My Last Innocent Year(70)
I watched him squeeze a lemon into his drink. Why was he bringing this up now, I wondered, when I’d already agreed to take the apartment and the job, when I’d ruined whatever hope I had of staying here with Connelly? I thought about “This Youthful Heart.” Without Connelly’s help, would I ever finish? Abe was right, it was a hard road, and while there was no point in bringing it up again now, he hadn’t made it any easier.
We were quiet until the waiter returned with our entrées. At the table next to us, the boy had lost his tic-tac-toe partner. I watched as he made big swooping spirals on the paper tablecloth.
“I’m sorry I haven’t lived up to your expectations,” I said, popping a piece of broccoli in my mouth. It tasted charred and bitter, like tears.
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you ever hear yourself? You’re always going on about how great everybody else is doing—Casey Hurwitz, Jeffrey Greenbaum—”
“Jeffrey Greenbaum is a schmuck.”
“Well, he’s Doctor Schmuck now. Even Benji, so sensible and clever, living at home to save money. And then there’s me, taking some stupid job I can’t afford to take, pursuing a dream that’ll never come true. You don’t believe in me, just like you never believed in Mom.”
He looked wounded. “I’m sorry you feel that way. It was never my intention. Your mother was a great artist.” I rolled my eyes. “No, she was. She always said I held her back, and maybe I did. But she didn’t believe in herself. I don’t know how you become a writer. It isn’t a life I ever imagined for myself and I don’t know how you get from here to there. But I don’t want you to be like your mother, with dreams that don’t come true. Or like me, who never had time for dreams.”
The waiter came by to refill our water glasses. “Do you remember that game we used to play?” Abe said when he was gone. “How Small Is Isabel?”
I nodded, remembering the game my parents and I used to play when I was little. A version of hide-and-seek in which I’d squeeze myself into as small a space as possible and wait for my parents to find me. It started when I was a baby. My mother had gone in to check on me and, in my father’s telling, had run back screaming, “Abe! She’s gone!” They looked for me everywhere—in the closet, in the bathroom, even on the fire escape, until, finally, Abe spotted me, wedged into a corner of my crib under a blanket. After he got my mother to laugh about it, it became part of the story they told about me. Isabel the magician! The shape-shifter! Able to transform herself into a speck of dust!
“That was a weird game,” I said, laughing.
Abe didn’t laugh. “After a while, I told your mother I didn’t want to play it anymore because I could see you doing it even when we weren’t playing. I don’t know how to explain it,” he said, “but I could see you making yourself small. And I didn’t like it.” He picked at his rice pilaf. “It’s silly to blame it on a game, but over the years I’ve wondered if I ever made you feel that you weren’t allowed to take up space in the world. Because you are.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” He was looking me straight in the eye. “So maybe that’s what I’m telling you when I talk about other people doing great things. Because if Dr. Schmuck can go to medical school, you can, too.”
The waiter cleared our plates. The people at the table next to us raised their glasses. “To the graduate!” Abe ordered dessert—two of them, an unheard-of extravagance. As we dug into our chocolate mousse, I wondered if this was why he’d come, to tell me this and make sure I heard him, really heard him. Maybe he’d always been telling me and I’d just chosen not to hear him. Why did I believe Connelly when he told me I was special, but not my father? In the candlelit glow of the restaurant, I saw Abe as others might have seen him, as a man free to decide what to do with the rest of his life. I thought about how he’d insisted we rub the bust’s nose. We could use a little luck, couldn’t we? Abe had never been allowed to have dreams of his own and so he focused on mine. It was the one thing he could give me that no one could take away.
A light rain was falling when I walked Abe back to his car. We went over, in great detail, where he would meet Debra’s parents in the morning before the ceremony and where we would all meet up when it was over.
“By the way,” he said, “did you fix the thing you were asking me about? The mistake you thought you’d made?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I did. Wait. I have something for you.”
“For me?” He unwrapped the package I handed him. It was the scarf I’d been making, wrapped in the front page of that day’s copy of the Wilder Voice. He held it up in front of him. Blue, yellow, gray; wool, cotton, polyester—it was a crazy, patchwork mess of a thing.
“I had a lot of extra yarn,” I said as he wrapped it around his neck, once, twice, three times. From tip to tail, it was taller than he was.
“I can see that,” he said, laughing. “Thank you.”
I smiled. A scarf was a project with no clear end, a way to outrun my mother’s words, and so I’d kept knitting until I’d run out of yarn. The whole time, I’d thought I was making it for Connelly, but it turned out it had always been for Abe.
He placed a bag of leftovers in the back seat. “I only worry about the money because I wish I could have given you more.”