The World Without You (13 page)

“Maybe Dad’s retiring was a bad idea,” Clarissa says. “Now he has his own activities. He goes running. He studies opera.”

“He has his vegetable-chopping course,” Lily says. “Mom’s always making fun of him for that.” The plate she has been drying slips out of her hands, and it hovers momentarily in the air before she reaches out and catches it. Bravo, she thinks darkly. Someone should hire her. They should send her off to the circus.

She takes over the washing because she can’t just stand there waiting to dry, and now she’s going through the dishes at an incredible clip, piling them in the drainer for her sisters.

“Nathaniel and I see them every Tuesday,” Clarissa says. “We have a regular dinner date with them.”

“And nothing seemed different?” Noelle says.

“I mean, everything’s been different since Leo died. But in the last few weeks, the last month?” And she thinks: was it obvious? Was there something she was missing, something right beneath her nose?

“What about you?” Noelle asks Lily.

“I saw them maybe six weeks ago. Mom was down for a meeting at NIH. Dad came along with her.”

Noelle reaches into the cabinet to put a bowl away and she stops mid-motion. “What was he doing coming down with her if they were about to split up?”

“I have no idea. “ Something has gotten stuck in the drain; without Lily’s noticing it, the water has risen to overflowing. She turns on the garbage disposal, but it makes a terrible cracking noise, so she turns it off. She removes a corn husk from the drain, and soon the water starts to seep out. A residue of endive and chicken skin settles on the dishes. She feels as if she might retch. She takes off the dish gloves and places them on the counter, where they lie, rubbery and immobile, like two dead fish.

“That’s all you’re going to say?” says Noelle.

“What do you want me to say? Malcolm and I took them out to dinner. We went to a nice restaurant.”

“But what did you talk about?”

Lily racks her brain for what they discussed, feels a panic overtake her at all the nothingness she retrieves. “It was six weeks ago,” she says. “Maybe more.”

“Come on, Noelle,” Clarissa says. “Do you remember what you were doing six weeks ago?”

“Well, I haven’t seen Mom and Dad since the funeral. I can’t be expected to know what’s going on.”

“And if you’d seen them?” Lily says. “Do you think you’d have figured things out? What would you have done, anyway? Staged an intervention?”

“I’m just saying,” Noelle says.

“What?” Lily says. “
What
are you just saying?”

The sink fills again, a few bay leaves bobbing to the surface, flipping over and over on themselves.

“You don’t notice things that are right in front of you, Noelle. Remember that guy you used to date who was so obviously, flamingly gay?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And the words return to Lily, her own words, from years ago.
Hey, Noelle, what are you, deaf?

Though it’s Clarissa whom Noelle is attacking now. Because what, she wants to know, was Clarissa doing showing up at the house at nine at night when she was supposed to be here at seven? “You fell asleep in the car?”

“What difference does it make?” Lily says. “She lost track of things.”

“Well, the timing could have been better. It’s Leo’s memorial. Mom and Dad spent days making dinner for everyone.”

“Mom and Dad spent days making dinner for
you
, and you refused to eat it.” Lily opens the refrigerator and rifles through the shelves. She finds a piece of watermelon wrapped in tinfoil and dispenses with it in a few bites.

“You know how they worry about us,” Noelle says. “I call every Sunday night at seven, and if they’re not home I leave a message. Since Leo died, I haven’t missed it once.”

“Well, that’s very noble of you,” Lily says.

“It’s not noble,” says Noelle. “It’s just what I do.”

Clarissa, meanwhile, remains silent. She’s doing the dishes again, the tendons in her forearms ballooning as she applies pressure to the steel wool. The water is as hot as she can tolerate, her hands turning pink as jellyfish. She’s thinking of their childhood, of the chorus that rang through their days. Go bring Noelle her knapsack, she forgot her homework. Go pick up Noelle from school, she lost her keys. Go take care of Noelle, she fucked the wrong guy. And now Noelle is lecturing her on responsibility. “You’re right,” she says. “Nathaniel and I should have gotten here sooner.”

“Okay,” Noelle says. “That’s all I was saying.”

“Jesus, Noelle. Would you leave her the fuck alone?”

“Forget it,” Clarissa says.

“I have forgotten it,” Noelle says. “It’s over.”

Clarissa looks at them squarely. “You want to know why Nathaniel and I were late? We stopped at a motel.” She hasn’t told anyone she’s been trying to conceive, but she’s tired of all this secrecy.

“You what?” Noelle says.

“I’ve been trying to get pregnant,” she says. “I was in a Seven-Eleven and I started to ovulate.” She explains it all to them, how she and Nathaniel have been trying for a year now. “I mean, I’m thirty-nine. Why did I think it would be so easy?” She lets her hands drop against her thighs. “Anyway, we stopped to have sex at a motel and then, when it was over …”

“You fell asleep?” Noelle says.

Clarissa says, “I know you’re Orthodox, Noelle, but don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what can happen after sex.”

“I’m so sorry,” Lily says. “I honestly didn’t know.”

“How could you have?” Clarissa hasn’t let Nathaniel breathe a word of it; she hasn’t breathed a word of it herself. And now she feels despicable. Because with her parents splitting up, what difference does any of this make? “Noelle’s right,” she says. “She lives in Israel and you live in D.C., and I see Mom and Dad every week. How could I have been so oblivious?” She slaps a dish towel against the counter: once, twice, three times, four times. A few drops of water come spraying off and land on her jeans.

She hears footsteps now, and when she looks up her mother is in the entryway to the kitchen, her father behind her. Nathaniel is there, too. And Thisbe and Amram: all the adults in the family.

“Is something wrong?” Marilyn asks.

“We’re just doing the dishes,” Lily says.

“It’s okay, Mom,” says Clarissa. “Everything’s fine.”

Noelle, on tiptoe, hooks a skillet onto the pot rack hanging from the ceiling. Clarissa turns on the garbage disposal one last time. Standing over the sink, Lily wrings out the dish towels.

“Thank you for cleaning up,” their father says.

“We should be thanking you,” says Clarissa. “You’re the one who cooked dinner.” But she feels all formal and stiff making such ceremony out of this, the way her father has made such ceremony out of their having done the dishes.

“It’s late,” Lily says. “Time for bed.”

But they remain where they are, standing in the kitchen and just outside it, as if they’re soldered to the floor.

Marilyn says, “I guess Dad and I really rained on the parade.”

“Some parade,” Clarissa says. “Get out the floats for Leo’s memorial.”

“Bad news on top of bad news,” Lily says.

The clock above the stove chimes midnight. A bird is chirping, a mechanical bird, the clock a gift from one of the girls, for someone’s birthday, Marilyn thinks, though she can’t remember whose. It’s a different bird for every hour, care of the Audubon Society, and now it’s chirping, chirping, issuing its relentless call. “We could certainly use some better news.”

Her mother, Clarissa thinks, is staring at her, asking her to be the bearer of good tidings, and standing there surrounded by her family, she blurts out, “Nathaniel won a prize.” Instantly, she regrets having said this, and Nathaniel, she can tell, regrets it, too.

“What prize?” her mother says, latching on to her words.

“It’s nothing,” Nathaniel says. “It’s utterly irrelevant.”

“Prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box?” Lily says.

“Pretty much.”

Clarissa hates herself for having brought this up, for having panicked in the silence. But she has no choice but to go on. She tells her family what little she knows, how Nathaniel won Columbia’s teaching prize. She listens to her own words as she says them, endures the sound of her voice bragging about her husband (oh, how she hates herself!), and now she endures their response, the
congratulations
es and the
oh-that’s-wonderful
s and the
where did you get such a talented husband
s, even Amram participating, Amram, who, as the other brother-in-law in the family, has a history of feeling shown up and who may, for all Clarissa knows, actually be fuming. But he’s putting on a good show of it, offering his glum congratulations, and Nathaniel, in turn, is glumly receiving them, as is Clarissa, and now Thisbe, a graduate student herself, says, “I’m just happy when my students don’t throw spitballs at me,” and everyone is saying, “Now, now.”

Soon they all disperse, and it’s just Clarissa alone in the kitchen. A minute passes, and Lily comes in. They’re standing at the corkboard beside the refrigerator, thumbtacked to which are their mother’s publications. There’s an op-ed from
USA Today
and another op-ed from the
Washington Post.
Beside them are letters from parents of other journalists who have been killed in the war. “Mom’s support group,” Clarissa says darkly.

“She’ll have to start another one,” Lily says. “Mothers of dead journalists who dump their husbands. It will be a support group of one.”

“It will be a support group of many,” Clarissa says. “There are a lot of idiots out there.” Also on the corkboard in their mother’s handwriting is the number of dead in the ongoing war, both U.S. and Iraqi. The same numbers are tacked up in their parents’ kitchen in the city, on the tiny chalkboard beside the phone. Constantly updated, Clarissa thinks, like the national debt. The Iraqi casualties are a matter of conjecture, but her mother has certainly educated herself. Every week she spends hours on the Web, keeping up with the news the papers don’t report. Pinned on the corkboard near one of her op-eds is a photo of the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. flag raised beside it. And, next it, her mother’s commentary.
So much for that.

“We should use it for target practice,” Clarissa says, and in frustration at everything—at Leo’s dying, at her mother, at Saddam Hussein himself—she takes a spoon and tosses it at the corkboard.

She emerges into the foyer, where the rest of the family is silently standing, everyone still pinioned to their spots.

“I’m beyond exhausted,” she says, and she goes upstairs and Nathaniel follows her; Noelle, Amram, and Lily ascend the stairs, too. It’s exactly, Lily thinks, how it used to be, the line for the bathroom, and somehow, as always, Noelle has gotten there first. Lily waits outside, needing to pee, her bladder pounding against her pelvis. Then the door opens, Noelle emerges, and it’s Lily’s turn to go in.

When she steps out of the bathroom, she sees Thisbe standing in the dark hallway, her head leaning against a picture frame.

“Careful, you. You don’t want to topple the art.”

“That would be some end to the evening.”

“It would be the coup de grâce.” Lily can barely make out Thisbe in the darkness. The only illumination is from the crack beneath the bathroom door and from the dwindling glow of the nightlight.

“I should have stayed in Berkeley,” Thisbe says. “I’m an interloper here.”

“Oh, Thisbe, how can you say that? You’re part of our family.”

“And now I’m watching your parents’ marriage split up. I just want to close my eyes.”

“I wish I hadn’t opened them in the first place.” Through the skylight, Lily can see a glistening shard of moon hanging like a comma in the darkness. She hears breathing down the hall. “Our snoring nephews.”

Snoring nephews, Thisbe thinks. Kissing cousins. She closes her eyes, wishes she were far away, back in Berkeley with Wyeth. “Where’s your father?”

“In their old bedroom,” Lily says.

“And your mother?”

“Downstairs.”

“On the couch?”

“Presumably.”

“Oh, Lily,” Thisbe says. “We can’t let her do that. She’s almost seventy years old. If only …”

“What?”

“If only I’d stayed in better touch. If only I’d been a more accommodating daughter-in-law.”

“Then everything would be perfect?”

“Do you know how often I called last year? Once every few weeks, at most. They’re Calder’s grandparents. I could have brought him east more. I could have made them feel more welcome in Berkeley. If only Leo were here.”

“Well, yes,” Lily says. “That would be nice.”

Leaning against the wall, Thisbe runs her hands through her hair. She presses her palms to her eyes so she can’t see anything but her own skin. “I should go to bed.”

“Stay up here,” says Lily.

“Where would I sleep?”

“In my room. We can have a slumber party. Girls’ night out.”

“Calder will wonder what happened to me.”

Lily’s thinking how she misses Malcolm, how tonight, of all nights, she doesn’t want to sleep alone.

Now Noelle emerges from her bedroom in a complicated caking of moisturizer and face cream. She’s wearing a long pink nightgown, which makes swishing sounds across the floor. “Thisbe,” she says, seeing her sister-in-law. “Lily.”

Thisbe reaches out and takes her hand, and now Lily does, too. They’re standing, the three of them, in the hallway, in a dark little huddle.

“I can’t believe this,” Noelle says. “Oh, God.” From beneath the doorway, they see the light go off in Clarissa and Nathaniel’s room.

Thisbe walks softly down the stairs, trying not to creak as she goes. But it’s an old house, and with every step she sends a noise through the hall. She gets to the bottom of the stairs, and there Marilyn is, lying on the couch, a mohair throw blanket tossed haphazardly over her, her fuzzy slippers lined up on the floor. She’s on her back, with a medical journal open across her face, as if she’s at the beach, sunning herself. Thisbe tiptoes past her, but Marilyn whispers, “I’m awake.” She’s sitting up now, her pale yellow nightgown tucked under her, her back straight against the pillow.