Prayers for the Living (45 page)

It was love at first blink. It didn't even take a blink, maybe only half a squinched look when Sadie came into the room. Both of them felt it like a piece of jagged glass in the palm of the hand—
suh-lash!
—and the pain was there, and the beautiful feeling, was how Sadie described it to me—only for the first time last night when she finally came back from her wanderings—but, oh, for how long I never knew where she was and didn't want to imagine!—here in the dark of this room, holding my hand, touching now and then a cool finger to my forehead, saying, oh, Gram, oh, Grammy, Gram—she had never felt anything like it before except maybe for the time when she was dancing with Rose Pinsker's grandson, Rick Sommer, the youth advisor turned dean, at the Purim dance, that was, she told me, the last time—and the first time—she ever felt like that with a boy or a man.

“It was like lightning striking me, Grammy,” she said—which was why, maybe, when I was telling you how much I wanted to stop things from rolling toward the end I thought of becoming like lightning, like a big summer storm—and then she made a little noise in her throat, like she was thinking of something she desired. Since from the
time she was a little girl I never heard her talk in that voice, with the dreamy part, with the little purr like a kitten's when it sleeps. What was this that happened to her? What do you call it? When my Manny fell in love with his Maby, it was so different, full of old-fashioned talk, from the Song of Songs they were reading, and if Maby behaved like a Delilah, like a Jezebel, then that was old-fashioned too. But this business between the women, you don't hear too much about it. There's nothing in the old books to explain it, at least nothing I ever heard. But it's there, here, in the world, a fact of life, like red hair and people who write with the left hand. But then I never heard everything—who lives long enough to hear everything? to know everything? The Jews thought they knew, you know. They thought they knew it all. They had the Torah, and they made commentaries, saying what they knew, and then commentaries upon the commentaries—see how much I learned over the years from my Manny?—but the years go by and soon you're arguing about the meaning of the commentaries on the commentaries and you forget about the first things you said, or they seem different, and what used to seem like such a simple truth has become so complicated that in the end all you know is that you don't know. And the gentiles, the goyim, they're no better, because they overlap with what the Jews know and add their own complications on top of our complications and it's even more mixed up—the truth—than it was when it first started—back then, in the Garden, where the first man and first woman came to life, and they looked at each other—like the way I looked at my Jacob the first time, it had to be—and so maybe that's the only thing we can know, that the lightning strikes whatever kind of tree is standing there, male, female, boy and girl, girl and girl, boy and boy, the lightning, the fire it makes burns the same.

For Sadie—if I could see and had a lipstick I could draw you an arrow—it went from the woman Peale to this college to trying to paint to—the disaster she made for her father, my Manny,
oi,
my Manny! my Manny! Here near the end I think of his beginnings and I turn to ice inside, ice! to think that it all should come to this, the boy, the years, the work, the love I had for him! Ice! Ice! Ice!

I'
M SORRY
. I'
LL
be calmer. I'll take it easy. Behind my eyes I see unfolding in time stoppage, like a flower, the year my Sadie went to college. It's a movie, sometimes, sometimes a song, a dance, a poem, and sometimes the bad odor when you lift the lid on a can of garbage that's stood too long in the sun.

“I like the work you showed me, Sarah,” the Peale woman said at the end of the interview and Sadie had put away her portfolio. “I'd like you to come to my studio in the city and show me more.”

If a man says a thing like this to a young girl he knows, she knows, everybody knows, what is meant behind the words. But what if a woman? if a girl, really, not that much older than the girl she speaks to, says such a thing? Who's to know what she really means? Who's to suggest that she's not just being friendly? Oh, these modern times, I'm telling you, where sometimes, you hear of these things, even the mothers and fathers can't be trusted with the children! And if it keeps up like this even the ground we walk on—or used to walk, because this particular grandmother, me, she don't walk much anymore—even the ground you can't trust. You hear about it, earthquakes, talk of planets going to collide, moons falling, the sun going out some day. And I say, what does it matter to me? What does it matter, if the child you bear and the children he fathered, they can't get together and live even for a few years in peace? I say, if that don't happen, then the rest could happen. I say, let the earth quake, let the stars crash, the sun spit and smolder out like a fire in a trash bin. What do I care? I have no hope. I have no prospects. I have no future that I see behind my closed-out eyes. Let it come, I say. Let it quake and shake and crash out and sputter—let it burn and burn and burn and burn, let the worlds collide, pieces of star shapes trailing through the airless spaces between the bones and tissues of void, a crash of a milk wagon of the heavens into the fire engines of hell. The only thing that comes of it is death.

S
EE
? T
HE SCENE
changes, time stoppage unfolds faster. Her mother's in the hospital scribbling star shapes in her notebook. Her father's on a business trip to New Orleans with the brother-in-law. Grandma is as always at home, in the apartment, getting the meals ready despite eyes so bad she has to run her finger along the edge of a knife to figure if it's the right one to cut with.

See?

She's walking across Houston Street, though classes haven't even begun yet, she's going to see the art teacher. Her portfolio, with some new drawings, it's banging against her leg. Her chest feels funny—like she wants to cough but can't quite. Her mind is a million miles away from the traffic and the trash on the street. She's thinking about how her father invited her to go to New Orleans, and she turned him down.

“You don't want to?”

He couldn't believe it.

“I have things to do, Papa,” she said, never, as usual, looking him in the eye.

“Things? What things? You don't want to eat with me at those restaurants? It's superb, my daughter, it's wonderful. The seafood especially.”

“You eat the shellfish?”

“Of course I eat the shellfish.”

“You don't keep any of the laws anymore.”

“Sarah, none of that means much to me anymore. Except that I try to stay true to the morality behind the laws. The spirit, not the letter.”

“You
have
changed,” she said.

“Of course I've changed. The world demands change and we demand that the world changes in turn, my dear.”

“When I was little you used to spank me if I broke one of the laws.”

“I never spanked you.”

“You did.”

“You have a faulty memory. Perhaps you recall the pain of humiliation as physical pain.”

“I remember physical pain.”

“You are imagining it. The memory plays tricks on us, darling. But will you think this through again? Are you sure?”

“Is it some kind of . . . ?”

“Some kind of what?”

“Never mind.”

“Will you think it over?”

“Um. I remember. I remember that you once broke my guitar. I was playing on the high holidays. And you smashed it.”

“I'm sorry. I was a fool. I apologize again. But didn't I buy you another guitar? And many other things?”

“That was after . . .”

“Yes, you're right. But are you . . . all right?”

“All right?”

“All right.”

“Yes, I'm all right. As all right as I'll ever be. This year.”

My Manny shook his head.

“Sometimes I don't know when I'm talking with you whether it's you or your mother I'm hearing. She is always saying things like that.”

“Things like what?”

“Like, I'm all right. This year.”

“But it's true. I'm all right this year. Next year I can't say yet. Can you?”

“I don't think like that anymore. And I wish you didn't. Look, Sarah, why don't you just get on the airplane with me and we'll have a fine trip to New Orleans.”

“Watch the rabbi eat shellfish in New Orleans.”

“Will you stop that? Since when are you such a letter-of-the-law girl? Were you ever? Never! No! But me, I'm a former rabbi. But I'm also a human being, and I have my appetites and desires and that's that. Am I supposed to be better than everybody else? Am
I like the Catholic who's supposed to be more Catholic than the pope?”

“I don't know what you're supposed to be.”

“So come to New Orleans and I'll show you some things you might enjoy.”

“What are you doing there anyway?”

“I have some business to do. But we can have plenty of time for fun.”

“I'll believe it when it happens.”

“So come and see and believe.”

“Is
she
going?”

“How does she know? Manny knows she knew?”

“Florette?”

She. Her
.

“You don't want her to come, she doesn't come.”

“Some loyalty. And true love.”

“You want me to take her so you can say I was keeping you from going? Sarah, don't try to have it both ways. You want to come, Florette stays here. You don't come, she might come along with me.”

“While my mother turns into a mushroom at Owl Valley? No thanks.”

“So that was the whole point of this conversation.”

“I didn't know it had a point. I was just talking to my father. And he turned everything to shit again.”

“You led me into this, you know.”

“Listen to the rabbi. The devil made him do it. The devil in his daughter.”

“Please don't talk like that. Now let's calm down and try to talk about . . .”

“Owl Valley.”

“You cannot keep throwing that in my face.”

“Owl Valley.”

“Please stop it, Sarah.”

“Owl Valley.”

“I can't . . .”

“Owl Valley.”

“If you . . .”

“Owl . . .”

Hit her he did. And sorry he was, too, like the time he hit her mother. But it was too late. By the time the stinging stopped in his palm she was already out the door and gone.

She's walking across Houston Street, classes haven't even begun and she's off to see her new teacher.

“I'm awfully glad you came,” this Peale woman says, her legs folded beneath her on a bunch of large floppy pillows. This is how they sit in such places, like Arabs in tents. Above her head the high ceiling of a factory loft, the kind of place I worked in for years after the death of my Jacob. And today, artists live and play in these buildings. And the granddaughter of a former seamstress plays here too, watching the funny little cigarette in the pinched fingers of her hostess, watching the trail of white smoke pour from her pinched red lips.