And I? “You are American royalty,” Daphna said. “You are a direct descendant of John Adams, I know that for a fact.”
It is a fact. It is another fact that the Adams descendants number in the thousands. And there is a third, unrelated fact, an odd one: though I avoided Daphna, as did my three neighbors, because, as Sylvia said, give her a sip and she’ll gulp you entire; because, as Lucienne said, she’s dérangée; because, as Connie said, her intensity makes you feel charred — an insightful remark, though it slid with no emphasis from Connie’s mouth, as if it were a standard lease form received on the fax…though I avoided her, I did half enjoy — well, quarter — the times I got captured. Her nonstop talk included celebrity gossip (she knew something about everyone in the universe); bits of information like the word for “cranberry”; and comments about her dry motherland. “We are parched, we worship water, our phlegmy consonants are the result of our nonlubricated pharynx.” A change, this dérangée stuff, from my usual conversations about mortgage rates and bridge loans and house footprints and zoning bylaws. A change from Rand’s solemn pronouncements about the decline of civility in the Western world.
“Every time we look around, Avner is being summoned to the councils of the great. He is great himself.” Certainly the little tailor traveled often. We imagined him at unworldly academic conferences. When he was away, his females ate tuna fish out of the can every night. “He has embezzled my dreams,” she said. “I am his favorite,” she told me. “His favorite thorn,” she told me. “His favorite demon,” she told me, told me, told me.
Saturdays we were safe from her. Avner and Daphna disdained synagogue worship, but the family devoted Sabbath mornings to scriptural study at home and the afternoons to those shopping trips led by the daughters. Sunday mornings they all cleaned the house. But the rest of the day we were at risk. On Sunday afternoons — at other times too — Daphna occupied herself by vigorously sweeping her seven front stairs. Sometimes she mopped them as well, and then swept them again. Depending on the season she engaged in conversation with the widower on one corner clipping his hedge or the elderly bachelor on the other corner shoveling his snow. The conversation would be conducted in a yell, woman to old man, old man to woman. Soon, though, Daphna would walk diagonally across the street to the hedge trimmer or down the street to the shoveler, dragging her broom like a nightmare tail. Eventually the chosen man would go indoors, probably to pour himself a stiff drink. Then Daphna would select one of us. Maybe Lucienne in the house next to hers (“handsome Tudor,” I’d say, if I ever had to sell it). Maybe Sylvia in the neglected house directly across the street (“Victorian fixer-upper”). Maybe Connie, next to Sylvia (“Colonial with deck, mint condition”). Maybe me, located at the end of our cul-de-sac like a hostess (“split-level charmer”).
But Daphna knew that Sunday was my busy day and that she was unlikely to find me at home. If I did happen to be in the house I might watch from between the slats of my upper-level bathroom as she made her rounds — loopy rounds, for she never rang the front doorbell, always the back. Barefoot, now holding her broom upright but upside down, she would disappear and reappear, cross and recross the street. The broom’s horizontal bar of whiskers was level with the top of her head. She looked like a peasant girl who had acquired a military suitor, or maybe a constabulary one.
Every Thursday afternoon I meet Rand in a coffee shop in Godolphin Center. I go home first to freshen up. One Thursday in October — it was Daphna’s second year in town, so I knew her schedule — I gave the street a once-over, then left my house on foot. Of course, to be safe, I walked on the side opposite Daphna’s house, and of course I walked fast.
“Shalom!” she screamed. She was standing on her top step, broom in hand. She must have been watching from a window, waiting to pop out. “Where are you going?”
“Coffee…with a good friend.” I didn’t break stride. “I’m late,” I said over my shoulder.
“The Marigold Café?” she yelled.
I nodded. My head was facing forward now, my right arm behind me like a wing. I wished it really were a wing.
“I’ll walk with you!” In a moment she was by my side. Her hand clutched the upended broom around its waist. Her unshod feet kept pace with mine.
“Daphna, don’t you teach on Thursdays?”
“It’s Sukkoth; no class.” Of course: in various Jewish backyards leafy structures had sprung up overnight. “You are enjoying that book under your arm? My oldest reads everything she can get her hands on. She reads upon rising, she reads when she goes to bed, she reads while she’s chopping onions, she reads in the shower…”
“A remarkable feat.”
“She accomplishes it. The teacher of my middle one tells me that she is the best science student he has ever encountered. She will become a physician, of that I am utterly sure. She will work on a Native American reservation with victims of fetal alcohol syndrome.”
“My husband was a drunk.”
“Ojibwa?”
“Episcopalian.”
We were passing a string of double-deckers. “These houses are advised to devote two-thirds of their land to grass, or something green,” she said. “But some are utterly blacktopped. Why? For the sake of the automobile.” Her family did not own a car; they used trolleys and an occasional taxi. They didn’t have a television either. “Did you see the sky at sunset yesterday? Royal purple, like the irises on Mount Gilboa. I stood in the attic of my home. There is a window facing west. The telephone rang several times, but I refused to abandon my post. Anyway, the calls are always for Avner or the girls. My oldest is sixteen. There are boys already in love with her. That is her destiny.”
We had reached Godolphin Center. The Marigold Café is a shallow place, mirrored to provide an illusion of depth. Rand was seated at a table in the back, against the mirror, his silver hair and distinguished shoulders doubled behind him. “Good-bye, Daphna.”
“They all want to pierce their ears. What do you think? Yes, mine also are pierced, but in my youth we stopped there. I am afraid that after the lobes the lips, after the lips the belly—”
“Good-bye, Daphna.”
She stood glaring at me, her feet bare on the pavement, the broom bristling beside her head. “When will you come to us for dinner?” She issued this question often.
“Soon,” I falsely promised, just as often. I turned in an abrupt manner, as if she had insulted me. It was the best method of breaking away. I entered the Marigold and leaned across Rand’s table to kiss his finely honed cheek. I sank onto the chair opposite him.
“Heavens,” he said, apparently noting my exhaustion. Then: “Heavens” again, looking past my ear. “Isn’t that your neighbor outside, getting in people’s way?”
I looked past his ear into the mirror. I saw, through the window of the café, that Daphna was still standing on the sidewalk and that passersby had to swerve to get around her. Some looked annoyed. Some stopped to talk. The human knot around her grew thicker, further irritating those wanting to keep going. Dear, aren’t you going to hurt your feet? that old lady must be saying. A good-looking broom, from a wag. Would you like me to take you to the shelter? Daphna turned her head from one to another. At last a policeman joined the little crowd and offered her his arm.