A guide for the perplexed: a novel Read online

  “Because the letters are still here, in the air,” she said.

  At first he thought he hadn’t understood her, or that she hadn’t understood him, that perhaps her Hebrew wasn’t as good as he’d assumed. But then she told him: “Everything that happened here still exists—what happened with the rabbis, what happened with your fifth-grade class, what happened this morning. All of it is still here. If it were made of stone, we could dig up the remains, like the hippodrome. Just because it isn’t made of stone doesn’t mean it isn’t still here.”

  He laughed. “I didn’t know you were a poet.”

  She smiled, then answered in English. “It isn’t poetry, it’s physics. There is such a thing as time dilation. My mother wrote half a dissertation about it. We don’t have the maps or tools to access it, but that doesn’t mean the past doesn’t still exist.”

  He laughed again, still unsure of whether she was joking. “So draw me a map,” he said.

  He was being sarcastic. He was shaken when she ­squatted down, her white skirt billowing around her like an ancient woman giving birth. She took a coin and began using it to trace curves in the sand. “I’m talking about a traversable wormhole,” she said. “Or actually multiple traversable wormholes in configuration. It’s called a Roman Ring.” (Later that night, he dug out his English dictionary and looked up the words, perplexed, awestruck.) She drew various shapes, interlocking ovoids and spirals, erasing and re-erasing, mumbling under her breath, unable to get it right. He watched the intensity of her face, the otherworldly beauty of her black hair and white skirt inside the enormous Roman ring. He shuddered when she looked up at him, daring him to join her, to step into a hole in time.

  “Nothing ever really disappears,” she said, “even when you want it to.”

  A rush of wind thrummed off the waves, blowing her diagrams to dust as both of them laughed. Underneath the aqueduct, she kissed him.

  Judith listened to all this and was surprised to find herself weeping. These were all the things she had hated—Josie’s arrogance, Josie’s certainty, Josie’s conviction that the laws of the universe did not apply to her—all the things she had hated for decades, the things she had built her life around hating. But now she saw what it was like to be someone who didn’t hate this demanding, insistent, driven woman—someone who instead knew who she was. It occurred to her that she had never known her sister, that she never could have. The gates of her own perception had been locked against it.

  “There were so many days when everything was so perfect, I just wanted to put those days in bottles and store them in the basement, like wines,” he said. “At the arboretum last spring there were thirty-five thousand daffodils in bloom. We were walking with Tali there before Passover, rolling her around in the flowers and watching them bounce back up around her. I remember thinking, this can’t be right, it can’t be possible to be this happy, something has to change. It’s almost like I expected this.”

  It had never seemed right to Judith either—Josie’s stunning brilliance, her joy after joy, her wealth, her fame, her handsome husband, her beautiful little girl, while Judith wallowed in mediocrity, losing one job or boyfriend after another, perpetually aimless, perpetually alone. But now that it was gone, it all seemed wonderfully right, all of it deserved. And she was ashamed.

  “How can I ever show Tali what her mother is like?” Itamar asked. “She’s only six. She’ll never know.”

  Judith considered it. Should she say something comforting, or something true? She thought of Josie’s great discovery, her gift to the world, her gift to her child. “It’s all in the software,” Judith told him. “You can look up any of it forever.”

  Itamar slowly, slowly shook his head. “The strange thing is,” he said, “I don’t want to.”

  Later that night, after the evening visitors had come and gone, Judith was getting ready to leave and wandered around the house, looking for Itamar. She almost gave up when she thought to look in Tali’s room. There she found him, huddled with his little girl in her bed.

  Judith stood still in the doorway, watching both of them sleep. Tali’s dark hair was spread around the pillow like an inkspill as her father’s arms encircled her shoulders. One of her little hands clutched his, and held it to her lips. The air trembled in the darkness with the duet of their breaths. In the doorway, Judith remembered something she had long forgotten: how one night after her father left, long ago, she had lain in bed crying silently, wishing for endless sleep, wishing for oblivion, wishing sixty years would pass in the blink of an eye, wishing she were an old, old woman for whom all of this was a dead and buried memory. In the darkness of that long black night, she was startled out of the abyss by a hand on her shoulder, mooring her to the edge of a cliff. Her little sister had climbed into her bed and held her, wrapped her arms around her, took her older sister’s hand in hers and rested it gently against her lips. Judith looked now at her sister’s little girl. What she thought was gone, destroyed and regretted forever, now lay stunningly alive before her, breathing beauty held tight in this man’s arms. Josie had always had grand ambitions, plans to change the world, vast and complicated dreams. But what Judith wanted was so simple, and now she knew where to find it.

  ONE COLD NIGHT, JUDITH came to the house claiming she needed to look through her mother’s insurance records—­something she had done many times during those weeks since Josie’s death, as the house sank into winter darkness. When Itamar opened the door for her, his tall thin body stood framed like a portrait in the glowing light of the hallway behind him. He pressed his back against the open door, effacing himself as the light and warmth of the house spilled before her. She reached to hug him, the casually meaningless clutch-and-kiss of in-laws, but then she saw that his head was pressed into his shoulder, with his phone tucked against his jaw. She was a minor character in his life, she knew, an inconvenience. “But you don’t have to look at it that way,” he said to someone who wasn’t her. “The whole situation could change in a matter of weeks.” She hung up her coat and made herself at home.

  Snow had begun falling outside when she emerged from the basement filing cabinets and sat down on the L-shaped couch in her dead sister’s living room. She had long felt uncomfortable in this room: she remembered sitting on this same couch many times as Josie and Itamar cuddled each other across from her, smiling at her, flaunting an almost vulgar happiness. But now the slight draft in the room was refreshing, an airing of bones. Judith contemplated the stacks of detritus on the coffee table: catalogues and magazines that no one had bothered to throw away, along with piles of first-grade papers, words beginning with the letter A repeated endlessly in red crayon.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t hang up,” Itamar said as he finally entered the room. “Idiot client. This person actually thought that ‘cloud computing’ meant that his data is stored in the air above his head. Like I’m God, managing the storehouses of snow. He asks me, ‘But isn’t it in some kind of radio wave or satellite feed?’ No one knows how the world works anymore. It really isn’t that hard to understand. People just don’t bother to find out.”

  His arrogance was familiar: Josie’s old pride. But from a man it was intriguing, sexy. Itamar sat down without looking at her, skidding a finger across the screen of his phone. He was still wearing his wedding ring, she noticed. She wondered how much time would have to pass before he would remove it.

  “It must be hard getting back to work, with everyone relying on you,” she said when Itamar slid his phone into his pocket. This was her ploy, of course: empathetic flattery. But perhaps Itamar would not notice. He noticed little. Even now he was glancing around the room, searching for someone more worthy of his attention, itching to retrieve his phone from his pocket again. He patted the rectangular tumor on his thigh. In her mind Judith saw a door closing, and shifted her foot to prop it open. “What are you going to do about Tali?” she asked. “You aren’t going to have time for her.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Itamar sai
d. An electronic bell tolled in the next room. He rose as if summoned. Judith assumed some company gadget had lured him away, but to her surprise he returned quickly with two mugs of tea, handing one carefully to her. She preserved the image in her mind of him hovering gently above her, his thin gray sweater covering his tall frame, his dark-haired hands passing her a hot mug with a delicacy bordering on love. “I haven’t told anyone yet,” he said, “but I’m thinking of selling the company, so I can just be with Tali.”

  Judith had raised the mug to her lips, but now she put it down on the table at her knee. She forced a laugh. “You can’t be serious.”

  Itamar didn’t smile. “I could use the life insurance payout, but it makes more sense to sell, especially now,” he said. He seated himself, talking to himself.

  “Sell the company,” Judith repeated.

  “Yes, to be with Tali,” he said. “I should probably take her to Israel. My father would like me to. There isn’t much reason for us to stay here anymore.”

  She detected something officious in his voice. He was testing her. He drank, eyeing her, and put the mug down on the crayoned pages, planting his hands on his knees. “It’s the right thing to do,” he said weakly. Inside the words was a question mark, intended for her alone. In that moment, in his pleading face, Judith sensed her own untapped power.

  “Josie would kill you if you sold her company,” she announced. “She would return from the other world and strangle you in your sleep.”

  It was bold, but it worked—far better than she expected. Josie’s name was like an electric shock. Itamar shuddered, stricken. Then he covered his face with his hands. He looked beautiful that way, vulnerable. And such beautiful hands.

  She admired his hands, and the top of his dark-haired head against the pane of the window behind him. Snow turned her own reflection into a grainy film, a clip from a documentary: the present moment after it became the past, trapped within this room. At last he raised his head. “I know that, Judith. Do you want to make me sick about it?”

  “No, I want to help you,” she said. She put out a hand, a dare. She knew he wouldn’t take it, but the possibility fluttered between them, a breath in her open palm. “You need to go back to work and start running the company, the way she ran it.” She avoided Josie’s name this time, yet still she saw him cringe. “What I can do is take over at home.”

  He squinted at her. He used to wear contact lenses, but he hadn’t bothered with them in weeks. His glasses were wire-rimmed, high style from ten years earlier. Judith had never seen him wearing glasses before Josie’s death. The lenses were intimate, the way they enlarged his brown eyes, softening them. It occurred to her that Josie had seen him this way every day, before bed perhaps, or early in the morning, or in the middle of the night, whenever their little girl was hungry or sick or had woken from a bad dream—all the endless, ordinary, unrecorded hours when the two of them, roused from the dead of night, formed a miraculous presence that became a life. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “My department doesn’t need me in the office all day long,” she said. “Josie was just doing me a favor by giving me this job. You of all people know that.” She watched as Itamar winced again at Josie’s name. There was something pleasant about his flinching, Judith noticed, a warmth in seeing him crumple. It flowed through her like a wave of hot water in a bath. “I could come here to be with Tali after school. It wouldn’t be a big deal.” She shrugged, as if this were an afterthought, rather than the creation of a world.

  “Ridiculous,” Itamar snapped. He was working hard to keep his voice level; the result was a low sneer. “We always took turns coming home in the evening to be with her, but it isn’t like we don’t have help,” he said. The “we” still sounded natural to him, it seemed, or rather he needed it to. Oh, what he needed, Judith thought. “You know that Tali has a babysitter,” Itamar said. “Tali loves Joy.”

  “Yes, Tali loves Joy, because Joy lets her watch cartoons all afternoon. That isn’t what she needs.”

  Itamar’s voice tightened. “How do you know what she needs? I’m her father. You’ve never even had a child.”

  This hurt her, the way Josie’s name hurt him. She thought of defending herself, but she knew she would lose. Instead she flattered, sympathized, groveled. “It’s just that I know how much Josie loved you both,” she said. The name lingered in the lighted room. “And I know that Tali needs as many people to love her as possible.”

  It almost worked. Itamar rubbed at his knees, humbled, until he thought of a reply. “But you don’t know Tali.”

  “Of course I do,” Judith said. Judith had spent much of the seven days of mourning with Tali, playing a game that Tali had invented—something involving estimating the number of jelly beans that could fit inside a doll’s decapitated head, filling the head with the beans, and then reattaching the head and concealing the doll in an enormous pile of dead leaves outside the house, for elaborate reasons concerning explosives and elves. Judith had dug the doll out just before it rained.

  “You don’t know how she is when she’s just with us,” Itamar insisted. “Tali is—she’s not a typical six-year-old. You really don’t know.”

  Snow danced in the windowpane behind Itamar’s head. A door opened in Judith’s memory: she and Josie hiding under the covers of her bed while a snowstorm raged outside, six-year-old Josie laughing maniacally as Judith shined a flashlight through the sheets. Then Josie had opened the window to test the storm’s wind velocity, and had drenched Judith’s sheets in snow and ice. Josie had found this very funny, as she returned to her own dry bed. Yes, Judith really knew. And she knew what she wanted.

  “It was different when there were two of you,” she said. He was lovely, she thought. There was an almost erotic tilt to his neck as he hunched his elbows on his knees. She wished she could run her hand along that neck, slip her fingers beneath the warm wool of his sweater, feel for the hardness of bone. “One of you always went home to be with her in the evenings, even when the other was overwhelmed. But you’re always going to be overwhelmed now, Itamar, unless you do something about it.”

  A vein in his neck bulged. “You’re telling me to fire Joy and hire you to empty my dishwasher, now that my wife is dead.”

  “No, I’m telling you to keep the babysitter, let her do more of the housework, and have me come to help.”

  “Help with what?”

  “With life, Itamar. With showing a little girl how to be alive. The way her mother would have done it.” Or should have done it, Judith thought. Judith was no longer ashamed of cruel thoughts.

  Itamar was looking at his hands now. His beautiful hands.

  The air shivered between them before he spoke. “Last night before Tali went to bed, I let her watch TV while I used the phone,” he said. His accent was heavier than it usually was. He and Josie had mostly spoken to each other in Hebrew, Judith knew, or perhaps that was only when someone else was listening. Judith barely remembered the little Hebrew she had been taught; Josie, of course, had mainly taught herself. “When I finished my phone call, I found Tali sitting on the floor, with a cracked egg on the rug in front of her,” Itamar said. “She was acting like a baby, playing with food. I yelled at her, and she said she was sorry. But when I took her up to bed, I saw that there was another cracked egg on the stairs. I said, ‘Taluli, did you crack that egg too?’ Then she told me that in school they had been learning about healthy foods, and that everyone was telling her that we need to be strong, so she wanted to be sure we had enough protein. She said it in Hebrew: helbon. I don’t even know how she knew that word. From my father, maybe? I don’t know. But in Hebrew it’s also the word for something inside an egg—the clear part, not the yellow. I can’t remember the English word.”

  Itamar was always exacting, Judith thought—demanding, flawless, like his wife. Without her he was slipping. “Eggwhite,” Judith assisted.

  Itamar squinted at her, skeptical. “Eggwhite?”

  There was a more
scientific term, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Josie would have remembered in an instant. Judith shrugged. “That’s what it’s called,” she said.

  Itamar sighed, and continued. “Tali had taken out all twelve eggs, all of them. A full box of eggs.”

  “Carton,” Judith corrected, though it was unlike her to correct him. Josie would have corrected him.

  Itamar nodded. He liked being corrected, Judith noted. “A full carton of eggs. She had cracked a different egg in each room of the house.”

  Judith imagined the little girl, her black hair just like her mother’s, rubbing eggwhite into the carpet. The thought thrilled her. Tali, she sensed, had what her mother had never had: a thirst for vengeance.

  “What did you do?” Judith asked.

  Itamar sucked in his breath. “I hit her.” He looked at the floor. “Not hard. Well, a little hard. She has a—a bruise.”

  A bruise? Judith thought, astounded to find herself suddenly sickened. She had to stop herself from repeating it aloud. Instead she looked at Itamar’s arms, which bristled with dark hair at the edges of his sweater’s woolen sleeves. He was like a wounded animal, caught in a merciless trap.

  He buried his face in his hands. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t believe I hit my daughter. My own daughter. I don’t—I don’t know what I was thinking. If I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. There was no thinking.” His whole body heaved as he breathed. “I can’t do this.”

  “Itamar, all I want is to help you,” Judith said softly. At that moment she believed it was true.

  He raised his head. His mouth was hanging open, a silent howl. She thought he wouldn’t respond. When he spoke, his voice was small and still.

  “Joy told me she can’t come tomorrow,” he said. “She has a family emergency.”

  Judith snorted as Itamar clicked his tongue, the Hebrew equivalent of a snort. Their transatlantic disgust met in the air between them, snapping like static. For the first time in weeks, both of them laughed.