“Oh, he’ll insist on visitation. Besides, I won’t be alone. I have you. Don’t I?”
“Of course. But you don’t feel the baby needs two parents?”
“Yes. You and me. Plus Adam. He’ll shape up and come through. He’s just dazed and pouting for the minute. Jim will make demands. It isn’t as if I’m trying to keep him away from the baby. But I don’t want to go through my life having a husband who prefers other women to me. The business of making love in our bed was more than I can stomach. I could forgive him once, but this was too close to home.”
“Forgive him once?”
“Do you imagine I never knew why he was fired? I just thought it was better for everybody if I pretended I didn’t. I thought he’d learned a lesson. I thought it was a onetime aberration. Now I wonder how many more there were I never knew about. I wonder about the receptionist before Elena. I wonder about his patients, but I don’t lie awake wondering, and if I stay married to him, I will.”
“I know. When I discovered Sam was having that affair, I just couldn’t recover from it. I kept thinking, well, if he would rather be with her, why are we together? I kept being haunted by images of them in bed together. I kept listening to everything he said and wanting to cross-examine him. Oh, so you say you went to the dentist. Exactly what time was your appointment? Well, a filling shouldn’t take more than half an hour….”
“We’re going to be on short rations. Babies are expensive. Adam will be in school for years yet. Maybe we should take in roomers. Oh, Adam’s coming home this weekend.”
“He sounded martyred on the phone.”
“Well, he’s going to have to put his bony shoulder to the family wheel. We’re all in deep shit, and he’s going to have to help rather than suffer at the top of his lungs.” Marta sounded cheerful, in spite of her words. “I hope you win this case.”
“I have to. If they don’t overturn the conviction, I think it’ll kill Maxine. That really scares me.”
“You did the best you could for her under frankly impossible circumstances.”
“You don’t think we have a prayer, do you? I have to start preparing for the SJC.” The Supreme Judicial Court: the highest court in the state. But would Maxine hold out that long?
37
Beverly
Beverly’s words beat around in her head like birds trapped in a house, banging themselves on the windows, able to perceive where they wanted to go but trapped by an invisible barrier. She could not think of a damned thing to look forward to. She would be lucky if she could drag herself around in a walker again. She knew how slow and painful and partial was the recovery from a stroke like hers. She had enjoyed certain things after her first stroke: being with Elena, E-mail, playing around on the Internet, and chatting to the degree she had been able to with Sylvia. Those had been her pleasures. She did not think she would be talking again soon. Sylvia had gone off to another job. Elena would probably leave now, to get away from Marta’s hostility. Her vision was too blurry to read a computer screen, although she could more or less see faces. She could distinguish between the bored nurses and orderlies and the truly nasty ones, and the couple of nice young women who tried to make contact.
She was worried about her darling. Elena was unnaturally quiet and broody. Every day she came to the rehab center to sit with her. Elena felt guilty about the fall, and Beverly had not managed to persuade her that to take responsibility for an accident was silly, unnecessary. It was like coming around a corner and bumping into an oncoming truck.
She did not believe in sulking, so she tried, to the degree she was able, to convey good spirits. But when she was alone, she wept. Sometimes she thought she would choke to death from her tears and the way they made her nose and sinuses block up. It would have been perfect if she had never wakened from that coma, just slid from sleep into death and vanished.
Her friend Dave had died in a coma. He had been struck by a scab’s truck on a picket line and never regained consciousness. He had left a living will, and for once, the doctors respected it—probably because there was no money in his family. The union was picking up the tab, but there were times it paid to be poor. She knew he would have wanted to go out the way he did, a light turned off, not to be kept like a big turnip in a hospital bed.
Dave and she had gone out for Chinese-Cuban. He loved black beans. When he was younger, his hair was black like those beans, like Elena’s. Glossy hair, his complexion ruddy, always a little weathered, and those gray eyes: they went right through her. Was it after the garbage strike? No, it had been a demonstration. Something about welfare. He’d had a scar on his right hand, crossing the back of it, dark red and slightly raised. For some reason, she had never asked him how he got it. She remembered the feel of that scar when she was touching his hand, when he was caressing her. They had never really had an affair, just gone to bed a couple of times. He was no great shakes in bed. Too much in a hurry. It was one item on a list. Too bad. He had been gorgeous to look at. She had gone to bed with him twice, no, three times, each time hoping it would be better, that he would be more involved, more sensual, less abrupt. Then she had decided it was pointless, and that they would just stay friends, which they had, until the end. She was glad he could not see her as she was now. She refused to look at herself in the hand mirror they gave her. That was not her face. Her hair was growing out gray again.
When she thought of her face, she thought of herself when she had been at her peak. For her that had come on the late side, say thirty to forty. Everyone had thought she was younger than she was, but when she had truly been younger, she had not had the confidence, the knowledge of men, to do much with her looks. No, her glory days had been in her thirties and early forties. She had worn a red rinse in her hair. Red hair, green eyes. Suzanne should tint her hair red. She would look much more interesting, but Suzanne had never listened to her when she tried to tell her how to capitalize on her features, how to present herself, how to dress and walk and smile. She had done her best to pass on tips to her daughter, although her hard-won know-how had been rejected every time. It was sad. Suzanne just refused to learn from Beverly, when if she had taken a little advice, she could have had so much more fun. A man like Victor would have gone off anyhow, but she could have kept Sam on the hook far longer if she had known how to play him. Suzanne just shut down whenever Beverly tried to pass on a few good words. If Beverly knew anything, it was men.
Whatever she tried to give her child, Suzanne never seemed to want. Instead she felt as if Suzanne wished she was more like her sister Karla, a homebody, a lump, a balebusteh, a grade school teacher with sentimental left politics, rife with superstition. It was her own fault for leaving Suzanne so often with Karla, but it had been out of the question to take her little girl into some of the dangerous situations where she was working as an organizer, particularly in the South. Those Klansmen didn’t care if they shot or burned a child instead of an adult. Perhaps they liked it better. She could not understand them, those men so driven by hate and malice and pride, so ready to maim and kill in the name of their skin. More than once she had thought she would die there, in the South. She had one of the lawyers with the civil rights movement draw up a will for her. She had little to leave, but she wanted it clear that Karla was to be Suzanne’s guardian. Once during a march, she had looked up and realized she was in the bead of a man with a rifle standing on an overpass. Then for some reason he laughed instead and did not shoot her. Later she heard he had shot someone else, a young man from Chicago. They never caught him. They usually didn’t.
How could she have lived her life so near the edge, so fully, so passionately, and be stuck now in a bed with no more ability to communicate than a worm or a cauliflower? Her voice had been her weapon, her tool. She had been valued by others for her ability to marshal the right words and say them passionately in a ringing voice. Her voice had never been called shrill, a full womanly voice that carried into a crowd. Without her voice, she was indeed crippled. Soon she would no
t remember what her own voice had sounded like, low pitched and rich in quality that men had compared to honey.
When the doctors or the nurses discussed her, they emphasized it was her second stroke, as if that proved she was careless, in a category of those easily dismissed. Maybe they tried hard with the first-stroke victims, but if it happened again, it was no longer worth their trouble. There was something dismissive in the label. Second-time loser. Second time around. Secondhand. They used to call imperfect merchandise seconds. She was certainly imperfect merchandise.
She wanted out of the rehab center, but going back to Suzanne’s was not hugely attractive. Her own life had been demolished, like an old tenement where people had lived for generations and raised their families and faced their troubles. Now it was a parking lot. Now she was parked in this bed. She could taste her despair. It was bitter tea in her mouth.
38
Suzanne
Suzanne read Rachel’s E-mail with an increasing sense of separation physical and mental. Suzanne had been told about a certain kind o rapture, a form of temporary infatuation, that came over people in Jerusalem. She was accustomed to a high level of intimacy with Rachel and she missed it. They were inhabiting different universes at the moment. Each of them regarded the other’s preoccupations as intrusions Worse than tangential. Irrelevant.
Dear Mom,
Now I know where the old legend of the streets of gold comes from: here. In the late afternoon, the streets near the Old City seem to be made of old gold. Sometimes they seem almost edible to me, like peanut brittle. It seems a pity to walk on them, yet people have for thousands of years.
Sometimes I feel drunk with breathing (and sometimes just plain sick because of the smog from the cars and trucks that gathers in the bowl of the city). But when the exhaust doesn’t get to me, the scents make me giddy.
Jerusalem smells of pine, or maybe it’s cedar, and of rosemary. When I think how you and Marta used to try to keep one pitiful pot of rosemary going all winter in the kitchen window, it makes me giggle. Here it grows like a weed. They use it for ground covers on hills. They use it for hedges, the way we use privet. Also their gardens are full of lavender. What we cherish as prize little specimens grow everywhere here fiercely as poison ivy in Massachusetts.
We were sitting on a hill near the kibbutz where Michael’s friend lives, and I realized we were sitting on thyme. It was all over the ground there. I don’t know if they planted it or if it grows wild, but truly, here even the weeds are holy and wonderful. I really do have a desire to kiss the ground sometimes, like some people do when they get off the plane. Wherever we go, I feel the past walking with us, shining through the present, so that at times, everything seems lit from within.
As for us, I think we will be married in late November or early December. We have to decide with the rebbe next week what would be convenient for him, and then I can give you the date. You should make reservations at once, then. It will be early enough in December so you won’t run into all the Christians coming for their holidays.
How was she going to make Rachel understand she could not afford flying to Israel herself, let alone with anybody else in the family? She would have to disappoint her daughter, who was never demanding, never surly. She felt rotten, but she also felt trapped. She was plunging headfirst into debt, and there were more expenses coming. She would have to sit down and figure out her situation exactly. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as she thought.
Rachel’s next E-mail was less ecstatic.
I am really shocked at both Elena and Marta. I can understand Marta better. After all, pregnancy makes some women’s tempers short. How is she now? Is she really going to divorce Jim? I am writing her separately. Marta has always been like a really close aunt to me, and I can’t even remember a time she was not there, even before we lived together. I know she will be a good mother to her baby, but I also remember how hard you told me it was for you to raise Elena alone. I am worried for Marta and she is always in my thoughts and prayers.
Elena will never cease to amaze me, what she decides to give herself to, what she pursues, and what she flees from. She is my own sister, but I think there is something perverse in her which leads her on dangerous paths and into darkness of her own making. I understand that she didn’t know that Marta was expecting, but she certainly knew Jim was married. What did she hope would happen? How did she justify it to herself? I try to imagine, and I can’t.
I am less surprised at him. He has always had a wandering eye, and he used to put his arms around me more than I was comfortable with. He always seemed like an old man to me. I mean, he was my “uncle.” Everyone has uncles who are just a little too familiar, so I didn’t see it as a big problem. Like relatives who insist on kissing you on the mouth when you don’t know them that well. Michael’s family are big kissers. It’s hard for me to get used to, but I resist showing discomfort. It’s my fault for being too stiff and formal with people.
This is a great place to work on being overly formal and distant, because everybody talks to you as if they were family and had the right to yell at you and criticize you to your face and give you advice. Everyone from the guy behind the counter in the coffee bar to the cab driver who took us from the airport the very first day to the woman who cuts my hair, off of Ben Yehuda near Cat’s Corner where all the kids hang out. She is planning my wedding for me, without my desire or input. At least she thinks she is. She has cut my hair all differently. I will have a picture taken to send you. We don’t have a new camera yet, since Michael’s was stolen. I wonder if we should ask for a camera as an early wedding present, as we could sure use one here, hint, hint. Maybe I should ask Dad, what do you think?
Suzanne sat at her desk going over bills. Money was still hemorrhaging. She had to find a way to cut costs; she had to find a way to make more money. Of course the simplest solution would be to leave the university and go back into private practice full-time, but if she did that, she would have no time at all for her daughters, her mother, Jake, her life. Herself. She had lived that way when she was younger. About to turn fifty, she found it unappealing. Stick your head in the buzz saw. The total unreflective life.
Still, she would have to cut back on pro bono work. What a choice. Be good to your mother or be useful to the people who really need your help with the courts and the law. It should not be a choice anyone had to make. It was unfair. People got old. People had strokes, heart attacks, developed cancers. It should not come as such a financial shock to a family. Something was wrong with the whole system of health delivery when taking care of a family member could bankrupt you in a few years. She did not know what to do. Everything she was earning, she was spending, and her savings were eroding at a frightening rate. When her savings were gone and her investments cashed in, she would have no cushion for disaster and trouble; and where would the money come from then for Beverly’s care? She could complain to no one except to Jake, when he was around, since she hardly felt she could dump on Marta, and it seemed tactless to complain to Karla. Would Rosella step in if something went wrong with Karla? When something went wrong. Rosella’s family’s financial resources were meager, but Karla was already living with her.
Costs. Okay, drop the rod and gun club. She wasn’t going to be shooting with Marta. Cut back to basic cable. She never had time to watch movies anyhow. Less takeout? But who would do the cooking? If she was to litigate more lucrative cases, she would not have time to make even the few meals she did. Elena was going to have to pick up some of the slack. Less dry cleaning, somehow, but she had to be absolutely neat and polished for court.
It was clear that she could not fly to Israel for Rachel’s wedding. Maybe Rachel and Michael could wait till they got home. Rachel would be incredibly disappointed, but to fly over would cost several thousand just for herself. She did not know when Beverly would be back home. She did not know what kind of care Beverly would need. Suzanne plunged her face into her hands and sighed. She felt run over. She got up and went into the li
ving room.
“Elena,” she said, standing over the couch. Then she thought better of their positions and took a seat in the armchair.
Elena opened her eyes. “I’m trying to learn to meditate.”
“Really?” Suzanne tried not to sound skeptical. “Does it help?”
“Sometimes. I should take a class. Marta should learn to meditate.”
“I think we should stay off the subject of Marta.”
Elena stretched with feral grace, arching her back. Elena had never gone through an awkward age, as Rachel and she herself had—sometimes she wondered if she had ever grown out of it.
“Elena, we have money problems. We’re spending much faster than we’re earning. We have to cut costs. Beverly’s condition is bankrupting me.”
“Just don’t let Grandma catch on to that.”
“I have no intention of speaking to her about the situation. You and I have to solve it.”
Elena seemed fascinated by the idea of cooking. “I used to see the cooks whip up dishes at the restaurant. I used to think like I could be a chef, except it’s so sweaty and they all have mad dog tempers and throw knives around the kitchen. Besides, I don’t want to go back to working in a restaurant. Too many drugs around. Too much nightlife.”
“Well, cooking for you, me, and Beverly won’t take chef’s school.”
“You have to let me cook the way I like it. No tofu. No turkey burgers. And at least sometimes I get to make things hot.”
“If you cook, you choose what we eat. Agreed.”
“I can do it.” Elena looked pleased with herself. “I’ll take over the grocery shopping too.”
“That would truly help.” Suzanne had expected a fraught conversation, that Elena would feel martyred and coerced. Finally she said that.