Freedom [180]
“Don’t worry about me,” Katz said. “I’ve still got part of a sandwich in my bag.”
“No, I’ll come up and sit with you. It’s just that things are a little disorganized around here. This house is just . . . just . . . just . . .” She clenched her fingers and shook her hands. “Unnhh! This house!”
“Calm down,” Katz said. “It’s great to see you.”
“How do they even live when I’m not here? That’s what I don’t understand. How the whole thing even functions at the basic level of taking the trash out.” Jessica shut the kitchen door and lowered her voice. “God only knows what she eats. Apparently, from what my mom says, she subsists on Cheerios, milk, and cheese sandwiches. And bananas. But where are these foods? There’s not even any milk in the fridge.”
Katz made a vague gesture with his hands, to suggest that he could not be held responsible.
“And, you know, as it happens,” Jessica said, “I know quite a bit about Indian regional cooking. Because a lot of my friends in college were Indian? And years ago, when I first came down here, I asked her if she could teach me how to do some regional cooking, like from Bengal, where she was born. I’m very respectful of people’s traditions, and I thought we could make this nice big meal together, her and me, and actually sit down at the dining-room table like a family. I thought that might be cool, since she’s Indian and I’m interested in food. And she laughed at me and said she couldn’t even cook an egg. Apparently both her parents were engineers and never made a real meal in their lives. So there went that plan.”
Katz was smiling at her, enjoying the seamless way that she combined and blended, in her compact unitary person, the personalities of her parents. She sounded like Patty and was outraged like Walter, and yet she was entirely herself. Her blond hair was pulled back and tied with a severity that seemed to stretch her eyebrows into the raised position, contributing to her expression of appalled surprise and irony. He wasn’t the least bit attracted to her, and he liked her all the more for this.
“So where is everybody?” he said.
“Mom is at the gym, ‘working.’ And Dad, I don’t actually know. Some meeting in Virginia. He told me to tell you he’ll see you in the morning—he’d meant to be here tonight, but something came up.”
“When’s your mom getting home?”
“Late, I’m sure. You know, it’s not at all obvious now, but she was actually a fairly great mom when I was growing up. You know, like, cooked? Made people feel welcome? Put flowers in a vase by the bed? Apparently that’s all a thing of the past now.”
In her capacity as emergency hostess, Jessica led Katz up a narrow rear staircase and showed him the big second-floor bedrooms that had been converted to living and dining and family rooms, the small room in which Patty had a computer and a foldout sofa, and then, on the third floor, the equally small room where he would sleep. “This is officially my brother’s room,” she said, “but I bet he hasn’t spent ten nights in it since they moved here.”
There was, indeed, no trace of Joey, just more of Walter and Patty’s very tasteful furniture.
“How are things with Joey anyway?”
Jessica shrugged. “I’m the wrong person to ask.”
“You guys don’t talk?”
She looked up at Katz with her amusedly wide-open and somewhat protuberant eyes. “We talk sometimes, now and then.”
“And what, then? What’s the situation?”
“Well, he’s become a Republican, so the conversations don’t tend to be very pleasant.”
“Ah.”
“I put some towels out for you. Do you need a washcloth, too?”
“Never been a washcloth user, no.”
When he went back downstairs, half an hour later, showered and wearing a clean T-shirt, he found dinner waiting for him on the dining table. Jessica sat down on the far side of it with her arms tightly folded—she was altogether a very tightly