So when she asked him again to sit back, to let others take over while he did the paperwork at home, Zalman didn’t answer at first. He chewed the chicken slowly and dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. He took a long sip from his water glass, then turned to look at his wife, standing, holding the dish towel against her chest as if it were a Bible. She was waiting, as always, patiently. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. How could he find the words? How could he tell her even now after fifteen years of marriage? Even now when she knew every wrinkle that wound along his face like a long highway, every word that came from his mouth even before he could utter it? Even now when she thought she knew him better than he knew himself? How could he tell her that he needed this job, this business that was his and nobody else’s? Something that was his and his alone. How could she understand when he already had a family, a home? When he had her.
And so, as Miriam remained standing, her deep-brown eyes laced with concern, Zalman looked up from his meal and finally said the one word that would slow the frantic beats of her heart. “Please.” Miriam blinked once, sat down, and began to eat.
Now as Zalman glided the roller along the expanse of wall, transforming the dim olive to a clean white, he felt happy. A sense of accomplishment flew through his body like a fine breeze, with each stroke, a peaceful feeling. Zalman enjoyed the weight of the roller as he moved it up and down the wall; its appearance when done would be smooth and clean. He enjoyed even the scent of the chemicals, the formaldehyde filling his lungs as he closed his eyes and breathed in. Zalman enjoyed the work.
But each day as he drove back to the shop, tucked away the cans, dappled now with clouds of color, pushing them back on the shelf until they were tight against the wall, a familiar uneasiness tugged at his heart. Outside, when he locked up the shop and walked the five long blocks home, he began to feel it more intensely. He let his feet move him forward, ignoring the pigeons pecking at a half-eaten granola bar on the sidewalk, even the next-door neighbor, an elderly Polish woman who nodded in greeting as she pulled her small cart of groceries behind her along the curb as he walked up the stairs, entered the apartment, kissed his wife’s cheek, soft, cool, compliant. Even when his daughter, seated at the kitchen table, looked up from her notebooks and smiled. Zalman didn’t notice any of it, and he realized then that it had been several months since he had.
When Miriam decided one afternoon in late spring that she wanted to go on a family picnic in the wonderful Central Park she had heard so much about, Zalman finally made sense of it, even if he could not yet give voice to the feeling. It had now been nearly two years since Jacob’s death.
“Daddy! Come sit by me on the blanket,” Debbie called out as she placed salami-and-tomato sandwiches on a navy-blue blanket that she and Miriam had spread on the grass.
Zalman put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and shook his head.
“On the dirt you want me to sit?”
Miriam laughed as she glanced at her husband’s face, stern and contemplative, despite the sunny spring day. She eased herself onto the blanket.
“I think your father can just as well sit on the bench over here and eat his sandwich.”
His daughter, giving up the fight, shrugged and held out one of the foil-wrapped sandwiches to him, then stretched her legs in front of her.
Zalman unwrapped the sandwich, took a bottled water from the ice case, and chewed his food thoughtfully as his wife and daughter chatted. He paid no attention to their conversation but instead let the sounds of birds chirping, the scents of roses beginning to bloom amid the shrubs, the cooling breezes, all the season wash over him as he closed his eyes. He thought about the monkeys and their antics that he would soon see at the park’s zoo. It had been a long time since he had visited a zoo—on one of the excursions taken with Jacob, Esther, and, of course, young Gary. When he opened them, his eyes fell upon another family just a short distance away, under a circle of trees. A mother tending to a toddler in a stroller as the father and son were having a game of catch.
And then, as if a light had been suddenly switched on in his brain, he knew what it had all been about. He knew he missed her. He missed Esther.
Still, for days and months after the realization, Zalman was plagued by anxiety, an anxiety that affected his stomach so badly that, seeing the flushed look on his face, hearing his refusal more than once when his favorite dishes, even her special cholent—a mixture of beef, potatoes, and beans that had cooked in a large pot for eight hours—Miriam insisted that he see a doctor. No sign of ulcers, he was assured, but nevertheless Dr. Steinberg had advised, somewhat firmly, that Zalman give up smoking. Nothing good, he admonished, could come from the habit. And that same afternoon, after a lifetime of inhaling nicotine, Zalman had his last cigarette. In fact, both his wife and daughter were surprised that he never fell back into the habit, never sneaked one as he went on his daily walk each evening, never even craved it. Eventually, his smoker’s cough, which had been so much a part of him, dissipated altogether, and Miriam stopped giving his tobacco-plagued shirts a second rinse in the wash. But although he received a clean bill of health, the lack of appetite, his inattentiveness, the sleepless nights, all persisted.