“Well, look who it is,” Daniela announces to her children in a sweetly prompting manner. “It’s Mrs. Perlman. Say hello.”
“Hello!” the boy repeats loudly, grinningly, with a wave of his small hand, happy to participate. But the girl remains silent.
“Hello, Josh,” Rachel replies to the boy, smiling, positioning her cigarette away from the child so that the smoke drifts up toward the ceiling. She cups her hand around the crown of Josh’s silky hair. Josh has his father’s myopically squinted expression—he’ll be wearing glasses by the time he’s five—but unlike his poppa, he is always full of joyful hellos, full of dimpled smiles and inquiries. Mommy, why is your hair black? Mommy, why are there cats? The fullness of life sings in his voice, innocent in his bustling joy.
Rachel cupped his head because maybe she hoped to snatch some of that from him. Is that a crime? No, he has so much he could hardly miss it. A small bit of childish joy stuffed in her pocket, who would know? But perhaps it’s that covetousness that Daniela detects and instinctually guards against as she absently presses the boy to her side in Rachel’s presence. The girl, Leah, on the other hand? She’s always unsettled Rachel. Those watching eyes, as if the child can look through skin and see the interior schemes of a skeleton at work.
“So how are you doing? How are things?” Daniela is asking. “Haven’t seen you in a bit.”
“I’ve been busy,” Rachel explains. “Things are crazy.”
“Really?” Daniela lifts her eyebrows with interest. “Crazy how?”
Rachel swallows. She thought she had learned by now to field these hallway chitchat questions. And crazy is one of her preferred American words, because it’s a cover-all word, like a big crazy blanket. Crazy. Work is crazy. Our schedule is crazy. Things are crazy. No one is supposed to ask why. “Well, the restaurant’s the usual nuthouse for Aaron.” She has learned nuthouse the hard way.
Daniela’s brows knit. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” She sympathizes.
“And how are things with all of you?”
“Fine. Except Ezra’s caught a cold,” Daniela reports.
“Oh?” Rachel asks, sounding concerned.
“Yes. It’s going around his office. I just hope he hasn’t brought it home. The last thing I need is for these three munchkins to come down with runny noses.” And then, “Wouldn’t that be too bad?” she asks her children, inserting them oddly into the conversation. “Wouldn’t that be too bad if Daddy spreads his sniffles? We don’t want that, do we?” She does this often, Rachel notices: addresses her “munchkins” in this manner, even though she’s talking with an adult, as if she cannot help but include the children in her every breath. But the children aren’t paying attention, so to Rachel, she says, “He thinks it’s all the fumes. The car exhaust, the bus exhaust in the streets.” And then, her voice drops, grows more confidential. “By the way, I just want to say again how sorry I am that Ezra wasn’t himself at dinner the other night.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Rachel assures her quickly.
“He must have been on the verge of getting sick. Also, he’s just been under so much pressure. The workload is terrible at the P.D.’s office. Almost unbearable. He’s always trying to juggle clients and cases, and of course there’s no money for public defenders. So he can be grouchy,” she chooses to say, “when he shouldn’t be.”
“I understand,” Rachel assures her. “Aaron too. Exactly the same way.” Once more. Two wives apologizing for their husbands’ poor conduct.
“You know they’ll be back to normal with each other in no time.”
“Well, wasn’t it sort of normal for them anyway?” Rachel asks. It’s a gamble. It’s a joke that could go wrong. But to her relief, Daniela laughs aloud.
“Yes,” she happily concedes, “I suppose it is. Men can be such children,” she confides, as if this is such a big secret.
Going down the stairs, of course, Rachel volunteers to help with the stroller, though it’s awkward, and the Taylor Tot contraption is not exactly light. Picking it up from the front, she must carry it while walking backward down each flight to the foyer, while Daniela grips the handle from above, the weight of the toddler in between. Step down, step down, pause. Step down, step down, pause. And all the while, the little child gazes deeply as if Rachel is a foreign object. Until the girl starts banging loudly on the stroller’s metal tray with a frown darkening her little face. Can children, in their innocence, perceive her crime against innocence? She’s honestly feared this now for years.
“Okay!” Daniella announces brightly. “I can take it from here, I think,” she tells Rachel as they reach the foyer. “The stoop steps are easy. Just bump, bump, bump.”
Rachel opens the front door and holds it for the caravan of mother and children to pass.
“Thank you! Thank you!” Daniela repeats buoyantly and prompts her twins. “Say ‘thank you’ to Mrs. Perlman!” Daniella never probes. She never probes. Rachel’s past is an undisturbed country, though she must wonder, mustn’t she? And Rachel wonders too. What does this young mother from Astoria think late at night? What is her conception of the murder factories that polluted the skies with death? Does she ever dare let it touch her? Does she ever lie awake, while Ezra snores beside her, imagining herself on the final march to the smoking chimneys, gripping her crying toddler so tightly in her arms, instructing the twins to hold each other’s hands? Hold your sister’s hand, Joshua. Be Mommy’s good soldier. Be Mommy’s darling little soldier.
Rachel knocks on the door of Naomi’s apartment. A pause, then a dead bolt slides, and the door opens, revealing Naomi in her chemical-stained work clothes, hair in the usual ponytail. “Oh my God. It’s you,” she declares as a greeting.
“I’m sorry. I should have called,” Rachel apologizes. “I brought back your dress.”
“Oh, jeez, you didn’t have to take it to the cleaner’s.”
“Actually? I did,” Rachel replies, handing it over by the wire hanger, still in the clear plastic bag. “So I don’t want to interrupt. You must be in the midst?”
“No, no, I’m not. Just fucking around with some stupid pix I took over the weekend. They’re not even very good. Come in,” she invites. Inside, the apartment is in the same basic disarray as always. Naomi snatches up a blouse from the sofa and tosses it onto a chair. “You look like you could use a pick-me-up,” she decides, dropping the dress in its dry cleaner’s sheath over the ladder-back chair. “What’s your poison?” Liquor bottles clink as she sorts through her inventory.
Rachel has crept in carefully behind her, reconnoitering the scene. “Whatever you have,” she answers. “What are the pictures about? From the weekend.”
“Oh. Nothing. A bunch of the alter kockers on the benches when I was up in Tompkins Square. But they turned out—I don’t know—kinda boring.” She says this while examining a bottle of gin. “I’m a little low on provisions. No more vodka, and no more decent scotch. But I’ve got some Gordon’s and some Lejon extra-dry vermouth. I could make us martinis if you don’t mind drinking them without olives. Oh! Wait!” She spots it. “There’s that bottle of Four Roses you and your huzz-band brought over last month.” She never misses a chance to razz Aaron, even when he’ s not there to score against.
Rachel sits carefully on the sofa. “I remember it. That was the night Aaron got his elbow caught in the subway door.”