“There’s no way I can pay more of Rachel’s expenses,” Sam said bluntly. “So you have your mother? I have Stephanie, Jonah, and Emma. An old lady lying in bed doesn’t touch what one active kid burns up in piles of cash—a kid who wears out clothes every day and takes fourteen kinds of lessons with all that gear and private school and doctors and dentists up the wazoo. Therapists. Orthodontists. Their clothes cost as much as my suits.”
She recognized that voice of Sam’s. It was not his negotiating voice. It was his, This is my final offer voice. “I’m getting further in debt with every day. Rachel’s year in Israel is not cheap, as you may have noticed….”
“It wasn’t my idea she become a rabbi.”
“Right. She could always get a restaurant job.”
“At least Elena doesn’t send me tuition bills every time I turn around.”
Saturday morning as Marta and Suzanne stood in front of the shooting table at the rod and gun club they had joined years before, she thought, there’s something satisfying about handling the gun, aiming, and then that moment of percussion and destruction—harmless, appeasing to the tension within, punishing only the target and releasing the week’s frustration and rage. They had used to go every Saturday, enjoying the incongruity of two feminists shooting together. Gradually they had let the game lapse until they went only once a month or so.
“Why did we stop doing this? It’s fun. It’s a tremendous release.”
“Why?” Marta grinned, taking careful aim. Since they were wearing ear protectors, they talked loudly to hear each other. They were early, and the range was half empty. “Why did we stop going to movies? Why did we stop going for walks in the country? Why did I never get another dog after Archie died?” She got every shot into the target. Marta was a better shot than Suzanne, but Suzanne’s clusters were more consistent.
It was Suzanne’s turn. “Because we don’t have time, only projects and duties and relationships.” Soon Marta would have a baby and her time would be even more limited. An elderly invalid downstairs and a new baby upstairs: they would be one crazy overextended household. Suzanne got most of her bullets in the target, missing only twice on that round. “Have you told Jim yet about the baby?”
“Soon. Very soon.”
“What are you waiting for? The onset of labor?”
“My doctor’s coming back from the Cape and I have an appointment to see her the first Monday after Labor Day. If everything’s on schedule, I’ll tell him that day.” Marta was missing most of her shots.
“The longer you wait, the more he’s going to feel out of the loop.” She wanted to urge Marta to tell him now, before it was too late, because she had an increasing sense of trouble coming.
Suzanne loved fall. It meant going back to school, as it had in her childhood, and she enjoyed teaching. She looked forward to the new classes, to the new students, and to her research assistant, Jaime, back from the Philippines where he had been visiting relatives. She wanted to get on with the law review article that had been languishing in her computer since February. She was tired of heat and air-conditioning equally, of soft asphalt underfoot, of fading cottons and browning grass and weary leaves on the maples along the street. She was beyond irritation at the kids next door screaming under her window when she was trying to work. She was sick of trying to figure out what to feed her family that wasn’t hideously expensive and wouldn’t heat up the kitchen.
The first crispness in the air the week after Labor Day perked up her spirits. She began her classes with energy, went shopping with Marta and bought a gray pinstripe suit in the newer cut they were showing, everything longer again. Fortunately, it came in petite, so skirt and jacket would not have to be altered. Marta bought a new gabardine dress, cut loosely. “Think ahead,” she said happily. “Four months and counting.”
“What did Jim say when you told him?”
“I haven’t….”
“Marta, you have to.”
“I’m scared.” Marta turned away from the mirror of the fitting room.
“What are you scared of?”
“That if I say it to him, I’ll lose the baby.”
Suzanne’s stomach clenched on itself. “Please tell him.”
“I will. As soon as my ob lady checks me over.”
“I thought that was last Monday?”
“She kicked me over to next Monday.”
“Are you sure Jim hasn’t noticed something?”
“We haven’t been at it much this summer. He’s a little depressed about work and his book. I haven’t pushed things, since I discovered I’m pregnant. I figure the less that goes on, the calmer it will stay for the little one.”
“Marta, you’re forty-six. This is going to make an enormous change in both your lives. I really think you better tell Jim, and soon.”
Marta shrugged, smoothing down the fabric. “Isn’t it funny how we just can’t bear to look at woolen things until the weather turns, even though we know damned well it’s going to be fall and then winter, just like every other year?”
“Marta, listen to me. You have to promise me you’ll tell him. I’m afraid for you. You can’t go on keeping this from him. He’ll be furious if you don’t share the news with him while it’s still early enough to do something about it if you both decide you don’t want the child.”
“Of course we want the child, Suzanne. Didn’t we try for three years nonstop?”
“That was ten years ago.”
“The years go by so fast, don’t they?” Marta took both her hands and squeezed them. “I promise, I’ll tell him. I’m seeing the doctor next Monday. Right afterward, if everything’s okay and the amniocentesis comes out well, I’ll tell him. Okay?
“Promise me you will. Promise! If you don’t, Marta, then I will.”
“All right! Don’t get brutal about it. Next Monday.”
Next Saturday morning Marta and she put in close to an hour target shooting, again getting up early to be there when the range opened. Today the canopy that protected the firearms from rain was flapping briskly like a sail over their heads. The wind carried a slight salt tang, coming in from the ocean and carrying a promise of rain that would wash the city air clean.
“We have to do things like this more often. Do you realize we did two things this week that weren’t demanded of us? We went shopping and here we are off to target shoot,” Marta said, eyeing the target. “We’re becoming frivolous. Next we’ll turn into ladies who lunch.”
“Lunch? What’s that? That apple I eat at my desk? The yogurt I gulp down in the car on my way to court?”
“Sometime this fall, we’ll do it! We’ll meet for lunch, like real ladies do. We’ll have a salad apiece and then dessert. We’ll dress up and carry shopping bags, even if there’s nothing in them but briefs. We’ll flirt with the waiter and complain about our husbands and our children. You can complain about Jake.”
“We’ll never do it,” Suzanne said bleakly.
“Oh, but we will, before I’m the size of a cruise ship.”
“If you tell Jim.”
“I’m telling him Monday, if the news is good. I see the doctor at one.”
“Good luck.”
“More than that. I want magic.”
When she got home, Suzanne spent some time with Beverly, while running up and downstairs to do her laundry. She felt she was annoying Beverly by zipping in, sitting for half an hour, then running off to move the wet laundry to the dryer and load the next pile of dirty clothes, but this was the time she had. Her time was almost all double-booked. Sheets from three beds, all those towels were a nuisance, but she could not add one more expense. She was going under financially. She had to do the laundry herself now.
“Makes me…nervous.” Beverly shook her head. “Always in hurry.”
“Mother, how does that make us different? You were always in a hurry too. We’re both impatient people. I get it from you.”
Beverly grinned crookedly. If Suzanne could amuse her, things wer
e always better. That was one way that her mother remained accessible. “Mother, I’d like us to use this time to get closer.”
“Laundry time.”
“I mean these months. I’d like us to…do better with each other. Communicate better.” She could see the skepticism in Beverly’s eyes. She went on. “Why do you doubt me? Or do you think we just can’t do it?”
“Always…want each…other…different.”
Suzanne was trying not to guess, not to rush to finish Beverly’s sentences for her. Elena’s accusation stung. She sat nodding, leaning forward, settling back in the straight chair. “Maybe we can stop doing that and accept each other after fifty years.”
“Fifty years!” Beverly repeated, as if appalled or astonished. “So long. You fifty?”
“I will be next spring.”
“Goes fast.”
“Doesn’t it.”
“Okay.” Beverly lurched forward and patted Suzanne’s arm. “Will try.”
“No, she hasn’t told her husband.” Suzanne felt guilty, as if she had betrayed Marta by sharing her secret with Jake. “I keep begging her to.” He had been showing her photos of the Fraser River in British Columbia where he had been last year at this time, with whom, she wondered. “It looks like Chinese landscape paintings—steep mountains like monoliths.”
“It’s a beautiful gorge. Where we were going, the only way across was a sort of hanging cage way above the waters.”
Who had he been traveling with? He always said “I,” but sometimes she observed another man or a woman in the photos: and in any case, someone was operating the camera. She suffered a throb of envy for the someone who had the freedom and time to pick up and wander off with him.
He lay propped on his elbow. The sun poured in through the slats of the blinds in his new apartment, igniting a stray white hair among the curls on his chest. “Marta had better tell him. Not something she should spring on him. By the way, dear, I’m actually not fat, I’m having contractions, so could you rush me to the hospital?”
“She’s superstitious about it. They tried for years to get pregnant after they lost a baby daughter. She kept miscarrying. Then they gave up.” She was still wondering who his “we” was.
“How does she know he wants a baby still?”
“I almost think it doesn’t matter. She wants it.”
“It’s his, right?”
“Of course! Marta wouldn’t have five minutes a week for an affair. It’s Jim I was suspicious of.”
“No longer?”
“I’ve been watching. I still don’t understand what was going on upstairs that afternoon, but I haven’t seen or heard anything since. A lawyer gets to be suspicious, and maybe my dirty imagination was running away with me.”
“Did you ask your mother?”
“She said nothing’s going on.”
“Well, she’s there a lot more than you are. Speaking of time, I need you to meet with the other lawyer who’s going to help us on the PCB case. Would you like me to set up an appointment, or do you want to talk to him yourself?”
No, she did not want to play telephone tag with Sid Braun. “I can make it Friday at three or the following Wednesday for a breakfast meeting.” She could not say No to Jake. It was a good cause, and she wanted him too badly. These times with him were a fix of pleasure, something that sustained her through the rest of the week. A hit of warmth.
“I’ll see what we can put together.”
She didn’t have this Sunday afternoon to spend lying here making love and chatting, and she didn’t have Friday at three to waste either, but she had to sacrifice them to Jake. Could she afford him? How could she possibly not try to? At her age and in her situation, having a lover was a luxury whose price had to come out of her flesh, but as long as she could have him, she suspected she would somehow manage. She only wished that he had less of an agenda. But if he were not the activist he was, rushing from court case to bargaining table to meeting to lobbying session, he would want far more than she could give him. If that time came, she did not know what she would do.
“I’d love to take you to British Columbia. A lot is still wilderness. It’s gorgeous. We could backpack into some of my favorite places. We wouldn’t see another soul for a week. Wouldn’t that be paradise?”
Suzanne could not imagine herself backpacking into the wilderness, even the beautiful mountains and waterfalls he had photographed, but it was all moot. He wasn’t going there anytime soon, and neither was she.
29
Elena
Elena was always super hot on Mondays, because usually Jim and she did not get a chance to be alone the whole weekend. This Saturday, they had from eight to nine-thirty in the morning: that was it. They almost got caught, because they had expected Marta to be at the range longer. Elena knew they simply could not continue like this. Yes, it made things hot, but it would be ever so much nicer to sleep and wake together, the ultimate couple thing: sleeping twined in the same sweet bed. She had never had that with anyone she loved, just guys who were convenient, whose main virtue was that they were there: not since traveling with Chad and Evan, and then they had slept in sleazy motels or crummy hotels, in the car, beside the car. So many meaningless guys since then, sometimes she couldn’t remember what they looked like. She was not sure she would recognize some of them in the street. Far from wanting to spend the entire night with them, she was bored shitless having to deal with them the next morning when all she wanted was strong coffee and to get her blood moving with some aerobics.
That was one thing she had gotten from her mother—that she liked to move, she liked to work out. She had to say that Suzanne kept herself in shape for a woman her age. She had real muscles, unlike cow Marta, who had been gaining weight steadily, visible to Elena’s watchful eye. There’s someone who needed a workout and wasn’t bothering. Elena had only to look at Jim, tight, taut, buff, and then at Marta with her belly pushing on her pants to know they were no longer suited, if ever they had been.
He needed her, he did, or he would die inside. Electric Elena he called her, my soul. Even in her dreams, she was with him. Last night she had dreamed they were making love in a large warm pool, floating together. She had come in her sleep, then wakened alone in the bed, deeply resenting their separation. It had to end. If she contemplated life without him, it was a return to dust and ashes. It was worse than meaningless, it was total nothingness. Love centered her. Love impaled her and held her upright. Loving him made her thrum with energy. She felt as if her touch could heal. When she massaged Beverly’s shoulders, Beverly told her it felt wonderful. She knew it was the magic from her love that was giving her holy energy that coursed out from her like light.
She went into Beverly’s room to give her breakfast, as she did every Monday. Suzanne had cut back one day on Sylvia this fall. Beverly skipped bathing those mornings, for she did not want Elena’s help in the shower. Elena understood her grandma’s embarrassment, although truly she would not have minded. Sylvia told her she could have been a nurse. She knew Sylvia meant it kindly, but that was no life. Helping her grandma a couple of times a week was nothing. Spending forty to fifty hours a week doing the same with strangers would drive her up the wall.
She made Beverly scrambled eggs with peppers and hot sauce, one of her specialties. Beverly loved it. “Tired…bland food.”
“Every Monday, you get my special eggs. Maybe we’ll run off to Mexico together, you and me. Hey, Grandma, ever been there?”
Beverly nodded and held up three fingers. Three times.
Elena brushed out Beverly’s hair. It looked much better red again, bringing out the green in Beverly’s eyes. She loved to fix up Beverly, who totally appreciated the attention. It gave Grandma a lift to know she looked better—more like herself. It was funny the things that gave you that sense of identity. When she was still in high school, she had this tough black studded leather jacket she had got Sam to buy for her birthday. She had worn it winter and summer, when it was far to
o cold or too hot for the jacket. It had gone west with her into trouble and the death of her friends. When it had been stolen at a party her senior year, she was devastated. Suzanne bought her another, but it was never the same. Years later, she would have the impulse to put on that jacket, her real jacket of which all others were imitations, and feel the loss all over again.
She could hear Jim walking around upstairs. He trotted out for his run, down the front stairs. She would not go upstairs till later. He liked the mornings to himself. He ran, he lifted weights. He caught up on his E-mail and made phone calls and puttered around the Internet. That was fine with her. She was a night person and woke slowly to full alertness. She never put her fine lingerie in with the regular wash. Monday mornings she did her hand laundry, enjoying the spectacle of her salmon, grass green, blue, scarlet, and black bras and panties, camisoles and slips hung on the line. This time she put them outside instead of down the basement. It was a gorgeous day. Summer had come back, warm enough to wear a sundress, her favorite, a dark honey color that set off her skin and eyes. The light was the same color today. She stood outside with her eyes closed, feeling the sun hot and red on her lids. She liked the way her underthings looked, like pennants, flags of pleasure and delight, silk and satin and nylon banners moving languidly in the faint breeze that was like a sigh. After the rain of yesterday, the weather had warmed, humidity and sweet sun from the South.
“Did you like fancy underwear, Grandma?”
“Liked…my body.”
She helped Beverly into the living room and put on CNN for her. Neither of them had ever been able to get into watching the soaps, although Sylvia had her favorite, General Hospital, she watched every day. Elena thought that neither her grandma nor she could enjoy other people’s pretend lives, for they both liked real action too much. Soaps were for women who imagined taking lovers but didn’t dare, women stuck in fading lives, who knew now they would never be loved the way they dreamed of, the way she was loved. She held herself gently by the elbows as if she might fly apart. Never had she believed, since she was fifteen and her life had cracked like an egg, that she would know love again and be totally, vehemently loved. She walked with that love shining around her.