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  “Why don’t you talk it over with Rachida?” Myra suggests. “If she’s interested, I could let Eva come a few weeks before you arrive as a trial.”

  6

  Rachida finds Omar asleep on the couch and Adam staring at his computer screen.

  “What the hell is going on here? I tried to call you half a dozen times to say I was going to be late, but no one picked up.”

  “Did you know that there are several hundred offspring of Moroccan Jews living along the Amazon? At the turn of the twentieth century, hundreds of young Moroccan-Jewish men, a lot of them were kids, not even twenty years old, traveled up the Amazon, starting in Belém in Brazil and eventually making their way to Iquitos in Peru in these crude boats they made themselves.”

  “Did you give Omar his bath?”

  Adam takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. He pulls his beard. Fourteen years ago, when they first met, he still had vestiges of his childhood beauty: his mother’s slender form and delicate features. Now he has the ungainly middle-aged flab of a once-skinny child who never developed the muscles to use his arms and legs in a powerful way, and his face is half-hidden by the scruffy beard. Without his glasses, he squints in the harsh light. He swivels in his chair so that he faces Rachida, whose outline—the cropped hair, the practical clothes—she knows he can barely make out.

  “It’s an amazing story. These guys basically became the brokers between the native Indian rubber tappers and the shipowners who transported the raw rubber to Europe. By 1910, two hundred Moroccan-Jewish men were living in Iquitos, and there were businesses named, I’m not joking, Casa Khan, Casa Israel, and Casa Cohen. These guys kept their Moroccan wives, but they also took common-law Indian wives and had lots of babies. Then this English botanist smuggled 70,000 rubber seeds from Brazil and planted them in the Royal Botanic Gardens to see if they could survive in a different climate. When they did, the seedlings were sent to Malaysia and other parts of Asia, where transportation was easier and the plantation owners didn’t have to deal with unruly labor who carried poison darts, and, poof, end of the Amazonian rubber boom. The Jewish guys just packed up and went back to Fez or Rabat or Tangier, leaving behind their common-law wives and all the kids.”

  “Why are you talking about this?”

  “This girl my mother wants to hire to help with Omar and the housework. She’s from this community that’s existed now for nearly a century—the great-great-grandchildren of those Moroccan-Jewish guys, Indians basically, who identify themselves as Jews even though they’ve almost all gone to Catholic schools and have only the vaguest ideas about Judaism.”

  Rachida doesn’t even try to stifle her sigh. Adam should know that she doesn’t give a fuck about Moroccan Jews. When she left Essaouira fifteen years ago, it was to get away from the dying community there. She just wants to get off her aching feet. She looks around for somewhere to sit other than the folding chair that came with the card table, but with Adam in the desk chair and Omar on the couch, there is nowhere else.

  When they first moved in, she intended, not to decorate—she hates that word, which reminds her of her mother’s pompous aspirations to Europeanize their mellah home—but to make the rooms comfortable. She wanted to buy an armchair for the empty corner of the living room and a real desk for the dining alcove and some shelving for Omar’s toys. But the house quickly turned into an endless series of problems, the leaking roof, the fuses blowing if they run the microwave with the air conditioner on, and Adam incapable of producing the tone of voice required to get the landlord to respond. Then there has been her father, no longer able to stand for hours at his jewelry bench, so that she’s taken to sending him a few hundred dollars a month, the money she might have spent on furniture (money she’s not mentioned to Adam and is certain her father has not mentioned to her mother), and she reached the breaking point with her practice and it has been all she can do to keep up her office hours and take care of Omar and fill out the respecialization fellowship applications.

  Rachida opens the folding chair and leans down to untie her shoes. It has been years since she’s been charmed by Adam’s obsessions, and her patience with stories about the valiant efforts of Jews to worship throughout the Diaspora runs to minutes, but this particular story about Moroccan Jews in South America does ring a bell with something her father once told her.

  “Some of the women from this community, Ursula told my mother, sent the women’s group at her synagogue a letter asking for instruction in Jewish cooking and family planning and including the question if someone could please explain to them why they couldn’t have pictures of Jesus in their houses. A lot of the younger members, like Eva, have developed the ambition of emigrating to Israel. Ursula says her synagogue has treated the emissaries the Iquitos Jews have sent to Lima abysmally, refusing their pleas for bar mitzvahs and circumcisions on the grounds that not having had Jewish mothers, they’re not Jews.”

  “Who is Eva?”

  Adam puts his glasses back on. Reading the scrolling text on his computer screen has left him with a throbbing behind his eyes. He wishes he could go upstairs and lock the bedroom door and look at one of the magazine pictures he keeps stashed in a large envelope in a file box at the bottom of his closet. Thinking about the photographs gives him a half erection, and for a moment he imagines getting up to touch his wife, but it strikes him as preposterous. He is afraid she would laugh out loud.

  Rachida pulls off her socks. Adam watches while she massages her feet: wide across the arches and surprisingly small. For a long time, Rachida had been the one who would get things started between them. Both of them lacked any prior experience, but she knew exactly what she wanted and gave detailed directions. After Omar was born, she stopped initiating. Adam’s desire for her has similarly diminished, but there are still moments like this one, with his erection now pressing against his briefs, when he wants to have sex and feels no aversion at the thought of it being with her. What he has never figured out, though, is how to shift from talking about who will take the laundry to the laundromat to the language of hands and tongues and more.

  “Are you going to answer my question? Who is Eva?”

  “This girl Ursula asked my mother to help find work in New York. My mother is thinking about hiring her to be a housekeeper for when we come. If we like her, she could help out with Omar after school.”

  Rachida sits up. Her glossy black hair, the envy of her sister and mother with their frizzy heads, settles back into place. Irritated by their constant playing with her hair, she chopped it off herself when she was ten, refusing ever since to grow it past her ears. Now she cuts both her and Omar’s hair by tracing the outlines of a bowl on their heads.

  “So, let’s see. My choice is, I have Omar watch DVDs while you cruise the Internet looking up whatever bizarre piece of history you’re into that day or he gets taken to the park after school by an Indian maid whose great-great-grandfather was a Jew from Morocco?”

  7

  If Ursula’s version of Eva’s story foregrounded the internecine struggles between the Limian maids and their San Isidro employers, Myra’s version is inflected through her psychotherapist’s lens. Related to Caro the following Sunday over the pot of chai tea that follows their dinner, it features a Jewish girl from the Amazon who needs to get away from a troubling family situation.

  “A family situation?” Caro asks. “What does that mean?”

  “Darling, I talked with the girl for half an hour on the phone. We talked about her work experience and the job description. Ursula said she thinks the mother died in some kind of disaster, but I certainly wasn’t going to ask about it over the phone.”

  “What’s her experience with kids?”

  “She’s done lots of babysitting and worked in the children’s program of an Amazonian lodge that caters to tourists. She loves kids. Alicia had her fill in when one of her maids was out sick. She said Eva cleans like a demon and irons like a dream.”

  “As if Adam or Rachida wear cloth
es that are ironed. Not to be a stickler for details, but does she have references?”

  Myra catches the waitress’s eye, makes a writing gesture on the palm of her hand. It is hard for her to explain her attachment to Alicia and Ursula. Having met neither of them until after she’d left her parents’ home and never having been to Peru, she would not say that she is close with them. Nonetheless, they are the closest link she has to her father, whose story—he’d traversed the years of the First World War driving an ice truck while he studied bookkeeping at night, his sister Misha, unable to learn English or convert her humiliated rage after she’d been jilted by her fiancé into something productive, his ward—still makes her sad. After the war, her father had accepted an offer from the ice manufacturer’s cousin, who assumed from his humorless honesty and balding pate that he was a man twice his age, to become comptroller for a kosher meat-processing plant in Baltimore. Misha had spent the allowance he gave her on magazines and chocolates and trips to the movies, untroubled by leaving the cleaning, shopping, and laundry for him to do on Sundays. When at forty-nine years of age and over two hundred pounds, she dropped dead of a heart attack, Myra’s father appeared so desiccated that the rabbi called in for the service thought he was Misha’s father. Once he learned the truth, a lightbulb had gone off for the rabbi: a match for his equally dour thirty-six-year-old spinster sister. Myra’s conception, she imagines, was the result of the only intimate relations the two of them ever had, her Baltimore childhood spent in an immaculately clean row house as barren of talk as it was of dust or beauty, the frugality of which had yielded her rather significant inheritance.

  “The first month will be a trial period. Alicia and Ursula are going to buy Eva a ticket with an open return date. She’ll come in the middle of June, a few weeks before Adam, Rachida, and Omar arrive. I’ll know within a week if she’s unsuitable, which would leave me time to find someone else.”

  For a moment, Caro thinks she detects a trace of anxiety on her mother’s face, but by the time the waitress arrives with a bill that her mother whisks away from Caro’s outstretched hand, her mother’s eyes and mouth are relaxed, so that it is only later, looking back, that Caro can see what any preschool director would tell you: first impressions are always right. About Eva, her mother hasn’t a clue.

  8

  As she walks home, it occurs to Caro that until she was seven, she believed they were a plain-vanilla family, with a mom who picked up the children at school and escorted them to ballet and to karate and to get their teeth cleaned, even if she was reading all the time, and a dad who was a cardiologist who got home in time for dinner and left the house on the days when he conducted teaching rounds before anyone else got up, and four grandparents: her mother’s parents in Baltimore, whom they visited at Thanksgiving and hardly saw otherwise, and her father’s parents, who lived nearby and had a house in the Catskills where they stayed every Memorial Day and Labor Day. Then, in the space of one year, her mother’s parents died, an event most remarkable for the fact that these pursed-mouth people, who’d insisted that Myra, their only child, wear the neighbor’s hand-me-down coats, had socked away quite a bit of money.

  For reasons Caro cannot explain, since there would have been enough money before (perhaps her mother needed it to be her own), the inheritance led to her mother returning to school to become a psychologist. Three nights a week, she disappeared for her classes, nights when it seemed that their father was always forgetting something and going back to his office or the hospital—the super’s wife, who wore a hairnet and smelled of talcum powder, willing to oblige for last-minute babysitting—until, several years into it all, there was a night when voices were raised and suitcases packed and her father moved in with the receptionist from his office.

  During the six months her father lived with the receptionist (Sharon or Sheri or maybe it was Shirley), Caro and Adam spent weekends at the receptionist’s apartment, weekends during which their mother raced to finish her dissertation and Adam, then eight, refused to take a shower (Sharon or Sheri or whatever her name was had no tub) or, to their father’s great irritation, sleep without the television on. Doctorate completed, her mother cashed in her inherited saving bonds and IBM stock to buy the then decrepit brownstone. When they moved in a year later, after the crackled tiles in the bathrooms had been acid-cleaned and the kitchen redone with the soapstone counters and her mother’s office installed on the street level, the block housed a group home for the mentally ill, a drug detox clinic, and two buildings rented out by the room. Now, twenty-two years later, her mother’s neighbors are investment bankers and partners in law firms.

  If her mother got her brownstone from her parents’ penny-pinching, Caro acquired her own apartment as expiation from her father, Larry—which was exactly how she put it when he hemmed and hawed—for ruining forever, she told him, her prospects for a healthy relationship by cheating on her mother.

  “You left at a critical time,” Caro had lectured her father, “the eve of the transition from concrete to formal operations.” It was the summer after her Harvard graduation. They were dining by the pool of her father’s Tucson casita, ten feet from the spot where on Caro’s last visit he’d proudly shot a rattlesnake curled at the foot of an enormous saguaro cactus.

  “Don’t give me your mother’s psychoanalytic crap,” her father said, cutting too quickly to the chase for Caro to clarify that this was Piaget, Developmental Psych 101, not Freud. So she’d switched to dollars and cents, a language that he and his cardiology partners spoke with a frightful fluency.

  “Actually, Daddy, what I’m asking for is really an exchange. Do you remember how you always promised you’d send me to medical school if I wanted to go? Well, I don’t. What I want is”—she paused and looked him in the eye—“a two-bedroom apartment, paid for in full, which, if I do what I’m planning to do, I’ll never be able to afford.” A good deal, she continued, truly, and then pulled out the pièce de résistance, a Lotus spreadsheet, which proved what a bargain her proposition was if he took into account the opportunity costs of medical school tuition.

  She complimented the pork chops dished out by her father’s second soon-to-be ex-wife, ignorant about anything not found in a women’s magazine but sufficiently cunning to act as though she did not understand the transaction taking place.

  9

  The plan Myra makes with Ursula is that Eva will arrive on a Saturday in the middle of June, two weeks before Adam and his family. Myra will meet Eva at the airport and then have the weekend to get her oriented. On the first Thursday in June, however, the phone rings minutes before Myra’s 8:45 patient.

  “Myra, sweetheart,” Ursula says, “there’s been a tiny problem, nothing to worry about, just something between Alicia and the maid whose boyfriend is the paisano of Eva. Alicia lost her patience and went, stupid woman, and changed Eva’s ticket for tomorrow before I could even check with you. So, please, sweetheart, forgive me, but she will be arriving tomorrow at four. I told Alicia, Tomorrow is Friday, Myra will be working, and she said, Just have Eva take a bus to her house. Of course I can’t let the poor thing take the bus, but I will give her some American dollars so she can take a taxi to you.”

  Throughout the morning, Myra finds her thoughts drifting to Eva: it does not seem right to have the girl try to negotiate a taxi at Kennedy airport. For all the years of her practice, however, Myra has done her best not to cancel her patients unless absolutely necessary. It is part of her covenant to her patients. They are to hold inside all of the tempestuous feelings the work stirs up between sessions; on her end, she promises to do her best to be there at the appointed time.

  It pains Myra to ask Caro, even though she knows it will really not be a hardship for Caro, her reaction a carryover from her childhood when she’d hated asking anything of her own mother (always, in Myra’s memory, on the floor on her hands and knees with a rag scouting out crumbs Myra assumed from her mother’s pinched face Myra had created), so that she’d struggled to button
the backs of her dresses, to make her own sandwiches, to not ask for new shoes until her feet hurt. Now, though, she can hear the soft, accented voice of her former analyst, Dreis, chastising her: And what is the favor? You are hiring the girl to help your son, you want her met at the airport because you think this the kindest welcome, you don’t want to disturb the work with your patients. This is your mother inside you. She could not tolerate that you were a human child who made messes, and now you cannot tolerate that you are human and do not have three hands and cannot be in two places at the same time …

  At lunchtime, Myra calls Caro at work. “But it’s no problem,” Caro says. “We only have twenty-six children who stay for the afternoon and there are three teachers plus the assistant director. They’ll be happy to have me out of their hair.”

  “Thank you, darling. You can take my car. I’ll leave the picture Ursula sent me of Eva with the guys at the garage.”

  10

  Caro sleeps with the shades open so she can see the morning sky, now lightening with streaks of dove and pearl.

  With all the talk about her brother’s move these past few weeks, she has not asked her mother about her project: something her mother calls the teleology of love. Knowing that most people consider a philosophical project pretentious or a sign of someone whose head is in the clouds, her mother does not discuss it unless asked directly. In her mother’s case, though, neither could be further from the truth. She is deeply practical: interested in ideas only to the extent that they touch on human dilemmas of real import. And she is the antithesis of pretentious. Because she believes modesty to be fundamentally false, a reaction formation, she once said, against the urge to boast, she is not modest. Rather, she feels no need to hijack others to be her audience.