As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (19 page)

Late in May, almost five months since Bec had seen Tyler and his wife and baby, Bec decided to drive to New Haven once again but ended up driving to Woodmont, visiting the cottage there for the last time in her life.

She didn’t know that would be the case when she set out. She intended to make her way to Tyler. Unlike her last attempt at seeing him, this time she knew that she couldn’t change the past or repair the damage she’d done. But she could at least tell Tyler she loved him, had never intended to part ways with him forever, had gotten mixed up, confused, more than a little lost. And then she could say, her dignity intact, a proper good-bye.

But for all her bold intentions, when she got to New Haven she didn’t exit from the highway but kept driving south.

When she arrived at Woodmont it was still morning, overcast, the sun behind the clouds pushing its way through every so often in brief flashes of light. She would have liked to stop for a cup of coffee but Sloppy Joe’s and the Villa Rosa hadn’t yet opened for the season. The entire village, it seemed, was closed. She drove past the synagogue, the words
Hebrew Congregation of Woodmont
as distinct as ever over its entranceway but its windows nailed tight with winter shutters and its front doors sealed with a large lock. Minutes later, from the cottage’s front porch, she glanced at the many other cottages in the cluster along the Bagel Beach shore. A wave of sadness struck her as she took in their emptiness: windows shut, doors locked, porches cleared of the summer clutter of outdoor furniture and towels and rafts and rubber tubes.

Inside the cottage silence settled around her like dust. She stood for a moment in the thick of it: the hush, the emptiness. Then, slowly, she took stock of the place, just as she and her sisters always had, roaming from room to room, unable to keep from touching the old family furnishings. Everything was still the same: the sofa bed, the corner chairs, the covered dining table, her cot and wicker chair. Upstairs, the claw-footed tub looked as freshly scrubbed as it had when she’d cleaned it the last day of the summer before.

In the back bedroom, the one Vivie and Leo had shared, Bec opened the closet only to find hanging there a lone remnant of the past, the strapless dress and matching jacket she’d made, with such hope in her heart, for Nina two summers ago. She pulled it from the closet, then sat on the bed holding the dress in her lap, her arms circling it, her body rocking back and forth. In its folds there wasn’t even a hint of that hopefulness left—for Nina, for her, for anyone else. She could feel that as she sat there, clinging helplessly.

Minutes passed. Finally she rose, re-hung the dress, shut the closet door with a final click, and made her way downstairs. Standing once again on the porch, she turned to lock the front door.

Outside she felt different, surer. There was nothing here for her anymore, she knew. And in the salty shoreline breezes she could almost smell the new life, a landlocked one filled with, come a given Saturday afternoon, veal cutlets and spaghetti or chicken cacciatore or maybe, sometimes, just meatballs.

The door locked, she reached for the mezuzah. She touched it then brought her hand to her lips. The gesture was the same one her father had made on his last day at the cottage in early September of 1939 when he was closing the place up, leaving for the season. The mezuzah was still new then. By the following January, Maks was dead from a heart attack that had overtaken him in his sleep.

Risel’s last day at the cottage, a week before her death, came at the start of the next summer. Standing in for Maks, Bec had watched her mother touch the mezuzah before entering the cottage. But once inside the place, she was overwhelmed by the memories. “Where is he?” Risel kept asking of Maks. She walked through the living room, the dining room, into the kitchen, and back out again. Slowly, she made her way to the water’s edge. “Where is he?” she called to the Sound, as if during the months of Maks’s absence he’d not been underground in the Jewish cemetery in Middletown but there in Woodmont, dunking, waiting for her to join him. “I’m tired,” she finally said at day’s end. But rather than go to bed she handed Mort the car keys. She begged him to take her away. “Done,” she said, simply enough. Then, “Away.”

T
hose weeks before Davy’s death in 1948 we relaxed in Woodmont even more than in previous years. Indeed, our whole Jewish neighborhood was relaxed, the recent news of Israel’s independence—life, as we saw it, birthed from the graves of six million—filling our lungs with an easier air. By summertime the conflict in the Middle East had lessened some, and the hopefulness that saturated Woodmont, that had brought so many Jewish families back to the shore after staying clear of the place during the war years, was undeniable. You could hear it in the optimistic tone of conversations. You could see it, too, in the amiable, untroubled way people walked each evening, back and forth, the length of Woodmont—from Hillside and Merwin avenues to the west end of Beach Avenue, and once there all the way to its east end—whistling, chatting, calling out hello.

By the end of our first month at the beach, Ada, Vivie, and Bec were practically carefree, or so it seemed by the way they let their duties slide, particularly the pre-Shabbos housecleaning that normally began first thing every Friday morning but that summer had incrementally been pushed back later and later. The last Friday in July, late afternoon, and the sisters were just beginning to get the house together before the men arrived from Middletown. Before that Bec had taken an especially long walk, her Friday claustrophobia setting in just after breakfast rather than after lunch. At the same time Ada and Vivie were on Mrs. Isaacson’s porch, chatting and sipping coffee, Mrs. Isaacson especially talkative about her granddaughter Judy, who was upstairs, as she was most mornings, still in bed. “Bad hormones,” Mrs. Isaacson, sighing, concluded about Judy. But then Judy appeared, looking unexpectedly chipper in a short red bathrobe and bare feet, and the women sat her down, fed her slices of peaches, combed and braided her hair, and generally fussed so much that Judy, for the first time that summer, smiled. “Do I look pretty?” she asked, touching her hair, and then she smiled again when the word “yes” came rushing at her from so many sources. She even agreed to come to the beach, at least for a spell, and, post-lunch, the women did just that, passing the time by playing rounds of bridge, reading magazines, and finally napping.

The afternoon peaked and ebbed without anyone taking notice. By four thirty, though, Ada was in the dining room, her hair unkempt, her cheeks red from either sunburn or adrenaline, and as she grabbed the better china from the dining room cabinet and practically threw it at me to set on the dining table she muttered,
“Shnel, shnel,”
reverting in her haste to the Yiddish of her mother. She was saying
quick, quick,
but even these words, normally of warning, were spoken with a playful edge as if our last-minute preparations were a kind of fun prank, something, if we timed it just right, we’d in fact get away with. In the kitchen, Vivie, Bec, and Nina were rinsing and chopping away, while upstairs Howard, once he’d arrived home from Treat’s, was hastily vacuuming a week’s worth of sand. Davy, who was not participating in the preparations but rather watching them, transfixed, as he sat at the head of the dining table, was finally summoned to race to the nearby bakery for the loaves of challah that nobody that morning had been in the mood to bake. Davy had just returned and handed the bread to my mother when the familiar clank of our Dodge coming to a stop caused all of us to stop abruptly as well. But the pause was fleeting. In the next seconds the challahs were set down and covered on the table, the vacuum cleaner was shoved into an upstairs closet where it didn’t belong, and the four burners of the gas stove were cranked up until small bursts of flames emerged from each one.

When Mort walked through the back door of the cottage and into the kitchen, he had no idea how quickly it had emptied of us just a moment before. Instead he saw the usual worn pots of this and that going on the burners, and the smell of dinner cooking was a familiar one. And he found the empty dining room, its table neatly enough set, looking as it always did. He might very well have found everything to be in order had Davy not called from upstairs, where we were all frantically changing clothes, “We almost forgot!”

“Forgot what?” Mort yelled back.

“Shabbos,” Davy answered, laughing.

A skirmish in the boys’ room sounded through the walls, and from Davy’s muffled squeals it appeared plain that Howard was smothering his face with a pillow.

My father, his steps heavy, began to climb the stairs.

“What’s going on?” he asked from the hallway. From behind shut doors no one answered. In the back bedroom Nina and I had already managed to change into the summer dresses we wore each Sabbath, and we were passing a hairbrush back and forth. Through the wall I could hear Howard once again muffling Davy, who was trying to tell Howard to cut it out. “You cut it out,” was Howard’s clearer reply.

Mort knocked on a door and in the next moment Ada was in the hallway explaining that everyone had taken a long nap that afternoon, the whole clan had fallen right to sleep—“Poof! Out just like that!” she claimed—but we’d wakened and now everything was as usual, she insisted, just a tiny bit late. She laughed, and then laughed again more determinedly. With that she must have convinced my father that nothing odd was up because I could hear him trail her down the stairs, and within seconds a familiar clanking from the kitchen meant that she was at it—checking the food, busying herself—and that Mort, satisfied that all was as it should be, had already landed in the living room, where, until dinner was served, he’d claimed a corner chair.

An hour or so later we ate our Shabbos meal. After the blessings, my father read to us his most recent letter from our cousin Reuben Leibritsky, who was living in Israel but was not particularly happy there.
Israel!
Reuben had written.
I hear it, cousin. I hear the word and how it’s spoken. Israel! But I have to tell you, no matter how much I hear it, I still don’t know where I am.
Everybody expected my father to follow the reading of the letter with a lecture about our Jewish obligations, or our luck, but Mort was silenced by his cousin’s anguished sense of displacement. “Let’s keep Reuben in our hearts tonight,” was all Mort said.

The next morning the men and boys went off to shul while we women and girls had a Saturday morning ritual of our own, sipping coffee and cocoa on the porch. That morning there was an especially deep tranquility among us, as if the arrival of the men the evening before and the rushed preparations for Shabbos and the long dinner that followed had been some kind of storm we’d managed to survive and we were now in the calm of an aftermath. Not that the men had done anything alarming. They’d merely arrived. But their very presence shifted the way of things so much it was as if we didn’t see each other while they were there. And so our gathering on the porch that Saturday morning was a time of reconnection. We didn’t talk. But even the silent gesture of looking at each other was a means of communication, and essential, it seemed, to our regaining a sense of presence. Even Nina and Vivie, whose relationship with Leo was more balanced than my mother’s and mine with Mort, required this composed time, this all-female Sabbath breather.

We were doing just that—breathing on the porch, our hot drinks long ago consumed—when we heard the men’s voices only yards away.

My mother jumped up first. “Tuna salad,” she said, before she rushed inside and, as instantly as if by magic, disappeared.

Our parents were going out that night, Saturday, post-Shabbos, to a fund-raiser for Israel at the Hebrew Congregation of Woodmont’s new social hall. They were going dancing, and the cost of the event’s tickets was their donation. Vivie and Leo were going too. The Isaacsons were going, as were the Radnicks and Weinsteins, though according to Mrs. Weinstein, Mr. Weinstein would have preferred to work on his latest radio like it was any old night. In fact, all the Jews of Woodmont of a certain age were going—all the grownups, it seemed, except Mrs. Isaacson’s granddaughter Judy, who preferred to stay home alone, and Bec, who preferred to stay with us kids, she said. So that evening she stood on the porch just like Nina, Davy, and I did, waving to the departing couples, the women bejeweled and perfumed and wobbling in heels they hadn’t worn all summer. But as soon as the couples were gone, Bec told us she really did feel like going out. Just not to the dance. Instead she felt like taking a walk. But first she had to make a phone call. “Yes … yes … now,” she whispered into the phone. After that she brushed her hair and restyled it, slathered on some lipstick, and then told me and Nina to watch Davy and to be good girls. “I might be a while,” she said.

Howard had already gone out for the evening, with Mark Fishbaum, we assumed. But it turned out we were wrong. After Bec left, Nina, Davy, and I took our own walk, to Anchor Beach, where we each bought a treat from Sal. Though the crowd at Anchor Beach was mixed, as Jews we could feel good there, safe, and we stayed, as we so often did, climbing atop a massive spread of rock to eat our treats. For a time we watched Arthur Weinstein race his twin, Jimmy, to Sal’s truck, but soon Davy drew our attention away from the antics of the Weinstein brothers. Pointing in the opposite direction, Davy had his eye on Howard, walking at some distance with his hands in his pockets, away from the Anchor crowd, until he finally stopped, settling on the sand behind a smaller patch of rock. To our surprise Megan O’Donnell followed him, lagging by ten yards or so, but once seated she leaned back on the same shale boulder that Howard was sitting against. They were clearly trying to hide, and for the most part their shared rock concealed them, but from our elevated position we could see them well enough. They were looking straight ahead, at the ocean or perhaps at the horizon line, which grew fuzzy in the distance as the day’s light dimmed.

“Shush,” Nina told Davy, yanking his arm down and then wrapping her arm around his shoulders. “Let’s spy on them,” she whispered.

For a time we watched as Howard and Megan did absolutely nothing. They stared ahead. Howard crossed his arms over his chest at one point then uncrossed them. Megan swatted at what must have been a bug. He finally said something to her, we saw, because she nodded, turning to him at last.

“They’re talking,” Nina reported, stating the obvious but voicing it with curiosity, as if the two were from such foreign worlds you’d think they didn’t share a common language.

“Who is she?” Davy asked.

“She’s the girl from Treat’s checkout stand,” I told him, having recalled seeing her—those frizzy strawberry-blond bangs—from our trip to Treat’s the other week.

“Name’s Megan,” Nina asserted. “We had a good talk that day. Remember?” She looked at me briefly, only to nod and see me nod back, and then she continued to stare at Howard and Megan.

Howard began gesturing in a way that suggested he was telling Megan a story. He also turned more her way, which put his back to us. The gestures continued for some time while Megan O’Donnell sat with her legs pressed to her chest, her body still except when she raised a hand to cover her mouth in what was apparently a laugh.

“How in the world could she think he’s funny?” Nina remarked.

“Howard’s
very
funny,” Davy said, surprised.

Nina leaned Davy’s way, gently bumping her shoulder against his. “Yeah, what funny thing has he done to you lately?” Her tone was consciously gentle, a way to keep Davy invested in the scene before them.

“I don’t know.” Davy swallowed a final bite of his ice cream. “Just is.”

“Molly, has Howard done anything funny lately?” Nina asked.

“He wakes up every morning with his hair sticking straight up. That’s funny,” I offered.

“
Very
funny,” Davy agreed.

Howard was still gesturing. Nina was running out of things to say to keep Davy still—Howard’s looks in the morning, it turned out, weren’t all that funny—but she clearly wanted to keep us there on the rocks.

Nina once again wrapped her arm over Davy’s shoulder and he leaned her way, allowing himself to be snuggled. I was no longer watching the two against the boulder but rather was watching Nina, who, despite the warmth she projected toward Davy, was otherwise sitting with her back straight, alarmed. When Howard leaned Megan’s way and put his arm around her, Nina groaned, as if in pain.

“What’s he think he’s doing?” she said, more to herself than to us. She turned away from Howard and Megan, toward the fading horizon line.

“He kissed her!” I said. “Nina, look!”

Though Nina snapped her head back, the kiss was over. And in the second that passed there wasn’t even a trace of its occurrence. Howard and Megan were sitting back, not touching, speaking, or even looking at each other. They simply faced the water. It seemed to me they might as well have been strangers. Or two people who simply couldn’t stand each other but were somehow stuck together, backs glued to that particular mound of shale.

“That’s pretty daring,” Nina declared, despite missing the moment. I knew she referred not so much to Howard kissing a girl—he’d already kissed lots of them—as to Howard’s kissing
that
girl, one he wasn’t supposed to kiss.

“It’s a free country,” I said, though not with complete conviction.

“Not that free, Molly,” Nina countered, a response that affirmed my doubts.

“Can we go now?” Davy asked, as uninterested in Howard as I’d ever seen him. Davy rose and began nimbly hopping, not rock to rock so much as ledge to ledge, rushing, it seemed, to leave Howard, Megan, and that kiss behind.

Nina and I slowly followed Davy’s lead, off the rocks and back to Beach Avenue, and finally back to our cottage.

The sun had fully set. We were sitting on the porch steps, watching for the occasional lightning bug to flicker before our eyes, and waiting for our parents to return from the dance, or for Bec to return from her walk, or even for Howard to return from his not-so-secret rendezvous, when Nina whispered into the darkness, “It isn’t fair. He always gets the girl,
always.
”