Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (28 page)

“I’m fine now,” he said. “But I had a drug thing. A problem. Big or little means the same with drugs. I left home four years ago. I was fifteen. I lived with my grandparents, then a girlfriend in Puerto Rico, then with an old teacher, and then the great-aunt of that teacher. My parents paid for rehab last year and I fell into this house-sitting situation, which is how I get to live here now.”

The word
girlfriend
got caught in my head and I could imagine her in vintage photos: Californian, with long legs and hair and moving like a tall tulip. Like him.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Now.”

I nodded.

“And the drugs are done,” he said. “Technically speaking, I mean. Never really done. Always a fight against the craving.”

“Craving,” I said, as if I didn’t know what the word meant. But of course I did. I’d just forgotten it as it pertained to me. I hadn’t craved in a while. Three days since the razor. I asked myself if I was craving right now. I wasn’t. For the moment, I wasn’t. The gauze he’d used on my arm was still attached. I’d showered carefully, kept it intact.

“Go,” he said. “Your turn.”

“Um,” I began.

“I’ll walk you home,” he said. “But you have to promise to do most of the talking from here on out.”

I said all right. I said that I’d try.

As we went along, the snow turned to hail and then to rain, but we didn’t mention it. I didn’t say the word
cozy,
but it occurred to me. I told him the details of the evening. About Dottie and Victoria and how we’d been right about them when we saw them putting out the clothes: that they were friends and not friends.

“Dottie’s such a character,” I said.

“Like from a musical?” he said.

“More tragic than that,” I said. “Off-Broadway.” I’d never seen anything off-Broadway in my life.

“Got it,” he said. “And Victoria?”

“From a book,” I said. “Strictly fiction.”

He nodded.

“I’d say Dottie’s up to no good,” Blot said.

“Probably,” I said. “But I don’t want to think about it.”

Not thinking about it made me want to hug Victoria.

I told him about what she had said about giving up a child. We were waiting to cross Ninety-Sixth Street.

“I can’t imagine what that would be like,” he said. “Like, I have absolutely no sense of it.”

“Me either,” I said.

Then we were quiet. For the first time, I felt the same age as him, though I wasn’t. I wondered if parents constituted an age group of their own. Victoria and my mother in the same age group, I thought. Dottie: not. Victoria had told me that Dottie had never had children and somehow that made sense to me. A certain kind of dull seriousness, like slate in their bones, settles into parents. No one else.

I tried not to count the seconds during which we were silent, which was hard only when Blot unfurrowed his brow. Other than that, he seemed intent, thinking deeply about something that had to do, I thought, with me. And I liked that.

When he began with “Obviously, I don’t know your mother,” I felt flattered. In a way, I thought, it was like he was saying that he did know me. “But doesn’t it strike you as strange,” he said and stopped walking again.

“Wait,” I said. It came to me quickly. I knew what he was going to say. He didn’t have to finish and I didn’t want him to. If the thought was going to become fully formed, I wanted it to develop in me. And I didn’t want him thinking that I was stupid.

I would have come up with it on my own. I might have. But it’s the way I do things: eating the uninteresting bottom part of the muffin before the perfectly compact top, eating the French onion broth before having anything to do with the cheese and bread. Good things, I have to save. I can’t look straight at them. And if I do, sometimes they feel prickly, as if I’ve been sitting in front of a fire for too long. This felt like that. I knew what was coming. It had been itchy but I couldn’t tackle it head-on. It felt like I needed to do a little dance around it first or it would bite me square in the face.

“She might be my grandmother,” I whispered.

“Right,” he whispered back. “I mean, I thought maybe she looked like you. From what I could tell.”

I didn’t know why we were whispering.

“It’s a stretch,” I said. “It would be crazy.”
Crazy
didn’t even begin to describe it. I put my hands to my face. “My grandmother?” I asked him.

“I know,” he said. “Crazy. But.”

We went quiet again, thinking.

“How did you say you found out about the masgouf?” he said.

“I overheard my mother talking,” I said.

“Right,” he said.

“It would be bananas,” I said.

“Greta’s here,” he said, as if it were evidence of how things could be bananas—in a good way. “Of all the days. Of all the gin joints.”

“My mother always quotes that movie,” I said.

“Eh,” he said. “I prefer drama in real life.”

I held out my hand. He mimed catching the drama all around us and then putting it in my palm. I closed my fingers around it, blew on my fist, put it into my pocket, and zippered it up.

I thought it was better to be safe than sorry, so Blot and I stood across the street from my building to say goodbye. To say that I felt funny didn’t scratch the surface. I felt like my body was carbonated and there was cotton candy filling my head. It was a miracle, I thought, that my feet were still on the ground. I wanted to ask him what had happened tonight, as if his spelling it out for me might make it all more real. But it wouldn’t. Just his standing there felt unreal. I hardly knew him and I wanted to ask him how he knew me so well, the crux of me—and how had he figured it all out, and who was he really, and where did he come from. That the answers would never do the questions justice felt like magic, when they talk about magic in that way.

As we looked at each other, I wanted to touch him. I wished I could just squeeze his arm, but I had no idea how. I couldn’t pin down the timing. So we stood there, quiet for a few moments, shrugging, nodding at each other. Finally, I bent down, filled my hands with snow, rolled the snow into a ball, and gave it to him.

“Here,” I said.

“Magnifique,”
he said with a gasp, marveling at it as he held it in front of his chest.

“Good,” I said. “Okay.” I turned, started to walk away between the parked cars.

“If you want to come by after I see Greta,” he called, “she’s getting picked up at the bookstore tomorrow night at ten.”

I tapped twice on the roof of a car.

When he left, he marched. Really marched. He held the snowball in his half-gloved hands at a distance, as if it were a fancy dessert on fire, like bananas flambé, or something he’d present to a queen. I watched him for as long as I could and he kept on like that, not even looking before crossing the street, just marching and keeping his eyes on the snowball in his hands. Left right left.

I opened the door of our building imagining that the snowball wouldn’t melt. That Blot would take it home and put it in a vase, and it would stay just so. Intact and glistening and clean.

Upstairs, I thought about going to see him tomorrow when he was still with Greta. Not to meet her, just to watch. Ever since we’d moved away from my father, I’d been obsessed with families. In Central Park. In Times Square. Ice-skating. I stared at so many families that I was always being passed a camera to take a group shot. I took my time, getting it from all angles, letting them joke with one another about smiling, and standing up straight, and sucking in their guts. I loved it when a little girl—maybe she was carrying a blanket and chewing on her hair—leaned on her mother’s leg and got one hundred times stronger, daring the world to mess with her. Or when a father pulled his son’s head onto his shoulder, all roughness and warmth, and the son’s head bobbed up just for a second, independent, before he let it rest again. And the mother winking at the father over their pack of kids. Or vice versa. Whatever. I loved that. I loved all of that. It made me wish so hard that I could remember being young, remember being so unable to be on my own that my mother had to carry me everywhere. Touching so much. But we weren’t stronger when we were together anymore, my mother and me.

I imagined Greta would make Blot stronger somehow. Prouder. He’d already done that for her. I was sure.

I would go to Victoria’s for the lesson early, I decided. My heart did a pancake flip as I thought of what to say to her. If anything. Should I say anything at all? I had no idea.

After that, I’d go find a place to watch Blot where he wouldn’t see me but I could see him. And Greta. Little Greta, now big. I bet she was beautiful and I bet she had no idea how very much she was missing, being far away from him. Not knowing how strong his shoulders were, how he could protect her from everything—and wanted to.

I undressed and lay down on the couch and waited for my mother to come home. But I didn’t hold my breath. I imagined the snowball in the vase and Blot watering it before bedtime and in the morning saying “Holy shit!” when he saw it had doubled in size. I craved that. That’s what I craved.

My mother came home very late. I knew just what I was going to say. I’d written it down.

She was softer when I was sleeping, even when she was mad at me. It was like she could imagine me before I could talk, and it filled her with mothering emotions. She took off her earrings, massaged her earlobes. She smelled like gardenias and gin. Her mouth was dry, and the clasp of her necklace was in the front.

She leaned over me.

“Come,” she said. “Let’s get you to bed.”

Very sleepily, I did it. Like I’d been dreaming about it.

“Mom,” I said. “What was so special about that masgouf you loved? The one at the Shohet and His Wife?”

She didn’t remember that she hadn’t said it to me. That it was Aunt Lou she’d told a week ago.

“The people, I guess,” she said. “It was so warm there. You’ve never seen such a family place.”

“Family?” I said. My heart came to a very vigorous boil. I wondered if she could feel it even though she wasn’t touching me.

She smiled like she couldn’t help it, and because of that I knew. I knew why she loved the masgouf. And why she loved that recipe, despite her chef-y-ness. I knew why she was always scanning the obituaries. I knew why she was so lonely—not only because of what was inside of her, splintered like dried-out marzipan where all the joy could slip through, but because Joseph and Victoria were out in the world, not-dying without her. They were making beautiful, delicious food. The only way she could love them, I thought, was for her to eat it and hope that it would fill her up.

It was just like Blot said. She had wanted me to hear what she’d told Lou. What he didn’t know was how it felt to have her count on me in such a profound way. She needed me, her little Lorca. Her little helper. In my head, I told her I was on it. I wouldn’t let her down. And I swear she nodded at me, though I hadn’t opened my mouth.

“Yes,” she said. “Family.” Her eyes welled up.

Then, so softly, “Oh, Lorca,” which only affirmed how right I was. I was in on the secret now too.

She took off the blanket and folded it over the arm of the sofa. She pulled up my socks as if she were about to stuff my feet into snow boots. When she kissed my forehead, I could tell that a smile had crept into her cheeks.

“I’ve never met anyone who asks so many questions,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, like it was some kind of compliment, and even though it wasn’t—at least, not exactly—I knew that it would be soon, that I’d finally cracked the code and was on to something after a million years, after my whole life.

I thought about rushing to Victoria’s, telling her everything, and having her reach for my hands, pull me to her, hold the back of my head, and tell me that this was the best moment of her life, but I decided against it. First of all, I had no idea how I might react to big emotion like that; it scared me—I might pass out, or break out in hives, or vomit endlessly into her kitchen sink. Second, though Victoria said that giving up my mother was her biggest regret, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a reason for her doing it. If there was something I didn’t know yet about her or, worse, if there had been something dangerous, sly, or hard about my mother even when she was the smallest baby, something that frightened Victoria, pushed her away so immediately and so forcefully that she’d vowed to never look for her daughter, even when she wanted to find out what she had become. Everyone who loved my mother spent his or her entire life trying furiously to get over her, to win back the emotions that my mother seized. I wondered if Victoria was entirely sure that she wanted to be found. After all, she hadn’t looked for my mother. I had looked for her. And also, I didn’t want to lose Victoria yet. I imagined her desperate to meet my mother, to be with her. And my mother would be cold to Victoria, elusive. I wanted to protect Victoria from that, but I was afraid too that Victoria might only look me in the eye and ask me how, how on earth, she could get into my mother’s good graces. What was the trick? Surely I must know.

For a moment, I considered telling Victoria that I’d been lying all along. That my mother had died and that’s why I’d come to her, to find the family that my mother and I never knew. And I’d spin her a beautiful story of my mother—of how she was meant to be a mother, born to love and care for a child. Victoria could feel proud that she’d had something to do with that quality. But it was a hateful, horrible thought and it repulsed me as soon as it popped into my mind. I repulsed me.

The next night, after my lesson at Victoria’s, during which I’d kept my mouth shut for once, didn’t say anything about my mother, and tried to just let things happen as they might, I headed to the bookstore, figuring that Blot would still be at the coffee shop next to it and I’d get a glimpse of him and Greta together. I put myself into position across the street and tried to see in, which I could. Easily. But he wasn’t there. Neither was Greta. I crossed the street and walked by briskly just to confirm it. I was right.