The Book of Intimate Grammar

24

When Mama heard that Papa was going back to tear out the tiles at Edna Bloom’s, she announced her intention of supervising the job. Once more the gloomy procession wound its way from Entrance B to Entrance A, with Mama in the lead, lofty and imposing in a turquoise sheath; she had wisely ruled out the brown cassock of the first visit on the grounds that it was too austere; she tried on and eventually decided against the checkered jersey, which, though respectable enough, created an ill-advised impression of severity; the bottle green was out because under the circumstances it might appear too frivolous, too gay; in the end she opted for the turquoise sheath, because it was sufficiently respectable but had softer lines that emphasized her bosom and rippled over her ample thighs, calling to mind the children tugging at it long ago; thus dressed, she marched up the stairs, clutching her knitting bag under her arm, jutting her chin out like Ben-Gurion.

Edna opened the door for her and slinked off like an ailing cat. When Mama set eyes on the islands of debris, all the color drained from her face. Only now did she grasp the extent of the damage. Such wreckage, such excess, called for retribution, demanded a victim. In a flash she understood that this was no longer the concern of three individuals but that a mighty struggle was in progress here between the forces of chaos and order civilization and insanity. Dauntless, copper-faced, she stamped over the ruins, enthroned herself on one of the torn leather armchairs, and crossed her arms over her bosom.

“Begin,” she said to Papa.

Edna Bloom, wearing a hollow expression, did not interrupt the ceremony. She walked in from the kitchen bearing a goodly tray with Papa’s second lunch. Papa looked from her to Mama. An hour and forty minutes ago at home he had polished off a plate of pupiklach drowning in gravy, vegetable soup Moroccan-style, a thick slice of turkey in curry sauce garnished with tawny onion rings, and a generous helping of rice; only Mama knew the rice should have been served with piñones, but that stinking one-armed vendor from the spice shop in the arket charged such a price, to hell with him; and for dessert, homemade applesauce with the peels removed. Now she inspected the regal feast that Edna Bloom was serving him. Papa pulled up his usual chair aNd, fixing his eyes on Mama with a little gasp, proceeded to tuck in.

He devoured the first course of eggplant in tomato sauce glistening with pearly garlic cloves; he lapped up the creamy onion soup with the crispy croutons on top; he feasted on succulent tongue of veal, seasoned Hngarian-style and flanked by heaping mounds of rice studded with piñones.

e dined in silence, his great jaws occupied with course after course. Mama watched him with a new look of empathy and wonder. She had never believed there was love between him and What’s-her-name; in fact, she didn’t really believe in love at all. What’s love anyway, she once said to Yochi, a moment or two in a lifetime of putting up with another person’s craziness. Now she was beginning to appreciate the earthier dimensions of Papa’s victim. Edna brought in the dessert: stewed fruit, a glass of orange juice, and a square of Splendid chocolate, and Papa ate, and wiped his lips on a lily-white napkin with a wooden ring around it, and cleaned his teeth with a fine little toothpick, concealing his mouth behind his hand — he forgets where I found him, you’d think at his mother’s they ate off Rosenthal — and, finally, belched, quickly excused himself, and returned to the job.

Wielding a small-sized hammer and chisel, he set about removing the floor in what used to be the hallway at Edna Bloom’s; he cracked the tiles like so many eggshells, working slowly with an air of doom: while he was tearing down the walls it was a comfort to imagine something growing here, gestating in the stone; but as he pulled out the tiles, formerly overlaid with brightly colored carpets — which Edna sold to the rag man for money to pay Mama and to buy the food she sacrificedto Papa — the nubbly concrete exposed underneath, the rusty rods, and especially the stratum of sand below them, gave off a gloomy chill. Papa tapped and uprooted and slowly excavated the floor as Edna sat gaping at him, nodding her head and humming in a monotone.

Solemnly Mama picked up her needles and plied them uninterruptedly throughout the ensuing days of Papa’s labors, knitting her surroundings into the fabric that soon became a woolly gray sweater; even when clouds of dust blew up she restrained herself from coughing. At last she realized how badly her rival was beating her, how cunningly she had laid bare that which Mama tried so hard to cover up over nineteen years of marriage.

Next morning, as she hung the winter quilts out the windows to air before putting them in storage, Mama caught sight of two rugged-looking movers hauling Edna’s dusty black Bechstein piano. A number of neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk to watch: Sophie and Peretz Atias, Felix and Zlateh Botenero, Avigdor Kaminer, who seemed to have perked up a bit since the death of his wife and even started dyeing his hair. When they noticed Mama looking down, they angrily turned away: they knew it was Mama’s greed that had made Edna sell her piano. But another thought had occurred to them too, that she was selling the expensive instrument because there was no room left for it in her little apartment.

It had been the only piano in the building, the only one on the block perhaps. And though Edna had played it no more than once or twice in the past few years, there were some among them who could still remember the occasion of its arrival here, and how Edna would practice a little Chopin in the afternoon sometimes. Mama had backed away when she saw them glaring at her, and now she reappeared in the window in all her majesty, shaking out the quilts with lofty indifference. But suddenly she too was seized with sadness. She stopped what she was doing and wadded up the rag in her hands as though to salute a passing coffin. She too, in those bygone days, had sometimes paused to listen, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. Sighing. When the movers drove off, the neighbors bowed their heads a moment, and a shiver of woe passed through the building.

And in the midst of all this, Grandma appeared. For months she had lain immobile, till the elderly doctor who suggested a new treatment the year before broached the subject again to Yochi one evening as shesat beside Grandma at the hospital; the doctor had been watching Yochi take care of Grandma for quite some time. Now he showed her Grandma’s records. What a shame, he said in his broken voice, and waited for an answer as her childish blue eyes stared down at the floor. How he must suffer, thought Yochi, with his voice cracking every minute. “Your grandmother could go on living,” he whispered again, and Yochi thought, He certainly doesn’t look like someone who chops people up for diploma practice. She said she needed time to decide, and pondered the dilemma without consulting anyone. A few days later she told him she simply didn’t have the strength to make a life-or-death decision. Let him decide and she would hope for the best. And the following day the doctor wheeled Grandma to surgery and did the deed: he cut a tiny drainage canal in her brain; the fog lifted, and one week later Grandma Lilly blinked an eye, sat up, and smiled, and when they showed her how, she started to walk again.

It was truly wonderful, but terrible too. Grandma was home, but no one dared to look at her — they were ashamed of leaving her like that, like a dog, alone in the hospital, but they were also ashamed of having seen her in such a pitiful state, of having handled her body as if it were their own. Mama gasped, remembering the things she had divulged while Grandma was ill. She blamed it on Papa, on the banging at Edna’s, it had shocked the foundations of order and reason, he’d raised the dead with his boom boom boom, and she bit her fingers with an anxious glance at Aron, as the three of them grasped what Mama would never acknowledge: that the family accounts with Fate were a mess; the letters had been switched.

Grandma came home by taxi. Papa went to fetch her at the hospital, stuffed respectfully into his only suit, the fusty one from his wedding day, and he had to breathe carefully not to pop the buttons on his barrel chest. Mama served coffee and a fallen torte, and they all sat frozenly around her, afraid to open their mouths. Grandma regarded them with her seeing eye, and the crooked new expression on her face looked sharp, disdainful. Her eye roved to the new buffet, the recently painted walls. “Remember, Mamchu, remember the mildew and the stains on the ceiling,” Mama gushed, “you were still here the time we had the leak from the sink upstairs at the Boteneros’, weren’t you?” A bitter smile floated over Grandma’s lips. Mama tormented herself for having trusted Grandma even on her deathbed. Still Grandma saidnothing and they couldn’t tell whether she knew how to talk or not. The whole left side of her body was paralyzed, but her face was barely wrinkled at all, as though she’d been living in a state of suspended animation beyond the ravages of time. One lid drooped over her eye, and from the side she looked like a fortune-telling gypsy. When Papa started cracking his knuckles she turned to him with amazing speed and he froze under her gaze. Mutely she examined the armature of his body, the new might of its bulwarks, and right away she knew everything, as though someone had whispered the story in her ear. There was no doubt that she knew. Slowly she turned to Mama and transfixed her with a long, apocalyptic stare, which only Mama understood.

Then she turned to Yochi. She stripped her naked with her eye and embossed a design of wasted youth. Yochi squirmed. Mama smiled encouragingly and whispered, “This is Yochi, Mamchu, you remember Yochi. She’ll be graduating from high school soon, she’ll get a deferment from the army and go to the university! Maybe she’ll be a doctor someday, a doctor!” Yochi didn’t even bother to protest. Grandma’s eye twinkled. Maybe she remembered something, a special moment out of her many hours in Yochi’s care. She smiled at her. Yochi wept softly, not bothering to wipe her eyes. Mama held out a handkerchief, but Yochi ignored her outstretched hand. The tears welled in her eyes and flowed down her cheeks, onto the chair and the carpet, and Mama watched in deep amazement, thrusting the handkerchief in Yochi’s face. “Enough already, nu, you’ll cause a flood, wipe your tears now, aren’t we happy to have Grandma home,” and Aron peeped at the tiny drops: what if Yochi went on crying forever, till her tears became a trickle, then a stream, then a mighty waterway coursing over the floor in search of Mama …

Then Grandma turned to Aron. Astonishment spread over her face, and her mouth skewed up inquiringly. Mama, Papa, and Yochi hung their heads. She seemed to be trying to say his name. They all looked up, surprised, hopeful. God Almighty. Aron’s hands were sweating. He remembered the golden thread she had given him once. Maybe now she’ll give me the real present, he thought. Grandma Lilly wagged her head, shaking off forgetfulness, fatigue. Her face turned sallow with effort and frustration. Aron sank back in his chair.

That day Papa didn’t go to work at Edna Bloom’s. Maybe Mama’s accusation worked and now he was frightened of himself. After theyput Grandma to bed in her alcove, Papa tiptoed around the house, and Aron tried to stay out of his way. With Papa in the house, even the door frames and the furniture, everything looked tiny around him, and Aron reckoned the days that had passed and knew only a miracle would save them now; something had to happen, one way or another, it had to, he was about to explode: the food he swallowed in tiny bitefuls clogged up his stomach, and how long would his heart be able to pump with all that mush inside him, it did seem to be beating more sluggishly of late, he had actually noticed that, maybe food particles were filtering into his bloodstream, congesting the chambers, the auricles and the ventricles; Aron could picture it clearly: the atrium, a muscular pouch, filling up with liquid food, and his heart struggling to pump it, barely able to contract, it was so glutted with goop; and all night long he tosses and turns, burping those little burps that burn and smell like rotten eggs, and next his throat will fill up and push out his Adam’s apple, and then the stuff will ooze into his face, and his cheeks will balloon, he’ll look like a freak, and from there it will pass into his brain, and then he’ll blow up, then they’ll really have a mess on their hands.

In the evening when Mama went out to the Romanian pharmacy to buy Grandma her medicines, Aron sneaked down to the furnace room and got the fancy dress and the high-heeled shoes and the bathing suit and the thick braid and all the other stuff. Cautiously he walked up to Grandma, who was sitting rigidly on her bed. He smiled at her and displayed his heavily laden arms. There were no sparks of recognition. He kneeled with effort and put the shoes on her twisted feet, and the hairbands on her head, like seven rainbows shining after a storm. She didn’t budge. She let him do what he wanted. Then he stood her up, and with great difficulty pulled the dress on over her robe. Why, he didn’t know, he only knew it had to be done and that Yochi would be proud of him. And then he went back to his room and lay down on his bed. At ten past seven Mama returned from the pharmacy and walked into Grandma’s alcove. Aron heard Mama give a frightened yelp, and after that she locked herself in her room, switched the light off, and didn’t come out till morning.

That evening there was no supper.

For three days more, three hours a day, Mama sat in the torn and dusty armchair at Edna Bloom’s. Still, she wouldn’t speak an unnecessary word to Papa, but at least she behaved respectfully toward himand also a little fearfully, as though watching the slow, awesome fall of a giant tree. Wearily he raised the little tile hammer, and there were long spells when he sat motionless on the broken floor, trying to remember why he had come here in the first place. And then Mama would look up from her knitting and stare at him in silence, not even daring to rouse him with a snort. At night, as he lay sleeping on the Gandhi mattress in the salon, he would groan so deeply he made the milk curdle, and Mama had to let his clothes out day after day to accommodate his expanding musculature; she slit his sleeves and sewed large strips of cloth into his trousers, but to no avail.

And then one day there were no more pinones in the rice, and Mama slackened her knitting. Edna served the dinner tray and stood abjectly by. And the following afternoon there was a chicken wing on the plate instead of butter-soft tongue of veal. Papa finished eating and picked his teeth as usual, only this time he neglected to cover his mouth and a feeble belch escaped it, tarnishing Edna’s face an ashen gray. Maybe that was the moment a voice whispered to her that she’d been fooled. That in some mysterious way, by some twisted conjugal logic, husband and wife had both been using her to reinforce their bonds. That all unconsciously, perhaps, they had sacrificed her to their union. Edna gave a short, fainthearted laugh. Mama and Papa examined her together.

The day after, it was a Thursday, Papa looked up from a meager drumstick and gazed reflectively into Mama’s eyes. Mama returned the gaze, reading what she read therein. When Edna left to get the dessert — for two days now this had consisted of watery peaches from a can — Mama said to Papa, “I’ll go home now, Moshe, for the thorough cleaning.” Just like that; and she walked away.

Papa waited for Edna Bloom. He stood up and wandered around the ruins till she returned, absently kicking the broken bricks, stamping lightly on the dust heaps. The first green leaves were budding on the plane tree in the yard. The warm sun tickled the most intimate corners of the afternoon. Aron stood on the sidewalk, looking thin and bowed from the back, his feet spread ridiculously wide as he gazed out at the valley. A sudden pain shot through Papa’s heart. Like a splinter from a nightmare piercing his memory in the middle of the day: he remembered his movements as he demolished the first wall. The unearthly winter he had drifted through alone for so long. He tried to recall whatit was he had been looking for, and shrugged his shoulders in disillusionment, in helpless grief; what else could he do.

Edna returned from the kitchen and her eyes sought Mama. Her face lit up for an instant, till she realized it was a sign of her final defeat. Papa took the plate from her hand and their fingers touched. Nothing happened. Except that Edna turned to stone. She felt it in her feet first, then her knees, and her thighs, and then the slow petrifaction of her sapless pubic mound. She had just enough time to imagine Mr. Kleinfeld digging her out of the marble that formed over her childless breasts, but by then there was so much stone in her heart and on her lips, and in her brain, that she didn’t hear him explaining, calmly and rationally, This has been dragging on too long, Miss Bloom, it’s too complicated, I never expected this, and I won’t take money for the floor in the hallway, it was a great honor to make your acquaintance, but now I have to go.