The Believers (7 page)

Audrey's initial response had been one of derision. She sang snatches of "Hava Nagila" and asked Rosa if she intended to marry one of those smelly old men with the payess. It was Joel who was nakedly enraged. That Rosa had succumbed, however temporarily, to the idiocy of faith was terrible enough, he told her. That she should have chosen Judaism in which to dabble could only be construed as an act of parricidal malice. "This is bullshit!" he yelled at one point. "I know you! You're constitutionally incapable of buying into this kind of fairy tale. You never even believed in the tooth fairy, for Christ's sake!"

Rosa had to smile at that. She was not so swept away that she could not see the high comedy of this spiritual seduction: a Litvinoff daughter, a third-generation atheist, an enemy of all forms of magical thinking, wandering into synagogue one day and finding her inner Jew. But there it was. Something had happened to her, something she could not ignore or deny. And there was a sense in which its unlikelihood, its horrible
inconvenience
, was precisely what made it so compelling.

In the synagogue now, the service had come to an end. From her seat in the balcony, Rosa watched an old man hobbling out of the sanctuary. He was so bent over with age that he looked as if he were searching for lost coins on the floor. She thought of her father in his hospital bed, still as an effigy on a tomb. After a moment, she lowered her head and began to pray.

CHAPTER
4

For an hour or so, Lenny and Karla had been urging Audrey to let them take her home so that she could get some rest. Audrey refused to countenance the idea of leaving Joel alone at the hospital overnight, so at last it was agreed that Karla would accompany her mother back to Manhattan to collect some clothes and that Lenny would hold the fort until Audrey returned.

When Karla and Audrey drew up at Perry Street, Julie was out on the doorstep, beating a rug. "Look at her," Audrey muttered. "I wish someone would put
her
in a coma."

"Hello, Aud," Julie called as they got out of the car. "What's the news?"

Audrey ignored the question. "Got everything disinfected, have you?" she snarled as she swept past.

"Oh, don't mind me," Julie said, "I like to do it!"

Inside the house, Audrey and Karla met Colin emerging from the downstairs bathroom, where he had been affixing a floral-scented flush device to the toilet bowl. He was wearing rubber gloves and one of Audrey's old aprons emblazoned with an image of a black fist and the word
AMANDLA!

"Aud," he said, lurching toward Audrey with his arms outstretched. "How
is
he?"

"Hello, Col." Audrey swerved deftly past him, leaving Karla to pretend that his proffered embrace had been for her.

"Oh, she looks terrible," Colin whispered in Karla's ear as Audrey proceeded downstairs to the basement.

"What's going on then?" Julie hissed, coming up behind them.

Karla gave her aunt and uncle a brief account of Joel's condition. They dropped their jaws and pressed their hands to their mouths in kabuki mimes of horror and dismay.

"I just can't believe it," Julie said. "He was as right as rain this morning, wasn't he, Col?"

Colin nodded.

"We had a lovely long chat with him, didn't we?"

Colin nodded again, with less conviction this time.

"He's been doing too much," Julie went on. "I said to Colin just yesterday, it's not right, the way he rushes around. My friend's husband got cancer last year." She lowered her voice to a whisper. "
Cancer of the bottom
. And the doctors told my friend it was one hundred percent stress-related.
One hundred percent
--"

"I think," Karla interrupted in a quiet voice, "I should go down and see if Mom's all right."

The basement at Perry Street was given over to Joel's chaotic office. Dirty coffee mugs and tottering ziggurats of books and papers covered most of the desk and a good part of the floor around it. A large framed photograph of Joel shaking hands with Martin Luther King Jr. hung above the desk, but otherwise the grubby walls were bare. Audrey was sitting cross-legged on the floor, rolling a joint, when Karla came down. Her overcoat, which she had not yet taken off, was puddled around her, like a melted candle.

Karla drew up one of the spindly revolving office chairs. "Do you want me to go up and pack a bag for you?" she asked.

"I think I can pick out my own knickers, Karla," Audrey replied.

"Oh, I know," Karla said, "I just thought..." She stood up. "I should probably call Rosa and tell her what's going on."

Audrey shook her head. "She can call herself if she wants to know."

Karla bit her lip anxiously. She felt awful about the fight at the hospital. If it hadn't been for her grinning like an idiot, Rosa would not have felt obliged to speak up for her. Still--she glanced at Audrey--there was no point in agitating her mother any further. She would just have to wait and call Rosa later on. She began wandering about the room, gathering up dirty coffee cups.

"Don't do that," Audrey said.

"I might as well, Mom--"

"Leave it."

Karla sat down again.

Her mother studied her with dissatisfaction. "You look like you've put on weight," Audrey said.

"Thank you."

"Don't get the hump. No one else is going to say it."

"Okay," Karla said evenly.

"What kind of a response is that?"

"I don't know. Just...okay."

Rosa often berated Karla for her passivity in the face of Audrey's remarks about her weight. "Why do you put up with it?" she asked. "Why don't you just tell her to fuck off?" But Karla never did. She could not have explained it to Rosa, but there was something in the brutal candor of her mother's sallies that pleased her. Her mother was right: no one else would say such things to her. No one else would ever speak the dread word "fat" in her presence. It was not for want of courage so much as lack of interest. It would simply never occur to anyone else that Karla's figure was worthy of comment.

Her problems with size were not, after all, a recent phenomenon. She had been sent to her first summer fat-camp in the Berkshires when she was twelve. While the matter of her girth was an intense and ongoing saga for
her--
a daily drama of doughnuts nobly forsworn and later feverishly salvaged from the garbage; of nonfat yogurt lunches canceled out by furtive french-fry snacks; of painfully tiny losses and appallingly sudden gains--for most people, she could see, her weight did not register as any sort of narrative at all. It was a static fact, an eternal and therefore unremarkable feature of the landscape. Only her mother, it seemed, was still sufficiently invested to notice when she grew infinitesimally smaller or bigger. Only her mother retained faith in the possibility of a non-enormous Karla. Although Audrey didn't like to speak of it as a rule, she too had had weight problems when she was young. Once, long ago, she had shown Karla a picture of herself, aged nine--a furious, balloon-faced child, busting out from her frilly nylon party dress like a sausage from its casing. "You get it from me, love," she had said, sadly. "And I got it from my mum. The only answer is discipline. Constant discipline."

"Are you going to do something about it?" Audrey asked now. "The weight?"

"Yes."

"It's important, you know. Mike might not say it, but believe me, he'd be over the moon if you lost forty pounds."

Karla was silent, wondering if her husband had actually been so disloyal as to discuss her weight with her mother.

"And," Audrey went on, "apart from anything else, it'd probably help you with getting pregnant. It can't help. The extra flab, I mean."

Karla nodded. "Uh-huh."

"And how is all that?"

"What?"

"The trying to get pregnant."

"Mom!"

"What's the big deal?"

Upstairs, the doorbell rang.

"That'll be Mike," Karla said, getting up. "I told him to meet me here."

"Stay," Audrey ordered. "Julie'll get it. What were you going to say about trying to get pregnant?"

"I wasn't. There's nothing to say."

"Oh, fine. Be a woman of mystery."

There was a pause, and Karla allowed herself to hope that her mother had now exhausted the subject of her fertility.

"So." Audrey took a long, hungry drag on her joint. "How much
do
you weigh at the moment?"

"Mom..."

Her mother smirked. "All right, buzz off then. You don't need to babysit me."

Karla found Mike and Colin and Julie in the front room, emanating the slightly affronted gloom of relatives who have been consigned to the sidelines of a family drama. At the sight of Karla, they all set their teacups down and stood up. Mike approached Karla and pressed his cheek against hers. "Where's Ma?" he asked. "Can I go see her?"

Karla shook her head. "I'd hold on for a bit. She'll be up soon."

"I told him he should wait," Julie said crossly. Clearly, she thought Mike's behavior very pushy for someone who wasn't even a blood relation.

"I think I should go down," Mike said.

Karla laid a restraining hand on his arm. "No, Mike, really, I wouldn't."

Mike's presence in her parents' house always made Karla tense. In private with her, he often spoke unkindly of Joel and Audrey. He accused them of being self-satisfied champagne socialists and claimed--not entirely unjustly--that they thought he was boring. Yet whenever he came to Perry Street all trace of this animosity disappeared, and he became feverishly anxious to please and impress. He flirted with Audrey and sucked up to Joel. He pontificated about politics and used lots of gratuitously fancy words incorrectly. (Once, after Karla had gently pointed out to Mike that the phrase "mute point," which he had been using all evening with her parents, was correctly pronounced "moot point," he had refused to speak to her for three days.) It never occurred to Karla to give the disparity between Mike's private pronouncements and his public behavior the name of hypocrisy. She thought it touching that in spite of all his understandable class resentment, he should still crave her parent's good opinion. She only wished, for his sake, that he could relax a little and not try so hard. Rosa and Lenny were always sniggering at his obsequious manners behind his back. And even Audrey and Joel, who were by no means averse to the subtler forms of flattery, seemed embarrassed at times by the brazenness of their son-in-law's fawning. "He's a good kid," Joel had once remarked after Mike had left the house, "but Christ almighty, I wish he'd stop kissing my ass."

"Do you think Aud's hungry?" Colin asked now. "She should probably have a bite to eat."

Karla, who had consumed nothing since the hospital Danish, stood up quickly. "I'll go and see what's in the fridge,"

"No, no," Julie protested. "Let me. You've had a long day."

Karla felt a mild panic at the thought of being hostage to someone else's culinary choices. She liked to prepare her own food. "Honestly, Julie--it's no trouble."

"But I'd
like
to do it."

The polite but intense struggle over who would get to author the refreshments was still going on when Audrey appeared.

"Ma!" Mike said, advancing quickly across the living room. He hugged his mother-in-law tightly and then held her at arm's length, to study her face. "You look tired. Come, sit down."

Karla glanced over at her aunt and uncle. Colin was watching Mike much as a circus audience watches a lion tamer placing his head in the lioness's jaw: half admiring the courage, half desirous of witnessing a bloody calamity. Julie, taking advantage of the distraction, was attempting to scuttle out to the kitchen unnoticed. Unwilling to accept defeat, Karla pursued her.

When the two women returned to the living room fifteen minutes later with a tray of sandwiches, they found Audrey standing in front of the fireplace. "It's an absolute disgrace," she was saying. "It's a fucking travesty!" Colin was sitting pinkly in an armchair, pretending to read a magazine. Mike was pacing.

"What's wrong?" Karla asked. "What's going on?"

"Honestly, Karla," Audrey said, "I don't know how you could put up with this. I couldn't show my face if I were you."

"What are you talking about, Mom?"

"The endorsement!" Audrey shouted. "Did your husband not tell you? Your shitty fucking union is planning to endorse the governor for reelection."

Karla's mouth opened and closed. She looked at Mike. "Is it true?"

Earlier in the year, the Republican governor had pledged two billion dollars to raising salaries for the union's employees, and there had been widespread speculation that he was buying the union's support for his reelection bid. Karla had refused to believe it. The governor had reinstated the death penalty in New York. He had vetoed an increase in the minimum wage. Her union, she had insisted, would never stoop to doing deals with a man like that.

Mike squared his shoulders defiantly. "It's nothing to be ashamed of," he said. "The governor has been a good friend to the union."

"Shame!" Audrey cried.

Julie set the tray of sandwiches down on the coffee table. "Food's up!"

Audrey shook her head. "I haven't got time for food. I have to get back to the hospital."

"Oh, Audrey," Julie protested, "you must eat something. Look, I made cheese and mayonnaise just the way you like it."

"I'm going to get my clothes," Audrey said, walking out of the room.

A moment later, she called to Karla from the staircase. Karla hurried over to the door. "Yes, Mom?"

"Just remember, Karl," Audrey shouted, "no more than two of those sandwiches, all right?"

Karla and Mike were quiet most of the long subway ride home to the Bronx. Mike groomed his hair with the special military hairbrush that he kept in his briefcase, and read the paper. Karla examined advertisements for technology institutes--"Are you ready for a rewarding career in database management?"--and gazed out at the tunnel.

"I'm worried," she said eventually. "I think Dad might die."

"Don't talk like that," Mike said. His tone was gruff, irritated.

Karla glanced at him. "I'm sorry you got a hard time from Mom tonight."

Mike turned his head to the side, considering his profile in the train window. "It's no more than I expected. She doesn't understand union politics. She thinks she knows better than the leadership how to best serve the members."

Karla nodded. He was right, of course. The leaders knew what they were doing. If they judged that supporting the governor was the best thing for the union, it really wasn't Audrey's place--or Karla's--to second-guess the decision. "Do we...will we have to vote for him, then?" she asked.

Mike bristled. "What do you think? There's no point in an endorsement if the members don't follow the directive."

"Right, no, I see. I just wondered."

Mike looked up as the train pulled into the Bedford Place station. "This is us."

Karla and Mike lived on a dark prewar block just down the street from the Bronx Botanical Gardens. The hallways of their building were permeated by the fumes of a vicious Mexican cleaning agent called Fabuloso that the super used to sluice the floors twice a week. Upon entering the building, Karla always took care to breathe through her mouth for the first five seconds or so in order to offset the initial olfactory shock.

This evening, as she stood greenly by the elevators, waiting for Mike to check the mailbox, the elevator doors opened and a middle-aged Filipino woman in knee socks and plastic sandals stepped out. "Hello, Mrs. Mee," Karla said. "How are you?"