Tinderbox Read online

  Eva is eating at the kitchen table by the time Myra comes back upstairs. She is humming between spoonfuls of cereal, a tune that is vaguely familiar. She smiles at Myra, a shy smile, but without any trace of embarrassment.

  “You moved upstairs.”

  Eva giggles. “I am sorry.”

  “Were you uncomfortable in your room?”

  “It is so lonely all the way down there. At home, we have one floor. My sister and I share a room. In Lima, I sleep in the room with my friend.”

  “That’s going to be Omar’s room when he gets here, but you can sleep there for the next two weeks. Maybe by then everything will seem more familiar.”

  Eva nods. As she stands to clear her bowl, she resumes her humming. Now Myra recognizes the tune. It is “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music.

  “Small and white / Clean and bright / You look happy to meet me.”

  The Sound of Mucous, Larry had called it. He’d chase the children around the house bellowing, “Big and green / Dirty and mean / You look happy to eat me.”

  The humming stops. “Thank you,” Eva says.

  15

  Usually a sound sleeper, Caro is woken in the middle of the night by a dream of howler monkeys. She is in a basket suspended from a tree. One of the monkeys has climbed in and is clinging to her, its claws digging so hard into her skin she can see beads of blood. Unable to shake the creepy feeling of the dream, she wanders into her kitchen, where she stands at the counter eating grapes, imagining her mother on the fourth floor of the dark brownstone with Eva three stories below. When the grapes are gone, she takes a bagel from the freezer and defrosts it in the microwave. She eats it slathered with peanut butter and then opens a carton of frozen yogurt, which she eats to the bottom.

  In the morning, she feels sick from the nighttime eating. No amount of toothpaste will remove the revolting taste from her mouth. She puts on her running shoes and jogs slowly across Eighty-sixth Street and then into Central Park. She circles the reservoir twice, once on the path by the water, once on the bridle path, hating herself for the useless calories. She can identify the impetus for stuffing herself—the anxiety about Eva, the memories she’d unleashed—but the understanding never stops the compulsive hand to mouth that leaves her with a self-loathing in comparison to which the original discomfort would have been a pleasure.

  With her head finally clear after the second lap, she calls her mother. The answering machine picks up. “Hi,” Caro says. “It’s me. I thought I’d stop by and see how you and Eva are doing.”

  Ten minutes later, she climbs the steps to the brownstone. Two urns overflowing with verbena and hollyhocks flank the door. She rings the bell, and then uses her key to let herself in.

  Her mother and Eva are at the farm table that separates the kitchen and parlor. Through the doors opening onto the dining deck, Caro can see the mugs left on the outdoor table. The canvas umbrella is open, casting shade over the terra-cotta pots. Below, in the garden, a path leads from the shaded lower deck to a fountain installed the year Adam left for college, if his at best partial residence in his N.Y.U. dorm can be called leaving, by her mother’s first lover, a photographer with a penchant for tinkering that resulted in a hidden pump that makes the water gurgle over a tiny wheel. Beyond the fountain and the brick-edged beds of plantings—low pachysandra, bushy oat grass, miscanthus interspersed with daylilies and purple irises—is the huppah under which Adam and Rachida were married seven years ago, Omar’s presence in Rachida’s belly obvious to all. The huppah is home now to a hammock, installed by her mother’s last lover, an itinerant lecturer of mathematics whose jealous scenes had led to what her mother has told her was a decision that “last” means not latest but final, a final she now views in the context of her teleology of love as progress rather than retreat.

  “Hello, darling,” Myra says. “We’re just working out a schedule for Eva, first for the next two weeks before the others arrive, and then for after that. Come take a look and see if we’ve forgotten anything.”

  Caro pulls up a chair and pours herself a glass of lemon water from the pitcher on the table. Although she and everyone else admire her mother’s keen organizational skills, applied these days primarily to herself and her own pursuits, they also provoke in Caro a kind of dread, a silent rebelliousness, as though she is being asked to conform to a grim military regime. When she once confessed this to her mother, her mother said, “I’m so sorry. How awful for you. You need to remember that I’m only trying to control myself. An orderly external life allows my mind to wander freely. It’s an occupational hazard for therapists. We overvalue order, since it’s the unchanging routine of the sessions that lets the unconscious flow.”

  Her mother’s love of order, Caro has come to understand, runs even deeper. For her mother, there is a harmonic beauty in a household where the precise number of cartons of milk needed for a week are loaded face forward on the bottom refrigerator shelf every Wednesday afternoon, where each closet has its designated function, where the mattresses are turned left to right, top to bottom, in alternating seasons. Unlike Caro, her mother eats the foods her body needs at the times they are needed. Her days are laid out so that each includes fresh air, work, solitude, conversation, and time at her piano. They are works of art unto themselves, something that fills Caro alternately with awe and horror—awe because her mother, in fact, accomplishes more in a day than anyone else she knows, horror because it seems inhuman to be able to keep destructive impulses so entirely leashed.

  Caro studies the first column of the schedule her mother has drawn up for Eva. It is labeled Daily Tasks: Mondays for laundry, Tuesdays for washing linens and ironing, Wednesdays for cleaning the baths and kitchen, Thursdays for vacuuming and dusting, Fridays for food shopping and errands. She skips to the column labeled Omar School Pickup. Caro had leaned on all her connections to find a first-grade spot for Omar, with a friend in the admissions office at the City School having come through only last week thanks to a family that was unexpectedly moving. On the schedule, there is Adam for Monday, Eva for Tuesday, her mother for Wednesday, Rachida for Thursday, and her own name next to Friday with a question mark.

  “I wondered if you want to do one day a week. I put down Fridays, since that’s usually a lighter day for you.”

  Caro imagines Omar holding up his hand in delight, the miracle of a finger for each weekday, a day for each caregiver. “Sure,” she says, a beat too slowly, her response like a card poorly played as it dawns on her that her brother’s move is pulling them both back home.

  16

  At first, Eva brings only her pajamas upstairs to the room Myra intends for Omar. By the second week, though, Myra notices that Eva has brought up the remainder of her possessions: the pair of black pants, the two pairs of jeans, a handful of T-shirts, the fake leather jacket, the Lakers’ duffel bag, a dog-eared Old Testament, and a small wooden box that she puts on the dresser. Eva’s toothbrush sits in a glass atop the fourth-floor hallway bathroom sink. A bottle of her shampoo rests on the side of the tub.

  It is Tuesday. Adam, Rachida, and Omar are due on Saturday. In the evening, Myra will remind Eva that she needs to move back downstairs before Omar arrives. When Myra comes upstairs from her office, though, Eva is so exuberant about her plans—in the fall, she will find a class to study Hebrew and maybe one to improve her English as well; she has been reading Dr. M.’s New York guidebooks about places she can take Omar—that Myra puts off raising the subject for another day.

  At two, Myra wakes to the sound of a scream. She reaches the hall with Eva’s second scream. She knocks on Eva’s door, then pushes it open. Eva is sitting upright in the bed.

  “Eva?”

  Her eyes are open, fixed straight ahead. She screams again.

  Myra places a hand on Eva’s back. The girl does not move or speak. She seems to be still asleep. Gently, Myra rubs Eva’s back, speaking to her softly, the way she had with Adam when he would have a night terror.

  Eva squeezes
her eyes tight, then opens them wide. She looks at Myra, unsure, it seems, who she is.

  “It’s Myra. Dr. M.”

  Eva vigorously shakes her head as though rejecting Myra’s words. Then she seems to come to. She covers her face with her hands.

  “What happen?” Eva asks.

  “You had a nightmare. You were screaming in your sleep.”

  “I am so embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed. Everyone has nightmares on occasion.” Myra pauses. It is true that everyone has nightmares, but only children rouse the household with screams.

  “It happen before, but not in a very long time.”

  “Would you like some water?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Myra goes into the bathroom and fills a paper cup with water. When she returns, Eva is still sitting up in the bed. She drinks the water, then crumples the cup between her hands.

  “I promise it will not happen again.”

  On Eva’s face is what Myra thinks of as the lovesick-puppy look. When the children were little, she would see it on occasion with a playmate: a child who would respond to cookies and milk and a hand on her shoulder by reaching out her arms and calling Mama. On occasion, the look will appear in the eyes of a patient whose hunger for love is so profound that the patient’s awareness that Myra is a therapist—listening with genuine care and interest, with what she has come to recognize is a kind of love on her part but remains at heart a job, a job she puts down at night and on weekends and during August so she can care for her own family and herself—is eclipsed by a voracious demand for more.

  “Go back to sleep. We can talk in the morning.” Myra holds out her hand to take the crumpled cup.

  “My father, when he hear me scream, he slap me. My sister, she put a sock in my mouth so he does not hear me.”

  Eva studies Myra’s face. “You are worrying it will happen after Omar arrives? Don’t worry. It is only because I was not used to it here. I am used to it now.”

  17

  In the morning, Myra cannot concentrate on her work. She sits in front of her computer, but her thoughts will not budge from Eva’s scream. Should she send the girl back to Lima? But for what? For being afraid to sleep alone on the ground floor? For having a night terror?

  At eight, she calls Ursula’s cell phone. It rings in Paris, where Ursula is on an extended shopping trip, on the rose quartz marble ledge of the enormous bath where she is soaking, in her suite at the George V Hotel.

  Ursula listens to her cousin’s concerns about Eva’s night terrors, her worry that perhaps New York is too much for the girl. She thinks about the problem Eva could make for Alicia and her in their San Isidro synagogue, where her eldest grandson will soon be seeking his bar mitzvah date, were Eva to ask for Hebrew lessons or Jewish education or, God forbid, to join the congregation.

  “Well, of course, sweetheart, if you need to send her back…” Ursula sighs. She climbs out of the tub, her brown nipples covered with milk foam. Her waist has thickened considerably since she reached menopause, a decade ago, but in her hand-sewn Parisian lingerie, her breasts and bottom—with the help of her trainer and ample French emollients—have retained sufficient firmness, in tandem with her Centurion American Express card, to attract the occasional twenty-something lover, such as the young Spaniard now splayed naked on the floral quilted spread of the hotel bed.

  “Well, I suppose I might find her a job in one of the knitting factories on the outskirts of the city. Only, they treat the girls there like slaves, paying them piece work for hats and sweaters. Fifty cents a hat. Two dollars a sweater.”

  Wrapped in a towel, Ursula enters the dressing room, the chaise longue and telephone table littered by now, her third day in Paris, with shopping receipts and clothing boxes, one of which produces a red lace brassiere and a matching pair of tap pants.

  She glances at the Spanish boy, who has produced an erection which he is fondly stroking.

  “Sweetheart, I have to go. I will call you later. I promise. But perhaps you might give it just a teensy bit more time?”

  Ursula feels a heaviness in her breasts and an urgency between her legs. “Kiss, kiss. Bye.”

  The Spaniard grins when he sees the red lace.

  “Be rough,” she orders.

  18

  By the time Myra has finished her midday walk around the reservoir, showered, eaten her lunch, and returned to her desk by the open French doors, the solution is clear. She will have to reorganize the sleeping arrangements. On the fourth floor, where she had planned for Omar to take the front room while she kept her bedroom overlooking the garden, she will let Eva stay put. She will give Rachida and Adam her bedroom. Omar can have the back bedroom on the third floor, and Adam can still have the music room for his office. She will move downstairs into the small room she’d planned for Eva.

  She gets up to look at the room. It is narrow, with a twin bed under the window. A small wooden dresser and a card table are the room’s only other furnishings. A pegboard with hooks serves as a makeshift closet. If she empties the closet in her office, there will be enough space for her clothes. In a way, it will be better. She won’t have to worry about Eva moving around while her patients are in the office.

  Fifty cents a hat. Two dollars a sweater.

  It is a more logical arrangement, she tells herself.

  19

  After the chubby engineer threw her out, Caro had camped in the fifth-floor walk-up apartment of Anne-Marie, a girl from Brussels she’d met at the Parc Monceau. Pooling the money from the envelope the engineer had given her and the allowance Anne-Marie received from her banker father, they left in June for Greece, after which they took the train west to Spain, the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier, and then another train south to Casablanca. Terrified of the overtures of a Coca-Cola distributorship heir which had taken a nasty turn, but more, really, of herself and who she’d become during the months since her employer had pulled back her sheets, she fled Casablanca, taking the first departing bus.

  The bus had gone to Essaouira, a town she knew nothing about. She spent three days in bed with what she thought was a case of tourista before she ventured out, wandering through a maze of narrow streets just wide enough for a wheelbarrow or donkey cart, the white light and briny smell from the adjacent sea lending a holiday atmosphere.

  At the jewelers’ souk, she found a silver bracelet for her mother, a braided cuff over which she bargained with the bearded shop owner to reach a price of 550 dirham. “A very rare piece,” the owner said. “I am losing money selling it to you.”

  Two stores down, the identical cuff was displayed in the window. “How much?” she inquired of the young man behind the counter.

  “I will give you a very good deal. Three hundred dirham.”

  Indignant, Caro returned to the first shop to protest.

  “That,” the man sneered, “that bracelet you saw, to mention it in the same breath as mine is an insult. I will give you the benefit of the doubt. You are ignorant about the differences in the quality of silver.”

  The man had a long face with a bulbous nose. His cheeks were flecked with broken capillaries. It was clear that, from his point of view, inflating prices for a tourist was acceptable practice, the exchange between them entirely within the realm of principle.

  Her eyes wandered to a shelf where there was a candelabrum that looked like a menorah. “Can I see that?”

  Very carefully, the shop owner reached for the object, which he placed on the glass countertop. There was a star of David on the base of the piece. He peered at her. “You are a Jew?”

  She did not answer.

  “You want this instead?”

  She nodded.

  “For you, I will rob myself. Rob my own family. But no more discussion of the quality of my silver. You will come to my home tomorrow for the Sabbath dinner.”

  And so Caro met Uri and his vain, hypochondriacal wife, Raquel, and then their brainy angry daughter, Rachida, and her sweet older
sister, Esther, the mother’s handmaiden and an image of how Rachida might have looked had she not felt her life depended on being as unlike her sister and mother as possible.

  Esther and Raquel fingered Caro’s clothes, the hem of the loose blouse and the folds of the long skirt she’d worn to walk the streets alone.

  “These are shoes for a girl?” Esther asked, giggling as she slipped her tiny soft feet inside Caro’s beat-up Birkenstocks.

  Uri batted Esther’s leg. “Excuse this rude child of mine.”

  Before dinner, Raquel lit candles. The family held hands, Rachida grimacing as she placed hers inside Caro’s, and Uri said the blessing over the wine, the same baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh haolam, borei p’ri hagafen Caro dimly recalled her mother’s uncle saying on their annual visits to her mother’s parents’ home.

  “Your parents, they keep the Sabbath?” Uri asked as Raquel served the couscous.

  “Not really. They both had uncles who were rabbis, but neither of them is religious.”

  “Your father should have insisted. That is the job of the father.”

  She did not want to say that her parents were divorced, her father remarried to a woman who wasn’t Jewish, but before she could decide what to say, Rachida blurted out, the first words Caro can remember her having said, her face locked until that moment in a bored scowl, “In America, they are not still in the Dark Ages. There are Jews who actually use their minds.”

  A vein throbbed in Uri’s temple. When he spoke, it was as though he were releasing his words one by one. “My daughter, she thinks that she is more intelligent than her father. She thinks her science is wiser than the Talmud. But she will learn. Our ancestors have been here since the time of the Romans. My father was a Berber. My grandfather was a Berber. My great-great-great-great-grandfather was a Berber. We are the Jews who came here directly from the Holy Land. Not the Jews who fled Spain. Not the Jews who pretended to be Christians. Before there were Muslims here, before there were kings—when there were only tribes of people. Our people have brought our trades to every corner of the world: to China, to India, to South America, to Canada. And always, always we have kept Sabbath, obeyed the kosher laws, observed the High Holidays. But no, my brilliant daughter, she is smarter than thousands of years of our people.”