I was making my way along the theater row, European style. As children we were taught, that when disturbing people, the lesser offense was to show them your embarrassed smile, not your indifferent back. Having brushed against a dozen sets of knees and purses, I found my seat, and caught a glimpse of the people sitting behind me. The woman gasped. I probably did the same. Though I’d imagined such an eventuality—after all, we had the same interests and were bound to run into each other at a concert or a play–this moment startled me.
“Oh, dear!” I squeezed a polite smile—that’s all I’d promised her in my last e-mail: civility. “Celeste, you look wonderful.” I wasn’t lying. She looked better than when we’d been friends. The shorter hairdo became her; letting the rusty gray show rather than dying her hair auburn made her look surprisingly younger than her late seventies. Her husband, Harvey, beamed sincerely—psychiatrists are the last to get it. We weren’t ever going to be friends again, no matter how much we all admired one another.
I felt Celeste’s presence behind me throughout the performance. My husband, Vitya, who’d arrived at his seat before me, hadn’t noticed her and Harvey–otherwise, he would’ve whispered something to me.
At the end of the concert I ran into Celeste again, in the bathroom. On catching her anxious look in the mirror as we both washed hands, I rushed out, water dripping from my fingers onto the marble floor.
***
When ten years earlier Celeste Minsker and I fell into a quick friendship, I could tell right away she was nursing a secret. Once our conversation turned to children, she hesitated as if aiming to land on the right answer: “two.”
“I have… two. All grown up now. Middle-aged.” She seemed distracted by the voluptuous proportions of Mother and Child that stood on the grounds of a sculpture museum’s garden cafe. The two of us were having lunch after our first training as new volunteer guides.
Our class was made up mostly of retired professors from local colleges, Princeton and The College of New Jersey. Several of my questions made me seem like someone who’d just landed from Hicksville on their rarified, serenely landscaped field with miles of rose hedges and peacocks preening themselves along the park’s walkways. What annoyed the group had endeared me to Celeste, an emeritus professor of biology. At least twenty-five years junior to the next youngest volunteer, I might’ve reminded her of her students.
I imagined Celeste carrying signs, saying LET MY PEOPLE GO and FREE SOVIET JEWS at demonstrations when I was still in the Soviet Union. Her efforts had paid off, and here I was, in person–a bit late, two decades in America already, but close enough.
Four lunches later, she finally said, “I had another son, the youngest of the three. Aar—” She choked on the name and never told me his full name. “He died in a car crash when he was six.”
“I’m so sorry, Celeste,” I said. My son was a teenager, so I grew cold with terror.
“Oh, it happened over thirty years ago. I’ve adjusted. But when it happened, I lived in a haze for years, throwing myself into work on my Ph.D. I was an okay mom for my other two boys—I cooked, not fancy-shmancy, but whatever. Something to get through the day. I couldn’t make myself care about anything, not really. It took years for me to resemble a human being again. And just when I came out of this walking coma, I caught my first husband having an affair and sent him packing.
“He kept pleading for me to take him back. But who needed him? I was independent, a professor. When I wanted, I had boyfriends galore. No problem. Then, Harvey and I dated for years until we got old and decided to live in the same place.”
About her two adult children, she spoke little. They didn’t live with her—I knew that much but waited to find out who they were and what they did for a living. Asking outright seemed rude, but soon my patience was rewarded.
After our next training class, we decided to explore the sculpture park together to select which pieces to include in our tours. To avoid the screaming peacocks blocking the path, we walked on grass toward a pond and a pavilion at its edge. It looked so romantic; I could see myself spending weekend hours there reading a book or watching dragonflies.
A boat-like structure came into view, docked at the farthest corner of the water. It was probably a sculpture. The map in our manual had an X in the pond with an obscure title, Acheron by Pels.
I went down to the water and squinted at the other shore but still couldn’t see the boat well. It was filled with something like large, green grasshoppers in weathered bronze; sackcloth of metal mesh covered the cast insects. This allusion to a blanket, along with the weeping willow branches hanging over the boat, the reeds and water lilies surrounding it, made me think of a cradle, of a nest ready to spring to life.
“Isn’t it stunning,” Celeste said, her eyes sparkling. “I’m telling you, this place is chockfull of surprises.”
