The Place Will Comfort You (21 page)

Anatevka Tender
 

F
INALLY THE KITCHEN drawer came open, slamming into her stomach and spewing the obstruction towards her face: rubber bands. Snarls exploded and spilled over the sides, red, blue, and amber. Bunches crumbled in the hand, while others glued themselves to the skin, the younger units, still sweating out their resilience. The clingers she shook off and the strays she kneeled to collect. All of them she stuffed into a Hefty bag.

“Yitz,” she called out. “Please!”

No answer. When at long last he would appear, he would insist he hadn't heard her any of the other times. If she could hear his sandals crunching on the Astroturf of the porch, couldn't he hear her shout? He would say it was a matter of focus. She believed this was true. The boy had an excellent mind—the young man, rather, the sergeant who made the rank despite the early trouble with compliance, just as in the years of double schooldays at Yeshiva he had excelled while garnering a reputation for disruption, as accomplished in the morning sciences as in the sacred texts of the late afternoon. What did he know from housework? The dullness he seemed to have a good sense of but he had no idea of the scope.

More wormy clots clung to the bottom of the drawer, coming
away with offensive sounds. She grabbed a scouring pad and a viscous detergent. All but the faintest tracks of rubber melted off the white surface. What remained was like the ghost of crayon vandalism, red, blue, and amber, washed off a wall. She rolled the drawer shut and moved on to another, also stubborn but surrendering sooner. Prone stacks of Styrofoam cups squealed in emerging, soft shards breaking off, concavities tinted with drink.

The bags of garbage were beginning to dominate the kitchenette floor and the job wasn't even half-done. The lessor was in too miserable a shape to be held accountable. The old man, the dying condominium owner whose name she could not seem to recollect although the nephew would have printed it on the lease, had hoarded also plastic bottle caps, salt packets, red coffee stirrers, cocktail swords, cruise ship napkins. She thought of the phone, mounted on the wall by a dry erase board, which still bore the words
pilot light
in a wavering hand. The mouthpiece had smelled spitty when she had spoken to Harvey the night before, and she had noticed rust-colored stuff caked around the pushbuttons. She didn't want to see that again when he called tonight. Cleaning supplies were piled on the counter. She soaked a paper towel with rubbing alcohol, strode to the phone, and rubbed. She had neglected to ask Harvey was he using what she froze in tinfoil. She'd left heating instructions on pieces of tape, but he should peel those off.

She erased the board while she was at it. The alcohol dissolved the words.

“Now
you're talking,” Yitz said.

She pitched the paper towel, the solvent drying icy on her fingertips. Yitz hadn't shouted, but she had heard him as if he were just outside the doorway, and he was, across the dining area, still on the porch. She had to remember the facts of this apartment.

“Now
who's
talking?” Once she was done with the big cleanout, she would have a radically easier time housekeeping than she had had in years. There was so much less space now. Mopping, only in
here and in the bathroom, maybe sixty square feet of linoleum, everywhere else carpeted. “Your little brother's with you? Eytan, I thought you were getting ready for bed.”

But she heard only Yitz, clearing his throat in a farcical manner. He and his brother must have struck up a clownish mood and were preparing some sort of presentation. Yitz would direct and Eytan would perform, the little introvert briefly turned out by his big brother's theatricality. No food matter stuck in an ear, she hoped, or nostril. The desired audience would be one taken unawares, so she walked over without clearing the fatigue from her face.

But Yitz alone stood on the porch once she had skirted the glossy oval of the dining table and pushed through the heavy folds of the floor-length curtains, the shock of changed location hitting her once again in the outdoor smell, Maryland at summer's peak. The humidity had brought out the curl in her son's black hair. Where was his kippa? His head was bare.

She couldn't see what he was looking at, just the evening sky, still fully lit and yet amazingly permissive of examination, the glare hung with a filter of thick clouds, lush with the details of a slowed or building storm. Another slice of this phenomenon was visible at foot level, framed by the iron stilts on which the wall was raised. The Astroturf disguised the unforgiving cement only by prickling at her feet through her hosiery. Each step forward reawakened the long miles of the passenger-plane flight stored in the vessels of her calves. She wondered if the pull of gravity at this height was worsening the congestion. The complaint dated to her first pregnancy, this boy, this discharged soldier, who at the start of their travels had been a nine-year-old charged for a historic climax, a permanent return, they had all thought, from Hoboken to the land of their Fathers. Through that journey, too, her legs had been such a bother that she still remembered. Coming or going the blood did the same, striving towards the ground the whole airborne way, but how much longer now it took the legs to return to normal.

She stopped just short of her son's side. When she saw his view she forgot her legs. Across the freeway lay the suburb, but sub-arboreal would have described it better from these heights, as it was entirely sunk beneath the trees, all evidence of human development shielded by a blanket of green, though not truly a blanket. In the layer, shaggy shapes swayed this way and that, pressed together, like a woolly-shouldered nation hunkering in prayer, or rather pending decision, given that the movement seemed to flow like a debate, circulating, splitting and returning. The chirr of some abundant local bug surged suddenly out of the dark divisions, and she would not have been surprised to see a ponderous neck drawn up from bowing, here and there a face turning up, in a time when the coming evening was announced by a great peal of silver hammers, ascending and descending, against aluminum it sounded like. The damp air bore sweet rot and verdure far above the fertile soil.

“Look at that,” Yitz said. “Boom. Green green green. That's trees for you,” he said, with nervous admiration as if he hoped to be one someday, at which ambition she could only raise her eyebrows. With the
boom
she had snapped out of the spell.

Why boom? Like a cry in a magic trick, to announce an immense change? And of course, yes, three days ago they would have regarded from their old home the rails of another porch set in stucco across a street where boys would pause from playing soccer when a car passed, their shouts rising in Hebrew when the conditions for play returned, whereas here today—boom! Nothing but green, green, green beyond the graphite streak of the far-down thruway. But unlike a magician he had extended both arms joined, right fist squeezed against left forearm, and jerked them like the mechanism of a rocket launcher. Boom.

“I need a chair,” he said. “I'm going to sit here.”

“The nephew could have taken that monster of a television and left us deck chairs,” she said. “Look at the grooves in the Astroturf There were deck chairs.”

“I dig that TV.”

“With all the woodwork?” she said. “Horrible. Dig?”

“It
should be
ornate. It's a shrine. It's a God.”

“Please with the nonsense. You don't say this kind of thing for your brother to hear, correct?”

“I'll buy it off the old dude. That thing's an antique, circa, what? Nineteen-something-or-other Americana, electronic Americana, electronicana. Dig it. First thing I'll set up when I get my own pad. Could use a new antenna, could use a better antenna.” He had started speaking at a normal pace but now he was racing. “Caught cartoons on it at three
A.M.,
three in the morning, man.”

“I'm your mother and not a man, please.”

“Any time of day you can watch anything,” he said. “There's never nothing on, which I find very cool, my learned gentlemen and fellow prodigies. Let us say grace.”

“Cool I don't think you even say anymore. That's from the sixties.” Did he need the indiscriminate greed for local idiom to mark him even more a stranger? The nonsense talk would be enough of an impedance when he began to make his way here, and with a faint Israeli accent now to boot.

“Cool's cool,” he said. “I heard it about five times from the bagger at Safeway.”

“That's from who you'll learn?” she said, but she allowed herself an ironic smile. She had been touched by the experience herself. “Did you hear all the Have a Nice Days from the cashiers?” she said. “And two How You Doin's on the way, from perfect strangers.”

“Have a nice day, now!” Yitz said.

“It's a pleasant practice,” she said. “Really agreeable.”

“Let's get kitchen chairs.”

“Okh, all those bags collecting on the floor. They won't fit in the chute. You saw where the garbage room was downstairs?”

“Five minutes let's enjoy the panorama.”

“View,” she said. “A panorama's only from a pinnacle with visibility
all around.” From within the apartment came a childish voice:
Imma!
“What is it?”
To use it?
“Use what?” But even as she shouted her voice declined towards the pitch of conversation, because who knew what he had found, and she would have to go and check. “I have to go check,” she told Yitz, turning to go back in. “Come soon. There's so much to do still inside.”

“That family is finished by now,” he said.

She turned back towards him. “I don't understand this,” she said. She didn't. Why he must continue to invite the war in Lebanon into their daily routine she could guess. What determined his timing, she couldn't. “Now, Yitz?”

He gazed past her cheekbone, as if expecting other company, more important. As always he proceeded to look down, annoyed, having been stood up.

“The Hezbollah by now would have come in and finished them off,” he said. “Collaborators they finish off.” He kicked the Astroturf, studying the action. “Did the poor schleps ask us to set up camp on their roof? Does the Hezbollah make fine distinctions? Wonderful questions, thank you, Yitzhak Hirschhorn. Discuss.”

“Please,” she said. “You can sit with me later. You and I, later we'll sit.” Again Eytan called out. “Wait!” she shouted.

“Just you and I?” Yitz said. “Bring him out with you, so he can hear what he won't have to see. They had three girls, one his age. She liked to bring the soldiers lemonade. Finished,” he said. “Boom.”

So there, the chilling sound again. And there, the momentary nausea that she had barely let herself acknowledge when, in the kitchen, she had thought Eytan was out here with his big brother, alone on the porch. What was that fiction she had told herself, a skit they were preparing for her? The boys hadn't done that in over three years.

“You should think,” she said slowly. “Before you speak about your little brother in this way, please think, a child who only knows to idolize you, a boy entering the second grade as a foreigner, your
baby brother. He would have been perfectly happy staying in the one place he knows.”

“When he's eighteen I'm sure he'll hold the sacrifice against you,” Yitz said. He used an expletive from the army, which struck her only with the ring of deep spite, but no meaning since it was in Arabic. The gallop of the furious words vanished into one of his farcical throat clearings, at the end of which the raging Arab reemerged as her surly son. “They had a dog,” he said. “I liked that dog, I always wanted a dog, yeah, dig it. I'm going to get myself a mastiff.”

“Not according to my lease,” she said.

Again she approached the curtains and pushed through. Again she stood in the old man's apartment, and an old man's apartment it still was, a much too fully furnished rental, choked with the choices of an uninspiring lifetime and the odors of canned soup. In her rush she nearly knocked a heaping bowl of furred wax peaches to the ground. She found Eytan sitting on the toilet, pants down, smooth thighs squashed against the seat. The seat was transparent and contained the shells of mollusks. He was looking at the ceiling.

“What's that?” he said.

“A heat lamp.”

“To use it?”

“Not to use it.” She flicked off the switch. Eytan watched the glare behind the glass shrink to a dot. “Don't look,” she said. “Harmful to the eyes. Remember to hold the flusher till the water starts.”

Through the hallway and the living room, the mustard carpet spared her legs and assaulted her eyes, likewise the oat-mash curtains and wallpaper, and doilies everywhere like fallen moths. What was this passion for draping, cloaking, coating every firm surface with something soft? She felt as if she were negotiating the folds of a great, slumped sack. A giant hand could gather up the edges and lift her up, out and away. She would find herself floating over the treetops, Yitz watching her from the porch, his face blurring until
altogether swallowed by the tower. The toe of her hose caught on a steel carpet border as she crossed the threshold of the kitchenette again. She yanked free and heard a run begin.