“Back to the bar mitzvah,” Nate says.
“There were two tables of gifts, one with my name, one with Solomon’s, and all during the party I kept going over and checking to see whose pile was higher, whose looked better.”
“And?”
“It was hard to tell — on account of how someone gave me a set of encyclopedias and wrapped each volume separately. The one thing I really liked was a pair of binoculars that were meant for Solomon but ended up with my gifts.”
“How did you figure out it was for Solomon?”
“The card: ‘For Solly, With Love from Auntie Estelle and Uncle Ruven.’ My mother wanted me to give them back to Solomon, but I refused. I took the binoculars and hid them outside, under the house.”
“Is it unreasonable to expect a rite of passage to feel good or be essentially positive?” Nate asks. “What about losing your virginity?”
“Look, Nate, I’m a lot older than you. I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”
“So you pop the bubble now?” he asks. “You make me feel as miserable as you?”
“No,” I say definitively and then stop. “I just want to protect you.”
“From what?”
“Life?” I suggest.
“Too late,” he says. “Did you ever give the binoculars back to Solomon?”
“I spilled the whole story to him one day at school. ‘Keep ’em,’ he said, ‘I already have binoculars.’” I pause. “I don’t think I ever told anyone that story before.”
“Not even Claire?”
“No.”
There’s a pause. “Why didn’t you and Claire have children?” Nate asks.
“Claire was afraid she’d be too cold as a parent; she thought she had no capacity to really love and that a child would suffer.”
“And?”
“I agreed.”
There’s a long pause. “I used to pray,” Nate says. “Every night I said a prayer to cover my bases; I always believed there was something larger — some bigger idea. I’m not sure what I think now; my relationship to belief has changed.”
“So — I get the feeling that you’re thinking no bar?”
“I thought it was meant as a conversation.”
“You’re right. It’s not something we have to resolve tonight.”
After her cover is blown, Amanda of the A&P vanishes.
Half as a prank, half because I’m genuinely curious, it occurs to me not to wait for her to come to me, but to go to her. I round up the half-empty cartons of Chinese food from the fridge, pack it all into the brown paper bag it came out of several days ago — receipt still attached — and staple it shut. Wearing Nate’s old white lab coat like a waiter’s jacket, I drive to her house, upscale Tudor, and ring the bell.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, opening the door.
“I have half-order for you,” I say in a bad Chinese accent as I hand her the bag. Peeking into the house behind her, I see nothing except a faded Oriental rug, a coat-and-hat rack, and a heavy dark wooden banister and stairs — carpeted. I imagine that on the left is the living room, on the right the parlor or dining room, and straight back under the stairs a half-bath, and then the kitchen across the back of the house — with perhaps a breakfast nook.
“You brought used Chinese food?”
“There’s a lot of it,” I say. “Fried rice, moo-shu pork.”
She hands the bag back to me as her mother comes up behind her: thin, with basketball belly pushing at the waistband of her bright-green pull-on pants; formerly tall, now substantially reduced; her fluffy white hair neatly fixed in tight rolls around her head, mid — George Washington.
“We give to the Kidney Foundation regularly,” the mother says. “My husband doesn’t approve of door-to-door solicitations, but how about some of my pin money — do you take cash?” She clicks open a small wallet and digs out five dollars, which she moves to hand me.
“Mother, he’s delivering food,” Amanda says, pushing her mother’s arm away. “And he has the wrong address. Better luck next time,” she says, closing the door in my face.
Out of boredom I try again. In my mind, it’s humorous and demonstrates my determination — I want something more, some better conclusion. I drive to the 7-Eleven and get a gallon of milk and some orange juice and pull up at the curb outside her house. After cutting across the dewy lawn on foot, I hop up onto the front step and ring the bell twice. BING-BONG, BING-BONG.
Her mother answers the door.
“I remember you,” she says, and I’m suddenly nervous that I’ve been made — so much for my disguise. “You used to come around years ago; the milk was in a bottle.”
“I’m not the one you remember,” I say.
“Must have been your father, then,” she says. The mother is elfin, playful, and very charming. She takes the milk from me with surprisingly strong arms. “Put me down for half a gallon next week, and some of the powdered-sugar doughnuts if you’ve got them.” She looks past me. “Crocuses are coming up,” she says, and I turn around and see that I’ve trod across a good number of them. “Daffodils come soon.”
“Is that man related to us?” I hear the father ask.
“No relation to you,” the mother says, closing the door.
Amanda calls me that afternoon. “All right, then, Mr. Curious, you want to come for dinner?”
“I think your parents like me,” I offer.
“They’ve conflated you into a milkman who needs a heart transplant. My mother said she gave you fifty bucks.”
“She gave me five.”
“Welcome to my world. She bragged to my father that it was fifty. ‘Any man comes to the door, you give him fifty bucks?’ ‘Just the good-looking ones,’ my mother said.”
“What time is dinner?”
“Come at five-thirty.”
“Can I bring anything?”
“Drugs?” she suggests.
“What kind?”
“Your choice.”
I bring one of George’s better bottles of wine. “You kids drink the grape juice, I’ll stick to my usual, if you don’t mind,” her father says, making himself a drink and mumbling that soon they’re going to have to let the cleaning lady go because clearly she’s dipping into the spirits and watering it down to cover her tracks.
The décor throughout is stiff — chintz, toile, and Staffordshire bull terriers on the mantel, a clock that chimes every fifteen minutes. Honestly, I didn’t realize that people lived that way: very non-Jew, very company man and proud of it, a chair with ottoman, and a sofa, all beyond formal and almost painful, with crocheted doilies under the lamps. Amanda brings out a plate of appetizers, Triscuits dotted with Cheez Whiz, sliced green olives with red pimiento centers.
The table is set with china, crystal, and silver, a small cup of soup at each of our places. “Cream of mushroom,” Amanda announces. I dig in, and then see that no one is eating it. The mother has dipped her spoon in, and the father seems interested only in his drink and the remaining Triscuits. At first I think it’s about grace — they’re waiting for someone to say grace — and then I realize it’s just the way it is.
Amanda looks at me. I move to help her clear the table, and she shakes her head no. She clears and returns with dinner plates — serving her father and me first, and then her mother and herself. Four fish sticks each for father and me, and two for Amanda and her mother; six Tater Tots for the men, four for the women; three spears of asparagus each; and a broiled half-tomato.
“So much,” her mother says, “I’ll never be able to eat it all.”
“Do your best,” her father says.
“The fish is nice,” her mother says.