The Law of Loving Others (18 page)

IT had been nearly a decade since I'd been to Florida, but the moment I walked out of the airport and felt the rush of humid air, I was flooded with memories. I thought of the time in second grade when my family and my cousin Molly drove down from New York. The whole trip was about ten days, and I missed two days of school. (Two days I
always
regretted missing, when the eggs our class was watching over finally hatched and cracked open, and those twiggy, fragile chicks sprang to life. By the time I returned to school, they were already full and round, chirping loudly and on their way back to the farm.) I remembered the long stretches of driving through the south, and finally when Molly and I saw the sign welcoming us to Florida, bright blue and ornamented with oranges, we ripped off our sweatshirts, as though the crossing of a state line indicated a sudden, severe change in weather, and the two of us screamed with sheer excitement. And then, a few years later in fifth grade, we went to Universal Studios, and I got sick from eating too many of those hot dogs wrapped in pretzel dough and threw up all over the fake New York City sidewalk.

My grandmother, Ruth, and her boyfriend, Saul, were waiting for me in a long white Buick, which looked like a relic of a different era. Ruth was small and round, with bands of flesh around her waist. She was wearing a yellow blouse and linen pants. Her hair was cut into a little bob, dyed reddish blond. She was seventy-eight and had always looked so young, but her hip was still slightly damaged from her fall in November, and she was using a cane to prop herself up, standing beside the car. I was startled at the sight of it.

“Emmala!” she cried, and we embraced warmly. She examined my face and then hugged me, repeated that motion a couple of times. It had only been a few months since we'd seen each other, but I imagined she was feeling particularly sad and nostalgic, having just recently moved down to Florida year-round, anticipating what it would be like to go months without a visit from family.

Saul stepped out of the car, walked around from the passenger side, and gave me a quick hug, then took the suitcase from me. He was wearing clean, white, thick-soled sneakers and a pair of salmon-colored shorts.

“How was your flight, honey?” My grandmother asked.

I climbed into the back seat of the Buick and I told them that it was mostly fine, that there had been a girl sitting behind me on the plane who gave herself a full manicure and pedicure. I could hear the sharp, metallic sound of the clippers, smell the acetone of the polish remover.

“I didn't say anything, obviously,” I continued, “but some guy sitting across from the girl freaked out and there was this big fight.”

“That's the kind of thing people get killed over if they're not careful,” Saul said.

SAUL and my grandmother lived about fifteen miles south of Fort Lauderdale, in a small city by the water, with wide open streets dotted with palm trees, lots of elderly Jewish women, and a handful of their remaining husbands. There were clusters of apartment complexes—tall white buildings and glass patios, gleaming turquoise pools. It was warm and balmy, the sky always some sweet pastel, the color of sherbet.

MY grandmother had had an apartment there for a dozen years, since she retired as an elementary school teacher in the late nineties. She was living there seasonally, shuttling back and forth between this apartment and her house in Queens. It wasn't until she moved down there that she met Saul. She'd been single for almost forty years by then, my grandfather having died in his late thirties, following a heart attack in the middle of the small men's shoe store he owned on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn.

Ruth was a single parent from then on, teaching extra classes during the school year and in the summers too, to support her children. And everyone in our family was a bit stunned, when, after so many years of solitude, she brazenly announced that she'd fallen in love. It was just a few months ago that she'd sold her house, and she and Saul moved in together in Florida.

“We are so, so thrilled to have you visit,” she told me now. “My friends can't wait to meet you.”

SO many things from my grandmother's house in Queens had been transplanted into this apartment. A bowl, in the center of the table, filled with papier-mâché fruits and vegetables: an eggplant, a tomato, a pair of oranges. A wall of photographs recreated in precisely the same arrangement as it had been in Queens: portraits of grandchildren, some pictures from a trip we'd all taken together to Club Med ten years ago—my cousin Molly snorkeling, surrounded by white trees of coral. One of me as a toddler in long footie pajamas, asleep and slung over my mother's shoulder.

There was the bathroom drawer filled, just like it used to be, with old makeup. Waxy tubes of pink lipstick, plastic compartments of blush, complimentary samples of perfume in tiny bottles that clanked together like wind chimes when I sorted through them.

THE three of us went out to dinner a short drive from their apartment. It was a seafood restaurant with a giant lobster that hung menacingly over a red roof. My grandmother and I shared a broiled salmon, our favorite kind of fish. She and Saul asked me about school, about Daniel. Saul readjusted his hearing aid every so often; when I spoke, he leaned toward me so he could hear better. We didn't talk about my mother. Or we did, but not about what was happening then, only the past.

Saul told a story about his twin granddaughters, who had just recently come to visit him—without their parents—around Christmastime. They were seven, and one became so homesick that she literally made herself sick, he said.

“There are so many fun things to do, we went to the beach, to play miniature golf, but no matter what it was, she cried. By the time she left, she could barely speak, her voice was so hoarse from all that crying!”

“Oh, I used to have such bad separation anxiety from my mother,” I said. “I'd cry hysterically even when she was only going to the supermarket.”

“She did,” my grandmother said, turning to Saul. “Sometimes when she was at my house without her parents, she'd miss her mother so much. Hours would pass and finally, when I knew that Carol would be coming back soon, I'd let her go wait by the door. She was always trying to look out of the small oval pane of glass in the center. But Emma was such a tiny little girl, and so I had to bring her a small stepladder. And she would stand on it, her head peeking out above the glass, just enough to see a slit into the outside world as she waited for her mother.”

She reached across the table to touch my hand.

“Oh my poor Emmala,” she said. “It was the sweetest, saddest sight.”

IN the parking lot, my grandmother and Saul held hands as they walked slowly, purposefully, toward the car. Saul's hands had grown puffy, swollen with age, I imagined, and they had a paw-like quality to them. I had wondered if all those years alone had hardened my grandmother in some way, but there was a gentleness between her and Saul, and I was surprised to see how sweet they were together, how delicately they embraced one another.

I had decided I wouldn't talk to Phil while I was in Florida, and so I kept turning my phone off or deliberately leaving it at the apartment. When I got back after dinner that night, there was a message from Daniel. I had hoped and imagined this trip would be enlightening in many ways, that I could just clear my head and focus on myself and my family. But even in Florida I couldn't stop analyzing things with Daniel and obsessing about Phil.

I imagined going to visit him at school; I saw us aimlessly roaming his leafy college campus, drinking beers at a noisy house party and then curling up in a tiny twin bed together. I thought about kissing him, casually, just turning my face toward his whenever I felt like it. And each time I got too caught up in the fantasy, I made myself sit for a minute and think of my mother. I thought about that night at the A&P, the faraway look in her eyes, the way the yellow light from Best Buy illuminated her blank face. I tried to conjure up the terror in the pit of my stomach, the sensation that I was in some sort of horror movie and my mother's body had been invaded, taken over by a zombie.