* * *
Huddie finishes his glass, a thin, sugary white, and wishes again that he’d brought decent wine instead of those irises, now bending in half over the jars she’s jammed them into. He puts a splinter of raw zucchini in his mouth and thinks of all the great meals he’s made, all the hot, oily bits, melting disks of fat and sugar he’s needed, to fill the space this short-tempered, weary woman left in him. Reaching for a fallen bottle of oregano, Elizabeth looks for a moment like June’s white twin. Muscular women, one plush layer over a wide back and hard legs striding until the last march. Bobcat wrestlers, point guards, piano-moving women. Stand in their way and be moved, fool. Elizabeth straightens up. He has misremembered. She has five inches on June and none of her broad curves. But her girl-arrow shape widens now to a protective, unshakable stance just like June’s, what love light there is shines only on their children’s faces. Except something else crosses Elizabeth’s face, opening and closing like a night rose. Her young face was two curved blades pointing to her square chin. Now there are soft velvet pleats along the jaw, a row of faint, sweet ridges he would like to touch as she lowers her head to check the vegetables. And as she bends over awkwardly to get a roasting pan for the little pink potatoes, not the practiced kneel of stewardesses and office ladies, all of whom know that men are always looking, Elizabeth bends her knees only a little and her ass juts out, hips low and wide, her waist calling for his hands, her ass pressing toward him in those old jeans with their white, pulling seams, and Huddie thinks that it was for this that he has lived so long. Lead me on to that light, Lord, lead me home.
* * *
“Sylvan,” Max says after dinner, looking out at the yard, his legs stretched out from the couch to the coffee table, like Huddie’s.
Huddie says nothing. Don’t mock my child. Do not say “Sylvan?” like it’s a sissy ten-dollar word. Do not say “You mean green?” like no real boy would say anything else. Say “You are a faggot, Max.” And then I’ll have to kill you, and my grieving, delicate boy will be shuffled from foster home to foster home, bullied by no-neck monsters, made to wear polyester clothes that will so madden him he’ll run away at the age of fourteen — I can see him with blond down on his cheeks, little gosling tufts — and find himself go-go dancing in some big-city Combat Zone, stripping down to a sequined, bulging G-string to the strains of “Over the Rainbow” for sticky dollar bills from the hands of vile middle-aged men.
“Yeah, it is,” Horace says.
“I love that,” Max says.
“Yeah.”
Huddie and Max sit on Max’s bed. This is the beautiful room in my house. I held his little biscuit feet in my hands, in this room. And beneath those feet, my hands, which I had always admired for their smoothness, were as worn and rough as cedar bark. Ivory angel feet, with opal nails and satin soles. And my hands became his steps, my body his playground, and my whole past was dissolved into his immediate, inescapable now.
Max’s bedroom walls are the elegant Parisian yellow my mother would have chosen, and the ivy stencils from floor to ceiling are also her kind of thing. It was my last unnecessary effort. We came home to this house and three barely furnished rooms and nine drifting, cocooned, and expensive months together. We lived in baby time, where if you’ve cleaned up the spilled talcum and gotten to and from the grocery store, you’ve had a day. I had no other life than Maxie’s, and I could neither remember nor imagine one. A leisurely shower elated me. Tiny red sneakers on sale with matching red and white teddy-bear print socks thrilled me. Burned toast and puddles of zwieback filled the kitchen and I swept it all into the garbage whenever I had the energy. I saw people only as they saw Max, and so I was inclined to love them. My father sent several thoughtful but not excessive checks and a stuffed pink panda, so gaudy and lush I could only assume his new wife had picked it out. He did not send a ticket to Oregon, and I thought, He’s seventy, he’s got a fifty-year-old wife with two college-age kids, her elderly, forgetful mother lives with them, fair enough. Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms. Sol had found the right family, finally, including a stepdaughter who screamed good-naturedly at him in the background, “Sol, Jesus fucking Christ, I’m waiting for a call, you know. Tell her Max is gorgeous, send her a crazy big check, and lemme talk to Kenny before the concert’s sold out.” I thought that when she dropped out of college and got tired of Kenny, I might persuade her to babysit Max. And me.
The apostle spoons went on the shelf over the changing table, and Max had every bath in the company of gospel greats. Greta found me and sent a painting of crows and snakes, which I put back in its crate and hid in the attic, beneath zipperless luggage and winter clothes. My mother was dead but showed up in dreams so hilarious and realistic I had to believe that her soul had migrated to my subconscious, from which it was now directing late-night cinema. In my dreams, we discussed breast and bottle feeding, the right age for solids, wheat allergies, and the ways in which Max was clearly superior to the little white lumps we’d bubbled next to at the YMCA Tot Swim. We agreed on everything, and when I wavered in my own convictions, my mother, in the pale, pale lilac charmeuse evening dress she wore when I was nine, assembled experts from Anna Freud to Oscar Wilde to reassure me.
Huddie puts his hand out to smooth Max’s hair, spread out on the pillow. He has done this a thousand times, and always with pleasure, but not to hair like this.
“I go to Hebrew School. I’m in Hey. Last year, I was in Daleth. That’s practically babies. We carpool with the Shwartzes and the Manellis. I hate her. She’s really, you know, she stinks.”
Huddie gives the blanket a tug and sits down, moving two black velour gorillas (one with red bow tie, one with peelable banana in paw) to the foot of the bed. In the language of parents and children, Max knows this means his time is almost up; Huddie anticipates the last sleep-defying whoosh of conversation, Max’s long day swirling out in a cloud of words and coded feeling.
“Are you Jewish?”
“No, I’m not. I go to church from time to time.” The ten years he was a deacon are a flat dream, a life built from the outside in: deacon, Chamber of Commerce president, New York Produces Man of the Year, County Youth Basketball coach, good father, good husband, as far as the job went.
“Some people convert.” Max says this into the foot of an eyeless Raggedy Andy doll. “Our snack lady was born Catholic.”
“Uh-uh. There will be no conversion, Mister Max. I think being Jewish is great for you and your mom. But I’m not Jewish.”
“I don’t think it really hurts that much,” Max insists. Huddie winces and wonders if that is really Max’s point, to say “I know you have one. I have one, too. And we are not alike and if I could I’d get the men who are like me to cut yours off.” Max shows what Huddie recognizes as a full-court-press smile: both dimples and the upper lip slightly lifted to reveal the shining white incisors. He is not without weapons, after all. Max raises his arm, and for an insane minute Huddie thinks Max will rest his small hand on Huddie’s groin. The boy takes a headless Ken from under his blanket and tosses it into the garbage.