They May Not Mean To, But They Do(47)

“It’s a perfectly good report,” she said. She began leafing through it, nodding approval at her own conclusions. “An excellent report, actually.”

“Joy?”

She had stopped turning the pages. She was staring, riveted, at one page. Then she grinned. “Oh dear,” she said, still grinning. “Oh dearie dear.” Surely that was supposed to say CUNY facilities. Surely that was not supposed to say CUNT facilities.

“Something wrong?” Karl said.

“Oh no,” Joy said. “Just a little typo.”





33

“Hi, Grandma,” Ben said. “Would you like a visit? I have a week off.”

In fact, the bar Ben worked at had gone out of business and he had Airbnb’d his apartment out for the month. He wasn’t sure why, but he admitted it to his grandmother as soon as he arrived.

“I won’t stay for a month or anything, but I didn’t know where else to go. Please don’t tell Mom. She’ll freak out.”

Joy found Ben fascinating. He was so sweet and so difficult in such a sweet way, drifting without bothering anyone, unproductive and undemanding, working at what in Joy’s day were considered summer jobs for a college man—construction, bartending, temporary doorman. It was not a philosophical choice, this drifting, not like Dolores’s granddaughter, who was a Dumpster diver, god help her. Molly worried too much about him, he was a good boy finding his way.

And now he needed her, Joy. She wondered if Molly had put him up to this, part of her plan to keep her relevant.

“As long as you like,” she said.

She wanted to dance, she was so relieved. She would not have to sleep in the apartment alone.

*

Uncle Daniel’s old bedroom, a.k.a. the maid’s room, was fusty and weird—childish and elderly at the same time. The carpet was as old as his uncle, the paint had once been a lovely shade of blue, he’d been told, but was now a sad colorless shade of nothing, and the window needed no curtains or blinds because it was darkened by grime. The built-in shelves, once so enviously shipshape (at least according to Ben’s mother), were claustrophobic and warped. The sink dripped, not too much, just enough to catch you by surprise.

“Honey, do you want some tea?” his grandmother called out.

Yes, he did want some tea, and how comforting to have his grandma make it, though she made the worst tea he had ever tasted, weak and lukewarm. But just the sound of her voice made the little room feel much nicer, more like home. Ben had always loved coming to her apartment. She’d made him cracker sandwiches: buttery orange Ritz crackers and peanut butter. There were toys she’d kept there just for him and interesting junk retrieved from the museum she worked at. There was a Betty Boop videotape he had always loved, it was so sexy and so peculiar—especially when she told him that Betty Boop was Jewish. Sitting on her bureau in her bedroom, there was still a wooden puzzle box in the shape of a butterfly he had gotten her for Christmas when he was a little boy. He’d bought it at a street fair and thought it was the most beautiful and original object anyone had ever given anyone as a gift. One of his paintings from kindergarten was framed in Lucite and hung in the foyer.

The kitchen was long and narrow, a tunnel, really, and at the end was a window. His grandparents had jammed a small square table there. It had two chairs, and you could not open the oven door all the way even if the second chair was pushed in. He sat there with Joy and looked out the window and drank his tea.

“Grandpa and I used to sit here,” she said.

“I can see all the flowering trees. It’s really pretty.”

“Yes. You’re in Grandpa’s seat.”

Oh god. How awkward. “Oh. Right,” he said. “Good seat to be in.”

His grandmother smiled. “You’re a fine person, Ben.”

“Like Grandpa.”

“He was all right,” said Grandma Joy. “Up to a point.”

She continued to smile, reaching behind her to grab a package of Oreos. She funneled several cookies into her hand.

“Enjoy,” she said absently, rattling the package at Ben.

She could remember so clearly the first time Ben stayed at her apartment. He had been eighteen months old, jabbering quite coherently, with the bottle hanging from the side of his mouth like a cigar. She and Aaron had set up the old crib, a beautiful, highly decorated wooden crib that had originally been Aaron’s, then taken it apart again the minute Molly saw it.

“The spokes are too far apart!” she said. “Are you trying to kill him? He could get his head caught. You put us in this? Unbelievable.”

So they had moved the beautiful crib from the 1920s back into the cedar closet and bought an ugly blue nylon playpen that could double as a crib. Ben ended up sleeping in their bed, anyway, whenever he stayed with them. Joy could hear his small, even breath; she could smell the warm, bathed skin; she could see his eyelids flutter, his fingers clutch his bear. When she looked at him now, a skinny young man who needed a shave, he was the same to her, her first grandchild.

In the morning, Joy put some sort of clothes on so she wouldn’t scare the horses, then staggered weakly to the kitchen to make Ben his breakfast. Standing over the stove to stir the Cream of Wheat, she eliminated the lumps in the cereal with solemn determination. She put the two bowls of cereal on the kitchen table with two spoons and two cheerful cloth napkins. She put the kettle on and forgot it until its whistle startled her and woke Ben.