A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (14 page)

“Drive, Joel,” Joyce said. “Two lights. We’re almost there.”

THE EMERGENCY ROOM PERSONNEL
were pleased by Viola’s arrival, as if they hadn’t seen an emergency in years and needed one to stay in business. Joel and Neal drove off. Three nurses became involved at once, cooing over the girl, while another brought Joyce a cup of coffee. The doctor tenderly examined Viola’s wrist. She was put in a wheelchair and sent to Imaging. By now she had stopped crying, amazed by the wheelchair and the enormous attention she was receiving.

It turned out that the arm wasn’t broken, only badly sprained. Viola required a cast anyway. Joyce was left alone in the waiting room, glad to leave her daughter in the care of trained professionals for a few minutes. The light in the windowless room was muted and classical music was piped in as soft as mist: there was nothing
urgent
in this emergency room. She leaned back and extended her legs, pleased to be in Connecticut, distant from her divorce. She slipped off her shoes and wiggled her toes in the beige plush carpet as if it were sand. A sprained wrist, no big deal after all. She imagined herself blessed with perspective, capable of seeing these petty crises for what they were. Her epic struggle with Marshall: what did it matter? They’d get divorced, one of them making out slightly less well than the other, and other worlds would con
tinue to move in their orbits around the anonymous stars within galaxies unseen by the biggest telescopes, and they’d all be dead soon enough. She told herself this while dreading that at the very moment she took the long view, Marshall would gain some trivial and incremental advantage.

Flora arrived with Victor, who entered the waiting room tightly grasping her hand, terrified. He burst into tears when he didn’t see Viola. Joyce took him in her arms.

“It’s my fault!” he bawled.

“It’s not your fault.”

“We made a suicide pack!”

“Pact. It’s okay, baby. She’s going to be fine.”

Joyce explained that the wrist wasn’t broken, but Victor continued to cry and Flora seemed distracted: one of her bridesmaids, she said, had come down with walking pneumonia. “I asked her if walking meant she could attend the wedding and she was offended. Is it all right if I leave Victor here? I want to pick up some chicken soup and bring it over. Is that appropriate?”

Her cell phone responded first, performing several bars of some Middle Eastern–sounding music.

Flora put it to the side of her face and grimaced. “What? I can’t hear you. What?” She put her finger in the other ear. She still couldn’t hear. “Wait, wait, Neal. Let me go outside.”

Joyce looked at her watch: twenty-five past four.
Shit.
The overcast sky’s afternoon grays would be sliding now into the deeper registers of sacred twilight. Heads were being covered, candles were being lit in muffled, God-infused homes up and down the East Coast. That was the long view. She bounced the boy on her knee, a nervous fidget on her part, but it quieted him. After a few minutes Flora came back, shaking her head.

“Is everything okay?”

“He’s driving me nuts,” Flora said. “They made it to the store in time, but the chuppah wasn’t there, even though they
had it reserved. They were told it was already picked up and paid for. Some kind of screwup.”

Joyce pressed to confirm: “But they made it to the store before it closed.”

“Just as they were pulling the gates. Joel virtually forced his way into the store, but there was no chuppah. He went nuclear. And Neal acted as if it was
my
fault! He said, ‘Your family didn’t want the chuppah anyway.’ He’s lost his mind, he doesn’t even
care
about religion.”

The two women settled back in the chairs and Flora closed her eyes. She too was trying to lift herself beyond the difficulties of the present moment. Victor had curled up against his mother’s body. Joyce felt ashamed to be so relieved, and she was still confused.

“Didn’t they have it reserved?”

“Yes,”
she said irritably, as if Joyce were being dense. “There was a mistake. Who knows, all these Jewish names sound alike.”

“They can’t go elsewhere?”

“There’s only a few Jewish religious supply stores in the state and they’re all closed for the Sabbath. The guy had to leave the shop before sundown. He was nearly in tears himself but wouldn’t look up who signed for it. And it’s supposed to be my fault!”

At that moment Viola was brought in, a cast at the end of her left arm. Victor stared in terror at the wheelchair and plaster-encased forearm. Joyce’s own body tensed. Viola’s hair had come undone and fell across her face in strands. She was weary, fully cried-out. Beyond the doors of the ER, the line of her jaw had firmed and the wary expression around her eyes had deepened. Joyce was vouchsafed a view of the face her daughter would take into adulthood, a perfect mixture of her features and Marshall’s, into a world whose real conflicts and dangers couldn’t yet be fathomed.

OTHER PROBLEMS HAD DEVELOPED
that afternoon, some of them more serious than Viola’s wrist sprain, the ill bridesmaid, and the lost chuppah. Flora’s wedding shoes, perfect on Wednesday, no longer fit. The caterer had worked off a long-ago-revised seating chart when she made the place cards. Intending to confirm the musicians’ presence at the reception one more time, Flora couldn’t reach them, despite repeated calls. The out-of-town guests were arriving at the local hotels, some having neglected to book rooms in advance. At the rehearsal that evening some confusion about the conduct of the ceremony was revealed and had to be resolved, as if no one had ever been married before. Then when the Reverend Gottschall reached the Hebrew prayer he was supposed to read, he asked about the chuppah. Joyce felt blood rush to her face in mysterious, conspicuous embarrassment. Flora rushed to say that there wouldn’t be one. Speaking in the same chilly monotone he had employed since returning from Hartford, Neal insisted that they pretend it was there. Joyce reminded herself that if she did nothing but keep the kids (now both subdued) out of the way, her family would be grateful.

The Weisses had chosen an Ethiopian restaurant as the place to host the rehearsal dinner. It was located in an eighteenth-century stone farmhouse, with exposed stone walls and hand-hewn cherrywood rafters supporting the high roof, but its interior was entirely African: tribal masks, woven baskets. The party was led to a perimeter of embroidered pillows around a low table, and an army of servers placed the food on a layered bed of doughy crepes that served as both platter and tablecloth. Their Ethiopian waitress, a tall young woman with model-class cheekbones and a minute voice whose unpredictably stressed syllables eroticized the most commonplace English words, instructed that there would be
no napkins; Amanda stared at her bug-eyed. They would have to tear off pieces of crepe to soak up the sauces and spices, as well as to wipe their hands and faces. The waitress watched them tentatively engage the meal. She towered above them, her otherworldly features serene and all-knowing. It was easy for Joyce to imagine that they were no longer in Connecticut. Yet every night this waitress, another token of a war-ravaged world, left the restaurant and drove down Connecticut roads to her Connecticut home to live among Connecticut people.

The Weisses had hoped, evidently, that a restaurant with such fantastic and informal eating arrangements, as well as a bar, would break down inhibitions among those who had just met. But Joyce sensed that she was dining at a banquet with two clans forced by hard circumstance to accommodate each other’s interests, in peril of being massacred after the first martini. Neal, Flora, and Joel took the smallest pieces of crepe, and Deke and Amanda took none, consuming small morsels of the food directly in front of them, with forks.

Only Harold Weiss found the chuppah affair amusing.

“One chuppah in the state, and somebody else got it!”

He seemed unaware of his sons’ anger or Joyce’s family’s discomfort. He was alone in having a great time with the food, tearing off chunks of crepe, standing to scoop up sauces and meats halfway across the table and shoving them into his mouth. A great red-brown stain blossomed on the upper part of his white shirt. He laughed at it. Joyce envied the waitress when he turned his voracious attention to her, demanding to know the Ethiopian name for every dish and condiment. The waitress smiled shyly and, her lips moving with delicate precision, pronounced each word in a breathy whisper:
berbere, zizil tibs, yedura alicha
. Each sounded like a promise. Joyce wanted to be like Harold Weiss and let herself go. She wanted to smear her lips with the same sauces, soaking herself in them. But she resisted
showing her appetite for the foreign world, this time, lest she betray her sister, mother, and father.

After they returned home she put her exhausted children to sleep. She had providentially wrapped Viola’s cast in plastic, but it was filthy anyway. And despite her restraint at the table, a droplet of sauce had ended its journey halfway across the world on the sleeve of Joyce’s blouse, inexpungible. She didn’t care; she was exhilarated by the foods she had consumed.

She prepared for bed. She scoured her face and applied a cleansing mask—Mousse Masque, it was called, and it was the color of chocolate. She spread the paste with a Kleenex to every part of her face, superfluously including her eyelids and the arches beneath her eyebrows. This didn’t make her as black as the waitress or as beautiful, but for the moment at least, as she watched her reflection, she imagined herself the cast-off child of another country, an impossibly exotic one with an ancient unread history: an Abyssinian, or at least someone with Abyssinian cheekbones. And Abyssinian
legs
. She resisted brushing her teeth right away, to retain on her lips and tongue the warmth of the East African sun. She gazed at her white-rimmed eyes, and as the door to her bedroom was flung open, a savanna wind gusted through the bathroom.

“I can’t stand it! I can’t!”

“What now?” Joyce said, trying to suppress her impatience.

“Neal’s ruining everything!” Flora cried.

“What? How?”

Flora did not remark on her sister’s negritude. She herself had been transformed. Her face was now puffy and blotched—tears had freshly run—and her hair was tangled. At the restaurant she had barely concealed her anxiety. “Guess.”

“I don’t know—”

“He’s going to Brooklyn! Tomorrow, before the wedding, with his brother!”

“For what?”

“A chuppah.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday, still the Sabbath,” Joyce said. “How’s he going to get a chuppah in Brooklyn on a Saturday?”

“Steve has a friend who has a friend whose family owns a chuppah, one they use for family weddings. They called him. He’s going to let them borrow it. They’re going to leave very early in the morning, pick it up, and drive back.”

Joyce’s already-hardening facial mask cracked as she dropped her jaw.

“That’s crazy. It’ll take them three hours to get down and three hours to get back! It’s a five o’clock ceremony. What if they have problems? What if there’s traffic?”

“I know, I know!” Flora sobbed. She fell heavily onto the bed and buried her wet face in her hands. “I told Neal that. I told him he was wrecking the wedding. Oh my God, I told him he didn’t really want to get married.” She gasped and shuddered. “It’s true. He
doesn’t
want to get married. He doesn’t! Because I’m not Jewish.”

Joyce sat alongside her and stroked her hair, its texture and color so much like her own. Flora’s quivering body was almost feverish. Joyce too had abandoned herself to tears recently, just this week two or three times. She worked now on Flora’s hair, running her fingers along the snarls, picking some of them apart.

“He does want to, he does. He loves you,” Joyce said, searching for the soothing tone that often eluded her when the children most needed it. She had a new thought, and the effect on her face ripped another fissure in the mask. She could feel a line of exposed skin. “Wait a minute, it’s Joel who’s so insistent about the chuppah. Why couldn’t he go to Brooklyn himself and leave Neal?”

“Good question!” Flora cried, furious. “I’ll tell you why. They’re afraid we’ll go on with the ceremony anyway, without him, without the chuppah. Neal’s a
hostage
!”

BY THE FOLLOWING MORNING
they were all moving in a grief-stricken stupor, as if preparing for a funeral. Even Deke was upset by his younger daughter’s predicament. He asked her to clearly, soberly, repeat everything Neal had said the night before. He called Harold Weiss, who was no less dismayed by his sons’ flight to Brooklyn. “I don’t know what’s in that boy’s mind,” he muttered. The mind he referred to belonged to Joel. Around ten o’clock Neal called Flora to say they had made it to Brooklyn in record time. Unfortunately, the chuppah was located at the guy’s parents’ house in Queens, but close by. Flora said, “Just come back, forget it.”

Hardly speaking to each other, Amanda, Flora, and Joyce went to have their hair done. Even with makeup Amanda’s face had gone gray and hard. She was probably wondering how she had raised these two daughters, one who was disastrously ending her marriage and another apparently incapable of beginning one.

Neal didn’t call again until two, as the wedding party was being assembled. Now Flora just grunted and hung up. She dropped the phone at her side, her eyes misted with frustration.

“He said they just crossed the Triborough Bridge.”

“They’ll get here at four-thirty, at the earliest,” Joyce guessed.

“And he sounded so chipper. He was
congratulating
himself for having found a chuppah! Like he hadn’t done anything wrong. Like he had just gone down the street for a bagel.”

She must have thought her mother was out of the room, but Amanda had hurried in when the phone rang. She was wearing a brocaded jacket with a matching skirt in pale sage. She barked, “This is no time for jokes.”

If the wedding began late it wouldn’t be the end of the world, especially with the end of the world elsewhere so pal
pable—but there was no way Joyce could tell her mother and sister so without seeming to make light of the situation.