The Beautiful Possible (21 page)

June 2002

Rosalie stands on her balcony and peers down at the street. A parade of white-haired expatriates gambol down the cobbled walkways, the choicest mangoes weighing down their straw market bags. By day San Miguel de Allende is a tourist paradise of cafés and English speakers who roam the art galleries and tour the gardens where the wealthiest gringos live. But at night, Rosalie lies awake and listens to gunshots in the surrounding hills, the howling of a coyote that prowls for leftovers in the alley behind a cantina. She falls asleep to the sound of rats outside her casa, rats larger than the raccoons that once rummaged through her yard in Briar Wood.

When Rosalie first moved here she felt homesick and questioned her choice to live so far away. She didn’t unpack for a year, and spent long hours sorting through boxes of memorabilia. On the days following 9/11 she practically lived at the Internet café, checking names and scanning photographs, scouring for anyone
who may have passed through Temple Briar Wood. And then one day she just stopped looking. Let others check the lists. Let others send the condolences, sign the cards, give the donations. She could not look back when she needed to look forward; San Miguel de Allende was her new home.

Just as she began to settle in, Rosalie went to a clinic for a routine test and was diagnosed with stage-three pancreatic cancer. Harvey Berger, expatriate internist and leader of the San Miguel Torah study group, told her what to expect, and that in time, she would have trouble sleeping, not because of discomfort but because she would be preoccupied with remembering the details of her life.

Rosalie is still strong and coltish; she scurries up the hills without losing her breath. She has let her hair go gray and wears flowing embroidered dresses that she purchased in the tourist boutiques when she first arrived. Harvey calls her his young
rabbanit.
“Do not tell anyone your age,” he says. “Your illness will be our little secret.” The two of them smoke weed together and conspire to create a little Jerusalem in San Miguel, radiating out from the Torah study group they lead every Saturday morning in the lobby of the El Norte Hotel. “Without us the little study group would be reading selections from Kahlil Gibran and performing
alef-bet
yoga,” says Harvey. “We are their living Torah.”

Harvey leads an abbreviated prayer and meditation service, and Rosalie presents one-minute sermons she calls frissons of Torah. Her fellow expats ask her questions that they never
broached to a real rabbi:
If I’m cremated, will my children sit shiva for me? Is there an afterlife? Do Jews believe in angels? Does the soul survive?
Instead of answering their questions, Rosalie offers brief Hasidic stories, and then asks if anyone wants to join her on the San Miguel House and Garden Tour, or meet up after her yoga class, or sit with her in the
jardín
at sunset.

When she passes the
mercado
in town and wakes up to the smell of burning cornhusks and
chile rellenos
, she tries to imagine Walter’s Bombay. The city where he woke up to the smell of spices connects Rosalie to the town where she will use spices to stay awake. His holy city of spices; her hilly town of scented candles and cornhusks smoldering in the street vendors’ tiny grills. His land between two worlds; her country between one life and the next. To Maya she writes:
I’m so sorry, my sweet girl. I moved far away from you but I knew I could not leave this world without starting over, this time for myself. One day you will understand. And you, Maya, will be the child of mine who understands everything.

Over tea one afternoon, Madeline asks Rosalie why she won’t return to the states for treatment. “I sit under the skylight in my bathroom,” says Rosalie, “and I am surrounded by blue tiles. Even the inside of my toilet bowl is a work of art. During the day the light pours in and there is no place I would rather be. And that’s only my bathroom. I am in the perfect spot to conclude my life. I don’t need to create an ugly chapter.”

“You will have to bring your children down,” says Madeline.

“I will,” says Rosalie. “Soon enough.”

“You plan to tell Maya, don’t you?”

Rosalie plays with her sugar packet, folds it into tiny squares.

“Maybe she senses it.”

“Be honest,” says Madeline.

“Not everything has to be spelled out. Maya understands subtlety. I’m sure she can figure this out on her own. She’s a rabbi, for God’s sake.”

Madeline laughs. “You realize your contradiction.”

“I sometimes think Sol knew more than he let on,” says Rosalie.

“Everyone has their blind spots,” says Madeline.

“Maybe Maya will do better. She’s the real deal now. A newly minted, honest-to-God unemployed rabbi who lives in Morningside Heights.”

“Men? Women?”

“Off and on with a wilderness rabbi named Jase. He leads retreats in the mountains.” Rosalie laughs.

“Why the derision? Didn’t you spend time at Eden Ranch?”

Rosalie tries to remember what happened there but she can’t place all the details. She can picture Paul walking with a very pregnant Giselle, and she can recall the litany of names that Walter called out during the fire. His sobs and her fear. Had she told Madeline everything? Even that? At least she kept some of the details to herself: the way the sound of Walter’s voice made her body soften, the perfume of cardamom on his palms, the swirl of desire that flowed and flows still—

“I suppose Maya will be just fine,” says Rosalie.

“Were we any less confused? Madame Sylvie and her little astonishments! We bought it all, didn’t we?”

“Sometimes I wonder if I was up for the challenge of my own life.”

“You pulled it off with style, pussycat. You carried this crazy bundle in your arms as if you were born for the task.”

“Did you ever worry about me, Madeline? All those conversations, our long nights on the phone. Why didn’t you wake me from my convoluted dream?”

“I wasn’t going to sever you from your life, sweet pea.”

Rosalie smiles. “My savior.”

“What about your children?”

“They are my own business,” says Rosalie. “And yes, I will sit them down and tell them. And I’ll start at the beginning. How we met. Our first time. All our first times, until the last times.”

“Have you invited them yet?”

“Not yet. Soon.”

After Passover, the San Miguel Torah study group recites an English translation of the Song of Songs. When they come to the last verse Harvey turns to Rosalie and asks why the lovers are always running on the mountain of spices, and why the book is filled with so much unrequited love. Rosalie shrugs.

“I once loved to look for interpretations, Harvey. I could unravel meaning out of a pie crust if I wanted to. But no more. You met me too late.”

The children have been summoned. Rosalie phoned each of them and explained the details of her diagnosis and how she feels mostly okay, and not to worry because she treasures her life in
Mexico and has everything she wants. Charlie, Philip, and Maya fly to Mexico City together and rent a car from the airport. A sudden rainstorm delays their nighttime arrival until dawn and Rosalie spends the evening anticipating and dreading their visit. She wants to tell them everything. She wants to talk about Lenny, about Sol, and most of all, she wants to tell them about Walter. And after everything is hashed over, revealed, and reviewed, Rosalie wants to top it all off with a coda: a little astonishment for each child—
dream beyond your marriage
—just as her father once gave to her.

As she waits for their arrival, she imagines them in their rented car: Charlie examining a map, squinting because he won’t buy the reading glasses he desperately needs. Philip, driving through the rain, rubbing his sleeve against the windshield because even if the car has a dehumidifier he won’t know how to turn it on. And Maya in the backseat, taking in the sights of a country she has never seen, forcing her eyes open even when she is too tired to stay awake.

Years back, when she was alone in the house, Rosalie would sometimes wrap herself in Sol’s tallit. She would pull it over her head, drape it on her shoulders, carefully fold the sides, and then immediately yank it off. The white wool was heavy and dank with her husband’s dried sweat, and the black stripes against her skin felt to her like bars of a cage. When Rosalie turned seventy Maya gave her a royal blue tallit made of diaphanous silk. She wears it around her casa and loves how the shade of blue matches Liberace’s plume and reminds her of Walter’s studio. In the predawn
hours before her children arrive Rosalie sits on the floor of her bathroom, rubs her bare feet on the blue tiles, lights a joint, and wraps the tallit around her shoulders.

For every telling there is a story, a narrator, and a listener. Rosalie can sum up the story in a single word—Walter. And just as she would read a K’tonton story to them when they were small, she would tell them this one. She would begin simply, with a refugee who followed a man wearing a brown felt hat. But does the story really begin with Walter? What about Sonia who was murdered? Maybe the story begins on the day Sonia and Walter set eyes on each other in Berlin. They were so young! It all began with their first kiss. Or it began the first time she kissed Sol. Or the first time her parents kissed each other, or their parents, or their grandparents, or theirs. Trace any love story back to its origins and you will find yourself in the Garden of Eden itself.

Living far away in Mexico Rosalie spends hours considering the tributaries of choices that flowed from a single river. If Sol. If Walter. If her father. When Maya was small she would say
feewee
instead of
if,
and so Rosalie thinks
feewee
Sol or
feewee
Walter,
feewee
a mango or
feewee
a peach. All those choices, all those details swimming back to her in a refracted jumble of time. So much is in order and yet so much is confused. The other day she ordered dessert in a restaurant and said to the waiter, “Apple cake and flan, please. My mother and I like to share something sweet.” She had no idea what she had said until the waiter asked Rosalie if her mother needed a menu.

And who would listen to her story anyway? Why would her grown children want to know of her love for Walter, and what
would it mean to them after all these years? Her children have lives of their own, their own tributaries of impossible choices. Why ask them to gather the discarded threads of a previous generation? Sol had introduced Maya to Walter, and she briefly encountered a stranger who seemed to have no consequence in her sweet life. When Rosalie reached into her pocketbook to give her the silver bracelet, she thought,
Let her know this matters, let her know this will one day hold meaning, let her know, somehow, of him.
And then she handed Maya the bracelet as if it were a random dollar bill, a candy bar, a tube of lipstick.
Here. This will look nice with the dress.

Charlie and Philip, of course, don’t seem remotely interested in imagining the underside of her life. To them, she would always be the mother of the original Kerem boys, the woman who raised them, then shouldered impossible grief, and when they were just about grown up, she held a baby girl in her arms and said,
Meet your sister.

But Maya is another story. In the deepest part of herself, maybe she knows about Walter. Even if Rosalie leaves out the details once again, Maya will find a way to live between the dual cracks of uncertainty and truth, just as she had. Rosalie lights another joint and lays her head on the cool blue tiles of her bathroom floor. She allows herself to think of nothing for a while, nothing at all.

Charlie and Philip enter first and embrace Rosalie in their big arms. She has forgotten that her sons have grey in their hair, that their bodies have grown paunchy with age. Charlie brushes tears
from his eyes and Philip holds Rosalie’s arm as if she is frail. Maya takes Rosalie’s face in her hands and stares into her mother’s eyes. Rosalie wonders if her daughter learned this gesture in rabbinical school, where they teach pastoral skills just as they once taught the intricacies of Talmudic thought. After drinking a cup of tea, Maya softens. She rests her head on Rosalie’s shoulder and plays with her mother’s fingers as she did as a child, only now she measures her mother’s fingers against her memory of how they were once not so frail.

Maya insists on serving breakfast. She finds her way around her mother’s kitchen, notices how Rosalie stores her teacups and mugs on a low shelf just like she did in the Briar Wood house. The same pots and pans. Here is her mother’s favorite whisk and carrot peeler, ensconced in this new drawer.
We have to convince her to come home for treatment,
Philip had said in the car.
She can’t be so sick
, said Charlie.
Just be in the moment with her
, Maya said to her brothers.
Both of you.
Maya whisks the eggs and wipes tears from her eyes.
Such a bullshit rabbi, dispensing wisdom about being in the fucking moment. This is impossible.

Maya tosses the eggs into a skillet and scrambles them. One day soon, she thinks, my mother will be gone and I will long to recover this time. This kitchen, these eggs, these plates, my brothers yammering away about nothing important. She slices mango and lays the uneven pieces on a plate, places fresh rolls in a basket, and gathers the food onto a tray.

Words fly all morning. Charlie and Philip pass around the latest photos of their children: Charlie’s son Sivan, named for Sol (
Don’t you think he looks more and more like Abba? Look at this one
from the preschool play; he’s a miniature Rabbi Kerem!
), Philip’s adopted stepdaughter Kayla
(Look, Mom, she drew this picture for you!)
The children offer summaries that are already familiar to her: Charlie has a job as a public defender, Philip teaches high school history, Maya needs to find work but she doesn’t want a pulpit job and she is off and on with her wilderness rabbi. Their words alternate in a stream of loud and soft syllables, humming like chords in a great symphony. And then Charlie says,
Remember how Lenny wrestled us to the ground and how Abba gave those unbearable sermons when we were small and won’t you come home, Mom, just for awhile, or better yet, let’s go to Hawaii together, we can schedule a time that works for all of us. Philip—see what you can find online, I heard about some specials. Oh, what a fabulous idea, don’t you think, Mom?