The World Without You (6 page)

It’s like the dream everyone has. You realize you’ve forgotten to go to class all semester and tomorrow’s the final in introductory Chinese. But for Noelle it’s not just a dream; it’s her life. She is, in fact, enrolled in introductory Chinese. She is, in fact, naked in school, always about to be discovered, because there’s something at the core transparent about her, the organs, the arteries and veins carrying the blood to her heart, just a body spread out for all to see, redheaded Noelle with the blue, blue eyes, fourteen years old and the prettiest girl in Mamaroneck High School. It’s where her family moved, to Westchester, when Noelle was thirteen because she’d gotten expelled from two schools in Manhattan and her parents thought if they removed her from the city they might keep her out of trouble. (That, more than anything, Noelle thinks, is why Lily can’t stand her. Lily never forgave her for banishing the family to the suburbs, for making her leave her friends and start over in a new school. Well, blame their parents, Noelle thinks; she didn’t want to leave the city any more than Lily did.)

Look at her
, they would say, the boys on the football team and the swim team, Noelle’s own teammates, the boys who tried out for the swim team just to see her in a bathing suit.
Why don’t you a wear a bikini, Noelle?
Thinking about her at night in their beds, beneath the sheets they soiled, not washing them, not wanting their mothers to wash them, not wanting to wash Noelle out of them.
You’re killing me, Noelle. Just thinking about you makes me come
. Noelle lived for their voices, feeling she was nothing when the boys didn’t talk about her, that she didn’t exist at all.
Noelle the nympho. The girl who couldn’t say no
. When her mother was on call, Noelle, who promised her she’d be studying, was instead out with Campbell, the next-door neighbor’s boy, or Bruce Weinstein from around the block. She knew who was awake and who wasn’t, whose parents were out, could feel her way around the streets near her home, moving stealthily through the bushes, avoiding the occasional passing headlights, following her own internal compass. In basements and attics, behind locked bedroom doors, lovely Noelle, her hair sliding across her face, the almost soundless sound of it, like the almost soundless sound of Noelle’s panties dropping to the floor.
Man, that girl’s efficient
, Casey Hopkins would say—Casey, whose father was a doctor at the same hospital as Noelle’s mother—and sometimes, hearing a parent come home late at night, the sound of others stirring in the house, Noelle would escape out the window.

“How ’bout we go rock climbing,” Noelle says, this to Mark Hathaway, Noelle guiding Mark’s hand beneath her shirt, Mark, only thirteen, a year younger than she is. Noelle’s heart goes out to the boys like this, the timid ones, like birds, the peach fuzz on Mark’s cheeks, the two of them in the audiovisual room where Mark spends most of his time, because he’s vice chair of the AV squad, shining the strobe lights on the students during the productions of
Guys and Dolls
and
Our Town
. Noelle runs her hands across Mark’s body, the smooth hairlessness of him, thinking of her mother back in medical school sticking her hands inside a cadaver. Mark is used to shining the lights on others, only now, with Noelle, the lights are on him and he wants them off; he doesn’t believe in kissing a girl with the lights on. But Noelle wants to see him; she won’t do anything with Mark unless she can watch what they’re doing. “How ’bout we go spelunking,” Noelle says, and she guides Mark’s hand down the inside of her jeans under the waistband of her panties. And it’s true what the boys say about her,
Noelle, just thinking about you makes me come
, because Noelle can see it on Mark’s face, the mere anticipation has caused him to ejaculate, and it’s as if Mark has forgotten his cue and everyone onstage is looking up at him, and Mark, humiliated, runs out, leaving Noelle alone, and now Mark has told the rest of the school what Noelle said,
How ’bout we go spelunking.

Soon everyone is saying it, the boys chanting it in Mr. Hampton’s English class and along West Boston Post Road, waiting for their parents to retrieve them from band practice. They say it on the way home from synagogue and church, seeing Noelle in a white bikini in front of her parents’ house sunning herself on a lawn chair, placing a halo of tinfoil around her neck so the sun will reflect off it to give her a better tan, her red hair settling in the crevice between her breasts.
Hey, Noelle
,
how ’bout we go spelunking
. And Noelle just laughs.

She does it everywhere with these boys, even in her parents’ house, in her bedroom when they’re asleep, and once in her parents’ bed when they were out, with a boy named Stanley, who said, “Doesn’t it creep you out, doing it in your parents’ bed?” but Noelle simply shrugged.
Noelle’s enterprising
, the boys say.
She makes do with what she can
. She’s had sex standing in the school elevator, having learned how to stop the elevator between floors, elevators having always been her thing. (One Halloween, when her family still lived in Manhattan, she told Rudolph, the elevator man, he could go home for the night, and she, at twelve, took over for him, offering the tenants candy and other trick-or-treats as she took them up to their apartments) Her parents moved to Westchester to keep her out of trouble, but there’s plenty of trouble to be found in Westchester, Noelle caught with the construction worker, Jimmy, twenty-three, blond and handsome, with that tool belt dangling from his slim waist, and, frankly, Noelle is tired of high school boys, Noelle who feels in that instant when a guy is about to come, in that moment of rapture that crosses his face, that everything’s okay and somebody loves her. She stands in the glaring light, knock-kneed as a foal, saying through the simple stance, the fragile pose,
Here I am, do what you want with me.

Noelle the slattern. Lubricious Noelle. Licentious. Lascivious. Wanton. Slut. Noelle knows these words, having taken Ms. Pickens’s vocabulary-building class, the boys in the hallway staring up at her from their Barron’s books as she walks insouciantly by. Noelle doing her best to study for the SAT, the way her sisters are doing, Clarissa and Lily off to Yale and Princeton while Noelle is going nowhere (
Nowhere Noelle
is how she thinks of herself, up in her bedroom, crying, alone). But then she reminds herself that no one is calling out her sisters’ names at night and no one is staying up late to help them with their math homework the way her mother is doing with her. But her mother loses patience with her; it’s hard for her to understand how school doesn’t come easily to Noelle. Her mother graduated number one in her class from the University of Pennsylvania and then again from NYU Medical School; like Clarissa and Lily, she has never failed at anything in her life.

“In that case,” Noelle says, “why don’t you take my test for me?”

“I can’t, sweetie.”

But in that
I can’t
, Noelle’s hears
I would if I could
, and she hates her mother for having no faith in her. “Go ahead,” she says. “Tell me you hate me.”

“How could you even think that?”

“You wish I’d never been born.” Then Noelle starts to cry, and she says, “Why do I fuck everything up?” because there’s something about her, she thinks, that’s at core unknowable, unlovable.

Even now, looking back, she wonders what her parents could have done differently. They tried counselors and therapists. They sent her to a summer camp for troubled youth. They punished her. They bribed her. But nothing worked.

She was twenty-five when she arrived in Israel. It was random that she landed there, another stop on a round-the-world plane ticket. She figured she’d work on a kibbutz, wake up at four in the morning to pick melons, then sleep away the afternoons with the other volunteers. She’d fall in love with an Israeli air force pilot, get up in the morning and put on his uniform and march like a soldier through the streets.

“Look at me.” Ari has dumped his pretzel twists into his ginger ale and is admiring how they float.

“Ari!” she says, then thinks better of it. It’s a twelve-hour flight; at a certain point you have to surrender.

“They look like fish,” Ari says, peering into his cup of pretzels.

Dov says, “You put pretzels in soda and you get Goldfish.”

“Not the food,” Akiva says. “Actual fish.” He looks up at his brothers. “Okay,” he says, “who can tell me what’s happening in Israel right now?”

“People are playing soccer,” Dov says.

“They probably are, but what I meant is, who can tell me what time it is?”

No one answers him.

“I’ll give you a hint. London is five hours later than Boston, and Jerusalem is two hours later than that.”

“In Israel, people are asleep,” Yoni says.

“The kids might be,” Akiva says. “But the grownups are eating dinner, or sitting at a café.”

On the screen above their seats, CNN is broadcasting NBA highlights, and Akiva snaps to attention. Like other Israeli basketball fans, he dreams that an Israeli will play in the NBA, though his real dream is to be that Israeli. He has memorized the names of the Israeli basketball players who almost made it to the NBA, and he has become a fan of the University of Connecticut, whose former star, Doron Sheffer, was drafted by the Los Angeles Clippers, only to accept a safer, better offer from Maccabi Tel Aviv. In a few years, the NBA will have its first Israeli player, but Akiva doesn’t know this yet, so it’s Sheffer who preoccupies him, Sheffer, who played for the University of Connecticut before Akiva was even born. But Akiva acts as if he’d been alive then, and at eight he, too, shares the burden of Sheffer’s failure. Akiva sees America as all-basketball-all-the-time, so when he meets an American who displays no interest in the sport he can’t help but feel that the person’s pulling his leg. He’s happy in Israel; it’s his home. Yet he believes that his parents, in moving to Jerusalem, voluntarily left heaven for the false consolations of earth. It’s as if in making aliyah they left the NBA itself, and so he inquires about their lives in the United States, thinking there must be something more than what his mother has told him, that they’re Jews and they want to live in the Jewish homeland.

Occasionally, Akiva will spot a tall African American on the street, a former NBA player extending his career and given, as Israeli law requires, a quickie conversion, and he will ask the player for his autograph. But he’s always being frustrated. Just last month, when Noelle told him about their trip, he said, “Why does it have to be during the summer?” Meaning why not during the NBA season when he could watch a game live? Another time, Noelle said. But when Akiva persisted, she explained to him about July Fourth, American Independence Day. “A long weekend,” she said, though this year July Fourth falls in the middle of the week. Every weekend in America is long, she explained. It’s one of the things she misses most about the States—sleeping in late on Sundays when she was a girl, bagels and whitefish, afternoons at her parents’ house sunning herself in the yard next to her mother’s bougainvillea—because in Israel Sunday is a workday like any other day of the week. Leo’s yahrzeit was coming up, she explained, which made it a more complicated occasion. “Bittersweet,” she said, realizing as she said this that Akiva didn’t understand what the word meant. But he pretended he did, or simply chose not to ask, which is what he always does when he doesn’t wish to discuss something. Noelle would like to talk to the children about Leo, but what is there to say? So many senseless deaths. Why compound them with another one? It’s Akiva she’s most tempted to talk to, because he’s older and might understand, and because he has memories of Leo, though it’s hard to know what he remembers and what he has gleaned from the stories she has told him and from the photograph of Leo, which stands on the shelf in their living room, her brother’s face looking down at them like some imperious god. But then she reminds herself that Akiva’s only eight, which was why when he said, “Well, I wish he’d died during the NBA season,” she let it pass.

“Is there a basketball hoop at Grandma and Grandpa’s?” he asks now.

She shakes her head.

“Why not?”

“Probably because Grandma and Grandpa don’t play basketball.” There was once a hoop in the driveway, but Leo and his friends used to stand on each other’s shoulders and grab onto the rim, and eventually they brought it down. The summer before he died, there was talk of putting up a new hoop, but it never happened, and now the court remains as it was, the downward slope of concrete going to the garage, the bare wooden backboard with the holes where the rim hung, the discoloration from the wind and rain, from the years of balls shot against it. “The next-door neighbors have a hoop.”

“Will they let me use it?”

“Maybe,” she says. “If you ask nicely.”

Ari starts to cry. To distract him, Noelle devises a game that involves figuring out what portion of the trip has elapsed, but because Akiva is getting all the answers right, his brothers lose interest.

Then they’re on to the next game, this one led by Amram, which involves guessing which of the passengers are undercover; there are rumored to be soldiers on every El Al flight. But the boys go about this too loudly (“That guy in the brown pants!” Yoni calls out), and Noelle is forced to make them stop.

The children order Sprites, their fourth of the trip, and Noelle says, “That’s enough, kids, you’ve had too much soda already,” but the flight attendant has already poured the drinks, and Amram says, “It’s an airplane flight, a special occasion,” and the boys all cheer and gulp down their sodas before their father can change his mind.

A couple of people wearing yarmulkes walk down the aisle looking for men to help make a minyan, and Amram gets up and joins them. Noelle doesn’t count for a minyan, but she decides to pray, too, doing so quietly from her seat.

Judaism, Lily likes to say: just another installment in the random life of Noelle Glucksman. (Lily was the one who wasn’t surprised when they learned after months of not hearing from her that Noelle, at twenty-six, had become an Orthodox Jew, living in Jerusalem, engaged to Amram.)
Hey, Noelle, what are you, deaf?
This when Noelle was a mere six and Lily seven, and sometimes Lily would shout and Noelle seemed not to hear her. Noelle ten and Lily eleven, Lily singing The Who to her, changing the words to
teenage spaceman
. In the morning when the alarm went off, Noelle slept right through it. And there Lily was again, coming out of the shower, screaming, “Would you turn off the fucking alarm, Noelle!”