Joy listened to the noises from the kitchen. Plenty of banging and crashing, but she found she didn’t mind as much as she had anticipated. Still, they didn’t know where anything was, those two, Coco and Molly. Joy got up and went into the kitchen, pointed out the roasting pan, the carving knife. The women smiled at her tolerantly until she went back into the living room. Fine, fine, let them look high and low for platters and gravy boats. If they needed any more of her help, they knew where to find her. She would sit and put her feet up and watch her grandchildren. That was matriarchal, too.
Ruby pushed her younger sister away and kneeled on the floor at the coffee table. She pulled an ornamental wooden box toward her and began to rummage through old photographs that were kept inside. Two years before, Ruby’s teacher had asked the class to construct their family trees. Ruby had formed an immediate attachment, bordering on obsession, with the heavy ancestral mustaches, the billowing knickers, the bows and fancy perched hats. She still gravitated to the photographs when she came to see her grandparents. She knew the names of every second cousin on both sides of the family. The old man with a long white beard spread across his chest who was wearing a fur hat was Aaron the First, as she put it—her grandfather’s grandfather. He had eyes like an angry crow.
“Why do you like him?” Cora asked. “He’s scary. And he’s dead.”
“So?”
“So he’s scary and he’s dead.”
But Ruby only shrugged and gazed fondly at the old man. He had sent his children to New York for a better life, six of them, holding only one back to take care of him and his wife in their old age. That daughter had died of cholera at sixteen. Tragic, Grandma Joy told her. Ruby thought, It served him right, but she said nothing.
“Is the turkey cooked or not?” Joy said, back in the kitchen. “I don’t understand.”
“Mom, you did plenty. Just sit down and relax. Coco and I can do this part.”
Joy had helped set up the extra table and the folding chairs, she’d helped Molly get the good dishes down, the good silverware, all the linens tucked away in boxes lined with tissue paper. That, plus everything she’d done to get Aaron ready—she was tired. In the living room, she watched as Aaron trudged in behind his walker. The girls looked up from the box of photographs.
“Do you want to look at your ancestors?” Ruby asked him.
“I’m too old to have ancestors.”
“That’s silly, Grandpa.”
“I’m too silly to have ancestors,” he said. He threw two kisses at the children. “Catch!” he said, and they both jumped and raised a hand, as if they were catching a butterfly. “Good,” he said. “Sometimes they get away.”
Joy helped him sit on his chair. He threw her a kiss, too. “Tough to be an old Jew,” he said.
“I’m Jewish,” Cora said.
Her sister rolled her eyes.
Cora showed Joy a photo of a man wearing a woman’s bathing suit.
“That’s my father,” Joy said.
“Why did he wear a girl’s bathing suit?”
“All the men did.”
“There’s a girl in my class who used to be a boy. But I’ve never seen her in a bathing suit.”
“Dear god.”
“Sometimes people get born in the wrong bodies,” Ruby explained to her grandmother.
Joy checked to see if Aaron had been following this, but he appeared to be, mercifully, asleep.
After a while, Cora began her ritual search for spare change, running her small fingers beneath the seat cushions of the sofa. Mostly she encountered grit, but she did come across a few bobby pins. Beneath the cushion of a chair, she discovered a clear plastic bean with a tiny wire. She was so disgusted when she realized that it was her grandfather’s hearing aid that she put it back. She moved onto the floor and lifted the sofa’s skirt. There, among the dust balls, she saw a ballpoint pen she could not reach.
She moved on to the ashtrays.
“What are ashtrays for?” she said.
Ruby looked at her incredulously. “For ashes.”
“For dead people in India?”
“You girls are very odd,” Joy said.
“For ashes from cigarettes. And cigars. And pipes,” Ruby said. “Don’t be so stupid, Cora.”
“But nobody smokes cigarettes or cigars or pipes.”
“Well, they used to.”
“Don’t call your sister stupid,” Joy said. “How would she know that? How do you know that?”
“Hasn’t she ever seen a movie?” Ruby said, turning back to a black-and-white photo of her father in the bath as an infant.
But Cora was no longer interested in the conversation. The heavy blown-glass ashtray in the front hall that was full of keys and paper clips was too high up and too heavy for her to lift with any confidence, so she stood on tiptoe and scrabbled through the loose keys and stamps and sample tubes of sunscreen until her fingers felt the cool of silver coins, quarters, quite a few this time. She sat down on the floor and counted them, piling them in towers of four. Nine quarters and then, in a small dish on the dresser in the bedroom, four rather sticky pennies. Her grandmother gave her an eyeglass case with a snap to use as a wallet.
Back in the living room, clutching her eyeglass-case purse, she approached her grandfather in his red chair that looked like a Chinese throne, or what she imagined a Chinese throne looked like after she once heard her grandmother say, “Just sit in it and stop complaining. It’s an antique. From China.”
Her grandfather looked uncomfortable. He shifted his weight back and forth.