The New Yorker - 06.12.2021

THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 61

The husband explains all this to
the wife, who sits beside him but seems
not to have absorbed the same infor-
mation from the heavy book.
She nods, a sad look on her face.
So interesting, she says.
I’m not spooked! the husband says.
Daniel has never heard the term
“ghost floor.” He’d like to mention it
to Mary Jane—perhaps she’s aware—
and discuss his own ideas regarding
structural integrity, things unseen but
present, the unaddressed. He’s been
hatching a plan, he’d like to tell her,
to open the walls on the second floor
and verify what he suspects may be
balloon framing. Are the joists dowel-
pegged? Hand-hewed or band-sawed?
It’s really quite exciting—but when
he looks up from his device, his vi-
sion speckled and hazy as if he’d just
emerged from a double feature at
noon, he sees that the evening clouds

have cleared and Mary Jane has moved

to the patio; she looks to be dead-

heading the daisies.

W

here did you come from? Who

are you, even? Daniel had wanted

to ask. This soon after they eloped—1975,

and there were too many other things

going on. The bar exam. A baby. Some-

one’s campaign for local office. Besides,

it seemed to be the wrong question, or

questions, for obvious reasons. Still, at

certain moments, it felt like Mary Jane

was an introduction that had gone by

too quickly, the kind that left you pre-

tending you remembered a name even

years afterward.

She was raised in Greenville, Dela-

ware, she had told him. Her mother

and father lively retirees who played

racquet sports on weekends with a cir-

cle of friends and canoed down the

Brandywine River, loaded, to celebrate

birthdays and other special occasions:

a ritual. And as a child she’d travelled

through Oklahoma with a magician,

long story.

She had a half sister and a half brother,

and together the two made a whole sib-

ling, mercurial and far away, living with

a hippie mother in Elk, California. Only

once had she gone with her father all

that way to see them. She remembered

how they ate chocolate and walked along

the broken edge of the coast. Seals had

been promised, but the seals were under

the white-capped and furious waves; the

waves broke against the rocks where the

seals were supposed to be and then fiz-

zled out into the far ocean, the foam

drawn back as if it were a curtain on a

dark stage; she couldn’t see a thing.

Where are the seals? she’d barked at

her father and the other two, but no one

seemed to hear her. She shouted against

the whip of the wind and felt dry strands

of hair in her mouth, itchy, annoying.

No one heard her. No one ever heard

her. That’s what she remembered, she

told Daniel. And please—Mary Jane?

I’ll never forgive them.

She had asked him to call her M.J.

on their first date: at the student union,

or maybe later while they smoked cig-

arettes and stood around the quad, too

cold in the brutal wind off the lake. By

the bicycle rack she teased, Is this a

girl’s bike? She was not someone who

knew anything about flirting.

Yard sale, he said. He knew nothing

about flirting, either.

They walked along the lakefront de-

spite the cold, and he pushed his bike

as she told him how she had travelled

across Oklahoma with a magician, a

friend of the family who was really just

a creep who needed someone to saw in

half, hold the dove, and wear the out-

fit. You know, she said, the leotard, and

in the wind her long red hair blew cra-

zily around her face as if it were a thing

on its own, and he stopped and reached

out, instinct, to push it from her face

so that he could see her, and she said,

Thank you. She stopped and said, Thank

you. This part he remembers best.

T

he daisies, purchased and planted

at the height of all this, have mi-

raculously survived the winter in their

big clay pots and are now sprouting,

blooming, and dying again. It all feels

Bless Nana my grandmother for her Southern accent in English

And her Romanian accent in Yiddish that I echo still unwitting

Bless respectful misquotations innocent mistakes well meaning

That may correct scholars or governors his name not Geronimo

I was not a chief he said never was a chief but because I was

More deeply wronged than others the title was conferred on me

Berra in Hebrew means a good person in Arabic a truth-teller

Or is it a town in Ferrara or a hut dweller or Spanish berrear

In a gym in shorts Larry wearing a towel or he sat some way

They said looked like a Yogi these things fit or stick Leander

In torn sneakers so foot skin showed I stomped it like one of

The jerks Harvey Korman’s character hires in “Blazing Saddles”

Let them go says Brooks in warpaint on horseback in Yiddish

Jay Silverheels mainly played Tonto a true Mohawk an athlete

He got to say the punchline he fired me when he found out what

Kemosabe means the joke maybe obsolete but for me it plays

In the sacred field of the unknown with meanings abounding

The title was conferred on me he said and I resolved to honor it

—Robert Pinsky