She's Up to No Good(7)

“Ew. He has a name. You actually—ew.” I took my hand off the steering wheel to rub my temple.

“Of course he has a name. And there’s an important lesson there for you. It’s not like you only get one love of your life. I had two.” She paused, and I could feel her shrewd eyes burning a hole in the side of my face. “Although I don’t think you’ve had one yet.”

I rolled my suddenly tight neck in a circle, wondering briefly if the reason Brad always cracked his when he got stressed was because I was the one making him crazy. “I loved Brad,” I said quietly.

She shook her head. “Tell yourself that if it makes you feel better.”

“What do you know about it? You weren’t in our marriage!”

“You weren’t either, or there wouldn’t be someone else there now.”

I held up a hand. “Can we just not talk for a little while? We’ve got a long drive—a long week—ahead of us, and I’m not trying to fight with you.”

“Who’s fighting?” I shot her a dirty look and she capitulated.

For approximately three miles.

“Tony’s not really the start of the story,” she said as we neared the Harbor Tunnel on 895. “My father is.”

“Zayde.” I nodded, using the Yiddish word for “grandpa,” which my mother called him.

“His name was Joseph. Yusef, really. But he wanted to be American. He came here from Russia, you know. He was nineteen and was running away.”

“What was he running away from?”

“A bad marriage.”

I sighed loudly. “Okay, really? Is this whole trip actually a setup to get me over Brad? Because you’re not very subtle about it.”

“Who’s being subtle? Not everything is about you, you know. And this trip isn’t.”

We were quiet for another mile, and I finally forced my shoulders to relax. “Fine,” I said as we emerged into the light. “What was so bad about his marriage?”

“Oh, he wasn’t married. His mother hired a matchmaker for him. And when they set up the shidduch, he followed the matchmaker to find the girl. He wasn’t marrying her if he didn’t like the looks of her. And he didn’t. He said she looked like an old sack of potatoes.”

I blinked at the rationale. “So he just ran away?”

“He pocketed the money his father gave him to buy a wedding suit, took the train across Europe, and bought a ticket on a ship to America instead.”

“How did he settle in Hereford?”

“By accident. He took the train from New York to Boston, where a cousin was. But he fell asleep and missed his stop. When the line ended, he got out and walked from the station to the water and said that was where he wanted to live. And he did from then until the day he died.”

“What about your mother?”

“She was from Rockport. A couple of towns over. Her parents came from Russia while my grandmother was pregnant with her.” She paused. “I never knew my grandparents.”

“How did they meet?”

“She was clerking for her father. She was older, twenty-five by then. He was twenty-four. Papa walked in, took one look at her, and knew she was the girl for him.” She stopped talking, her lips pressed into a line that meant she wasn’t going to elaborate further.

We rode in silence for another two miles, and I wished for my car, where I could put on music from my phone. My grandmother’s face was turned to the window. I looked over at her, thinking for the first time that she looked older than the grandmother of my memory. Vain to a T, she religiously followed a skincare regimen that kept her looking younger than many of her contemporaries. Not that she had that many contemporaries left. Most of her friends and all her siblings were now gone. She was the second-youngest of seven, but the baby of the family had died very young in some nebulous accident. And my grandfather had been gone for—wow, was it five years already? Loss takes a physical as well as an emotional toll, and the lines on my grandmother’s face told that story.

I saw the sliver of my own face in the rearview mirror. No, there weren’t lines yet, but that didn’t mean I looked the same anymore either. Six months of learning to live with the fact that my life was never going to be perfect—that I was never going to be perfect—had done some damage. I may not have looked older, but something had changed. I didn’t know how to quantify it except that I didn’t like it.

I glanced back at my grandma, who was watching me through the same pair of eyes as mine, just hooded in wrinkled lids. “She wasn’t in love with him, you know.”

“Who?”

“My mother. She was in love with someone else. That’s why she wasn’t married at twenty-five.”

“Then why—?”

“He wasn’t Jewish, so her father wouldn’t let her marry him. I think she married Papa to get away from her father’s house.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It’s how it was back then.” She shrugged. “You married Jewish, or your parents sat shiva for you. It’s why I didn’t marry Tony. He was Portuguese.”

“And you just went along with that? That doesn’t sound like you.”

She let out a small bark of laughter. “You know me well. No. But it was for the best. In the end. My father did eventually come around on Tony—too late for us, but things work out the way they’re supposed to. It wasn’t his fault. He was a product of his time. Just like I am. Just like you are.”