In the center of this mess of a mealtime, I felt my thoughts whirl. How would I sell the place when they left? How would I ever find people as oblivious as these? The furnace might be new but the oven was as old as the house. The electricity was so faulty that no lamp could sustain more than a sixty-watt bulb. I knew that in other rooms, as in this kitchen, crown molding was separating from walls and plaster was cracking. There was a particularly deep fissure in the ceiling of the master bedroom. Avner and Daphna had probably learned to ignore it. Sam was too besotted to notice. Someday this house would defeat me.
But the family was defeating me already…these people occupying a chiaroscuro kitchen, these people of many languages, these people indifferent to the ordinary conventions of table manners, these people of no restraint. These people steamed in happiness.
Daphna put down her book. “Join us, Ann,” she commanded. And then: “We would like you to share our meal.”
Join them? Share their meal? Nudge the oldest off her stool and snatch her book for myself? Sit at the table with Avner and Sam and twirl a wineglass? Sink to the ruined linoleum and eat stew with a spoon, with my fingers? If I dined there just once I might move in, never leave, marry myself to the lot of them. Just what Daphna wanted.
“I have an engagement.”
“Oh,” tragically.
I edged backward.
“Please, the front door,” Daphna said. She escorted me out of the kitchen and through the dining room used only on Fridays — there was an awful zigzag crack from ceiling to floor, as if lightning had once struck — and into the hall, all without flicking any switches, so we proceeded in semidarkness to the front vestibule. The broom leaned against the wall like a shotgun. Daphna opened the door. We stood at the top of the glistening seven steps. “This brief seasonal warmth is called the January thaw. The Gulf Stream sends balloons of hot air, and the arctic winds retreat. Even the global warming meshuggeners don’t use the thaw as evidence, it was occurring in Eden already…” She flung sentence after sentence at my escaping self. But standing in her kitchen, looked up to and looked after by daughters, husband, and at last a courtier, she had said no more than a dozen words, probably fewer. I turned toward her from the bottom of the steps.
“You must come sometime!” she urged.
“Go back,” I said, and hurried down the street.
IV.
I haven’t married Rand. I couldn’t say yes to his offer. Daphna’s kitchen ruined any charm it had. I couldn’t say yes to Daphna’s offer either. It’s too bad I didn’t marry my beloved Patrick thirty years ago. I would now be the widow of a horse, contentedly remembering that laugh of his whenever we took a fence.
So, having not disposed of my business, I must now dispose of Daphna’s house. Soon after that night, Avner accepted a position in the latest Israeli government — apparently he does move among the powerful — and within a week of his appointment the entire family decamped for Jerusalem. Never mind the contract with the university — in fact, the university trumpeted this faculty-government connection. Never mind the house they owned — luckily I found two Pakistani doctors to rent the place furnished for a few years; they work long hours at the hospital and we never see them. And never mind the girls’ interrupted schooling. The family did stay in town long enough to watch the middle daughter receive a first prize at the science fair.
Daphna said farewell by leaving a brief note in each of our mail slots: Off to the Cabinet. Shalom. Probably she sensed that she had outworn our tolerance of her garrulity. And anyway she was returning to Jerusalem, where, I’m told, everybody talks at once, brags all the time.
But Sylvia was home when the note popped through her slot. It was morning; her hair was still in its bun. She opened the door. She told us later what she learned. Avner had indeed taken a ministerial post, but he could have done so several times in the past; his wisdom is valued by many parties. This time he accepted, not because of the usual parliamentary crisis but because of a domestic one.
No, he had not come home to find Sam and Daphna warm under the cracked bedroom ceiling. “We Godolphinites do our share of sinning,” Sylvia pointed out, “but we do not abuse hospitality.”
“Oh,” said the disappointed Lucienne.
Sam had fallen in love, yes — with the oldest daughter. And she with him.
“They are utterly too young,” Daphna told Sylvia. But Sylvia with her fine, marinated intelligence saw through that small truth to the larger one beyond. As enlightened as Avner and Daphna wished to seem, they could not wholeheartedly welcome an Irish cop into their bloodline.
“See how you feel when we return,” Avner advised the lovers.
“Write every day,” Daphna added. “Promise to remember each other!” What cleverness; they started forgetting each other before she finished the sentence.
Sam Flanagan never visits our dead-end street. On the corners, in their seasons, hedge clipping and snow shoveling go on undisturbed. And once every few months, Connie and her husband invite Lucienne, Sylvia, and me to dinner, served in a cool green dining room with a view of the deck. I’ll have no trouble selling that house.
“Do we miss Daphna?” Sylvia wondered on one of those occasions. She was well into the wine; a helix of gray hair fell over one shoulder.
“Yes, no,” Lucienne said. “She was too hungry.”
Connie said slowly, “She wanted to…mean so much to us. It was…inappropriate.”
“Also doomed,” I added.
“Indeed,” Sylvia said. “We mean so little to each other.”
Deliverance
The hiring committee — the three members of the staff and Rabbi Stahl from the board, who begged to be called Steve — were briefly taken aback by the candidate’s looks. Donna could feel a ripple of confusion. The woman’s name was Mimi. Her blunt hair was dyed the crystalline color that old-movie buffs called platinum. She had a wide lipsticked smile. As she advanced toward them across the large basement dining room, it became apparent that she was very pretty. She’d stated outright in her cover letter that she was a divorcée with three grown daughters. She must have borne them young. She wore a long suede coat and high-heeled boots. A fur pillbox rested on the platinum bob.
You are not what you wear, as the staff knew well. Some of the most crackbrained guests at Donna’s Ladle could rummage through a pile of donated rags, select a few, and with those few convert themselves into a dead ringer for a CEO or, if you want to talk really elegant, a high-priced call girl. This Mimi, so bewitchingly chic, might have a heart of gold.
The hiring committee, sitting side by side at the long table, took turns telling Mimi about the facility (“a soup kitchen for women and their children”) and the general nature of the work (“cooking, plunging toilets, bossing volunteers, hanging out”) and the sometimes strained relations with the Unitarian church whose basement they occupied.
It fell to Donna to define the particular duties of a new staff member. “When my baby comes, three months from now, I’ll go on indefinite maternity leave, though I’ll volunteer in the kitchen one day a week. Pam here”—an affectionate look—“will take over my administrative and fund-raising chores, and so her old job as resource coordinator is up for grabs.”
“Scrounging for supplies,” Pam explained. “Wheedling donations, buying food cheap. Batting eyelashes at pro bono plumbers.”
Mimi’s eyes were blue under black lashes. “Pleading with restaurants?” she asked.