The World Without You (12 page)

It’s the nine of them standing behind their seats, eight adults plus Akiva, who was supposed to go to bed with his brothers and his cousin; he’s on Israel time, and it’s four-thirty in the morning there. But he claimed he wasn’t tired, and Noelle and Amram were too tired themselves to argue with him (“He’s already a teenager,” Noelle told Marilyn. “What am I going to do when he’s a real teenager?”), so they agreed to let him stay up for another half hour.

Marilyn is at one end of the table, and David is at the other. Everyone is still standing, waiting for Marilyn to tell them what to do. “Sit,” she says, but she remains standing herself, and it’s not until she pulls out her chair that everyone else does as well.

She smooths her skirt beneath her. She brushes some hair from in front of her face. “This is just …” Her voice cracks. She tries to gather her composure. “This is the first time we’ve been together since Leo died.” It’s not like she needs to tell them this. Yet she feels as if she does, as if she has to remind them why they’re here.

Everyone casts their glances down, even Akiva, who is running his feet along the floor, the only sound Marilyn can hear besides the muted noise of her own gulping. She thinks of the food in the kitchen, of the meal they’ve prepared, and it’s not lost on her that what she and David are serving is what Leo himself would have ordered if she’d asked him to choose the menu.

She raises her wineglass to make a toast, but nothing comes out. Her reflection undulates in the china, coming back to her murkily as if from under water. “This past year has been awful. Dad and I, it’s like we’re going through this cloud cover, and then there’s more cloud cover and more cloud cover and it never stops.”

But David has gone into the kitchen, and soon he emerges with the gazpacho on a cart. Now he’s recalling for the family a memory from when he and Marilyn were first married, living in a one-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue, when they had a dumbwaiter that went down into the courtyard.

But Marilyn can barely hear him. She’s sitting at the table, staring vacantly ahead, unable to pay attention to anything he’s saying.

“Amram and I need to wash,” Noelle says, and Marilyn remembers: the ritual hand-washing before they eat bread, which they do at the start of every meal. How quickly she forgets, when the easiest thing is to remember Noelle as she was years ago, when there was no washing or ritual blessings, when there were, it sometimes seemed, no meals at all, when dinner for Noelle, despite Marilyn and David’s objections, was a couple of Hostess Twinkies washed down with a Tab. Is it possible she longs for that now?

Amram breaks a challah roll into three and gives a piece to Noelle and a piece to Akiva and leaves the last piece for himself. Akiva leads them in the
motzi
blessing, and it astonishes Marilyn to listen to this, the language her grandson speaks so effortlessly, the things he knows that she never will.

Noelle removes a plastic bag out of which she produces a couple of turkey sandwiches and a tub of sliced cucumber. She passes out plastic cutlery and disposable plates to Amram and Akiva.

“What’s that?” Lily says.

“Our food,” says Noelle.

“And paper dishes,” says Amram.

“You brought your own?” Lily’s wearing a bright red shirt, which matches her hair, and a silver chain from which dangles an amethyst. Her skin is pale, but she flushes easily in the heat, and beneath the bulbs of the chandelier color rises to her forehead.

“We always do,” Noelle says. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

Lily hasn’t, exactly, though it startles her every time. She feels vaguely offended, on her own behalf and on her parents’, as if everything they do, everything they touch, is contaminated.

“But the food is kosher,” Marilyn says. “Don’t you remember?” She escorts Noelle into the kitchen, where, laid out in a row, are the chicken thighs, the caramelized vegetables, the corn on the cob, the pasta salad, the slushies.

“That’s nice of you, Mom. It’s just …”

“What?”

“The dishes,” Noelle says. “They would need to be kosher, too.”

“They
are
kosher,” David says. “Don’t you remember? We bought new dishes.”

Noelle is quiet.

“What?” Marilyn says. “I don’t understand.”

“You know how strict Amram and I are.”

Marilyn opens the fridge and shows Noelle a package of Miller’s Swiss Cheese, with the rabbinic seal of approval laminated across it.

“The kitchen itself would need to be kosher,” Noelle says. “The oven, the dishwasher, the microwave, everything. “

“Are you kidding me?” David says. He’s ready to chronicle the hours he and Marilyn spent cooking, the trips to the kosher butcher, ready to lay out the receipts for the dishes and pots, all so Noelle and Amram and their four boys could eat in their house, so they wouldn’t feel excluded over the holiday.

“I’m sorry,” Noelle says. “I should have told you not to bother.”

“Well, we did bother,” Marilyn says.

“I’m sorry,” Noelle says again. But what do her parents want her to do? Eat something that’s not permitted?

Now Marilyn is back at the table, and she’s looking at everyone and she starts to cry.

“Oh, Mom,” Noelle says. “I’m so sorry. We know how hard you and Dad must have worked.”

“I don’t care about the food,” Marilyn says. “You and Amram can eat what you want to.”

“What’s wrong, then?”

Marilyn glances up at David, but he’s looking away. She thought she could wait until after the memorial, but she sees she can’t. All her plans, her whole life, feel like folly. “Dad and I need to tell you something.”

Everyone looks up.

“We have some news you need to know.”

“Marilyn,” David says sharply. “You said we were going to wait.”

They
were
going to wait, but she can’t do it. She can’t do anything but sit here and stare at her family, even as she knows she must talk.

Outside, in the distance, a siren blares. From upstairs comes the sound of a grandson coughing. “Dad and I are separating,” she blurts out.

“You’re what?” says Lily.

“We’re splitting up,” she says. “I’m leaving Daddy.”

For several seconds there’s pure silence.

“Are you kidding me?” Clarissa says.

David says, “Do you think we’d joke about something like this?”

Meanwhile, Marilyn is trying to explain things, though she can’t explain them, even to herself. She won’t say those words, that she doesn’t love him anymore, because they’re not true. “We lost our son,” she says. “It’s ruined us.”

Again there’s silence, and Marilyn can’t stand it, because the quiet is worse than anything else. But her daughters just sit there, punch-drunk and mute, and David does too.

“It will be better this way,” she says. Certainly, she thinks, it can’t be worse.

Noelle, rising from her chair and grabbing hold of Akiva, says, “This is a grown-up conversation” and ushers him upstairs to his room.

When she returns, Lily says, “When did this all start?”

Marilyn doesn’t know how to answer her. It started with Leo’s death, of course, but at the same time it has sideswiped her. You put a frog in cold water and turn on the flame, and the water heats up so slowly it doesn’t know to jump out. That’s what it’s been like for her. Only she
is
jumping out: she’s leaving David. “You had to know we were arguing. We’ve been fighting all the time. It’s been horrible.”

“But it’s only been a year,” Clarissa says. “That cloud cover you were talking about? I’m just beginning to emerge from it myself.”

“But I’m not going to emerge from it,” Marilyn says. “That’s what you don’t understand.”

Again everyone is quiet.

“I wake up every morning and look at Dad and all I can think about is Leo. Jesus, girls, we were his parents.”

“Shouldn’t that be bringing you together?” Lily says. “I mean, it’s been hard for me and Malcolm, too.”

“But no one else is giving up,” Noelle says.

Is that, Marilyn wonders, what they think she’s doing? Because she tried. All year long, she’s been trying.

“You could go to couples counseling,” Lily says.

“We did,” Marilyn says, “and it didn’t work.” She looks up at David pleadingly. He’s flanked on either side by Thisbe and Nathaniel; Amram is a couple of seats away. Her daughter-in-law and sons-in-law, Marilyn thinks, none of whom have said a word, looking, the three of them, like trespassers on their property, though she knows this is a shock for them too.

“You need to explain,” Clarissa says.

So Marilyn tries. A few months ago, she and David went to a cocktail party up at Columbia Presbyterian. They were talking to this man, sixtyish, pleasant enough, doing his best to keep up his end of the social compact, and somehow they got on the topic of children, and he asked how many they had. “I said, ‘Four,’ Marilyn says, “and at the same instant Dad said, ‘Three.’”

“And she was angry at me,” David says.

“Livid,” says Marilyn. “Finally, I say, ‘Eight months after he dies, and you’re already saying we have three children?’”

“And I’m thinking, well, we
do
have three children, and does Mom want me to tell this stranger who’s probably as bored at that party as we are, ‘We had four children, but one of them died tragically in Iraq, you’ve probably heard of us, we’ve been on TV’? Twenty years from now, if we’re even still alive, someone asks how many children we have, am I still supposed to say four?”

“It wasn’t twenty years,” Marilyn says. “It was eight months.”

Everyone is silent again, and Marilyn is thinking, Please don’t do this to me. But she doesn’t even know whom she’s addressing or what she’s begging them not to do.

A beeping comes from the other room; the oven timer has gone off. She can’t look at any of them, so she stares through the open door into the kitchen, where a mesh bag of shallots dangles from a knob. A single onion skin pierces through the mesh, trapped like a sparrow’s wing.

“You called one time,” David tells Lily, “and I remember what you said to us as we got off the phone. ‘Make sure you get out. Be good to each other.’”

“But we weren’t,” Marilyn says, and she thinks this has been her great failure, that it will be the great failure of her life—that she hasn’t been able to be good to David, that now, when they should be cleaving together, they have instead been cleaved apart.

Rain whips against the house. The tree branches lift over and over again, as if trying to fly off.

“Dad just wants to make things better,” Marilyn says.

“What’s wrong with that?” says Lily.

“Because it’s so damn
teleological
,” Marilyn says. “Therapy, couples counseling—it’s all there to deny the truth.”

“What’s the truth?” David says.

“That our son died and things will never be the same for us.”

A crack of lightning illuminates the porch; thunder rolls in obligatorily. Besides that, no light comes in from outside, no sound either. Marilyn tries, vainly, to catch David’s glance, but he’s looking down, at his half-filled plate and cutlery.

“Do you think Leo would have wanted this?” Noelle says.

“I have no idea what Leo would have wanted. That’s the point. He’s not here.” Marilyn closes her eyes, and when she opens them again everyone is still staring at her exactly as they were. She had a feeling they would object, that they’d try to convince her she was being foolish, but she’s saddened now, disappointed in them, disappointed in herself for wishing they’d responded differently.

Now dessert is before them, loosed from its box, sitting on a doily in the middle of the table, a key lime pie, with the words
kosher
and
pareve
on the discarded wrapping. A kosher key lime pie, Marilyn thinks, bought for their daughter who won’t eat it, and now it seems her other daughters won’t eat it, either: no one is hungry anymore. They sit silently around the pie, which is beginning to bleed beneath the chandelier bulbs, and presently, Lily rises to clear the table. The rest of them remain seated, listening to Lily in the kitchen as she topples the chicken and the half-eaten corncobs into the garbage pail.

Then everyone disperses and it’s just Marilyn alone in the kitchen, feeling disgusted with herself. She leans over the grill and eats a chicken thigh with her hands, the marinade dripping onto the floor, and now it’s gotten onto her skirt and fallen onto her espadrilles.

The sisters do the dishes, standing beside each other in such stupefied silence it’s as if they’ve been pummeled. The rest of the family is elsewhere, scattered to the living room and upstairs. Outside, the rain pelts the roof and comes at the windows sideways. Clarissa washes and Lily dries and Noelle puts the dishes back in the cabinets. They move with the mute efficiency of an assembly line.

“Can you fucking believe it?” Lily says. She waits for Noelle to rebuke her for her language, but even Noelle knows better.

“I saw them just last week,” Clarissa says, “and they seemed fine. I mean, they were bickering, sure, but I didn’t think anything of it.”

“I always thought they had a good marriage,” Noelle says.

“I did too,” says Lily. Though no one, she thinks, pays attention to their parents’ marriage until they’re forced to do so.

Clarissa, letting the water decant onto a plate, is recalling a toast she gave at her wedding. Standing next to Nathaniel, she told the assembled guests that her parents were an inspiration for them, that the greatest gift they’d given her and Nathaniel was their relationship. “And, sure,” she tells her sisters, “weddings are these big public events where people get sentimental, but I meant what I said about Mom and Dad. I wouldn’t have said those words if I didn’t think they were true.” She looks down at the sink, filled with soap and dirt and mashed-up watermelon rind, everything a turbid gray.

“They used to do everything together,” Lily says. “Remember in elementary school how all our friends got picked up by babysitters and we got picked up by Mom and Dad? I’d have soccer or music or swimming, and there they were, like conjoined twins. They were the most inefficient people in the world.”