At first, of course—even before the first—she hadn’t wanted to nurse at all. When Bartha had first brought it up, before Alexander was born, she had been appalled. She’d never heard of such a thing, she told him, not in normal life. “In what life, then?” he asked, amused, she knew, but she was serious—she meant she’d never known, or even known of, anyone who had breastfed a baby. “In books,” she told him, and he said, “So then!” as if this proved his point. “Not in books written now,” she said. “In old books, from a long time ago.” Bartha laughed then, and she thought that was the end of it. But he brought it up again—and again—insisting that she try it, “only try, for two weeks, no more. Then if you don’t like it, you can stop,” until, worn out, she gave in, she told him she would try. “For two weeks only,” she said grudgingly, without the slightest doubt that she would hate it.
But she loved it—oh, how she loved it! How satisfying it was to know that her body—her own body that had always seemed a thing apart from her, her true self—was so useful! How happy it made her that it, that she, could provide her baby with the very thing he needed most! Bartha as he watched her feed the baby said, “You see? This is good, yes?” but she couldn’t talk to him about it. She could hardly bear the thought that she had ever meant not to nurse her son.
When the food came, Alexander was still nursing. Esther freed one hand and picked up her fork, even though she wasn’t hungry. Bartha always noticed if she wasn’t eating, and she knew that if she didn’t at least manage to look as if she were interested in the food on her plate, he’d insist she put the baby down and “concentrate on eating.” Concentrate on eating! As if food were something to be studied, contemplated, memorized.
He and the others were concentrating very hard on their food, not only eating it but also yet again talking about it. As Esther poked her fork into a piece of chicken and stirred it into the noodles Bartha had made such a big to-do about, he was reminiscing about food he’d eaten long ago in Prague and claiming that the meal that they were having now, “while not bad—I don’t say that it’s bad,” was only an “approximation” of the wonderful meals he remembered. “Oh, is that so?” said Clara. “The way you talk sometimes, you’d think your last good meal was in 1935.”
“No, not at all. I have had many good meals in this country. Not so much in Omaha, perhaps—”
“Uh oh,” Vilmos said. “Now here it begins again.”
“I thought you liked this place,” Clara said.
“Omaha?” said Vilmos. “Or America?”
“This restaurant,” Clara said, as if she couldn’t tell that he was making fun of her.
“Oh, but I do like it,” Bartha said, and went on to explain that in spite of its shortcomings (which he then enumerated: the food itself, invariably overcooked as well as incorrectly spiced; the gaudy, inauthentic “Czech” decor; the costumes on the waitresses), it was “very nearly brilliant” in comparison with all the other restaurants in Omaha—“and in particular the steak houses for which, I am so often told, this city is so famous, and yet where one cannot find a steak so good as can be found in New York City.” And he added, slyly, “Perhaps the trouble is that they send to New York all the best steaks of Nebraska? Or”—pausing, pretending to think—“perhaps the explanation is that there is not one person here who knows how to prepare properly a steak, so that no matter how excellent the meat, it is ruined in the preparation?”
Was it possible, Esther wondered—this had never occurred to her before—that he said such things just to tease Clara?
“You can’t be saying that you believe there isn’t one good chef in Omaha!” Clara said, as he must have known she would.
“Oh, yes,” said Bartha. “Yes, indeed I am. If someone should learn such a skill, or discover in himself so great a gift, would he not upon that instant run away from here?” He said this as if he didn’t know—as if he himself had not been the one to tell Esther—how proud Clara was of having come to Omaha to live. Vilmos had told Bartha, who’d told Esther, that Clara had “run away” as soon as she was old enough to leave her family behind in the small town (the name of it would not stay put in Esther’s mind) in which she had grown up, somewhere in the middle of Nebraska. Vilmos had met her soon after, when he’d come here on a business trip, and Clara had (so Bartha joked—or Esther assumed it was a joke) “with feminine wiles arranged for him to stay forever.”
Omaha, as far as Clara was concerned, was the city. Maybe not so differently from the way she herself had grown up thinking of Manhattan, Esther thought: the place she had aspired to escape to. And like herself (like the way she used to be, before she’d found herself in Omaha), she seemed not to be aware—or not to care—that there were other cities.
About anyplace but Omaha, Clara had no curiosity. She’d never asked Esther anything about New York, and when conversation turned to California, where Vilmos had lived in a series of cities—Northern, Southern, Central, coastal and non-coastal (he’d hold up his right hand and tick off the categories on his fingers, and a wave of homesickness would sweep through Esther—not for California, a place she’d never been, or even for her childhood self, who had enjoyed thinking of all the places she had not been to yet, places she might someday go, but for her English teacher junior year, Mr. Inemer, counting on his fingers form and structure, voice, tone, meaning)—Clara expressed only suspicion and disdain. Esther had asked her once if she had ever visited the state in which Vilmas had lived for so many years before he’d met her, and Clara said, “California?” in a way that Esther understood to mean, Why would I? And Esther, sorry that she’d asked, said, “I thought maybe you’d made the trip to see Vilmos’s father.” Clara snorted. “If he wanted to see us, he would come here, the way my parents do.” As if a trip from…whatever Clara’s town was called—Long Something—was the same as a trip from Fresno, California.
Esther put down her fork and picked up her wineglass, wondering if Bartha would tell her again that she had had enough to drink. But he didn’t say anything and she took three sips in quick succession before she set down the glass. She tried to think of what the town where Clara’s parents lived, the town Clara was from, was called. Long Island? That can’t be right. And not Long Beach, either—but it was something that reminded her of beaches. Rockaway? Rock Island? No, that was from a song. The Rock Island line is a mighty fine line. Absently she hummed it under her breath. No one noticed.
The baby’s sucking had slowed down; his eyes were closed. Was he going back to sleep? She joggled him a little on her lap to perk him up and he began to nurse again in earnest. He was more like her than he was like Bartha: he too had to be reminded to “concentrate on eating.” In solidarity, she stabbed a piece of chicken and made herself put it in her mouth. She should eat something. She didn’t have to wait for Bartha to remind her.
Grand Island—it came to her unexpectedly. That was the name of Clara’s town. She almost said it out loud, almost said, An island in the middle of what? And then when Clara didn’t have an answer, she would say, So tell me—please, I’m interested—in what way is it grand?
These were the kinds of questions Clara would ask her, so why shouldn’t she?
Leah used to tell her, Don’t even try to be sarcastic. It’s not your style. Leave it to the people it comes naturally to. And what was her style, then? she wanted to know. Sincerity,