They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (19 page)

Of course there were no nice steady corporations anymore, not the way there used to be. And Aaron’s problem had not been independence, it had been entitlement. And why shouldn’t Ben try to find something he loved doing? He was young and bright and earnest.

“You’ll find what you want,” she said. “It may not be what you think it will, it may find you when you least expect it, it might even be law school. And if you’re drifting, you might just drift into the right thing. Or if it’s the wrong thing, you’ll figure out how to turn it into the right thing. Sometimes you have to create your passion. I have great confidence in you. You’re young. You have time. You’re a fine person, Ben.”

He sighed and finished his Cream of Wheat. Then he said, “Thank you.” He smiled and got up and kissed her cheek and put his bowl in the sink. It amused her to see that he did not put it in the dishwasher or even rinse it, that he just left it there. “Thank you, Grandma,” he said again. “You’ve always helped me a lot, you know that?”

No, she didn’t, but she was extremely happy to hear it now when she felt she was about as useful as one sock.

“You have time,” she said again.

They went for a walk every day and sat on the same bench in Central Park watching the dogs parade by. They ate lunch in the coffee shop, and when Ben wasn’t seeing his old friends, they ate dinner there, too. They bumped into Karl twice, but they didn’t sit with him.

“He was Grandpa’s friend in the park.”

“Yeah?”

Ben didn’t seem interested and Joy had no desire to tell him more. There was nothing to tell, anyway.

She was none too steady on the walks back and forth to the coffee shop. Sometimes her feet just sort of slid forward instead of lifting up and moving the way feet are meant to do.

“I’m shuffling,” she said. “I’m going to shuffle right onto my face if I’m not careful.”

“You can lean on me,” said Ben.

That made Joy smile. She remembered holding his little hand to cross the street, lifting him onto the bus’s high step. He used to wear tiny navy-blue sneakers and overalls.

“Yes,” she said. “All right, I will.”

His arm was wiry and strong. He slowed his step and shortened his long stride.

Ben stayed for six nights before he heard about another job in New Orleans and decided to sleep on a friend’s couch down there until he could get his apartment back. But before he left, he asked his grandmother for a favor.

“It’s kind of private,” he said.

“Do you need money, sweetheart? Of course you do. Here’s a twenty. No, that’s not enough. Here, I’ve got eighty bucks.”

Why is my grandmother carrying a purse around her own house? Ben wondered. He knew that if he asked her she would tell him a long complicated story that would make no sense to him, so he didn’t ask her. But he put his hand out to stop her rummaging in the big shoulder bag.

“No, Grandma, no. It’s not money. And you gave me a really generous Christmas present. Really.”

She’d had to be creative at Christmas. So much had been going on. There was no way she could have gotten out to go Christmas shopping. A card with nice crisp bills for Ben had done nicely, five twenty-dollar bills. She thought of the two beautiful teacups (they’d been her mother’s, just a small chip on one, and she had three more) she’d given Molly and Freddie, plus an opal and silver ring she’d found that Molly had liked as a child, she told them they could share it, there had to be some advantage to having your daughter marry another woman. But money had been fine for Ben.

“Then what can I do for you, Bennie?”

He blushed and reached into the breast pocket of his shirt. It was a nice shirt. Had she given it to him for his birthday last year?

“Did I give you that shirt?”

“Yeah, I think so.” He handed her a crumpled wad of pink paper.

“Ben! A traffic ticket? You don’t even have a car.”

“Don’t tell Mom, okay? It’s kind of embarrassing.”

He did look embarrassed, that was certain. His cheeks were as rosy as a little English choirboy’s. It made him even more appealing. He was such a handsome boy. He was such a good boy, staying with her like this. She felt sick at the thought of him leaving. Maybe it would have been better if he had not come at all, then she wouldn’t have minded his departure.

“And the problem is, there’s a court date,” he was saying. “And I won’t be here because I’ll be back in New Orleans, and so I was wondering…”

Joy nodded and smiled. Ben needed her. This strong young man needed her, and it made her feel a bit strong and a bit young herself. A bit manipulated, too, but that was a grandson’s god-given right, to manipulate his grandmother.

“I’ll pay you back the money for the fine,” he said with the generous confidence that his offer would not be accepted.

“But how did you get a parking ticket without a car, Ben?”

“Oh,” and he said something in that soft, barely comprehensible mumble young people so often employed.

“What? I hate it when you people mumble. Even your mother does it sometimes.”

“You know, um, public urination.”

Joy looked down at the piece of pink paper in her hand, then gingerly dropped it onto a paper napkin she pulled out of her pocketbook. “
What?
” she said. “That is disgusting, Ben. What is the matter with you? Is this what people do in New Orleans? Are you insane?…”

She went on and on, making her way to the bathroom sink to wash her hands, Ben following like a shamed dog, which is just what he had behaved like, a dog. On the street. Public urination? There was a ticket for that, that specifically? How much urine was on the public street if they had to maintain a special traffic violation category for it? “Why on earth did you pee in the street? In public?”

“It was really late at night. Everything was closed. And, you know, New York has no public bathrooms. In Paris they have public toilets.”

She paused. She said, “Ah.” She said, “Well.”

He knew the word “Paris” would do it. She had taken him to Paris once, when he was quite young. Just the two of them. She had gone to do some research for the museum, and she brought him along. She made him go to a ridiculous number of museums, but mostly they ate and walked.

“Oh, Ben,” she said. “What is to become of us?”

“I didn’t pee on the ticket, Grandma.”

She picked it up and folded it neatly and zipped it up somewhere in her bag. “Our secret,” she said.

34

Molly’s department had gotten a request to excavate a racehorse that had been buried in the 1960s at a racecourse that was closing. The owners of the horse wanted him and his memorial moved to another racecourse intact. Molly had never heard of the horse, but Freddie told her he was quite famous in California. Her father had been a fan.

Molly called Ruby in New York and said, “I don’t know why, I thought it would interest you.”

“Do you think I’m morbid, Aunt Molly?”

“A little.”

“Yes, it does interest me. Is the horse in a casket?”

“No. Afraid not. A canvas sack. We may not find much. But the shoes should be intact.”

“Can I have one?”

“No.”

“Can I come?”

The excavation of the racehorse happened to coincide with Ruby’s vacation, and after a relentless campaign of whining, Ruby convinced her parents to allow her to go to Los Angeles to stay with her aunts.

Joy was horrified. “We just buried Daddy,” she said when Molly phoned to tell her. “Don’t you think it’s too upsetting for a little girl to dig up a dead body so soon? It’s too upsetting for me, that I can tell you. I’m sorry, Molly, but I do not want to hear any more about horse corpses. Goodbye.”

“I didn’t even think of my father,” Molly told Freddie. “My mother said it’s a lack of imagination.”

“Well, good. You remember him as he was. I remember my mother as she was. It’s more realistic, in a way. We don’t live in a horror movie, after all.”

“No,” Molly said. “Do you think my mother does?”

Freddie chose to say nothing, which Molly seemed to find reassuring, because she smiled as if at her own foolishness and said, “Of course not. Of course she doesn’t.”

*   *   *

At first, Cora did not want to be left behind.

“Do you really want to watch Aunt Molly dig up an old dead horse?” her father asked.

She thought about it. The horse might smell. It was probably a skeleton, which was bad enough, but it might look like the Mummy or a horse zombie. And the digging was slow, which could be boring. “Joanie and I were going to have a lemonade stand outside the building. It’s not very warm yet, but you can do good business that week because of tourists.”

“So you’d rather stay home?”

Cora nodded. “You write the
e
’s on the sign backward. To make it look childish. It draws customers.”

He was glad at least one of them would be home. Daniel had never understood that you could love anyone as much as he loved Ruby and Cora. This love was new, born when they were born. Now life without that love coursing through him was unimaginable. Their voices were like birdsong, their movements like dance.

“Every morning when I see them my heart sings, it really sings,” he said to Molly. “I don’t want Ruby to visit you. I’ll miss her too much.”

Molly felt a pang of longing for Ben. “It never goes away, missing them.”

“Like Mom and you.”

“Not what I was thinking of.”

“I, on the other hand, am the good sibling who stayed home,” he said happily.

“The oceans are rising,” she replied.

*   *   *

Molly stood with Freddie and Ruby waiting for Ruby’s suitcase.

“In Japan they have sushi that goes around just like this, on a conveyor belt, but smaller, obviously,” Ruby said.

“You’ve been to Japan?”

“No. But I like sushi. But Daddy says overfishing is ruining the ocean.”

“We’ll get you some sushi.”

“Thank you, Aunt Freddie. And thank you, Aunt Molly, for inviting me to your dig.”

“It’s not the walls of Troy,” Molly said. “But it’s good practice for the students. The horse died of colic very suddenly. They didn’t even mark the grave properly, so we’ll have a bit of a search.”

“Did they shoot him?”

Ruby did not look like a morbid child. She was dressed in pink and sparkles and frayed denim like every other little girl in the airport.

“I don’t think so. I think they give them shots or something.”

“Cora’s scared of dead things. But I don’t see why. They’re dead. I don’t mind them. I like to know that things happened before I came along. I don’t know why, but I do.”

The purple camouflage suitcase appeared on the belt.

“Maybe it helps you realize that things will come along after you, too.”

“I think I’m too young to think that.”

*   *   *

They found the rib cage first. Ruby dusted off the dirt with a paintbrush, following the curves that outlined the commanding chest. The mighty horse’s legs seemed to be galloping even now. The students were silent when they saw all of him, a bas-relief of bones rising from the sandy soil.

Ruby lit a candle for him when they got back to the house. “
Yitgadal v’yitkadash
,” she said. She shrugged. “That’s all I know of that one by heart. You’re supposed to have ten people, and I’m sure you’re not supposed to say it for a horse, but I don’t care. And I say it every night for Grandpa.” She looked at them defiantly.

Molly wiped away a few tears. She did not sleep that night. Her mother was right, it was too soon after Aaron’s death to dig up a body. Ruby was fine. It was Molly who had nightmares.

“You were crying in your sleep,” Freddie said. “I couldn’t wake you.”

Molly didn’t want to talk about it. And she certainly didn’t want to talk about her bad dreams to Ruby, who looked as chipper as ever when they went into the kitchen. She had helped herself to a large bowl of the neon-colored cereal her parents forbade her.

“Guess what my father said to his ex-girlfriend,” Freddie said. She read aloud from an email sent by Green Garden: “‘Thou wouldst eat thine dead vomit up and howlst to get it.’”

Ruby looked up happily from her cereal bowl. “Dead vomit! Can I meet him?”

They went to Santa Anita. Molly and Ruby sat in the backseat, Freddie and her father in the front. Ruby nudged Molly, then pointed to the back of the father’s head and the back of the daughter’s head. They were shaped identically.

“Molly and her students and Ruby dug up a racehorse and moved him to Santa Anita, Dad.”

“Your friends always were peculiar.”

“We didn’t move him, actually. Just dug him up. Not too many opportunities to dig things up in Los Angeles. It’s great experience for the students.”

“Students?” Duncan said. “Students of what? Grave-robbing?” He chuckled. Then, “Don’t go digging me up, you girls.” Then, “Where are the flowers?”

“What flowers?”

“For your mother. I always bring flowers.”

“Dad, we are not going to the cemetery. We’re going to the track.”

“Yeah? Why didn’t you say so?”

They ate pastrami sandwiches and bet ten dollars on a horse named Madeira My Dear, who won.

Freddie’s father made Ruby promise to go to the track with him again. “You bring luck.”

“I’m not superstitious.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I am.”

35

The thought of an outing excited Joy. The brick buildings glowed, genial and rosy in the sun. What a beautiful day and she’d woken up feeling strong. Oh, this was very nice! She began the search for her wallet, her bags, her sunglasses, her gloves.

She bought a tuna-fish sandwich and a ginger ale at the little deli on the corner and watched the man behind the counter wrap the sandwich in white paper, then cut it diagonally. That was nice, too. She liked her sandwiches cut diagonally. This is what she would do when she retired. Go on outings with tuna-fish sandwiches cut on the bias. You couldn’t do that in an assisted-living facility, not like this, spontaneously. You probably had to check out at the desk, sign an attendance sheet, get permission, like the loony bin.

She didn’t have to ask anyone for anything.