A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (12 page)

And I said, “Mommy, I can’t make a fish, not a really
fishy
one.” And she told me to see it, to think it, to feel its movements in my hand. In my mind it glistened and flipped its adorable lavender tail through bubbling rainbows (I saw
Fantasia
four times), but on paper all I had were two big purple marks and two small scribbles where I wanted fins. She laid her big, square hand over mine lightly, like a magic cloak, and the crayons glided over the paper and the fish flipped its tail and even blew me a kiss from its hot-pink Betty Boop lips. And I was so happy that her hand could do what my mind could see.

By the end of June, though, she stopped trying to have me do the same for her. We just sat, and I’d bring in paintings from the year before, or even five years before, to give her something new to look at. And we looked hard, for hours, at the last painting she’d done on her own, not a sketch or an exercise, a finished piece called
Lot’s Wife.
The sky was grays and blues, beginning to storm, and in the foreground, in the barren landscape, was a shrouded figure. Or it could have been just the upright shroud itself, or a woman in a full-length muslin wrap. But the body was no longer alive; it had set into something dense and immobile. And far off to the right, bright and grim, were the little sticky flames of the destroyed city, nothing, not even rubble, around it.

“It’s so sad,” I complained to my mother.

“Is it?” She hardly talked anymore; she didn’t argue; she didn’t command. She never said, “Can I make a suggestion?” A few requests for nothing much, mostly silence.
She took a deep breath. “Look again. The sky is so full and there is so much happening.” She looked cross and disappointed in my perception until she closed her eyes and then she just looked tired.

My graduation was the next day and it went about the way I expected. I overslept. My father overslept. The aide didn’t wake us when she left. I didn’t even open my eyes until Kay called me from the pay phone at school. I told her I didn’t know if I could get there on time. I didn’t know if I wanted to. I asked my father, who shrugged. He was still half asleep on his couch.

“I don’t know if you want to go, Delia. I suppose you should. I could come if you like.”

My father was, and is, a very quiet man, but he wasn’t always like
that.
This past year she took the life right out of him. I have spent one whole year of my life with a dying woman and a ghost.

I went, in my boxer shorts and ratty T-shirt, and until I saw all the girls slipping their blue robes down over off-the-shoulder clouds of pink and white, I forgot that we were supposed to look nice. Kay flattened my hair with spit, stuck my mortarboard on my head, and elbowed me into our section (Barstow, Belfer). In our class picture there are five rows of dyed-to-match silk shoes and polished loafers and a few pairs of sneakers and my ten dirty toes. I didn’t win any prizes either, which I might have if I hadn’t been absent for fifty-seven days my senior year.

Kay’s parents, who are extremely normal, dropped me off on their way home to Kay’s graduation party. Mrs. 118
Belfer showed me the napkins with Kay’s name flowing across in deep blue script, and she reached into the bag on the front seat to show me the blue-and-white-striped plastic glasses and the white Chinet plates.

“Send our … Tell your father we’re thinking of you all,” Mrs. Belfer said. Kay and I had made sure our parents didn’t know each other, and even when my mother was okay, she was not the kind of person to bond with other mothers.

My father made room for me on the porch swing. He ran one finger over the back of my hand, and then he folded his arms around his chest.

“How’d it go?”

“Okay. Mr. Switzer says hi.” Mr. Switzer was my ninth-grade algebra teacher. He used to play chess with my father, when we had people over.

“That’s nice. You were a hell of a chess player a few years ago. Eight years ago.”

I didn’t even remember playing chess; my father hadn’t taken the set out for ages, and when he did, he didn’t ask me to play, he just polished the marble pieces and rubbed a chamois cloth over the board. My mother got him that set in Greece, on their honeymoon.

“Eight years ago I was a chess player?”

My father shut his eyes. “I taught you when you were five. Your mother thought I was crazy, but she was wrong. You were good, you got the structure immediately. We played for a few years, until you were in fourth grade.”

“What happened?” I saw him sitting across from me,
thinner, with more brown hair. We were on the living room floor, a little bowl of lemon drops between us. My mother was cooking chicken in the big red wok, and the chess pieces were gray-and-white soldiers. My queen was gray with one white stripe for her crown.

“Mommy got sick, the first time. You don’t remember?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You don’t have to remember, Delia. We don’t even have to talk about this now. Your mother says, your mother used to say, that I don’t say what needs to be said.”

He put his head back, and I did too. We looked up at the old hornet’s nest in the corner of the porch.

“Car accidents or no, she’s going to die. She is going to leave us to live this life. Even if I am blind drunk and you are dead in a ditch, she is still going.”

The swing creaked, and I watched our feet flip back and forth, long, skinny feet, like our hands.

“The aide’s leaving. Let’s go upstairs. It’ll be a treat for your mother, two for the price of one.”

“I’ll stay here.”

His fingers left five red marks on my arm, which bruises up at nothing.

“Please come.”

The swing rocked forward, free of us, and I followed him.

________

W
hen she died that night, I wrapped the painting of Lot’s wife in an old sheet and hid it in the closet, behind my winter boots. My father said it was mine. We sprinkled her ashes at the Devil’s Hopyard.

My father began tucking me in, for the first time in years. He did it for weeks. We still hadn’t really cleaned up, not ourselves, not the house. My father stepped over my CDs and cleared a space for himself on my bed. He said, “It’s a little late for bedtime stories, I guess.”

“Tell me about Mommy.”

“All right,” he said. “Ask me something. Ask me anything.”

“Anything?” I didn’t even know how many siblings my father had, and now I could ask him anything?

My father put the bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the floor and rubbed my feet. “Cast discretion to the winds, Delia.”

“Why did Mommy get cancer?”

“I have no idea. I’m sorry. Next?”

“Did Mommy mind your drinking?”

“Not very much. I don’t think I drank too much when she was well, do you?”

“I don’t remember. Next. Were you and Mommy virgins when you got married?”

My father laughed so hard he stamped his feet up and down and wiped his eyes.

“Christ on a crutch, no. Your mother had had a dozen lovers before me—I think a dozen. She may have rounded down to the nearest bearable number. I was a callow
youth, you know, I didn’t really appreciate that being last was much, much better than being first. And I had slept with two very patient girls when I was at Swarthmore. Slept with. Lain down with for a few afternoons. Sorry. Too much?”

“Was it great, with Mommy?” I said this into my pillow.

My father pushed the pillow away from my ears. “It was great. It was not always fireworks, but it was great, and when it was fireworks—”

“She rocked your world.”

My father patted my feet again. “That’s right. That’s a great expression. She rocked my world.”

I
still don’t know where to hang the picture. My father says no room in our house is right for it. We don’t want it to be in a museum. I unwrap it at night and prop it up next to my bed and fall asleep with my hand on the clean canvas edge, and I smell the oil and the wood frame, and I smell salt.

H
elp me.

I slid my hands up the legs of Jack’s shorts to stroke the top of his thigh, and he lost his grip on the paint roller. A hundred tiny drops flew through the air at me. Thoroughly speckled, squinting to keep the paint out of my eyes, I stroked higher under his boxers, right up the neat, furry juncture of his crotch.

“Jesus,” he said. “It’s not like I have any balance anyway.” Which is true. He has Parkinson’s, and no sensible group of people would have him painting their synagogue if it weren’t for the fact that he’s been painting houses for twenty-five years and is the synagogue president’s husband. I volunteered to help because I’m in love with Jack and because I like to paint. I lay down on the dropcloth and unbuttoned my shirt.

“Want to fool around?”

“Always,” he said. There has never been a sweeter, kinder man. “But not right now. I’m pretty tired already.”

“You rest. I’ll paint.”

I took off my shirt and bra and painted for Jack. I strolled up and down with the extra-long paint roller. When the cracks in the ceiling lost their brown, ropy menace, I took the regular roller and did the walls. I poured Jack tea from my thermos and I touched my nipples with the windowsill brush.

He sat up against the bima, sipping sweet milky tea and smiling. His face so often shows only a tender, masked expressiveness, I covet the tiny rips and leaks of affect in the corner of his mouth, in the middle of his forehead. His hand shook. He shakes. Mostly at rest. Mostly when he is making an effort to relax. And sometimes, after we’ve made love, which he does in a wonderfully unremarkable, athletic way, his whole right side trembles and his arm flutters wildly, as if we’ve set it free.

I told a friend about me and Jack painting the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, and this woman, who uses riding crops for fun with strangers and tells me fondly about her husband’s rubber fetish, got wide-eyed as a frightened child and said, “In shul? You made love in shul? You must have really wanted to shock God.” I said, “No, I didn’t want to shock God”—what would have shocked God? two more naked people, trying to wrestle time to a halt?—“it was just where we were.” And if someone had offered me the trade, I would have rolled myself in paint and done dripping off-white
cartwheels through the entire congregation for more time with Jack.

R
osh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are my favorite holidays. You don’t have to entertain anyone or feed anyone or buy things for anyone. You can combine skipping waves of kindly small talk with deep isolation, and no one is offended. I get a dozen invitations to eat roast chicken the night before, and a dozen more invitations to break the fast, including the one to Jack and Naomi’s house. I think her name was Nancy until she went to Jerusalem in eleventh grade and came back the way they did, lean and tan and religious and Naomi. Jack thinks she’s very smart. He went to Catholic school and dropped out of Fordham to run his father’s construction business. Mouthy Jewish girls who can talk through their tears and argue straight through yours, myopic girls who read for pleasure—for Jack, this is real intelligence. And Naomi Sapirstein Malone totes him around, her big converted prize, the map of Ireland on his face and blue eyes like Donegal Bay, nothing like the brown eyes of the other men, however nice their brown eyes are, not even like our occasional blue-eyed men, Vilna blue, the-Cossack-came-by eyes, my mother says.

M
y mother still couldn’t believe I’d even joined a synagogue. Two bar mitzvahs when I was thirteen set off an
aversion to Jewish boys that I have only overcome in the last ten years. And if I must go, why not go someplace nice, with proper stained glass and a hundred brass plaques and floral arrangements the size and weight of totem poles? There, you might be safe. There, you might be mistaken for people of position, people whom it would be a bad idea to harm. When my brother Louis had his third nervous breakdown and they peeled him out of his apartment and put him in a ward with double sets of locking doors and two-way mirrors, the doctors tried to tell me and my mother that his paranoia and his anxious loneliness and his general relentless misery were not uncommon in children of Holocaust survivors. My mother was not impressed and closed her eyes when Lou’s psychiatrist spoke.

We went out for tuna fish sandwiches and I tried to tell her again, as if it were only that she didn’t understand their zippy American medical jargon. I counted Lou’s symptoms on my fingers. I said that many young men and women whose families had survived the Holocaust had these very symptoms. I don’t know what I thought. That she would feel better? Worse?

“Well, yes, of course, they suffer. Those poor wretches,” she said, in her most Schönbrunn tones.

“Like us, Meme. Like us. Daddy in Buchenwald. Grandpa Hoffmann in Ebensee. Everyone fleeing for their lives, with nothing. The doctor meant us.”

My mother waved her hand and ate her sandwich.

“Please. We’re very lucky. We’re fine. Louis has your Uncle Morti’s nervous stomach, that’s all.”

Louis recovered from his nervous stomach with enough Haldol to fell an ox, and when he got obese and shaved only on Sundays and paced my mother’s halls day and night in backless bedroom slippers, this was Uncle Morti’s legacy as well.

How can you say those prayers when your heart’s not in them, Jack said. My heart is in them, I said. I don’t think belief is required. I put my hand out to adjust his yarmulke, to feel him. I never saw anything so sweetly ridiculous as his long pink ears anchoring that blue satin kippah to his head.

You could wear a really dashing fedora, I said. You have that sexy Gary Cooper hat. Wear that. God won’t mind. God, I said, would prefer it.

N
aomi’s break fast was just what it was supposed to be: platters of bagels, three different cream cheeses in nice crystal bowls, roasted vegetables, kugels, and interesting cold salads. There was enough food that one wouldn’t be ashamed in front of Jews, not so much that one would have to worry about the laughter of spying goyim.