She considered moving in with Sean but decided that was more than their fragile link could endure. By spring, she would find an apartment, a roommate, somewhere she wanted to live. She would still see Grandma regularly. Her California dreams had evaporated with her feelings for Jim. Here she belonged, by the cold gray North Atlantic of winter. Often in the mornings now, ice skimmed the puddles. It snowed again and this time it stayed, thatching the grass, turning everything ghostly. That night, after they hung out in a late-night bar, she walked on the Common with Robby, the headwaiter, his current lover Tom, Sean, and Cassie, one of the waitresses. They crunched the new snow. Then Tom, Cassie, and she lay down and made angels. It felt blissful lying in the clean snow that gleamed in the darkness with the fresh flakes falling on her face like little kisses. Robby stood grinning at them. “My, what sweet children. The only snow I like I get from my dealer.”
“Ah, but this is free,” Tom said, but he got up and dusted himself off. Robby had a gift for making people feel silly when he chose. He was the connection in the restaurant, the man who could get what anyone wanted. Elena, who had not touched drugs in five years, avoided that side of him. She kept herself on a strict two-beer limit. Everyone teased her, but she was Robby’s age and had a couple of years on them—except Sean and the kitchen staff.
The talk show she ended up going on with Jim was local, since this case was purely a Massachusetts scandal. She wasn’t sure why she’d decided to do it, except maybe as some kind of revenge. She wanted the world to see what kind of a jerk he’d really been. She had never heard of the loudmouth who ran it, but apparently he had been a columnist in the Herald for centuries. The audience was gross, whooped up and out to witness bloodletting, but she kept her cool. Jim’s line was all about how Marta had written the domestic violence bill that they were all living under, and yet she had not hesitated to grab a gun and try to shoot him.
“First of all, she didn’t try to shoot us. She goes to the range regularly and my mother, who’s her best friend, says she’s a good shot. She shot way over our heads. It was a statement, like, she was really”—she paused for a usable word, for the first several that came to her had shit in them—“angry with us. It was like this theatrical gesture.”
“Didn’t you feel in danger?” Joe, the talk show guy, asked, leaning forward. She could tell he thought she was cute.
“Never. She was aiming way over our heads. That’s why the police laughed this off. He’s here because the police wouldn’t do anything. It was like setting off firecrackers, if you see what I mean?” She gave him a melting look.
“She could have killed us,” Jim said. “She shot off a whole round.”
“You’d have to stand on a stepladder to get in the way,” Elena said and was rewarded by a laugh from the audience.
“Isn’t it unusual, don’t you think, for a girlfriend to be defending the wife?”
“I was a…a fool. An idiot. A bitch, to get involved with him. He told me their marriage was over. He said he hadn’t touched her in two years. And meanwhile, she was pregnant. I’m so ashamed.”
“She kept it from me!” Jim said. “She never told me.”
“That she got herself pregnant?” Elena waved her hand. “She must have, since you never touched her, right?”
“How do I know it’s mine? I don’t remember dragging you off to bed, screaming and protesting. If I remember right, you came on to me.”
“So we’re both stupid and unfaithful creeps? As for the baby, try a DNA test if you aren’t sure,” Elena said. “But you’re sure. You don’t even have a candidate because she was too busy supporting you to see anyone else. I’ve always admired Marta, and I think I was trying to be her.” That was total bullshit, but she figured it would go over, being the kind of mushy psychologizing she could see the host eating up. She was scared of Jim, in a way, scared of how he had fooled her. Scared she could be sucked back in. Scared she wanted passionate consuming love so badly she made it up out of pasteboard.
It was ugly. Jim accused her of being brainwashed and out to get him because he had stopped seeing her. Everything got twisted around, but she kept her cool. She could tell the host was disappointed that she couldn’t be shaken. Soon he let them go and called in the next set of fools, two sisters who were fucking each other’s husbands.
She confided in Beverly. “I’ve been thinking about this summer, thinking about it a lot. And the one thing I’ve come up with is that I liked working in his office. I like therapy.”
Beverly printed on the pad, WORK THERAPIST OFC?
“No. I want to be a therapist.”
“Why?” Beverly said in that strangled voice that sounded as if it were ripped from her throat.
Elena shrugged. “I think I’d be better at it than he is, for one thing. I’d be better than the shrinks I was sent to after, you know, Evan and Chad. I know a lot about the dark side of people, how you get into things, how you get obsessed. I think I could help, partly because I’ve been so fucked up myself. And if I did something that was right for other people, I’d hate myself less.”
Beverly printed, WHY HATE SELF? WONDERFUL. GOOD TO ME.
“Then you’re the only one I’m any good for. Or who thinks I’m good for anything at all.”
YR. MOTHER LOVES. NO GOOD SHOWING.
“Yeah, I feel like she does, maybe for the first time since I was a little girl.”
“Lots ways…do good,” Beverly laboriously mouthed. She pointed to her chest. “Did good…for people.”
“Grandma, I’m not about to become a union organizer.”
Beverly shrugged.
“I guess I want a profession. When I meet people, they always say, And what do you do? What I should answer is, I fuck around and I fuck up.”
Beverly shook her head and then winced.
“Come on, lazy. It’s time for you to walk.”
With the cast off, Beverly was supposed to walk every day, but she was always putting it off because it hurt and it exhausted her. Elena took it on herself to make sure that Beverly took at least a short walk. With the pavement icy, they walked to and fro in the house, or else Elena would take Beverly to a mall. “You want to go to the Chestnut Hill Mall today?”
Beverly shook her head no. “Crowded.”
It was getting close to Christmas. Grandma was right. “Okay. We’ll take a stroll in lovely casa nuestra. Sounds like cosa nostra, doesn’t it?” Elena ran into the living room and put on one of her favorite disks lately, Juan Luis Guerra. Then she bopped back into Beverly’s bedroom and offered her arm. Helped her grandma out of bed. They began walking in time to the music, which she turned up superloud. Beverly liked the music, loosely nodding her head in time as they made their difficult deliberate way out of the bedroom, across the kitchen, and into the living room and then around the living room and back. They turned into a parade, because all three cats followed them as they promenaded. Going half time to the music, stepping along. It made Elena feel good.
While Grandma was napping, Elena did her laundry and got out the yellow pages to start calling colleges and universities in the area about graduate training in becoming a therapist. She felt very competent and focused as she asked questions about the programs and requested their catalogs and registration forms. Was she trying to show Jim that she wasn’t just a bimbo? Was she trying to impress her mother? Was she trying to work off guilt? It didn’t matter, she could see nowhere else to go.
She did not know if she believed she would do this thing, go back to college where she had often felt ill at ease, get a graduate degree—she who had taken five and a half years to get a B.A. She had majored in psychology finally because it was the easiest for her, except for Spanish. She had begun taking Spanish at Boston Latin as soon as she could, continued in Brookline, continued in every college. She had always pushed herself to learn it so well that she hoped eventually to be mistaken for a native Spanish speaker.
Now she had a new fantasy. She could see herself in a com
fortable office warm and welcoming, not like Jim’s at all. She would have her own assistant, taking calls and booking appointments and billing insurance companies. She would wear glasses on the job, just clear glasses to make herself look serious. Large important-looking glasses. She would wear her hair caught back and dress in suits, like Suzanne. Suits said that the wearer shouldn’t be trifled with. Her mother went to court in suits. Jim dressed too casually. She would not. She would let the clients know she was on the job and serious about it, and she would advertise that she offered therapy in Spanish.
She was lying on the couch in the living room with MTV on just for the company, eating taco chips and drinking diet soda. She could see herself in her office. She could see the office, the desk with a slate top. She would not space out the way Jim confessed he did when a client bored him. She would sit perfectly still except for taking notes. Everything about her would convey intense unwavering attention, what a person wanted who came to see a therapist.
Beverly’s bell rang. Elena sighed but got up at once. She had been enjoying her vision. She felt almost as if standing up might let it slip out of her. It was a fantasy she felt good about, and she did not want it to escape. But Beverly was calling. She helped her up and Beverly went to the bathroom while Elena ran downstairs and moved her wash to the dryer. Then she got Beverly settled in bed again.
She could see that her grandmother was working herself up to say something. Sometimes it took Beverly several minutes to get a sentence all lined up before she tried to spit it out. Elena passed the time thinking about Sean. He was good to her. Why couldn’t she be in love with him? No, better that she wasn’t, for whenever she truly fell in love, she fell off the edge. It was a disaster. Better to feel affectionate toward him and enjoy the occasional sex. Normally she wanted more and hotter, but she was still a casualty of the sex wars, and gentle and occasional was just fine for now. She saw him standing at the window of his North End apartment, doing his morning exercises, a combination of aerobics and tai chi. She had begun learning to do the tai chi with him. For serious exercise, she preferred to go to the gym.
Beverly was speaking now. “Need your help.”
“Sure, Grandma. Anything.”
“Mean it?”
“Don’t you know me yet? What do you want me to do for you?”
“Want die!”
“Grandma, things are better now. You’re home. You’re getting some benefits from the therapy.”
“No use. No point. Want die.”
“What exactly do you mean, you want to die?” Elena asked slowly.
“Want pills. Kill me.”
“You want to kill yourself? No way. I’ve been down this road before. Grandma, when you kill yourself, you’re really dead. Meat.”
“Not child. Know. Want…die.”
“Grandma, it’s not that bad. Are you in a lot of pain?”
Beverly glared at her. Her lips thinned. “Want die.”
“Are you asking me to help?”
Beverly nodded again, again.
“Grandma, I love you. But I can’t do that. I know what a mess it is. Believe me, I know. I’d miss you too much. Mother would miss you.”
“No use.”
“You mean, it’s no use my arguing with you, or your life is no use?”
“Both.”
“Your life is plenty of use. You listen to me. We talk. We spend time together. It means something to me. It must mean something to you.” Elena took Beverly’s hand. Her own felt cold to her, as if the warmth had drained out of her body when her grandma started talking about death and dying. Yes, she was scared. She did not want to hear this. She had to make Beverly stop.
“Love you. Want die. Now.”
43
Beverly
Beverly had been exactly twenty-nine, yes, when Suzanne caught German measles. That was before kids were routinely vaccinated. Did they even have a vaccine that long ago? Suzanne had been seven, a skinny little girl, too skinny, with reddish hair, big green watery eyes. Was she wearing glasses yet? No, they sent her home from school with a note that she needed glasses that same year, afterward. Suzanne got dreadfully sick, and then she caught pneumonia and was taken to the hospital. The doctor was not encouraging. He asked to speak to the father. “There is no father,” Beverly said. She was furious that he was trying to go over her head. He thought her daughter was going to die.
She had held Suzanne’s superheated hand. Her daughter was burning up. Delirious. Tossing in the bed like a fish dying on a dock. Then Beverly had thought secretly to herself, guiltily, that perhaps she should not have had a daughter. It would be terrible if Suzanne died, terrible, but at the same time, it would be easier. She was always having to think about what to do with Suzanne when she went away. She had felt she would not be complete as a woman if she did not have a child, but now she wondered. A child seemed to eat money sometimes. There was always something that needed attention, that needed fixing, that had to be replaced or provided.
But when Suzanne was restored to her, thinner than ever, pale and slight as a sheet of paper, she had wept, holding her daughter and feeling that nothing could be as precious. How could she have imagined life without her little one? Then the next day, she hauled off and swatted Suzanne when she spilled her soup all over the table. A clumsy child, there was no getting around it. A little ballet dancer she wasn’t. Two left feet and two left hands. There was something intractable in Suzanne from the moment she could sit up and say Mama, intractable and lumpy. Suzanne would sit glowering, making herself dense and immovable.
She had felt guilty about her temper, but Suzanne had a temper of her own. From the time Suzanne was eleven, they’d had screaming matches. They would both stand their ground and shriek at each other. “You will!” “I won’t!” Her daughter was as stubborn and willful as she was. They were a match, everyone said that. It used to infuriate her, how Karla could get Suzanne to do almost anything, how Suzanne would do the dishes without being asked at her aunt’s, how Suzanne would pick up after herself. At home, she was a little pig.
How had they got off on the wrong foot with each other so quickly, so unremittingly? Two strong wills striking metal against metal. Yet as an adult, Suzanne often seemed phlegmatic. Her daughter appeared to be encased in protocol, duty, busy-ness, the make-work of the law. It felt to her as if Suzanne had gone into the law in order to retreat from her, from their hectic and never affluent life together. The law was Suzanne’s shell she carried on her back.
Beverly stirred in the bed, trying vainly to find a comfortable position. Her body was sore all the time. She should try to get up, climb into her wheelchair, roll into the living room. She did not feel like it, so much effort for so little gain. There was nothing on television. It was hard for her to use the computer, for her vision was still blurred. Suzanne had bought her a big expensive monitor that she could read, but it took too much work for her to get to it. With the big monitor, she could no longer use the laptop in bed. Now it sat on the makeshift desk. She stared at it across the room and imagined sending E-mail messages to all the people she used to communicate with. Half of them probably thought she was dead. Wasn’t she?
She could see it clearly now, with so much empty time to contemplate her life: she should never have had a child. She was not cut out to be a mother. She had never really wanted to be responsible for another person, to have to explain her decisions and justify them, to have to drag that other through her life clunking behind. She had never wanted to marry. She had understood from adolescence on that being the legal property of a man was a bad idea for her, that simply having another body always there, someone for whose meals, clothing, bills, and opinions she was responsible, would be death itself. She would hate him. He would be a large pole to which she would be tethered. Why hadn’t she applied that to children? When she had discovered herself pregnant, she had been delighted, as if it were some kind of accomplishment. She had felt very adult and competent and full of fantasies about he
r own child.
Her friends were shocked. Women did not just go and have babies by themselves in 1950. If they got pregnant and could not afford to fly to Puerto Rico for an abortion, then they went off to have the baby in a “home” like a women’s prison, and the baby was taken away and adopted.
She had been so proud. So confident. Was it only that she enjoyed shocking the people around her, even the most political men and women who thought of themselves as socially advanced and free thinking? Had she been acting in a little private play of her own, the bold heroine, the new woman in her cute maternity outfits Karla sewed for her? Karla had been behind her all the way. Beverly had entertained visions of herself with a miniature version by the hand, a little red-curled Beverly, a brave curly-headed little boy, a darling radical Shirley Temple marching along with her on parades and picket lines.
As soon as she was home from the hospital with a squalling baby, she had intimations she had made a terrible error. Everyone said she was so brave, but here she was in a little apartment in Brooklyn down the block from Karla, and stuck, penned up with a voracious creature with a voice like a steam whistle and one demand after another. She never finished having to fix something for or around the baby. The creature never seemed to sleep more than a couple of hours at a stretch. Karla had endured two miscarriages and was glad to take the baby when Beverly could not stand being stuck with her another hour. It had seemed to her even then that the tiny red-faced Suzanne glared at her balefully, reproaching her for her secret regrets.
She finally dragged herself into the wheelchair and rolled over to the computer. Then she sat there idle in front of it. Elena had made the screen background dark red for her. It was cheerful. But who did she really want to talk to, and what did she really have to say? Labor organizing was useful but sometimes so depressing. You just got people a wage they could live on and raise their families in decency, and then the fucking owners moved the factories where they could get kids to work for fifty cents an hour. Your people were all out of work and back in poverty, stuck in dead-end jobs they could not live on. The more you liked the people, the more you respected and admired them, the worse it was for you. She had tried to affect the economic and political life of her country for half a century, and sometimes she had succeeded and sometimes she had failed, but it was over. She could not push anymore.