The World Without You (22 page)

“Did you doubt I would?”

She shrugs.

“One missing husband down, another missing husband to go?”

“So Mom told you.”

He nods.

A nail file sits on her mother’s nightstand. Beside it is a bottle of No-Poo. It’s shampoo without shampoo, from what Noelle understands, the idea being that shampoo leaches out your hair’s essential nutrients, though the one time she tried it, she found that in addition to leaching out essential nutrients shampoo also leached out dirt.

“Are you worried?” her father asks.

“I’m always worried about Amram.” But now, she admits, she’s worried even more. She can hear the piano being played downstairs. “What are you reading, Dad?”

He holds the book up to her. “Civil War biography.”

She didn’t know he was interested in the Civil War. Or in biographies, either, for that matter. She’s standing across the room from him, as if waiting to be invited further inside.

“Mom’s always saying that women read fiction and men read biographies of Civil War heroes.”

“Yet all those years you taught your students to read great literature.”

“You’re right.”
Great Expectations. The Great Gatsby.
Great books with the word
great
in them. He should have named the course that. And not a Civil War general in the bunch. Or a president, either. Again he holds up the book for her to see. It’s about Ulysses S. Grant. “Mom got it for me for Father’s Day.”

“Since when does Mom get you gifts for Father’s Day?”

Since forever, he admits. When the children were small, she used to get him Father’s Day presents on their behalf and he pretended they had come from them. Over time, it became a habit.

She looks up at him, hesitates.

“What?”

“I didn’t get you a Father’s Day gift, Daddy. Not even a card.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Clarissa and Lily didn’t get me anything, either. Everyone has other things on their mind.”

And it occurs to Noelle that Father’s Day was only three weeks ago. “Wait a second, Dad. Mom got you a gift just last month?”

“You’re saying that’s strange?”

“Don’t you think?” She’s looking out the window, where, below her, the bird feeder sways in the porch light.

“Whatever’s happening between Mom and me, it’s not the book’s fault.”

She looks up at him. For an instant, she thinks she sees tears in his eyes.

“And I’m learning something. There’s value in that.”

“You always liked to learn things, didn’t you, Dad?”

“I still do.”

The closet door is open across from him, the mirrors lined up so she can see her reflection, a row of them, one after the other like a chain of dolls.

“How about you?” he says. “Do you like to learn things?”

“Sure,” she says. When she first came to Israel, she didn’t even know the Hebrew alphabet; twelve years later, she’s fluent. And the prayer liturgy, the kosher dietary laws, the dos and don’ts of Sabbath observance: they were all foreign to her once and now she’s mastered them. Still, the details can elude her—she often relies on Amram to remind her what’s what—and though she can sit for longer than she could as a girl, she prefers to watch a movie or talk to a friend than to read. The Jews, she thinks, are the People of the Book, but in this regard, at least, she’s not one of them. “Do you miss teaching?”

“Sometimes,” he says. “Mostly I miss my students. The smart ones, at least, and the majority of them were smart. Occasionally I’d get a student who wasn’t really interested in literature, and by the end of the semester something clicked.”

“And you ended up changing their lives?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as that. But, sure, you do your best to make a small impact.” The truth is, there are only two things he doesn’t miss about teaching. Grading is one. If he could have taught without having to grade exams, he’d have been happy to do it for half the salary. The second thing is the parents. Though that’s really the first thing. The phone calls, the angling for good grades, all that anxiety about college. It was private school and it was Manhattan, so it came with the territory. Still, if it hadn’t been for the parents, he suspects he’d still be teaching now.

“I wouldn’t work if I didn’t have to,” Noelle says. “I don’t know a lot of people who would.”

“What would you do instead?”

“I’d raise my boys.”

“And once they were raised?”

“I’d find something.”

“Wouldn’t you be bored?”

“Even if I was, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Given the choice, I’d rather be bored than busy. She looks up at the photo across the room, the one of Leo on top of Clarissa. “It’s funny, Amram’s not a teacher, but sometimes I think he was born to be one. He certainly knows how to hold forth.”

“And that bothers you?”

“Sometimes.” Though it can be reassuring in a way. It’s nice to be with someone who seems to know the answers, even if you resent being told what they are. “How did you end up becoming a teacher in the first place?” And she realizes, asking this, how little children know about their parents, how few questions they ask.

“Originally I was getting my PhD, but I never quite finished.” He’d gone to Columbia for graduate school, only a few blocks from where the children were born. He’s never been able to escape that neighborhood. He completed his coursework and took his comprehensives, but when it came time to write his dissertation he got stuck. It wasn’t writer’s block, exactly; it was more like inspiration block. He had a crisis of the spirit. He saw an advertisement for a high school teaching job. It was a replacement position for the year; an English teacher had gone on maternity leave. She gave birth, presumably, but she never came back, and one year became five years became forty. He fell into what he ended up doing, which, he suspects, is what happens to most people. At this point, he can’t believe he was ever going to be a professor. He’s always saying that his high school students were better, smarter, and more interesting than the students he would have taught at college. They were better, smarter, and more interesting, he often thinks, than he is himself.

Noelle steps tentatively toward him, as if she’s waiting for him to offer her a seat, but there are no seats in the room, just the bed, with a clearing below where his feet extend. But it makes her uncomfortable, a grown woman sitting next to her father on his bed, so she simply stands across from him.

She hears a car move past the house, the sound of it reverberating, then drifting off. “I’m sorry about last night.”

“What about it?”

“The food you and Mom made.”

With a toss of his hand, he waves her off.

“I should have been more flexible.”

“At least we were all there. It’s what Mom wanted. To have the whole family together again.”

“And you didn’t?”

“Under the circumstances, I don’t know.” He’s flipping through the book, and she recalls her parents, years ago, rebuking her for breaking the spines of her textbooks, for leaving them face down on the desk and floor.

“I brought you some ice cream,” she says. “Butter pecan. Your favorite.”

“Darling.”

“But it’s all melted now. You’ll have to drink it.” She looks past him, at the photo of her on her mother’s dresser. “Amram was fired,” she says. “He lost his job.”

“I’m sorry.”

She is, too. She hears water running down the hall. Someone is getting ready to take a bath.

“Mom and I can help if you need money.”

She always needs money. That’s the given. But no, she tells him, she doesn’t want his help. It’s not that she’s above asking for assistance. She has received money from her grandmother, certainly. But Gretchen is at a further remove, whereas to ask money from her parents would be to admit failure, and Amram, certainly, wouldn’t countenance it. Still, she’s grateful for the offer, happy to know that if it comes down to it she won’t end up on the street.

Her father closes his eyes. His book is lying open on the bed, and she removes a tissue from the tissue box and places it as a bookmark between the pages. Staring up at her is a picture of Ulysses S. Grant, and for an instant she’s back in high school, asked to recite the names of the presidents, but she can’t do it, her mind’s a sieve. Another humiliation revisits her, her math teacher, Ms. Rinehart, returning the exams in reverse order of the scores, and there she was, sitting in the back of the classroom, her head lowered, her red hair tenting her face, as exam after exam was returned, each name lowering her score even further. How easy it is for her to remember such things. How quickly she turns on herself. “Do you want to rest?” she says. “I can turn out the lights.”

He shakes his head. “I got all these supplies form the hardware store. Come,” he says. “Let’s start with the bathroom.”

She follows him inside, where the mirror above the sink is halfway off its hinge. He takes a screwdriver and removes it completely and examines the back for missing screws. She thinks she hears a car coming up the driveway, but when she goes to the window she sees it’s nothing, just some engine across the hedge, probably the neighbor’s lawn mower.

Back in the bathroom, she finds her father leaning over the tub.

“False alarm?” he says.

She nods.

For several seconds there’s silence.

“Thank you, Daddy.”

“For what?”

“Thank you for not saying that Amram will be back soon.”

He gives her a sorrowful look. “Count on me to be the voice of pessimism?”

“Not the voice of pessimism. Just the voice that understands there are things you can’t know.”

The mirror is leaning against the base of the sink, and she moves it to the wall to steady it. Then she approaches her father, who’s bent over the tub, and gets down on her knees to help him.

8

It’s noon in California when Thisbe reaches Wyeth, but he sounds as if he’s still asleep. Calder is napping in the basement. Thisbe sits quietly beside him in the dark listening to his breath draw out.

“Did I wake you?”

Wyeth doesn’t answer.

“It’s noon, Wyeth. Time for lunch.”

“I was up earlier, but I fell back asleep. It’s good you called. I’m supposed to be studying for both of us.”

Yet he’s in bed at noon: a laggard on the job.

“Let me guess. You ordered in pizza.” Wyeth is the cook in their relationship, but he finds it depressing to cook for himself, so when no one else is around he reverts to a college-kid existence: the half-emptied Styrofoam boxes, the takeout menus fanned across the floor.

“Chicago-style pizza,” Wyeth says. “Deep dish.” As if to reassure her he hasn’t completely gone to pot.

“In my honor?” Coming east, Thisbe and Calder had a stopover at O’Hare and they spent a few hours wandering around Chicago. Now Wyeth is eating food that tracks where they’ve been. Proof that he’s been thinking about her. Though she worries she hasn’t been thinking about him.

It’s hot in the basement; there’s no cross-breeze. She shucks her dress and leaves it in a heap on the floor. Sweat trickles along her arms and down the backs of her knees. Her pulse jangles in her forehead. “Wyeth,” she says, “I haven’t been able to tell them about you.”

“That’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t.”

She met Wyeth last fall, her first semester of graduate school, though she likes to say she’s known him for years. Wyeth is an old friend of Lily and Malcolm’s. In an earlier life he was a political organizer; he spent several years registering voters down south. Thirty years late to the ball, is how he puts it: a nineties version of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. But after a few years, the job wore on him. He found the weather in the South oppressive, and he didn’t like making conversation with strangers, much less knocking on their front doors. He was, he discovered, one of those antisocial social people: he liked the idea of a party more than the party itself. And the idea of people more than actual people. “Except, of course, for you.” That was why he became an anthropologist. Ultimately, he preferred Cro-Magnon man.

As a break from his job, Wyeth spent a summer in D.C., where, to supplement his income, he waited tables at Malcolm’s restaurant. Late at night after the restaurant had closed he and Malcolm would hang out in the kitchen while the dishes were being cleaned, drinking beers and watching the World Cup on TV. Lily would join them when she got off from work and the three of them would ascend the stairs to the patio. Often they were still there at three in the morning; one time they fell asleep outside and were woken up the next day by Malcolm holding plates of eggs Benedict.

“Do I get paid overtime for sleeping here?” Wyeth asked.

“Absolutely,” said Malcolm.

“Waiters have to report for duty in a few hours,” Lily said.

“I’ll be here for my noontime siesta.”

And there he was, back at the restaurant in the afternoon, still there late at night after everyone else had left and it was just him, Malcolm, and Lily drinking beers on the patio. “What do you know?” Lily said to Malcolm. “We’ve made a new best friend.”

One weekend, Leo and Thisbe came through town. Thisbe recalls the bar they went to, thinks she remembers Wyeth himself, though it’s hard to know what she remembers and what she’s been told so many times she simply believes she remembers it. But she takes solace in the fact that she met Wyeth, and in the fact that Leo was there, too. She has come to believe that Leo liked Wyeth, as if Leo’s presence, and his liking Wyeth, were a kind of telescoped approval of what has happened now.

At the end of the summer, Wyeth returned to Alabama, and he stayed in only sporadic touch with Lily and Malcolm. But when they learned he was moving to Berkeley to study anthropology, Lily said to Thisbe, “You have to meet this old friend of mine.” And to Wyeth she said, “You have to meet my sister-in-law.”

Thisbe and Wyeth were on the lookout for each other, but they didn’t need to be. It’s a small department; their first semester, they were paired in seminar for oral reports and they took potshots at Clifford Geertz (reactionary) and Margaret Mead (even more reactionary). After class, they would drink lattes at a café near campus until it was time for Thisbe to pick up Calder from day care.