Honeydew: Stories Read online

  We had reached Godolphin Center. The Marigold Café is a shallow place, mirrored to provide an illusion of depth. Rand was seated at a table in the back, against the mirror, his silver hair and distinguished shoulders doubled behind him. “Good-bye, Daphna.”

  “They all want to pierce their ears. What do you think? Yes, mine also are pierced, but in my youth we stopped there. I am afraid that after the lobes the lips, after the lips the belly—”

  “Good-bye, Daphna.”

  She stood glaring at me, her feet bare on the pavement, the broom bristling beside her head. “When will you come to us for dinner?” She issued this question often.

  “Soon,” I falsely promised, just as often. I turned in an abrupt manner, as if she had insulted me. It was the best method of breaking away. I entered the Marigold and leaned across Rand’s table to kiss his finely honed cheek. I sank onto the chair opposite him.

  “Heavens,” he said, apparently noting my exhaustion. Then: “Heavens” again, looking past my ear. “Isn’t that your neighbor outside, getting in people’s way?”

  I looked past his ear into the mirror. I saw, through the window of the café, that Daphna was still standing on the sidewalk and that passersby had to swerve to get around her. Some looked annoyed. Some stopped to talk. The human knot around her grew thicker, further irritating those wanting to keep going. Dear, aren’t you going to hurt your feet? that old lady must be saying. A good-looking broom, from a wag. Would you like me to take you to the shelter? Daphna turned her head from one to another. At last a policeman joined the little crowd and offered her his arm.

  I later heard from Connie’s husband that he’d seen the two of them and the broom proceeding down our street, Daphna talking and the policeman listening; and that he, Connie’s husband, couldn’t tell whether his neighbor was under arrest or whether, at last, she was getting somebody’s full attention.

  II.

  The policeman’s name was Sam Flanagan.

  He was tall and auburn-curled, snub-nosed and broad-grinned; and if I had ever brought him home my father would have thrown him out. Jews, Daddy could just tolerate; Irish, he despised. Sam had been born twenty-five years earlier on Magazine Street in the section of town we real estate people still call Whiskey Point. He was as thorough a Godolphinite as Daphna was a Jerusalemite, and he lived in his parents’ shabby house with eight of his nine brothers and sisters. The oldest, married to a man from Bhutan, had moved out.

  “Can you imagine the chaos there?” Daphna said to me. “Siblings and their friends, assorted uncles and aunts, everyone drinking and watching television and utterly making a racket. They might as well be Arabs. What an atmosphere for a scholar.”

  Well, Sam was a scholar, of sorts. He had graduated from the police academy and achieved a bachelor of science as well, and now he was studying law part-time. Our town pays for that sort of thing for its public employees, but of course it doesn’t provide a study house or even a carrel. “Within our family a person is able to reflect, to contemplate; and the girls have hundreds of those yellow highlighters.”

  And so Sam on his red Vespa came to that dreadful house (“prewar spaciousness; new furnace”) almost every weekday, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the evening. “Sometimes in the morning,” Lucienne reported, her cheeks as pink as that day’s scarf.

  “Policemen have shifting shifts,” I told her.

  “He takes one of the girls for a ride before school.”

  I knew that. When Sam rounded the widower’s corner with a daughter riding pillion, I was reminded of my splendid horse, Patrick. He was a Hanoverian, seventeen hands. I had stabled him at Prides Crossing. During my teens I rode him three afternoons a week, taking the trolley from South Godolphin to North Station, then the train to Patrick. And so I was reminded too of my parents, bravely maintaining that South Godolphin mansion (“Italianate villa on two acres; swimming pool and carriage house”)—reminded of Daddy’s bankruptcy and the taking over of his company by two well-dressed Italians. “Goddamn foreigners.” And reminded of my misguided marriage, entered into in the wake of Daddy’s ill fortune. All those memories, occasioned by a young man and a girl on a motor scooter. Lucienne in her soft chiffon and tippling Sylvia and Connie the determined empath probably had youthful things to be reminded of too. I don’t know what those things were because around here we don’t discuss regrets or triumphs. And I certainly don’t know what Avner thought on a particular morning when he descended his front steps just as Sam rode up, Daphna behind him, her arms around his leather jacket, hair streaming. I know only that he waved at them.

  Daphna was now often seen at the supermarket, accompanied by the youngest daughter, who examined each item and calculated its price per ounce and chose the cheapest, and at the same time kept a running total in her head—I knew she did that; Connie’s remarkable intuition saw tumblers spinning behind the girl’s forehead. Daphna began to cook almost every night—I knew that too; Lucienne provided her with many of the recipes. Sam and the family could probably fit themselves around the kitchen table, especially if the debris were removed. But Sabbath dinner had always been served in the dining room, heavy with the dark furniture that came with the dark house. On Fridays, driving by, slowing up, I could see six people around the table, could see Sam’s curls brazen in the candlelight.

  Wednesdays became safe. Every day was safe. Daphna had retreated into her expanded family. I wished them all good listening.

  III.

  It was on a Wednesday that the package came—Wednesday morning, a few days after New Year’s Eve. The postman held it out to me at arm’s length. The package was oblong and bore Israeli stamps and was addressed to Daphna in English. “Nobody’s home there, not even Flanagan.” (Postmen know everything.) “Would you sign for it?” As a proper Godolphin citizen, I complied.

  I forgot about it for a day. But on Thursday when I got home from the Marigold Café I noticed it on my Stephen Badlam chest, the one item of furniture I’d salvaged from Daddy’s house. I picked it up and hurried down the street, still wearing my otter coat, twelve years old now but once stunning, still wearing my high-heeled boots. The evening was misty, and warm enough for me to unbutton the coat as I walked. Rand had proposed that afternoon. I was thinking it over. I liked sailing with him off Wings Neck. I’d like being moneyed again. I could sell the business. And though I would never forget Patrick, I could buy another horse…

  I walked up the seven moist steps. No one answered my ring. I walked down and made my way along the driveway, past the red Vespa. I rang the back doorbell.

  Who opened it? The youngest girl, I think, scrambling up from the floor where she and the middle one were sitting, each with a bowl of stew—one of Lucienne’s recipes, probably. One girl was eating with a spoon, the other was not. The stew proper was in a large enameled pan on the stove, and its fragrance almost banished the odor of cranberries burning in another pot. Other things cooked on other burners. Something sweet baked unseen in the oven. The fan, never fixed, did not dissipate these aromas. The room was steamy and it was illuminated only here and there, like a Rembrandt tavern. Some light came from a tipsy lamp on the table; some from a butterscotch disk, circa 1930, embedded in the ceiling; some from a bulb on a pole with a shredding shade; some from a weak fluorescent bar imperfectly attached to the stove. Daphna was standing at the stove, stirring and tasting, then raising her wooden spoon like a scepter. She and the girls wore golden hoops in their ears—the daughters had apparently prevailed in the matter of lobes. Their long hair was loose and lustrous. The oldest was sitting on a high stool, reading. Avner and Sam, at the table, argued in a peaceable way, each gesturing with a wineglass. The table was littered as usual, but a few plates had been laid.

  I approached Daphna. “This is yours.” Garlic and rosemary threatened to overwhelm me. The two men belatedly stood up. Sam overturned his wineglass. I handed the package to Daphna.

  “From Abba!” she cried. She tore away the stiff mail
ing paper and unwrapped corrugated cardboard from three books. I saw that one was French and another German. The cover of the third was embossed with beautiful, curly letters. She pressed all three to her breast. I motioned to Avner to sit, and he did, and so did Sam, and they resumed their amiable dispute, which had something to do with the Bill of Rights. They spoke English, of course. The two younger daughters were speaking Hebrew. The oldest daughter, her paperback in her left hand held open by her thumb, slid off the stool and retrieved the wrapping paper and the cardboard from the floor (Daphna was already reading one of the new books) and stuffed it into an overflowing trash basket and picked up Sam’s fallen wineglass and refilled it and handed it to him, raising her eyes briefly from the page. I imagined her in the shower, one arm extending beyond the plastic curtains to keep the book dry.

  In the center of this mess of a mealtime, I felt my thoughts whirl. How would I sell the place when they left? How would I ever find people as oblivious as these? The furnace might be new but the oven was as old as the house. The electricity was so faulty that no lamp could sustain more than a sixty-watt bulb. I knew that in other rooms, as in this kitchen, crown molding was separating from walls and plaster was cracking. There was a particularly deep fissure in the ceiling of the master bedroom. Avner and Daphna had probably learned to ignore it. Sam was too besotted to notice. Someday this house would defeat me.

  But the family was defeating me already…these people occupying a chiaroscuro kitchen, these people of many languages, these people indifferent to the ordinary conventions of table manners, these people of no restraint. These people steamed in happiness.

  Daphna put down her book. “Join us, Ann,” she commanded. And then: “We would like you to share our meal.”

  Join them? Share their meal? Nudge the oldest off her stool and snatch her book for myself? Sit at the table with Avner and Sam and twirl a wineglass? Sink to the ruined linoleum and eat stew with a spoon, with my fingers? If I dined there just once I might move in, never leave, marry myself to the lot of them. Just what Daphna wanted.

  “I have an engagement.”

  “Oh,” tragically.

  I edged backward.

  “Please, the front door,” Daphna said. She escorted me out of the kitchen and through the dining room used only on Fridays—there was an awful zigzag crack from ceiling to floor, as if lightning had once struck—and into the hall, all without flicking any switches, so we proceeded in semidarkness to the front vestibule. The broom leaned against the wall like a shotgun. Daphna opened the door. We stood at the top of the glistening seven steps. “This brief seasonal warmth is called the January thaw. The Gulf Stream sends balloons of hot air, and the arctic winds retreat. Even the global warming meshuggeners don’t use the thaw as evidence, it was occurring in Eden already…” She flung sentence after sentence at my escaping self. But standing in her kitchen, looked up to and looked after by daughters, husband, and at last a courtier, she had said no more than a dozen words, probably fewer. I turned toward her from the bottom of the steps.

  “You must come sometime!” she urged.

  “Go back,” I said, and hurried down the street.

  IV.

  I haven’t married Rand. I couldn’t say yes to his offer. Daphna’s kitchen ruined any charm it had. I couldn’t say yes to Daphna’s offer either. It’s too bad I didn’t marry my beloved Patrick thirty years ago. I would now be the widow of a horse, contentedly remembering that laugh of his whenever we took a fence.

  So, having not disposed of my business, I must now dispose of Daphna’s house. Soon after that night, Avner accepted a position in the latest Israeli government—apparently he does move among the powerful—and within a week of his appointment the entire family decamped for Jerusalem. Never mind the contract with the university—in fact, the university trumpeted this faculty-government connection. Never mind the house they owned—luckily I found two Pakistani doctors to rent the place furnished for a few years; they work long hours at the hospital and we never see them. And never mind the girls’ interrupted schooling. The family did stay in town long enough to watch the middle daughter receive a first prize at the science fair.

  Daphna said farewell by leaving a brief note in each of our mail slots: Off to the Cabinet. Shalom. Probably she sensed that she had outworn our tolerance of her garrulity. And anyway she was returning to Jerusalem, where, I’m told, everybody talks at once, brags all the time.

  But Sylvia was home when the note popped through her slot. It was morning; her hair was still in its bun. She opened the door. She told us later what she learned. Avner had indeed taken a ministerial post, but he could have done so several times in the past; his wisdom is valued by many parties. This time he accepted, not because of the usual parliamentary crisis but because of a domestic one.

  No, he had not come home to find Sam and Daphna warm under the cracked bedroom ceiling. “We Godolphinites do our share of sinning,” Sylvia pointed out, “but we do not abuse hospitality.”

  “Oh,” said the disappointed Lucienne.

  Sam had fallen in love, yes—with the oldest daughter. And she with him.

  “They are utterly too young,” Daphna told Sylvia. But Sylvia with her fine, marinated intelligence saw through that small truth to the larger one beyond. As enlightened as Avner and Daphna wished to seem, they could not wholeheartedly welcome an Irish cop into their bloodline.

  “See how you feel when we return,” Avner advised the lovers.

  “Write every day,” Daphna added. “Promise to remember each other!” What cleverness; they started forgetting each other before she finished the sentence.

  Sam Flanagan never visits our dead-end street. On the corners, in their seasons, hedge clipping and snow shoveling go on undisturbed. And once every few months, Connie and her husband invite Lucienne, Sylvia, and me to dinner, served in a cool green dining room with a view of the deck. I’ll have no trouble selling that house.

  “Do we miss Daphna?” Sylvia wondered on one of those occasions. She was well into the wine; a helix of gray hair fell over one shoulder.

  “Yes, no,” Lucienne said. “She was too hungry.”

  Connie said slowly, “She wanted to…mean so much to us. It was…inappropriate.”

  “Also doomed,” I added.

  “Indeed,” Sylvia said. “We mean so little to each other.”

  Deliverance

  The hiring committee—the three members of the staff and Rabbi Stahl from the board, who begged to be called Steve—were briefly taken aback by the candidate’s looks. Donna could feel a ripple of confusion. The woman’s name was Mimi. Her blunt hair was dyed the crystalline color that old-movie buffs called platinum. She had a wide lipsticked smile. As she advanced toward them across the large basement dining room, it became apparent that she was very pretty. She’d stated outright in her cover letter that she was a divorcée with three grown daughters. She must have borne them young. She wore a long suede coat and high-heeled boots. A fur pillbox rested on the platinum bob.

  You are not what you wear, as the staff knew well. Some of the most crackbrained guests at Donna’s Ladle could rummage through a pile of donated rags, select a few, and with those few convert themselves into a dead ringer for a CEO or, if you want to talk really elegant, a high-priced call girl. This Mimi, so bewitchingly chic, might have a heart of gold.

  The hiring committee, sitting side by side at the long table, took turns telling Mimi about the facility (“a soup kitchen for women and their children”) and the general nature of the work (“cooking, plunging toilets, bossing volunteers, hanging out”) and the sometimes strained relations with the Unitarian church whose basement they occupied.

  It fell to Donna to define the particular duties of a new staff member. “When my baby comes, three months from now, I’ll go on indefinite maternity leave, though I’ll volunteer in the kitchen one day a week. Pam here”—an affectionate look—“will take over my administrative and fund-raising chores, and so her old jo
b as resource coordinator is up for grabs.”

  “Scrounging for supplies,” Pam explained. “Wheedling donations, buying food cheap. Batting eyelashes at pro bono plumbers.”

  Mimi’s eyes were blue under black lashes. “Pleading with restaurants?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Have you thought of those unopened airline meals that go begging at the end of each flight?”

  No one had thought of them.

  Mimi had worked as a volunteer in a children’s hospital; she could do light carpentry; she was, by her own grinning admission, a better than fair cook. Her hat was now in her lap. She asked a few questions about guests fighting with each other and workers burning out. “I’m afraid I have no cellular telephone,” she said at the end of the interview; she’d already confessed to having no car.

  “You communicate through your familiars,” the rabbi said with a smile.

  Mimi beamed back at him. “And travel on an old broomstick, you’ve got it.” Then she left, carrying her hat, walking away with an unhurried ease, her radiant hair dimming as her figure receded.

  “I’ll bet she owns jeans,” Donna said.

  “I liked her,” said the other two staff members, almost in unison.

  The rabbi shrugged. “What’s not to like? Her hat reminded me of one of my grandmother’s. She was a Brooklyn hysteric, claimed that animal skins were essential to tranquility.”