“Whatever you say, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
I knew she was kidding about more brisket, trying to cheer me up. I deposited my plate and silverware in the sink without offering to help clean up because I knew she’d only take offense, as she had after previous offers. Back in the living room, the Giants running back got stuffed for a two-yard loss.
Mrs. Schmulowitz threw up her hands in exasperation.
“Can you believe this interior line play? Oy gevalt It’s a horror! Even I can trap block better than that.”
“Just wanted to say good night, and thanks again for dinner.”
She gave me a disconcerted look. “It’s not even the fourth quarter yet.”
“I’m thinking of turning in a little early, doing some reading.”
The old lady’s cataract-clouded eyes pooled with tears. She said she knew what I was going through, and that her heart ached for me. She told me how one of her brothers had joined the army, gone off to fight in North Africa, and been declared missing in action. Nearly a year transpired before the family received a letter via the Red Cross saying he’d been captured and was in a German POW camp, homesick but otherwise well.
“In the words of Tom Petty,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, “the waiting is the hardest part.”
“How do you know Tom Petty?” I asked her.
“How do I know Tom Petty? I know Tom Petty because he’s older than I am.” She got up and turned off the TV. “Listen, before you go, there’s something I need you to do for me, a big favor.”
“Name it.”
“I need you to come with me to my watercolor class tomorrow.”
“I’m not much of a painter, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
“Like anybody in the class is a painter? They’re relics, old as dirt, everybody in there. Half the people, their brains have turned to Cream of Wheat. The point’s not to paint, bubby. The point is, I just want you to come with me.”
“Why?”
“Why? It’s a surprise, that’s why.”
“I don’t like surprises, Mrs. Schmulowitz. And I’ve had more than my share recently.”
She put her arms around my waist. I could feel most of the bones in her body.
“You have an obligation to go on living, Cordell. For her. For you. Regardless of where she is right now. The sooner you start doing that, the better off you’ll both be.”
She promised the painting class would do me good.
“I’m an old lady, bubeleh. Humor me.”
Mrs. Schmulowitz was a force of nature. What choice did I have?
Kiddiot slept on his back at the foot of my bed that night with all four paws up and his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, while I stared at the ceiling, anguishing over the choices I’d made, replaying on a continuous loop the hours leading up to Savannah’s disappearance and my attempts to find her in the hours afterward. What could I have done, short of never spotting that airplane in the first place, that would have let me roll over and find Savannah sleeping contentedly beside me? What clues had I missed? The guilt, incompetence, and helplessness I felt were palpable, weights that pressed like concrete on my heart. I thought I might vomit, but didn’t. I got up, drawing a disapproving sneeze from Kiddiot who didn’t appreciate being disturbed, and went outside.
The night was still. No moon. I gazed up at the southern sky, through the dark, outlying branches of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s oak tree, to the three stars of Orion’s Belt. To their right was a V-shaped pattern of stars — the face of Taurus the Bull — and, slightly beyond the bull’s face, the star cluster known as Seven Sisters.
To the average eye, the Sisters look like a small, blurry cloud of light. But if your vision is keen, you can discern all seven stars. For centuries, Native Americans used the star cluster as an eye test of sorts; only those would-be fighting men with the acuity of vision to see all seven stars were allowed to join the most elite warrior sects. Often, when I was at the academy, I would walk onto the parade grounds at night, lie down and gaze up at the Sisters, if only to reassure myself that I had the right stuff to be a pilot. Inspiration often followed my stargazing. But as I stared into the heavens that night from my landlady’s tidy, postage-stamp backyard, all I felt was lost, adrift amid the cosmos.
More than anything, I felt alone.
FIFTEEN
Mrs. Schmulowitz drove a banana yellow Shelby Mustang with an automatic transmission and a vanity plate that read, “BRISKET.” She had to sit on two volumes of the 1966 Encyclopedia Britannica to see over the steering wheel, but that didn’t stop her from racing down San Miguel Boulevard like she was trying to outrun the zombie apocalypse, garbed in some sort of weird, Annie Hall-like outfit.
We roared past Rancho Bonita’s majestic, Spanish-style county courthouse doing fifteen over the posted speed limit.
“You’re gonna really enjoy this painting class, bubby,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said.
“Assuming we get there alive,” I said, bracing myself against the dashboard.
She whipped a sharp left onto Vespucci Street and through the crosswalk, nearly creaming a pair of portly businessmen who literally had to leap for their lives.
“Will you look at that? A parking space, right in front of the rec center. This must be my lucky day.”
“Did you not see those guys, Mrs. Schmulowitz?”
“Did I see them? Of course, I saw them. I also saw they could definitely use some exercise. If public schools still had physical education, we wouldn’t have this problem! They can thank me later.”
The space was impossibly tight, sandwiched between a white Volvo sedan and a Chrysler PT Cruiser. Mrs. Schmulowitz parallel parked like one would expect a nearly ninety-year-old woman to parallel park. She played bumper cars, pounding her way in.
“Perfect,” she announced when we were wedged squarely against the curb. “C’mon, bubeleh let’s get you some culture.”
The weekly painting class was held on the second floor of the Rancho Bonita Parks and Recreation Department’s Vespucci Community Center, a stately, two-story red brick building that had once served as a convalescent hospital for wounded soldiers returning from the Great War. The classroom was filled with mostly elderly women, some tethered to oxygen tanks, others reliant on wheelchairs or walkers, all sitting around long tables, glumly slapping thin, wet paint on pieces of watercolor paper.
“Hello, good people,” Mrs. Schmulowitz announced as we walked in. “Welcome to Tuesday.”
Nobody bothered to look up.
The class instructor, who Mrs. Schmulowitz introduced me to as Meredith Crisp, touted the fact that he’d studied under the late Thomas Kinkade, America’s self-proclaimed “Painter of Light.” I didn’t know squat about fine art, but what I’d seen of Kinkade’s saccharine fairy tale villages convinced me that whatever artistic technique Crisp had to teach, I wasn’t interested in learning. Not that I had any illusions of becoming the next da Vinci. Far from it. I was only there to keep my landlady happy.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Schmulowitz, he’s really not allowed in here,” Crisp said, taking her aside, glancing at me, and whispering a little too loudly with a catty smile that really wasn’t a smile. “This is a seniors-only class.”
“Who’s to know? The geriatric Gestapo? Lighten up, Meredith.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Schmulowitz. Those are the rules. I really didn’t make them up.”
He was well past sixty but trying hard not to look it. Flip-flops, too-tight jeans, a Coldplay T-shirt under a fringed leather vest, leather bracelets, a long, beaded earring dangling from one lobe, and purposefully mussed, Rod Stewart-like head of blond, thinning hair that was among the worst dye jobs I’d ever seen.