paper, laying it tenderly in a box imprinted with the store’s logo, as if preparing a loved one for burial. The irony touches me. Minutes later, I’m hoofing it back downtown in a taxi, the suit ignorantly, trustingly huddled against my hip.
The taxi reeks of some oppressively expensive perfume, making my contact lenses pucker, making me almost miss the days when cabs smelled comfortingly of stale cigarettes. Opening the window is not an option, however, since Reykjavik is warmer than it is in Manhattan right now. It’s that first week after New Year’s, when the city, bereft of holiday decorations, looks like an ugly naked man left shivering in an exam room. I take advantage of a traffic snarl at 50th and Broadway to fish my cell phone out of my purse and call home, half watching swarms of tourists trying to decide whether or not to cross against the light. They’re so cute I can’t stand it.
“Mama!”
I’m immediately sucked back through time and space, not just to Richmond Hill, Queens, but into another dimension entirely. Instead of feeling connected, I feel oddly disconnected, that the woman in this taxi is not the person my daughter hears on the other end of the line. In the background, I hear Mr. Rogers reassuring his tiny viewers about something or other (my throat catches—how could Mr. Rogers die?). Guilt spurts through me again, sharper this time; I push the box slightly away, spurning it and everything it connotes, as if Fred Rogers is looking down from Heaven and sorrowfully shaking his head at me.
“Hey, Twink,” I say to the little girl who dramatically altered the course of my life half a decade ago. “Whatcha doing?”
You would think I would know by now not to ask leading questions of loquacious, detail-obsessed five-year-olds.
“I got hungry so I fixed myself a peanut butter sandwich,” Starr says, “but the bread was totally icky so I had cheese and crackers instead, and a pickle, and then I had to pee, and then you called so now I’m talking to you. Oh, and I saw the cutest puppy on TV—” a subject she’s managed to wedge into every conversation over the past three months “—and Leo said he’d take me for a walk later, if it’s warm enough, and you would not believe the loud fight those people behind us had this morning—”
I elbow my way through a comma and say, “That’s nice, honey…can I talk to Leo for a sec?”
I hear breathing. Then: “So can we?”
“Can we what?”
Breathing turns into a small, pithy, much-practiced sigh. “Get a puppy.”
Considering I want a puppy about as much as I want a lobotomy, I say, “We’ll see,” because I’m in a taxi and this is using up my free minutes and while I basically know more about nuclear physics than I do about mothering, I do know what kind of reaction “No, we can’t” will bring. And I have neither the minutes nor the strength to deal with the ramifications of “no” today.
Of course, the little breather on the other end of the line is a poignant reminder of the ramifications of “yes,” but there you are.
“Put Leo on,” I say again. Breathing stops, followed by a clunk, followed by heavier, masculine breathing.
“Yes, I’m still alive,” are the first words out of my grandfather’s mouth.
“Just checking,” I say, playing along. Sharing the joke. Except my father’s father had a quadruple bypass a few years ago. So the joke’s not so funny, maybe. I can hear, immortalized through the magic of reruns, King Friday pontificating about something or other. My grandfather is not immortal, however; there will be no reruns of his life, except in my memory. An unreliable medium, as I well know.
“Just checking?” He chuckles. “Three times, you’ve called today.”
“I worry,” I say, sounding like every woman stretching back to Eve. Whose real reaction to Adam’s nakedness was probably, “For God’s sake, put something on, already! You want to catch your death?”
“You shouldn’t worry,” my grandfather says. “It can kill you.”
Black humor is a big thing in my family. A survival tactic, ironically enough. “I’ll take that chance.”
Another chuckle; I listen carefully for any sign the man might momentarily drop dead. Never mind he’s been healthy as a horse since the operation. But at seventy-eight, he’s already bucking the family odds. I mean, one glance at my family medical history and the insurance examiner got this look on her face like she half expected me to keel over in front of her.
With good reason. Not only does our family exhibit a propensity for dying young, but without warning. Well, except for my mother. But other than that, it’s hale and hearty one minute, gone the next, boom. My mother, at forty, from ovarian cancer. My father at fifty-one, massive heart attack. Grandmother, sixty-three, stroke. Assorted aunts, uncles, third cousins—boom, boom, boom. Okay, and one splat, but Uncle Archie always had been the black sheep in the family.
“Well,” my grandfather says, amused, “nothing’s changed since lunchtime, I’m fine, the baby’s fine, everybody’s fine. Except maybe you.”
By the way, my graduation present was a burial plot. What can I tell you, the Levines tend to be practical people.
I change the subject. “You fix the Gomezes’ leaky faucet?”
My grandfather owns a pair of duplexes. We all live in one, he rents out the two apartments in the other. Sure, they bring in extra cash, but speaking as somebody who finds changing a lightbulb a pain in the butt, I keep thinking he should just sell the place, give over the responsibility to someone else.
“This morning,” he says. “Think maybe I’ll switch out their refrigerator, too.”
“What’s wrong with their fridge? It can’t be more than, what? Ten years old?”
“It’s too small. Especially with the new baby coming.”
Which would make their third. Sometimes, I’m surprised Leo even bothers to collect the rent. These aren’t tenants, they’re family. Not that I don’t like the Gomezes—or the Nguyens, in the upstairs apartment—don’t get me wrong. Mr. Gomez paints his own apartment, just asks Leo for the paint; and Mrs. Nguyen’s window boxes in the summer are the envy of the neighborhood, regular forests of petunias. Besides, the Gomez kids give Starr somebody to play with, on those odd occasions when she’s in the mood for other children. It’s just…oh, hell, I don’t know. I just think he should be free by now, you know?
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I can sell the old one, it’ll be okay.”
My brain’s slipped a cog. “Old what?”
“Refrigerator.”
“Oh.” The taxi driver blats his horn, scaring the crap out of me. Nothing moves, however. “Starr says maybe you’ll take her for a walk later?”
“I thought maybe. We’ve been cooped up in this house too long. It’s up in the mid-twenties, I’ll make sure she’s warm, don’t worry.”
But this time, even as I smile, I realize the knot in my gut isn’t anxiety (for once), it’s something closer to envy. My grandfather will dress my daughter in her leggings and heavy, puffy coat and mittens and that silly fake fur hat he gave her for Christmas—she will look
