Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [91]
When I heard the kitchen door slam, I opened my eyes and saw that Deborah wasn’t standing there anymore. Marie had also disappeared, but after a moment she reemerged from the kitchen, carrying a damp cloth, which she used to blot the spreading purple stain on the tablecloth. At her sharp request Philly leaned over and righted the upset chair. Irv, employing his usual strategy for dealing with what he called Deborah’s conniption fits, had returned to his food, working with determination on a large thick slab of kugel. James was busy reading the bottle of zinfandel, a concerned expression on his face, as though he’d just found out it was wine he’d been drinking all evening and were searching for the place on the label where they told you how to get it to stop. I looked at Emily; she was looking at her mother, who was looking, I was surprised to find, at me. I considered for one wild instant the possibility that Deborah had spilled the beans not to Emily at all, but to her mother. But then I saw what Irene was thinking. The same optimism that made it possible for her to believe that Emily and I might stay together led her never to abandon the hope that Deborah’s strange behavior was brought about largely by outside forces. She was thinking that I had gotten Deborah stoned.
“Deborah,” I said, smiling, giving my head a disingenuous shake. There was a rustling sound at my ear and a bright splash of blue appeared on my plate. My yarmulke had fallen into my salad.
Emily stood up.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, sounding determined. She went into the kitchen and out the back door, and a moment later we could hear their voices rising and falling in the flooded yard. That left six of us to sit in our chairs and stare at the pieces of broken matzoh that littered the table like pages torn out of prayer books. Marie, Irene, and Irv made several valiant attempts to start and sustain a discussion about a documentary they’d seen on PBS the night before about some Jews who were hoping to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, but it was all that anyone could manage to eat the food on our plates without choking and fight off the maddening desire to eavesdrop. I, of course, failed even to manage that. I couldn’t hear what the sisters were saying, but the truth was I didn’t really need to. I could fill in the dialogue myself.
“How about that farm in Sweden where they’re already breeding all those special red heifers?” Marie said.
“I have a hard time believing your basic Ken and Janet Abramowitz from Teaneck are really going to cough up five thousand dollars to have their own personal red heifer sacrificed in Jerusalem,” said Irene.
“I guess I’d better get back our deposit,” Irv said.
Just then Emily came running back into the house, with an unaccustomed thunderousness, across the kitchen floor and then out into the living room. She made directly for the hall closet, grabbed the long leather coat in which she’d fled Pittsburgh yesterday morning, and then, stopping only briefly to shoot me a tear-streaked and heartbroken look, ran back outside. We sat there, Grady and all the people who were staring at him, for another twenty seconds or so, and then, treading softly, Deborah reappeared, contentedly chewing on a mouthful of gum.
“Where’s your sister?” said Irv.
“She’s going for a drive,” Deborah said, with a little shrug.
“Is she all right?”
“Fine.”
From outside there was the irritable two-stroke cough of Emily’s old Bug, and then a scrabbling of gravel as she pulled away. I hoped she would be all right, driving around in a state of shock, with those six-volt headlights, on those dark lanes. It was not unusual for her to take off in her car when she was upset, however.