Other People's Lives by Johanna Kaplan Page B

standing close to the stove but was sitting on a faded upholstered wing chair that she had pulled up to the table; to Louise she seemed suddenly faded, too. Her hair was disheveled, her shoulders were hunched, and the yellowish, lined raincoat that she always wore was half open as if she were unaware of the cold. Her arms were spread out on the table, but the heavy canvas sandwich bag still hung from one of her wrists. She seemed caught in an odd, unconscious oblivion: her face and body drained, her eyes far away. Had she sat this way once at her cousin Klaus’? When she was very skinny? Sleet began hitting the wide, unshaded windows and one of Matthew’s Magic Markers fell; the sounds were simultaneous.
    â€œI love fireplaces,” Julie said. “I really love them. I mean the real kind—with a fire in it, like the one we had in the country. It was so beautiful—I used to sit there in front of it, watching it for hours and hours. You know what I just flashed to? The pictures in children’s books! I used to just stare and stare at the fire and sort of turn the pages in the books and get so high that I would really get into those pictures. I mean really into them, like I was inside of them. They were very stoned.”
    How do you like to go up in a swing,
    Up in the air so blue?
    Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
    Ever a child can do!
    It was what Louise’s mother had read to her—and read very quickly, in obvious annoyance. Her accent had been more noticeable even to Louise, and seemed so especially now in remembering it: her fair-skinned, distant mother in a blue-green suit, sitting on a park bench in the playground, with one hand rapidly turning pages, with the other shielding her eyes—not from the sun, but from the sight of the sandbox, which offended her. The noises offended her, too: the gossiping women, the crying children, the planes overhead, the trains underneath.
    â€œWe had for children terrible books,” Maria said. “Always ugly, always punishings. Struwwelpeter! Max and Moritz! Only bad children and only terrible things to happen to them. Fairy tales, too. Not like here—Grimm stories they make very different in America. I know— from reading them to Matthew. Do you remember, Matthew? When I read to you those witches stories? No? I think probably you’re only hungry, that’s maybe the trouble. Yes, baby? What do you think?”
    â€œMaria, guess who that was! It was Leon!” said Rebecca, pushing through the swinging door with the force of her clothes and her voice. “I told him you were here and he sends his love and I told him how amazing it was that you’re here because I was just thinking of calling you this morning because of Elliot. And I said, ‘See! You can never tell what’ll happen!’ but he wasn’t surprised at all because I can always tell. And we’re so proud of Elliot! I said, ‘Call up Elliot right now and tell him that Maria will be glad to tell him everything that he needs to know.’ Because I know you would, I don’t even have to ask you, and anyway you’re exactly the right person.”
    Maria was unwrapping the sandwiches. She raised her head and said, “Rebecca, this is Julie Dresner and this is Louise Weil. But I think I don’t know who is Elliot.”
    â€œMaria! You know Elliot—my wonderful, brilliant nephew—really he’s Leon’s nephew, and we’re so proud of him and we always were, even when his mother used to complain that he was too quiet and he wouldn’t talk to her, and who could blame him! I wouldn’t talk to her, either, she never shuts up, she’s one of those really over-protective, you know what I mean— smothering mothers, so naturally he had to retreat into his books and his studies, and now even she has to admit that she’s proud of him for what he got. But we’re even more proud of him because not