and took her sunglasses out of her bag.
“Hey there, Todd,” Grandpa said, and he and Ben's father shook hands in the way of men, advertising to one another their harmless intentions and their potency. Magda shook his hand also—she didn't kiss men or women—and Ben could see that she was thinking of jewelry stores and the inside of her purse, that perfection of quiet gold and black. She was lost in the placid contemplation of order. Tomorrow she would go to New York, which was full of dresses.
“We've got to run, honey,” Ben's mother said to his father. “You're late.”
Ben's father shrugged, elaborately, for Grandpa. They were both innocent workers trying to survive in a world of women. But Grandpa refused. He made the noise again, hwrack hwrack hwrack, and kissed Ben's mother, loudly, on the cheek.
“You got your tomatoes?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she told him, and her voice crackled. Magda was the tomatoes' fault; cancer got Mrs. Marshall next door.
“Gimme a squeeze,” Grandpa said to Ben, and Ben gave himself up to Grandpa's big bristling arms. There was his grandfather's perfume, the sweet sharp musk of his breath. Ben was unmade in his grandfather's embrace. He was free to be no one.
Then he was released again, back into the demands of the ordinary day. Magda gave him her dry kiss as she thought about dresses and cancer, the lost safety of other countries. He went with his parents to the car, got into the back seat and watched as his grandfather's house disappeared in the flat, watery shimmer of other houses and potato fields.
“How was it?” Ben's father asked his mother.
“Okay,” she said. “The usual. I wish you wouldn't be late.”
“I do my best.”
“Magda's put on even more weight. She's big as a house.”
“I guess your dad likes a little heft,” Ben's father said.
“Please don't joke about it. Joke about anything else.” Ben's mother took off her sunglasses, wiped them on her skirt, put them on again. She turned to Ben.
“Well, honey,” she said. “We made it. What if we went to P.J.'s for dinner?”
“Sure,” Ben said, and he could tell she was pleased with his own pleasure. The car moved forward through the leaf shade and the patches of sun. His mother was happy again, safe. She hummed something under her breath, a tune that was her gladness set to music.
“I am so relieved,” she told Ben's father, “to be away from that place.”
“You did your duty,” Ben's father said.
“Do you know what they're adding now? A fountain. When you walk in the front door the first thing you're going to see is a plaster dolphin spitting water into a clamshell.”
“Whatever turns you on.”
“It's embarrassing. Who do they think they are, the king and queen of Sheba?”
Ben sat in the back seat with the bag of his grandfather's tomatoes on his lap. He slipped his hand inside the bag. He held a tomato, still warm from the sun, and permitted himself a brief lapse into the other way, the weak silent self who wanted only to be alone, and to sleep.
1987/ The ladies' lunches had been Cassandra's idea. Mary put him off at first, saying always that she had another engagement or a sinus headache or just too much to do around the house. But Cassandra kept calling, with a grand and strangely innocent patience (couldn't he tell he was being put off?), and finally Mary gave in. Yes, fine, she'd drive up to the city and meet Cassandra for lunch. All right, a week from Monday at one-thirty, at an address somewhere in Greenwich Village. No, she felt sure she'd have no trouble finding it.
What else could she do? Cassandra was, really, Mary's best single point of access to Zoe. For some reason, Zoe seemed to trust this person. Zoe had made this person the godmother (her term) of her baby, though of course it hadn't been a real baptism and, of course, Zoe couldn't be persuaded to give the child a real baptism, in church. Mary had complicated feelings about that. On one hand, there was the question of the child's soul. On the other, there was, undeniably, a certain sense of relief at not having to go to Father McCauley at St. Paul's and discuss the particulars of baptizing an illegitimate half-black baby whose father was god knows where and whose mother wanted as godmother a man who might very well have shown up at the christening in a wig and a dress.
On Monday at