She notes the shift of his eyes to the clock on the opposite side of the room. A small clock placed discreetly on a bookshelf ticking off the minutes of the therapeutic hour.
“Am I running out of time, Doctor?” Rachel asks.
The doctor does not answer this question. Instead he sniffs lightly and says, “I want you to think about something, Rachel. I want you to think about how you can express your emotions in your art. And I don’t mean emotions on the surface. I mean the emotions you have trapped inside you. Down deep. The emotions that erupted the day at the department store counter.”
Rachel is silent.
“I firmly believe you should return to painting. And I don’t want to give up on the idea, even though you’re resistant. It’s important. Honestly, not only important to you. But important that it be known.”
“Known?”
“The truth. The truth of what happened. It’s been over a decade since the end of the war. I think it’s time the truth be told.”
“A decade?” says Rachel the stone. “Doctor, it might as well be a thousand decades. It’s all ancient history. All anybody cares about now is the bomb. Who has the bomb? Who will get the bomb? The bomb and what’s on television? I Love Lucy? No one cares about history or truth.”
A pause. “Maybe not,” Dr. Solomon is willing to concede. Then the leather of his chair creaks as he leans forward. “But if that’s true, then all the more reason that you should wake them up, Rachel,” he says. “As an artist. And dare I say it? As a Jew—or perhaps simply as a human being—you have a responsibility to share your story.”
Rachel feels herself balancing on the point of a needle. “And with whom would you have me share it?”
Dr. Solomon shrugs. “With the world,” he says.
“Is this really necessary?” Aaron is grousing into the bathroom mirror, tying his tie behind Rachel, who is rouging her lips in her slip. “An evening with the Fucknik on my only night off for a week?”
Rachel lifts the tube of Red Velvet, primps her lips to smooth the color. “You don’t wish to go? Don’t go. I’ll say you’re too busy.”
“Oh yeah, sure,” her husband snorts. “Like that wouldn’t get back to my mother.”
Rachel crinkles her brow. “What? What wouldn’t get back?” she asks. “What are you talking about?”
“My mother, that’s what I’m talking about.”
“Your mother would really care if you miss coffee and dessert?” She mouths a tissue to remove the excess red.
“Care? If I skip an evening with my dear cousin Ezra, by lunch tomorrow, his mother’s on the phone with my mother, drilling into her ear,” and here Aaron drops into his sour-faced impression of his aunt Ruth’s Brooklynese. “‘Too busy? Too busy for family, I guess, but what can you do? For some, business comes first.’ And then kablooey,” he declares. “I just don’t need the grief.” He gives his hair a touch with the comb, then brushes past her into the bedroom to yank on his shoes.
Entering the Weinstein apartment upstairs, there’s the matter of the mezuzah. Having a mezuzah fastened to your doorpost is a mitzvah in the eyes of God. But what to do if you’re up from the Perlman apartment, where no such mitzvah is in evidence sanctifying even a single doorway? The Weinsteins’ front-door mezuzah came from a trip to Jerusalem. The Hebrew words Shomer Dlatot, Keeper of the Doors, fashioned into its brass cylinder. Aaron always brushes past it with a tap, flicking away a kiss on two fingers with the same cursory routine as if he’s kissing the cheek of ancient Bubbe Perlman.
Rachel usually follows in a hurry too, whisking past with a half gesture in her husband’s wake. But this time, she’s first through the door and skips it completely, covering herself by handing Daniela a half gallon of Newbrook vanilla ice cream in a carton. She catches the corner of Daniela’s glance at the omission but keeps moving into the apartment. She could have pretended and offered up a counterfeit mitzvah, but she wants to be on the level with God. She has not yet forgiven Him, He should know.
The Weinstock children are asleep in the next room. Daniela invites Rachel to look in on them with her, as if it’s an honor or a treat, but when she does, all Rachel sees are small heads poking out from blankets. Another mezuzah guards the bedroom door, and she does not challenge it by crossing the boundary.
In the living room, the coffee is going cold in the cups and the ice cream is melting into sugary pools on the plates of half-consumed slices of Daniela’s homemade lemon pound cake. The room is lit by the foggy blue-white glow of the television screen, a Magnavox in a mahogany console. I’ve Got a Secret. That’s the name of the show. Rachel finds it somewhat incomprehensible. A panel of celebrities, whom she is supposed to recognize but doesn’t, are asking questions that are managed by some fellow in a bow tie. What are they supposed to be guessing? Secrets? She can’t really follow.
“So what’d this gadget set you back anyway?” Aaron is asking, nodding toward the Magnavox like he’s laying a trap.
“Normally? A hundred,” Ezra informs him. “But Daniela’s got a cousin on Utica Av’—so we got it for eighty.”
“Eighty,” Aaron repeats with a squinting frown. “Still,” he concludes. “That ain’t beans. But then who needs to eat, huh?” he wonders aloud.
“Aaron, you’re being rude,” his wife points out mildly.
“Just sayin’, honey,” Aaron responds. And then his expression balls up like a wad of paper as a commercial break interrupts the show’s proceedings. “Ah, now, ya see? This is exactly what I hate about television,” he announces. “Every how many minutes? A word from our sponsor.”
Rachel glances at him, then back at the set. A few paid performers have come on the screen to sing that Winston tastes good like a—bop, bop—cigarette should. She and Aaron are sharing the green damask sofa. Her penny loafers are off and her feet curled under her. Ezra is planted in his chair, one sandal missing, massaging his toes through his socks, but Daniela has encamped on the floor, braced against the sofa. She is further along than Rachel realized and will need help getting up, because her belly is now swollen to the size of the moon. Her cheeks are flushed, and her face is round. She has lost all her angles. All her edges have vanished.
“I mean, do I really need this guy telling me that Winston brought flavor back to filter cigarettes?” Aaron rants. “Do I really need that information fed into my brain?” he asks aloud. “I don’t smoke ’em and never will. I don’t care what this schmo Moore has to say on the matter.”
“My mother loves Garry Moore,” Daniela injects. “She says he’s cute as a button.”
“Okay, well…” Aaron shrugs dismissively.
“So. You don’t like the commercial shtick?” Ezra has the solution. “Close your eyes,” he suggests, still working his toes. “Stick your fingers in your ears.”
Aaron swallows, but Rachel can tell that the tension in his body is ratcheted upward. The unbearable boyish restlessness betrays itself in the flexing muscle along his jawline and the fidgeting cigarette. He bangs off ash into the ashtray they share.
The room is filled with the TV’s chatter. Rachel looks around her. Everything is comfortable in the Weinstock apartment. Comfortable in the messy way that apartments with children can be. Toys picked up and dumped into a play basket. Children’s books atop a stack of magazines. Tawny Scrawny Lion. Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf. A basket of laundry, folded but not yet put away, tucked under the lamp table. The baby pictures in frames cluttering the wall.