She saw friends from the restaurant more often than she had since she’d been fired, but she could not spend much time with them. They worked late; she had to get up early. The women at Black, Lincoln and Worthington didn’t attract her. They seemed slight and vacuous. She had made friends with one of the technicians at the rehab clinic, Cindy, recently divorced. They took to going out together Saturdays to the movies, to a club, to a rock concert. Cindy was a year older, chunky but cute, blond, curvy, and savvy with a great capacity for remembering jokes. Elena never remembered anything but punch lines. She envied people who could hold a crowd with a story.
She spent a lot of time going over the affair with Jim. She was sure she had seduced Jim. She was convinced she had thought of him sexually first, then put out some musk he could not resist. He had not loved her; she had loved him. That was her crime. She had made him come to her. Perhaps she had never forgiven Marta for making her lie in court about Evan and Chad, but she knew Marta had done all that to protect her. Why had she held a grudge so long for something done to keep her out of worse trouble? Because she pushed her own guilt off on Marta, that was why.
She tried to talk to Cindy. Cindy thought she was being mushy and mystical. “So you got involved with a married man? Most men are married. I did that back in college. Everybody does it once. It’s only fatal if you keep doing it.”
“I think I just bring terrible trouble down.”
“On yourself mostly, sounds like.”
“Not exactly…So are you in the mood for Mexican? Or Thai?”
She had been working at Black, Lincoln and Worthington for exactly three weeks. Her probationary period would end next Friday. Monday as she came into work, she was told to report to Mr. Lincoln. “Miss Blume, I’m afraid we’re going to have to let you go.”
“But I’ve always been on time. I come back from my breaks early. I’ve greeted everyone the way I was told—”
“Miss Blume, it’s nothing personal. But you’re at the front door of our company.”
She saw Sunday’s Globe lying on his desk. In the Metro section, there was a column about the so-called scandal around Marta, Jim, and domestic violence. Photos of all three of them, including a really stupid one of her with her eyes half shut, were printed with the column.
“Is there anything wrong with my work?” she asked.
“We just feel you haven’t really fit in…”
She was still on probation. No severance pay, no notice needed. She came in at five to nine on Monday, and by nine-twenty she was back in the parking lot. So much for Black, Lincoln and Worthington. She was unemployed again. And notorious.
Suzanne sat at the table, frowning. “I’m just trying to see if we have a case.”
“Mother, enough with law and courts. I’m not going to sue them. It’s a crappy job.” Elena was waiting to see if her mother liked the Creole chicken.
“You don’t want them to take you back?”
“No. They’d resent it and me. I don’t have any friends there.”
Suzanne frowned, eating absentmindedly, glass of water at the ready. “Maybe they could use you at Earthworks.”
“Mother! Haven’t you learned anything?”
Suzanne looked blank for a moment. “Oh, Jake is hardly ever there. And if he wanted a young girlfriend, the place is crawling with interns in their twenties. Besides, I think you learned something—I’d like to think so.”
“So would I. Do you like the chicken?”
More water. “It’s delightful.”
“It’s too hot for you.”
“No, it’s fine…. I should learn to eat hotter food. It’s supposed to be good for you.”
Nothing further was said about Elena’s going to work for Earthworks. She wished she had saved the Sunday paper. She should have asked Mr. Lincoln for his, since obviously he had finished reading it. She found a couple of possibilities in the daily paper and spent the next morning finding out that each of them had heard of her also. Her picture in the paper hadn’t helped her job prospects.
One of the guys at the old restaurant told her Natalie’s was looking for a hostess. She wished she could stay out of the late-night restaurant workers’ scene, but maybe Natalie’s wouldn’t mind if she was momentarily notorious. She called up and got an interview. There really was a Natalie, who would be meeting her at 3:00 P.M. Friday in her restaurant at the base of Beacon Hill.
Natalie was about fifty, as short as Suzanne but much heavier, crammed into a pants suit. She had cropped blond hair and smoked constantly. “Yeah, I saw your picture in the paper. What happened, you get canned for that?”
Elena was truthful, figuring she had nothing to lose. Natalie hired her on the spot. “Report for work starting tomorrow. In fact, if you could start tonight?”
“I could be back by five, dressed for work.”
“Do it.” Natalie dismissed her, going back to her accounts.
Well, at least she didn’t have to take money from her mother, and she had a job that paid better than Black, Lincoln and Worthington. Almost anything would, short of baby-sitting. It was a familiar scene, and she fit right in even if half the waiters were younger than she was. Robby, the headwaiter, was the person she had most to please, as Natalie did not pay much attention to the waiting staff unless something went wrong. She spent her time on the menus, on lining up specialty events, on advertising and publicity. Robby was exactly Elena’s age and quickly figured out they were the same sign, Aries. Robby was thin, good-looking in an edgy, slightly overpolished way, gay, with ambitions to be an actor. Two of the other waiting staff were would-be filmmakers. They had one poet and one photographer and an ex-model, whose career had lasted six months. It was a typical restaurant scene, and after work, most of them went out together to the bars frequented by other late-nighters. Yes, it was comfortable, it was a scene she slipped into like an old pair of pants. Nonetheless, if she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life doing restaurant work, she had to scramble. But in which direction? Up? Sideways? Just not in the same tired circles.
Whenever she was sitting still for a moment, whenever she was in the tub, she no longer fantasized about Jim or any other guy. She tried to imagine herself in various lives. It was a mental trying-on, the way she might try on dresses in a boutique—except with an undercurrent of desperation. She had to choose one of these; she had to try on the right one and plunk down money and time to possess it. She needed to become something real. She had the feeling that then she would be protected from herself, from the wild flight into obsession, from the stupid risk that brought down the roof. But only if the choice she made was the right one. In middle school, they had had a book of short stories. One of them, “The Lady or the Tiger,” she remembered. Two doors, with something behind them, happiness or death. Well, she had already loosed the tiger. Lady Luck had to be behind the next door she opened. Had to be.
40
Beverly
Beverly lay in the bed in the room she had been given in Suzanne’s house, rolling from side to side as she had been taught. She faithfully performed the range-of-motion exercises, but she no longer believed in them or anything except her own great fatigue with all of this futile fussing. The doctors had told her that her leg was healing nicely, as if that mattered. Her brain, that had always served her so well, would not heal. The neat sweet connection between mind and body she had always taken for granted was broken. Parts of her body obeyed her still; parts obeyed fitfully, like her voice; parts were dead to her, like her right hand. She had a distant lost foot at the end of the broken leg. Once it had belonged to her. No more.
She had to plot carefully how to get up. Moving herself from the bed to her wheelchair required every bit of concentration she could muster. When she was finally in the wheelchair, she trembled with fatigue and had to rest before she could wheel herself to the bathroom. Then she must transfer again, to the toilet. Long after she had used it, she sat there resting. She had finally mastered transferring herself to t
he chair in the shower. The liquid soap hung on an old belt where she could reach it. Her greatest difficulty lay in getting the water just right. Elena had made marks with nail polish where she should turn the two dials for a good mix, but sometimes the water was hotter than other days. Then one morning she slipped, losing her balance. Suzanne heard her fall and acted terrified, then dragged her to the doctor to be tested all over again.
Every movement had to be planned like a military campaign. Every movement had to be calculated and performed with intense concentration. Otherwise she would fall. Otherwise she could break bones. Otherwise she might bang her head and have another seizure. It was boring to think hard about how to soap herself, how to rinse herself. Drying her body was a tricky undertaking. She was still trying to carry that out when she heard someone in the kitchen. The day had begun for the rest of them. Usually it was Suzanne, because Elena had an evening job and slept late. Now Beverly would have breakfast in bed, because by this time she was exhausted and had to rest. The effort of showering and drying wore her out. Suzanne brought food in on a tray.
After her oatmeal, toast, juice, and coffee, she promptly fell asleep. When she woke, the house was quiet. The phone’s ringing had awakened her. She did not move, although there was an extension within reach of her arm. Trying to answer the phone and make herself understood was an agony she would never go through again. It was humiliating. Besides, someone had answered it already, Elena or the answering machine.
She must get up and put clothes on. She rang her bell. Rang it again. It would be much faster if Elena helped her. The physical therapist was coming at ten-thirty, so she had to be out of bed and decent. Had she done the exercises she was supposed to do? She remembered doing them, but sometimes she got confused and thought she had done some task that she had really last done the day before. The days blurred into one another, melting into a featureless lump like melted wax. She slept so much that half the day was gone into unconsciousness, and the rest was disjointed into uneven segments by her napping.
“Oh, it was just somebody from the restaurant, wanting a ride tonight.” Elena helped her dress. These days all Beverly ever wore were sweats that closed with Velcro. Anything else was too difficult to get on or off, except for two caftans Elena had bought her. She liked those best. She had always had contempt for people her age who slopped around in sweats, but now she was one of them. At least the caftans hinted that she had once been a woman. She especially liked the green one with glints of gold embroidery that Elena had bought from her first restaurant paycheck.
The physical therapist was about thirty. She had too much forehead, going up and up over her thick brows, making her eyes appear small. They were like round blue dots behind her glasses, like the eyes children drew. She smelled of mints and more lightly of sweat. Today they did a lot of arm and shoulder exercises, the therapist moving the arm for her, placing a hand on her elbow and taking her hand in the therapist’s own. Lifting the arm up over her head, then slowly down. Then the same slow dance out to the side. Moving the fingers of the dead hand. Moving the thumb. Before her second stroke, she had begun to have some feeling in that hand, but it was gone—like almost everything else she had cherished.
All but one. Elena. She missed Sylvia, their constant discussions of the news and society in general. She had asked if Sylvia could not come back at least sometimes, but Suzanne had learned she had another full-time job. If she were still a normal person, she could have called Sylvia and chatted. After the physical therapist left, not to be back till Thursday (she came twice a week), Beverly once again slipped down into the sleep of exhaustion. When Elena woke her for lunch, she had been dreaming. She had been a fugitive, running through abandoned buildings with the footsteps of the red squad behind her. They were after her. They were going to beat her. She was running for her life.
Her heart was still pounding in her chest when Elena woke her, repeating, “Grandma, Grandma. Lunchtime.”
She insisted on getting out of bed (she was still dressed) to have her lunch. “Next week, you’ll get that cast off,” Elena said as she maneuvered the wheelchair into the kitchen. “Won’t you be glad to see the last of that?”
“It…ches.”
“I broke my wrist once.”
Beverly nodded wildly, crookedly, holding up her good left arm. Meaning she had done so herself: had her wrist broken.
“I remember the itching under the cast. How was your therapy?”
Beverly shrugged on her left side. “Wha?” Pointing.
“Oh, the soup. Hot and sour Chinese. And mu shu pork. After all, neither Suzanne nor Rachel is here, right? So we can sneak us some pig meat.”
Beverly grinned.
“I figure if I roll the pancakes up for you, you can eat them one-handed.”
Beverly nodded. “Good to me.” It came out more like Goo tommy, but Elena understood and nodded back.
“I try, Grandma, I try. You know, Jim and I haven’t said one word to each other since that Monday.”
“Pig.”
“I don’t want to talk to him. He hangs around at odd moments waiting for me, but I don’t let him catch me. I have nothing to say to him that isn’t obscene.”
“Big pig.”
“You think talking about pork made me think of him?” Elena chuckled. “I’ll hide the trash away at the bottom of the bag, and Suzanne will never guess we were wicked. Okay, finish off your soup and I’ll start rolling pancakes.”
Beverly had been astonished when Marta had shown up with Suzanne to take her back in the van. She had assumed that Suzanne and Elena would have moved into an apartment somewhere. No, it was back to the same apartment in Brookline with Marta upstairs, and Marta and Suzanne apparently still best friends. If only she could speak well enough to ask, but two-word sentences were all she could manage. That didn’t make for an effective interrogation procedure, especially when she was prying for the delicate, the uncomfortable, the stuff Suzanne would rather leave unsaid. Elena too seemed to accept the situation. All the women were still living here, and only the man was gone. Elena told her that Marta had thrown Jim out, and that he was furious about it. Beverly thought he ought to be grateful she hadn’t shot lower.
She no longer considered Jim worthy of Elena. He had shown himself to be a coward, throwing Elena aside to protect himself. Her good hand fluttered on the table. There was so much she wanted to say to Elena, so much she wanted to teach her, to share with her, and the effort of sputtering out two words exhausted her resources. She touched Elena’s hand. “Sweet,” she burst out. “You.”
“Yeah, sweet like a rattlesnake. I’ve learned something, believe me.”
Beverly shook her head.
“Yes, Grandma. I went after him.” Elena sighed. “Never mind. I’m doing fine. I don’t think I’m cut out to inspire a grand passion in some guy.”
Beverly disagreed with wild head shaking. Then she printed on a pad J?
Elena looked at her blankly.
Beverly laboriously printed JAKE TRIAL?
Elena looked blank. “He’s still out in California. You’ll have to ask Suzanne. I didn’t know you’d gotten to be friends with him.”
They hadn’t, because she couldn’t talk with him. She understood his situation and how badly things might go for him in court. If the lumber interests owned the judge, as it seemed they did, then he could really be screwed. She didn’t think Suzanne had grasped how vulnerable he was to the conspiracy charge. He hadn’t taken his defense seriously because he thought it was a minor case, but she had seen organizers railroaded for twenty years just for doing what he had done. It was hopeless. Before her second stroke, she had thought about E-mailing him, but she had not gotten around to it before she could no longer use the computer. She liked him, his presence, his energy, his political strength. Suzanne had made a good choice this time, but he was in bigger trouble than he seemed to understand, unless the judicial system had changed more than she thought it had.
Elena had c
leared the table and made them both espresso. “Now what would you like? Would you like me to cut up a pear?”
Beverly shook her head no.
“Maybe later. Those Bosc pears I got are pretty good. I pick out fruit better than Suzanne does.”
Beverly nodded.
“But what would you like, Grandma?”
Beverly decided to risk telling the truth. “To die.” She held Elena’s gaze with her own, never wavering. “To die!”
41
Suzanne
Suzanne came abruptly awake. It was 2:00 A.M. and the phone was ringing. She did not pick it up. She had endured middle-of-the-night phone calls from clients before, and it was best to answer them the next day, unless they had just been busted. Those kinds of phone calls had mostly ceased when she became an academic instead of a full-time lawyer. She sat up in bed, listening while her heart pounded from the sudden jolt into consciousness and the adrenaline slowly receded in her veins. She was especially annoyed because she was getting so little sleep these days. Only after Beverly fell asleep in the evening, did she get to her briefs, her classes, her own work.
“Mother! Mother!” It was Rachel, although it did not sound like her.
“Rachel?” She grabbed at the receiver on the combination answering machine and phone that sat beside her bed. “Are you hurt?” Bombing was the first thing she thought of.
“I’m so humiliated!” Rachel began to sob bitterly.
“What’s wrong?” She turned on the bedside light and sat up, mounding the pillows behind her and disturbing the two orange cats, who had been sleeping, one pressed against her right thigh and one against her left.