Free The Archivist by Martha Cooley Page A

you,” Roberta added at this point in her narration, “that while denial is useful, it has its price. There’s no such thing as identity without history. My parents think they’re living in the present, but actually they live in a dream of the present — a dream that their past continually threatens to break open.”
    She rubbed her eyes briefly; the gesture suggested her tension. “Maintaining that level of denial would take a fair bit of energy, wouldn’t it?”
    “Yes,” I said, noting the creases at the corners of her eyes. “I guess it would.”
    “You know, my parents are tired so much of the time. Upbeat, deliberately cheery and upbeat, yet tired … Their kind of optimism is exhausting.”
    Roberta’s account of her parents’ conversion wound down at dusk. We were sitting at a table near one of the windows. The fading light entered the room at a slant, mingling with the smoke from Roberta’s cigarette. I helped myself to one from her pack. I’d taken to smoking occasionally with her and found the activity enjoyable, untinged by even a hint of the remorse I might have expected to feel after relapsing into a habit broken years earlier. There is something about being in one’s sixties that vitiates such guilt. I didn’t want to resume smoking; I merely wished to have a cigarette, now and then, in Roberta’s presence.
    “So,” she said, “you wanted to hear about my parents, how they got here, all that stuff. Is your curiosity satisfied?”
    “Well,” I said, exhaling, “what interests me is that I asked for the story of their emigration, but what I got is the story of their conversion from Judaism to Christianity.”
    “It’s the same story. And you’ve put it slightly wrong: they converted from the identity of Jewishness to the identity of Christian-ness, if that makes any sense.”
    “In a way,” I said. “I mean, I understand that they had no belief in Judaism, and in that sense naturally they didn’t convert from it to another faith. I gather they turned from a life with no faith toward one in which faith could play a part. From darkness to light, one might say.”
    “One might. I wouldn’t.”
    I decided to push a little. “Who knows what it was like for your parents? You can only speculate.”
    I waited for her to continue, but she was quiet. After a minute I broke the silence.
    “Not long after we met,” I said, “you indicated that you found your parents’ conversion distasteful.”
    She smiled, but her face reddened slightly. “One of those understatements I use with strangers,” she said.
    “So try something else. I’ve ceased being a stranger.”
    Her color deepened. She reached for another cigarette.
    “Enraging,” she said after lighting up. “Enraging.”
    I didn’t know where to go, in which direction to urge her. At various points during her narrative I’d detected anger, the veiled kind that displays itself in certain turns of phrase, certain ironies. Yet I hadn’t expected her to admit to feeling it, and its sudden expression was like the presence of a third party. I noted the signals: Roberta’s sharp exhalations of smoke, a rapid flicking of ash, the sliding of one black-shoed foot to the carpeted floor, where it tapped out a muted staccato. Her anger lay just under the surface, and it governed. I was foolish to think I could urge or lead her anywhere.
    “You confuse me,” I said as blandly as possible.
    She snorted, then turned and looked directly at me. Even in that oblique light, her eyes were a crisp green.
    “Do I?” There was a pause; when she spoke again, her voice was somewhat less sharp. “I confuse myself, too. I mean, I’m thirty-five, did you know that? — you’d probably guessed something close, hm? And still locked in combat with my mother and father. Oh, we get along, at least on the surface. But I haven’t talked with them about anything serious for at least two years — since just before I came back here to do graduate work, in