They May Not Mean To, But They Do

33

“Hi, Grandma,” Ben said. “Would you like a visit? I have a week off.”

In fact, the bar Ben worked at had gone out of business and he had Airbnb’d his apartment out for the month. He wasn’t sure why, but he admitted it to his grandmother as soon as he arrived.

“I won’t stay for a month or anything, but I didn’t know where else to go. Please don’t tell Mom. She’ll freak out.”

Joy found Ben fascinating. He was so sweet and so difficult in such a sweet way, drifting without bothering anyone, unproductive and undemanding, working at what in Joy’s day were considered summer jobs for a college man — construction, bartending, temporary doorman. It was not a philosophical choice, this drifting, not like Dolores’s granddaughter, who was a Dumpster diver, god help her. Molly worried too much about him, he was a good boy finding his way.

And now he needed her, Joy. She wondered if Molly had put him up to this, part of her plan to keep her relevant.

“As long as you like,” she said.

She wanted to dance, she was so relieved. She would not have to sleep in the apartment alone.

* * *

Uncle Daniel’s old bedroom, a.k.a. the maid’s room, was fusty and weird — childish and elderly at the same time. The carpet was as old as his uncle, the paint had once been a lovely shade of blue, he’d been told, but was now a sad colorless shade of nothing, and the window needed no curtains or blinds because it was darkened by grime. The built-in shelves, once so enviously shipshape (at least according to Ben’s mother), were claustrophobic and warped. The sink dripped, not too much, just enough to catch you by surprise.

“Honey, do you want some tea?” his grandmother called out.

Yes, he did want some tea, and how comforting to have his grandma make it, though she made the worst tea he had ever tasted, weak and lukewarm. But just the sound of her voice made the little room feel much nicer, more like home. Ben had always loved coming to her apartment. She’d made him cracker sandwiches: buttery orange Ritz crackers and peanut butter. There were toys she’d kept there just for him and interesting junk retrieved from the museum she worked at. There was a Betty Boop videotape he had always loved, it was so sexy and so peculiar — especially when she told him that Betty Boop was Jewish. Sitting on her bureau in her bedroom, there was still a wooden puzzle box in the shape of a butterfly he had gotten her for Christmas when he was a little boy. He’d bought it at a street fair and thought it was the most beautiful and original object anyone had ever given anyone as a gift. One of his paintings from kindergarten was framed in Lucite and hung in the foyer.

The kitchen was long and narrow, a tunnel, really, and at the end was a window. His grandparents had jammed a small square table there. It had two chairs, and you could not open the oven door all the way even if the second chair was pushed in. He sat there with Joy and looked out the window and drank his tea.

“Grandpa and I used to sit here,” she said.

“I can see all the flowering trees. It’s really pretty.”

“Yes. You’re in Grandpa’s seat.”

Oh god. How awkward. “Oh. Right,” he said. “Good seat to be in.”

His grandmother smiled. “You’re a fine person, Ben.”

“Like Grandpa.”

“He was all right,” said Grandma Joy. “Up to a point.”

She continued to smile, reaching behind her to grab a package of Oreos. She funneled several cookies into her hand.

“Enjoy,” she said absently, rattling the package at Ben.

She could remember so clearly the first time Ben stayed at her apartment. He had been eighteen months old, jabbering quite coherently, with the bottle hanging from the side of his mouth like a cigar. She and Aaron had set up the old crib, a beautiful, highly decorated wooden crib that had originally been Aaron’s, then taken it apart again the minute Molly saw it.

“The spokes are too far apart!” she said. “Are you trying to kill him? He could get his head caught. You put us in this? Unbelievable.”

So they had moved the beautiful crib from the 1920s back into the cedar closet and bought an ugly blue nylon playpen that could double as a crib. Ben ended up sleeping in their bed, anyway, whenever he stayed with them. Joy could hear his small, even breath; she could smell the warm, bathed skin; she could see his eyelids flutter, his fingers clutch his bear. When she looked at him now, a skinny young man who needed a shave, he was the same to her, her first grandchild.

In the morning, Joy put some sort of clothes on so she wouldn’t scare the horses, then staggered weakly to the kitchen to make Ben his breakfast. Standing over the stove to stir the Cream of Wheat, she eliminated the lumps in the cereal with solemn determination. She put the two bowls of cereal on the kitchen table with two spoons and two cheerful cloth napkins. She put the kettle on and forgot it until its whistle startled her and woke Ben.

“You’re the best,” he said.

She could feel him watch as she shoveled sugar into her Cream of Wheat.

“Grandma, are you okay with sugar?” he said the first morning. “I thought…”

“Oh yes,” she said. And to his credit he dropped the subject. He must have gotten that from his father, discretion. Certainly not from his mother. Joy missed his father. Doug Harkavy was such a nice man. Molly was lucky to have married him. Freddie was wonderful, too, of course. But what was the point? Well, the world was upside down, that’s all.

“How is your father, Ben?”

“He’s great. He has a grandchild. Well, she does, so he does. It’s cute, too.”

When Molly had announced she was leaving her husband for Freddie, a woman named Freddie, Joy had not fainted, though her heart was pounding and the room began to darken. She had smiled and said she wanted Molly to be happy, to be herself, and it was true, but she’d been thinking, What about Ben? He might be shunned by other children, he might be stunted in some Freudian path to maturity. She had worried, Aaron had worried, and then it turned out there was nothing to worry about, after all. Ben’s friends — well, it was a different generation, wasn’t it? — seemed to take the situation in stride. Ben was miserable about the divorce, but he didn’t seem unduly upset about his mother and Freddie. Of course, he was in college. And this is New York City, anything goes, she had said to Aaron. All that worrying for nothing. It had been a great strain, worrying so much and hiding it from Molly.

“Worrying is inefficient,” she said to Ben, smiling at him. “Look at you. You’re a fine person, Ben.”

Ben looked surprised. “Do you worry about me?”

“Not anymore.”

“I worry about me. I wish I knew what I really wanted to do.”

“Don’t you want to go to law school?”

“Sort of. It seems interesting. But what if I have to get a job doing, like, contract law or something? I wish I were, I don’t know, passionate about something.”

He gazed at her so confidingly. He was very good-looking, and when his eyes shone with emotion like this, he was irresistible. She thought of saying, Passion is for the bedroom! Get a job! Get a job with health insurance! That’s all that matters! Don’t be like your grandfather, always looking to be happy in his work, excited, creative (English translation: broke). Independence is overrated. It leads to dependence. Get a job in a nice steady corporation and keep your head down, and do your dreaming on the weekends and pay your bills.

Of course there were no nice steady corporations anymore, not the way there used to be. And Aaron’s problem had not been independence, it had been entitlement. And why shouldn’t Ben try to find something he loved doing? He was young and bright and earnest.

“You’ll find what you want,” she said. “It may not be what you think it will, it may find you when you least expect it, it might even be law school. And if you’re drifting, you might just drift into the right thing. Or if it’s the wrong thing, you’ll figure out how to turn it into the right thing. Sometimes you have to create your passion. I have great confidence in you. You’re young. You have time. You’re a fine person, Ben.”

He sighed and finished his Cream of Wheat. Then he said, “Thank you.” He smiled and got up and kissed her cheek and put his bowl in the sink. It amused her to see that he did not put it in the dishwasher or even rinse it, that he just left it there. “Thank you, Grandma,” he said again. “You’ve always helped me a lot, you know that?”

No, she didn’t, but she was extremely happy to hear it now when she felt she was about as useful as one sock.

“You have time,” she said again.

They went for a walk every day and sat on the same bench in Central Park watching the dogs parade by. They ate lunch in the coffee shop, and when Ben wasn’t seeing his old friends, they ate dinner there, too. They bumped into Karl twice, but they didn’t sit with him.

“He was Grandpa’s friend in the park.”

“Yeah?”

Ben didn’t seem interested and Joy had no desire to tell him more. There was nothing to tell, anyway.

She was none too steady on the walks back and forth to the coffee shop. Sometimes her feet just sort of slid forward instead of lifting up and moving the way feet are meant to do.

“I’m shuffling,” she said. “I’m going to shuffle right onto my face if I’m not careful.”

“You can lean on me,” said Ben.

That made Joy smile. She remembered holding his little hand to cross the street, lifting him onto the bus’s high step. He used to wear tiny navy-blue sneakers and overalls.

“Yes,” she said. “All right, I will.”

His arm was wiry and strong. He slowed his step and shortened his long stride.

Ben stayed for six nights before he heard about another job in New Orleans and decided to sleep on a friend’s couch down there until he could get his apartment back. But before he left, he asked his grandmother for a favor.

“It’s kind of private,” he said.

“Do you need money, sweetheart? Of course you do. Here’s a twenty. No, that’s not enough. Here, I’ve got eighty bucks.”

Why is my grandmother carrying a purse around her own house? Ben wondered. He knew that if he asked her she would tell him a long complicated story that would make no sense to him, so he didn’t ask her. But he put his hand out to stop her rummaging in the big shoulder bag.

“No, Grandma, no. It’s not money. And you gave me a really generous Christmas present. Really.”

She’d had to be creative at Christmas. So much had been going on. There was no way she could have gotten out to go Christmas shopping. A card with nice crisp bills for Ben had done nicely, five twenty-dollar bills. She thought of the two beautiful teacups (they’d been her mother’s, just a small chip on one, and she had three more) she’d given Molly and Freddie, plus an opal and silver ring she’d found that Molly had liked as a child, she told them they could share it, there had to be some advantage to having your daughter marry another woman. But money had been fine for Ben.

“Then what can I do for you, Bennie?”

He blushed and reached into the breast pocket of his shirt. It was a nice shirt. Had she given it to him for his birthday last year?

“Did I give you that shirt?”

“Yeah, I think so.” He handed her a crumpled wad of pink paper.

“Ben! A traffic ticket? You don’t even have a car.”

“Don’t tell Mom, okay? It’s kind of embarrassing.”

He did look embarrassed, that was certain. His cheeks were as rosy as a little English choirboy’s. It made him even more appealing. He was such a handsome boy. He was such a good boy, staying with her like this. She felt sick at the thought of him leaving. Maybe it would have been better if he had not come at all, then she wouldn’t have minded his departure.

“And the problem is, there’s a court date,” he was saying. “And I won’t be here because I’ll be back in New Orleans, and so I was wondering…”

Joy nodded and smiled. Ben needed her. This strong young man needed her, and it made her feel a bit strong and a bit young herself. A bit manipulated, too, but that was a grandson’s god-given right, to manipulate his grandmother.

“I’ll pay you back the money for the fine,” he said with the generous confidence that his offer would not be accepted.

“But how did you get a parking ticket without a car, Ben?”

“Oh,” and he said something in that soft, barely comprehensible mumble young people so often employed.

“What? I hate it when you people mumble. Even your mother does it sometimes.”

“You know, um, public urination.”

Joy looked down at the piece of pink paper in her hand, then gingerly dropped it onto a paper napkin she pulled out of her pocketbook. “What?” she said. “That is disgusting, Ben. What is the matter with you? Is this what people do in New Orleans? Are you insane?…”

She went on and on, making her way to the bathroom sink to wash her hands, Ben following like a shamed dog, which is just what he had behaved like, a dog. On the street. Public urination? There was a ticket for that, that specifically? How much urine was on the public street if they had to maintain a special traffic violation category for it? “Why on earth did you pee in the street? In public?”

“It was really late at night. Everything was closed. And, you know, New York has no public bathrooms. In Paris they have public toilets.”

She paused. She said, “Ah.” She said, “Well.”

He knew the word “Paris” would do it. She had taken him to Paris once, when he was quite young. Just the two of them. She had gone to do some research for the museum, and she brought him along. She made him go to a ridiculous number of museums, but mostly they ate and walked.

“Oh, Ben,” she said. “What is to become of us?”

“I didn’t pee on the ticket, Grandma.”

She picked it up and folded it neatly and zipped it up somewhere in her bag. “Our secret,” she said.