“He’s this other dude,” Bekka said. She sometimes referred to her mother as a “dudette.” “She’s a dudette, all right,” Ira would say.
“Bummer,” said Ira now. “Big, big bummer.”
He phoned Zora four days later, so as not to seem discouragingly eager. He summoned up his most confident acting. “Hi, Zora? This is Ira,” and then waited — narcissistically perhaps, but what else was there to say? — for her response.
“Ira?”
“Yes. Ira Milkins.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know who you are.”
Ira gripped the phone and looked down at himself, suddenly finding nothing there. He seemed to have vanished from the neck down. “We met last Sunday at Mike and Kate’s?” His voice quavered. If he ever actually succeeded in going out with her, he was going to have to take one of those date-rape drugs and just pass out on her couch.
“Ira? Ohhhhhhhhh — Ira. Yeah. The Jewish guy.”
“Yeah, the Jew. That was me.” Should he hang up now? He did not feel he could go on. But he must go on. There was a man of theater for you.
“That was a nice dinner,” she said.
“Yes, it was.”
“I usually skip Lent completely.”
“Me, too,” said Ira. “It’s just simpler. Who needs the fuss?”
“But sometimes I forget how reassuring and conjoining a meal with friends can be, especially at a time like this.”
Ira had to think about the way she’d used conjoining. It sounded New Agey and Amish, both.
“But Mike and Kate run that kind of house. It’s all warmth and good-heartedness.”
Ira thought about this. What other kind of home was there to run, if you were going to bother? Hard, cold, and mean: that had been his own home with Marilyn, at the end. It was like those experimental monkeys with the wire-monkey moms. What did the baby monkeys know? The wire mother was all they had, all they knew in their hearts, and so they clung to it, as had he, even if it was only a coat hanger. Mom. So much easier to carve the word into your arm. You were used to pain. You’d been imprinted. As a child, for a fifth-grade science project, in the basement of his house, he’d once tried to reproduce Konrad Lorenz’s experiment with baby ducks. But he had screwed up with the incubation lights and had cooked the ducks right in their eggs, stinking up the basement so much that his mother had screamed at him for days. Which was a science lesson of some sort — the emotional limits of the Homo sapiens working Jewish mom — but it was soft science, so less impressive.
“What kind of home do you run?” he asked.
“Home? Oh, I mean to get to one of those. Right now, actually, I’m talking to you from a pup tent.”
Oh, she was a funny one. Perhaps they would laugh and laugh their way into the sunset. “I love pup tents,” he said. What was a pup tent exactly? He’d forgotten.
“Actually, I have a teenage son, so I have no idea what kind of home I have anymore. Once you have a teenager, everything changes.”
Now there was silence. He couldn’t imagine Bekka as a teenager. Or rather, he could, sort of, since she often acted like one already, full of rage at the incompetent waitstaff that life had hired to take and bring her order.
“Well, would you like to meet for a drink?” Zora asked finally, as if she had asked it many times before, her tone a mingling of both weariness and the cheery, pseudoprofessionalism of someone in the dully familiar and official position of being single and dating.
“Yes,” said Ira. “That’s exactly why I called.”
“You can’t imagine the daily dreariness of routine pediatrics,” said Zora, not touching her wine. “Ear infection, ear infection, ear infection. Whoa. Here’s an exciting one: juvenile onset diabetes. Day after day you just have to look into the parents’ eyes and repeat the same exciting thing: ‘There are a lot of viruses going around.’ I had thought about going into pediatric oncology, because when I asked other doctors why they’d gone into such a seemingly depressing thing, they said, ‘Because the kids don’t get depressed.’ That seemed interesting to me. And hopeful. But then when I asked doctors in the same field why they were retiring early, they said they were sick of seeing kids die. The kids don’t get depressed, they just die! These were my choices in med school. As an undergraduate I took a lot of art classes and did sculpture, which I still do a little, to keep those creative juices flowing! But what I would really like to do now is write children’s books. I look at some of those books out in the waiting room and I want to throw them in the fish tank. I think, I could do better than that. I started one about a hedgehog.”
“Now what’s a hedgehog exactly?” Ira was eyeing her full glass and his own empty one. “I get them mixed up with groundhogs and gophers.”
“They’re— Well, what does it matter if they are all wearing little polka-dotted clothes, vests and hats and things,” she said irritably.
“I suppose,” he said, now a little frightened. What was wrong with her? He did not like stressful moments in restaurants. They caused his mind to wander strangely to random thoughts like Why are these things called napkins rather than lapkins? or I’ll bet God really loves butter. He tried to focus on the visuals, what she was wearing, which was a silk, pumpkin-colored blouse he hesitated complimenting her on lest she think he was gay. Marilyn had once threatened to call off their wedding because he had strenuously complimented the fabric of her gown and then had shopped too long and discontentedly for his own tuxedo, failing to find just the right shade of “mourning dove,” a color he had read of in a wedding magazine. “Are you homosexual?” she had asked. “You must tell me now. I won’t make the same mistake my sister did.”
Perhaps Zora’s irritability was only creative frustration. Ira understood. Though his position was with the Historical Society’s Human Resources Office, he liked to help with the society’s exhibitions, doing posters and dioramas and once even making a puppet for a little show the society had put on about the first governor. Thank God for meaningful work! He understood those small, diaphanous artistic ambitions that overtook people and could look like nervous breakdowns.
“What happens in your hedgehog tale?” Ira asked, then settled in to finish up his dinner, eggplant parmesan that he wished now he hadn’t ordered. He was coveting Zora’s wodge of steak. Perhaps he had an iron deficiency. Or perhaps it was just a desire for the taste of metal and blood in his mouth. Zora, he knew, was committed to meat. While everyone else’s cars were busy protesting the prospect of war or supporting the summoned troops, Zora’s Honda had a bumper sticker that said, RED MEAT IS NOT BAD FOR YOU. FUZZY, GREENISH BLUE MEAT IS BAD FOR YOU.
“The hedgehog tale? Well,” Zora began. “The hedgehog goes for a walk, because he is feeling sad — it’s based on a story I used to tell my son. The hedgehog goes for a walk and comes upon this strange yellow house that has a sign on it that says, WELCOME, HEDGEHOG: THIS COULD BE YOUR NEW HOME, and because he’s been feeling sad, the thought of a new home appeals. So he goes in and inside is a family of alligators— Well, I’ll spare you the rest, but you can get the general flavor of it from that.”
“I don’t know about that family of alligators.”
She was quiet for a minute, chewing her beautiful ruby steak. “Every family is a family of alligators,” she said.
“Well — that’s certainly one way of looking at it.” Ira glanced at his watch.
“Yeah. To get back to the book. It gives me an outlet. I mean, my job’s not terrible. Some of the kids are cute. But some are impossible, of course, some are disturbed, some are just spoiled and ill-behaved. It’s hard to know what to do. We’re not allowed to hit them.”