The World Without You (17 page)

“What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to talk about you, Mom. Why in the world are you leaving Dad?”

“I told you already. If you didn’t understand it the first time, I don’t see how I can do any better now.” A giant elm tree gives them cover, though now, when a breeze comes through, it washes water onto them.

“Think about the practical things,” Clarissa says. “Is there going to be a big court case? Will you be hiring expensive lawyers?”

“Clarissa, Dad and I have decided to separate. Hiring lawyers is the farthest thing from our minds.”

“But it could come to that.”

“We’re not that way.”

“No one’s that way until they become that way.”

“What do we have to fight over? This house?”

“For one.”

“We’ll sell it and split the proceeds. I don’t need Dad’s money and he doesn’t need mine. I make a good salary. Dad did fine, too, when he was teaching, and now he’s collecting retirement.”

“Grandma will cut you out of the will.”

“If she does, so be it. I never planned to marry rich.”

“But you got used to it.”

“Inasmuch as anyone gets used to Gretchen. It’s like getting used to gravity. She’s just there.”

“But it’s a good kind of there. It gives you a cushion.”

“Maybe so, but mostly I just try to ignore it. And when I’m not ignoring it, I’m paying attention to it in such a way that I might as well be ignoring it.”

“How?”

“By not buying something I could buy anyway and probably
would
buy anyway were it not for the fact that I’m afraid I’d be buying it because I could come into a big inheritance someday.”

“What wouldn’t you buy?”

“A necklace, a nice coat, the strawberries for six dollars at Dean and Deluca when I could get the same strawberries elsewhere for half the price. Dad’s even worse. He always thought Grandma was spoiling you kids. ‘Why can’t she visit without bringing gifts?’ he would say, and I would say, ‘Because she likes to bring gifts, it makes her happy, indulge her, David.’ So he did for a while—at least he tried—but then her second husband died and she married again and she was living in New York, we were seeing her all the time, and she was still bringing gifts. I remember your childhood as one enduring battle between Dad and me over which of Grandma’s gifts we could keep. Her last husband owned a fleet of Jaguars and one time Grandma brought Leo a toy Jaguar. Dad hated that car. If his son was going to ride around in a toy car, it wasn’t going to be in a toy Jaguar.”

“And look at Dad’s wreck of a car now,” Clarissa says. “When is he going to get rid of it?” She’s staring at the car dripping rain in the driveway, bathed in the vestigial glow of the tennis court lights.

“I’ll tell you when he’s going to get rid of it. Never. Dad says he likes Volvos, so I say, ‘Fine, buy yourself a new Volvo,’ but he doesn’t want a new Volvo, he wants an old Volvo, preferably one that’s about to break down. It’s the same thing with his clothes. Nothing gets thrown out until it’s threadbare. So if you think we’re going to take each other to court, you don’t have a clue.” She starts to cry.

“Mom …”

“Do you think this is easy for me?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, it’s been dreadful.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“I told you,” she says, rising from her seat, and her voice is full of impatience. “Dad and I can’t talk to each other.”

“Of course you can. I saw you two last night.”

“Listen to me, Clarissa. Dad says he’s tired, but he’s not too tired to come home after midnight and refuse to tell me where he’s been. He started running after Leo died, and do you know how many miles he runs a week? I’m busy, too—I’m the one who still works—but I come home at night, I’m available to him.”

“Have you told him this?”

“Come on, Clarissa. Even when he’s there, he’s not there. He spends his time practicing his librettos. He sings more than he speaks. Most of the time when I hear his voice it’s in Italian.”

Clarissa’s quiet now. She looks down at the racquets, which lie at her feet, like two giant fly swatters.

“If you want to blame me, I’m fine with that, but I have just one request. I want these next couple of days to be normal.”

“Oh, Mom. How in the world can they possibly be normal?”

“I want us to have the memorial exactly as we’ve been planning to have it. I want us to be sad in exactly the way we were going to be sad. And then, when it’s all over, if you want to hate me—”

“Mom, I don’t hate you.”

“As long as you don’t hate me for the next couple of days, that’s all I care about. The memorial—this whole holiday—is for Leo.

“Okay,” Clarissa says, but then she’s off, back to the house, her sneakers hitting the wet pavement. She passes her father’s Volvo, the beige paint peeling, the chassis looking as if it’s about to cave in on itself. She walks under the bird feeder and beyond the geraniums that line the front path, and just before she moves out of sight, she looks back at her mother still sitting in her chair beneath the garage overhang, the bucket of tennis balls at her feet. She steps quietly into the house, and when she reaches the landing she removes her shoes so as not to track mud across the floor.

When she gets upstairs, she finds Lily and Noelle standing in the hallway.

“How’s Mom?” Noelle asks.

“Bullheaded as ever. She wants us to act as if everything’s normal.”

“Normal?” Noelle says.

“What are you going to do?” says Lily.

“I guess I’ll have to try,” Clarissa says. “What about you?”

“I don’t know.”

Down the hall the door has opened; one of the boys is stumbling toward them, wrapped in a sheet.

“Dov, honey,” Noelle says. “Go back to bed.”

“Is it true?” he says. “Do Grandma and Grandpa not love each other anymore?”

“Who told you that?”

“Akiva,” Dov says.

“Oh, honey.”

“Well, is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Lily bends over to pick Dov up.

“What do you think?” Dov asks her. “Have Grandma and Grandpa stopped loving each other?”

“It’s complicated,” Lily says.

But Dov is only five, and that answer itself is too complicated for him.

Now Lily has handed him to Noelle, who carries him, wrapped like a burrito in his sheet, back to the bedroom where his brothers are sleeping.

“‘It’s complicated,’” Lily says to Clarissa. “Isn’t that something from Facebook.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Clarissa says. “I’m not on Facebook.”

“The last of her kind,” Lily says darkly.

Now another of Noelle’s boys appears in the hallway, and another, and another. They move in slow procession down the hall.

“My tooth fell out!” Yoni says. “I lost a tooth!” He’s walking through the corridor toward Clarissa and Lily.

“Yoni lost a tooth!” Akiva says. He has emerged from the bedroom in his blue briefs, a quilt wrapped around him like an enormous mane.

“The tooth fairy is coming!” Yoni says.

“Thank God you’re in America,” Akiva says. “If you were in Israel, the tooth fairy would give you shekels, but you’re in America, thank God, so you’ll get dollars.”

7

It’s six now and the boys are back in bed; it’s early afternoon Israel time. For the moment, Noelle feels as if she’s in a bubble, lying awake next to Amram while the children are asleep. She presses her ear to the wall to see if her sisters are awake; it’s been a fitful night for them too.

She rolls over onto her stomach and back again. She wonders what she looks like from up on the ceiling, lying sleepless in her childhood bed. This is where she spent summer after summer. And Christmas vacation and spring break. Amram, who has risen, is in a T-shirt and cutoff jeans, his thighs thick as ham hocks, his prayer fringes sticking out from under his shirt, twisted as always around his belt loops. His yarmulke, blown by the breeze coming through the open window, flips over itself so that it’s barely hanging from a few tendrils of hair; it droops to the side like a single earmuff.

He’s standing now with his ear to the wall. “Your brother-in-law’s awake.” He says these words with such derision Noelle is forced to remind him that Nathaniel is his brother-in-law, too.

“Ah, yes,” Amram says. “The fucking genius. He’s in lecture mode again.”

“Come on, Amram. When has Nathaniel ever lectured you?”

“His very existence is one big lecture.”

“He’s one of the most unassuming people I know.”

But it’s his very unassuming nature that assails Amram. Amram has a history of hating the smart kids, starting in high school and continuing into college, at SUNY Oswego, where only by studying hard did he pull Bs. Even at yeshiva, he resented the students who picked up the Talmud’s logic faster than he could, and he would compensate for his weaker analytic skills with more strenuous religious devotion. For Amram, there’s nothing worse than an academic, even an academic like Nathaniel, who rarely talks about his work. If anything, that makes Nathaniel more detestable. Amram sees Nathaniel’s regular-guy manner as a form of pretension; it’s his way of mocking him. “If everyone was telling you you’d win the Nobel Prize, would
you
be modest?”

“I hope I would.” But the truth is, Noelle doesn’t know. It’s beyond her ability to imagine winning the Nobel Prize. Even contemplating it is ridiculous.

“Clarissa acts like his PR rep.”

“She’s proud of him, Amram. I’d be proud of you, too, if you won a prize. I’m already proud of you.”

“For what?”

“Just for being who you are.” She rests her hand on Amram’s shoulder, and for a second he allows her to leave it there, but then he brushes it off.

“Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Why do there have to be sides?” But then she adds, because it’s true, that she’s on his side, of course. She loves him: he’s her husband.

He goes out onto the balcony, where, with his back to her, he smokes a cigarette. She wishes he wouldn’t smoke, especially not at her parents’ house. She herself has resolved not to smoke this holiday; she doesn’t want her mother to judge her. Or to judge Amram either. She will criticize Amram, but if anyone else criticizes him, especially someone in her family, she’ll rush to his defense.

Back in their bedroom, Amram gets down on the floor and does fifty pushups and fifty sit-ups, then follows those with one-handed pushups, ten with his left hand, ten with his right, the way he was taught in the Israeli army. An
oleh
at twenty-eight, he could have served in the army for only a few months, but he wasn’t interested in cutting short his duties; if anything, he’d have liked to do the full three-year stint required of Israeli eighteen-year-olds. But Noelle persuaded him to serve only a year and a half. He’s a man of routine. He does the same number of pushups and sit-ups every morning, takes the same route to synagogue each Shabbat, and Noelle always packs him the same lunch: a turkey sandwich on rye, two pickles—one sour, one half-sour—a bag of corn chips, a piece of marble cake, an Orangina.

“HHHelp me stretch.” Amram lies on his back, his knees bent, his soles planted firmly on the floor. He ran twelve miles the other day, and he’s still suffering the consequences. He’s a weekend warrior, only those weekends have been coming less and less often. He won’t exercise for weeks, and then, inspired one day to go for a jog, he figures that, since he’s at it already, he might as well run ten, fifteen miles. Then he’ll spend the next week recuperating. Now he’s enlisted Noelle in his recovery: the lady he saws in half. Except she worries she’ll saw
him
in half, or, at the very least, that she’ll injure him doing what he tells her to do. Right now, she’s pushing so hard against his thigh it’s as if she’s trying to budge a stalled car. “Amram, I’m no good at this.”

“Actually, you’re quite good. I can feel the muscles being stretched.”

“Why don’t you hire yourself a personal trainer?”

“Because it would be expensive to fly him here, don’t you think? Other leg,” he says, grabbing hold of his left knee and pushing it toward the right one. “Okay,” he says, “that’s enough.”

He checks his stocks on the computer. His portfolio is small, but he follows it closely. He can talk at length about the companies he has invested in, and he keeps his holdings for the long term—he’s resistant to admitting a mistake—with the kind of determination that some might find pigheaded but that Noelle sees as evidence of more general loyalty. He’s always invoking Warren Buffett, whose newsletter he subscribes to. He’s a very poor man’s Warren Buffett, but this makes him no less dedicated to his principles.

Noelle flips through the
Berkshire Eagle
, which someone has left up in their room. She’s checking out the TV listings. “Look what’s playing tonight. Another one of those Entebbe movies.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Amram says. “They turn our heroism into entertainment while they rebuke us at the UN.”

Noelle doesn’t disagree. But she’d rather not agitate him now. Already, he seems riled up. “Do you want to watch it?”

Amram shrugs. It’s been twenty-nine years since Entebbe. It’s one of Noelle’s early memories, America’s bicentennial, up in Lenox for July Fourth, she and her sisters eating roast beef sandwiches while in the background the TV played. She recalls the footage of the boats tacking up the Hudson, then the news reports breaking in, her parents cheering at the announcement that Israeli commandos had stormed the airport and saved the hostages. A hopeless raid in a hostile country, Idi Amin providing haven for the PLO. Noelle can’t explain it, but she felt pride watching TV that day, as if she were Israeli and this was already her homeland, the instinctive sense of belonging in a country she didn’t even know. In the years that followed, when those TV movies kept being played, she would stay up past her bedtime to watch, in defiance of her parents’ orders. She can still see the flight taking off, the camera scanning the rows of seats, knowing there are hijackers in the cabin, but who they are she can only guess. Then the hijackers commandeer the plane and hold guns to everyone’s heads and they’re screaming things in a language she doesn’t understand. Even now, when she wants to irk her mother, she’ll say, “I’m in Israel because of you, Mom. I saw you cheering that day in front of the TV, and I got inspired.”