The rabbi was saying something in Hebrew, looking her way. “The Mourner’s Kaddish,” he said in English, nodding at her. She scrambled to her feet. “Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba,” she read out loud from the transliteration: Glory and sanctified be God’s name.
Her heart seized. Her parents were gone. She wanted to shake off that fact, she wanted to escape it; she wanted more than anything for it not to be true.
She went on chanting. She ignored the English translation. She didn’t want to know the meaning of the words. It was the sounds that mattered, the sounds that were offering her solace. She was here, standing, for him. She was his daughter, still. A raspy voice had joined her, a male voice—another mourner, she realized.
There were probably fifteen people present in a room that could hold a hundred, but when the others joined in to read the last line in unison, to say amen, it was the first time in months that Lizzie felt the weight of her loss ease a little.
After, the rabbi approached her. “You see? You were able to say it. May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem, and may your father’s memory be a blessing.”
It shouldn’t have felt like such an achievement and yet it did. “Thank you,” she managed.
By the time she got back to Max’s, she was running behind. She had been looking forward to seeing Rose all week. Now she would be late. She showered quickly and downed a yogurt and got in her rental car. They were meeting at the small park tucked behind Wilshire in the shadow of the La Brea Tar Pits. It had been Rose’s suggestion; she lived nearby. “First the May Company moved out and then Bullock’s too,” Rose had said to her on the phone. “Now it’s just me and the dinosaurs.”
Lizzie made surprisingly good time from Venice to mid-Wilshire, and made it to the meeting spot about five minutes late.
Rose was waiting. She wore a long tailored white shirt, a chunky amber necklace, looking more chic and younger than Lizzie had remembered. “Shall we?” she said. There was a note of imperiousness in her tone. Without waiting for an answer, she began down the path at the park’s edge. Lizzie scurried after her.
“Sorry I’m late,” Lizzie said as she hurried. “Traffic.” Rose’s fast pace surprised Lizzie. She was tiny, a good several inches shorter than Lizzie herself.
Rose didn’t respond. When she finally spoke, her tone was softer. “I try to walk every day. After I retired from the school, I was driving Thomas, my husband, crazy, moping around the house—a common enough story—and these walks, they’re such a small thing, but they saved me.” A thin, rolled-up circular sat in the middle of the path; she kicked it out of her way.
“You’re married?” Lizzie asked. She didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her that Rose might be.
“I was, for a long time,” Rose said. “More than fifty years. But Thomas died nearly two years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lizzie said as her image of Rose shifted again: she had been married for more than half a century; she was a woman who had also experienced a big loss.
Rose gave her a curt nod.
“Do you have any other family, kids nearby?” Lizzie asked.
“No,” Rose said. “No kids—nearby or elsewhere.”
“I’m sorry,” Lizzie said. “I don’t know why I asked that.” She hated it when people made assumptions about her. She had only meant—she was thinking of how difficult it must be to lose someone after all that time—she only hoped Rose wasn’t alone.
“It’s fine. Not everyone is made to have kids.”
“Yes,” Lizzie said, still feeling chastened but slightly relieved. “Absolutely.” Maybe she was one of those people.
“We were very happy together, just the two of us, Thomas and I,” Rose said plainly. She was walking briskly when she said it, didn’t look at Lizzie.
“That’s wonderful to hear.”
“Are you married?”
“No,” Lizzie said. “Not married, no kids.” She tried to say it airily, but even she could hear her plaintive undertone.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Still young yet,” Rose said.
Lizzie gave a half smile. She did the math in her head all the time: If it works out, she might think on a promising first date, then I could get pregnant in the next year. Or even if it didn’t work out. She had been thinking this with Max. Would it be so bad if I just got pregnant?
“You have no idea if you’re going to get married,” Rose said. “But the world is teeming with all that we don’t know. It doesn’t mean that you won’t.”
“True enough,” Lizzie said. She was relieved that Rose didn’t start naming random single men—the nephew of her mah-jongg partner, that chatty dentist who was quite attractive—that she could set Lizzie up with. Even Claudia—Claudia!—who had been involved in a ménage with her married landlords postcollege, who used to flit from partner to partner like the sun might not rise tomorrow—was now married and talked to her as if she were doing something wrong. “Maybe you need to be a little more open,” she had said after Lizzie called to chat after a disastrous blind date. More open? Lizzie had just gone out with her friend’s mother’s oncologist. (“He’s very sensitive and empathetic,” her friend had said. And arrogant, Lizzie thought within minutes of meeting him. And most likely gay.) Not open? What was Claudia talking about?
At the corner, Rose turned down a smaller, residential street. They passed modest stucco Spanish-style houses built close together, yellowing pocket-sized lawns. The sidewalk was empty of people. Was one of these houses Rose’s? Lizzie could imagine passing it, and Rose not saying a word.
“So you used to be a teacher?” Lizzie asked.
Rose nodded. “English, junior high school English, for more than thirty years. Much of that time at Eastgate, when it was still all girls. Such a mistake to merge with Wilton. Come,” she said, and they crossed the wide stretch of Third Street, cars flying past.
Ah, Eastgate. Lizzie smiled in recognition. Of course. The illustrious school Joseph had hoped she would attend, but there were few spots the year they moved and Lizzie didn’t get in. The high school she went to was more progressive (“ragtag,” Joseph had called it). “I went to Avenues.”
“Now, that makes sense.”
Was that a touch of sarcasm in her voice? “What does that mean?” Lizzie asked.
“Nothing,” Rose said. “I only meant: you seem more, I don’t know, artistically inclined.”
“Please, I was the least artsy person there,” Lizzie said. She added: “Lawyer,” with a gesture toward her chest with her open palm.
“So I heard from your father,” Rose said. “Wise.”
“I don’t know about that,” Lizzie said, although she continued to love her work, the precision of the law. But she was thinking of all the books she had been reading at Max’s—it had been years since she had read that much. “I always loved English class, and reading in particular,” she said to Rose. “It must have been fun to teach.”
“I don’t know if fun is the word I’d use, and reading is the least of it. But it was a wonderful career.”
“I was reading a book yesterday that you probably know. By Stefan Zweig,” Lizzie said.
“Of course.”
“That chess story of his—”