They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (12 page)

The hole it made in the plate-glass window of the corner market was small, like a bullet hole in a windshield in a television show. The cracks around the hole were the cracks around the hole in the ice on the skating pond in a movie and the little girl slips in, mittens flailing above the cold black water, and drowns.

Ruby stood, three feet above the sidewalk in the freezing wind, and stared in surprise at the hole in the window. The hole severed the stem of the letter
T
in the word
MARKET
.
MIKE’S CORNER MARKET
. Ruby felt her mother yanking on her arm, but did not see her. She saw only the mouth of the man who owned the store, Manuel (not Mike, there was no Mike), a nice man who sold her candy and Doritos. His mouth was moving, his missing tooth appeared and reappeared, a blink of dark space. Like the hole in his window. His face was contorted in mystified rage. He slapped the top of his shiny bald head with an open palm.

“What were you thinking?” That was her mother’s voice. “Hand it over this minute.” That was her father. They were all inside the store now, all of them in the narrow space between the counter and the racks of chips and boxes of power bars, in a line—Ruby, her father, who was pulling her slingshot from her frozen grip, her mother, her sister, who was white and awed but still wailing, Manuel, and a man Ruby did not know. Manuel’s voice was speaking Spanish. Manuel’s hand was pointing at the man who stood in front of the cash register. He was a tall man in a navy blue parka. His hair was soft and dark and fell over his forehead like a boy’s, but he was not a boy, he was a young man. He was wearing a small beanie, the Jewish beanie, she forgot the name. His eyes were bright and blue. He was holding a Kleenex to his cheek. It was bright red. Red with blood. He was the handsomest man Ruby had ever seen.

The Spanish words and the words of her mother were all mixed together with Cora’s wails. The noise was amplified by the constricted space, and the warmth was overwhelming after the windy street, and Ruby was sweating and crying, and her mother was holding her shoulders and shaking her, not very hard, and Manuel was slapping his head with both hands, and Cora was gulping her sobs down.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Ruby thought, but no words came out.

And then the handsome man put one hand on Ruby’s mother’s shoulder and one hand on Ruby’s shoulder, the hand with the bloody Kleenex. The blood was so bright. It was the color of the paper stuck in the bottom of the plastic container of raspberries. It was almost pink. The tissue had sucked the color up. It flapped like a flag. A horrible, bloodstained flag. Ruby stared at it, and she didn’t even hear herself scream, but she screamed, screamed bloody murder, as her father said later. And everyone else was suddenly quiet, even Cora.

Ruby screamed for quite a while, but eventually she heard what the handsome man was saying. He was kneeling down on the dirty bodega floor, and he hugged her and said, into her cold ear with his warm breath, “You didn’t mean any harm. I know that. Accidents are everywhere, just waiting for us, aren’t they? This accident is over now. No one was hurt. No one was hurt.”

She did not remember her father reassuring Manuel that they would pay for a new window or Cora telling her she would be paying for it from her allowance for the rest of her life.

The handsome man held her hand and walked home with them. He was a rabbi. Call me Rabbi Kenny, he said. That’s why he was wearing a beanie, she supposed (yarmulke, that was the name, she remembered). That’s why he forgave her. He was a man of the cloth. Manuel had given him a first-aid kit he sold in the shop, no charge, and it had two gauze pads, which the rabbi had unwrapped and placed over the cut. He asked Ruby to apply the Band-Aids to hold them in place. There was no blood coming through them. No more blood, said the rabbi. See?

“You might need stitches,” Daniel said.

The rabbi said, “No, I don’t think so. Ruby did an excellent job patching me up.”

Ruby’s mother gave Ruby a cold glance.

“Why did you do that?” Daniel asked for the tenth time.

Rabbi Kenny said, “It was a mistake, a lapse in judgment, and Ruby seems like the kind of person who learns from mistakes.”

“Well, that’s true,” Coco said. “She does. But we’re so sorry, Rabbi.”

Ruby was thinking how kind it was of the rabbi to refer to her as a person, rather than a little girl. Or a monster.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said, the first words she had spoken since what she already thought of as the Incident. “I’m really, really, really sorry.” She looked into her victim’s lovely blue eyes. She wanted to say, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. She had seen it on so many TV shows. It was obviously inappropriate for a rabbi, which seemed a shame, for she
had
sinned and she
did
want his forgiveness.

“People should wear helmets,” Cora said.

Rabbi Kenny lived a few blocks away with his wife and two small children. His synagogue was around the corner. They had passed it millions of times, but never gone in.

“We’re not exactly observant Jews,” Coco said.

“Daddy says monotheism is the greatest disaster to befall the human race,” Cora said.

“Well, Daddy said Gore Vidal said that, sweetie,” Coco interjected quickly. “I don’t know that Daddy thinks that himself.”

“He said.” She stopped and folded her arms and glared at her father.

“A clever but simplistic sentiment,” Daniel said, “and like everything Gore Vidal said, it’s a little bit true, that’s all I was saying.”

“Daniel!” Coco was clearly embarrassed.

“Daddy!” Ruby said.

Cora gave a triumphant “ha” and moved on.

“I still remember my haftorah,” Daniel said to the rabbi. “I’m not a complete pagan.”

Rabbi Kenny laughed. “Well, if you’re ever locked out of the house or something, pop into shul.”

18

Molly burrowed into the pillows, eyes closed, a cool scented breeze blowing in through the open window. She listened to the crows in the neighbor’s sycamore. The deplorable tree shed darkness and elephantine leaves, but high in its branches there lived a family of crows, an exemplary family, crow sons and daughters from the year before helping out with their new siblings, all sober as a portrait of Queen Victoria and her own mob of children.

There were pomegranates and grapes growing over her neighbors’ fences. One house had a garden of neon-colored succulents, another a cheery garden of pink and yellow roses. Molly never argued with anyone who described Los Angeles as a jumbled and incoherent city, a nightmare of traffic bordered by jumbled, incoherent rows of houses in every architectural style known to man. Its flora was jumbled, too, incoherent and abundant palm trees and pine trees, roses and cacti. The place was a foreign country as far as Molly was concerned. And after almost sixty years in New York, years of Manhattan in all its might and frantic momentum, every day felt like a day of blessed vacation in a faraway vacation land. Work did not interfere with this holiday feeling. She could hardly believe her luck. Some sky above her, some sun. Some crows.

She thought of her mother shivering and feeble in the biting January wind. A disconcerting tableau: her lovely mother, her lively mother, bundled and drained, shuffling like a refugee in her own life.

Molly had always thought of her mother as someone sharp and bright, someone light and airy, full of color and warmth and intensity. A kind of maternal sun goddess, always there whether she showed herself or not, always there behind the inevitable clouds of Molly’s life, of the family’s life. Like Aaron, Joy had been both attentive and absentminded as a parent, but to Molly the periodic negligence was freedom, it was privacy, independence. If Joy worked late or was out of town at a conference and the cupboard was bare like a nursery-rhyme cupboard, Daniel and Molly rejoiced, for that meant hamburgers or pizza or Chinese food or a trip with Aaron to the market to buy the makings of eggplant Parmesan, his specialty. The pressure from such kind and consistently inconsistent parents was negligible. Joy and Aaron held, for reasons the children did not understand but did not question, an unshakable faith in Molly and Daniel. If either child stepped out of line, the line moved accordingly. Even now, Molly could feel Joy trying to forgive her, to understand her act of geographical treachery. But Molly could hardly understand it herself. She had fallen in love. She had been offered a job. She woke up happy every morning. Those were facts. Why did she feel she had to explain them, excuse them; why weren’t those facts the explanations in and of themselves?

Molly called her mother every day. She never mentioned the sunshine and the soft breeze. It would be in bad taste to call Joy’s attention to the glorious physical reality of Los Angeles. Joy called Molly every day, too, sometimes more than once: she was still so weak from the C. diff, the wind was ferocious, the mayor said something appalling. Sometimes she called to tell a funny story or report on the medical progress of someone Molly had never met, to urge Molly to watch something on television, to discuss her health or Aaron’s behavior or a doctor’s report or a possible side effect of a pill neither of them was taking. “I told Dr. Moritz he gives me a reason to live,” she would say after a dentist appointment. “I have to live many, many years to amortize the cost of these new implants.” Molly would laugh. Her mother often made her laugh. Just as often Molly listened annoyed and impatient, yet even then she found herself soothed by the inconsequential drip, drip, drip of the conversation. Her mother’s voice made her feel safe, safe from the loss of her mother.

“You’re too far away,” Joy said.

“So are you,” Molly said, but she said it gently, and she meant it.

She also meant to visit every six weeks. It did not work out to be quite that often.

“Don’t come, don’t come, this is the worst winter we’ve ever had, it’s not even safe to go outside,” Joy told her, and Molly pretended she thought her mother meant what she said. She put off her visit for two weeks, three weeks, then a month. The snow fell in New York, then fell again. “The sidewalks are sheets of ice,” Joy would say. “Treacherous sheets of ice.” The weathermen warned the elderly to stay inside. It was too cold, too windy, too icy. “I went downstairs just to stick my nose out the door, just to get some fresh air, just a walk to the corner, but the doorman wouldn’t let me leave the building. Not one step. Far too dangerous.”

“The doorman takes better care of my parents than I do,” Molly said to Freddie one morning, a beautiful morning, the air brilliant and blue.

Freddie handed her a cup of coffee. “Thank god for those doormen.”

“My mother says she has cabin fever. You know, I couldn’t do anything about that even if I were there. I can’t change the weather. And she won’t come out here, even to visit, even for a week. Well, how could she? She can’t leave Daddy, and he certainly can’t come. So what good would I be there anyway if they can’t leave the house? I mean, I spend more time with my mother on the phone now than I ever did in person when I lived in the city.”

Molly was talking to herself, Freddie understood that, and she sat in the winter sunshine not quite listening. Her own father had a new girlfriend. It was causing ripples of resentment in the facility, and not only from his former girlfriends. The social worker seemed somehow offended, too. “They’re all over each other,” she’d said in the last call.

“Am I supposed to leave my job? Leave you? Leave my whole life?” Molly was saying. “Well, maybe she thinks since I did it once, I could do it again, just roll the film backward…”

“I don’t like the direction in which this monologue is going,” Freddie said. “I really don’t.”

“… Of course, that’s not what she wants, which is good, because it’s not going to happen, because how could I even get my old job back, and what job would you be able to get in New York…”

Freddie stopped listening again. It was indecent to intrude on such desperate thoughts. She tried not to worry that Molly might someday approach her with a serious plan to leave L.A. A few times when she had taken Molly at her word and thought the guilt outweighed everything else and suggested they move to New York, Molly had been horrified and said, “Can’t I feel guilty in peace?”

19

For Joy and Aaron, the months were long and cramped, though not without excitement. The apartment teemed with people in rubber gloves, and the atmosphere was pungent and gurgling with strange cuisines, sausages and beans, African pumpkin and foo-foo, fish heads floating in soup pots, chicken feet protruding from stews. Joy’s eyes burned from the spices in the air. She was afraid to look in the refrigerator.

She was still tired, more tired than she had ever imagined a person could be and still rise up and stand on two feet. Her hearing was going, too, she was sure of it. “I’m deef, Paw,” she said to Aaron, and he smiled because he knew he was expected to, not because he thought she was funny, she could tell. There were days when she was glad of losing her hearing, the babel of languages and the sounds of pain thereby muted and dulled. The cold and snow continued morning after morning, afternoons of snow dissolving into snowy nights. Joy and Aaron, trapped inside, migrated from one end of the apartment to the other and back. Aaron could no longer use a walker, and the one time they had tried to push his wheelchair in the snow, before the temperature really dropped, the wheelchair bucked and slid and crashed into a bank of snow.

The wind blew and iced branches fell. The sidewalks dwindled to slippery tracks. The days, short and dark, seemed endless. Joy wondered if Aaron suffered from choking claustrophobia, too. She couldn’t ask him. He no longer said more than a few stock phrases. For Joy, the way one indistinguishable hour ran into another was frightening. She came to cherish the arrivals and departures of Walter, Elvira, and Wanda. They were like the chimes of a clock, like church bells, dividing the day into its proper parts.

On one afternoon when the sun peeped out and the temperature rose to just below freezing, and Joy could stand the seclusion no more, she bundled Aaron up in a heavy sweater and the parka she’d gotten him on sale at McLaughlin’s, which looked so good on him.