They May Not Mean To, But They Do

17

In her parents’ bedroom, it was dim and cluttered with medical apparatus. Her father sat in his leather recliner, a blanket spread neatly over his knees. He grabbed Molly’s hand and motioned for her to lean down, then put his lips close to her ear.

“There’s a black man in the house,” he whispered, obviously alarmed.

“That’s Walter, Mom’s nurse’s-from-when-she-broke-her-ankle-ten-years-ago’s son-in-law’s cousin’s mother’s friend from church. Or some such thing. He’s from Ghana.” He was a very gentle man with a beautiful smile and a staccato, musical accent. He knew how to change a colostomy bag. He was strong. He was kind.

“What’s he doing here? There’s a black man in the apartment, I tell you,” he whispered again, sputtering now. He pulled on her arm.

“Walter. From Ghana,” she said, louder.

“No one from Ghana is named Walter,” he whispered. “He’s a fraud. Get him out.”

She straightened up and looked down at her father. His beard was trimmed. His hair was combed. Even the hairs in his ears had been trimmed. His nails were clean. His shirt was unstained and buttoned properly. And that blanket on his lap — he could have been a gentleman taking in the salt air on an ocean liner.

“Daddy, he’s here to help you.”

“I don’t need help. What are you talking about? Help? I don’t need help. You’re the one who needs help.”

“Well, Mom needs help. You don’t want her back in the hospital, do you?”

“Hospital? Nobody tells me anything. Where’s your mother?”

“She’s resting. Do you want her to drop dead from exhaustion? Then who would take care of you?”

He looked pointedly at her.

“Me?” she said. “I wouldn’t last two minutes.”

“Honey?”

“Yes, Daddy?”

He motioned her to lean down again. “There’s a black man in the house,” he whispered.

* * *

“I knew he was a Republican,” she said later to Freddie on the phone. “But he never struck me as any more racist than anyone else his age. The uncomfortable kind of racism, not the suspicious kind.”

“He’s not himself, though.”

“I hope not.” That didn’t come out right. “Anyway, he’s incredibly difficult one minute, then he just switches over to sweetness. When I left the room, he and Walter were sitting side by side eating vanilla ice cream, watching NY1.”

“That’s the real Aaron, the vanilla ice cream one.”

Freddie was a gracious person. It was one of the things Molly loved about her.

“Thank you for being a gracious person, Freddie,” she said. “Even in the face of ghastly in-laws.”

Freddie laughed. How lovely that laugh was. How close Freddie seemed.

“They could have stopped with the telephone…” Molly said.

“Who?”

“… No television, no cars or planes, no computers. Just telephones, the invention that allows me to hear you from so far away, the magical telephone. It would have been enough.”

“That and penicillin,” Freddie said.

When they hung up, Freddie called her sisters. They were the first and second children, born only eleven months apart. They liked to call themselves Irish twins, though they were not even Irish. Freddie was the youngest, separated from Pamela and Laurel by almost a decade, but they acted like little sisters to Freddie’s mind, giggling and teasing each other, trading clothes, trying each other’s lipsticks, doing each other’s hair. Freddie had never paid much attention to them, two squealy older girls off on their dates, counting their sweaters. It was no surprise when, both divorced, they opened a boutique together, though why they chose Rio de Janeiro she could not fathom. They must stand out in that city like two sore thumbs, two plump pink sore thumbs, she thought. They resembled Freddie’s mother, though they did not remind Freddie of her mother. They were pinker than her mother, who had skin that was soft and blushing, and they were chubby. Freddie’s mother had spoken like an adult woman who hoped someone might listen to her now and then. Her older daughters spoke like girls at a slumber party, breathy and secretive, then shrieking with laughter. And now, presumably, in Portuguese. Freddie could not envision them among what she imagined to be the slender, sophisticated bronzed beauties of Rio. They had done well with their boutique, but when Freddie tried to picture them in their store, she saw only the two of them selling clothes back and forth to each other.

She had been closer to her brothers in age and in temperament. But they had grown up and gone their own ways, like her sisters. If any one of them had moved any farther away from Los Angeles, they’d have ended up being home again, the world being round and all.

“I’m keeping you informed,” Freddie said when Pamela answered. Laurel immediately picked up another extension. How quaint, Freddie thought. Like our grandparents.

“He’s a marvel,” Pamela said.

“What are you two doing for Christmas?” Laurel asked.

“Well, Molly had to go to New York to see her mother, so…”

“No, I meant you and Dad.”

“Oh.”

“He won’t know what day it is anyway,” said Pamela.

“I could take him to the track.”

Neither of them thought that was a good idea, but they were sure Freddie would come up with something.

“I picture you two sitting in front of the fire at Green Garden,” Laurel said.

“Oh, perfect!” said Pamela. “Drinking eggnog. Just the thought of you and Dad in front of the crackling fire makes me nostalgic.”

Freddie did not tell them Green Garden had no fireplace.

She called her brothers next, but she got the time wrong and woke one up, and the other did not answer.

“Molly, I miss you,” she texted.

“Never again” said the text that came back.

* * *

There were certain things about the Christmas Hanukkah season that Coco did not like. First of all, she felt guilty for having a Christmas tree, not because she was Jewish, but because it was such a waste. A living thing cut down for nothing.

“I understand not eating meat,” Daniel had said the first time it came up, when Ruby was two. “I understand being a vegetarian. But you’re not a vegetarian. And even if you were a vegetarian, you would eat vegetables. Vegetables would die so you could live. Isn’t a Christmas tree like a vegetable? It grows out of the ground. It’s like a big stalk of broccoli.”

“We don’t eat Christmas trees. It doesn’t die so I can live. It dies so we can decorate it.”

“We could eat it. We could chop it up and cook it after Christmas.”

“Very funny.”

Coco hated waste. It was that simple. The death of the pine tree was not the issue. She was not a fool, she was a science teacher, and she understood the importance and beauty of decomposition, how it brought new things to life. But the planting and cultivating and harvesting of what was essentially a big bauble, a bauble on which to hang other baubles — that was unconscionable.

“It provides employment,” Daniel said.

“Those Canadians who drive down every year and sell them on the street?”

“It provides enjoyment!” he said, pleased with the rhyme.

She sniffed her disapproval.

“Ruby really, really wants one.”

Then, of course, Coco said “Okay!” instantly. For Ruby, anything.

And now she made a big, happy fuss over the tree each year. She did love the smell, the look of them lined up on the sidewalk, the ritual of carrying the tree home. Once it was standing in the living room, though, and opened its fragrant branches, spreading the outdoor smell through the house, Coco had to fight off a flicker of sorrow. Like any useless bunch of carnations or daisies, the Christmas tree would shrivel and die. She cheered herself with the thought that the city now had a policy of gathering the trees up and using them for compost.

Choosing presents helped to cheer her up, too. Each potential recipient of a gift presented a puzzle to be solved. This year, she had solved two problems at once — a gift for Ruby, who was so unpredictable and in-between these days, and a more immediate use of the Christmas tree than compost.

She’d been a little unsure about the kit of science projects she’d gotten the girls. It used marshmallows, which of course they would like. It was, however, educational, and educational gifts sometimes fell flat. But when they opened their gifts on Christmas Eve, the science kit was both Ruby’s and Cora’s favorite. Cora immediately took herself off to watch marshmallow after marshmallow swell prodigiously in the microwave. And because the kit included a slingshot, Ruby, in her new Tom Sawyer phase, was delighted. The rubber tubing, the patch of leather, the plastic Y-shaped stick did the trick. She had been lobbying for a frog for Christmas, but without any real conviction.

“Best of all,” Coco said, handing her another package, “you can make a new, stronger slingshot from the Christmas tree!” It was a whittling knife.

“This is the best Christmas we ever had,” Coco told Daniel that night. The tree had been put to use, Cora went to bed wearing every wearable gift and clutching a new stuffed dog and a bag of marshmallows, and Ruby went to bed clutching her knife.

“I hope Ruby doesn’t cut a finger off in her sleep,” Daniel said.

“It’s a jackknife. It’s all folded up. Would you say that if she were a boy?”

“No. Then I’d be sure there would be cut-off fingers. Don’t let my mother see the knife.”

“Didn’t you have a jackknife when you were a kid?”

“They said I could have a BB gun when I was twenty-one.”

“Typical.”

“I had a compass.”

* * *

It was too difficult to load Aaron into a taxi this year to go down to Daniel and Coco’s, so the family gathered for Christmas Day at the apartment uptown instead.

“Grandpa, look. I made a slingshot. And I’m whittling a new wooden handle for it, too. A slingshot uses kinetic energy.”

“That’s a dangerous weapon,” Aaron said, handling the stick. “My father would have murdered me if he knew I had a Christmas tree.”

“It only shoots marshmallows.”

“We always had a tree,” Molly said. “Grandpa Bergman didn’t mind.”

“Like hell.”

Ben had been sitting on the floor playing with the Spirograph he’d gotten the girls. Now he examined Ruby’s knife. He put it in his pocket.

“Thank you, Ruby. I’ve always wanted a pocketknife.”

She chased him around the apartment and Cora chased her. Joy watched them fondly. But the noise was pounding in her ears, the laughing and happy screaming. Wrapping paper flew around them, ribbons trailed from the girls’ shoes, stuck to the soles by tape. Cheerful children, she said to herself. A blessing. She repeated it silently several times to chase away the other things she was thinking, which were, Shut the hell up, Stop it, Why must you be so noisy, You are not on the street, You are driving me crazy.

Ben’s father, Doug, came with his wife, Lisa, a sweet youngish person with long, lank hair and a nervous laugh. Who would not laugh nervously, Joy thought, thrown into the bosom of your husband’s ex-wife’s family? She greeted the woman with as much warmth as she could muster. It wasn’t Lisa’s fault that Molly had left Doug, it wasn’t Lisa’s fault that modern mores compelled all these exes to gather together and exchange gifts, it wasn’t Lisa’s fault that Joy missed Doug and held Lisa responsible, even though it was not her fault, it was Molly’s, but of course Molly had the right to be happy, of course she did.

Molly threw her arms around Doug when she saw him. I love you, Doug Harkavy, she thought. I will always love you, you are Ben’s father and there was a time when we planned our future and our future died yet here we are, and I will always treasure those days and I’m so glad I’m no longer married to you and I bet you’re glad you’re no longer married to me.

“Whaddya get me?” she said to him. She realized she was a little drunk. Ben had made a cocktail with apple cider and bourbon.

“Where’s Freddie?” Lisa said politely.

“Home with her own dysfunctional family. Well, just her father, really. She couldn’t leave him. He’s been ill. Men-tal-lly ill.” Oh dear. She was truly drunk.

“Okay, Mom, sit yourself down right here and drink this big glass of water, that’s a good girl.”

Molly beamed at Ben. She beamed at Doug and Lisa. Good old Lisa. She beamed at her mother and her brother, at Coco and the two little girls. When her gaze got to her father, she stopped beaming. He was tugging at the colostomy bag.

“Daddy, don’t.”

He looked up at her. He shrugged.

“You should eat something,” Ben said, but Molly was no longer drunk, not even tipsy. She was sad, suddenly and thoroughly sad. She shook her head at Ben, afraid if she spoke she would cry.

“Marshmallows,” said Cora. “Eat marshmallows.”

“I don’t have marshmallows,” Joy said. “But I have Mallomars. Would anyone like a Mallomar?”

“Shoot a Mallomar, Ruby,” Cora said excitedly.

Ruby said, “I ain’t botherin’ with suchlike nonsense.”

“Ruby is channeling Tom Sawyer,” Coco said proudly.

“Sounds more like Slim Pickins,” Molly said.

“We used to say ‘“Ain’t” ain’t in the dictionary,’” Daniel said to Molly. “Remember? But it turns out it is.”

Joy started telling Ben her story of when she had polio as a child.

“They were all so hysterical,” she said. “My mother fainted, my grandmother had to tend to her, and for all I know, it wasn’t polio at all. Maybe my leg fell asleep.”

“But you were in the hospital, Grandma. They put you in the hospital. It must have been something.”

“Oh, who knows, they were all so hysterical.”

They ate Mallomars while Cora explained Boyle’s Law as she understood it, which Coco said was brilliant, until Cora began speculating on volume and pressure in the bowel, at which point Coco interrupted and said the bowel was not a closed system, and Molly involuntarily glanced at her father and thought of his system, definitely not a closed one. He had fallen asleep in his chair, his chin on his chest.

“Do you want to try the experiment, Grandma? You put marshmallows in a syringe.”

“Well, I don’t have any syringes on hand, sweetheart. Maybe another time. You’ll teach me.”

Aaron’s head jerked up and he said, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“I bet you can,” Cora said. “Can we try? Can we get an old dog? From the ASPCA?”

“But what if it really won’t learn any new tricks and the saying is true?” said Daniel.

“And we’re stuck with an old dog with a low IQ?” said Coco.

“Well, at least it won’t live very long,” Ruby said. “If it’s so old.”

Cora started to cry.

“Ruby, really,” Coco said. “Was that necessary?”

“I’m very sensitive,” Cora said between sobs.

“Death is natural,” Ruby said. “No dog can live forever, especially an old one.”

Daniel rocked Cora on his lap. “Our dog can’t ever die, Cora sweetheart, because we don’t have a dog.”

But that made her cry harder.

On the walk home from the subway, Ruby kicked the snowdrift and waited for her parents and Cora to catch up. Cora was crying and dawdling because she was cold. If Cora would hurry up, she would be warmer, their mother explained, embarking on what Ruby thought was a clear and reasonable, though rather long, disquisition on the relationship between heat and energy. Ruby had tried hugging Cora from behind and duck-waddling along against her to provide some insulation, but there was no satisfying Cora when she was in this mood.

“Hurry up! I’m freezing!” Ruby called.

The snow that had piled up at the edge of the sidewalk was not really a drift. It had been pushed there by snowplows the night before, and it was already specked with black smuts of city dirt. Ruby scooped up a handful of dirty snow and packed it into a ball and took a few steps up the side of the mound of snow. She put the gray snowball in the leather pocket of the slingshot and let it fly, but it fell apart and disappeared into the dusk.

She shuffled her feet on the icy sidewalk. The wind blew and the sky was dark. Cora sniffled and shambled beside their mother. After two more blocks, she again refused to move, demanding a taxi. While her mother and father argued with her, Ruby pushed off and slid on the ice all the way to the next corner. There, the great berm of snow created by the plows took a right angle. She was boxed in by three-foot walls of snow. A narrow path of footprints ran up the snowbank. Over the course of the day it had cut into the bank like a mountain pass. It was frozen now, the bumpy pattern of boot soles shining in the street light. Ruby struggled to the top and surveyed her territory. “I’m the king of the world,” she hollered into the wind. Nobody heard her.

She bent down and pried loose a small rock that had been plowed up with the snow, then fitted it with frozen fingers into the slingshot.

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.”