The World Without You (28 page)

Now Marilyn is talking about an anniversary party she and David threw for themselves. “It was our thirtieth,” she tells Thisbe. “I don’t know if you remember it.”

Of course Thisbe remembers. She’d been with Leo only a few months at the time, and Marilyn hadn’t invited her to the party. She was twenty-one years old, and did she really want to drive down from Maine to eat canapés with her new boyfriend’s parents? That had been Marilyn’s defense. Christmas break was coming soon, and Thisbe would probably prefer to be off skiing. But when Leo found out she hadn’t been invited, he was furious. And Thisbe herself was insulted, hurt. Yet it’s been years since that party, so that now, when Marilyn apologizes for the snub, it takes Thisbe a moment to realize what she’s talking about. “I haven’t thought about that party in years.”

“Well, I have,” Marilyn says.

“I came to other parties,” Thisbe says. “I was included in everything after that.” And there’s this, she thinks: she’s here now, for the memorial.

“I was so sorry when you two broke up,” Marilyn says.

For a second, Thisbe doesn’t know what Marilyn is talking about. Then she realizes: Marilyn is referring to when they graduated from college and she and Leo split up. They were twenty-two at the time, not yet ready to marry, not yet ready to live together, even, and Thisbe was intent on taking the Foreign Service exam—she was hoping to go to Ghana—and Leo was off to his own far-flung places. They didn’t meet again until a few years later, when they ran into each other on the Upper West Side beneath the marquee of the Beacon Theater. Neil Diamond was playing that night, and Thisbe said to Leo, “You’re not going to that concert, are you? Please don’t tell me you’ve started to like Neil Diamond.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not at such loose ends.”

“But you’re a little at loose ends?”

“I
have
missed you.”

“We were young,” she says now. “It took us a while to figure things out.”

“But you did,” Marilyn says. “That’s what’s most important.”

Thisbe tries to look away, but it’s like those 3-D baseball cards from the cereal box: whichever way you hold Marilyn, she’s staring back at you.

“I remember when you two met,” Marilyn says. “Leo fell in love with you instantly.”

And Thisbe, reddening, says, “I fell in love with him, too.”

Only now, looking at Calder, who’s been witness to all this, and at his cousins, staring down at their cold cuts in perplexity and embarrassment, Thisbe says to Marilyn, “Maybe this could wait.” She worries what Calder will say if the conversation continues; she fears he’ll mention Wyeth.

“Why shouldn’t they hear this?” Marilyn says. “They should know about Leo.”

“They do know about him,” Thisbe says. “I talk to Calder about him all the time.”

“Well, I want them to hear about him from me too. Anyway, I don’t believe in protecting children, certainly not from something like this.”

I’m not protecting him
, Thisbe wants to say, even as she’s thinking,
It’s up to me to decide whether I protect him.

But Marilyn has quietly left the table. When she returns, she’s holding a large cardboard box with Leo’s possessions inside it. She removes a photo album, which she passes around from person to person, the adults holding the album for the children to see, making sure nothing gets smudged.

Soon it’s Thisbe’s turn to look at the album, and she’s thinking there’s something unfair about photos; she’d like to have them banned. She flips to a photo of Leo from when he was six, playing the lion in a children’s theater version of
The Wizard of Oz.
And another photo, from the cast party, when he’s eating ice cream through his lion’s mouth, fed to him in spoonfuls by his sisters.

“He was a bottomless pit,” Marilyn says.

Noelle says, “He used to eat all of Mom’s leftover apple strudel, then try to pawn it off on someone else.”

“On his friends,” says Marilyn.

“One time,” Clarissa says, “he blamed a band of strudel-eating intruders.”

“Strudel bandits!” Noelle says.

“Remember when he was a teenager,” Marilyn says, “and he made Dad and me buy him a mini-fridge?”

“He kept it next to his bed,” Clarissa says, “stocked with provisions for a middle-of-the-night meal.”

“Thank God for his fast metabolism,” Marilyn says.

In other photos, Leo is holding a lacrosse stick, a badminton racquet; he’s wearing an old headband; he’s drawing at an easel. “Who knows where all that stuff came from,” Noelle says.

“He and his friends shared everything,” Marilyn says.

“They were such girls,” says Lily. “They even shared clothes.”

Marilyn has risen from her chair and is standing now behind Thisbe, who holds the album next to her plate.

“Who’s that?” Thisbe asks. She’s pointing at a photo of Leo, who’s spinning a basketball on his middle finger, showing off for some girl.

“Leo’s first girlfriend,” Marilyn says.

“Nora?”

Marilyn shakes her head. “The first girl Leo kissed, the summer after sixth grade. Kimball, I think her name was. He never told you about her?”

“If he did, I’ve forgotten about it. I knew about Nora, of course, but other than that, our past was the past and I was fine with that.”

“Mom,” Noelle says, “are you trying to make Thisbe jealous?”

“She has nothing to be jealous of,” Marilyn says. “Not of Nora or anyone else. When Leo fell for her, it was like,
Wow.
”

Thisbe’s thinking of Nora now, the wishbone image of her. They met only once, at the hardware store, and when Leo introduced them everyone was uncomfortable. She didn’t see her again until Leo’s funeral, where Nora inserted herself front and center, impresario of an event that wasn’t hers. Nora’s nothing to her now; she never was, really. So she’s surprised to discover she still has animus for her, and it startles her, the quiet venom she feels, as she says, “Nora and her eating disorders.”

“That was the least of it,” Marilyn says. “You’d think Leo, the youngest child, allowed to do whatever he pleased, wouldn’t have been attracted to someone like Nora. But beneath it all he had a savior complex. And then you came along and we all were relieved. Finally, Leo was with someone who didn’t need taking care of.”

“We all need taking care of,” Thisbe says.

Akiva asks to be excused, and a palpable relief settles on everyone, as one after the other, as if forming a conga line, the children leave the room.

Now David comes through in his paint-spattered pants, moving quickly past them as if to say Don’t mind me.

Marilyn removes a set of weights from the box. “These were Leo’s,” she says. “You know what he called them? Dumbbells for a dumbbell. If only the whole world were as dumb as Leo.” She reminds everyone how Leo, born premature, took to the weight room when he was eleven, and how, a year later, the family adopted a stray Labrador retriever Leo had found cowering beneath a bench in Riverside Park and named her Kingman, after Dave Kingman, the New York Mets home run king. The dog took a liking to Leo and didn’t seem to mind, or was too feeble to object, when every morning as part of his weightlifting routine Leo would bench-press Kingman herself, three sets of twelve repetitions, Kingman prostrate, helpless but good-natured, as she was lifted and lowered and lifted again. And when Leo grew tired of bench-pressing Kingman, when the dog became less pliable, he took to bench-pressing Noelle, who was willing in this way to help him stay in shape: Leo on his back, thrusting lithe Noelle up and down, up and down. Leo, who beat up the school bully, then beat up the kid who made fun of the school bully for Leo’s having been beaten him up.. Leo, Marilyn’s little weightlifting philosopher of a son, bench-pressing Kingman, testing the premise that if you lifted a cow when it was born and kept lifting it every day there would never come a day when you couldn’t lift the cow. “You know what I keep forgetting about Kingman?” Marilyn says. “That dog was a girl.”

“Yet he named her Kingman,” Noelle says. “He tried to get her to lift her leg to pee.”

“He always felt outnumbered,” Clarissa says. “That’s why he liked to spend time with Dad. A break from all that estrogen.”

Though the truth, Marilyn thinks, was that Leo was happy to be the only son in the family: he liked being the alpha male.

She lays the weights at Thisbe’s feet. “I want you to have these.”

“Oh, Marilyn, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t lift weights,” Thisbe says, because it’s the only thing she can think to say, though she does lift weights, and fearing that Marilyn knows this, she corrects herself and says she dislikes free weights, she prefers the machines, then adds that her luggage was already over the weight limit on her trip east and she was forced to pay a fee. She could buy weights, she says, for the price it would cost to carry them back. She
will
buy weights, she’s tempted to tell her mother-in-law, knowing only that she can’t return home, to Wyeth, with her dead husband’s dumbbells in tow.

“Here,” Marilyn says. “Take this instead.” And she hands Thisbe a San Diego Chargers football pennant.

“Leo was the world’s most avid Chargers fan,” Clarissa says. “We never knew why he liked them.”

Neither did Thisbe. The more the Chargers lost the more devoted he became; he was, in his own way, a lonely man of faith.

And now she’s sitting with the pennant in her lap, wondering what she’ll do with it when she gets home, and presently some gravy drips off her plate, staining the pennant brown.

She will do it now, she decides: she will tell Marilyn about Wyeth. But when she goes to speak, she falls mute. She grabs her wine glass, and she’s holding the stem so tight she fears it might break. “Things are different now,” she says. “A year has passed. A lot has happened since Leo.”

“It’s been endless,” Marilyn agrees. “It’s been terrible for the whole family.”

“But it’s changed—”

“I know.”

“I—”

“Darling.”

There it is, she thinks, that noxious word again, and why, she wonders, does she let it bother her when it’s meant as an endearment? But it doesn’t feel like an endearment; it feels like an assault. Marilyn doesn’t have the right to call her that. If they’d had another kind of relationship she might have the right, but they didn’t have that kind of relationship, and now, with Leo gone, they’re not going to have it. “I need to be excused.” She exits the dining room, and finding Calder with his cousins in front of the TV, she picks him up and carries him down the stairs.

In the basement, she gives Calder a bath, and when he’s done, he comes back upstairs to watch TV with his cousins.

Soon, though, he runs into the kitchen. “Ari wet his pants! He got pee on Grandma and Grandpa’s carpet!”

“That’s impossible,” Noelle says. Ari must hold the world record for earliest toilet training; he stopped wearing diapers before he turned two.

Calder directs her into the living room, where his cousins are crouched as if examining a dead bug. Marilyn is already wiping up the pee. “Should I get him a diaper?” she asks Noelle.

“He doesn’t need a diaper.” It’s an absurd response, Noelle understands, coming from someone whose child just peed on the floor, yet she refuses to believe it. Ari never has accidents. She gets down on the rug and, in what feels like a humiliation, puts her nose to the fabric. Maybe Calder is mistaken and someone spilled a glass of water. Or maybe it
is
pee and Calder is the guilty party.

But of course Ari peed. He’s standing right in front of her with his pants wet.

Noelle takes him upstairs and cleans him off, and in violation of everything the books advise about parenting and everything she herself believes, she says, “Why did you do that?”

“It was a
ta’ut
,” Ari says. An accident.

Except it wasn’t an accident. There are no accidents with Ari. “Is it because Abba drove off?”

“It was a
ta’ut
,” Ari insists, and he starts to cry.

Back in the living room, she finds herself apologizing again and again, and every time she does so she feels worse for it.

“Really, Noelle,” her mother says. “It’s not a big deal.”

But it feels like a big deal, and everyone’s insisting that it isn’t one only flusters her further. “I’ll pay to have the carpet cleaned.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

She’s still down on the carpet, examining the stain. “I don’t know how it happened. He was toilet trained at twenty-one months.”

“Noelle. Please. Forget about it.”

Amram drove off, so Ari peed in his pants. She’s making too big a deal of it, but she can’t help it. It’s Amram’s fault, yet it’s her fault, too; she might as well not be able to keep her own bladder in check. Sleeping with whatever boy came her way. What good is her newfound modesty when she can’t control things any more than she ever could? She can’t control her husband and she can’t control her children, and what good is she if she can’t do that?

She puts the boys to bed, but when she comes downstairs everyone is silent and she’s convinced they’ve been talking about her. Thisbe is trying to get Calder to sleep, but he’s running around the living room holding his pajamas aloft, which gives her brief comfort—
she
got her children to bed—but soon Thisbe corrals him and brings him downstairs, and that feeling disappears, too.

She goes over the last couple of hours like a dog pawing over a clump of dirt. She measures her mother’s affection for her grandchildren and it seems that her boys have gotten the short end of the stick. She thinks of the way her mother is with Calder, the
sweeties
and
darlings
she doles out, words with which she herself once measured her mother’s affection and found herself wanting. Her mother seems more enthusiastic, more open-armed, more
something
with Calder. Noelle can’t blame her. Her mother sees Calder more often than she sees her boys; Calder may live across the country, but he doesn’t live across the world. That was her choice. She’s Orthodox now; that was her choice, too. Her mother has more in common with Calder; of course she favors him. Maybe she’s imagining it, maybe she’s being paranoid, but it doesn’t matter, it’s what she feels.