Her mother was apt to open a can of chili or chicken soup and call that supper. Her mother did not think Suzanne was wonderful. Her mother was always telling her how to act with boys, how to dress, how to carry herself. Then Suzanne would purposely slump and pick up a book and pretend to drown out her mother’s voice with the words on the page until in fact she became so involved that she could not hear Beverly telling her what was wrong with her and how to make it right. Beverly was always trying to fix her, to improve her, to organize her. The way Beverly did things was right, and the way that Suzanne wanted them was wrong—morally, aesthetically, politically wrong!
Her mother scoffed at lawyers and said the first thing to do after a revolution was to shoot them all. Her mother considered she had long ago sold out. Her mother thought teaching jurisprudence was a con, something highfalutin and silly. Her mother thought feminist theory was bad politics. Beverly had tried to make her feel guilty first for marrying Sam and then for divorcing him. How could she bring her mother back to Brookline, to a neighborhood Beverly hated to visit because she called it bourgeois?
There was a message from Jake: he would be in town Tuesday. Could she see him? She taught until three. Her sexual harassment case had gone to the jury, who had only taken two days to give her—or rather her client Sherry—a victory. She was still awaiting a decision on the appeal of the murder conviction of Phoebe, who had tried to protect her daughter. She had preparations to make for Pesach, for her classes. She could steal the time from around four-thirty to bedtime, a block of time she communicated about at once.
She was not nervous this time. She longed to fall into him and be replenished. She was exhausted, she was overcommitted, and he was her vacation. She would never say that to him—she doubted there was a man living who would like to feel he was essentially a kind of recreation program for a woman—but she just wanted to snuff herself out in him for a few hours. She had consulted her gynecologist and put herself on the pill. She was entering menopause, but it seemed a gradual entry, and she could, her gynecologist warned her, still get a nasty surprise and find herself pregnant. She endured occasional hot flashes, but as far as she could tell, she had been too damned busy to actually experience her own menopause. It was creeping past her. When she had a hot flash, she was still astonished and often did not realize till a couple of months had passed that a period had been missed. Her body seemed off on its own adventure, without her mind accompanying it. She felt as if she were being cheated of something other women had begun to study: a colleague in women’s studies was writing a book about the change. With her weekends gone, she was behind in everything she did. Her article languished in her computer. Fortunately, she had overprepared her lectures on constitutional law during the last summer, so she managed to stay afloat.
She had not enjoyed a full night’s sleep in weeks. Her fatigue reminded her of just after Elena was born. After Rachel’s birth, it had been less totally draining, because she had known what to expect, because she had Marta and some help from Sam. With Elena, she had had only herself and a couple of weeks of Aunt Karla’s presence, a miracle in the middle of chaos. But Karla had to go back to teaching school and she was waiting for her own little girl to become available. That was Suwanda, tall, lean, now an acupuncturist in San Diego. Karla had adopted Rosella two years later, as a newborn. For a woman who had never given birth, Karla knew a lot about raising kids.
“Beverly glares at me,” Karla said on the phone. “I feel as if she hates me now! Rosella came in with me and she hardly looked at us.”
“She doesn’t hate you, dear. She hates the situation she’s in. She hates her body and her brain that betrayed her. She hates the hospital and the staff who treat her as if she’s feebleminded.”
“She’s always resented me. Judged me. You know that.”
“Beverly hasn’t been satisfied with either of us…. That’s how she is. But right now, she needs our help. Try to encourage her to work with her therapists.”
“The last time I was there, she wouldn’t even write answers to us.”
She jumped into bed with Jake within ten minutes of meeting him in the lobby, falling into him as if diving into oblivion. They made love much longer than the time before and far more powerfully. She wanted passionately not to think, not to be conscious: a powerful aphrodisiac. She knew she was surprising him, but he seemed rather pleased than overwhelmed. He was a man who liked sex with her, she was realizing with great satisfaction. It was a balm to her confusions. At least here in this rented hotel bed, she was at ease. Who would have guessed it? She did not really have the time to spare to do this, but she did not care. It was the most pleasurable event in her life for weeks.
Lying under him, over him, beside him in a half-destroyed bed, she realized she had never experienced sex the way she did with Jake. Perhaps it was him, perhaps it was simply her long abstinence, perhaps it was the time in her life. Sex with Victor had been potent but far more passive. He was something that was happening to her. He was the event. She was the object. With Sam, it had been mutual but low on their list of priorities after the first couple of months. They did it when they both could arrange the time and energy, and it became less and less frequent until perhaps once a month they got together. They were both so ambitious then and so overcommitted and so involved in whatever cases they were fighting in court that they barely observed each other. All her energy at home went into the baby and Elena, the children who always needed more than she could give, never mind Sam. Neither of them seemed to have the will to force intimacy and sustain it. It just hadn’t seemed important enough to work on, until it was gone.
She did not exactly consider Jake important to her, and she was surely just as overcommitted in time and energy now as she had been then with Sam—but she experienced him as her last chance at sex, perhaps in her life. They had created an artificial intimacy on-line that was blooming into a physical intimacy both jolting and sensual. She loved his mouth. She loved the way he entered her slowly, withdrawing and then thrusting in again. She loved the way his head snapped back when she was riding him and he was gone into sensations and she knew he would never, never suddenly open his eyes to ask if she had remembered to turn on the answering machine. Perhaps it was marriage that had deadened Sam and her. Perhaps it was being young and greedy for winning. Perhaps it was having a baby too soon after they married. But this late blooming was rich. Jake’s large hot hands on her breasts almost brought her to orgasm again. Her breasts had never felt so sensitive and as able to give her pleasure.
Over supper she stared into his face, trying to understand the power of their coupling. She asked him questions about his life. His daughter had suddenly written to him, sending a photo of herself with a baby boy. His board had agreed that he could try to put together a Boston office if he had enough backing. He would be in charge of it, but he would need a local board of advisers and volunteers and money. Especially money.
“I’ve got this pesky case pending in California. From a protest about logging old growth redwoods. The local police came down on us hard. That was five months ago. I keep expecting it to be dismissed—after all, the violent ones were the police, not us. But it just drags on and on from motion to motion.”
“Who’s your lawyer?” She questioned him carefully about the case, but it sounded fairly trivial. At the most he could expect a suspended sentence and a fine, even if his lawyer lost. Nothing to worry about, she guessed.
His dark, intense eyes, close to almond-shaped, were beautiful in his sharp face. His face had something foxy about it: quizzical, feral, alert. He was one of those men who liked to put their backs against a wall and look out at the room. He gazed at her more intently than anyone had in more years than she could imagine. It was hard for her to take an interest in the Italian food, good as it was, for all she wanted to do was get back in bed with him and wipe out her life for another two hours. Yet the conversation was good. It was rare; it was years and years since she had sat talking i
ntimately with a man, talking openly, honestly. She had male colleagues, she had male clients from time to time, she had male students and Jaime, her assistant. This was different. It was what had attracted her to him on-line: the quality of the discourse. The sense of ease.
12
Beverly
Beverly hated the physical therapist pulling on her arm and her leg. It was humiliating to be handled like a sack of trash bundled for the dump. They made her stand up. They were talking at her, the nurse with the frizzy hair and the therapist, a woman half her age with damp pudgy hands and an inane grin. Oh, you think it’s funny I hang on to the bed afraid of falling.
“You have to learn to fall, Mrs. Blume. You are going to fall, and you have to learn how to do it correctly so you don’t injure yourself.”
Grin. Right, it’s funny for you, you bitch, to see me crashing to the floor, but it’s damned well not amusing to me.
“Take another step. That’s right. Now we have a walker for you.”
Beverly let herself drop abruptly on the bed’s edge. She was never going to use one of those disgusting contraptions. Decrepit old people used them, shuffling along. The nurse and therapist were talking at the same time. When two people talked to her, she couldn’t focus on either. They worked with stroke patients, you’d think they’d have learned that she could only hear one of them.
“If you ever want to go to the potty on your own, you’re going to have to get up on your two feet and put one foot in front of the other.”
Back and forth they made her march like Frankenstein’s monster, to the door and back to the bed, to the door and back to the bed. She had to urinate, but did they care? She tried to tell them, but she could only make a moan. She tried to reach for her pad, but they made her keep walking to the door and back, to the door and back. Finally she couldn’t hold it, and the warm seep of urine ran down her leg as she wept with her good eye.
The occupational therapist was trying to teach her to dress herself. Beverly kept trying to pull her panties on. She got her legs in the right holes this time, but the label was in front. It was so hard to coordinate everything. Her bra she could not do one-handed at all. She could not go through life with her tits swinging in the breeze. Not that she was as big as Suzanne, who knows where she got that from. Actually Karla had the same oversize breasts. The occupational therapist Nona, a woman whose hair was as short as a man’s and whose grip was firm on her, who would never let her drop or think it was amusing if she fell on her face, showed her a bra with Velcro in front. It was the right size. Nona saw her looking at the size. “Same size as the bra you came in with,” she said with a slight smile.
Beverly nodded fervently, her head as it always did now, canting to the side. On the third try, she got the bra on. Better.
“We’ll skip the slip today, okay? Now I have here a dress you can close with Velcro. It’s kind of like a bathrobe, but it’s striped, anyhow. Kind of cheerful. I have to show all this to your daughter, if I’m around when she comes in. Do you think she could come in on a weekday?”
Beverly shook her head no.
“Oh, well. I’ll leave her a message.”
On Thursday she went to the bathroom by herself, got her pants down, even flushed, got her panties back up. She turned on the faucet one-handed and washed her good hand and patted at her useless hand. Then she hobbled back to the bed, step, slide, step, slide, like some stupid ballroom dance she was doing with the metal walker. By the time she got back to the bed, she was so exhausted she slept until the nurse woke her.
Eating was problematic. Food got stuck on the other side of her mouth. She imagined her body as split between her and what she called IT. The Jerk. The Jerk owned the right half of her body. On her half she chewed her food and swallowed it, but food that wandered over to the Jerk’s cheek could get stuck there and choke her unawares.
The doctors were thrilled Friday because she felt it when they pricked her thigh, but she couldn’t move it. It seemed the worst of all worlds. Her right thigh could hurt but remained as inert as a bag of wet sand.
They had given her special utensils to eat with. She could drink pretty well, although sometimes liquid dribbled out the right side. But it had taken a week before she could reliably get the spoon into her mouth instead of just somewhere near it. Everything she did turned into a mess. Everything she did was hard. Fatigue would drop on her suddenly and crush her to the bed. She thought of exhaustion as a boulder that suddenly fell on her and pushed her flat. In any five-minute interval, she could use up her energy completely and deflate.
She could read for a while. The newspaper was hard, the print too small and the contrast poor. Large-print books were perfect. She felt as if she were reading children’s books, but they were normal novels and nonfiction books. She could read for up to half an hour before she wore out. When Karla came next, Beverly decided to be good to her sister this time and nod at her and write messages. She told her to bring some large-print books that were worth reading, something political with substance to it. A good biography of somebody who mattered. Karla seemed delighted to be asked to do something and promised she would return in two days with books. She did. Rosella came with her, carrying the big bag. WHERE TWINS? Beverly printed.
Rosella laughed. She was a small woman, no taller than Karla, and she had married a Black man not much bigger. But the twins were already up to their mama’s waist. “They won’t let us bring the little ones in here. Maybe they think stroke is contagious.”
SCARY? Beverly printed. SCARES ME.
Rosella had brought her a drawing Johnny made, of a stick woman in a bed with a big sun shining over her. Karla put it on her bedside table, propped against the lamp. It was the most cheerful thing in the depressing room.
The speech therapist was a bald man around fifty who wore loud plaid shirts that never went with his trousers. He must be color-blind, like a lot of men, and obviously his wife had left him. Today the shirt was a mauve, magenta, and teal madras worn with a pair of olive khakis. She stared into his eyes, half hidden behind his bifocals, and longed, longed for him to do something magical that would give her back her voice. She could remember her own voice, low-pitched, sexy, men had often told her. She longed to hear her own voice again more than she longed for anything else. She would gladly hobble around, she would wear Velcro clothes, she would eat with funny utensils, but give her back the power to speak and she swore she would be happy again. She stared into his face in silent supplication.
“Now I want you to make me a list of all the words you can think of that begin with S.”
Laboriously Beverly carved into the page SHIT, SHE, SALMON, SYLPH, SHOP, STORE, SAVE, SIGN, SIGNAL, SLAM, SORE, STYMIE. She had only got that far when he stopped her.
“Ssssssssss,” he said. He put his hands on her face. “Sssssssssss.”
She tried. How she tried. What finally came out was “Shhhhhhhhh.”
“That’s good. That’s very good. Now try to breathe out a sound. Just breathe it. Ahhhhh. Ahhhhhhhh.”
No sound emerged, but the breath sounded a little like Ahhhhh. A nonvocalized Ahhh.
“Now try to put it together. Shaaaaaah.”
She made a nonvocalized sound that nonetheless was recognizably Shaaaa. Then she began to giggle, because Sha! in Yiddish meant shut up. A song of her childhood came to her and suddenly she was singing it rustily in Yiddish. “Sha! Shtil! Mach nich kein gevalt! Der rebbe geyn sein tanzen, tanzen valt….”
“It’s good you can sing. You should sing as much as you can. It’s practice for your vocal cords.” He had her sing “Some Enchanted Evening” as far as she could get. He had a deep baritone, nothing like Ezio Pinza, but still, it was fun. They sang some more show tunes together. She loved hearing her own voice. She felt almost human when the session ended. She was wheeled back to her bed and slept. When she woke, she said, “Shaaaa!” Almost a croak emerged. She managed a smile that was perhaps more grimace than smile, but which she totally meant. Dear, de
ar man. She must learn his name next time. He was her hero. Dr. Fish, that’s what the nurse called him. To her, he would be Ezio. She wanted to throw away all the other therapists and work with him all day with as much energy as she could force from herself. “Ahhhhhh.” She was croaking. “Shaaaah. Ahhhhhhh. Shhhhhh. Shaaaah. Shaaah! Shaaah.”
13
Suzanne
Suzanne borrowed Marta’s van to transport Beverly to Brookline for Pesach. After the holiday, Beverly was to enter a local rehabilitation center for stroke patients. Beverly was so excited about leaving the hospital, it was hard to make her understand that she could not go home. Suzanne had moved Beverly’s things to Brookline a month before with the help of Karla overseeing Rosella and Tyrone. The landlord was glad to have Beverly leave, so he could double the rent.
Suzanne had been paying Beverly’s bills. One of the many things her mother could not do was to sign a check. It felt distinctly uncomfortable to be operating behind Beverly’s back, making decisions for her mother, who had never lacked decisiveness, but discussing anything with Beverly took forever and she tired quickly of trying to communicate. She could form few words and no coherent sentences. She would not assess her prospects and options realistically. The easiest thing for Suzanne was to view her mother as a helpless client and make decisions for her—although she felt uneasy.
Thus Suzanne was carting Beverly off to Brookline, where Beverly had visited perhaps three times in the twelve years Suzanne had been living in the house with Marta and Jim. When Suzanne wanted to see Beverly, she went to New York. Her mother was portable in certain ways. When duty called, she went, but visiting her daughter in Brookline made her uncomfortable. It seemed to thrust right into her face everything about them that was different. They had more fights on Suzanne’s turf than on Beverly’s. Beverly was at home only in New York. She had been born there, grown up there, and never put down roots anyplace else. It had always offended or puzzled her, depending on her mood, that her only daughter preferred the Boston area. Probably she considered it a sign of weak character or a lack of style. She had always made clear that she thought Suzanne lacked style.