Sitting with Elizabeth in a diner twenty miles from Great Neck, his hands circling her wrists, Max could not remember what he had planned to say. Her face was a little thinner. New contact lenses made her eyes brightly pink and round as little lightbulbs. She looked bored.
“I’d love to have you visit me this summer. I might take a little place in the city. Do you think that might be fun? Or maybe a cabin in the Berkshires?”
“I don’t know.” She made a nest of torn sugar packets around her coffee cup.
“Think it over. It’s the end of June now. If you could decide this week, I could start looking. We could start looking, if you felt like it.”
Max and Elizabeth shared, for twenty seconds, exactly the same mental picture: Max and Elizabeth trudging from walk-up to walk-up, meeting a dozen rental agents whose pleasant surprise at this nice father-daughter pair curdles before the plumbing’s been tested.
“No, I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll tell you next week.”
“I’ll take maybe, milacku. Maybe yes? Is that yes for a visit or yes for — for a long visit?”
Elizabeth was done. Between his fat shrimp fingers around her wrist and the last sugar packet. Done. Now everything out of her mouth would be a lie, and she smiled like he was her favorite person.
“Maybe yes. Maybe very likely yes, a long visit. I could stay for a month or six weeks if you want, but I don’t even want to talk about it for another week, okay? There’s been too much going on.”
“Okay, baby girl.” He kissed each of the ten fingers he’d been squeezing. “Of course that’s okay.”
“Don’t call me for a week,” she said.
“Whatever you say. You’re the boss.”
They kissed, and Elizabeth thought, This is it, this is the last time I’m doing this.
Max thought, Yes, Lord, help me turn this around, even now, and I will be your devoted servant. Help me. The boys aren’t babies, they can see this is killing us, it can’t be good for them, seeing us suffer. Greta will be better off without me, she’ll be more independent, she’ll be a better mother, God, she’ll probably recover, she’ll become a counselor for other agoraphobic ladies, write a book about it, she’ll make a lot of money. She’ll remarry some nice Jewish guy, not to be another father, but a nice guy, bald, a podiatrist. And Lizzie and I will be like other happy couples, whoever they are, except she is so beautifully young, and we will be beyond happy, sweet Jesus, and want only each other.
Everything that drove Elizabeth crazy about Rachel turned out to be exactly what was called for in their Great Getaway. Rachel persuaded her father to lend them the station wagon, drove all the way uptown to Columbia University to collect sleeping bags from her brother and his roommate, showed her interested parents and an utterly bored Margaret the AAA trip map, and pointed out all the educational side trips and that no day’s drive was more than a reasonable 250 miles. Rachel, who would become a fine doctor, would also have made an excellent president or a criminal genius. Elizabeth’s only job was to be pleasant to her mother for the remaining eight days and remember her camera and a heavy sweater for the cold nights in the Rockies. Rachel packed two of most items, assuming that Elizabeth would forget almost everything, which she did, knowing that Rachel would pack two. For nine weeks they drove across America, eating apple-butter-and-whole-wheat sandwiches, kissing boys who were handsome only by the firelight of various campgrounds, and becoming expert at putting on eyeliner using their Sierra Club cups as mirrors.
Huddie lies on the gritty floor. He smells the drops of sweat spattered on the shining wood, sees the frayed plastic tip of the ref’s shoelace; his face is near enough to the man’s left sneaker to lay his tongue on it. Water roars through both ears. He hears only a dense, cupping sound. Huddie concentrates on these things to keep from screaming. He has to cry. The ring of fire in his right knee flames dark red up his whole side, and his flesh must be falling off in seared chunks now. Kind faces he recognizes but can’t place hover over him, and he sinks into a grey minty ocean and sees Elizabeth arched back above him, white legs tight around him, their black hairs joined, green trees over them, his fists wrapped in her long hair, his face deep soft between her breasts. His mother’s hand, wide, gardenia-scented, slides up his face, into nothing.
Max’s letters found Elizabeth at college and she read them, the only thick, nicely written letters of her life, of course she read them and cried and returned them all, except the last one.
March 6, 1974
Dearest girl,
I won’t begin with another lament. If you were moved by my misery, I would have heard from you in the last three years. I’m no longer astonished, you’ll be indifferent to hear, that you ran off like that. I am not even astonished that a relationship that I thought made us both happy was obviously a burden to you, one to be shed at the earliest possible moment.
I said to you, in one of our very sweet times together, you were sitting on my lap, that you would break my heart. As I recall, you weren’t in the least upset or guilty, just annoyed with me for bringing it up. And rightly so. Since we both knew what the ending would be, why harp on it?
I regret wasting even one second of those times on anger and shame and self-pity. I am trying my damnedest now to live in the past whenever possible and expect to continue doing so.
You, of course, have moved on and so I won’t be writing again.
I never think of you with anything but love.
Your Max
The Night Is Dark
“Every couple has a life,” Greta said. “Bury me.”
Max stood up, staring at the ocean bleached and mirrored in the late afternoon sun.
“I know you thought ours would be a happy life, and so you are disappointed. Please bury me, I’ve got everything but my arm.”
He put one foot out, pushed a little hill of sand toward her brown arm, and walked closer to the water.
Greta raised her voice. “Come, just a little more, Max. Just my arm. I am not asking for the world, you know, just a little sand.”
He didn’t move.
“I did think it would be a happy life. That is what people think. That’s why they marry and have children. In anticipation of further joy, of multiplying happinesses.”
“Maybe that’s why Americans marry. People like me marry and have children because we are apparently not dead, because we are grateful, because we wish to become like the others. To experience normal despair and disappointment. Garden-variety unhappiness. So, I am not sorry. We have had a normal life together.”
Max was not surprised, not even inclined to argue, when Greta described insomnia and agoraphobia, sex both dismal and frightening, and the death of their oldest child as a normal life, but he was not comforted.
“Do you know what I remember most when I came here? Betty Boop. They showed her all the time, late at night, early in the morning, some channel in New Jersey. They love Betty Boop. And Bimbo and Koko. And Shirley Temple, day and night. Polly wolly doodle. The Littlest Rebel. Did you see that?”
“No. I was selling shoes or still killing Germans. Whatever I was doing, I wasn’t watching cartoons or musicals commemorating the good old days of slavery.” He came back from the water and put two scoops of damp sand on Greta’s arm.
“Do the rest, Max, just cover me up.”
He did, and when she wiggled two long fingers, he covered those, and when they broke free again, to show that it wasn’t enough, he mounded the sand six inches high on top of her hand and crowned it with a sprig of stiff black seaweed.