The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (98 page)

And for just a moment, Kristina remembered the way she’d felt sitting around that kitchen in the old days.

Dull moonlight sloshes around like rainwater in the plastic over the window. Alma hasn’t come in yet. But Kristina’s just as glad to have had this time with Eli.

This afternoon, when Alma answered the door she looked silently for a moment at Kristina, with her bruises and the beautiful, dark child. Then she stood aside to let them in. Heaven knows what she thinks—she didn’t ask questions.

When Kristina was young she idolized Alma. It was Alma who looked out for her, and she never doubted for a moment that Alma would gladly take her in if the time came. It hardly matters now that it seems not to be the case. She looks around at Alma’s cheap, carelessly ugly place—home for nobody, really. Oh, those shining floors, that quiet, the breathing shadows! Will she ever see it again?

Noah coughs raspily in his sleep. She puts her hand to his hot forehead, and he opens his eyes, just for a moment.

Stolen car! Kidnapped child! How can those words mean her? The deer come crashing through the woods, Zoe holds her breath, Eli’s rage is all around them, the red net casting wide. What’s right outside? Keys hanging from the warden’s belt? The men with the guns? Just guns, or guns and badges…

No one looks at anyone—really completely looks—the way he looked at her. She never imagined, or even dared hope, that she would meet such a man or have such a time in her life. Better keep moving. New names, new histories, a nondescript room in a busy city where she’ll be able to lose herself and Noah. Watching, hiding, running—that way at least she’ll be with Eli for good.

Hi, Barbara, I said. You’re Barbara?

Eileen, said the nurse who answered the door. Nights.

I’m the granddaughter, I said.

I figured, Eileen said. Barbara told me you’d be showing up. So where’s that handsome brother of yours?

Bill? I said, I beat Bill? That’s a first.

Traffic must be bad, she said.

Traffic, traffic…I was goggling past Eileen at Nana’s apartment—the black-and-white tile, the heavy gold-framed mirror, the enormous vases or whatever they are, the painting I’d loved so much from the time I was a child of a mysterious, leafy glade, the old silver-dust light of Nana’s past. I was always shocked into sleepiness when I saw the place, as if a little mallet had bonked me on the head, sending me far away.

Or in Connecticut, Eileen said. I looked at her. Isn’t that where they drive in from? she said. He’s a wonderful man, your brother. So kind and thoughtful. And his wife, too. They always know just how to cheer your grandmother up. And that’s one cute little girl they’ve got.

How’s Nana doing? I asked.

A while since you’ve seen her, Eileen commented.

I live on the other side of the country! I said.

I know that, dear, Eileen said. I’ve seen your picture. With the trees. Before the second stroke she liked me to sit with her and go over the pictures.

I stared. Nana? Bill had told me to prepare myself, but still—family souvenirs with the nurse? It’s supposed to mean something to be one person rather than another.

Eileen accompanied me into the living room. Nana was dozing in one of the velvet chairs. I sneezed. Soldiers were marching silently toward us across the black-and-white desert of an old television screen. An attractively standardized smiling blond woman in a suit replaced them. Does Nana watch this? I asked. She seems to like having it on, Eileen said. I keep the sound off, though. She can’t really hear it, and I’d rather not. Wake up, dear, your granddaughter’s here to see you. Don’t be surprised if she doesn’t recognize you right off, Eileen told me. Dear, it’s your granddaughter.

It’s Lulu, Nana, I said, loudly. Nana surveyed me, then Eileen. Neither Bill nor I had inherited those famous blue eyes that can put holes right through you, though our father had, exactly, and so had our brother, Peter. Where does all that beauty go when someone finishes with it? If something exists how can it stop existing, I mused aloud to Jeff recently. Things take their course, Jeff said (kind of irritably, frankly). Well, what does
that
mean, really—
things take their course
? Jeff always used to be (his word) charmed that I wasn’t a (his word) sucker for received (his phrase) structures of logic. Anyhow, if something exists, it exists, is what I think, but when Nana turned back to the TV she did actually look like just any sweet old lady, all shrunk into her little blanket. I bent and kissed her cheek.

She winced. It’s Lulu, dear, Eileen shouted. One of Nana’s hands lifted from the pale cashmere blanket across her lap in a little wave, as if there were a gnat. I’ll be in the kitchen, Eileen said. Call me if you need me. I sat down near Nana on the sofa. I was not the gnat. Nana, I said, you look fabulous.

Did she hear anything at all? Well, anyhow, she’d never gone in for verbal expressions of affection. Someone sighed loudly. I looked around. The person who had sighed was me.

The last time I’d seen Nana, her hearing was perfect and she was going out all the time, looking if not still stunning, still seriously good, with the excellent clothes and hair and so on. She was older, obviously, than she had been, but that was all: older. It’s too drastic to take in—a stroke! One teensy moment, total eclipse. In my opinion, all moments ought to contain uniform amounts of change: X many moments equal strictly X much increase in age equal strictly X much change. Of course, it would be better if it were X much
decrease
in age.

Oh, where on earth was Bill? Though actually, I was early. Because last week when I’d called my old friend Juliette and said I was coming to the city to see Nana, she said sure I could stay at her place and naturally I assumed I’d be hanging out there a bit when I got in from the airport and we’d catch up and so on. But when I arrived, some guy, Juliette’s newish boyfriend, evidently—Wendell, I think his name might be—whom she’d sort of mentioned on the phone, turned out to be there, too.
Sure, let’s just kill them, why not just kill them all,
he was shouting. Juliette was peeling an orange. I’m not saying kill
extra
people, she said. I’m just frightened; there are a lot of crazy, angry maniacs out there who want to kill us, and I’m frightened.
You’re frightened
, he yelled.
No one else in the world is frightened?
Juliette raised her eyebrows at me and shrugged. The orange smelled fantastic. I was completely dehydrated from the flight because they hardly even bring you water anymore, though when I was little it was all so fun and special, with the pretty stewardesses and trays of little wrapped things, and I was just dying to tear open Juliette’s fridge and see if there was another orange in there, but Wendell, if that’s what his name is, was standing right in front of it shouting,
What are you saying? Are you saying we should kill everyone in the world to make sure there are no angry people left who want to
hurt
anyone?
So I waited a few minutes for him to finish up with what he wanted to get across and he didn’t (and no one had ever gotten anything across to Juliette) and I just dropped that idea about the orange and said see you later and tossed my stuff under the kitchen table and plunged into the subway. When Juliette and I were at art school together, all her boyfriends had been a lot of fun, but that was five or six years ago.

Happy laundry danced across the screen on a line. Little kids ate ice cream. A handsome man pumped gasoline into a car, jauntily twirled the cap back on the gas tank, and turned to wink at me. A different standardly attractive woman in a suit appeared. It was hard to tell on this ancient black-and-white set what color we were supposed to believe her hair was. Red, maybe. She was standing on the street, and a small group of people, probably a family, was gathered around her. They were black, or anyhow not specifically white, and they were noticeably fatigued and agitated. Their breath made lovely vapor in the cold. One of them spoke distractedly into a microphone. The others jogged up and down, rubbing their arms. Someone was lying on the pavement. The possibly redheaded newscaster looked serene; she and the family appeared to have arrived at the very same corner from utterly different planets by complete coincidence. She had a pretty good job, actually. A lot better than selling vintage clothing, anyhow. And maybe she was getting some kind of injections. Then it was the blond newscaster again, bracketing a few seconds in which a large structure burst slowly open like a flower, spraying debris and, kind of, limbs, maybe. The blond newscaster was probably getting injections herself. I’d been noticing lines maybe trying to creep up around near my eyes, lately. But even when I was a little child I felt that people who worry about that sort of thing are petty. Of course, when I was a little child I wasn’t about to be getting sneak attacks from lines anytime soon. Hi, Nana, I said, sure you’re okay with this stuff? But she just kept gazing at the images supplanting each other in front of her.

One way or another it had gotten to be a few months since Bill had called to tell me about Nana’s initial stroke. I’d intended to come right out to see her, but it wasn’t all that easy to arrange for a free week, and Jeff and I were having sort of vaguely severe money problems, and I just didn’t manage to put a trip together until Bill called again and said that this time it was really serious. I reached over and rested my hand on Nana’s. Nana had pretty much looked out for us—me and Bill and Peter—when our mother got sick (well, died, really) and our father started spending all his money on cars and driving them into things. If it hadn’t been for Nana, who knows what would have happened to us.

Nana gave my hand a brief, speculative look that detached it from hers, and then she turned back to the TV. From what closet had that old apparatus been unearthed? Nana had always gotten her news from the
Times
, as far as I knew, and other periodicals. I wondered what she was seeing. Was it just that the shifting black-and-white patterns engaged her attention, or did she recognize them as information and find solace in an old habit of receiving it? Or did she still have some comprehension of what was happening in front of her?

Enormous crowds were streaming through streets. Refugees! I thought for an instant, my hands tingling. Evacuations! But a lot of the people were carrying large placards or banners, I saw, and I realized this must be one of the protests—there was the capitol building, and then something changed and the Eiffel Tower was in the distance, and then there was something that looked like Parliament, and then for a second, a place I couldn’t identify at all, and then another where there were mostly Asians. The apartment was stifling! Despite the horrible freezing weather I got up to open the window a crack. When I sat down again, Nana spoke. Her voice used to have a penetrating, rather solid sound, something like an oboe’s, but now there were a lot of new threadlike cracks in it—it was hoarse, and strange. I suppose you have no idea how I happen to be here, she said. This is where you live, Nana, I said, in case she’d been speaking to me; this is your home. Nana examined my face—dispassionately, I think would be the exact right word. No wonder my father had been terrified of her when he was growing up!
Thank you
, she said, apropos of what, who could say. She folded her hands primly and ceased to see me.

My brain rolled up into a tube and my childhood rushed through it, swift pictures of coming here to this apartment with my mother and father and Peter and Bill—swift-moving, decisive Nana, smelling simply beautiful when she leaned down to me, and her big, pretty teeth, and all the shiny, silver hair she could twist up and pin in place in a second with some fantastic ornament. The ornate silver tea service, the delicate slice of lemon floating and dreaming away in the fragile cup, the velvet chairs, the painting of the mysterious, beautiful, leafy world on the wall that you could practically just
enter
…the light, as soon as you opened the door, of a different time, the lovely, strange, tarnished light that had existed before I was born…Translucent scraps of coming to see Nana went whirling through the tube and were gone. Nana, I said.

Doll-like figures sprayed into the air, broke open and poured out blackness. There was a bulldozer, and stuff crumbling. Eileen came in. Would I like a cup of tea, she asked me. Thanks, I told her, no. She paused for a moment before she went away again, squinting at the screen. Well, who knows, she said. But I’m glad I don’t have sons.

Nana had come into the world at the end of one war and lived through part of another before she left Europe, so she must have seen plenty of swarming crowds in her time and crumbling stuff and men in uniforms and little black pin-pricks puncturing the clear sky and swelling right up. Jeff and I don’t have a TV. Jeff doesn’t like anything about TV. The way the sets look, or the sound it makes, or what it does to your brain. He says he’s not so dumb that he thinks he can outsmart the brainwashing. He likes to keep his brain clean all by himself, and it does have a sparkly, pristine quality, despite the fact that it’s a bit squashed by events at the moment, which occasionally causes him to make remarks that could be considered vaguely inappropriate. For example, the other day we were going up in the elevator of the office building where Jeff and his team do their research, and there was a guy standing next to us, wearing a light blue kind of churchy suit, and Jeff turned and said, sort of to him, in a low voice, It’s sunset.

The guy glanced at Jeff and then at his watch. He had really nice eyes—candid, I think you’d say. He glanced at Jeff again and said, Would you mind pushing seven? Jeff said, Yup, the sun is setting, you guys at the helm. He pushed seven and turned back to the guy. See it sink toward the horizon, he said, feel the planet turn? Hear the big bones crunch at the earth’s hot core? The woolly mammoths, the dinosaurs, hear that? The fossil fuels sloshing? Crunch, crunch, slosh, slosh, Dinosaur Sunset Lullaby? I nodded to the guy when he got out at seven, but he wasn’t looking. Normally, Jeff is very cogent, and he’s amazingly quick to spot the specious remark or spurious explanation, especially, these days, if I’m the one who’s made it. I don’t especially mind having a TV around myself, but my concentration isn’t all that terrific in certain ways and I really can’t get myself to sit down and follow what’s going on in that little square window, so maybe I’m not as vulnerable to assault as Jeff is. But if someone turns a TV on in a bar, for example, I don’t just have to run out screaming.

So obviously, I never actually see a TV unless we happen to go out, which we really can’t spare the money to do these days, even if we were to feel like it (which Jeff certainly doesn’t). But TV or not, I had no trouble recognizing those faces appearing in front of me as I sat there next to Nana. I suppose everyone knows those faces as well as if they were tattooed on the inside of one’s eyelids. There they are, those guys, whether your eyes are open or shut.

Gigantic helicopters were nosing at some mountains. I felt worn out. Flying is no joke at all these days! The interrogations at the airport, and worrying about the nail scissors, and those dull boomings, even though you know it’s only luggage getting vaporized, and then when you finally do get mashed into place on the clanking, rickety old thing, with your blood clotting up, and the awful artificial, recirculated whatever it is, air or whatever, who doesn’t think of great chunks of charred metal falling from the sky. Oh, well. I’d gotten to Nana’s in any case.

A recollection of my father and Nana sitting in this room back when they were on viable terms, drinking something from fragile, icy little shot glasses, pressed itself urgently upon me. Though of course, when Bill finally did stride in, allowing his overcoat to slip off into Eileen’s hands, Peggy behind him, I was glad enough not to be sprawled out hiccuping. You beat me, Bill said, and kind of whacked me a bit on the back, that’s a first. Unfair, I said, when am I ever late these days? How would I know? Bill said. You live on the other side of the country.