said. "It's just simpler. Who needs the fuss?"
"But sometimes I forget how reassuring and conjoining a meal with friends can be, especially at a time like this."
Ira had to think about the way she'd used "conjoining." It sounded New Age-y and Amish, both.
"But Mike and Kate run that kind of home," she went on. "It's all warmth and good-heartedness."
Ira thought about this. What other kind of home was there to run, if you were going to bother? Hard, cold, and mean: that had been his home with Marilyn, at the end. It was like those experimental monkeys with the wire-monkey moms. What did the baby monkeys know? The wire mother was all they had, all they knew in their hearts, and so they clung to it, even if it was only a coat hanger.
Mom
. So much easier to carve the word into your arm. As a child, for a fifth-grade science project, in the basement of his house he'd tried to reproduce Konrad Lorenz's imprinting experiment with baby ducks. But he had screwed up the incubation lights and cooked the ducks right in their eggs, stinking up the basement so much that his mother had screamed at him for days. Which was a science lesson of some sort—the emotional limits of the
Homo sapiens
working Jewish mother—but it was soft science, and therefore less impressive.
"What kind of home do
you
run?" he asked.
"Home? Yeah, I mean to get to one of those. Right now, actually, I'm talking to you from a pup tent."
Oh, she was a funny one. Perhaps they would laugh and laugh their way into the sunset. "I
love
pup tents," he said. What was a pup tent, exactly? He'd forgotten.
"Actually, I have a teenage son, so I have no idea what kind of home I have anymore. Once you have a teenager, everything changes."
Now there was silence. He couldn't imagine Bekka as a teenager. Or, rather, he could, sort of, since she often acted like one already, full of rage at the second-rate servants whom life had hired to take and bring her order.
"Well, would you like to meet for a drink?" Zora asked finally, as if she had asked it many times before, her tone a mingling of weariness and the cheery pseudo-professionalism of someone in the dully familiar position of being single and dating.
"Yes," Ira said. "That's exactly why I called."
"you can't imagine the daily drudgery of routine pediatrics," Zora said, not touching her wine. "Ear infection, ear infection, ear infection. Wope. Here's an exciting one: juvenile-onset diabetes. Day after day, you have to look into the parents' eyes and repeat the same exciting thing—'There are a lot of viruses going around.' I thought about going into pediatric oncology, because when I asked other doctors why they'd gone into such a depressing field they all said, 'Because the
kids
don't get depressed.' That seemed interesting to me. And hopeful. But then when I asked doctors in the same field why they were retiring early they said they were sick of seeing kids die. The kids don't get depressed, they just die! These were my choices in med school. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of art classes and did sculpture, which I still do a little to keep those creative juices flowing! But what I would really like to do now is write children's books. I look at some of those books out in the waiting room and I want to throw them in the fish tank. I think, I could do better than that. I started one about a hedgehog."
"Now, what's a hedgehog, exactly?" Ira was eyeing her full glass and his own empty one. "I get them mixed up with groundhogs and gophers."
"They're—well, what does it matter, if they're all wearing little polka-dot clothes, vests and hats and things?" she said irritably.
"I suppose," he said, now a little frightened. What was wrong with her? He did not like stressful moments in restaurants. They caused his mind to wander strangely to random thoughts, like "Why are these things called
napkins
rather than
lapkins
?" He tried to focus on the visuals, on her pumpkin-colored silk blouse, which he hesitated to
"But sometimes I forget how reassuring and conjoining a meal with friends can be, especially at a time like this."
Ira had to think about the way she'd used "conjoining." It sounded New Age-y and Amish, both.
"But Mike and Kate run that kind of home," she went on. "It's all warmth and good-heartedness."
Ira thought about this. What other kind of home was there to run, if you were going to bother? Hard, cold, and mean: that had been his home with Marilyn, at the end. It was like those experimental monkeys with the wire-monkey moms. What did the baby monkeys know? The wire mother was all they had, all they knew in their hearts, and so they clung to it, even if it was only a coat hanger.
Mom
. So much easier to carve the word into your arm. As a child, for a fifth-grade science project, in the basement of his house he'd tried to reproduce Konrad Lorenz's imprinting experiment with baby ducks. But he had screwed up the incubation lights and cooked the ducks right in their eggs, stinking up the basement so much that his mother had screamed at him for days. Which was a science lesson of some sort—the emotional limits of the
Homo sapiens
working Jewish mother—but it was soft science, and therefore less impressive.
"What kind of home do
you
run?" he asked.
"Home? Yeah, I mean to get to one of those. Right now, actually, I'm talking to you from a pup tent."
Oh, she was a funny one. Perhaps they would laugh and laugh their way into the sunset. "I
love
pup tents," he said. What was a pup tent, exactly? He'd forgotten.
"Actually, I have a teenage son, so I have no idea what kind of home I have anymore. Once you have a teenager, everything changes."
Now there was silence. He couldn't imagine Bekka as a teenager. Or, rather, he could, sort of, since she often acted like one already, full of rage at the second-rate servants whom life had hired to take and bring her order.
"Well, would you like to meet for a drink?" Zora asked finally, as if she had asked it many times before, her tone a mingling of weariness and the cheery pseudo-professionalism of someone in the dully familiar position of being single and dating.
"Yes," Ira said. "That's exactly why I called."
"you can't imagine the daily drudgery of routine pediatrics," Zora said, not touching her wine. "Ear infection, ear infection, ear infection. Wope. Here's an exciting one: juvenile-onset diabetes. Day after day, you have to look into the parents' eyes and repeat the same exciting thing—'There are a lot of viruses going around.' I thought about going into pediatric oncology, because when I asked other doctors why they'd gone into such a depressing field they all said, 'Because the
kids
don't get depressed.' That seemed interesting to me. And hopeful. But then when I asked doctors in the same field why they were retiring early they said they were sick of seeing kids die. The kids don't get depressed, they just die! These were my choices in med school. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of art classes and did sculpture, which I still do a little to keep those creative juices flowing! But what I would really like to do now is write children's books. I look at some of those books out in the waiting room and I want to throw them in the fish tank. I think, I could do better than that. I started one about a hedgehog."
"Now, what's a hedgehog, exactly?" Ira was eyeing her full glass and his own empty one. "I get them mixed up with groundhogs and gophers."
"They're—well, what does it matter, if they're all wearing little polka-dot clothes, vests and hats and things?" she said irritably.
"I suppose," he said, now a little frightened. What was wrong with her? He did not like stressful moments in restaurants. They caused his mind to wander strangely to random thoughts, like "Why are these things called
napkins
rather than
lapkins
?" He tried to focus on the visuals, on her pumpkin-colored silk blouse, which he hesitated to
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