The World Without You (42 page)

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“Now you’ve offended him.”

Malcolm, complying, playing along, has his hands pressed to his heart; he’s looking at Gretchen in supplication.

“You haven’t even tried it,” Marilyn says.

Gretchen takes a compulsory bite of French toast, then stirs the eggs around her plate. “I’ve always hated this town.”

“I know you have, Mom. You said there was nowhere to get a decent cup of coffee, much less a good bagel.”

Gretchen looks at him distantly, as if being reminded of someone she’s forgotten, a former version of herself.

“You’ll be going home in a few hours,” David says. “You won’t have to come back here for a long time.”

“I’m never coming back here.”

David looks at her as if to say, Come on.

Gretchen deposits her fork on her plate, her napkin in a ball beside her cutlery, and asks to be excused. She traffics into the hallway, where everyone can see her straightening the art on the walls. In the living room, she nudges a pile of books on the coffee table so they’re not too close to the edge.

“What’s she doing?” David asks.

“Making sure the picture frames aren’t off-center,” Lily says.

“She just needs to get back to the city,” Marilyn says. “She was forty-nine when I first met her, and even then she hated to leave New York.”

“I’d like a cup of tea,” Gretchen says when she returns.

David jumps up; Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle do the same. Soon Nathaniel and Malcolm join them, too, and this time Gretchen doesn’t object. The cupboard is open, and they’re all reaching for a glass.

“You see, Gretchen?” Nathaniel says. “You ask for a cup of tea and you get six.”

“You still rule the roost, Grandma,” Lily says.

“One cup is sufficient,” Gretchen says. “And a biscuit, please, if you would.”

“One biscuit, coming up,” David says. He brings his mother a plate of cookies.

“How are they?” Lily asks.

“They’re not entirely disgusting,” Gretchen says.

“Look, Grandma,” Clarissa says, pointing at what’s left of Gretchen’s cookie. “It’s in the shape of Pennsylvania. Remember how we used to do that? Play ‘United States of Confectionaries’?”

Gretchen gazes back at her distantly.

“We’d chant ‘United States of Confectionaries,’” Lily says. “That was your signal to bring out the cake and cookies. Then the four of us would bite into them in the shapes of the states.”

“One time,” Clarissa says, “Leo made you buy him five packages of Oreos. He claimed he needed to complete all fifty states. He said it was for his geography homework.”

“Leo was the champion, wasn’t he?” Gretchen says.

“Yes, Grandma,” Lily says. “He was.”

For an instant it seems as if there are tears in her eyes. She lays her head on the table, her hands on either side of her.

“Do you want to lie down?” Nathaniel asks.

“I’m just resting,” Gretchen murmurs.

“You can rest on the sofa,” Marilyn says. “You’ll be more comfortable there.”

“I’d rather rest here.”

Gretchen stays with her eyes closed. Her breathing has gotten slower; it seems she might have fallen asleep. A minute passes, and she looks up. “I’m sorry,” she says, dabbing her eyes with a napkin. “I must have been exhausted.”

“Mom, you don’t need to apologize.”

Gretchen presses her hands against the table, and now she’s standing up. She never was tall, and she has shrunk considerably over the years, but she has a way of staring down at people from below. Poised before her chair, looking out at her family, she looms above them all. “My only grandson died last year. I said I didn’t want to go through this again, and I meant it.”

Everyone nods. From the living room come shouts. Somebody has won at solitaire.

“Then Amram came to fetch me, and I’m not someone who’s easily fetched.”

“We know you’re not, Grandma,” Clarissa says.

“I don’t do things I don’t want to do.”

“We understand, Mom.”

“But then Amram told me what’s happening in this family, and I marched straight to the car.”

“Mom—”

“Please, David, let me finish. I’m not about to be party to this—the breaking up of my family.”

“Gretchen.” It’s Marilyn who’s speaking now, but Gretchen won’t let her interrupt either.

“I didn’t want to come here,” Gretchen says, “but I’m here now, and you’re going to listen to me.” She’s looking at her son, at her daughter-in-law, at both of them together, and they’re looking back at her, and now they’re looking away. “There’s no excuse for this. Don’t talk to me about love, and don’t talk to me about grief. Do you think I don’t know about grief? My grandson died a year ago. I’m ninety-four years old. Almost everyone I know is dead, starting with my first husband, your father, David, whom I loved.”

“I know you did, Mom.”

“I loved all three of my husbands. I won’t talk about my private life, but if you want to know whether we ever had problems, the answer is we did.”

Everyone stares back at her.

“But I never thought of leaving them, and none of them ever thought of leaving me. I know something about integrity, and I know something about love. And I know something about loyalty, which is the most important quality of all. You,” she says, and she’s pointing at Thisbe, who’s so startled she shoots up in her chair. “You’ve been quiet the whole meal.”

“I …”

“It’s okay,” Gretchen says. “Your actions are more important.”

“What actions?” Thisbe says, feeling as if she’s been caught at something, she has no idea what.

“How old were you when Leo died?”

“Thirty-two,” she says. “I’m thirty-three now.”

“I wasn’t much older when David’s father died. I know what that’s like, to be a young widow.”

The porch door is open and a breeze comes in, sending the chandelier spinning so that the bulbs shine on Thisbe. She can feel herself breaking out in a sweat.

“No one understands something like that,” Gretchen says, “until they’ve gone through it themselves.”

Thisbe agrees. No one really knows what she’s endured: not her family, not her closest friends.

“You could teach your in-laws a lesson about loyalty.”

A piece of scrambled eggs is impaled on Thisbe’s fork, which she’s holding in front of her, not sure whether to raise it to her mouth or lower it to her plate, so it just hovers in midair, like a bird. “What do you mean?”

“You flew out here, didn’t you?” Gretchen says. “You traveled across the country with your son.”

“He was Leo’s son, too,” Thisbe says. She can hear Calder now, playing with his cousins in the living room.

“But you could have declined the invitation. It would have been easy enough to find an excuse.”

Thisbe looks down at the floor.

“No one likes to fly across the country with a small child. Believe me, I’ve done it myself. And that doesn’t even take into account the cost of plane fare.”

“It’s okay,” Thisbe says. “It wasn’t a burden.”

“Please, Thisbe. Learn to take a compliment.”

“Okay,” she says. “Thank you, Gretchen.” It’s true, she thinks. She’s never been good at taking a compliment, certainly not from Gretchen, who always scared her and still does. She’s never been good, either, at being floodlighted with attention the way she’s being floodlighted now, and she thinks if she just acts grateful and says thank you, Gretchen might cast her gaze, her reedy voice, at someone else.

“All I know,” Gretchen says, “is that I’m surrounded by blood relatives, but it’s the people who have married into this family who have shown the most character.”

Noelle sits up ramrod straight. She’s not sure whom to defend and whom to attack. She looks directly at Gretchen. “If Thisbe’s so loyal, why does she have a new boyfriend?”

“She what?” Marilyn says.

Lily turns in her seat. “Jesus Christ, Noelle!”

“Not only that, but she’s about to move in with him. I overheard them on the phone last night.”

“What happened to your vaunted hearing defect?” And the words come back to Lily,
You little snoop.
Noelle always with her ear to people’s doors, never able to keep a secret. The girl who couldn’t keep her legs shut couldn’t keep her mouth shut.

“And you,” Noelle says to Lily, “saying what you did at Leo’s memorial. Don’t you have any shame?”

“I have nothing to be ashamed of,” Lily says. “Mom and Dad are splitting up. Everyone at this table knows it’s happening, and the rest of the world will know it soon, too.”

“You have a new boyfriend?” Marilyn says to Thisbe.

Thisbe hears a fork fall, a single blueberry roll across the table and drop slowly to the floor. “I was going to tell you.”

“She
tried
to tell you,” Lily says.

“You already knew?” says Marilyn.

“I knew Thisbe had a boyfriend,” Lily says. “He’s an old friend of Malcolm’s and mine. When we heard Wyeth was going to Berkeley, we put him and Thisbe in touch. ”

“You set them up?” Marilyn says.

“She didn’t set us up,” says Thisbe.

“Even if I did.” Lily can hear her mother’s voice.
He was your brother. Where do your allegiances lie?
And she hates that question. Hates the very idea of allegiances.

“I’d have met Wyeth, anyway,” Thisbe says. “Our department is tiny. A year in, and we already know each other too well.”

“That’s what kills me,” Marilyn says. “A year in.”

“What do you mean?”

“Leo was alive a year ago.”

Thisbe nods. How, she thinks, can she possibly forget this when she’s here, in Lenox, thousands of miles from home, returned like a package to Leo’s family, to everyone, to everything, she abandoned?

“Why?” Marilyn says, and she might as well be asking this about Leo himself. It’s what Thisbe herself has been asking this past year, what she continues to ask: why did this happen to him, to her, to all of them?

But Marilyn is asking her about Wyeth. “Why are you moving in with him?”

“Because I love him, Marilyn. Because I want to move in with him. Because Calder loves him, too. Because I’m thirty-three years old and …”

Marilyn is standing now, and Thisbe senses anything is possible; she believes Marilyn might hit her.

“You may think I’m an unreasonable person, Thisbe.”

“No, Marilyn. I don’t think you’re unreasonable.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to be alone for the rest of your life.”

“But you’d have liked more time?”

Marilyn nods. But now, looking down at the remains of her scrambled eggs, she says, “I don’t know.”

She’d have liked more time, too, Thisbe wants to say. She certainly hadn’t been planning for this to happen. A friend of hers once said that it’s the people with the best marriages who are the quickest to meet someone new. They
like
being in a relationship; it’s actually a testament to the person who died. But Thisbe’s not going to tell Marilyn this because it will sound condescending, and because she suspects it won’t ring true; she’s not even sure it rings true to her. She won’t tell Marilyn about her and Leo’s troubles. It would seem like she’s trying to absolve herself, and she doesn’t wish to be absolved. And why should she destroy her mother-in-law’s illusions when they may not be illusions in the first place? She loved Leo; they might have worked things out if he’d come home from Iraq. And if someone said it was a blissful marriage, she wouldn’t disagree. Only a year has passed, but she already can’t remember it. “I’m sorry,” she says. The words feel piddly, insufficient, a coat thrown over a corpse, but they’re all she has.

And Marilyn nods, removes her plate from the table, and silently exits the room.

Holding an ice pack, Lily climbs the stairs to the second floor and knocks on the door to Amram’s bedroom. “Can I come in?”

Amram, who has just woken up, groggily admits her. The tissue surrounding his right eye has started to inflate; the skin has already begun to yellow.

“How are you doing?”

He shrugs. “The oddsmakers say I’m going to live.”

“I’ll tell you one thing. I’d sure like to see the other guy.” Lily recalls the time Malcolm got a black eye, playing pickup basketball. He’d been breaking up a fight, and a punch intended for someone else landed on him. Socked in the eye by his own teammate. Felled by friendly fire. The skin around his eye turned yellow, then purple, then orange, before settling into a dusky blue-black. Killer Malcolm, his friends began to call him, and Lily started to call him that, too. She discovered, to her surprise, that with a certain segment of the population Malcolm’s injury conferred on him a kind of status, and one time, on the Metro, a girl whistled at him and said, “Baby, you’re hot!” Whatever else, getting punched in the face made you public property. She suspects Amram is in for that now.

“You did see the other guy,” Amram says. “She was downstairs eating breakfast with you.”

Lily steps tentatively toward him, holding out the ice pack. “Here,” she says. “I thought you could use replenishment.”

He could. The ice pack Noelle gave him is all melted now, sitting on the nightstand beside the bed, dripping to the floor. As he props himself up, he looks at Lily askance through his good eye. “Have I missed something, or have you become a doctor?”

“I was born to one,” Lily says, shrugging. “Maybe some of it got passed down.” Passed down enough, she thinks, for her to have contemplated going to medical school for a time, though a week of organic chemistry her sophomore year at Princeton ended any chance of that. It wouldn’t have worked out, anyway. She gets squeamish at the sight of blood.

“So is this the pity vote?”

“What pity vote?”

“Come on. Don’t pretend you ever liked me.” Amram seats himself up straight so he’s staring directly at her, though he needs to tilt his head to look out of his good eye.

“Since when do doctors have to like their patients?”

“Or patients their doctors.”

“Exactly.”

Lily’s hands have gotten wet from holding the ice pack, and a little numb too. She wipes them on the back of her jeans. She’s standing by the window where she can see out on the deck her father’s new telescope directed at the firmament like a cannon. Astronomy’s a guy thing, she thinks: point your phallus at Cassiopeia. There’s something about the stars, especially in Lenox where there are so many of them, that turns a person mushy-headed. The world is so big and you’re so small; it can make you start mooning. “We missed you at breakfast,” she tells Amram.