Tinderbox Read online

  For Dreis, the insight was just the skin of the beast. Myra still needed to face the ugly fact that she was like them—her own insistence on order and cleanliness, her stubborn, cruel belief that the state of pristineness was possible, be it in her thoughts, where she expected of herself to have only clean and generous responses, or her home, where she never allowed the paint to remain chipped, or with her body, where her torso by eight weeks after both of her children’s births had been free of bulges.

  “If your insistence on perfection was simply your identification with your mother,” Dreis declared, “you would have given it up by now. No, it is more insidious. It is the expression of your grandiose defenses against the rage and despair you felt, as though you can conquer the natural order of disintegration and decay. You believe that you alone can keep a flower in bloom, that in your home, on your body, the petals will not wilt and the leaves not turn brown.”

  With this, Myra wept. What issued from her body was something more than tears, something closer to her own soul. She saw her insistence on having a third child as part of her demand for perfection: a tyrannical expression not only of her mother still alive and scrubbing inside her, but the invulnerability she had cultivated. With this, she was able to say out loud, “Well, I didn’t love my mother and father either”—and then to weep at the great loss of this, not to have loved her own parents.

  16

  After Myra returned to New York from Tucson, the trip during which Larry had managed to delude himself for a scant few minutes that she might go to bed with him, he received a letter from her, her precise handwriting filling a single sheet of pale gray stationery.

  Dear Larry,

  I hope your ankle is okay.

  I think you should know that I was tempted to sleep with you. Unlike you, I have been with no one else since you left. (I know you like to say that I kicked you out, but surely you can see that it was you who left me…) I am grateful that whatever small quantity of wisdom I have gained over the years was able to take the reins, because it would be a terrible mistake for us to become entangled again above and beyond what we will always have, which is to be the parents together of our children.

  Once you severed the covenant between us (I am sorry to sound so Catholic here), it altered forever the path of my life. I had assumed that we would go hand in hand to old age, that our growth would come through learning about ourselves, through learning to love each other more deeply. I was very sad to give that up. I would have liked to take that path with you. Now, though, we will each take different routes. On my end, I do not believe that romantic love will be a central part of my life from this point on. Not that I don’t think that I will have another lover—I imagine I will once the children are older, perhaps after they’ve left the house. Rather, I feel that I now have the children and my patients, and I suppose myself to nourish first. When I fell in love with you, I gave you all my heart. I will never be able to do that again, not because you broke my heart, but rather because I have moved on to a place where I can no longer give away that much of myself.

  So, my dear Larry, you will remain always my ex-husband (my only ex-husband, I am quite certain) and the father of my children. If you take up with the women you take up with because you truly desire love, I hope that you will find it and be at peace, and that we will continue to work kindly together to parent our children. I think we’ve been doing a pretty decent job at putting aside our quarrels with each other in the service of their well-being. Sometimes, I even think that we’re doing a better job as divorced parents than we might have had we remained together.

  Yours in friendship,

  Myra

  For three nights after receiving Myra’s letter, Larry made excuses to Linda for not seeing her, spending his evenings drinking brandy and watching television with his dogs on the couch beside him. On the fourth night, Linda came over unannounced with two filets mignons and a chocolate sour-cream bundt cake. She was three inches taller than he, six in her spike-heel sandals. He could discern the outline of her nipples beneath her white T-shirt. Pushing the dogs aside, he fucked her on the living-room couch and then, unable to control himself, cried in front of her.

  In the morning, with Linda still asleep in his bed, he wrote Myra:

  Dear Myra,

  Now it’s my turn to be honest with you. I wanted to touch you two weeks ago not because I lusted after you but because I still love you. That must sound like a strange thing to say after what I did to you. There is no defense to my argument other than to say, which, of course, you must know, being in your line of work, that a person is the final arbiter of the truth or falseness of his own feelings and this is how I feel. I believe that we could have a strong marriage. I have half my life left. I would like to sit with you when our children graduate from high school and college, to visit our baby grandchildren together. I would like to be grandparents together, doing all the corny things that grandparents do with their grandchildren.

  Maybe you’re being a little selfish to hold on to your grievances with me?

  Yours always,

  Larry

  A week later, he received another letter from Myra:

  Dear Larry,

  Thank you for your letter. I am very warmed that you still love me. In a certain way, I love you too. I do need, however, to point out that your fantasies about us are only an extension of our being parents together, which we can, to some extent, continue to do. You can sit with me when the kids graduate from high school and then from college. We can both attend our grandbabies’ birthday parties.

  You must, however, recognize that these images do not constitute a marriage, or at least not the marriage I would want (and will probably now never have). Very few people actually have a marriage that I think is worth having. My parents shared little more than a roof together. Your parents are locked in constant battle, which protects them from the harsher reality that your father long ago outgrew your mother. My cousins, Ursula and Alicia, carry on with their husbands as in tawdry romantic comedies. Only my friend from graduate school, Charlotte, who you never met, has a marriage that looks good to me. She and her husband are truly friends. They discuss everything. They go to one another first when they are in pain. They nourish one another’s most delicate hopes, the wishes most of us don’t dare to even say to another person. They treat each other with a most gentle kindness, aware that they hold each other’s inner life in their hands. And they manage to do all of this without sentimentality or banality, their lives together leavened always with humor. Perhaps we might have learned to treat one another similarly, but during the years we lived together, we never achieved anything even approaching this.

  I think it best that we not correspond further.

  Again, yours in friendship,

  Myra

  17

  Before she has the key in the door, Caro knows that she is going to eat. There is no hunger, her stomach still filled with her mother’s food. Rather, after hearing Layla’s story, seeing the long scar on her arm, there is a craving for the oblivion of salt, sugar, chewing, all the while knowing, even before she has touched the refrigerator door, that what will enter her mouth will not be a comfort but rather a gorging—a debasement of what her mother would call the human spirit, that tiny flame it remains every person’s mission to keep alive.

  She starts with a leftover deli container of tuna and continues through a bag of pretzels and the remains of a box of cocoa she eats dry with a spoon. Hopelessness descends over her, accompanied by revulsion, not only at her behavior, but at the immorality of creating misery, of wasting her own life with this cycle of destruction. She subtracts dates in her head: fifteen years since her return from Morocco when she stumbled upon food as a drug—the disgust about her gluttony preferable to the disgust she felt that fall about herself.

  Paris, Agios Nikolaos, Casablanca.

  Slut.

  Returning to Harvard, she ate so much food, she feared damaging her intestines. She prayed to be a
ble to make herself vomit, but could not force her stomach to eject its contents. That semester, she’d read the Richmond Lattimore translation of The Odyssey of Homer, been pierced by the image of Penelope weaving a shroud by day for her father-in-law, Laertes, and then unraveling it by night. And so it seemed with herself when, by the end of the year, twenty pounds heavier, she settled on the seesaw of binging by night and starving by day.

  Caro stares at her bloated face in the bathroom mirror. For Penelope, the unraveling at night served a noble purpose: the stalling of the suitors who would have had her abandon her husband, Odysseus.

  Would there be suitors if she stopped?

  She stretches out on her bed. She has her mother, whereas her mother had no one. How, then, is it that her mother can do so many things that she cannot? Her mother knows how to make herself lovely, something she does in the same way, for the same reasons, she arranges a vase of flowers—that it is ennobling to create beauty. With effort, Caro can make herself look passable, someone people won’t notice one way or the other. Her mother knows how to take care of a child. Caro, child expert, lecturer at national conventions on the emotional and pedagogic needs of the three-year-old, has never tucked a child into bed, given a bath, taken a temperature.

  Her mother knows how to make a meal: roast a chicken, whisk a salad dressing, roll out a pie crust. Her mother knows how to create a home, a garden, an office. Her mother knows how to heal a person.

  Her mother has never slept with four men in a five-month span, one of whom tried to kill himself afterward, and then not been touched by anyone in the fifteen years since.

  18

  Adam watches his wife clip her toenails. Still in the hospital scrubs she wore through the dinner with Layla, she is seated in the middle of what, despite the four months they have occupied this room, he still thinks of as his mother’s bedroom. Omar is asleep a floor below them. His mother has finished her piano practice. He can hear Eva climbing the stairs, the sound of her door shutting.

  Rachida carries her weight in her back and arms. With her head bent over her small foot, she looks even more top-heavy than usual.

  “Damn. I think I’m getting an ingrown.”

  Adam ignores his wife’s comment. Rachida is a workhorse—she returned to work when Omar was three weeks old—but she maintains a habitual litany about minor ailments, a litany that seems like a nervous tic, an unconscious imitation of her mother’s more insistent complaints. He’s met Rachida’s mother only once, on the trip she made with Rachida’s father to New York for his and Rachida’s wedding, but even then, she complained morning to night: her aching feet, her upset stomach, the terrible injustice that Rachida—hating shopping, soap operas, and anything to do with homemaking—has refused to act like a daughter and then, to add insult to injury, moved across an ocean.

  “What do you think Eva does in her room at night?” Adam asks.

  “She’s studying Hebrew. She’s taking a class at some synagogue.”

  “She told you?”

  Rachida looks up from her feet. “What do you mean?”

  “She hardly talks to me. Does she talk to you?”

  “When I’m around. Your mother told me about the classes. I can’t think of anything more stupid than learning Hebrew, a language spoken in one country with six million people. Why doesn’t she learn Chinese?”

  “Because they don’t speak Chinese in Israel. And that’s where she wants to eventually move.”

  Rachida makes a snorting sound. “So she can live in a settlement on the West Bank with an Uzi rifle under her bed? You should see the pictures of the places my mother’s brothers and cousins live. The Israelis talk a good game about being the homeland for all Jews, but what they really mean is for all Ashkenazi Jews.”

  Adam regrets having come upstairs after putting Omar to bed. He’d had a vague idea of talking with Rachida about his remake of The Searchers—how he has changed Ethan to Moishe, a peripatetic rubber trader whose brother settled in Iquitos and fathered two daughters with an Indian woman, Ethan’s issues about miscegenation recast as Moishe’s rejection of his brother’s daughters as Jews, but now, with Rachida’s scowl, he already knows her response. She’d find the logical hole in the idea, the reason that Ethan cannot become Moishe, that Texas cannot be Iquitos.

  Rachida stands. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  Through the half-open bathroom door, Adam watches his wife pull off the blue scrubs. It has been nearly a year since he and Rachida have had sex. What would happen if he put his hand on the white cotton underwear she is still wearing as she turns on the shower? Most likely, he thinks, she would laugh.

  The first time he saw Rachida naked, he’d been surprised to discover a scattering of black hairs around her nipples and a faint dark fuzz that ran from her belly button down to her pubic line. He softly touched the fuzz. He’d never touched a woman in an intimate way, never imagined there would be an opportunity.

  “My mother used to come after me with depilatory creams. She once threatened to have me restrained in an electrolysis chair if I didn’t do something about the hair on my stomach.”

  “I like it,” Adam said, and in a way he had. It alleviated his worries about his own scrawny arms, his lack of sexual experience, which he quickly learned didn’t bother Rachida at all. To the contrary, she preferred his inexperience, since it made it easier for her to direct his fingers and tongue to precisely the places she wanted. For the first year, she had wanted sex every night, and she had come every time. As the months passed, he’d grown bolder—a liberation in knowing there was no other man he was competing with for her—and she had let him lead on occasion, moving her body the way he wanted.

  At the end of their first year together, he’d started looking at magazines. The first few times, he had told himself that it was simply an overflow of his sexual feelings—that after Rachida would leave for the hospital, he was sometimes still aroused. He filled a brown envelope with photographs cut from the magazines: some of them Playboy girls whose photos he had never looked at in adolescence, pink nipples and firm buttocks pointed sky-high; then, as he ventured into edgier magazines, vaginas spread open, men with elephantine penises, handcuffs, anuses. Men kissing men. Men sucking men.

  Terrified of tainting the screen, of blighting that refuge, he never looked at videos, at images on the computer. When Rachida had stopped wanting sex during her pregnancy with Omar, he’d been relieved, his orgasms, by then, more intense with the brown envelope than with her.

  Rachida closes the bathroom door. Adam can hear the shower curtain being drawn shut. He goes downstairs to the piano room his mother has let him use as his study. “Do you remember?” she asked the afternoon they arrived when she showed him the table she had moved under the window for his desk and the closet she had cleared for his things. “I’d planned for this to be your room, down the hall from Caro. You insisted, though, on taking the room upstairs, across from mine. I tried to convince you that this room was nicer, larger, but you would have none of it.”

  The first thing he checked after his mother left was that the door had a lock. There were rice shades that covered the windows. Now he bolts the door, closes the shades, opens the closet, and retrieves the brown envelope from the back of the farthest file box.

  19

  “I love Eva,” Omar says. It is a Saturday night and Rachida is home, sitting what Omar calls criss-cross-applesauce on the bath mat while he plays in the tub with his rubber sea animals and plastic submarine. For a moment, what looks to Rachida like a wave of worry passes over Omar’s face. Is he afraid that he should not have told her that he loves Eva? That she will be mad? But he’d been so open about his love for Zahra, his Moroccan babysitter in Detroit. And Rachida had so clearly endorsed it, taking him each year to buy something special for Zahra’s birthday, holding him in her lap when he cried after they had to say goodbye because they were moving here. Hadn’t she told him that love is a bottomless lake? That loving one person does not
take away from loving another?

  Eva, though, is different. She is nothing like Zahra. She runs up and down the stairs with Omar. At night, after Rachida or Adam has tucked Omar in and gone up to their room, Eva, Omar has confided in Rachida, sometimes sneaks downstairs and climbs into bed with him because she is scared. Rachida had not been pleased to hear this, but the truth is, Omar seems happier than she has ever seen him. With Eva, to come back to that word Omar’s preschool teacher used, Omar seems actually childish.

  “It’s very dangerous where Eva comes from,” Omar says. “Her father once killed a poisonous spider in their kitchen. Her sister got leeches on her legs when they were playing by the river.”

  Rachida soaps Omar’s back. When, as a baby, he was slow to pull himself up and late to walk, she assumed he had inherited Adam’s lack of coordination and strength. It had taken her a while to realize that Omar is simply still—without the compulsive climbing-touching-spinning-top frenzy of so many young boys.

  “Eva said she’s going to take me to see the jungle. When she comes back from Israel to visit Iquitos, she’ll stop and get me and bring me with her. The poor people come there on rafts they make into their houses. They bring banana leaves to make into roofs and their bathrooms are floating outhouses! And she’s going to take me to the jungle lodge where she used to work. They have dolphins in the river and red howler monkeys like the one she gave me.”

  “That’s nice.” She is drifting into half-listening, something she finds herself doing too often in response to Omar’s strings of enthusiasms—dinosaurs, jellyfish, asteroids, the moon, enthusiasms that center on science, her passion too, but are too melded with fantastical narrations to hold her attention.

  She’s had to delegate long hours of Omar’s care to Adam and various babysitters, but this has never dented her feeling that Omar’s well-being is entirely her responsibility. She alone has organized each step in his life: the cessation of the bottle and then the pacifier, the beginning of foods, toilet training, the adjustment to school. With a look, she can tell if he is well or sick, tired or rested. It has come as a disappointment, though, to discover her lack of patience, not only for Omar’s enthusiasms, but for play itself. The discomfort she has felt when observing Omar belly-flopped beside Adam or Zahra or, these past few months, Eva, the two of them moving around Komodo dragons or killer whales or triceratops, Omar’s hand resting on his companion’s wrist or arm or shoulder. The fear that she resides outside the circle of his deepest feelings, the administrator of his life rather than a character in it.