*
Molly had come a week earlier than either Freddie or Ben, neither of whom could get to New York until Thanksgiving Day, and Joy was glad. It gave her a little time to be alone with her daughter. From the kitchen table, she watched with pleasure as Molly grabbed parcels from the refrigerator and threw them into a large garbage bag.
“Mom, this is disgusting.”
Joy nodded. Molly’s movements, so abrupt and assured, charmed her. It was as if Molly were a little girl, a busy, officious little girl, as she had sometimes been, bossing her brother around, arranging the spices in the kitchen alphabetically as soon as she learned the alphabet.
“It’s wonderful to have you here,” Joy said.
Molly looked up from the garbage bag. She smiled.
“I miss you terribly,” Joy said.
The smile faded. “That makes me feel kind of guilty, Mom.”
“Would you prefer that I didn’t miss you?”
Molly pondered that. “I don’t know. Maybe. No.”
“Good. Because I do, whether you like it or not.”
She watched Molly spray the kitchen table with Fantastik and scrub it vigorously with a sponge, her elbows almost banging into Joy’s face.
“Should I move?”
“You’re okay.”
Joy did not offer to help. Molly did not like help. Joy watched her with growing satisfaction. The chemicals in the spray made her eyes sting, but she said nothing. The sticky circles left by teacups and jam jars disappeared. Molly gave her a quick kiss on the head as she put back the saltshaker, the sugar bowl with one of its handles broken off, the portable radio, then quickly took them off again and scrubbed them, too. She scrubbed the blackened windowsill.
“That will never come off,” Joy said.
“I miss you, too, you know,” Molly said.
“I should hope so.”
Joy listened to the water run as Molly took a shower in Danny’s minuscule bathroom. There was life in the apartment, echoes of her old life, echoes of life before she was old.
“Aaron,” she said that night as she tucked him in, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her face against the back of his head, “I love you.”
He said, “I love you, too, my darling.”
The words echoed in the apartment full of echoes.
*
Joy left for work at 9:30. She never knew what she would come home to, but Aaron tended to sleep during the day and never went near the stove, so she told herself. She was a conservation consultant for a small museum on the Lower East Side that specialized in Jewish artifacts. It was, she had once observed, years ago, not unlike Hitler’s Museum of an Extinct Race, but with less stuff. Aaron was shocked when she said this. They were in Prague at the time, entering a museum beside the old synagogue, a museum that was piled with candlesticks and spoons and silver spice boxes stolen from Jews by the Nazis and stockpiled in anticipation of Hitler’s museum.
“Joyful, darling, a little perspective,” Aaron said.
A museum like hers was a record of the past, not a trophy of genocide, certainly that was true. But Time was so cruel and so thorough. It made her sad sometimes as she examined her own museum’s jumble of dented tin pushkes, Sabbath candlesticks brought from the Old Country, telegrams, newspapers, photographs, the wheel of a pushcart, a deck chair from the Catskills. Where did they belong now? Nowhere. It was an extinct world that passed through her hands and into the Lower East Side Museum. Joy would examine each item donated to the museum or acquired, each fragment of this lost world, to determine if it deserved to be found or to be lost again, to be tossed back quite literally onto the dust heap of history. This choosing which item lived and which died, so to speak—that was the part of her job she did not relish, separating the wheat from the chaff.
“Who am I to judge?” she said to Aaron. “If the pope said that about his flock, is it any wonder I feel that way about my flock of artifacts?”
“I don’t know how to tell you this, my love, but you are not the pope.”