“I’m giving you the candle holders,” Greta said.
I Surrender All
Not long after Max’s last letter, Elizabeth came home for one final weekend before the end of spring, shortly before she would have to find herself a real home. Standing on line at the Bagel Hut, squashed between two suede jackets, she stood patiently, even penitently, the edges of a pink sequinned turban brushing her eyelids. At each jingle of the door chime, everyone turned to scrutinize the next wave of customers: a pushy newcomer, sneaking in at the head of the line to make off with the really fresh bagels and the last of the whitefish chubs, or someone fondly, vaguely remembered from the old neighborhood, before everybody had become middle-aged and found themselves with expensive, youthful clothing and spoiled children. In Great Neck a woman’s face or hair color meant nothing; only the backs of the hands and the little hump at the base of the neck told you the truth.
Elizabeth turned at the jingle, with everyone else, and saw Max. She pushed through the crowd surging into the small space she’d left and held on to his sleeve, making herself talk.
“Hi. I can’t believe you’re in here. Margaret’s getting married tonight. That’s why I’m back.”
“That’s why you’re back?”
Something had changed his face. Whatever it was had torn up his cheeks, leaving them so soft and pulpy that if she’d had the nerve to touch him, skin would have stuck to her finger.
“Max, are you all right?”
He backed out of the store, brushing against the thick coats, his hands feeling for the doorpull behind him.
Elizabeth followed him onto the street, forgetting the whitefish salad and bagels and three kinds of cream cheese she’d offered to pick up for the get-acquainted lunch with her mother’s groom and his sister. She stood a few steps behind Max, thinking, He is not walking away from me, he loves me.
“Go home, Elizabeth.”
“I am going home, this was my last stop. What is wrong with you?”
Max kept going, bent over like some dark-jacketed horseshoe crab scuttling for retreat, for the absence of contact.
“I’m sorry I didn’t write. I just … I don’t know, I couldn’t. I’m really sorry. Max, I’m really sorry.” She yelled into the cold, garlicky air, startling two women halfway into Bagel Hut, friends of Margaret’s who waved and watched as Max walked faster. Max and Elizabeth stood half a block apart, on either side of the bank parking lot where he’d taught her to drive a stick-shift, and he shouted something the wind took away, and then he stopped.
It was tears. Tears had changed his face, as they were changing it right now, breaking down his flesh with little hammers until there was nothing left but watery mass and two red wells of misery.
“No one told you?”
“Max, I don’t talk to anyone anymore. Rachel’s in Kenya. Is it the boys?”
“Benjamin.”
They sat on the bench across from the parking lot and Max told Elizabeth about Benjamin, about Greta reluctantly, bravely taking him to his Cub Scout meeting, about the wet leaves and the teenage boy driving the van too fast around a narrow corner, one that had already been marked with a DANGEROUS CURVE sign. And the car partially crushed into the trees, leaving Greta enough room not only to move around but to open her door and walk out to greet the ambulance. And it looked like Benjie would recover, not even be scarred by all the glass, and then he got an infection.
“You know he had Addisons? It only seems that no one in my family has an immune system; Benjie really didn’t. The scratches from the accident killed him. I moved back in; I had to, since Greta was hardly leaving the house after that. She’s seeing a shrink now, the guy I used to see. The boys are in therapy, too. I don’t know, I think it helps Danny, but he’s the strong one anyway. Marc is just …” Max turned away. “The world is a terrible place, sweetheart.”
She touched the edge of his jacket for comfort, fingering the little cracks in the old leather.
“I’m here. If you need me, I’m here.”
“No, you’re not. You’re at college, leading a college girl life, and I am here, leading my life. Enough.” He stood up. Elizabeth sat like a lump, arms around her legs. She shook her head, wanting to tell him it looked like she would actually graduate in June, that she’d passed all her courses and turned in all her papers, despite occasional, profound lapses in concentration, two weeklong bouts of self-prescribed bed rest, and several trials of psychotropic medications that left her dry-mouthed and dizzy, something pale green and sticky leaking from her right breast.
She had watched Rachel take college the way she’d taken the road cross-country, carefully aggressive, hardly checking the map, since all the signs seemed so clear to her and fairly helpful. Elizabeth’s college life had been like her driving, too: she did it because she believed she had to (only one application, scribbled in midwinter, while standing in the post office), she never once intuited the right direction, and she understood that her safe arrival, at the end of these four years, owed more to other people’s skill and sensible swerving than to her own efforts.
“I am here for you, just like you were for me. I can help,” Elizabeth said, and cried into the sleeve of her sweater, relieved that she did not, in fact, know what to do, that that had not changed between them.
“Don’t cry,” he said, as kindly as he could. He would have been dimly pleased to hear she was graduating, dimly concerned about the blackouts, but she was alive and Ben was not and her breasts were nothing to him now, unless they could be traded, every moment of them, for him. He hugged her to be rid of her, looking forward to walking back alone, to weeping inside for Ben, to preparing for another evening of emotional heavy lifting and grey, pointless goodness, for Danny’s driving lesson, for Marc’s marathon TV-watching, for the balanced meal he cooked (not that Greta ate), for creating a father for his remaining, less loved boys, now desperately seeking their own lives, if only he will let them go.
And Elizabeth pressed in close, smelling his cigarette smoke and his Scotch and his Barbasol shaving cream, smells so woven into her sense of life that the sight of those striped cans on a supermarket shelf will make her eyes swell with tears for years to come, even after she forgets this conversation.
“Anything you want, Max,” she said, to reach into him without his really hearing, so he’d let her in without knowing he’d done so.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Go home, milacku.”
Margaret laid out daughter-of-the-bride clothes, layering them from the peach silk skirt to the white lace blouse, an ivory nylon slip and pale peach pantyhose on top of the pile. Peach peau de soie shoes faced the bed. Idiot-proof dressing. Elizabeth drank champagne while she showered, drank stingers while she dried her hair, put on socially appropriate makeup, although not the peach-toned stuff her mother had piled suggestively in front of the bathroom mirror. She simulated eye contact by looking at people’s foreheads and she fought back nausea when her mother promised to spend her life with Aaron Price, the psychiatrist she’d had in mind for Elizabeth in the bad old days. Elizabeth spent the rest of the afternoon and some part of the night in the ferocious blank haze that gives alcohol its good name.
Still drunk at dawn, she left her mother the nicest note she could and drove back to college. Instead of showing up for the graduation ceremony, she put on the peach skirt and the white lace blouse and got a job in a safe place.
What Else Can I Do?