The World Without You by Joshua Henkin

Author:Joshua Henkin [Henkin, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9780375424366
Google: E-BjYhiujQgC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 13530703
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

9

It’s eight o’clock, but dinner hasn’t started yet; everyone is stalling except Noelle. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s eat.” If they wait until Amram comes back they may never eat again. Yet even as she’s thinking this, she cranes her neck and looks out the window, hoping to see his car.

“Pavlov’s bell is ringing,” Marilyn says. She bangs a fork against the kettle, but all it makes is a dull thud.

“I hope Pavlov could hear well,” Lily says.

“Certainly better than me,” says Noelle. She set the table earlier, but she put the knife on the left and the fork on the right and the spoon on the inside of the fork, knowing as she did so that she was making a mistake but not sure how to correct it. It doesn’t matter, she tells herself. As long as everyone has silverware. But it feels symbolic of something larger. If there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things, she can be counted on to choose the wrong way.

“Where’s Abba?” Yoni asks.

“He’ll be back soon,” Noelle says, doing her best to sound convincing.

“Where did he go?”

“Out,” she says. “To run some errands.”

“What errands?” Dov says. “Why has he been gone so long?”

“Boys, boys,” Noelle says, drawing the four of them into a hug. “So many questions.”

They eat at the same table where they ate last night, only now, with the children present, they’re flank to flank as if at a trough. Marilyn has placed a long silk runner down the length of the table, all blues and reds and purples, in the hope that something colorful might brighten her mood. One of the chandelier bulbs has gone out, and she gets on tiptoe and taps at it until it comes on again. She spins the chandelier like a roulette wheel. It’s what she used to do when the children were babies—the rotating lights mesmerized them—and when she does it now Ari snaps to attention, watching the bulbs spin and spin.

“In another life you’d have been Vanna White,” Lily says.

“Whoever that is,” says Marilyn.

“Oh, Mom, come on.”

Marilyn has seated the children strategically, adult next to child next to adult next to child, but there’s only so much strategic seating can do. At her table sit an eight-year-old, a six-year-old, a five-year-old, and two three-year-olds. A representative of every age group, like some child’s version of the UN. Though they feel at the same time like one age group: the rabble. She didn’t have enough dining room chairs to seat them all, so Clarissa removed two folding chairs from the closet, but now the boys are fighting over who gets the regular chairs and who gets the folding ones, and soon they’re negotiating over the size of the cutlery—some of them got larger forks than others—and Ari is saying he wants the teddy bear spoon, but the teddy bear spoon, Noelle informs him, is back in Israel.

“It’s not fair!” Ari says.

“It never is,” says Noelle, blowing out air in mock exasperation, though the feeling is less counterfeit than she lets on.

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