I gawked at him, amazed that he’d avoided the question so cavalierly. He wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘You guys have a good Christmas?’ he asked.
Our Christmas dinner had been lonely, pointedly quiet. We imagined Steven doing wonderful things in Martha’s Vineyard: sledding, eating an enormous dinner with his friends, exchanging brightly wrapped gifts. After dinner, my father curled up next to our small Christmas tree and cried. I rubbed his head, sending the Swiss men down the plastic ski slope again and again.
I tilted my chin up to Steven. ‘Do you remember that ski slope Mom and Dad got for us when they went to Switzerland?’
He glanced at me warily. ‘Huh?’
‘You know. The little Swiss skiers? You loved it when they got it for us. You played with it constantly. It was your favorite toy.’
The wind had turned the tip of Steven’s nose red. ‘Sorry, no.’
Years of words lodged in my throat. Please just tell me something real, my mind clawed desperately. Anything. I wanted Steven to answer the same questions I had always longed to ask my mother: how did he manage it, suppressing everything, detaching so completely? Had that terrorist obsession been it-had he gotten his emotions out of his system, vowing never to explore them again? I had never felt so lonely, standing on that corner. How was it that a cab driver, a stranger, could unburden himself far more than my own brother could? How was this so backward?
‘Here you are,’ the driver said after a wall of silence. ‘Mayflower Hotel, right?’
We were in front of a modest hotel with a few stone steps. The bellhop opened a door for an old lady. Across the street was Central Park. A magazine vendor rearranged a stack of newspapers. I gave the cabbie money and, just like that, he peeled away up Broadway, cutting off another cab as he changed lanes.
The hotel’s lobby was shabby yet stately, with old wooden fixtures and gilded details, the carpet worn, the chandelier missing some crystals. A tired-looking Indian woman hunched at the front desk, sleepily taking my money. The flowers in the vase next to her were slightly wilted. A placard by a conference room said, Acting For Beginners here! Someone had propped open the conference room’s double doors with a dictionary. Inside were five rows of folding chairs. A few people were already sitting. They weren’t the East Villagers I imagined, but jowl-faced old ladies, Upper East Side to the core in their stiff suit jackets, their brooches, their magenta lipstick. Two women sat at the front, whispering. An older man wearing a hound’s-tooth cap slumped at the back, doing a word-find puzzle.
I wanted there to be a bigger turnout. If I stayed, she’d survey the crowd and recognize me. Or would she? I was taller, older, my oval face thinner, and I wore mostly oversized black sweaters and black jeans, a far cry from the bright, preppy colors I’d worn in tenth grade. But it was still my same green eyes, my dark hair that couldn’t hold a curl, my petite ears, features that were half hers. She would look out and know.
A few more people walked in and sat down. There was a youngish guy with tattoos on his neck, a woman in a tall, African-style head wrap. After a while, someone emerged onto the stage. The crowd broke into applause.
My hands shook so badly I couldn’t bring them together to clap. The woman wore a long patchwork skirt and a white blouse. Her brown hair fell down her back. She faced the wall, taking items out of a box. It looked like her back, I thought: straight and thin and strong. Older, a little, and she’d started wearing rings. In just seconds, she would look out into the crowd and see me. And then what? Would the talk stop? Or would she keep going? I had a horrible thought: She will keep going. It won’t matter.
But when she turned around, her eyes were brown, not green. Her lips were small and pinched. Her skin was sunbaked and wrinkled, raisin-like. She wore large turquoise earrings in her ears, and when she smiled, one of her front teeth was gray, possibly dead. This woman had large breasts and a sweet, motherly smile and a low, raspy voice that was nothing like my mother’s mid-range, clear one. This Meredith Heller wore no makeup, and looked out in the crowd at me and smiled. And then she smiled at the women next to me, and the man with the flat head. She smiled at us. ‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming.’