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She couldn’t say that about herself. She loved words. She loved composing sentences. She felt happier writing, no matter how tedious the subject matter was, than she did doing anything else. But she still had a lot of room left for doubts, worries, anxieties and her three children. She’d been an overly concerned mother. She often told her son that he’d have been much better off with less attention from her when he was small. It used to make him laugh. But she meant it. No one needed a mother who was always looking at you. Who hovered and inquired and discussed and listened. Relentlessly. It was entirely unhelpful.

  ‘“Do you know how lucky you are to have him?” woman after woman had said about Garth, to Ruth. “Do you really know how lucky you are?” a woman at a cocktail party kept repeating to Ruth recently. The repetition had made Ruth feel as though she was visibly, toxically and terminally flawed. As though she was a burden, if not an outright charity case. No one as far as she knew had ever said to Garth that he was lucky to have her. She certainly felt lucky to have Garth. He was very smart and very kind. And very funny. Maybe she was lucky to have anyone. She’d felt, as a teenager, that she never would. It was funny how those things never left you. How the fat teenager never totally disappeared. Garth often told her how lucky he was to have her. She was always grateful to him for feeling that way.

  Garth would probably be away for six months. It would be the longest time they’d spent apart, in their twenty-five years together. Garth usually quelled Ruth’s anxiety. He saw most possibilities and occurrences as full of promise. Although he’d only been gone for a week, it had seemed like a very long week to Ruth. She couldn’t even really talk to him on the phone. Garth was not good on the phone. He didn’t like phones. In person Garth was loquacious, articulate, exuberant and affectionate. On the phone he turned into someone who resembled an accountant or an insurance clerk. A friendly accountant or clerk. He spoke to everyone in the same cheerful, brisk manner. Including Ruth. Garth sounded pleased to hear from the caller and eager to get off the line. To everyone. Ruth had learned long ago that it was not much use expecting to be able to discuss her work or the kids or her father or anything of any length over the phone with Garth. She missed Garth.

  ‘I know he’s not in the country,’ Ruth said to Sonia. She paused. ‘I’m trying to restrain myself from ringing him every five minutes,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ said Sonia.

  ‘I’m not succeeding,’ said Ruth. ‘Yesterday I called him seven times. It’s okay,’ Ruth said before Sonia could say anything, ‘I couldn’t get through. I got the answering machine each time. I didn’t leave a message.’

  Ruth felt embarrassed. She decided to put some distance between herself and the conversation about the multiple calls to Garth. She went to the bathroom.

  ‘Shall I call you if I make any firm arrangements for a women’s group?’ Ruth said to Sonia as they were leaving Coco’s.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Sonia.

  Ruth strode along Broome Street. She loved walking. She walked everywhere she could. Walking gave her time to think. Gave her a peacefulness. ‘Have a good day asshole,’ a woman on the corner of Mercer Street shouted at a man who’d nearly knocked her over in his haste to grab a cab. ‘This city is insane, crazy, loco,’ the woman shouted at no one in particular.

  Ruth felt happy. It was still a relief to hear someone complaining about New York again. Complaining about the city used to be almost mandatory for New Yorkers. Everyone complained. Including Ruth. She complained about the noise, the traffic, the cost, the rush, the stress. Complaints about the city came to a standstill on September 11, 2001. Complaints disappeared. In the days after September 11 people in the streets looked heartbroken. You could see what people were feeling. You could see who they were under the masks that mask people from each other. It was almost shocking to see what person after person was feeling. The anonymity and invisibility of those around you was removed. You could see beyond the lipstick, the business suit, the briefcase, the jeans or the Chanel coat. You could see anguish on people’s faces. You could see tenderness. You could see vulnerability. You could see love. You could see who people were.

  Who people were had preoccupied Ruth for a large part of her life. ‘You’ll never know what people are capable of,’ her mother Rooshka Rothwax used to say to her over and over again. Rooshka and Ruth’s father, Edek, had spent five years imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto, in Poland, before being transported to Auschwitz. Ruth knew that her mother really knew what people were capable of. Really knew who people were.

  Business had slowed down dramatically for Rothwax Correspondence in the period immediately after September 11. It stayed slow for weeks. Months really. It seemed to Ruth that people were expressing themselves more. By themselves. They appeared to be more in touch with their feelings. It seemed that post September 11 people had a greater need to be connected more directly. To communicate in their own words. Not hers. Heads of corporations or small businesses, housewives, economists, bankers, forklift drivers, doctors, often people who’d never read a poem in their lives, were writing poetry. And their own letters. Words, it seemed to Ruth, had become more personal. Words had always been personal for Ruth. And essential. If you grew up with parents who didn’t speak much English, you understood that the right word was critical.

  Ruth also thought that after September 11 many issues that had previously seemed meaningful had become meaningless. Small and large irritations had seemed of less consequence. Almost inconsequential. Hostility, antagonism, animosity, antipathy and impatience were visibly diminished. Neighbours spoke. Colleagues cared. Families appeared to unite. It didn’t last. After three or four months business picked up. Rothwax Correspondence was as busy as ever. Ruth had to compose many September 11 letters. Clients wanted references to the tragedy in a large number of business and personal letters. Other things also went back to normal. Or possibly deteriorated. Three years after September 11, old prejudices were even more entrenched. Old hatreds enhanced and amplified. And intimacy between people seemed as distant and absent as it had ever been.

  Ruth’s intimacy with her father had increased. Eighty-seven-year-old Edek Rothwax had moved to New York from Melbourne, Australia, five months ago. He’d wanted to move. He’d wanted to live in New York. He wanted to be closer to Ruth. She’d said to him that it wouldn’t be easy. That he’d be lonely in New York. That he wouldn’t have his friends around him. ‘I got no friends,’ he’d replied. ‘Who do I see?’ Ruth had listed several people. ‘These are not friends,’ Edek had said. ‘These are people what I play cards with.’

  ‘I am still pretty strong,’ Edek said. ‘I can help you in the business. I can still carry parcels and I can order stuff what you need. I can make things easier for you.’ Ruth’s chest had constricted at the thought of Edek making life easier for her.

  She had been right to worry about Edek making her life easier. Edek was causing disarray, if not mayhem, in the office. He had put himself in charge of what he called ‘The Stockings Department’. Ruth had explained to him that while he may be ordering stock and doing the stocking, he couldn’t really call it the Stockings Department because that suggested stockings. ‘That’s what I will be doing,’ he had replied. ‘Doing the stockings.’ Ruth had given up. Edek was unstoppable. He came to the office every day. Before Ruth. And before Max, the thirty-two-year-old woman who had worked for Ruth for almost eleven years.

  Edek over-ordered everything. He ordered twelve cartons of paper for the laser printer. There were eight reams of paper in each carton. And five hundred sheets of paper in each ream. That added up to forty-eight thousand sheets of paper. A week later he ordered another twelve cartons. Rothwax Correspondence didn’t need that much paper. They printed only two copies of each letter, and thirty per cent of the letters were written by hand. Tara McGann, a PhD student at Columbia University, worked in the office at night handwriting the letters. She was very good. And very accurate. She never misplaced or mistakenly altered a word. Ruth hoped that Tara
McGann’s PhD would take several more years.

  Edek ordered mainly from catalogues. He loved ordering. He bought wire-bound notebooks. Hundreds of them. ‘I do see you do write down the points what you want to make in such notebooks all of the time,’ he had said when Ruth questioned him. She didn’t want to point out that she only used the wire-bound notebooks to make notes when she was not in the office. In the office she used legal pads. White legal pads. Rothwax Correspondence would have to be a multinational corporation in order to need that number of wire-bound notebooks. And the wire-bound notebooks all had yellow pages. Ruth hated writing on yellow paper.

  Ruth narrowly avoided Edek buying custom-imprinted pens for Rothwax Correspondence. He’d come into her office to ask her what she thought would be the best wording to put on the pens. ‘Rothwax Correspondence for Every Person’s Letters’ was Edek’s suggestion. ‘They would be very good for business in my opinion,’ he had said and looked hurt when Ruth firmly said, ‘No, they wouldn’t.’ Edek recovered from this within a few days. And went back to ordering. He ordered absurd things. He ordered a self-navigating sweeper/vacuum cleaner. You pushed one button and it propelled itself around the floor.

  ‘We’ve only got carpet in one room. And that’s the storeroom,’ Ruth had said.

  ‘But this machine does save you a lot of time,’ Edek had answered. ‘Nobody does have to push it. It does move by itself. This machine does know when it has finished the room.’ The manufacturers of the self-propelled sweeper/vacuum cleaner said, on the box, that their product scooped debris better than a traditional sweeper. Ruth wondered if by traditional sweeper they meant a broom. Edek liked to put the self-navigating sweeper/vacuum on several times a day. Ruth hated the sound it made as it swept and vacuumed the storeroom.

  Edek loved to be helpful. In his desire to contribute to the wellbeing and efficiency of Rothwax Correspondence he rearranged things. He plugged the fax machine into the company’s main phone line. The resulting confusion lasted almost two days, the first time he did it. He unplugged the surge bars that protected two of their computers. He rearranged several filing drawers and, among other things, erased a slew of messages from the answering machine. He interrupted Ruth, often. Yesterday Edek had asked her if they had run out of staples yet, just as she had thought of a good line for the greeting card line she had just branched out into. She didn’t want to tell Edek that they had enough staples to staple every one of the forty-eight thousand Hewlett Packard laser jet pages he’d bought to the other forty-eight thousand Hewlett Packard laser jet pages she knew would be arriving any minute.

  ‘No, we don’t need any staples yet,’ she’d said. The line she had in her head evaporated. It was to have gone after the line, ‘Congratulations. Ditching him is so much better than ditching yourself.’

  This was to go into a greeting card subcategory Ruth had called Women. It was part of a much larger category she called Relationships, which also had subcategories called Big Moves, Think Twice and Good Moves. And sub-subcategories called Marriage, Divorce, The Boss, The Colleague, The Partner, The Job, The Decision, Consequences, The Relatives, Pets, Neighbours and Decisions.

  Her father interrupting her train of thought was not one of the most worrying aspects of the addition of Edek Rothwax to the offices of Rothwax Correspondence. One day Ruth had made the mistake of asking Edek to deliver a batch of letters to one of her very wealthy clients. ‘Is the boss in?’ Edek had asked the boss’s assistant when he’d arrived with the letters. ‘I am Ruthie Rothwax’s father,’ he’d added. ‘I am Ruthie Rothwax’s father,’ Edek had said again when the client himself came out of his office.

  After chatting for a minute or two, Edek asked the client, Mr Bregman of Bregman Capital Ventures, if he’d ever been to Israel. Mr Bregman said no. Edek then explained that most Australian Jews had visited Israel. Edek had explained, and not succinctly, how Australians gave more money per capita to Israel than Jews in any other country. And that a very large percentage of Australian Jews had visited Israel. And only a very small percentage of American Jews had ever been there. ‘I think that all Jews have big responsibility to visit Israel’ had been Edek’s closing statement. Ruth had heard all of this from Mr Bregman’s assistant, who had called to say the letters had been delivered. Ruth was surprised at the call. Few clients called to acknowledge the delivery of letters. Certainly not Mr Bregman.

  ‘Did your father deliver them?’ Mr Bregman’s assistant asked Ruth.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Oh good,’ the assistant said. ‘We thought he might have been an impostor.’ Then Ruth had heard the rest of the details.

  ‘I’ll lose him as a client,’ Ruth said to Edek when Edek returned to the office. ‘And we’re not trying to change the world.’

  ‘What are we doing?’ Edek said.

  ‘We’re making a living,’ Ruth said. ‘We’re earning money.’

  ‘We got already enough money,’ Edek replied.

  Ruth didn’t want to argue about that. She didn’t want to point out that she had supported him for years. Support that was much more expensive now that he lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Second Avenue in New York City than it had been in Melbourne. Part of her thought that Edek was right. She probably did have enough money. She had enough money to own a large loft in SoHo and a beach house. She had enough money to buy all the books she wanted and to go to the theatre as often as she liked, and to travel.

  ‘I’ll lose him as a client,’ she said, again, to her father.

  ‘Big deal,’ Edek had answered.

  Ruth wished she could find an interest for Edek if not a hobby. Something to occupy some of his time. But he’d never really had any hobbies. None at all. Unless you included eating. Ruth didn’t think eating qualified as a hobby.

  Her father did enjoy a game of gin rummy. She had suggested that he join a Jewish senior citizens’ organisation. ‘What for? To play once in a while a game of cards with some alte kackes like me? It’s better that I help you out,’ he’d said. ‘That way I can be of help to you,’ he’d added, in case she hadn’t quite understood.

  Ruth took a deep breath. She was almost at the office. She was sure her father would already be there and possibly already enquiring about lunch. During the morning Edek would periodically ask what time was lunch. Ruth explained to him, over and over again, that Rothwax Correspondence was not like a school or a factory, where lunch hours could be fixed. They had to be flexible. They ate their lunch whenever they felt hungry and when it was convenient.

  Edek then began asking Max and Ruth what they were going to have for lunch. He would start asking this question at about ten a.m. No one else in the office was thinking about lunch at ten a.m. Possibly, no one else in Manhattan was thinking about lunch at ten a.m. Edek liked to get the lunches. Max, who usually ordered in, was quite happy for Edek to get her lunch. It gave her greater choice. She could now get food from Whole Foods or the Balthazar Bakery or even Olivier’s Asian Rice Bar, which was at least ten blocks away.

  Edek was prepared to walk anywhere or catch a cab to get lunch. In order to keep hot food hot, he would get a cab back even if the office was close. He liked to get lasagna or spaghetti bolognese or macaroni and cheese from a deli on Duane Street for himself. And this way, he could fill the container himself and get exactly as much as he wanted. ‘I did eat too much lasagna,’ or spaghetti or ravioli, he would announce to Ruth, holding his stomach when he finished his lunch. ‘But it was very good,’ he would add before swallowing several Tums or Rolaids.

  When Ruth arrived at work in the morning she would often find Edek sitting in her office looking through files. Or talking to Max. Edek would be giving Max advice. Advice about life or love, or apartments or the subway. He would tell her about his life while she looked transfixed and ignored incoming phone calls. As soon as he saw Ruth, Edek would jump up and leave. He would run off with the same short, stubby, swift little steps he’d run with all his life. He would disappear into the
storeroom. Or the bathroom, or the kitchen area. ‘I was just finishing,’ he would say as he fled. ‘I don’t want to be a bother,’ he’d add. ‘Your father is wonderful,’ Max said, several times a day.

  If only Ruth didn’t need Max in the office, Max would be a perfect companion for Edek. They could talk all day. Max loved to talk. Max could be very longwinded about even the simplest things. For years Ruth had been telling Max to edit. ‘Edit, Max, edit,’ Ruth would say as Max used dozens too many words to explain what she was saying. ‘I’ll only be a minute,’ Max would say when she interrupted Ruth. ‘I’ll only be a minute because I have to call Mr X back and get the accounts out before the post office closes.’ Or because the locksmith was coming or the exterminator or the window cleaner. Edek didn’t think Max used too many words. He listened to all of Max’s words and then offered up his own.

  Ruth wished Edek would meet a nice woman. Someone Jewish, maybe someone who spoke Yiddish, and, possibly, Polish. Ruth wasn’t expecting Edek to meet the love of his life. He’d done that. He’d loved Rooshka dearly. For so long. Ruth just wished her father could find a companion. Someone to go to the movies with. Someone to do things with. Someone to keep him company during the day. If she could find someone to keep her father occupied during the day, her own days would be more orderly.

  But Edek wasn’t interested. ‘I got plenty of company,’ he’d said several times. ‘I got you, that’s the main thing, and I got Gut.’ He always pronounced Garth ‘Gut’. ‘And I got Zelda and Zachary and Kate which are very good grandchildren to me. Not many people does have such good grandchildren,’ he added. ‘I got plenty of company. You do not have to worry about me. I am one hundred per cent okay. I should worry about you. You do work too much. And I am very happy that I can help you with this work.’

  Ruth had felt flat. But she couldn’t bring herself to puncture Edek’s notion of his contribution to Rothwax Correspondence. When he told her he’d found manila folders or cardboard rolls on special, she just looked pleased. Or what she hoped passed for pleased. Rothwax Correspondence never used cardboard rolls. Ruth hoped they weren’t very large. She told Max to tell the people who delivered them to take them straight to the basement. Ruth had had to start using the two hundred and fifty square feet of basement space that came with her office. She’d never used it before.