They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (6 page)

She tried reminiscing. Older people loved to reminisce. “Remember when you had to drive up to Vermont to take me home from camp?”

“You don’t say?”

“Yup. Twice, actually. Because when you got there the first time, I had already changed my mind and wanted to stay. But by the time you got home again, I had changed it again and wanted to leave. I was so bossy. Why did anyone listen to me? I was eleven, for god’s sake.”

But her reminiscences were apparently not his reminiscences. He smiled and patted her gloved hand with his gloved hand, his expression blank.

“Now, look, Daddy,” she said, “you drove all day. I
know
you remember. You have to. You were so annoyed, but then you just laughed. That got me really upset—that you laughed at me, that my situation was comical and I was just one of a million little girls who did this, just an ordinary, predictable child. You have to remember all that. I got mad when you laughed, and you somehow understood and stopped laughing and pretended to take me very seriously, and then I was happy.”

“Imagine that, imagine that.”

Then another old man with an identical red walker appeared, and Aaron seemed to come alive. He stood up, with great effort, and offered the man his hand. “How do you do?” he said.

The slow determination of his movements, the difficulty and awkwardness of them, lent them a seriousness, almost dignity. Why don’t we revere the elderly? Molly wondered briefly. She knew why. They were difficult and inconvenient. But how brave her father was just by standing up, by insisting on the code of conduct he’d been brought up with, by being, simply, polite. He still tried to open doors for Molly, his hand shaking. At first she told him not to, afraid he’d topple over. But then she saw it mattered. It was what a man did, a man brought up when he was brought up.

Aaron put out his hand to shake the newcomer’s and with some formality introduced first Molly, then himself. There was a cookie crumb in his beard. Molly saw it and thought, for a flash, how foolish he looked, then recanted. The cookie crumb was not foolish at all, it was a battle scar from a battle to exist in a world that insisted on changing if he so much as blinked.

The other man introduced himself as Karl. “And this,” he said, gesturing toward his plump, red-cheeked caretaker, “is Marta. She is kind, though strict.”

“I go coffee,” she said in a heavy accent, Polish, Molly guessed.

“Would you like coffee, too?” Karl asked. “Marta, can you get this nice young lady and her delightful father a cup of coffee?”

Molly pulled her wallet out, but Karl put up his hand and said, “My treat.”

He was a good-looking old man, silky gray hair nicely cut, beautifully dressed. Molly shot a glance at her father. The cookie crumb had been dislodged. His beard could use a trim, but it wasn’t too bad. Her mother took very good care of him. Better than she took of herself, but there are only so many hours in the day, as Joy said when Molly pointed this out to her.

Marta returned with four cups of coffee, and they sat there drinking the scalding coffee in the cold November air.

“Chilly for two old geezers like us,” Karl said to Aaron.

“Not like the war,” Aaron said, shaking his head.

“I don’t know why people call them flying rats,” Karl responded. “Listen to them. They coo like doves.”

Neither Aaron nor Karl seemed to mind the gaps, the non sequiturs, in their conversation.

“We had cold showers in the jungle, but boy oh boy, we sure didn’t mind.”

“Just listen to them cooing. Like lovebirds. They’re pretty, too. Don’t you think?”

“
Oh that I had wings like a dove!
” Aaron said. “
For then would I fly away and be at rest
.”

“Dad? That’s beautiful. Is that a poem?”

But her father had no answer for her. He smiled and turned his face up to the golden autumn sun. Molly looked on, a little envious, as the two men sat in a companionable silence, side by side, while the pigeons cooed like doves.

9

When the groceries arrived on Thanksgiving morning, Joy was astonished. “What are all these boxes? There’s no room for them!”

“Don’t worry,” her daughter said.

“Don’t worry,” her daughter-in-law said.

Joy allowed them to usher her into the living room. Her original plan was to order Thanksgiving dinner from the coffee shop, but Molly had given her that you-are-crazier-than-I-thought look.

“Don’t look at me like that. The kitchen gets too hot when you cook in it.”

“I’ll take care of everything,” Molly said soothingly, as if that were reassuring. But Joy did not want her daughter to take care of everything, she wanted to take care of everything herself. As she always had, but no longer could.

“The coffee shop has wonderful turkey. Moist. And it’s sliced.”

“That is so depressing, Mom.”

Joy knew she should find Thanksgiving turkey from the 3 Guys coffee shop depressing, too, but she found the thought comforting instead. Everything would be done, there would be no banging of pots and pans and oven doors; there would be no grease, no smoke; there would be calm instead of chaos. And she would be in charge.

She said, “I can’t take the disorder of cooking a Thanksgiving dinner, the crazy mess, the hot steam in the kitchen, the millions of dishes. It’s too much for me, Molly. But I don’t want to give up my place as the matriarch, I suppose. What foolishness. But it’s true.”

Molly looked at her with interest. Then she laughed and said, “So the 3 Guys will be the new family matriarch?”

“I said it was foolish.”

It was Danny’s wife, Coco, who came up with a compromise. Coco liked to smooth the waters in the family. She was a fidgety intellectual woman who had a fondness for any problem she might be able to solve—her children, for example, presented wonderful puzzles. It was the chemistry teacher in her, Aaron used to say. Coco suggested they order everything ready-made from one of any number of high-end grocery stores. “Zabar’s, Fairway, Fresh Direct. We live in New York City, people. We’ll get a whole turkey, it’s not carved, but you don’t have to roast it, and everything else comes with it. You just heat everything up. No cooking.”

Joy could not really see the difference between cooking and heating everything up, but she agreed. When there were no problems available for Coco to handle, Joy felt uneasy, almost guilty. Her daughter-in-law’s intervention in the Thanksgiving-dinner difficulty provided a rush of satisfaction.

But Joy had not expected so many boxes.

“Where is Aunt Freddie?” Danny’s daughter Ruby asked. She had just turned twelve. Her sister, Cora, was eight. Ruby and Cora—Joy never could understand how two nice little Jewish girls had been given such names, the names of women who waitressed in diners in 1932, but then, they thought her own name was odd, so there you were. Such sweet, pretty girls, flowering vines, wrapped around each other as usual, the two of them giggling and tangled on the couch.

“She’s coming soon,” Joy said. “She took a red-eye.”

“A red-eye,” Cora said. “Ew.”

“It means a flight at night and you have to stay awake all night and your eyes get red,” Ruby said.

“Aunt Freddie has blue eyes,” Cora said. “So there.”

Joy had marveled at first at how blasé the girls were about their Aunt Molly marrying a woman. She still marveled.
It’s very strange
, she wanted to say sometimes.
Don’t you see?
“Aunt Freddie will be here soon, in plenty of time for dinner,” she said instead.

Ruby had recently gone through a Katy Perry phase, mercifully short, when she wanted to dye her hair blue. She settled for a blue wig on Halloween. Then, just a week ago, she’d done an about-face. She still dressed in incomprehensible combinations of sparkly garments. She was wearing such an outfit now, an undersized flared skirt in a strawberry print, each strawberry a collection of layered red sequins, leggings decorated with clown faces, a gold-and-pink-striped lamé T-shirt. But she was now reading
Tom Sawyer
with the same intensity she’d previously reserved for Katy Perry songs and gossip, and she was now intent on getting a pet frog.

“No more Katy Perry karaoke?” Joy asked. It had been cute, Ruby lip-synching the pop songs, until she began shaking her hips in suggestive ways.

“I don’t want to be stereotyped,” she said.

Daniel flopped down beside his mother. “As what? A teen pop star?”

“Don’t tease me,” said Ruby. “Mommy said her father teased her about the Beatles and she never got over it.”

“Mommy’s a stereotype,” Daniel said.

Joy listened to the noises from the kitchen. Plenty of banging and crashing, but she found she didn’t mind as much as she had anticipated. Still, they didn’t know where anything was, those two, Coco and Molly. Joy got up and went into the kitchen, pointed out the roasting pan, the carving knife. The women smiled at her tolerantly until she went back into the living room. Fine, fine, let them look high and low for platters and gravy boats. If they needed any more of her help, they knew where to find her. She would sit and put her feet up and watch her grandchildren. That was matriarchal, too.

Ruby pushed her younger sister away and kneeled on the floor at the coffee table. She pulled an ornamental wooden box toward her and began to rummage through old photographs that were kept inside. Two years before, Ruby’s teacher had asked the class to construct their family trees. Ruby had formed an immediate attachment, bordering on obsession, with the heavy ancestral mustaches, the billowing knickers, the bows and fancy perched hats. She still gravitated to the photographs when she came to see her grandparents. She knew the names of every second cousin on both sides of the family. The old man with a long white beard spread across his chest who was wearing a fur hat was Aaron the First, as she put it—her grandfather’s grandfather. He had eyes like an angry crow.

“Why do you like him?” Cora asked. “He’s scary. And he’s dead.”

“So?”

“So he’s scary and he’s dead.”

But Ruby only shrugged and gazed fondly at the old man. He had sent his children to New York for a better life, six of them, holding only one back to take care of him and his wife in their old age. That daughter had died of cholera at sixteen. Tragic, Grandma Joy told her. Ruby thought,
It served him right
, but she said nothing.

“Is the turkey cooked or not?” Joy said, back in the kitchen. “I don’t understand.”

“Mom, you did plenty. Just sit down and relax. Coco and I can do this part.”

Joy had helped set up the extra table and the folding chairs, she’d helped Molly get the good dishes down, the good silverware, all the linens tucked away in boxes lined with tissue paper. That, plus everything she’d done to get Aaron ready—she
was
tired. In the living room, she watched as Aaron trudged in behind his walker. The girls looked up from the box of photographs.

“Do you want to look at your ancestors?” Ruby asked him.

“I’m too old to have ancestors.”

“That’s silly, Grandpa.”

“I’m too silly to have ancestors,” he said. He threw two kisses at the children. “Catch!” he said, and they both jumped and raised a hand, as if they were catching a butterfly. “Good,” he said. “Sometimes they get away.”

Joy helped him sit on his chair. He threw her a kiss, too. “Tough to be an old Jew,” he said.

“I’m Jewish,” Cora said.

Her sister rolled her eyes.

Cora showed Joy a photo of a man wearing a woman’s bathing suit.

“That’s my father,” Joy said.

“Why did he wear a girl’s bathing suit?”

“All the men did.”

“There’s a girl in my class who used to be a boy. But I’ve never seen her in a bathing suit.”

“Dear god.”

“Sometimes people get born in the wrong bodies,” Ruby explained to her grandmother.

Joy checked to see if Aaron had been following this, but he appeared to be, mercifully, asleep.

After a while, Cora began her ritual search for spare change, running her small fingers beneath the seat cushions of the sofa. Mostly she encountered grit, but she did come across a few bobby pins. Beneath the cushion of a chair, she discovered a clear plastic bean with a tiny wire. She was so disgusted when she realized that it was her grandfather’s hearing aid that she put it back. She moved onto the floor and lifted the sofa’s skirt. There, among the dust balls, she saw a ballpoint pen she could not reach.

She moved on to the ashtrays.

“What are ashtrays for?” she said.

Ruby looked at her incredulously. “For ashes.”

“For dead people in India?”

“You girls are very odd,” Joy said.

“For ashes from cigarettes. And cigars. And pipes,” Ruby said. “Don’t be so stupid, Cora.”

“But nobody smokes cigarettes or cigars or pipes.”

“Well, they used to.”

“Don’t call your sister stupid,” Joy said. “How would she know that? How do
you
know that?”

“Hasn’t she ever seen a movie?” Ruby said, turning back to a black-and-white photo of her father in the bath as an infant.

But Cora was no longer interested in the conversation. The heavy blown-glass ashtray in the front hall that was full of keys and paper clips was too high up and too heavy for her to lift with any confidence, so she stood on tiptoe and scrabbled through the loose keys and stamps and sample tubes of sunscreen until her fingers felt the cool of silver coins, quarters, quite a few this time. She sat down on the floor and counted them, piling them in towers of four. Nine quarters and then, in a small dish on the dresser in the bedroom, four rather sticky pennies. Her grandmother gave her an eyeglass case with a snap to use as a wallet.

Back in the living room, clutching her eyeglass-case purse, she approached her grandfather in his red chair that looked like a Chinese throne, or what she imagined a Chinese throne looked like after she once heard her grandmother say, “Just sit in it and stop complaining. It’s an antique. From China.”

Her grandfather looked uncomfortable. He shifted his weight back and forth.

“Grandpa, want to see my money?”