The companionship I had enjoyed that Friday afternoon at the beach with Nina didn’t last. When her father arrived for the weekend he’d come with another book for her, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, almost as thick as the book she’d just read by Darwin. Oh God, I thought, she’ll be gone for at least another whole week. Switching gears from science to history didn’t seem to bother her. Her ease in this matter had much to do with the note her father wrote her, a note for each book, which worked to pique her curiosity, no matter the subject. Of the Lincoln biography Leo had written: Nina, This is my third Lincoln biography in ten years and still he retains what I call a mystery of character. Nina didn’t read this one out loud as she had the last. But once when she wasn’t looking I glanced at the message tucked into the biography’s pages. Finishing it, I rather wished for a note like that from my father, but he wasn’t a reader like Leo. He didn’t write notes.
And so the third week of our stay in Woodmont came, July inched onward, and Nina was back to her metal chair on the front porch, reading. She’d still not even tried on the dress and jacket that Bec had sewn for her. She barely had a tan either. We could have been in the middle of New Haven, or back in Middletown, for all the interest Nina took in going to the beach. She remained porch-bound, always wearing shorts and a jersey, though since Howard had teased her, never one as tight as on that first day. The sisters were beginning to wonder what was up with all this ducking of sunshine, sand, and water. “Honey, you’re hiding,” I heard Vivie say to her the Monday morning of that third week. Nina’s answer was firm. “Go away,” she said, waving her hand and returning to the words on the page.
That same Monday Howard began to tease Nina again. “Whatcha reading, Nina?” he said, though he knew perfectly well what she was now on to, and as he waited for her answer—a predictable bark at him to leave—he began to sprinkle sand over her book and to drip water onto its pages from his wet hair. Mark Fishbaum was with him, as he typically was in the late afternoon after they were through with their sail on Mark’s boat. That day, as was their custom, Howard and Mark had lugged the Sailfish ashore then rushed back into the water for a quick swim before supper. The two had whooped loudly as they leaped into the sea, and then, dripping in their bathing trunks, revved from their sail and swim, they’d climbed up the beach and onto our front porch, where Howard started in with nagging Nina.
Mark was nicer, though, polite, mild-mannered, and he didn’t join Howard, whose teasing lasted only seconds, just enough to get a rise out of Nina, which allowed Howard to then throw his arms up over his head and yell a victorious, if not ludicrous, “Touchdown!”
“Are you through?” Nina retorted, wiping the sand and drops from the pages and glancing up for only the briefest instant.
The next day Howard and Mark sailed again, swam again, and climbed onto our cottage porch, dripping wet, again. This time, though, Howard dropped himself into a chair, said nothing, and simply began to towel off. To Nina’s surprise, it was Mark who said, “Whatcha reading, Nina?”
“You too?” she exclaimed. She almost jumped from her chair. Her body tensed and she looked ready to punch him.
“No, I mean it. What is it?” His tone of voice was calm, sincere, not undulating with sarcasm. After Mark repeated the question, he walked behind Nina, glanced over her shoulder and down at the biography on her lap.
When she looked up she was beginning to blush. “Just a book,” she answered. “On Lincoln.”
“Good?” Mark asked.
“Reasonably,” she said, and then she snapped it shut, shot up, and almost bumped into Mark as she opened the screen door and ran inside, both annoyed and flustered, away from him.
Though Davy had no idea what Lucinda Rossetti was getting at with that thick border of red at the bottom of the picture she’d begun, he finally responded by adding an inch of blue to the top of the page. He’d make a sky, no matter that the picture’s foreground didn’t resemble anything like grass. He sent it back, and on Wednesday of that third week, when Bec came in at lunch with the mail, she sang, “Letter for Davy Leibritsky!” in a voice just like the bellboy’s in the radio commercial who cried, “Call for Philip Morris!” At that Davy leaped from his chair. He tore open the new envelope, unfolded the picture, and then stood in the middle of the kitchen as befuddled as the week before. This time Lucinda Rossetti had added an inch of color to each of the three stripes—brown, gray, and blue—that she’d placed on top of the red border at the bottom. Grabbing the drawing from Davy, my mother gave voice to Davy’s silent confusion. “What the hell?” she said. After a moment’s more scrutiny she added, her voice charged, “Is it something Catholic? Is that what it is?”
“Don’t respond right away,” Vivie advised, stepping toward Ada and yanking the picture from her, stopping her before she had any more thoughts about Catholics or anybody else. “Give it some time,” Vivie told Davy. “Something about it might come to you.”
Davy, nodding, returned the picture to the envelope and placed it on the little table in the dining room on which the telephone sat. Resuming his lunch, he said, “I just don’t get her.” One elbow was on the table and his chin rested in the palm of his hand. “Elbows off,” Ada said. “Off.”
Because Nina was so preoccupied, I began to hang out at the beach with some other girls I knew, girls my age who liked to sunbathe as much as I did, and swim and play hopscotch in the sand, and chat long after lunch in someone or another’s cool kitchen, and who liked to collect shells and, especially, sea glass. Melissa Bornstein was one friend and Anna Weiss another. But I still longed for Nina, the person of summers past with whom I’d tanned, taken walks, and even sat beside while reading; the person with whom I gladly shared the sofa bed even though she tended to kick the blanket off at night; the person I’d tell everything to, if only she wanted to hear, and who I hoped would tell everything to me. But Nina wasn’t talking much that summer. Whatever her thoughts were, more and more she seemed to keep them inside. By that third week her mind was a hive of hidden secrets. As we approached the week’s end I began to say to myself of Nina, just as Davy had said of Lucinda Rossetti, “I don’t get her.”
Thursday of that week began with a cloudy morning, and for something to do inside Davy pulled the Bagel family out and he and I began to toy with them. Later that day he tried once again to make sense of the picture Lucinda Rossetti had sent, but once again the brown, gray, and blue stripes were indecipherable. Davy sat with the picture awhile, along with a box of crayons, then pushed them aside. By the time we met Sal for our Good Humor treat, Davy had traded in Lucinda’s drawing for Esther Bagel.
“Hello, Esther,” Sal said as Davy stood before him, holding Esther out. “What kind of day you having today, Esther?”
“Okay,” Davy, as Esther, said. “Ho hum.” Esther then scratched her head as if she didn’t quite believe her own words. “I’m here for a pick-me-up, Sal,” she said more forcefully. “You got anything for me?”
“Is it the regular?” Sal asked, concerned.
“Yeah, Sal,” said Esther. “It’s the regular.”
The regular was vanilla ice cream coated with chocolate, on a stick, just like the picture on the truck’s side.
“The regular for you too, Molly?” Sal asked, and I nodded. A moment later he handed me a toasted almond bar.
“All picked up?” Sal asked before we left.
“And then some,” Davy answered, still in Esther’s voice.
“That’s what I like to hear, Esther.” Sal winked. “Bye-bye, apple pie,” he called, and as he climbed aboard his truck we heard him whistle, sharp as a bird’s song, a remarkable sound that caused Davy and me to turn back for a better listen, then to jog beside the rolling Good Humor truck until Sal, spotting us, opened his eyes wide and frantically waved his hand with the cigar in it, motioning us to back off. “Oh, no,” he hollered, his voice firm but still friendly. “No, no, no.”
As the days of our third week in Woodmont passed, we could feel the end of July approaching. At Treat’s produce stand the peaches of summer were at their juiciest and selling nicely. As were the tomatoes. The strawberries of June had come and gone but the raspberries of August were beginning to ripen. Megan O’Donnell was still adding columns of numbers those long, hot summer afternoons and Howard Leibritsky was still unloading and bagging merchandise: green beans, heads of lettuce, and zucchini; blueberries, plums, and peaches. Whenever he could he would glance over at Megan, who had begun, at last, to glance back at him. Whenever their eyes met he didn’t smile and neither did she, and because of that shared seriousness Howard had a feeling that when he met Megan officially, when they finally talked, he’d find out what he already suspected: she was different from all those other girls he’d known, and not just because she wasn’t Jewish.
On Friday of that third week Nina and I were told to borrow bikes from the Weinsteins and ride out to Treat’s together to get tomatoes and several cantaloupes for the weekend. To my surprise, without a fuss Nina agreed, and off we went, flying on those borrowed bikes. When we got to Treat’s, Howard waited on us, or rather on me, for Nina hung back, close to the checkout stand, unwilling, or so it seemed to me, to engage with Howard. Instead, she gradually struck up a conversation with Megan O’Donnell, who stood only feet from her. Soon, Nina was talking away, laughing at times, nodding at others. Megan was doing the same. As Howard handed me one melon, then another, I began to sink dejectedly under their weight. Howard, too, seemed sullen as he eyed the congenial scene at the checkout stand.
“Hey, Nina,” Howard said to her coolly as he approached the checkout area carrying a bag filled with tomatoes. The phrase wasn’t so much a greeting as it was a call to attention. But for once Nina felt free to ignore Howard, and as she continued talking with Megan O’Donnell—I heard them discussing Middletown, which Megan was saying she’d once been through—Nina turned her back to Howard.
“Hey, Nina,” he repeated, this time with noticeable irritation. Finally he cut in to the conversation, speaking to Megan for the first time with a banality that had to be a letdown for him. “Three cantaloupes and a bag of tomatoes,” he told her, dropping the bag on the counter. He backed off but not without muttering to Nina, “Leave her alone, already, why don’t you?”
Megan was the one to answer his question. “It’s okay,” she said, smiling and nodding, which caused her frizzy bangs to fall into her eyes. “I’m really fast with numbers. I can always catch up.”
She looked at me first, then Nina, then Howard, without changing her expression. Howard obviously found the neutrality disturbing. For a moment it seemed like he might say something else to Megan, something more substantial that would turn her eyes specifically his way, but he merely coughed and then gave up the effort, staring off in silence with an expression that was rare for him, anxious, even vulnerable. In his frustration he kicked an already soggy fallen tomato, causing the red juice to splatter over both his sneaker-clad feet.
Nina looked at the sullied sneakers then at Howard’s perplexed face.
“Touchdown,” she said.
That afternoon Tyler McMannus came to the cottage—an official, legitimate visit—to pick up Bec and take her into New Haven. Mrs. Arthur Coventry would be coming to the shop for a fitting. In preparation for it, that morning Bec had asked my mother if she would try on the dress, now fully finished, which Ada was more than happy to do.
“Gorgeous,” Vivie remarked from her seat in one of the corner armchairs in the living room. Though we’d been up for some time, the sofa bed was unmade, and Nina and I were still in it, Nina sipping tea, me just lying about. Because of that, the one corner chair Vivie sat in was the only seating available in the room. Bec stood in the doorway between the living room and her sunporch. Carefully, she handed the dress to Ada, who put it on and then posed in a different doorway, the one between the living room and dining room. The space was wide enough to allow her to hold her arms out, and when she did she also spun on her toes, the dress’s skirt ballooning around her. Her dark hair was still braided from the night before, and it too flew out as she twirled.
“Hot dog,” she said excitedly. “I feel seventeen again. How do I look?”
She was asking Bec, who was inspecting her, inch by inch.
“Hold still,” Bec told her, smoothing out the skirt, slapping at it at times as if to tame it. A moment later she said, “Now turn. Slowly. Slowly.”
My mother complied. The dress was classically styled, with long sleeves, which we were told Mrs. Coventry had specifically requested, a low neckline with a collar, which Mrs. Coventry wasn’t so sure about and had to be convinced of, and a belt at the waist, which Mrs. Coventry was sure would be a disaster but had nevertheless, with Bec’s urging, consented to. From the waist down the taffeta took over and the dress flowed out. Though the fabric was stiff, it nevertheless hung in a way that seemed almost natural. The burgundy color against my mother’s tanned olive complexion was its most striking feature.
“Oh, Ada,” Bec finally said. “A bit big in the middle, but still, Vivie was right. It’s that color. It’s splendid on you.”
For a moment my mother couldn’t stop touching the dress, its sleeves, its collar, its stiff but flowing skirt. Though Bec sewed for us all she’d never made us anything this elegant. Even the enviable dress and jacket for Nina was a much simpler affair.
Ada shrugged. “Oh well,” she said, dropping her arms, resigned to finally parting with it. “For a moment I felt like Cinderella, dressed up for the ball. Yes,” she said, nodding. “I did.”
When she laughed, plaintively, her sisters joined her.
“Those ladies from New Haven,” Bec said, patting my mother’s back as she turned her around one more time. “You wouldn’t believe it. To them a dress like this is just any old day.”
But that afternoon, once Bec and Tyler had arrived at the shop, Bec understood that she’d been wrong about Mrs. Coventry. The woman, anxious about the upcoming fiftieth-anniversary party she was planning for her husband, wasn’t taking anything for granted. She’d invited the whole world, Mrs. Coventry complained upon entering the store. “What was I thinking?” she asked.
Rising to greet her, Bec gave Mrs. Coventry—dear in a way that Bec didn’t recall from two months back, and a little rounded in the shoulders—a quick squeeze. Her white hair curled around her weathered face. She wore pearl earrings and a necklace with a large stone attached that Bec didn’t recognize. “Garnet,” Mrs. Coventry explained. “Native to Connecticut.” She seemed tired, her voice dragging, and Bec offered her a chair. The woman dropped into it, sighing.
“Remind me never to throw another party,” she told Bec, shaking her head and pulling a hanky from her purse, which she used to dab her brow. “I’m too old for this. That’s what I’ve found out. That this was a very silly idea.”
“Not silly. It’s exciting, and very generous of you,” Bec insisted. Something about the women’s vulnerability, her fatigue, touched Bec. “Also very loving,” she added.
“Very, very,” Mrs. Coventry answered, waving the white hanky as if in surrender. “Oh, I guess you’re right.” She laughed, her spirits lifted, apparently, by Bec’s remarks. “Now I have to see if I can get this old bag of a body into the dress.” She stopped laughing. “I invited everyone,” she added sadly.
Bec nodded.
“Foolish,” Mrs. Coventry quipped. “Very, very.”
As the women talked, Tyler approached them carrying the dress, which was the same color as Mrs. Coventry’s garnet. Despite her hesitations in the planning process, especially about that belted waist, at the sight of the finished dress Mrs. Coventry quickly smiled. Her back straightened. It seemed to Bec she was holding in her already dainty tummy.
“Come on, let’s get you into this,” Bec urged. “Would you like me to stay?” she asked once they were in the fitting room, and the woman nodded, almost frantically.
“Someone to lean on,” Mrs. Coventry said.
“Bec,” Tyler called minutes later. “How’s it going in there?”
She turned to Mrs. Coventry, who had yet to speak. “Well?” Bec asked. When designing the dress she’d worried that the style was too young for the woman, but she’d gone ahead with it anyway, as Mrs. Coventry had a trim figure that could in fact withstand the belted waist, and upon meeting her she’d noticed there was such energy and lightness in her spirit. She seemed youthful at heart, despite her years. Bec had spent considerable time the day of their initial appointment getting to know Mrs. Coventry, discussing style options while taking her measurements. Bec had spoken her usual “Trust me” at the end of the meeting, to which Mrs. Coventry had answered, “But I do. I do. That’s why I’m here.” The woman had touched Bec’s cheek then, such a gentle, loving gesture that when Bec recalled it as she sat watching Mrs. Coventry stare at herself in the mirror, waiting for her response, she wanted to reach out and soothe the woman’s worries in the same way.
“I don’t know what to say,” Mrs. Coventry blurted, finally turning to face Bec.
With Mrs. Coventry’s assent, Bec pulled the curtain aside. Tyler’s eyes widened instantly. From behind him, Irene, their junior seamstress, gave a loud and pleased gasp.
“Goodness,” Tyler whispered to Mrs. Coventry, “but you look amazing.”
“Mrs. Coventry?” Bec asked in almost the same hushed tone as Tyler’s. “You haven’t said anything. Do you like it at all?”
The woman took a step back. “Do I like it?” she repeated, fluffing the skirt of the dress, lifting it up then letting it fall. “Truth is, I never expected something like this. It makes me remember how it used to be. That’s it. That’s why I’m nearly speechless.” She lifted the skirt once again then dropped it. “I adore this dress. I do!”
Bec clapped in delight. That Mrs. Coventry’s words were so much like Ada’s was as surprising as how much the woman had taken to the dress. Irene insisted on dashing out for some champagne.
When Irene returned, the four sat in the chairs at the rear of the store, sipping and chatting. Bec had the dress draped over her lap as she hemmed its sleeves—a touch too long—then rose for a quick pressing. Soon enough she’d finished, and Tyler wrapped and boxed the dress, then placed it at Mrs. Coventry’s feet. When she was ready to leave, Mrs. Coventry turned to Bec.
“You may not understand this, but I see a lot of myself in you,” she said, pulling Bec close. “I can’t sew like you, of course, but I rather like making things. Like this damn party,” she said, a hint of mischief in her voice. “It’s quite the concoction. You see what I’m saying?” Mrs. Coventry tilted her champagne flute for a final sip. “I’d like you to come to the party,” she said next with near urgency. “I really would. You and Tyler and Irene. I consider you friends. I’d be so honored.”
Bec walked the woman to the door. Tyler was a step behind, carrying the box with the dress in it. “That’s generous,” Bec acknowledged. “But we can’t. Not our place. You just come back and tell us all about it. Won’t you?”
“I will. I’ll tell you all about it,” agreed Mrs. Coventry, raising her head to kiss both Bec and Tyler. “But I wish you’d reconsider. It is your place. Because it’s my place,” she said with an earnestness that made Bec think of the very store they stood in, a place she thought of by then as his and hers, not exactly a home, but something close to it, and wasn’t that all right? The accommodation?
That same Friday afternoon in Middletown, after Mort and Leo had left for Woodmont, a new shipment of men’s shirts arrived at Leibritsky’s Department Store, short-sleeved, for summer. As Nelson pulled them from their box he was reminded suddenly of another box in the store’s basement containing almost the same shirts. He’d forgotten about them, had never gotten them to the sales floor last year. Why the hell did the summer shirts always manage to arrive so late in the season? he wondered, frustrated. And given last year’s blunder, why’d he go and order them again? He shrugged. He knew the answer well enough. He was lousy at business. The simple fact was undeniable. Nelson was glad then that Leibritsky’s Department Store came with such a spacious basement, a place he often visited to take a moment to himself, a place large enough to hide his many mistakes in.
In certain respects he’d moved in down there, staking out a corner for himself and furnishing it with a rocking chair, along with a lamp and a two-drawer desk. The desk was covered by a phonograph and stacks of records—worn 78s for the most part, though over the past weeks he’d added a few 33⅓s, able to play for a whole forty minutes, a technology just out that summer. Benny Goodman was what he turned to when he needed a workday lift, the instantaneous rapture of “Sing, Sing, Sing” the tune he could count on to get his blood pumping as dramatically as the song’s insistent drums. But that Friday, arriving at his basement nook, the one place in the universe of Leibritsky’s where he was at home, where his breathing, despite the basement’s dampness, came easy, he decided against “Sing, Sing, Sing” or anything else by Goodman. Instead he chose silence. He rocked in his chair for a time, ate one and then another penny Tootsie Roll, then turned toward the desk, opened its top drawer, and pulled from it an old framed photograph.
He wiped the glass over the picture. The face he looked at, female, was smiling and young as ever. Just twenty-one. Nelson was now forty-two. He’d been thinking about that smiling face since his lunch with Howard two weeks back. “It can be hard to be a son,” he’d told Howard then, which was an indirect reference to his long-ago love affair with the girl in the photo, Mimmie Klein. His loss of her love was not unrelated to something his father, Howard’s grandfather, had said. That day at lunch with Howard, had Nelson not stuffed his face with fruit cocktail, he might very well have talked about Mimmie, the girl of a thousand years ago and yet of only yesterday.
Two weeks later, and he still couldn’t get her off his mind. He ate another Tootsie Roll. He didn’t speak her name for fear that it would un-dam a grief he wouldn’t be able to stop. “Lousy at love,” he said to no one. “Lousy at summer shirts.”
While Nelson sat in the basement staring at the photograph, and while Bec said good-bye for a second time to Mrs. Coventry, hugging her even more warmly, Mort and Leo stood at Jimmies hot dog stand at Savin Rock amusement park in West Haven having their weekly pre-Shabbos snack: two dogs and a Coca-Cola for each of them. They’d listened to a ball game the whole ride up, the New York Giants versus the Dodgers, who were hot this season with that “blackie Jackie,” as Mort called the Negro, Jackie Robinson. For some reason, Mort couldn’t stop with it. “Blackie Jackie,” he said again as he waited for his hot dog.
Leo raised his eyebrows.
“Ah, hell. Didn’t mean anything by that,” Mort said. “I’m not Ada, you know.”
Leo only nodded.
At the same time my mother and Vivie were still at the beach, sitting in their folding chairs, wearing old housedresses over even older bathing suits, their feet soaking in the waters of the Long Island Sound, their hair in the same braids they’d worn to bed the night before. They hadn’t picked up the house yet. Nor had they begun to marinate the chicken for dinner. The dining table had yet to be set, too.
Vivie yawned. Ada sighed.
“It’s Friday, you know,” Vivie reminded her sister.
Ada sighed again, but this time with just a hint of frustration. “For crying out loud, let’s take ten more minutes,” she urged. “What’s the rush? You know?”
So the cottage was a little messy when the men arrived later that afternoon, the dining table not yet set, the women still in their flowery housedresses, Davy, in bathing trunks, not yet showered. Mort, inspecting the place, inspecting the women, inspecting his youngest son, seemed momentarily alarmed. But the chicken was in the oven, along with baking potatoes, and the smells from the food were reassuring. There would be a Shabbos meal like every other Shabbos meal.
And there was, except for Bec’s surprising absence. By the time we sat down at the table and readied ourselves for the pre-dinner blessings, Bec still hadn’t returned from the fitting in New Haven for Mrs. Coventry. The sun was sinking, the breezes off the Sound had stilled, and Mort sat at the head of the table, his yarmulke in his hands, his prayer book opened, waiting. Gradually, we gathered around him and waited too.
“Where’s Bec?” Mort finally asked after a long and cold silence. He was drumming a forefinger on the table’s edge. Outside, over the ocean, the sun had dropped beneath the line of the horizon. My empty stomach was growling and I suspected other bellies were too. Davy hungrily eyed the mound of challah loaves.
No one answered. Ada turned to Vivie, a questioning look in her eyes, but Vivie only shrugged. “You know,” Vivie then began, her voice quiet but earnest, “it can be uncomfortable for her on the weekends. I don’t think she feels about Shabbos the way we feel.” I assumed Vivie was speaking about Bec’s Friday claustrophobia, her weekly need to take off in preparation for the weekend. “Let’s just give her a bit more time,” Vivie added.
Mort glanced toward the darkening sky with a disapproving eye. He checked his wristwatch. He sighed. “All right,” he finally said.
But a moment later he nodded impatiently Ada’s way, which was her cue to rise and light the Sabbath candles, then to circle her hands over the flames, as if conjuring the sacred light, cajoling it into being.
The Sabbath had begun, too, for Bec, though in a different way. The fitting over, the champagne drunk, the dress shop locked for the weekend, Bec and Tyler had said good-bye to Irene (Tyler crooning that old song “Goodnight Irene, goodnight, Irene, goodnight”) and they’d headed back to the Buick Roadmaster. They were driving out of New Haven, toward West Haven and Woodmont, when, waiting at a stoplight, Tyler slapped his hands on the steering wheel in obvious frustration.
“Come on, stay with me longer,” he said, turning Bec’s way. “Let’s have dinner somewhere. Bec, please.”
His words surprised her. He’d never interfered with her family life before. And that was just it: as long as she kept her worlds separate—the independent and private life in New Haven, the family life in Woodmont—then she could have them both. But she couldn’t bring them together; she knew that as well as she knew anything. She’d tried to visualize it many times, inviting Tyler to the cottage, not as her employer but as her love, the two of them sitting side by side at the Friday Shabbos meal. That was the image that shattered her heart. A stranger at Shabbos. A married Catholic man sitting at the sisters’ beautifully laid table, not knowing what in the world was going on as they lit the candles, blessed the wine and bread, chanted the ancient Hebrew prayers. There was a sanctity to their ritual that an outside presence would simply violate. And Mort! Just thinking of Mort sharing a Shabbos table with Tyler made Bec shudder. She’d be destroying his Shabbos, which was their Shabbos, their world. A stranger at Shabbos and the family might as well be eating regular rather than challah bread. A gentile at the table and everyone would know the difference in an instant, would feel the dilution, the diminution of everything they valued. Indeed, what she was doing with Tyler was so far outside the bounds of acceptability that no one even suspected it, not even after all these years. Yes, to have everything she wanted with Tyler was to lose everything she had with her sisters. In this way Tyler’s asking her to come with him to New York was really his asking her to make a choice that for all these years she’d been more than content to avoid.
“Bec, please,” Tyler said again. The light changed and he drove forward then pulled the car to the curb. He looked at her, reached for her, and she said, in words she couldn’t quite believe, “Okay, yes.”
In West Haven they found a little Italian restaurant neither had been to before. Using the restaurant phone, she called the cottage to tell the family she’d be late, but they already knew that. She’d interrupted their meal. With an unsteady hand, she hung up the phone. How easy it was, she realized, as she stumbled back to Tyler, to be left behind. She and Tyler had been seated by a window. Their table was small, intimate, and covered by a white tablecloth. Already the sky outside was growing dark and a waiter came over even before they’d ordered their food to light a candle at the table’s center. As Bec stared into the flame she felt a growing impulse to raise her arms and circle her hands over it just as she was sure her sister Ada had done over the two Sabbath candles at the center of the dining table in Woodmont. Soon their waiter brought them glasses of red wine and a basket of bread. They could have their own Shabbos, she realized. She explained to Tyler about the candles, the wine, and the bread. In the next moment he lifted both a chunk of bread and his glass of wine.
“Good Shabbos, Bec,” he said, so sincerely that for a moment her eyes welled up.
Then she laughed. And he laughed. They clinked glasses, sipped wine, chewed the soft bread. Before long the waiter brought them two plates heaping with summer greens, carrots, and tomatoes. She was hungrier than she’d realized. Tyler kept talking throughout the meal, about the week that he’d spent at the dress shop without her. She nodded as she ate, cheese ravioli that were more delicious than any she’d ever had.
By the time they finished their meal the sky had completely darkened. Only two other couples had come in for dinner, and they sat at tables some distance from hers and Tyler’s. She glanced out the window. There was water out there somewhere, the Long Island Sound, connecting this place with that other place, that cottage at Bagel Beach, but in the dark she couldn’t see it. She turned back to Tyler, who sat with a look of contentment on his face. His gray eyes reflected the glow of the candle’s flame. He was quieter now, having gotten the this-and-that of the week out of his system, but he wasn’t quite ready to go yet, he said, and she agreed, quickly, that neither was she.
They kept sitting like that, serenely, not speaking but enjoying a kind of coupled solitude that made Bec feel as if this little restaurant were there solely to serve them. In the darkness outside the rest of the world had disappeared. Their waiter came by, asking them if they’d like coffee or dessert, and Bec was taken by the mellifluousness of his voice. He too seemed to be there solely for them. Whatever they wanted, he said. That was what was for dessert. Then he added, joking, but better to order tiramisu, or maybe, a little lighter, some sherbet.
They sat, they smiled, they sipped coffee, and for the first time in a public place, they reached for each other’s hands. When had Shabbos ever been this lovely? Bec began to wonder.
When had she ever felt this much at the center of it, this loved, this well fed?
When had she, single and childless, ever been anything but a stranger, really—a guest, an extra—at the family Shabbos meal? And how strange not to have felt the weight of it, her years and years of Sabbath loneliness.
But she didn’t even realize Shabbos was lonely until just then, when it suddenly wasn’t anymore.
She began to shake her head, a measure of her bewilderment, then to nod over and over until Tyler understood from the insistent repetition the depth of what she was saying to him, that she would go to New York, begin that new life, and as he straightened in his chair and cleared his throat as if to speak, it soon became obvious he couldn’t speak, could only do as she was doing: the nodding, the silent yes, over and over again.