Louisa Meets Bear by Lisa Gornick

Author:Lisa Gornick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374710262
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Raya in Rapahu

Shortly before midnight—eighty-seven days after her mother, Raya, walked in front of a bread truck that sent her soaring diagonally across the street, her flight halted only by the crash of her head into the door of a parked car, leaving her locked in another reality that Marnie imagines sometimes as a long deep sleep during which the body tends to itself (though, in Raya’s case, with the help of tubes going in and out of her orifices) while the mind wanders through a cineplex infinitum, and, at other times, as a terrible and lonely claustrophobia, akin to being trapped in a mine shaft with limbs pinned by the walls and air sweet from lack of oxygen—Marnie lifts her rather substantial leg over the edge of the tub and dips a big toe into the steaming water.

When the doorbell rings, Marnie, still soaking, is jolted from a reverie (her work: the way she finds the kernels for her children’s stories) about a creature, swift and cunning like a wood thrush with a crest of plumules a peacock would envy, who flies into a dank, bat-ridden cave to retrieve a key to … to the universe. Damn you, she thinks, both about Ben, her ex-husband, and the only person who would visit without calling, and Julio, the night doorman for whom Ben once did some free printing work, who lets Ben come up without announcement.

Damp under her terry-cloth robe, Marnie pads through the living room with its bay window from which if you lean far out and look west you can see a patch of the Hudson and unlocks the sequence of bolts Ben installed before moving out nine years ago. Then, at twenty-six, she’d been a young divorcée; now the building houses a half dozen other women of Marnie’s age also with a marriage behind them.

Ben hands Marnie a bag of kosher Chinese takeout. His dark hair is flecked with snow. With the collar of his leather jacket turned up over his thick neck, he looks like a Jewish version of an Irish thug from a thirties movie, only an inch or two taller than Marnie but with shoulders twice as broad; indeed, some of Ben’s printing shop clients (Marnie thinks of Mesoni—a guy rumored to have used Mob connections to get the contract to grind the city’s used subway cars into spools of wire) suggest something B-grade, a world where the action passes in warehouses, landfills, and container-ship yards.

“Ellie?”

Ben nods and follows Marnie into the kitchen. He leans against the counter while she fills a teakettle.

“What happened?”

“She’s back to wanting to keep it. The social worker told her they take the baby right after delivery—to make it easier on the mother. She came home bawling her eyes out, that she can’t go through with it, can’t let them cut the umbilical cord and then that’s it.” Ben shudders.

“Is she just upset or do you think she means it?”

“I don’t know. She’s got that midwestern bullheadedness where there’s a right and a wrong and nothing in between.

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