Tinderbox (3 page)

“Are you going to answer my question? Who is Eva?”

“This girl Ursula asked my mother to help find work in New York. My mother is thinking
about hiring her to be a housekeeper for when we come. If we like her, she could help
out with Omar after school.”

Rachida sits up. Her glossy black hair, the envy of her sister and mother with their
frizzy heads, settles back into place. Irritated by their constant playing with her
hair, she chopped it off herself when she was ten, refusing ever since to grow it
past her ears. Now she cuts both her and Omar’s hair by tracing the outlines of a
bowl on their heads.

“So, let’s see. My choice is, I have Omar watch DVDs while you cruise the Internet
looking up whatever bizarre piece of history you’re into that day or he gets taken
to the park after school by an Indian maid whose great-great-grandfather was a Jew
from Morocco?”

7

If Ursula’s version of Eva’s story foregrounded the internecine struggles between
the Limian maids and their San Isidro employers, Myra’s version is inflected through
her psychotherapist’s lens. Related to Caro the following Sunday over the pot of chai
tea that follows their dinner, it features a Jewish girl from the Amazon who needs
to get away from a troubling family situation.

“A family situation?” Caro asks. “What does that mean?”

“Darling, I talked with the girl for half an hour on the phone. We talked about her
work experience and the job description. Ursula said she thinks the mother died in
some kind of disaster, but I certainly wasn’t going to ask about it over the phone.”

“What’s her experience with kids?”

“She’s done lots of babysitting and worked in the children’s program of an Amazonian
lodge that caters to tourists. She loves kids. Alicia had her fill in when one of
her maids was out sick. She said Eva cleans like a demon and irons like a dream.”

“As if Adam or Rachida wear clothes that are ironed. Not to be a stickler for details,
but does she have references?”

Myra catches the waitress’s eye, makes a writing gesture on the palm of her hand.
It is hard for her to explain her attachment to Alicia and Ursula. Having met neither
of them until after she’d left her parents’ home and never having been to Peru, she
would not say that she is close with them. Nonetheless, they are the closest link
she has to her father, whose story—he’d traversed the years of the First World War
driving an ice truck while he studied bookkeeping at night, his sister Misha, unable
to learn English or convert her humiliated rage after she’d been jilted by her fiancé
into something productive, his ward—still makes her sad. After the war, her father
had accepted an offer from the ice manufacturer’s cousin, who assumed from his humorless
honesty and balding pate that he was a man twice his age, to become comptroller for
a kosher meat-processing plant in Baltimore. Misha had spent the allowance he gave
her on magazines and chocolates and trips to the movies, untroubled by leaving the
cleaning, shopping, and laundry for him to do on Sundays. When at forty-nine years
of age and over two hundred pounds, she dropped dead of a heart attack, Myra’s father
appeared so desiccated that the rabbi called in for the service thought he was Misha’s
father. Once he learned the truth, a lightbulb had gone off for the rabbi: a match
for his equally dour thirty-six-year-old spinster sister. Myra’s conception, she imagines,
was the result of the only intimate relations the two of them ever had, her Baltimore
childhood spent in an immaculately clean row house as barren of talk as it was of
dust or beauty, the frugality of which had yielded her rather significant inheritance.

“The first month will be a trial period. Alicia and Ursula are going to buy Eva a
ticket with an open return date. She’ll come in the middle of June, a few weeks before
Adam, Rachida, and Omar arrive. I’ll know within a week if she’s unsuitable, which
would leave me time to find someone else.”

For a moment, Caro thinks she detects a trace of anxiety on her mother’s face, but
by the time the waitress arrives with a bill that her mother whisks away from Caro’s
outstretched hand, her mother’s eyes and mouth are relaxed, so that it is only later,
looking back, that Caro can see what any preschool director would tell you: first
impressions are always right. About Eva, her mother hasn’t a clue.

8

As she walks home, it occurs to Caro that until she was seven, she believed they were
a plain-vanilla family, with a mom who picked up the children at school and escorted
them to ballet and to karate and to get their teeth cleaned, even if she was reading
all the time, and a dad who was a cardiologist who got home in time for dinner and
left the house on the days when he conducted teaching rounds before anyone else got
up, and four grandparents: her mother’s parents in Baltimore, whom they visited at
Thanksgiving and hardly saw otherwise, and her father’s parents, who lived nearby
and had a house in the Catskills where they stayed every Memorial Day and Labor Day.
Then, in the space of one year, her mother’s parents died, an event most remarkable
for the fact that these pursed-mouth people, who’d insisted that Myra, their only
child, wear the neighbor’s hand-me-down coats, had socked away quite a bit of money.

For reasons Caro cannot explain, since there would have been enough money before (perhaps
her mother needed it to be her own), the inheritance led to her mother returning to
school to become a psychologist. Three nights a week, she disappeared for her classes,
nights when it seemed that their father was always forgetting something and going
back to his office or the hospital—the super’s wife, who wore a hairnet and smelled
of talcum powder, willing to oblige for last-minute babysitting—until, several years
into it all, there was a night when voices were raised and suitcases packed and her
father moved in with the receptionist from his office.

During the six months her father lived with the receptionist (Sharon or Sheri or maybe
it was Shirley), Caro and Adam spent weekends at the receptionist’s apartment, weekends
during which their mother raced to finish her dissertation and Adam, then eight, refused
to take a shower (Sharon or Sheri or whatever her name was had no tub) or, to their
father’s great irritation, sleep without the television on. Doctorate completed, her
mother cashed in her inherited saving bonds and IBM stock to buy the then decrepit
brownstone. When they moved in a year later, after the crackled tiles in the bathrooms
had been acid-cleaned and the kitchen redone with the soapstone counters and her mother’s
office installed on the street level, the block housed a group home for the mentally
ill, a drug detox clinic, and two buildings rented out by the room. Now, twenty-two
years later, her mother’s neighbors are investment bankers and partners in law firms.

If her mother got her brownstone from her parents’ penny-pinching, Caro acquired her
own apartment as expiation from her father, Larry—which was exactly how she put it
when he hemmed and hawed—for ruining forever, she told him, her prospects for a healthy
relationship by cheating on her mother.

“You left at a critical time,” Caro had lectured her father, “the eve of the transition
from concrete to formal operations.” It was the summer after her Harvard graduation.
They were dining by the pool of her father’s Tucson casita, ten feet from the spot
where on Caro’s last visit he’d proudly shot a rattlesnake curled at the foot of an
enormous saguaro cactus.

“Don’t give me your mother’s psychoanalytic crap,” her father said, cutting too quickly
to the chase for Caro to clarify that this was Piaget, Developmental Psych 101, not
Freud. So she’d switched to dollars and cents, a language that he and his cardiology
partners spoke with a frightful fluency.

“Actually, Daddy, what I’m asking for is really an exchange. Do you remember how you
always promised you’d send me to medical school if I wanted to go? Well, I don’t.
What I want is”—she paused and looked him in the eye—“a two-bedroom apartment, paid
for in full, which, if I do what I’m planning to do, I’ll never be able to afford.”
A good deal, she continued, truly, and then pulled out the
pièce de résistance
, a Lotus spreadsheet, which proved what a bargain her proposition was if he took
into account the opportunity costs of medical school tuition.

She complimented the pork chops dished out by her father’s second soon-to-be ex-wife,
ignorant about anything not found in a women’s magazine but sufficiently cunning to
act as though she did not understand the transaction taking place.

9

The plan Myra makes with Ursula is that Eva will arrive on a Saturday in the middle
of June, two weeks before Adam and his family. Myra will meet Eva at the airport and
then have the weekend to get her oriented. On the first Thursday in June, however,
the phone rings minutes before Myra’s 8:45 patient.

“Myra, sweetheart,” Ursula says, “there’s been a tiny problem, nothing to worry about,
just something between Alicia and the maid whose boyfriend is the
paisano
of Eva. Alicia lost her patience and went, stupid woman, and changed Eva’s ticket
for tomorrow before I could even check with you. So, please, sweetheart, forgive me,
but she will be arriving tomorrow at four. I told Alicia, Tomorrow is Friday, Myra
will be working, and she said, Just have Eva take a bus to her house. Of course I
can’t let the poor thing take the bus, but I will give her some American dollars so
she can take a taxi to you.”

Throughout the morning, Myra finds her thoughts drifting to Eva: it does not seem
right to have the girl try to negotiate a taxi at Kennedy airport. For all the years
of her practice, however, Myra has done her best not to cancel her patients unless
absolutely necessary. It is part of her covenant to her patients. They are to hold
inside all of the tempestuous feelings the work stirs up between sessions; on her
end, she promises to do her best to be there at the appointed time.

It pains Myra to ask Caro, even though she knows it will really not be a hardship
for Caro, her reaction a carryover from her childhood when she’d hated asking anything
of her own mother (always, in Myra’s memory, on the floor on her hands and knees with
a rag scouting out crumbs Myra assumed from her mother’s pinched face Myra had created),
so that she’d struggled to button the backs of her dresses, to make her own sandwiches,
to not ask for new shoes until her feet hurt. Now, though, she can hear the soft,
accented voice of her former analyst, Dreis, chastising her:
And what is the favor? You are hiring the girl to help your son, you want her met
at the airport because you think this the kindest welcome, you don’t want to disturb
the work with your patients. This is your mother inside you. She could not tolerate
that you were a human child who made messes, and now you cannot tolerate that you
are human and do not have three hands and cannot be in two places at the same time …

At lunchtime, Myra calls Caro at work. “But it’s no problem,” Caro says. “We only
have twenty-six children who stay for the afternoon and there are three teachers plus
the assistant director. They’ll be happy to have me out of their hair.”

“Thank you, darling. You can take my car. I’ll leave the picture Ursula sent me of
Eva with the guys at the garage.”

10

Caro sleeps with the shades open so she can see the morning sky, now lightening with
streaks of dove and pearl.

With all the talk about her brother’s move these past few weeks, she has not asked
her mother about her project: something her mother calls the teleology of love. Knowing
that most people consider a philosophical project pretentious or a sign of someone
whose head is in the clouds, her mother does not discuss it unless asked directly.
In her mother’s case, though, neither could be further from the truth. She is deeply
practical: interested in ideas only to the extent that they touch on human dilemmas
of real import. And she is the antithesis of pretentious. Because she believes modesty
to be fundamentally false, a reaction formation, she once said, against the urge to
boast, she is not modest. Rather, she feels no need to hijack others to be her audience.

When her mother first told Caro about her project, Caro had to ask for a definition.
“Teleology,” her mother answered, “is the study of the purposes or goals in either
nature or history. You know that I don’t believe in such ideas: that we are part of
a deity-created design, that history is unfolding toward an end. I’m stealing the
word for my own purposes.”

“Which are?”

“To understand human desire.” Her mother smiled shyly. As a girl, she has told Caro,
her shoulders had hunched with chronic embarrassment. She was nearly thirty before
she stood sufficiently tall for it to be noted that she has the neck and carriage
of a Russian dancer, something she has not yet lost, as though her late blooming has
been compensated for by a delayed demise. Caro can understand entirely why her father
fell in love with her mother, and how devastated he must have been when she was willing
to throw herself on the rocks, body and soul, time and again, in her effort to have
a third child. Why he had to cheat so as not to feel enthralled or crushed.

“I don’t mean this in a grandiose, absolutist way. I’m not talking about universal
truths, just the commonalities in experience between people due to our shared biologies
and histories. I’ve reached the age when the end seems nearer than the beginning,
when reflection is a stronger impulse than fantasy. You’ll see, or perhaps you’ve
already seen”—she paused to check Caro’s face—“what one wants changes. I’m trying
to understand the evolution of that change. I’m using myself, not because I’m exemplary,
but rather because I’m the case I know best.”

While Caro was in high school and college, her mother had written half a dozen papers
on quirky subjects, such as secret-keepers, gossip, arrogance as an expression of
sadomasochism, papers that without fanfare gathered an audience. The teleology is
her mother’s first long project. The idea, her mother has told her, was inspired by
a conversation they once had over dinner at an outdoor café in Riverside Park. They’d
fallen into one of their familiar riffs, remarking on the dichotomies among the four
of them. Her father, a doer, a fixer of clogged hearts, screened doors, horse bits.
A fact junkie—a filing cabinet of information on diplomatic and military history,
pharmaceutical and surgical cardiac interventions, medical practice economics, the
care and breeding of horses. Adam, his opposite, a thinker and imaginer, a translator
of stories into images—and yet also a collector of arcane knowledge. Her mother, an
intellectual from the era before specialization and technology and career pigeonholing
trumped the ambition of a thinking person to be sufficiently broadly informed so as
to reflect on current affairs, history, the full spectrum of human experience.