He would have hated that job, couldn’t have done it for a second. Please, Missus, may I have just a moment of your time? I have an offer that will transform the lives of you and your children . . .
‘Thank God for that,’ he said.
‘Not at all, this is worse. What I do have is a self, and it’s killed that instead.’
It was true. She didn’t remember who she’d been, in those hopeful spirited sexy days, could hardly recognise the person she now was, save for the clear recognition that she didn’t like her.
And as for her world, she detested it. It was intolerably sylvan in Alexandria, promiscuously treed and bushed, but it was just across the Potomac from DC and the smells wafted across the river. One Sunday, as they were crossing the bridge on the way to an enlightening children’s afternoon at the Smithsonian, Ben had looked down at the brown sluggish waters and remarked how polluted the river was.
‘Yeah!’ said Becca. ‘You can even see the pollute!’
You could see it in DC, too. The city landscape was polluted. Shit steamed in the streets. Shits walked the streets (they were called Republicans) and the faecal current swept across America, over the cities and the plains, polluted the rivers and the lakes, crossed the Rockies, stinking and malign. Everyone breathed it, everyone was infected. It was almost impossible to escape.
Ben had a variety of car activities for diverting the children, to get their minds off their struggle for dominance. There was the licence plate game, a singsong, the alphabet game, I spy, tongue-twisters, various simple riddles, though the kids had heard them all by now. Chickens crossing the road? Boring! He amused himself inventing new ones that left him belly-wobbling, giggling like a schoolboy.
‘What’s the difference between a duck?’ he asked.
There was a pause while the children waited for him to continue.
‘Do you have any questions?’ he asked disingenuously, already beginning to giggle. Addie stared out the window.
Jake was first to respond.
‘That’s stupid. You can’t answer that . . .’
‘Why not?’
‘You didn’t say, the difference between a duck and a . . . what!’
Ben allowed a little time to coagulate in the smoky air. Becca leaned forwards: That was really smart of Jake!
He half-turned from the driver’s seat and looked at each of the children, wisely.
‘I’m not giving any hints,’ he said, and burst into laughter so protracted that the car began to drift across the lane. Drivers honked furiously. He pulled himself together, straightened their trajectory, wiped his eyes, laughed some more. From the back, you could see his shoulders shaking.
‘That’s not fair!’ said Becca.
‘That’s not funny!’ said Jake.
‘Grossman slays Grossman!’ said Ben, proudly.
‘Again!’ said Addie. Ben was unusually animated; it didn’t ring true, all this fun. What the hell was there to have fun about? She looked at him sharply. Something was up, he looked shifty and evasive.
‘I spy with my little eye,’ she said tersely, as the kids began to scan the unfolding countryside, the orange and yellow and brown cars, two-tones, with their chrome and white-walls, the billboards on the side of the road pimping boisterously for Nabisco Oreo Cookies and CANvenient 7Up. More intelligence and wit went into them than into the governance of the whole nation.
‘Something beginning with A.’
Jake, reflexively competitive and four years older, looked round the car. Unwilling to miss out, but only just competent, Becca looked wherever he did, in the vain hope that he might miss an A and then she could name it.
‘An arm!’ he shouted.
‘Nope.’
‘An ankle!’
Becca scanned her body anxiously.
‘Not that either.’
Unwilling to be drawn further into this dangerous body parts inventory, guessing all too easily which one Addie had in mind, Ben joined in.
‘There,’ he shouted, pointing across the road. ‘Amattababy!’
There was a snort of derision from the rear.
‘Ben, you can’t just make things up!’
‘I didn’t!’
‘Did so! What’s a mattababy?’
His shoulders started to shake.
‘Nothin’, baby. What’s a matta with you?’
It was a brocheh, Perle reminded herself, such a blessing to have Addie and the children coming, and that Frankie and Michelle and their little ones had settled in Huntington after the war.
‘It’s a brocheh,’ she said firmly.
Maurice put down his coffee cup, paused to light his filter-tipped Kent cigarette and place it in the ashtray on the dining table, let enough time go by to suggest unexpressed disagreement, as if he needed to consider whether it was such a blessing after all. You could get brochehed half to death during a hot summer with a tiny house full of needy, squabbling, overheated and over-entitled family.
He could hardly have admitted it to his wife, nor entirely to himself, but he was anxious about their imminent arrival, the invasion of a home hardly big enough for the two of them, stuffed for the summer with Addie and her kids, Frankie and Michelle with an uncertain number of babies popping in as fast as they popped out, Die Schwarze moping in the tiny maid’s room next to the bathroom. The children would be put into the guest room, and Addie – and later in the month Ben, when he joined them in a couple of weeks – would sleep in the back area, which had screens separating it from the porch, and a glass door that could be closed at night, a curtain drawn across. Hardly private, hardly comfortable. A thin partition wall separating the cramped space from the parents’ bedroom. He wondered how they ever managed to do it; they gave rare sign of having done so. No noises in the night, no sly smiles in the morning.
No guest ever leaves too early. A month, no, seven weeks this year, of Addie and the kids! They’d be arriving in a few hours, and he was already apprehensive. She was spiky and difficult, had been since her childhood, or at least from those early days when she was supplanted by the arrival of baby Frankie. Perle had adored her son since he first peeked into the world and her recalcitrant displaced daughter had never recovered.
He would make himself scarce. Go into the garage to his workbench, find things to make, or to fix. The fence round the back of the house needed new slats, do the undercoat and painting, put them up next week. There was always something to do at the bungalow. He quite liked Harbor Heights Park, the trip from the city on Grand Central Parkway and Northern State, the slow retreat from his beloved concrete to the occasional pleasures of grass and trees, the mildly alarming rural peacefulness. No horns honking, no traffic, no crowds. It was fine with him, so
