They May Not Mean To, But They Do(15)

“A red-eye,” Cora said. “Ew.”

“It means a flight at night and you have to stay awake all night and your eyes get red,” Ruby said.

“Aunt Freddie has blue eyes,” Cora said. “So there.”

Joy had marveled at first at how blasé the girls were about their Aunt Molly marrying a woman. She still marveled. It’s very strange, she wanted to say sometimes. Don’t you see? “Aunt Freddie will be here soon, in plenty of time for dinner,” she said instead.

Ruby had recently gone through a Katy Perry phase, mercifully short, when she wanted to dye her hair blue. She settled for a blue wig on Halloween. Then, just a week ago, she’d done an about-face. She still dressed in incomprehensible combinations of sparkly garments. She was wearing such an outfit now, an undersized flared skirt in a strawberry print, each strawberry a collection of layered red sequins, leggings decorated with clown faces, a gold-and-pink-striped lamé T-shirt. But she was now reading Tom Sawyer with the same intensity she’d previously reserved for Katy Perry songs and gossip, and she was now intent on getting a pet frog.

“No more Katy Perry karaoke?” Joy asked. It had been cute, Ruby lip-synching the pop songs, until she began shaking her hips in suggestive ways.

“I don’t want to be stereotyped,” she said.

Daniel flopped down beside his mother. “As what? A teen pop star?”

“Don’t tease me,” said Ruby. “Mommy said her father teased her about the Beatles and she never got over it.”

“Mommy’s a stereotype,” Daniel said.

Joy listened to the noises from the kitchen. Plenty of banging and crashing, but she found she didn’t mind as much as she had anticipated. Still, they didn’t know where anything was, those two, Coco and Molly. Joy got up and went into the kitchen, pointed out the roasting pan, the carving knife. The women smiled at her tolerantly until she went back into the living room. Fine, fine, let them look high and low for platters and gravy boats. If they needed any more of her help, they knew where to find her. She would sit and put her feet up and watch her grandchildren. That was matriarchal, too.

Ruby pushed her younger sister away and kneeled on the floor at the coffee table. She pulled an ornamental wooden box toward her and began to rummage through old photographs that were kept inside. Two years before, Ruby’s teacher had asked the class to construct their family trees. Ruby had formed an immediate attachment, bordering on obsession, with the heavy ancestral mustaches, the billowing knickers, the bows and fancy perched hats. She still gravitated to the photographs when she came to see her grandparents. She knew the names of every second cousin on both sides of the family. The old man with a long white beard spread across his chest who was wearing a fur hat was Aaron the First, as she put it—her grandfather’s grandfather. He had eyes like an angry crow.

“Why do you like him?” Cora asked. “He’s scary. And he’s dead.”

“So?”

“So he’s scary and he’s dead.”

But Ruby only shrugged and gazed fondly at the old man. He had sent his children to New York for a better life, six of them, holding only one back to take care of him and his wife in their old age. That daughter had died of cholera at sixteen. Tragic, Grandma Joy told her. Ruby thought, It served him right, but she said nothing.

“Is the turkey cooked or not?” Joy said, back in the kitchen. “I don’t understand.”

“Mom, you did plenty. Just sit down and relax. Coco and I can do this part.”

Joy had helped set up the extra table and the folding chairs, she’d helped Molly get the good dishes down, the good silverware, all the linens tucked away in boxes lined with tissue paper. That, plus everything she’d done to get Aaron ready—she was tired. In the living room, she watched as Aaron trudged in behind his walker. The girls looked up from the box of photographs.

“Do you want to look at your ancestors?” Ruby asked him.

“I’m too old to have ancestors.”

“That’s silly, Grandpa.”

“I’m too silly to have ancestors,” he said. He threw two kisses at the children. “Catch!” he said, and they both jumped and raised a hand, as if they were catching a butterfly. “Good,” he said. “Sometimes they get away.”

Joy helped him sit on his chair. He threw her a kiss, too. “Tough to be an old Jew,” he said.

“I’m Jewish,” Cora said.

Her sister rolled her eyes.

Cora showed Joy a photo of a man wearing a woman’s bathing suit.

“That’s my father,” Joy said.

“Why did he wear a girl’s bathing suit?”

“All the men did.”

“There’s a girl in my class who used to be a boy. But I’ve never seen her in a bathing suit.”

“Dear god.”

“Sometimes people get born in the wrong bodies,” Ruby explained to her grandmother.

Joy checked to see if Aaron had been following this, but he appeared to be, mercifully, asleep.

After a while, Cora began her ritual search for spare change, running her small fingers beneath the seat cushions of the sofa. Mostly she encountered grit, but she did come across a few bobby pins. Beneath the cushion of a chair, she discovered a clear plastic bean with a tiny wire. She was so disgusted when she realized that it was her grandfather’s hearing aid that she put it back. She moved onto the floor and lifted the sofa’s skirt. There, among the dust balls, she saw a ballpoint pen she could not reach.