The minivan was harder to steer than an ordinary car but had room for the wheelchair. Suzanne had done her best with Elena’s help to fix up the room off the kitchen for Beverly. Suzanne’s gym equipment was now split between her bedroom and her office, and very much in the way. Every time she used the treadmill, she had to hang a quilt over the corner of her chest of drawers, so she would not hit herself on it. She hoped Beverly would be comfortable in that room for the next three days, until Suzanne could check her into the rehab unit.
It was definitely spring on the Wilbur Cross. The willows had leafed out along the streams. An occasional magnolia or cherry was in bloom. The day was sunny with the temperature in the upper fifties and the air softer than it had been in months. It was a drive she would normally have enjoyed, but she was monitoring her mother with one ear and Rachel and her boyfriend with the other. Suzanne felt sore with anxiety. Unlike most years, she was not looking forward to Pesach. The first-night seder was always with her daughters and whoever they brought, with Marta, Jim, and their son, Adam, and a friend or two. Beverly had never before come to her, although when Suzanne was growing up, Beverly had sometimes trekked out to Karla’s in Brooklyn, where Suzanne always went. This year her assistant, Jaime, wanted to come and also Celeste, shattered by divorce, and Georgia, just back from Bali.
She acknowledged to herself that she did not look forward to a seder with Beverly, whom she remembered at Karla’s in the old days as quarrelsome, alternately bored and combative. Beverly never felt comfortable with the ritual or pleased that her daughter enjoyed what Beverly considered a forlorn relic of the ghetto. Now Beverly would be quiet, necessarily, but it was no improvement. Suzanne sighed, making her way across the Connecticut River at Hartford. They were all who they were, and she must make the best of it. The hospital social worker had pressed upon her eight different pamphlets. If she did everything the woman urged, she would rebuild her entire apartment, reorganize her life, and hire ten different people to help.
It was still light when she pulled into her steep drive. There was her house on its hill, the little backyard sloping sharply downhill, three stories painted light blue with dark blue trim. Home in recent years had meant quiet and comfort. Now she could not read the meaning of her home. Her life felt at the moment without sanctuary—except for those brief moments with Jake: because, she thought, I do not have to take care of him. I’m not responsible for him. Therefore I can be happy.
Suzanne realized in the next twenty-four hours that she had not really absorbed what the social worker had been trying to tell her. For Beverly to exist at all in the apartment, everything must be changed. In the small bathroom off the kitchen there was a shower, but it could only be used if the controls were lowered to where Beverly could reach them. That meant having a plumber in. They had nothing resembling a bath chair until Elena found a stool in the basement. It was not designed to get wet, but it would have to do. Beverly had to be helped onto the stool and off the stool again. The bathroom needed a railing for her to hold on to. They moved a single bed against the wall to protect on one side, but she could not sit up in the bed by herself and she was afraid she would fall out. If Beverly moved back here after the rehab center, Suzanne would have to buy or rent a hospital bed. Jim found a bookcase upstairs he could lend to the cause, with big square partitions where Beverly’s clothes could be stacked, as she could not open a drawer. They gave her a tambourine to summon them when she needed something, and the tambourine sounded every other minute.
It took such effort for Beverly to haul herself in or out of bed that most things she might need had to be within reach of her good hand. Once they understood that, they had to turn the bed around so that her left hand would be on the outside, able to reach the table they placed there.
She never seated people at the seder but always let them find their own places. She was amused to note that Elena put herself in between Marta and Jim, as if she were their child, leaving Adam to sit beside Rachel—which he probably preferred anyhow. Elena had suddenly adopted Marta and Jim as preferable parents, obviously. Long ago, when they had moved into this house, Elena had resented them, imagining they were spying on her, keeping watch on her for Suzanne. Elena had lived in this house for two years until she went away to college, only returning for vacations. Now Suzanne was pleased to see that Elena was establishing her own relationship with them, finally. Suzanne drew a deep breath and tried to relax her shoulders. She so wanted everyone to be happy, to have a good seder, to be together in kindness and joy and maybe even a little bit of something spiritual and enlightening, just a little. She wanted joy in the house, a guest like Elijah, who had his cup set out for him. There had not been enough joy lately.
She had not let Rachel have her way with the food. There was plenty for vegetarians, but Suzanne still made chicken soup with matzoh balls and roast lamb. The tzimmes was vegetarian: carrots, apples, raisins, onions cooked long and slow together, Karla’s recipe from her own mother. An heirloom. So were the soup and the matzoh balls. Suzanne enjoyed the sense of being one in a line of women making a particular recipe for a particular holiday, women appearing one inside the other receding ever smaller like the cows on the tin of evaporated milk from her childhood. Beverly used to buy evaporated milk for some stupid reason. It didn’t spoil. It was one of those weird tastes from childhood that brought back not nostalgia or pleasant memories but an archaic sense of discomfort, like woolen leggings and rubber galoshes, the smell of the cloakroom in grade school. The sweetish overcooked taste of evaporated milk.
Her mother had always improvised meals, for Beverly suspected there was something bourgeois or overly fussy or perhaps dangerously fattening involved in thinking seriously about food. It was from Karla that Suzanne had learned to cook, not that she ever had time to do it. It was a pleasure for vacations, for holidays, for the rare times she had the energy and the leisure to entertain. Basically, the only time she ever cooked a big meal was at Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, or somebody’s birthday. Yet Suzanne was proud that she could create a sumptuous spread on the appropriate occasion.
Suzanne relinquished leading the service to Rachel, who had brought a new Haggadah, photocopied in her office. There was a lot of turning of pages back and forth and people asking, Where are we? Too much Hebrew for Suzanne’s taste, who considered it like pepper, nice as a condiment, but avoid heavy use. Rachel was running quite long. Suzanne began to fidget about her meal in the kitchen sitting in the turned off oven. Rachel was good, though, with a charm in delivery that Suzanne had never before seen in her daughter, already a performer, as rabbis had to be. Suzanne suddenly remembered Rachel in a play in middle school, wanting to be the heroine but being given the part of the heroine’s mother instead. She had been valedictorian of her class, but she had not been asked to the senior prom. She had been president of the Social Issues Club and the French Club, but Saturday nights she went out with her girlfriends or stayed home. She had always been her mother’s daughter. Elena had been and still was tighter with Sam than his own daughter. Sam loved Rachel, but Elena knew how to play him. Rachel was too straightforward to charm her father as much as Elena could.
If Sam had married a Jewish woman, it would have been awkward for Rachel this Pesach, because she would have had to decide whether to spend the second-night seder at her father’s or Michael’s family. Sam’s tall slender blond wife did not make a seder, so Rachel was spared the choice. Sam’s wife played tennis and golf, gave elaborate dinners and parties for his clients, kept the large house in Weston immaculate with help from a string of au pairs and maids, and raised his second batch of children with every kind of lesson that money could buy, from ballet and gymnastics to soccer and violin. They were precocious edgy children with streaks of violence and anxiety that she could sense like the seep of gas whenever she found herself forced to spend time with Sam’s family. That did not happen as much since Rachel had learned to drive. Sam had given her a series of old cars, each good for two or t
hree years before it disintegrated.
When at last she could serve the meal, she watched Rachel with Michael. “Here. Try the tzimmes.” She fed him as if he could not take for himself. There was something passive in him, as if he simply waited to be served, to be fussed over, knowing that it would come to him. For Rachel he was the prize of her life, Suzanne began to observe. He was pleasant enough looking, teeth a little too big for his mouth but all right. Beverly kept smiling at him as nearly as she could, with her face only partly under control. Her favorites at the table were Elena, Michael, and Jim. Beverly had seldom met Adam and paid little attention to him. Poor Adam was used to Rachel’s full attention. She had always played the role of doting older sister, since she had been ten and Adam, eight. Today her attention was fixed on Michael. Adam had always been prone to whine, and he was overflowing with complaints tonight. The wine was harsh, the tzimmes not sweet enough, the service too long, his favorite song had been left out: but what he really minded was Rachel turned not to him but to Michael.
Unlike Rachel, Michael was not taking a large part in the seder. He was more an observer, looking a little amused, as if perhaps this was not what he considered a real seder, not traditional enough. “Who leads the seder in your house?” she asked him.
He seemed surprised at the question. “My father, of course.”
Of course? Why not his mother? She suspected that he was judging them in some quiet way. Was he finding not merely the seder but the family too outré? This was a house of women, and she doubted if the boy was used to that. He probably believed the way he was used to was the only right way.
Elena had always liked Celeste, enjoying her gamy humor, but her divorce had left her shattered, and Elena instinctively shrank from her ravages. Celeste was quiet and morose. When she read a passage, her voice was an octave higher than usual, a child’s tremulous voice. Once or twice Suzanne was afraid Celeste would begin to cry, and immediately set her some task. Normally she thought during the seder about her own personal liberation and political issues in which she was involved, but she found herself too wedged between her roles as mother and as daughter tonight to give much thought to anything spiritual. She did not see much liberation coming her way this year.
Jaime followed along with the exotic reading and the exotic food, seated on her left as she had Beverly on her right. Perhaps she was attempting to protect both of them from casual buffeting. Georgia, who was an interior decorator with exquisite taste, had brought her a beautiful scarf from Bali, sea colors, that Elena was wearing. She had immediately claimed it, and Suzanne could not refuse her for she looked stunning in it, worn casually around her shoulders over a sea-green camisole and tight black pants. Jaime eyed her curiously, a parrot perched at a table of sparrows. She paid little attention to him, focused on Beverly and Jim. After all, although Jaime was as beautiful and as splendid as herself, he was two years younger than Elena—and at their ages, that could seem a generation. However, Jaime was observing her.
Georgia was beginning to age, she realized with a pang, her black glossy hair streaked with white. The sun had turned her fair skin leathery. Suzanne had never noticed all those wrinkles around her eyes. She was as thin as ever but had begun to look more gaunt than chic. They were all getting older. People kept telling her tonight how good she looked. She was accustomed to her looks being taken for granted, like the walls and the ceiling, nothing to comment on. She felt like telling Georgia and Marta and Celeste that it was only that she was getting laid for the first time in more than a decade. This glow was her body’s delight. It would be short-lived, only a little generator of joy parked out there away from the rest of her roiled-up life.
She became aware Beverly to her right was trying to speak, her face distorting with effort, her mouth drooling. Suzanne felt torn among those needing her attention: her daughters, both of whom usually soaked up her available energy, her assistant, a stranger here, Celeste who was sunk into a dangerous depression, and her mother. She was used to having Beverly command her attention by forceful statements. She was used to fending off her mother’s attacks. She was used to pretending not to understand allusions to her bourgeois pretensions and her safe dull money-grubbing lifestyle. She was not accustomed to having to wipe her mother’s face and lean close to try to figure out what Beverly was sputtering. She felt guilty because she was put off by Beverly’s inability to control her body, her voice, her face. The same thing will happen to you when you’re her age, she told herself, and you’ll want people to be kind and understanding and accepting, won’t you? So get it together, Suze, get it together and be a mensch. This is an opportunity too, to improve that first relationship of all. “You want something, Mother? More lamb? Tzimmes?”
Beverly was pointing. There were various bottles on the table, grape juice for the nondrinkers, Manischewitz for the traditional, like herself, and kosher Israeli dry wine for those who could not stomach alcoholic cough syrup. For Suzanne, the taste of sweet kosher wine was the taste of Karla’s Shabbats, of holidays and all the times she had escaped her own mother and taken refuge with her aunt. She realized Beverly was wildly pointing at the dry red wine. She was not sure whether the social worker had said Beverly could have wine or not, but she was damned if she was going to forbid it if Beverly wanted it. Beverly very much did. Beverly sipped carefully and managed not to spill a drop. Then she waved her glass for more.
“Grandma, do you really want more?” Rachel asked, leaning across the table.
Beverly nodded wildly.
“The difference, according to Rabbi Moshe Poleyoff, between drinking wine for the sake of the mitzvah on the night of Pesach and drinking that leads to excess is that the second comes from being empty inside and making wine fill that emptiness. But if we are filled with joy and express that through wine, then the wine becomes the simchah shel mitzvah, the joy of the mitzvah….”
Beverly made a derisive noise and carefully drank down the glass. She managed a lopsided grin at Rachel and then at Suzanne. Dessert was never a big deal on Pesach—macaroons, fruit, and a matzoh-based custard cake. The huge meal left little room for sweets. After the food they raced through the tail end of the Haggadah. There was always singing then, which Suzanne had loved since childhood. “Grandma, you’re singing,” Rachel said, and Elena too turned to stare. In fact, Beverly was singing. “Eli-ahu ha-navi, eli-ahu, eli-ahu….”
“Grandma,” Elena said, peering around Jim. “Have some more wine! It’s a miracle.”
Beverly giggled and did have more wine. By the end of the dinner, she was lolling in her chair, breathing in gusts through her mouth, now and then snoring. Suzanne was happy for her. It was probably the first pleasure Beverly had enjoyed since her stroke. For Beverly at least, this evening was some kind of momentary liberation.
14
Twelve Years Earlier
Elena
Elena hated school. She hated all the girls who gossiped about her and called her a slut. She hated the boys who grabbed at her in the halls and begged her to suck their cocks. She hated the teachers who classified her as less than human. She hated the counselor who told her in a sickly sweet voice of pretend concern that she was not performing up to her potential—performing like a trained seal. She sat there, seeing herself leaping up, reaching across the desk, and strangling the woman. Feel my potential, bitch. Basically, Boston Latin was not a hand-holding type of school. If her grades sank too far or too quickly, she would be booted. Nobody would be begging her to stay. Perform or perish. She kept playing Twisted Sister. She really was a sick motherfucker, according to her peers, and she sure was the odd one out in her family. She was no longer passing all those tests they threw at her. She played that record over and over again in her room, on her headphones.
She hated her little sister, Rachel, who was Mama’s girl and always sucking up to Mother. Rachel was good, Rachel was perfect, Rachel was a complete nerd. She brought home her report cards like Moses coming down from Sinai. What Elena did as well as
she could with great effort and sweat, Rachel just zipped through. She did all her homework in record time and did extra. She always had science projects going in the room they shared. She never asked for cool clothes or anything fun, but for books nobody else had ever heard of, and lately she wanted a computer. Who ever heard of a ten-year-old girl with a computer? Only nerdy boys had them. Rachel thought she was a little genius, and so did her teachers, and so did Sam, and so did their mother.
Most of all she hated her mother, who kept going on about college, college. Elena was never going to college. As soon as she was old enough to get a license, she wanted a car. Like Judas Priest sang, “Headin Out to the Highway.” She had a learner’s permit already. Chad got his license the week he turned sixteen. He was after his father to buy him a car. When Elena had a car, she was going to get in it with Evan and Chad and take off. They would go down to Mexico. They would drive up to Alaska. They would go anyplace but here. Key West. The Mojave desert. She did not care where. Chad would care and Evan would care but she just wanted to take off and never look back. She would be with both of them and there would be nobody to pester them and hector them, and what they were to each other and what they did together. Only with them did she feel alive. When she was alone in her room, she wondered if she even existed. She felt empty, empty. She didn’t know who she was and she wished she was dead. Life stretched before her like a hall at her high school when she was cutting classes and every room had a boring class in session and going down the hall, she could hear the stupid smug bored voices of the teachers in each one. It was a puce-colored hallway reeking of years of sweat and grease and chalk dust. That was the rest of her life. A dull dim hallway going between one place she didn’t want to be to another place she dreaded going. It was all shit. It was all shit forever.