She shares his tendency to babble, here in this excited crowd. He says quietly, meaning it, "You were a good mom, to humor Ahmad."
Her face loses its gleam of mischief. "He's asked so little, really, over the years, and now he's leaving. He's always seemed so alone. He did this Allah thing all by himself, with no help from me. Less than help, really-I resented that he cared so much about a father who didn't do squat for him. For us. But I guess a boy needs a father, and if he doesn't have one he'll invent one. How's that for cut-rate Freud?"
Does she know she is doing this to him, making him want her? Beth would never think to bring in Freud. Freud, who encouraged a century to keep on screwing. Levy says, "Ahmad looked handsome up there, in his robe. I'm sorry I began too late to get to know your son. I feel a fondness for him, though I suspect it's not reciprocated."
"You're wrong, Jack-he appreciates your wanting to raise his sights. Maybe he'll do it himself later. For now he's barreling ahead on the trucker's license. He passed the written exam and in two weeks takes the physical exam. For Passaic County it's over in Wayne. They need to make sure you're not color-blind and have enough peripheral vision. Ahmad has beautiful eyes, I've always thought. Inky. His father had lighter eyes, oddly, sort of gingerbread color. I say 'oddly' because you'd think Omar's would be the darker, with my pale ones in there."
"I see a shadow of your green in Ahmad's." She ignores this flirtation and goes on, "But they're not twenty-twenty. Ahmad's. More like twenty-thirty- astigmatism-but he was always too vain to wear glasses. You'd think with all this piety he wouldn't be vain, but he is. Maybe it's not vanity, it's more that he thinks Allah would give you glasses if He wanted you to wear them. He had trouble seeing the ball in baseball; that was one of die reasons he took up track as his spring sport."
This tumble of sudden specifics about a boy not too different in Jack Levy's mind from the hundreds he deals with every year, intensifies his suspicion that this woman wants to see him again. He says to her, "I guess he won't be needing those college catalogues I dropped off a month ago."
"I hope he can still find them: his room is a mess except for the corner where he prays. He should have returned them to you, Jack."
'Wo pfoblema, senor-a." He notices around tJiem, in the jostling, jubilant, but already dwindling crowd, other people glancing in their direction and giving them a little room, sensing that sometliing is cooking here. He feels himself incriminated by Terry's overanimation as he tenaciously tries to match his smile to tiiat on her round, bright, freckle-starred face.
The shadow of a big dark-hearted cloud sweeps the sunshine away and casts dullness upon the scene-the lake of rubble, the street from which traffic is barred, the bravely, brightly clad mob of parents and relatives, the civic facade of Central High School, its portals pillared and its windows barred, the height of it like the backdrop of an opera set dwarfing the singers of a duet.
"That was rude of Ahmad," his mother says, "not to return them to you at the school. Now it's too late."
"Like I said, no problem. Why don't I come by sometime and pick 'em up?" he asks. "I'll give a call ahead to make sure you're there."
As a kid, living over on Totowa Road when it was still pretty rural but for the new ranch houses, walking to school in the winter, Jack would sometimes venture out, to test his nerve, onto the ice of a marshy pond, long since built over, that he passed on the way. The water was not deep enough to drown in-cattails and grassy hummocks betrayed its shallow depth-but if he broke through, his good leather school shoes would be soaked and muddied and maybe even ruined, and in a family whose finances were as pinched as his family's, that would have been a disaster. At the silver edge of the cloud, sunshine breaks through, scintillating on Terry's silk head scarf, and he listens with trepidation for the ice to crack.
III
THE PHONE RINGS. Beth Levy struggles to extricate herself from her favorite chair, a rocker recliner called a La-Z-Boy, covered in a dull-brown vinyl imitating creased cowhide and equipped with a lever-operated padded leg rest, in which she has been sitting eating a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies-low in calories compared with chocolate-chip or sandwich creams-while watching All My Children on WABC before switching channels to As the World Turns, on at two. She has often thought of putting a longer cord into the jack so she can carry the phone over to her chair and rest it on the floor for this part of her day, the days when she doesn't go into the Clifton Library, but she never remembers to ask Jack to buy the longer cord at the telephone store, which is way off in the mall on Route 23. When she was a girl you just called AT amp;T and they sent a man in a gray (or was it green?) uniform and black shoes who fixed everything for a few dollars. It was a monopoly, and she knows this was a bad thing-calling long-distance, you were charged for every minute, and now she can talk to Markie or Herm for hours and it costs next to nothing-but also now there is no fixing phones. You throw them out, just like old computers and yesterday's paper.
Also, at some level she doesn't want to make her life any physically easier for herself than it already is; she needs every pitiful ounce of exercise she gets. When she was younger and married, she spent all the morning running around making beds and vacuuming and putting dishes away, but she became so expert she can do these things almost in her sleep; just sleepwalking through a room she makes the beds and tidies things up, though it's true she doesn't vacuum the way she once did-the new machines are lighter and she knows are supposed to be more efficient, but she never has the right brush for the end of the hose and finds the little storage compartment the vacuum part carries around inside itself difficult to unlatch; it's almost like a puzzle putting things together, compared with the old uprights that you just switched on and that set up vacuumed breadths on the carpet like a lawnmower on the lawn, with the sweet little light in front, like a snowplow at night. She hardly noticed any exertion, doing housework. But then she had less weight to move around-it is her cross to bear, her mortification, as religious people used to say.
A lot of her colleagues at the Clifton Library and all the young people who come in and out have cell phones right in their purses or clipped on their belts, but Jack says it's a racket, the charges add up, like on cable TV, which was something she wanted, not him. The so-called electronic revolution, to hear Jack tell it, has brought about a wealth of schemes for painlessly extracting money from us in monthly charges for services we don't need, but with cable the picture is certainly clearer-no ghosts, no wobble and twitch-and the choices are so much more there was no comparison; he himself turns on the History Channel some nights. Though he claims books are much better and deeper, he almost never finishes one through. About cell phones he actually told her, right to her face, that he doesn't want to be reached all the time, especially if he's in a tutorial-if she has a health emergency she should call 911, not him. This isn't very subtle. There's a level, she knows, at which he wouldn't mind if she were dead. It would be two hundred forty pounds less on his shoulders. On the other hand she knows he will never leave her: his Jewish sense of responsibility and a sentimental loyalty, which must be Jewish too. If you've been persecuted and reviled for two thousand years, being loyal to your loved ones is just good survival tactics.