Tinderbox (36 page)

38

When Talis gets home from the hospital, he sits on the edge of the bed where Caro
has been lying, unable to sleep since Rachida’s call. “A specialist from Boston came
to look at Chicky’s foot. The dermis is basically intact. She’s beginning to grow
new skin on the ball of her foot.”

Caro opens the covers and beckons Talis to come into the bed. Still in his nurse’s
uniform, he climbs in next to her. He buries his nose in the hollow of her neck.

Caro strokes his hair. “Don’t you want your own baby?” she whispers.

“You mean with my genes?”

Caro nods, the top of her chin grazing Talis’s hair.

Talis turns onto his side. He smiles sadly at Caro. “Genes don’t make people belong
to each other. I haven’t seen my father since I was one. If he’s still alive, if I
ever meet him, I’ll probably recognize certain things about myself in him, maybe my
hairline or the way my third toe is longer than the second. But he never raised me.
Never taught me anything. Never made me his.”

The adoption attorney they had consulted told them that as soon as Chicky is ready
to leave the hospital, they can bring her home as foster parents while their application
for adoption is being processed. “Nothing is guaranteed,” he said, “but I don’t foresee
any problems.” Just hearing the word “problems” had made Caro so anxious, she had
to excuse herself for the ladies’ room.

Talis takes her hand. “Sometimes you just have to jump.”

39

Now, when Myra picks up Omar on Wednesdays, he asks to come straight home to see his
cousin. He races to wash his hands and then flings himself on the floor to play with
Chicky, who can sit up supported by pillows. Afterward, he eats the snack that Caro,
on maternity leave, gives him, and goes upstairs to do his homework or play on his
own for a while. Caro then commences her weekly report to her mother on the things
Chicky is doing: babbling, pointing, smiling at certain books.

“I know I must sound ridiculous, as though I have the only baby in the world.”

“When you were little, Grandpa Max used to visit us on his lunch hour every Friday.
I was exactly the same way: describing your and Adam’s incredible feats. Who else
can you go on and on with about your children other than their grandparents?”

“You mean, with whom else can you abandon restraint and good taste?”

“You’re doing so well. It’s such hard work, taking care of a baby. And it’s doubly
hard for older mothers. Not that you’re old to be a mother, especially these days.
But with the twenty-two-year-old mothers, they haven’t yet developed a self they have
to put aside for the baby’s sake. There’s less for them to give up.”

“Chicky couldn’t give a damn that I’ve written grants totaling nine million dollars
or that I’m used to running a staff of eighteen. All she cares about is that I feed
her when she wants to be fed and entertain her when she want to be entertained and
hold her when she wants to be held.”

Over the years, Myra has treated half a dozen mothers unable to keep at bay the resentment
of having to put her own desires on the back burner for the good of her baby. The
more strongly the mother resists the immersion in her baby, the more the baby senses
the rejection, the baby’s pain manifest in a disorganized flailing that the guilty
mother experiences as condemnation of her, a vicious cycle of neither enjoying the
other because they are profoundly out of sync. The mothers arrive in her office, so
stressed they seem ready to explode, filled with inane advice from parenting magazines
about taking more time for themselves. Time for exercise and manicures and romantic
meals with husbands. They are shocked and often furious when Myra prescribes the opposite:
more time with the baby.

Caro snaps Chicky into her bouncy seat. Chicky bats at the toy bar, squealing when
the clown flips over the top. “Talis showed me something he’s been reading. There’s
an idea that’s part of Kabbalist thought called
tsimtsum
. It has to do with the way that God had to contract himself, absent himself, in order
to create the world. It made me think about Chicky—the way that I have to constrict
myself, my own wishes, so as to leave her room to unfold.”

Chicky pushes against the belt of the bouncy seat. She scrunches her face and punches
the air with her chubby fists. Caro unbuckles her and Myra holds out her arms to take
the baby. It seems pointless to tell Caro that she, too, had once been fascinated
with the same idea. Myra bounces Chicky on her knees while the child, her face now
so relaxed it is hard to believe the protest was only seconds before, examines the
hair on a purple giraffe.

“I have to learn to do the same thing with Talis,” Caro says. “He’s such a slob. I
can have everything put away before I go to bed, and by the time he’s been home fifteen
minutes, he’s left a sticky spot of orange juice on the counter and toothpaste smeared
in the sink and his clothes on the floor. Before Chicky, I coped by keeping his stuff
in the front bedroom, but now it’s Chicky’s room. I have to keep reminding myself
that he’s the one who’s normal, that a pristine environment is what’s unnatural.”

Caro leans over and kisses the top of her baby’s head. “What in nature is pristine?
The leaves fall from the trees, animals shed their skins, dead birds rot in ditches.
Nothing.”

“I’m afraid you got that from me. The notion that the pristine is something to aspire
to. It’s like any idea: it turns on itself. There’s that precarious line over which
something worthwhile becomes a horror.”

Myra turns Chicky around so Chicky can see Caro’s face. She hooks one arm across the
baby’s tummy and strokes her soft dark hair with the other. Like with Eva, she can
see the scalp underneath—only with Chicky, this is because she is half-hatched.

What Chicky wants is to drink in the world. What Eva wanted was to pour herself out.

“Da!” Chicky shrieks, pointing at the giraffe she has flung to the floor. Bracing
the baby against her arm, Myra retrieves the toy.

With Eva, Myra had let herself be deceived about the necessity of the boundaries she
maintains with her patients, the way that the limit on their access to her serves
as a firewall. Eva lit the match, but it had been she, Myra, who had laid the tinder
with her foolhardy good intentions. The
yes
to Adam’s request to live with her, not even a request, rather an implied request—or
had it even been that? had the idea, in fact, first been hers?—that should have been
a
no
. The girl from the Amazon who should never have come to New York. The story she should
never have let Eva tell.

40

Thanksgiving morning is cold but bright. When Talis comes in, he gives Chicky her
bottle and she goes blissfully back to sleep.

At nine-thirty, Caro bolts awake. Talis is asleep beside her with an arm stretched
like a tree limb across the white sheets. She bounds out of bed. She told her mother,
who’d promised to help with the dinner, that they would start cooking at nine. Yesterday,
Talis made the pies and the cranberry sauce, but there is still the turkey to stuff
and the vegetables to prepare.

She finds her mother in the kitchen mixing corn bread to put in the stuffing.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. How’d you get in?”

“Omar. He was up reading and eating cereal. I’m glad that you got to sleep in. Omar
and Adam and Rachida just left to watch the parade from my apartment. Omar invited
one of his friends to go with them. They plan on meeting your father at his hotel
afterward.”

Rachida had come in late last night. Seeing Rachida for the first time since the summer,
her hair grown out so it falls in a glossy bob, Caro did a double take. It had been
Rachida, though, seeing Adam without his beard, his delicate features uncovered, who
did the real double take.

“Look at you,” Rachida said, touching Adam’s smooth chin. “When did this happen?”

“Ten days or so ago. I got tired of the boys and the other teachers at the school
pigeonholing me because of the beard. And,” he paused to wink at Caro, “Chicky pulling
on it all the time.”

Her father, who’d taken the red-eye, should have arrived by now—Betty, off to her
brother’s for Thanksgiving, not having objected to his coming East for the long weekend
so he could meet Chicky. Before Chicky came home from the hospital, he’d sent Caro
a check for nursery furniture, enough, she joked, to furnish the entire house. This
past week, he consulted with her by e-mail half a dozen times about what kind of toy
Chicky would like, until she finally wrote him:
Calm down. We’re talking about a six-month-old. Just bring yourself and a wooden spoon
and an old pot
.

The coffee is made, which Caro knows her mother must have done. She takes the cup
her mother hands her, and for a confused moment, it is as though the year she and
Talis and Adam and Omar and now Chicky have lived here dissolves and it is her mother’s
kitchen again.

She inhales the coffee. “Do you miss the house?”

“Not really. Not that I didn’t love living here. I had wonderful years here, but it’s
not as though I want to be back in those years now. I feel very lucky to have been
able to move on.”

Myra puts the pan of corn bread in the oven. She takes the sausages she brought out
of the refrigerator and begins dicing them into cubes. “And I love my new apartment,
the sun rising over the reservoir, the lights reflecting on the water at night.”

“Sounds like you’re burning the candle at both ends.”

“I’ve been working hard on finishing my project—the last stage, I think, of my teleology
of love.” Myra raises her voice on the word “teleology,” as though mocking herself.

“And?”

“Oh, it’s too early in the morning…”

“I’m interested. Truly.” Caro sips her coffee, enjoying the moments before Chicky
will wake up, before she will turn to washing the turkey and cutting the vegetables.
The kitchen is filling with the sweet and savory smells of the corn bread baking and
the sausage pieces now cooking in the cast-iron pan. Her mother smiles, her way of
saying, Caro has learned, that although she takes her work seriously, she doesn’t
expect anyone else to do the same.

“It’s life its very self,” Myra says. “I hope that doesn’t sound too corny. And, of
course, I’m only using myself as a case study. After the breast, or the longing for
the missing breast, and words and mastery of the body and romance and children and
then—again, for me—my patients and my garden and my piano and my feeble attempts at
something spiritual, something transcendent, it has come round to being able to love
life its very self.”

Caro nods. The words are her mother’s, the ideas ones she could not have found syllables
for herself, but the sentences feel so inevitable, they seem almost to be coming from
her own head, like a reverse déjà vu—a glimpse of a state of mind she will reach one
day herself.

“The greatest art, the apex of love, I’ve come to think, is to be able to love life
its very self.” Her mother cracks two eggs into the bowl where she will mix the stuffing.
A froth forms as she whisks together the yolks and whites. “I see it in my mind as
one word:
Lifeitsveryself
.”

Only now does Caro recall that corn-bread-and-sausage stuffing is her father’s favorite.
Her throat catches as she is filled with gratitude, gratitude at her mother’s generosity.
Gratitude that she’d not had to build herself entirely from scratch as her mother
had. To have grown up in Rome, not on parched sand.

41

After dinner, Caro and Myra do the dishes while Rachida plays chess with Omar. Larry,
done with his mock groaning that he ate enough to slay three cardiac patients, lies
on the floor flying Chicky on his knees while Adam shows Talis portions of
Fitzcarraldo
, which he has discovered Talis has never seen.

Myra takes the sink, washing the oversized platters that were once hers and that she
left for Caro and Adam. Caro dries the platters with the tea towels her mother gave
them as a housewarming present.

“You did a lovely job, darling,” Myra says. “With the dinner.”

“It’s very strange to be stepping into your shoes.” Caro looks at her mother’s face.

“It’s your turn. And I would never have been able to manage here, with the garden
and the stairs, once I got really old. With my new apartment, I can see myself able
to live there until the end of my days. I’ll be one of those women with a caregiver,
a nanny for old ladies, wheeling them to the park for air.”

“I’ll wheel you.”

“Hopefully we’ve got a while before we’re there.”

To Caro, her mother seems lighter since the fire, since leaving the house, as though
the luminous air of her new home, the sky over the park, the sun on the reservoir,
has penetrated her skin. Her mother has become happily unencumbered while she has
become happily encumbered.

Myra gives Caro the last platter to dry. She scrubs the sink and dries her hands on
the apron wrapped around her. For the first time, Caro notices the age spots on the
backs of her mother’s hands, patches of skin where the pigment is failing—the inevitability
of the day when she will touch her mother’s hands and they will be cold.

She sets the platter on the counter and wraps her arms around her mother’s slender
torso. She rests her cheek on her mother’s breastbone. Over the last year, she has
seen crow’s-feet emanating from her own eyes, a heaviness under her chin, the telltale
signs of her own body’s slippage, her own decay.

Through their breathing, beyond it, Caro can hear her mother murmuring something like
there, there
, or perhaps it is that phrase,
lifeitsveryself
, murmured over and over like an incantation. She sees herself burying her mother—Adam
and Rachida and Omar and Talis and Chicky with her at the graveside, each of them
throwing a handful of dirt against the mahogany coffin. Then twenty-five more years
until it will be herself lowered into the earth. And who will be standing there to
kiss her forehead, to bid her farewell? It is hard to imagine Adam or Talis outlasting
her. Omar, yes, sad, of course, but not filled with grief. It will be Chicky who will
be grief-stricken. Chicky, tall and graceful, her hair dark and sleek, her long lashes
rimmed with tears, her slender arms, one of them still marked by fire.