Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (44 page)

She looked back up, towards the plate-glass window, barely taking in the unremarkable sampling of humanity inside the shop. A woman about her own age, but rather stooped, was waiting impatiently behind a young man whose black curly hair contrasted sharply with an electric-orange
T-shirt. The shop assistant wore a baby-blue smock and had bleach-blonde hair that fell across her face as she packaged up the young man’s flowers. Sarah shook off the notion of irises and moved on, covering the last steps to the grocery store with a skipping little step. It was the kind of place that could be counted on for milk, baking soda, or a light bulb until eleven o’clock at night and on Sundays too, and Sarah went to the back of the store, took a carton from the refrigerated display case, paid for her purchase, and hurried home.

Daniel was standing in the kitchen, beaming.

“Fixed it.” He pressed a button and the coffee grinder dutifully reproduced its regular whirring noise without protesting squeaks.

“You’re so clever. What did you do?”

“Well, at first I thought it might be the motor had burned out. And if the motor is gone, you might as well throw the thing away. A small appliance like this, there’s no point replacing a motor. But then I thought it might be worth looking at the ball bearings…”

Sarah was not especially interested in the inner workings of the coffee grinder, and turned to put the milk away.

The doorbell rang.

“There he is.”

They both hurried towards the front hall where Daniel, arriving slightly before Sarah, stepped aside to let her open the door. Maxime stood on the front porch, dressed in blue jeans and a bright-orange T-shirt, and carrying a bouquet of three massive yellow-and-brown sunflowers on giant stems.

“Hi.”

Sarah stood there for a moment, unsure how to approach him, the bouquet blocking her path towards his body. He held the flowers out to her and she took them, only to find that
with her hands now full she was still unable to reach him. Daniel stepped out from behind her, grabbed at Maxime’s arm, and tugged him into the house. Once inside, it became apparent where his luggage was: he was wearing a large backpack that propelled him forward and there was no room for the three of them in the small vestibule. Sarah found herself backing away, into the house. “Was the train busy?”

Maxime had convinced his parents it would be easier and quicker for him to take the subway north rather than have them meet him downtown at Union Station.

“Yeah, tons of people got on at Kingston. Everybody gets out of school the same week.”

“Do you want tea?” Sarah did not wait for an answer but turned and headed back towards the kitchen, carrying the sunflowers in both hands. Where on God’s earth were they growing sunflowers in May, she wondered, as she left them on the countertop and plugged in the kettle. Turning to the cupboard, she took out both the teapot and a plate, leaving one sitting beside the bouquet while she took biscuits from a tin to place on the other. Reaching for the sugar bowl, she started to arrange everything on a tray as though preparing for a party. But once the tea had steeped, she wound up pouring it into mugs and placing them directly on the counter in front of Daniel and Maxime, who were standing there still talking about his train ride. She picked up the sugar and made as though to spoon some into Maxime’s tea, but he stopped her.

“No, thanks.”

“But you take sugar.”

“No, thanks, just plain.”

She doled out sugar for Daniel and herself, but left her mug on the counter.

“I should put the flowers in water. They are gorgeous, so large…” She reached for a glass vase, unsure how to arrange huge blooms of late summer that, it always seemed to her, belonged more in the open fields than in any garden or drawing room.

“I wasn’t sure what to buy you, but I liked the sunflowers.” Maxime looked quizzically at his bouquet which now threatened to overturn the delicate vase in which Sarah was attempting to balance it. “They remind me of Van Gogh,” he explained.

“Van Gogh?”

“Yeah, you know. He painted sunflowers.”

“Oh, yes, painting.” Sarah, judging that the vase was balanced, gently removed her hand. It toppled, spilling water all over the countertop.

Art was a sore point that spring, for Maxime had come home from Montreal to take a summer job working at the information desk in the museum, pointing visitors towards the dinosaurs and the Chinese porcelain. It was a good wage for a student but the position had nothing to do with becoming a doctor, as Sarah had pointed out several times. It was all very well in his undergraduate years to take odd jobs serving in restaurants and shops, but surely now that he was in medical school, these mundane occupations were beneath his status as a soon-to-be-doctor. She was no great lover of art, secretly suspecting that all cultural interests were frivolous even if she knew better than to voice this opinion to her many friends and acquaintances who saw fit to visit galleries or concert halls. And whatever their social merits, she could state openly and with certainty that these fields did not
provide steady employment, so she did not regard the museum’s information desk as any improvement over waiting tables. She had urged Daniel to find some colleague who would take Maxime on as an assistant for the summer, despite her husband’s protests that this kind of work would have to wait for his internship. Brushing aside her urgency, Daniel argued there was no particular rush, and when Maxime accepted the museum job, she felt that her men were in collusion against her, neither trying hard enough to find the correct alternative. She fretted that Maxime would not be properly prepared for his last years of medical school, would fail to secure a good position for his internship, and would thus delay the day when he could take over his father’s practice, the day when she could breathe easily as she contemplated his future.

As her cherished baby had grown to manhood, the first of his mother’s many anxieties in his regard remained the issue of his career. From childhood, it was understood by his parents that Maxime was to follow his father into medicine; for Daniel, the son of a doctor and the grandson of a rag merchant, this was the choice demanded by family history. For Sarah, it was the choice demanded by fear, because she saw in it a profession that offered the surest route to middle-class security. Anything else seemed to open up gaping vistas of uncertainty: paltry salaries or no salary at all, unpaid rents on cramped apartments, soiled clothes, and unwashed dishes. She had never known poverty, but it too loomed up as yet another danger that might yet destroy her son. Maxime himself had few other ideas about professions with which to counter his parents’ plan; he knew how high marks in science and math led to medical school and how medical school led to internship, residency, and private practice, but had little sense
of how one might become a museum curator, an English professor, or a stockbroker. He knew that the sharpest tool with which to torture his mother, the surest way to blackmail her, was to express doubts about this agreed-upon future, but since he also sensed from adolescence that he would inevitably disappoint his parents, that in some unspoken, almost incomprehensible way his soul was not that of the son they wanted, he chose mainly to acquiesce on the subject of his profession. Through his university days at McGill, he was to dance a fraught little tango with his mother—advancing with “I think I’ll quit and go to Europe,” and “You know, Ma, I really enjoyed that art history course I took last year,” but then retreating in the face of “Once you have started something, you finish it, Maxime,” or “There are no jobs in the universities these days, especially not in the humanities.” For all that Maxime flirted with rebellion, he had the personality of a conformist. Sarah wanted her son to be a doctor and that, at least, he did. In 1994, four years after the day he appeared with the sunflowers, almost ten years after he first left for Montreal, he returned to Toronto with a B.Sc., an M.D. and a year’s internship to his credit.

Up at the top of Bathurst Street, isolated at the northern edge of the city where a string of gas stations, low apartment blocks, and kosher delis is sliced in half by the twelve traffic-choked lanes of the 401, the Villa Nova Retirement Home exudes false cheeriness. It is a squat steel-and-glass box with ostentatiously clean and open lines, decorated with pots of pansies and low pine trees on the outside, checkerboard linoleum and bright-red curtains on the inside. Its name is Italian, its decor Milanese modernist, but there is no hiding
the truth that its exclusively Jewish clientele is waiting to die. Shrivelled souls confined to wheelchairs or shuffling about with the help of canes, they look as out of place here as kindergarten children on a day trip to the glass towers of the stock exchange, so disproportionate is their shrunken scale to that of their bold surroundings. Sarah, who loathed her weekly visits here for Sunday dinners full of lengthening silences, wondered that its inhabitants did not find their surroundings bizarre. Surely these men and women, who had grown up in the dark drawing rooms of Europe or in the claustrophobic apartments over their parents’ shops down on Spadina Avenue or on Montreal’s Boulevard Saint-Laurent, would have preferred crown mouldings, mahogany, and red velvet, or at least some chintz.

Rachel, however, professed to like this place—several of her old friends lived here, and besides, “It’s clean,” she had told Sarah when they inspected it together. Or at least she had professed to like it back then, when she had first moved here after Sam’s death, four years ago now. Today, she was eighty-eight and Sarah, who had sometimes heard her snap back at the overly friendly staff with uncharacteristic sharpness and saw that she was slipping, losing some of her hold on life both mental and physical, did not ask the old woman if she still liked it here. There were no other options. At least Rachel was largely uncomplaining and still chatted to the other ladies and the few men who were left too. She was talking about Maxime now, boasting about him to a neighbour: Sarah and Daniel could hear her small, quavering voice echoing in the big, empty lounge as they made their way to her side.

“My grandson. At Toronto General…”

“Eh?” Mrs. Lieberman either hadn’t heard or was
feigning deafness to avoid giving Rachel the satisfaction of impressing her.

“He’s starting at Toronto General. You know, downtown. He’s a doctor and he’s going to work downtown.”

“Oh, downtown, eh?”

“Rachel. Look at you. Is that a new sweater?” Daniel called out deep and loud as they reached her chair, and as she clasped his hand, set to admiring the soft-pink fluffy cardigan she was wearing. Behind him, Sarah bit her lip and sighed.

“Hi.” Rachel extended her free hand around Daniel to Sarah, and clasped the fingers in hers, not letting go of either of them until they broke away to settle in the chairs across from her.

“I saw Max last night.”

“You mean a dream?” Sarah was puzzled.

“He came to visit.”

“Yes, Maxime often comes to visit, when he’s in Toronto,” Sarah agreed.

Rachel’s voice was more hesitant now, but she persisted: “He came yesterday.”

“He’s still in Montreal, Rachel. He gets back Wednesday, this week. He’ll come and visit soon, I’m sure. He has to move all his things back, you know, and get started at the hospital. It will take a bit of time, but I’ll tell him that you were asking to see him.”

“No hair. He’s got no hair.”

Sarah and Daniel caught each other’s eye. Daniel shrugged.

“Yes, dear.” Sarah agreed. “What do you think they are serving for dinner tonight?”

“No hair.” Rachel looked over at Daniel. “I’m getting old. I don’t understand these things.”

Daniel instantly demurred. “No Rachel, you aren’t even ninety yet. You’ll live to see the year 2000, I bet you will, only a few more years.”

“Six more years,” Rachel corrected, and in the firmness of her voice and brightness of her eye, she seemed herself once more.

Dinner that night was boiled beef. It was usually that, or macaroni coated in a heavy sauce of ground meat and tomatoes. Afterwards, there would be stewed prunes or applesauce. Sarah sighed and thought fondly of the soufflé she was planning for tomorrow’s dinner. When Rachel had first moved here, Sarah had dropped by to visit on the occasional weekday afternoon, and every other Sunday Daniel had picked Rachel up and brought her back down to their house for a meal, but now Rachel was always asleep if Sarah called during the day and it was getting more and more difficult to manoeuvre her into a car. This past winter she had refused to go outside altogether and Sarah and Daniel’s biweekly visits were now weekly events, the only contact they had with Rachel. Sarah wondered guiltily if she was only finding excuses not to visit, and sighed again.

“Where’s that girl? They are also so slow, those
shvartzes.”
Mrs. Lieberman looked querulously up from her empty plate while Sarah and Daniel winced. Rachel, meanwhile, looked placidly around her, apparently unaware of their discomfort.

“I am here, Mrs. Lieberman.”

The waitress, a large woman of Jamaican extraction, forty-five if not older, was within earshot and moved over to the table, bearing two plates of food. Daniel tried to catch her eye with a rueful smile to distance himself from Mrs. Lieberman’s remark, while the waitress plopped the food
down with unnecessary vigour, if no particular anger, in front of Mrs. Lieberman and Rachel.

“There you go, dears.” She stepped back a bit from the table and laughed. “There you go. I’m not kosher but the food sure is.” She laughed again and, reaching back towards Mrs. Lieberman, patted her on the head.

Sarah felt her sympathies shift and her embarrassment grow. She looked down at her lap, then noticed with horror out of the corner of one eye that the man at the next table was drooling, and lifted her gaze again to the table, staring at the place setting in front of her until the waitress reappeared with two more plates for her and Daniel. Sarah thanked her quietly.

Rachel seemed oblivious to all the movement around her, taking notice only of the beef in front of her, poking it experimentally with a fork but not conveying any to her mouth. As if from some distance, she spoke.