They May Not Mean To, But They Do

9

When the groceries arrived on Thanksgiving morning, Joy was astonished. “What are all these boxes? There’s no room for them!”

“Don’t worry,” her daughter said.

“Don’t worry,” her daughter-in-law said.

Joy allowed them to usher her into the living room. Her original plan was to order Thanksgiving dinner from the coffee shop, but Molly had given her that you-are-crazier-than-I-thought look.

“Don’t look at me like that. The kitchen gets too hot when you cook in it.”

“I’ll take care of everything,” Molly said soothingly, as if that were reassuring. But Joy did not want her daughter to take care of everything, she wanted to take care of everything herself. As she always had, but no longer could.

“The coffee shop has wonderful turkey. Moist. And it’s sliced.”

“That is so depressing, Mom.”

Joy knew she should find Thanksgiving turkey from the 3 Guys coffee shop depressing, too, but she found the thought comforting instead. Everything would be done, there would be no banging of pots and pans and oven doors; there would be no grease, no smoke; there would be calm instead of chaos. And she would be in charge.

She said, “I can’t take the disorder of cooking a Thanksgiving dinner, the crazy mess, the hot steam in the kitchen, the millions of dishes. It’s too much for me, Molly. But I don’t want to give up my place as the matriarch, I suppose. What foolishness. But it’s true.”

Molly looked at her with interest. Then she laughed and said, “So the 3 Guys will be the new family matriarch?”

“I said it was foolish.”

It was Danny’s wife, Coco, who came up with a compromise. Coco liked to smooth the waters in the family. She was a fidgety intellectual woman who had a fondness for any problem she might be able to solve — her children, for example, presented wonderful puzzles. It was the chemistry teacher in her, Aaron used to say. Coco suggested they order everything ready-made from one of any number of high-end grocery stores. “Zabar’s, Fairway, Fresh Direct. We live in New York City, people. We’ll get a whole turkey, it’s not carved, but you don’t have to roast it, and everything else comes with it. You just heat everything up. No cooking.”

Joy could not really see the difference between cooking and heating everything up, but she agreed. When there were no problems available for Coco to handle, Joy felt uneasy, almost guilty. Her daughter-in-law’s intervention in the Thanksgiving-dinner difficulty provided a rush of satisfaction.

But Joy had not expected so many boxes.

“Where is Aunt Freddie?” Danny’s daughter Ruby asked. She had just turned twelve. Her sister, Cora, was eight. Ruby and Cora — Joy never could understand how two nice little Jewish girls had been given such names, the names of women who waitressed in diners in 1932, but then, they thought her own name was odd, so there you were. Such sweet, pretty girls, flowering vines, wrapped around each other as usual, the two of them giggling and tangled on the couch.

“She’s coming soon,” Joy said. “She took a red-eye.”

“A red-eye,” Cora said. “Ew.”

“It means a flight at night and you have to stay awake all night and your eyes get red,” Ruby said.

“Aunt Freddie has blue eyes,” Cora said. “So there.”

Joy had marveled at first at how blasé the girls were about their Aunt Molly marrying a woman. She still marveled. It’s very strange, she wanted to say sometimes. Don’t you see? “Aunt Freddie will be here soon, in plenty of time for dinner,” she said instead.

Ruby had recently gone through a Katy Perry phase, mercifully short, when she wanted to dye her hair blue. She settled for a blue wig on Halloween. Then, just a week ago, she’d done an about-face. She still dressed in incomprehensible combinations of sparkly garments. She was wearing such an outfit now, an undersized flared skirt in a strawberry print, each strawberry a collection of layered red sequins, leggings decorated with clown faces, a gold-and-pink-striped lamé T-shirt. But she was now reading Tom Sawyer with the same intensity she’d previously reserved for Katy Perry songs and gossip, and she was now intent on getting a pet frog.

“No more Katy Perry karaoke?” Joy asked. It had been cute, Ruby lip-synching the pop songs, until she began shaking her hips in suggestive ways.

“I don’t want to be stereotyped,” she said.

Daniel flopped down beside his mother. “As what? A teen pop star?”

“Don’t tease me,” said Ruby. “Mommy said her father teased her about the Beatles and she never got over it.”

“Mommy’s a stereotype,” Daniel said.

Joy listened to the noises from the kitchen. Plenty of banging and crashing, but she found she didn’t mind as much as she had anticipated. Still, they didn’t know where anything was, those two, Coco and Molly. Joy got up and went into the kitchen, pointed out the roasting pan, the carving knife. The women smiled at her tolerantly until she went back into the living room. Fine, fine, let them look high and low for platters and gravy boats. If they needed any more of her help, they knew where to find her. She would sit and put her feet up and watch her grandchildren. That was matriarchal, too.

Ruby pushed her younger sister away and kneeled on the floor at the coffee table. She pulled an ornamental wooden box toward her and began to rummage through old photographs that were kept inside. Two years before, Ruby’s teacher had asked the class to construct their family trees. Ruby had formed an immediate attachment, bordering on obsession, with the heavy ancestral mustaches, the billowing knickers, the bows and fancy perched hats. She still gravitated to the photographs when she came to see her grandparents. She knew the names of every second cousin on both sides of the family. The old man with a long white beard spread across his chest who was wearing a fur hat was Aaron the First, as she put it — her grandfather’s grandfather. He had eyes like an angry crow.

“Why do you like him?” Cora asked. “He’s scary. And he’s dead.”

“So?”

“So he’s scary and he’s dead.”

But Ruby only shrugged and gazed fondly at the old man. He had sent his children to New York for a better life, six of them, holding only one back to take care of him and his wife in their old age. That daughter had died of cholera at sixteen. Tragic, Grandma Joy told her. Ruby thought, It served him right, but she said nothing.

“Is the turkey cooked or not?” Joy said, back in the kitchen. “I don’t understand.”

“Mom, you did plenty. Just sit down and relax. Coco and I can do this part.”

Joy had helped set up the extra table and the folding chairs, she’d helped Molly get the good dishes down, the good silverware, all the linens tucked away in boxes lined with tissue paper. That, plus everything she’d done to get Aaron ready — she was tired. In the living room, she watched as Aaron trudged in behind his walker. The girls looked up from the box of photographs.

“Do you want to look at your ancestors?” Ruby asked him.

“I’m too old to have ancestors.”

“That’s silly, Grandpa.”

“I’m too silly to have ancestors,” he said. He threw two kisses at the children. “Catch!” he said, and they both jumped and raised a hand, as if they were catching a butterfly. “Good,” he said. “Sometimes they get away.”

Joy helped him sit on his chair. He threw her a kiss, too. “Tough to be an old Jew,” he said.

“I’m Jewish,” Cora said.

Her sister rolled her eyes.

Cora showed Joy a photo of a man wearing a woman’s bathing suit.

“That’s my father,” Joy said.

“Why did he wear a girl’s bathing suit?”

“All the men did.”

“There’s a girl in my class who used to be a boy. But I’ve never seen her in a bathing suit.”

“Dear god.”

“Sometimes people get born in the wrong bodies,” Ruby explained to her grandmother.

Joy checked to see if Aaron had been following this, but he appeared to be, mercifully, asleep.

After a while, Cora began her ritual search for spare change, running her small fingers beneath the seat cushions of the sofa. Mostly she encountered grit, but she did come across a few bobby pins. Beneath the cushion of a chair, she discovered a clear plastic bean with a tiny wire. She was so disgusted when she realized that it was her grandfather’s hearing aid that she put it back. She moved onto the floor and lifted the sofa’s skirt. There, among the dust balls, she saw a ballpoint pen she could not reach.

She moved on to the ashtrays.

“What are ashtrays for?” she said.

Ruby looked at her incredulously. “For ashes.”

“For dead people in India?”

“You girls are very odd,” Joy said.

“For ashes from cigarettes. And cigars. And pipes,” Ruby said. “Don’t be so stupid, Cora.”

“But nobody smokes cigarettes or cigars or pipes.”

“Well, they used to.”

“Don’t call your sister stupid,” Joy said. “How would she know that? How do you know that?”

“Hasn’t she ever seen a movie?” Ruby said, turning back to a black-and-white photo of her father in the bath as an infant.

But Cora was no longer interested in the conversation. The heavy blown-glass ashtray in the front hall that was full of keys and paper clips was too high up and too heavy for her to lift with any confidence, so she stood on tiptoe and scrabbled through the loose keys and stamps and sample tubes of sunscreen until her fingers felt the cool of silver coins, quarters, quite a few this time. She sat down on the floor and counted them, piling them in towers of four. Nine quarters and then, in a small dish on the dresser in the bedroom, four rather sticky pennies. Her grandmother gave her an eyeglass case with a snap to use as a wallet.

Back in the living room, clutching her eyeglass-case purse, she approached her grandfather in his red chair that looked like a Chinese throne, or what she imagined a Chinese throne looked like after she once heard her grandmother say, “Just sit in it and stop complaining. It’s an antique. From China.”

Her grandfather looked uncomfortable. He shifted his weight back and forth.

“Grandpa, want to see my money?”

He gave a short laugh. “You rob a bank?”

“I discovered it.”

She unsnapped the eyeglass case.

“Whatcha got there? New glasses?” he said.

She thought he was playing with her. She took out two of the sticky pennies and held them over her eyes, the case safely clutched in her armpit.

“Don’t do that,” her mother said sharply. She had appeared suddenly, the way she often did. “Stop.”

“Why?” Cora put the pennies back, her lower lip protruding, sullen. “I was just fooling around.”

“Because the Greeks put pennies on dead people’s eyes,” Ruby said. “To pay the ferryman.”

“Coco,” Joy said to her daughter-in-law, “your children know far too much about death rituals.”

Cora sat on Ruby’s lap. “But, Ruby, I’m not Greek,” she said. “And I’m not dead.”

“Kaynahora,” Ruby said, looking up from a picture of a skinny elderly couple inside an old-fashioned grocery store. “That means you shouldn’t get the evil eye.”

“In Greek?”

Now their mother laughed, said, “You two. Honestly,” and returned to the kitchen.

“So, Grandpa, you want to see my money?”

He gave another little snort of a laugh, just like the last one, then said, “You rob a bank?” He looked at the eyeglass case. “You wear eyeglasses now?” Then he began to sing: “My eyes are dim, I cannot see, I have no-ot brought my specs with me-ee-ee…”

“Grandpa, who’s this?” Ruby held up a black-and-white photograph of a long-eared dog standing in front of a screened-in porch. She handed it to Aaron.

“That’s Prince,” he said. “That’s my dog Prince.”

He brought the photo closer to his face. Ruby thought he was looking at it more closely, but no, he did not bring it to his eyes. He whispered, “Prince. My dog Prince,” brought the photograph to his lips, and kissed it.

* * *

When Freddie arrived, Aaron recognized her, but he did not seem to remember her name.

“Look who the wind blew in!” he said.

Molly’s son, Ben, got there a few hours later.

“Look who the cat dragged in!” Aaron said.

Ben did look a little like a cat at that moment, a scraggly alley cat. He had gotten a ride from New Orleans with a friend and they’d driven all night. His hair, not very clean, stuck up at unexpected angles in unexpected places. His clothes were wrinkled, even his parka. He had grown a beard, which disconcerted Molly for a moment. She worried about Ben, down there in a violent city with a job that kept him out so late. She worried that he drank too much, that he wasn’t doing anything with his life. Sometimes she welcomed the concern about her parents as a distraction from her concern about Ben.

“You look handsome,” she said. Ben Harkavy, bartender and handsome alley cat, the kind that rubs against your leg, then hops a fence and disappears.

Ruby and Cora, who loved Ben in a way that reminded Molly of her feelings for her father when she was a child, a reverential physical ownership, threw themselves at him for a double piggyback. Molly gently pushed them aside so she could give Ben a hug. Her arms around his neck, her face on his coat still cold from the outside air, she felt herself relax. Ben was a good boy. Ben was healthy and dear and safe in her arms. And with Ben here as well as Freddie, at last she would be able to make some order in her parents’ lives.

“The cavalry,” she murmured. “Thank god.”

“You miss me?”

“God, yes.”

“Don’t make him feel guilty,” Joy said. “Your mother doesn’t like it that I miss her.”

Ben hugged his grandmother and said, “You can miss me, too. Instead of missing her. I don’t mind.”

“I miss you the most,” Cora said.

“You’re just his cousin,” said Ruby.

“So are you.”

Ben squatted down and pulled them to him, one in each arm, and the apartment was boisterous and gay. Coco and Molly had used the dessert plates for the salad, but Joy found she didn’t mind. The children were playing a game that involved pulling the tablecloth as hard as they could, but she didn’t mind that either.

“To Mom and Dad,” Daniel said, raising a glass of wine.

Aaron gave a bloodcurdling howl.

“Grandpa,” said Ben, jumping up, kneeling beside Aaron. “What happened?”

“What are you talking about?” Aaron said.

Molly saw Ben go white. He had not seen too much of his grandfather in the last year, and when he had, Aaron had always managed to simulate conversation.

“Grandpa forgets sometimes,” Ruby whispered to Ben.

He smiled at her. “Thank you.” But he was obviously shaken.

“What’s going on?” Aaron said, looking around with wild eyes. He swatted Ben away with his enormous white hand. “Off your knees, soldier.” He caught Molly’s eye. “I’m fine,” he said. Then that awful sound, again.

By the time Molly brought out the apple pie, the sound had taken on an alarming volume and pitch.

“What do we do?” Molly said.

“Joy, what should we do?” Coco said.

“Mom, has he ever done this before?” said Daniel.

“Aaron,” Freddie was saying, “where does it hurt?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aaron said.

Joy had not spoken. The room looked blank to her, as if it had emptied. The sounds were muffled. Except for Aaron’s. He was hazy beside her, enormous, ashen, opalescent. But the sounds he was making were not.

“Aaron, eat some pie,” she said. How stupid: Eat some pie. But it was all she could think of. She shoveled some pie onto a fork and held it to his mouth. “Delicious pie.”

Aaron opened his mouth and allowed her to tip the pie in. He chewed. He smiled. He swallowed. The noise stopped.

Joy looked up at her family and smiled, though she could hardly breathe.

“Pie,” she said.

Then the sound began again.

* * *

As Molly steered Aaron and his walker through the lobby, the doorman said Pow! Pow!, pretending to box. It was his favorite doorman, Ernie, but Aaron did not say Pow! Pow! back. Ernie looked solemnly at Molly as he opened the door, then he hailed a cab. Aaron’s long, lanky body, always so thin and flexible he seemed to be made of pipe cleaners, was now stiff and unyielding. He sat on the seat of the cab, his legs out, feet still on the pavement. The doorman went around to the other door and tried to pull him over by his shoulders, sliding Aaron across the seat. His legs stuck straight out the door now, feet in the air above the street.

The driver got out, and he and Joy tried to bend Aaron’s legs while Molly watched them as if she were witnessing a natural disaster, struck dumb, stuck in place.

“Well, hold my bags, at least,” Joy said.

Molly took the three heavy bags.

“No problem, no problem,” the taxi driver was saying. “Slowly, slowly.”

We are in a cab, Molly texted Freddie. The coffee is decaf, in case anyone asks.

Getting Aaron out of the taxi was even worse. The driver, a wisp of a man who said he was from Bangladesh and had a grandfather and knew how to respect the old, was holding him up beneath his armpits. Joy and Molly each took one arm, but Aaron began to sink to the ground, slowly, inexorably, the stiffness gone, as if he were melting.

“I can’t, I can’t,” Aaron said.

“Nice man, do not give up,” the taxi driver said. “For the sake of the nice ladies, do not give up.”

Aaron’s knees buckled, he was squatting, held up only by the two women and the determined driver. He sank lower and still lower, until Joy, shaking beneath the weight, was sure she would have to let him sink to the ground.

Just at that moment, two enormous arms wrapped themselves around Aaron, lifting him easily.

The two arms belonged to a security guard who was even taller than Aaron and far bigger, a muscular giant of a man. He held Aaron aloft, dangling him, Aaron’s feet just touching the ground.

“We forgot your shoes,” Joy said in horror. Aaron was wearing bedroom slippers. He was out on a cold rainy day in his bedroom slippers. “Your shoes, your shoes,” Joy said.

“Mom, it’s okay, he won’t need them, it’s the hospital…”

“Your shoes, Aaron. I’m so sorry.” It was all Joy could see, his large feet, clodhoppers he always called them, brushing the pavement in the wool cable-knit sock slippers with deerskin soles. He hated them, but they kept him warm and they weren’t slippery. “Oh, sweetheart, you hate these slippers. But why, Aaron? I ordered them from Hammacher Schlemmer…”

“He’ll be in bed, Mom. It’s okay.”

Another security guard came running out with a wheelchair and Aaron was folded awkwardly into it. He was so weak he was not even moaning now. But his feet in their warm slip-resistant slippers were off the sidewalk, placed on the footrests by the two security guards, one guard per foot. Seeing the men handling the big feet, seeing each foot on its footrest, made the slippers seem less out of place, and Joy recovered herself.

“There you are, Aaron,” she said, holding his hand. “There you are.” She ran her other hand along the arm of first one guard, then the second, as if she could gather strength from them, Molly thought. Or for good luck, the way people stroke a talisman.

“You came to our rescue,” Joy said. “And on Thanksgiving!” She looked around at the gathering, the first security guard an African-American, the second a giant as pale as Putin, clearly Russian, both towering over the Bangladeshi taxi driver and over her, a Jewish lady, and her daughter, a lesbian lady.

“New York is so cosmopolitan,” she said as they wheeled Aaron in after more effusive thank-you’s. “Isn’t it, Aaron? We’ve always liked that. Aaron, do you want to be near the window while we wait? We can people-watch.”