It was Lewyn, though obviously not Lewyn. It was Lewyn as he had been, at two or two and a half: compact, intense, with sharp features and a frown, and curly brown hair cut close to his head, though not as close as this child’s. That was a difference. Another difference, obviously, was that this child was African American. （Or perhaps just plain African? There were entire neighborhoods of new immigrants in Brooklyn, though not necessarily this particular neighborhood.） But apart from that: Lewyn. Two-year-old Lewyn, reconstituted with taupe-colored skin and reading a book that surely was too advanced for him （and would certainly have been far too advanced for two-year-old Lewyn, the last of her children to read）。
Our mother stopped looking for a chair. She stepped closer to the children. One of the moms looked up at her, then went back to her conversation. Johanna was gripping the book, Colleges That Change Lives, in her right hand. She felt her left hand want to reach out and she stopped it, of course, but she could not stop her eyes from swallowing him whole. Lewyn. At that moment a half mile away in some discussion group or eleventh-grade language lab, but also here and transmogrified into an alternate version of his earlier self. She understood that it was strange. She could not understand why it bothered her so much.
Then a slender woman stepped between Johanna and the boy, and scooped him up onto her hip, and ran out of the store.
Even in the blur of that instant—red dress, bare brown leg, small head, dreadlocks—our mother understood it all. This child who was not her son Lewyn; his mother, that fleeing woman, was Stella Western, and his father was our father, Salo Oppenheimer.
Johanna stumbled out onto the sidewalk and looked around, still with the paperback book in her hand. She turned first to the right, back in the direction of the Walden School, and saw nothing. She turned to the left and saw Stella Western, far away on the next block and moving fast: a tiny, narrow woman with an obviously protesting small boy jolting along on her hip. The boy was also still holding his book. Johanna felt sick. She watched them go. It would not be possible to catch up with them. Why, for what reason, would she want to catch up? What could there possibly be to say?
She went back inside and numbly paid for her book. Colleges That Change Lives.
Then she walked home, down the same streets that had enclosed her life as a mother and as a wife. It was all so ridiculous, the effort she had put into everything, the fiction she had made for herself to live inside. She thought of how hard she must have worked to not know this obvious thing, all the way back to that night Salo had brought her to dinner to meet this old friend from Cornell. The woman had been lively and good-natured. She’d asked Johanna about the children. She’d spoken about the documentary she wanted to make, about some artist who turned people into buildings, and our mother had told herself, afterward, Well, that was a harmless evening. Never thought of again, at least not by her. Never mentioned between them again. And yet, Stella Western—her name retained in some overly efficient cerebral locker room inside our mother’s head—had slipped from that unremarkable restaurant meal into some netherworld of her husband’s life, and implanted herself. All those hours in Coney Island or wherever it was. With the art. All of her own compensation, perhaps, for our father’s suffering. And now, here was an actual human child with her own child’s face and, for all she knew, an equal claim to Salo’s time, name, and everything else, which was not fair, not after she had wound her own life around him, like a suture.
This was the flaw in making a bargain with yourself. There is no one else there to agree to the terms.
Her feet were dragging. She fought the urge to stop, to collapse on any one of the famously lovely Brooklyn stoops, where happy families passed warm afternoons together on the weekends, something she and her husband and her children had never done, not once. And Stella Western, who at the time of their pleasant dinner supposedly lived somewhere in the Bay Area, had looked very much at home on Court Street, rushing past the shops and restaurants that Johanna and her family had been walking past if not patronizing for years. Their streets. Their shops and restaurants. Their neighborhood. Their family.
I have given too much, our mother thought. And she had asked far, far too little in return.