Good Harbor

“Call me?” asked Joyce.

In the car, Joyce switched off the radio. She felt like a rat about the way she’d made fun of her own book. It’s not a bad book, she thought. It’s pretty good, actually. “Magnolia would spit on me,” Joyce muttered, glancing at herself in the rearview mirror. “And she’d be right.”

Alice was a wonderful woman, a sweet person, but no great beauty. Her skin was leathery from all the years of working in her father’s landscaping business. What were the odds of her finding a new love?

Joyce recognized the fantasy, though. After eighteen years, who didn’t? Her marriage was stuck in its own mud. All the conversations she and Frank had these days turned into skirmishes about Nina. They hadn’t been to a movie for ages. She could count on one hand the number of times they’d had sex in the last year.

Sex with someone new. Conversation with a man whose eyes locked on hers. Shopping for new sheets hand in hand. She’d seen women her age in love, glowing like lanterns. Was it endorphins or gratitude? God, it would be great to feel like that again.

But it would kill Nina. All that “resilient kid” stuff aside, Joyce could imagine the scene at the kitchen table: “Your father and I have decided . . .” Her daughter would crumble.

Frank didn’t deserve that, either. He was a good husband. Not hostile, like Marie’s. Or arrogant, like Heidi’s. As for Alice’s Tim, Joyce had to admit, he was dull, bordering on dumb.

The big problem with Frank was the way he withdrew into things — his work, his gardening, whatever book he was reading, or even a TV show. When they’d first met, Joyce had fallen in love with his self-sufficiency — especially after two high-maintenance boyfriends. But now his independence felt like distance. Most of the time, he seemed a million miles away. The only thing they seemed to share anymore was Nina. And the mortgage. And a billion memories.

Back in her own driveway, Joyce sat in the car looking at the dark windows. To be fair, she wasn’t exactly knocking on Frank’s door these days, either. He’d probably respond if she said something, but she couldn’t muster the energy.

They’d had these long dry spells before, and each time Joyce had been the one to insist they find their way to water. One time, she’d shanghaied Frank — left Nina with a sitter, picked him up at work, drove them to New York City for dinner, a play, and a night in a hotel. Once, she insisted they talk to a therapist.

But this dry spell was starting to feel like the Sahara. Joyce was tapped out and pissed off that it was up to her to make the effort, start the conversation, take the initiative. Wasn’t it Frank’s turn yet?

Oh, well. At least she wasn’t as bad off as the women in her book grou

p. Nina was a pain in the ass, but soccer was going to get her daughter through the “Ophelia” years. Frank was not stupid or hostile. Hell, she’d bought a house in Gloucester.

It’s all relative, right? Joyce thought. And things are relatively good.

Then she remembered the blank, almost frightened expressions on her friends’ faces when she’d said “romance novel.” Not one of them had asked the name of her book. Not even Alice.

Joyce brushed her teeth, swallowed two aspirin, and picked up Anna Karenina again. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Joyce couldn’t remember if that sentence had seemed wise when she’d read it in college.

She left the book on the couch and crawled into bed, careful not to wake Frank. She tucked herself into the far side of the comforter and thought about her book group. Compared to them, her family seemed rock solid. But Joyce wasn’t so sure she would go as far as “happy.”

KATHLEEN COULDN’T remember the last time she had used the Sabbath candlesticks. Buddy’s parents had worked in the store seven days a week, so her husband had no childhood attachment to the Friday-night rituals of wine and bread and candles. But Kathleen loved the weekly celebration she’d studied in her conversion class, especially the candles. As a little girl she’d looked after her grandmother’s votives, which burned in every room, sending up prayers to the Blessed Mother, to Saint Jude, to Saint Teresa, the Little Flower. At Christmas, there were red and green candles everywhere — even the bathroom.

She welcomed the Jewish routine and made it her own. Every week when Hal and Jack were growing up, she’d polished the candlesticks, warmed a challah bread in the oven, and polished the sideboard with lemon oil. Her sons told her they still associated those smells with Fridays.

Holding a match to the bottoms so they would stay in place, Kathleen wondered if her candle lighting was for Jewish purposes or out of Catholic nostalgia, but decided it made no difference. “Light is a symbol of the Divine,” she said, quoting a line from a long-ago sisterhood Sabbath service.

Kathleen had cooked Buddy’s favorite dinner, the fat grams be damned: orange-glazed chicken, pan-fried potatoes, green beans, and chocolate mousse. When he saw the container of cream on the counter, he said, “Trying to get rid of me, eh?”

“Well, now that I’m going to live to be ninety, I thought I’d find myself a younger fella,” she said from inside Buddy’s lingering hug. “I do have a favor to ask, though.”

“That mink coat you’ve been hinting at?”

“I won’t need that until November,” she said, teasing back. “But I would like to go to temple tonight.”

Kathleen had converted to Judaism the week before they married, thirty-three years earlier. It didn’t bother Buddy that Kathleen Mary Elizabeth McCormack wasn’t Jewish. He had been one of a handful of Jewish kids growing up in Gloucester. The working-class Italian and Portuguese boys in school never bothered him about being different, maybe because he was a head taller than most of them. For Buddy, Judaism was a matter of holiday foods and honoring his parents’ traditions. But Mae and Irv Levine both wept for joy when Kathleen told them she was going to convert.

It hadn’t felt like a momentous decision to Kathleen at the time. Catholicism had stopped making sense to her at the age of fourteen, and no one in her own family had objected to her becoming Jewish. The grandmother who would certainly have objected, and loudly, on the grounds of Kathleen’s immortal soul, was dead by the time she got married. Kathleen had no memory of her father, who had walked out when she was three. She didn’t recall her mother saying anything, but then, her poor mother seemed congenitally unable to object to any awful thing life laid in her lap. As a teenager, Kathleen had secretly prayed, “Please, God, make me be different from my mother.”

Pat heard her calling to religious life in college and was Sister Pat by the time Kathleen met Buddy. Pat wrote a long letter wishing her sister “shalom in her new spiritual home” and, on the day of Kathleen’s conversion, sent a dozen long-stemmed roses, a huge extravagance back then.

Rabbi Flacks, the perpetually tired man who tried to teach her the Hebrew alphabet, took her for a perfunctory ritual dunk in a tiny pool in the basement of a run-down Boston synagogue. Afterward, in the parking lot, with her hair still wet, Buddy gave her a simple, gold Star of David on a chain. She’d worn it at their wedding, at the boys’ circumcisions and bar mitzvahs, during the Jewish holidays, and whenever she went to temple — even if only for a committee meeting. She had worn it to her one and only job interview, too.

They had joined Temple Beth Israel in Gloucester when the boys started kindergarten. Kathleen drove them to religious school faithfully and even worked on a few fund-raisers, but Buddy didn’t like going to services. He said he found the seashore more spiritual, and he wasn’t interested in the social life of the congregation. He would have let their membership lapse long ago, but Kathleen kept paying the dues.

She was attached to the place. Buddy’s folks had been there for the bar mitzvahs, basking in the reflected glory of their grandsons’ performances. The organ played the same melody when each of her boys carried the Torah scroll up and down the center aisle in the sanctuary. Leading that joyful pageant, they clutched the blue velvet covers with white knuckles. They were very different, her boys: Hal serious, Jack sunny. But for their bar mitzvahs, they’d been identically proud and nervous in their brand-new suits, identically self-conscious and fearless of their changing voices.