‘It isn’t that I’m not going back to work,’ Varya says. ‘I’m just not going back to the Drake.’
She has told her mother that she made a critical mistake, something that compromised the integrity of the experiment. Soon – when Ruby leaves, perhaps – she’ll tell Gertie about Frida, and, most of all, about Luke. Their relationship has been too fragile to share, and though it is less fragile now, Varya still fears she’ll lose him as suddenly as he appeared. They’ve begun to exchange snail mail, photos and postcards and other small things. In May, Luke sent a picture of him with his new girlfriend, Yuko. Yuko is at least a foot and a half shorter than he, with an asymmetrical haircut dyed pink at the ends. In the photo, she is pretending to pick Luke up, one of his long legs slung over her arm as they squint with laughter. Another month passes before Luke admits that Yuko is his roommate, the one who posed as a Chronicle editor – though it wasn’t romantic then, he hastens to add – and that he kept this a secret because he did not want Varya to resent her.
Varya flushed with pleasure, both to see his happiness and to think he cared what she thought. That week, she passed a farm stand advertising homemade fruit preserves. She pulled to the side of the road and picked through the glass jars, their contents jewel-like in the afternoon light. When she found cherries, she bought two jars, keeping one and mailing the second to Luke. Ten days later, his reply came:
Not exceptional, but steady. Solid. The almond extract is a nice touch, and brings out the muskiness of the cherries, so they’re more than just sweet.
Varya grinned at the postcard and read it twice more. Unexceptional but steady and solid was not the worst thing one could be, she thought, and she went to the pantry to retrieve her own jar, which she had waited for his reply to open.
‘Where, then?’ says Gertie now, looking at her own lap. ‘You can’t sit around all day, like me. Eating pickles.’
Immediately, Varya hears her siblings. As if you really have to worry about that, Klara would say. Then Daniel: Yeah – Varya, sitting around, eating pickles? I don’t think she’s capable of such a thing. Lately, Varya sees them everywhere. A teenage boy, running past her apartment after dusk, will remind her of Simon, racing around 72 Clinton on cool summer nights. She sees Klara’s smile – sparkling, sharp – on the face of a woman at a bar. She imagines herself going to Daniel for advice. He was always right behind her: in age, in his ambitions, in his support of the family. She knew she could count on him to care for Gertie or to try to bring Simon home.
For so long, she stifled these memories. But now, when she calls them up in these sensory ways, so that they feel more like people than ghosts, something unexpected happens. Some of the lights inside her – the neighborhood that went dark years ago – turn on.
‘I think I might like to teach,’ she says. In graduate school, she taught undergrads in exchange for tuition remission. She hadn’t thought she could do such a thing – before her first class, she vomited in a sink in the women’s restroom, unable to reach the toilet – but she soon found it invigorating: all those upturned faces, waiting to see what she had up her sleeve. Of course, some of the faces were not upturned but sleeping, and secretly, those were the ones she liked best. She was determined to wake them up.
On the last night of Ruby’s visit, Varya comes for the magic show. While Ruby is setting up in the dining hall, Varya and Gertie eat dinner in Gertie’s room. Varya is thinking of the Golds, what her siblings and Saul would think to see Ruby onstage, and then, in the strange half-light of dusk, she begins to share something she thought she never would: she tells Gertie about the woman on Hester Street. She describes the blanketing heat of that July day, her anxiety while climbing the stairs, the fact that each sibling entered the room alone. She shares the conversation they had on the last night of Saul’s shiva, which she realized in hindsight was the last time the four of them were ever together.
As Varya talks, Gertie doesn’t look up. She stares at her yogurt, bringing each spoonful to her mouth with such bland focus that Varya wonders if this is a bad day, if her mother is absent. When Varya has finished, Gertie wipes her spoon with a napkin and sets it down on her dinner tray. Carefully, she closes the yogurt container with its aluminum foil lid.
‘How could you believe that junk?’ she asks, quietly.
Varya opens her mouth. Gertie puts the yogurt container beside the spoon and folds her hands in her lap, looking at Varya with owlish indignation.
‘We were kids,’ says Varya. ‘She frightened us. And anyway, my point is that it isn’t –’
‘Junk!’ says Gertie, decisive now, leaning back in her chair. ‘So you went to see a Gypsy. No one’s stupid enough to believe them.’
‘You believe in that kind of junk. You spit when a funeral goes by. After Dad died, you wanted to do that thing with the chicken, swinging a live one around in the air while reciting –’
‘That’s a religious ritual.’
‘And the funeral spitting?’
‘What about it?’
‘What’s your excuse?’
‘Ignorance. What’s yours? You don’t have one,’ she says when Varya pauses. ‘After everything I gave you: education, opportunity – modernity! How could you turn out like me?’
Gertie was nine when German forces took Hungary. Her mother’s parents and three siblings in Hajdú were sent to Auschwitz. If the Shoah had solidified Saul’s faith, it had only diminished hers. By the time she was six, even her own parents were dead. God must have seemed less likely than chance, goodness less likely than evil – so Gertie knocked on wood and crossed fingers, tossed coins into fountains and rice over shoulders. When she prayed, she bargained.
What she gave her children, Varya sees: the freedom of uncertainty. The freedom of an unsure fate. Saul would have agreed. As the only child of immigrants, her father had few options. To look forward or back must have felt ungrateful, like testing fate – the free present a vision that might vanish if he took his eyes away from it. But Varya and her siblings had choices, and the luxury of self-examination. They wanted to measure time, to plot and control it. In their pursuit of the future, though, they only drew closer to the fortune teller’s prophecies.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Varya. Her eyes swell.
‘Don’t apologize,’ Gertie says, reaching out to swat Varya’s arm. ‘Be different.’ But when she’s finished swatting, she grasps Varya’s forearm and holds on, as Bruna Costello did in 1969. This time, Varya doesn’t pull away. They sit in silence until Gertie fidgets.
‘So what’d she tell you?’ she asks. ‘When are you gonna die?’
‘Eighty-eight.’ It now seems very far away, an almost embarrassing luxury.
‘Then what are you so worried about?’