Being Esther (15 page)

Then the meal is over. Ceely, Sophie, and Josh clear their plates, abandoning Lenny and Esther, who knows that the minute she gets up somebody will drive her home. Sometimes it feels
as if all the rushing had been set in place to hurry the evening along to the moment when someone reaches for the car keys and hustles her out the door. Another Sunday meal completed, a race to the finish from the moment Ceely phoned in the order and asked, “How soon will it be ready?”

But for a while, it is just Esther and Lenny.

This evening, Lenny is telling Esther that if his latest grant application is rejected, he'll have to fire two research assistants. Esther issues some consoling remarks, glad that for once she has something to offer. Rejection, she understands. But beyond that, Lenny might as well be speaking Milo's language, one that employs the Cyrillic alphabet. Hard as she tries, she can't quite grasp her son-in-law's work, which entails the search for extending life. Turn off the aging switch. That's what Lenny wants to do. When he tells her his grant application proposes to build on earlier successes with yeast and a particular kind of worm, Esther considers telling him about the pack of expired Red Star yeast in her refrigerator. But then Lenny, who has been waving his chopsticks for emphasis, bursts forth, “The question is, why can't we do the same with people?” With a gesture of finality, he plunks down his chopsticks on the clean white cloth.

At times like this Esther finds herself scrutinizing Lenny's face, as if after all these years, something new might present itself. He has a strong nose and a fringe of graying hair, the texture of Brillo. In his frenzied, professorial state, he reminds her of the fuzzy
New Yorker
cartoon characters she so enjoys. The first time Ceely brought Lenny home, Esther could barely contain her disappointment. She'd been expecting someone with a bit more dash, a more even temper, the kind of person you could count on when your car conked out or the toilet wouldn't stop running. Yet for all his brilliance, Lenny Frankel was the last person you'd call on in a pinch. She's long suspected that his incompetence
was willful, a deliberate strategy to insulate himself from the everyday tasks of life. Yet her son-in-law has grown on her. And when he talks about his work, his features, normally inscrutable, rearrange themselves into something open and appealing.

Now, trying to sound like one of those clever radio hosts, Terry Gross, or that smarty-pants, Ira Flatow, someone with the ability to appear informed while knowing nothing really about the matter at hand, she says, “You mean to tell me that if I were a worm, you could do something to make me live longer?”

Lenny removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. Their color—one blue, one brown—have the power to disconcert her. They are like Lenny, Esther thinks, one part brilliant scientist, the other,
haimish
son-in-law. The problem is, she never knows which Lenny she is talking to. “If you were a worm?” he says. He blows on the lenses, then polishes them with a napkin, slowly picking his words, as if the deliberate spacing of each utterance will make everything clear. That is something else she likes about Lenny. Even her simplest questions earn his utmost consideration.

He puts his glasses back and gazes at her from behind thick lenses. “Not a worm, Esther.” He pauses. “C. elegans.” He draws the word out, pronouncing it as if he were ordering something off a French menu. “The little nematode. It's brilliant, really.” Then he plunges his chopsticks into a cold carton of sesame noodles, which earlier had been the subject of considerable debate over whether Mr. Yee had skimped on the peanuts.

All this talk of worms, Esther thinks. But Lenny wouldn't appreciate the irony, wouldn't stop to consider that one might not want to hear about worms while eating noodles. Nor would it occur to him that despite all his journal articles, the chapters in textbooks, the invitations to lecture in faraway places, despite the hobnobbing with other experts, and the endowed chair (he is the Morris and Sylvia Fischbach Professor of Molecular Biology)
that Esther once famously asked to sit on, despite all that, she can tell Lenny Frankel a thing or two about getting old. And not once will she have to talk about worms at the dinner table.

“Brilliant. Yes,” she agrees, her voice trailing off. She fingers her chopsticks, still encased in their paper wrapper, and considers the infinite frustrations of living in an aging body.

She might remind Lenny that once she'd wielded these sticks with the same precision as he. In fact, it was she who introduced the family to chopsticks the year she took Mrs. Chen's cooking class in Old Town, bought a wok and five-spice powder. She wonders whether older Chinese share her problem: at a certain age, hobbled by arthritis, do they switch to forks? Or perhaps no accommodations are made for this particular infirmity and eventually they starve to death. Perhaps this was how the Chinese dispensed with their elders, the way Eskimos are said to set their aging parents adrift on ice floes. She is just about to say, “What's the point of living longer, when daily our bodies defeat us?” when Ceely appears, already buttoning her coat. “Lenny?” The uptick she delivers at the end of his name sounds like a prearranged signal, which Lenny misses. Frowning, Ceely repeats his name. Then, with deliberation, says, “It's too late for lectures. My mother is tired.”

“Leave him alone,” Esther scolds. “He's explaining something.” Smiling, she turns to her son-in-law.

Lenny hunches his shoulders and rises as he begins to stack the dishes.

Esther reaches over, sets a hand on his to stop him. “I'll help with that,” she says.

“No!” Ceely snaps. She fishes the car keys from her purse. “Lenny can do them.” Then, atoning for her outburst, she says, “Besides, you must be exhausted.”

“Not really.” Esther sits up straight, sets her hands in her lap, and smiles, an obsequious child hoping to stay up past her bedtime.

“Well, I'm tired,” Ceely sighs, jingling the keys, as if Esther were a baby in need of pacifying. “Even if you're not.”

Esther consults her watch, Marty's old Timex with the expandable band and the big numbers. It's early. She looks at Ceely, her golden child who morphed into an angry teen and then an officious adult. The adolescent rage is gone, but so are the soft contours. If Ceely were a chair, she'd be hard, unyielding. Utilitarian. “Perhaps you should see a doctor,” Esther says.

“A doctor?”

“If you're so exhausted.” Esther folds her napkin and places it to the left of where her plate had been. At least Ceely doesn't use paper. She sets out her good dishes, cloth napkins. “It's not even eight o'clock,” Esther says, as she presses the napkin with the flat of her hand. “Besides. How can you be tired when you didn't cook?”

“What did you say?” Ceely's nostrils flare; her face flushes. She flings her purse over her shoulder, and turns to exit.

Esther looks at Lenny, beseeching him for support, but his head is bowed as he busies himself with the dishes. Then she turns to Ceely. “Stop,” she says. “I merely said that you shouldn't be tired, given that you didn't cook dinner.” She smiles ruefully. “Remember the old joke?”

“Joke?” Ceely's face falls, resistance yielding to resignation.

Esther, stifling the urge to tell her daughter to put on some lipstick, says, “You know. The one about the reservations?” She turns to Lenny. “I'm sure you've heard it.”

Lenny glances at Ceely, who shoots him a warning look.

“I'm sure Lenny's heard it,” Esther insists.

“Heard what?” Ceely sinks into a chair, letting her purse drop to the floor.

“The joke about the reservations.”

“Tell me,” she sighs.

“Never mind. I'm sure you've heard it. It's old as the hills.”

Ceely jackknifes out of her chair, grabs her purse, and rattles the keys. “Will you please just tell the fucking joke, so we can get out of here?”

“Ceely!” The dishes in Lenny's hands crash to the table. He glares at his wife. “That's enough.” Turning to Esther, who is folding and unfolding her napkin, he says, “We'll clear up, Esther. Then I'll drive you home.”

Esther, fighting back tears, nods, then turns to Ceely. “Reservations,” she whispers. “It's what a Jewish woman makes for dinner.”

To Lenny she says, “You have work to do. Ceely will take me.”

E
sther tossed and turned that night. She wanted to blame her restlessness on Mr. Yee's free hand with the MSG. Or perhaps she should have rejected that second cup of tea. Whatever the reason, she lay in bed unable to erase from her mind the image of Ceely buttoning her coat, jangling the car keys, rushing her out the door.

Esther doesn't want to live with her daughter. Even worse is the thought of living with her son and that malingering wife of his, Sheila, always in bed with a bad back. Doped up, too, with Barry's help. Esther is as sure of that as she is that one day Barry Lustig, DDS, will lose his license for pushing drugs. No. She doesn't want to live with any of them.

She thinks of old Mrs. Abelson, who lived with her son and daughter-in-law and their four children, one of whom had been Ceely's best friend in grade school. Esther has long forgotten the girl's name, but she remembers the girl's mother.

She still can picture Faye Abelson on the front porch reading when Esther stopped by to collect Ceely. Faye, barely glancing up from her book, inclined her head toward the door, and said, “I think the girls are inside.”

Once, Faye was reading
Light in August.
Esther, who had been reading one of those books recommended for the beach, wondered if she should go back to school like Faye, who was studying for an advanced degree in English literature. But Marty would only dismiss the idea, find some way to make her feel even smaller
than she did standing on the Abelson's sagging porch wishing she had the time to sit in a wicker rocker reading Faulkner. Just as she started to berate herself for caving in to Marty's bullying put-downs, a shriek erupted from somewhere inside, followed by a barrage of Yiddish and English, and then a slamming of doors. “My mother-in-law,” Faye drawled, as if enervated by the heat from that fictional Mississippi place whose name Esther never could pronounce. Faye gave the slightest nod toward the screen door, which had been aggressively clawed by the cats, and repeated that the girls were inside.

Esther was wondering whether to knock, walk right in, or ring the bell, which she suspected might be out of order, when Faye shouted, “Ma!”

In a flash, old Mrs. Abelson appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a print apron. “Damn dog,” she hissed. “Ate the rolls.”

“Did anyone remember to feed him?” Faye asked, without enthusiasm. And then, “Are the girls still inside?”

Mrs. Abelson held up a finger and said, “Wait,” as if otherwise, God forbid, Faye might have to pull herself up from the chair and go in search of the girls. After the old woman scurried away, Faye slumped deeper into her rocker and sighed. “That woman is a whirling dervish. She doesn't know the meaning of the word
sit.
”

Esther understood from her own mother's twice-yearly visits—at the high holidays and at Passover—that Mrs. Abelson was afraid to sit. These older women knew their place, staying tucked away, fading into the background. Mostly, they tended the kitchen, where they learned to make themselves indispensible.

Whenever Esther's mother came to visit, she'd charge around the kitchen in a pink sweat suit, rubber gloves, and pursed lips, cleaning the refrigerator, tossing out empty cereal boxes, and rearranging the pots and pans. She consolidated the dregs of
Cheerios, Rice Krispies, and Frosted Flakes into one box, which inevitably led to an uproar at breakfast when the stale mixture tumbled into the children's bowls. All her efforts backfired. By the third day, Marty was fuming and Esther was promising that her mother's next visit would be even shorter.

Esther would never interfere with Ceely's kitchen. She certainly wouldn't accept an invitation to move in. Still, it would be nice to be asked. She imagined Ceely saying: “Ma? You know that extra bedroom?” Then Esther could reply, “Thank you very much. I appreciate the offer, but I can take care of myself.”

Sometimes Esther wondered whether Ceely would have turned out differently if she hadn't panicked all those years ago. But Barry was only six months old, Marty had just opened the drugstore on Touhy Avenue, and twice a week she was helping with the books. Then Helen had an idea. “What you have to do, Esther, is take a hot mustard bath. Then you ride the Bobs.”

“A roller coaster? Are you crazy?”

“You asked my advice. That's my advice.”