Authors: Francine Prose
Just outside the kitchen, Norma—like a teenager with a younger sister she doesn’t really want to bring to the party—rushes ahead, leaving Vera to stand in the doorway and watch Rosie and Norma chop salad vegetables on the butcher block by the window. “What can I do?” Vera says.
“Nothing,” says Norma. “Keep us company.” Company? They don’t even know she’s there.
The warm early-evening light recalls the paintings of Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School, the luminous pastel skies of Vera’s Brooklyn childhood. Actually, it doesn’t seem quite bright enough for that sharp cleaver Rosie’s using. It takes all Vera’s self-control not to ruin the moment by yelling, Turn the light on! Watch your fingers! Though probably Norma and Rosie know instinctively, as she does: if they turn on one less-than-absolutely-necessary light, Dave will come in and shut it off.
There’s a period in Dave’s life he rarely mentions: after Spain he spent two years teaching English in the Soviet Union. Stalin was in power. Vera thinks of purges, of Osip Mandelstam, of wide, bleak skies and crowd scenes from
Doctor Zhivago
. She’s asked, but the only thing Dave’s ever said is how the shelves in the markets were bare except for huge boxes of US-Army-issue cornflakes, and he said it every Sunday when Norma cooked big breakfasts—waffles, popovers, eggs. The first time Lowell met her parents, she’d brought it up, hoping that Lowell would tell his story about cornflakes airlifted up to the Alaskan tundra and that he and her father might come together over a shared history of breakfast cereal. But Dave just got quiet and later that evening called to ask her not to talk about his trip to the Soviet Union in front of strangers. It was then—and not at dinner, as she’d planned—that Vera told him she and Lowell were already married and she was expecting a child.
The point is: when her father turns off lights they can’t see without, drives to Jersey for cheap gas, eats the hard bread heels, Vera understands that these are the habits of a man who lived two years on cornflakes. Of course she knows from living with Lowell that a cornflake diet can just as easily have the opposite effect, but the real point is: her father is generous with other things. Not for one moment can Vera remember doubting he loved her.
And besides, Rosie and Norma couldn’t have found a more flattering light. With its fading, they actually seem to grow slimmer, more graceful. Their hands move surely among the strips of green pepper, the perfect circles of radish like the coins of some newly discovered country. Even as the dying light blurs the edges of things, it highlights their textures. Rosie and Norma’s bare arms touch and the contrast in the surface of their skin is astonishing. What fifty years can accomplish!
Rosie and Norma lean closer, reminding Vera that a few years ago they
were
closer: as close as that. Then even Vera called them Gram and Gramp because their connection to Rosie seemed the central one, the hopeful one with its promise of continuance. Now things have fallen off. Rosie calls them Dave and Norma and complains that when she stays overnight they don’t let her do
anything
, by which she means talking all night on the phone.
Nonetheless Vera knows Norma and Rosie are still closer to each other than either of them is to her. Even their comfortable silence sounds a reproach: if she were part of the scene, she’d be chattering like a finch. She can’t help being jealous; it’s like feeling the whole world except her is in love. So when Rosie starts talking, Vera’s relieved; it’s as if she’s out with two lovers and is grasping at conversational straws to keep them from falling into an embarrassing embrace.
“I might quit summer program,” Rosie says.
“Sweetie, why?” says Norma.
For a while it doesn’t seem as if Rosalie’s going to answer. Finally she says, “Carl.”
“What about him?” asks Norma.
“I can’t tell you,” says Rosie. “It’s too gross.”
“Try me,” says Norma.
“All right,” Rosie says. “But promise you won’t be completely grossed out and blame
me
?”
“I promise,” says Norma.
“Okay. Remember, though. You promised. Well…It was water-gun day. We all got to bring our water guns in. Around lunchtime mine ran out and Carl said he’d fill it for me. He took it to the boys’ room and when he brought it back it was kind of warm and…oh God, I can’t say it…he’d pissed in it!”
Norma flinches. “Please, the word is
urinate
!” Then she bursts out laughing. “You know what?” she says. “Carl likes you.”
Four things occur to Vera, all nearly at once. One: Rosie’s never even mentioned Carl to
her
. Two: Rosie already knows Carl likes her, because Three: She’s more sure of herself than Vera was at her age. Which may have something to do with Four: When Vera was Rosalie’s age, Norma wouldn’t have been half so forthcoming with the information that Carl liked her. Yet only now does Vera understand that Norma’s reticence had nothing to do with jealousy, rivalry, meanness, but rather with the same protectiveness Vera feels for Rosie. Despite her firm belief in liberal attitudes toward children and sexual play, Norma would have hesitated—and perhaps rightly so—to encourage a daughter’s affection for the kind of boy who’d pee in her water gun. With a granddaughter, it’s different: perspective, more humor, and forty years to have learned that such boys may turn out to be the best.
“The dumb part is,” Rosie’s saying, “me and Carl have so much in common it’s unbelievable. We feel the same about everything! He likes Michael Jackson, I like Michael Jackson. He hates Boy George, I hate Boy George. He loves Dungeons and Dragons, I love Dungeons and Dragons. He loves raw spinach and hates cooked spinach, I love raw spinach and hate cooked spinach…isn’t that unbelievable?”
“Unbelievable,” says Norma.
Vera imagines Rosie and Kirsty in their Dungeon Master’s cave with its magic doors; now every one of them swings open, revealing Carl surprised in the act of peeing in a plastic gun. She’s lost the thread of Rosie and Norma’s conversation. It all grows fuzzy, until suddenly—perhaps it’s the light—she sees herself as a character in
Our Town
or
Carousel
, any one of those dreadful stories about people who die and come back to watch a soft-focus, tear-blurred version of life without them.
“Can I bring the salad in?” she says. For all the response this gets, she could be one of those ghosts only Topper can see.
“Dinnertime!” Norma sings out.
Following her mother into the living room, Vera notes how Norma’s embroidered blouse and dirndl skirt match the general decor, except that the clothes are fake peasant: machine work on cotton polyester. “Sit!” orders Norma, and Vera does, opposite Dave, while Rosie and Norma carry in platters and pitchers and bowls.
Though the fan’s doing nothing about the August heat, Norma wouldn’t feel she was feeding them without a hot meat meal. The food matches everything else: Jewish international. The lamb stew with potatoes and limas reminds Vera of
cholent
. Its muttony smell evokes Berbers dipping into a common plate. They should be cross-legged on a carpet on a tent floor, elbow-deep in grease.
Norma fills their plates and, without waiting for them to taste it, says, “How’s the stew? I got it from that new book Daddy got me,
Cooking Moroccan
.”
Vera used to think that such questions were Norma’s demands for flattery and homage. Her reputation as a cook has never been in doubt. Every time they go out—to a restaurant, to the homes of Norma’s colleagues and their old friends from the Party—Dave compares the cooking unfavorably with his wife’s. The noise of all that dutiful public praise kept Vera from hearing. How long it took her to understand that Norma might need reassurance, too.
“Great,” Vera says, and Rosalie says, “Really great.”
“Dave?”
“It’s all right,” says Dave, and Vera thinks, No wonder she’s got to ask every time.
“What’s wrong?” asks Norma.
“The meat’s a little stringy is all.” Dave’s teeth seem to be bothering him; it’s hurting him to chew.
“Now you’re getting like your granddaughter,” says Norma, “She’d be happy if we never had meat.”
All eyes turn toward Rosie, who’s meticulously spearing limas and scraping gravy off her potatoes. “You know what they feed cows?” she says. “You know what’s in this stuff?”
“Protein,” says Dave, but he’s smiling. Norma, too. For though like the rest of their generation they believe in the life-giving sustenance of animal flesh, they approve of Rosie’s vegetarianism, in which they see a nascent understanding of the harmful excesses of capitalism.
“It really is terrific,” says Vera, chewing extravagantly, heroically, as if for them all—for Dave’s teeth, Rosie’s fears, Norma’s need for approval and love. And it is; it’s delicious. The hot food makes Vera break out in a sweat and even that feels pleasant. After a while Norma clears her throat and says, “Dave, guess what Rosalie’s been doing in summer program.”
Eyebrows bristling, Dave focuses on Rosie. Vera wonders if her mother means Rosie to tell about Carl and the water gun, and so is relieved when Rosie says, “We went to the planetarium.”
“Was there some kind of special show?” asks Norma, though probably she already knows. She’s been retired from her counseling job for a year; but much remains, especially this mode of inquiry, this dogged pursuit of information her students were too timid to offer or didn’t even know they had.
“It was mostly for the little kids,” says Rosie. “
Sesame Street
garbage. Kermit and Big Bird up in the sky.”
“For the children!” says Norma. “Isn’t that wonderful!” Dave’s gone back to eating. There’s a silence, then Norma says, “Guess where Daddy and I went this week.”
“Where?” says Rosie.
“The Whitney, they have the most fabulous show. The Ashcan School. Gropper, Marsh…”
Vera thinks of muddy colors, subway riders with grimy faces, shopgirls’ legs splayed on spinning amusement-park rides, yet understands that Norma’s affection is complex: part esthetic, part political, part nostalgic. Probably Ashcan prints were what young Lincoln Brigaders tacked up on their bedroom walls.
On the wall above Norma’s head is a picture Dave painted just after McCarthy got him fired from the public-school system. It’s a crowd of faces, red, brown, and black, crudely done; it looks like a UNICEF card. Vera has almost no memory of that time. Used to keeping secrets, they kept that one from her so well her only recollection is of watching daytime TV, of Norma switching channels back and forth from Joe McCarthy to her favorite cooking show, Dione Lucas, until some shadow of the senator seemed to linger on the cook; even years later, when Lowell watched Julia Child, Vera would feel queasy and have to leave the room. It’s all still there, thinly camouflaged, lodged in neuron and synapse and cell. When Vera thinks Carmen’s Holy Trinity sounds like a congressional committee, what else could she have in mind?
Dave’s painting was only an interim distraction until he found work at the sporting goods store. Vera’s never understood why, of all jobs, he picked that. He never showed any interest in games, and once at a dinner she heard him telling friends how sports were popularized by the early industrial bosses, who found that their wage slaves functioned better if allowed to toss a ball around a few minutes a day. There was just that one time at a picnic for the guidance people from Norma’s school; someone brought a ball. Vera’s still astonished by the agility with which Dave jumped and dunked and made the net swish with shot after perfect shot.
That’s what Vera wants to ask about, but Dave won’t want to answer, no more than he wants to talk about Reginald Marsh. The one story he’s still interested in telling is the story of the Spanish Civil War, and they’ve heard it a hundred times. She remembers how Dave used to charm new people with those stories and wonders if he ever wishes she and Rosie were new people.
The last time she urged him to tell them was that first night she brought Lowell home. Her hope was that Dave and Lowell would recognize each other as fellow storytellers, and that her parents would see that Lowell was, in his own hillbilly way, as deeply in love with the spirit of the people as they were. But all that came of her hopes was one silence after another. It wasn’t easy steering the dinner conversation in a middle-class Jewish household to polo, but Vera kept turning it till Lowell could tell his
buzkashi
story: hordes of mounted Afghans playing free-for-all polo with no rules and a dead goat with its head whacked off instead of a ball. Norma got up from the table, leaving them to Dave’s disapproval; in his day, you traveled to save the world from Fascism, not to watch the
lumpen
play ball. Vera served up Lowell’s cornflakes from heaven, but had to tell Dave’s Russian cornflake story for him. Which was why he got angry and called her up; and she told him the news about Rosalie, which she hadn’t been able to squeeze into all that silence.
Afterward she felt so sorry for announcing it that way, she sat down and read Karl Marx. All her friends had read Marx in college, searching their Modern Library Giant
Das Kapital
for some clue to Vietnam. But Vera was glad she waited till she was pregnant, with all her emotions so close to the surface. She remembers reading with tears streaming down her face, moved by that enormous, unshakeable faith in the coming of the Revolution, its comforts so similar to what she knew of faith in the Messiah. Some things can be done to hasten its arrival, but not much; and besides, it will come no matter what.
This is what she wants to tell her father: “Dad, don’t worry! You and the boys in the Lincoln Brigade, you did what you could! History will resolve itself; the prisoners of starvation will arise without us!” But she knows it’s false comfort, false cheer, the same misguided impulse that makes her want to write Bigfoot nicotine-fit stories for that kid craving cigarettes on the subway.
“Guess what happened to me today,” she says, then stops, afraid they’ll think she’s imitating Norma and unsure of what she intends to say next.
“What, dear?” asks Norma.
“Here’s another good one,” says Rosie. “Now Mom’s going to tell you how she’s got ESP.”