The Sixteenth of June (13 page)

He and Nora had gotten high here once, that summer she stayed with them. The two of them had leaned out the windows one night, passing a joint back and forth, the rest of the house asleep. Nearly a decade ago, he realizes. Everything felt possible then, as though nothing between them would ever change.

“She lost her sense of purpose out there. She'd lie in bed not wanting to get up. All that stuff they had—the classes, the field trips—that wasn't her.” He is glad his back is to his brother, that he can speak the words to the glass.

“I used to get her to take a walk with me when the weather was nice. Miriam said it was good for her. And she always put on a smile, acted like she was fine. But I could tell—” Stephen finds that he knows what he is about to say, that he has known it all along. A hint of sunlight filters through the clouds, touches the leaves.

“I could tell she was sad. When I left, there was nothing for her. I tried to get people to visit her, some of the other residents. I asked if they could check on her.”

They would agree, touched by his request. But he could tell they were unsure what to say to the withdrawn woman who kept to herself. The woman who ate her meals alone. Who never took pottery classes or attended events. Who never went to museums. He sensed this but ignored it, relieved when they assured him that, yes, of course, they would knock on her door. Even though he knew, he knew, it was not those faces she craved.

“If Mom and Dad were so concerned about her, why not have her live here? God knows there's enough space. Mom could've hired someone to keep an eye on her. They raved about Pine Grove. But they never asked if it was what she wanted.

“She was a lot like you, Leo. She loved family. That was the most important thing in the world to her. I think some part of her assumed when they put her out there that she'd see us more. That we'd visit.” Those years in New York were hard, she had admitted. Not because Michael was busy, but because he was unavailable.

“I don't think Dad likes to think about where he came from. Maybe you make a giant leap like that and you can't look back. But she definitely got the message. He wanted to forget about being Jewish, his past.”

“Maybe he never was so Jewish to begin with,” Leo counters. “Maybe that wasn't his scene.”

I did it, too, Stephen reflects. I let her sit on that couch like an outcast. Because I worried what everyone would think. Stephen closes his eyes. His vanity. His stupid sense of vanity had kept him from being kind.

“Or maybe,” Leo continues, “it was to make Mom feel more comfortable. It's hard when someone feels left out.”

Stephen turns, wondering if Leo can hear himself. “The way they make you feel, you mean?” Stephen shakes his head. “Do you remember that time I tried to host Passover? Back in New York?”

He was in middle school. June had acquiesced, and he'd excitedly called his grandparents in Brookline to invite them to the city. He picked up a copy of the blue-and-white Maxwell House Haggadah from Gristedes. “Maxwell House, as in the coffee?” June asked, bewildered. “Does Zabar's have something nicer?”

Stephen set the table, carefully placing pillows on chairs, adjusting their angle. He set out the parsley, the dish of salt water. Tears, he had learned. A bowl of tears to remind us.

But when his grandparents arrived, Michael and June stood back like they were strangers. It was Stephen who had rushed forward to take their hands, eager to show them the dining table. “Perfect!” Grandma Portman declared. “Everything is perfect,
bubeleh
.”

June winced at the term of endearment. She frowned at the strange rituals of the seder. The dirty Jews, he felt her thinking. He had imagined a warm reunion, wisdom and tradition encircling them at the table. But when he looked at the salt water, he felt his own loss.

“Mom was awful to them. Dad didn't really join in. He pretended not to know about the seder, like it was all new to him.” Normally expansive Michael was reluctant to speak that day, like a boy with a stutter.

The Haggadah was supposed to be an act of telling. “Tell your son,” it said. But how could that happen if his father refused to speak? If he went silent at any mention of the past?

They never attempted it again. Stephen didn't have the heart to subject his grandparents to the humiliation. Passover became a modernized meal with matzah and merlot, cleansed of religion. “Persecution,” Stephen says. “All the history of the world is full of it. You just don't expect it to happen in your own home.”

“Please. You're being ridiculous.”

“Leo, who fits in? When it comes to our family, who actually fits? You? Grandma Portman? Nora? Mom and Dad set the rules. The trouble is that they come at everyone else's expense.”

“You!” Leo suddenly bellows.

Stephen takes a step back, startled.

“You're the one who fits in! It's
you
! Don't try to play the victim. You're—” Leo casts about for words. “You're the golden boy!”

Stephen regards him for a minute and then bursts out laughing. “Me?
Me?
You can't be serious. I'm the one who took refuge in a nursing home.”

“You're the smart one, the artsy one. You're tall—” Leo pauses. “You know what I mean.”

“Listen, do you know how hard I fought them to go to Hebrew school? Do you know how much they hated having me convert?”

“Oh, please. That's just a religious thing.”

Just a religious thing, Stephen thinks. Because God is no big deal. “You know the other place I go once a week that we don't talk about? The synagogue. Why do you think we have brunch on Sunday? They know I go there, and they gloss right over it. It never dawned on me to tell them about visiting Grandma Portman because they've made it abundantly clear they don't want to know.”

Leo shifts uncomfortably.

“When you think about what you want, your future home, your family, is this what you picture?” Stephen gestures around the room. The crystal gleams, silent.

“Don't you picture a family that's close? A family that actually talks about stuff ?”

“But you're blaming them! You're blaming them for your secret.”

“No. I'm blaming them for not wanting to hear it. They never made space for her in this family, even after Grandpa died. If they were so concerned for her, why not have her be a part of our lives?”

Leo does not answer.

“I think—I think for a long time she saw the choices they were making and went along with them. Wanting to be supportive, not wanting to meddle.” No Haggadah, she would have thought sadly. Okay. Okay. “But when they put her out there, she saw how they felt about her. She saw that they wanted to live their lives without her.”

“But she had a say in the matter!” Leo interjects. “She could have refused.”

Stephen looks across the room at the folder on the desk. She was depressed, he wants to tell him. I didn't want to see it, but she so obviously was. She was probably on antidepressants to rouse her and sedatives to help her sleep, a circle of drugs to bring her up and down. “Let's try the meds,” Michael would have said briskly, the folder spread before him. “Maybe she'll perk up.”

She didn't feel as if she had a choice. Because what was she supposed to do? Refuse their help? Turn them down when they were all she had left? And so she made the best of it, figuring she might as well.

Stephen turns. “Let's get this up,” he says, indicating the banner.

“What? She did speak up and they ignored it?”

“We probably don't have much time.”

“Why are you changing the subject?”

“I'm not.” Stephen turns and is surprised by how close Leo is. A foot away, right before him. Leo's brown eyes are hurt, confused.

“She was no doormat, Grandma Portman,” Leo says.

“I know.”

“She could have left that place, if it was so awful. No one forced her into anything.”

Stephen hesitates. “It's complicated.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“People don't always do what makes them happy. Sometimes people go along with things because they think they should. They go along because they don't think they have a choice. They go along because happiness feels impossible.”

“Oh, Christ. Christ, Stephen. Is this about
Nora
?”

“I didn't say that.” Stephen looks down at the banner.

“You're seriously linking this to Nora?”

“You're the one who brought her up.”

Leo shakes his head. “Right. I brought it up. But you think it, right?”

Stephen eyes him, unsure of what to say.

Leo laughs into the silence, and this time it's his laugh that sounds bitter. “You've never approved. I get that, okay? But let's not go there. You had your shot with her.”

Stephen's heart sinks. “No, Leo. It's nothing like that. I was never . . .”

“No?” Leo says harshly. “Then what is it? You think I make her unhappy? You think I'm like the nursing home, trapping her?”

Yes I said yes,
the banner's bright ink cries.

Leo crosses his arms across his chest and Stephen looks at the familiar pose. Leo, five, dejected he can't play Little League. Leo, eight, waiting up late in his Phil Simms jersey for their dad to get home. Leo, fifteen, watching Stephen fill out college-application forms.

“I don't think any of those things. I just think—” Stephen knows that whatever he says, things will never be the same between them. “I just think that I've known her for a long time. I was friends with her before you two started dating.”

“I get it! You were BFFs.”

“Let me finish, okay? I don't think you're bad for her. You're my brother. And I was never interested in her that way. It's just—I
know
her. And I'm not saying I know her better than you or anything like that,” Stephen adds hastily, seeing that Leo is about to interrupt. “But I knew her before her mom got sick. I knew her before everything got crazy. And she's
changed
.” Stephen looks at his brother, who is grudging, guarded.

“Our grandmother—I think she felt like everything was out of her hands. She felt like it was all decided, like she had no choice. She faded out there. I saw it but didn't want to see it.” The institution of marriage, he thinks. To you, it's camp. “I just think—when someone is suffering, when someone is ill—and Nora
is
ill, Leo, she saw her shrink this morning—then it's not the right time to be making decisions about the future.”

“This morning?” Leo repeats.

They hear a noise behind them and turn. Nora is in the doorway, clutching two floral arrangements, a strange sound having escaped her.

“Nora,” Leo says, starting toward her.

But Nora takes a step back. She gestures with the arrangements, each one moving in her hand, as if to say, No, please, continue.

Stephen watches the vases nervously. “I'm sorry—”

“We weren't—” Leo starts.

“Talking about me?” she says, finally finding her voice. “But you were.”

The three of them stand looking at each other.

“We were,” Stephen finally acknowledges. “I don't know how much you heard. But you're right, we were. Only because we care.”

“Because I'm
ill
? I heard plenty.”

Leo draws a breath and takes a step toward her. His movements are so cautious that Nora laughs. “What do you think I'm going to do?” she asks shrilly. She looks down at the vases in her hands, her grip on them too tight. “You think I'm going to throw these? You think I'm going to—?” Then Leo is there, relieving her of them. He takes them from her and places them on the empty table.

“Are there more of those?” he asks quietly.

Nora is silent for a moment, looking at her empty hands. “Downstairs,” she says finally. “A whole bunch. June asked me to bring them up.”

“I'll get them,” Leo offers. “You take a load off, okay?”

As if he could fix everything, Stephen reflects. As if her world were broken in some way he could repair. “I should go,” he says. “I need to get ready for the party.”

He brushes past their convergence at the door. Nora has changed into an ivory dress with green embroidery, and he wonders if Leo knows, if he had even noticed her black dress earlier. It was the same dress she had worn to her mother's funeral. Nora had sat on the couch that day staring at the box of ashes, the empty rocking chair a few feet away.

Stephen pauses on the landing and watches Leo jog down the stairs. Nowhere to go but up, he thinks, and begins the climb.

Thirteen

T
he summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Dusk, that magic hour, the day bleeding into its own end. Nora catches sight of the setting sun through the small laundry-room window. The air in the room smells of starch and ironing. Carol's housekeeping supplies line the shelves, scouring powder and cleaning agents in canvas bins. An ironing board is next to a more elaborate machine, where, seated, Carol can feed linens through a press, her foot operating a pedal. Nora rests her chin on her knees and leans back against the washing machine.

Strands of hair litter the ground beside her. Just one, she had told herself. Her hairpins lay scattered across the sink, an explosion of metallic lines like fireworks across the porcelain. She had placed them so carefully earlier, thinking, this way I won't, this way I won't. She was pleased with her reflection at the loft, enjoying a boost of confidence before leaving the apartment. But how long had that lasted? An hour?

“Darling, do me a favor and bring these up,” June had said, pressing two vases into her hands. There was no question in her voice. It was an order, as though Nora were one of the staff. The arrangements were green and white, a broad leaf encircling the vase's interior to conceal the water and the stems. “The boys will do the rest,” June added. Only while Nora was ascending the stairs, hearing Stephen's and Leo's voices, did it dawn on her that June was referring to her sons.

Nora had stopped in her tracks when she heard them arguing. They talked about her as if she were a child. “And she is ill, Leo,” Stephen said. As if he were an expert! As if he knew anything at all.

She hadn't heard much before that—only a few words about their grandmother. Leo must have confronted Stephen about the visits.

“You shouldn't presume to know what's best for me,” she should have interrupted in a dignified voice. Instead, a squawk came out, a sound before the words could form. They turned, startled. Stephen's face showed concern. Leo's face crumpled.

After they left, Nora gazed around the room. She could feel their argument linger in the air. She felt Stephen's discomfort, his sadness. She felt Leo's determination to pretend everything was fine.

“There,” Leo said, returning with the last of the flowers. He set the vases down and hopped up the ladder to hang the banner. Watching him work, she wondered if the scene had really happened. Leo seemed so calm and unfazed. “What?” he asked, when he caught her staring, and she shook her head.

They stepped back to examine the banner. “Do you think it'll hold?” she asked, looking dubiously at Leo's roll of masking tape. She imagined the banner floating down during the party and landing on June's head.

“It only needs to last a couple of hours.”

A couple of hours! It seemed so obvious when he said it. “And you're sure it's straight?”

Leo shrugged. “People will think it's straight because it's supposed to be.” With that, he sauntered out of the room.

“Whoa!” Nora trotted after him. “Where are you going?”

“I figured I'd see if my mom needs anything else. You know how she gets.” Leo regarded her. “You okay?”

“I was worried—” But Nora stopped, unsure how to continue. She was worried about the fight she'd overheard. Worried about her friendship with Stephen. Worried that one day Leo will turn to someone and say, “I need to check on Nora. You know how she gets.” Nora had a thousand worries she did not know how to name.

Leo reached out and put his hands on her shoulders. “Relax, love. Go get a drink. Everything will be fine.”

The bar wasn't fully set up, and Nora felt too self-conscious to reach for the vodka. So she headed to Carol's nook under the stairs, the ironing room, June called it. But Nora thinks of it as Carol's room, a secret space in the house that is nearly tropical, the sultry warmth from the dryer mixing with lingering steam from the irons. How many hours had she and Carol spent there, laughing about something from choir, gossiping about June? Nora always sits on the washing machine, watching Carol feed bedsheets through the rotating press. It's the one place in the house where Nora doesn't have to worry about her posture or manners, where she can relax.

She half hoped Carol would be there, called in to do some last-minute chores. There she would be, pressing hemstitched napkins into perfect squares, looking up with her liquid eyes when Nora turned the knob. But the room was empty. And Nora knew when she found it vacant how this would end.

Was she ashamed that she couldn't hold out? She was, but the relief exceeded the shame. Her fingers were exquisitely attuned to her scalp, and when they raked over its surface, some process commenced of its own accord, her mind going blank, focused only on the precise millimeter of space she touched, her mouth filling with saliva just before she pulled. One, two, three, the hairs came out. The first three were duds, but the fourth had the prized white bulb on its end, glistening, a scepter. Holding it, she felt triumphant. Just a few more, she thought.

This is how it goes. There is always a reason, a special set of circumstances. She doesn't pull out of habit, the way Leo seems to think. “You pulling?” he sometimes asks. As if she would do it without realizing.

He had left his browser window open one time. The website came as a shock. She clicked past the medical pictures with a shudder, whole scalps plucked bare, and looked at the lists of clinical terms.
Trichophagia
, she read, flinching. As if she would ever eat her hair.

She didn't feel a rush of recognition. She never pulls from other parts of her body. It doesn't interfere with her functioning. Besides, isn't it arbitrary, what gets deemed a disorder?

People do worse. Those men on the stoop, drinking to get through the day. And then Jon and Mike, smoking. Sharon, too. Aren't those behaviors more harmful? Wouldn't a doctor prefer that she pull her hair rather than ruin her lungs and liver? The outside of the body is a surface. People tattoo it, pierce it. Yale probably has anthropological courses on how such behavior is relative. Probably somewhere in the Amazon women from indigenous tribes sit in circles, grooming one another, plucking hairs and swallowing them.

But no one wants to hear her speculate along such lines. Even the academic shrink had paused, eyeing her. Worse than I thought, Nora could see him thinking.

Leo had told his family about it without asking her permission. She thought she'd been imagining their little looks, June's eyes drifting to her hair. “Of course I told them,” Leo said blankly when she asked. “They don't judge you, Nora.” She looked at him and laughed. “Your mother invented judging. Do you really not see that?”

“What do you think his motives were?” the academic shrink asked, gazing at her. “He cares about me,” she was supposed to reply. “He loves me. I guess he just wants to help.”

Her habit was supposed to become the demon. Her tick, the trich. It was the bad boyfriend she was supposed to dump, choosing virtuous Leo instead. Love would conquer all. She simply had to make the choice, to marry rather than be ill.

But what if they were wrong in how they classified problems? What if the men on the stoop and her dad needed shrinks more than she did? When she rejoins Leo upstairs, he'll be pleased to see her relaxed. All she needed was some downtime, he will muse, thinking that his advice worked.

This was what she tried to explain to the cognitive therapist. How do you stop doing something when it feels like it
helps
? What do you do when the solution to the problem is the problem?

Ultimately, she doesn't fault Leo for his efforts. He thought he could erase her problems as if they were stains. Leo the Fixer. Leo the Problem Solver. She imagines a white can in one of Carol's bins with a sketch of his profile, assuring and calm. “Two shakes gets the problem out!”

That has been their dynamic all along. It was he who convinced her to stay at Delancey that summer, after her mom was diagnosed. “Oh, I couldn't,” Nora said with a nervous laugh when he suggested it. She loved the idea of spending the summer with him, but there was just no way. “No way?” he repeated, raising a brow. This was not a phrase in the Leopold lexicon. “Why's that?” “Oh, about a hundred reasons,” Nora replied as he wrapped his arms around her, thinking of money, her mother, logistics. “I don't want to spend the whole summer apart,” he murmured. “What would I tell my parents?” Nora asked. “We'll make shit up,” he told her.

That was exactly what they had done, fabricating a story about a musicologist at Penn. “It's an amazing opportunity,” she explained to her parents over the phone while Leo looked on, coaxing her with his hands. “And it's free?” her dad asked. “Yeah. I mean, this guy's a friend of my program director's. At Yale? And Stephen's parents offered to put me up. They have this whole attic—it's got a bedroom and everything. On its own floor? You know, separate.” Leo was waving at her frantically to stop talking. A pause on the phone ensued. Free, she could hear her dad thinking. But she felt the word in its other register.

“Of course you should do it,” her mom said. “Sounds too good to pass up.”

Did her mom know? Did she suspect Nora of lying? “He's a madman,” her mom would say after a fight, picking up the things Nora's dad had thrown. Then why? Nora could never bring herself to ask. Why do you stay?

Maybe her mom understood that Nora couldn't abide by her choices. Maybe her mom was glad one of them was getting away.

Nora had never liked being at home, but at least she and her mom used to hang out. When she came home on break, they would spend a day at the mall, catching a matinee, then visiting the pet store to see the kittens, touching them through their cages. Later they would go out for ice cream and trade stories. It was a silly ritual, but it was theirs.

After the diagnosis, Nora felt their dynamic shift. Her mom wanted to ignore being sick, but it couldn't be ignored. So it sat in the house like a bad smell. “Do you want to go see a movie?” Nora asked when she came home that spring. “Maybe tomorrow,” her mom replied, too stubborn to admit that she was tired. Nora was left in limbo, not knowing what to do. If she went out with a girlfriend, her father would berate her. “You're supposed to be here to help!” he'd yell.

He, on the other hand, had no trouble ignoring his wife's illness. He went right on expecting his meals cooked, his laundry done. “Let him do some of this stuff,” Nora hissed when she saw her mother unloading the dishwasher days after her surgery. “He doesn't know how,” she said with a smile, letting Nora take over. She sat down in her chair. “Marry one that cooks,” she advised. “Apparently they exist now.”

The two families had gone out to lunch once at the end of that summer. Nora finally told her parents about Leo, and an awkward meal at Devon Seafood ensued. Nora cringed at the collision of her different worlds. “Jeez,” her dad said, looking at the prices on the menu, “does the ocean come with the fish?” Michael smiled pleasantly across the table while Nora wanted to sink beneath it.

They stumbled their way through the meal, Leo cracking jokes to put her parents at ease. Her mother tried to engage with June, nodding thoughtfully at her airy remarks and stories of her time in Manhattan. “I grew up in Brooklyn, you know,” Iris said. “Ah, Brooklyn,” June replied.

In a polite battle at the end of the meal, Michael tried to slip his AmEx to the waitress. “We insist,” Nora's mom said with a polite smile. “On splitting,” Nora's dad clarified. “Oh, Frank.” Nora's mom shook her head.

“Well,” her father said, stuffing his credit card back in his wallet and nodding to Leo. “You've got your work cut out for you with this one. I give you credit for even trying.” Everyone froze as if a current of electricity had shot through the table. “She's not so tough to take,” Leo replied after a beat. Nora's father made a face of incredulity as though Leo had said something absurd.

Michael, at the head of the table, cleared his throat. “We adore having Nora stay with us, Frank.” Michael hesitated, as though about to say more, but then Leo changed the subject in his smooth way, steering them into a different conversational lane.

Delancey had been her shelter that summer, the architectural equivalent of Leo's arms. Nora often had the place to herself. Leo worked during the day and Stephen studied at the library. Michael and June were usually out until the evening. Nora listened to CDs on their expensive sound system. She studied scores in the sunny kitchen and made herself tea. She imagined she was in Paris, put up in a fancy hotel. She imagined crowds gathering to see her. Each morning she woke up and, seeing the attic's eaves, remembered with a smile that she had escaped.

Leo came up to her room most nights, the queen bed pitched under the roof's peak. Nora would be listening to Chopin or Debussy. Maybe this is how it can always be, she would think. They made love loudly, having tested for sound once during the day, Leo jumping on the bed and yelling while Nora, one floor below, heard nothing but her own laugh.

After he had fallen asleep, she would study his face, illuminated by the bedside lamp. He's a good guy, she would reflect, watching his chest rise and fall. He even cooks.

Vacations can't last, she would tell herself in the morning, walking to work. She was waitressing at Manning, and it was an easy walk. She started with breakfast and lunch service, but soon picked up night shifts, the time slot of glorious tips. She was saving up for airfare to Milan, hopeful that she could put enough aside to buy her mom a ticket to visit her.

At first, she ignored the live jazz at the restaurant. Her head was filled with Maria Callas. There was agony in that voice, suffering laid bare. Maria Callas made you forget the technical skill, the hours of practice. All Nora heard, busing the tables, was the fight of feelings, their delicate war. She carried trays of drinks but rode the current of that voice, entranced by how it lulled you and raised you at will.