Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(129)
They could talk about how lucky they were (Sam very nearly lost his fingers), but never how unlucky. They could speak in generalities, but never recount the details: Dr. Fred repeatedly sticking needles into Sam’s fingers to test for feeling, while Sam looked into his parents’ eyes and begged, pleaded, for it to stop. When they came home, Jacob put his bloody shirt in a plastic bag and walked it to the garbage can on the corner of Connecticut. Julia put her bloody shirt in an old pillowcase and tucked it halfway into a stack of pants.
Too much love for happiness, but how much happiness was enough? Would she do it all again? She always believed that her ability to endure pain was greater than anyone else’s—certainly than her children’s or Jacob’s. A burden would be easiest carried by her, and regardless, it would ultimately be carried by her anyway. Only men can unhave babies. But if she could do it all again?
She often thought of those retired Japanese engineers who volunteered to go into failing nuclear plants to fix them after the tsunami. They knew they’d be exposed to fatal amounts of radiation, but given that their life expectancies were shorter than the time it would take for the cancer to kill them, they saw no reason not to get the cancer. In the hardware gallery, Mark had said it wasn’t too late in life for happiness. When, in Julia’s life, would it be late enough for honesty?
—
It was amazing how little changed as everything changed. The conversation was continually expanding, but it was no longer clear what they were talking about. When Jacob showed her listings for places to which he might move, was it any more real than when he used to show her listings for places to which they might move? When they shared their visions for happy independent lives, was it any less make-believe than when they used to share their visions for living together happily? The rehearsal of how they would tell the kids took on a quality of theater, as if they were trying to get the scene right, rather than get life right. She had the sense that to Jacob it was a kind of game, that he enjoyed it. Or worse, that planning their separation was a new ritual that kept them together.
Domestic life stagnated. They talked about Jacob starting to sleep elsewhere, but Tamir was in the guest room, Barak was on the sofa, and leaving for a hotel after everyone was asleep and arriving before anyone woke up felt both cruel and profligate. They talked and talked about what kind of schedule was most likely to facilitate good stretches with the kids, and good transitions, and as little missing as possible—but they didn’t take any steps either to repair what was broken or to leave it behind.
After the funeral…
After the bar mitzvah…
After the Israelis leave…
After the semester ends…
There was a nonchalance to their desperation, and maybe talking about it was enough for now. It could wait until it couldn’t.
But funerals, like airplane turbulence and fortieth birthdays, force the issue of mortality. Had it been another day, she and Jacob would have found ways to continue living inside their purgatory. They would have created errands to run, diversions, emotional escape hatches, fantasies. The funeral made a conversation almost a crime, but it also inspired an unrelenting questioning in Julia. All that could be deferred on any other day was now urgent. She remembered Max’s obsession with time, how little there was. “I’m wasting my life!”
She went to the bedroom, to the dozens of coats piled on the bed. They looked like dead bodies, like Jewish dead. Those images had imprinted Julia’s childhood, too, and she now found certain resonances impossible to escape. Those images of naked women holding their children to their chests. She hadn’t seen them since she first saw them, but she never stopped seeing them.
The rabbi had looked across the patiently waiting grave and into Julia. He asked, “But in your experience, do Jews cry silently?” Did he see what no one could hear?
She found her coat, put it on. The pockets were filled with receipts, and a small arsenal of candies for bribing, and keys, and business cards, and assorted foreign currency from trips she could remember planning and packing for but not taking. In two fistfuls she transferred all this to the garbage, like tashlich.
She went to the front door without stopping: past the white cabbage salad, black coffee, bluefish, and blondies; past the purple soda and peach schnapps; past the chatter about investments, and Israel, and cancer. She walked past the drone of the Mourner’s Kaddish, past the covered mirrors, past the photos of Isaac on the console: with the Israelis at their last visit; at Julia’s fortieth; on his sofa, looking off into the near distance. When she reached the door, she noticed, for the first time, the sign-in book resting open on an accent table. She flipped through it, looking to see if her boys had written anything.
Sam: I’m sorry.
Max: I’m sorry.
Benjy: I’m sorry.
She was sorry, too, and she touched the mezuzah as she crossed the threshold, but didn’t kiss her fingers. She remembered when Jacob suggested they select their own text to scroll into the mezuzah of the front door of their home. They chose a line from the Talmud: “Every blade of grass has an angel watching over it, whispering, ‘Grow! Grow!’?” Would the next family to live in the house even know?
THE LION’S DEN
Tamir and Jacob stayed up late that night. Julia was somewhere, but she wasn’t there. Isaac wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. The kids were supposed to be asleep in their rooms, but Sam was in Other Life while snapchatting with Billie, and Max was looking up words that he didn’t understand in The Catcher in the Rye—pissed, as Holden had taught him to be, that he had to use a paper dictionary. Barak was in the guest room, asleep and expanding. Downstairs, it was only the two cousins—old friends, middle-aged men, the fathers of still-young children.