8
“Can I please go play at Rudy’s house?” Bobby asked. “Please, Mom?”
“After you do your homework,” I said as I unlocked the front door of the house. “Just like I said the last two times you asked me.”
“I’ll do it later, I promise!”
“You know the ...” I trailed off as we walked inside. Then I leaned back out the door and made sure I was in the right house. Yes, that was our address. And the key in my hand had unlocked the door. But every stick of furniture had been rearranged. The kids looked at me in confusion as well.
Music was coming from the radio in the kitchen, and I steeled myself. “You two go on up to your rooms and do your homework. I’ll make a snack and then you can go play.” Neither moved, so I pointed to the stairs. “Homework. Now.”
I waited until they had scampered up the stairs before I marched into the kitchen, switching off Eydie Gorme, who was singing on the radio to blame it on the bossa nova, as I entered.
“I was listening to that,” Ruth said mildly from the stove.
“Ruth,” I said as measuredly as I could. “What happened to the furniture?”
“Isn’t it lovely?” she asked. “Just the freshening up the house needed.”
I blinked at her. “Ruth, you can’t just rearrange someone else’s house.”
“Well, I’m living here now too, and—”
“Visiting,” I said, cutting her off. “You’re visiting here now. This is still my house, and I expect to be able to have the furniture the way that I like it.”
“Suit yourself,” she said with a shrug as she continued to stir whatever she was cooking. I pinched the bridge of my nose in irritation, then went into the living room to see how much work it would be to move everything back into place.
“I finished my homework,” Bobby said, bounding into the room. I always checked it with him, especially when he did it in two minutes flat, but I just didn’t have the patience right then.
“Go ask your grandmother for a snack, and then you can go to Rudy’s house.”
It wasn’t until dinner was finished and I was sitting on the closed toilet while Bobby bathed that I realized the kids had eaten Ruth’s dinner without complaint.
Truth be told, I couldn’t remember what it was through the rage of dealing with the furniture, nor if I had actually eaten any of it.
My stomach rumbled, and I realized I likely hadn’t.
“What was dinner again?” I asked Bobby as he emerged from under the bubbles with a white head and bubble beard.
He looked at me like I was the strange one. “Spaghetti and meatballs,” he said.
I nodded. That was difficult to mess up and a guaranteed kid pleaser.
“I like yours better though,” Bobby said loyally. “Grandma’s spaghetti is kind of crunchy. Like eating bones.”
I let out a yelp of a laugh.
“What?” Bobby asked suspiciously.
“Nothing,” I said, dumping a cup of water over his head and revealing his brown hair. “I just love you.”
“I love you too,” he said, dipping his head back into the bubbles. “Do I look like a grandpa?”
“One with very smooth skin,” I assured him. Then I realized I had no idea how to shave a face. Legs, sure, but in the next ten years, I was going to need to figure that out. I wondered who had taught Harry to shave. Maybe a friend’s husband would step in?
That was what Ruth and my own mother didn’t understand: sure, I needed help, but I needed Harry’s help, not theirs. More mothers were just too many cooks in the kitchen, quite literally sometimes.
It was an issue Ruth should understand, having lived it. But maybe having only one child was different. Maybe thirty years ago was different. Maybe she and I were just different.
Or maybe the reason she didn’t have chin hairs was because she taught herself how to shave too.
I dumped another cup of water over Bobby and told him it was about time to get out of the bath.
I had a few years before I had to figure it out.
There had to be directions somewhere. Maybe a library book on it.
Or I could ask Eddie to explain shaving to me sometime before Bobby grew a beard. I would just have to be enough.
Susie was in her room, her grandmother brushing her hair, when I came to tell her it was bedtime. I listened at the door for a moment, jealous and wanting to tell Ruth that that was my job, not hers.
“Really?” Susie was asking. “A pony? Of your own?”
“Of my own. I loved her,” Ruth said. Her voice sounded wistful as she remembered the simpler time of her childhood. Not that her childhood had been simpler, but when she was just a couple of years younger than Susie, she couldn’t have understood how complicated things were about to become.
“What was her name?”
“ Sheyntkeyt .”
“What does that mean?”
“Beauty,” Ruth said. “Like how I call you my sheyna maidelah . Pretty girl.”
Susie thought for a moment. “What happened to her?”
Ruth grew quiet, remembering. “We had to leave her,” she said eventually. “We had to leave everything to come here.”
“Why couldn’t you bring her with you?”
“We had to leave suddenly,” Ruth said. “In the night. The men—”
Knowing the rest of the story, I entered the room quickly. “Ready for bed?” I asked lightly.
“Not yet,” Susie said, waving me off. “What men?” she asked Ruth.
“The men said if they wanted to come to America, they had to come right then,” I said, not letting Ruth reply.
Susie was too young for pogroms. And while the Russians may have taken that pony, it was much more likely that Ruth watched them slaughter it.
We had enough issues with nightmares as it was these days.
“And it’s a good thing they did, or Daddy and I wouldn’t have met.
” I looked purposefully at Ruth over Susie’s head. “Isn’t that right?”
Ruth studied me for a moment. “I suppose. If you want to look at it that way,” she said. “Time for bed, my sheyna maidelah .”
“Can Grandma tuck me in?” Susie asked.
I felt my body tense, but Ruth shook her head. “That’s your mama’s job,” she said. “Give Grandma a hug, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
Susie obliged and confirmed that she had brushed her teeth without me needing to ask anymore.
Unlike her brother, whose breath I needed to smell if I didn’t watch him brush.
She climbed into bed, and I tucked the blankets gently around her, brushing a few stray strands of hair off her face.
“Did you know Grandma had a pony?” she asked me, then yawned. “Can I have a pony?”
“No, sweetheart, you can’t.”
“Why not?”
I wished I could say yes. “Where would we even put a pony? We don’t live on a farm.”
“In the backyard.”
“Ponies need more room than that,” I said.
“A dog, then?”
I kissed her forehead. “We’ll talk about it.” She opened her mouth, and I cut her off. “Another day. Right now, go to sleep. You have school tomorrow.”
She pouted slightly. “I wish we lived somewhere with ponies.”
“Dream about that,” I told her. “And we’ll talk about a dog soon.”
Ruth was in the living room watching television when I went to clean the kitchen after the kids were asleep, but the kitchen was already clean.
I debated pouring myself a brandy and then going to take the bath I had wanted to take two nights earlier.
But I had to deal with Ruth if we were going to live under the same roof for any period of time.
Moreover, I needed to draw my boundary lines.
No redecorating and no telling the kids horror stories of escaping pogroms.
But the brandy wasn’t a terrible idea for that.
I poured a glass, then took a long sip, relishing the burn as it went down.
I didn’t drink often—it was a bottle left over from Harry’s thirty-second birthday party, when we had foolishly celebrated him making it past the age his father had passed at.
I didn’t want to think about that. But keeping my cool in a conversation with Ruth at this point required fortification.
I refilled the glass and then left the kitchen for the living room, where Ruth was chuckling over The Red Skelton Show . “Can we talk?” I asked her.
She didn’t even glance up, though I did note a glass of sherry on the table in front of her. “Can it wait until the next commercial?” she asked.
I could give her that much. So I sat in Harry’s armchair and waited for the show to go to a break.
When it did, she turned to me. “I was trying to help. With the furniture.”
It wasn’t an apology, but it was close. “I understand that. But making more work for me isn’t helping.”
“You could have left it. Then it’s not more work.”
I sighed and counted to ten in my head before responding. “When’s the last time you redecorated your own house?”
“This isn’t about my house,” she said quickly.
“Then why does it have to be about mine? How would you feel if I went over and rearranged all your furniture?”
She looked like she wanted to say something but kept her mouth shut.
I could feel the brandy loosening me up, and I again wondered if I had actually eaten dinner or if I had just moved furniture in a rage.
“Look, Ruth, the kids love you. And I think it’s really good for them to learn about Harry’s side of the family.
But if you’re going to ... visit here, we need to set up some ground rules or we’re going to butt heads.
” I’d started to say if she was going to stay here, but I needed to be clear that this wasn’t a permanent situation.
Her brow furrowed slightly at my choice of words, and I knew she had caught my point.
“Such as?”
“No redecorating if we don’t discuss it first. No telling the kids stories that they’re too young to hear.”
“I wasn’t too young to live it,” she said quietly, her eyes fixed on a point over my shoulder, seeing sights I never wanted to imagine.
“And they, God willing, will never have to. They already suffered the loss of a parent. Please don’t make them afraid that they’ll be forced to run as well.”
“They’ll need to learn eventually that the world isn’t safe for us—”
“Ruth, they’re going to learn that on their own. But this world is safer. Our world. No, not everyone loves us,” I said, thinking explicitly of Mrs. Kline. “But it’s not the same world you grew up in. Not here.”
We weren’t that far removed from the atrocities of Europe. Less than twenty years since it ended. But that was an eternity to small children. Hearing such things from Ruth, someone they knew and trusted, would only instill a fear that they didn’t need to have.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Let me shower in privacy,” I said. “And I’ll give you the same courtesy.”
The commercial break ended. “I assume there are no objections to Red Skelton?”
“None whatsoever,” I said. I still would have preferred a bath and a book in bed, but I stayed with her until the end of the episode as a gesture somewhere between a show of solidarity and a show of possession.
Eleven more days, I told myself as I got into bed later that evening. What else could she throw at me in eleven days?