Tinderbox (7 page)

Rachida feels her irritation rising, her impatience with Adam’s cinematic obsessions.
If they were not at her mother-in-law’s table, she would tell him to zip it. Eva looks
at her plate, which Rachida notices has no shrimp. Does Eva keep kosher?

“Perhaps Eva doesn’t know about the film,” Myra says.

“Impossible. Herzog took over Iquitos. The Amazon was filled with canoes confronting
the steamship, which they really drove over the rapids.”

Eva continues to stare at her plate. Rachida sees Omar reach under the table to take
Eva’s hand, the way she once saw Caro do with Adam when their father, Larry, had launched
one of his bellicose lectures on the grandeur of a man riding a horse.

“It’s a movie, Eva,” Myra says, “that was filmed in Iquitos. When was it made, Adam?”

“It was released in 1982. But they began preproduction in the mid-seventies. It took
so long because Jason Robards, who originally played Fitzcarraldo, got sick and had
to resign, and then Mick Jagger, who played his sidekick, a Sancho to Robards’s Quixote,
quit because he’d run out of time before his next tour. Herzog had to virtually start
over. For a while, he planned to play Fitzcarraldo himself, but then Kinski insisted
that he would be better and had to do it.”

“Eva would have been a young child while they were filming. It’s unlikely she’d know
the extras.”

“I am very sorry. My parents never go to the movies. My father drive a speedboat for
one of the jungle lodges, and he always go to a bar after work. For fun, my mother
play this tile game with the ladies on our street. She is a very religious person.
The only movie she ever watch is
The Sound of Music
. We watch it on television every year together.” Eva’s face brightens. “Do you know
the movie? I know all the songs!” Softly, Eva begins to sing: “The hills are alive
with the sound of music / With songs they have sung for a thousand years…”

As a child, Rachida had loved that movie. She, too, can remember watching it on television
with her mother and sister, Julie Andrews singing in a dubbed French.
“Collines que j’aime / Vous chantez au monde / Des airs qu’autrefois / J’entendais
chez moi…”
Once, she’d tried to get Adam to watch it with her, but he’d said, “You’ve got to
be kidding. It’s kitsch through and through.”

“You must have heard people talk about Herzog making
Fitzcarraldo
,” Adam persists. “Your parents or other people who were involved?”

Her annoyance like a sneeze that can no longer be controlled, Rachida blurts, “Stop
interrogating her. Can’t you see that she doesn’t know anything about it?”

Now it is Omar’s turn to look into his plate.

“Oh Jesus, I’m sorry.” Rachida sighs. “Just, Adam, enough already.” She looks at Omar,
but when he lifts his face, his expression is impassive, as though he long ago resigned
himself to his mother’s sharp tongue and his father’s way of never seeing that he
is annoying the shit out of everyone.

“We’ll have to watch it after dinner,” Adam says. “It opens with this fabulous scene
of Klaus Kinski and Claudia Cardinale, both in gorgeous white finery, racing to get
to the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus in time to hear Caruso sing.”

21

When they are done eating, Adam goes to look for his copy of
Fitzcarraldo
. Rachida and Myra take Omar upstairs to help him get ready for bed, and Eva clears
the table. Caro follows Adam into the music room, where her mother has set up a table
under the window for him to use as a desk. She watches her brother rifling through
the file boxes he has brought with him, wondering if she should ask how things are
going with Rachida.

“It’s got to be in here. I’d never have left it behind.” Adam splits the tape on a
box labeled
The Searchers
and begins emptying out cassettes and files. Caro examines the labels on the other
boxes: Contracts & Bills, Screenplays/Books. Only one is unlabeled.

“How about this one? Could it be in here?” she asks, tapping the box.

Adam intercepts her arm so quickly, he lands her a shove. Their eyes lock and her
hands clench. It shocks her, this taste of sibling violence that for them had been
blessedly rare, squashed by her feelings of pity and protectiveness toward her scrawny
brother.

“It’s not in there.” He pushes the box out of her reach, his clutter having already
defiled their mother’s serene order, so that Caro has to fight an urge to chastise
him, to order him to put his things away—the vestigial, bossy, older-sister feeling
that he is hers but also that he is her responsibility.

“I’m going to call it a night,” Caro says.

22

“We’re doing great,” Myra reports when Caro telephones a few days later to inquire.
“On Sunday, Adam took Omar to the park, where he met a child who’ll also be in first
grade at City. The mother told Adam about the camp at the school. Adam and Omar went
over to see if there were any openings, and there was one space left. They let him
start right away. He loves it. They’re doing a unit on reptiles and have two snakes
and a gecko in a terrarium. Adam was thrilled, because it means he can get down to
work now rather than having to wait for September. I was going to call you tonight
to see if you wanted to do pickup on Friday.”

Something about the way her mother’s words are inflected leaves the impression of
an imperative rather than an interrogative. Only once has Caro heard her father, who
has never let go of his mantle as the aggrieved party, as though it were her mother,
not he, who’d busted up their marriage, voice anything that sounds like a criticism
of her.
The softest-spoken tyrant you’ll ever meet,
he’d said.
A will of steel
.

On Friday, Caro meets Omar in the classroom that serves as home base for his camp
group. He is sitting at one of the child-sized tables reading a junior encyclopedia,
his head arced over the book so she can see the cowlick at the top of his soft neck.
He doesn’t notice her arrival until she kisses his hair.

“Auntie Caro, can I finish my page?” Caro glances at the book, open to a section on
insects and spiders. A diagram shows the butterfly life cycle: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis,
adult.

“Okay. Where’s your stuff? I’ll gather it up.”

Omar points to a wall of cubbies where a group of boys are gathered like a squirming
beast, poking one another with the action figures they are allowed, with the day now
over, to remove from their camp bags. She retrieves Omar’s bag, damp, with a faint
scent of chlorine from the balled-up bathing trunks inside.

Once they are outside, Caro takes Omar’s hand. They walk to Broadway for ice cream
while Omar describes the way a caterpillar makes a chrysalis, and how when it splits
open—he unfurls his fingers so his hands are pinwheels—there’s no more caterpillar,
just a butterfly!

She watches her nephew’s ice-cream cone, expecting the splatters to which she is accustomed
from her preschoolers, but Omar manages his cone with careful expertise so that the
only residue is a pale vanilla spot on his nose. With it half-uneaten, he hands it
to her. “I’m full. I’ve had enough.”

Is there something worrisome about a child not finishing an ice-cream cone, something
too restrained for his age?

“Do you know how many horns the styracosaurus had? Six horns on its head plus one
on its nose.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Do you know which dino is my very favorite one?”

“Let me think. Mmmm … The polkadotateratops?”

Omar looks at his sneakers, as though sparing her the humiliation of discovering that
her joke is not funny. “The parasaurolophus. It had only one horn on its head and
it was a herbivore.”

He stops—so suddenly Caro nearly drops the remains of the now dripping cone—and leans
over, pointing at a chewed-up piece of gum on the sidewalk. “A bird or a squirrel
could choke on that.”

“Don’t touch. I’ll get it.” She picks up the gum with one of the napkins she’d wrapped
around the cone. At the corner, she tosses the cone and the gum in a trash can.

“Eva is a vegetarian,” Omar continues, slipping his hand into Caro’s now empty one.
“Did you know that some vegetarians don’t eat anything that comes from animals?”

“They’re called vegans. Is Eva a vegan?”

“She doesn’t eat meat or chicken or fish. Rachida told me it’s not because of her
religion. She just doesn’t like it.”

When they arrive back at the house, Eva is in the kitchen washing lettuce and boiling
water for pasta.

“Hi, Miss Caro. Hi, Omar. You like something to drink?” Eva asks, having been carefully
instructed, Caro imagines, by her mother to offer Omar plenty of fluids.

“Yes, please. What are you making?”

“Macaroni and cheese pie.”

Eva tilts her head toward an index card propped against the tile backsplash. She looks
at Caro. “Your mother write the recipe for me. She is teaching me how to cook. Did
she teach you?”

“A few things. Omar says you’re a vegetarian.”

Eva wipes her hands on the hips of her pants. “The smell of cooking animal, it makes
me sick to the stomach. Your mother is so nice. She says it is okay if I prepare everything
else, she will make the meat. She washes and seasons it so I don’t have to touch it.”

“Are you allergic?” Omar asks. “There’s a boy in my camp who’s allergic to nuts. He
has to keep this special pen that’s really a needle in his backpack.”

“I don’t like the smell.” Eva crinkles her nose. With a shudder of her shoulders,
she turns back to the stove.

23

Over dinner, Adam announces that he has begun a new project, a remake of
The Searchers
.

“I’ve been thinking about it a long time, debating the dramatic circumstances. Then
this week it came to me. Eva inspired me.” He smiles in her direction, a smile she
responds to with what strikes Myra as a look of frozen fear.

“I’ve been reading about the boomtown atmosphere of Iquitos in the 1890s. All of these
people descended on the town to make their fortunes with rubber, with no regard for
the people who’d lived there for centuries. I’ve recast Ethan Edwards as a Jew from
Tangier searching for the missing daughter his brother had with a common-law Indian
wife.”

“
The Searchers
,” Myra says. “I must have seen the original, but I can’t remember it.”

“It’s fabulous! We can watch it after dinner. I have a copy upstairs. It’s John Ford’s
finest film. You could learn how to paint, how to photograph, how to be a novelist
just by studying that film.”

Rachida, who has made an extra effort to be home for dinner since she was on call
the night before, rolls her eyes, but before she can make a caustic remark, Myra says
that would be lovely and Omar is pleading to watch too.

“Please, Rachida, I don’t have camp tomorrow.”

“How many people of color are slaughtered in this thing?” Rachida asks.

“There are ways of seeing the film that transcend the old cowboys-and-Indians genre.
It’s really a profound critique of racism, about Ethan Edwards’s projection of the
savage part of himself onto the Native Americans.”

“Pleeeeese … pretty please with a cherry on top.” Omar holds up his hand. “I give
my word of honor.”

“It’s scary,” Adam says, “but nothing is really shown.”

“I’ll cover my eyes if it’s inappropriate.”

“Why don’t you get into your pj’s and brush your teeth first,” Myra suggests.

Adam heads upstairs to help Omar and to get the video set up in the music room while
Myra goes out to water her garden. Rachida says she has to make a work call, leaving
Caro to help Eva with the dishes.

Caro assumes the position at the sink, rinsing the dishes and them handing them to
Eva to load into the dishwasher. She can see her mother in the garden below moving
among the plant beds with her snaky hose. Leaning over to prune the white begonias,
her mother appears in the soft dusk slender and limber as a girl.

Stuffed with the macaroni and cheese, Caro feels old and heavy. She watches her mother
rewind the hose and then disappear, heading inside, Caro assumes, through the doors
to her office. A few minutes later, Caro hears her mother’s steps on the front stairs,
and then the piano as she begins to play.

“Your mother, she plays so beautifully,” Eva says. She looks at Caro shyly. “I never
hear anyone play so beautifully.”

“She does.” Caro listens, trying to identify the music—one of the Bach Inventions.
Despite her persistent efforts, her mother had not been able to get either of her
children to stick with an instrument. Adam had hung in for two years of clarinet,
before hurling it on the floor in a moment of frustration. Caro had quit the guitar
after six months of lessons, during which she’d developed painful calluses and failed
to tune the damn thing.

For her fiftieth birthday, her mother, having never played anything more than a schoolgirl’s
“Chopsticks,” bought herself a grand piano. Even the bow-tied salesperson questioned
the purchase; perhaps, he suggested, she would like to rent a console on which to
take her first lessons. Her mother was resolute. She had already found a teacher,
an Austrian man who’d looked at her hands and had her sing the melody of a Chopin
waltz before declaring that she would be playing the Mozart Sonata in C by the end
of a year.

On the day the piano arrived, her mother began her practice schedule: one hour, five
nights a week. Indeed, by the end of her first year of study, she was playing the
easy Mozart sonatas, Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” and the Chopin Waltz in A Minor.

The first time Caro heard her mother play, she was filled with wonder tinged with
a strange resentment. Glancing up from the keys, her mother had seen Caro’s expression.

“Yes?” her mother said, placing her hands in her lap.

“I can’t believe how well you play. After so little time.”

Her mother raised her eyebrows.