Kaaterskill Falls (30 page)

“Look,” he tells her, “it’s something I disagree with; it’s something I wouldn’t do.” He can’t call it wrong. The word is too difficult, too divisive. But he is troubled that he hasn’t somehow prevented her from taking this action, from expanding her business in this way. This kind of entrepreneurship, increasingly assertive, offends his pure sense of how to act in the community, his sense of the order of things. He has lived in this particular hierarchy all his life, moved within it as through water, slowly, but without a feeling of constraint. Neighbors, teachers, rabbinic authorities, rippling around him in smooth concentric circles. “I just worry about it, this business of yours,” he tells her.

“But do you want me to succeed?” she asks him.

He hesitates. “Yes,” he says.

They lie on the bed with their differences between them, the seam exposed where they are joined together.

T
HERE
are long tables set out in Eva and Maja’s garden. Platters of lox and whitefish garnished with sliced lemon, capers, olives, sweet purple onions. There are small slices of rye bread fanned out on plates, bagels, onion rolls, miniature Danish. Trays arranged with cookies from the city. Nothing ordinary. Only small and delicate cookies. Madeleines, ladyfingers stuck together with raspberry jam and dipped in chocolate, cookies like flowers and cookies like leaves, cookies dusted with crushed walnuts. There is punch and lemonade in Eva’s heavy cut-crystal bowls. Elizabeth watches the cookies disappear, the punch ladled out floating with sherbet, the children swarming the dessert table. In past summers Eva and Maja prepared everything themselves for Renée’s birthday. They had their husbands bring up some of the food from the city, but they did most of the
baking. This year, however, Eva has been tired. She’s had dizzy spells and has been seeing doctors in the city. She and Maja have not told Elizabeth what the problem is.

“Elizabeth!” Beatrix calls out from across the lawn. “We never see you. You’re always minding the store.”

“You can come and see me there,” Elizabeth says, and she smiles, because Cecil is standing with his arm around Beatrix’s shoulders, just as he had a year ago when they were newlyweds. He is uxorious, Elizabeth thinks. Terribly proud, exceedingly in love with his mathematician wife.

“But what about our badminton?” Beatrix asks her.

“I thought you’d given up playing badminton with me,” says Elizabeth.

“Listen to her,” Beatrix says to Cecil. “Listen to this arrogance.”

“When I’m over this flu, I’ll come play again,” Elizabeth promises.

“You said that last week,” Beatrix says.

“It’s been a rather long flu,” Elizabeth admits. “But come see me at the store.”

“And who is minding the children while you’re there?” Beatrix asks.

“I’m open while they’re in camp, and on Thursday afternoons Chani watches them for me.”

“Oh, Chani. How very clever of you to have a teenager,” says Beatrix.

“Chani’s my big girl,” Elizabeth murmurs, looking over to where Chani sits on the grass with a bowl of ice cream.

“Well, I don’t know how you do it all,” Beatrix says, throwing her long rough black hair over her shoulder. And Elizabeth realizes with a rush of pleasure that Beatrix is not teasing her. She is really speaking in admiration.

“I hear that you’re going to start a franchise, you’ve been so successful,” Andras says to Elizabeth as he comes over with Nina.

“Oh, no.” Elizabeth laughs. “No franchises yet.”

“I have to admit,” Andras says, “when Isaac called me last winter I said it wouldn’t work out.”

“Oh—I didn’t know Isaac called you,” Elizabeth says, startled.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. You have every right to be proud.” “But I don’t feel that way,” Elizabeth confesses to him. “I’m too busy.”

“And what is it like having a business?” Nina asks.

“It’s all come about so strangely,” Elizabeth says. “So many people coming up because of the Rav’s illness. Unfortunately this isn’t an ordinary summer. And the work is different from what I expected. It isn’t more difficult, but it’s more uncertain. I thought I would feel somehow more”—she pauses to think of the word—“triumphant. But I’m too busy. Too tired! I thought success would be sweeter, somehow.”

“Well, success is an acquired taste,” says Andras. “But here we are already in July. You should be planning for next year.”

“I have records of all my sales, and I was going to study them to plan for next summer, but this year is so unusual. Everyone is here.”

“This summer doesn’t have to be unusual,” says Andras. “You should be compiling a customer list with phone numbers in the city. Then over the winter you can work out orders for next year. You can give discounts for ordering ahead.”

“How much of a discount would you give?” Elizabeth asks him.

“Talking shop at the party,” Nina admonishes them as she goes to greet the Sobels. But Andras is already considering the question.

They talk for a long time, Elizabeth and Andras. They discuss Elizabeth’s profits and expenses; they talk of the possibilities for next summer. And Elizabeth forgets her cold. Her voice is full of energy. Somehow it returns to her—the sense that this is her project, that she has created something of her own, even within the tight weave of associations in Kaaterskill—the family, the Kehilla, the neighborhood. She has knit from this mesh something entirely new.

The long cool evening settles over the party. The guests drift home. The children quiet down. Renée is opening her presents on the grass, Nina trying to keep the cards with the gifts. Elizabeth walks home with Isaac and the girls. She steps lightly, looks everywhere. She watches the maple leaves shifting in the sky. After speaking to Andras, her mind is filled with plans and new ideas. She is bright with anticipation.

Then, as they are walking back to their bungalow, they meet the
Steins, their Kirshner neighbors in the city. “Good evening,” Isaac calls out to them.

“Hello, hello,” they answer. “Where were you? Estie was looking for someone to play with. You were all away.”

“We were at Eva and Maja’s party,” Elizabeth says. Lightly, recklessly, she adds, “I catered it.”

They stare at her, shocked to hear her say this.

Then Elizabeth stands there with Isaac and the children and she wishes she could take back her words. Her cheeks burn. She should have kept quiet. But her confidence spilled over, her joy in her accomplishment. The words escaped her at the wrong time to the wrong people. They belonged to a different conversation.

“I didn’t know you were a caterer too,” says Leah Stein.

And Elizabeth can’t speak. She feels the reproach in her neighbor’s words. The sarcasm and the disapproval. She feels it just as if a bee had stung her careless hand. First the soft body of the bee, and then the surprising flicker, and then the pain.

E
ARLY
the next day as the new week begins, Elizabeth’s head aches, and she buries her face in the pillow when Isaac gets up to leave. With difficulty Elizabeth struggles out of bed and packs five lunches for the children to eat at camp. She stands at the counter and spreads strawberry jam and peanut butter on five slices of bread. As always she spreads the jam first, and then the peanut butter directly on top. She got into the habit years ago in order to prevent the children from just licking off the jam. Into five brown bags goes each finished sandwich, along with an apple, a can of juice, a bag of pretzels, and two oatmeal cookies. She starts closing up the peanut butter and sways back dizzily. She will have to put up a note at the store. She has to go to the doctor.

After the older girls set out on their bikes, and after Nina drives up and takes the little girls to camp along with Alex, Elizabeth hurries across the street, where Beatrix is working, pacing on the porch, back and forth, back and forth, thinking about her mathematics.

“Beatrix,” Elizabeth says, “I’ve got to get some antibiotics. Do you think I could borrow the car?”

“What, the Minx?” Beatrix asks, looking over at the tiny cream-colored Hillman Minx that she and Cecil drive. “Do you know how?”

“Oh, yes,” Elizabeth says. “I learned on a manual. I just have to get to our doctor in Kendall Falls.”

“Right,” Beatrix says, and she sticks her head inside the screen door. “Cecil? Throw me the keys.”

D
R
. P
ETERSON
, short, heavy, and sandy haired, has an office in one half of a long ranch house set back from the road. Elizabeth always goes to her when the girls are ill, and once she came when she sprained her ankle. She’d returned home with a brochure about sprains, and the children had enjoyed learning what color her ankle was going to turn next.

“Well,” Dr. Peterson says, after she has examined Elizabeth, “you certainly have a sinus infection, and we can give you something for that, but all this seems to have gone on for quite a while along with your other symptoms—exhaustion, indigestion, queasiness. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I hope not,” Elizabeth says. She and Dr. Peterson have always been frank with each other.

“Well …” says Dr. Peterson.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Elizabeth says.

“All right,” Dr. Peterson says. “Well, we’ll see. Let’s give you a quick mono test as well.”

Elizabeth drives back to Kaaterskill and hurries to the store. She takes her antibiotics and feels out of kilter. A bit numb. People come and go, and she talks to them from deep within her head cold. Everyone seems very far away.

That night Elizabeth and the girls call Isaac in the city. As always he talks to each of them. “We made tambourines,” Brocha tells him. “Brown. I used all the colors, and so it was brown, and there was glitter on top, and then we put on bells.”

“I didn’t finish.” Sorah tries to grab the phone. “Mommy, I didn’t finish my turn.”

“You can have a turn after Brocha,” Elizabeth says.

“How come she gets two turns?” Chani asks.

“She’s just going to finish her turn because she got interrupted,” says Elizabeth wearily.

“I got interrupted too,” says Ruchel. “And I forgot to say something. Mommy, I really need the phone. Mommy, I
really—”

“Stop it!” Elizabeth tells all of them, and finally she takes the phone away. “I got the antibiotics,” she says to Isaac. “Ten days … Yes, a sinus infection.”

She has a hard time getting the children to bed. At nine it’s still light outside, and they want to go outside and play, but finally, at ten-thirty, they are all asleep. Chani’s book has slipped down from her bed to the floor. Brocha has stopped calling for a cup of water, and a cup of water with ice, and a toy for her bed—a soft toy—and a blanket for Three Bears, and she lies limp on top of the covers in her nightgown, with her arms around Three Bears’ blanket.

At last the house is perfectly quiet. Elizabeth takes a deep breath. Then she steals into the living room and calls Isaac back.

“What? What is it?” he asks, startled from sleep.

“It’s all right.” She has to whisper in the tiny house. “The doctor gave me a pregnancy test—to rule it out.”

He doesn’t say anything at first. Then he says, “But that can’t be.”

“I know, but—it’s true. In March.”

They sit there on the phone, he in the city, and she in Kaaterskill, and they don’t speak. Elizabeth tries to steady her voice. “I don’t understand why, now suddenly—”

“But this is … a … wonderful thing,” Isaac says slowly.

“It’s just a shock,” she says.

“It’s a surprise.”

“I’m not used to it yet.”

“I know—but, Elizabeth, it’s no tragedy, it’s a wonderful thing.”

“But I don’t know how—I don’t know how I can start again—because I thought we were—it’s in the middle of everything. And what about next summer? The store.”

“But we could get you some help with the—to watch—”

“Isaac,” she whispers. “It’s awful.”

“It’s not awful,” he says sharply.

“I meant that suddenly it’s happened now. I can’t believe it. And where are we going to find the space? And the money is—”

“But wait, think,” he tells her. His voice is fuzzy and exhausted, but somehow close, as if his lips were brushing her ear. “It’s a miraculous thing, because, because what could be more important than having a child? What work could be more important? A child is everything. The future. The beginning of everything.”

Yes, she thinks, but I have five already. I have invested in the future already.

“Elizabeth? We’ll find a way.”

“I haven’t told them.”

“Of course not. Who knows?” he tries to joke. He is thinking that it could be a boy.

“It won’t be,” she says miserably, “I know it won’t.”

“You need to sleep,” he says.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep.”

“But you have to try,” he says. Then he admits, “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep either.”

Elizabeth puts down the phone gently, and she walks out onto the porch. She shivers in the cold night air, but she stands for a long time looking at the towering trees, and the black sky. And she tells herself that even though there isn’t enough money; even though she and Isaac are stretched to the point that they haven’t any more energy, or attention, or patience, left to give, they will stretch a little more, and there will be joy in the giving. She will not be disappointed; she will not allow herself to be afraid.

I
RA RUBIN
has shot up this summer. When he steps inside the bookmobile, his head grazes the roof. Instantly—as soon as he comes in—he sees Renée sitting at the drop-leaf checkout table, but he tries not to stare at her. He browses among the books instead.

During the winter, when he was thinking about Renée, it occurred to Ira that she would probably look down on the paperbacks he reads—even the good science fiction. He decided then that when he saw her again in the summer he would take out better books, impressive books—the old ones Mrs. Schermerhorn displays as classics. This summer he has already borrowed
War and Peace
and
David Copperfield.
Valiantly at home he is struggling through
The Red and the Black.
He’s even hammering away at
Favorite Works of the Greek Philosophers.
Somehow it’s never occurred to Ira to return the books without reading them. Doggedly he keeps at it—his secret travail, his chivalric service.