The World Without You (41 page)

She hands him an ice pack. “This should help stop the swelling.”

He’s sitting up now, drinking from a glass of water. The color has drained from his face.

“You’ve gotten yourself quite a shiner,” she says.

“
I’ve
gotten myself quite a shiner?”

“Okay,” she says. “I have.”

“You hit me on purpose, didn’t you, Noelle?”

She doesn’t even know. She hit the ball straight at him, hit it with purpose, with force, hit it the way she was hitting it all set, hit it to shut him up. But did she mean to hit him in the face? She isn’t sure. All she knows is that something has been taken from her, and now, as she apologizes to Amram, she feels that everything she has endured these past three days, everything she has endured these last months with Amram, has been blotted out with one lousy black eye. “I’m sorry, Amram,” she says, and she kisses him on the forehead, and when she goes downstairs she makes a plate of their kosher food and brings it up to him, and seeing that he’s fallen asleep, she leaves it on the nightstand beside his bed. She is sorry. She wishes she hadn’t hit him in the face. But she’s sorrier still for what she’s lost, the feeling that she’s in the right and nothing can change what’s happened, sorry to see her parents and her sisters and her own children looking at her askance as she returns to the kitchen, as if she’s the bad guy here, and her husband, who has earned no praise from them, no love, is now, battered as he is, transporter of Gretchen, the family matriarch, back to their country house, somehow, perversely, the hero.

In the kitchen, surrounded by her family, Noelle remains wound up. She stands silently, still in her sneakers and long skirt, her nose smudged with dirt from a ball she dove after, while Lily sets the table for breakfast. Gretchen has taken her post by the oven, watching Marilyn prepare scrambled eggs.

“How are you, Grandma?” Clarissa asks.

“I’m fine. “As if to prove it, Gretchen removes the spatula from Marilyn’s hand and tends to the eggs herself. She looks at Marilyn with silent determination, her every gesture saying, I was making scrambled eggs before you were born. Watching this, Thisbe feels a small, secret pleasure: even Marilyn has a mother-in-law.

And Lily, watching as well, makes a mental note to tell Malcolm, who’s in the living room playing cards with the boys. Thank God he seems to have found a backer for his restaurant. If Gretchen were to contribute so much as a penny to the cause, she’d rename the place Gretchen’s Gourmet.

Gretchen, still at the stove, turns her attention to Noelle. “How’s your husband doing?”

“He’ll be okay, Grandma.”

“You certainly beat him up.”

“Grandma, he’ll be fine,” Noelle says, her voice clipped, her arms folded across her chest, making clear through her carriage as she walks to the fridge to remove some butter and milk that she doesn’t wish to discuss this further.

But now Dov has come downstairs, having just visited his father, and as he walks into the kitchen he announces, “Abba’s eye is black and blue.”

“Abba’s eye’s not black and blue,” Akiva says. “It’s going to
be
black and blue, but it’s not black and blue
yet.
”

“Bruises take time,” Yoni agrees.

“Don’t you know how the human body works?” Akiva says to Dov.

Apropos of nothing, Calder says, “My daddy’s dead. They buried him yesterday. I was there.”

“Actually,” Thisbe says, crouching beside him, “they buried him last year. Yesterday was just the memorial.”

“They buried him again,” Calder says.

David brings out the Monopoly set and tries to explain to the boys how you amass as many hotels as you can, the fact of which the older cousins already know and the younger cousins aren’t interested in.

“Eema broke Abba’s face,” Ari says, and he starts to cry.

“I didn’t break Abba’s face,” Noelle says. She takes him in a hug, but then she says, “That’s enough.” Because it
is
enough. But when he persists, wanting to know what went wrong, she’s forced to address the issue once more. “It happens in sports,” she says. “People get injured, and eventually they heal.” Then she says the words
the blessing of the skinned knee
, a phrase that’s always being uttered by the Anglo-Saxons in her Jerusalem neighborhood, coming from a book she hasn’t read and doesn’t care to—she hates parenting advice books—knowing as she says this that the analogy is imprecise, that when people say
the blessing of the skinned knee
they don’t have in mind hitting your husband in the face with a tennis ball. But she’s said it, and now, she makes clear, the discussion is over. She goes into the living room and sits down in the rocking chair and, finding nothing else with which to occupy herself, she picks up one of her mother’s medical journals and pretends to read it.

When her mother calls everyone in for breakfast, she reluctantly joins them. She’d rather not eat, rather not be here at all, but she doesn’t want to be upstairs with Amram either, his eye slowly turning colors, so she deposits herself in the dining room and takes out the last of their kosher food.

She realizes she forgot to introduce the boys to Gretchen. Gretchen has met them before, of course, but she hasn’t seen them in a year. “This is Akiva,” she says. “Amram’s and my eldest.”

“Nice to see you again, Akiva.”

She introduces the other boys, too, but it’s Akiva Gretchen is most interested in. “Are you in school?” she asks him.

“It’s summer vacation,” he says.

“I mean in general.”

This perplexes Akiva. He’s eight years old. Is there anyone who’s eight who isn’t in school?

“What do you study?”

But his answers either bore Gretchen (math, reading, social studies) or confuse her (
chumash, navi, dikduk
), and so she moves on to other topics, such as the weather, which, rainy as it is in July, confounds her.

Noelle goes upstairs to check on Amram, but he remains asleep. She inches the food closer to him—cream cheese on a bagel, whitefish, some orange juice—thinking the smell of it might wake him. She recalls that concussion victims need to be kept awake. Though what is she thinking? Amram doesn’t have a concussion; he didn’t injure his head.. In a week people will look at him and they won’t even know anything happened.

“How’s he doing?” Marilyn asks when she comes downstairs.

“He’s fine,” she says, her voice clipped again, feeling her family’s stares on her, the stain of their collective accusation. “Can we talk about something else?”

“What would you like to talk about?” Clarissa says.

“How’s Israel?” asks Gretchen.

“It’s fine,” Noelle says, not wanting to talk about that either, not wanting to talk about anything at all.

“I read about Israel in the
Times
,” Gretchen says. “For a little country, you make a lot of news.”

“I know,” Noelle says ruefully. She could give Gretchen an earful about the Western press. All the distortions and falsehoods.

On a platter beside the coffee cake, Marilyn has arranged little square sandwiches with the crusts cut off, toothpicks piercing them, the red tassels at the top like tufts of hair. Cucumber and cream cheese. Egg salad. Smoked salmon. Gretchen helps herself to a sandwich, and as she does so, she lets the bracelets around her wrist clank against each other, as if she’s ringing for a dog. She holds a teacup to the light, examining it for blemishes. Gretchen’s famous hands, Noelle thinks. They’ve grown spotted over the years, but beneath the mottled hues they’re as lovely as ever. Once, taking Amtrak down to Baltimore with her fiancé, the man who if he’d lived would have become Noelle’s grandfather, Gretchen was approached by someone in their train berth who told her he was in advertising. A modeling agent, he called himself, and he told Gretchen she had the loveliest hands he’d ever seen; he wanted to make her into a hand model. A hand model! She was almost offended. What was a hand model, anyway? They put you on billboards advertising bracelets and wedding rings? They took photos of you pouring milk? They wanted your body parts, Gretchen told her grandchildren, took your limbs and did what they wished with them. Not that she was suited for modeling of any kind. All that preening and primping: she wasn’t good at sitting still. Though she kept the man’s address. For all Noelle knows she still has it somewhere; she’s never been one to discard a compliment.

Gretchen excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and when Marilyn asks if she needs help, she refuses it. She ferries herself past the refrigerator and into the other room.

When she returns, she looks down at the boys clustered around the table.

“Those are your great-grandchildren, Grandma,” Clarissa says.

“I know who they are.”

“Of course you do.”

“Then why did you say it?”

“I was just reminding you,” Clarissa says. “Sometimes you step back and take note.”

“I don’t need reminders,” Gretchen says.

The scrambled eggs get passed around, moving from plate to plate until they’re finished, and now Nathaniel rises to get some more, but at the sight of this Gretchen says, “Please sit down.”

Nathaniel looks at her quizzically.

“Grandma thinks the women should serve,” Clarissa says. Years ago, she explains, when Gretchen had the grandchildren over for dinner, it was always the girls she made clear the table and place the dishes in the sink. “Leo can clear the table, too,” Clarissa said. “You’re being sexist, Grandma.” But Gretchen looked nothing so much as amused. The very word
sexist
, if it meant anything to her, she took as a compliment. She had read about women’s lib., and she’d learned all she wanted to know about it. She had three husbands, and not one of them ever washed a dish, ever boiled an egg, ever folded laundry, ever touched an iron. It was for the help to do, and when the help wasn’t available, it was her job. The world may have been embarking on a time when men would do women’s work and women would do men’s, but she wasn’t coming along on that expedition.

Nathaniel, smiling, promises Gretchen he won’t assist in her kitchen, but in his mother-in-law’s kitchen he’d like to help. Soon he’s back with the plate of eggs, and it seems Gretchen has capitulated because now she’s letting him serve her.

“How are you, Mom?” David asks.

“I’m just fine,” Gretchen says, and she proceeds to tell a story about one of the workers in her building who came in to replace a lightbulb and dragged the ladder clear across the floor. “I had to put down a rug to hide the scuff marks. Compassion alone prevented me from saddling him with the bill.”

Noelle smiles. Compassion, she thinks, isn’t the first word she associates with Gretchen, but then she will surprise you. She can be extraordinarily kindhearted, except for when she’s not being kindhearted. And she’s loyal to her family. In her worldview, there’s her family and there’s everyone else. In this regard, at least, she’s like President Bush: you’re either with the Frankels or you’re against them. David, in particular, can do no wrong. Gretchen was similarly devoted to Leo. She favored him unabashedly, and when this was pointed out to her she simply shrugged. She’s never made any bones about it: she prefers boys.

“I’m not hungry,” Calder says, and soon he and his cousins have gotten up from the table and gone into the other room. Akiva, ever the dutiful eldest child, passes out decks of cards and sets everyone up to play solitaire. He seats himself next to Calder and Ari, who are too young to know how to play solitaire, and so he tries, vainly, to explain the rules to them.

Back in the dining room, everyone is silent. Finally, Lily says, “We’re so glad you came here, Grandma. It’s hard to imagine having done this without you.”

“You did do this without me,” Gretchen says. “The memorial was yesterday, and I wasn’t there.”

“Leo forgives you,” Lily says. But the words, intended lightly, come out wrong, and Gretchen remains silent.

“Better late than never,” Clarissa says.

“It doesn’t matter when you came,” Lily says. “Just as long as you’re here.”

But Gretchen won’t be toadied to. She nods in the direction of Malcolm. “I’d like the chef to make me some French toast.”

“The chef’s off duty,” Lily says. “There are labor laws, Grandma. Malcolm’s on break.”

“That’s okay,” Malcolm says, rising from his seat. “I can make an exception for Gretchen.”

“Do you prepare it with vanilla?” Gretchen asks.

“If you’d like.”

“I wouldn’t,” she says.

In that case, Malcolm says, he won’t prepare it with vanilla.

“I bet if you ask nicely,” Clarissa says, “Malcolm will even put horseradish cheddar in it.”

Malcolm raises a single eyebrow, the closest he’s come to registering a complaint.

“That’s your favorite cheese, Grandma, isn’t it?” Lily says.

But Gretchen doesn’t respond. She raises a tissue to her face and dabs fastidiously at her mouth, careful not to disturb her lipstick. “You say better late than never, but I didn’t want to come here at all.”

“Well, we’re glad you did, Mom.”

“The only reason I came was because of Amram. He drove down to the city to get me.”

“And we’re thrilled he did,” Lily says.

Hearing this, especially from Lily, sets Noelle’s teeth on edge. Amram drove down to the city to ask Gretchen for money. She has no evidence of this, but she also has no doubt. Yet even as she’s thinking this, she’s wondering who she is to be accusing him, thinking that if he in fact managed to secure a gift from Gretchen she would be grateful. She tries to imagine how much money her grandmother has, and all she can think of are those dead CEOs. She recalls that old joke: “How do you make a small fortune in Israel? You bring a large one from abroad.”

“You told me you didn’t want to come here,” David says. “That you’d already been through too much.”

“I have been through too much,” Gretchen says. She’s sitting up straight, her napkin folded primly in her lap, but there’s a vacancy to her gaze, as if she’s looking through them.

Lily says, “Malcolm made French toast for you, Grandma. Normally that would cost you fourteen dollars.”