Stained Glass
Suzanne Kazenoff Rosenzweig
Here in Brooklyn the really cool Jews live in churches. Cool you had to be. Cool, hip, young. Brooklyn’s changed and they’ve changed. Like it or not. Nora has known this for a long time but she didn’t realize how stunning and, indeed, surreal the whole thing might be until she and Frank enter Lily and Alec’s apartment.
Ghost white buttresses shore double and triple height ceilings awash in azure, mint and java. Candles glimmer in the bathroom and, in the tiny dining area, glass domed lights dangle from gossamer thread. Deviled eggs lie atop tiny licorice pebbles in deep bamboo beds. Frank sniffs them out like a pig to truffles. Despite his thickening arteries and doctors’ warnings, he lingers at the table where lemon bars kiss triple-nut clusters. And bite-sized sandwiches are cut into shapes delightful to the senses – ovals, rectangles, perfect crust-free squares. Chocolate candy circles, in baby boy colors, spill from the table onto the hardwood floors. Toddlers whoop with delight at every sugary treasure they find. Champagne flows as if the world were made of grapes and laughter. Nora ambles off to find her friend Celie, Lily’s mother, but Celie finds her first. She wraps her arms around her and holds her fast in a bond that only people with fifty years’ shared history can begin to comprehend. When they finally separate, Nora can feel her mascara running. “Mazel Tov,” she says. This is a celebration.
It could have easily been a funeral. Three years earlier, months following her wedding to Alec, Lily was hit with that crazy disease with a name so complicated it was reduced to three simple letters, “TTP”. Her platelet count plummeted to 2000 and the hospital staff was changing her plasma nearly as often as her bedding. Celie, Nora’s best friend since junior high school, wasn’t sure if Lily, her youngest, would make it, the kind of thing to make you question God, if you didn’t already. Lily was spotted like a jaguar from the bruising. The whole family was terrified. Twenty-something and locked up in a hospital ward so isolated that only family and medical faculty were let in. No tweezers, no butter knives, almost no patients under seventy. God forbid a shard of glass. The only one on the floor who looked worse than Lily was Celie. Nora was with Celie when her father died and, years later when her mother (whom Nora loved like her own) died. She was with Celie when her son took the car and just kept on going until Celie had to call “Radio Jesus” to reach him in the Pacific Northwest. She was there after the D&C that Nora guessed was an abortionbut never delved into. But Nora had never seen Celie as gutted and ghostlike as she was when Lily took ill. Face masked so tight you couldn’t pry it open with a scalpel.
That was just a few months into Frank’s first remission. Back when just the sight of a hospital made Nora want to bolt or vomit or both. Not that much has changed. Still, Nora remembers being there for Celie, sitting in the waiting room riddled with angst. Roaring and frozen at the same time. All of that contradiction now a permanent part of her. Hospitals remind you how close you are to dead, and of all the dreams that are born there.
But now here’s Lily, Celie’s youngest, bruise-free and peach-cheeked like her baby. Makes you almost believe in miracles. Nora wonders whether this will be the only miracle that’s in her own life: so close, yet someone else’s. Of course Nora wants it for the girl, her dear friend’s child. And she wants it for her dear friend. Is it so wrong, she wonders, to want just a little piece of this for herself too? And when on earth did “dear friend” become part of her vocabulary? It sounds like a relic from the land of poodle skirts and five cent pickles. Looking around her, Nora’s beginning to feel like a relic herself.
“Hey Nora!” Walt’s voice is almost as warm and embracing as his big bear hug. “Have you seen him? Can you believe it? Just look at him, he’s thriving!” Nora has loved Walt since the day she saw him, when he sauntered into the fraternity party and bee-lined his way to Celie. He hasn’t taken his eyes off Celie since. “Seventeen doctors told Lily, Don’t, You can’t, You mustn’t.”
“And then all those surrogates,” Celie adds.
“But she did it herself after all,” Nora repeats what they’ve told her so many times. “A miracle baby, truly, how wonderful.”
“It feels good,” Walt says. Nora can’t remember a happy occasion with Walt when he didn’t use those three words. As if life could be distilled down to such simple boilerplate. She looks, really looks, at the baby in Walt’s arms. Swaddled in cashmere blankets and Asian booties, he has almond eyes, swollen lips and two chins. He is perfect plus one. And Nora is happy for them, truly she is. Indeed, nothing short of something awful could have stopped Nora from being here. Yet she feels plastic and disposable as a Pez dispenser popping out sugary tidbits. Like her feelings are bricked behind her teeth. Dusty rose lips dam a powerful river of anger and mess. Better that the floodgates clamp shut.
Watching this next generation having their babies, buying their homes; even their fears are shrouded in promise. At sixty-two, Nora’s promise doesn’t come without a “com” in front of it. There’s Marty in the corner: his colorectal cancer has been checked for the moment. Its return is his promise. The exact timing is the only question. Jean has had her face done twice and now Phil sports his eye-job beneath big round black lenses. “All my friends are doing it,” he told Walt and Celie who, of course, told Nora. He needs new friends, they all agreed. What a pairing: the clown and the fool. The outside may look late forties, but the inside knows the truth.
“Let me show you how fabulous I look,” Phil laughs.
“I see,” Nora says. “You moron,” she wants to shout. “You think it matters? You think you matter? Can’t you see you’re dying? We’re all dying, you pompous ass!” Instead she gives him a peck on the cheek. “Nice to see you again,” she says. And in a weird way she means it. Why not? After all, there are limits on how many times people meet. You just have to be old enough or ill enough to think about it. A place where Nora never thought she’d be. She realizes that no one ever does. Knowing these things doesn’t make them better. It just makes them more real.
“Those lemon bars are lethal,” Phil says to his wife, “you can’t eat the whole thing.”
“But I --” Jean starts.
“Trust me. It’s not going to look good on you.” Phil takes another bite of the pastry in his left hand.
At sixty-something, Jean will never reveal her age, but she’s quick to confirm that she’s still a size 6. And if she wasn’t, who the hell cares? That kind of nonsense just sets Nora off.
“I think it’s time for a drink,” Nora says.
Everyone else seems to have had the same idea. At the foot of the buffet table, the bar is overflowing with people. Nora peeks at her watch. Within the past fifteen minutes or so, it seems as if half the building has streamed in. Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and here are the…. Carols and Steves that Nora grew up with partake in the revelry, as do the Sheenas, Dylans, Chos, Plums and Kadejas of this generation. Welcome to the 21st century. Nora feels like an alien.
Nora’s own kids couldn’t be here or choose not to be. That’s their right, she knows, but it makes the blue tinge to her mood just a bit bluer and a whole lot more tangible. Two generations had grown up together, why not a third? A million years and only yesterday since Nora was at the baby naming for this baby’s mother with two toddlers in tow. Back when Brooklyn was just plain old Brooklyn and Java was an island not a color scheme. Back when half a life ago meant so much less, and there was still so much more to go.
“There must be eighty people here,” Nora says to Frank.
“Food’s okay.” He nods over his cashews.
“Frank!”
“Celie looks good,” he says.
“Celie always looks good,” she says. Nora has been loyal to Celie since eighth grade and it’s not going to change. Fifty years of friendship is not something that she takes lightly. There’s so much history invested in that sentence. And she’s always loved Celie. How can one not? Even so, Nora finds herself thinking about Walt instead. Though Celie looks good, her husband Walt looks great. Trim, with a full-head of dark hair peppered with gray, and a smile that hasn’t changed since college. He personifies happiness. Between Walt’s smile and the hillocks of muscle protruding from his collared shirt, Nora can’t help but think Viagra ad. Nora doesn’t mention this to Frank. Indeed, she questions herself for even thinking it. The mess keeps oozing out. And, as surprising as this is, she’s more surprised that there’s not more. How much can one think and still stay sane? She wonders. Nora seeks out Frank’s eyes, hoping to share something with him, though she’s not sure. He’s chewing the fat with Phil, gorging on platitudes. A life filled with empty calories: is this then her portion? Conversations redefined; limpid, worn-down chunks of the obvious beaded together and knotted with time.
Everything shrinks. Except for Frank’s eyebrows, which have evolved into thick, fuzzy caterpillars. Nora can live with the wild brows. Indeed, she can live with whatever is there. It’s what’s missing that’s so painful. It’s the dearth of discourse that’s so hard. Frank seems to have lost more of his vocabulary than his hair. Before, when there was a language gap because his first tongue is Hungarian, he’d make up English words. Half the time Nora wouldn’t even call him on it as the words were so cockamamie. Half the time she would and, when she did, it was like watching a big red balloon burst. Anger, puffery, then shrunken resignation. His need to win was so absurd, but the drive was sort of sexy. At least he was trying. Now even cheating at Scrabble no longer appeals to him. For a man who outran the Nazis and the communists both, it is amazing how still he has become.
When they were living in the hospital, after Frank had had his first and second surgeries for lymphoma, after the pneumonia, and then the cancer’s return, the goiter-like bulge, the broken hip because of the spill on the stairs that he never fixed, and the rest of it, all of those times she made pacts with God and wished for things. Simple things, the kinds of things on which most people wouldn’t waste a wish. But Nora felt compelled. She wished and wished and wished and wished. For the most part, she got what she requested. Even so, she had never expected this. Frank and Nora left to grow old when the rest of Nora’s generation was deep in the throes, good and bad, but mostly good, of middle age. Can they have already outstayed their welcome?
Nora angles her way to the bathroom. Any excuse for a door with a lock, a moment of peace, the opportunity to, quite literally, let it all out. Washing her hands, Nora composes herself. A different kind of woman would have four shades of lipstick and make sure that she’s reapplied at least one of them. Jean for example has never been seen by anyone Nora knows without a deep red moue of a mouth. In fact, Celie believes that she has her lips permanently dyed. Nora can’t imagine. She simply makes sure that her shoes trail no toilet tissue (it has happened to her on more than one occasion), that her buttons are buttoned and that her breath doesn’t stink. Then she heads back to find Frank. In the baby’s room, carved out of the den and two steps down from the buffet, Frank has positioned himself in a nursing chair. Like a eunuch, he stares glassy-eyed at a half dozen stunning young mothers across the way. Drawn like a puppy to a teat. Frank, the castrated Casanova, is somehow much harder to bear than the wannabe lothario he once presented.
“Can I get you anything?” Nora asks him.
“I’m fine,” he says.
“Not so much cheese,” she says, surveying his plate.
“Allow me my fun,” he warns her.
“Okay.” This isn’t a winnable fight.
Walt comes over to chat with them, to take care of them. He’s a therapist and could get a conversation out of a lamp post. Nora has spoken with Walt all her adult life. Frank has put her on the phone with him once or twice more recently at Frank’s insistence. He may not be what he was, but Frank still knows that Nora’s not herself. Misery does not love company. It is all-consuming and odious. Walt is always kind and, at times, almost unbearable at his attempts to be helpful. Walt’s her friend not her doctor and she’s too raw and too sore for any further exposition. If she needed anything from Walt it would be for him to be a bit more like Frank. Worn, a little embarrassing, sexless. But she has known Walt too long and felt too much to want that for real. She will let him baby sit Frank for a few minutes though, a favor and a compromise that she can accept. People congregate everywhere and swarm round the buffet like bees to roses. Nora joins them in filling a plate. Just because everything tastes like sand doesn’t mean she doesn’t feed her face anyway. Eating without judgment is one of the very few benefits to aging and she will take it with relish.
It is about midway through a four-hour open house and they are knee-deep in noses and elbows. How the caterers are managing to even get from the closet of a kitchen to the table is anybody’s guess. But they are. And though toddlers seem to be pouring from the rafters and slightly older children are jumping from the loft’s too narrow stairwell, it is mostly the adults who make any messes worth speaking about. So many feet are moving from the tiny living room and nursery to the buffet that Nora feels the pulsing through the floorboards. It is quite possibly the most physical sensation she’s felt in months.
Frank doesn’t participate in this reckless to and fro. He has planted himself with his own personal cheese tray, and there he will sit until he needs to stand. Nora keeps a watchful eye on him, not so different from the young mothers with their toddlers. Even when she is speaking with other people, he is directly in her line of vision. Sometimes she worries that if she lets him out of sight, she will be more willing to lose him. None of those fancy container stores make a holder for that. There is simply no vessel big enough for her emotions, messy, contradictory and fraught with guilt. Just look at him in the corner, with the wispy curls spilling past the ear lobes of an otherwise bald head. Frank is fat again. For him, this is a good thing. For Nora it is and it isn’t. Good to know that the cancer has been kept at bay, but now she gets to worry about his cholesterol. If she has learned one thing in this life that is true, it is this: you don’t come between Frank and his sausage. Or pastry or chestnut puree or…you have the idea. Food still fuels him. Once upon a time it was Nora he couldn’t wait to touch, hold, taste, with the lust of the gourmand that he was. She’s shut down there too now, kitchen’s closed. Oh, but sometimes the hunger itself could eat her alive. Forty years of marriage yet so much left unsaid.
Walt gives Frank a pat on the back and hops the two steps from the baby’s room to the bar. He tings his crystal flute with a swizzle stick once, twice, a few times more and the cacophony is silenced. Of course there’s still a shriek or two from the under-three set, but a noticeable calm penetrates the air. His daughter and son-in-law stand on the stairwell behind him that leads up to the loft, cradling the newborn. Walt cedes the floor to them.
“Thank you for coming,” the baby’s mother says. “Alec is too nervous to speak and when he does he doesn’t make much sense anyway. I just married him because he’s so cute.”
“Hey!”
“Well he is. Both my boys are,” she says and the whole room is going “Hear! Hear!”
Alec has bedroom eyes and big bones, and the way he looks at his wife, Nora can almost picture her naked. She sees Walt looking at Celie that way too. What do you have to do or be to get looked at that way? Nora wonders. Has she lost it or did she never have it in her? It’s been so long she can’t remember.
With a nod here and a whispered “excuse me” there, she extricates herself from the masses and monopolizes a corner of the wall at the very edge of the living room by the stained glass window. It is a smallish apartment, but the brilliant architecture opens the space. Bathed in the rich colors and the sunlight she lets the noise and the crowd and the world swallow her. She’s already at that age when women become invisible. As she grows smaller and smaller there is a perverse sense of serenity, the kind she doubts she would get from any of these yoga classes everyone keeps pushing. Not that the calm takes away the sadness. But it does dull it slightly. Windows, special windows, can do that. She and Frank have always had a passion for and found their passion in glass. Indeed, once the children were born, they used to escape to glass shows all over the country and sometimes beyond. Whenever they needed to remember who they were individually and as a couple there was Morgantown or Corning or even Murano (a tenth anniversary splurge) to get lost in so that they could find themselves.
“Hooray!” Walt cheers.
“Here’s to Lily!” Someone shouts. The rest of the room joins in. “And Alec! And the baby! L’Chaim!”
Speeches must be over. To life, indeed, Nora thinks. She’s just getting started. Sex was part of every glass show. American, Bohemian, cruets, paperweights, it didn’t matter. Permanence from fragility: art from sand, potash and metal oxides. Mirrored by ecstasy; born of nothing but palms and thighs and lips and friction. Nora and Frank would watch themselves dance in the glow of a new purchase. If they bought nothing, the motel mirror would serve fine. Still, she preferred to come in color – cranberry glass, yellow-green, slag. Yes, she sees them now, as if floating above their bed, carpet, even the hardwood floor. Movement, color, light, so much light and…why had they never done it in a church with light streaming from the cobalt blues, golden yellows and reds? If she lived here, she would smear herself in cannoli cream from the Italian bakery shop she noticed across the street and then make mascarpone love under the stained glass stars.
“Nora. Nora.” She remembers when her children used to do this. Remembers when she was the vessel for all of that need. Nora would lock herself in the bathroom to read a letter, make a phone call, anything for two minutes to call her own. But now sometimes even two minutes feels like too much alone time. She is beginning to think that there will be nothing but alone time and it’s coming fast.
“Right here, Frank.” He tugs at her.
“Where were you? Could you get me a coffee?”
“Sure,” she says. Three creams and four sugars, she knows it just doesn’t taste the same when you get it for yourself.
“You about ready to go, Hon?” It’s the same thing Nora might call the check-out girl at the Shop-Rite.
“Where’s the rocker?” Frank asks.
“It’s in the nursery, where you were sitting. Remember? We put it there when we first got here?”
“Mmm.”
She had ordered it not knowing whether to get the white or the maple, and by the time Celie returned her phone call she had already opted for the darker wood. Celie had said “white” but the truth was Nora preferred the maple. Exactly what she would have wanted for her own grandchild; exactly what she would buy if the day would only come. Frank really wants grandchildren. “You don’t escape the Nazis to leave nothing,” he says. “Leave the kids alone,” she tells him, believing that the less they presume, the more they will be inclined. Too many decades of arguing has taught her that nothing worth having is controllable, least of all one’s children. The rocker looks fine in the nursery. Possibly not as good as the white would have but fine. Just like the half-Jewish baby looks fine in the church. None of it really matters. What she wouldn’t give to have these kinds of choices as her gravest doubts.
Carol and Steve, Phil and Jean are all heading to the door, and Nora supposes it’s time that she and Frank do the same. Best to leave when the sun is still with you. The baby has been toasted, the parents and grandparents congratulated, food eaten and pleasantries exchanged, there is little left to be done. New Jersey waits.
She can still hardly believe that now that their kids are out of the house, she and Frank live in New Jersey. But, when the house in Rockland became an albatross and stairs were no longer an option, even the hope of Manhattan was beyond the realm of economic possibility. Leave it to them to have picked the one town in New York where real estate barely budged. Oh, she loved watching the boys swing like monkeys from the porch to the tree house. And the deer were magnificent. But the treacherous roads in winter made for more than a few frightening fender benders and a house with a quarter mile of plank path and thirty years worth of clutter is not an easy sell. Add the lack of decent transport to Manhattan, and it was no wonder that everyone looked elsewhere. And who ever would have guessed that Brooklyn would have reinvented itself?
So New Jersey it is. Since Nora has always been scared of bridges, on days like today, living in Jersey is even harder to stomach. There was a time when she could push past it, back when she lived in Brooklyn, and wherever she was headed was worth whatever the price of the trip. Nora is sixty-two years old. Frank is seventy-three and his lymphoma is stronger than he is. Her gephyrophobia is just as carnivorous. This fear of bridges has grown so great that she’s no longer sure whether she’s afraid of leaving one place or getting to the next. All she knows is that there’s no such thing as safe. She’s read studies. You do change as you age. You become more of who you’ve always been and you lose your filter as you lose your courage. You also lose your balance. At least that’s what Nora has come to believe. They took the Battery over, but Nora overhears someone say it’s closed for police action. She’s choosing to believe it’s not true or, if it is true, that the problem is over and the tunnel has been re-opened. Frank has been having these weird moments where he falls asleep at the wheel. In fact, that was the first time he had Walt call Nora. He was in the hospital, having wrecked up the car pretty bad, and Frank wanted Walt to take Nora car shopping. Nora hadn’t told Walt (or Celie) prior to Frank’s call. She hadn’t even told her kids. It wasn’t that she was embarrassed; it was just that she was, well, she didn’t even know what she was. Hurt, scared, frustrated, angry, the list is endless. And her new ultra-safe Volvo doesn’t change anything. The wreckage follows her everywhere.
Celie gives the best hugs, and Nora leaves the affair with Walt’s sweet smile and Celie’s embrace close to her heart. She’s also got a party favor, a CD with a picture of the baby on the cover and a list of his “favorite” tunes. What she’s supposed to do with this, she has no idea, but looking at his little face, she knows she can’t throw it out. She hands it off to Frank.
Goodbyes keep getting harder, and the lengths between people and places seem longer and longer. Doors locked, Nora turns from WINS to an FM station, easy listening or some such thing. WINS is saying that the tunnel is closed, and Nora doesn’t want to hear it. She looks at Frank, her big baby, already nodding off in his shoulder-harness. White-knuckled, Nora makes the first right on President Street and the second on Clinton. She glances in the rearview mirror. Brownstone after brownstone, none of them looking like the ones she knew as a child; it’s true, you can’t go home again. Decrepit old row houses transform before Nora’s eyes into fancy stores with fancier price tags. All of this rebirth would be exciting if it weren’t so daunting. After yet another Starbucks, Clinton’s barrage of street lights wane. The sign for the bridge looms just overhead. Nora switches the station again. “The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel is closed on account of police action,” the traffic and transit reporter says. Nora clutches the wheel more tightly.
“Frank, Frank, wake up,” she whispers.
“Hmm…”
She makes the left for the bridge and stops by the barrier ramp. Nora has to think and think fast as the cops across the way aren’t going to let her linger long. There’s always the midtown tunnel, she tells herself. If only she knew an easy path to get there. She should have asked at the party, but who would have thought that the Battery would really be closed? Calling is futile. So many people arrived late to the party saying that no one heard the intercom or their calls for help with directions. And it seems moronic to disturb them anyway given that the bridge is right in front of her nose. Nora wishes that they had sprung for the global positioning system. She reaches for the glove compartment and her trove of maps. “Frank, I mean it, wake up,” she nudges him. “Give me the map.”
Nora loves maps. She finds it such a joy to get a concrete sense of where she is and where she’s heading. “Not the CD, Frank, what do I need with that? I meant the map, the tri-state one!” He pops the CD into the player and then forages in the glove compartment for her request. First the kids, now Frank, the endless responsibility is exhausting. Right now, she’s having trouble enough unfolding the darn thing, let alone reading it. The champagne doesn’t help either.
She has dawdled too long and the cops are heading across the road. Of course, she realizes that she can ask them the way to the midtown tunnel. But the whole thing is just too ridiculous, too embarrassing. She’s a big girl and she can handle this, she tells herself. Take a deep breath and prepare to go over the bridge.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” blasts out of the six-in-one changer. Frank hums along.
“Frank, honey, take the keys. I’ll take over when we get to the FDR.”
“Are you sure?”
“Switch with me. It’s the only way.” Nora pats his left leg as she returns the map to the glove compartment. She rubs his leg again with her right hand as she opens the door. Frank takes her hand in his for a moment. Her skin is chapped, the nails are uneven. There is beauty in this, he thinks. These hands are the hands of a woman who works. Frank lets go and angles himself over toward the driver’s seat. It isn’t easy. They have been married for forty years and, though Frank doesn’t tell Nora enough, he loves her. He certainly doesn’t want to let her down. But he is so tired and the pill and alcohol combination just makes everything fuzzier. “Please don’t take my sunshine away,” Frank drums his fingers in tune to the music.
Despite Nora’s best intentions, the sun is beginning to fade, and they will head for Jersey in the dark.
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Suzanne Kazenoff Rosenzweig holds a BA in English Literature from Swarthmore College and a JD from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she was a member of the Cardozo Law Review. She is also a graduate of the New School University’s MFA program in creative writing. Several of her short stories have been awarded Glimmer Train Finalist standing. More recently, she became a member of the Advisory Committee for The Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph’s College.