May 2011
Two days after Ella told her about Jude, Helen was setting the table for dinner for the three of them, excited by the thought of company, of another person being in the house. She had stopped lighting Shabbos candles a long time ago, but that didn’t keep her from lighting regular candles, and as she did, she felt a sense of holiness in the room. Maybe that was a good omen.
Even though she had suggested this dinner, trying to be open in a way her parents had never been, the truth was she wasn’t thrilled about entertaining Ella’s boyfriend, a kid she didn’t know. Maybe by getting to know him, she could coax Ella back a bit. For the past few weeks her daughter had been drawing away, always dreaming, shutting everything and everyone out. She frequently didn’t hear Helen when she asked her a question. Ella was coming home later and later from school, always with a flimsy excuse. At night, Helen heard her prowling around, and one night, Helen had gone to Ella’s room to find her leaning out the window, looking at the sidewalk below. Helen had crept downstairs to see what was drawing her daughter’s attention, and that was when she saw a boy with long shaggy hair staring toward Ella’s window, his face lit with love.
She couldn’t let things go on this way. Helen kept imagining all sorts of terrible things, such as Ella getting pregnant like she had, or Ella running away with that boy and ending up panhandling on the city streets. Hadn’t her daughter listened to her stories, how her friends and family had shunned her? Even if she had wanted to walk into her family’s shul on Shabbos, she knew she wouldn’t be welcome. So many things could be taken away from you.
And then she thought of herself, alone in the house, without her daughter, and all she could think was Too soon, too soon. She was desperate for every second of these last years before Ella would inevitably go off on her own. Helen hadn’t gone to college and it would be wonderful if Ella could be the first generation to do so, but she would have to depend on scholarships for that. Plus, Helen didn’t know if Ella wanted to further her education. When she asked, Ella just shrugged.
Helen checked the clock. Ella and Jude were coming after their school activities, and they’d be there soon.
She had researched this boy’s father, Andrew Stein, a superior court judge. He was wealthy and privileged, and they had a huge townhouse on the Upper East Side. Worried how her place would look by comparison, Helen had taken a whole a day off from work to clean. She couldn’t do much about the faded velvet couch except brush it. She couldn’t replace the chipped wainscoting or the horrible, old-fashioned gray wall-to-wall carpeting the landlord had installed. What she could do was run out and buy flowers—bright, showy gladiolus—and put them around the apartment.
She paced, waiting. Then she changed her dress from her workaday blue denim to one she had borrowed from the dress shop, a navy silk. Deciding that was too fancy, too obvious, she changed back into the denim and added dangling earrings. She put on lipstick.
Ella and Jude arrived by six, holding hands, their love palpable. Jude put out a hand politely.
“I’m so happy to know you,” he said. When he walked to the living room, he turned to her and told her how much he loved the velvet of the couch. He admired the wainscoting, and then he asked if he could help with dinner.
“So polite!” Helen said.
And then Jude noticed the flowers and his whole body seemed to relax.
“Gladiolus,” he said. “They represent strength, remembrance.”
“Jude knows all about botany,” Ella said proudly.
Jude sat down on the couch, Ella beside him, Helen on her favorite blue paisley chair. He began asking Helen questions about her life, about what books she read, while Ella sat there awkwardly. He told Helen how he loved plants and wanted to be a botanist, how his mother used to drive him along the back roads outside the city, stopping so they could look at the wildflowers. She had taken him foraging in Central Park, showing him how you could make soup out of the greens they found. She had pointed out marigolds, lilies, even purple foxglove, which was not only gorgeous but that some herbalists would brew into a calming tea.
When they sat down for dinner, Helen worried about the store-bought pasta with jarred sauce, but Jude had second helpings, and when she got up to clear the table, imagining that Jude must have a maid for that, maybe a cook, too, Jude sprang up, gathering plates. And then Ella joined him in washing and drying the dishes. Helen couldn’t help herself; she came into the kitchen to help, too, all of them laughing and talking. For a moment, Helen felt like she was back in her parents’ home, except there, the men would never have done the kitchen work. Helen grabbed a towel, shimmering with pride. She had cooked a dinner people enjoyed. She was making the kitchen shine. Letting the evening just happen. That was true holiness.
When Jude left, Helen turned to Ella. “I like him,” she said, and Ella beamed. “He’s welcome here anytime.”
AFTER THAT, JUDE began coming to their apartment more and more, sometimes every day. Helen would hear him in the background whenever she called Ella’s cellphone. He’d be there when she got home. Only a fool could miss how happy Ella was. It was as if she had relaxed into her own skin finally, and that made Helen relax, too. But it wasn’t just Ella who had changed—it was Helen’s home. It felt noisy with life again. Maybe not the swarm of people from her childhood, but there was always someone in the kitchen, someone bringing out a chessboard. Even the air felt different, lighter.
“Make yourself at home,” she told him, and he did, and wasn’t that something? She felt good when she saw his socks in the laundry curled up like commas; and of course, she’d wash and fold them, the same way she would Ella’s, because what were families for? And wasn’t this what it was beginning to feel like, the three of them? She bought him a toothbrush and always put clean sheets on the velvet couch for when it got too late and she didn’t want him taking a subway or even a cab home, not when he seemed so tired.
“Make sure to let your father know you’re here,” she said, and Jude always nodded.
She loved his laughter, the low buzz of talk, the life in her house. Jude had even come to the shop, alone, because he had wanted to see where she worked. She had been beaming, proud. She had showed him her workroom, she had introduced him to coworkers, and when he left, one of the saleswomen had said, “Your son is a darling!”
“He’s not my—” Helen said, and then stopped and smiled. “Thank you.”
ONE NIGHT, HELEN awoke to the sound of the two of them having sex in Ella’s room. She froze, and then got her robe. She didn’t think it was right for them to have sex in her house. Was it right for them to have sex at all? When she was Ella’s age, no one she knew had had sex unless they were married. No one had talked about it. And then Helen had had sex—only once—and that had been her ruin, her never-again moment. But if she said no to Ella, what would happen? They’d have sex anyway. So she waited until the next day, when Jude was gone, and offered to take Ella to a doctor to get the pill or an IUD.
“Mom…,” Ella said warningly.
“You’re risking your future—”
“Oh my God, that’s what his dad says,” Ella said. “I’m not discussing this.”
“You are if you’re having sex in my house. Having overnights. You have to be protected. Both of you.”
Ella’s face turned steely. “Fine. We’ll take care of it.”
“How?”
“We just will.”
“You prove it to me, and then he can sleep here. I’d rather you do it here where you’re safe than outside where you won’t be.”
Ella sighed heavily, but two days later, she purposefully left a box of condoms displayed on her desk. It wasn’t protection enough, but at least it was something.
Even after that, Ella was stiff around Helen, and Helen knew that the subject was closed.
There were other closed subjects. One day, Helen saw how Jude and Ella were talking secretively at the kitchen table, practically whispering. She noticed how sad Jude looked, how he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt buttoned to his wrists. He looked like he was crying.
She waited until Jude headed for the bathroom and then quietly asked Ella if this talk was something an adult should know about, because there were resources for all kinds of things.
Ella grew alarmed. “It’s nothing,” she said. “And it’s not your business. It just has to do with Jude and me.” Ella frowned. “And what are you doing, hovering over him?”
Helen sighed. “Honey, he doesn’t have a mother, and he needs mothering.”
That night, Ella and Jude were watching Fame on the small TV in the living room. Helen came in and said, “Oh, I love that film!” and sat beside Jude. As soon as she did, she felt Ella watching her.
“Didn’t you say you had to finish a dress?” Ella said pointedly. Helen felt the air around Ella chill, so she left the two of them to watch alone.
Helen fretted and worried over Jude. She sat in her bedroom, which was also her sewing room, yearning to be with the two kids. Jude didn’t seem to mind her presence. She gave him advice and he listened to it. He seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say. Almost once a week, he brought her a new plant. And not only was Jude not turned off by their shabby home, he seemed to want to be there all the time. He made himself comfortable, treating the fridge as his own, sprawling on the couch. But he gave back, too, making dinner without being asked, cleaning up the kitchen after meals so that it gleamed.
She couldn’t resist. She got up from her sewing machine and pressed her ear against the door to hear what the kids were saying.
“Soon as we graduate, we’ll leave the city,” Jude said.
“Let’s go live on the beach.”
“We can get married in a field of flowers and build our own log cabin. I’ll have my own plant store and you can help me, and maybe you can become a writer, since you like stories.”
“Two kids,” Ella said. “Or maybe six.”
“Not six!” Jude said, and they both laughed, and Helen, listening, thought of her home growing up, how six was never too many children, just as there was never too much happiness.
Jude told Ella that they would have their life. They’d have everything and it would go on forever and ever and ever.
Helen picked up the sleeve she was working on again, part of a dark green velvet suit that she knew could sell at the shop. She told herself that Ella and Jude were just dreaming, that there was no danger in their relationship. None at all.
LATER THAT WEEK, Helen was listening to Jude talk about the books he was reading. “I just finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” he was saying to Ella. “You have to read it!”
Helen grabbed a pencil from an end table and wrote the title down. She wasn’t familiar with that title, or any of the other books Jude mentioned, but she could check them out from the library.
His face glowed when he talked, and he turned to smile at Ella.
The kids. She thought of both of them as hers somehow.
“I bet you have a nice garden at home,” she said, imagining it spreading across a rooftop, or potted along a sunny balcony. But Jude shook his head.
“No, actually. My father says plants draw bugs.”
“Does he now?” Helen said, and then she had an idea. This was her home, and she could do what she wanted, and if that included making that home more welcoming to Jude, especially with that father of his, well then that’s what she would do. It would be a mitzvah. A gift from her to the kids.
“I want to show you guys something,” she said, and then she led them down a set of stairs to the back of the building. “Ta-da,” she said, opening the door. And there it was, a square patch of dirt in a corner, overgrown with grass, buzzing with insects. A shared backyard that no one ever used.
“Well, what do you think?” she asked. “You could have a garden here. I know it’s little, but it’s something. And there’s a lot of sun back here.”
Jude threw his arms around her. She couldn’t believe that she, Helen, could do something for this wonderful boy that his own father wouldn’t, and she felt a special thrill knowing that it would be yet another thing that would draw him to her home.
Ella hung back, uncertain, but Jude grabbed her hand. “We can go together and choose seeds tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll get a shovel and some fertilizer. It’ll be our garden. Thank you, Helen. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
It was the first time he had used her first name.
“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to be disrespectful—” he started to say, but Helen raised a hand.
“It’s actually more respectful for you to call me Helen.”
The next day Jude and Ella got to Helen’s apartment early, carrying packets of seeds, a shovel, and a watering can. Every day that week, they met at the house after school, first to clear and then to dig the garden and seed it.
“Our garden!” Ella kept saying when they finally tromped inside, tired and grinning, dirt on their clothes and under their nails. Helen knew that our meant that she wasn’t invited to help, but that was okay, because when the kids weren’t tending the garden, they were sitting next to it on rickety lawn chairs, talking. All Helen had to do was look outside her kitchen window and she could see them there, her radiant children. And afterward, the kids would come inside, and she’d cook them dinner, and her house would be flooded with life again.
Most of the seedlings took ten days to germinate, three weeks to grow. And grow they did, and Jude began coming to Helen’s more and more often to nurture them, to be with Ella, and to see Helen, too. Eventually bigger greenery poked up. Butterflies and bees and birds came. All that summer, there were marigolds, tomatoes, bright bursts of sunflowers that Jude said could grow to beanstalk height. And plenty of foxglove, the purple flowers Jude had asked to plant, the blooms she thought were so pretty.
IT WAS JULY, and so hot that Helen wanted to get to work early, if only for the relief of air-conditioning. The kids had already gone out to a museum and Helen was just about to leave for work when someone buzzed her apartment. She looked outside and saw a man in a business suit.
“Who is it?” she said into the intercom.
“Judge Andrew Stein,” he said.
Surprised, she buzzed him up.
As soon as he came in, he looked her apartment up and down as though entering had been a mistake. She offered the couch, but he sat on a wooden chair, brushing it off first. She offered him a glass of water, and he looked offended.
“Judge Stein,” she said finally. “I’m betting this is about our kids. Am I right?”
He sliced one hand through his hair. “I was going to phone you about this before, when I caught them at my home, in bed together.”
“What?” Helen said.
“I told them Ella wasn’t welcome in my home anymore. Now I find out he’s over here all the time instead,” he said. “They’re seeing too much of each other. It’s not healthy. Jude has a future to think about.”
“Well, they’re kids. Puppy love,” Helen said, but Judge Stein shook his head.
“My son is at your house all the time. He sleeps here. He eats here. He’s taking advantage of you.”
“No. No, he isn’t. I love having him here. He’s a perfectly good, polite boy. A nice boy.”
Judge Stein sighed. “Well, truthfully, I’d like for you to help me stop it. They can see each other, but not like this. It’s—obsessive, wouldn’t you say? He’s practically living with you. They’re still children. Don’t you think this is wrong?”
Helen could see Jude’s sweater tossed in a corner. She now stocked his favorite lemon yogurts in her fridge. Already this morning, she had changed the sheets on Ella’s bed—and done a wash so there would be fresh linens for Jude on the couch. And there in the kitchen was the chess game she and Jude had played for long, comforting hours.
“I don’t, actually,” Helen said, standing. Her head felt full of bees. And then she motioned him to the back window, where he could look out and see the garden. “See that?” she asked, and he peered past her. “The kids built that garden. They dug the dirt. They planted all kinds of things.”
“My son is always trying to get me to buy plants,” Judge Stein said. “But I know what would happen. No one would care for them.”
“But look how they care for this garden!” Helen said. “It’s full of flowers and herbs.”
“Jude knows how I feel,” Judge Stein said, turning from the window. “I believe your daughter knows as well. This isn’t a good situation, and I am going to do my best to nip it in the bud.”
“Try that and it’ll just get stronger,” Helen said. “Believe me, I know. Let it burn out.”
“Fire burning out is one thing. Wildfire is another,” he said shortly.
Helen sighed. “I trust my daughter to make the right decisions,” she said.
“So I’ve heard.”
“Thank you for coming by.” She walked to the door, firm but polite.
As soon as he left, Helen went back into the kitchen, simmering with rage. How dare he? she thought. She had a full house here now, a family. There was warmth and laughter and love. And she was going to fight to keep them.