“Maple syrup,” she said. “Real maple syrup. No one serves real maple syrup anymore.”
They talked about Aaron, about his reminiscences about the war, about the pigeons. Joy cried, just for a minute, and Karl handed her a large, clean white handkerchief with his initials monogrammed on it. She hesitated before handing it back and had a flash of memory, another large, clean white handkerchief, no monogram in those days, a fit of sneezing, the embarrassment of handing it back. She looked up. Karl was smiling.
“I remember,” he said.
“Were we on a sailboat?”
He nodded.
“I thought you were very brave to take it back after all that sneezing.”
“I didn’t have much choice.”
She laughed. “I remember thinking it would be very forward of me to keep it. That was the word. ‘Forward.’ Why didn’t I have my own handkerchief? And why do you still use a handkerchief? They’re very unsanitary.”
“You can keep that one.”
“Oh no,” she said. “I couldn’t. It’s too beautiful.” She wrapped it in a paper napkin and gave it back to him. Then she ordered a cup of soup, and suddenly, as if she’d known him all her life, which she very nearly had, she began confiding in him, telling him about going back to work, about how awful Miss Georgia had been. She took the report out of the red bag.
“It’s a perfectly good report,” she said. She began leafing through it, nodding approval at her own conclusions. “An excellent report, actually.”
“Joy?”
She had stopped turning the pages. She was staring, riveted, at one page. Then she grinned. “Oh dear,” she said, still grinning. “Oh dearie dear.” Surely that was supposed to say CUNY facilities. Surely that was not supposed to say CUNT facilities.
“Something wrong?” Karl said.
“Oh no,” Joy said. “Just a little typo.”
33
“Hi, Grandma,” Ben said. “Would you like a visit? I have a week off.”
In fact, the bar Ben worked at had gone out of business and he had Airbnb’d his apartment out for the month. He wasn’t sure why, but he admitted it to his grandmother as soon as he arrived.
“I won’t stay for a month or anything, but I didn’t know where else to go. Please don’t tell Mom. She’ll freak out.”
Joy found Ben fascinating. He was so sweet and so difficult in such a sweet way, drifting without bothering anyone, unproductive and undemanding, working at what in Joy’s day were considered summer jobs for a college man—construction, bartending, temporary doorman. It was not a philosophical choice, this drifting, not like Dolores’s granddaughter, who was a Dumpster diver, god help her. Molly worried too much about him, he was a good boy finding his way.
And now he needed her, Joy. She wondered if Molly had put him up to this, part of her plan to keep her relevant.
“As long as you like,” she said.
She wanted to dance, she was so relieved. She would not have to sleep in the apartment alone.
*
Uncle Daniel’s old bedroom, a.k.a. the maid’s room, was fusty and weird—childish and elderly at the same time. The carpet was as old as his uncle, the paint had once been a lovely shade of blue, he’d been told, but was now a sad colorless shade of nothing, and the window needed no curtains or blinds because it was darkened by grime. The built-in shelves, once so enviously shipshape (at least according to Ben’s mother), were claustrophobic and warped. The sink dripped, not too much, just enough to catch you by surprise.
“Honey, do you want some tea?” his grandmother called out.
Yes, he did want some tea, and how comforting to have his grandma make it, though she made the worst tea he had ever tasted, weak and lukewarm. But just the sound of her voice made the little room feel much nicer, more like home. Ben had always loved coming to her apartment. She’d made him cracker sandwiches: buttery orange Ritz crackers and peanut butter. There were toys she’d kept there just for him and interesting junk retrieved from the museum she worked at. There was a Betty Boop videotape he had always loved, it was so sexy and so peculiar—especially when she told him that Betty Boop was Jewish. Sitting on her bureau in her bedroom, there was still a wooden puzzle box in the shape of a butterfly he had gotten her for Christmas when he was a little boy. He’d bought it at a street fair and thought it was the most beautiful and original object anyone had ever given anyone as a gift. One of his paintings from kindergarten was framed in Lucite and hung in the foyer.
The kitchen was long and narrow, a tunnel, really, and at the end was a window. His grandparents had jammed a small square table there. It had two chairs, and you could not open the oven door all the way even if the second chair was pushed in. He sat there with Joy and looked out the window and drank his tea.
“Grandpa and I used to sit here,” she said.
“I can see all the flowering trees. It’s really pretty.”
“Yes. You’re in Grandpa’s seat.”