The silence that follows is clumsy.
“I think I’m going to have the chocolate rugelach for dessert,” Daniela decides aloud. “It was so good the last time.”
“Well, actually, I’m not sure we will have the time for dessert,” Rachel decides to say in an apologetic voice.
“Oh, no?” Daniela sounds disappointed.
“Aaron has his fish market tomorrow, don’t you, Husband?”
“Yep,” Aaron responds, tight-lipped.
“So he has to be up early. Very, very early.”
“Aw, well, that’s too bad,” Daniela concedes sympathetically. But then here comes Ezra wading in up to his hips.
“You know, cuz,” he says to Aaron. “You really are lucky you don’t have kids. They keep you up all night, the little stinkers.”
Aaron blinks. “And who was talking about having kids?” he wants to know. “Was that a topic I missed?”
Ezra only shrugs. “I’m just saying. You’re lucky. That’s all. So what that your mom’s going gray waiting on her share of grandkids,” he says. A little joke, that’s all. A little poke as he’s picking a roll to butter from the basket.
Aaron fails, however, to see the humor. “Hey! Knucklehead!” he objects, face reddening. “My mother’s doing just fine!” he declares, poking a finger into the air at his cousin.
“Sure. I’m sure she’s good, cousin,” Ezra says to Aaron. “I’m sure she’s just great.”
“Ezra.” Daniela speaks her husband’s name as if it’s a command. “Stop. There are two people in every marriage making decisions,” she reminds him. “And what they decide is none of our business.”
Ezra nods and raises his hands in surrender, holding a roll in one hand and a butter knife in the other. “Right. You’re right,” he agrees, expending a breath of regret. “I’m sorry. My wife is correct as always. None of my business, and I shouldn’t have brought it up. Okay, Sergeant Perlman?”
“I just don’t get why you feel like you can shoot your mouth off anytime you please.”
“Well, I won’t talk about the kettle or who’s calling it black,” Ezra says. Finishing his buttering, he sets down the roll. “But okay. Point taken,” he announces. “Mea culpa,” the man adds with the softened tone of any good public apology.
“And I think you should apologize to Rachel too,” Daniela points out.
The attention of the table shifts, and Rachel feels a sting of panic. Through all this, she has felt herself shrinking. Growing smaller and smaller until she feels like no more than a gnat flitting about the table.
Ezra is only too happy to concede. “Apologies, dear lady,” he says, making praying hands as he makes one last stab at a joke. “It must be tough enough to be married to this guy without me kibbitzing in.”
“Oh great.” Aaron nods, frowning. “That’s a great apology. Just terrific. You should carve that one in stone.” He lights up a cigarette and blows out smoke that settles with the silence over the table until he says, “You know, I think I will have the stuffed cow spleen after all. I mean, why not? I’ve already got heartburn thanks to the nudnik here,” he says, shrugging his head toward Ezra. “So what the hell?”
In the taxicab on the way home, Aaron and Ezra with Rachel in between are all squashed into the rear seat in imitation of ten pounds of baloney in a five-pound sack, while pregnant Daniela sits up front in the passenger seat. Not a word passes between them. In the hallway of their building, the women exchange brief farewells, but the men remain silent. Ezra is already trotting up the stairs to the fifth floor, Aaron already digging his key into the door lock of their apartment.
Sorry, Daniela mouths with a sad little smile and touches Rachel’s arm.
Inside the gray light of the apartment, Rachel slips off her coat one arm at a time. “I don’t understand,” she is saying. “Why must you compete so?”
“Because he’s an overly competitive dope,” Aaron answers, tossing away his hat and roughly scratching his head of curls.
“He is?” says Rachel, closing the door behind them.
“Hey. People compete in this country, Rachel,” Aaron says, yanking off his coat. “It’s the American way,” he declares, aggressively hooking his coat on the hall tree and flipping on the light switch. “It’s why America is America. It’s why we’re the richest country in the world and have never lost a war.”
“All I’m asking is this: what do you hope to gain by this war between the two of you? He’s not an enemy. He’s your cousin.”
“Twice removed,” he corrects.
“And what does this mean, ‘twice removed’?”
“Twice removed from the list of people I can stand to socialize with. At least twice I removed him, probably ten times, and yet he keeps coming back. Honey, the man is a judgmental dope, even when he’s ‘apologizing.’ My mother’s always said that Ezra’s a first-class tumler, just like his old man, and she’s always been right.”
“Tumler or not,” Rachel says, picking up the cat who comes meowing toward her. “He’s still your family. And this is how you treat him? You should be glad you have family.”
“H’boy, here we go.”
Rachel turns, hugging Kibbitz in her arms. “Here we go what?”
Aaron loosens his tie, lights a cigarette from a leftover pack on the coffee table. “Nothing. I know. I’m lucky to have family left.”
“That’s right. You are,” she says and shifts the cat’s weight onto her shoulder. “So don’t you be the judgmental dope.”
In the bedroom, discussion continues as they prepare for bed. Aaron sits slouched on the bedspread, jacket gone, collar opened, tie pulled apart and hanging from his neck, cigarette smoldering in the bedside ashtray. He sighs as he tugs off each shoe and tosses it. “H’okay, h’okay,” he surrenders. “I get it. Family is family. He just gets under my skin is all. Always acting like the almighty goodnik. ‘My responsibility as an American Jew,’ with his big bronze star gleaming.” Kibbitz is mewing on the bed. Aaron picks him up and plops him on the floor. “Like he single-handedly routed the whole friggin’ Nazi war machine.”
Rachel turns her back to Aaron, lifting her hair so he can unzip the back of her dress for her. “Maybe he takes being a Jew seriously.”
Reaching up and zip he’s done. “And you’re saying I don’t?”
“I’m saying that maybe you think you don’t. And that’s why he gets under your skin.” She slips her shoulders free. “And by the way, it certainly was not Ezra Weinstock routing the Nazi war machine.” Rachel steps out of the dress. “It was the Red Army doing that.”
Aaron yanks off a sock, tosses it. “Yeah? Well, tell him that, why don’t you?” Yanks off the other sock. “No, on second thought, don’t. In fact, don’t tell anybody that, okay? The last thing I need is a Commie lover in my bed.” Suddenly he seizes her and pulls her onto the bed on top of him. She yelps, but then her eyes go wide when he kisses her.
“I know,” Aaron admits, an intimacy entering his voice. “Even though it’s not easy to believe, considering the tribe from Webster Avenue. I know that I am lucky to have family. But luckier to have you.”
A second kiss goes deeper.
She could ruin her life quite easily, or at least her madness could. It wouldn’t take much to drive her entire existence on West 22nd Street over a cliff. She could light a match and drop it on the sofa upholstery and sit back. The simplicity of it both terrifies her and entices her. She knows that it’s her guilt that pushes her to mad thoughts. But her desire for a just atonement is strong. Biblical, even.