Radar came back down the stairs. “Why mommy sad?”
“I don’t know,” said Kermin.
“Someone mean her?”
“Come,” he said. He took his son by the hand and led him back upstairs.
• • •
THE NIGHT AFTER they received the article, Kermin, a man who did not drink but was clearly drunk, barged into their evening bubble bath, shortwave radio in hand.
“There is no more tests!” he said. “Jebeš ljekare!”
“Kerm, careful!”
He swayed. “No more tests, do you hear me?”
“Okay, calm down. Don’t yell so loud.”
“And no more doctors!”
“Okay.”
“Fuck this Fitzgerald so-and-so.”
“Kerm.”
“We know more than he does, and we know nothing! If he cannot find such-and-such, then there is nothing to find. Moj sin je zdrav.”
He reached into the bathtub to touch Radar’s head and tripped, dropping the radio into the sea of bubbles. The shortwave, chattering away, sputtered, slurped, and went silent. Charlene screamed, thinking they would both be electrocuted. She clutched their child to her chest. Radar, dark and radiant against his mother’s pale skin, began to whimper. Kermin grasped clumsily at his machine and promptly fell into the bath with them.
A shocked silence. And then Kermin started to laugh. After a moment, Charlene joined him. They laughed and built a tower of bubbles on Radar’s head, who waved at his crown. The air parted, the clouds receding. They did not have to fix this anymore.
6
It was a clean break, or as clean a break as you could hope for. In the months that followed, Charlene felt closer than she had ever felt to Kermin. They started sleeping together again for the first time in almost a year, though she still insisted on using at least two forms of birth control.
Perhaps sensing their daughter had turned over a new leaf, her parents offered to help them buy a house, an offer that Charlene begrudgingly accepted. They moved out of their apartment in Elizabeth and into a single-family faux colonial on a tight suburban street in Kearny, away from the Serbian community that had sustained and battered them. The sultry S-curve of the Passaic River formed the real and imagined border between their old lives and new.
Charlene brought all of her books with her — boxes and boxes of them. There was ample shelving in the new house, and she spread out her collection across several rooms, their spines clustered according to color. Visiting the new house, her mother said the library looked like a Rothko painting.
“It’s not a bad thing,” she said. “Just different.”
Soon after, Charlene hung white sheets in front of the shelves, as if to protect the books from an imminent construction project that never came. The sheets, once hung, were accepted and then forgotten, and would remain in place for the next thirty years. To fetch a book, you had to step through the curtain into another realm, into a mausoleum of forgotten bindings.
Kermin also moved his business across the Passaic, to a lonely little block in Harrison, next to a synagogue and a karate studio. Without the cultural patronage of the Serbs, he had trouble attracting new clients, and what little business which had sustained him in Elizabeth quickly dried up. Kermin sat in his new shop, surrounded by his electronic parts, and waited for the jingle of a bell that rarely came. He was perhaps the best TV-and-radio repairman in New Jersey, but he was not a people person, and the tiny television had not quite caught on in America in the way he had predicted. Americans liked big and bigger, and, most often, biggest. When things broke, they were more likely to buy a new one than fix what they already had.
Once settled into their new home, they enrolled Radar in a local day care. For the first time since his birth, Charlene felt comfortable enough to release him into the care of others.
“He must meet friends, kids, boys, everyone,” said Kermin. “So he can be normal.”
The day care was a brick-and-pastel compound called Shady Dale Tots. The playground out front was padded. There were two neon turtles you could ride like ponies. The adults at Shady Dale Tots cooed and pinched Radar’s cheeks. After his first day, Radar asked Charlene why there were no doctors, only other kids like him.
Her newfound free time terrified her. In the mornings, she would often sit with a copy of the Star-Ledger, a perpetually disappointing, perpetually comforting cultural artifact, reading and half reading, taking little sentence-long sips from stories that outlined the misfortunes of others. One morning, after burning clear through the local news, Charlene suddenly found herself in the classifieds — rare territory she usually found a touch gauche, a touch desperate even for her tastes. (Who would go public with something like that?) But now, faced with these crowded columns of informal commerce, she found herself voyeuristically scanning the personals and job listings and for-sale items. A thousand potential worlds awaited her attention. The personals were particularly mystifying, for the carefully ascribed acronyms and decontextualized details (“SWDM, 58 seeks SWF for LTR. I’m a Catholic-turned-atheist”) made each sound like an encoded diplomatic cable rather than an intimate come-on. In some ways, their impossible brevity reminded her of the obituaries that she had once collected as a child, but these missives were not meant to memorialize a life gone by. The personal ads had been crafted by living, breathing people who were awaiting actual responses. Their summary was like a death before death.
It was then that her eyes fell upon a nondescript ad in the bottom right-hand corner of the page:
DO YOU HAVE A SENSITIVITY TO TASTE AND/OR SMELL?
The International Flavor and Aroma Corporation of Elizabeth, NJ is looking for select, qualified candidates for several entry-level flavorist, perfumer, and quality control positions. Industry and/or science background helpful but not necessary. Apply to: IFAC H&R, PO Box 4923, Elizabeth, NJ 07207
Charlene read the ad twice through and then once more. She took a pair of scissors and carefully cut it out with four neat little snips. When she was done, the slip of newspaper lay by itself on the table. She fetched a piece of paper, fully intending to respond, but when she tried to write a reply, she found she had nothing to write. After several attempts, she gave up. She hid the ad inside a recipe booklet and tried to forget she had ever seen it.
Still, she realized she needed to find some type of job. Kermin’s business was floundering, and even with the financial assistance of her parents (who were incidentally also paying for Radar’s day care), they were in increasing need of a steady source of reliable income. Maureen, mother of Bryan, one of Radar’s day care buddies, found Charlene a position as a part-time receptionist at the semi-upscale hair salon where she worked. The pay wasn’t much, but it kept her busy.
One day at day care pickup, Charlene and Maureen lingered, chatting. Maureen was quietly becoming one of her few confidants. Close female friends were unusual for Charlene, who naturally drifted toward the gruff honesty (and the associated sexual complications) of male companionship. But Maureen was perky and kind and eternally optimistic — everything that Charlene was not.
“I was all, ‘If you try that again, we’ve got a problem,’” Maureen was saying. “You know what I mean, honey? You just can’t take that from people.”
Charlene, half listening, watched the children. She was aware — not for the first time — of their incredible whiteness. They appeared almost sickly under the fluorescent lights, as if they had never been exposed to the sun. The boy with the bowl cut whose name she could never remember was playing a block game with Bryan. Radar sat in his usual spot in the corner, contentedly rewiring one of his radios. At first the teachers had frowned upon having such dangerous elements in the classroom, but when they witnessed the degree to which Radar was consumed by his electronics, they had reluctantly made an exception.