realize how deftly she had manipulated the greeting. Old habit had made him hold her just a little too tightly and a little too long. And perhaps she broke away a little more quickly than would have been normal, even for a perfunctory social greeting. He could almost hear the thought in her head: Take that, lover boy.
He also noticed that she was wearing a wig. How odd. Had she gone Hasidic all of a sudden? Not likely. No doubt just having a bad hair day.
Ruthie opened the trunk. Ivan stepped into the road just long enough to get the picnic hamper out, then carried it around the house into the back yard. Behind him, the dog barked. But Mrs. Sprewel wasn't yelling at Terrel anymore, and the kite was still up.
Ruth saw the wasp land on Ivan's back as he bent over the trunk to pick up the hamper. She didn't say anything to Ivan. Instead she silently invoked the wasp: Sting the bastard! Thinks he can hold me like old times, thinks he still has the right to pull me close enough to mash my breasts up against his chest and hold me there - well, that's a right I give to those who deserve it.
The wasp didn't sting him. But it didn't fly away, either. As Ruth followed him around the house, she could see the wasp crawling along his shirt. Plenty of time. Besides, if the wasp didn't sting him, she had the brownies. Plenty of itch and sting in those, if she chose to serve them to him. Not all the brownies, of course. Just two of them on which she placed the itching powder from the gypsy's bag, then put icing over them. She probably wouldn't serve those to Ivan and his bride. She had much greater hopes for the one big piece of chicken breast that she injected with the thin clear fluid from the gypsy's jar. Let Ivan eat that while Katerina was in the house on some made-up little errand and see whether he wanted to be married to the shiksa after that.
I can't believe I'm even taking these things seriously, thought Ruth. This is magic, witchcraft, superstition.
But why shouldn't it work? Witchcraft was simply an alternate way of viewing the universe, every bit as valid as science. Folkways were often wiser and more in harmony with the earth than the hard-edged metallic thinking of the engineers. Ivan used to laugh at her when she said things like that, and once he asked her if she believed that principle applied to recipes and directions. "Don't you expect directions to have a one-to-one correspondence with the highway system?" But that was just patriarchal thinking. Anything women said or thought had to be put down by men. She hadn't realized that Ivan was such a patriarchalist until after he betrayed her, but love is blind.
"Can I ask you one question?" she said as she followed him around the side of the house.
"Sure," said Ivan.
"Did you marry her as Ivan Smetski or Itzak Shlomo?"
"What?"
"Was it a Christian wedding or a Jewish one?"
He didn't answer. Which meant it was a Christian wedding. He betrayed everybody, from God to all the Jews who died in the Holocaust, and right on down to Ruth. And he didn't care. Because he was in love.
Well, what happens if you fall back in love with me? Do you switch religions again? How many times does this make? What are you, God's little tennis match, back and forth, back and forth? Double fault this time, Itzak.
"Why do you care?" asked Ivan.
For a moment she wondered what he was asking about. Then she realized he was finally answering her question from before. "Every time a Jew dies, all other Jews should mourn," she said.
He stopped abruptly and turned around. Standing there holding the heavy picnic hamper, he looked her in the eye and said, "If this is a sample of what this picnic's about, let's get this stuff back in your trunk and you can go on home."
"No, I'm - I'm sorry, Ivan, no, I'm not going to snipe at you. I was just remembering what my grandmother always said."
"My parents don't think I'm dead because I married her."
"I'm sure they don't," said Ruth. "Nor do I. I'm here, aren't I?"
"Why are you here?"
"For lunch," said Ruth. "And to try to make sense of my own life. I suddenly find myself at loose ends. I not only lost a fiance, I also