* * *
—
A tulip stem inside me snapped. This is what I felt.
It has stayed snapped, it never grew back.
* * *
—
I began to write more truthfully after that.
* * *
“Mom,” said Becka into my phone—I was walking down the street to the drugstore the day after having seen William in his apartment—“Mom, what the fuck?” So I knew he had told her about Estelle.
“I know,” I said. I walked over to a bench on the sidewalk and sat down.
“What the fuck?” Becka said again. “Mom, that poor man! Mom!”
“I know, honey,” I said. I watched through my sunglasses people going past me, but I did not really see them. Then my phone buzzed and it was Chrissy calling. “Chrissy’s calling,” I said to Becka, “hold on a minute.” Then I pushed the green circle and Chrissy said to me, “Mom, I can’t believe this! I just can’t believe it!”
“I know,” I said.
* * *
—
It was like that, the girls went back and forth with me about the outrage against their father, and I was calm and spoke to them both, and when they both asked me “Is he going to be okay?” I said he would most certainly be okay. I emphasized this, because I did not know myself—except what choice did he have, what choice do most of us have, except to be okay? I said, “He’s still reasonably young, and he’s very healthy, and he’s going to be fine.”
* * *
—
Within a week Chrissy had ordered a bed and a bureau for Bridget and she also bought new rugs. “They’re much prettier,” she said. “They really lighten the place up.” She’s a wonderful person, Chrissy. She has always taken charge.
In three more weeks, Chrissy called and said, “Mom, we’re going to have dinner with Dad at his place. We’d like it if you came.”
* * *
I think I have to mention this, although I have said I would not talk about David, but I think you should know:
When I say I had no home except for William, this is true. David—I told you this before—had been a Hasidic Jew growing up poor right outside of Chicago. But he had left that community at the age of nineteen and he had been ostracized and he had no contact with his family until almost forty years later when his sister got in touch with him. What you need to know is that he and I had this in common: We had, neither one of us, been raised with the outside culture of the world. Neither of us had grown up with a television in the house. We had only a vague knowledge of the Vietnam War, until we taught it to ourselves later on; we had never learned—because we had never heard—the popular songs of the time we grew up in, we had not seen movies until we were older, we did not know the idioms that were used in common language. It is hard to describe what it is like when one is raised in such isolation from the outside world. So we became each other’s home. But we—both of us felt this way—we felt that we were perched like birds on a telephone wire in New York City.
But let me just say one more thing about this man—！
He was a short man, and a childhood accident had left him with one hip higher than the other and so he walked slowly and with a severe limp. And he was—being not tall—slightly overweight. What I mean is that he looked as different from William—almost—as a person could look. And I had none of the reaction I had when I had married William. I mean that David’s body was always a tremendous comfort to me. David was a tremendous comfort to me. God, was that man a comfort to me.
* * *
When I walked into William’s apartment that night to have dinner with the girls and him, I was surprised that the girls’ husbands were not there, and I said so, and Becka said, smiling, “We left them home.”
It was true that the place looked a great deal better, and I walked through it and exclaimed on everything Chrissy had done. （The vase on the mantel was gone.） And William looked better, though when he bent to kiss my cheek he gave a sigh and squeezed my arm, and I understood it to mean he was doing this for the girls, so they could see that he was all right. The girls both cooked, and the four of us sat in the kitchen—Estelle had left behind the round kitchen table—and William had two glasses of red wine, which he almost never had—I mean, William almost never drank is what I mean. And there was this:
It was unbelievably easy for me to be there. I think we all felt that. It was like a moment out of time, and the four of us were thrust back into the old rhythms that we had had when we were a family; I felt absolutely relaxed, is part of what I am saying. And the three of them seemed that way too. It was remarkable how easy it was for us. I looked at all three of them, and their faces seemed shiny with a kind of happiness.