Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (12 page)

Just then my chest exploded.

“Ouch!” I cried. I lurched forward and crashed. Dottie was there with me on the floor, on her knees.

“Are you all right?” she said, touching my face. “My word. You’re pale as a ghost.”

The pain was gone, but I lingered. Here was Dottie, I thought. I looked at her. Dottie. In my head, I begged her to stay like that—with me, for a moment. No one else would.

“You look awful,” she said.

“I had a pain.”

“Sharp?” she asked. “Below the breastbone?” I nodded. She waved it off.

“I get those all the time,” she said. “The doctor says it’s gas. I say it’s lovesickness. But either way, what can you do?”

I looked at her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Dottie had her moments. Like just then. Amazingly, she had justified my feelings, my whole life with Joseph. She hadn’t meant to, of course, but she had. Dear Dottie. I was lovesick. And despite herself, she understood. I put my hand on her arm, gave it a little squeeze.

“I’ll help,” she said. We both stood up, arms full of clothes. She was standing there with the same pile and no progress.

We both got down, gathering. We were a team, and we weren’t. We went through one, two, three, seven bags and cleared the floor. We pushed them down by leaning with our elbows. I could smell Dottie’s lipstick again. I rolled my eyes. I didn’t care if she saw me. Then I held the bag down and Dottie tried to make knots of the tiny bits of plastic that were left.

My body felt like it had been dipped in concrete. It was heavy and stiff. I wanted to quit. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

There must have been twenty bags in all. We kicked them out the front door and into the elevator foyer. I asked myself if I was sure about this, and I was. I wanted to feel lighter. This would help. As we waited for the elevator, the bags popped open. One after the other, like lawn sprinklers. I almost fell on the floor, dove headfirst into his coats.

“It’s okay,” Dottie said. “Let’s just get the stuff back into the bags and we’ll tape them shut.”

It had always been like this. I hated her. I loved her. She was optimistic. I wasn’t. She didn’t sweat the small stuff. I did. She was uncomplicated. It was as if the American paleness of her skin reflected something from the inside: day clouds or the foam on cold milk. I imagined my own insides but all I could come up with was a steely basement, full of complex mechanisms, functioning and airtight.

We took care of all the bags. Dottie picked up each one and held it while I wrapped, around and around, with tape, which made a loud, screeching sound that I was grateful for, its irreverence.

And then I remembered. “One second,” I said to Dottie and ran back inside. I got an old white blouse from my closet, stuck my fingers into the pocket stitching, and began to rip. I couldn’t stop. I’d meant to do something small but instead I made a gash nearly the length of the entire blouse, as if I were somehow aware of a certain gasping that was taking place in my chest and was hoping to give it space, a little air. It sounded like a tiny orchestra of cracking bones and I grimaced, thinking of Joseph being hoisted now from the stretcher to somewhere else. Would they see his bones? I wondered. And what color would they be?

“Oh, Joseph,” I said, stuffing my testament to our abandoned Jewish faith under my shirt. I went into the study and grabbed the memento leaves from the garbage. I stuffed those under my shirt too, and I raced—using that term loosely—back out the door to Dottie.

I felt like an abandoned ship, rotted and heavy at the bottom of an ocean, and yet as stray and tinny as a can.

In the elevator, Dottie and I were suddenly, obviously still. I could hear our high, wispy old-lady breaths. For a second, I thought I should get back upstairs to check on Joseph. It didn’t feel so different yet. For nearly a year, I’d been talking to him in my head, where he was more likely to answer. I’d been reminding myself of him, not the other way around, him reminding me of himself. I was grateful for what hadn’t yet sunk in.

Dottie looked awful. I hadn’t ever seen her like this. I didn’t imagine she’d ever seen herself like this. She’d never given birth. She never exercised. She never cried in public. Black fuzz stuck to the sweat on her face so she appeared bearded. Stray eye makeup had condensed into native smudges above her cheeks. Still, there was something feminine about her. Graceful even. Despite all her hoopla—the makeup, the fur, the high heels—Dottie had always made me question my own looks. Next to her, I was always wrong—too dressed up or down. I was always trying too hard. But Dottie, she knew what to do. She had a vast knowledge of things that I never would. I could say that about plumbers too, I suppose, or nuclear physicists, but that had nothing to do with anything.

We left the bags by the curb between the smeared dog poop and a meter. They made little expanding sounds against the tape. I threw the leaves into the street, hoping they’d be swallowed by a gutter. I folded my white shirt, the ripped one, and put it on top. Begrudgingly, I wished Joseph rest.

I wiped sweat from my eyebrows. Salt was dripping into my mouth.

Upstairs, I sat on the couch in Joseph’s study with the note in my hands. They were old hands, I noticed, and unattractive, like raw meat. The room seemed enormous but darker without all those pale sheets and blankets. For a moment, I considered going back down, carting the bags up again, emptying them onto the bed, folding everything nicely, and keeping the pile in the study. I could have put flowers by it. I pushed the thought away.

It had been like that when we gave her up. Now it was like that again.

But I wanted to find her. No matter what, no matter what Joseph might have told her about me, I had to find her. Or maybe, I thought, she’d find me. Now. Maybe she was already looking. Maybe she knew all about me and when he didn’t call her, she would come, knowing that we’d lost him, and somehow we could share just a little bit in each other’s hurt.

I went back to his desk. There were no other clues. I spent hours going through the whole house, searching for our daughter in every dusty corner. I found paperwork I thought we’d thrown out ages ago. Despite the hour, I called numbers for the adoption agency, the doctor we’d gone to. I even called the hospital where I’d given birth. At some point, everything in New York becomes a dry cleaner’s. Or a nail salon. I came to one dead end after another, and with each failed attempt, I was let down not only because I was getting nowhere but because each moment I spent wondering about her, about who she was, about her relationship with Joseph, was another moment in which she wasn’t finding me either.

I made a mental list of the things that I wouldn’t do: I would not turn on music. It would make me cry. I would not read the newspapers. They would make me cry. I would not open the mail, put food in the fishless fish tank, use cardamom, or go near the study. I would not cry. I would not wait.

Everything I did was an act against waiting for her.

That’s when I remembered the leaves. I raced to the window, but his things were already picked over. The pile was smaller, ruffled up. I put on my glasses. And the leaves, which I’d tossed into the street, were definitely gone. Probably in the sewer system and halfway to Chinatown by now. I stared at the space where they’d been.

S
URPRISE, SURPRISE,
I couldn’t stop thinking about Blot.

Late Friday night, after I got home from buzzing Victoria and Joseph, I was thinking that if I could have gotten my act together earlier, left my mother not-eating her dinner, Blot and I could have both rung the buzzer. We could have been disappointed together. If I hadn’t come up with the brilliant idea to cook dinner—a crappy, no-red-wine-in-the-sauce disaster—we could have done the whole thing together. I wouldn’t have been by myself. I wouldn’t have almost literally killed two birds—Blot and the Shohets—with one stone.

I tried consoling myself with the fact that I was one step closer to the recipe. I’d heard Victoria’s voice. But it did no good. The problem was that my happiness was like a soap bubble; it had to be kept in the air, from touching a surface, from popping. I wondered if some people’s default was happiness—and what sadness felt like when you were totally sure that you’d be happy again.

The happiness kept unraveling. First, I felt I’d ruined everything with Victoria. I’d pissed her off. She’d laughed at me. Also, Blot might not give me another chance to hang out with him. I’d stood him up. And suddenly I missed my father. I missed the giant size of him. Even his knuckles were the biggest knuckles I’d ever seen. It’s amazing to be hugged by a man like that. Sometimes I wondered if my mother missed that too.

“Dad’s a super-hugger,” I’d told her once.

“If you’re in the mood,” she’d said. I’d never not be in the mood, I’d thought. Not for a second.

I told myself,
Be happy.
Do you want to make it worse? If you were happy, you could have a normal conversation, go for a normal walk, meet a normal boy at a normal time, and do something that might seem totally, one hundred percent normal.

But willing myself to be happy was like willing popovers to not collapse when the oven door was opened.

When I got home that night, my mom and Aunt Lou were out. So I took a knife and got into the bathtub. I ran the water as I sat in there. I alternated it from all hot to all cold. I took little flecks off the top of my foot, on the flat, turbot-ish part of it. Turbot en papillote; turbot Provençal; turbot with summer truffles; turbot with langoustine, fennel seed, and horseradish.

I imagined Blot saying to a group of friends, all of them drinking beer and wearing vintage T-shirts,
She’s totally nuts. She just didn’t show up. I bet she was doing some bizarre ritual with goats. I don’t think she has a single friend. She’s tweaked.

I didn’t completely believe he’d say that. He wasn’t like that. Still, I could hear the words. They enabled me.

Eventually, the blood burst. It made tight, stormy eddies around my legs. It made me feel more alive than anything else could, which sounds ridiculous, I know, because it was life withdrawing from me, that blood. Life scurrying away.

A little while later, I put pressure on it. I put on ointment and a Band-Aid. I toweled off and watched to make sure nothing got stuck in the drain.

I made tea and waited for my mother and Aunt Lou. After a while, the warm sogginess of the bath wore off and I caught a chill as I lay on the couch. It was Friday, after all. They’d be out late. But it was so often like this. The waiting. Some days, I didn’t take a sip until I heard her in the hallway. I’d try to capture that moment of settling in, just before, so I could be ready for her. Like I’d just sat down for tea. I’d hold my lips to the top of the mug. I’d hover. I’d close my eyes.

“Now,” I’d whisper. “Right now. Right now.” Usually, by the time she walked in, the tea was cold.

They came home around one from a winetasting, and Lou got right into the shower. My mother plopped down on the couch across from me and threw her perfect feet onto the table. She smelled of sour melon.

I could have moved to her couch—she would have shoved over—if I’d wanted to. I could have held her pinkie finger if I’d wanted to. But it had become part of me, the waiting. I still felt on the brink of something even though we were here like this. I could have reached out and touched her. Each moment—this one and then the next—was rife with possibility, the potential for something good. Better. More.

She was silent and her silence was everywhere.
But in a moment,
I kept thinking,
now, now, now, now, she’ll say something, anything, something loving even, about my face or how I’d grown up or did I want to go to a movie, maybe have dessert for dinner, and that boys are difficult, trust her, she knew all about it, but don’t be down, I deserved the best. I would be all right.

Her words would be soft as cream.

Or maybe it was better this way, I thought. What happened after hope?

Then it shot out of my mouth.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have left Dad,” I said. There was something angry and gusty inside me. She looked at me and then looked away so that I wasn’t even sure if it had registered.

“Maybe things would have been different,” I said. “Me, for example.”

I wanted her to respond, yell. I waited.

Her eyes settled. I watched her watching. I tried to see what she saw. The corner of that brick building? A television light flickering blue black blue red green? Her head trembled ever so slightly, as if she might have been asleep. But she wasn’t. She looked at me suddenly, right at my leg where the cut was, though I was wearing pants. I girded myself.

“It’s my day off,” she said.

I kept my mouth shut for once. It worked.

“You could have been anything,” she continued. “Anything but this. It’s so hateful.”

Everything dropped. The sense of waiting. It felt like I had been in it for hours. It felt like she’d just turned off the lights and everything was suspended by darkness.
Don’t, Lorca. Don’t say a word.
I didn’t. I couldn’t look at her. I made the same promise I’d made to myself constantly, daily, hourly, by the minute over the years: I’ll never hurt myself again.

“I’ll never understand why you do this to me,” she said. “I don’t know what else you want.”

She crossed her legs. Soon, I covered her with a blanket. I kept telling her I was sorry but I didn’t say for what. I was begging her. She didn’t say anything back. Not long after, she fell asleep. Sleep came easily to her. Me, I had to fight my way into it. Sometimes, going to sleep felt like being punished. I started to cry but stopped myself. I wasn’t angry at her.

If I was going to boarding school, I had no one to blame but myself.

The things in my room were keeping me up. The razors, the tweezers, the cuticle scissors, the box of extra-large staples. A car alarm went off a couple of times and I sang along quietly with the sequence of melodies, hoping the humming would comfort my heart.