Tinderbox (19 page)

Christmas had hit an all-time low the year her mother kicked their father out and
Adam refused to go to Max and Ida’s Riverdale house for Hanukkah without her. Gently,
her mother attempted to explain that now that she and their father were getting divorced,
she would no longer be attending his father’s family gatherings. “Go,” she urged.
“Grandpa will be so sad if you don’t.” But Adam had been unbudgeable, so that Caro
had to go alone.

Arriving home that night, Caro burst into tears. “I hate Christmas,” she sobbed.

Her mother bundled her into her arms. “I think this is about the divorce, don’t you,
darling?”

“No, it’s not about the stupid divorce. It’s about Christmas. I hate being Jewish.
I want Christmas.”

In the morning, instead of their usual sensible breakfast of Irish oatmeal and fruit,
there were waffles dusted with powdered sugar and mugs of hot chocolate capped with
whipped cream. Adam pressed his moistened finger onto the plate until he’d captured
every sugar morsel.

“Children,” her mother announced, “I’ve been thinking things over. We live in the
city where Christmas is the most beautifully celebrated, save perhaps in Rome, of
anywhere in the world. Christmas is a New York tradition. We are New Yorkers. There
is no reason we can’t enjoy the part of Christmas that is about New York, not Jesus.”

After that, her mother had taken them every year to see the tree at Rockefeller Center,
the windows at Saks and Lord & Taylor, the Neapolitan crèche in the Medieval Hall
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, for Caro, the highlight of the season, the
Balanchine version of
The Nutcracker
performed by the New York City Ballet. Each year, they would invite another Jewish
family for Christmas dinner, and her mother would serve mulled cider and oysters Rockefeller
and roast a leg of lamb bought from a butcher shop on Madison Avenue. For dessert,
there would be a bûche de Noël and chocolate-covered strawberries.

Caro had loved the tree that magically grows to the ceiling as Marie’s nutcracker
transforms into her prince, the scent of nutmeg and rosemary that would fill the parlor
floor Christmas afternoon. But the dread never fully disappeared, the feeling that
she was counting the days until the holiday season was over.

2

The first weekend in December, Caro arrives at her mother’s house for Sunday dinner
to discover Eva and Omar decorating a tree in the parlor. Bing Crosby is singing carols
while Eva, humming along, hangs red and green balls and Omar makes loops out of construction
paper. In the kitchen, her mother is stuffing Meyer lemons into the cavities of two
organic chickens.

“What’s going on?”

“Eva brought home a tree. She carried it herself from Broadway. God knows how she
did it. Omar was so excited when he saw it that I decided to leave the decision up
to his parents. Rachida surprised me by being entirely gung ho. Adam tried debating
with her about the capitulation to capitalism and the hegemonic culture until Rachida
told him to do something I won’t repeat. She took Eva and Omar to CVS to buy lights
and ornaments.”

“How do you feel about it?”

Her mother puts the chickens in the oven. She washes her hands and begins wiping down
the counters with white vinegar, the way her own mother, a germ’s worst enemy, Larry
had called her, had taught her to avoid the parasites poultry breed. “At first, I
felt uncomfortable. But when I saw how much fun it is for Omar and Eva, I thought
what’s the harm. The tree has nothing to do with anything religious.”

“So are you going to have Santa Claus bring presents?”

“Omar already told me that Santa Claus is made up. Reindeer are the size of horses,
he said. Nothing that size could fly. No. Of course not. We don’t have to fall prey
to the domino theory: that if you give way in one area, you’re doomed to give way
for everything.”

Caro feels oddly chastised. Had she been a parent, she could imagine herself under
the sway of this slippery-slope logic, as though a lollipop for a three-year-old would
lead to Twinkies and cotton candy for dinner. “I’m surprised Eva wanted a tree.”

“Before her mother died, she always had one. She thought it was a present for us.
It never occurred to her that as Jews we might not want one.”

3

When his parents were alive, Larry had come to New York every year for the week between
Christmas and New Year’s, a week when his office closed and the only heart procedures
were on those persons unfortunate enough to have a coronary event over the holidays,
when they’d be left in the care of the lowest-rung attendants.

This year, with Adam and Omar in New York, Larry feels a yen to again come East during
this week. As long as he is home on Christmas Day—exclaiming over presents he doesn’t
want, accepting grunted thank you’s from Betty’s boys for the gifts he will learn
he has given them—and for the New Year’s Eve dinner dance at their club, Betty will
not object to his being gone in between.

He decides to test the idea with Caro.

“Sounds great, Dad. Omar and I are both off from school, so we’ll have lots of free
time. Rachida probably has to work, but I’m sure she’s not the reason you’re coming.
And Adam, well, he doesn’t pay attention to the calendar.”

“How about your mother? I assume I’d have to come to the house to get Omar. Do you
think she’d mind?”

Caro hesitates. Her mother has always been the poster-child divorced parent; it never
occurred to Caro that seeing her father might still be hard for her. “Why don’t you
ask her yourself?”

“She might not welcome a phone call from me. It’s been a long time since we talked—since
Grandpa Max’s funeral, I think.”

At the funeral home, Larry still recalls, Myra had kissed him on the cheek. Her eyes
were damp as she told him how sorry she was about Max’s death. Three years later,
though, when his mother died, she’d not come to the service, sending, instead, a contribution
to the B’nai B’rith fund they designated in memoriam. Part of his despondency at his
mother’s funeral, he’d known, was because Myra was not there.

“Maybe I could shoot her an e-mail.”

“That’s a good idea.”

4

On the second Monday of December, Myra opens her e-mail to see [email protected]:

Dear Myra,

I hope it doesn’t shock you to hear from me this way, but I thought you might prefer
the screen to the phone. I’m thinking of coming East (by myself) for the week between
Christmas and New Year’s to see the kids and Omar. I’d like to take Omar to do some
things, which would probably mean picking him up or dropping him off at your house.
Okay with you?

I would think I’d won the lottery if you’d have dinner with me, but I won’t even ask
since I know you won’t. How about a line or two to hear how you are?

There seems no way to sign this damn thing without offending you, so I’ll just say
Ciao.

Larry

Myra stares at the words. She puts her sandwich back on the plate. It pleases her
that Larry has written his e-mail like a letter, not all in lowercase without punctuation,
the way the kids do, or with the self-consciously casual diction so many affect, an
excuse, she’s always thought, for sloppy writing, which translates in her mind to
sloppy thinking.

It surprises her that she does not feel adverse to the idea of seeing Larry, of having
his bearish form lumber up her front steps. For a moment, she imagines him seated
on her sofa, drinking a glass of red wine while Omar plays on the floor. They’d had
only nine years together as parents. Omar will be seven in February, the age Adam
was when they separated.

She glances at her watch. It is a little past two. Soon Eva will come for her tray.
In the week since Eva told Myra about her father lacing the house with kerosene-soaked
rags, she has not sat again in the patient chair.

Myra takes a bite of her sandwich and then gulps down half a glass of water.

Dear Larry,

I read in The Times that there are now websites divorced parents can use to coordinate
schedules and finances without having direct contact. I’m not sure if we’re lucky
or unlucky to have missed these developments.

Of course you may pick up Omar at my house. I’ll decline the dinner invitation for
both of our well-being, but hope you’ll stay for a glass of wine in my parlor.

All best,

Myra

PS Don’t be shocked when you see a Christmas tree. Eva brought one home and none of
us had the heart to disappoint Omar by refusing to let her put it up.

5

“A Christmas tree?” Larry says to Adam when he calls to discuss his trip. “Why would
Eva want a Christmas tree?”

Larry lies wrapped in a towel on a chaise longue on the terrace by his heated pool.
Betty is inside baking her umpteenth batch of Christmas cookies, this particular one
a cardiologist’s nightmare since they are made with bacon fat, a recipe her first
mother-in-law told her is traditional in Sweden. All morning, Betty fried bacon, plate
after plate, which she and the boys ate with eggs and then, for lunch, in sandwiches.
When he came inside for his own lunch of cottage cheese and salad, there was a measuring
cup filled with amber fat.

“Eva says her mother always had a Christmas tree.”

“I thought Eva considers herself a Jew.”

“Not considers, Dad. Is a Jew.”

“How can she claim she’s Jewish? She wouldn’t know if you ate matzoh at Passover or
Hanukkah.”

“It’s not a question of claim. It’s how she feels. She feels Jewish.”

“Fine, I feel Chinese. That doesn’t make me Chinese. She was never in a synagogue
before she came to New York. She told me she went to Catholic grade school. It’s absurd.”

“To you. She feels in her bones that she’s different, and she connects that difference
to her great-great-grandfather. She believes that her life will be righted once she
can live as a Jew.”

“I don’t live as a Jew. I haven’t been in a synagogue since I moved out of my parents’
home. But I am a Jew. It was the soup in which I was raised. We ate Jewish foods at
home. My grandparents spoke Yiddish. My father was an atheist, well, until the whole
Frank Lloyd Wright–God–nature nonsense set in, but that, too, for him was part of
Jewish culture—the red-diaper-baby Jewish intelligentsia strain. For Eva, it’s nothing
but fantasy.”

“Who gave you the mantle to decide what identities people can take? She’s as much
a Jew as you are. She’s not Christian, she’s not Yagua, she’s not Moroccan. She’s
a Jew. Perhaps more so, because she feels that being a Jew makes her different from
the people she grew up around—that it defines her. You’re a passive Jew. You don’t
have to do anything to be a Jew. She struggles day by day to create herself as a Jew.”

Adam senses that his father is thinking about what he is saying, that his father is
torn between his intellectual honesty and his adherence to a crusty cynicism, which
will inevitably win out in the exchange.

“You’re getting a little liberal-artsy for me. A little theoretical-shmetical. Let’s
keep it simple. Does she eat bagels and lox on Sundays? Does she like celery soda?
Does she cringe when she sees those bloodied dolls nailed to their plastic crosses?
That’s how you tell if she’s a Jew.”

6

Before beginning her writing project on the teleology of love, Myra had collected
ideas: tsimtsum, wabi-sabi, the uncarved block. More accurately, she had collected
distillations of ideas, since it is not in her nature to study an idea per se: its
history, the semantic debates, the fiefdom struggles over its control. That would
seem sterile to her, shallow in the way of careers based on the study of well-being
via statistical analyses of self-report checklists by researchers who have never sat
down with a human being to discuss the subject.

Now she thinks about wabi-sabi as she has come to understand it: the acceptance of
not only the inevitability of decay but of the beauty within the process of decay.
That from the moment we are born, a wall is painted, a cake baked, decay sets in,
and that this decay, if accepted, if part of the object’s organic conception, can
be more beautiful, more satisfying than an artificial idea of perfection. An electronic
gadget breaks and is done for, more expensive to repair than to replace. A stone wall
smooths, rounds, nourishes green moss in its crevices. A woman’s face can change from
a plump peach to a sculpted oval of planes and bones and wisdom lines.

It has taken Myra a long time to accept this notion of celebrating decay, in her home,
in the objects around her, in her garden, in her body. Now, though, when she looks
in the mirror, she does not feel at war with the gray, with the wrinkles. True, she
has been lucky—her body has remained lithe and limber—but she has let go of the idea
that life is an arc with a build up toward an apex and then a slow winding down. She
is no more accelerating or decelerating now at fifty-nine than she was at nineteen.
So it comes as a surprise that she feels nervous about seeing Larry—always trying
with his young wives and horses and cars to vanquish time. About seeing herself through
his eyes.

7

The phone rings on the bedside stand. It is three o’clock in the morning, the week
before Christmas. Adam has the receiver in his hand before he realizes that Rachida,
who came home after he went to bed, is asleep beside him.

“Rachida, Rachida, is that you?”

He recognizes the voice of Rachida’s sister, Esther. “It’s Adam. She’s right here.”

Rachida bolts up, grabbing the phone so violently that it smashes against his chin.
As Adam turns on the light, he sees the tears already streaming down her cheeks, her
face crumpling. From the tears, Adam knows it must be her father, Uri.

After she hangs up, he tries to put his arms around her, but she will not have it.
She lies on her side, her back to him, and heaves into the pillow. Adam goes into
the bathroom to look for a box of tissues. Not finding one, he tears off a wad of
toilet paper. Rachida bats it from his hand.