Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (3 page)

J
OANNA AND
K
EN
were behaving sensibly. Joanna was waiting near the mime, who was now walking an imaginary tightrope. He stopped, alarm on his painted face. He was pretending to lose his balance. His stiffened body canted slowly sideways in discrete jerks like a minute hand until at ten past the hour he collapsed into himself and in a wink became a man hanging from a tightrope, left arm upward and unnaturally long, right one waving desperately, legs splayed.

Ken had gone looking for Sophie. He would follow their route backward to the museum, into the museum, from the Burne-Jones camp-counselor angels to the Degas and the Renoir. He would return to the library if necessary; Joanna imagined his tense interrogation of the man who inspected backpacks. The mime was collecting a thicker crowd; she had to crane her head to watch him. Sophie would enjoy this outdoor show once Ken found her, if she had not been snatched into a car, if she were not to end her life as a photograph on a milk carton. Joanna must not think that way, not not not; she must imagine normal outcomes like normal mothers, like mothers of normal children. The girl has wandered off, ruining our day because of some rush of curiosity, hyperintuitive they call her,
I
call her inconsiderate, doesn’t she know enough to make things easier, not harder, don’t we have it hard enough already with little Miss Misfit here, oh, my sweet Lily, my sweet Sophie, my darling daughters; and so I’ll gaze at Lily dozing and think of Sophie when she was an infant and slept on her side in her crib with arms extended forward and legs too; she looked like a bison on a cave. I remember, I remember …
She
probably remembers, she with the genius IQ who can sing songs backward. Ken loves to show off her memory and her queer talents, his prize onion. The mime’s pedaling to safety; he’s earned that applause. Haven’t I got coins for his hat? But I can’t leave the stroller, we can’t leave each other, any of us. Of course Sophie will remember to stand still as soon as she realizes she’s lost. Where would she go? She doesn’t know this town. She’s seen only the museum, she didn’t like it, and the library, she hated it; Ken was hurt. She liked the subway. All kids like the underground: sewers, buried treasure, zombies. All kids like trains. They want to be headed somewhere, inbound, outbound …

Ken’s face was putty.

“The library?” she needlessly asked.

“No,” he panted.

“Come,” Joanna said. “I know where she’ll go.”

S
OPHIE, WRIGGLING ONE ARM
out of the backpack, decided to start with the French newspapers. She was to study French next year any way, with the rest of the special class. But she was pretty sure that she wouldn’t soar with the new subject. She was tied to her first language, hers and Lily’s. Still, she’d learn the rules. She’d listen and sometimes talk. Now, staring at
Le Monde,
pretending that the man with earmuffs had gone home, she let her eyes cross slightly, the way she wasn’t supposed to, and she melted into the spaces between the paragraphs until she entered a room beyond the news-print, a paneled room lit by candles, walled in leather volumes, the way she had wanted the fifth-biggest library to look. Though more books had been written than she could ever read—she had realized that as soon as she saw Section 4 East—she would manage to read a whole lot of them, in golden dens like the one she was seeing. She would read as many as her parents had read. She would grow as large as her parents had grown. Like them she would study and get married and laugh and drink wine and hug people.

Steadied by this vision, she let herself look further. Her life would be lived in the world, not in this paper house. She foresaw that. She foresaw also that as she became strong her parents would dare to weaken. They too might tug at her clothing, not meaning to annoy.

Lily would never leave her. “She will always be different, darling,” her mother had said. At the time Sophie had thought that her mother meant we will always be different. Now she added a new gloss: I will always be different.

She felt her cheek tingle, as if it had been licked by the sad, dry tongue of a cat. At full growth Lily’s head would be almost level with Sophie’s shoulder. Lily would learn some things. Mostly she would learn Sophie. They would know each other forward and backward. They would run side by side like subway tracks, inbound and outbound. Coextensive.

She had to return to her family now; she had to complete the excursion. She shoved her free arm into the strap and settled the backpack on her shoulders. She walked past the man in earmuffs without saying good-bye.

K
EN AND
J
OANNA
bumped the stroller down the subway stairs. Ordinarily they would have joined the line at the token vendor’s booth to be admitted through his gate. Instead Joanna inserted a token and hurried through the turnstile. Ken handed her their little girl across the device. He pressed his own token into the slot and turned around and lifted the stroller above his head and burst through the stile buttocks first. They put Lily back into the stroller and rushed toward the ramps.

“Outbound?” said Ken.

“She knows better.”

On the ramp they had to arc around an old woman who had paused mid-journey with her trash bag on her left and her collapsible cart on her right. “That’s okay,” she called.

The inbound train had just left. The platform held five people who had missed it: three students, one bearded man, and a tall black woman—an islander, Joanna could tell; her regality proclaimed her origins, that magazine under her arm was probably in French.

S
OPHIE WASN’T FAR BEHIND THEM
. She had found the subway entrance as soon as she left the little house. While her father was bearing the empty stroller backward through the turnstile, she was beginning her descent from the street. While her mother was choosing inbound, Sophie was thinking about joining the line of token buyers, of promising to pay later. She decided not to risk conversation with the man in the booth. By the time her parents reached the inbound platform she was slipping underneath the turnstile. She started down the ramp.

She saw them before she reached the bottom. Her mother sat on a bench, holding Lily in her lap. Her father, standing, bent over them both. They looked like everyday people, but Sophie wasn’t fooled—her mother’s knees were knocked together under her coat and her feet were far apart, their ankles bent inward so wearily that the anklebones almost touched the floor. Without seeing her father’s face, she knew he was close to tears. An old woman with a cart leaned against the wall. As Sophie appeared the woman said, “Now your reunion,” in a conversational tone, though rather loud.

Ken turned and unbent: a basketball replay in slow motion.

Joanna took relief like an injection; pain was killed and feeling as well. She saw that the child had undergone some unsettling experience, but Joanna had no sympathy to offer now. Perhaps this once Sophie would be given the blessing of forgetfulness.

And indeed Sophie moved forward with a light tread, as if she had not just witnessed the future unrolling.

Lily attended slackly. But then she raised her mittened hand.

“Phie!”

H
E WAS THE LAST
J
EW
in a cursed land.

A ruined country, a country of tricksters. Rich haciendas hid within the folds of mountains. Guns lay under crates of bananas. Even the green parrots practiced deception. They rested in trees, not making a sound; suddenly they rose as one, appearing and departing at the same time, leaving the observer abandoned.

The only Jew!

In truth, there was a second Jew: his son, Lex. They faced each other across the kitchen table. Lex seemed to pity the plight of his father: that on the eve of Yom Kippur there was no corner in the city where a Jew could pray for forgiveness with nine others.

“They all fled to Miami after the revolution,” Lex said. “Taking their money with them.”

Robert winced.

Lex said, “We’ll find you a minyan, Bob.” He looked at his father with compassion.

But was it really compassion? Or was it the practiced understanding of a professional social worker? Just as he had adjusted to his son’s use of his first name, Robert had reconciled himself to Lex’s womanish vocation. But he had not become accustomed to the nods, the murmured assents. He himself was an investment consultant.

“We’ve gone through the guidebooks,” Lex reviewed. “Shall we hunt down a Shapiro in the telephone book? A Katz?”

Father and son laughed. Their own name was Katz.

The little boy looked from one to the other.

He was a thin child despite a seemingly insatiable appetite. His name, Jaime, printed in Lex’s hand, adorned the crayoned scribbles taped to the refrigerator.

There they sat, in front of those unambitious efforts, in the scarred kitchen of a small house on a muddy street in the capital city of a Jewless country. Robert was still wearing his pajamas. Far away in Beverly Hills, the drawings of Robert’s granddaughter, Lex’s niece, also decorated a refrigerator.
Maureen Mulloy
, the signature read. Maureen Mulloy printed her washerwoman’s name herself. The Mulloys’ Mexican housekeeper hung up the artwork. Who else could do it?—Maureen’s parents practiced law twelve hours a day.

Jaime. It was pronounced “Hymie.” Robert speared a slice of papaya from the breakfast platter.

Lex was reading the telephone book. “No Shapiros, Bob. No Katzes, either. I’m not even listed—my phone belongs to the organization.”

Robert ate a slice of pineapple.

“I’m going to call the embassy,” Lex said.

“Ex,” said Jaime, slapping Lex’s arm. “Tengo hambre.”

“Qué quiero?” Robert attempted. “I mean, qué
quieres
…” Lex had already risen. He and Jaime stood side by side, composedly surveying the contents of the refrigerator, a slight young man and a very slight child. “Qué quieres,” Robert repeated, softly. His hesitant spoken Spanish was getting him nowhere with the boy. Why had he spent a month listening to those damned language tapes? Why had he come here, anyway?

Five days ago he had descended the aluminum steps of the airliner and stepped onto the tarmac, already blistering at two in the afternoon. He was used to hokey airports. He wasn’t used to the absence of jet lag, though—he seldom journeyed from north to south. The sun had stood still on his behalf. No need to nap, no need even to eat, though on the ride from the airport Jaime insisted on stopping for a tamale. “Ex, Ex!” he shouted, pointing to the stall. Lex pulled over. Robert smiled at Lex, indulgent parent communing with indulgent parent. But Lex ignored the smile. His attentiveness toward this soon-to-be-adopted son was meant to be approved, not joined.

The boy dropped consonants, confusing Robert. That first afternoon, Robert looked at a picture book with him.
Vaca
, cow, became
aca
;
caballo
, horse,
callo
. Little Maureen would become Een, he supposed, if the cousins—could he really call them that?—ever met. They might not meet for a long time. The family was scattered: Robert and Betsy in Massachusetts, their daughter Mulloy née Katz out in California, Lex here in Central America two years already, God knew how much longer.

“I’ll stay until the adoption is final,” Lex said late that night, after Jaime had finally gone to bed. “That’s another six months. Afterwards …” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I won’t go to Chicago, that’s for sure. I don’t want to be in the same city as Ron.” Ron was his ex-lover. “Perhaps Jaime and I will come back to Boston.”

Robert nodded. “There’s a bilingual program in the schools.”

“Spare us.” Lex rolled his eyes. “We’ll continue to talk Spanish at home,” he went on. “Jaime will pick up English at school, in play-grounds—as immigrant children have done for generations.”

He can hardly speak his own language
, Robert didn’t say.
He can’t count. He doesn’t know colors.
“How old is he? Seven, you wrote? He’s … small.”

“We use the evidence of bones and teeth,” said Lex. “Central Americans are smaller than North Americans, and those with a lot of Indian blood, like Jaime, are the shortest. I’ll invent a birth date when I apply for his passport. I’m going to say he’s five. He’s about three emotionally—a deprived three. No one ever sent him to school. When I first met him at the local orphanage a year ago he didn’t talk at all. He’s matured considerably since being with me.”

Robert felt weary, as if jet lag had claimed him after all.

And so he had gone to bed, in the narrow room off the kitchen. His window faced an inner courtyard just big enough for a clothesline, a sink, and a single tree that bore hard citrus fruits. There the parrots hid.

After Sunday, Robert was on his own for a few days. Lex was working, and Jaime attended day care. Robert awoke each morning to the sounds of the two at their breakfast. He figured out most of what they were saying. Jaime repeated the breakfast menu, the few chores, the routine of the day care center. Then he repeated them again, and again. Between repetitions Robert heard the rustle of the newspaper and the slur of rubber wheels along a linoleum floor. Jaime was playing with his small toy car. He supplied the motor with his own throat. “Oom!” Twenty-five years earlier, Robert and Betsy had shared the
Globe
while, at their feet, two charming toddlers rummaged in a pile of Legos. Jaime wasn’t ready for Legos, Lex had explained. He wasn’t ready even for the starter set Robert had brought as a gift. Jaime didn’t get the idea of construction. He had probably never seen toys before the orphanage found him—maybe he’d played with a couple of spoons, or filled an old shoe with dirt. Maureen, Robert remembered with satisfaction and guilt, could already erect elaborate towers.