The Place Will Comfort You (22 page)

Among his other puzzling comforts, the old man had hoarded a colony of sealed sandwich bags stuffed with a mysterious substance, dark and dry. She could live with the mystery. She threw the bags out by the handful, but soon she had poked one open, rubbed a pinch between her fingers and sniffed, what? Tea leaves, but weaksmelling and silty, not the cut of leaf sold loose. He had salvaged the contents of used teabags.

She was washing her hands for the umpteenth time that day when the phone rang. The best rates had set in there hours ago.

“How You Doin's on the street from perfect strangers,” she told Harvey. “Have a Nice Day in every shop. You having a nice day?”

His time it was the dead of night, he said. The voice came across corrupted, not altogether him and the retort uncalled for. She knew what time it was for all of them.

“I should say reaccustomed for myself,” she said. “I find I'm touched. I find I appreciate the civility, and not to mention Yitz. This morning at Safeway I thought he was going to propose to the cashier. I told him, Yitz, I'm positive the sentiment is genuine. It also happens to be in her job description. Eytan dropped a blueberry yogurt in the parking lot, and the cart collector offered a replacement. It wasn't even cracked, only caved in.”

He said there were still some loose ends at the department, some last-minute demands.

He had his ticket, though?

Yitz muttered on the porch and shuffled his sandals. Harvey must have heard the shift in her attention. He was waiting.

“Monday you said you would book it at lunch,” she said.

Soon as the pace let up, he said, a lot of administrative loose ends. Considering his appointment as department chair he owed his colleagues a thorough wrap-up.

“Your chairmanship ended a year and four months ago,” she said. “And the buyers?”

The closing had to be rescheduled.

“Why?”

“A few remaining questions.”

“But we had cake and coffee twice. They were looking to renovate. They didn't mind the parking spot, they met the tenants' council. They got along with Abukasis!”

“Only a few remaining questions,” he said. “Leave it to me. You have enough on your hands right now. Trust me. Are you having a nice day?”

“Thank you,” she said. “I am indeed.” She let him know she had set all the important concerns in motion. Yitz's application at the college was missing only his discharge papers, Eytan and she were to meet the principal at Jewish Day tomorrow.

Harvey asked where the principal had gone to college. She didn't know. Had the boys made it to morning prayers at the local shul? he asked. Not yet.

The line was lousy. At times there was a delay in reception. She would hear nothing and then he would come in with just a fraction of the first syllable shaved off, so that there was the unpleasant but really unfounded sense of omission. Other times it seemed her voice was being transmitted to him more swiftly than it could travel to her own ears. He would interrupt.

She already had one job lead, she said, from a member of the community who— Yes, very homey. Only a little tidying up. She wondered if she shouldn't be the one to call him tomorrow, so the—

“Leave it to me.”

“That phrase again,” she said.

“That what?”

“Leave it to me,” she said. “Twice now. It sounds glib. You never say that.”

“Bonny.”

“Are you punishing me?” she said.

“What is this all of a sudden?”

“You won't answer the question.”

“Can I be punishing you when it seems I'm the one being prosecuted?”

“So this is debate club and not a conversation.”

“I'd rather not go looking for extra grief,” he said. “I called to see how you're all doing.”

“We would do better with you here.”

“Is this a choice that I'm making?” he said.

“So it's
my
choice. Terrific. He is punishing me.”

“Is this a choice that I'm making, having to wrap up our affairs here. What are you trying to stir up, Bonny?”

“Get your ticket,” she said.

“Don't speak to me in this manner, Bonny!” She moved the phone farther from her ear, heart quickened with the disconcerting thrill she always felt when she had managed finally to provoke open resistance. “Don't treat me like some self-indulgent balker, a child, a foot dragger. Don't trivialize my task here. Don't—”

“What else?” she said. “God knows I could use the help right now and this is enormously helpful, Harvey. I shouldn't do what else?”

He said nothing and in fact she had been primed to carry on, but someone was addressing her from outside.

“You can give me one more job?”

And if only this had been Yitz expressing interest in a useful outlet. However the voice was the voice of a second-grader and the syntax that of a native Hebrew speaker. Eytan stood in the doorway with bright red shoulders, in Israeli pajamas consisting of a thin tank top and shorts, hair dripping wet beneath his kippa, crocheted of white thread bordered with green.

“You ran the shower too hot!” she said.

“I did what now?” Harvey said.

“So I fixed it,” Eytan said.

She told her husband she had to go. She would call him tomorrow. He told her to have it her way.

She herded Eytan back into the bathroom, where she removed his kippa and wrapped his head in a towel. The container of ointment was lined up on the rim of the sink along with all the other new pharmaceuticals awaiting a clean shelf.

“I can do some more with the blue spray on where there's glass?”

“No, enough of that,” she said. She smoothed the cream onto his shoulders. “Next time before you shower you call me. Does it hurt?”

“No,” he said. “So another job. What one are you doing now? I can help?”

“I'm in between. Listen, you have to learn the settings before you run it alone.”

“One more job,” he said.

She returned the ointment to its place, unwrapped the boy's head, and secured the tightly knit kippa back at his crown, with a metal clip that clicked as it shut.

“One and no more,” she said. “Then we call it a day.”

A White House snow dome, a Miss Liberty snow dome, Mount Rushmore in a snow dome, Abe Lincoln cleaving pewter logs, corkbacked coasters, two sets intermixed, one celebrating aspects of Virginia, the other stamped with simplified Chagalls.

Two glass bluebirds, two ruby cardinals, a Disney-type woolly mammoth, ferocity replaced with dimples and a lolling tongue cast in a rubbery polymer. She transferred everything to Eytan, where he squatted by the tasseled sofa, ripping the
Times
for padding. For each new artifact he paused and with a ceremonious gesture extended his hands, received it but did not yet wrap, instead arranging everything in rows on the sofa. She piled doilies on the armrest. Her eyes began to itch. Once in a while Eytan sneezed.

The oak-entombed television served as the site of a ceramic shtetl. In the shadow of the bent antenna, in valleys of wrinkled lace, enameled huts and figurines staged a nonsensical production of the stock Old World tableaux. The band of wedding musicians swept bows across strings and blew wind into instruments, as the dairyman slogged by with morning buckets, chickens pecking underfoot. On his path a man and woman whirled together, dancing, gripping edges of one handkerchief, free arms stretched out; the woman's grazed the ear of a Melamed, who in turn wagged a glazed finger at a benchful of schoolboys, behind whom four men in black caftans and white stockings held up the four poles of a canopy, which sheltered a rabbi and a bride and groom. This last piece, like all the ones before, she handed to her son, followed by doilies. She fetched a canister of Lemon Pledge and sprayed down the fuzzed areas.

Olive-wood camels, olive-wood mules, olive trees painted on olive-wood slabs. Isaac's binding pounded into the soft foil of a single bookend, a midget Rachel's Tomb in clay, slotted on top for alms. Impossible the old man wouldn't own a brass King David's Tower on a chain. She looked behind a bureau and there it was, on ropes of dust.

Perhaps the carpeting should be professionally shampooed and suctioned, perhaps torn up. How, otherwise, even once the residues in the whole place had been eliminated, would she overcome this stubborn case of crawling skin, knowing that the main surface of the place was a sponge? True, she disliked mopping but she loved a floor just mopped. She hated to have given up her tiles, hard but ever cooling to the feet, back home. And what was it, only three days away, if not still her home? Harvey was in right now. Standing on her spotless tiles and cursing her for making them leave, yes, though he wouldn't admit it, hard at the task of chronicling the move as a concession to her and not to circumstances. She had been coming to see it in his behavior, like the sickened way he had looked
at her the night before the flight, standing with his back against the kitchen tiles they had chosen twelve years ago, a harvest theme, persimmons and blue grapes. He had reached to hold her hands and she wouldn't make her hands available. She'd been koshering beef liver! Chopped liver freezes very well. She told him, You don't want to touch my hands, and he could see that—had seen it well before his gesture, and still chose the impossible time. Bacteria, juices, blood, she had said. He walked away as if she'd meant these as personal slurs. The slightest motion between them nowadays connoted disappointment on a massive scale. How could it but? When their last domestic project had been to dismantle their existence.

Mezuzahs wrenched off their door frames, closets emptied, the white walls bared from batik tapestry, a woodcut print, a copper platter, an oil painting, original calligraphy on simulated parchment.

Not much, at the end of the day. Few and commanding foci, that had been the goal twelve years ago, for the home that had been not only their first owned, but also the first with a concept of design. They had stuck to local craftwork, the minimal touch or the marvel of intricacy, religious themes as well as secular, befitting the vision: the grandest old hopes alive in contemporary garb, Modern Zionist Orthodoxy. Here the days would move by the map of Law while the heart beat for Zion, and all the time the mind would remain immersed in the developing world, which again was Zion, rising around them in fresh asphalt, new cement foundations and young trees, close by the sands of the Mediterranean. Inside their apartment they invoked the outside, sand-colored tiles set off with a blue wool kilim, not too broad, not to obscure the stone reflecting the pure walls, clean, fixed planes in an apartment just finished within a building similar to scores rising in sprawling blocks of bright white multistories, contractors' signs blazing all over Herzlia, squares of color silk-screened on tin. The ficus saplings in their wire enclosures fended off the heat with quavering fig leafs. This was their place, an M.A. and a Ph.D. in scientific disciplines, chemistry
teacher and metallurgist, the daughter of a beadle from Trenton with her Harvey, the would-be heir of a Bronx grocery, who had engaged her to him in Hoboken with the wall of Jerusalem in sterling silver around her finger.

The furniture they sold. Any notion of attachment fizzled once they had looked into shipping costs. This time there would be no subsidy. No establishment supported the descent, which was instituted on what principles? One, mercy on her sons. And the practice? A very big move. And after that?

Yitz's throat-clearing kept announcing his presence on the porch, but the farcical delivery negated the insistence. Eytan remained busy at the sofa. He had sorted the old man's collectibles into groups, according to what categories, it wasn't clear. She had specified only two: storage or keeps. He took a step back to appraise the inventory. He was taking profound satisfaction in the work. There stood Harvey, but very small. There he had been, too, in the altitudes between Ben Gurion and JFK, in the little boy's fantastic self-sufficiency. Eytan had kept himself diverted the entire time with only five slim storybooks, a box of crayons, and paper. No, paper she had forgotten, so he had drawn a family of puppets onto travel-sickness bags. The use of these had kept him busy the rest of the way, the only fuss coming after the long nap, when he awakened thirsty. He wouldn't push the call button.
No, you, you,
he whispers through tight lips, scandalized.

Footfalls crunched on the Astroturf outside. At the sofa Eytan raised a hand behind his head, twisted a tuft of hair near his kippa, stepped forward and made a selection, picking up the mammoth and looking closely at the tusks.

The curtains billowed, writhed, then separated into panels, Yitz bursting through, droplets rolling down his sideburns onto stubble. “Summer shower!” he said. “I remember the smell!”

Eytan gaped big-eyed at his brother, then at her. “Here in the summer it rains?”

“I saw lightning,” Yitz said. “Dig it. We're going to get a show. We need some chairs out there. Let's get some kitchen chairs.” Thunder broke and he jumped, but wove the motion into a decision-making gesture, smacking a fist against a palm. His little brother hopped to, beginning to walk in his direction, still holding the mammoth, scratching his neck with the trunk.

“Eytan!” she said. “No.”

He hid the mammoth behind his back, as if the toy were at issue, and as if it must be hidden from Yitz.

“You cannot go out,” she said.

“Let the kid have some fun,” Yitz said.

“Sixteen stories up, Yitz? Exposed in an electric storm, on metal chairs?”

“Ahh,” Yitz said. “Guess the fun's only for me.”

“No,” she said.

He took a step around the sliced oval sheen of the expandable table, towards the kitchenette.

“Those chairs stay where they are,” she said.

“Who are you talking to like that?” he said. “I'm twenty-one.”

“Who are
you
talking to, Yitz?” she said. “You are in your mother's home. I allow no willful self-endangerment at any age.”