Cathleen Schine - They May Not Mean To, But They Do

“I can see all the flowering trees. It’s really pretty.”

“Yes. You’re in Grandpa’s seat.”

Oh god. How awkward. “Oh. Right,” he said. “Good seat to be in.”

His grandmother smiled. “You’re a fine person, Ben.”

“Like Grandpa.”

“He was all right,” said Grandma Joy. “Up to a point.”

She continued to smile, reaching behind her to grab a package of Oreos. She funneled several cookies into her hand.

“Enjoy,” she said absently, rattling the package at Ben.

She could remember so clearly the first time Ben stayed at her apartment. He had been eighteen months old, jabbering quite coherently, with the bottle hanging from the side of his mouth like a cigar. She and Aaron had set up the old crib, a beautiful, highly decorated wooden crib that had originally been Aaron’s, then taken it apart again the minute Molly saw it.

“The spokes are too far apart!” she said. “Are you trying to kill him? He could get his head caught. You put us in this? Unbelievable.”

So they had moved the beautiful crib from the 1920s back into the cedar closet and bought an ugly blue nylon playpen that could double as a crib. Ben ended up sleeping in their bed, anyway, whenever he stayed with them. Joy could hear his small, even breath; she could smell the warm, bathed skin; she could see his eyelids flutter, his fingers clutch his bear. When she looked at him now, a skinny young man who needed a shave, he was the same to her, her first grandchild.

In the morning, Joy put some sort of clothes on so she wouldn’t scare the horses, then staggered weakly to the kitchen to make Ben his breakfast. Standing over the stove to stir the Cream of Wheat, she eliminated the lumps in the cereal with solemn determination. She put the two bowls of cereal on the kitchen table with two spoons and two cheerful cloth napkins. She put the kettle on and forgot it until its whistle startled her and woke Ben.

“You’re the best,” he said.

She could feel him watch as she shoveled sugar into her Cream of Wheat.

“Grandma, are you okay with sugar?” he said the first morning. “I thought…”

“Oh yes,” she said. And to his credit he dropped the subject. He must have gotten that from his father, discretion. Certainly not from his mother. Joy missed his father. Doug Harkavy was such a nice man. Molly was lucky to have married him. Freddie was wonderful, too, of course. But what was the point? Well, the world was upside down, that’s all.

“How is your father, Ben?”

“He’s great. He has a grandchild. Well, she does, so he does. It’s cute, too.”

When Molly had announced she was leaving her husband for Freddie, a woman named Freddie, Joy had not fainted, though her heart was pounding and the room began to darken. She had smiled and said she wanted Molly to be happy, to be herself, and it was true, but she’d been thinking, What about Ben? He might be shunned by other children, he might be stunted in some Freudian path to maturity. She had worried, Aaron had worried, and then it turned out there was nothing to worry about, after all. Ben’s friends — well, it was a different generation, wasn’t it? — seemed to take the situation in stride. Ben was miserable about the divorce, but he didn’t seem unduly upset about his mother and Freddie. Of course, he was in college. And this is New York City, anything goes, she had said to Aaron. All that worrying for nothing. It had been a great strain, worrying so much and hiding it from Molly.

“Worrying is inefficient,” she said to Ben, smiling at him. “Look at you. You’re a fine person, Ben.”

Ben looked surprised. “Do you worry about me?”

“Not anymore.”

“I worry about me. I wish I knew what I really wanted to do.”

“Don’t you want to go to law school?”

“Sort of. It seems interesting. But what if I have to get a job doing, like, contract law or something? I wish I were, I don’t know, passionate about something.”

He gazed at her so confidingly. He was very good-looking, and when his eyes shone with emotion like this, he was irresistible. She thought of saying, Passion is for the bedroom! Get a job! Get a job with health insurance! That’s all that matters! Don’t be like your grandfather, always looking to be happy in his work, excited, creative (English translation: broke). Independence is overrated. It leads to dependence. Get a job in a nice steady corporation and keep your head down, and do your dreaming on the weekends and pay your bills.

Of course there were no nice steady corporations anymore, not the way there used to be. And Aaron’s problem had not been independence, it had been entitlement. And why shouldn’t Ben try to find something he loved doing? He was young and bright and earnest.

“You’ll find what you want,” she said. “It may not be what you think it will, it may find you when you least expect it, it might even be law school. And if you’re drifting, you might just drift into the right thing. Or if it’s the wrong thing, you’ll figure out how to turn it into the right thing. Sometimes you have to create your passion. I have great confidence in you. You’re young. You have time. You’re a fine person, Ben.”

He sighed and finished his Cream of Wheat. Then he said, “Thank you.” He smiled and got up and kissed her cheek and put his bowl in the sink. It amused her to see that he did not put it in the dishwasher or even rinse it, that he just left it there. “Thank you, Grandma,” he said again. “You’ve always helped me a lot, you know that?”

No, she didn’t, but she was extremely happy to hear it now when she felt she was about as useful as one sock.

“You have time,” she said again.

They went for a walk every day and sat on the same bench in Central Park watching the dogs parade by. They ate lunch in the coffee shop, and when Ben wasn’t seeing his old friends, they ate dinner there, too. They bumped into Karl twice, but they didn’t sit with him.

“He was Grandpa’s friend in the park.”

“Yeah?”

Ben didn’t seem interested and Joy had no desire to tell him more. There was nothing to tell, anyway.

She was none too steady on the walks back and forth to the coffee shop. Sometimes her feet just sort of slid forward instead of lifting up and moving the way feet are meant to do.

“I’m shuffling,” she said. “I’m going to shuffle right onto my face if I’m not careful.”

“You can lean on me,” said Ben.

That made Joy smile. She remembered holding his little hand to cross the street, lifting him onto the bus’s high step. He used to wear tiny navy-blue sneakers and overalls.

“Yes,” she said. “All right, I will.”

His arm was wiry and strong. He slowed his step and shortened his long stride.

Ben stayed for six nights before he heard about another job in New Orleans and decided to sleep on a friend’s couch down there until he could get his apartment back. But before he left, he asked his grandmother for a favor.

“It’s kind of private,” he said.

“Do you need money, sweetheart? Of course you do. Here’s a twenty. No, that’s not enough. Here, I’ve got eighty bucks.”

Why is my grandmother carrying a purse around her own house? Ben wondered. He knew that if he asked her she would tell him a long complicated story that would make no sense to him, so he didn’t ask her. But he put his hand out to stop her rummaging in the big shoulder bag.

“No, Grandma, no. It’s not money. And you gave me a really generous Christmas present. Really.”

She’d had to be creative at Christmas. So much had been going on. There was no way she could have gotten out to go Christmas shopping. A card with nice crisp bills for Ben had done nicely, five twenty-dollar bills. She thought of the two beautiful teacups (they’d been her mother’s, just a small chip on one, and she had three more) she’d given Molly and Freddie, plus an opal and silver ring she’d found that Molly had liked as a child, she told them they could share it, there had to be some advantage to having your daughter marry another woman. But money had been fine for Ben.