And she had not told Darren. She was trying to telephone her brother less frequently. Her emails to him were very belatedly answered, if answered at all. She had to accept—He is moving away from me. I remind him of what he wants to forget, and who can blame him.
In a state of intense anticipation she’d stared from the rear, tinted windows of the car hired to bring her into the city. She had not been to New York City more than a few times, with her parents—not for a long time. The drive was slow and halting and her view was truncated by lanes of traffic, heavy-duty construction equipment making a deafening racket, elevated railroads, girders. Billboards, fleeting patches of sky. Highway ramps, bridge ramps. More elevated railroads, girders. More traffic, slow and halting. Her head began to ache with the strain of anticipation. She had packed only a few things but she had not forgotten her camcorder. She was wearing her heaviest winter jacket and layers of clothes beneath. It was January, that cheerless month. In Michigan, snow had accumulated in dunes like slag.
In New York there was much less snow. From the rear of the hired car she saw patches of dirty white like soiled Styrofoam.
She tormented herself with a fantasy of arriving at the address on Bleecker Street her grandmother had provided her and finding—nothing.
A barren lot, an abandoned building in a derelict urban setting. And slow-falling snow to obscure her tracks.
It was a malevolent fairy tale. She did not want to think of her life as a malevolent fairy tale.
And then, the car was moving swiftly onto a ramp—across the Williamsburg Bridge—was this the East River below? High-rise buildings loomed above the choppy water. The sky was mottled with cloud, a deep bruised sky of myriad layers as in a painting of El Greco that had been one of her father’s favorites—A View of Toledo.
Her heart lifted, she began to feel hope.
The driver continued to Houston Street. Her grandmother’s apartment building was located near the intersection of West Houston and West Broadway, near Washington Square Park.
At LaGuardia Place were three high-rise buildings, with vertical panels of glass. There were nothing like these in Ann Arbor.
She gave her grandmother’s name, and her own name, to a doorman. Again the fleeting thought came to her—It is a mistake. I am not expected.
Ascending then to the thirty-first floor in an elevator.
And there, waiting by the elevator, her beautiful silver-haired straight-backed grandmother Madelena Kein—the woman who’d made it clear years ago that she had no interest in being someone’s gram-muddy.
“Naomi! Welcome.”
There was an embrace—slightly stiff, awkward, but eager—for which Naomi wasn’t prepared. The older woman’s arms were thin but strong.
Madelena was just slightly shorter than Naomi. Her striking silver hair was plaited around her head like a crown. She was dressed in rippling black pleats, trousers with flaring cuffs. The skin of her perfect-petal face was unlined and smooth as the skin of a woman decades younger.
Her eyes were veiled by large tinted glasses with chic black frames. In these glasses Naomi’s pale girl’s face hovered uncertainly.
“Let me take that, dear.”
Before Naomi could protest Madelena took her suitcase from her fingers and bore it to the opened door at the end of the corridor. As if, so much younger than Madelena, Naomi were not capable of carrying the suitcase herself. How embarrassing!
“And how was your flight?—and how are you?”
“Fine. I am—fine.”
“And is that how you are really?”—Madelena was smiling at Naomi with a kind of warm, teasing affection as if they were old acquaintances, or accomplices.
Was this her father’s mother, who had to be in her mid-seventies at least? It did not seem possible. Naomi was feeling dazzled by the vigorous straight-backed woman who’d snatched the suitcase from her fingers with the impetuousness of one whose will is rarely challenged.
She remembered her father ruefully joking that in time his youthful and energetic mother would be mistaken for his sister—“A slightly older, bossy sister.”
Madelena was saying that she hated plane travel. Hated putting herself in the trust of strangers. “Traveling is so passive. It’s a toss of the dice whether we survive the simplest flight. I’ve been checking your flight out of the Detroit airport, it was unsettling to be told that the plane was delayed while the wings were being de-iced.”
Naomi was surprised and touched that Madelena had cared so much. She could think to say, haltingly, “Yes. It was very cold and icy there . . .” She was smiling foolishly.
Inside the apartment Madelena insisted that Naomi drink a glass of water—“You’re dehydrated from traveling. It can’t be avoided. If you aren’t careful you will get a very bad headache. And tomorrow is your first full day in New York City—you must not be indisposed.”