Jake had called her twice. She had not returned his calls. If she dialed his apartment now, she would surely get his answering machine and be able to leave a message that would alert him to her situation. She could not speak with him. She had not an ounce of emotional energy left for him or anyone else. It was absurd. She had finally met a man who was truly interested in her, and she simply did not have time to see him. Her family had closed over her head, and it was all she could do to teach her classes, meet her students, and try to hold on to her cases that were proceeding inevitably to court.
As it happened, she was there at the right moment. Her mother’s eyelids fluttered several times as had happened before. Now, however, her eyes opened a slit and she moaned. “Mother,” Suzanne said loudly, unsure if Beverly could hear her. “Mother! I’m here.”
Beverly moaned again and Suzanne ran into the hall to tell the nurse. Suzanne could not tell if Beverly knew where she was. Suzanne stood by the side of the bed while the nurse checked her mother over, checking pulse and pressure. Then they made her leave. She thought that unfair, since she desperately wanted to find out what kind of shape Beverly was in.
Still, she and Elena mildly celebrated Beverly’s return to the living with a couple of big cookies Elena picked up at the local bakery. Suzanne said, “It makes me nervous, him trying to see you.”
“Don’t worry. It was stupid. I was stupid. Marta and you were stupid to throw us together. He’s a sleaze, Mother.”
“Did Beverly know what was going on?”
“Well, of course. She was home all day. She liked to know what was going on. It made her feel more…real. Connected. In touch.”
“She should have told me.”
“And betrayed my confidences? Come on. Grandma’s always been on my side.”
“Someone truly on your side would’ve advised you to clear out, and fast.”
“Grandma’s like me. She likes intense emotions and drama. But I’m going to change. I’m going to be calm and mature. I’m going to be like a rock. That’s what I’m going to be when I finally grow up: a boulder.”
“Elena, precious, you don’t have to go from extreme to extreme.”
“Maybe I do, Mother. Then someday I’ll end up in the golden happy middle. But maybe I can only get there by banging from one side to the other.”
She noticed suddenly that all three cats were lying in a heap on the plush chair, clutching one another in sleep. Some peace accord had been reached. Perhaps they understood that chaos had come and things would never be the same. Mao lay between the two larger orange cats, sleeping soundly. At least someone was benefiting from the troubles that had beset her family.
34
Beverly
Beverly woke to blurred grayness, her head throbbing. Her right leg was in a cast. She touched it tentatively, her bad leg. That at least was better than if it were her left leg. She kept blinking but she could not see well, and then she was too exhausted to cling to the narrow rock shelf of consciousness. She slid off and dark waters closed over her.
Suzanne had been there, she remembered that. A strange nurse, Black but not Sylvia. She could not speak. Again, again. She groaned when she thought of how hard she had worked to regain some speech, and now it was gone. She had slid all the way down the glass mountain and lay in a heap at the bottom, worse than before, because her vision was blurred, so how would she read or see the computer screen?
She desperately needed to know what had happened upstairs, when she had tried to climb the stairs. She must find out if Elena was all right. No one had thought to offer her pen and paper and she could not speak. She felt entirely helpless, imprisoned in isolation. They would not let anyone be with her long. Suzanne came and went, nurses and aides and orderlies. Finally Elena came. Elena’s face was blurred but her voice was clear and low pitched. “Grandma. Can you make out what I’m saying?” Elena peered at her, bringing her face close to Beverly’s. “Okay, if you can understand me, press your finger into my palm.”
She pressed her finger into Elena’s warm soft palm. Then she traced a question mark again and again.
“Oh, you want to know what happened, right?” Her Elena, bright and sensitive as always, sat beside the bed and told her everything. Beverly was immensely grateful. Nobody had thought to bring her up-to-date. Elena came every day, as did Suzanne. Beverly slept a great deal, if she could call that dark heavy place “sleep,” full of fragments that brushed her mind, perhaps fragments of her mind partly exploded, debris floating loose in her.
Beverly could tell that the nurse had an attitude about Elena, who was always being judged by other women. Beverly fiercely wanted to comfort her, to protect her, to show that nurse her solidarity with Elena, but she could not. She supposed everyone in the hospital knew the story. It was easy to pass judgment on women who took chances: bad women they were labeled for being adventurous. Elena’s crime had been falling in love with a man who was leading her on. Married men could be dangerous, because they knew women better than bachelors and they had a lot of practice at manipulating a woman. They knew what to say and how to make you feel sorry for them. She had been in that bed several times herself. A married man had a lot of practice in lying successfully to a woman, in making excuses, in making promises that sounded convincing.
They made her get up and hobble to the bathroom. They had to hold her because of her broken leg. If that leg wasn’t stupid, she would never have broken it. Strong bones ran in her family. She had never before broken a bone except when her wrist was snapped in a demonstration, but that was intentional. She had healed fast then. A textile mill strike in South Carolina.
All those flowers. People had really cared then. She had been a heroine to the women of the mill. That had felt stronger than the pain of her wrist. She couldn’t even remember the pain, but she could recall vividly the cookies. She had been so young then that eating all those cookies had made her face break out. She could still taste the coconut orange cookies one middle-aged woman had brought her with a big red bow left over from Valentine’s Day on top.
She had been strong then for such a small woman. She astonished the male organizers, the way she could hold up in a march or a picket line, the way she could work all day and still have the energy for a good rousing speech at night. She had looked far more delicate than she was, but that too had often been to her advantage. She had been roughed up a few times, beaten, especially in the South. The civil rights days had been dangerous. She had felt real fear days and nights and days and nights.
Lying in the narrow hospital bed, she remembered another narrow bed, upstairs in the house of a Black family in Alabama. There was only one loft room and she had been put in it, while the rest of the Lucases doubled up downstairs. Those nights were hot and still and the air was thick, almost wooly in that loft. The sound of a car pausing outside the house choked conversation at once, could wake her from what passed with them all for sleep.
She could see Leander’s face vividly, and his sister Marcella, both with slightly uptilted eyes, a tint of red in their hair and skin, the high cheekbones of southern Blacks with an Indian ancestor. She could hear their voices. Marcella had been jailed for two months after a march and then went on a hunger strike for better conditions, losing a third of her body weight. She turned ashen, her skin lifeless. Their mother was fired from her maid’s job and had to start taking in laundry. Yet they shared what they had with her. Mrs. Lucas was always claiming she wasn’t hungry when there wasn’t enough food to go around. She herself lost seven pounds while she was staying with them. She was closest to Marcella, who was twenty. They lived warily, all of them, doing what they had to but always on edge.
Sure enough, one night the Ku Klux Klan threw a fire bomb. It crashed through the window into the kitchen. They managed to put out the fire, although it cost them one of their only blankets. They had to. The fire department stood around and watched the flames, making jokes about niggers and nigger lovers. Leander had been burned, but not ba
dly. They had treated it with ice and grease. She remembered the dog, but she could not think of his name, barking hysterically at the fire. She remembered the taste of greens with a bit of pig fat in them. Yes, she had eaten pig down South. If they had any meat, that was what they had. She never said a word. She could taste those greens with fatback and onions. Mrs. Lucas made a kind of fry bread when there wasn’t much else. She could not have refused to eat what they shared with her, for they honored her with their sharing. It was all they had to give, besides their trust and their friendship.
When Beverly woke next, she did not know where she was, and she thought she was in her room upstairs in their little house, Leander and Marcella and their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lucas, and Leander’s girlfriend, Ella with the corn rows. The brown dog with his tail that would slam on the floor like a metronome. The smell of the laundry cooking on the stove and the scorched smell of the iron. She was convinced she was there in that loft room until she tried to move and her leg would not obey her and everything turned gray. Then she remembered it was thirty-five years since she had seen them. Yet their shotgun house with the ladder going up to the loft where she slept felt far more real to her than anything in the hospital. She felt as if she could extend her hand to touch Marcella or Leander, hug Mama Lucas and be engulfed by her warmth, sit on the rough wooden steps patting their big waggy dog, Sugar. She was still that thirty-something New Yorker with the strawberry hair and her big green eyes and her false air of fragility and her daily inexhaustible strength. She had been closer in age to Mama Lucas than to Marcella, but she felt much younger than Mrs. Lucas, and everybody seemed to think she was younger too. The hard life and poor nutrition aged them early and fast. Somewhere in the wreck of her stroke-wracked body that woman with the reddish hair and the peach complexion still abided. Her real life was not here in this sterile place where she had no identity, but out there, somewhere, where things counted and lives were changed, out there where if she could only summon the strength and the willpower, surely she could break through and once again live—live touching others truly and being touched by them, a woman other people might love, might hate, might admire, but never could ignore. Here she was as invisible as dust on the windowsill, and as unimportant.
35
Elena
Elena was glad when Grandma was transferred from the hospital to the rehab center, where it was a lot less depressing and easier to park.
“Yeah, I’m looking for work,” she told her grandma, who was propped up awkwardly in a chair, dumped there like a bag of laundry. “My car needed a brake job, so Suzanne had to pay for it, which made me feel totally shitty. But I’m back to my own wheels again. I’m going to get a fucking job somewhere, somehow.”
“Hurt?” Grandma was talking but very slowly, laboriously. Her voice sounded as if it had been squashed. It was much worse than before.
“Sometimes. I get depressed when I think how stupid I was. How I could believe so passionately in such a nasty wimp.”
“Want…home.”
“I’ll bet you want to get out of here. But the therapy is helping, isn’t it?”
Grandma shrugged. She printed on her pad, 2ND TIME, THEY DON’T TRY.
“But you’re trying hard.”
Grandma shrugged again. She spoke, “Point?”
“You mean, what’s the point? So you can get around again. So you can speak to me.”
Grandma printed, ONLY YOU UNDERSTAND.
“That’s because, you and me, we love each other better than anybody else loves us, Grandma.”
Grandma tapped her hand and tried to smile. Her face was twisted and her smile, a grimace, but Elena understood. It was such a rotten thing that the old woman had to go through all this again. Some of the therapists were good, they worked hard, but Elena could see that the orderlies treated her grandma like a sack of flour. They picked her up and put her here or there, they spoke around her, they touched her roughly and unfeelingly, as if she were a piece of furniture. They did not have the patience to wait while she got together the word or two she meant to speak. Elena made a great point of her own presence, to try to protect Grandma if she could, but she knew the effect was short-lived.
“I can’t figure out what I want to do.”
“Live,” Grandma said.
“Yeah, that’s cool and everything—like, neither of us is dead. But I have to figure out what I want to do. I can’t go on the way I have been.” She waited for Beverly’s nod. She could explain to her grandma exactly how she felt, as she never could to anyone else. “So now I have to grow up. Mother’s a lawyer. Rachel’s going to be a rabbi. But I’m nothing. I was thinking for a while maybe I’d go to law school….”
Grandma managed to shake her head vigorously.
“I know, I know. Big mistake. I could never stand it. Too boring. Too in the head. I know.”
Grandma nodded. Made a lunge and patted her hand.
“Well, I’m not going to be a doctor or a nurse. I can’t stand these places.” Elena waved her hand at the Maalox-green walls, mint-flavored antacids. “I can use a computer, but I don’t love them, the way Mother does. I just don’t love words that much.”
“Colors,” Grandma said.
“Yeah, I love color. My eyes sink in. But I’m not cut out to be an artist, Grandma. I don’t believe in those framed things on the wall, like they mean that much. I hate museums. I feel trapped and coerced. Like someone is yelling in my ear, Appreciate, Appreciate you shithead, you turkey!”
Grandma giggled. Elena loved her even more then. She could not imagine her mother giggling at that. Rachel certainly wouldn’t. They would both want her to appreciate! Where did those voices come from anyhow? Grandma was never her conscience. “Grandma, if you were my age, we’d be girlfriends. We are anyhow.”
Grandma brought Elena’s hand to her lips and tried to kiss it. She could not control her mouth very well and drooled a little. Elena did not mind, although Grandma looked embarrassed and dabbed at the hand, grimacing again. “Don’t be embarrassed. Dogs do the same thing, and I like dogs.”
That made Grandma giggle again. “Me, dog?”
“No way. Just nice like one.”
“Friends.” Grandma waved between them.
“To the end.”
How Elena hated the Sunday want ads. It gave her a headache just to weigh the Globe help-wanted section in her hands and look at all that fine print. There had to be something she could do. Oh, she could probably get a job as a receptionist for a while. Boring, boring. But her looks would get her that, and she would be ultrapolite. She would kiss ass down to the bone for a job. She just could not stand being stone broke. She could feel the wheels grinding in the house. Her mother had never spoken to her of money in her life. Whatever Elena had asked for, she had gotten unless her mother did not think it was good for her. It was strangely human for her mother to admit to money troubles. Suzanne had never told them they could not afford a school or a trip or some coat, probably because Suzanne always felt guilty, as if she wasn’t a good enough mother. Well, she wasn’t a great one for sure, although Elena wondered if she would do any better. With Jim, that loser, she had assumed they’d have children. Life was so fucking weird and malignant. She knew for sure that Suzanne had to be really hard up to mention money to her, so she was determined to carry a bit of the load.
Monday morning as she was doing her laundry, she saw Jim hanging around in the backyard by the oak tree, as if to catch her. Yellow leaves all over the ground like fallen light. He didn’t go to his office Monday, of course. He looked like a forlorn kid, like a kid who ought to be in school and didn’t know what to do with himself. For a moment, watching from behind the curtain in Beverly’s room, she felt sorry for him. She felt a moment’s tug of pity. She made herself turn away. It didn’t mean anything. He tried to get into the house and pounded on the door, but she lay low. Marta had changed the locks, giving them new keys to the front door and the grade door in back. She stayed in her room till
he finally drove off.
Two police detectives showed up at the house just as she was about to go to a job interview. Jim was trying to cause trouble for Marta about shooting into the wall that day.
“She didn’t shoot at us. Understand, she was standing at the foot of the bed and we were in it. Naked. She’d come in to tell her husband she was pregnant, and there he was all over me. But she didn’t shoot at us. She raised the gun and shot way over our heads. It was like a symbolic act, understand, but she hadn’t lost it, and she actually was very careful not to hurt us. Personally I would have drilled both of us if I’d been her. We both deserved it. It wasn’t assault. If anything, we assaulted her.”
“You don’t want to lodge a complaint against her?”
“I’m guilty. She isn’t guilty of anything except trusting two people she had every reason to trust—except we weren’t worth it.” She would come through for Marta: it was the honorable thing to do. It would serve Jim right. What was he trying to pull off anyhow? “We were never in danger and she wasn’t even threatening us. It was like setting off firecrackers. No, I wasn’t scared. I was just ashamed.”
Because she wanted money, wanted it badly, she took the first job she was offered, a receptionist’s job at a group of financial analysts and investment counselors who shared a suite of offices off Route 128 in Needham. It was about twenty minutes from the house, and she would be going against traffic coming and going. The pay was ridiculous, but she wouldn’t hesitate to quit if she found something better.
“Elena, you didn’t have to take a low-level job like that. I can find you something with friends of ours,” Suzanne said, dutifully eating the chicken Elena had fried.
“I have to take it. I need to be working. Your friends would be terrified to hire me, for fear I’d fuck their husbands. You know that.”