The World Without You (37 page)

“Or the fact that we’re both lefties? I’m the only lefty in my family, and I wore it like a badge. I insisted on being seated at the dinner table so I wouldn’t bump elbows with the person next to me. I demanded special scissors for lefties, and a chair at school with the desk growing out of the left side instead of the right. I used to memorize the names of famous lefties. Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, Ty Cobb.”

“Oh, Noelle. You didn’t marry Amram because of that either.”

“For a time, I was obsessed with horoscopes. If a guy was the right sign, then I’d think he was the one for me, and if he wasn’t the right sign, I’d convince myself he was still the one for me.” Noelle forces out a laugh, a single propulsion of breath like a pneumatic door being opened. “But you probably think I’m no different now, praying to some absurd God.”

“I don’t think religion is the same as astrology.”

“When I told the rabbi at the Wailing Wall that Amram and I share a birthday, he said, ‘You see? It’s
bashert.
’”

“What’s that?”

“According to Jewish tradition, God chooses your spouse for you. Your help meet, like Adam and Eve.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I used to,” Noelle says. “Now I’m not so sure.” She plucks a dandelion and blows at the fuzz, which lands like little hairs on her rollerblades. She’s been wearing a sweatshirt around her waist, but now, in the shade, with the sweat seeping into her clothes, she’s starting to feel the evening’s impending chill, so she puts the sweatshirt on. “I’m much more patient than Amram. He’ll be in the bathroom washing up and the boys will be badgering him to go make them breakfast. But he won’t be moved. He yells at the kids more than I’d like him to. But he’s a good father. He’s the fun parent—the one who swoops in and does the tickling and the card tricks, who gets the kids to levitate.”

“To
levitate
?” Thisbe says.

“When the boys were babies, he would stand behind a wall and extend them out into the room so it looked like they were flying. That’s what drew Amram to Judaism. The miracles. He’d like to perform a few miracles himself.” Noelle rises, then sits down again, as if she’s rubber-banded to the ground. She taps her rollerblade against the grass. “You probably think we’re ridiculous, bringing our own kosher food.”

Thisbe shakes her head. She’s seen far stranger things than that. She lives in northern California, she reminds Noelle. They have all-liquid diets there, and entirely plant-based ones. She’s at the epicenter of the raw-foods movement.

“And the crazy thing is, I passed a nonkosher hotdog stand this morning, and it was all I could do to stop myself from buying one.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do. At the airport the other night when we were waiting for our luggage, I came across a
Playboy
at the newsstand. Back when I was in high school and Clarissa and Lily were in college,
Playboy
came to campuses to audition models. ‘Girls of the Ivy League,’ the issue was called. Clarissa and Lily were indignant, of course; they’ve made a life out of being indignant. But if I had been a student at Princeton or Yale, I’d have been the first to pose. Modeling for
Playboy
, having the whole world look at me—it was the only thing I cared about. You don’t know me, Thisbe. I’m sitting here with my hair covered, but am I any different from who I was then?” With a single thrust, Noelle pulls her kerchief off, and for an instant Thisbe expects to see her bald. But beneath the kerchief is just her hair, red and matted to her forehead. Thisbe averts her gaze, and she keeps it averted as Noelle puts her kerchief back on and reties it behind her head. “I can feel myself slipping,” she says. “What if I go back to how I was?”

“You’re away from your surroundings,” Thisbe says. “You just need to get home to Jerusalem.”

“Maybe this is just who I am.”

“It’s not who you are.” And then, because, despite having been her sister-in-law, Thisbe doesn’t really know Noelle, and because she doesn’t believe, in any case, that people are simply one thing to the exclusion of others, she says, “You’re probably a lot of different things.” Which comes off as patronizing.

“You’re not listening to me,” Noelle says.

“I
am
listening to you.” But Thisbe realizes Noelle is right.

They’re still sitting on the grounds of the Tanglewood Institute, where a couple of girls emerge from behind a copse of trees. They must be eight or nine, and they’re chasing each other, clumps of mud flying from their sneakers, laughter swelling and dissipating as they orbit an enormous oak, appearing and disappearing and reappearing again like horses on a carousel. Soon they pick up paddle racquets in the shape of violins and start to hit a rubber ball back and forth. Tanglewood kitsch, Thisbe thinks.

But Noelle isn’t paying attention to them. She’s looking above her, where a helicopter has emerged from between the clouds. She wishes she were up there. She used to go on helicopter rides above Manhattan, hoping the pilot would fall sick and she’d be forced to take over the aircraft. When Leo was sixteen she took him hang-gliding, though she made him promise not to tell their parents; they’d have been apoplectic if they’d found out. She signed the consent forms, saying she was Leo’s guardian, which she was, at least for the day. She and Leo were the risk takers in the family, the ones who jumped off high ledges on their skateboards, who went diving off the rocks at the quarry, coming within inches of their lives. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s follow those cars.”

But the cars are all stuck bumper to bumper, and so she and Thisbe pass them now, moving along the shoulder of 183 as the blacktop continues its steady downward incline toward Kripalu and Tanglewood.

When they reach the tent, teenage boys in matching Tanglewood T-shirts are guiding the concertgoers into the parking lot. A family of four walks through the gate, the parents holding beach chairs, two boys of about sixteen carrying a mammoth cooler, out of which sticks a plastic baggie, flapping in the air like a fish. At the edge of the road, an eagle pecks at a piece of hot dog. Someone is playing “Sweet Baby James” on a boom box.

There’s a clearing ahead, and soon Thisbe sees it: the lake, Stockbridge Bowl, where she and Leo used to swim. Noelle is skating there now, so she follows her, to where Noelle sits down beside the water.

“It’s getting late,” Thisbe says. “Your parents will start to worry about us.”

“Let them worry.” Noelle removes her rollerblades, and now she removes her socks as well. She’s sitting barefoot on the ground in just her blouse and long skirt.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going for a swim.”

“In what?”

“In my skin,” she says. “Are you telling me I can’t do that?”

“No,” Thisbe says. She’s not telling Noelle that. Though she does say, lamely, “Isn’t that against your religion?”

Noelle laughs. “Since when have you become an authority on my religion?”

Since never, Thisbe thinks. And when Noelle points out that Stockbridge Bowl is desolate, that it’s off the main road and no one’s going to be here now—a Wednesday evening at seven o’clock with the July Fourth crowd roaring in the distance for James Taylor to emerge—that there’s no lifeguard on duty, that it’s just the two of them, Noelle and Thisbe, both of them women, relatives, in fact (“Unless you don’t consider me your sister-in-law any longer”), that there’s no injunction in the world forbidding Thisbe from seeing Noelle naked. Thisbe just nods. She continues to nod as Noelle removes her blouse and skirt so she’s in just her bra and underwear, and then she removes those too. She’s standing naked in front of Thisbe in only her kerchief, and Thisbe has a brief, absurd image of some photography exhibit, a photo of Noelle with the title
Devout Skinny Dipper
, but before the image is even complete, Noelle has removed her kerchief as well. She’s bent over in the grass so that, from behind, Thisbe can see her genitals. Noelle folds her blouse, her skirt, her undergarments, her kerchief, and lays them in a pile at her feet. “Well?” she says. “Are you going to join me?”

Thisbe shakes her head.

“I trust it’s not against your religion, either.”

“No, Noelle, it isn’t.”

“Then what’s stopping you?”

“I just don’t want to swim.” Though the real reason is that, though Thisbe has signed on for a lot by coming back east, one thing she hasn’t signed on for is going skinny-dipping with her Orthodox former sister-in-law. As uneasy as she felt watching Noelle undress, she would feel that much more uneasy getting undressed herself. Just to make that clear, she doesn’t so much as loosen her rollerblades as she settles herself onto the grass.

As she watches Noelle step into the lake, her red hair loosed from its kerchief, as she sees the water rise to her thighs, as she watches her sister-in-law throw herself into the water so she’s fully submerged except for her head, Thisbe finds herself recalling Noelle, a hot August day shortly after she and Leo got married, wearing an evening dress that was long-sleeved and loose-fitting, as the rabbis dictated.
Dowdy.
That was the word Leo used to describe the women in Noelle’s Jerusalem neighborhood. It was the word he’d once used to describe Noelle herself. But looking at her that night, Thisbe thought that, despite the kerchief and the dress, despite having given birth only three months earlier, Noelle was anything but dowdy. She’d been a lovely girl, and she was still lovely. The feeling returned—it returns to her again—of having been an only child, looking in solitary on the adult world. How she had wanted a sister! And now she had a sister-in-law. Three of them, in fact. This is what she’s thinking as she watches Noelle do the crawl, remembering what a fine swimmer she is. Still, she cries out, “Be careful, Noelle! Don’t go too far! There’s no lifeguard here!”

But if Noelle has heard her, she doesn’t let on.

Now the concert has begun. James Taylor has come onstage; Thisbe can hear the crowd cheering for him as she waits by the water for Noelle, who has switched from the crawl to the breaststroke and back again and who, having been in the lake for twenty minutes now, gives no sign that she’s through. Thisbe’s just sitting on the ground, feeling her shorts stick to the backs of her thighs, her feet growing sore in their rollerblades.

Finally, Noelle swims back to shore, and when she emerges she shakes her head from side to side, trying to drain the water from her ears. She sits down naked next Thisbe and makes no move to put her clothes back on. She’s letting herself drip-dry in the hovering twilight.

“I’d offer you a towel if I had one.”

But Noelle seems not to care. She’s sitting no more than two feet away from Thisbe, as if she’s daring her to look, or not look, and so Thisbe settles on some compromise between looking and not looking, hoping that, whatever she’s doing, she doesn’t piss Noelle off.

The oak trees swirl above them, making low, guttural sounds. A few fireworks go off, and a few more. Noelle, still naked, is staring at Thisbe’s hands. “I see you’ve stopped wearing your wedding ring.”

Thisbe nods. “Why should I be wearing it?” Though the last time she saw Noelle she was wearing it. And even after that. Her first semester in Berkeley, sitting alone at a Chinese restaurant, her bag laid carefully on the seat across from her as if she were saving it for someone, she was approached by a busboy, who said, “Are you waiting for your husband?” and she started to cry over her spinach dumplings. Because she realized she
was
waiting for her husband, waiting for Leo to return from Iraq. When did a widow remove her wedding ring? The Jews must have had an answer for that, the Jews like Noelle. The Varsity Jew, Leo used to call her; he said Noelle lettered in Judaism. More than once after Leo’s death she wished she were like Noelle, steadfast, consoled by religion’s ministrations, not the doubter she was, without a ready-made community to take her in. Sometimes she thinks that’s why she went to graduate school, to have a community, paltry as it is, her group of graduate students commiserating over their classes, her cohort of anthropologists. A month after she and Wyeth got together, she was washing up in the bathroom when her wedding ring fell off and rolled down the drain. She screamed as it disappeared, but she didn’t call the plumber, and she suspects she was secretly relieved. The next day, Clarissa phoned. They hadn’t spoken in months, and it was as if Clarissa knew what had happened and was watching out for Leo. Talking to her, Thisbe felt shaken, and when she got off the phone she went back to the bathroom and inserted her fingers down the drain, trying vainly to retrieve the ring. “It fell down the sink,” she tells Noelle. “I took it as a sign that it was time to stop wearing it.”

“You think that was a sign?” Noelle says. “That’s idiocy..”

“No more idiocy than marrying someone because you share a birthday. Or because your rabbi told you to marry him.”

“That’s not why I married Amram.”

James Taylor is between songs—he’s talking now—and someone in the crowd seems to have called out, but Thisbe can’t decipher the words. A few piano chords ring in the distance. The audience starts to cheer. Noelle is still sitting naked on the grass, though now she reaches over and puts on her kerchief. “I miss Leo,” she says. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”

Thisbe nods.

“Don’t you miss him?”

“Of course I do.” A squirrel shoots down a tree, its tail moving spasmodically like a mop.

“How?”

“What do you mean, how?”

“How do you miss him?”

In every way, Thisbe thinks. Because how can she not miss Leo when all his mail still gets forwarded to her, when just last week she received a reminder for his six-month dental appointment, and she was tempted to call the dentist and yell into the phone that Leo didn’t get a six-month dental appointment, he got a six-year dental appointment (his mother notwithstanding, he hated dentists and doctors both), and besides, he was dead, it was his very dental records with which they’d identified him, and didn’t they know that, or did they not have such a box to check off? How can she not miss Leo when he was still on her phone machine when she moved to Berkeley, and he might still be on it were it not for the fact that it broke and she had to buy a new machine. How can she not miss Leo when on Calder’s birthday she signed the card from both of them, though it didn’t matter, of course—Calder can’t read—but
she
can read, and for the week after his birthday she would read the card to him every night before he went to sleep, closing with the words
Love, Mommy and Daddy
. How can she not miss Leo when she still has his clothes, many of which have gotten mixed up with hers, and one time when Wyeth jumped out of the shower to answer the doorbell he threw on her shirt, which was lying on the chair, only it was Leo’s shirt, and when she saw him in it, she screamed, “Would you please take that thing off!” How can she not miss Leo when she often thinks of her grandmother, dead for a decade, and of her grandfather, dead even longer than that, and how when her grandfather was dying, a slow, protracted, excruciating death, her grandmother didn’t want him to go into the hospital; she wanted him to die at home. And how when he did die, early one morning, she got into bed with him one last time and held his body, already overcome with rigor mortis, and how Thisbe, when she heard that story, thought it was so beautiful she swore to herself that if she ever got married and outlived her husband, she would lie down with him one last time like that. Only the way she imagined it she was eighty or ninety, not thirty-two, and she didn’t picture that he would be far away and there would be no body to speak of, nothing, certainly, she could lie down with even if he were there. Is that what Noelle means by how does she miss him? She thinks, Let me count the ways. But she’s not going to tell Noelle any of this because it’s private and, besides, she has nothing to prove to her. “I just miss him,” she says.