she would never dare to ask him.
But then there were many things she did not dare to say to him. Even at this moment, she thought, what she would have liked to say was that she saw nothing wrong with hot dog buns—or at least nothing wrong enough to talk about—and also that, to her, King Fong’s was no better or worse than the Chinese takeout she used to have at Leah’s house on Brightwater Court.
But even if she’d dared, this would not be possible. There was no place to edge in even a single word between Bartha and Clara once they started down this road, not unless one shouted or pounded on the table, as Vilmos did when he was moved to interrupt them. And now Clara was speaking of a restaurant that Bartha hadn’t been to yet, one that she claimed was “out of the ordinary—even you would see that.” “Even I?” said Bartha. “Even I who have given up hope of having an extraordinary meal ever again? I have accepted my fate, dear Clara.” And of course Clara took umbrage at what she declared was an insult to the city of Omaha itself, “which has been so welcoming to you,” and Esther was silently astonished (in what way, welcoming?) but Bartha said only, “A city, like a gentleman, must not be insulted by an honest appraisal of its shortcomings.” “Then you will not be insulted,” Clara said, “if I tell you that you’re being a bit of an ass.” Bartha laughed. “I will try not to be.”
Vilmos was laughing too, and looking from his cousin to his wife with such evident pleasure that just then Esther wondered if it might be for his amusement that these arguments were staged.
Everyone was amused but her, it seemed.
As Clara extolled the virtues of her adopted city—its friendliness, its “nice neighborhoods,” its symphony and art museum (Bartha groaned and shook his head), Esther considered Vilmos, who never felt obliged to come to the defense of the city in which he had made his home because Clara had made it hers. Bartha was quite sure, he had told Esther, that his cousin would prefer to live elsewhere, but it didn’t seem to her that he had any objection to living in Omaha. She’d never heard him say a word against it, or for that matter express any affection or nostalgia about any other place he’d lived. Certainly he didn’t long for California the way Bartha longed for New York.
This thought was a surprise. Did Bartha long for New York? He was talking now, with what might be longing, about the restaurants he loved most there. Esther knew which ones he meant before he named them—they were little Hungarian restaurants run by families, and to get to them he had to change trains twice, then walk for what had seemed to her a long time on the one occasion she had gone with him to visit one of them.
Alexander had slowed down again, and Esther glanced at Bartha as she rearranged the baby in her arms so that he could switch to her other breast. She was still expecting him to observe that she had hardly touched her food and to tell her to put Alexander down—she was all set to say, “I can’t now. Look, he’s nursing, can’t you see?” (and, indeed, the baby had begun to nurse again with renewed interest)—but Bartha was telling Clara, in great detail, about the food served in those little restaurants. He made the food sound a great deal nicer than what Esther could recall from her one visit (a brown heap of meat for each of them, mounds of mushy vegetables, dumplings and gravy, noodles—again noodles!—and saucers of sour cream). She’d gone with him only once because it was so hard for her to get out in the evening. She had to tell her parents it was something to do with school, that it was required (the sacred word!). Between the lying, which she wasn’t used to, and the hour-long subway ride and then the long walk at night from the subway station to a neighborhood she’d never even known existed, she was so unnerved by the time they reached the restaurant he’d chosen that it would not have been possible for her to have a pleasant evening. As it was, she had been miserable. Bartha hardly spoke to her, he was so busy chatting with the waitress and the cook, and exchanging greetings with some of the other people eating there. She’d never heard him speak in his own language before and it made her uneasy, despite (or else—but it was only later that she thought of this—because of) seeing what a pleasure it was for him: it made her wonder if the rest of the time, forced to use another language that was not his own with students and with friends and neighbors—with her—he was less than happy. And the food, which Bartha told her was “exactly” the food of his youth, was too heavy and too rich for her—she ate almost none of it.
But what made her most miserable was the lie she had told. She could not stop thinking about it; she could not stop worrying about getting caught in it. How would her father punish her if he worked out that she had been lying? Would he then find suspect everything she said? Surely he would watch her more closely. Oh, to have risked everything for this evening that had given her no pleasure!
Throughout the meal she worried, and throughout the long trip home. How was it, she marveled, that so many girls her age lied so assuredly and frequently—how was it that they behaved so recklessly, so badly? (What she overheard from girls she didn’t know or hardly knew in school astounded her. How did they cause their parents so much grief and worry without ever worrying themselves? “It’s just as if they were a different species,” she’d said once to Leah, who’d said, “No. They’re only silly. They’re only stupid. They don’t think.”)
She was exhausted and close to tears when she let herself into the apartment, and so pale that her mother exclaimed, “You’re getting sick!” and insisted on taking her temperature. (She would not have been surprised if she had had a fever.) She was relieved when after this one evening out with her, Bartha resumed his habit of so many years of going to these restaurants alone.
How was it that she had never thought before about how he must miss them? He used to go twice, three times a week. And she had never given any thought to all the other things he must miss, too—the opera and the Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall. The Metropolitan Museum, to which he had taken her on every one of the occasions (three) she had managed to slip away from her parents and the store and her friends without a lie—except perhaps a lie of omission—on a weekend afternoon. Oh, and also the Frick, where he had promised to take her but had never had the chance to, “to see the Vermeers, the best paintings in the world,” he said. And the Museum of Modern Art, which she had never visited with him, although she’d been there on class trips, once almost every year. Bartha liked to “drop in, he told Esther, “once each season, at its start, to mark time’s passage.”
And how he must miss Sheepshead Bay, where he often walked, admiring the docked fishing boats! They made him feel as if he had slipped away to somewhere else, he would tell her (“but then it is so reassuring to find that one is still here after all”). Sometimes he would talk for a few minutes with the fishermen, whose Brooklyn accents were, he said, “so magnificently, so beautifully at odds” with the fishing stories they offered him.
Sheepshead Bay. And the boardwalk along Brighton Beach. And the pavilion on the boardwalk, where he used to sit on Sundays in good weather, looking at the ocean while he listened to the men who played accordions and fiddles there and told each other jokes in Yiddish. How he must miss a place to sit where there was anything to see, to hear.
As she used the back of her fork to nudge her vegetables up to the edge of her plate, she thought of how, when they’d first come to Omaha, Bartha had sat once for an hour on Vilmos and Clara’s front porch, and afterwards told her that he had seen “a hundred cars fly down the street, and not one person walking.” Why, he must miss walking in a place where other people walked. He must miss Brooklyn and Manhattan’s streets, he must miss seeing crowds of people. He must miss subways, buses—everything, she thought, and that she’d never thought of this before filled her with shame.
Think how much he must miss his studio, she told herself. Think how much he must miss his own belongings. There had been nothing in the apartment she’d grown up in that had felt to her as if it were importantly her own, that meant enough to her for her to think of taking when
