Being Esther (4 page)

Was that a conversational gambit, an opening through which Esther was expected to reveal something of herself? She eyed
Penny's casual, blond hair, the way it stayed within the confines of a thin plastic headband. Eloise would have hair like that. You remind me of Eloise, she might say. And then they could discuss the story about Connecticut. The other stories, too, if there was time. Penny would see that Esther loved to read, was up on the latest books. So what if she couldn't imagine a life beyond the one she was living?

“And I need someone who's punctual.” Penny tilted her head to the side, as if she were assessing Esther's ability to read a clock. “Is there any reason you can't show up on time?”

Esther shook her head. Ceely and Barry would be in school by then, Marty long gone to the pharmacy, leaving her to rattle around, holding down an empty fort. She wanted to tell Penny that she'd fly to the store; walk the two miles, if the car broke down. Nervously, she nattered about working in her father's store. She neglected any mention of dusting the mannequins, polishing the mirrors, filling the cut-glass dish with lemon drops, and chose instead to inflate her duties in the office, where, in a pinch, she opened the mail, sorted the accounts payable, answered the phone.

On the basis of that, she supposed, she got the job.

Marty was stretched out in his favorite chair working the daily crossword when she finally spoke up, announced her good news.

“But what about the children?” he said, without glancing up.

“What about them?” Esther absentmindedly flipped through a magazine, wishing she could find a way to tell her husband how she'd been rushing to get home before school let out when she spotted the help-wanted sign in the window. She might share with him that she changed her clothes three times before the interview, and still got it wrong. “But I got the job!” she could say.

“Basil's girlfriend,” Marty said, pressing a pencil to his lips. “Six letters.”

She glared at him as she recalled an earlier conversation, one in which she'd proposed returning to school for a degree in library science. “Then what?” he'd said. “Then I'll get a job at a library,” she replied. “At your age?” he asked. Esther was thirty-three. This time, Esther intended to stick to her guns. Marty wasn't going to bully her out of a job.

She set the magazine down and picked up
Nine Stories,
which she'd been displaying on the coffee table for weeks. “It's only three mornings a week,” she said. “While the children are in school,” she added, her voice trailing off.

Flipping to the last story in the book—the one in which that brilliant child was pushed into the deep end of an empty swimming pool—she settled on the passage she'd committed to memory. Esther had read and reread those lines as if she were rehearsing for a play. She recited them in front of the mirror and while clearing the breakfast dishes. “One of these days you're going to have a tragic, tragic heart attack.” That's what the woman in the story, the one with the unfortunate son, had said to her husband. Esther shouted those words while she ran the vacuum, while making the beds. Then, like that fictional woman, she threatened to wear red to her husband's funeral and sit in the front row flirting with the organist.

Esther was conjuring a way to work those lines into the conversation, the way to portend Marty's death and his funeral, when he looked up from his puzzle and said, “I suppose if it's only three mornings a week . . .”

Esther closed the book, returned it to the coffee table, and nodded. “Brenda,” she said.

“Brenda?”

“Basil's girl.” Softly, she added, “Nobody will ever know I was gone.”

E
very morning at 8:30 sharp, Esther and Lorraine speak by phone, though it would be easy enough to meet near the statue of Saint Francis, in the building's courtyard.

One morning Lorraine makes the call, the delicate expression the two employ for checking to see that the other has made it through the night. The next morning, Esther returns the favor. And so it will go, until the day one of them doesn't answer, leaving the other to panic, wondering what to do. Dial 911? Call Milo, the building's super?

Today, while waiting for Lorraine to call, Esther peers through her living room window across the courtyard into the other apartments of the Devonshire Arms.

Lorraine's curtains are drawn, yet Esther can picture her friend seated at the kitchen table with the
Sun-Times
and her second cup of Sanka.

When the phone finally rings, Esther picks up and without so much as a hello, says, “Ceely kidnapped me.”

“Esther, listen to me. Your own daughter cannot kidnap you.”

“Trust me. She did.” Esther pauses, waiting for her friend to deliver the verbal equivalent of a pat on the arm.

Lorraine sighs. “To tell you the truth, I didn't sleep so well.”

“I just said that I was kidnapped, and you're going on about a sleepless night!”

Esther is about to hang up when Lorraine says, “Why don't you start at the beginning?”

“Not now,” Esther whispers. “Later. I'll tell you at lunch.” She has just finished reading the newspaper. The government is spying on ordinary citizens, listening in on phone conversations without a warrant. Though she doesn't believe for a minute that anyone would bother eavesdropping on a couple of eighty-five-year-old women, she isn't taking any chances. What happened to her is nobody's business.

She thinks about her grandson, Josh, who doesn't care who knows what. Last Sunday, after dinner, he sat her down at his desk, punched some keys on his computer, and told her about something called a blog. “Here, Nonna. Check it out.” She read about Josh and his girlfriend, a sweet girl with a heart-shaped face and messy hair, about the things they did when he was away at college, about the smell of his sheets after sex. Esther, who could remember changing Josh's diapers, stopped reading and said, “Very nice.”

No, she is not about to broadcast the details of her life to strangers. No blogs. No revelations for government spies. “I'll tell you everything. Later,” Esther says to Lorraine. “Now tell me what kept you up. Was it the music? I heard him playing again last night.”

Sometimes at night Esther listens for the music from across the courtyard. The autistic boy who lives next to Lorraine can play for hours. It's always the same, a haunting melody that stirs forgotten feelings of longing. This she won't tell a soul, not even Lorraine, but last night the music started when she was in bed reading. She set down her book, closed her eyes, and listened. When the music stopped, she opened her eyes and he was there, standing at the foot of her bed. “So it's you,” she said, smiling up at him. Marty's hair appeared as thick and wiry as the first time they'd met. He needed to lose the same ten pounds he'd carried before his illness. And he wore the same fat, sloppy grin. Even
the gap between his front teeth, the one she'd loved exploring with her tongue, was still there.

“Yes,” he said, jingling the change in his pockets. “It's me.”

“The music,” she said. “It touched me.”

“Where?” He drew closer. “Show me.”

She placed her hand on her breast, and he placed his hand over hers, and then he began moving it slowly up and down the front of her body, playing her with the assurance of a virtuoso. She closed her eyes again and tried guessing what song he was playing.

When she opened her eyes he was gone and she wept at the loss, which felt as strong as the first time. Then, her hand touching the spot where his hand had been, she whispered, “If that's what you get to do after, if you get to learn to play such music, then maybe it's not such a bad place after all. Better than that joint Ceely's been pushing.”

Now Lorraine is saying, “It wasn't the music. I just couldn't stop thinking about poor Mrs. Singh.” She pauses. “Or maybe it was the cake I ate at dinner. Maybe that's all it was.”

“No,” Esther says. “What happened to that woman is enough to keep anybody up.”

Esther has never had a neighbor like Mrs. Singh, who lands, unbidden, at Esther's door, a bird-of-paradise in her brilliant saris bearing samosas, lentils with curry, chapatis, and dal.

Esther knows that cooking is her refuge from the loneliness of being shut in with a sick husband. Yet lonely as she is, Mrs. Singh has never accepted Esther's invitations for tea. “Kumar,” she'll say, looking over her shoulder at the door she always leaves slightly ajar. “Well, next time,” Esther will say. Graciously, she accepts her neighbor's offerings, always returning the empty plates with something of her own creation: poppyseed cookies;
chicken soup; a wedge of her famous kugel, the fat, buttery egg noodles studded with plump golden raisins.

Now she confesses to Lorraine that until the other day, her biggest fear for her neighbor was that she would trip on the hem of her sari and fall down the stairs. “There must be some way to hike it up,” she tells Lorraine. “Even in winter, she lets those beautiful silk skirts drag through the snow.”

“The Singhs owned a shop on Kedzie,” Lorraine offers. “Before Mr. Singh got sick. It was one of those shops that sell saris and gold.”

“That's no excuse,” insists Esther, who knows that about the Singhs. “Dresses aren't like tissues, no matter how many you have.”

Over lunch at Wing Yee's, Esther tells Lorraine that the other day she'd gone down for the mail and found Ceely in the lobby with Milo. “They stopped talking when I showed up, and gave each other a look. I was sure he'd been telling her about Mrs. Singh. That's the last thing I want Ceely to know. I felt like chasing her out the door with Milo's broom. Then Milo started whistling and sweeping the stairs, and Ceely asked if I was ready. I didn't know what she was talking about.” Esther pauses. “Remember
Gaslight
?” She searches Lorraine's face for some sign of comprehension. Amazingly, Lorraine's looks haven't deviated since high school. She wears the same coral lipstick and her hair, swept up and secured into place with a thick coating of spray, is still a silvery blond. Esther always feels as if she has a poppyseed stuck in her teeth when she's with Lorraine.

“You don't remember, do you?” Esther says. “It's the movie where Charles Boyer convinces his wife that things that happen are figments of her imagination. He isolates her and in the end
he drives her mad.” She pauses. “Lorraine, I am here to tell you that my daughter is gaslighting me. She insisted that we had a date. But we did not.”

Lorraine nudges a teacup toward Esther.

Esther pushes it away. “You don't believe me.”

“I believe you.” Lorraine refills her own cup. “But she didn't exactly kidnap you. She's your daughter. Besides,” she says, reaching across the table for Esther's hand.

“Stop!” Esther recoils. “I know what you're going to say—that I don't have to move. But one day . . . one day, just like Helen, I'll paint my eyebrows with lipstick, or serve a raw roast to dinner guests. I'll burn myself with the teakettle, or trip on the bath mat and break my wrist. We have to be so careful, Lorraine. It's exhausting being this careful.”

M
rs. Singh was mugged early on a Sunday morning, while heading for a bus to visit Mr. Singh in the hospital. She'd hoped to arrive in time to feed him his breakfast.

“Next thing I knew, I was on the ground,” she tells Esther, who already knows the details, compliments of Milo. The two women have run into each other in the foyer, collecting their mail. Mrs. Singh's arm, the one she ordinarily uses to hike up her sari when she climbs the stairs, is in a sling. As she struggles with the key to her mailbox she tells Esther that she never heard her assailant. “One minute, I'm heading for the bus; the next, boom, I'm on the ground!” All she remembers is a burning sensation piercing the shoulder where her purse strap had been. Her sari was ripped, her eyeglasses broken, and so was her right arm, which had taken the brunt of the fall. “I never saw it coming,” she says.

Esther considers telling her neighbor about the mugging that precipitated her father's move to America, and how he often reminded the family that if he hadn't been attacked at the train station in Warsaw by a group of hooligans who taunted him for being a Jew, he would have gone to the death camps with the rest of his family. Her father spoke of that attack as “the straw that broke the camel.” Sometimes, he called it “the silver lining in the clouds.”

Instead, Esther offers to help Mrs. Singh in any way she can and warns her neighbor not to trip on the hem of her sari as she makes her way up the stairs.