Tending the Lambs
Maybe Detective Ramos was right. There have been no more incidents. It could be the frigid air forcing people indoors has chilled their anger. I’ve chosen to deal with mine by focusing on my neglected career.
Valerie has rallied. When she isn’t at her desk she takes long walks through the neighborhood. That will be good for her. She’s starting to put on a little weight.
Andy is still meeting with clients at the house. Telephones ring; doors slam; voices drift through the walls and interrupt my focus on the pieces I’m laying down on my art board.
We’ve taken on a lot by moving in with the kids. I honestly don’t know why Valerie and Andy proposed this arrangement. Roger seems at ease but I tiptoe around looking for privacy I can’t find. The light in my studio is perfect, but the space is cramped. It is as irritating as trying to fit into a dress that is a size too small. I’m blaming my creative block on the size of my world.
Mike says I need to think differently about this. He reminds me of the value of green periods, when life hums along and we’re in the doldrums. I understand doldrums. I feel like I’m circling with the current and heading nowhere. What I don’t get is why Mike thinks this is a valuable experience.
Today, Mike and I are closeted in my studio. As he talks, he runs his hand along the counter where my jars of brushes and bottles of glue line up.
“This might be the time for you to step into another activity.”
“Don’t you think I’ve already stepped in it by picking up a new husband, moving in with my daughter, and making a home for my nephew?”
Mike shakes his head and rests his eyes on a sketch I’ve abandoned. “Perhaps now is the time for you to do something that scares you.”
“Moving into a glass house surrounded by neighbors with weapons isn’t scary enough?”
“Apparently not.” He holds up my boring sketch, and waves it in front of my face.
My early collages captured all the emotions I felt about Leora’s disaffection for her family. Peeling that onion had the effect of scratch art. I etched the layered forces of human nature to reveal dark motives and produced works of eerie beauty. When I finally laid my mother to rest many years after she died, my passion was spent and my work shows it.
“Are you suggesting that to resurrect my creativity, I have to manufacture discontent?”
“Not at all.” He lays down the sketch, clears a place on the laminate countertop and hefts himself up to sit in the middle of my work, legs dangling off the counter. When he sees that this invasion annoys me, he lifts an eyebrow. “I’m saying what I’ve always said to you. Make room for people.”
“I haven’t done that?” I stretch my arm out toward the glass panel that pulls light from outside. On the other side of the window Valerie and Roger are in lively conversation, probably about the deck she wants him to build out over the creek.
Mike slides down off the counter and takes a few steps over to where I stand. He takes my hand and pulls me around so I’m facing him. His hands form a large chafing dish, warmed and ready to receive my cold ones.
“Dee, you hide in here from your family, from your community, I daresay from the God who wants to use your talents to grace other people’s lives.”
“I’m an artist! I need to be alone!” I hear what a cliché that is as it comes roaring out of my mouth. I start to giggle. I give Mike my best Greta Garbo impression.
“I vant to be alone.” I croon these words, and we both crack up. “Okay Mike, I’m done defending myself. What is it you have in mind?”
“Look at what God is sending you.”
“Young people. Lots of young people.” Danny is here for the duration. David arrives tomorrow. Laura is starting a Bible Study at her house for teenage girls and she wants me to come and help.
“He’s sending you His lambs.”
“I don’t know what to do with them.”
“Just watch over them. Instead of holing up in your studio, join us for our social time. Get to know these kids.”
“That’s all I have to do? Be social?”
“Be available. Be approachable. That’s all.”
“That’s a tall order.”
“We don’t serve a small God. Dee. If your neighbors oppose your family for building something that’s different, think what’s it’s like for these kids. The way they dress, their music, their openness to new experiences, good and bad; they attract opposition. Someone has to be on their side, to help guide them in the choices they make.”
“You seriously think I’m a good candidate for helping young people make good choices?”
“Let me tell you what I see. You have a peaceful home. You have a full measure of wealth and talent and love, pressed down, shaken together, running over. How can you not share that?”
R
David has arrived. What a good-looking kid. I’ve never met his mother but I can sort out the features that are Roger’s and the ones that must come from Dara. He’s tall, like his father, but not as athletically built. He’s on the slender side. Dara must be small-boned. He has Roger’s deep-set, dark brown eyes, but where Roger’s eyes are deep waters with a calm surface, David’s are more penetrating and wary. Well-trimmed, straight black hair sweeps across his forehead. Roger’s used to fall forward in curls but in the last few years he’s had the barber cut his curls off. Less gray to remind him that he’s getting older.
David’s long, straight nose is more prominent than Roger’s. When he smiles, his thin, straight lips hint at the kindness but not the humor of his father’s smile. I imagine he has his mother’s passionate nature.
Rather than marry Roger after the war, Dara chose to go to Israel with the Selvino children. These were Jewish war orphans who were being prepared for relocation from Italy by The Jewish Brigade. Dara gave them instruction in Judaism. Her route to her new homeland was a circuitous one. A Polish Jew, she was raised in London. Roger told me that she wasn’t all that keen on her religion until she came to understand what it meant to be a Jew in wartime. The tug of her outrage over what these children had suffered was stronger than her love for her own child’s father. She wanted to raise David in a kibbutz in Israel, alongside the children she was committed to caring for in a new country committed to defending its people at all costs.
When the children grew up and David came of age, Dara married a professor of Agriculture who moved his little family to a moshav ovdim on the Haifa coast. Rural cooperatives were giving way to privatization. Members of the moshavim could own property. Dara’s professor was involved in an industrialization movement and eager to profit from its innovations. David was amenable to leaving the kibbutz, but resistant to moving to a new farm with his mother and her new husband.
Like the American teenager who feels constricted by his parents’ choices, young people in Israel are beginning to reject their parent’s readiness to band together under a collectivist system that sublimates personal choice in favor of the common good. Life is changing in Israel, but not fast enough for David. He leaped the ocean to accept his father’s offer of a Stanford education.
I stand in the doorway, watching Danny help David get settled. The difference in these two boys’ temperaments and experiences is striking. Danny is almost seven years older than David, a young man really. He has spent more time in the United States, whole summer vacations. Danny is a joker, full of charm and get-up-and-go.
David has come over on short visits but he’s been more places, Connecticut, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. David appears more introspective.
The only thing they have in common as far as I know is their rural roots. Then David pulls a music case out of his duffel bag.
“You play?” Danny reaches for the case. David nods permission and Danny opens the case and pulls out a pear-shaped stringed instrument. He whistles his appreciation, holding the short bent neck in one hand and rotating the bowl that resembles a walnut and mahogany-striped watermelon. “What is this?”
“It’s an oud, a lyre harp, a very old instrument that’s sort of an ancestor to your guitar.”
“Wow, will you teach me how to play this?”
“If you’ll help me get my hands on a guitar.”
David follows Danny out into the garage. It’s not long before sounds of amplifiers being tested and strings being tuned muffles into the kitchen. Danny’s guitar riffs are familiar. We have to strain to hear the soft haunting sound of the fretless oud. Its soulful song transports my untrained ear back to the Tales of the Arabian Nights.
I join Roger in our suite. His scotch and soda sits companionably next to my amber-colored Manhattan with two cherries. We settle into our chairs and I spin scenarios of what I see in the future for these boys. Roger one-ups each projection. One runs a multi-national corporation that provides life-saving technology to hospitals, and one promotes humanitarian causes through his work with the United Nations. We heap honors and awards on them. Quite simply, they are our hope.
The driving rhythm of a drum beats us back to reality. Scott is here. Mike will be here with the youth group in a half an hour. The boys haven’t been fed.
We are too old for this.
R
Thank God for TV dinners. I have a freezer full. I sit all three boys down at the table in the family room. They barely scrape the last of the meatloaf, corn and apple crisp out of the metal trays before more boys pile through the front door. David eats dutifully, Danny rummages around in the refrigerator, looking for a second course, and Scott throws half of his dinner away. I’m going to have to do better.
Why does God throw His parties in the houses of people who have no gift of hospitality? When the first of Mike’s ducklings raps his knuckles on the door and then walks right in, I flash to a box of brownies I should have picked up at the store. Then Laura comes through the door carrying a platter piled high with home-baked chocolate chip cookies. I don’t have time to hate her because the flood gate opens and boys pour in.
Laura and Mike are setting up chairs in the living room. Strange young men are shoving cookies into their mouths and checking the refrigerator for milk. I hope the milk in our refrigerator is still good. David looks terrified and tired. I pull him aside and tell him I will explain this tomorrow, he is free to go to his room.
“Where is my Dad?”
Well isn’t that a good question.
I can’t believe that Roger has just taken himself off to the The Echo with Andy, business as usual. And my gal, Val? She is holed up in her bedroom. She’s her mother’s daughter.
Valerie approves this chaos in theory, but in fact she has not proved up to the challenge. Valerie I understand, but what is Roger thinking? He’s not thinking. Roger has no experience being a hands-on parent. I shoot up a prayer and Mike walks into the kitchen.
“Boys, head on into the living room.” Mike taps one of them on the shoulder. “Ed, get them started, okay? I’ll be there in a minute.”
Ed and Laura do a changing of the guard and now it’s Mike, Laura, me, David and Danny standing in the kitchen. I introduce David. Mike shakes his hand and Laura offers him a cookie.
“David, how was your flight?”
“It was long, sir.”
“You must be past exhausted.”
“I am, sir.”
“Well, we will keep the noise level down, I promise you. Why don’t you boys turn in for the night?”
“David,” I direct an encouraging smile toward his sleepy eyes, “Roger and I will have breakfast for you in the morning. The house will be quiet then. We’ll have time to catch you up on what’s going on here and help you settle in.”
Tension begins to drain from David’s body and Danny takes the cue.
“Yeah, I’ve had a day. Let’s bag it, okay?”
I mouth a thank you to Mike as he heads to the living room and turn to Laura. “I can’t believe that Roger went out on David’s first night here.”
“Men are creatures of habit. I’m sure he thought he was leaving David in your capable hands.” Laura takes the platter to the sink and washes it.
“He should have talked to me first, don’t you think?” I take the platter from her hands and dry it.
Laura turns to face me, leaning back against the sink. “You both have a lot to adjust to.”
I step back and flick her with the dishtowel. “Not as much as you do. How are you doing, Laura?”
She wraps her arms around her shoulders, hugs herself and then starts rubbing the back of her neck.
“I have my ups and downs. Working with the kids is a great distraction. Truth be told, it’s a pure joy. Trying to make sense of the state of our finances? Not so good.”
It’s odd to me that Laura talks as if Fred is still part of the equation. But then, I’m a person who never thought in terms of we, at least until we moved into this house.
“Do you mean that you are having a hard time figuring out where the money is, or that it is less than you expected?”
“Dee, I don’t think there is enough money for me to keep the house. It looks like Fred cashed in some life insurance policies that would have helped me pay the mortgage down. I don’t know why he did that and then killed himself. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Oh Laura.” I want to fix this. “Listen, Roger is very good with finances. Would you let him look things over and see if he can figure something out?”
Laura is quiet. She probably feels like she’s said too much. We can talk about feelings, but finances are something we never discuss.
“I appreciate the offer, Dee, but Mike is going to help me out.”
Does she mean that he’s going to look into the situation and give her advice, or does she mean he’s going to give her money?
Laura sees my frown and knows exactly what I’m thinking.
“Oh no, I don’t mean he’s going to pay my mortgage. I would never let him do that. I mean we’re going to come up with a plan.”
“A plan to keep you in your house?”
“Not necessarily.”
There’s no time to pursue my inquest any further. Roger and Andy come through the kitchen door from the garage.
“There are a lot of cars on the street, Dee. Have you talked to Mike about asking the boys to carpool yet?” I bristle at Roger. I guess I’m responsible for everything. Laura seizes the opportunity to escape.
“Dee, don’t you worry about it.” She gives my hand a quick squeeze as she makes her exit. “Roger, I’ll talk to Mike about the traffic problem.” She flashes her big smile at him. “I know your attention is all filled up with your son now. I just met him. What a darling boy!”
Oh, these wily Southern women.