“What are you doing? We don’t have time for you to take her in,” I tell my daughter.
“We’re not going to just leave her here.”
“She’s a grown woman,” I explain, as Roslyn, almost as if in response to this, groans. At least, that’s how she responds when I start pulling on her leg.
“No…Western…medicine,” Roslyn manages. It takes a minute. She says all this without opening her eyes, channeling it from whatever dark pit to which her consciousness has been repelled.
“You’ve taken quite shock,” I tell her. I try to make my voice as soothing as possible, while still yelling it at her. “It’s probably for the best you get it looked at.”
“No,” Roslyn says again. At least that’s what I think she says. It’s hard to hear when the ambulance pulls in behind us with its lights on, and starts honking. When the driver gets out of the cab, there’s some yelling too. By then Roslyn, eyes closed, has apparently drifted off again. I put my hand back on her leg and start to pull on it. She kicks me.
“Miss Director, we have a previous invitation to a Shabbat dinner at my grandfather’s, would you like to come with us?” Tal asks, shoving herself next to me.
“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” Roslyn keeps going, and we take that as a yes, throw the wheelchair in the trunk and peel out of there.
—
I am at Irv’s doorstep with his granddaughter after being absent from her life for seventeen years. I have this other woman with me who’s Irv’s age and in a sweat suit and a wheelchair. I’m holding her back by one shoulder to keep her from falling over.
“Irv, this is Roslyn Kornbluth,” Tal begins. She motions to Irv, then motions to Roslyn, who flutters her eyes in recognition. “Roslyn runs my school and Warren just almost killed her with one of those electrocution guns, so we thought it might be nice if she joined us for dinner. She’s black and Jewish, so consider her a peace offering.”
“Must look…a mess,” Roslyn whispers, but not really to anyone, almost like she’s talking to the strands of her curls.
“Nonsense, such a beautiful woman needs no embellishment.” Irv smiles and bends over to her, and I get a whiff of his cologne, which is whiskey. Jovially, he picks up Roslyn’s hand, and first I think he’s going to check her pulse, but he kisses it.
“She’s had a long day,” I tell him.
And Irv just smiles and says, “I’m sure she has, I’m sure she has,” and that’s when I get that he thinks she’s always in this wheelchair, this beat-up fraying thing, not just in it because I almost electrocuted her.
Inside, it’s the same apartment. It’s the same apartment I made Tal in. I remember it as soon as we get inside. The rest, the doorman, the lobby, all these prewar Walnut Street high-rises look identical to me but this apartment, this is it. The place I’ve been avoiding for eighteen years. My memories, my guilt, they were in here, waiting for me. The last time I was in this place, the less successful sperm from Tal’s batch were seeping into my underwear. I’m pretty sure the apartment knows that, remembers my teenage trespass. There will be a sign, I know. Words forming on refrigerator magnets or something, something more than my heavy breathing. Ghosts are real; I can totally see that in this moment. And I really start wheezing, being in this place, being caught back here. We go in the kitchen and apparently there is a toilet handle at the back of my neck, and I can feel it now, I can feel it being pushed, and all the blood rushing from my brain, down, congealing in my jawbone, pulling my mouth slack and open. I know what’s happening. I am fainting. I look at Tal. I look at her so beautiful and think, How bad can my sins be? I scream this in my head, How bad can my sins be? But my body isn’t listening. I lean on the wheelchair to keep from falling over. I lean on Roslyn’s shoulder. Roslyn says, “Ow!” with surprising clarity.
“Here, I’ll take her,” and Irv yanks Roslyn away, and is moving down the hall offering “We’ll get you a nice seat at the table” before I can stop him. Somehow, I didn’t imagine Roslyn coming to the table. I imagined we would just wheel her into a dark and calming room and drape a sheet over her head till it was time to leave. I start to feel dizzy again and Tal takes my hand.
“You can’t lose your shit, okay? Warren? Pops?”
“No,” I tell her. I can’t. I straighten up. Tal grips my hand harder.
“No nervous breakdowns until after the kiddush.”
The rest of the Karp family turns out to be just three people, which is a bit of a relief. I can handle three. That’s just: this, that, and the other. This and that are an elderly couple who look like they’re in their sixties or seventies, or white-people fifties. They are introduced as Dot and Art.
“Twins!” Dot says, and there is graveled triumph in this declaration. Victory that she’s still alive to say it, again, and Art winces, dramatically It is clearly a practiced overture, the signature opener of their repertoire. Still a crowd pleaser, even after years of being downgraded from the Broadway of youth to old age’s community theater.
“And this is my daughter, Elissa,” Dot tells me and I look to the side and there is Cindy Karp, twenty years older and back from the grave to haunt me. Same kind of eyes, same kind of hair, exactly the same kind of general disapproval I imagined on her face that last phone call. I know it’s not her, just a cousin, a co-sharer of genetic memory, but I start to sway anyway. I remember to introduce myself. I am Warren Duffy. I’m a grown man now, but I was once the callow youth who owned the penis that once poked your angelic little Cindy, no doubt dooming her. This is my lovely daughter, you know her much better than I, but without her I would be unconscious at this moment. But all I say is my name, and my great joy at meeting them. They look down to the side of me. Smiles freezing. At Roslyn, who has been pushed up to a place setting at the table. They look at Roslyn’s skull; her neck has quit its job. The head has lobbed forward, stopped only by her chin on her breastbone. All you can see of her is the curls of her hair: thick, mostly salt-and-some-pepper spirals rolling from her scalp and stopping just short of the table in front of her.
“This is my friend. Roslyn. She directs the learning center Tal is enrolled in,” I tell them when they look back at me, wondering. “Roslyn?” I ask, leaning in closer to her, smiling enough for both of us. “Roslyn?” again, yet nothing but a light moan comes back to me.
“Is she…?” Art drifts, waiting for me to complete his sentence. What he is asking I have no idea. Is she disabled? Is she my mom? Is she sick? Is she dead?
“Yes,” I tell him, then give a sad look as further answer, and both he and his sister smile knowingly and suddenly all this is normal.
“I thought you’d be blacker,” Dot tells me.
“Mom! No! You can’t say things like that. Please forgive her,” the daughter says to me. Elissa even reaches out her hand in front of me like she can shield me from her mother’s lack of tact.
“No, it’s okay. I totally expected to be blacker also. Every time I look in the mirror, it’s a shock, trust me.”
“You know I don’t mean anything racist by it,” Dot tells me, and I look deep within myself, but I don’t know that at all. Still, I’m very willing to pretend, so nod accordingly. “It’s just, I remember when Cindy said she got pregnant by a black guy, we were expecting a much darker baby, but Tal came out white. I just thought maybe she got confused: Cindy was a wild one.”