They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel by Cathleen Schine Page A

“Sometimes they get away.”
    Joy helped him sit on his chair. He threw her a kiss, too. “Tough to be an old Jew,” he said.
    “I’m Jewish,” Cora said.
    Her sister rolled her eyes.
    Cora showed Joy a photo of a man wearing a woman’s bathing suit.
    “That’s my father,” Joy said.
    “Why did he wear a girl’s bathing suit?”
    “All the men did.”
    “There’s a girl in my class who used to be a boy. But I’ve never seen her in a bathing suit.”
    “Dear god.”
    “Sometimes people get born in the wrong bodies,” Ruby explained to her grandmother.
    Joy checked to see if Aaron had been following this, but he appeared to be, mercifully, asleep.
    After a while, Cora began her ritual search for spare change, running her small fingers beneath the seat cushions of the sofa. Mostly she encountered grit, but she did come across a few bobby pins. Beneath the cushion of a chair, she discovered a clear plastic bean with a tiny wire. She was so disgusted when she realized that it was her grandfather’s hearing aid that she put it back. She moved onto the floor and lifted the sofa’s skirt. There, among the dust balls, she saw a ballpoint pen she could not reach.
    She moved on to the ashtrays.
    “What are ashtrays for?” she said.
    Ruby looked at her incredulously. “For ashes.”
    “For dead people in India?”
    “You girls are very odd,” Joy said.
    “For ashes from cigarettes. And cigars. And pipes,” Ruby said. “Don’t be so stupid, Cora.”
    “But nobody smokes cigarettes or cigars or pipes.”
    “Well, they used to.”
    “Don’t call your sister stupid,” Joy said. “How would she know that? How do you know that?”
    “Hasn’t she ever seen a movie?” Ruby said, turning back to a black-and-white photo of her father in the bath as an infant.
    But Cora was no longer interested in the conversation. The heavy blown-glass ashtray in the front hall that was full of keys and paper clips was too high up and too heavy for her to lift with any confidence, so she stood on tiptoe and scrabbled through the loose keys and stamps and sample tubes of sunscreen until her fingers felt the cool of silver coins, quarters, quite a few this time. She sat down on the floor and counted them, piling them in towers of four. Nine quarters and then, in a small dish on the dresser in the bedroom, four rather sticky pennies. Her grandmother gave her an eyeglass case with a snap to use as a wallet.
    Back in the living room, clutching her eyeglass-case purse, she approached her grandfather in his red chair that looked like a Chinese throne, or what she imagined a Chinese throne looked like after she once heard her grandmother say, “Just sit in it and stop complaining. It’s an antique. From China.”
    Her grandfather looked uncomfortable. He shifted his weight back and forth.
    “Grandpa, want to see my money?”
    He gave a short laugh. “You rob a bank?”
    “I discovered it.”
    She unsnapped the eyeglass case.
    “Whatcha got there? New glasses?” he said.
    She thought he was playing with her. She took out two of the sticky pennies and held them over her eyes, the case safely clutched in her armpit.
    “Don’t do that,” her mother said sharply. She had appeared suddenly, the way she often did. “Stop.”
    “Why?” Cora put the pennies back, her lower lip protruding, sullen. “I was just fooling around.”
    “Because the Greeks put pennies on dead people’s eyes,” Ruby said. “To pay the ferryman.”
    “Coco,” Joy said to her daughter-in-law, “your children know far too much about death rituals.”
    Cora sat on Ruby’s lap. “But, Ruby, I’m not Greek,” she said. “And I’m not dead.”
    “ Kaynahora ,” Ruby said, looking up from a picture of a skinny elderly couple inside an old-fashioned grocery store. “That means you shouldn’t get the evil eye.”
    “In Greek?”
    Now their mother laughed, said, “You two. Honestly,” and returned to the kitchen.
    “So, Grandpa, you want to