would learn to like each other; perhaps the feeling would even blossom into love. Thisbe would be spending her life with Leo; she would be the mother of Marilyn’s grandchildren. Marilyn even allowed herself to imagine her old age, David dead already, Thisbe coming to visit her in the nursing home, where the waiting rooms were filled with daughters and daughters-in-law. Mothers and daughters-in-law: such volatile, loaded relationships. Yet mother-daughter relationships could be loaded, too, and Marilyn had managed to have good relationships with her daughters. She saw no reason why she couldn’t do the same with Thisbe. Only now, she realizes, she made a mistake.

She’s looking at Thisbe from across the table, and for a moment it’s as if no one else is in the room and it’s just her and Thisbe, separated by all that burnished blond wood. A bee buzzes against the porch window, as if trying to ram its way in.

“Darling,” Marilyn says. She can hear her heart beat like a thrush in her forehead.

“Please, Mom,” Lily says. “Leave Thisbe alone.”

“What did I do?”

Lily’s thinking of Wyeth, of her conversation with Thisbe just hours ago, hoping to shield her as best she can, to protect her from her mother.

“It’s okay,” Thisbe says. “I’m all right.”

Clarissa, trying to redirect the conversation, says, “Are we set for the memorial? It’s at noon, right?”

“But we should get there early,” Marilyn says.

“Did you finish your speech?” Lily asks Clarissa.

“No,” Clarissa says. “Did you?”

Lily shakes her head. She has begun it and begun it and begun it again. She should stand at the podium and read twelve different opening paragraphs, each one more atrocious than the next.

“Will you be speaking, Marilyn?” Nathaniel asks.

Marilyn shakes her head. She spoke at Leo’s funeral, and she’s been speaking throughout the year in the nation’s op-ed pages. She’ll leave it to her daughters to speak.

“And Dad?” Noelle says.

“Last we spoke, he didn’t know.”

The silence settles on them like a lead coat.

Clarissa, grasping for some subject, says, “Nathaniel will be wearing a tie. I can’t remember the last time he wore one.”

Noelle, too, trying to keep the conversation aloft, says, “I bought four ties for the boys duty free at the airport.” She got five ties, in fact, one for Amram, but it looks like that one won’t be necessary. At least it will spare them another fight. Amram thinks ties are a woman’s idea of how a man should look.

“I wore a tuxedo once,” Dov says.

“Well, you won’t be wearing one tomorrow,” says Yoni.

Akiva spears his sandwich with a fork.

“Akiva,” Noelle says, “stop playing with your food.”

But Akiva goes on playing with it, stabbing the bread until it’s bullet-pocked, and Noelle doesn’t have the will to object anymore.

Ari, playing with his sandwich himself, says, “I never got to wear a tuxedo.”

“You will someday,” Noelle says. “If you want to.”

“Count yourself lucky,” Nathaniel says. “Some of us spend our lives trying to avoid wearing a tuxedo.”

Ari says, “I want to wear a tuxedo to Uncle Leo’s memorial.”

“Well you can’t, honey,” Noelle says.

There’s more silence; again Marilyn is staring at Thisbe. She still doesn’t know why Lily rebuked her, why anyone is rebuking anyone now.

Thisbe, as if sensing this, says, “It’s okay.” She’s extending her hand to Marilyn, but she’s across the table, out of reach.

“I don’t know,” Marilyn says.

“Me, either,” says Thisbe, though she doesn’t even know what she doesn’t know. She’s eating the chicken thighs and the leeks, the pasta salad, Noelle’s food, the kosher food—the one gentile at the table and look what she’s ended up with. She’s thinking, stupidly, that the food doesn’t
taste
kosher, feeling as always when it comes to Judaism like an ignoramus, a fool.

“I wasn’t always the easiest mother-in-law,” Marilyn says.

“Oh, Marilyn. Please don’t say that.”

“Well, it’s true.”

“You were a good mother-in-law,” Thisbe says, feeling the words catch in her mouth, convinced she sounds insincere, ashamed she’s forced to say this. With her right hand she’s forking the food into her mouth while across her body her left hand moves of its own accord, trundling along her lap like a rodent. Where is everyone to rescue her? Where’s Clarissa? Where’s Lily? Where’s Noelle? Where of all times is Amram, whom she can usually count on to distract the others? He has vanished, and everyone else is quietly chewing their food, a bunch of ruminants, unmoving and silent, as if they’ve been ossified by Marilyn’s words.

“You must think I’m ridiculous.”

“Why would I think that?” Thisbe says.

“Spending my life writing tendentious op-eds.”

“They’re not tendentious,” she says. “I like them.” Though what she feels is mostly a mixture of discomfort and relief. Discomfort that a year after Leo died he remains in the news, that her life is still fit for consumption. Relief that Marilyn has taken up the mantel, that she’s become the public face of it all and, in so doing, has spared her.

“I could waterboard Alberto Gonzales himself and it wouldn’t bring Leo back. I’d like to spit on Bush. The nerve of the man to claim my son as his ally. Leo hated that war.”

He did, Thisbe thinks, though he hated it the way most people she knows hated it, idly at first, and then less idly, as things started to go bad. The war was over, in any case, by the time Leo was killed; he was covering the occupation, and though there wouldn’t have been an occupation without a war, there would have been other occupations, and other wars too, and Leo would have found his way to them. Thisbe dislikes Bush as much as her mother-in-law does, but when Leo was abducted, accused by his captors of being a U.S. agent, when he was placed before the cameras, looking woozy, lobotomized, was it any wonder Bush enlisted him for his cause? Bush lied about WMDs; mischaracterizing Leo was small stuff by comparison. And the left, in embracing Leo, mischaracterizes him, too. Because Leo wasn’t interested in being a hero, certainly not a political one. What Marilyn fails to understand is that Leo wasn’t political; he was a journalist. He refused to tell Thisbe how he voted, and though she had no doubt, his political views were beside the point. What he wanted was adventure; in another era, he’d have traveled to Africa to hunt elephant tusk. But Thisbe can’t tell her mother-in-law this, can’t say what she believes, which is that if Leo were alive he wouldn’t recognize the person she’s writing about.