Devotion. Michelle Herman

“There is no doubt of that.” And when Clara told him this was nothing to be proud of, he said, “Oh, you are absolutely right about this too.” He was still laughing, and it dawned on Esther—and here was something else that she had never thought of before!—that arguing with Clara amused him. Perhaps it also amused Clara, who was now launching into a defense of restaurants she liked in Omaha—a list that even Esther could have reeled off by heart: Johnny’s, which was near the stockyards, and the Black Angus, and King Fong’s, downtown, where Bartha claimed he’d had the worst Chinese meal he had ever had, “in all my life, my long life, in any city, on any continent.”

      If they were not amused by this, why would they bother jumping into the same argument again and again?

      “Alas, it is hopeless, my dear,” Bartha said, sounding cheerful. “We will not agree, not ever.”

      “You are hopeless,” Clara told him. “You are impossible to please.”

      “Not at all. To please me is quite simple.”

      “Oh, yes. As long as you’re in New York. Or Prague or Budapest. Or Paris.”

      “Or Vienna,” Vilmos put in. “Ah, my friends”—he brought both hands to his chest, and in an excellent imitation of his cousin, he cried, “the sausage, sausage such as I may never hope to see again. And such beautiful homemade sauerkraut! And the bread—I weep to recall it. And now?” He thumped the tabletop. “Now I am to be satisfied with the American red frankfurter with its curlicue of yellow mustard and eight skinny limp gray strings of tinned kraut—as your vendors so charmingly call it—on a white bread roll that tastes like…ah, like—”

      “Like air,” Bartha said obligingly. “Like emptiness.”

      Clara said, “Oh, yes, that’s very funny. But the truth is you’ve been in America long enough to have grown accustomed—”

      “To your ‘hot dog’ buns? A lifetime would not be long enough for this.”

      “They’re not my hot dog buns,” Clara said. “Besides, nobody really likes them. That’s not the point of them.”

      Esther was tempted to speak up then, to ask Clara what the point was. Vilmos winked at her but she ignored him. What she really wanted to know was how it was possible to talk so much—to think so much, to care so much—about food. She could not understand how Bartha, who was so worldly, who unlike Clara had many more important things on his mind, could devote so much of his attention to what he ate and where he ate (and also when and how he ate—for he liked to have his dinner at six forty-five, with the table set correctly and with linen napkins, and he had to have his salad after, not before or with, the main course). Esther would just as soon have lived on sandwiches—tuna salad or cream cheese and grape jelly or bologna—and when she felt the need for something more substantial, with side dishes included, heated up a TV dinner. As for where and how and when, she’d be content to eat propped up in bed or sitting on the couch, with paper plates and napkins, plastic cutlery. She would be glad to give up restaurants forever if only Bartha ever took her anyplace besides a restaurant—if there were anyplace to go besides a restaurant to which the baby would also be welcome. If there were anyplace at all to go, baby or no baby.

      But with “no baby,” she thought, they would not be in Nebraska. They would still be in New York, and there would be a million places they could go.

      But with “no baby,” what would have come to pass between the two of them by now?

      She swatted this thought away. It was a question she never asked herself.

      Certainly she would never dare to ask him.

      But then there were many things she did not dare to say to him. Even at this moment, she thought, what she would have liked to say was that she saw nothing wrong with hot dog buns—or at least nothing wrong enough to talk about—and also that, to her, King Fong’s was no better or worse than the Chinese takeout she used to have at Leah’s house on Brightwater Court.

      But even if she’d dared, this would not be possible. There was no place to edge in even a single word between Bartha and Clara once they started down this road, not unless one shouted or pounded on the table, as Vilmos did when he was moved to interrupt them. And now Clara was speaking of a restaurant that Bartha hadn’t been to yet, one that she claimed was “out of the ordinary—even you would see that.” “Even I?” said Bartha. “Even I who have given up hope of having an extraordinary meal ever again? I have accepted my fate, dear Clara.” And of course Clara took umbrage at what she declared was an insult to the city of Omaha itself, “which has been so welcoming to you,” and Esther was silently astonished (in what way, welcoming?) but Bartha said only, “A city, like a gentleman, must not be insulted by an honest appraisal of its shortcomings.” “Then you will not be insulted,” Clara said, “if I tell you that you’re being a bit of an ass.” Bartha laughed. “I will try not to be.”

      Vilmos was laughing too, and looking from his cousin to his wife with such evident pleasure that just then Esther wondered if it might be for his amusement that these arguments were staged.

      Everyone was amused but her, it seemed.

      As Clara extolled the virtues of her adopted city—its friendliness, its “nice neighborhoods,” its symphony and art museum (Bartha groaned and shook his head), Esther considered Vilmos, who never felt obliged to come to the defense of the city in which he had made his home because Clara had made it hers. Bartha was quite sure, he had told Esther, that his cousin would prefer to live elsewhere, but it didn’t seem to her that he had any objection to living in Omaha. She’d never heard him say a word against it, or for that matter express any affection or nostalgia about any other place he’d lived. Certainly he didn’t long for California the way Bartha longed for New York.

      This thought was a surprise. Did Bartha long for New York? He was talking now, with what might be longing, about the restaurants he loved most there. Esther knew which ones he meant before he named them—they were little Hungarian restaurants run by families, and to get to them he had to change trains twice, then walk for what had seemed to her a long time on the one occasion she had gone with him to visit one of them.

      Alexander had slowed down again, and Esther glanced at Bartha as she rearranged the baby in her arms so that he could switch to her other breast. She was still expecting him to observe that she had hardly touched her food and to tell her to put Alexander down—she was all set to say, “I can’t now. Look, he’s nursing, can’t you see?” (and, indeed, the baby had begun to nurse again with renewed interest)—but Bartha was telling Clara, in great detail, about the food served in those little restaurants. He made the food sound a great deal nicer than what Esther could recall from her one visit (a brown heap of meat for each of them, mounds of mushy vegetables, dumplings and gravy, noodles—again noodles!—and saucers of sour cream). She’d gone with him only once because it was so hard for her to get out in the evening. She had to tell her parents it was something to do with school, that it was required (the sacred word!). Between the lying, which she wasn’t used to, and the hour-long subway ride and then the long walk at night from the subway station to a neighborhood she’d never even known existed, she was so unnerved by the time they reached the restaurant he’d chosen that it would not have been possible for her to have a pleasant evening. As it was, she had been miserable. Bartha hardly spoke to her, he was so busy chatting with the waitress and the cook, and exchanging greetings with some of the other people eating there. She’d never heard him speak in his own language before and it made her uneasy, despite (or else—but it was only later that she thought of this—because of) seeing what a pleasure it was for him: it made her wonder if the rest of the time, forced to use another language that was not his own with students and with friends and neighbors—with her—he was less than happy. And the food, which Bartha told her was “exactly” the food of his youth, was too heavy and too rich for her—she ate almost none of it.

      But what made her most miserable was the lie she had told. She could not stop thinking about it; she could not stop worrying about getting caught in it. How would her father punish her