They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (18 page)

She typed some figures into the computer. The screen shuddered and suddenly there was something different on it. What had she done?

What had she done? What was she doing? Why was she here? These were vast questions that had become horribly small and specific to her. It was hard to remember exactly what she had done earlier in the day. It was hard to focus on what she was doing at that moment. It was hard to understand why she was in this windowless, airless closet.

She tried to concentrate on the report on the air quality necessary for new display cases. She pulled a bottle of water from one of her bags, but she could not unscrew the cap. She glanced at a study of formaldehyde in enclosed environments. She wondered if she was breathing formaldehyde in the enclosed environment that was her office.

She leaned back and looked up. There were several missing ceiling tiles near the light, as well as some wires left hanging from a wall socket. She had filled out all the forms for maintenance, but then she’d been told it would take weeks for anyone to get to it. “Volatile Organic Compounds,” she typed, a term for hydrocarbon gases.

When a workman passed she went to the door and hailed him like a cab. He was a lovely man, happy to help her, very sympathetic, even when he had to go and get a ladder. The room had such high ceilings—it was higher than it was wide, higher than it was long. He came back and set up his ladder and fixed everything just like that, one, two, three. He had a daughter in high school. They chatted about the cost of college as he hung her posters.

Then Miss Georgia whisked by the open doorway and, like a character in a cartoon, backed up, demanding to know what was going on. The workman, whose name was Marlon, winked at Joy and slid out the door. Miss Georgia watched him go with a disapproving look, then turned to Joy. “Chop-chop,” she said. “We have work to do.”

“Excuse me?”

Miss Georgia clapped her hands together like a kindergarten teacher. “Chop-chop.”

“Chop-chop?” Joy said, thinking of all the years she had worked to get her master’s degree and then her Ph.D., thinking of her training and all her experience, all the years she had worked at this museum before Miss Georgia even knew how to spell museum. Chop-chop? “I’m sorry, but what is it you think I’m doing if not working?”

It was the slight smirk that appeared on the director’s face that pushed Joy over the edge.

“Why don’t I just stick a broom up my ass and sweep the floor, too?” she said.

Now she lowered her head to the shiny white top of the drawerless desk and did not move for what seemed like a long time. She pictured the director’s face after her outburst: truly shocked. Joy wanted to laugh, but she was too tired. The surface of the table was cool and soothing on her forehead. When she lifted her head, the windowless room spun around her like a merry-go-round and the director seemed to be back in her doorway, a file in her hand.

“I’ve been knocking for quite a while,” Miss Georgia said.

Joy stared at her.

When Joy still did not speak, Miss Georgia added, “Yes. The less said the better.” Miss Georgia held up a hand, traffic-cop-like, then dropped a thick manuscript on Joy’s desk. “Your recommendations for the photographic collection.”

Joy pulled it toward her.

“Because you were ill,” Miss Georgia said, “we decided to help you out.”

Joy started to ask why they thought she needed help on that particular report, which was, after all, finished.

“No, no, don’t thank me,” Miss Georgia interrupted. “Not necessary. We got some excellent outside help on the project.”

“But I—”

“Say no more.” Miss Georgia put her finger to her lips.

Joy flipped through the manuscript, a comprehensive guide to protecting the museum’s photographs in their new location that she’d worked on for months before the move.

“We read your report, of course,” the director said. “But under the circumstances, we felt it would be prudent to hand the project over to outside sources.”

Joy’s bags were even heavier going home. The report was hundreds of pages long. She put it in the red bag and clutched it to her side. When she finally got a cab, the thought of going home to her empty apartment was too grim. She got off at the coffee shop wondering if they would force her to sit at one of the sad little tables against the wall where all the old widows and widowers sat. She wanted a booth. She wanted to be near a window. She was breathing heavily. It was from anger, of course. Unless she was having a heart attack.

“Joy!” a voice cried out when she got inside, and it was Karl.

She hadn’t seen him since before Aaron died. He had been so kind, sending a lovely note on thick creamy stationery. Beautiful old-fashioned fountain-pen handwriting. It had disturbed her, that familiar handwriting from long ago.

“Joy, I’m so sorry about Aaron. I lost a good friend,” he said when his attendant had lurched out of the booth, offered her seat to Joy, and disappeared into the night. When her waffle came, Joy pulled a brown glass bottle out of one of her bags.

“Maple syrup,” she said. “
Real
maple syrup. No one serves real maple syrup anymore.”

They talked about Aaron, about his reminiscences about the war, about the pigeons. Joy cried, just for a minute, and Karl handed her a large, clean white handkerchief with his initials monogrammed on it. She hesitated before handing it back and had a flash of memory, another large, clean white handkerchief, no monogram in those days, a fit of sneezing, the embarrassment of handing it back. She looked up. Karl was smiling.

“I remember,” he said.

“Were we on a sailboat?”

He nodded.

“I thought you were very brave to take it back after all that sneezing.”

“I didn’t have much choice.”

She laughed. “I remember thinking it would be very forward of me to keep it. That was the word. ‘Forward.’ Why didn’t I have my own handkerchief? And why do you still use a handkerchief? They’re very unsanitary.”

“You can keep that one.”

“Oh no,” she said. “I couldn’t. It’s too beautiful.” She wrapped it in a paper napkin and gave it back to him. Then she ordered a cup of soup, and suddenly, as if she’d known him all her life, which she very nearly had, she began confiding in him, telling him about going back to work, about how awful Miss Georgia had been. She took the report out of the red bag.

“It’s a perfectly good report,” she said. She began leafing through it, nodding approval at her own conclusions. “An excellent report, actually.”

“Joy?”

She had stopped turning the pages. She was staring, riveted, at one page. Then she grinned. “Oh dear,” she said, still grinning. “Oh dearie dear.” Surely that was supposed to say CUNY facilities. Surely that was not supposed to say CUNT facilities.

“Something wrong?” Karl said.

“Oh no,” Joy said. “Just a little typo.”

33

“Hi, Grandma,” Ben said. “Would you like a visit? I have a week off.”

In fact, the bar Ben worked at had gone out of business and he had Airbnb’d his apartment out for the month. He wasn’t sure why, but he admitted it to his grandmother as soon as he arrived.

“I won’t stay for a month or anything, but I didn’t know where else to go. Please don’t tell Mom. She’ll freak out.”

Joy found Ben fascinating. He was so sweet and so difficult in such a sweet way, drifting without bothering anyone, unproductive and undemanding, working at what in Joy’s day were considered summer jobs for a college man—construction, bartending, temporary doorman. It was not a philosophical choice, this drifting, not like Dolores’s granddaughter, who was a Dumpster diver, god help her. Molly worried too much about him, he was a good boy finding his way.

And now he needed her, Joy. She wondered if Molly had put him up to this, part of her plan to keep her relevant.

“As long as you like,” she said.

She wanted to dance, she was so relieved. She would not have to sleep in the apartment alone.

*   *   *

Uncle Daniel’s old bedroom, a.k.a. the maid’s room, was fusty and weird—childish and elderly at the same time. The carpet was as old as his uncle, the paint had once been a lovely shade of blue, he’d been told, but was now a sad colorless shade of nothing, and the window needed no curtains or blinds because it was darkened by grime. The built-in shelves, once so enviously shipshape (at least according to Ben’s mother), were claustrophobic and warped. The sink dripped, not too much, just enough to catch you by surprise.

“Honey, do you want some tea?” his grandmother called out.

Yes, he did want some tea, and how comforting to have his grandma make it, though she made the worst tea he had ever tasted, weak and lukewarm. But just the sound of her voice made the little room feel much nicer, more like home. Ben had always loved coming to her apartment. She’d made him cracker sandwiches: buttery orange Ritz crackers and peanut butter. There were toys she’d kept there just for him and interesting junk retrieved from the museum she worked at. There was a Betty Boop videotape he had always loved, it was so sexy and so peculiar—especially when she told him that Betty Boop was Jewish. Sitting on her bureau in her bedroom, there was still a wooden puzzle box in the shape of a butterfly he had gotten her for Christmas when he was a little boy. He’d bought it at a street fair and thought it was the most beautiful and original object anyone had ever given anyone as a gift. One of his paintings from kindergarten was framed in Lucite and hung in the foyer.

The kitchen was long and narrow, a tunnel, really, and at the end was a window. His grandparents had jammed a small square table there. It had two chairs, and you could not open the oven door all the way even if the second chair was pushed in. He sat there with Joy and looked out the window and drank his tea.

“Grandpa and I used to sit here,” she said.

“I can see all the flowering trees. It’s really pretty.”

“Yes. You’re in Grandpa’s seat.”

Oh god. How awkward. “Oh. Right,” he said. “Good seat to be in.”

His grandmother smiled. “You’re a fine person, Ben.”

“Like Grandpa.”

“He was all right,” said Grandma Joy. “Up to a point.”

She continued to smile, reaching behind her to grab a package of Oreos. She funneled several cookies into her hand.

“Enjoy,” she said absently, rattling the package at Ben.

She could remember so clearly the first time Ben stayed at her apartment. He had been eighteen months old, jabbering quite coherently, with the bottle hanging from the side of his mouth like a cigar. She and Aaron had set up the old crib, a beautiful, highly decorated wooden crib that had originally been Aaron’s, then taken it apart again the minute Molly saw it.

“The spokes are too far apart!” she said. “Are you trying to kill him? He could get his head caught. You put us in this? Unbelievable.”

So they had moved the beautiful crib from the 1920s back into the cedar closet and bought an ugly blue nylon playpen that could double as a crib. Ben ended up sleeping in their bed, anyway, whenever he stayed with them. Joy could hear his small, even breath; she could smell the warm, bathed skin; she could see his eyelids flutter, his fingers clutch his bear. When she looked at him now, a skinny young man who needed a shave, he was the same to her, her first grandchild.

In the morning, Joy put some sort of clothes on so she wouldn’t scare the horses, then staggered weakly to the kitchen to make Ben his breakfast. Standing over the stove to stir the Cream of Wheat, she eliminated the lumps in the cereal with solemn determination. She put the two bowls of cereal on the kitchen table with two spoons and two cheerful cloth napkins. She put the kettle on and forgot it until its whistle startled her and woke Ben.

“You’re the best,” he said.

She could feel him watch as she shoveled sugar into her Cream of Wheat.

“Grandma, are you okay with sugar?” he said the first morning. “I thought…”

“Oh yes,” she said. And to his credit he dropped the subject. He must have gotten that from his father, discretion. Certainly not from his mother. Joy missed his father. Doug Harkavy was such a nice man. Molly was lucky to have married him. Freddie was wonderful, too, of course. But what was the point? Well, the world was upside down, that’s all.

“How is your father, Ben?”

“He’s great. He has a grandchild. Well, she does, so he does. It’s cute, too.”

When Molly had announced she was leaving her husband for Freddie, a woman named Freddie, Joy had not fainted, though her heart was pounding and the room began to darken. She had smiled and said she wanted Molly to be happy, to be herself, and it was true, but she’d been thinking,
What about Ben?
He might be shunned by other children, he might be stunted in some Freudian path to maturity. She had worried, Aaron had worried, and then it turned out there was nothing to worry about, after all. Ben’s friends—well, it was a different generation, wasn’t it?—seemed to take the situation in stride. Ben was miserable about the divorce, but he didn’t seem unduly upset about his mother and Freddie. Of course, he was in college. And this is New York City, anything goes, she had said to Aaron. All that worrying for nothing. It had been a great strain, worrying so much and hiding it from Molly.

“Worrying is inefficient,” she said to Ben, smiling at him. “Look at you. You’re a fine person, Ben.”

Ben looked surprised. “Do you worry about me?”

“Not anymore.”

“I worry about me. I wish I knew what I really wanted to do.”

“Don’t you want to go to law school?”

“Sort of. It seems interesting. But what if I have to get a job doing, like, contract law or something? I wish I were, I don’t know, passionate about something.”

He gazed at her so confidingly. He was very good-looking, and when his eyes shone with emotion like this, he was irresistible. She thought of saying, Passion is for the bedroom! Get a job! Get a job with health insurance! That’s all that matters! Don’t be like your grandfather, always looking to be happy in his work, excited, creative (English translation: broke). Independence is overrated. It leads to dependence. Get a job in a nice steady corporation and keep your head down, and do your dreaming on the weekends and pay your bills.