The World Without You (36 page)

When they reach town, the sidewalks have been taken over by window-shoppers, so they step out onto the street and skate between the cars. If the cyclists can do it, why can’t they?

“Where are we going?” Thisbe asks.

Noelle doesn’t know. She’s skating forward now, with Thisbe behind her; they’re weaving between the stalled cars.

It requires getting used to, Thisbe thinks, the sight of Noelle on rollerblades. As she moves along Main Street with a breeze at her back, Noelle’s denim skirt bulges as if inflated with water, and her kerchief, knotted behind her head, flutters like a pennant. Cars pass them, belching out smoke, and the sounds of traffic makes it hard for them to hear each other. Now Thisbe moves forward so they’re skating abreast. Noelle crouches and comes up and crouches again, so that it looks as if she’s doing knee bends.

It’s six in the evening now. The fireworks will start in a couple of hours. And at seven o’clock, James Taylor will perform on the Tanglewood stage. On the corner of Main and Walker two teenage boys in Lenox T-shirts are holding up signs selling tickets to the concert.

“They should sell those tickets to their own grandparents,” Noelle says. “How old is James Taylor, anyway? Sixty? For all I know, he’s a grandparent himself.”

“From heroin addict to grandparent,” Thisbe says. “So there’s hope for us all.”

“If there’s hope for me,” Noelle says, “there’s hope for everyone.”

It’s an hour before the concert, but already the traffic is thick with exhaust, with the smell of salami and pâté, of macaroni and cheese, pickles, mashed potatoes, and scones. The stuff of summer picnics, Thisbe thinks, recalling weekends with Leo, wandering past Kripalu to Tanglewood, where they would camp out on the lawn while the string musicians held practice. They used to fall asleep in the grass with their turkey sandwiches and watermelon spread across their stomachs: their own human picnic bench. Then Leo, waking up to the sound of the cellists practicing, would say wistfully, “Clarissa used to promise she was going to play here and she’d get us free tickets.”

In Lilac Park, more James Taylor tickets are being scalped. “Beer here!” Noelle calls out, and now she and Thisbe are skating down Sunset to where the residential streets have been emptied out. Here they can move unimpeded in either direction, going past house after house, all those lawns flagged out front with their green
Berkshire Eagle
boxes.

“Do you rollerblade a lot?” Thisbe asks.

“Whenever I can,” Noelle says. “It’s the only exercise I get besides carrying my kids. What about you?”

“Not in ages.”

“Rollerblading is my Prozac,” Noelle says. “If I didn’t have it, I’d have to take the real thing.”

“Would you consider it?”

“Maybe,” she says. “If it were permitted.”

“It’s against Jewish law?” It feels like a stupid question, the way most of her questions about Judaism feel stupid, but then it’s hard for Thisbe to guess what’s prohibited and what isn’t. Just as often, she’s thrown by what’s allowed. She recalls learning that, if slaughtered properly, venison is kosher. Deer!

“The problem isn’t Jewish law,” Noelle says. “It’s Amram. He doesn’t believe in taking drugs.”

“But he wouldn’t be the one taking them.”

Noelle thinks to say Amram sets the rules, but she’s never thought of it so starkly, and it discomfits her to think of it that way now, so she doesn’t say anything. “Anyway, he’s not here to tell me what to do.”

“Not at the moment.”

“And he may never be. For all I know, he’s never coming back.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Honestly, Thisbe, I have no idea. But when my mother promises me he’ll come back soon, it sounds condescending, not to mention stupid. So don’t go giving me false assurances either unless you know something she doesn’t.” Noelle skates into a cul-de-sac and Thisbe follows, and soon they emerge onto Yokun Avenue.

“So you haven’t heard from him at all?” Thisbe says.

Noelle shakes her head. “He’s been gone over a day now. You can’t tell me Leo ever did anything like that.”

“Not unless you count flying off to Iraq.”

“I don’t.”

They’ve circled back to Lilac Park, where they stand unmoving on their rollerblades while beside them, on a bench, a couple is giving their rottweiler puppy scraps of a roast beef sandwich. “I don’t know how much longer I can take Amram.”

Thisbe’s quiet.

“I know what everyone’s saying about him. And about me too as a result.”

“Well, you’re in good company,” Thisbe says. “I can only imagine what they’re saying about me.”

It’s true, Noelle thinks. She feels an alliance with Thisbe: the pariahs among her family, the ones cast overboard. “Honestly, Thisbe, could you ever imagine yourself with someone like Amram?”

No, Thisbe thinks, but then there aren’t a lot of people she could imagine herself with. And she understands Amram’s appeal. He has a kind of bullying charisma that would be more compelling if he didn’t always act so aggrieved. “
De gustibus
,” she says.

“What?”

“It’s Latin for taste.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning love is particular. I wouldn’t expect anyone to understand why I love the people I love.”

“You’re talking about Leo?”

“For one.”

“Everyone loved Leo.”

“Not everyone. But I loved him, and that’s all that mattered.”

As the time for the concert has drawn near, the streets have, in fact, started to fill with grandparent types. Or grandparent types trying not to be grandparent types. Women James Taylor’s age in muumuus and peasant dresses, men in ponytails, too old, Thisbe thinks, to be men in ponytails—and she lives in Berkeley, the world’s capital of men too old to be in ponytails.

“Come on,” Noelle says. “Let’s head down to the show.”

“But we don’t have tickets.”

“We can lurk around the edges and watch the crowd. I hated James Taylor when I was growing up. We can see if I still hate him.”

They thread their way past the row of stopped cars, and soon Noelle veers off into the Tanglewood Institute, where the grounds are lined with trees and where a couple of musicians walk past them now, carrying trombones. Noelle skates on her own, back and forth along the concrete, before coming to a stop next to Thisbe, who has settled herself onto the grass across from a sign that says
BOSTON
UNIVERSITY
.

“How about you?” Noelle says. “Do you work out a lot?”

“When I can,” Thisbe says. “Grad school comes with a gym, so I might as well use it. The problem is, I hate those machines. Leo used to say any exercise you can do while reading isn’t really exercise, and I agree. I run a couple of times a week up in the Berkeley hills. It’s my version of sightseeing.”

“It’s funny,” Noelle says, “but I used to be the athlete in my family.”

“Not anymore?”

She shrugs.

“You seem pretty good with wheels on your feet. I can’t imagine you’re worse without them.”

“I was on the swim team in high school,” Noelle says, “and I used to play in the father-daughter two-on-two basketball tournament. I fought with my father growing up, but not as much as with my mother. I liked playing basketball with him. Sports were this thing we had together.”

“And now?”

“Now he’s here and I’m there. And I doubt he plays basketball anymore. There’s an over-fifty league, but once you get to sixty everyone but the crazies has been weeded out. At a certain point, people start to tear their ACLs.”

“How about in Jerusalem?” Thisbe says. “Do you play basketball there?”

Noelle shakes her head. “It’s hard to find women who want to play, and I can’t play with men.” She shrugs, half apologetically. “No physical contact with anyone but your husband. Basketball isn’t football, but it’s still a contact sport.” She subsides onto the grass at the edge of the Institute. More musicians walk by; the brass section seems to have been released en masse. A cluster of young men move past holding tubas.

“Does it feel like a concession, not playing basketball anymore?”

“At first everything felt like a concession,” Noelle says. “But after a while I began to see things differently.” She removes a granola bar from her pocket. “Want some?”

Thisbe shakes her head.

“Though, sure, I wonder sometimes. I miss things, especially when I’m here.” She dispenses with the granola bar in a few bites. Patches of sweat bleed through her kerchief.

Thisbe’s sweating, too. Her blond hair is noosed behind her, and as she tilts her head forward her ponytail swings over her and slides across the ground.

“It was weird seeing everybody at the memorial. It felt like I’d left and everyone else was still here. I don’t know why that should surprise me. Where did I think they would go?” She grabs a clump of dirt and disperses it like grain.

“It was nice of you to say the kaddish,” Thisbe says. “It would have meant something to Leo.”

“You think? I was afraid you’d disapprove.”

“Why?”

“Imposing my religion on you? You may recall I skipped your wedding.”

Thisbe does recall it, and it didn’t please her at the time. How, she wondered, could Noelle not come when her own brother was the one getting married? And she, through no fault of her own, was to blame. Marilyn and David were frantic about it; they did what they could to get Noelle to change her mind. Leo, for his part, seemed not to care. “More cake for me,” he said to Thisbe, which bewildered her. There had been years of this, she understood, years of having to endure Noelle, but she had grown up alone, always wanting a sibling, and then to be granted one and not have her come to your wedding seemed almost too much to bear.

Noelle is still sitting on the ground, her legs moving back and forth, digging little trenches with her rollerblades. “It’s weird,” she says, “ten years ago I didn’t even know the Hebrew alphabet, and now I’m fluent. If you’d told me Israel was where I’d end up, I’d have thought you were crazy. And the thing is, I could as easily have landed in Sweden.”

“But you’re happy in Israel, aren’t you?”

Noelle shrugs.

“You tough Israelis.”

“We just pretend we’re tough.”

“I can’t imagine living in a place where my kids would have to go to the army.”

“I can’t, either.”

“Yet you’re there.”

It’s true, Noelle thinks. She’ reminded of how, when she first moved to Israel, it was one of the country’s attractions—how she could walk cavalierly through the streets while back home her parents were reading about the latest bombing. She saw her parents the way New Yorkers saw tourists—cautious, jittery, terrified of subway crime—when all they had to do was come visit. They did come visit, and at the end of the day when she dropped them off at their hotel she said, “Well, that’s a relief. You made it back alive.”

“Okay,” her mother said, “so it’s not so dangerous.”

But when they returned to New York, they were afraid for her again. The first few years of their marriage, she and Amram lived on the West Bank, in a town that’s been in Israel’s possession since 1948; even under Oslo no one was talking about giving it back. “It’s got everything we need,” she told her parents. “The bank and the supermarket are just a stone’s throw away.”

“Very funny,” her mother said.

“I keep reminding myself,” Noelle tells Thisbe now, “that after Christopher Reeve was paralyzed, his daughter joined the college polo team. It’s how I buck myself up.” She’s sitting against a tree, and she tucks her rollerblades beneath her. A line of ants ascends the trunk, moving in procession. “Anyway, the army is years off. I have more immediate problems to worry about.”

“You mean Amram?”

“Even if he comes back, what good does it do me? I joke that I have five boys to take care of, but it’s not really a joke. He doesn’t help out much with the children.”

“Welcome to my world.”

“Why?” she says. “Was Leo the same way?”

“Well, he drove off, too, didn’t he? Or flew off, rather. It’s hard to change a diaper when you’re in Iraq and your son’s in some walk-up in lower Manhattan. Before long, technology will solve that problem, but it will be too late for me.”

“And when he was home?”

“When he was around, he was around. When he was available, he was available.”

Beside them, the cars inch their way down to Tanglewood. The sun is unspooling across the sky. On someone’s rear window is a
HILLARY
FOR
PRESIDENT
bumper sticker, though the election is still more than three years away.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” Noelle says, “but after Leo died Amram tried to market his story.”

“Market it?” Thisbe says. “How?”

“He knows some TV guys in Tel Aviv, and he had this idea for a script. A true-life story about Leo Frankel. It was around the same time he was talking with Malcolm about going in on his restaurant. He casts his net wide.”

“Everyone needs to make a living.”

“There are livings and there are livings.”

This is true, Thisbe thinks, but she doesn’t care. Another bad script about Leo: she’s seen more than her share of them. In the weeks and months after Leo died, she received e-mails and phone calls from literary agents and Hollywood scouts. Her story had to be told, she was informed. A publisher intimated that she wouldn’t even need to write the book herself; she could hire a ghostwriter. “But can he write my seminar papers?” Thisbe said. “If he can, then we’re talking.” Everyone descended upon her like maggots on carrion. The rights to Leo’s story, the rights to her story: she shooed them all away.

“It’s funny,” Noelle says, “but I’ve always taken comfort in the idea that Amram and I have known each other since high school. And the crazy thing is, we didn’t really know each other in high school. I mean, I would have recognized him in the halls, sure, but I doubt we exchanged more than ten words our whole time there. Amram and I have the same birthday—May eleventh, a year apart. I was born at one in the morning and he was born at one in the afternoon. It’s ridiculous to think that makes a marriage.”

“Come on, Noelle. You can’t convince me you married him because of that.”