As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (21 page)

Mimmie Klein,
he again almost blurted to Howard.
Isn’t that some name?

The first time he’d met Mimmie he’d treated her to a meal, though unlike the present one with Howard, that meal of long ago was an inadvertent gift. He was at a deli on Commonwealth Avenue the winter of his sophomore year at college and she, a stranger then, was there too. It was nearly seven in the evening and Nelson, hungry, already had his sandwich wrapped to go and was in line to pay. Even as the sandwich was being made he’d begun to sweat inside his winter coat, but waiting in line he started rapidly to overheat. Someone ahead was taking a long time to pay. Nelson, like the person before him, unbuttoned his coat and pulled his hat off. Mimmie stood two people ahead of him in line. And ahead of her was an elderly man, dressed like the rest of them in heavy winter gear, who also had a sandwich wrapped to go. He was trying to pay but no matter which pocket he dug into, the change didn’t add up. The young clerk behind the counter became angry. Nelson noticed how he was as red-faced as the flustered man. “Can’t you see there’s a line?” the clerk scolded as the old man reached into one more pocket. “I don’t understand,” the man said, glancing behind him at Nelson and the others, and the clerk answered, “It’s simple. Pay up or give up. We can’t be running a charity.”

Nelson stepped past the customer ahead of him and then past Mimmie. Standing beside the elderly man, he told the clerk he would pay for the man’s sandwich.

“What?” the clerk said, still glaring at the man. “You’re doing what?”

Nelson paused. He’d already pulled out a dollar but he fished in his pocket for another. “In fact, I’m paying for everybody,” Nelson added.

A fifth customer joined the line.

“Paying for everybody,” the clerk said, loudly and mockingly, as if Nelson were attempting to show off. But that wasn’t his intent. He just didn’t like the clerk. Not at all.

Nelson glanced behind him, then back at the clerk. Even though a sixth person, hearing the news, joined the line, Nelson nodded, then searched his pocket for more dollar bills, but there were none, just some change. As he pulled out everything he had, the elderly man beside him held a weathered hand to his shoulder.

Nelson was eleven cents short and the clerk let him and everybody else know it. “Paying for everybody,” the clerk gibed.

“Here you go,” someone, a woman, said from behind Nelson, and in the next moment Mimmie was standing next to him, looking not at him but at the clerk. She handed him the extra change. She glanced Nelson’s way then leaned around him to catch the eye of the older man. “Generosity,” she said, her eyes back on the clerk. “Ever hear of it?”

The clerk took the money—two dollars and seventy cents from Nelson and eleven cents from Mimmie—and without further conversation, five sandwiches and a tub of potato salad were purchased.

The last person in line was a father holding his child’s hand, and with the exchange of money the child unwrapped her sandwich and bit into it despite the father telling her, “Slow down, Clara. Don’t want to get a stomachache.” As Nelson passed him, the man reached into his pocket and threw a penny Tootsie Roll Nelson’s way. Nelson caught it, instinctively, and the man nodded a silent thanks. Mimmie clapped.

Nelson was back outside, a block away, feeling all the chillier after sweating inside with his coat on, when Mimmie caught up to him.

She offered him two quarters but he shook his head. Snow had begun to fall and the traffic, what little there was on Commonwealth Avenue, had slowed.

“People don’t always stick up for what’s right,” she told him.

“I don’t know,” Nelson said. “It was just a matter of some change.” In fact it was a matter of all the money he had for the rest of the week—three more days—and realizing that, he began to grow anxious. He’d eat just half the sandwich that night and save the rest for the next day.

“Some change, as you say, can sometimes mean life and death,” Mimmie asserted.

“Not today, thank God,” Nelson answered, though he wasn’t so sure about the days to come.

“No, not today,” Mimmie agreed. She was tiny and had curly hair. Those were the only details he noted in the darkness.

Nelson was shivering and he could see that Mimmie was too. He was about to nod and turn to go when Mimmie said, “Come on, let’s get some coffee.” She pointed to a shop across the street. But for lack of any money, even pennies, Nelson shook his head.

He changed his mind, though, when Mimmie insisted, “My treat. Least I can do.” She showed him the quarters again. “Name’s Mimmie Klein,” she said.

They met for dinner the next week at the same coffee shop on Commonwealth. He already knew that she was up in Boston from New London—that first meeting they’d shared their backgrounds, their Connecticut stories—but he hadn’t yet learned that she was studying math.

“Surprised?” she asked him. He couldn’t decide if she expected the reaction or wanted it.

Either way he was surprised, but only because he found mathematics so difficult. That anybody could be good at it surprised him.

“People often can’t believe it,” she said, telling him next that her being female was what threw people at first. After all, Boston University was among only a handful of places that even allowed a girl a higher education. So simply being female was quite the thing, quite the mystery, but being a
cutie—
she articulated the word with a seriousness it didn’t often connote—was the kicker. She shook her head, causing her curls to bounce, and Nelson found the gesture appealing. She was cute. And she was serious and surprisingly direct. If she’d been ugly, Mimmie explained next, leaning with some urgency across the table toward Nelson, of course the matter would be a little easier to understand.

“But I’m not that bad,” she concluded, frowning.

“No, no,” Nelson agreed, blushing, then feeling an unusual stirring in his heart.

He stank at math, he confessed—he was a word guy, not so much out loud, of course, everyone knew that, but he had words going in his head left and right, he was very busy with words in there, he told her—and for the rest of the semester as he and Mimmie grew close he discovered that he’d been right: he couldn’t have passed introductory calculus but for the big mathematical brain inside the otherwise tiny Mimmie Klein.

But in the end he’d lost her. If he had told Howard about her, if he had put his burger down and asked Howard to do the same, and if, folding his napkin and shaking his head in seriousness, he had begun speaking, he would have said,
I lost her. I lost my love, Mimmie Klein.
But instead he said, “Pretty good, huh?” holding up his burger. And Howard said, “Someday I’d really like to try a cheeseburger.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Nelson responded, his tone a warning to Howard about the rule banning meat with dairy.

“Just dreaming,” Howard said.

Howard’s girl in Woodmont played piano, he noted at long last, pushing his plate aside. She’d been taking lessons since she was six.

“You’ve heard her play?” Nelson was genuinely interested. But Howard shook his head. She’d just told him all about it, he answered, suddenly embarrassed.

Nelson stopped asking after that. He would listen, merely listen. And soon enough Howard offered a bit more. She was good with numbers, he said. “She’s the best checkout girl at Treat’s,” he boasted, and with his napkin and an imaginary pencil he did a quick imitation of a person adding numbers.

“Numbers,” Nelson repeated, surprised to find Howard’s girl having something in common with his own. The likeness caused a quickening in his heart, and he pulled two Tootsie Rolls from his pocket. He threw one Howard’s way and waited for Howard to say more, but he didn’t. Finally Howard began describing the walks he and his girl took along Beach Avenue, part of the many evenings they’d spent “just talking,” Howard said. Then he corrected himself. “Mostly talking.”

“Talking’s good,” Nelson responded. “She sounds like a catch, Howard. You’re a lucky man.”

“Uncle, there’s more.”

Howard shifted on his side of the booth. A moment ago, engrossed in unwrapping the candy, Howard had looked like the nephew Nelson had always known. Years had passed, but nothing, really, had changed. He could see the little boy right then inside the big kid. But a second later Howard looked so much older, so much more serious. Nelson blinked, surprised, when Howard buried his face in his hands and groaned—something Nelson had never seen him do before.

“Hey, hey, hey. She sounds like a nice girl. A good girl. Howard, you telling me you’re in some kind of—” Nelson paused. Never had he had this kind of talk with his nephew. “Trouble?” he whispered. “Howard, you in trouble?”

“Not the kind you’re thinking of,” Howard answered, his voice resigned.

Embarrassed, Nelson turned away. He swallowed his chocolate. “Hell, Howard. I wasn’t thinking of any particular kind of trouble. No, no. I wasn’t.”

“Want to know her name?” Howard asked.

“Of course.”

“Megan.”

“Megan,” Nelson repeated, nodding.

“Megan O’Donnell.”

There was a moment of silence and then Nelson said, “Dear God, Howard.”

“I know.”

“God almighty, boy.”

“I
know.
”

“Holy mackerel, Howard.”

“Uncle, can’t you stop? I thought I could tell you. I thought you’d be the only one who wouldn’t jump down my throat. Uncle, what do I do?”

“Oh boy, Howard. If only all you wanted was a cheeseburger. That’d be easy. I’d say, for crying out loud, in my presence alone, have a goddamned cheeseburger. Just once and it’ll be over with.” Nelson paused, fingering the small pile of candy wrappers beside his plate. “But about that girl,” he added at last. “I’m just your uncle. I can’t be the one to tell you what to do.”

Within weeks of meeting Mimmie, Nelson knew what to do: he made seeing her a regular thing. By spring of his sophomore year he and Mimmie were planning their days around each other, studying together at the university library in the evenings, taking walks along Commonwealth Avenue most afternoons, going to the movies on Saturday nights, eventually holding hands inside the darkened theater, turning to each other sometimes to laugh or smile.

She was the one, he soon concluded, no doubt about it. But he was too shy to even kiss her much less tell her so. Then, a week before they were to part for the summer, he finally made his move. They were in a theater and the movie—Buster Keaton’s
Seven Chances—
was coming to a close. The music was swelling, the credits rolling. And if they rolled any faster, Nelson figured, the moment would be gone. He pulled Mimmie close and pressed his lips, quickly, to hers. When they parted she called his name, quietly, lovingly. He kissed her again.

A long summer came after that, and Nelson went home to work in the store while Mimmie stayed in Boston with an aunt, but when they returned to school the next year the affection flowed freely. Something had happened over the summer—a lot of letters back and forth, and, for Nelson at least, a lot of dreaming—and they couldn’t keep themselves from sneaking kisses every chance they got. His third year of college passed in what felt like a flash: days as full and happy as Nelson had ever known. He was reading for classes and getting good grades; he was working part-time in a stationery store, easy enough tasks compared to the convoluted ordering for all the departments he did back home at Leibritsky’s; and he was in love with Mimmie who, every time he kissed her—whether on the banks of the Charles River or in the doorway to her student house—kissed him back. “Nelson,” she would so often murmur, just as she had that first time, whispering his name for no reason other than to say it.

For two and a half years they kissed, only kissed. Then, late in the fall of their senior year, they did more than kissing. They did—as he would have quietly told Howard, if he could have opened up and told him everything—they did the other thing: the act of love.

Thanksgiving break his senior year, Nelson traveled back to Middletown to be with the family and to work at the store. Moreover, he planned to broach the subject of marriage to Mimmie with his father. The year before she’d met the family, briefly, as she’d detoured through Middletown on her way home to New London. Everything had gone well. She had walked each aisle of Leibritsky’s Department Store. She’d shaken Mort’s hand and then Zelik’s. Nelson and Mimmie had then ambled along Middletown’s Main Street, Nelson pointing out each business to her as if it were an old friend. “I see. I see,” Mimmie noted as Nelson told her the history of the enterprises along Main Street.

For two years already Nelson had saved every cent he could for an engagement ring. By that Thanksgiving of 1927 he had forty-six dollars. It would have to do, he figured, as he hurried into Pinsker’s Jewelers, at the corner of Main and College streets, several blocks south of Leibritsky’s. A half hour later, and exactly forty-six dollars poorer, he returned to work.

“We have this idea,” his father told him upon his return from the jewelers. Zelik, along with Mort, was sitting on a crate in what was then the back room, a storage room. The store was a smaller place then, just a hole in the wall, filled with odds and ends. For so many years before this Zelik had been a peddler, running goods first by horse and cart between Middletown and Hartford, following the routes along the Connecticut River, until one day, just outside Hartford, his horse’s knees buckled, a trunk of women’s clothes fell to the ground, opened, and spilled, muddying the lot of them, and that was it: Zelik Leibritsky was determined to open a shop. For some reason Zelik, once he’d urged Nelson to sit, repeated this personal history. Then he told Nelson to eat; for lunch they were nibbling sardines from small tins and drinking cream soda. Zelik’s beard was already fully gray. He’d been forty by the time Nelson was born in 1906 and now he was closing in on sixty-two. Sometimes, it seemed to Nelson, listening to Zelik as he rattled on about how they could continue to build the business, all those years between them were as wide as a world. The old man still had one foot in age-old Europe, in Russia, where all his ideas came from. Nelson, on the other hand, was modern. He had a few ideas that came straight from Boston, USA.